But why had they chosen her? She studied the piece of film, wishing she had some way of knowing what it contained. Why her? Well, there were several reasons she could think of. She was headed for Berlin and was scheduled to arrive there on a definite flight at a definite time. And she was traveling at the behest of the United States Department of State, and at the invitation of the West German government. Those circumstances combined to make her an ideal unwitting courier for whatever secret information the microfilm contained. She would get a cursory customs inspection at the worst, and her passport would barely receive a second glance.
And then, in Berlin, the receiver would find a way to get his hands on her passport. The microfilm would be removed, the photo returned to its place, and she would go back to New York without having had the slightest notion that she had played a role in a game of espionage.
With trembling hands she managed to get a cigarette from her pack. It took her three matches to get the thing lit, and then she puffed nervously on it, stabbing it out in an ashtray after a few unsatisfying drags.
The face she had seen in Cork! She had thought it was nothing more than a case of nerves when the thin man with the long face appeared there. But it had not been her imagination. The man was just who he appeared to be, the same man who had choked her in London. And he was following her, biding his time, making certain that he could keep tabs on her. He hadn’t tried to steal her passport this time.
Because it had not been necessary.
Another man had already set her up for the kill—
She reached for her cigarettes again, then pushed the pack furiously aside. How could she have been such a fool, such an utter and complete fool? She remembered the first meeting with David at the pub in Dublin, the smooth way he had managed to pick her up, the immediate interest he had taken in her. Of course he had been interested. It wasn’t her looks or her voice or her personality or anything else about her that had interested him. It was the pure desire to make her a part of his little game of espionage. The whirlwind courtship in Dublin made it infinitely easier for him to keep her under surveillance. No need to have men following her, not when David himself could stay with her for hours at a time.
And then he had appeared in Dingle. She winced at the words she had spoken to him, at the great willingness she had shown to be played for a fool. She had actually believed that he had crossed the country for love of her. Love? Hardly that. It was in Dingle, her last stop in Ireland, where he would plant the microfilm in her passport. Then she would be out of the country in a flash and in Berlin in another flash, and that would be the last she would ever see of him.
“I think you should go to Berlin,” he had said. “You have to go to Berlin. If you pass up this chance you’ll be sorry later. You’d keep thinking about it, and you’d start to see me as a man who was already getting in the way of your career...”
She felt tears forming at the backs of her eyes, and she steeled herself and blinked them back. Of course he had insisted she go to Berlin — he wasn’t interested in smuggling spy secrets into County Galway. No wonder her words had shocked him. And she thought of what would have happened if she hadn’t spotted the film. She would have gone on to Berlin, just as he wanted, and then, fool that she was, she would have come right back to Ireland. And she would have gone to Connemara, anxious to see him, head over heels in love with him, but he would not have been there. He’d be out of the country, probably, and laughing his head off at the silly girl folk singer who’d been stupid enough to fall for every line he handed her.
She shook her head, almost unable to believe it. She had always felt herself to be a good judge of people, had prided herself in her ability to size people up quickly. This time she had fallen flat on her face. It seemed impossible that he could have taken her in so completely. She had honestly felt that she knew him well, and now it seemed that she had not known him at all.
“Everything there is to know about me. Age, height, weight...” Her precious little speech was coming back to haunt her now. That must have floored him, she thought; she had actually been so considerate as to hand him her passport without his even asking.
Or had that been a hint, when he gave her that line about knowing so little about her? If she hadn’t brought out the passport, maybe that would have been his next line. “Let’s have a look at your passport, Miss. I’d like to check your vital statistics, if you don’t mind.” Except, of course, that he would have phrased it more glibly than that. How delighted he must have been when she saved him the trouble! And then he had simply leaped up onto the stage to introduce her, and while she stood up there singing her head off, he held on to her passport for her — and slipped the microfilm into it.
But what could she do now?
She knew the answer to that readily enough. All she had to do was do nothing at all, hide the microfilm somewhere, glue the photo to her passport once again, and somehow get through the weekend. Then, once she got to Shannon, she could find someone and turn the microfilm over to him. An Irish customs official, perhaps, or an American consul. Was there a consulate at Shannon? She didn’t know, but at least she could find someone there who would help her.
But of course, David would accompany her to the plane! She hadn’t realized it before, but obviously he wouldn’t let her out of his sight until she was on the plane bound for Berlin. And if she found some excuse to get rid of him, it was a sure bet that he would have someone else follow her. Like the man from London, the man she had glimpsed in Cork, the long-faced knife-thin man with piercing eyes.
She shivered. How could she get through the weekend? It wouldn’t be possible for her to act natural with David. How could she let him kiss her now? How could she even walk at his side without breaking out in a cold sweat?
No. He would know at a glance, would know that she knew before she had spoken half a dozen sentences to him. And if he knew that she knew, if he realized that she would not smuggle the microfilm for him, that she would instead go to the authorities...
Why, he would kill her.
She looked again at her hands, held them out in front of her. She was surprised to note that her fingers did not tremble at all now. She was oddly calm, inexplicably calm in the face of the thought. She ran it through her mind as one of a series of interesting, even notable facts: it was raining outside, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides, and he would kill her.
She tried to imagine it and could not; the image she had formed of him was so utterly incompatible with that of a killer that it would have been laughable if she had been capable of laughter. He would kill her, though, and probably without a second thought, without feeling anything at all. Because he was not what he had seemed to be. He had sat singing Irish songs with her, had stood skipping stones at the sea, but he was not really the kind of man who did these things. He was some sort of spy. He was a man involved with the men who had mugged her in London, he was a secret agent, a spy, he was...
She did not know what he was. She knew only books and movies, Richard Burton in a shabby trenchcoat, Sean Connery pressing dashboard buttons and sending pursuers spinning off the road. Eric Ambler, the Orient Express, knives and guns and strangling, newspaper headlines, a crazy montage of unreality.
She had to run. She had to get away, but David would be coming for her soon, and she had to get away, but how and why and where and oh, God, what was she going to do?
She had to talk to someone. She started for the door, got halfway to it, then halted abruptly and covered her face with her hands. She didn’t even know whom to talk to. There was only one person in Ireland that she had come to know and trust, and that person was David, and he was the one person above all whom she could not trust, ever. She had to talk to someone, but whom?