'Got it.'
'Synchronise watches at 20:05 hours.'
'20:05.'
If you can't make it on time, stay away. You'll be coming through heavy surveillance.'
'Understood, sir. But I'll be there.'
I put the receiver down and asked Al for some paper and an envelope; then I centred for a moment to slow the adrenalin but the nerves were humming with it and I walked out of the bar and through the lobby and up the stairs, climbing them slowly, steadily, counting them as a mental exercise to keep the left brain occupied while I went through the next sixteen minutes, checking to see if there was anything else that should be done and coming up blank — everything was done, the fuse had been lit and it was burning.
Fifteen stairs and a Chinese woman on the second floor, carrying a child, Lily coming along from my room on the third'You eat here tonight, Mr Jordan?'
'I don't know,' I told her, didn't know what was going to happen tonight, could be anything, life, death, the wire biting deep or the courtyard coming up, spinning slowly, they say you never cry out, maybe the air rush, or of course the dawn and no conclusion – he'd take his time, make certain of me, no hurry.
Negative dunking, yes, all right, try it this way, with a bit of luck I might turn it into an overkill, catch him off balance and use a sweep or get to his throat, whatever, blow his world away instead of mine.
Whistling.
Fifth floor and the rain drumming on the roof, a crack of yellow sky through a window again like a rat on a treadmill until it was nineteen minutes past the hour and then I went down to the lobby and walked past the man registering at the desk without looking at him, going into the short passage that led to the courtyard at the rear, turning, waiting.
Al was writing in the big book with its worn soiled cover and its oxidised gold tassel, a gesture to elegance, a suggestion that was in fact the Mandarin Oriental and not a sleazy doss-house on the waterfront, writing in the book, dear Christ, we haven't got time for dial, but then it has to be done because the shutters don't fit exactly across the windows and they're watching him now, the man at the desk, just as they've been watching me for the last hour from the doorways opposite.
Two minute to go. Two. Not long but within the critical time-frame; centre and relax.
The doors banged open and someone came into the lobby from the street and I froze and waited for them to move into sight, a woman with a dog in her arms, middle-aged, Caucasian, discount.
'Okay,' Al said to the man at the desk, 'you need a hand with the bag?'
'No.'
Early thirties, five-ten, eleven or twelve, black hair, dark blue eyes, his raincoat soaked, he'd walked here, quicker, no cabs available but got here in time, good as his word, a san-dan in Shotokan, to be expected.
He picked up his bag and turned and saw me and I made a signal and he came into the passage, an easy stride, confident.
'Veneker.'
'Jordan.'
'Nice weather for ducks.'
I gave him the envelope. 'Take this to the airport and leave it at the Hertz counter, to be picked up by this man, who's flying in tonight.'
'That's all?'
'Yes.' I gave him the keys of the car. 'Toyota, parked in shadow. Don't be seen getting into it, and in this rain you'll keep the windows shut anyway. If you're followed, try and lose them, but don't try too hard: they won't let you.'
He stood with his feet apart, balanced, tapping the envelope on the knuckle of his thumb, some of the tension in him coming off because he'd expected something a lot more dangerous than this.
'Roger. Once out of the car, sir, do I try and lose them? Going through the terminal?' A beat. 'I'm quick off the mark.'
'Again, try to lose them but don't.'
'And once I've done the drop?'
'Fade. They won't be interested in you after that.'
I sensed his hesitation as he stared at the name on the envelope, Harrison, J. MacKenzie. He was wondering why I was doing a drop in a public place and involving other people, and what would happen when the surveillance team asked for the envelope.
But they wouldn't.
'Okay, sir. Do I report back to Cheltenham?'
'I'll do that.' I checked my watch. 'You've got less than two minutes. Leave the bag here.'
He put it down. 'Do I go out by -'
'No, this way.'
I took him past the kitchen and into the courtyard at the rear. Rain in the lamplight, falling straight down, smelling of steel.
'Use that door in the wall across there. The car's on the other side.'
Toyota.'
'Right.'
He slipped the envelope into his mac and gave me a sudden straight look. 'You be all right, will you?'
'Never say the.'
He nodded and ducked through the rain towards the door.
I turned back into the hotel and went along the passage, picking up his bag and putting it behind the desk, and that was when the heavy booming sound came and the slats in the shutters were lit with a white flash and I stood with my eyes squeezed shut – no, oh no, Mother of God forgive me.
17 Crucifix
Rain on the roof. Underneath its sound I listened to the silence, tuning the rain out, listening to the silence. But even then I was picking up small sounds that came into the silence and faded: a distant voice on another floor of the hotel; a door shutting; the far faint note of a ship's siren from the river.
It was necessary, vital, to keep the steady drumming of the rain tuned out and to identify every small sound in the undertow of the silence, because he would come for me barefoot, and my only chance, here on the fifth floor, would be the ability to catch any slight sound he might make: the creak of a floorboard, the rustle of his sleeves as he brought his arms up in the final instant, the jerk of his breath.
Dark – pitch dark.
The lights had been burning when I'd reached here, halfway along the corridor, a minute ago, four dim bulbs under dusty silk shades with burn-marks on them. Now they were dark. The switch was not in the corridor, but round the corner by the stair well. That was how I knew he was there: he needed the dark.
Dead man's shoes.
In the last few seconds I suppose he'd make a rush and all I'd know about it would be the sudden change in the air pressure and the breath blocking in his throat and the hot sharp bite of the wire before I could She moved.
The rain drumming, louder here than in the other place, would Al find the bag behind the desk?
In a dead man's shoes, dear Mother of God.
Stirred beside me.
He came at me in a flash and I screamed The hands of a child, still.
'Fuckee, fuckee?'
Her small pointed breasts against me, the smell of her as she moved close and held onto me, not held me, held onto me, there's a difference.
'No,' I said and drew a long breath and lay still, listening to the only sound that had crossed the bridge of nightmare into reality: the rain on the roof, louder here because it was falling on corrugated iron, and maybe that was why she was frightened, and would also be frightened of thunder.
So I put my arms round her, bring her child's body curving into the arch of my own. She mistook me and opened her legs and began moving, and I whispered, 'No, Chu-Chu, no fuckee.'
'No?'
'You must sleep,' I said. She stopped moving and held me now in a different way, not dutifully like a prostitute but almost tenderly, for her: there'd been no tenderness for her to receive or express for a long time, I suppose, in the refugee camp, unless Chen had thought it necessary to teach her again, in between the fuckee.
At some time in the next few minutes she fell asleep, her head in the hollow of my shoulder, and I forgot about her and the rage came back, the self-rage, scalding, because when I'd walked out of the Red Orchid it had been in a dead man's shoes: Veneker's.