Scared for my own skin, it doesn't do, you know, it doesn't get you anywhere except on the bloody slab, but the problem was that I was still scared because I was still in a red sector and we were jammed solid in a pack of cars and if one of Toufexis's hit men had seen me leaving the club and going down to the car park they'd come for me and it wouldn't do any good keeping the doors locked because they'd just smash a window with the muzzle and start pumping.
Control, yes. There must be a modicum of clear thinking. 'Listen,' I told Ferris, 'this won't wait for debriefing. There's an international syndicate called the Trust, and von Brinkerhoff is a member. Their objective is to "buy America and sell it to the Soviets" – I quote.' I gave him the other names she'd told me, and filled in the details. 'She said she'd got it all on paper, a whole brief, she called it, at her apartment. So if you can get permission to go and look around -'
'Someone broke in there, half an hour ago.'
Merde.
'How do you know?'
'I had some people stationed there in case it was in fact some kind of trap. Two patrol cars arrived and they followed the police inside the building and said they were reporters. The doorman told them he'd been attacked and tied up, fifteen minutes before. They found Cambridge's door open, with the lock smashed.'
The place ransacked, every drawer pulled out, the pictures dragged off the wall to find the safe, the bedding all over the floor, the mattress ripped, and in the end they'd found it, the brief, they must have, because she hadn't even thought about checking for bugs on the phones in her flat or the phone in her car, she wasn't intelligence, she was political, didn't understand things like cover, had probably just dropped the brief onto the coffee table or somewhere and they'd looked right past it at first and then they'd seen it and there was nothing we could do about it now.
We were moving suddenly, free of the jam, going north-east along Bayshore Drive.
'It could have been Proctor,' I said.
'That is our thinking.' His and Croder's. 'He was seen landing from the yacht's cutter.'
'When?'
'Earlier tonight, just before eleven.'
Slight jolt to the nerves.
'They lost him?' They must have, or Ferris would be telling me where Proctor was now.
'Within minutes.'
Support people are exactly that: they are troops in the field and they lack the refined, exhaustive training of the shadow executives. Even if I'd tagged Proctor myself he would have made it difficult for me because he was on my own level, competent and seasoned.
So Proctor was off the Contessa and back in the streets of the city and he'd probably conducted the break-in himself because he was very good at it and he'd been looking for a vital piece of product. He had also cut right across the potential end-phase of Barracuda and put us back onto square one.
'If he landed at 10:45,' I said, 'that was about an hour after Cambridge phoned me in Nassau. It would've taken him about an hour to reach land from the Contessa. That call must have been bugged and Proctor himself could have been listening in.'
The thought of it gave me another jolt. 'Hold on,' I told Ferris. 'Treader, how far are we to the safe-house?'
He half-turned his head. 'Ten minutes, bit more.'
'Don't go any closer. Keep on the move but don't circle that area.'
'Got it.' I saw him checking the outside mirrors.
'Is Hood with us?'
'Two cars behind.'
12:41 on the digital clock.
I said to Ferris, 'She must have taken that brief without their knowing – they wouldn't have given it to her. There would have been several copies, and they didn't know that copy was missing until she phoned me in Nassau over a bugged line. Then Proctor knew.'
'We considered that.' His tone still had its cutting edge. I'd heard it before, in Mandarin, in Northlight, when the mission had gone dangerously off track. He wasn't of course furious with Proctor tonight; he was furious with himself for letting it happen, furious with his own incompetence, as competent people often are when a wheel comes off. 'We also considered that it might have been Stylus von Brinkerhoff who'd shown her a copy of the brief. He was at the party tonight.'
That's possible. She said he was attracted to her.'
'I would think most men were.'
'Where's von Brinkerhoff now?' I asked him. Perhaps we could turn him.
'We're watching for him to take the cutter back to the yacht. Monck suggests that if Cambridge wanted you to meet von Brinkerhoff, he might be ready to back out of the project, or even blow the Trust. We've sent someone to Quay 19 to wait for him and offer your apologies for not being in time to meet him at the Yacht Club, and see what he says, see if he's ready to take it further.'
Treader went through some lights on the yellow and checked the nearside mirror. 'There's a Corvette moving up on us,' he said. 'I've been trying to lose it.'
'It he right behind?'
'No, there's a Buick right behind but the Corvette's buzzing it.'
There is the moment when you are sitting comfortably in a sumptuously-appointed limousine with a telephone in your hand and a cocktail cabinet in front of you and pile carpet under your evening shoes and there is the moment when you are suddenly aware that you have become prey to a hunter not far behind you who seeks your death, and aware also that you cannot hope to run fast enough to escape him, and the contrast between these two moments is so violent as to numb the mind, because in this instant the trappings of civilised life are stripped away to leave you in a different world, a different creature, crouched barefoot on rough ground with the hackles raised and the teeth bared as the terror courses like cold fire through the blood.
Proctor was in this city again and he'd come here to retrieve that brief and he'd asked Toufexis to make the Cambridge hit for him and he knew how close the executive in the field for Barracuda had come to infiltrating his operation and he knew I'd be at the Yacht Club party because he'd bugged Erica's phones and he had not asked Toufexis to hit me too because he wanted to do it himself.
It had become personal. My meeting with him on the day I'd arrived in this town had forced him out of his apartment and sent him straight to ground and he'd used his connections with the Mafia and got Toufexis to put out a contract on me and they'd tried twice and I was still alive and was still a threat to him, and it had hurt his pride and he'd told Toufexis's hoods to hold off tonight because he wanted this kill for himself.
Lights swung in the mirrors but I couldn't see from this angle what Treader could see. 'I want instant replay,' I told him.
'We've lost the Buick. I think he got scared.'
'The Corvette's right behind us?'
'Yes. Close.'
'Ferris,' I said on the phone, 'are you still there?'
'Yes.'
'We're heading north on 22nd Avenue and crossing Coral Way. I think Proctor is right behind us.' I let him absorb that while I spoke to Treader; then I came back on the line. 'He's in a black Corvette with a Florida number plate. You've got that?'
'Yes. I'll do what I can.'
'Thank you. Have you got a second line there?'
'Yes.'
'Then leave this one open.'
He said he would.
Flashes on the roof-lining, quick and regular. Proctor was signalling for us to pull up.
'Treader. Where's Hood?'
'Behind the Corvette. And there's a red Mazda behind the Honda.'
Whole bloody parade, Proctor right behind us and a Toufexis hit man following Hood in the Mazda, light traffic coming the other way, the night clubs still open, this town never sleeps. Proctor was still flashing us and it was the sensible thing to do because he didn't want to make any noise, attract any attention: none of us wanted the police in our way. It would be very nice to tell Treader to put his fist on the horn and leave it there till a patrol car picked us up, officer, this nasty man behind us wants to kill me so you'd better do your duty, so forth, nothing so cosy because it would lead to a lot of awkward questions and making charges and that would stop Barracuda right in its tracks, and in any case there's a strict injunction in the rule book against a shadow executive's calling upon any police officer – it's quaintly written, don't you think – for his assistance, and yes, I take your point, Barracuda is going to get stopped right in its tracks in any case just as soon as Proctor gets into the back of this sumptuously-appointed limousine with his Heckler and Koch P7 9mm and its Wilson sound suppressor and starts tickling the tit, which he is very likely to do for the simple reason that he can outpace this ornate tart trap by a factor of three to one and if you think this looks like a car chase you're dead wrong, it's a funeral procession.