I got shunted into the Cultural Attache office again and the girl came in. I hardly recognized her. Everything was the same, beautiful walk, good clothes, an oddness to the left side of the face – but her eyes flickered to the aftermath of shock and her voice had lost its certainty. For the first time she looked like a woman instead of a mechanical goddess.
Maybe I had changed too: she took a few seconds to focus. We stood listening to distant sounds, phone bells and doors, the sounds of a complacent Embassy shaken to the core.
I said: 'Room 6.'
'Yes.' She still didn't move or look away. All the words she wanted to speak, all the questions she wanted to ask were held silent in the flickering of her eyes.
'Did you manage to do anything?' I asked her.
It was her voice that had answered my call from the bar on the Link Road when I'd told them to get me Room 6.
'Yes.' It came out in soft little jerks. 'They're making a priority search – it was reported missing about a half hour before the motorcade started – they needed a little persuading but I – persuaded them.'
She couldn't even stand still. Her nerves had set the whole line of her lean body trembling. Loman had said she was with Mil. 6. They shouldn't have kids like this in their outfit because things were bound to break them up. It was happening now.
I said: 'Are they going to use helicopters? Calling the Army in?'
'It's for them to work in their own way – all I stressed was the importance of watching docks, airports and the land routes to the Laos frontier--'
'Laos?'
'The quickest route to China.'
Loman might know. I would ask him.
I said: 'What have you told Loman?'
'Nothing.'
'What has he told you?'
'Nothing.'
'Where's Room 6?'
'I'll show you.'
It was an effort for her to look away from my face. I followed her out to the corridor and we saw Cole-Verity, the Ambassador, surrounded by flapping minions – a big man still in his ceremonial dress, decorations, gold epaulettes, ashen-faced and half-shouting at them, 'Tell them it's an emergency news blackout. Get that mob off the steps and block the switchboard – outgoing calls only. McMahon, come in here and bring Straker with you.' They peeled off as he pushed open a door.
Loman had come up from the other direction and he had the same look in his eyes and I knew now what was wrong with the girl and some of the rage came back.
'For Christ's sake, someone's got to do it, haven't they?'
Loman took my arm and we went into Room 6 and he locked the door and I said: 'Thank Christ she's gone.'
They're all the same, they don't like it when they know there's been a killing: even after two world wars they look at you as if it's never been done before: even when they know there's a bump on the program and you're the louse that's got to do it they look at you afterward as if you've just climbed out of a drain.
'How did she know, Loman – how much have you told her? What's a Mil. 6 trollop doing in our bloody woodshed?'
'Sit down and control yourself.'
'You couldn't get rid of her, could you – is she your type or something?'
Stomach full of adrenalin, full of acid, sweating like a pig – a feeling of great age, responsibility, failure and defeat. Getting old, too old for it.
He went on waiting, leaning by the window looking down at his shoes. I went twice round the room looking at nothing and trying to think of a word, one word that would tell him what I thought of his talent as an intelligence director and what I thought of the crowd out there in the Link Road where the water cart was washing away the blood and what I thought of a mission that had run smash into ruins because we couldn't even handle a monkey-sized Mongolian thug whose answer to everything was a bullet.
There wasn't a word for all that.
'When you are ready,' he said.
His calm helped. The whole of the Embassy was rocking under us but he was calm.
'Did you go down to the Link Road?' I asked him. My voice sounded quiet, maybe the contrast, maybe I'd been shouting.
'Yes.'
'What did you see?'
'I couldn't get near anything, so I arranged for you to meet me here and came along to wait.'
'So you don't know anything.'
'No. Perhaps you will tell me.'
'It was a snatch.'
He came away from the window and by the look on his face I could see that he really hadn't known. He said softly, 'Do you mean the Person is still alive?'
'I tell you, it was a snatch. He was never in the sights. It was the driver they shot.'
In the face of his surprise I felt suddenly in control and for the first time saw the room in detail and took an interest in it because I had to orientate, find bearings, relearn the familiar. White paint, frescoed ceiling, blue carpet, company-meeting table, chairs, telephone, ashtrays: a sunny room, hospital-clean, the kind of place you always hope you'll be taken to after the accident. That was, in a way, the way it was.
'Go on,' he said.
'I took action as soon as I knew. It was no good telling Ramin's bunch so I got to a phone and asked for Room 6 and the girl answered. I told her to get a dragnet put out for the ambulance – anyone here could use more pressure than I could. They could make it an Embassy alert call--'
'Ambulance,' Loman said.
It was difficult to remember that in the instant of firing the Husqvarna I had been as ignorant as he was now, and that it was only by going to look at the dead man in the Phra Chula Chedi that I'd been able to see the whole picture.
They got him away in an ambulance,' I said. 'Look, I'll give you the set-up – his set-up, Kuo's. He's moved into the snatch game. The Person wasn't down for killing. Somebody wants him, don't ask me what for. And they've got him. We worked on the premise that he was the target of the Kuo gun and he wasn't. The target was the driver of the Cadillac and he was shot dead precisely where the road curved so that the car would just run straight on into the crowd. Then they did the snatch. You imagine the confusion? Three tons at twenty-five miles an hour ramming into living people. I saw the driver myself, still at the wheel, and a man slumped in the back – both dead.'
Loman asked: 'How was the other man killed?'
'I don't know. It wasn't with a second shot. Kuo shot once – I'd have heard a second shot. I didn't hear the first one because it was covered by the sound of my own – bound to be because we were both operating within a period of a few seconds and it was a few seconds before I got my hearing back. Even if I'd heard his shot I would have thought it was an echo of mine.'
'Where did he shoot from?'
'Look,' I said impatiently and hit the table with the flat of my hand, 'here's the temple. Here's the condemned building. Link Road between them. Get out of your mind for a minute that the target was the driver. Suppose, as we did suppose, that the target was the Person. The car is running almost head-on toward the temple and it's a perfect site for a marksman because the visual effective speed is about five miles per hour instead of twenty-five. From the temple you could shoot the Person because he was sitting in the back on a seat raised nine inches. You couldn't shoot the driver because he was behind the windshield. You could only shoot someone in the back – over the windshield. I knew this – it's simple geometry. I didn't question it: but I would have questioned it if I'd known the target was the driver.'
'He was here, then, Kuo?' His polished nails flashed in the light as he tapped the table.
'Somewhere in this area, near the condemned building. You could only shoot the driver from behind. Same data: car moving tail-on, visual effective speed five miles per hour instead of twenty-five – and no windshield in the way.'