I moved away and found easy cover in the crowd and did some fast checking close to Zade and extended the field progressively. It was impossible to be certain but I did the best I could. Half the people in the queue with Zade were South American Indians and there was no one I'd seen before since I'd arrived in New York.
Zade was now at the desk and the porter stayed close to him, bending over some of the baggage lined up for the scales and looking at the labels, 'half-turned away from Zade and working rather welclass="underline" good agent material but don't let it go to your head, buster, don't get into this game because it's strictly for freaks.
I stayed where I was until he came away from the desk and began looking for me.
'He's going to Belem on Flight 238, coach class.'
'All right, we'll keep moving. Single or return?'
'Goddamn it, I forgot to — '
'Never mind. What's his name?'
'He's a Mr Zane.'
Close enough. The professional terrorists in the international class didn't use a cover name: they're too proud of the ones they've built their reputation on.
'Listen, I'm going to the Varig desk and I want you to keep him in sight, The other fifty's still waiting for you but not if you lose him, understand?'
'Well okay, but I could lose my job if I don't look after those people down by the — '
'I'll be ten minutes.' The queue at the desk had dwindled. 'If I'm longer than ten minutes you get double.'
I booked first class because that would allow me to go aboard before Zade and use the toilet for cover while he came through the forward compartment. Once in his seat he wouldn't come forward and since I'd be first off the plane when it landed I could set up the surveillance and take my time.
'Have a nice trip, Mr Wexford.'
'Thank you.'
The porter had moved out of sight but I'd seen the direction and found him at a drinking-fountain near the gift shops.
'He's right over there, mister.'
'Yes, all right.' I turned my back and used the window of the coffee-shop to keep him in view. He was standing at one of the telephones, looking around him as he talked. I gave the porter his fifty and told him he was off the hook and went over to the gift shop and bought a plastic rain-cape and put it on. I'd cleaned up a little in the men's room at the Hertz office and seen in the mirror that my suit had in fact been ripped at the shoulder and one knee when I'd done me get-out thing in the alley: good cover for a drunken bum but inconsistent now with the image of a first-class passenger on Flight 238.
Zade was on his way to the departure gate and I followed him through the X-ray and used one of the telephones in the Varig bay while he stood at the windows looking out. He had my image in reflection but I wasn't concerned because I couldn't board the aircraft without his seeing me and he didn't know who I was.
Ferris came on the line.
'Kennedy Airport,' I told him.
Slight pause. Possibly he'd been thinking the Kobra rendezvous had been arranged for New York and now he knew it wasn't.
'All right,' he said.
'I gave him the info: Zade, Belem, flight number, so forth.
When I'd finished he asked quickly: 'What time are you boarding?'
'Five minutes.'
He was thinking again: this was giving him a lot of work to do.
'Clear field?' he asked next I said I thought so because I'd been checking the whole time since I'd followed Zade into the bay and I'd drawn blank on two counts: no one here was watching Zade and no one was watching me.
'You think this could be a jump feint?'
'No,' I said.
Zade was too big for that. I knew something about his style and he preferred working solo, as I did, and if there were any peripheral footwork to be done he got someone else to do it and when he booked a seat for Brazil that was exactly where he was going.
I don't think he was holed up in the Lulu Belle Hotel on Broadway in order to pull his travel pattern together while his protection cell tested for ticks: he had a reputation for getting through half a dozen girls a day when he was under operational tension and the Lulu Belle had been a characteristic port of call on his way through the city.
'We haven't got anyone in Belem,' Ferris said. 'Our nearest man is in Recife.' He gave me the address and asked for a repeat. 'You think the objective might be in transit there?'
'If he is, he didn't book right through.'
'Oh bloody hell,' he said quietly and I knew what he meant. Most of the South American countries need a visa and medical certificate with smallpox on it and a subsistence attestation and anything up to four passport photos and Ferris was going to have to get them for me in New York and do it fast enough to make sure I didn't lose Zade at Belem Airport.
I wondered if he could do it. The Travel people in London are first class but if the director in the field has to use local facilities there's always a risk and you can blow a complete mission with a suspect border-franking if you're forced into frontier-jumping by the opposition: it's one of the objects of making a feint.
'Listen,' Ferris said. 'Brazil is a signatory to Interpol.'
'Fair enough.'
But it doesn't always work and he knew that, 'What about signals?' I asked him.
'Through the consulate. Booth Building, Avenue 15 de Agosto.'
Repeat.
'I've got two minutes,' I told him. The boarding call was coming over the speakers.
'I think that's everything.'
He sounded rather vague.
Ferris is never vague.
'What happened,' I asked him, 'to that other tag?'
There was time now to think about that. I still didn't want to, but there was time.
'He was called off,' said Ferris.
'What the hell for? You had both of them running when-'
'Orders from London. He — '
'Listen,' I said, 'I want to know.'
Brief pause.
'It's not your concern.' His tone had gone cold. 'You are now locked on to the objective in a clear field and you know I what to do and we expect you to do it. Questions?'
Quite a lot but he was right: it wasn't my concern.
In any given mission London knows as much as there is to know: as much as Briefing can get out of their files and as much as Signals can get out of their network and as much as Codes and Cyphers can get out of their computers. London gets all there is. But they don't pass all of it on. They give the director in the field precisely as much as it's essential for him to know; and out mere in the field where the pattern is changing rapidly from phase to phase the director uses his own discretion as to how much his executive needs to know in order to work at his full potential.
The executive is a ferret. They put him down the hole and he doesn't ask any questions that don't concern him. All he's I got to do is stay alive and come up with the goods and the only way he can do it is by trusting London. If they don't I tell you everything you've got to believe it's for your own good ad eventually your own salvation, 'No questions,' I said.
The line went dead.
'Would you like something to read?'
'Please.'
New York Times.
This was the edition Zade had bought.
He was sitting twelve rows behind me in the coach class:' I'd gone into the forward toilet and swung the catch and shut the door against the lever, using one eye at the three-millimetre crack until I picked up his image as he passed through the front-end compartment.
Since we shall be flying for most of our journey over water, so forth.
The whine of the reactors increased and we began moving across to the runway.
I knew what they'd done with the tag. The other one.
Those four men on Broadway and West 69th Street had been local hirelings, like the man reporting on the Secretary of Defense in Washington. Two of them had still been in fit condition When Zade had left the Lulu Belle Hotel and they might have given him mobile protection on his way to the diner in Queens: I didn't know because I wasn't there. But I'd been there when Zade had driven from the diner to the airport and there hadn't been any protection and there still hadn't been any protection at the airport itself and I could think of only one reason.