Blair smiled ruefully. No matter how hard you tried you never got beneath the skin. ‘Where this time?’
‘Thailand.’
Blair whistled his surprise. ‘Jesus Christ! What are you doing in Thailand?’
‘Thailand’s just base. I’m taking a team into Cambodia.’
The older man laughed. ‘Taking on the Khmer Rouge single-handed, are we?’
Elliot smiled. ‘It’s a small private job. Man’s paying me a lot of money to go in and get his family out.’
‘How far in?’
‘About a week there, a week back. It’ll be a small team. Just three of us. I’ll want automatics, pistols, grenades, knives, kit, radio, rations and medical supplies. And maps. Can you do it?’
‘Thailand’s tricky. Can’t get anything in. Have to procure locally.’
‘I don’t want to know how difficult it is, I want to know if you can do it.’
‘’Course I can do it. Have you ever know your old sergeant to let you down?’ He rose. ‘I think I will have that drink.’ He crossed to the cabinet to pour himself a stiff measure. ‘Can’t guarantee what I get you, though. Be either Russian or American. Probably Russian.’
‘I’d prefer American.’
‘Might cost more.’
‘So, it’ll cost more.’
Blair sipped his whisky and rolled it around his mouth. ‘Who are you taking?’
‘Slattery.’
‘That bloody Aussie! Man, he’s aff his heid!’
‘He’s good. I phoned Sydney this morning. I’m meeting him in Bangkok.’
Blair shook his head. ‘The two of you loose in Bangkok. That would be worth seeing.’ Pause. ‘Who else?’
‘A pal of Slattery’s. A Yank called McCue. Vietnam vet. Ex-Big Red One. Tunnel Rat. Stayed on in Bangkok after the war.’
‘When you going?’
‘Flying out later this week. I want to be ready to move in a fortnight.’
Blair emptied his glass. ‘You’re aff your heid, man!’ Another pause. ‘Don’t suppose you’d like to take a fourth?’
Elliot grinned. ‘You’re too bloody old, Sam.’
‘I’m as fit as you are.’
‘No chance. The only place you’re going to die now is in your bed.’
Chapter Eight
Lisa had not gone back to college. The Christmas holidays were coming up and, anyway, she couldn’t have faced it. The sympathy of her friends, the questions she wouldn’t want to answer. And she was no longer sure she was the person she had been just a week ago. College, and a future in journalism, seemed unimportant, trivial.
She had wandered around the house for days, unable to settle, picking up a book, reading a few pages then laying it aside. She had phoned Wiseman several times, but he had no news. David had called every day and she had put him off each time. Somehow he belonged to the person she had been before, to Lisa Robinson, the shy orphaned eighteen-year-old who had stood so helplessly at her mother’s graveside only a few days earlier. Lisa Elliot was someone else. Who that person was, she could not yet tell. Just that she was different. She had money, independence, and a father who’d killed women and children in cold blood.
Then, on the fourth day, came the call she had been waiting for. Wiseman’s voice at the other end of the line. ‘We can’t guarantee,’ he said, ‘that he’ll still be there. But it’s the last address that we can find.’
Lisa’s mouth was dry and her hands trembled as she stepped out of the taxi into the King’s Road. She had not wanted to take the cab right to the door. She needed time to walk, collect her thoughts, summon the courage to make her way to the mews address Wiseman had given her, to knock on the door and face the man she had always thought was dead. Her father.
She realised very quickly that had been a mistake. All she’d done was make time for her courage to fail. What would she say to him? What if he didn’t want to know, and shut the door in her face? What would she do then? She walked slowly, dreamlike, through the late evening Christmas shoppers, tinsel flashing in shop windows, Christmas lights tinting the faces of passers-by. She caught a glimpse of her reflection in a window. A pale, frightened face staring back from the glass. She focused beyond the reflection. An ice-cream parlour. And she shivered. A little girl holding her Daddy’s hand as he bought her a two-flavour cone, her face alight with pleasure, her father’s smile of fond indulgence. Ice cream at Christmas. Moments Lisa had never known. She caught her reflection again and looked quickly away.
Now or never.
The cobbled mews lane was deserted, feeble pools of yellow light falling from old-fashioned coach lamps mounted on each cottage wall. One or two lights shone in upper windows. A red Porsche stood parked on her left as she entered through an archway. You needed money to own a mews house here.
Number twenty-three had a lacquered, oak-panelled door. There was no name plate, no light in the upper windows. She pressed the buzzer and heard it sound faintly within. She waited, but already she knew the house was empty. She tried again, an automatic response, and stepped back to look up. The darkness in the windows mirrored her despair. She turned away.
A net curtain flickered at an upper window as her footsteps receded down the mews.
‘She’s gone. Probably some woman he’s been two-timing.’ The man turned away from the window as his companion again turned on the flashlight and quickly completed the wiring Lisa’s arrival had interrupted. He lifted the top casing of the telephone answering machine and slipped it carefully back in place, dexterously tightening the screws at all four corners.
‘That’s it,’ he said, and placed each of the specialist tools of his trade into the pockets of a folding canvas carrier which he rolled up and dropped into a soft leather holdall. He switched off the flashlight. ‘Let’s get out of here.’
The other man lifted the holdall and patted the answering machine gently with his gloved hand. He grinned. ‘Merry Christmas, Mr Elliot.’
Chapter Nine
Elliot looked down as his plane circled before coming in to land at Bangkok’s Don Muang international airport. Below, the paddy fields caught and reflected the light of the moon, hundreds of silver-paper shapes arranged in random geometric patterns. The airport was crowded and hot. A sticky heat you could almost touch. It came as a shock after the hours of incarceration in the air-conditioned fuselage of the aircraft that had left London shivering at minus ten. Elliot felt his clothes go limp. He had a long, irritating wait to clear customs and immigration, Thai officers inspecting him with inscrutable dark eyes. Slattery was waiting for him at the international arrivals gate in a short-sleeved, sweat-stained shirt.
‘Hey, chief!’ His big hand grasped Elliot’s. Elliot had a great affection for this voluble Aussie, and a great respect too. As a soldier of fortune in the early days of the war in Nam he had adapted quickly and easily to the guerrilla tactics of the VC, realizing long before the Americans that this would be no conventional war for conventional soldiers.
Elliot grinned. ‘How are you, you ugly bastard?’
‘Getting uglier.’ Slattery pulled playfully at Elliot’s scarred cheek. ‘And you get prettier every time I see you.’
He was a man of indeterminate years, though probably in his early forties. His coarse blonde hair had been crew-cut to little more than a stubble. He was short, about five-nine, but broad-built, stocky, with enormous strength and stamina. He had a striking face, squat and ugly, made almost remarkable by the pale grey of his eyes. His deep tan was ruddy rather than brown, his eyebrows bleached nearly white by the unrelenting Australian sun. But Elliot’s first impression was that he had lost weight.