Fire Hawk (16 page)

And Martin had never known.
That's what Chrissie had said. Her husband had never once suspected she was having an affair. Always imagined that when his wife disappeared late at night, not returning for hours, she was driving round in her car letting off steam or parked up somewhere smoking cigarette after cigarette until she calmed down enough to return to him. Never known the truth until this summer. And Martin Kessler was by profession a spymaster.

Sam walked back to the hall, picked up his bag and took it to the bedroom to unpack, putting his things away with a neatness bred by years spent in cabins too small to swing a cat in. Chrissie had teased him about his tidy ways, asking where he would stow a woman if one were ever to move in with him. His life was too ordered, she'd told him, too complete for a woman to be let in permanently.

He changed into jeans and a T-shirt and, resisting the temptation to sink a large scotch, perched in the galley-like kitchen and brewed some tea in a mug that bore the crest of the last ship he'd served in.

It was late afternoon. The doctor had suggested he do things that were normal and routine. Might drop into the pub later for a couple of pints and some inconsequential chatter, then pick up a takeaway at the local Tandoori before dosing himself with the sleeping pills the medic had prescribed and try for a night without bad dreams.

He began checking the food cupboard and the fridge, with the idea of a visit to the supermarket – anything for distraction. But Baghdad came winging back into his head. The beatings, the endless questions about the messenger's whispers, the sheer bloody terror of believing he would be killed . . .

‘Hell!'

This wouldn't do. He needed to fill his head with something else. He got up from the kitchen stool, stomped into the living room and switched on the TV for the news.

It turned out the world had moved little since he'd last been in touch with it. On the other side of the Atlantic the US presidential election campaign was as lacklustre as ever. At home Conservative MPs were still fighting like rats in a sack, and in Israel Palestinians were protesting violently against new Jewish settlements on the West Bank.

Then Saddam Hussein's picture came on the screen. He turned up the sound. The voice-over reported the Iraqi leader launching a stinging verbal attack on Jerusalem and Washington over their ‘betrayal of the Oslo accords'. A warning that a failure of Middle East peace could lead to global war.

A war waged with biological weapons. Was that what the madman planned?

A shiver ran through him. Anthrax weapons were out there and he was doing nothing to find them. But what could
he
do? Like the man strung up by his hands in the Baghdad prison, he was just a messenger. He'd done his duty. Passed on all he knew to his masters. Not his responsibility any more. The hard part was to stop thinking that it was.

What he needed was to wash his brain out. The whiff of the sea might do it. A few days on his boat with a stiff sailing breeze and some sun on his back. Why the hell not? They'd told him to take leave.

He looked at his watch. Not yet six. To learn where the sloop was moored, he would need to talk with his sailing partner who'd used her during his absence. And Tom Wallace wouldn't be back at his Chichester home for another fifteen minutes or so.

Bored by the TV news, Sam switched off and stood by
the window again looking at the river. Water was a balm for him. Always had been, from the moment his long dead father first taught him to sail.

He would need to let Waddell know that he was disappearing for a few days. It smarted just to think of the man.
In your guts. Like in the Kiev affair? It's facts we need, Sam, not judgements based on hunches
.

Kiev. A balls-up of mega proportions which he'd never got to the bottom of. A sting run jointly by the intelligence organisations of three nations which had turned into a farce. The operation to crush an international drugs ring had been triggered by information from the Ukrainian SBU – part of the former Soviet KGB. Ecstasy tablets produced in Ukraine had been flooding markets in Germany and Britain. The lab producing them had been located but they wanted to nail the distribution network too. According to sources in Germany and Ukraine a huge consignment of drugs was to be transported to western Europe hidden inside trucks carting display material back from a trade fair in Kiev. Conveniently, Entryline Exhibitions had had the contract for the British companies represented at the fair. Sam had been dispatched to Kiev as site manager.

Coincidentally, Chrissie had been there too, acting as backup for the new SIS resident at the British Embassy who'd only been in the post a few weeks. With a charm that could suck foxes from their holes, she'd assembled a contact list to die for during her career with the Foreign Office and SIS. One of those contacts was a man named Viktor Rybkin whom she'd met in Washington two years earlier. Rybkin was SBU, resident in the American capital then, but on his return to Kiev he had become SBU liaison officer on transnational crime. It was he who had been running the Kiev end of the ecstasy investigation.

On that occasion too Sam had used the Terry Malone pseudonym, but his real identity was known to Viktor
Rybkin. No reason not to be. In that operation they had been on the same side. He and Chrissie had kept at arm's length from one another to preserve the secrecy of their relationship, but one night at his hotel there had been a message to meet her outside a café on vulitsya Khreshchatyk, Kiev's tree-lined, lamp-lit main boulevard.

He'd arrived at the appointed hour but Chrissie hadn't. Instead, he'd watched coming towards him the burly shape of Viktor Rybkin.

‘I want to show you the sights,' he'd grinned. The SBU man had a small scar on his cheek and a lopsided jaw. ‘Chrissie said she'd fix for you to be here.' His English had a heavy American accent. ‘Now we all got the same enemy – hoodlums, Mafiya – you should take a closer look at our ones.'

Rybkin had whisked him round the city by car, pointing out restaurants and clubs from where the gangs operated. There were more than six hundred Mafiya-style mobs active in Ukraine, he'd said.

‘We call them Mafiya, but they are New Russian criminals,' he'd explained in smooth, educated English, ‘not like the Italian families. Except in one way. They kill just as easy. Every week here in Kiev there are maybe five, maybe six murders, half of them contract killings.'

The tour had ended at a
banya.
In a well-equipped gym, tough, fit men in designer track-suits and Lycra hipsters sweated over the machines and downed imported energy drinks. All Mafiya, Rybkin had warned. They'd stripped off their own clothes to mingle with the naked bathers in the steam room. The Ukrainian's torso had been exceptionally hairy, Sam remembered, and his penis unusually small. ‘But I use it well,' Rybkin had assured him.

They'd sat in an alcove and Rybkin, his voice muffled by the hiss of steam, had pointed out some of the kings of
Kiev's underworld, the tsars of the Ukrainian black economy.

‘They know who I am, I know who they are. It's a game. We watch each other. What I'm telling them is that if they cross the line I shall know where to get them.'

Being exposed like that to men who might have been running the very drug ring they were trying to crush had felt like professional suicide. But it was the way they did things in Ukraine, Rybkin had assured him.

That same night, surveillance cameras he'd set up at the Kiev fair site had recorded ‘drugs' being hidden in British and German trucks. He'd reported a good ‘gut feeling' about it to London. But when the vehicles got home, no one had come for the hidden cargoes. Eventually, a police forensic team had examined the load and found it to be chalk. Ecstasy tablets from Kiev
had
turned up on the streets a few weeks later. They'd gone by another route.

In the SIS witch hunt that had followed, suspicion for the blowing of the operation had focused on Rybkin, but some had stuck to Sam. Chrissie had begged him to say nothing about her unwittingly setting him up for the visit to the
banya,
because if the powers that be knew about it, she'd be for the Star Chamber.

Bugger Waddell, digging all that up again. Bugger his suspicious little puritan mind.

The time had come for a proper drink, he decided. He took his mug back to the kitchen then poured a couple of fingers of whisky in a glass, topping it up with a little water from the tap. He gulped down a good slug.

There was a good chance Tom Wallace would be home by now. He grabbed the phone from the wall by the kitchen door and dialled. He'd known his sailing partner for fifteen years, ever since they studied at Dartmouth together. Tom had left the Navy three years after him, to take over an antique business started by his father.

The phone was answered on the third ring.

‘Wallace, you dog!' Sam growled.

‘Packer! Where've you been?'

‘Some hell hole or other. The usual, you know . . .'

Wallace had a good idea that he did dodgy work for the government and never asked for details.

‘Expected you back ages ago.
Backgammon
's in bloody Cherbourg. Been there nearly three weeks. You were supposed to bring her back to the Hamble, you sod.'

‘I know. I was away longer than expected.'

‘Living it up at somebody else's expense no doubt.'

‘No doubt.'

‘The marina charges'll be horrendous by now. Take your gold card with you. You
are
going to get her, I take it? That
is
why you're ringing?' Wallace liked people to do what they'd agreed to do.

‘Yes. I plan to get the ferry over as soon as I've got a crew sorted. I don't suppose you're free . . .'

‘No. Can't leave the shop this week. But I'm sure you can whistle up some bint from your little black book.'

Tom Wallace had a vivid fantasy image of Sam's love life, mainly because he never told him about it except to say it was active and complicated. Wallace himself had been married for eleven years but was now divorced, with two daughters he seldom saw. He lived alone, making little effort to attract a new partner. From time to time he talked of getting a Thai bride by mail order.

‘You'll need to keep an eye on the engine, Sam. Bit of a water leak when she's running. God knows where from. Pump the bilges every few hours and you'll be okay. Hope the boat's clean enough for you. Took a couple of friends from the trade over with me last time. One of them was sick everywhere.'

‘Oh thanks a lot.'

‘No prob. Washed it off the seat covers for you.'

‘Very thoughtful.'

‘She's in berth F7. In the main marina at Cherbourg. You've got keys haven't you? Not lost them?'

‘No, Tom. I've got my keys.'

‘Good. Where are you planning to go?'

‘Don't know yet. I'll check the tides and work it out from that. Be back in the Hamble within the week I should think.'

‘Nice. Hope the weather's good for you. Piddled with rain half the time we were there.'

Sam rang off. He felt better for having decided to go away. Now to find a crew. It wasn't that he couldn't manage the boat on his own – he'd often sailed solo – but he wanted company. Someone undemanding.

Chrissie had never sailed with him. She'd always worried there'd be some incident or other that would make their relationship public.
Not worth the risk, lover. Anyway, I'd be sea sick.
The only boat they'd been on together was a Thames skiff last summer, soon after she'd returned from a two-year stay in Washington with her husband. During her time in America she'd had a
really serious
go at making the marriage work, she'd told him. But without any notable success. They'd found a deserted stretch of water somewhere near Goring, tied the painter to a tree root then made up for lost time among the cow parsley.

Shit! They'd spent some good, stolen times together over the years. Later that same afternoon, he remembered, they'd rowed slowly past an isolated, half-timbered waterside cottage.
I want it,
she'd moaned.
A gingerbread house.
To be their love nest, she'd said. Somewhere to spend whole days and nights together instead of snatched hours in constant fear of discovery. It was then that he'd realised that despite the frailty of her marriage she had no intention of ending it. A husband
and
a lover was what she wanted.

There had been other women during his liaison with Chrissie, particularly during her time away in America. Some he'd slept with, others he'd dated for their company. But thinking about them now, none came to mind as a potential crew for the next few days. And most of the men he knew had steady jobs from which they could never escape on weekdays. He began to resign himself to going alone. The
Backgammon
was an eight-year-old Moody 31 with rigging lines that ran into the cockpit to make single-handed sailing easier.

He began to write a list of things to take. The boat was well-equipped. All he needed was clothes, a passport and some money. He pulled an almanac from the shelf in the living room to study the tide tables. He would listen to a shipping forecast and check the ferries. He was sure there was a daily sailing to Cherbourg at midday.

Pottering around the flat getting together the things he would require felt good. Normality. It was what he needed. And there'd still be time for a pint in the pub.

Then he pulled himself up short.

‘This is insane,' he muttered to himself. ‘There's a madman out there with a load of anthrax warheads – and I'm going bloody sailing!'

DEAN BURGESS'S NECK
ached after a night wedged against the door of the Nissan in the least uncomfortable position he could devise. The atmosphere had become threatening overnight and this morning the inspection team had donned their UN blue hats and were keeping together in groups of no less than three.