Fire Hawk (29 page)

At the top he stopped and looked again. She had fair hair hanging to her shoulders and was staring out to sea. So far as he could tell she hadn't noticed him.

Suddenly he realised who it was and moved closer.

‘Sophie?'

The woman jerked with fright and stared round at him, straining to see.

‘Wha . . . whozat?'

‘It's Terry.'

‘Oh. You.' A pause, then she turned her face to the sea again. ‘'Lo.'

He crunched over to where she sat, a picture of despondency.

‘You all right?'

‘No.'

His fault? he wondered. The result of his abrupt disappearance from the Paradiso?

‘Look, sorry about the drinks. Suddenly saw someone I had to talk to.'

‘Yeah, yeah. You're a heap o' shit. You all are.' She choked on the words. ‘Whyn't you just piss off?'

He couldn't tell whether she'd been crying or was just drunk.

‘Look, I said I'm sorry,' he repeated, trying to convince himself it was all right to leave her to her misery. Then he decided he'd better make sure she hadn't been harmed in some way.

He flopped down beside her.

‘Did something nasty happen to you?' he asked gently.

‘Na-asty? No way,' she spluttered almost laughing. ‘Nuffing ever does. Tha's the trouble.'

Pissed as a fart, he decided.

‘So, the bloke you were with . . .'

‘Into a pumpkin. At midnight. Went home to his wife and sprog.'

‘Which wasn't what you'd had in mind.'

She gave a gust of a sigh, her breath reeking of brandy.

‘Look. Din't wan' a relashunship with him or anything like that,' she slurred. ‘Din't pertickely like him. Jus' wan'ed a
shag.
Thas all. Not much to ask izit? You blokes are s'posed to wan' it all the bloody time.' She punched him feebly on the shoulder. ‘So wha's wrong with
me,
eh? Why don't
I
get my share?'

He saw tears glinting on her cheekbones and put his arm round her shoulder. He decided to give her a couple of minutes and then be on his way. ‘You will, sweetheart. There's a bloke out there who's for you, you'll see.'

‘Huh. Anyway, I don't feel like it anymore, so gerroff.' She twisted away from him. ‘Lost my libeediboo. So don' bloody try anything. Awright?'

‘I won't. Have no fear.' He stood up. ‘Look, I'm going inside. I'll give you a hand if you want. But I'm going in now. So if you're not coming, it's goodnight. Okay?'

‘Hang on, hang on. Don' be like that.' She grabbed his arm and tried to pull him back down. Then she groaned as if in great pain.

‘What's the matter?' Perhaps she
had
been assaulted.

‘Wha's the time?' she queried miserably. ‘Jus' remembered something . . .'

‘About ten to three.'

‘Oh gawd!'

‘What?'

‘Got to do a pres'tation in the morning. Morning? Christ! It's bloody morning already. I'll get the sack, I will.'

‘You'll be all right. Drink loads of water, get some sleep, and down some paracetamol when you wake up. Be as right as rain.'

‘No, no!' she howled. ‘You don' understand. I've got to
do
the pres'tation. Like tonight.'

‘You mean
prepare
it?'

‘Yes,' she answered forlornly.

‘That's a presentation I'd quite like to watch!'

‘You
mean
bastard!' she howled.

Suddenly he thought of something. The presentation would surely be done on a computer.

‘You've got the kit for this somewhere?' he asked tentatively. ‘A PC?'

‘Course. In my room. It's got more hardware in it than s-lilicon valley. PC, scanner, printer, the lot.'

‘And software for playing around with photos?'

‘Oh yeah. The lot. Done a course on it.'

‘Brilliant. Come on then. I'll give you a hand if you like. It won't take you long. The sooner you start . . .'

She didn't move.

‘I think I'm goin' to be sick . . .' She pitched forward and retched.

‘Christ,' Sam breathed, suppressing his revulsion. Somehow he was going to have to sober her up a bit.

Ten minutes later he'd got Sophie to her room on the floor below his own, a room with the same striped wallpaper and faded Monet print. Clothes which she'd worn earlier in the day were strewn untidily across the double bed. He sat in front of her table-full of computer equipment while she threw up again, in the bathroom this time.

She emerged eventually, her face pinched and blotchy, her lank hair clinging to her small head like a beggar's. She perched on the edge of the bed, trembling.

‘G-got to sleep,' she stuttered. Suddenly her eyes closed and she tipped sideways onto the mattress with the grace of a ballerina, tucking her legs into a foetal position.

‘No, luvvy, you can't,' Sam cajoled, springing to his feet. ‘You can't sleep yet, Soph. Sorry. You've got work to do.' He crossed to the bed and shook her gently. ‘Look, I'll help you. Switch all this kit on and show me what it does.'

‘No. I jus' wanna sleep.'

He grabbed her by the shoulders and pulled her upright. She stared gormlessly up at him like a beached fish. ‘Come on.' He put his hands under the sticky armpits of her little black dress and lifted her to her feet.

‘Gawd, I'm goin' to be sick again,' she wheezed.

‘No you're not.'

He sat her down at the chair in front of the laptop and found the power switch to boot up the machine. Sophie
began to retch, but dryly, covering her mouth with her hands. Sam found a waste bin and dropped it at her feet.

‘Just in case, right? Now take in some deep breaths.'

‘Sorry,' she whispered between gulps. ‘Disgusting, aren't I?'

‘No. Not disgusting. You just drank too much. Happens to us all.'

As she continued the deep breathing he went to the bathroom and returned with a glass of tap water.

‘No.' She pushed it away. ‘Tastes foul. There's some fizzy stuff in the minibar. It's what I usually have when I get like this.'

The screen in front of her was displaying the Windows desktop. Her hand swallowed the mouse as naturally as if it were an extension of her arm. She clicked on the icon for the presentations software.

Sam filled a glass from a bottle of mineral water and held out a packet of cheese biscuits. ‘If you can nibble a few of these it'll help.'

She forced herself to smile. ‘Thanks. You're being kind. Can't imagine why.'

‘Pure self-interest,' Sam breathed, pulling across the chair from the dressing table and sitting beside her. ‘Always wanted to know what you can do with pictures on a PC.'

She was beginning to nod off again, but he nudged her and she loaded a photo from file. A picture of the Mondiale Hotel.

‘Well, well . . . recognise that?'

‘Not half. Can you go close in on part of it? The doorway, for instance.'

She drew a box round the entrance porch then clicked on ‘expand'. It filled the frame.

‘Can you make it lighter, so we can see detail on the faces behind the window?'

‘Course. Do anything. Even age someone fifty years if I want.'

She clicked and tinkered until a face that had been obscured by shadow was now much clearer.

‘Amazing. With my PC at home I don't know much more than how to switch it on,' he told her disingenuously. ‘Hey, tell you what. There's a photo I took from the board in the hall – can you scan it in for me?'

‘Look, if I'm ever goin' to get this pres'tation sorted . . .'

‘Won't take a minute.'

He placed the photo face down on the scanner glass. Her hand twitched across the mouse pad. Soon the picture was filling the screen.

‘Who are these people?' she asked, mildly curious. Then she pursed her lips and pressed at her stomach as if suffering from cramps.

‘No idea,' Sam lied. The faces by the bar were the ones he was interested in – still dark and unidentifiable.

‘Oh hell!' Sophie rose unsteadily, both hands clasped to her stomach. She scuttled to the bathroom and banged shut the door.

Sam transferred to her chair and gripped the mouse, ignoring the explosions from the loo. He'd watched carefully what she'd done before. He boxed round the face of the man by the bar who was looking at Chrissie and expanded it to fill the screen. Still just a dark smudge, except he could now make out a pale moustache. The face had a mournful look. Something about it that was familiar, but he couldn't be sure it hadn't just
become
familiar by working on it.

He clicked on the drop-down image enhancement menu and played with the sliders for contrast and brightness. From the bathroom behind him there came a muffled sob. Slowly, using software tools to sharpen and
highlight, the definable features of a man's face began to emerge from the blob on the screen.

‘I don't believe . . .'

It was a face he now recognised. The oddly dog-like looks, the mournful droop of the moustache, the unflinching Labrador eyes – it was in the store room in Baghdad that he'd seen them before. The man he'd called Saladin who'd watched his interrogation in silence. The man to whom the others deferred. A creature for whom only one thing had seemed to matter – that the message whispered to Sam in the foyer of the Rashid Hotel had been harmless. That even if it had warned of the anthrax attack it had
not
revealed its date and location.

Sam let out a low whistle.

And Saladin had been
here,
in this very hotel on Tuesday night, watching with apparent disquiet as two Ukrainians downed booze and shot their mouths off with an English woman. Why should he be so concerned? Because the Ukrainians were men he'd done business with?

‘Yes!' he hissed. There was no other explanation that made sense. Here was the link they'd been looking for. A tenuous, unverifiable one, but a link nonetheless.

The bathroom door banged open and Sophie emerged, wrapped just in a towel. She pitched forward onto the bed and closed her eyes as if she never expected to open them again.

Sam clicked the mouse and a colour close-up of Saladin rolled out of the printer.

THE BONDED CONTAINER
yard on the western side of Limassol had come to life at six a.m. when a lone forklift driver arrived for work. Within minutes of him greeting the night security man, hanging up his leather jacket in the site office and climbing behind the wheel of his machine, the main gates had slid open to admit the trailer truck that had come to take away the container bound for Israel.

The forklift drove into the warehouse and lifted the Haifa-bound box from its position of isolation on one side of the shed. To the driver it was just a box, forty feet long and eight feet wide, with a weight of several thousand kilos. There was no need to know where it had come from, nor to enquire what it contained. His employer paid him well, with an unspoken understanding never to let his curiosity get the better of him.

The container that had arrived here from Ilychevsk near Odessa three days ago emerged now through the wide opening of the warehouse doors, raised high by the forklift like a mantis at prayer. With a precision born of years of practice the driver lowered it gently and accurately onto the locating lugs of the transporter's flatbed.

The truck driver collected the container's shipping papers from the site office, then with a final inspection of the trailer to ensure the load was secure, he swung up into the cab and drove out of the gates. At this hour of the morning he expected no delay at the port. There'd be a glance at his papers at the customs barrier, then straight onto the quay and the berth where the ship for Haifa was waiting. At noon the container with its unpleasant cargo would be on its way to its final destination.

There had been no need for Viktor Rybkin to be here in person to watch this final stage of the Cyprus operation. To do so would have risked drawing attention to himself. And there was nothing he could achieve in person here that money hadn't already secured for the organisation. Nowhere in the world were there businessmen who couldn't be bought.

It would have been impossible anyway for Rybkin to be here. His flight to Odessa had just lifted off the runway at Larnaca. The Ukrainian passport he'd been travelling on had been issued in a false name. The grumpy policeman who'd made a special inspection of the departing passengers' documents on instructions from his chief in Limassol had not given him a second look.

The RAF flight carrying Chrissie's coffin back to England was due off the ground at midday, but to satisfy the RAF's procedures Sam needed to be at Akrotiri an hour earlier, Mowbray had told him. He was on his way already however, by taxi, well ahead of time, because he had something important to do at the air base before the
flight. The car took the ring road north of Limassol, heading west.

Mowbray had driven down from Nicosia at dawn. Over bacon and eggs in Sam's hotel room, his parrot-grey eyes had examined Sam's photographic evidence with solemn concentration. Then, choosing his words with care, he'd admitted that it did give
some
weight to the idea that if an Iraqi group
was
preparing a biological weapons attack, then it
could
be being helped along the way by criminal elements from Ukraine.

Mowbray had put both the original photograph and the computer-enhanced print of Saladin into his briefcase so that he could transmit them to London as soon as he got back to Nicosia. Then Sam had handed over Chrissie's ear stud, but Mowbray suggested he put it with the rest of her possessions which he would find at the RAF base.

He'd surprised Sam by saying he wasn't intending to pass on any of what he'd just learned to the Cypriot police. ‘To be frank, their “accidental death after a night out” explanation suits us well, Sam. Amazingly the press seem to be prepared not to speculate on the exact circs of Mrs
Taylor
's demise, out of consideration for her family back in England.' Mrs
Kessler
's funeral would take place tomorrow, he'd added. Quick and quiet before some scoop-hungry hack made a connection.