Mambo (57 page)

He looked up.

Magdalena had flown three times over the city of Santiago de Cuba before she found what she was looking for. Dimly, she registered the meadow, the ring of trees, the missile-truck fifteen hundred feet below her. It was tiny and it wouldn't stay still in her vision, and spots the shape of amoebae kept prancing in front of her eyes. But it was the chill that bothered her more than anything else, the voracious cold that consumed her. She'd never known such a sensation before.

The death cold, she thought.

The cold of the coffin. Frozen earth.

She passed across the field, wheeled the small plane, made a second sweep; the craft lost height, dropping two, three hundred feet. Then she must have blacked out briefly because she couldn't remember bringing the plane even lower, bringing it down to a height that was only five hundred feet over the missile truck. She clutched her side, drew her hand away, saw how her palm and fingers were covered with blood that had seeped through Canto's bandage. But the bloodied hand was no longer her own, it was some ghostly thing, an appendage without substance. And it seemed to her that the blood froze on her flesh, and changed to crystals, pale pink crystals that were swept from her skin by the draught that rushed through the open window.

Dying, she thought. Dying, dying.

She made another pass over the field.

She was so low now she could see the faces of the men who fired guns at her. Their bullets slammed against the fuselage. She watched the marksmen rush out of her path as she flew no more than fifteen feet over the surface of the meadow.

Dying, she thought again.

It had its own kind of perfect madness.

The truck loomed up in front of her. The missile, angrily poised as if for flight, the open door of the control module – she saw these things rush towards her, and then it was as if everything in the world were being sucked in by her propellers, leaves, blades of grass, men, guns, clouds, everything was disappearing inside the slipstream of her rushing aircraft, crowding her vision, her brain, stifling her ability to take air into her lungs.

Inside the module Gunther Ruhr set the course of the missile. He calculated it would strike directly into the heart of Miami. But accuracy wasn't very important when you were talking about the total devastation of a city; a mile or two either way hardly mattered.

“How much damage will it do?” Rosabal asked. “How many will die?”

“Consider Hiroshima,” Ruhr answered.

Hiroshima. Two hundred thousand people had died there, many thousands more had become sick from radiation. The city had been totally destroyed
. Rosabal said nothing. He heard gunfire outside, ignored it. He merely imagined the chopper was circling the field again. Sooner or later it would be shot out of the sky. Nothing in the external world was important; only this small chamber mattered.

“This will be worse,” Ruhr said cheerfully. “Much worse. Ten times as many people will perish. Perhaps more.”

“Do it,” Rosabal said.

Ruhr leaned forward over the console. Like a cardshark about to shuffle a deck, a conjurer ready to perform an illusion, he rubbed his hands together a few times as if to stimulate his circulation, then he held both hands over the console. He might have been born for just this moment, his trick of all tricks.

“Do it! Goddamit, do it now!” Rosabal snapped.

Gunther Ruhr smiled; it was perhaps the singular most blissful expression that had ever appeared on his face. His hands dropped toward the console.

In a fraction of time too small for even the finest chronometers to measure, too short for the senses to organise detail from chaos, Magdalena saw Rafael Rosabal in the open door of the module. His face was turned slightly away from her, but his profile was visible, unmistakable. She felt her chilled blood rush to her head and through the window of her small failing plane could smell wet grass and black mud – and then everything came together in that one chaotic reduction of time, module and aeroplane, sky and mud, Magdalena and the man she loved, the man with whom she might now spend eternity if there happened to be one, it all fused, melded, and even as it came together it also exploded and blew apart, white flame conjoining the aircraft and the missile-truck, searing the fuselage, disintegrating the module and the men inside it, setting aflame the cables that married the missile to its control centre, then finally toppling in fire the missile itself, which rolled from the truck and slithered from its erector and slumped, fuses melted and shot, navigational system destroyed, its function rendered harmless, into the soft mud.

Frank Pagan saw Magdalena for only a second as the plane savagely struck the module, and then he closed his eyes against the intense heat he could feel roll across the meadow toward the trees where he stood. When he opened his eyes he looked at how tall flames rose in a great white dance from the truck, a noisy dance set to the strange crackling music of fire. There was a quality of illusion to his perceptions: had he really seen her in the tiny cockpit of that doomed plane? Had he imagined it?

He stepped back under the cover of the trees. The soldiers who had been shooting at him only minutes before were running from the fiery ruin of the truck as fast and as far as they could, some with their uniforms on fire. He saw one wing of the plane collapse like burning paper, but after that there was very little distinction between objects trapped in the furnace. They all glowed with the same hallucinatory intensity.

He turned and ran as quickly as he could to the place where Bengochea and the child waited in the helicopter.

Cabo Gracias a Dios, Honduras

The storm uprooted the tent of Tomas Fuentes and blew it across the airstrip toward the ocean, where anchored boats precariously rode the swell. A freighter that had set sail some thirty minutes before had already turned back, and another small ship was reported capsized. On the airstrip, fighter-planes were chained to stone chocks lest they drift and roll in the wind. Tomas watched his tent go flying off like a great bird with drab olive plumage and the grace of an ostrich, and then it was lost from sight. Bosanquet's tent went the same way, flapping like loose laundry, dragging its guy ropes behind it.

Fuentes studied the roiling sea just as the wind ripped the panama hat from his head and launched it up into the tall branches of trees where it was blown from left to right, up and down, then out of sight, a symbol – if Fuentes wanted to see it this way – of a lost cause.

He preferred to think of it as a cause postponed. There would be other days, and they would be stormless, and the sea clear all the way to Cuba and that
hijo de puta
, Fidel Castro.

21

London

Frank Pagan looked from the window of the Boeing 727 as the electric coastline of Florida faded and the darkness of the ocean replaced land. Then there were clouds, becalmed in the storm's aftermath. He pretended to read the in-flight magazine but his attention was drawn time and again to Steffie Brough in the seat beside him.

She was lost in a glossy magazine of her own, a world of models, a synthetic reality, clearly preferable to the one she'd just experienced. She was oddly quiet most of the trip, unwilling to answer even the most innocuous of Pagan's questions. He realised that sooner or later this little girl was going to need expert help, a counsellor, a therapist. Ruhr had left his mark on her – the question was how much damage had been done?

Pagan, who had no great mastery of small talk, made idle comments, and Steffie Brough responded, if at all, in a dull way. Strangers with nothing to share, Pagan thought, which in one sense was true – he a London cop, she a horse-breeder's daughter from farmlands, what could they have in common? The girl, though, had a certain dead look in her eyes, as if curiosity were a capacity she didn't have; no questions about Pagan's investigation, no gratitude. Although Pagan sought none, he nevertheless would have thought it natural in the circumstances. She flipped magazine pages, picked at her airline food – chicken pellets with almonds, a glutinous matter masquerading as rice. She was quite lost to Pagan's efforts to reach her, beyond any kindness he showed, any concern he demonstrated. And he tried; despite what he considered a lack of any natural affinity for kids – here he underestimated himself – he made a good effort. Her retreat defeated him.

It was after five a.m. when the flight reached London, a grey English dawn with a spiteful, jaundiced sun. Heathrow was out of the question – too many journalists and photographers waiting for snapshots of that most beloved of human occurrences, the tearful reunion. Consequently, the plane was diverted to Gatwick, and Stephanie Brough's parents were taken there in an unmarked car.

Pagan disembarked with the girl. Outside, in a lounge set aside for the child's return, a small crowd had come to meet her – her parents, a grandmother, a brother (a gangling youth of unsurpassed awkwardness who had somehow contrived to break the stems of roses he brought to his sister), a dozen or so uniformed policemen, half of them women, detectives in plain clothes, Billy Ewing from Golden Square, and Martin Burr, who clapped Pagan's shoulder as if to say it was a job well done. And so it was, but Burr was never expansive in his appreciations. A professional did what was expected of him, a professional needed no special thanks. Later, there would be reports and interviews, but not for the moment.

Pagan, tired, trying not to yawn, was thanked by the gushing parents and the grandmother who planted a perfumed kiss on his lips. All he wanted was to drift away, go back to his flat, sleep for days. It was a lonely prospect and he was apprehensive about the possibility of bad dreams, a missile rising into the launch position, the sight of a small aeroplane burning in a Cuban field – but it was time to slow down his private clock.

He watched the happy crowd inside the lounge, the smilingly tearful family, Steffie's mother with her white insomniac face lit like a bright lightbulb, Mr Brough in a check suit with a camel hair waistcoat, Steffie herself clinging quietly to her mother.

And yet Pagan felt weird. Displaced. Out of sorts. A feeling that had nothing to do with his fatigue. There was something not quite right about this whole gathering.

He walked to a drinks machine, pressed in a coin, heard a can of Coca-Cola come hurtling down the chute. He popped it, sipped the stuff, longed for a dram of the Auchentoshan to spike it up, and wondered what it was that left him so chilled, that sense of missing something. And then he knew what it was even before Billy Ewing – hushed, confidential, looking like a bookie's clerk – grabbed him by the elbow and took him aside. They stepped out of the lounge and into the grubby dawn, where Billy blew his nose with distinctive flair, a trombonist of the sinuses.

“It's Foxie,” Billy Ewing said.

Of course, Pagan thought. That was it. Foxie wasn't here. Good old Foxie hadn't shown up. He gazed at Billy Ewing and waited for more, but the Scotsman hadn't much to add.

“He hasn't come back yet, Frank. Off he went to Glasgow, called in with one message, and that was the last we heard from him.”

“You've tried to contact him?”

“Oh, aye, last night I talked with Glasgow Central myself.”

“And?”

Billy Ewing shrugged. “And nothing. No trace. He borrowed a car belonging to Glasgow CID – and it hasn't been returned.”

“Do you have a copy of his last message?” Pagan asked.

“Back at the office.”

“We'll go in your car, Billy,” Pagan said.

“Whatever you say.”

They went in Ewing's Ford through Central London, through streets springing to daily, prosaic life, and by the time they reached Golden Square, Frank Pagan's sleepiness had evaporated, replaced by a general sense of uneasiness.

The message was already two days old and as Pagan fingered the flimsy piece of paper he had the unsettling feeling, given perhaps only to mediums and soothsayers, that Foxie's silence indicated a serious condition.

“Mibbe he's following up on something,” Ewing suggested. “Mibbe he's on to something hot.”

“And he couldn't find change for a telephone call, Billy?”

Ewing, baffled, shrugged. He knew as well as Pagan that Foxworth was a diligent man who paid conscientious attention to detail. Pagan went inside his office and sat for a time on the sofa. He shut his eyes, rubbed them, worried about Foxie.

He looked up at Billy Ewing. “Get me on the next available flight to Glasgow, Billy. And get me a gun.”

“Do you want some company, Frank? I know the territory, after all.”

Pagan shook his head, stood up, felt an immense pressure in his chest. He didn't want company, talkative or otherwise. He would follow Foxworth's trail alone. He borrowed Ewing's pistol, a Smith and Wesson, and Billy drove him from Golden Square out along the motorway to Heathrow.

On the way Billy Ewing mentioned the result of his inquiries into Harry Hurt and Sheridan Perry. Pagan could barely recall having made the request; it seemed such a long time ago. Rich pair of buggers, Frank, was how Billy Ewing phrased it. “But wealth, as my old Grannie used to phrase it, is no guarantee of immortality.”

“Meaning?”

“Harry Hurt was assassinated in Washington, and Sheridan Perry has disappeared.”

“Somehow I'm not surprised,” Pagan said.

Billy Ewing sighed. “There's a lot of dying going on, Frank.”

Scotland

The flight to Glasgow was uneventful. It was just after eight a.m. when Pagan arrived and took a taxi to the city centre. Morning sunlight in the city, an unexpected state of affairs, and lovely, the breeze off the River Clyde bracing, the clouds rushing across a clear blue sky. In the heart of Glasgow Pagan went at once to the offices of the Executive Motor Car Company in West Nile Street. This was the new Glasgow – gone was a certain tired, washed-out drabness, a weariness of the soul that had given the city the appearance of some Baltic capital. Uplifted, scrubbed, renewed, it was as if the city had overcome an inferiority complex after many years of arduous, expensive therapy.