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PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF CAMPBELL ARMSTRONG
“Campbell Armstrong is thriller writing’s best-kept secret.” —The Sunday Times
“Armstrong is among the most intriguing of blockbuster writers … near to un put down able.” —GQ
“While touching on suspense with a skill to please hard-core thriller addicts, he manages to please people who … warm to readable novels of substance.” —Daily Mail
“Armstrong’s skill is not just an eye for a criminally good tale but a passion for the people that will populate it.”—The Scotsman
“Subtle and marvelous … This is a dazzling book.”—The Daily Telegraph on Agents of Darkness
“A consummate psychological thriller … Without doubt, Armstrong is now in the front rank of thriller writers.”—Books on Heat
“Armstrong has outdone both Frederick Forsyth and Ken Follett.” —James Patterson on Jig
“A full throttle adventure thriller.”—The Guardian on Mambo
“A wonderful puzzle that keeps us guessing right to the end.” —Publishers Weekly on Mazurka
Heat
A Frank Pagan Novel
Campbell Armstrong
For Aidan, Connor, Neil and Owen
1
BUCKINGHAMSHIRE, ENGLAND
The resort hotel, surrounded by a golf-course and tennis courts, was located in a secluded green valley of the kind reserved for the sporting pursuits of the rich. Horses were available for guests who wanted the experience of hacking country lanes, and there was a high-tech indoor gymnasium. Since Frank Pagan played neither golf nor tennis, and thought horses petulant creatures given to treacherous inclinations – and pumping iron, in his book, was an overrated activity with high cardiac arrest possibilities – he wasn’t altogether at ease in these expensive, rustic surroundings.
But he had more pressing reasons for his lack of comfort. Sixty-three of them, to be exact. Sixty-three men and women.
He stood on the balcony outside his room and surveyed the area as far as the wooded horizon. It was glorious weather, the last day of an August that had been sunny and hot throughout. A few figures in the distance trotted after golf balls; on one of the tennis courts a middle-aged Australian woman scampered across red clay with racket outstretched to make a return to her partner, a taut, leathery man from Dallas.
Sixty-three reasons, Pagan thought.
He continued to observe the view. Cloudless sky, copper sun, a golf ball in high flight. A horse whinnied nearby. These were peripheral details to him. His concentration was elsewhere. He was thinking of the hidden figures in the landscape, the men and women who strolled among clumps of trees and communicated with one another by means of cordless phones, the casually dressed characters that drifted with apparent aimlessness around the edges of the tennis courts or wandered the foyer downstairs or strolled the corridors. These were the palace guard, the security forces he’d assembled to protect the sixty-three counter-terrorist specialists from around the world gathered here for this conference. The guards, members of Special Branch, equalled the specialists in number – and still Pagan, in his wary vigilance, wasn’t sure this was enough.
He checked his watch. Five forty. There had been two seminars during the course of the day, one on the subject of electronic surveillance chaired by the expert from Dallas, the other concerned with ways of more efficiently sharing computer information to track the movement and identities of terrorists. Pagan, his attention inclined to wander, had sat through the meetings with the same discomfort he felt now on the balcony.
The safety of these international experts was his responsibility. And safety, as he knew, was a porous concept. It was an imperfect world, and you could take all the precautions you thought necessary – and still you were never sure you’d covered every contingency. The thought nagged him. But what could he do? Lock all the participants in their rooms for the three days of the conference? Shackle them to their beds?
He stepped back into his room, leaving open the balcony door. Dinner was at seven thirty, and after dinner, God help him, he was scheduled to give a speech. He dreaded public speaking because he was essentially a private man. But whether he liked it or not he was the star here, the principal speaker; the guests wanted to hear what he had to say on the subject of terrorism.
No, that wasn’t entirely true: they wanted to hear about one terrorist in particular.
He sat on the bed, which was covered with sheets of paper on which he’d scribbled notes. He reckoned he’d speak for twelve minutes, fifteen maximum. The idea made him nervous. All faces turned in his direction, all attention focused on him. He was more accustomed to watching than to being watched. He picked up one of the sheets and looked at what he’d written … After her disappearance in Venice last March, all of my department’s time and energies have been concentrated on finding her …
Finding her, he thought. The phrase, so flat and bone-dry, gave no indication of the amount of effort that had been expended. It suggested nothing of the intensity of the search, the hundreds of sightings that had turned out to be cases of mistaken identity. The long days spent perusing reports that had come from around the world – from the Far East, Europe, and the United States.
Finding her. There was a sense in which she’d become mythical. She’d entered a realm of invisibility.
He gathered a few crumpled sheets together and walked inside the bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror. He wondered how other people would see him when he rose to give his speech. He wanted to project confidence and optimism; to flash the occasional generous smile expected of people making after-dinner speeches. A joke to tell, perhaps. Something to lighten the atmosphere.
He ran a hand over his short hair, uttered aloud a few sentences in a brisk way. We don’t give up. That’s the secret. We keep trying. We keep trying to imagine ourselves in her place, the kinds of things she’s likely to do, the places she might visit, the old acquaintances she may be tempted to contact … He studied his reflection, leaned forward and looked directly into his grey eyes and thought they were the colour of a wintry afternoon in London.
We keep trying, he thought. Because that’s all we can do. Because the rest is thin air.
The chef was manic and operatic, didn’t like a single member of his staff, considered them idiots incapable of performing even the simplest of tasks without his supervision. His nickname among the staff was Mussolini.
He’d discovered a human hair in the white wine sauce for the écrivisses cardinalisées, which caused him apoplexy. He stood in the centre of the stainless-steel kitchen with the offensive, spidery strand dangling from his fingers.
‘And whose – whose is this? From whose scalp did this fall?’ His eyes popped.
The kitchen hands, the choppers, the peelers, the under-chefs, everyone stopped what they were doing.
‘It is black,’ said the chef.
The staff was silent. The chef strutted back and forth like a detective about to interrogate the various suspects in a drawing-room murder.
‘It comes from somebody with black hair,’ said the chef.
Seven of the twelve kitchen staff had hair that colour. The chef realized he didn’t have time to question them all; he was under pressure, he was always under pressure; he had a dinner to prepare for more than sixty people and already he was concerned about the filet de boeuf en croute because he considered the pastry-chef, a plain bespectacled woman whose only distinction was her total lack of personality, another potential incompetent. In fact, he had all kinds of concerns beyond a single human hair that had found
its way into the wine sauce. The soufflé au bleu required his personal attention if he wanted to avert a disaster. And the mousse aux marrons – that was a production number all by itself.
He glared at the staff. ‘Later, we will explore the matter of this hair more thoroughly,’ he announced. He clapped his hands quickly several times. ‘For now, back to work. All of you. Work work work! And no hairs! No more hairs!’
He wandered the kitchen, surveying his domain. He studied the pastry-chef a moment. She was rolling out sheets of brioche dough. She did this with a certain facility, admittedly, but the chef never allowed himself to think well of the accomplishments of other people. He watched her work. If she was aware of him, she gave no indication. She continued to roll the dough, her manner one of absorption.
He shook his head and walked away. He didn’t like her wrist movements. It was always the same; there was always a fault to be found, if you looked for it. It was what the chef enjoyed most about the human race: it was superbly flawed. So why did he bother to sweat over the perfection of food, when the pigs chewed and swallowed it without appreciation? Because he was an artist. And an artist, as the whole world knew, did everything according to his own vision, appreciated or not.
At six thirty Robbie Foxworth, Pagan’s assistant, joined Pagan in his room. Foxworth was already dressed for dinner: tux, cummerbund, bow-tie. He’d combed his red hair back with some kind of gel that glistened. He surveyed the bundle of sheets on Pagan’s bed and said, ‘Ah, this must be the speech.’
‘You want to make it on my behalf, Foxie?’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Foxie. ‘These good people are expecting the great Frank Pagan, not his lieutenant and general gofer. Why? Are you nervous?’
‘Am I ever nervous?’
‘If you were, you’d hide it anyway, and nobody would ever know.’
Pagan fumbled with his tie and the bow slackened and fell apart, and the ends flopped. ‘Can you do this for me, Foxie? I never got the hang of these things.’
Foxworth gathered the ends, tied the bow deftly. He knew about dinner-jackets and bow-ties. He’d gone to the kind of expensive school where one learned such things at an early age. He had also learned good manners and the need for self-discipline and how to comport himself with a certain dignity. His father had been a somebody in the Foreign Office, and the Foxworth family could trace its lineage back to the time of the Norman Conquest.
Pagan, who came from an altogether different background, South London, father a bricklayer, looked at himself in the dressing-table mirror and saw a stranger in a tuxedo. ‘I always feel ridiculous in a monkey suit.’
Foxie said, ‘You look fine, Frank. Suave’s the word.’
Pagan adjusted his cummerbund slightly. He stepped out on to the balcony. The golf-course was empty now, and so were the tennis courts. But the watchers were still scattered here and there.
Foxworth, who’d spent much of his life studying the often inscrutable nuances of Pagan’s behaviour, detected an uneasiness in Frank that had nothing to do with the prospect of an after-dinner speech. ‘You’re bothered by something,’ he said.
Pagan stared off into the distance. Birdsong and sunlight. All the open spaces. The copse of beech trees behind which the sun would eventually wane. ‘I’m not sure,’ he said.
‘You’ve got security men coming out of the woodwork, Frank. Everything’s covered. The hotel staff have been checked. Nobody can even get past the gatehouse without a special ID card. It’s under control. Relax.’
Pagan wasn’t always easily reassured. In every landscape something always lurked; especially his inner terrain, where there were shadows, and tangled shrubbery, and menaces too vague to name. He said, ‘I could have done without this conference.’
‘It was arranged last year,’ Foxie remarked. ‘How would it have looked if you’d cancelled it?’
Pagan shrugged. ‘Sixty-three of the best counter-terrorist professionals in the world could have stayed at home, and I wouldn’t have this headache.’
Foxie moved on to the balcony now. He sniffed the rich scented air of summer. ‘Tranquillity,’ he said, and gestured out across the view. ‘Not even a breeze. All you have to worry about is this bloody speech, which I assume you’ve rehearsed and committed to memory.’
Pagan smiled. ‘I need a joke, Foxie. One good joke to put in the speech. You know any?’
‘My repertoire’s a bit thin. Besides, I never remember jokes.’
Pagan stared across the golf-course and said, ‘What the hell. I’m bad when it comes to telling them.’
‘There you are then,’ Foxie said, closing the subject.
‘In any case,’ Pagan added, ‘I don’t feel the topic of my speech merits much in the way of mirth.’ He looked at Foxworth and suggested they have a pre-dinner drink from the mini-bar.
The pastry-chef spread a glaze of beaten eggs across the surface of the dough with a simple steady motion of her hand. Then she sealed the dough around the meat. The chef watched her.
‘Two hundred degrees Celsius in the oven. No more, no less,’ he said. He noticed she didn’t have black hair. More mouse-coloured, and tucked in under her white cap.
‘After fifty minutes, place foil over the tray. Ten minutes later, remove the tray from the oven.’
The pastry-chef checked the oven gauge, opened the door, slid the large tray inside.
‘Fifty minutes,’ the chef said.
The pastry-chef, whose English had a foreign inflection, said, ‘Fifty minutes, of course.’
‘Exactly fifty.’ The chef tapped his wrist-watch. ‘Precision is the key to everything.’
‘Yes,’ said the pastry-chef.
In his room, Pagan sipped his second Scotch and soda. The first had softened his mood somewhat. The second would help increase the illusion of relaxation. Foxie sat on a chair by the open balcony door with a glass of white wine in his hand. He was something of a connoisseur when it came to wines, and the one he was drinking was causing him to grimace. He held the glass up to the light, seeking impurities.
‘Nasty stuff,’ he said. ‘Tastes of cardboard.’ He set the glass down and looked at Pagan. ‘What’s the gist of your speech, Frank?’
‘I thought a little background first,’ Pagan answered. ‘The explosion. Her associations with certain arms dealers. A mention of her freelance work in the Middle East.’
‘Your audience will already know all that.’
‘It does no harm to refresh their memories,’ Pagan said. ‘Then I’ll cut to the chase. How we came close to capturing her in Venice. The steps we’ve taken in trying to find her ever since. A general review of procedures.’
Foxworth said, ‘You don’t have an ending, that’s the problem.’
Pagan shrugged. ‘Only a beginning and a middle.’
A beginning and a middle, and perhaps something of a mild fixation in between, Foxworth thought, although he didn’t say so. He would never have uttered the thought aloud. When it came to the subject of the woman, you had to be careful what you said around Pagan. He was sensitive in ways Foxworth had never seen before, as if the woman were silver paper pressed upon an exposed nerve in his teeth, something that caused him a flash of pain. Perhaps pain wasn’t the word. Something else. Foxie let his line of thought fade away. At times it served no purpose to explore Frank Pagan’s psyche, which was a well-defended fortress.
The telephone was ringing on the bedside table. Pagan reached for it.
When he heard the voice on the other end of the line, he felt the mellow effects of the Scotch dissipate immediately. He was at once jolted into sharp attentiveness.
She said, ‘I want to see you.’
‘Where are you?’ he asked.
‘Don’t ask unanswerable questions, Pagan. You should know better. I just think we should sit down and talk. It’s been a while.’ She laughed, and although it was a light sound, almost musical, it chilled him. ‘Leave the hotel now.’
‘I can’t leave now,’
Pagan said. He was conscious of Foxworth’s puzzled expression.
‘Forget the dinner, babe,’ she said. ‘Forget the big speech. Drive to the village of Stratton. There’s a pub called The Swan. Go inside. Wait for me there. If you’re alone, I’ll contact you. If you bring backup, even one, you don’t see me.’
Pagan said, ‘The Swan. In Stratton.’
‘Only if you leave now. Waste time, I’m history.’
‘I’ll be there.’ He set the receiver down.
Foxworth asked, ‘Well?’
‘I have to go.’
‘You can’t go. You’ve got people who’ve travelled thousands of miles to hear you speak, Frank. For God’s sake. You’ve got Australians, Americans, Kuwaitis—’
‘Don’t remind me,’ Pagan said. ‘Just handle things for me. That’s all I ask. Make some kind of excuse.’
‘Such as?’
‘Think of something.’
‘Frank—’
‘I’m going, Foxie. Enjoy the dinner, explain I was unavoidably called away – I might be back in time for dessert.’
Foxworth sighed, ran a hand across his face. ‘I don’t have to guess who called, do I?’
‘No,’ Pagan said. ‘You don’t.’
‘And she’s going to meet you in Stratton. At The Swan.’
‘That’s what she says.’
‘Why the hell is she in this neck of the woods at this particular time?’
‘That remains to be seen.’
Foxworth stood up. ‘It smells, Frank. There’s a bad odour. I don’t like it.’
‘I’m used to bad odours,’ Pagan replied. He walked toward the door. ‘Don’t mention this to anyone. One other thing. Make absolutely sure the security level is intensified. I want the grounds searched. The corridors. The rooms. The wine cellar. The kitchen. Everywhere. If anyone asks about all this activity, you know what to tell them.’
‘I believe the phrase is precautionary measures,’ Foxie said.
‘Big precautionary measures,’ and Pagan was gone from his room at speed, a flash of black and white, a man in a hurry so purposeful and concentrated it might have been interpreted by a casual onlooker as a sign of dementia.
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