Heat

by Campbell Armstrong

  ‘Be specific.’

  ‘Half a million dollars, OK? Is that enough?’

  Her eyes disappeared a second behind her glasses, which made exact interpretation of her expression difficult for Pasco. ‘How did you get that much money?’

  When she asks you that question, this is what you tell her, James had said. Pasco stepped further into the room and said, ‘It’s guilt money from Uncle Sam. They call it back earnings, plus interest, plus bonuses, plus hardship allowance, plus this, plus that. It’s supposed to buy my silence.’

  ‘Is that what you want, Mr Pasco? Silence?’

  ‘Fuck, no. I want to make a hell of a noise.’

  She removed her glasses and closed them with a tiny clicking sound.

  7

  LONDON

  The day started in asphyxiating humidity. Pagan’s shirt stuck to his skin, sweat glazed his forehead. No breeze moved the trees in Hyde Park. The surface of the Serpentine was still and glassy. When he came to an empty bench he sat down.

  He turned his face to see Foxworth strolling along the path toward him. Foxie reached the bench, sat, fanned the dead air with one hand. Pagan opened a brown paper bag and removed a picture frame, which he passed to Foxie – who hadn’t been puzzled by Frank’s request to meet in the park; Pagan often suggested outdoor locations for a rendezvous, usually when he had something he didn’t want to talk about in Golden Square, where George Nimmo had spies.

  Foxie took the picture frame and stared at it. ‘Where did this come from?’

  ‘My bedroom,’ Pagan said.

  Foxworth placed the frame on his lap. He studied the woman’s photograph a second, then the inscription: For Frank, happy days. ‘How did it get there?’

  Pagan took the frame back. ‘Somehow she got into my flat, then proceeded to slip this photograph inside the frame, after removing the one already there – which was an old picture of Roxanne.’ He wasn’t sure what angered him more: the theft of Roxanne’s picture, which had been precious to him, or the fact that the woman had invaded his privacy; or was it the idea that, despite the fact that her name was on every front page in the country this morning, she felt secure enough to break brazenly into his residence and leave behind an object she knew would taunt him, and remove another whose theft she believed would infuriate?

  ‘She was never short of nerve,’ Foxie said.

  Pagan looked at the photograph. It was one he didn’t have in his collection. It might even be recent. He imagined her going inside a studio, possibly right here in London, and posing for this. Her face was upturned just slightly, and her smile – which could dazzle and seduce – was insolent.

  Something struck him then that hadn’t registered before. The woman’s pose was an exact replica of Roxanne’s, the tilt of face, the way her hair touched the shoulders, the direct look into the lens. This realization appalled and jolted him. She’d copied Roxanne’s look. Devastating, this impersonation of a dead woman’s appearance. And depressing, because it reinvigorated a sense of old losses he didn’t want to surface.

  ‘Is there anything to suggest who the photographer is?’ Foxie asked.

  ‘Not a mark, nothing, nothing at all. I’ve been over it. Believe me.’

  A bright red kite appeared briefly in the sky, then collapsed. Foxie watched it fall beyond the trees. ‘She’s thumbing her nose, Frank. She’s telling us she can’t be touched.’

  ‘If she’s thumbing her nose, it’s a gesture aimed directly at me,’ Pagan said. ‘It’s no big outrage this time, it isn’t anything on her usual grand scale, it’s nothing designed to cause public chaos – this is personal, this is for me alone. Definitely. Consider something else. The photograph she put in my bedroom fits the frame precisely. Which suggests she already knew I had a picture on the bedside table. In other words, this wasn’t the first time she’d been in my flat. Christ, she probably even measured the bloody frame. Which means she wasn’t in any particular hurry.’

  ‘You might try a stakeout,’ Foxie said. ‘She might visit you again.’

  ‘I’ll arrange something,’ Pagan said. He raised his face and gazed through the trees and wondered if, even now, she was nearby, concealed in the landscape like one of those kid’s puzzles where you’re supposed to find objects hidden in a drawing. She had to be watching him at least some of the time. She had to have known when he left his flat and went to the office, and how long he was likely to be gone.

  He looked down into the woman’s eyes. There was a seriously jarring disparity between her beauty and the brute ugliness of her actions. He placed the frame back inside the paper bag. He wondered where Roxanne’s photograph had gone, and hated the idea it was in the woman’s possession; something of himself had been plundered.

  He got up from the bench and, followed by Foxworth, strolled in the general direction of Park Lane.

  ‘Get some people onto the photographic studios,’ he said. ‘If the picture was taken here in London, I want to know who took it. I don’t believe for a moment she left her address with the photographer, but we might learn something. There might be a detail, a trace.’

  Foxworth wondered how many photographers there were in London. It struck him as a grinding task, days of legwork and phone calls.

  On Park Lane Pagan hailed a taxi. Traffic was dense, stop–start. He lowered the window, sought some trace of a breeze, but the air that whimpered into the vehicle was tepid and toxic. He was glad when they reached Golden Square and got out.

  Before they entered the building, Foxie said, ‘I assume you haven’t mentioned the picture to George Nimmo.’

  ‘I don’t intend to. I can hear him snigger. Oh, she’s breaking into your flat nowadays, is she? Well, well. She must feel pretty damn secure if she can pull a stunt like that. No, I don’t want to mention this to Nimmo.’

  ‘Did you see him on the box last night?’

  ‘I gave it a miss,’ Pagan said.

  ‘He was in fine form. Full uniform, the whole thing. Almost sounded Churchillian at times. A bit of podium-thumping. He managed to come off as reassuring, if you wanted to be reassured. The British policeman is the best in the world, our Special Branch is second to none, the woman will be found. Manpower will be increased. Uniforms everywhere. Roadblocks. Door-to-door searches throughout the land. Quite a performance, really.’

  They passed through the metal detector. The sergeant at the desk, Whittingham, looked attentive when Pagan came in sight.

  ‘Stuffy old morning,’ said Whittingham.

  ‘A killer,’ Foxie agreed.

  ‘Rain’d be nice,’ Whittingham added. He shook his head sadly. ‘Terrible business, Mr Pagan.’

  ‘Terrible,’ Pagan said. The feebleness of words. Their inadequacy. They weren’t equipped to carry anything but frail loads.

  ‘And that woman’s back,’ Whittingham remarked.

  ‘With a vengeance,’ Foxie said quietly.

  Pagan and Foxworth stepped into the elevator and rode to the second floor. Foxie said, ‘I’ll get started on this photography angle.’

  Pagan nodded, entered his office, closed the door. He took the frame from the paper bag, then slipped the photograph out from under the glass and propped it up on his desk. He kept thinking of the women inside his flat, how she must have gone from room to room, perhaps looking through his clothes, reading his mail, then sitting on the edge of his bed and picking up the picture of Roxanne, studying it, staring at it, possibly thinking: So you were Pagan’s wife. You were the wife to whom he was faithful.

  Faithful. He’d come close to wrecking that fidelity eleven years ago when he’d captured the woman as she was passing through Heathrow airport. He thought about the hotel room where she’d been kept under guard awaiting the arrival in London of FBI agents intent on taking her back to the federal penitentiary in Danbury from which she’d escaped. He remembered the time he’d spent alone with her in that room, but the memory was awkward, and it still shamed him to recall the ease with which he’d been aroused
by her gestures and words, how far he’d travelled along the road to betraying his wife; he’d understood then that there were unexplored flaws in himself, as if within Frank Pagan there existed another person altogether, one with unexpected needs and urges. The passage of eleven years might have blunted that appetite, if not the memory. Steadfast Pagan, the keen young cop, had glimpsed the edge of raw desire, and hadn’t altogether enjoyed the sight.

  The woman knew. She’d known he wanted her. And now she’d stolen Roxanne’s photograph and left one of her own as if to remind him that his marital fidelity had been constructed on a flimsy platform, that his moral sense was fragile. How could he keep law and order in the world if he couldn’t keep it in himself?

  He rose, looked out across Golden Square; it occurred to him that she must have been down there at times watching the building, perhaps looking up at the very window where he stood. He imagined himself as if viewed through the telescopic sight of a rifle, a target crisscrossed by lines.

  What did she want from him? What was to be gained from infiltrating his life? From outrageous trespass? Tiny acts of mischief and malice might satisfy her for a short time, but sooner or later she always needed a bigger stage, a spotlight. That was her weakness; that was an area that might ultimately be exploited to his advantage. But when would she reappear? and where?

  He made a phone call, arranged for an unmarked car to be situated in the vicinity of his flat; then he opened the bottom drawer of his desk and removed a file.

  It contained a profile of the woman written by a prison psychiatrist in Danbury, Connecticut. She’d been born into a wealthy North Carolina family, father an unbearable autocrat given to strange mood swings, mother a drunk. She’d run away from one boarding-school after another, stabbed a classmate at the age of ten, then was institutionalized briefly at the request of her parents. At sixteen, she’d drifted into the radical underground. She’d participated in the bombing of a radio station in Denver, a bank robbery in Des Moines, the sabotage of a train carrying a shipment of arms to a naval base in San Diego. According to the shrink’s report, she had a high IQ, and was fluent in French, Russian and German. She was also sexually ambivalent: a nice catch-all phrase, Pagan thought. She used a variety of aliases, most of them drawn, for some reason, from the names of birds or animals. She’d called herself at various times Caroline Starling, Cara Raven, Carola Fox. She had, the psychiatrist had written, a penchant – such understatement – for violence. She needed no political motivation for violent acts. Politics, as such, appeared to be of no interest to her. A note appended to the end of the report had mentioned three applications of electro-therapy and an extended course of mood-altering drugs, neither of which treatments had made any apparent difference.

  The bones of her life, Pagan thought. The unfleshed skeleton. It was the kind of material from which you couldn’t fashion predictions about her future behaviour.

  He had included his own report on her, written several months before, in the same file as the psychiatrist’s, and he scanned it quickly. It mentioned her long convoluted relationship – love? hate? some combustible amalgam of the two? – with the late Tobias Barron, an international arms dealer who posed as global philanthropist, friend to the Third World, a man who supplied weapons to any country in need even as he funded health clinics in Angola and agricultural research stations in Cuba; Barron had never played favourites, never taken sides. And when business was slack, when the hotspots of the world threatened to lose their violent radiance, he’d used his complex chain of influential associates to exacerbate tensions in volatile countries – assassinations here, terrorism there, whatever it took to stimulate the need for arms. And the woman had gone along willingly in this partnership of destruction.

  Pagan shut the folder. All this was history. It was the present that engaged his attention. He scanned the telephone messages that had accumulated through the night. Calls from various foreign embassies, ambassadors and consuls who wanted to know exactly what had happened in the placid Buckinghamshire countryside; demands from the press for statements; messages from an unhappy public. Is this what we’re paying taxes for? Is nobody protecting us?

  He set these aside. What could you say to console Jack Public? What could you tell the ambassadors and consuls of other countries when it came to the murder of their nationals? Sorry didn’t take you very far.

  He examined the reports that had come from Special Branch, which confirmed that airports were being monitored, railways, bus stations, points of egress kept under constant surveillance. Terrific, if you knew who you were looking for, if you knew the face she was wearing, the identity she’d assumed. Carmen Profumo, pastry-chef, would have been discarded by this time. Used, out of date, no further assistance. She’d already be somebody else, a different name, a different look.

  His telephone rang and he was caught in two minds about answering it. One of the assistants on the top floor, that warren of cramped rooms, could pick it up.

  The ringing stopped. Foxie appeared in the doorway and said, ‘For you, Frank.’

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘She wouldn’t give her name. Said it was personal.’

  Pagan picked up the receiver.

  She said, ‘Sorry you wasted your time in Stratton, Frank.’

  He didn’t speak. He looked at her photograph. The eyes had the effect of whirlpools on him. He covered the mouthpiece with his hand and whispered to Foxie, ‘Trace this. Quick.’

  Foxie left hurriedly, jacket flapping.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ the woman asked. ‘Am I getting the silent treatment? Fuck you, Frank. I save your life and you don’t have a word of gratitude for me?’

  ‘Thanks,’ he said in a dry way. ‘For saving my life.’

  ‘That’s better, Frank. I always appreciate gratitude.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what I don’t appreciate. Somebody killing innocent people. Somebody going through my flat. What’s the name of your fucking game? Planning some new atrocity? Poisoning fifty or more people wasn’t enough for you? What I don’t understand is why – why kill all those people?’

  ‘Who knows? To get your attention?’

  ‘My attention, Jesus Christ—’

  ‘To remind you of me.’

  ‘I hadn’t forgotten—’

  ‘It’s been seven months and you haven’t managed to find me,’ she said. ‘You needed to know I was still around. I was beginning to feel just a touch neglected.’

  Neglected, he thought. She kills all these people because she wants attention? No, it was deeper than that, it went down through the corkscrewing layers of her being, this urge to kill, this need for a blood-fix; it went down into the core of herself, where there was chaos and madness and a desire to shape the world the way she wanted it to be, regardless of all the misery she created, a need to define herself in terms of violence because without it she had no fixed identity.

  ‘I’d never used poison before,’ she said. ‘It’s called Compound Zero-8. Neat name, huh? Sounds like a carpet-shampoo or something. It was developed originally by Hitler’s scientists in 1940, but never used. I guess it was overlooked, or they couldn’t find a way to use it safely. It was refined by Saddam’s specialists during the Gulf fiasco.’

  A history lesson, he thought. He had a fierce desire to confront her physically, to be in the same space she occupied at that very moment. To put her hands around her slender neck and choke all the life out of her. That rage inside himself, he realized, was a murderous thing.

  She said, ‘What fascinates me about the compound is the fact that it acts like one of those spooky new viruses from Africa people are always talking about. It infiltrates the central nervous system within five minutes of ingestion. First symptoms are nothing much, a mild sense of disorientation, some nausea. Then tremors. Next, the poison attacks vital organs and glands. The liver comes under massive assault. There’s renal failure. The lungs seize up. Intra-alveolar haemorrhaging. The gums bleed. The nose bleeds. This is followed b
y … are you still with me, Frank?’

  ‘I’m listening,’ he said. But I don’t want to hear this.

  ‘A whole gang of symptoms,’ she said. ‘Incontinence. Diarrhoea. Brain dysfunction. Hallucinations of a nasty kind. Then paralysis. Blindness. Pain, intense pain. Death comes as a blessing. And this entire process takes only thirty to thirty-five minutes. Three-quarters of an hour tops.’

  The tone of her voice made Pagan think of a car salesman extolling the virtues of a certain vehicle. There was an infusion of enthusiasm, almost a pride, in the way she talked of the substance. It was ghoulish, more than ghoulish. He didn’t know how to respond, what reactions were appropriate in the circumstances. But he had to keep her on the line. ‘It’s a tough act to follow, if you intend to follow it.’

  ‘I haven’t decided my next move,’ she answered. ‘I might simply go away. You might never hear from me again. Then again, you never know. I think of what the compound might accomplish if, for the sake of discussion, I tossed a couple of ounces into London’s water supply. Interesting notion.’

  ‘Fascinating,’ Pagan said. The water supply, he thought. Nothing was secure. Everything was vulnerable. Food, water.

  ‘That could do some serious damage,’ she said. ‘Great for the funeral business.’

  ‘Less great for the victims,’ Pagan remarked.

  She was quiet for a moment. ‘You’re tracing this call, I guess. I won’t hang around much longer. Pity. I like talking to you.’

  ‘Why did you spare me at the hotel anyway? Why do me a special favour?’

  ‘You’re like unfinished business. I have days when I can’t get you out of my mind. Funny.’

  ‘Very,’ he said.

  ‘I think back ten, eleven years when I first met you and I remember a time when anything seemed possible. Don’t you find that getting older is a matter of diminishing possibilities?’

  ‘I hadn’t thought about it,’ he said.

  ‘You should, Frank. You should think about time passing. You also ought to give some thought to painting that flat of yours. Christ knows, it needs it. Know what your place really lacks?’