by Eric Ambler
I was still tired and confused or I would have remembered that there could be only one answer to that-my passport was not valid and an airline would not carry me. But instead of the answer, another stupid question came into my mind; and, stupidly, I asked it.
“Am I included in this?”
Harper turned right round in his seat to face me, and gave me the cold, unpleasant smile I liked least.
“Included, Arthur? Why? Did you have something else in mind-like making a quick deal with Franz, for instance, or even the police?”
“Of course not. I just wanted to be certain.”
“Well, that makes five of us who want to be certain. Don’t you worry, Arthur. Until we’re on that plane with the loot all safe and sound, you’re not even going to the can by yourself. That’s how much you’re included.”
Fischer and Miller thought that hilariously amusing. Miss Lipp, I noticed, was keeping her attention divided between the road ahead and the cars behind.
We came to Corlu and turned right onto the main Istanbul road. Harper began to organize the change of plan.
“The first thing is to get the stuff out of the door. Hans, you’d better change places with Arthur. He can get busy now.”
“He can’t,” Fischer said. “There are seven screws on the rear door. With the door shut he cannot get at them. The door has to be open.”
“All the way open?”
“Nearly.”
Harper looked at the heavy doors. They were hinged at the rear, and would swing open against the wind. We were doing over sixty. It was obviously out of the question to take the panel off while we were on the move. He nodded. “All right. Here’s what we’ll do. As soon as we get to the airport, Elizabeth and Leo will take all the passports and get busy buying tickets and filling out passport cards and customs forms for all of us. Right?”
They nodded.
“Then I follow them inside just to check on the flight number and boarding time so that we all know what the score is. As soon as I have that, I return to the car and Arthur drives us to the parking lot. There, we open the door and get the stuff. When it’s out, Hans gets porters and we unload the baggage. We leave the car on the park. Any questions?”
“You could unload the baggage first,” said Miller; “while the car is in front.”
“Maybe. If we have plenty of time. If we don’t have too much, I’d sooner make sure of the loot first.”
“We must have some baggage for the customs,” Miss Lipp put in. “People without baggage get a personal search.”
“All right. We’ll unload just the stuff from inside the car and leave the rest until later.”
There was a murmur of agreement. Miller asked: “If there are two flights available within a short time, which do we take?”
“If one of them flies over a lot of Turkish territory-say, to Aleppo or Beirut-we take the other. Otherwise, we take the first.”
They went on discussing which city they would prefer as a destination. I was wondering what would happen if I told them about my passport. From Harper, I decided, there would be only one reaction; if they could not take me with them, yet dared not leave me because I knew too much, I would have to be eliminated from the picture altogether. There would be a corpse on the floor of the car they left behind them. On the other hand, if I waited until the passport was challenged at the airport, there wasn’t much they could do. I could yell my head off, demand to see a security official and tell him to contact Tufan. True, the three men had guns; but even if they managed to shoot their way out of the place, I would stand a better chance of coming out of it alive.
“Any more problems?” Harper asked. “No? Okay, then, let’s have the passports.”
I nearly threw up, but managed to cough instead.
Fischer asked me to get his out of his inside pocket for him. Miller passed his over and Harper flipped through the pages. I gave him Fischer’s.
Miss Lipp said: “My bag is on the floor, if you want to put them in it now.”
“Okay. Where’s yours, Arthur?” Has any boy not handed in his homework?
I handed the wretched thing to him and waited.
He lingered over my vital statistics. “Know something, Arthur? I’d have said you were a good three years older. Too much ouzo and not enough exercise, that’s your trouble.” And then, of course, his tone changed. “Wait a minute! This is over two months out of date!”
“Out of date? But it can’t be!” I know I handed in my work with the rest, sir.
“Look at it!” He leaned over and jammed it under my nose.
“But I had no trouble coming in. You see, there’s the visa!”
“What difference does that make, you stupid slob? It’s out of date!” He glowered at me and then, unexpectedly, turned to Miss Lipp. “What do you think?”
She kept her eyes on the road as she answered. “When you leave here the immigration people are mostly interested in seeing that the exit cards are properly filled in. He’ll get by there. It’s the airline-counter check that matters. They are responsible at the port of disembarkation if papers are not in order. We’ll have to write in a renewal.”
“Without a consular stamp?”
She thought for a moment. “There’s a Swiss airmail stamp in my purse, I think. We could use that. Ten to one they won’t look at it closely if there is writing across it. Anyway, I’ll keep them talking.”
“What about where we land?” asked Miller. “Supposing they catch it there?”
“That’s his worry,” Harper said.
“Not if they send him back here.”
“They wouldn’t trouble to do that. It’s not that serious. The airport police would hold him until the airline could get the Egyptian consul to come out and fix the renewal.”
“He has been nothing but a nuisance from the beginning.” This was Fischer, of course.
“He was useful enough last night,” remarked Miss Lipp. “By the way, that renewal had better be in his handwriting. Would it be in Arabic?”
“French and Arabic, both.” Harper stuck the stamp on the renewal space. “Okay, Arthur. Here you are. Write across the center of the stamp. ‘Bon jusqu’au,’ let’s see-make it April ten of next year. Then do it in Arabic. You can, I suppose?”
I did as I was told-as ever-and handed the passport back to him.
I didn’t know where I stood now. If the plane went to Athens I might be able to get away with it; I still had my Greek permis de sejour to fall back on. But if I went to Vienna, or Frankfurt, or Rome, or (hideous thought) Cairo, then I’d be completely up the creek. I would have to wait until I knew whether they were going to Athens or not, before I decided whether I would go along or try to stay. If I wanted to stay, though, it would be more difficult now. With Harper and Fischer keeping their eyes on me, and no official to single me out because of my invalid passport, yelling for help wouldn’t do much good. A quick clip on the jaw from Harper and some fast talking-“So sorry. Our friend tripped and hit his head on a suitcase. He’ll be all right in a moment. We’ll take care of him”-would be the end of that. I would have to rely upon the surveillance cars. The only trouble was that before they regained direct contact with Tufan, we would be at the airport. I would have to give the men in the cars time to draw the right conclusions and issue the necessary orders.
I could only think of one way of causing a delay. When I had finished putting back the door panel, I had slipped the screwdriver into my pocket. There wasn’t another one in the car, I knew.
While we were going through Mimarsinan, fifteen minutes or so away from the airport, I managed to ease the screwdriver from my pocket and let it slide back on the seat until I was sitting on it. A minute or two later, I pretended to stretch my legs and stuffed it deep down behind the seat cushion and below the back of the seat. If I wanted to go, I could “find” it; if I wanted to delay, I could look for it in vain on the floor. That way, I thought, I would at least have some sort of control over the situation.
“They’re still tailing us,” she said. “I don’t get it. Franz must have guessed where we’re heading for by now. What does he think he’s going to do?”
“Supposing it isn’t Franz?” Miller said suddenly.
“If it isn’t Franz, who is it?” Fischer demanded irritably. “They can’t be police or they would have stopped us. Could it be Giulio?”
“That is an imbecile suggestion,” Miller retorted. “Giulio is of our company. You are not. If you were, you would not say such a stupid thing.”
I have a unique capacity for self-destruction. I said, helpfully: “Perhaps it is Franz. Perhaps he thinks that we are going back to the villa. If we were, we would still be on this road.”
Harper looked back. “When will he know better, Arthur?”
“Not until we turn right for the airport.”
“How far is the turn-off?”
“About six miles.”
“How far then?”
“A mile and a half.”
He looked at Miss Lipp. “Do you think you could lose them so that they wouldn’t see us make the turn?”
“I could try.”
The Lincoln surged forward. Seconds later I saw the red speedometer needle swing past the ninety mark.
Harper looked back. After a minute, he said: “Leaving them cold.”
“We’re going too fast for this road” was all she said. It didn’t seem to be worrying her unduly, though. She passed two cars and a truck going in the same direction as if they were standing still.
I already knew that I had made a bad mistake, and did my best to retrieve it. “There’s a bridge a mile or so ahead,” I warned her. “The road narrows. You’ll have to slow down for that.”
She didn’t answer. I was beginning to sweat. If the surveillance cars lost us, that was really the end as far as I was concerned.
She beat a convoy of army trucks to the bridge by fifty yards. On the other side, the road wound a little and she had to slow down to seventy; but when I looked back there wasn’t a car in sight. As she braked hard and turned right onto the airport road, Harper chuckled.
“For that extra ounce of get-up-and-go,” he announced facetiously, “there is nothing, but nothing, like a Lincoln Continental.”
There’s nothing like feeling a complete bloody half-wit either. When we drew up outside the airport building, my legs were quivering like Geven’s lower lip.
Miller was out of the car and into the building almost before the car had stopped. Miss Lipp and Harper followed while Fischer and I handed the bags inside the car, mine included, to a porter.
I couldn’t help looking back along the airport approach road and Fischer noticed. He smiled at my lily-livered anxiety.
“Don’t be afraid. They are on their way to Sariyer by now.”
“Yes.” I knew that at least one of them would be; but I also knew that the men in the cars were not incompetent. When they failed to pick up the Lincoln again, the second car would turn back and try the airport road. How long would it take them to get the idea, though? Five minutes? Ten?
Harper came out of the building and hurried to the car.
“There’s an Air France jet to Rome,” he said. “Seats available. Boarding in twenty minutes. Let’s get moving.”
I drove to the car park, a chain-fenced area just off the loop of road in front of the building and beyond the taxi rank. There were only a few cars already there and, on Harper’s instructions, I backed into an empty space between two of them.
“Where is the screwdriver?” Fischer asked.
“On the floor.” I was still backing the car and could see that he was already searching for it.
“It must have rolled under one of the seats,” Harper said impatiently. “Okay, Arthur, that’ll do. Let’s get the doors open so we can see.”
I pulled up, got out, and immediately began trying to peer under the seats. With a Lincoln there is not much to see. The seats are snug against the floor.
“Oh, for God’s sake!” Harper said angrily. Suddenly he grabbed at my jacket. “You must have put it in your pocket.” He started slapping them to find out.
“I put it on the floor.”
“Well, it isn’t there now,” Fischer said.
Harper glanced at his watch. “It must have been pulled out with the baggage.”
“Shall I go back and look?”
“No, get one out of the tool kit.”
“There isn’t one there,” Fischer said. “I noticed that before.”
“Okay, see if it’s on the ground back there.” As Fischer hurried off, Harper looked at the next car to us, a Renault, and tried the front doors. They were locked, of course. Then he tried the front luggage compartment. To my horror, it opened. The next moment he had a tool roll in his hand and was taking a screwdriver from it.
He grinned. “If the owner comes back, we’ll buy it off him as a souvenir,” he said, and quickly went to work on the door panel of the Lincoln.
I was utterly desperate or I could never have done what I did; but as I stood there gaping at him I became aware of the sound of the engine running. I hadn’t finished backing the car into line with the others when he had made me stop. Then I had simply forgotten to switch off.
The door to the driver’s seat was open and so were both back doors. He was crouched over the panel of the right-hand one on the opposite side of the car from me.
I glanced at the car-park entrance to make sure that Fischer wasn’t coming back; and then I moved. I went to the door by the driver’s seat, leaned across it as if I were going to switch off the engine, and looked across the back of the seat.
Harper was bending down to undo one of the screws by the hinge.
I slid into the driver’s seat gently so as not to rock the car, and eased the transmission lever from “Park” to “Drive.” The car gave a slight jerk. At the same moment I stamped on the accelerator.
I heard a thump as the door sent him flying, then I spun the wheel and was heading for the car-park entrance.
About twenty feet from it, I jammed on the brakes and the two rear doors swung shut with a slam. Through the rear window I could see Harper scrambling to his feet. As I closed the door beside me I accelerated again and went through onto the road. A moment later I was halfway round the loop. Another car ahead slowed me for a moment. In the driving mirror I saw Harper running towards the taxi rank. I leaned on the horn ring and the car in front swerved. Then I was out of the loop and on the approach road.
I had gone about a mile when the Opel passed me going in the opposite direction. I waved frantically, but kept on going. I didn’t care whether they thought I’d gone mad or not. All I wanted was to get away from Harper.
I went on driving fast towards Istanbul until I saw in the mirror that the Opel was behind me. Only then did I stop.
It wasn’t my fault that they took all that time to catch up with me.
12
“The Director is not pleased with you,” Tufan informed me.
It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him what the Director could go and do to himself; but I managed to keep my temper. “You got the stuff back,” I reminded him sharply; “you have the names and descriptions of the people who took it. You know what was done and how it was done. What more do you want?”
“The woman and the three men,” he snapped.
The nerve of it! “It wasn’t I who let them get on that plane to Rome,” I said.
“It was your stupidity that did. If you hadn’t panicked, if you had stopped immediately when you saw the Opel instead of driving off like a madman, they would be in prison now. As it was, they got a close enough look at my men to realize their mistake. We had had no information from you. By the time we were able to re-establish contact with you, naturally they had gone.”
“They can be arrested in Rome. You can extradite them.”
“Not without a case stron
g enough to justify extradition proceedings.”
“You have it. I’ve told you what happened.”
“And what do you think your evidence would be worth in an Italian court?” he demanded. “You smuggled the explosives in. Who is there to confirm your story of the subsequent robbery? They would have your record from Interpol to discredit you. Is the court to extradite four persons on your unsupported word that you have told the truth? They would laugh at us!”
“What about Giulio and Enrico?”
“Very sensibly, for them, they are saying nothing useful. They chartered a yacht. They decided to go for a night cruise. They were hailed by some men in a caique who said that their motor had broken down. They took them to Serefli and put them ashore. Is that a crime? Tomorrow the police will have to let them go. There is nothing we can do. Your mistake, Simpson, was in not carrying out orders.”
“What orders, for God’s sake?”
“The orders I gave you in this very room. You were told to report. You failed to do so. It was unfortunate that the packet you dropped in the garage was overlooked, but you had other opportunities. You could have reported at Serefli. You could have dropped your guide’s license at the guard post as you were taken through. There was want of imagination. We have no choice but to abandon the inquiry.”
“Including the inquiry about the attack on the guard post?”
He looked like a man who, having just realized that his fly is undone, has decided that he can only ignore the fact. “That,” he said loftily, “has already been described officially to the newspapers as an unsuccessful attempt by dissident elements to blow up a train.”
There was no polite comment I could make on that one, so I just shrugged and looked over his head at the picture of Abdul Hamid being deposed.
He stood up, as if to end the discussion, and smoothed down the front of his tunic. “Luckily for you,” he said, “the Director is not entirely dissatisfied with the affair. The Bureau has recovered the proceeds of a serious robbery which the Criminal Police did not even know about. It shows that we are not at the mercy of events, but in charge of them, that we anticipate. You were not entirely useless to us. As a result the Director has authorized the payment to you of a bonus.”
