Fire Hawk

by Geoffrey Archer

  ‘At the Limassol morgue. The autopsy this morning was incomplete. Something unclear still about the way she died. Choking apparently, but no sign of pressure on the throat or anything. Just some bruises on her body and stress marks on the wrists and ankles suggesting she’d been tied up at some stage. So they were doing more tests. But we’re moving her tomorrow hopefully. Back to the UK on the RAF Herc that shuttles to Lyneham every Friday. A funeral’s being set up for Saturday. A private one. Just family, I’m told. Martin Kessler wants it over with quickly before the media realise the body’s even left the island.’

  ‘I’d like to see her.’ The words slipped out.

  ‘Yes, I imagined you would. Best if you wait until she’s moved to the RAF base at Akrotiri. I’ve passed your cover name to a Squadron Leader Banks. Give him a ring first.’ He wrote the number down on a page from a notebook.

  ‘Don’t the police have any witnesses?’ Sam asked in exasperation. ‘Somebody must have seen something.’

  ‘Well they may have by now, but they’ve not told us.’ Mowbray leaned back in the chair and folded his arms. ‘The man in charge is an Anoteros Ypastinomos – a chief inspector to you and me – but he’s no ball of fire. Got where he is through family connections. Father was an EOKA folk-hero in the nineteen-fifties. Killed a couple of British soldiers during the independence struggle but was never nailed for it. The son isn’t much keener on the British than the father was. Not exactly making waves for us. But he’s the High Commission’s problem, not yours. For what it’s worth I’ll be getting an update tonight. I’ll ring you later. Where are you staying?’

  ‘I’ll try the Mondiale,’ Sam answered automatically.

  ‘Of course.’

  Mowbray lifted an eyebrow. Then he leaned forward again, placing his elbows on the table. A hand went to his mouth and he nibbled unconsciously at a nail as if debating how to phrase the next part of what he had to say.

  ‘There’s something else you ought to know, but don’t for heaven’s sake jump to any conclusions on this one. There’s no proof of any connection.’

  ‘Connection? With what?’

  ‘With Khalil’s visit to Cyprus.’

  ‘You’re talking riddles.’

  ‘Sorry. There . . . there’s been a report from the UN Special Commission in Baghdad.’

  ‘Anthrax!’

  ‘Well, yes, actually. They’ve found evidence the Iraqis have been producing biological weapons grade material in the past few weeks. The man in charge of the production committed suicide when they exposed him.’

  ‘Did he!’ He felt a certain satisfaction at what Mowbray was telling him, vindication of his belief that the message whispered to him in Baghdad was genuine. He leaned forward. ‘Tell me more.’

  ‘UNSCOM have had a team in Iraq for the past few days. They’re pulling out this afternoon. The Iraqis have withdrawn all co-operation.’

  ‘But what exactly have they got?’

  ‘Look, it’s only the sort of evidence they always knew they would find one day.’

  ‘Quentin!’

  ‘No, Sam. Just because some unidentified man in Baghdad whispered a warning to you about anthrax weapons being smuggled out of the country does not mean there’s a link. All this proves is the Iraqis are still experimenting with the stuff despite all their denials. It’ll slap on the head any chance of UN sanctions being lifted in the near future, so it’s of major political significance. But what UNSCOM has not uncovered is any evidence the Iraqis were planning to use the stuff. And when we’re talking about biological weapons capabilities, it’s intentions that matter more than anything else.’

  Sam held his breath. He wasn’t hearing Mowbray’s words any more. In his head the links were clear, creating a conspiracy theory that was frightening in its potential.

  ‘There could be a link,’ he began.

  ‘No evidence, Sam,’ Mowbray insisted. ‘No evidence.’

  ‘Let’s just play with a scenario.’

  Mowbray shrugged uncomfortably.

  ‘Let’s imagine the anthrax production the UN uncovered was for warheads that have already been sneaked out of Iraq. And let’s imagine also that the people who imprisoned me in Baghdad are directly involved in the scheme to use the warheads.’

  ‘That’s stretching credibility. They were just security men as far as we know.’

  ‘But Quentin, their direct involvement is the only way I can explain why they were so damned desperate for me not to have found out about the anthrax.’

  ‘It’s not the way London sees it.’

  ‘Bugger London. Look, suppose I’m right. Now, getting anthrax out of the country would be no great problem considering the leakiness of the Jordan border. The hard bit is to get the weapon to the right target at the right time for maximum effect. And for that they might need money. A lot of it. So that could be why Khalil was brought to Cyprus. For them to use the cash stashed away in the accounts he controlled in order to buy whatever help they needed to carry out the attack.’

  ‘Hypothetical speculation,’ said Mowbray dismissively.

  ‘Sure, but plausible. Now, follow that on. Chrissie turns up suddenly. She gets too close. Learns something that could wreck the Iraqis’ whole scheme. Learns perhaps how the money was to be spent. So they kill her.’

  Mowbray pursed his lips and blew out. ‘I have to tell you that the feeling in London is that the money Khalil was brought here to free up was for something much more probable, namely to finance another palace for Saddam Hussein.’ He flattened his hands together and touched them against his lips. His grey eyes had lost their certainty, however.

  Sam downed the rest of his beer. The instinct that he was right and the great minds in London were wrong was powering him forward like a Californian surf.

  ‘Facts, old man,’ Mowbray growled at him. ‘We must deal in facts and not suppositions.’

  ‘Okay. Hang around and I’ll bring you some.’ Sam stood up, refolding the map Mowbray had spread on the table. ‘I can have this?’

  ‘Sure. But where are you going so suddenly?’

  ‘Wherever it was Chrissie went.’

  The Limassol highway skirted the foothills of the Troodos mountains, its two-lane dual carriageway almost free of traffic. Pulling down the blind to protect his eyes from the last of the crimson sun, Sam glanced right towards the purple heights of Mount Olympus which would be capped by snow in a matter of weeks. As the car dipped over a ridge, Limassol’s hotels and apartment blocks appeared ahead, a hazy holiday and business conurbation which stood ugly and square against the leaching red of the horizon.

  Junction 21 was signposted and Sam dropped his speed. The Mondiale Hotel was on the beach well short of the town itself. He turned left, then left again onto the old coast road. The entrance was down a winding drive lined with flower-beds and bungalows. The parking areas were mostly full, but he found a space, then took his bag into the spacious lobby.

  It was a hotel of a type he was well familiar with, making its living from conference facilities. And there was a business group resident at the moment, he noted, judging by the clusters of young people in crisp shirts and neatly pressed blouses standing around, their chests decked with name badges.

  After his ‘Terry Malone’ credit card had been swiped for the bill he took the lift to the third floor. No sea views available, they’d told him, and seemed surprised that he didn’t care. He dumped his holdall on the double bed, then peered from the window down into the car park. It was after six by now and visiting businessmen who’d had dealings in Limassol during the day were returning to their five-star roost.

  He closed the heavy beige curtains, unzipped the holdall and pulled out his wash-bag. He took a quick shower, then ran a battery shaver over his chin and dressed in dark grey trousers and the light check jacket that didn’t crease which he always travelled with. Then, looking like any other businessman dressed for whatever the night might bring, he took the lift to the ground floor and sauntered into t
he lobby, racking his brains to think how Chrissie would have set about her task here four days earlier.

  He heard a babble of bright young voices from the far side of the wide lounge. A long, narrow bar overlooking the pool and closed off with a crimson rope was crammed with conference delegates in dark suits and cocktail dresses, all animated, all still wearing their name labels. Tupperware reps, Sam guessed, although they could have been Mormons for all he knew. He strolled over to take a closer look and collided with someone heading in the same direction.

  ‘Sorry! So sorry.’ A young woman with straight blonde hair tied in a short pony tail whose otherwise appealing face was dulled by a receding chin, grabbed at his arm to steady herself. ‘So terribly sorry. Wasn’t looking where I was going.’

  Something told Sam the collision hadn’t been entirely accidental.

  ‘My fault entirely,’ he answered courteously. She had a trim, tidy figure encased in a low-cut black dress. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes of course. You going to the reception?’ She shot a glance at his lapel. ‘Oh no. No badge.’

  ‘Wish I was,’ he beamed, mind on autopilot.

  ‘Well . . .’

  It was all she said. Her eyebrows fluttered a couple of times as if to suggest that it wouldn’t be hard to gatecrash, but he didn’t react.

  ‘Well, have a good evening anyway.’

  ‘Yes. You too.’

  He watched her disappear into the throng beyond the crimson rope, then turned to take in the expanse of the lobby.

  How would Chrissie have stalked Khalil? Once she’d made the happy discovery that he was resident here, would she have just waited for the Iraqis to come down from their rooms? Waited where? On one of the velvet sofas in the lobby? A stool in the bar? And when Khalil appeared, how had she observed him? There were two ways to watch a mark. Unseen from a distance or right up close. Getting close was Chrissie’s style.

  Sam continued his slow perambulation of the lobby, deciding his eventual destination would be the still-empty cocktail bar tucked round a corner beyond the reception desk. Suddenly his eye was caught by a pin-board set up on an easel to one side of the main entrance. Photographs. He crossed over to look. Pictures taken at some gathering earlier in the week, each with a number. A notice said prints could be ordered at the reception desk.

  Then he saw the date. Tuesday – the night Chrissie had disappeared. His pulse quickened.

  The prints were standard six by fours, about twenty-five in number. A mix of faces in the shots. Some dark and heavy with Cypriot features, others quintessentially English. And a few that looked more Middle Eastern.

  He pulled from his jacket pocket the small photo of Salah Khalil that Waddell had given him and began to scan the prints for any sign of him, or of Chrissie. He began at the top left corner of the board and worked systematically. Jolly faces with smiles like open zips, snapped in the bar and the lounge. Some revellers faced away from the camera, some were obscured by others. He became distracted by the varying states of inebriation displayed. A few weren’t drunk at all – prim faces, hands clutching glasses of juice. Others seemed bent on flushing away inhibitions with heavy doses of spirits.

  He reached the bottom right corner. There’d been no sign of Chrissie and no face that looked like Khalil’s. Then he remembered it was on Tuesday that the Iraqis had checked out – Khalil couldn’t have been here. He was about to look through the set again in case Chrissie was somewhere in the background of the shots, when a woman’s voice cut in from behind him.

  ‘Looks fun.’

  Sam spun round. It was the blonde girl with the receding chin and the compact body. She stood a foot away, smirking at him.

  ‘Were you there? That party,’ she elaborated, lifting her mildly embarrassed face towards the photos. ‘I wondered if you were in one of the pictures.’ She laughed a little nervously, covering her jaw with a hand as if to conceal its inadequacies.

  ‘No,’ he replied. ‘Not me. Just looking to see if I could spot any friends. You?’

  ‘No. Only arrived yesterday.’

  She beamed a smile, then waited as if to say This is the second time I’ve made a move on you mister. Now it’s your turn.

  Sam stared back like a dummy. He didn’t want this distraction.

  Confronted with his blank response, she decided to plunge in again anyway.

  ‘Look, I was wondering . . . You see, some of us from the company are making our escape from the do over there.’ She flicked a glance back towards the bar she’d just left, and her pony tail swished and bounced. ‘Bit of a yawn really and the chief exec’s about to make a speech which is really, really going to kill it stone dead. So we’re taking off for a bite to eat somewhere, then a club. And we’re short of one bloke.’

  Sam looked past her and saw a couple standing a safe distance away trying to conceal their embarrassment at her forwardness by staring through the glass doors into the hotel drive.

  ‘And, um, since you seemed to be on your own,’ she concluded, in so deep now that she couldn’t turn back, ‘and you looked friendly . . .’

  She coloured even further and laughed again, the hand darting to her mouth once more.

  Sam beamed. ‘Now, normally that’s the sort of invitation I wouldn’t dream of refusing. Unfortunately, there’s somebody I have to meet this evening.’

  ‘Oh. Pity.’ She flattened her lips to conceal her disappointment. Her eyes showed she thought he was giving her the brush off. ‘Ah well . . . just thought I’d give you a try.’

  ‘Thanks. Normally, as I say . . .’

  She began to move back to her friends.

  ‘Maybe I can make it later,’ he called after her.

  Daft. There wouldn’t be any later. Not for that sort of thing anyway.

  ‘Club’s called the Paradiso,’ she called back over her shoulder, pushing at the swing door. ‘And I’m Sophie.’

  Then she was gone.

  He turned back towards the board of prints. There was one in particular that had intrigued him at the first look. Two men and one woman at a table, she with her back to the lens, one man beside her, the other opposite, facing the camera. The man was leaning in towards the woman, one hand resting on hers, the other clutching a highball of ice and some dark spirit. A face built round a wide, leathery mouth in which the top front teeth sparkled with silver. He had close-cropped, wiry hair and wore a black roll-neck shirt and white jacket. The pebble-hard eyes weren’t quite in line. One of them might have been glass. The tense set of the woman’s shoulders suggested the man’s advances weren’t entirely welcome.

  Metal teeth. There was only one place in the world where Sam had seen dentistry like that – the former Soviet Union.

  The man had the looks of a Mafiya hood from central casting. Here to launder money, no doubt, some of which he was spending on a hooker by the look of it. Quite classy for a tart, the woman was. He couldn’t see her face, but she had shiny, chestnut-brown hair. Gold earrings. Wearing a cream jacket that could have been linen.

  Suddenly he felt the ground open.

  ‘Oh my God,’ he croaked.

  Cream – linen – jacket. Jacket and matching skirt. The outfit Chrissie had been wearing in Amman. The suit from Prada she’d been so damned proud of. The shining hair, the shoulders tightly hunched – yes, she did that when she was tense.

  ‘Shit!’

  It was Chrissie.

  Photographed on the night she was murdered.

  17

  HIS MOISTENING EYES bored into the photo, unconsciously trying to draw her essence from the picture as if sucking moisture from a grain of wheat. He flicked a fingernail under the pin holding it to the board. He needed to have this picture like he’d needed her on Sunday in Amman. But more than that, it was the key to her death. He secreted it in the inside pocket of his jacket, turned to check no one had seen him do so, then, stifling his emotions, crossed the lobby to a corner seat where he could study it.

  Did the police hav
e a copy of this? he wondered. Had they identified the high roller who had his hand on hers? And the second male in the group, sitting on Chrissie’s right also back to camera – also Russian? Why? Why had she been with these characters?

  Sam studied the body language. The second man wore a green jacket and sat all square and straight, as if keeping his face from the camera had been his intention. Not a freckle showing. Same with Chrissie. Both of them squaring their shoulders to the lens to ensure their features weren’t captured on film. Interesting.

  He tried to work out where they’d been sitting. Beyond the group was a darker area where the camera’s flash had hardly reached. About half a dozen bodies there, some seated, some standing by the bar counter. One man on his own looking towards the table where Chrissie sat, his face no more than a shadow.

  Sam stood up again and moved towards the cocktail bar, easily locating the table in question, now occupied by a couple who weren’t speaking to one another. He approached the counter and perched on a stool.

  ‘A beer,’ Sam ordered from the slim, crinkly-haired barman.

  ‘Tuborg Export?’

  ‘Keo, if you have it.’

  The barman ducked down to the refrigerated cabinet, then plonked the bottle and a glass on the varnished mahogany bar top.

  ‘Nice bar,’ Sam commented chattily. ‘Worked here a long time?’

  ‘Me? Too long, sir.’

  The man laughed and wiped the counter with a cloth. Then he nudged a bowl of crisps so that it slid along the varnish under its own momentum, stopping precisely in front of Sam.

  ‘Neat,’ Sam mouthed.

  ‘But next month – finish,’ the barman continued, ignoring his compliment.

  ‘Really? Where are you going?’

  ‘London, sir. Piccadilly.’

  ‘Same hotel group?’

  ‘Yessir. Better pay and more tips.’ He flashed his straight, white teeth.

  ‘But your regulars here – they’ll miss you, I expect.’

  ‘Of course.’ He took it as a statement of the obvious rather than a tribute.

  ‘Or perhaps you don’t have regulars. Being a hotel.’