She had managed earlier, in the foyer of the Hotel du Cap, whilst the Mercs were arriving and circling, to give him a millisecond’s conspiratorial look, a miniature communication that said, ‘Hi Jack Regan, forgive me while I go through all this shit, a girl’s got to make a living. And please don’t let these guys guess about you and me...’ Or had she? Had that actually been the message of that look? Or was its brevity a simple message? How many guys, at a conservative guess, would he think she had slept with in the last Gregorian calendar year, a hundred? A cop’s got to be a fun experience to be noted in graffiti on the chalk cliffs of her experience. Yes, she’d said, ‘Would it work back in London for us, Jack?’ But what in Hell did that mean?
Jack Regan sat out his vigil in the car, watching Almadi, a man who could probably buy London, probably would, treating her with the reverence of a queen. His speculations passed into query and crisis – at the end of two hours he thought about it, searched his memory, but he couldn’t remember any other time in his life when he’d felt more depressed about a girl.
The N204 Nice to Cuneo is more a switchback than a road, and sections of it have been used to separate the boys from the men in the last hours of the Monte Carlo Rally, some of the boys landing up on the bottom of the myriad of chasms and ravines. The road to Cuneo seems to have been designed with the idea of preventing anyone getting to this no man’s land town between Nice and Turin. Of course there’s the autostrada, which makes the Monaco-Turin hop a shopping trip, but it’s the old road, of deep crevasses, gaunt mountains and tinkling waterfalls streaking silver among the pines, that road which Almadi’s party in the four Mercedes took the next morning.
Hijaz rode as usual in front, chauffeur-driven in a black Mercedes 220. Sheikh Almadi rode in the second car, three French officials with him and the chauffeur, so it was a tight fit for everyone inside that Mercedes. Regan rode alone in the back of the third Merc. He too had a Hertz chauffeur who spoke English and had travelled everywhere and said he had his shirts tailored in London, and talked about all the important people he knew and after half an hour of this had bored Regan stiff. In the fourth car, a chauffeur and two more French officials.
Hijaz had told him, like a nanny carefully explaining the details of an outing to a child, that they were going to a French factory plant near Tende, just this side of the Italian border. Sheikh Almadi was to inspect some installations. For Regan’s information these installations were guarded by military personnel. So the only security problems involved the journey there and back.
Regan had nodded. Regan didn’t care too much. He’d just had a night’s sleep on the problems of yesterday and found some of them were not resolvable. Like Hijaz knew a lot about the people in the BMW and was not telling Regan. Well, that wasn’t good enough. But he wasn’t about to start a tendentious row. He’d decided he’d call the Yard at five-thirty tonight, just when Maynon would have left the building, but while DCI Haskins was still there. He would tell Haskins he was pissed off and coming home. Hijaz had said in the nanny speech there was a possibility that Almadi, if the morning’s trip went well, might pull out tomorrow, heading back for Bahrain. There were, de facto, a priori, and phrases from other dead lingos, things that Regan would not do, lengths to which he would not go, calls beyond acceptable duties. It was as simple as that – he was not of a mind to accompany Almadi back to the khaki deserts, fly-swat in one hand, and binoculars in the other, searching forever the burning dunes for the thin-faced assassin of the Wellington Clinic. Sod the lot, he was off. He had not told Hijaz yet.
He sat in the Merc on the road to Cuneo – the only concession to his job, the blue steel, blunt-nosed Walther 9-millimetre, the gun which he’d unhappily misplaced before the Antibes killing. He felt pessimistic about everything. His face was sour, his eyes mild-angered. The road kept torturing itself round, trying to find a way up the valleys. The cars kept crossing low bridges over rushing rivers filled with wood and brush torn by the torrent, and little valleys of green sward where maybe in ages past Roman heavy mobs in centurion gear had kipped the night prior to a move west to lean on some Gauls. Regan remembered his Caesar’s Commentaries, that’s what the wops used to do for a laugh. They’d spent two centuries kicking the shit out the southern frogs, just for some herbes de Provence in their pasta.
His mind ranged, touching on thoughts provoked and soured by the gaunt scenery, as the four Mercedes made their stately climb upwards through the valleys. Jo had affected him. What a dumb-assed thing to happen. Soft green eyes, and a penchant for a screw with a cheque at the end of it. Right? Wrong. Who was he to fall for her? Who was he to fall for anyone? Didn’t he know himself? Hadn’t he evolved, some years after the bust-up of the matrimonial home, a studied system of rapid rutting with some non-aligned broad and at the precise moment when it might change gear, as it always did, a quick burial ceremony with the excuse of a lot of work? Exit girlfriend. No, he’d tried all that permanence, living together, joint bank accounts. He had actually intended his marriage to work, and had been quite shocked when it didn’t, when she left him. She, who didn’t have the energy to raise her eyes for a loan, had got the whole bastard thing together inside twenty-four hours, and said farewell to Jack Regan – she hadn’t brought it up before but it was all quite decided in the pin-head she used for a brain that this was fuck-off time. That was unfair, he decided, as he looked out over the valleys. The problem with the marriage was he didn’t think there was a problem until it was too late. Eight billion marriages a year go down in the same flames. The pine trees nodded their heads at him, either in complete agreement or because of the upwind from the gorges.
Jo, an entirely beautiful girl, from sex to simple conversation. But the thing that screwed him here was that he’d never met a bird before, not one, that he’d thought was too good for him. Well, he’d met his match in a bedroom in the Hotel du Cap. That was the lousiest discovery he’d ever made in his life. There were a thousand ice-cold handsome millionaires in the world who would turn in a couple of shipping fleets to grab that ass. He had watched those guys last night, the simian French civil servants, and Almadi, flutter around her, moths to the flame. He felt like lifting up the Walther, telling the Hertz chauffeur to overtake the Almadi car, and shooting some neat holes in Almadi’s head – a symbolic blow for the little people of the world. But he wouldn’t do it, because the one thing about Jo that he was sure of was that he had already lost her.
The line of Mercedes had now come out on to a high wide plateau, low foothills still to the right of the road. The lead car slowed. Regan gave up his gloom. He’d be back in London tonight. He’d remembered a Tom he knew, met her six months ago on a pub raid in Harmonsworth. He’d given it to her twice, once on her birthday, her nicest present, she’d said. Not a bad looking kid and as hot as a raw pepper. He’d go there tonight. He’d take a bottle of Bell’s and bury himself in that lot. He would forget sitting outside that restaurant, the Oasis in La Napoule, last night, watching her, and loving her.
The lead Mercedes took a left turn off the main road and up a tarmacadam road into a new valley sheer with rocks. The three cars followed.
Half a kilometre up the valley, the first fresh paint steel signs. ‘Attention a 100 metres, Privee. Attention. Propriete Privee. Gouvernment de France.’ A hundred metres on, the first car halted. A metal fence blocked the road. In the fence a wide high set of steel gates. On each side of the gates high steel trellis towers with floodlights. By the left hand gate, a low shed, looking like the guardroom of a regimental building. Standing around the shed four uniformed soldiers, each with a sub-machine gun. Two of the soldiers were near the closed gates. It was evident that the procession of Mercedes had been expected. An officer, also armed, came smartly out of the hut at the appearance of the first Mercedes and signalled the two guards on the gate to open it wide. The four Mercedes drove through.
For the last five minutes on the main road there had been little sign of humanity, but once inside the gates, and
on the further half-kilometre drive up to the main installations, Regan surveyed a hive of activity. Workmen, soldiers, earth-moving equipment, cranes, trucks, a helicopter sitting on a clearing among pine trees, fork-lift trucks passing with building materials, the large site criss-crossed with recently made cement roads. At the end of the main approach road a group of around a dozen buildings.
Four of the buildings were large enough to be aircraft hangars. But Regan saw that each contained suites of offices, and car parks. Something about the whole place struck him as curious. There must be hundreds of people in the vicinity of this complex, but they’d passed no cars or any other traffic on the road up to the main gates of the installation. Obviously it was a self-contained community. It looked like a dozen things. It could’ve been an airport, but it didn’t have any runways. It looked like an astronomical observatory, two of the buildings had huge half-spherical metal roofs, with open panels in them.
Regan’s chauffeur halted the car. Regan picked up the Walther, pocketed it, and climbed out. Almadi and the three French civil servants were already out of the larger Mercedes and heading now, deep in conversation, towards a low building which looked like a reception centre.
Regan took a quick shufti around. Again, many people in the vicinity, many vantage points for a potential assassin. But he could see a couple of armed soldiers, one a captain, stepping out from another low building and moving over towards the cars. Evidently security had been organized inside the complex.
He started to move off after Almadi and the three Frenchmen. Hijaz stepped out from behind the first parked Mercedes and intercepted him.
‘It will not be necessary to accompany Sheikh Almadi on his tour of these buildings,’ Hijaz said. ‘In fact he insists that neither you nor I accompany him.’
Regan shrugged. ‘Suit yourself. What is this complex? I notice it doesn’t advertise itself.’
‘It’s a government installation,’ Hijaz stated.
‘That’s obvious to a child. What kind of installation?’
‘Just a French Government complex.’
Regan looked hard at Hijaz. ‘D’you ever answer a straight question?’
Hijaz didn’t seem to care. ‘The answer is implicit, the answer is, don’t ask questions...’
‘I’m leaving for England tonight,’ Regan said suddenly, the voice unaggressive, just tired. ‘I can’t respond to people like you. I don’t think I give a shit anymore whether anybody puts a bullet in any one of you.’
It was as if Hijaz had a piece of food in his mouth and was chewing it over – that was the accompaniment to his rapid cerebral calculations arriving at an answer for Regan. ‘I don’t think it matters if you go. Sheikh Almadi signs the deal with the French this afternoon. We had to protect him to the point where he signed that deal...’
‘What deal?’
Hijaz shook his head. ‘In a way I’m sorry for you. You’ve never understood anything about anything. You never will.’
Regan wasn’t going to rise to it. He went back and sat in the car. Hijaz strolled off towards the reception building.
Almadi was there an hour and a quarter. From time to time Regan, either sitting inside the Merc or stretching his feet in a tour of the perimeter of the car park, saw the sheikh with his escort coming out of one building and heading into another. The sheikh’s escort now numbered about a dozen people. The original three senior civil servants who had travelled in his car, and the two who had travelled in the fourth Merc, were now joined by another half dozen men all in laboratory technicians’ white coats.
At five minutes after midday, Almadi, surrounded now by at least a dozen white-coated technicians in addition to the dark-suited civil servants, arrived back in the car park. With much bowing and handshaking on the part of everyone present, he got into the car. Hijaz walked down from the first Mercedes, poked his head into Regan’s car. ‘We’ll take a different route back. A normal precaution. All right?’
‘All right,’ Regan said. He had just found out that his Hertz chauffeur who’d travelled everywhere and got his shirts tailored in London had in fact been quietly slavering his way through a copy of the magazine ‘Oui’, which he’d placed in the mid-pages of his ‘Le Monde’.
Regan signalled the gent as he put ‘Le Monde’ aside to start the car that he, Regan, had spotted the flesh acres and would appreciate a view. Wordlessly the chauffeur handed over the magazine.
Regan opened the mag. The four Mercedes moved into U-turns and headed off down the road to the steel gates.
The handshaking was now replaced by waves from the white-coated men they were leaving behind. Regan didn’t join in. He sat back and studied the centre-fold of a sixteen-year-old who was put together in such a way that, from the simple forensic evidence contained in the photo of the body, Regan knew men were going to kill each other or themselves in a desperate effort for possession.
There wasn’t a lot that could be done to vary the route from Tende. They took a half-made lane to Sorres which eventually led to the Grande Corniche.
Regan looked up from ‘Oui’ at Eze-La Turbie. They were in the centre of the village. There was a Friday morning market on in a square, which, according to the parking signs, was normally a car park. Regan looked over the top of the copy of ‘Oui’. A Peugeot bread van had just pulled up alongside the Merc. The man driving the van had a moustache. Suddenly Regan was sure of two things. The moustache was a false one, and the driver of the bread van was the killer who had accompanied him down in the elevator of the Wellington Clinic.
Regan lifted the copy of ‘Oui’ magazine up another couple of inches to completely hide his face. But he felt sure the man had not spotted him. The moustached killer’s attention was rivetted on the Mercedes in front, and what could be seen through its rear window – the back of the slate-grey head of Almadi seated to the right of one of the French officials.
Slowly Regan’s hand moved inside and under the left lapel of his jacket, found the butt of the Walther, and eased it out of the shoulder holster.
The traffic lights that had held up the cortege changed to green, but there was still an uncertain milling around of housewives and stall-holders crossing the road and the stream of traffic took a few more seconds to get underway.
Meanwhile the bread van nipped in between Almadi’s Mercedes and Regan.
Regan dropped the copy of ‘Oui’, leant forward, spoke to the chauffeur, pulled out all the stops on a performance that would have had Sir John Gielgud checking back over his career to see where he had gone wrong. ‘This is Eze, isn’t it? I was here a few days ago. Could you do me a great favour? That tobacconist over there,’ he pointed to a tobacconist on the other side of the square, ‘sells British cigarettes called Embassy. I came here to Les Hauts. I bought some Embassy. I think he short-changed me. Ten francs he charged for two packs.’
‘Ten francs, two packs? You were robbed.’
‘Well, that’s what I thought. You couldn’t possibly do me a favour and get some more Embassy for me at the right price?’ Regan stuffed a ten-franc note into the top pocket of the chauffeur’s jacket.
‘Okay,’ the chauffeur said. ‘I’ll be a second.’
He got out of the car, signalled the fourth Mercedes in the line to overtake, and follow off after Hijaz and Almadi’s cars, and the bread van.
The chauffeur crossed the square and entered the tobacconist. Regan almost fell out of the rear door in his haste to get into the front behind the driver’s wheel. But once installed he took another couple of seconds to put on the chauffeur’s hat and the dark driving glasses which the man had left behind. The Hertz chauffeur had switched the engine off. Regan turned the key in the ignition, slammed the accelerator pedal to the floor, and took off with a couple of black Pirelli signatures making his exit from the square.
He could almost physically smell the danger. It was if as he knew that death, not his death, but Almadi’s, was probably seconds away, and yet before he could act, he must think, use his go
d-given intelligence to sort out a precise organization of thoughts to translate into action.
He’d got a car – he’d had to take it away from the Hertz chauffeur because he intended to risk the auto, wreck it if necessary, use it as a battering ram, whatever. There would have been no time to explain that or any part of it to the chauffeur. And the man would have said, ‘No’ anyhow, it was not part of his job to smash up his employer’s assets.
Regan cut through the traffic which had meanwhile lined up behind the Hijaz and Almadi Mercs, closely followed by the bread van, and the other Merc. The road was falling and narrowing down now towards Nice and the Baie des Anges, glimpses of the sea below among the cotton clouds that were drifting, at this height, through the precipices of the high road. His first decision was to find a precise spot in the on-coming series of S-bends see-sawing down the sides of the gorges, a hundred yard stretch in which to attempt to overtake three cars and the bread van. That was phase number one. Phase number two, which Regan was now rapidly drafting as the only phase two possibility, was difficult to contemplate. He had to stop the bread van, but not by killing the driver. He must stop the driver in what looked like a genuine accident, because he had phase number three to think about. He wanted the killer of the Wellington Clinic walking away from the bread van. He wanted that man intact, leading him back to the people who gave him his orders. The only thing that Regan really wanted to sort out in this whole glad bag of crime was who in Hell employed the man with the false moustache to blow the holes in Haffasa in the Wellington Clinic, London, England.
The Sweeney 03 Page 9
