The Arab, always nervous in Winter's presence, was wearing sharp-pointed, highly polished shoes and they squeaked when he moved.
^ 'Everything is the way you want it, the way you planned It,' Winter said slowly.
^ Riad thrust both hands inside his raincoat pockets, hands which had been fluttering as though unsure who they belonged to. Standing stiffly, he spoke in what he imagined was a voice of authority. The feet also, Winter observed, seemed unsure where to put themselves.
^ 'There has been a change of plan, Winter. You are no longer needed in San Francisco. You are to take the first available flight to Los Angeles. There you will board a plane for Paris.'
^ Winter sat down, sprawling out his legs and looking up at Riad with a cigarette in his mouth. 'Why?'
^ 'I'll break those shiny teeth of yours and poke them down your throat – if I feel like it. Actually, I feel just like that.'
^ Winter spoke so mildly that for a moment Riad could not believe he had understood. He moved forward and Winter lifted his foot. The movement was so quick Riad had no time to dodge. The heel of Winter's right foot smashed down on the shiny shoe and Riad squealed. 'I like people who keep still,' Winter remarked. 'Seen today's newspaper?' He folded the paper to the Anchorage news item and shoved it at the Arab. 'Read it! That bit at the bottom.'
^ Riad read it and the newspaper rustled as he tried to hold it steady. Then he dropped the paper on the table, took out an airline folder and handed it towards Winter. 'These are your tickets – in the name of Stanley Grant…'
^ 'You haven't commented on the news item.' Winter stayed flopped in his chair, making no attempt to take the folder Riad was holding.
^ 'They must have tried to escape,' Riad muttered. 'I do not wish to discuss this thing…'
^ 'What you wish doesn't matter any more…' Winter stood up, walking towards Riad who backed away and then realised he was moving towards the open window. 'No one in Anchorage tried to escape,' Winter told him. 'Swan wouldn't have risked it – not with his wife being there. So, what happened?'
^ 'I was not there…' Riad was trembling, trying not to catch Winter's blank gaze as he backed into an alcove which contained a writing desk. 'I have to leave at once…'
^ 'And you didn't say you knew this filthy thing in Anchorage was going to happen – but you did know. You weren't surprised or appalled when you read that paper – you were just worried that I had found out about it.'
^ 'I know nothing about Anchorage…' Riad's arrogance had dissolved. Backed into the alcove by the cold-eyed Englishman, his nerve was going rapidly. He pulled at his collar which felt like a noose round his neck, his legs were trembling, there was a sharp pain of tension in his chest. Behind him he felt the wall; there was nowhere else to go and Winter kept coming towards him. 'I know nothing about Anchorage,' the Arab repeated. 'Nothing…'
^ 'They will make the demand, the Americans will accept…' He choked on his own words as Winter grasped him by the throat, dragged him towards the open window. Riad, quick-witted, immediately understood. 'No! No! Please! I beg you…' Winter had both hands round his throat now, ignoring the frantic beat of Riad's fists, dragging him closer and closer to the wide-open window. The Arab obviously had a horror of heights. Winter stood Riad with his back to the window and bent him at the waist over and outwards, his own legs pressed hard against Riad's which were supported by the lower wail. Riad's upper half went further and further outwards over the ten-storey drop until his head was upside down and above the thump of blood pounding in his ears he heard the blare of traffic horns over a hundred feet below. He saw the sky, the drunken slant of buildings and felt Winter's hand on his throat pushing him down and down. Bile came into his mouth, the pain in his chest was appalling, the pounding in his ear-drums was like a drum-beat, then he felt Winter's other hand grasping his belt, lifting his feet off the bedroom floor and he knew he was going down into the chasm – hurtling through space – until his skull met the sidewalk and was crushed and he was dead for ever and ever.
^ Winter hauled him back inside, shook him like a child's doll while the doll drooled with terror, hardly sane at this moment as he saw Winter's bony face through a shimmering mist of near-faintness. 'What is going to happen aboard the ship?' the Englishman hissed through his teeth. He shook him with cold intensity. 'What is going to happen aboard the ^ Challenger ^ that I don't know about?'
^ Riad was now choking for breath like a drowning man as his heart pounded so fast and heavily it felt it would burst out of his rib cage. He tried to speak, tried to tell Winter to stop shaking and he would speak… He gasped, started taking in such violent, wheezing gasps of air that Winter was alarmed that he would faint so he held him still. The Arab looked up at him with a pathetic look of a child. They were both human beings, caught up in a plot of unimaginable violence planned by a man a third of the way across the world who thought nothing mattered but the freeing of sacred Jerusalem from the grip of the intruder.
^ Riad collapsed, went limp in Winter's grip, sagging while the Englishman still held him up, more of a weight than Winter would have imagined, but a dead man is always heavy.
^ Ahmed Riad had not been well when he alighted from the plane at Los Angeles after his eleven-hour flight from London. The tension in the United States did nothing to improve his condition. The ordeal of hanging out of the window brought on the final, massive coronary which killed him – before he had a chance to say a word about the nuclear device which LeCat had smuggled aboard the tanker now waiting to enter the Bay.
^ Believing that Riad had only fainted, in a great hurry to make a phone call, Winter left the unfortunate Arab lying on the carpet ^ while he lifted the receiver. The operator came on the line at once and Winter was mopping his forehead with a handkerchief when he spoke.
17
^ It was 9.30am when Ahmed Riad died. Winter had been very brief on the phone. 'I'm not waiting here while you trace this call,' he told MacGowan's assistant. 'You have exactly forty-five seconds to get the Governor on the line and then I'm breaking the connection. I can tell him the complete structure of the terrorist team aboard that tanker outside the Bay…' MacGowan's growling voice had come on the line within thirty seconds – Winter had timed it by his watch.
^ His call to MacGowan had been brief: Winter knew that if he was to carry any weight at all he had to get to the Governor as a free man, going to see him voluntarily. If they were able to arrest him first, they would never believe him.
^ Realising now that Riad was dead, Winter hung a 'Do Not Disturb' notice on the outside door handle before he left his bedroom. Riad's diplomatic passport – trade representative of some obscure Persian Gulf sheikhdom – was in his pocket as he hurried along Geary and found a cab just emptying itself of its passengers in Union Square. Arriving at the Transamerica building, the strange, pyramid-shaped edifice overlooking the Bay – if your floor was high enough – he went straight up to the Governor's floor. It was high enough for a view of the Bay, and plain- clothes detectives were waiting for him.
^ He had gambled on MacGowan's character, on the little he had heard about him, gambled on the independent-minded American wanting to see him. MacGowan came into the room while they were still searching him for weapons. They found nothing on him; ^ ^ Winter had dropped the Skorpion pistol and holster from the Golden Gate bridge while Walgren had waited with the car. You don't, if you are staying at a good hotel in a city, arrive with guns. MacGowan, who had been watching Winter while they searched him, ushered the Englishman into his private office and shooed the police away. 'Hell, you searched him. I can take care of myself…'
^ The interview between MacGowan and Winter behind closed doors went on for one hour – a long time for both men who were quick-witted and incisive, who went to the guts of a problem immediately. Part of that time was taken up by MacGowan, once a trial lawyer, grilling the Englishman. At the end of the hour MacGowan was convinced Winter was telling the truth. Others -when he held a full meeting of his action committee – were less easy to convince. Peretti, backed by Col Cassidy, was particularly sceptical. 'We have to be sure there are no explosives aboard that vessel,' he insisted. 'Winter should be subjected to a lie-detector test…'
^ 'Bloody waste of time,' MacGowan snapped. 'A scientist's toy for the enjoyment of idiots. Twenty years of criminal practice taught me to assess a man face to face. Anything that whirrs and flashes, Peretti, and you think it's God's answer to the human problem…'
^ They subjected Winter to the lie-detector and they were all there, firing questions at him. Karpis of the FBI,
