and she was far to the back of the interior, and the torches of the men found her, and she screamed, and he heard the sirens…
The first sirens of the day had woken Harry Compton.
He'd slept rotten. Not the fault of the bed in the hotel room that he'd tossed half the night. He'd tossed, he'd put the light back on in the small hours and he'd tried to win some sleep by reading the file he had accumulated on Charlotte Parsons, Codename Helen, and he'd dreamed.
He thought he might have slept a little over three hours. He had thrust himself out of the bed and walked over the scattered bedclothes, and gone to the window and pushed back the shutters. He had seen the two cars powering along the street with the lights on the roofs and the sirens blasting. He'd seen the guns, he'd seen the guards, he had seen the slumped figure in the back of the lead car.
They'd met for breakfast.
At home, Fliss left him alone for breakfast. If she sat with him they argued. He took his breakfast alone in the kitchen at home, a snatched apple and a piece of toasted bread smeared with honey, and coffee. The American didn't seem to want to talk, which suited Harry Compton. The American had eggs and sausage and bacon cooked to extinction. They'd talk after breakfast, that seemed to be the deal. It was the American's problem that they hadn't been met, for the American to sort out, and for the American to argue that the mission of Codename Helen was dead in the water, aborted… There were mostly tourists in the breakfast room. There were couples from Britain and Germany and they wore bright clothes that were ridiculous for their age and their eyes were on their food and their guidebooks. Breakfast would be inclusive, so they were eating big, like the American, and they were gutting the guidebooks so that they would seem intelligent each time they were dumped off the bus and marched to the next antiquity. He was contemptuous of tourists because his mortgage was?67,000, monthly repayments hovering at? 350 a month, and if the baby came then they would need a bigger place, bigger mortgage, bigger monthly drain. Most summers he went with Fliss for two weeks to her aunt's cottage in the Lakes, and most summers after a week there he was yearning to get back to S06 work. Harry Compton had told his wife that he'd be gone forty-eight hours, that he wouldn't be getting to see anything… He chewed on the bread roll, not fresh that morning, and the coffee was cold…
The man came from behind him.
The hand of the man brushed across the table and bounced the small basket that contained the bread rolls.
He had his back to the entrance of the breakfast room, hadn't seen the man come.
The hand was tanned and it had fair hairs growing on it. The hand scooped up Dwight Smythe's room key from beside the basket of bread rolls.
He was half out of his chair, the protest was in his throat, and he saw the American's face, impassive except that the big lips moved nervously.
'Leave it, Harry,' the American growled, water on shingle. Dwight Smythe, no fuss, laid down his fork and rested his hand loose on Harry Compton's arm.
He subsided back onto his chair. The man walked on, slipped the key to Dwight Smythe's room into his trouser pocket. The man was dressed casually, a check shirt and jeans, and he carried a plastic bag that was weighted, and the top of a sketch pad protruded from the top of the bag. The man wore a long pony-tail of fair hair, held close to his neck by a red plastic band. He was, to Harry Compton, like a drop-out, like a druggie. The man went to the end of the breakfast room and he was looking around him as if for a friend, as if to find someone he was due to meet. The man turned, the man had failed to find his friend, and he came back past them. Harry Compton saw the man's face. He saw drawn lines, as if the man were scarred with anxiety. He saw the man's waist and the bulge below where the shirt was tucked into the trouser belt. The man was gone past him.
'I think we'll have fresh coffee,' Dwight Smythe said, and his tongue brushed on his lips. 'This coffee's cold shit.'
Dwight Smythe called the girl, and it was ten minutes before the coffee came, and while they waited for the coffee the American ate two rolls of bread with jam on them, and he didn't talk… He was a detective sergeant, headhunted for an elite unit, he was supposed to have the qualities of a policeman and an accountant and a lawyer, and he reckoned that he knew nothing… They drank most of the second pot of coffee, and Dwight Smythe wiped the crumbs off his face… He wasn't firearms-trained, he had never carried a weapon more lethal than his truncheon, he knew nothing…
They went out of the breakfast room and crossed the hotel lobby. The British tourists were loading noisily into their bus, and the Germans were crowding round their courier.
They walked up the wide staircase, and then down the corridor. There was only a chambermaid in the corridor with her trolley of clean sheets, clean towels, soaps and shampoos. Harry Compton realized that he had glanced her over, as if a chambermaid could be a threat. The 'Non Disturbare' sign was on Dwight Smythe's door. He thought there would be a fight, but the fight was the American's problem. The chambermaid was in a room down the corridor. The American knocked lightly on his own door. The accent, American, was a murmur – the door was not fastened.
The man sat on Dwight Smythe's unmade bed. On the crumpled pillow was an ashtray. The man smoked his second cigarette, looked up as they came in, his hand had been over the bulge in his waist and now dropped away. The strain was stamped on the man's face. It was the American's problem, the American's job to do the dirty talk.
'Hi, Axel, good to see you.'
'Sorry for last night.'
'Not a problem. Axel, this is Harry Compton, out of London, a detective in the-'
Axel jerked across the bed and his body upset the ashtray and spilled the cigarette debris over the pillow, and he reached for the TV control and flicked buttons until he found loud rock, and he raised the volume.
Dwight Smythe said, soft, 'We were sent together, there's been high-grade crap between London and Washington.'
The cigarette went to the mouth, the hand snaked forward. The murmur stayed with the voice as if, Harry Compton thought, the shit had been kicked out of him. 'I'm Axel Moen, happy to meet you, Harry. Sorry I didn't make the airport.'
'Didn't matter, we had a good ride in,' Harry Compton said awkwardly. Not his problem, it was for the American to dish the shit.
'Axel, I'm not carrying good news/ Dwight Smythe blurted. 'I'm sorry, I'm only the goddam messenger.'
'What's the message?'
'Let me say this. When we met in London, when we travelled, we may not have hit it.
I might have sparked you. Maybe I thought you arrogant, maybe you thought me fourth-grade. That's past, gone.' 'Spit it.'
Dwight Smythe scratched at the short curled hair of his scalp, like he was buying time. 'It's not easy, not for me and not for Harry
… Up on high, Washington and London – Axel, they've killed it.'
Harry Compton waited for the fight back, waited for the anger to jut the chin, waited for the tirade about big men being short of balls.
'They're aborting. They've gone cold. They're frightened. They want your Codename Helen shipped out. They want her home.'
He saw Axel Moen's shoulders drop, as if the tension drained.
'They want her removed, immediately, from the field of danger. It's why I'm here, why Harry's here.'
He saw the light flicker back in Axel Moen's eyes, like a lamp hit them where before there had been darkness.
Axel Moen said, conversational, 'That's good thinking, it's right thinking, it's what I was getting to think myself. You see, not certain, but I think I am followed.'
He saw the slight smile break on Axel Moen's mouth, like ice was fractured.
Axel Moen said, 'They'd be too good for you to know it. It's what I think, that I am followed. I think they have a tail on me. Don't have the moment how, where, they made the link. It's why I didn't come to the airport to meet you. It's why I didn't plug in the phone when you were calling. If they can put the tail, they can put the bug. If there is a tail, then I have to believe they are here, outside, and waiting on me. When you think you have a tail, then you
