hand, on which was sitting a hawk. Aleppo watched as they proceeded to a mown circle of grass, where the keeper raised his hand slowly until the bird suddenly took off. It flew round in a big arc and then swooped back down again to snatch at the lure the man held at the end of a long cord, the bait an ounce of raw grouse meat.
He heard the little boy’s father ask, ‘What happens if they don’t come back?’
‘They’re carrying a radio transmitter. It’s tiny – just a microchip,’ the man said, pointing to the hawk now back on his extended hand. ‘I can hear it through my earpiece. The closer I get to him, the louder the transmitter squawks.’
‘What’s the range of the signal?’
‘The manufacturer claims it’s twelve miles.’ He scoffed. ‘But that’s because the manufacturer is in Salt Lake City. In this landscape it’s more like twelve hundred yards.’
‘Do they go that far?’
The instructor shook his head. ‘Not usually. They
Aleppo moved away and strolled, deep in thought, towards the golf courses, coming shortly to the edge of a little lake, no more than a few hundred yards square, which was nestled in a long hollow beside the main drive. A small island in the middle of the lake boasted a solitary cedar tree surrounded by low rushes that went down into the water. On Aleppo’s side of the lake was a wooden landing stage with a rowing boat tied to an iron ring. Across the water, on the golf course side, sat a small putting green. This could be useful, he thought, suddenly open to yet more possibilities.
When he returned to the hotel there were three men at the reception desk, wearing suits and ties, white shirts, and tasselled loafers. One had an earpiece, and wore a miniature American flag pinned to his lapel. Aleppo stopped at the desk, ostensibly to ask for a newspaper in the morning, but really to confirm his suspicions that these were Secret Service men.
‘It’s just preliminary,’ one of them was saying to the manager. ‘Next week we’ll be up to check every room thoroughly. For now, it’s just to acquaint ourselves.’
He moved away casually and went up to his room, thinking hard. The Secret Service men would be back for their room-to-room inspection of the place; they’d be followed by British police, using state-of-the-art detection equipment and sniffer dogs.
It simply wouldn’t be possible to hide anything in the hotel itself. The IRA had done that at the Grand Hotel in Brighton, almost managing to murder Margaret Thatcher and most of her Cabinet. They’d concealed a long-fuse bomb behind the panelling in the bathroom of one of the central tier of rooms. It had been put there so far in advance that it had escaped the sweeps made just days before the Conservative Party Conference had begun. But things had moved on a lot since then in the security world.
So any action would have to take place somewhere else in the grounds. They’d be heavily policed, of course, and a perimeter would be established out on extended boundaries. But with hundreds of acres to police, it might just be possible to think of something that would escape the combined efforts of the UK police, foreign security, sniffer dogs, and state-of-the-art detection machines. But it wasn’t going to be easy and to do that he’d need help -and from someone who knew the place far better than he was ever going to. Someone with access. He’d need a local ally, with local information.
That night he dined again in the Italian trattoria, but this time he asked the maitre d’ for a table towards the back of its big room, where he knew he would be waited on by the pretty sandy-haired girl.
‘Good evening,’ she said, as she came to take his order.
‘Good evening, Jana,’ he said, reading the name tag on her blouse. She gave a faint smile.
Each time she came to the table, he greeted her approach with an admiring gaze that he was glad to see her reciprocate. At last, as she brought his after-dinner coffee, he said quietly so no one else would hear, ‘What time do you get off?’
‘And why would that be of interest?’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he said, looking down at his demitasse, ‘I thought you might let a foreigner buy you a drink. In return for some local knowledge.’
‘Oh I see, you’re looking for a tutor, are you?’ She gave a knowing smile, but then just as quickly frowned. ‘Seriously, though, we’re not allowed to fraternise with the residents. It would be more than my job was worth.’
‘Maybe it wouldn’t have to be in public.’ He opened his hand; in his palm lay his room key, with its number face up ?411. ‘You have a good memory, don’t you, Jana?’
She looked a little startled by his boldness. ‘Well, I don’t know about that.’
‘It’s just a drink. I have a rather enormous minibar. Too much for me on my own.’
‘I thought I’d heard them all,’ she said with a laugh, then went off to see to another table.
But later, as he sat in his room, reading the local paper, he was unsurprised by the slight tap at the door, and when he opened it, the girl Jana was standing there. She was out of uniform now, wearing jeans and a pink crop top. As she slipped quickly into the room, he closed the door behind her.
‘I’m not sure I should be doing this-’ she began
‘Shhhh,’ he said, putting a finger to his lips and leaning over to kiss her waiting lips.
Much later, when it was closer to morning than midnight, but while it was still pitch-dark outside, the door of 411 opened, and Jana came out silently, then walked speedily down the corridor to the back stairs. She felt happy to have conducted her rendezvous unobserved, and a little exhilarated, especially since the man had said he would be back in three weeks’ time.
THIRTY-SIX
Peggy was being so solicitous that Liz found herself growing impatient. ‘I’m fine,’ she protested again in the face of her junior colleague’s repeated offers of aspirin, ibuprofen, paracetamol. ‘If you don’t leave me alone, I’m going to call the Drug Squad.’
Mercifully, Charles Wetherby appeared in the doorway and Peggy went back to her desk.
‘Liz, Tyrus Oakes is flying in from Washington. He’s due here at ten tomorrow morning, and I’d like you to join the meeting.’
‘That was quick,’ she said. Wetherby had only been back from Washington two days.
He nodded. ‘I think we’ll be getting an answer this time, or he wouldn’t be taking the trouble to come in person.’
The next morning, when she entered Wetherby’s office, she was unsurprised to find a stranger sitting there, but she was utterly astonished to find Andy Bokus with him. What on earth was going on?
Wetherby made the introductions. Tyrus Oakes looked dapper in a grey summer suit. He exuded the old-style charm of a Southern plantation owner – he shook her hand, gave a gallant little bow, then pulled back a chair for her. Wetherby watched the performance with barely suppressed amusement. Bokus, looking hot in a khaki suit, just nodded at Liz. ‘We’ve met,’ he said curtly.
‘Good to see you, Charles,’ Oakes said affably as they all sat down again. ‘As I promised, I’ve come with an explanation and to clear up a misunderstanding.’
Wetherby’s eyebrow lifted, almost imperceptibly. ‘Thank you,’ he said mildly. ‘That’s good.’
The thoughts flashing through Liz’s mind were less charitable. Were they questioning the authenticity of the photographs she saw lying on Wetherby’s desk? It was certainly true that thanks to computer technology, pictures could tell all sorts of lies: you could morph images to seat people next to each other when in fact they were on different continents; you could delete whole mountains from landscapes, or remove entire buildings from an urban panorama. But in this case the camera was telling the undeniable truth: Andy Bokus was sitting next to a suspected Mossad officer at the Oval cricket ground.
Or would Oakes try and suggest that Bokus had run into the Mossad man ‘by accident’?
Oakes said, ‘What I am about to tell you is of course completely confidential and I hope I can count on its remaining that way.’
Wetherby said sharply, ‘We are looking forward to what you have to say. To put your mind at rest, Liz is here
