“You’re leaving,” Wolf said. Somehow he must have heard that Alex’s training was over.
“Yes.”
There was a long pause. “What happened on the plane…” he began.
“Forget it, Wolf,” Alex said. “Nothing happened. You jumped and I didn’t. That’s all.”
Wolf held out a hard. “I want you to know … I was wrong about you. You’re all right. And maybe … one day it would be good to work with you.”
“You never know,” Alex said.
They shook.
“Good luck, Cub.”
“Good-bye, Wolf.”
Alex walked out into the night.
PHYSALIA PHYSALIA
« ^ »
THE SILVER GRAY Mercedes S600 cruised down the freeway, traveling south. Alex was sitting in the front passenger seat with so much soft leather around him that he could barely hear the 389 horsepower, 6-liter engine that was carrying him toward the Sayle complex near Port Tallon, Cornwall. At eighty miles per hour, the engine was only idling. But Alex could feel the power of the car. One hundred thousand pounds worth of German engineering. One touch from the unsmiling chauffeur and the Mercedes would leap forward. This was a car that sneered at speed limits.
Alex had been collected that morning from a converted church in Hampstead, North London. This was where Felix Lester lived. When the driver had arrived, Alex had been waiting with his luggage, and there was even a woman he had never met before—an M16 operative—kissing him, telling him to brush his teeth, waving goodbye. As far as the driver was concerned, Alex was Felix. That morning Alex had read through the file and knew that Lester went to a school called St. Anthony’s, had two sisters and a pet Labrador. His father was an architect. His mother designed jewelry. A happy family—his family if anybody asked.
“How far is it to Port Tallon?” he asked.
So far the driver had barely spoken a word. He answered Alex without looking at him. “A few hours. You want some music?”
“Got any John Lennon CDs?” That wasn’t his choice. According to the file, Felix Lester liked John Lennon.
“No.”
“Forget it. I’ll get some sleep.”
He needed the sleep. He was still exhausted from the training and wondered how he would explain all the halfhealed cuts and bruises if anyone saw under his shirt. Maybe he’d tell them he got bullied at school. He closed his eyes and allowed the leather to suck him into sleep.
It was the feeling of the car slowing down that awoke him. He opened his eyes and saw a fishing village, the blue sea beyond, a swath of rolling green hills, and a cloudless sky. It was a picture off a jigsaw puzzle, or perhaps a holiday brochure advertising a forgotten England. Seagulls swooped and cried overhead. An old tugboat—tangled nets, smoke, and flaking paint—pulled into the quay. A few locals, fishermen and their wives, stood around, watching. It was about five o’clock in the afternoon and the village was caught in the silvery light that comes at the end of a perfect spring day.
“Port Tallon,” the driver said. He must have noticed Alex opening his eyes.
“It’s pretty.”
“Not if you’re a fish.”
They drove around the edge of the village and back inland, down a lane that twisted between strangely bumpy fields. Alex saw the ruins of buildings, half-crumbling chimneys, and rusting metal wheels and knew that he was looking at an old tin mine. They’d mined tin in Cornwall for three thousand years until one day the tin had run out. Now all that was left was the holes.
About another mile down the lane a metal fence sprang up. It was brand-new, twenty feet high, topped with razor wire. Arc lamps on scaffolding towers stood at regular intervals and there were huge signs, red on white. You could have read them from the next county:
SAYLE ENTERPRISES
Strictly Private
“Trespassers will be shot,” Alex muttered to himself. He remembered what Mrs. Jones had told him. “
The car reached the main gate, where there was a security cabin and an electronic barrier. A guard in a blue- and-gray uniform with SE printed on his jacket waved them through. The barrier lifted automatically. And then they were following a long, straight road over a stretch of land that had somehow been hammered flat with an airstrip on one side and a cluster of four high tech buildings on the other. The buildings were large, smoked glass and steel, each one joined to the next by a covered walkway. There were two aircraft next to the landing strip. A helicopter and a small cargo plane. Alex was impressed. The whole complex must have been a couple of miles square. It was quite an operation.
The Mercedes came to a roundabout with a fountain at the center, swept around it, and continued up toward a fantastic sprawling house. It was Victorian, redbrick topped with copper domes and spires that had long ago turned green. There must have been at least a hundred windows on five floors facing the drive. It was a house that just didn’t know when to stop.
