'For vacation? You should spend at least a week. There is many things to see.'
His smile flashed again, and he rocked his head. 'Well, maybe you're right. I'll see how it goes.'
Satisfied, the clerk pressed the stamp onto the page and handed it back. 'Enjoy Slovenia.'
He passed through the luggage area, where other passengers from the Amsterdam-Ljubljana flight leaned on empty carts around the still-barren carousel. None seemed to notice him, so he tried to stop looking like a paranoid drug mule. It was his stomach, he knew, and that initial Dexedrine rush. Two white customs desks sat empty of officials, and he continued through a pair of mirrored doors that opened automatically for him. A crowd of expectant faces sank when they realized he didn't belong to them. He loosened his tie.
The last time Charles Alexander had been in Slovenia, years ago, he'd been called something else, a name just as false as the one he used now. Back then, the country was still exhilarated by the 1991 ten-day war that had freed it from the Yugoslav Federation. Nestled against Austria, Slovenia had always been the odd man out in that patchwork nation, more German than Balkan. The rest of Yugoslavia accused Slovenes-not without reason-of snobbery.
Still inside the airport, he spotted Angela Yates just outside the doors to the busy arrivals curb. Above business slacks, she wore a blue Viennese blazer, arms crossed over her breasts as she smoked and stared through the gray morning light at the field of parked cars in front of the airport. He didn't approach her. Instead, he found a bathroom and checked himself in the mirror. The paleness and sweat had nothing to do with aviatophobia. He ripped off his tie, splashed water on his cheeks, wiped at the pink edges of his eyes and blinked, but still looked the same.
'Sorry to get you up,' he said once he'd gotten outside.
Angela jerked, a look of terror passing through her lavender eyes. Then she grinned. She looked tired, but she would be. She'd driven four hours to meet his flight, which meant she'd had to leave Vienna by 5:00 a.m. She tossed the unfinished smoke, a Davidoff, then punched his shoulder and hugged him. The smell of tobacco was comforting. She held him at arm's length. 'You haven't been eating.'
'Overrated.'
'And you look like hell.'
He shrugged as she yawned into the back of her hand. 'You going to make it?' he asked. 'No sleep last night.”
“Need something?'
Angela got rid of the smile. 'Still gulping amphetamines?'
'Only for emergencies,' he lied, because he'd taken that last dose for no other reason than he'd wanted it, and now, as the tremors shook through his bloodstream, he had an urge to empty the rest down his throat. 'Want one?'
'Please.'
They crossed an access road choked with morning taxis and buses heading into town, then followed concrete steps down to the parking lot. She whispered, 'Is it Charles these days?'
'Almost two years now.'
'Well, it's a stupid name. Too aristocratic. I refuse to use it.”
“I keep asking for a new one. A month ago I showed up in Nice, and some Russian had already heard about Charles Alexander.'
'Oh?'
'Nearly killed me, that Russian.'
She smiled as if he'd been joking, but he hadn't been. Then his snapping synapses worried he was sharing too much. Angela knew nothing about his job; she wasn't supposed to.
'Tell me about Dawdle. How long have you worked with him?'
'Three years.' She took out her key ring and pressed a little black button until she spotted, three rows away, a gray Peugeot winking at them. 'Frank's my boss, but we keep it casual. Just a small Company presence at the embassy.' She paused. 'He was sweet on me for a while. Can you imagine? Couldn't see what was right in front of him.'
She spoke with a tinge of hysteria that made him fear she would cry. He pushed anyway. 'What do you think? Could he have done it?'
Angela popped the Peugeot's trunk. 'Absolutely not. Frank Dawdle wasn't dishonest. Bit of a coward, maybe. A bad dresser. But never dishonest. He didn't take the money.'
Charles threw in his bag. 'You're using the past tense, Angela.'
'I'm just afraid.'
'Of what?'
Angela knitted her brows, irritated. 'That he's dead. What do you think?'
2
She was a careful driver these days, which he supposed was an inevitable result of her two Austrian years. Had she been stationed in Italy, or even here in Slovenia, she would've ignored her turn signals and those pesky speed limit notices.
To ease the tension, he brought up old London friends from when they both worked out of that embassy as vaguely titled 'attaches.' He'd left in a hurry, and all Angela knew was that his new job, with some undisclosed Company department, required a steady change of names, and that he once again worked under their old boss, Tom Grainger. The rest of London station believed what they'd been told-that he had been fired. She said, 'I fly up for parties now and then. They always invite me. But they're sad, you know? All diplomatic people. There's something intensely pitiful about them.'
'Really?' he said, though he knew what she meant.
'Like they're living in their own little compound, surrounded by barbed wire. They pretend they're keeping everyone out, when in fact they're locked in.'
It was a nice way to put it, and it made him think of Tom Grainger's delusions of empire-Roman outposts in hostile lands.
Once they hit the Al heading southwest, Angela got back to business.
'Tom fill you in on everything?'
'Not much. Can I get one of those smokes?'
'Not in the car.'
'Oh.'
'Tell me what you know, and I'll fill in the rest.'
Thick forests passed them, pines flickering by as he outlined his brief conversation with Grainger. 'He says your Frank Dawdle was sent down here to deliver a briefcase full of money. He didn't say how much.'
'Three million.'
'Dollars?'
She nodded at the road.
Charles continued: 'He was last seen at the Hotel Metropol in Portoroz by Slovenian intelligence. In his room. Then he disappeared.' He waited for her to fill the numerous blank spots in that story line. All she did was drive in her steady, safe way. 'Want to tell me more? Like, who the money was for?'
Angela tilted her head from side to side, but instead of answering she turned on the radio. It was preset to a station she'd found during her long drive from Vienna. Slovenian pop. Terrible stuff.
'And maybe you can tell me why we had to learn his last whereabouts from the SOVA, and not from our own people.'
As if he'd said nothing, she cranked the volume, and boy-band harmonies filled the car. Finally, she started to speak, and Charles had to lean close, over the stick shift, to hear.
