Conquest stood listening with a dull stare. ‘Are you an aviator too, Mr Wilde?’
‘No, but I can make a damn good witness.’
Conquest nodded. ‘Excuse me.’ He took his wife’s arm and without another word turned her smartly away to a side-door in the terminal building. She and Murray had not even exchanged a parting glance. Murray watched her for a moment, then began to walk with Ryderbeit and Jones towards the main Arrivals door. There was to be no V.I.P. treatment for them; even internal passengers from the Royal Capital had to be checked through Immigration. Laos was a country at war, he remembered, as Ryderbeit said: ‘That bastard didn’t look sweet, did he?’
Murray shrugged: ‘Maybe he loves his wife?’
‘He sure doesn’t love me,’ Ryderbeit said, kicking one of the baggage-touts in the entrance hall. ‘Anyway, thanks for the recommendation. I may need to quote you on my accident report.’
‘Thank you too, Mr Wilde,’ said No-Entry Jones: ‘It’s of especial help, when you lose a plane, to have a friendly, independent witness.’
‘Friendly!’ said Murray, smiling wryly as he waved at one of the Toyota taxis outside. ‘You mean that friendly little afternoon we passed yesterday, Mr Jones?’
‘I am sorry about that,’ said Jones, ‘but I hope it will prove beneficial in the long run.’ He declined the taxi. ‘I have to check in with Control. You coming, Sammy?’
Ryderbeit winced. ‘What the hell for — I’ve had the push, haven’t I? I need a drink.’
‘You haven’t really got the sack?’ Murray said, as the taxi swung out on to the dusty highway into Vientiane. ‘Conquest can’t have that much influence?’
‘Conquest is CIA, and CIA is Air U.S.A., and the name of Samuel David Ryderbeit is getting to be international bad news by now. It’s not just Conquest, anyway. There’s a whole load of other things catchin’ up. That aircraft-carrier business, for instance. A lot of people got very unhappy about that.
‘It’s a funny thing,’ he added, staring glumly at the streams of bicycles outside: ‘Try sellin’ a perfectly good watch to a stranger in the street, and he won’t touch it. But just mention some bloody great carrier and you get every arms merchant in Europe offerin’ you air-tickets to Geneva to start discussions. That’s another funny thing — always Geneva.’ He turned suddenly: ‘Is it going to be like that with us, soldier? A planeload o’ greenbacks and a lot o’ nice serious gentlemen in dark suits and homburgs meetin’ us at Geneva airport to discuss terms?’ For the first time since they had met, Ryderbeit sounded subdued, almost sad.
‘You getting sacked just now’s been a great help,’ Murray said brutally. ‘Couldn’t you have tried to smooth Conquest down? You’re the hero, remember — you saved his wife’s life, not me. I’m just the one who spent the night with her.’
Ryderbeit sat stroking his hairless chin. ‘Yeah. She looked pretty uptight this morning, didn’t she? I just wonder what young Maxwell’ll do if he finds out?’
‘What the hell can he do? Sue me for enticement through the Saigon courts?’
‘He could try and get you run out of Vietnam. At least, that would be the more official line — the State Department way of doing it. Only we’re not quite under State Department jurisdiction here, so he might try to play dirty. They have a nasty habit in Vietnam of rewarding adultery by cutting off the offending member. It depends on whether Maxwell’s one of the Ivy League or not. I suspect not.’
Murray nodded. ‘And all in the interests of getting his wife to send a Red Alert on Saigon airport. It looks as though I’m getting to become a different sort of hero.’
The taxi had pulled up outside the Hotel des Amis.
The girl behind the bar handed Murray another vellum envelope in which this time was a sheet of paper with the copper-plate heading:
FOREIGN AID RESERVE CONTROL
ROYAUME DU LAOS
Georges Finlayson, Directeur
Underneath, in ballpoint, was scrawled, ‘Be at the White Rose at 8 tonight. Yrs G.F.’
Ryderbeit leant across and read it over his shoulder, laughing: ‘Ah, he’s a naughty lad, is our Filling-Station! That place, the “White Rose”, is the dirtiest knockin’ shop in Asia — the girls there are like tins o’ worms with outboard motors! Still, you won’t catch any CIA boys in there.’
Murray ordered two beers. ‘Tell me about Jones,’ he said.
‘Jones?’
‘How do you come to be flying with him? A bloody kaffir, as you call him. Or small-part kaffir — it doesn’t matter. He still doesn’t fit in.’
‘He’s the best navigator there ever was. And don’t let any of those other Air U.S.A. bums tell you otherwise.’
‘You like him?’
‘Sure. I’m broadminded, see. And No-Entry’s a good man. I’d stake my life on him — I do most times I go up with him on one o’ those rollercoasters.’
‘You trust him?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘What’s his background?’
Ryderbeit drank half his beer in one long swallow. ‘Background? Ralph Jones, learnt his navigating in Flying Fortresses and his manners in Virginia — the hard way. I think he once washed dishes in a bar in Richmond. He used to box too — middleweight champion for his unit in Germany. When he left the Air Force he did a whole list of jobs. His last one was disc jockey for some radio station
