‘He won’t forget us.’
‘We’ll have others besides him. We’ll have them all.’
‘And you still think you can get away with it?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘It’s crazy — you know that? You can’t steal all the money in Vietnam and think they will let you keep it. This Frenchman you tell me about — this Pol, I’ve heard his name before. Maxwell doesn’t usually talk about his work with me, but he did ask me about Pol because I’m French and my father might have had some dealings with him in Algeria. I told him the truth — I had never heard of a man called Pol. Then I asked him why, and you know what he said? He said, “Because the bastard’s working for Charlie Cong, like all the goddam French!”’ (She spoke these last words in English, with a distorted American accent, smiling to herself in the half-dark.) ‘He said it as though I were no longer French, but one of those horrible patriotic American wives — that I would necessarily hate this man Pol because he worked for the Liberation Front.’
‘He works for Sihanouk,’ said Murray thoughtfully. ‘But that’s about the same thing to a man of Maxwell’s political subtleties. Did he say anything about me?’
‘No. But I had the impression that he deliberately avoided talking about you. I think perhaps he suspects something between you and Pol.’
‘Do you know a man called Sy Leroy?’ Murray added after a pause.
She turned her head, beginning to frown: ‘A Jew who poses as a MACV liaison officer?’
‘Jew, part-Negro, Southern gentleman — some kind of social outcast.’ He grinned. ‘That’s the one. He and your husband questioned me about Pol yesterday afternoon.’
‘What did they want?’
He told her, concealing nothing he had not concealed from her husband and Leroy: he did not tell her of his discovery of Finlayson’s body, nor that Pol had been responsible — only that Maxwell suspected that Pol had done it. When he was through, she said: ‘You should be very careful of this man, Leroy. I don’t know him well, but I do know he works for the National Security Agency. He would not have questioned you unless he considered you very seriously.’
For a moment Murray said nothing. The CIA was one problem, the NSA quite another. Jacqueline was no fool in appraising her husband’s outfit and its rivals. While the CIA might be a rich, elaborate, devious freelance government-within-a-government, hatching plots, toppling regimes, tampering with the mechanics of international affairs, the NSA was a soberer, more compact, and ultimately more dangerous organisation. It had the ear of the President’s closest advisers and its computerised intelligence data was treated with less scepticism than its rival’s. But the even more sinister implication was that it dealt primarily with matters of internal security rather than foreign affairs. Murray supposed that his name, along with Pol’s, would almost certainly have been flashed to Washington where they would join the ‘grey list’ — that twilight zone of suspects somewhere between the Immigration blacklist and the FBI files. The portents for the next twelve days, and the even more crucial ones that would follow, were not good.
He said: ‘Jackie, when you meet the others, I don’t want you to say anything about this man Leroy. Don’t even mention your husband’s conversation with me. It may not be important in the long run, but I’d prefer no-one knows.’
‘You’re mad,’ she said. ‘The Americans will know that you and Pol have done it. And then there’s that crazy man Ryderbeit. You really think you can trust him — trust any of them?’
He paused. ‘I wouldn’t trust them with a million New Francs. But this is rather different — rather more like seven thousand million.’ He found himself repeating, even believing, Ryderbeit’s own thesis for mutual trust in a venture like this — that the sum was so vast that no sane man would be tempted to try to increase his own share by cutting out someone else’s. He was not so sure, though, that Jacqueline Conquest saw it quite this way. She had rolled again on to her side facing him, her long legs pulled up under her chin, her eyes open, almost unblinking. ‘Tu es fou, chéri,’ she said at last.
‘You won’t do it?’
‘Do it? You mean look at General Greene’s top secret air traffic control schedules for Sunday the fifteenth, then send the alarm? Yes, I’ll do that — that’s no problem.’
‘So?’
‘You can steal this money, and perhaps Ryderbeit is clever enough to land the plane on this dam. Pol may even arrange to get it out of Laos — perhaps into India. And then what? You think you will ever be free? Even with all that money, you think you can ever live a happy life?’
‘Ah merde!’ he cried. ‘Jackie, you talk like a bad woman’s novelette. You think any of us are interested at this stage in the morals of money? All right! We’ll become wicked, spoilt, selfish rich shits with big cars and fancy clothes and we can be rude to anyone who matters, and even doesn’t matter. Or perhaps we’ll be just lonely old Gatsbys living in the big house which no one wants to go to — except for parties.’
She squeezed him close against her. ‘You won’t be like that. I don’t want my share, anyway. Perhaps a little of yours.’ She smiled. ‘But only a little. Enough to buy a chateau on the Loire — somewhere between Chenonceaux and Blois. With a high wall and a moat to keep strangers out. And we’d drive to Switzerland through the Bourgogne country and drink the very best wine on our way to see our bankers once a month.’
‘Our bankers will come and see us,’ said Murray. ‘But we could buy the vineyard, and even the chateau with it — except that we’d probably have Pol
