‘You’re green, Hawn. We have a lot of interests and a lot of secrets to protect. We not only have to protect ourselves against our business rivals — we have OPEC and the whole darned Middle East and Iranian fuck up to contend with. But now we also get people like you. Or does that make you sound too important? Well, let’s just say that people like you are worms in the woodwork. If necessary they have to be got rid of.’ He stood up. ‘I’ve done you at least one favour, Hawn. I’ve given it to you straight. Just don’t run yourself and your girl dead into the ground.’
He called something and the man in the grey flannel suit opened the door from outside. As they left, again Robak just nodded. The door closed and they were alone in the corridor.
‘Not a very nice man,’ Anna said, as they stood waiting for the lift. ‘Did you take him seriously? Senior oil executives don’t usually behave like that, do they?’
‘I rather suspect some of them do.’
The lift arrived; it was empty.
‘He was trying to scare us, Anna. He’s probably scared himself. He made a bad mistake in laying it on about Salak. He obviously knows that Salak is a fund of information, and he’s terrified that he’ll give it to us. Robak’s just a cog in a huge organization, and it’s my guess he’s been delegated to kill this story. If he doesn’t he’s in for the chop.’
They reached the lobby.
‘Tom, do you think he’s bluffing?’
‘Not altogether. Only he’ll need a lot more to go on before he takes really drastic action. What worries me is the efficiency of his intelligence sources. He’s obviously having us thoroughly covered while we’re here, which is going to make it bloody difficult to contact Salak again without ABCO knowing.’
CHAPTER 22
‘You realize, of course, that we’re in the classic squeeze — to use the poker expression? I’ve never asked you this before, angel. How brave are you?’
Anna’s spoonful of crusty yoghurt stopped halfway to her mouth. ‘I don’t know. Not very, I don’t think. I hope I’ve done all right so far?’
‘So far the going’s been fairly smooth — except for young French, which you weren’t involved in, and which may have nothing to do with this business anyway — and that little trouble with the Spanish police.’ Hawn smiled. They were at a pavement-table outside a small restaurant near the Covered Bazaar. The crowds made it easy for them to be observed, which did not worry Hawn. He had chosen the place for this very reason.
‘But now that we’ve run into Salak, the stakes have got rather higher. Salak’s offered us a deal, and it’s probably already too late to go back on it. But while Salak may have a strong arm, I doubt it extends far outside Istanbul — whereas ABCO’s certainly does.’
She took another spoonful of yoghurt. An old-fashioned hippy with a guitar sat watching them both lazily from a nearby table. He was eating bread and honey, She said, ‘You’re not suggesting we run out, are you? Like Salak first threatened to do to us — put us on the next plane?’
‘I haven’t suggested anything. I was just presenting the facts. Because you’re in this as deep as I am — don’t forget that. You came in at the very beginning. And if I go down, you go down with me.
‘The real point is, the story’s so obviously true. The files, statistics, Shanklin and Frisby, Mönch and Salak — Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, even Venice. It all hangs too well together. Otherwise why are ABCO getting so worried? Just what are they frightened of?’
The waiter had banged down two plates of blackened shish-kebab, and for a moment they sat picking at the meat in silence. The hippy strummed the first three notes of a tune, then seemed to give up. Across the street, at the corner of a blind alley, an old Negro sat against the wall: gaunt and blue-black, before him a shabby carpet on which were spread carved wooden artefacts — effigies, tribal trophies, symbols of the power of darkness? What assiduous tourist, Hawn wondered, would visit Istanbul to haggle over the obscure relics of Black Africa? For that matter, what lone journalist and his innocent girlfriend would travel here, to take on a known criminal like Salak and the whole might of ABCO?
‘I think I know what they’re scared of,’ Anna said at last. ‘We know the Nazis got their oil from the West. We know that ABCO was involved, and we’ve got a pretty good idea how it was done. But I’d give you good odds, Tom, that it wasn’t just ABCO playing truant with the Nazis and finishing the war as rich men. I think it goes deeper than that — and a lot dirtier.’
Hawn had stopped eating. ‘Could we be thinking along the same lines?’
‘I think there may have been people high in the Allied Governments who were in on it. But we still have to prove it. In a box of documents, perhaps, hidden in a lonely lake? You’re right, though, ABCO aren’t worried just for themselves. As Robak said, they’ve got an image to protect — and they hire buffoons like Hamish Logan to protect it. But when things start getting hot for them, their methods become pretty unsophisticated. They believe in bullying people. That’s how oil companies do business.’
‘I should have thought the easiest way out for them would have been to try and buy us off.’
‘Maybe they will. We might even finish up rich.’
Anna was thinking that they might just as easily finish
