“Where are you going?”
“Adrian Black is coming out of hospital again tonight.”
“New angle? He’s been interviewed by everyone except News at Ten…”
“Dunno,” he replied, “but I have a feeling we only have half the story.”
“How do you mean?”
“The file story on the art dealer in Venice. That was a friends of Ti’s. Well, two bodies turned up a couple of days later.”
“We knew that,” she said.
“Well, it turns out they weren’t players, and they weren’t freelancers on the King’s or Kaiser’s shilling either.”
“Sorry,” Chloe said, shaking her head. “You’ve lost me.”
“Two heavies have a go at Ti’s friends. They turn up dead in a canal out by the glass factory. But they weren’t ours, and they weren’t put in by the Surete or the other players. These guys were outsiders. So who the hell were they?”
“Are we sure he did them?” she asked, incredulous. “Seems a bit extreme.”
“Let me tell you a story. Did you do the martial arts course at Lincoln?”
“Sort of,” she admitted.
“Then you know the rituals. The bows, the protocol of the bout?”
“Yeah.”
“A few years ago, some idiot administrator at Century was looking at Ti’s records and saw that he hadn’t done a recent competency test on the mat. Believe it or not, he was recalled from Romania to do it. Anyway, he arrived back, pissed off as you can imagine, only to find the instructors endorsed the order. So he goes up to the Oxford place. That’s where the really nasty bits go on. Instead of waiting in the dojo, he walks into the changing room where the instructors are waiting, fully dressed in his street clothes, and beats the three of them then and there. No bow, no protocol, no niceties.” Cockburn shook his head, half appalled, half impressed. “He must be a fourth dan by now. He would have taken out those two in Venice without a murmur after what they did.”
*
Quayle placed a message to Kurt Eicheman from Orly airport and, as he stood in the booth waiting for the Bremen housewife on the other end of the line to get a pencil, he watched the arrivals area behind him. He was confident he had shaken Alexi Kirov at Heathrow and was checking more from habit than anything else. Soon, the woman came back on the line, and as he spoke she took it down verbatim. Once Kurt received it he would know where to meet Quayle.
Putting the phone down, he walked direct from the phones to his departure gate for a flight to Oslo where he would buy a third ticket under a third name and enter Germany from the north. If all went to plan, he would be in Frankfurt that night – and, by then, he hoped that the German BND man had been able to find out something about the Geneva connection.
By 8pm that evening, he had room in a city centre hotel – and, taking a bag of recent purchases into the bathroom, he went to work. An hour later, his short grey hair was blond and he leant over the dressing table to look into the mirror as he dropped the green contact lenses into his eyes. Satisfied, he pulled on a pair of shoes that he had altered to change his walk and, grabbing an old coat, he walked out into the busy streets.
The rendezvous was a dingy porn theatre. Twenty minutes before the contact time, he slid his money under the glass window to a bored middle-aged woman and pushed through the grubby double doors. Inside there were seventeen rows of seats and, in the flickering light from the screen, he could see men scattered in the rows. Taking a seat up in the back – from which he could see both the entrance and the exits – he settled back to wait. Up on the screen, in vivid colour, a busty brunette was entertaining two black men. The sound was out of synch with her movements, mouths moving soundlessly, only to be followed a full second later by what the producers had hoped would be a lusty groan. A few rows in front, a transvestite moved seats and sat next to a balding man and they exchanged whispers, the blond wigged head then dropping into the other man’s lap.
Moments later, the door swung back and a figure entered, sliding into a seat with a coat folded in its lap. Cigarette smoke drifted up from somewhere down front and, to Quayle’s right, a man began fondling his partner, her head thrown back as his hand worked between her thighs.
Turning her head toward Quayle, she smiled invitingly. On her outstretched hand, he could see the glint of a wedding ring. One large white breast was now out of her blouse and a man in the row in front leant over and began to join in, his erection jutting clear of his trousers.
Up on the screen, the scene had changed. Now a girl dressed in a school uniform walked down a street and stopped to talk to an old man in a Mercedes.
The theatre doors eased back again and another figure entered, paused to allow his eyes to adjust to the light, and then moved up toward the back rows. It was the BND man. Quayle lifted his hand in recognition and Kurt dropped into the seat beside him.
“Nice spot,” he whispered.
“Thought you’d like it,” Quayle replied. “Anything for me?”
The woman down the row groaned as someone did something to her that she liked. In the dark the pale shapes of her legs were reaching upwards, toes pointed to the ceiling, as one of the men thrust into her.
“Ja. Maybe.” He held out a piece of folded paper. “This man is a sometime right wing academic, sometime critic. Nasty little shit, but a good thinker. He was involved in something a few years ago and we got some photos. In one he wore a square ring.
