Then it came in a flash. The warning. Quayle’s eyes glittered for a second. Then he smiled as the manager re-entered the office, holding a sets of keys aloft.
“Ah. Thank you. That was very careless of me.”
Soon, Quayle left with the keys, collected his bag and made his way up to the apartment. Rolling the carpet back from one corner of the wall, he leant down and attached a sucker cup device to the thin concrete floor. Then, taking the trailing wire, he plugged it into a small micro recorder and listened for a few moments.
Voices and a television in the background. He rolled the enhancer dial a fraction and the sound became clearer. The set was state of the art technology four years ago and had been given to Quayle by a grateful CIA man.
They were in, settled by the sound of it. He listened for half an hour longer, until finally he heard one of them phone out for food and talk about the evening television movie. Satisfied they weren’t going anywhere, he dropped the earphones and turned the battery pack off. Then he showered and decided to try for some sleep. He hadn’t slept properly in days, and now he had a few hours to kill.
He rolled between the clean starched sheets – but with the sleep came the demons, angry and malevolent, and he sat up, sweating and shaking, within an hour of lying down. It was the first time since leaving Serifos. He thought about Holly with Marco in Valldemosa.
It seemed like an omen, so with a shaking hand he reached for the phone – but somehow he found the discipline to be able to put it down again. He could have been traced this far already. Unlikely, but possible.
Getting up, he walked into the shower and stood beneath the pelting hot water.
*
“That’s it then,” Cockburn said, leaning over her shoulder. The microfiche reader was big and cumbersome so they had walked down into registry to read it there.
“I believe so,” Chloe said. “The date’s right. Italian business-man escapes Libyan Prison. How many could there be?”
“Bugger all from Jebel Muhkta, that’s for sure…”
The news story was from page seventeen of the Times, and rated only four paragraphs, but the man’s name was there.
“OK. Get onto Rome station. Ask them to get a recent address on this individual. Assume they’ll have something by tomorrow. I’ll put together a team from Milburn. Be ready to move in the morning.”
“Milburn? Is that necessary? I rather liked it without them,” she muttered.
“We aren’t the only people looking for them, remember. I don’t like the rough stuff.”
That night, the Station Chief in Rome met a friend for a drink in a cafe after work. The man was in the anti-terrorist section of the police and owed MI6 a favour after they had handed over information about a Red Brigade member who was transiting through Italy. He left almost immediately and, by 8pm, had accessed the police computers, then hauled out operators for both immigration and the expatriate division of the tax department.
By 9pm, he was able to supply not only the man’s Madrid address, but the name of a Spanish journalist who had recently finished an article on eccentric millionaires, a distinction that he felt included Marco Gambini. He handed over a sheaf of photos. The quality was good and the station chief was pleased. They would transmit well. Century would be happy and he could get an early night.
Chloe then raised the station chief in Madrid and asked him to pay a call on the journalist. “We need to know where this Marco character is now. Any hidey holes round the place, weekend retreats, boats, that sort of thing…” She paused to allow the voice scrambler to unravel things and spoke again, “I’ll wait here for you to call back, shall I?”
“Who wants it?”
“Hugh Cockburn,” Chloe answered
“Oh. Coming up in the world, are we?” He paused there but she didn’t rise to the bait so he continued, “Don’t wait. I’ll get onto it tomorrow.”
“Sorry. This is a grade one request,” she said firmly.
The man was in the middle of a dinner party and his wife was not going to be impressed when he made excuses and walked out.
“It always is,” he replied miserably and hung up.
*
Quayle crossed back to the listening device and bent down, lifting the headphones to his ears. He could hear television noise in the background and someone doing something in the small kitchen. Crossing back to the bedroom, he pulled on a dark blue track suit, running shoes and a wool balaclava, the face piece of which he rolled up over his eyebrows. He had no heavy knife, so made do with a small paring knife from the apartment’s kitchen. He didn’t need a weapon, but the psychological effect of its presence was crucial.
Pulling the apartment window open, he climbed out onto the balcony. The drop to the next floor was absolutely silent, and once there, he paused, listened and moved up to the window. It was open, draughts of warm air shifting the curtain in a soft wavy flow like seaweed. Swiftly, he moved along the balcony to the bedroom window. It too was open and he silently slid the window back and climbed in, the warm air stuffy and soporific after the freshness of the night outside.
In the living room, the television blared. From the hall, he could hear someone talking on the phone in angry fast French. Duboir, he thought. If your masters aren’t pleased, they’ll
