Watching through the fire escape, Alex saw that there was a cargo plane in the middle of the square. It took him a moment or two to accept what he was seeing. There was no way the plane could have landed there. The square was only just wide enough to contain it, and there wasn't a runway inside the compound, as far as he knew. It must have been carried here on a truck, possibly assembled on site. But what was it doing here? The plane was an old-fashioned one. It had propellers rather than jets, and wings high up, almost sitting on top of the main body. The words MILLENNIUM AIR were painted in red along the fuselage and on the tail.
Cray looked at his watch. A minute later the loudspeaker crackled again with another announcement in Dutch. Everyone stopped talking and gazed at the plane. Alex stared. A fire had started inside the main cabin. He could see the flames flickering behind the windows. Grey smoke began to seep out of the fuselage and suddenly one of the propellers caught alight. The fire seemed to spread out of control in seconds, consuming the engine and then spreading across the wing. Alex waited for someone to do something. If there was any fuel in the plane, it would surely explode at any moment. But nobody moved. Cray seemed to nod.
It was over as quickly as it had begun. The man in the white coat spoke into a radio transmitter and the fire went out. It was extinguished so quickly that if Alex hadn't seen it with his own eyes, he wouldn't have believed it had been there in the first place. They didn't use water or foam. There were no scorch marks and no smoke.
One moment the plane had been burning; the next it wasn't. It was as simple as that.
Cray and the three men with him spent a few seconds talking, before turning and strolling back into the cube. The guards in the square marched off. The plane was left where it was. Alex wondered what on earth he had got himself into. This had nothing to do with computer games. It made absolutely no sense at all.
But at least he had spotted Damian Cray.
Alex waited until the guards had gone, then twisted out from behind the fire escape. He made his way as quickly as he could around the square, keeping in the shadows. Cray had made a mistake.
Breaking into the compound was virtually impossible, so he had worried less about security on the inside. Alex hadn't spotted any cameras, and the guards in the towers were looking out rather than in. For the moment he was safe.
He followed Cray into the building and found himself crossing the white marble floor of what was nothing more than a huge glass box. Above him he could see the night sky with the three windmills looming in the distance. The building contained nothing. But there was a single round hole in one corner of the floor and a staircase leading down.
Alex heard voices.
He crept down the stairs, which led directly into a large underground room. Crouching on the bottom step, concealed behind wide steel banisters, he watched.
The room was open-plan, with a white marble floor and corridors leading off in several directions. The architecture made him think of a vault in an ultra-modern bank. But the gorgeous rugs, the fireplace, the Italian furniture and the dazzling white Bechstein grand piano could have come out of a palace. To one side was a curving desk with a bank of telephones and computer screens. All the lighting was at floor level, giving the room a bizarre, unsettling atmosphere, with alt the shadows going the wrong way. A portrait of Damian Cray holding a white poodle covered an entire wall.
The man himself was sitting on a sofa, sipping a bright yellow drink. He had a cherry on a cocktail stick and Alex watched him pick it off with his perfect white teeth and slowly eat it. The three men from the square were with him, and Alex knew at once that he had been right all along—that Cray was indeed at the centre of the web.
One of the men was Yassen Gregorovich. Wearing jeans and a polo neck, he was sitting on the piano stool, his legs crossed. The second man stood near him, leaning against the piano. He was older, with silver hair and a sagging, pockmarked face. He was wearing a blue blazer with a striped tie that made him look like a minor official in a bank or a cricket club. He had large spectacles that had sunk into his face as if it were damp clay. He looked nervous, the eyes behind the glass circles blinking frequently. The third man was darkly handsome, in his late forties, with black hair, grey eyes and a jawline that was square and serious. He was casually dressed in a leather jacket and an open-necked shirt and seemed to be enjoying himself.
Cray was talking to him. “I'm very grateful to you, Mr Roper. Thanks to you, Eagle Strike can now proceed on schedule.”
Roper! This was the man Cray had met in Paris. Alex had a sense that everything had come full circle. He strained to hear what the two men were saying.
“Hey—please. Call me Charlie.” The man spoke with an American accent. “And there's no need to thank me, Damian. I've enjoyed doing business with you.”
“I do have a few questions,” Cray murmured, and Alex saw him pick up an object from a coffee table next to the sofa. It was a metallic capsule, about the same shape and size as a mobile phone.
“As I understand it, the gold codes change daily. Presumably the flash drive is currently programmed with today's codes. But if Eagle Strike were to take place two days from now…”
“Just plug it in. The flash drive will update itself,” Roper explained. He had an easy, lazy smile.
“That's the beauty of it. First it will burrow through the security systems. Then it will pick up the new codes … like taking candy from a baby. The moment you have the codes, you transmit them back through Milstar and you're set. The only problem you have, like I told you, is the little matter of the finger on the button.”
“Well, we've already solved that,” Cray said.
“Then I might as well move out of here.”
“Just give me a couple more minutes of your valuable time, Mr Roper … Charlie…” Cray said.
He sipped his cocktail, licked his lips and set the glass down. “How can I be sure that the flash drive will actually work?”
“You have my word on it,” Roper said. “And you're certainly paying me enough.”
“Indeed so. Half a million dollars in advance. And two million dollars now. However…” Cray paused and pursed his lips. “I still have one small worry on my mind.” Alex's leg had gone to sleep as he crouched, watching the scene from the stairs. Slowly he straightened it out. He wished he understood more of what they were saying. He knew that a flash drive was a type of storage device used in computer technology. But who or what was Milstar? And what was Eagle Strike?
“What's the problem?” Roper asked casually.
“I'm afraid you are, Mr Roper.” The green eyes in Cray's round, babyish face were suddenly hard. “You are not as reliable as I had hoped. When you came to Paris, you were followed.”
“That's not true.”
“An English journalist found out about your gambling habit. He and a photographer followed you to la Tour d'Argent.” Cray held up a hand to stop Roper interrupting. “I have dealt with them both. But you have disappointed me, Mr Roper. I wonder if I can still trust you.”
“Now you listen to me, Damian.” Roper spoke angrily. “We had a deal. I worked here with your technical boys. I gave them the information they needed to load the flash drive, and that's my part of it over. How you're going to get to the VIP lounge and how you'll actually activate the system … that's your business. But you owe me two million dollars, and this journalist—
whoever he was—doesn't make any difference at all.”
“Blood money,” Cray said.
“What?”
“That's what they call money paid to traitors.”
“I'm no traitor!” Roper growled. “I needed the money, that's all. I haven't betrayed my country.
So quit talking like this, pay me what you owe me and let me walk out of here.”
“Of course I'm going to pay you what I owe you.” Cray smiled. “You'll have to forgive me, Charlie. I was just thinking aloud.” He gestured, his hand falling limply back. The American glanced round and Alex saw that there was an alcove to one side of the room. It was shaped like a giant bottle, with a curved wall behind and a curving glass door in front. Inside was a table, and on the table a leather attache case. “Your money is in there,” Cray said. “Thank you.” Neither Yassen Gregorovich nor the man with the spectacles had spoken throughout all this, but they watched intently as the American approached the alcove. There must have been some sort of sensor built into the door because it slid open automatically. Roper went up to the table and opened the case. Alex heard the two locks click up.
