Goswell owns the physical unit and has it quite well guarded, I can't turn down his requests just yet. But the time is coming. And I'll need men with your skills with me.'
Peel thought about the million euros in the Indonesian bank. He was already richer than he'd ever expected. His father, title notwithstanding, had been a land-poor duffer who'd lost even that before he died. A million euros was nothing to sniff at, but if he stuck with this strange character, the chance of more was distinctly possible.
'I am at your service, Mr. Bascomb-Coombs.'
'Oh, do call me Peter, Terrance. I'm sure we're going to get along just fine.'
Chapter 14
Ruzhyo rode the underground train through the SeaTac airport toward his gate. He was booked on a British Airways 747 to London. He had taken a bus from Mississippi to New Orleans, a Stretch-727 from there to Portland, and a Dash 8 from there to here. Had anybody been able to follow him to Mississippi, they would have seen a similar travel pattern from Las Vegas to Jackson: He had rented a car and driven to Oklahoma City, then caught the first of three short commercial flights south-eastward from there. A pursuer might have expected him to continue east or south, to Miami, say, and instead, he had reversed his direction. Once in London, he would fly to Spain or Italy, from there to India or Russia, and from there, home.
If you were being chased, it was not wise to run in a straight line, especially if the hounds were faster than you.
The train was full, and when it stopped again to load more passengers, Ruzhyo got up from his seat and offered it to a young and very pregnant woman carrying two bags. He and Anna had wanted children, but that was not to be.
The woman thanked him and sat. He held onto a railing and watched the wall pass in front of the windows.
The train stopped, the passengers alighted, and Ruzhyo headed for his gate. He was hours early, but he had nowhere else he wanted to go. He would find a sandwich shop; a bathroom to attend to his needs; a place to sit and perhaps to sleep. In the military, one learned to sleep whenever the opportunity arose, and sleeping in a comfortable chair was easy.
The flight to Heathrow was a direct one, only nine or ten hours, and he was booked in the center cabin, as would be a man traveling on business. He wore a medium-price suit, a pale blue shirt and tie, and carried a briefcase full of magazines and blank paper to augment the image. He was just another corporate wheel in the machine, nobody to look twice at.
British Airways wasn't as bad as some, certainly much better than any of the Russian or Chinese internal airlines. His last flight on the English carrier had been dull enough, save for the touchdown. The big jet hit the runway hard enough to deploy the oxygen masks and to shower passengers with luggage from the overhead bins. No one had been hurt, but it had been something of a surprise. Perhaps they had been letting the stewardess practice her landings. Or maybe the pilot had fallen asleep.
He mentally shrugged. He had hit harder. Once, during a monsoon, the JAL flight he was on had landed in Tokyo hard enough to collapse the nose gear, sending a shower of sparks past the passengers' windows despite the wet pavement. Once, on a flight to Moscow, the vintage turboprop Russian plane upon which he had been traveling had landed safely but hit a refueling truck as it taxied to the gate, killing the driver and throwing to the floor half a dozen passengers in too much of a hurry who had unbuckled and left their seats. Bones had been broken on that one. And once, after he had alighted from a small Cessna at a remote field in Chetsnya, the little craft had taxied away toward the runway to depart, rolled over a land mine sixty meters away, and had been blown to pieces.
He had ceased to worry about such things long ago. If your number was up, then it was up. Until then, the old saw was true: Any landing you could walk away from was a good landing.
A little pub in the terminal had Rueben sandwiches on the menu, and he ordered one and a beer. The television set was on, a sports channel. Hideously ugly women, puffed up like human toads and stained dark brown, paraded back and forth on a stage, flexing their muscles. They looked like men in bikinis. Backstage, one of the women was interviewed, and when she spoke, her voice was deeper than an operatic bass singer's.
Amazing what people would do to themselves. Ruzhyo had once trained briefly with Russian Olympic track athletes, and he knew something of the chemicals they used to enhance their performances. The male steroids these women bodybuilders took left them with permanent changes in their bodies: deep voices, acne, hairy faces and bodies, and enlarged sexual organs. It was fine to pump up when one was twenty-five to stand on a stage, but what would these poor women look like at fifty or sixty? He shook his head. No eye for the future.
'Jesus, would you turn that shit off?' one of the other bar patrons said to the man behind the counter. Several of the other men raised their glasses in support. The counterman shrugged and changed the channel.
Ruzhyo ate his sandwich and drank his beer.
MI-6 had given Alex and Toni a fair-sized office with full access to their computer systems. Well, at least insofar as this particular problem went. Toni had come across plenty of off-limits files.
Alex was down the hall, conferring with Hamilton. Toni was alone in the office, cross-referencing airline computer data, when Angela Cooper tapped at the open door.
'Come in,' Toni said.
'Sorry to bother you, Ms. Fiorella, but Alex wonders if you might join him and the director-general for a word?'
'Sure,' Toni said. She logged out of the workstation. Cooper stood there waiting, smiling, but looking somehow impatient.
'This way, please.'
Toni felt short and dumpy next to the blonde, who wore a dark green suit with the skirt hemmed a couple of inches too high above her knees, and sensible pumps with two-inch heels. She had good legs though, and maybe if Toni were tall and leggy, she'd showcase them, too, instead of wearing a plain blue silk blouse, jeans, and walking shoes. Well, she hadn't packed for work, had she? After the conference, at which she'd worn both suits she'd brought and then sent them to the cleaners, pretty much all she had in the way of clothes were casual things. It was supposed to be a vacation, wasn't it? But she'd call the cleaners and get her work clothes back. She wasn't going to let Ms. Cooper here make her look any worse than she had to look.
'Sorry about interrupting your vacation this way.'
Toni pulled her thoughts away from clothes and back to the moment. 'What? Oh, well, it's not your fault. We got to see a little of your country anyhow.'
'Different than the States, isn't it?'
'You've been to the U.S.?'
'Oh, yes, of course. A few work trips. And I spent a summer at UCLA back when I was a student. Lovely climate, I got my first real tan there.'
'Alex says you are from the Bronx?'
'I spent a week in Manhattan once, late in August. The heat and humidity were fairly awful.'
'It's worse in July.'
Ten paces went by without any more conversation. The silence was just getting awkward when Cooper said, 'I understand that Alex is divorced and has a daughter. Have you met her — the daughter?'
