‘They’re okay.’

  ‘Have you seen any Sicilians here?’

  ‘Nine. They haven’t seen you, not to recognise.’

  ‘Where are they?’

  ‘Five outside, two of those are in the car park. The others are in here, that one over there, the one on the far side with the cummerbund, those two by the bar.’

  He meant he’d seen them before or they’d been seen before by one or more of the other support people here tonight, seen and recognised. There could be a dozen more of them, a hundred, they’ve got a vote too, got political views, go to political parties, eat cookies, crap, close in on you, aim for the head, splinters of bloodied bone from the site of exit in the skull, you’re taking a risk, you’re playing Russian roulette again, you —

  Oh for God’s sake piss off.

  ‘When you see me getting out of the car I shall want your personal signal as to whether you think I should go into the building. You’re Hood, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Seen him before, North Africa, Loman had put him into the field for Tango, he’d impressed me, knew how to drive, how to subdue, a man, how to make no noise, ask no questions, I wouldn’t be surprised if they didn’t send him up to Norfolk for training as a shadow if he lived long enough, though it’s a fraction chancy for the troops, as you know, look at the one they got last night in Riverside Way.

  ‘All right,’ I said, ‘tell someone to get my car moved within sight of her limo. She —’

  “That’s been taken care of. You’re on the west side, three rows from the gates and five cars along from the middle aisle. She’s on the same side, two rows from the gates and six along, the gaps counting as cars, because there’s a lot of movement down there now with people still leaving. Your driver’s waiting for you there, name of Treader. I’d better fade.’

  I moved round the room, keeping behind people when I could, watching for Erica. In ten minutes she came through one of the arches with a man, talking intently. I hadn’t seen him before. Hood was watching him from the bar. I moved again, this time towards the reception area, and I was outside by the time she came across the porch. She was still talking to the man, listening to him, neither smiling, nothing social, and when they parted she simply turned away and he went back inside.

  There were other people drifting across the lawns and along the pathways, dinner jackets, bare suntanned arms, cigars, the glitter of jewellery, sudden laughter, a drunk getting rather loud and then being hushed, chauffeurs coming forward, some of the men in blue serge moving into the crowd, music still coming from the building through the open french windows, a three-quarter moon afloat in a clear sky above the turreted roof, a fine night, windless but close, oppressive.

  I didn’t know where Croder was, or if in fact he was here by now; he hadn’t necessarily been on board the shuttle chopper I’d heard earlier. There was another one on the pad with its rotor turning but I think it was taking off, not landing. Croder might not be here at all, though I assumed he’d be somewhere in Miami by now. There was still a chance that Erica would agree to meet him, give him the whole thing.

  That had been Ferris, I think, doing his homework, going through my debriefing on the Kruger Drug meeting and suggesting that Croder follow me in to Miami in case Erica was ready to talk.

  She was walking down to the gates, another man with her now, a bodyguard, keeping pace from a short distance behind, his head turning the whole time. Someone was laughing in the little group on the west side of the car park - the chopper was airborne over the pad and some balloons were blowing across the people’s heads in the down draught.

  I went through the gates not far behind Erica and peeled off to the left, walking five cars along and three rows down. I was in a small open space now, with no one near me, and I saw the man signal me from the limousine. I didn’t see anyone looking in my direction, but I’d seen Hood over towards the aisle, covering me, and I felt the pressure coming off, the pervasive fear that had been with me since I’d arrived here.

  My shoes - Monck’s shoes - slipped a little over the brick-red tiles; I suppose they were new ones. The chopper was passing overhead now and some of the coloured balloons were sent blowing to the ground and bouncing and flying up again in the draught from the rotors as the chopper slowed, hovering, and I looked up and saw the door coming open a few inches and the submachine gun poking through the gap and the dark orange flame as it began firing.

  Chapter 19 : MAZDA

  Picked up the phone and dialled.

  ‘Yes?’

  Voice I didn’t know.

  ‘DIF.’

  ‘He’s not here.’

  ‘Then give me the number.’

  Rage, great rage.

  ‘Parole?’

  ‘Barracuda. Give me that number.’

  ‘He’s mobile. Here it is.’

  Wrote it down on the pad. ‘Christ,’ I told the driver, ‘is this the best you can do?’

  ‘We’re jammed solid,’ he said. Treader.

  Ringing tone.

  Smoked windows, I couldn’t see much more than highlights outside, glass, chromium, police cars with their roofs lit up. Sirens fading in, a fire truck, an ambulance, rage, great rage.

  ‘Yes?’ Ferris.

  ‘Listen,’ I said, ‘they’ve hit Cambridge.’ Get in control, accommodate it, but Jesus Christ we should have seen it coming. We —’

  ‘Where are you?’ Ferris asked.

  ‘In the limo, outside the Yacht Club.’

  Good evening. Brilliant smile. This is Erica Cambridge, and these are my views.

  The bloody thing pumping out rapid fire and her white silk dress turning crimson and the bodyguard trying to reach her but going down too, his body humped and jerking as the shots went in, then the chopper lifting suddenly and very fast, leaving the balloons blowing across the car park, blue and green and red and yellow, whirling in the wind above the people’s heads as some of the women screamed and went on screaming until a kind of silence came, the sound of the chopper fading across the sea.

  ‘Get in!”

  Treader, dragging me to the car and hustling me into the back, slamming the door and getting behind the wheel and starting up and moving off, someone hysterical in the crowd just here where the woman was lying, the woman and the man, their blood pooling in the moonlight.

  Rage, fierce rage.

  And these are my views.

  Let them stand.

  ‘You saw it happen?’ I heard Ferris asking.

  ‘Yes. I saw it happen.’

  Get in control. It was nasty but the executive in the field is reporting to his director and there is the need for control, for decorum, you understand, there is no room here for personal feelings.

  ‘How did it happen?’

  You’re perfectly right, how indeed did it happen, they’ll want it for the signals board in London. ‘A chopper took off from the pad here and came across the car park and someone opened the door and used a submachine gun at a range of fifty feet.’

  In a moment, ‘Where were you?’

  ‘Not that close. They weren’t making any mistake. It was a straight, accurate hit.’

  We moved forward, slowed again. The cars were jamming at the stop sign where the Yacht Club drive met the main road. Police whistles blowing - they were trying to clear the exit roads but it was difficult because a lot of people had obviously stopped their cars to see what had happened, some of them standing on the roof.

  ‘They didn’t know you were there,’ Ferris said. ‘The chopper didn’t shift its —’

  ‘No. This was just for her.’

  We’ll go to my apartment and I’ll show you what I’m talking about. It’s actually on paper, duplicated. You know what I’m saying? A whole brief, do you understand?

  The product. Mission completed.

  Not now.

  ‘All right.’ Ferris sounded a touch over-controlled, very cool, his articulation precise. We had come, after all, so very close to wrapping this one up and going home. ‘Your instructions are to —’

  ‘Listen,’ I said, ‘her phone must have been tapped. They picked up her call to Nassau tonight.’

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘She’d been on the yacht and she asked me along to the club to meet Stylus von Brinkerhoff and said it was very important for me to meet him. She also named Proctor. We were bugged. We must have been.’

  ‘It didn’t cross your mind,’ Ferris asked carefully, ‘at the time?’

  ‘All that crossed my mind was that she could be trying to trap me.’

  Scared for my own skin, it doesn’t do, you know, it doesn’t get you anywhere except on the bloody slab, but the problem was that I was still scared because I was still in a red sector and we were jammed solid in a pack of cars and if one of Toufexis’s hit men had seen me leaving the club and going down to the car park they’d come for me and it wouldn’t do any good keeping the doors locked because they’d just smash a window with the muzzle and start pumping.

  Control, yes. There must be a modicum of clear thinking. ‘Listen,’ I told Ferris, ‘this won’t wait for debriefing. There’s an international syndicate called the Trust, and von Brinkerhoff is a member. Their objective is to “buy America and sell it to the Soviets” - I quote.’ I gave him the other names she’d told me, and filled in the details. ‘She said she’d got it all on paper, a whole brief, she called it, at her apartment. So if you can get permission to go and look around —’

  ‘Someone broke in there, half an hour ago.’

  Merde.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I had some people stationed there in case it was in fact some kind of trap. Two patrol cars arrived and they followed the police inside the building and said they were reporters. The doorman told them he’d been attacked and tied up, fifteen minutes before. They found Cambridge’s door open, with the lock smashed.’

  The place ransacked, every drawer pulled out, the pictures dragged off the wall to find the safe, the bedding all over the floor, the mattress ripped, and in the end they’d found it, the brief, they must have, because she hadn’t even thought about checking for bugs on the phones in her flat or the phone in her car, she wasn’t intelligence, she was political, didn’t understand things like cover, had probably just dropped the brief onto the coffee table or somewhere and they’d looked right past it at first and then they’d seen it and there was nothing we could do about it now.

  We were moving suddenly, free of the jam, going north-east along Bayshore Drive.

  ‘It could have been Proctor,’ I said.

  ‘That is our thinking.’ His and Croder’s. ‘He was seen landing from the yacht’s cutter.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Earlier tonight, just before eleven.’

  Slight jolt to the nerves.

  ‘They lost him?’ They must have, or Ferris would be telling me where Proctor was now.

  ‘Within minutes.’

  Support people are exactly that: they are troops in the field and they lack the refined, exhaustive training of the shadow executives. Even if I’d tagged Proctor myself he would have made it difficult for me because he was on my own level, competent and seasoned.

  So Proctor was off the Contessa and back in the streets of the city and he’d probably conducted the breakin himself because he was very good at it and he’d been looking for a vital piece of product. He had also cut right across the potential end-phase of Barracuda and put us back onto square one.

  ‘If he landed at 10:45,’ I said, ‘that was about an hour after Cambridge phoned me in Nassau. It would’ve taken him about an hour to reach land from the Contessa. That call must have been bugged and Proctor himself could have been listening in.’

  The thought of it gave me another jolt. ‘Hold on,’ I told Ferris. ‘Treader, how far are we to the safe-house?’

  He half-turned his head. ‘Ten minutes, bit more.’

  ‘Don’t go any closer. Keep on the move but don’t circle that area.’

  ‘Got it.’ I saw him checking the outside mirrors.

  ‘Is Hood with us?’

  ‘Two cars behind.’

  12:41 on the digital clock.

  I said to Ferris, ‘She must have taken that brief without their knowing - they wouldn’t have given it to her. There would have been several copies, and they didn’t know that copy was missing until she phoned me in Nassau over a bugged line. Then Proctor knew.’

  ‘We considered that.’ His tone still had its cutting edge. I’d heard it before, in Mandarin, in Northlight, when the mission had gone dangerously off track. He wasn’t of course furious with Proctor tonight; he was furious with himself for letting it happen, furious with his own incompetence, as competent people often are when a wheel comes off. ‘We also considered that it might have been Stylus von Brinkerhoff who’d shown her a copy of the brief. He was at the party tonight.’

  That’s possible. She said he was attracted to her.’

  ‘I would think most men were.’

  ‘Where’s von Brinkerhoff now?’ I asked him. Perhaps we could turn him.

  ‘We’re watching for him to take the cutter back to the yacht. Monck suggests that if Cambridge wanted you to meet von Brinkerhoff, he might be ready to back out of the project, or even blow the Trust. We’ve sent someone to Quay 19 to wait for him and offer your apologies for not being in time to meet him at the Yacht Club, and see what he says, see if he’s ready to take it further.’

  Treader went through some lights on the yellow and checked the nearside mirror. ‘There’s a Corvette moving up on us,’ he said. ‘I’ve been trying to lose it.’

  ‘It he right behind?’

  ‘No, there’s a Buick right behind but the Corvette’s buzzing it.’

  There is the moment when you are sitting comfortably in a sumptuously-appointed limousine with a telephone in your hand and a cocktail cabinet in front of you and pile carpet under your evening shoes and there is the moment when you are suddenly aware that you have become prey to a hunter not far behind you who seeks your death, and aware also that you cannot hope to run fast enough to escape him, and the contrast between these two moments is so violent as to numb the mind, because in this instant the trappings of civilised life are stripped away to leave you in a different world, a different creature, crouched barefoot on rough ground with the hackles raised and the teeth bared as the terror courses like cold fire through the blood.

  Proctor was in this city again and he’d come here to retrieve that brief and he’d asked Toufexis to make the Cambridge hit for him and he knew how close the executive in the field for Barracuda had come to infiltrating his operation and he knew I’d be at the Yacht Club party because he’d bugged Erica’s phones and he had not asked Toufexis to hit me too because he wanted to do it himself.

  It had become personal. My meeting with him on the day I’d arrived in this town had forced him out of his apartment and sent him straight to ground and he’d used his connections with the Mafia and got Toufexis to put out a contract on me and they’d tried twice and I was still alive and was still a threat to him, and it had hurt his pride and he’d told Toufexis’s hoods to hold off tonight because he wanted this kill for himself.

  Lights swung in the mirrors but I couldn’t see from this angle what Treader could see. ‘I want instant replay,’ I told him.

  ‘We’ve lost the Buick. I think he got scared.’

  ‘The Corvette’s right behind us?’

  ‘Yes. Close.’

  ‘Ferris,’ I said on the phone, ‘are you still there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We’re heading north on 22nd Avenue and crossing Coral Way. I think Proctor is right behind us.’ I let him absorb that while I spoke to Treader; then I came back on the line. ‘He’s in a black Corvette with a Florida number plate. You’ve got that?’

  ‘Yes. I’ll do what I can.’

  ‘Thank you. Have you got a second line there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then leave this one open.’

  He said he would.

  Flashes on the roof-lining, quick and regular. Proctor was signalling for us to pull up.

  ‘Treader. Where’s Hood?’

  ‘Behind the Corvette. And there’s a red Mazda behind the Honda.’

  Whole bloody parade, Proctor right behind us and a Toufexis hit man following Hood in the Mazda, light traffic coming the other way, the night clubs still open, this town never sleeps. Proctor was still flashing us and it was the sensible thing to do because he didn’t want to make any noise, attract any attention: none of us wanted the police in our way. It would be very nice to tell Treader to put his fist on the horn and leave it there till a patrol car picked us up, officer, this nasty man behind us wants to kill me so you’d better do your duty, so forth, nothing so cosy because it would lead to a lot of awkward questions and making charges and that would stop Barracuda right in its tracks, and in any case there’s a strict injunction in the rule book against a shadow executive’s calling upon any police officer - it’s quaintly written, don’t you think - for his assistance, and yes, I take your point, Barracuda is going to get stopped right in its tracks in any case just as soon as Proctor gets into the back of this sumptuously-appointed limousine with his Heckler and Koch P7 9mm and its Wilson sound suppressor and starts tickling the tit, which he is very likely to do for the simple reason that he can outpace this ornate tart trap by a factor of three to one and if you think this looks like a car chase you’re dead wrong, it’s a funeral procession.

  First shot and I slid down against the soft leather upholstery to bring my head below the rear window and saw Treader doing the same thing, settling back against the head-rest, wouldn’t help him much because Proctor would be using heavy armament against a car like this or he wouldn’t have started firing at all, though Treader could get away with it if the slugs had to plough through the rear panel of the boot and then the back of the rear seat before they hit the head-rest with most of their momentum gone, he was just making things as easy for himself as he could, never say die, so forth, take what cover you can get.

  ‘What do you want me to do?’ he asked me, and I liked that, we were having a conference, and if we needed advice from headquarters we had a line still open for signals, you can’t say, you can’t say, my good friend, that the situation was not under control.