"I was going to describe a young girl, an only child, so loved that she had no sense of the cruelty children are capable of. But, Dr. Freud, I'm sure you're right."
Aubrey snorted with amusement, then continued to study the photographs, murmuring:
"A great pity he did not have the presence of mind to take some pictures of the men who so frightened him… Although, on the other hand—"
"What is it?" she asked eagerly, almost rising from her armchair.
"Patience is a virtue," Aubrey remarked with mock primness.
"A face here, passing into the hotel. Afof coincidentally present, I think. Here this man." She was already at his shoulder, leaning over the back of his chair. He smelt the slight, oldfashioned scent of her perfume and remembered that her mother had often worn the same. He patted her hand on his shoulder and she did not resent the touch, though he was certain she understood its motive.
"Who is he?" she asked, straightening.
"Bring me my magnifying glass. In the drawer of the desk there." His request was almost reluctant, as if he had been forced to admit his age. She held it out to him.
The faces in the photograph, through the rain and the slightly wrong focus, enlarged and distorted as if in fairground mirrors.
"Yes. Definitely," Aubrey concluded.
"You know him I don't."
"My world, not yours, dear girl. My world." His voice had an edge of asperity, even distaste. She took the photograph back to her chair and studied the face Aubrey had indicated. Rain-pallid, slightly blurred by the extra flesh of good living and poor camera work A tough, alert face; pale, dead eyes, set above large cheekbones, a long jaw, a shock of greying hair.
"His name is Fraser," Aubrey was saying.
"He is a former field agent quite a senior and experienced one of my service. An erstwhile intelligence officer of particular, even peculiar skills."
"You don't like him? He worked for you?"
"As little as possible. Others quite liked his somewhat direct methods. Many agents wouldn't work with him, if they could possibly avoid it. You see, his survival instinct was capable of overriding all other priorities including the lives of his colleagues." Despite the chilliness of his account and the evident distaste of his tone, there was a dreamy, reminiscing pleasure on Aubrey's features.
"Patrick Hyde, of whom you may have heard me speak—"
"Endlessly. How is your long-lost son, by the way?"
Aubrey all but pouted, then smiled.
"I gather he prospers in the Penal Colony of Australia. Free of me at last, perhaps… But Fraser is our concern. Hyde would never, on any account, work with him."
"Why not?"
"Fraser was a psychopath. Is."
"In SIS?"
"Many of his skills were just what was required. He was also successful, efficient. Not all agents possessed the same abilities, nor the same personalities.
Fraser was one of the truly bad apples we could turn to some account on behalf of Her Britannic Majesty's Government and in the further defence of the realm.
Despite your disapproval!"
Then…?" she asked, still as shocked as a child might have been.
Then it is possible that your friend did not acquire his heroin addiction until yesterday." He shuffled in his chair, as if eager for activity, plagued by restlessness. I'll make some enquiries, Marian.
I'll try to discover what the appalling Fraser has been doing in the way of gainful employment since he left the service."
"When would that have been?"
Two or three years even as many as four. I must check."
"And you think—?" She paused. Michael Lloyd's body, lying on his new carpet, seen through the letter box's slit, as if a scene from some wide-screen movie shown on television. She felt tears, and anger, equally.
"Do I think? Mm perhaps I do. If Fraser's employers, whoever they are at present, felt that your young friend's presence was a threat… then Fraser would take just such a direct means to close the door with as much finality as he could. Yes… Fraser is certainly capable of killing your friend."
CHAPTER FOUR
Ghosts in the Machines His office was, for the moment, a dusty, cramped space in need of repainting close under the roof of the Commerce Department. The perspective from its one small window, jammed shut and wire-netted against the pigeons, was bounded by the Washington Monument and the White House. Since he was not a political animal, it had come as a surprise to Gant that he had been given the view. The office itself was much more indicative of his lowly status as a Federal employee.
Hands still in his pockets, he turned from the window and the morning sunlight falling across the Ellipse and its acres of grass, which made the Monument a dazzling and unreal white. There were reports on his desk that needed his attention, though none of them was urgent. Mostly they were filed copies of accident reports that had been forwarded to the headquarters of the Accident Investigation Office by the various state investigatory units which were only loosely linked to the National Transportation Safety Board. He rubbed his hands through his cropped hair, his sense of frustration childishly acute, unreasonable.
He had returned to a kind of sense-deprivation the flotation tank of his daily existence after the flight and the crash landing. He disregarded the newspaper and TV coverage, which Vance had milked and ignited in turn; that had all been Vance's prize.
The two 494s of Albuquerque Airlines were flying again, half-full, though the two planes Burton had in Europe were slower to be trusted
… even though they were not fitted with the fuel computer system that had failed. Vance had, on TV, publicly changed the subcontractor, reverting to an older fuel computer system which would be marginally less efficient but which had a track record. Also, he was very publicly suing the errant manufacturer for millions of dollars. The media had gone along for the ride; Vance was crowing again, like some overpaid sports star, and they liked that.
He didn't savour the exploitation of his own role, the images of "Nam and himself in uniform and the scrappy accounts of his Cold War career.
The MiG-31, the Firefox, sitting in the Skunk Works at Burbank, stripped down, its pieces of fuselage lying about its skeleton like the ripped-off shards of a giant beetle. Other images of MiL gunships, references to Winter Hawk.
He had turned off the set and gotten another beer from the icebox, regretting that he was being used by Vance; regretting more, perhaps, that he had broken open his new self only to find it the wrapping on a mummy's corpse and nothing more… Underneath the veneer of this office, his job, the secretary in the even smaller room next door, his pay cheque everything had crumbled into dust as soon as he had been exposed to flying, danger, his supreme skill with machines that flew.
He could taste the dust in his dry mouth now. It had been stupid, so stupid, to have gone back, to have put himself The intercom blurted.
When you sold the farm, he thought bitterly, and moved on, you didn't return to it on Sundays and the Fourth of July. You forgot it.
"Yes?"
"Agent Mclntyre from the FBI is here to see you, sir."
Gant grimaced, then said: "Show him in, Mrs. Garcia."
He took up his position at the window once more, hands in his pockets, shirtsleeves rolled, shoulders slightly hunched as if in anticipation of an assault from behind. There were grey squirrels on the lawn in front of the Commerce Department. He heard the door shut behind Mclntyre, and sensed the enthusiasm of enmity that the FBI man brought with him into the cramped office.
"You're really appreciated by the NTSB, uh, Gant?" he heard.
The FBI Building faced the Department of Justice across Pennsylvania Avenue.