"Not if they're crooks — surely?"
"Fraser is an actor in the drama. Stay away from Eraser, I beg you.
Whatever you do do nothing!"
It was late afternoon when Fraser halted the hired car a few hundred yards from the French farmhouse. He got out of the air-conditioned interior of the Renault into a balmy warmth that seemed to emanate from the small orchard, the slope of the land, the hills and dark, massed trees behind the house. There was no sign of Strickland.
"He is here, isn't he?" Fraser asked his companion.
The Frenchman nodded.
"I called him as soon as I finished speaking to you. He said he would be here all day."
"He's probably watching us through a telescopic rifle sight," Fraser muttered.
The youngish Frenchman brushed back his flopping, dark hair with one hand and laughed.
"Should he be quite as nervous as you suggest?"
"No. Come on, let's go and see him."
They opened the gate in the wooden post-and-rail fence that surrounded the two or so acres that belonged to the property. Fraser was still stiff from the flight to Bordeaux and the hour's car journey that followed. Resentful, too, of the imperious, dismissive manner in which Winterborne had issued his orders, demanded success. The Frenchman, Roussillon, had been waiting for him at Merignac airport, having flown down from Paris. In effect, both of them were simply obeying Winterborne's command. Even though Roussillon was employed by French counter-intelligence.
Around the property, the Dordogne stretched and heaped away abruptly.
The hills rose and pressed, the land fell away from them towards the thin streaks of meandering rivers. A litter of tiny villages was scattered across the landscape, nestling beneath hills crowded with dark trees, or hunched beside the rivers. There was the sense of gorges, of wilderness, too.
Then Strickland was in the doorway of the farmhouse, removing a pair of wire rimmed spectacles and squinting in the late-afternoon sunshine.
He was weaponless but alert, until his myopic eyes recognised Fraser.
The man's bulk was oddly at contrast with his patient silence and his mannerism of rubbing his eyes, head on one side, in a display of mild, innocuous curiosity. Then he stood aside, servant-like, gesturing them inside the house. The Frenchman's expensive leather shoes made clicking noises on the cool flagstones of the floor.
The scents of blossom, wood, polish. Strickland kept the farmhouse as neatly as any house proud woman might have done. He followed them in, again gesturing without words to tall-backed chairs in a stripped, plain wood around the heavy table. The kitchen area flowed smoothly into a sitting room lined with bookshelves and prints. A heavy, fringed carpet covered the flagstones; the windows, tall and narrow, looked towards the closest village perched on a hillside. Fraser sat down and Roussillon, his dark features still amused, sat opposite him.
"Coffee something stronger?" Strickland asked, already fussing to fill a cordless kettle on the kitchen work top His accent remained American, slightly southern in intonation, his voice as smooth and polite as a Mormon.
"Coffee for me," the Frenchman volunteered.
"Beer."
"Surely." Strickland bent his tall, muscular frame to the fridge. He poured the beer into a glass as the kettle began to bubble. When he turned back to his guests, he said half-apologetically: "I read the newspaper reports." His smile was boyish, selfdeprecating.
"I didn't take into account a pilot with that kind of insight. Well, truthfully, I didn't think of Gant at all."
He made coffee for himself and Roussillon and joined them at the table.
Fraser watched Strickland intently as if he might miss some sudden metamorphosis in the man. Yet Strickland continued to shrug apologetically, smile ingratiatingly.
Fraser's various meetings with the American had all, without exception, left him more puzzled than before. The man killed people but behaved like a pastor and there seemed no evident hypocrisy. Perhaps the explanation lay in the fact that Strickland always killed long-distance, removed people he had never even seen.
"What can I do for you?" he asked eventually, though not with any suggestion that he had tired of waiting for them to speak.
"A repeat performance," Fraser announced, finishing his beer.
"Another?"
Thanks." When Strickland returned with a second can, he said: "My employer needs another tragic accident."
"How soon does he need it?"
"Quickly."
"I don't usually follow the stock market, except as regards my own portfolio," Strickland explained, 'but your phone call didn't take me off-guard. The price is two hundred thousand. Non-negotiable."
"It has to be done on site."
Strickland appeared alarmed. A large black-and-white cat appeared through the open kitchen window and lowered its forelegs into the sink in order to drink, its back feet still on the windowsill.
That isn't the way I work."
"Not normally, no. But two hundred thousand isn't a normal fee, either. And there's the pressure of time, my friend." Even to himself, he sensed his accent thicken as his voice darkened. Strickland seemed unimpressed by implicit threat.
"Why the rush? OK, don't answer that. Stocks and shares. Loss of blood, internal haemorrhage, even. Yes, there would be a desire to hurry… but I don't work in that way. It's too messy."
Roussillon murmured: There could be more money perhaps as much as another fifty thousand."
Strickland glanced swiftly at Fraser and realised that the two men were not engaging in some negotiating ploy. Fraser was surprised.
"Out of the petty cash, Michel?" he sneered.
"I didn't realise the DST were chipping in to bale my employer out or I'd have kept something back for myself." He laughed. The French Intelligence officer smiled and shrugged.
"I wish Mr. Strickland to feel we value him, Robert. Merely I that'
"And Balzac-Stendhal will, in any case, pay the price. You I won't be left short."
Strickland left his chair and walked to the window. He began absently stroking the cat, who was still half-immersed in the sink, licking at the drops of water the tap had spilt. While it licked, it purred.
Fraser thought there was something reluctant about the man's posture, something like the merest suggestion of an internal argument, violent and intense. Then he turned to face them.
Three hundred thousand. For an on-site operation and one that is untraceable, even by someone as clever as Gant."
That was the pilot Vance used, right?"
Strickland nodded.
"Yes. An accident investigator, too. He could appear in the play again. I'll bear it in mind, this time."
"You know him? Was he CIA, too?"
"From time to time. When things needed to be flown."
"Oh, yes. I remember him now. Another of Aubrey's cowboy operators. I was working for Far East desk in those days. I wondered where I'd heard the name before."
"You should try reading newspapers with information rather than bosoms," Roussillon commented.
"One learns such things from such newspapers."
"When must this operation be completed?"
Two days three at the outside."
That quickly?" Strickland pondered, his large hands knuckled on the knotted, scratched wood of the scrubbed table. After some moments, he announced: "I've been working on some refinements to that fuel computer malfunction."
The copyright remained with you, according to the contract."
"As always. I've had one or two other ideas since I got back. Perhaps you could make yourself comfortable? Give me an hour or two and I'll give you a definite answer. If I can do it, then I'll accept for three hundred thousand. But I'd like to make certain. Help yourselves to coffee, beer, anything else. You'll stay to dinner?"