His nerves jangled, his body temperature fluctuated as if he were passing through the rooms of a bath-house, from sauna to cold dip to sauna again. He glimpsed, like an arachnophobe might have seen in a shadowy corner a large and poisonous spider, his fear of Winterborne and his gofer, Fraser. It was the same fear that had broken in upon him after Fraser and Roussillon had left the farmhouse.
He'd cooked them a Dordogne peasant stew, served them wine and coffee, signed the contract, received the down payment, seen them from the premises. With the washing-up done and the cat on his lap, he had suddenly sat bolt upright in his chair as the last of the daylight darkened outside. The cat had scratched his thighs in surprise.
Strickland had realised that he had been afraid not to agree, afraid not to take the money. Winterborne, using Fraser as his mouthpiece, had effectively insinuated that they would kill him without hesitation if he did not assist them… despite their knowledge that he stored, in a safety deposit box in Rome, meticulous and incriminating records of every assignment he had carried out.
Against Winter-borne, he was certain that evidence no longer offered a guarantee of his safety.
So, he had agreed. The price-hike had been a mere formality.
He glanced up. The long northern evening lay like a golden cloud over Oslo and the sloping land with the narrow Oslof jord beyond it. The panoramic windows of the passenger lounge let in too much landscape and seemed to expose him as the only still, fixed figure in the lounge's terrain.
Simple job… your own cleverness… The fragments of his self-assurance glinted like a window shattered by an explosion, but would not cohere. An airliner lifted into the evening, turning orange-red then golden then silver as it rose into the rays of the low sun, navigation lights winking. Beyond the main runway were the airport's maintenance hangars, liveried planes dotted around them.
Simple job… The replacement fuel computer system circuitry lay innocuously inside his PC, in the cabin bag. Simple job… your cleverness… The papers that described him as an engineer with Vance Aircraft were in his pocket. One of the two Vance 494 airplanes was in a maintenance hangar for overnight checks before resuming its schedule of shuttle flights around the Scandinavian capitals… Simple job, then, to appear overalled beside it, to replace the fuel computer board with his own, which contained the redoctored chip which would jettison the fuel while the instruments continued to read normally… and which would now reconfigure itself on impact or engine-stop, declaring itself to be harmless, fully operative. This time there would be no trace, no ability to outguess him and recognise sabotage… simple.
He breathed a little more easily, his chest less asthmatic ally tight with the tension that Winterborne, his location, his immediate future all generated. It was that simple. One more appalling crash and the
494 would be consigned to aviation notoriety and history. Gant could not this time interpose nimble-mindedness and experience between his design and execution. It would all happen with the functional reliability of an electronic component. Perhaps two dozen people would die, since passengers were reluctant still to trust the 494. The carnage would be minimal stand-by tourists and commuters but sufficient. The 494 would be grounded, Vance Aircraft would collapse, imploding under the pressure of the banks, the NTSB, the European politicians.
He admired Winterborne's ruthlessness. However, after this, he would walk away.
Disappear for a time. One of his other bolt holes rather than the Dordogne farmhouse whose tranquillity he so much valued.
Strickland glanced at his watch. Eight in the evening. They'd be working on the 494 for most of the night. He had time for a meal. Yes
… his stomach seemed much less unsettled since he had refused the plastic tray of food on the flight from Frankfurt. He stood up, picked up his bag, and began searching the overhead signs for the location of the restaurant. Simple job… The long Georgian facade of Uffingham was floodlit against an orange sunset as her constituency agent's Land Rover came out of the avenue of oaks and the house surprised her, as it always did, with memories and its own beauty. It was, in Pevsner, the most beautiful house in Warwickshire, perhaps the entire Midlands, and to her it was utterly precious.
She had spent many of her childhood holidays there, with or without her parents, depending on Daddy's postings and Mummy's eagerness or reluctance to accompany him. She had, in an important sense, grown up there, perhaps even more so than David Winterborne and his brother.
Clive Winterborne's family had owned the house for six generations someone in their military, clerical and political ancestry had been in trade, she often reminded Clive, to have afforded such a house and estate in the middle of the last century; its building and inhabitation having bankrupted the gentrified Whig family who had created Uffingham.
Clive had inherited the house from a bachelor uncle, having refused all interest except his massive shareholding in the Winterborne commercial empire, founded and web-centred in Singapore in the heyday of political empire. Instead, he had fallen into the role that nature, looks and habit seemed to have designed him for, that of paternalistic country gentleman. His Eurasian wife, whom Marian always had difficulty remembering which saddened her had returned to England with him after the army in Malaya and elsewhere. Just as he had wanted nothing to do with Winterborne Holdings, so he had disdained MoD, even against her father's blandishments. Instead, he had given himself, increasingly and with a seeming urgency after the death of his beloved wife, to good works… one of which had been to persuade her, so he always maintained, to first stand for the constituency.
Is it in your gift? she had asked. Laughing, he had replied, Probably.
She smiled now, remembering, as the Land Rover climbed the curving drive up to the house. A long stone balustrade, like a fortress' ramparts, contained the forecourt and the house as it looked southwards over farmland. The vehicle passed a huge urn sprouting a profusion of summer colour, and began threading its way across the gravel between the litter of Rolls Royces, Porsches, BMWs, Volvos and four-wheel drive executive weekend vehicles. Chauffeurs lounged against dark limousines.
Marian was grateful to breathe in the fresh evening air.
Swallows swooped about the house and she heard the screams of mobbing swifts.
She caught a glimpse of them flicking amid the forest of chimneys. The
Vanbrugh facade, cream in memory, was garish in the floodlighting. The doors beneath the portico were wide and lights spilled out. She could hear faint music, fainter than the rustle of Bill's wife's acres of taffeta and silk as she climbed from the high front passenger seat. The gorgeous redundancy of material in the gown, and its ladybird colours of red and black, rendered her own costume more mannish than ever. She had decided on her close impersonation of a man's dinner jacket and trousers, her hair tied back in a brief, bushed tail, her waistcoat shimmering like petrol in a pool of water.
"OK, Pat?" she asked as the central locking bleeped to Bill's satisfaction. His wife glanced up, as if the creases of travel in her gown were a matter of reproof from Marian, then she continued smoothing the taffeta and silk into pre-inspection satisfaction. She evidently felt Marian's outfit the next most obvious declaration of sexual orientation to dungarees.
"Good!" Marian announced brightly, wishing for a cigarette. She had not smoked in the Land Rover out of deference to Pat's intense hatred of tobacco… but perhaps the mannish suit might relieve her jealous suspicions of Bill's relationship with her. Poor Bill… "You look gorgeous," he dutifully informed Pat, who visibly brightened. Then they were crunching over the gravel towards the house, mincing between Jaguars, a pair of matching Ferraris, down the tall alleyways of off-road vehicles clustered as thickly as at some large agricultural show. More thickly, she observed.