Gant had stayed behind with Aubrey for some kind of briefing; perhaps he had stayed overnight. He seemed contained, but like a pressure cooker filled with boiling water and steam. She understood his motives, even though his intent had a primitive, violent end in view.
Strickland had caused a chaos in his world, just as David Winterborne had done in hers. The minibus pulled out of Old Palace Yard into traffic, towards Waterloo and the train to Brussels… where Michael had been murdered.
Her briefcase was full of the morning papers, each of which celebrated, in its own particular manner, Aero UK's success, Tim Burton's expansion plans and the coming transatlantic price war. Boeing was already engaged in furious counter hype Air France was about to lease a dozen Skyliners, with a promise to buy at least six of them by the end of the year. Europe was vigorously thumbing its nose at the States and its plane makers She looked up as Ben Campbell sat himself next to her. His smile was engaging, self-regarding. His Times, as he unfolded it, observed in a headline Success for Skyliner at eleventh hour. It had been close, the line between success and failure, threadlike. David had merely tilted the balance a little, slightly moved the goalposts, so that he, Aero UK and Balzac-Stendhal were now standing on the other side of the narrow line. Success and failure all it had required was a few instructions given in a high office overlooking the City after receiving best advice and the consequence had been one murder in another country and two remote aircraft accidents. For those small and obscure events, the reward could be a difference of hundreds of millions, eventually billions. How could David not have taken the course he had?
"You all right?" Ben Campbell asked.
"You looked a bit off-colour out there." The Euro MP's enquiry was brightly, in curiously made.
"Fine," she replied, glancing up then quickly down again as she met the hot penetration of his stare, sensed the weighing, the judging that was occurring behind it.
"No, I'm fine, Ben," she repeated. Thanks for asking."
That fire business, I suppose?" he murmured.
"I suppose," she snapped ungraciously, then added: "Sorry it was a bit unsettling… You know."
"Yes, I'm sure."
Campbell, a Euro MP for the last three years, a Commission functionary before that, was their duenna for the junket to Brussels. It was a PR role he seemed formed by destiny to fulfill, his thick hair, white teeth, firm jawline offering the necessary assurances concerning the rectitude of everything European. Campbell's Eurosoup, many Members unkindly called him.
"We will be out to change your mind, Marian, I give you fair warning," he announced with an ingratiating smile. Throw off our ogre's clothes for something more attractive to you."
"I don't doubt it."
His eyes seemed filled with a piercing enquiry, but she could not be certain that it was not her own nerves that made his proximity and interest suspicious. There seemed to be another role, besides that of expert PR man. Of course, Ben Campbell had long been a lobbyist for Aero UK and Balzac-Stendhal… and an associate of Winterborne. With surprising ease, she could imagine herself and Campbell as prisoner and escort. She rubbed her arms involuntarily. Ben Campbell was a professional, fully employed smoothie… it was just his manner.
Wasn't it…?
"Did your mum make you up some sandwiches for the train?" she managed.
His smile was warm, reassuring: it disarmed. Yet his presence discomfited.
London slipped past the window of the minibus, but despite herself, she could not help feeling once more that she was under threat; even from Campbell.
The minibus crossed Westminster Bridge. She glanced back towards Parliament as if expecting David to be standing there, monstrously enlarged. The sunlight made the Palace of Westminster a gingerbread house, biscuit-coloured. The Thames was flecked with pleasure craft other junkets, corporate entertainments, business as usual. Had it been at some cocktail party or reception that David had first decided that Michael Lloyd must be silenced… that she should be burned alive?
She shivered and Campbell noticed the involuntary spasm. Waterloo loomed as darkly as some Victorian prison-house. Come on, come on, she told herself, but there seemed no defiance available.
His eyes moved from the map strapped to his knee to the landscape four thousand feet below the Cessna. He was above Perigueux, Limoges behind him, Brive a smudge away to the east. The land ahead of the aircraft was beginning to crumple like a suddenly ageing face into the worn folds and creases of the Dordogne. Soon he would need to find somewhere quiet to land.
He had walked out to the plane Aubrey had hired for him, into a glad-to-be-alive summer morning through which he had had to pass as if it was no more than a stage set. Dew still on the grass. A young woman in the office had completed his paperwork and glanced casually at his pilot's licence. There had been no more to it than that before he had unlocked the Cessna, done his external checks, climbed in, started the engine. Even the name of the place, Biggin Hill, had impinged without any sense of its history. The hours he had spent with Aubrey, after the general and his daughter had left and before he had briefly slept in the old man's spare bedroom, had sapped like leeches. Until this flight over southern England, the Channel, then northern France had seemed no more than a getaway, some kind of temporary escape.
The woman had grasped at him like feverish hands, her determination greater than his, her sense of urgency more vivid.
His search for Strickland wasn't just a wild card to her, it was something like a solemn promise. He felt the weight of her indignation, her demand for the truth, press at his back. She was uncomfortable to be around, even to remember.
The Channel had been filled with shipping and white wakes, an impression of slow, inexorable purpose and of certainty and destination. His flight was more empty than that, the plane's unfamiliar slowness suggesting drift, aimlessness.
He checked the map again. The clock on the instrument panel showed ten-forty.
French air traffic control was on a go-slow, not answering his calls since he had first contacted Paris. An Air Algerie flight, picking up one of his calls, had offered to relay to Paris Control on his behalf, but that hadn't been what he wanted. There was an airfield at Perigueux, already behind him, another at Brive and a third at Sarlat about eighteen miles south of his position. Sarlat was ideal had he wanted to use an airfield. He didn't. Almost certain that he had left Aubrey's apartment without detection, and that his taxi hadn't been followed out of London, he still sensed that they would be waiting for him — French Intelligence, the people from Oslo at Bordeaux, which his flight plan claimed was his destination. Any diversion to another airfield was traceable and a matter of no more than an hour's drive from Bordeaux. He needed to disappear, temporarily, and to have a secure, undiscovered airplane to return to… with Strickland.
Strickland was at his farmhouse-Doubt was pointless. He cut it off and eased the throttles back and put the Cessna into a gentle, descending turn. His altitude was four thousand feet above sea level, the country was three thousand feet below him. He had seen narrow river valleys that were possible landing sites, but hedges and clumps of trees were scattered across their slopes like traps. Most of them were narrow gorges anyway too narrow for him to ensure a safe landing. It should only look like a forced landing, the airplane had to stay in one piece, its flimsy undercarriage usable for take-off.
He dropped lower still in a left-hand orbit. His right hand reached out to grasp the fuel mixture control. He made the mixture leaner, his fingers almost stroking the control, until the engine banged, popped, became fragile and insufficient to support the weight of the Cessna against the air. The wind noise intruded into the engine's coughing.