Winterborne listened to the scattered words, the tapping noises on the keyboard of his PC, her breathing, her shocked, delighted surprise none of them were able to shatter the deep pleasure of his mood. The breakfast meeting had been replete with the rich diet of deals, leasings, promises to purchase. It had been like arriving somewhere long desired after a strange and perilous journey. It had worked, the whole desperate strategy.
'… Come in, yes I've finished," Winterborne heard.
"Come in-!"
The tiny, amplified noises of the PC being closed, the sound of the wardrobe door in the bedroom, the movements of the maid who had interrupted her. Winterborne stood at the window of the suite, staring blindly through the glass, as if rain had dissolved some magical vision.
He turned and glowered at the tiny tape-recorder he had almost nonchalantly removed from the desk drawer, expecting to hear only the sound of a vacuum cleaner. The fat black pen, uncapped so that its noise-activated microphone could function, seemed to mock him. Such had been his eagerness for the breakfast meeting and his sense that it would go well, he had almost forgotten to uncap the pen. Habit had saved him-and condemned Marian. His features twisted in an expression of pain as much as rage. He silently cursed himself for continuing to use those old passwords that Robbie had discovered so long ago. No one else knew them except Robbie. How could Marian have known? From Robbie?
It did not matter how, he told himself angrily. She knew. She had broken into his PC. She must know everything… He heard a snarling noise, strangled in someone's throat. His own, he slowly realised. He rubbed furiously at his throat as if he suffered a kind of moral laryngitis, an inability to curse her; then he rubbed his cheeks and eyes. Sunlight slanted across the desk, the recorder, the black pen.
He punched his fist down against his thigh, hurting himself. Again and again.
Then he began smoothing the bruised place rhythmically, as if using some healing ointment. Marian had sealed her fate, as a melodrama might have expressed it. She had engaged in enemy action, she had persisted after his warnings, refusing to let the matter rest. She had flouted their mutual past, the very thing that had held him back in front of a subordinate. Very well… He moved round the desk and thrust the recorder back in a drawer. Glanced at his watch. He needed to speak to Fraser immediately, before he left for America and to Roussillon. There must be some kind of accident…? At once, it was there as brilliantly and quickly as a light being switched on. A mugging that went terribly wrong, perhaps… Ben Campbell would be with her, he might even be injured. But Marian would be killed. A victim of mindless, motiveless street crime. Campbell's cooperation in the incident would silence him as effectively as Marian would be silenced.
He snatched up the phone and dialled Eraser's room. He had ten minutes before he must leave for the Skyliner jaunt, for more success; the seal on the enterprise. He smiled.
On board the plane, he would introduce Marian to Roussillon. She was a perceptive woman, perhaps she would even recognise her assassin.
"Fraser come up at once. Find Roussillon for me and bring him, too.
I've made up my mind."
She concentrated on the traffic on the Brussels ring road, then on the interchange with the E10 autoroute to Antwerp, as if the ordinary, the meaningless, would remove all thought of David.
Yet the knowledge that she had obtained no real shred of proof against David and that she must try again bobbed on the surface of her mind like a body she could not drown. Campbell's mood, as he sat beside her in the back of the chauffeur driven limousine, was strained, quiet.
The ramps and twists of the motorway interchange were left behind and the panorama became a flat expanse dotted with buildings whose windows reflected the midmorning sun. The light gleamed from the tail planes and flanks of dozens of aircraft. One lifted from the runway as she stared from the window, almost lurching into the sky by an effort of will.
Ben Campbell had been engaged in a brief, furious conversation with David in the foyer of the Amigo as she had come out of the lift. She was wearing her brightest clothes, a black and yellow spotted skirt and a bright-yellow jacket the insect-colours of warning and defence, a deliberate choice. However, she could hardly summon the willpower to sustain its defiant humour.
Because David had known what she had done, she was certain of it. He had glowered at her in the moment before he had changed his expression to a bland smile and had pecked at her cheek. Somehow, he had discovered her interference with his PC. She could not dismiss her impression. Campbell, dumb with some weight and mood of his own, confirmed her sense that she had increased her danger.
There she is," Campbell murmured as the car ran beside the high perimeter fence.
His hand pointed eagerly but his voice lagged, as if he were weary of his own enthusiasm.
"Oh-yes."
The Skyliner seemed bulbous, even ugly, beside the sleeker European and American airliners that surrounded it. A great bottle-nosed dolphin of a thing, its front section bulging like a deformed head, its waist thick, its wings and tailplane earth-bound. Then she lost sight of it as the car turned into the main gates, her last impression that it was liveried in the colours of the European Union, blue, white and gold-starred. The grandiose European dream that it represented seemed diminished by her sense of a small provincial airport, a cramped, dowdy collection of buildings. The new terminal, built to handle international flights, seemed inappropriate; a super store sprung up in a quiet residential district.
"You'll be impressed," Campbell offered, his salesman's manner somehow crumpled, under pressure.
"It's a very good airliner. It was just too expensive until now." He rallied more by habit than excitement.
Marian nodded. The limousine drew up on the concrete apron in front of the terminal. Airliners in a dozen liveries nuzzled like piglets at the pier's air bridges She got out of the car, even thankful for the overpowering scent of aviation fuel on the warm breeze, and the sense of bustle, after Campbell's desultory, drizzling conversation in the car. As he began marshalling the occupants of the little fleet of limousines that had driven from the hotel to the airport, Marian studied him.
Throughout the short journey, Campbell had seemed uncharacteristically preoccupied, even brooding. His talk was mere sound bites left out in the rain to spoil. He seemed wary of her. Nervous of being near her, as if she carried some raging infection. Amost as if she made him feel guilty.
Another aircraft flashed in the sunlight as it lumbered into the air.
Then, calming as a doctor, Henry was beside her.
"All right, lass? You look pale." The elderly Opposition Member was a thankful distraction.
"Bloody funny-looking aeroplane, has to be said!" His raised voice teased the smooth, ushering Commission civil servants. David, she saw, was watching her intently, until Tim Burton dragged at his arm like a small boy filled with enthusiasm, pulling him towards the airliner.
She saw Bryan Coulthard, the chief executive of Balzac-Stendhal, Rogier and Laxton together, all of them supremely cheerful. A select band of European press figures, from the broad sheets and the tabloids, were marshalling their photographers, buttonholing MPs and EU officials alike. No one seemed to want to interview her, thankfully. Perhaps she was the skull at this particular banquet? It was David's day…
There was a general movement towards the Skyliner, something as natural and irresistible as a tidal swell. It was sleekly fat close to, its girth Victorian-boastful, reeking of luxury.