"You all right, Ben?" she asked waspishly as she found Campbell once more at her side.
"What—?" He seemed uncertain for an instant, then he added: "Oh, yes just don't like flying all that much. Never really taken to it—" His sickly smile irritated her.
David was surrounded by reporters and officials, his hand firmly grasping that of the President of the Commission. The smooth Belgian was inclining his head towards David in the manner of an obeisant or that of a fellow conspirator. The little tableau increased her annoyance.
"Ready, Marian?" Campbell asked uncertainly. He had watched her studying David.
"Yes!" she snapped.
"Ready. Are you, Ben?"
"What? Oh, yes. Let's go then." He gestured towards the passenger steps.
Once they were in the first-class cabin, Campbell left her side, hurrying away into a sc rum of journalists. A glass of champagne appeared magically in her hand as she surveyed the lounge, spacious as a hotel foyer.
"Big bugger, eh?" Henry said at her elbow.
"Like a bloody cruise ship. But then, I suppose that's the idea, eh, lass?"
She managed to nod in a mimicry of enthusiasm. That, after all, had been the principle on which the Skyliner had been created. First class as an imitation of a liner's stateroom, the seats scattered as casually as in a club's library. Business class, the remainder of the cabin space, was narrower, but still huge-seeming, stretching away from her.
Wide aisles, groups of seats, computer workstations, desks… The carrier of choice for the global marketplace. Other cabin variants offered luxurious charter flight facilities, one even provided lounges and a cinema.
The latest, or so she had heard, proposed seating in excess of the new Boeing, now that price was a factor. Tim Burton would put that type into operation on the Atlantic run.
The aircraft seduced. There had been an unfairness about its previous lack of success. It was big, quiet, luxurious affordable, now and the logical next step beyond Airbus. It did indeed seduce… She shook her head.
"Summat wrong?"
"Ringing in my ears, Henry." She smiled.
People had died for this occasion, this display. To place her here, with the influential, putting champagne to her lips amid the joviality of power and money.
The innocent had died.
"Hello, Marian!"
It was Tim Burton, grinning like a boy with a new train set. She knew him as someone she had encountered at parties or occasionally scouring the House for a tame lobbyist.
Tim your new toy? I like it." She raised her glass to the down lighters in the cabin's high ceiling. Henry had drifted away towards a knot of civil servants, bent on mischief.
"Congratulations."
"Damn close-run thing, Marian, I can admit that now."
His grin was infectious, his too-long hair suggestive of innocence.
"Poor Alan Vance, of course. You heard about that? Mm. Well, thanks to your friend David and Bryan Coulthard, I'm off the hook! My version won't be as luxurious as this, of course — hi, David!"
He was as grateful and innocent as a puppy. Gant would not have wasted a moment suspecting his involvement. He had been all but ruined. Hi, David. It was what his computer had said to her and David, she was certain, knew of its infidelity.
The man with David was in his late thirties, taller than David, slimly elegant, darkhaired, brown-eyed. Deeply attractive.
"Marian my friend Michel asked to be introduced to you," David murmured. At the same moment, his hand was proprietorially on Tim Burton's shoulder.
"Mizz Marian Pyott, one of our most colourful Members of Parliament…
I warn you, Michel, Marian doesn't like foreigners. Michel Roussillon, who is in charge of our security."
They shook hands.
"David exaggerates my bigotry," she flirted.
"My prejudices are capable of being disarmed." Her smile was dazzling.
Roussillon was remarkably good-looking.
Roussillon… Roussillon.
She released his grip, too quickly not to alert him. His name had been in David's computer under the Robbie file-The lake was all but empty of canoes and tourist sailboats in the late afternoon. Anyway, it was too early in the season for there to be more than a few people renting cabins.
Another's head broke the water thirty yards from the pebbled shore along which he was walking. When the scout camps and the fishermen and the playacting tourists came, the otters retreated to secluded pools.
For the moment, trout and salmon were theirs for the taking.
Smoke drifted above lodgepole pines from the invisible chimney of an occupied cabin. He heard the faint noises of children.
He was walking to the store for supplies, and walking to think the thing through.
In the lodge, even in the dense forest around it, it was difficult sometimes to see matters in any clear light. It was all too comfortable and familiar, too much a refuge; and it prompted his sense of control, suggested he accept the offer that had come via the e-mail.
A fundamentalist splinter group wanted Arafat killed just as a fundamentalist Jew had killed Rabin last year. It seemed a simple, if challenging, proposition, one which oughtn't to disconcert. It did, though.
Strickland's large hands were thrust into the side pockets of his windcheater, as if he were attempting to imitate an even larger man.
His head studied the pebbles along the narrow beach as if reading runes. The pines crowded towards the shore and the mountains were reflected in the still deep blue of the lake. He ignored the familiarity of the scene and its congenial sense of wilderness. He raised his head once, attracted by the puttering noise of the mail boat returning across the lake towards the jetty and the scramble of wooden cabins and lodges that were the only settlement for miles. Then he returned his attention to the pebbles, to his own long afternoon shadow, the images of snowcaps and glaciers fading from his retinae.
The middleman had placed the asked-for, non-returnable deposit in his Swiss account. The bank had faxed him the confirmation two hours ago.
Now a meeting had to be arranged. But he had come here, to the wilderness where he was known by another name, because he had been certain, after Oslo, that Winterborne would turn Fraser and the Frenchman on him, just to clean house. Only days later, an offer that challenged ego and invited greed had appeared out of the blue… because they'd lost track of him? Was it them, or was it genuine and coincidental? Even Winterborne or Fraser or Roussillon could have guessed that he'd find Arafat an irresistible target. Rabin had been a clay pigeon by comparison. One of the most difficult men in the world to eliminate, the e-mail had offered like a tempting menu. A traitor to the Palestinian cause, or something like that, had revealed the target's identity. Arafat.
Winterborne could easily have discovered that he had been hired once before to kill Arafat in North Africa and had failed when Arafat left seconds before the device was detonated. And eueryoneknew how much he hated failure… a meeting, then. Could he risk it? And if he did, where? He paused in his stride, looking up. The familiar mountains, spilling frozen snow and ice; the still lake, the mail boat wake fading as it bobbed beside the jetty, its engine off. Another's head, then that of a second. A mule deer appeared confidently from the pines, maybe aware the tourists and sportsmen hadn't yet moved into the wilderness. The animal watched him, unafraid. A canoe rounded the flat, tiny, sparse-treed islet in the middle of the lake. Strickland breathed deeply.
The afternoon temperature had begun to drop. His indecision remained with him, a solid, indigestible lump in his stomach. He was challenged by the commission… and he was suspicious. The walk had resolved nothing.