We boarded a slow, ancient, and rickety flight to Malaga, where we sat around the hot airport for three hours before boarding another slow, ancient, and definitely wobbly plane for Seville, where it was a dusty, sweat-soaked evening before we could board a stomach-lurching, ear-popping flight to Nice. There the food improved, and the plane we boarded for Paris was an Air France DC-8. In Paris, the food was even better, if we both hadn't been too tired to really enjoy it; and the Air France 747 for New York that we boarded at seven in the morning was both comfortable and punctual. Still, by the time we touched down at JFK, my charming hot-blooded belly-dancer had turned into an exhausted and irritable little girl who couldn't think — or talk — about anything but a clean bed and sleep, on something that wasn't moving.
"You slept," she mumbled accusingly as we walked down the ramp from the plane into the terminal. "Every time the plane took off you fell asleep as if you'd turned off a switch, and you slept like a baby until we landed. It's too efficient. It isn't human."
"An acquired talent," I said. "Necessary for survival. If I depended on comfortable beds for rest, I'd have collapsed permanently a long time ago."
"Well, / am going to collapse permanently right now," she said, "unless I can get into a bed. Can't we…"
"No," I said firmly. "We can't. First, we have to take care of baggage."
"Ah," she mumbled, "pick up our baggage. Of course."
"Not pick up," I said. "Get rid of. Excess baggage. Human baggage. Unwanted friends who have become all too touchingly attached to us."
She stared at me, puzzled, but I didn't have time to explain, and the crowd now gathering to go through Immigration was no place to do it anyway. We became a part of that crowd, had our realistic looking but phony passports stamped, and then plodded through Customs to have our luggage chalked. A few minutes later I was in a phone booth placing a coded call to AXE headquarters, on Dupont Circle, Washington, D.C. As I was waiting for the call to go through on the scrambler, I glanced through the glass walls of the booth.
They were still with us.
The Chinese girl, looking very exotic and glamorous in a Vietnamese dao, was apparently engrossed in buying a French fashion magazine at the crowded newsstand. The Frenchman, very suave in his tailored suit, with distinguished silver streaks in his hair, was staring into the distance in a languid pose, as if waiting for his chauffered car.
It wasn't the same Frenchman who had begun the trip with us, of course. The one who'd picked us up at the Tangier airport had been a balding, rumpled little man in badly matched sports shirt and slacks, hiding behind a copy of Paris Match. In Malaga, he'd been replaced by a goon whose face bore evidence of a highly unsuccessful career in the ring, or some rough bars. He'd stayed with us through Seville, right into Nice, where he'd been replaced by the diplomatic looking character I was now watching.
The Chinese girl had picked us up in the Tangier airport and stayed with us every lap of the way, making no attempt to disguise the fact she was tailing us. She even bumped into me very deliberately on the flight from Paris and tried to start a conversation. In English. She was the one T couldn't figure out. And frankly, she was the one who worried me.
But the ridiculously circuitous route I'd plotted from Tangier to New York had given me what I wanted: The chance to find out if we were being tailed, and by whom. I relayed this information to Hawk when he came on the wire. When I had finished there was a moment's silence.
"Sir?" I said finally.
"Hak hak harurrmunmrnph!" Hawk cleared his throat while he thought. I could almost smell the horrible reek of one of his cheap cigars. I respected Hawk totally, but my admiration didn't extend to his choice of cigars.
"Chinese. Did you get the regional dialect?" he asked finally.
"Cantonese. Pure and classic. In English…"
I paused.
"Well?" Hawk demanded. "She had a definite accent when she spoke English?"
"Mott Street," I said dryly. "Maybe Pell."
"Hak hak hak," came the sounds. Hawk was thinking. "Harump. She was born here, then. New York, Chinatown."
"Definitely," I said. More silence. But now I was sure we were thinking on the same wavelength. It was almost unheard-of for an American-born ethnic Chinese to be an agent for the Chinese Communists. So who was she working for? I asked Hawk.
"We can't say definitely," he said slowly. "There are a number of interesting possibilities. But we don't have time to check her out now. Just shake her. And shake the Frenchman. I want you in Washington by midnight. With the girl. And, Nick…"
"Here, sir," I said with difficulty. Outside the booth, Michelle, who was propped against it, had closed her eyes and begun to slide peacefully down the glass surface very much like a falling raindrop. Alarmed, I reached out one arm and pulled her upright. Her eyes opened, and she didn't look at all grateful.
"Nick, shake the Frenchman, but don't hurt him."
"Don't…" I was tired. I became irritated. "Sir, he has to be OAS."
Now Hawk sounded irritated.
"Of course he's OAS. Our man at immigration in JFK confirmed that several minutes ago. He also happens to be a French diplomatic official. Grade Two. And the last thing we need right now is a diplomatic incident and some nice little stories in the newspapers. Publicity is not exactly what AXE thrives on, is it, Nick? So just shake him and the girl in a suitably non-violent, unspectacular manner and get down here to Washington. Clear?"
"Clear, sir," I said, as cheerfully as possible.
There was a click, and the line went dead. Hawk didn't like goodbyes. I made one other call — to an agency that specialized in foreign car rentals to people with somewhat unusual demands — then went outside the booth to find that Michelle had discovered that it was possible to sleep soundly standing up. I shook her.
"You," I said, "are going to wake up."
"No," she said, firmly but sleepily. "Pas possible."
"Oh yes," I said. "It's possible. You just aren't trying hard enough."
And I slapped her. Her eyes flew open, her face contorted with rage, and she reached up to claw at my eyes. I held her hands. I didn't have time to waste on long explanations, so I gave it to her straight.
"Did you see what happened to Akhmed and his wife? Would you like that to happen to us? It's a pretty safe bet it will, if we can't shake these two characters who're following us. And we can't shake them if I have to spend part of my time hauling a sleeping beauty around from one place to another. Got it?"
Some of the anger died from her eyes. Resentment remained, but it was controlled.
"And now," I said, "coffee."
We went into a nearby airport coffee shop and drank coffee. And more coffee. And more coffee. Black, with plenty of sugar for fast energy. By the time my name — that is, the name on my passport — was called out over the paging system, we'd each had five cups. Even so, I ordered four more to take with us when we left.
The BMW was waiting for us in the parking lot. It's a fairly small car, and it doesn't have the flashy sporting look of a Jag or a Ferrari. But its rate of acceleration equals that of a Porsche, and it holds the road like a Mercedes sedan. Also, when it's been properly worked on, it can do better than 135 mph on the straightaway. This one had been properly worked on. I knew. I'd driven it before. I threw our bags in the trunk and gave the red-haired kid who'd delivered the car five bucks to make up for his disappointment at having come here in such heavy traffic that he'd never got the car above 70 mph.
As we pulled out of the airport parking lot I got a clear glimpse of the Frenchman. He was in a brown and white 74 Lincoln Continental, driven by a ratty-looking little character with black hair slicked straight back from his forehead. They pulled in back of us, several cars behind.