'What currency?'
'You asked for US dollars.'
'Yes.'
'Then you shall have US dollars.'
There wasn't anything else so I talked to Cone again and went over the whole thing twice and he said he'd got it. It's just a simple exchange, Charlie,' I told him. 'Nothing we haven't done a hundred times before.'
'Give it all I've got. Call you back at the same number?'
I checked with Klaus and he nodded.
'Yes,'I told Cone.
'Anything else?'
'No,' I said, 'there's nothing else,' and he rang off and I put the telephone back and Klaus snapped the driving-door open.
'So! We will go back into the house. Schwartz?'
The man's feet grated over the gravel. 'Sit in the car here and when the telephone rings call me on my pager.'
Headlights flooded the driveway as we left the Volvo, and the gates began swinging open.
'Who is that?' Klaus called out.
'His name is Khatami, mein Fuhrer. He gave the password.'
A black Porsche came into the drive and cut its lights and the gates were swung back as a man got out and came across to the house. Klaus didn't break his stride but shook the man's hand and told him to go on ahead. 'I'll be there in a moment, Bijan. The others are waiting.'
He led me into the panelled hallway and touched my arm – 'Everything looks very fine, my friend. I'm sure your associate realises that delivery has to be made on time. I could have given you a more comfortable deadline if it weren't for the fact that my operation is running to a precise schedule, and I can't afford delays.' His black eyes watched me steadily. 'The next twenty-four hours, you see, constitute a count-down.' A man was stationed near the wide carpeted staircase and Klaus called him over. 'Fogel! Show Herr Mittag to his room.' He turned away and said over his shoulder, 'You'll find everything there – toilet necessities, a choice of pyjamas, a small bar – turning round for a moment – 'Inge will entertain you if you wish – just mention it to Fogel here. We shall meet again to receive the call from your associate. I am very pleased, you know, that you have offered me this particular item at such a convenient time – I am delighted.'
His footsteps faded out along the corridor. Fogel showed me to a bedroom suite on the floor above and left me there, and I began thinking about the man who'd just arrived in the Porsche, Khatami. He hadn't been in uniform this time but I'd recognised him: he was the Iranian pilot I'd seen talking to Inge Stoph at the airport cafeteria.
Cone telephoned just after three in the morning and we went down to the Volvo.
'We can meet the deadline.'
He was in a public phone box. He'd got out of his hotel and into another one but he couldn't phone me from there and he couldn't give me his new number because he knew I wouldn't be alone. He also knew that I couldn't call him back, wouldn't know where he was, couldn't hope to reach him again.
'Good for you, Charlie,' I said, and put the phone down and watched the severed lifeline go snaking away in the dark.
Chapter 16: SIROCCO
The sun was a pale disc in the haze, still low above the horizon. Its light glinted on metal and glass surfaces, on the mascot of the Mercedes limousine as it swung in a half-circle by the VFW-Fokker and halted. Klaus got out first and we followed.
There were two other cars already here, with people standing near them in a group, waiting for Dieter Klaus, watching him. His bodyguards – four women and two men – closed in around him as he walked towards the plane with that implacable energy of his. There was a small dog among the people who stood waiting. The pilot came down the ramp and saluted Klaus, standing aside and waiting for him to board the company jet. Klaus spoke to him and got an answer; I didn't hear any actual words but I suppose he was asking the pilot about the weather forecast: the haze was thick towards the horizon.
I joined the group, one of the male guards walking a little way behind me: I'd been under what amounted to close escort since we'd left the house, and I didn't expect that to change. Geissler, the man who'd interrogated me in the garage, had come with us in the limousine, and went aboard the plane soon after Klaus. The rest of us were following now, and the woman in the camelhair coat gave me a flashing smile and said in English – 'Hello, I'm Helen Maitland, and this is George, my husband.'
'Hans Mittag. Delighted.'
I'd caught sight of her earlier this morning, getting into one of the cars at the house.
'Dieter told us about you,' Maitland said. 'Most interesting.' Then he hurried up the ramp, a short man, quick in his movements and with the same nervous tension in him that Klaus had.
The focus of this operation – Shatner, in London briefing – is on a man named Maitland. Or rather, on his death. A week ago he was murdered, and his body taken away. His flat was broken into with some violence, and the police found evidence of massive blood loss. There were marks on the floor indicating that his body had been dragged out of the flat to the lift. The telephone was hanging by its cable – he'd been talking to a woman friend, who came forward, when the flat was entered. She reported sounds of the door being smashed in, an outbreak of voices and finally a cry.
Helen kept close to me as we went up the ramp, and I thought I heard her whisper, 'I'm sorry…'
Maitland had sat down with Klaus in one of the forward seats behind the flight deck. The pilot had taken his place next to the navigator, and a stewardess was greeting us as we came aboard. Her smile, I thought, was over-bright, as Helen's had been just now when she'd greeted me. No one was talking much; they seemed to be taking their cue from Dieter Klaus, from their fuhrer, and this morning he was totally changed from last night: in the limousine there'd been none of his brief outbursts of laughter. I took as long a look at Maitland as I could when I went past his seat: later I might need the ability to recognise some of the people here, perhaps quickly and at a distance.
Maitland, Willi Hartman had told me in the night-club, had been interested in the Red Army Faction. He began asking me questions about them. Then later I realised he was – how will we put it? – playing a kind of game with himself. He had a master plan, he told me once, about how to assassinate Moammar Gadhafi.
A counter-terrorist game, then? He fancied himself as an armchair counter-terrorist?
I think, yes. George was a very unusual man. Very intense.
The twin jets began moaning.
He was neurotic, Willi had said with sudden force. May I say that?
Helen hadn't objected. Oh, of course. Terribly so, terribly neurotic, yes. He fascinated me.