“Oh. Well, how does the food get up here?”
“On the elevator.”
“And is the pantry where they prepare it for serving?”
“Yes.”
“Well, may I take a look at the pantry then?”
“I’d be happy to show it to you, but there’s an Orthodox Jewish wedding tonight, and the caterer might not like...”
“The caterer?”
“Are you familiar with the word trayf?”
“I’m sorry, no.”
“Well, I just don’t think he’d like us in the pantry while he’s setting out his kosher dishes and things.”
... and had also been able to locate and mark in memory all the exits leading from the room. Tomorrow morning, he would wander the back stairs without Miss Lubenthal in tow, searching for both an escape route and a possible lay-in location, should his final plan call for one. Earlier this afternoon, under guise of asking about a dais for his sister and her bridal party...
“Do they ever do that? Sit at a separate long table?”
“Oh, yes, to avoid seating conflicts between the two families. That way, the bride and groom, together with the bridal party, sit at a table on a raised dais, and there are no problems. Here in the Baroque Room, we normally...”
... and had gone on to show him where the dais was usually placed, there on the left, with the huge arched windows facing the park at right angles to it.
That’s where Thatcher’ll be sitting, he’d thought.
And maybe Bush as well.
With an exit door close by, leading to the pantry on the left. And directly ahead, a visible flight of steps climbing upward.
He would reconnoiter those steps tomorrow morning. Meanwhile...
He picked up the receiver again, and dialed the 800 number for Epsilon Chemical Supplies in Meriden, Connecticut.
The liaison officer seemed not at all bothered by the fact that counterfeit British passports were in circulation. Apparently, this was a common occurrence and not something to get one’s feathers—
“In any case,” Geoffrey said, “it was only one passport. That is, they were one and the same passport, with different names in them, you see. The dead Scotsman’s passport, that is.”
The liaison officer glared at him.
His name was Joseph Worthy, or so he’d said, who knew what it might really be? He explained to Geoffrey at once that he was not with Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise Office, as he’d told the noisy Miss Phipps, but served instead as liaison between MI6 and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, of which the British Consulate here in New York was an integral part. It was the Secret Intelligence Agency, in fact...
“SIS, MI6, call it what you will,” Worthy said.
... who’d contacted him early this afternoon to report the alarming fact that two women with identical green scimitar tattoos had been found dead in Manhattan, both of them carrying false British passports. The passports, he was now saying, were of no interest whatever to him. Sixpence a dozen, buy them in any local pharm...
“Well, surely not,” Geoffrey said.
“Figure of speech,” Worthy said.
“I should hope so.”
“The scimitar tattoo, on the other hand, is something of concern, especially since a former prime minister will be here in the city a fortnight from now.”
“Nine days from now, actually,” Geoffrey said.
“Worse yet,” Worthy said. “Who’s the police officer investigating these homicides?”
“A man named Allan Santorini. He’s with Homicide North. In the Twenty-Fifth Precinct uptown.”
“Seem any good?”
“A typical New York detective,” Geoffrey said, and shrugged. Unwashed, unshaven and uncouth, he thought.
“Does he have any idea what those green scimitars might mean?”
“No. And neither do I.”
“Does the name Sayf Quaṣīr mean anything to you?”
“No, what is it?”
“It’s an elite Libyan intelligence group.”
“It’s an Iranian terrorist group,” Santorini said.
“Simsir,” the other man said, and nodded. “I’m familiar with it.”
They were sitting in the twelfth-floor offices of the Federal Bureau of Investigation at 26 Federal Plaza downtown. Santorini had called here the moment he’d made his computer discovery. The special agent with him now was named Michael Grant. He was fifty-three years old and balding, and he told Santorini that his biggest recent assignment had been rounding up a gang of rustlers — here in the East, would you believe it, rustlers! — who’d been dumb enough to move cattle interstate from New York to Pennsylvania, thereby invoking the wrath of the federal agency. Through the windows behind him, the Statue of Liberty and the Jersey shore were clearly visible.
“Do these people tattoo themselves?” Santorini asked.
“Not to my knowledge,” Grant said.
“Little sword on their breasts?”
“I’m not that familiar with them.”
“Little scimitar? Because it means scimitar in Persian, you know. Simsir.”
“I didn’t know that,” Grant said. “In any case, they’re out of business. They were very active during the Iran-Iraq War, claimed responsibility for the assassination of several top-level Iraqi diplomats. But I haven’t heard anything about them since that bombing at JFK, back in...”
“That’s what I wanted to ask you about.”
“We caught a punk named Mustapha Hayiz — there’re no state or federal statutes against terrorism, you know, the Bureau got called in ’cause the bombing took place at an airport... interstate, international, all that jazz. We found him living like a camel-driver in a room in Philadelphia, big terrorist hero, the whole place stinking of human excrement. He wouldn’t tell us who his accomplices were — for all we know, he was operating solo on the airport bombing. Anyway, we sent him up for a long, long time — but he broke out last October, don’t know where the hell he is now. Probably back in Teheran, clenching his fists for the television cameras.”
“How many others were there in the group?”
“Originally? Five or six. All these terrorist groups with the high-sounding names — the Holy This and the Holy That, the Masked Ones, the Islamic Legion, the Flaming Sword, the Volcano, the People’s Bureau for Solidarity and Horseshit — these’re sometimes two, three guys who know how to put together a bomb, and another dumb bastard who’s willing to sacrifice his life delivering it.”
“Any women in these groups?”
“Sometimes. Why?”
“We found two dead women tattooed with green scimitars.”
“Well, green, now you’re talking Libya,” Grant said.
“Which is what concerns us,” Worthy said. “Do you remember the Yvonne Fletcher incident?”
“Of course I do,” Geoffrey said.
“April 17, 1984,” Worthy said, and nodded solemnly. “St. James’s Square, London. Outside the Libyan embassy... well, they called it the People’s Office. There were demonstrators outside...”
Geoffrey could still remember that day.
He was sixteen years old at the time, home from Eton, visiting his parents. A quiet Tuesday in London, five days before Easter. St. James’s Square tree-shaded and still save for the chanting of the demonstrators. The BBC news cameras were covering the event dutifully but routinely; in a democracy, one became used to demonstrations for or against everything on earth. The police were there as a matter of course; they were always on hand to make certain a crowd didn’t go entirely berserk. But no one, least of all Geoffrey, was prepared for what happened next.