He was watching the screen only casually, glancing up every now and then from the thriller he was reading, an addiction he’d picked up from his mother. He had reached the part in the book where the female detective was out in a rainstorm, tracking a rapist, when all at once he thought he actually heard thunder, and then realized in an instant that the sound had come from the television set — but it wasn’t raining in London that day. And then he recognized with a start that what he’d heard was gunfire. Actual gunfire. Not the kind you read about. Real gunfire. He looked up sharply. On the television screen, people were shouting, and policemen were rushing to where a young woman in uniform was lying on the pavement — dead, as it later turned out. Someone inside the embassy had fired an automatic rifle from the first-floor window, killing her instantly.
“We had that bloody embassy under siege for ten days,” Worthy said now. “Then somebody decided to allow the bastards clear passage home. Diplomatic immunity. For murderers.” He grimaced sourly, shook his head. “We still haven’t resumed relations with Libya... well, of course you know that.”
“Yes,” Geoffrey said.
He was still thinking about that dead policewoman lying on the pavement.
“So now we have two of Quaddafi’s elite intelligence people abroad in New York a week before...”
“Five days, actually,” Geoffrey corrected. “And they’re not quite abroad anymore, you know. They’re both dead.”
“Five bloody days before she gets here,” Worthy said. “Which seems quite a coincidence to us.”
Geoffrey didn’t see any connection whatever. He said nothing.
“I understand the Consulate here has been handling the banquet arrangements,” Worthy said.
“No, sir, not the banquet itself. The Canadian Consulate is looking after that. All I did was consult with them on the seating arrangements for the main table. So that Mrs. Thatcher might not be inadvertently offended. That was the extent of my participation.”
“Where have they seated her?”
“Well, let me show you the diagram,” Geoffrey said, and opened a desk drawer and took from it a copy of the sketch the Canadian Consulate had sent him. Worthy studied it:
“In keeping with protocol,” Geoffrey said, “the visiting prime minister is considered to be at home when he attends an embassy affair. The Canadians have quite properly granted him the presidency of the table, here at the center, with his wife on his right, both of them facing the entrance doors.”
Worthy looked puzzled.
“Do you see where the places are marked with the Roman numeral one?” Geoffrey said. “That’s where Mr. and Mrs. Mulroney will be sitting. The Canadian P.M. and his wife.”
“What do all those little circles mean?”
“The circles indicate ladies. The usual seating arrangement for these affairs is boy-girl-boy-girl, as you see it here.”
“And where will our girl be sitting?”
“Well, I had something of a row about that with an idiot at the Canadian Consulate, who mistakenly assumed that the Consul-General and his wife should take the places of honor to the right of the host and hostess respectively. I informed her that protocol was crystal clear as concerned a visiting prime minister and the president of a repub...”
“Former prime minister.”
“In the eyes of many she’ll always be the P.M.,” Geoffrey said.
“Be that as it may, where are they seating her?”
“To the left of Mr. Mulroney, where you see the circled number one position. Mr. De Gortari, the Mexican President, is to the right of Mrs. Mulroney. But all of this may go up in smoke, if what I hear is true.”
“What is it you hear?”
“That someone very high up may be dropping in. A surprise guest. In which case, there’ll be something of a brouhaha regarding the seating arrangements. I’ll stick to my guns regarding Mrs. Thatcher’s place of honor, of course, but...”
“How do you mean someone very high up?”
“Here,” Geoffrey said, and tapped his forefinger on the desk.
“Here in the consulate?”
“No, no. Here in the States.”
“How high up?”
“If they’d told me, it wouldn’t be a surprise anymore, would it?”
“When will they tell you?”
“If it becomes necessary to move Mrs. Thatcher, I’d imagine.”
“And when will that be?”
“I haven’t the faintest.”
“May I have a copy of this?” Worthy asked.
“I’ll have one run off,” Geoffrey said, and took the seating arrangement from him, and pressed a button on his phone console.
“I’ll want to know immediately if her position at the table is changed.”
“I’ll call the moment I hear anything.”
“Because we’ll be planning very tight security,” Worthy said, and winced as Lucy Phipps’s voice blared out of the speaker.
The third call Sonny made was to a firm called J.D. Bowles Laboratory Sales, Inc., in St. Paul, Minnesota. He spoke to someone in sales, telling her he wished to order some isopropyl alcohol. She looked up the item in the company catalogue, told him it came in 480-milliliter bottles and sold for $9.75 plus tax, how many bottles did he want? He told her he would need only one, and said he wanted one-day FedEx delivery. She said it would go out in the morning. When she asked him his name and company affiliation, he told her he was Hamilton Pierce of SeaCoast Limited and gave her the firm’s address and telephone number. She asked him what sort of company it was.
“We do research,” he said.
“Can you be a bit more specific?” she asked.
“We do a wide variety of experiments for private physicians,” he said.
“Can you tell me how you plan to use this product?” she asked.
This surprised him. Isopropyl alcohol was common rubbing alcohol, harmless even in the hundred-percent concentration stocked by a chemical supply house.
“We’re running toxicity tests on rats,” he said.
“Toxicity tests on rats,” she said, obviously writing. “Very well, sir. Someone will call you regarding billing. Meanwhile, this will go out tomorrow.”
“Thank you very much,” he said.
Nodding, he put the receiver back on its cradle.
The photography shop was located on the second floor of a brownstone on East Seventieth Street, between First and Second avenues. There was a tailor shop on the ground floor and a palm reader on the first floor, and then the photography shop at the rear of the second-floor landing. Sonny did not get there until a little past five that Friday afternoon.
A man named Angus McDermott ran the shop. Four years ago, he had prepared Francine Dumar’s suicide note from a sample of her handwriting. Sonny told him he was looking great, which wasn’t quite true. McDermott had lost a lot of weight in the past four years, and his normally ruddy complexion was now somewhat sallow, his reddish hair thinning. McDermott was gay; Sonny wondered now if he’d contracted AIDS since last he’d seen him.
“How can I help you this time?” he asked.
There was the faintest burr in his voice. He had once lived in Glasgow, Sonny knew, but he was certain the man’s heritage wasn’t Scottish; the cover name was as false as his own Krishnan Hemkar. The night he showed Sonny the perfect suicide note, handwritten on Francine’s own stationery, they got drunk together in a Third Avenue bar. In the empty hours of the night, McDermott confessed his abiding hatred for the United States, but never once mentioned what had provoked such murderous rage. Sonny got the feeling a woman was somehow responsible, but he knew better than to ask McDermott.