'Careful, Alex,' said his mother.
'He's okay.'
'Let your brother have a go now.'
The disappointed boy climbed out and his brother lowered himself in. After Adam had answered his questions about what this knob did and what that switch was for, the grateful mother and her two excited sons disappeared into the hotel.
Adam slipped into the Mercedes, switched on the engine and pulled away from the kerb. Then he noticed the packet on the passenger seat and grinned, stopped the car.
He climbed out and went over to the Rover and left the packet jammed under its windscreen wiper.
Ten minutes later the pen pusher and his partner came out of the rear entrance and saw that the Gullwing was gone.
'Fuck it!' shouted pen pusher, dreading the report that he would have to file highlighting his failure. 'Fuck it!'
They opened up the Rover and climbed in.
'What's that?' asked pen pusher's colleague.
'Where?'
'Under the bloody wiper.'
There, as a final taunt to their dismal failure, was the remains of a bag of chips wrapped in the faded newsprint of yesterday's paper.
'Very clever,' said the official voice on the telephone. 'And very childish.'
'Why was I being followed?' asked Adam, the receiver resting on his shoulder as he looked out of the apartment window to the street below. The blonde he fancied in the jewellers would soon be going home, her day's work complete. He still hadn't angled out how he was going to introduce himself to her. Probably the F40. She was definitely a Ferrari type, the Gullwing being too noisy and too basic. He decided then that he would browse in the jeweller's tomorrow, leave the red coloured sports car at the kerb where she could definitely see it. Maybe ask her to show him something in the window.
'You were told to keep out of sight.'
'Nobody's going to recognise me.'
'As a soldier you obey orders.'
'I did. I’m strictly on leave. That doesn’t mean being trapped in my flat.'
'No, you were told to lie low, not draw attention to yourself. Those were your orders. In the three days since you've been back, you've done everything except stay at home. Nightclubs, casinos, trips to restaurants for lunch. Usually with companions who are, let's say, more than noticeable…,' the puerile envy in his voice made Adam smile ',…not exactly keeping a low profile, are we?'
‘Right.
'What?' demanded official voice.
'I don't need nursemaids.'
'What makes you so… The trouble with you, Nicholson, if your records are anything to go by, is that you don't give a damn. That you've got a bloody death wish. Now, some people say that makes you an exceptional soldier. I say that makes you a liability. I don't mind you getting killed. But I don't want half a dozen innocent bystanders gunned down with you in your blaze of glory. You're to stay in. That's an order.'
'For how long?'
'Until we tell you different.'
Adam heard the phone go dead. He returned the receiver to its base and went back to his vigil. In the background, from the kitchen, he heard Lily preparing his evening meal.
'What's for supper?' he shouted.
'Just you wait and see,' came her muffled reply.
It was a game they played, she never telling him what she was cooking, he always asking. In the six years she had been with him, he had never been disappointed. It was simple English cooking, so different from the haute cuisine he lived on in the restaurants. But it was the best food he knew.
He decided not to stay in. Even if he was recognised because of that picture, he would far prefer to be out in the open, in the freedom of his own space where he could defend himself without hindrance..
He dreaded whatever they his Command had in store for him. He regretted not going back to Northern Ireland; he had become an outsider.
The depression would come quickly; it always did when things were out of his control. It was his dark half, the part of his soul that plunged him into despair and solitude. He thought of his dead twin Marcus, of his other spirit that always shared his life and lived within his body.
In silence, as he waited for the girl across the road, he cursed the unknown security officer who had carelessly allowed his photo to be splashed across the front page of the Times.
Ch. 7
She'd been waiting for him at the airport; frustrated when the Tannoys had barked out that the United Airlines' flight from Washington would be late.
The frustration had remained bottled up, turning to anger as a second announcement informed her that there would be a further delay due to traffic problems over Denver.
'It's always Denver,' Billie thought. 'What's so special about Denver?'
Phil Tucker came through the gate thirty minutes later, more than ninety minutes late.
'Billie Knutsford?' he asked, approaching her cautiously.
'Yes.' Dammit, she nearly said 'sir' again.
'Hi' he smiled, offering his hand. 'Phil Tucker. Say, I've got a flight out of here in another fifty minutes. We aren't going to have time to get to the office.' There was no way he was going to stay overnight; not if he wanted a peaceful weekend at home with Jean, his wife. She always hated him going out of Washington. 'Can we find somewhere private here?'
'Sure. How about my car?'
'Great.'
She led him out into the car park, towards a bright yellow and red 1989 Jeep Renegade. Billie unlocked the central locking and they both climbed in.
'These discs're for you.' Tucker took a case of discs from his briefcase. 'They're just slices from our data base in Langley. I need you to run some checks on them.'
'What am I looking for?'
'You understand this is top secret. I mean, no-one.'
'Yes.'
'Good. Okay if I smoke?'
She nodded. She hated cigarettes and it would take days to get the smell out of the car. She watched him take out a Camel from the soft pack and light it with a Zippo. Then he told her about Reindeer. As he spoke, she opened a window. There was more smog in here than San Fran, she thought.
'But who was he?' she asked when Tucker had finished.
'A nobody. Someone we'd forgotten about.'
'Important enough for someone else to remember. Lapland's in Finland, isn't it?'
Tucker nodded. 'Reindeer was over sixty. Been drawing a pension for ten years. We’d retired him. I guess it wasn’t one of the elves. It was a professional hit. Clean, right on the button. Anyway, he left an envelope for his wife, to be opened if anything happened to him. She rang on the number he'd left.'
‘He was an asset?’
‘Sure’.
‘Sleeper?’
‘Not really. Just someone we’d call on if we needed local information.
‘Was he productive?’
‘We never used him. We just had him there in case.’
'How many others have we got out there like him?'
'A few. Not as many as we had. Not since we turned to satellite surveillance under the Carter Administration. But enough, in case we ever needed them. Anyway, a lot of them were just stuck out there in the field, they'd integrated into their communities, there was no way we could get them out. Mostly locals anyway.’
'One old guy gets killed. Doesn't mean the Russians, or anyone else, took him out. Could just be a local murder, an accident that we're taking the wrong way.'
'No. Too professional.'
'Was "Reindeer is dead" an open code?' asked Billie. This was CIA jargon for a code concealed within an innocuous message. The Japanese had established this technique successfully during the Second World War, just after their attack on Pearl Harbour. "East wind rain" had been the sentence, a grim warning to their embassy staff in Washington to destroy sensitive documents as the two countries were about to enter into war. Such codes were being used regularly by the activist groups on the Californian campus'.