He had thought the men good and strong, the woman pretty — there had been a moment when her hand had rested on his thigh as she made a point of emphasis, and excitement brimmed in him — and there had been trust. If he was captured and talked, they would be destroyed, and if they were taken and went down under interrogation, he would be broken. The woman had limped, and had said, matter-of-factly, she had been tortured long ago, which had clinched the trust for him. He had left them, the men wrapping him in bear grips, the woman kissing him full on the mouth, and carried away the fifteen kilos of explosives with the detonators, in waterproof paper sealed with masking tape.
With the parcel in the car's boot, the driver had negotiated narrow, winding roads and brought him to the port of Castro Urdiales. There, he had sat in a café and sipped coffee with a florid-faced Englishman, who had failure written at his mouth and defeat in his eyes. The price, without haggling, was agreed at twenty-five thousand American dollars, and the parcel had been slipped from its place on his knees under the table into the grasp of the Englishman, and the money was given over. From the near-empty café's window, he could see the grey skies over the harbour and the spray climbing over the outer groyne. The launch was pointed out to him — it nestled against a pontoon but shook in the swell.
He had been taken back, through the night, towards Barcelona, and in the dawn, with rain in the air, near to a station on the city's railway, he had suggested that the driver might wish to relieve his bladder after the long drive. Then he had come behind the man, taken his throat in his hands and strangled him. He had torched the car and left the body in undergrowth at the end of an uncleared track; the killing was to protect his identity. He had taken the train, with the day's early commuters, and after two changes had reached the airport, and forgotten the man who had driven him.
As he presented his ticket — best to travel in a tourist mass because with a group the scanning of passports at his destination would be slack — a ground hostess smiled at him, and he smiled back, but his eyes were on the bursting cleavage under her blouse.
She giggled and he laughed, as if he was going on holiday, took back his ticket, walked on and was buried in the flow of tourists.
He thought the package was drugs — heroin from Afghanistan or cocaine from Colombia — and Dennis Foulkes didn't give a damn. He was broke, and likely to be formally bankrupted. The cash stashed in a plastic bag in a galley cupboard would be enough to hold off the creditors, and protect his proudest possession.
She was the Joker of the Pack, and Dennis Foulkes loved her with passion. The money paid to him would hold off the inevitability of their parting. She was a motor-cruiser with two Volvo 480 h.p. engines that gave her a maximum speed, in good conditions, of thirty-three knots. She was a little over thirteen metres from bow to stern, with a beam of fractionally more than four metres. Inside those specifications were a cockpit, a saloon, a galley and dinette, three master staterooms — two of them en-suite — and crammed into every corner of her hull were the luxuries of wealth…He had had wealth. Money had dripped off him when he had run a prospering Rover car dealership, and he had not heard the warning sirens — eye off the ball — because he had just shelled out £265,000, paid without a loan, and he had taken the berth at the Kingswear marina on the south Devon coast, and had thought his business could run itself.
What a bloody fool. The car factory had collapsed in insolvency, what was in his showroom couldn't be given away, and he had not seen it coming. House gone — repossessed when the mortgage could not be met. Wife gone. All he had to remind him of what he had once been was the Joker of the Pack, which boasted the best electronic navigation systems, cocktail cabinets in solid wood, carpets and a bed in the biggest master stateroom that he could have shagged three little beauties in and not felt it a crowd. He did chartering. Any sod who'd pay could get a ride across the Channel, and he wasn't too proud to do day trips to Plymouth in the west or Lyme Regis to the east. He was for hire, and each pound or euro he was paid helped to keep his love under his feet. And if there were no punters, too early in the season, just a package wrapped in waterproof paper and bound with masking tape — stacked at the back of the galley cupboard — Dennis Foulkes wasn't losing sleep. The nightmare in his life was that his creditors at the bank or the mortgage company would hear of the Joker of the Pack, send in the bailiffs and flog her off dirt cheap to settle against the million, might be two, that he owed the bank and the building society — but a drip of cash showed willing and would keep them off his bloody back…Necessity, and love, dictated that he had made no judgements on the man who had sat with him in the café overlooking the harbour at Castro Urdiales.
The Joker of the Pack shuddered under him in the crested waves of a force six, might be seven, and he was far out in the Bay of Biscay and on course for a landfall sighting of the French coast at the Île d'Ouessant and then the run, God willing in calmer waters, across the Channel and into the Dart estuary.
He reflected, hanging on to the wheel as she bounced on the swell and water cascaded on to the bridge's windows, that the girl who had come tripping down the pier at Kingswear to arrange all this hadn't seemed the type tied into drugs importation. The guy had, cold sort of bastard for all his smiling, and he'd left a taste of fear behind him that was still in Dennis Foulkes's throat — but he'd thought her a nice girl. A pity about that awful bloody scar on her face.
He kept her shoulders and back always in view. Jamal was beside her, but it was the woman on whom he concentrated his attention.
A hundred and fifty yards behind her and Jamal, it was hard for Syed to follow her, but he had the skills. Syed's home, where he lived with his parents and where he worked in the kitchen of a fast-food kebab store, was north-west London, Hanger Lane, but the skills he now used had been learned on the teeming streets of Peshawar. Pakistan was where he had travelled two years before, aged nineteen, to visit family, and there he had been recruited. He had been putty in the hands of those who had noted him: four months before he had flown to the homeland of his father and mother, his elder brother had been attacked on a late-night bus, punched and kicked unconscious by white yobs — why? Because his brother was a Muslim, Asian, a 'bastard bloody Paki', the family had spent weeks travelling to and from the West Middlesex Hospital to see a young man who, for three days, had lingered close to death with tubes and drips keeping him alive. His brother was now recovered in body, but seldom left his Hanger Lane home. For what had been done to him, Syed had no regrets at having accepted the advances of the recruiters.
In Peshawar he had been trained in the arts of following a man or woman and remaining unnoticed. Ahead of him, the woman guided Jamal through the streets in the centre of the town and into the wide square, where the first buds were on the trees, and led him towards the steps up to the shopping centre. Using what he had been taught in Peshawar, Syed was in place to satisfy himself that the woman had no tail on her. If there had been a tail from the security people, he would have spotted the signs from as far back as a hundred and fifty yards. He would have seen men pass women and move forward without acknowledging a colleague, and men or women lift their hands to speak into their wrists, and the loitering of those men and women with newspapers who did not read the columns of print. They had believed him an excellent pupil in Peshawar, and told him so *. It was the first day that Syed had met others from the group, and the first time since his return from Pakistan that he had been called forward. He thought, his initial impression, that the woman believed she owned too great an importance with them, that she was flawed by the scar that marked her out and would make her remembered, but those decisions had been taken by others.