Sanders watched him go, in an agony of sorts: should he stay and wait for Devereux, or follow his charges? A low growl left him, and he stalked back down the corridor after them.
It took Jilly less than a minute to finish her first gin. She examined the tall glass, still half full of unmelted ice.
‘Better make it a double next time,’ she said. She caught the waiter’s attention and he walked smilingly towards her, knowing a potentially good customer when he saw one. Jilly ordered her double, but Hepton and Sanders shook their heads. Hepton was nursing a half-pint of lager, Sanders a tomato juice. They were seated at a corner table — at Sanders’ insistence — from which they could watch the door to the hotel lobby and still have a view of the other occupants of the cocktail lounge. Not that there were many occupants to watch. The resident pianist was playing to a table of four well-dressed women, their clothes younger than their years. They applauded every tune, but quietly, politely, and he bowed his head each time, accepting gracefully, as he hoped to accept their drinks and their tips.
Two businessmen stood at the bar, slowly smoking cigars, sipping whiskies. They glanced around the room occasionally, looking first at the table of women and then over towards Jilly. They weren’t hopeful; just looking.
‘This is nice,’ Jilly said without much attempt at sincerity.
Then Sanders, who had been the most subdued of the three, almost leapt from his seat, waving frantically towards the door, where Cam Devereux was standing. Devereux saw him and approached the table. Sanders sat down again, looking relieved and more animated again. Devereux squeezed into the booth beside Hepton. He had washed, changed his clothes and combed his hair. He had also had time to think, and was more wary than ever, as his first question showed.
‘Who did you say you were?’
But the waiter was walking briskly in their direction, awaiting Devereux’s order.
‘Glenlivet, plenty of ice,’ Devereux said, just as briskly. When the waiter had gone, he repeated his question. Sanders was about to respond, but Hepton beat him to it.
‘I’m Martin Hepton. This is Jill Watson.’
‘And you both work for the Foreign Office, too?’
‘No,’ said Jilly. ‘We’re friends of Mickey.’
‘Mickey? You mean Mike Dreyfuss? How long have you known him?’
‘Since school,’ Jilly answered.
Devereux nodded slowly. ‘I haven’t known him more than six months,’ he said. ‘But he seemed like a great guy.’
‘No need for the past tense,’ Sanders said. ‘He’s still alive, remember.’
‘Yeah.’ Devereux’s voice was like melting ice. His drink arrived and he gulped at it.
‘This is a nice hotel,’ Sanders noted aloud. ‘It must be costing you a fortune.’
Devereux smiled and looked straight at Sanders as if to say: I know what your game is. ‘I’m not paying for it,’ he admitted. ‘My employers are picking up the tab. Necessary R and R.’
Sanders was relentless. ‘Is it necessary?’
‘Hell, yes,’ Devereux said loudly. ‘You ever see guys you’d gotten to know torched in the blink of an eye? Guys you respected suddenly dead, and all the time they’re dying you think maybe you can do something to help, but you can’t? Jesus!’ His face was red now, and his voice had grown deeper. There was a silence at the table while they waited for him to calm down.
‘Another drink?’ asked Hepton, whose own glass was empty.
‘Look,’ Devereux said, ‘let’s just cut the shit, okay? What do you want?’
Hepton didn’t know quite where to start, but both Jilly and Sanders had turned to him, expecting him to speak. ‘Major Dreyfuss telephoned us,’ he began. ‘He was wondering what you know about the crash.’
‘What’s it to you anyway?’
‘Our lives are in danger,’ Jilly said quickly, ‘and we want to know why. We’re scared.’
Devereux seemed confused. ‘Your lives?’
‘And that of Mike Dreyfuss,’ Hepton continued. ‘You see, I work at the control base for the Zephyr satellite, and somehow that satellite is tied up with the Argos shuttle. It looks as though the shuttle was trying to tap into Zephyr. We don’t know why. Maybe Zephyr was doing something — something secret and something somebody wanted to know about.’
‘Send a satellite to trap a satellite, huh?’
Hepton smiled. ‘Maybe. But then the shuttle crashed, making the whole thing look like a suicide mission.’
‘Not suicide,’ Devereux said sharply, examining his empty glass. ‘Murder. Sabotage, if you like.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Hell, I don’t know why I’m telling you this... or maybe I do.’
He paused again, as if thinking things through. Then he began to speak.
‘The day of the launch,’ he said, ‘some new guy turned up in the control room. He had a console tucked away in a far corner. A console they’d brought in the previous week. Well, he told me his name, but not much else. I can’t even remember now what he said his name was. He knew what he was doing, though; I mean, he knew how to operate the computer, but he wasn’t like one of us. I took a look at his screen that day, and he was in touch with the onboard computer. It was as if he knew something we didn’t.’
‘Such as?’ asked Hepton.
‘Such as that the whole onboard computer program had been fixed before the shuttle went up, and all it needed was the touch of the right buttons in the right order to bring a doomsday code into operation.’
‘A doomsday code?’ The question was Jilly’s.
‘Self-destruct,’ Hepton explained. ‘Zephyr has one too, in case it falls into the wrong hands.’
Sanders was enthralled. ‘So this man caused the shuttle to malfunction?’
Devereux was staring into his glass still. He’d played these scenes out a hundred times before in his head. ‘You should have seen his monitor. It was like a Christmas tree, all these lights...’
There was a pause. Hepton broke it. ‘Did you tell anyone about this?’ He was thinking how closely Devereux’s story followed his own, or even Paul Vincent’s.
‘Yes,’ Devereux said. ‘That was when they strongly suggested that I take a holiday.’
Hepton nodded. ‘So what’s it all about, Cam?’
‘Hell, I don’t know. I don’t want to know.’ Devereux looked up from his glass at last. ‘No, that’s a lie. I do want to know. I can tell you this: that wasn’t a comms satellite Argos was launching. It was something else, something secret. Something for the military. There were a couple of the chiefs on site to watch the launch...’
Hepton remembered the brass who had watched over his own side of things. It couldn’t be a coincidence.
‘... and I figured the satellite must be some kind of intelligence-gatherer. Maybe a communications intercept.’
‘Did the rest of the crew know?’
‘The ground staff knew, or at least we guessed.’
‘But what about the shuttle crew?’
‘Well, Mike Dreyfuss didn’t know. But as for the rest of them...’ Devereux shrugged his shoulders. ‘What does it matter, they’re dead now.’ He turned suddenly and held his glass aloft, yelling towards the waiter, ‘Another one of these!’ Then he looked back at Hepton. ‘Have I told you anything you didn’t know?’
‘Oh yes,’ Hepton answered thoughtfully. ‘Quite a lot.’ There was one thing, one innocuous thing Devereux had said, that kept echoing in his head. A communications intercept. Something didn’t ring true, but he couldn’t think just what.