Jigsaw (48 page)

The burn on the side of his neck buzzed angrily. He folded Streik's papers, felt sleepy, fought against the sensation. Streik's diction, his ellipses in speech:
Peace is bad for business
. Whose business? Pagan wished he could focus harder.

The Vietnamese nun came back inside the room, looking agitated. ‘Mr Pagan, there are policemen who want to see you. I have tried to tell them you're in no condition for visitors, but they are very persistent.'

The gendarmes, he thought. Of course there would have to be cops. An explosion in the middle of Lyon was the kind of thing that would quicken their interest. He stuffed Streik's papers under his bedsheets.

‘I can't keep them away from you,' the nun said.

Pagan shrugged. He was floating again. ‘Send them in,' he said. Chewing on her lower lip, her expression one of charitable concern – an angel of mercy, he thought – she opened the door. At once the room was filled with stern men, some of them in uniform.

And in the centre, yo, stood George Nimmo.

Pagan had a moment of light-headedness, one of those jarring displacements of self caused by the combination of drugs and the appearance of George Nimmo. He looked at the crucifix on the wall, which he found too finely detailed, as if it had been cloned from a cell of Christ and not carved from simple wood.

‘Pagan,' Nimmo said.

Pagan involuntarily touched the dressing on his neck and winced. ‘George. Good to see you.'

‘What the hell are you doing here? What in God's name have you been up to?' Nimmo's face was red. He was closer to apoplexy than sanity.

‘It appears I got too near to a fire,' Pagan remarked.

‘And now you're well and truly burned,' said Nimmo, his hands clenched in anger. ‘Well and truly.'

Pagan thought: You had to give George some credit for maintaining control of his voice, even if his body revealed his true mood. Nimmo stepped forward and for a moment Pagan had the absurd thought George was about to raise a fist and strike him, but that wasn't Nimmo's way, he wasn't a man of action, he preferred to work with papers and memos and have quiet words in the right ears. His axe was a bureaucratic one.

‘Why are you in France? Why wasn't I informed? Why did I have to hear of your reckless misadventures courtesy of the Lyon Police Department?'

Pagan said nothing. Drugs distanced him from Nimmo's wrath. He was more interested in Streik's dying words than George Nimmo's full-blown rage. Even as Nimmo went on snapping and fuming, Pagan was still hearing echoes of Jake Streik.

‘These gentlemen,' and here Nimmo gestured to the congregation of law-enforcement officers, ‘are demanding to know your business in their jurisdiction. And rightly so. You don't come blundering into somebody else's backyard and bring down all kinds of destruction. You don't carry on like that, Pagan. There's protocol involved. You didn't inform me. You didn't inform these good men. No, you went in feet first as usual, you went your own damn way without regard. You're a walking disaster, Pagan. A disgrace. And I'm taking you back.'

‘Back where?'

‘Where do you think?' Nimmo stepped very close now. The hands were still fisted, the knuckles drained of blood.

‘Is this your way of saying I'm off the investigation?' Pagan asked. He raised eyebrows in a form of mock innocence.

‘Don't play silly buggers with me,' Nimmo said. ‘You know damn well what I mean. I wouldn't let you direct traffic in Kensington High Street, never mind the investigation of a bomb attack.'

‘I'm getting the picture,' Pagan said. It was strange how he managed to draw strength from Nimmo's words; the more Nimmo railed at him, the better he felt, the harder his resolve became. ‘Too bad,' he added. ‘Just as I was making headway.'

‘Headway. Is that what you call this?' Nimmo made a snorting scornful sound and gestured round the room. ‘For the benefit of our French friends here, what exactly are you doing in Lyon?'

‘Following a lead.'

‘And? And? I'm listening.'

‘Obviously somebody didn't like what I was doing, George.' For a second he had the mischievous urge to toss out the name of Caan, to throw the Ambassador on to the bonfire of Nimmo's anger, but he resisted.

‘This so-called lead – I dare say it had something to do with your raging paranoia about our American friends?'

‘Hardly raging, George. Let's just say there's a connection between the death of Bryce Harcourt and my business in Lyon.'

Nimmo unclenched his hands finally and turned to look at the assembly of French cops. He was putting on quite a little show for them, berating Pagan before their very eyes, dismissing him. Nimmo knew how to play to the gallery.

‘And this mysterious connection will lead us to Carlotta, will it?'

‘Perhaps.'

Nimmo paced around in circles, hands clenched behind his back. ‘At considerable expense to Special Branch – to say nothing of serious injury to your colleague – you pursue some nebulous lead which, in the final analysis, may or may not have something to do with Carlotta. Pardon me if I don't see the logic.'

Nimmo was quiet for a moment, apparently gathering his strength for a renewed assault. But instead he appeared to lose his momentum and stepped back among the clutch of French cops where he held a hushed conversation with a man in a long heavy overcoat, who was seemingly Nimmo's opposite number in Lyon. Pagan experienced weakness again. What happened now? Did he go back to London handcuffed to George Nimmo? Would he be escorted to the airport, there to await the next flight home? Pensioned off, banished to his flat in Holland Park. The bright side of that fate was the fact he'd have all the time in the world for Brennan Carberry, whose face drifted tantalizingly through his head. Enticing as this was, he thought: No way. Nimmo wasn't going to cast him aside. He wasn't about to quit now.
Rock and roll, Frank. Keep on trucking
.

Nimmo took a couple of steps toward the bed. ‘Right. We're agreed.'

‘Who's agreed what, George?'

‘You spend the night in the hospital. First thing in the morning, we catch the early flight to London.' He came even closer to the bed, ‘Think yourself lucky you're not being locked up, Pagan.'

‘I bless my good fortune,' Pagan said.

Nimmo shook his head. ‘You won't be blessing anything when we get back home.'

‘What do you intend, George? Public disgrace? Pagan in the pillory? Behaviour of rogue cop humiliates Commissioner? I can see the tabloids.'

Nimmo ignored this. He went out of the room, followed by the contingent of French police. Alone, Pagan lay motionless. He reached under the sheets, grabbed Streik's papers, spread them across the bed. Talk to me, Jake, he thought. Tell me more. Take me to a place beyond these scraps of detail. Show me the whole thing. Come back from the grave and
speak
to me. He looked at the papers in the attitude of a man awaiting news trumpeted from a disembodied voice at a seance.

Bryce Harcourt and Jake Streik. Carlotta and her Underground bomb. The transfers of vast sums of money. The Undertakers. Caan's complicity. He had more slippery hoops in the air than he could handle. His brain wasn't up to it. Whatever they'd pumped into him had a tidal way of coming and going. Moments of clarity and focus were eclipsed by lassitude and confusion.

He stared at Streik's handwriting. His head was clapped-out again; sleep murmured in his ears.

Chaos, he thought. If peace was bad for business, then chaos was good – if you were in the kind of business where profits were to be made from anarchy. He found himself thinking of William Caan, whose fortune, according to Martin Burr, had come from computerized weapons systems. What was it Burr had said so long ago? Scrap a new missile and a whole industry suffers? And all the sub-industries, all the subcontractors, all the research-and-development boys start to hurt as well. Factories close, weeds grow through concrete, FOR SALE signs mushroom, former high-paid executives sign on for welfare, ruin all the way down the line.

Because peace is bad for business.

This train of thought faded out on him. Caan eluded him, drifting away like a wisp of woodsmoke on a dull afternoon. His insight came to an end in a thicket of half-formed notions and tangled deductions. I'll come back to it, he thought. I'll rest, then I'll come back to it.

He shut his eyes, saw a fierce after-image of Nimmo's flaccid features, opened his eyes again at once. He didn't want Nimmo occupying his head. No. He decided that what he really wanted, what he
needed
, was to speak to Brennan; this was the druggy urge that fluttered through him now. He longed to hear her voice, make a soothing connection with her, envisage her lying across her bed in the room at the Hilton with the telephone pressed to her lips.
I don't want you to worry
, he'd say.
There's been a small accident
. Maybe he wouldn't mention it at all. Maybe he'd say what he'd considered saying before, that he loved her – an ambitious statement, one of consequence and commitment, a declaration and a risk.

He raised his face. There was a telephone on the bedside table. He doubted if it was connected to anywhere beyond the hospital switchboard, but he'd try it anyhow. He fumbled for the receiver and, to his surprise, heard a dial tone. He called the operator, had himself transferred to International Inquiries, and was presently patched through to the Hilton in London, where a receptionist answered. Pagan asked for Brennan's room number. Dismayed, he heard her line ring unanswered, on and on. He replaced the receiver, dropped his head back against the pillows and wondered where she was at this time of night. The explanation's simple, he thought. She'd gone to a theatre because that's what Americans did in London. And now she was sitting in the hotel bar nursing a nightcap and thinking thoughts of him. There: perfectly acceptable. So why didn't it silence his concern?

He felt drowsy again, but the drift towards sleep was disturbed by recurring images of Brennan and her empty room. With the lover's unbounded optimism, he dialled the Hilton again. There was still no answer from her room. He left a message with the operator, settled back, shut his eyes. She wouldn't go away. She was there. She was in front of him constantly. He tried to remember if he'd been this obsessed over Roxanne, but that whole history was strangely lost to him. He floated into shallow sleep, fought against it, forced himself awake. He needed to think. He needed to be alert. Rhodes, he thought. Who the hell was this Rhodes character who figured in Streik's death-bed thoughts? It seemed to him a matter of the utmost urgency to find out; Rhodes suddenly dominated his sluggish brain.

He reached for the telephone and dialled Billy Ewing's line at Golden Square. The Scotsman was in a spluttering mode. ‘Frank? Where the hell are you? It's like some bloody palace coup is going on here, for God's sake. Gladstone and Wright are installed in your office, going through your notes, rummaging through everything they can lay their hands on … They even had me in there for questioning. They're like the bloody Gestapo. ‘What did Pagan tell you? What secrets are you keeping from us?' And now we've got some tight-arsed bastards from Nimmo's special staff going through the whole place. Jesus.'

‘Call it the end of a very short era, Billy,' Pagan said. ‘I've got a small job for you.'

‘Frank, I was to let them know the minute you made contact—'

‘You wouldn't do that, would you, Billy?'

‘What do you think I am?'

‘Run a name for me. Rhodes. Montgomery Rhodes. An American. See if we've got anything on him. And then call me back as quick as you can at this number …' Pagan looked at the phone, read the digits to Ewing. ‘I don't know the area code for Lyon. Look it up.'

‘Listen, Frank, I'll do what I can, but I'm not sure they'll even let me within a hundred yards of a computer the way things are. They've taken over. Everything. It's like the invasion of the body snatchers.'

‘Stay calm. Do what you can, Billy.'

‘Don't hang up, Frank. There was a message for you. I took it myself. Guy called Zuboric from New York. Grumpy character.'

Zuboric. Pagan had almost forgotten. He shut his eyes. ‘And?'

‘I'll read it for you word for word.'

Ewing read in an intoning, ministerial way. No, Pagan thought. Zuboric's got it wrong. It doesn't make sense. A confusion of names, a blip in the system, a hiccup. No. No. He asked Ewing to repeat it, but before Billy could respond the line – whether severed by the hospital, or more likely by an eavesdropper in Golden Square – had gone dead. Pagan slumped back against the pillow. He shut his eyes again. Sometimes computers went mad, gremlins made mischief of the system, viruses played havoc with the links – and what came out was skewed, false. Sometimes data was inaccurately stored by the operator, a keyboard struck wrongly, a letter out of place. You heard such things all the time. You heard of mistakes, bank statements sent to the wrong person, electricity bills that amounted to impossible sums of money, you heard all kinds of computer horror stories—

And Zuboric's message—

Zuboric's message had to be one of them. Misinformation. Yes. That was the word.

But somehow he knew otherwise. And somehow he'd known all along. He kept his eyes shut. He didn't want to open them. Didn't want to think.

‘Frank …'

He shifted his head, licked his dry lips. He had one of those moments when the border crossing from reality to fiction shifts, when you find you have a visa valid for neither the dream world nor the waking one. But the touch of her fingers on the back of his hand was real enough, and so was the sound of her whispered voice, and the way lamplight created flared shadows in her hair, which she'd rearranged, pulled from her face so that no careless strands fell upon brow. She was sitting on the edge of his bed. She wore a black leather jacket, black T-shirt, faded blue jeans. She looked, he thought, both beautiful and austere, and despite the devastating message he'd received from Artie Zuboric he was filled with a yearning to touch her.