Krysalis: Krysalis (44 page)

When Mr. Smoochums was already some yards away, his wife managed to disentangle her bag. She tripped, still giggling. As she did so, Tom came smoothly out of his seat to take her by the arm, maneuvering himself between the woman and David. His jacket sleeve brushed David’s own. In his right hand he held what looked like a leather wallet.

The boorish businessman chose that moment to stand up, reaching for the overhead locker. Because he had been sitting in an aisle seat, the effect was to bring him into the line of the drunken woman’s awkward stumble, throwing Tom Burroughs off balance.

David saw the look on the FBI agent’s face and for a second could not understand his rage. Then Tom’s own words came back to him,
count cents!
and he knew why he was angry, just as he knew why the businessman’s face had turned blue and he was now staggering
back into his seat, fighting for breath…. So David grabbed the businessman’s briefcase and, holding it in front of him like a shield, yelled at the top of his voice,
“Steward! Emergency! There’s a dead man back here! He’s been murdered. Help!”

Disjointed realizations flooded through his mind. Burroughs had been working for the enemy all along. He’d somehow managed to dispose of Pattmore and then come to the bar, intending to go to London right from the start. But before David could analyze the knowledge, he remembered, just in time, that he was still hemmed into the row of seats. Now he retreated as far as he could, until his back came up against the hull.
“Murder, murder!”
he shouted again. Tom Burroughs turned on the balls of his feet and lunged at him, holding out his wallet. After a second of disbelief, David’s brain alerted him to the truth: somewhere in the leather there had to be a poisoned pin, maybe a blade, his only chance was to stay out of range.

“Stop!” he heard a voice shout from the front of the plane, but he dared not be distracted from his assailant. “Security!” the same voice shouted. “Stop or I shoot.”

David parried Burroughs’ next thrust with the briefcase, pushing him aside. Burroughs lowered his right hand; David caught a flash of something metal as the American prepared to lunge up, beneath his guard, but as he did so, from somewhere near the front of the cabin came a loud “plop!” The woman screamed in pain and fell across Burroughs, bearing him down, and he sank to the floor, where he stayed, pinned by her weight, until stewards dragged him away, leaving David with a drunk and a corpse for company in the world’s most prestigious aircraft.

David could not move. He felt full of toxins and aches and pains. There was this voice, but he couldn’t focus on it. At last he hauled himself into the aisle, to be met by a man he vaguely recognized as a fellow passenger who’d been sitting up front throughout the flight; he was in the act of holstering his pistol. “You’ve killed her,” David muttered. Even as he spoke he was angered by the knowledge of how feeble he must sound.

“I doubt it. The bullet’s just a bag full of sand, you see. Safe to fire even while we’re flying.” The speaker bent down to check. “Yes, she’s only stunned.” He stood up again. “What was all that about, anyway?”

David, still too shocked to speak, merely shook his head.

“From where I stood, it looked as if someone was trying to kill you.”

Yes, that was right. They meant to stop him, and Burroughs had been part of it.
Who was he working for, really?

The security guard turned his attention to the businessman, who now sat white-faced with his eyes closed. “Got the wrong chap, by the look of it. Now he
is
dead, if you like. Can I have your name and address, please, sir?”

David complied.
They’ll do anything to stop you. Anything at all. Your faith, against their force.

“Occupation?”

“Uh … civil servant. Actually …”

Faith? Do you have faith in Anna!

The security guard had been writing details in a notebook. Now, hearing hesitation in David’s voice, he paused. “Yes?”

They will do whatever they have to, to prevent you from reaching the woman you love.

David realized why he felt so uncomfortable: he had been holding his breath. “I’m about to resign,” he said.

CHAPTER
35

Albert cut up steak for
boeuf bourgignon
while he planned his assault on Kleist’s Hampstead house.

He liked dealing with raw meat, its sogginess, its moisture, above all, the smell, which lingered on the skin long afterward. These views Montgomery shared. The stout tortoiseshell sat on the drainboard, eyeballing his master in the hope of a tidbit. Albert grinned at him. “Hypnotic puss,” he murmured. “You’d be a match for our Gerhard any day, wouldn’t you? Stop looking at me like that.”

But he tossed Montgomery a piece of prime steak anyway. He could afford such extravagant generosity now, or at least he would soon be able to.

He’d just begun to mix the steak with seasoned flour, taking his time over it, relishing the way the blood supped up gluten to make his fingers sticky, when the phone rang. He gave his hands a cursory wipe with a piece of paper towel and glared at Montgomery, “Don’t you
daze!”

Albert lifted the receiver from its wall-mounted rest.

“Go now, right this minute.”

Fox, in a phone booth, urgent, panicking.

“What’s—?”

“M Center’s gone berserk. Their cipher traffic’s splitting our machines apart. Redland’s on the warpath.”

A long breath escaped Albert’s lips. “When?”

“Eight o’clock. There’s a connection. Tell you what it is later. And for the love of God,
be careful.”

“Don’t forget to warn off the police.”

“Sorry, can’t. Security overload.”

“Shit!”

Fortunately he had dressed for the occasion earlier, so he did not even have to think, just lights off, car keys, out.

He drove carefully but fast, avoiding the main arteries and making every effort to keep his anger reined in, but that was hard. When they sent a man to do this kind of job, they always tipped off the police first. Routine. High on the “To Do” checklist. But this time Albert was on his own.

The phrase Fox had used, “Security overload,” meant they had reason to be afraid of leaks. Albert was disclaimable.

Hampstead coming up … he forced himself to review his reconnaissance of the area.

After the meeting with Redman he’d spent the afternoon idling his way around Hampstead, guidebook in hand, to all intents and purposes an ordinary tourist. Kleist’s house was halfway up a short hill. Trees, grass, big imposing houses set well back. Tiresome about the red boxes, each residence (he had somehow stopped thinking of these sprawling properties as mere houses) had a burglar alarm prominently displayed.

Trees in the street. Trees in the small front garden. More of them visible over a first-floor gable, around back. Great cover. An Edwardian pile, all bricks and red tiles, with fresh-looking white paint, privet hedge, a mixture of healthy yellows and greens, to the left, close-boarded fence to the right, no gravel to worry about, unlike Eddy Clapham’s ait.

Plenty of other things to worry about, though. Burglar alarms …

While still some yards short of his destination Albert switched off the engine along with the lights, allowing his car to roll until at last he was parked in the spot he had marked down earlier. No more planning, no hesitations, just get in, target, penetrate.

He slipped through the darkness, a liquid, elemental part of it, flowing in silence around to the front of Kleist’s house. The front garden was long, no other part of London offered such priceless facilities to nocturnal intruders, and that of course was why he now had to deal with a professionally installed alarm system.

He did not pause for breath until he had skirted the side of the house and reached an area of shadow at the back. Albert looked up. No lights. Perhaps the housekeeper had gone out for the evening, it wasn’t yet ten o’clock. Check it out.

He found a tenace, onto which opened a pair of French windows. Albert risked a burst of light from his torch and made a face: metal shutter gates on the inside. But almost certainly there weren’t any pressure pads. Another flash showed him only black rectangles, unmarred by the telltale white rubber circles. Risk it. No choice, anyway. Risk it.

He had passed the SAS regiment’s Advanced Lock Neutralization course and he came better equipped
than most burglars, but this part of the job was child’s play. Mushroom-shaped blob of putty on the outside of the pane, a glazier’s blade for the circle, one smart intake of breath, a tap … and there was a hole large enough to admit his hand.

No alarm went off. Albert smiled. People always thought they had done enough. They did not know it, but they had never done enough. It was only a matter of time before someone finally got away with the Mona Lisa.

Instinct made him turn his head. Behind him, the back garden—dark and peaceful. Beyond that, another house framed against the dim lighting in the street where he had parked. Upstairs, a single window was lit. Albert knew himself to be horribly exposed. What if the night owl behind the window chanced to look out? … don’t think about that.
No time.

The hole he had made was above the lock of the metal shutter gates but he couldn’t see a keyhole on the outside. Fortunately Albert’s hands were small; he managed to insert two fingers through one of the diamond-shaped gaps between the struts. The shutter lock yielded at his third attempt with the skeleton key and the fastening of the French doors themselves was a cinch.

He had started to sweat and he did not know why. He looked over his shoulder. Nothing. Only the house beyond the wall, where that light still burned. That ominous light.

Albert stepped back, wiping beads of perspiration from his face. What kind of alarm was this? He increased the odds in his favor by removing one entire pane of glass from the right-hand door, enabling him to
pass through easily when the time came. That left the metal gates, unlocked but still shut, to circumvent.

Now he was tingling all over. He jerked his head around. Everything seemed the same. No it didn’t. Someone stood at the illuminated first-floor window in the house behind. Seconds ticked by, but the silhouette remained motionless. Was the person looking out, or did he have his back to the window?

Ignore him.

Since when have you ever ignored your instincts? The police don’t know about this. Yet! Stay alive!

He had hunches but no choices, and Albert found himself cursing Fox. He lacked an alibi, resources, time … a minute passed. Too long. Use the shadows, just
penetrate!

He made himself get on with the job. There were the wires! At the top of the gates, two of them, one at each side, which meant more glaziery and the removal of the other pane of glass. Albert took a closer look. The wires ended in square metal contacts, one male, one female, which linked when the gates were closed. Break the contact, and …

The wires extended right and left along the gates at the height of a man’s mouth. They were attached to the struts by metal brackets. Screwdriver, some fancy double-jointedness on the part of Albert, who caught each bracket as he prized it loose, and the wires, still joined, hung in loops. Now, when he slid the shutters open, the struts moved independently of the wires, leaving the electric contact solid.

Behind him he heard a window open and a voice called “Who’s there?”

Albert immobilized himself.

“Who is that? I can see you.”

Long pause. The voice belonged to a man but it was high-pitched and quavery. Old? No, not old, but … something weird about it.

Albert ground his teeth, eyes flickering between the French doors and the window of the house behind. Now it was open, a shadow leaned out, probing the gloom. Albert did calculations with the speed of light. No alternative.

One last potential obstacle remained: contact pads under the rug beyond the windows.

Acrobatics.
Crash dive!

He retreated a dozen paces, took a deep breath, and launched himself forward. As he reached the hole where the glass had been he was traveling horizontally, diving beneath the coiled wires, over the rug, to land on his stomach halfway down Gerhard Kleist’s living room.

He was into the trap. And now he had bare seconds in which to work his way out of it.

Albert knew all the places where people keep burglar-alarm control boxes. They have to be near an entrance, so that when the owner comes back to an empty house he can shut down the system within forty-five seconds of entry. Most householders, worried by the thought of arousing neighbors and police unnecessarily, keep them mounted by the front door. Albert sprinted along the hallway and discovered that Kleist was the norm. Another skeleton key, into the control box,
twist,
safe.

He had been in the house for thirteen seconds.

Cut the phone. Junction box on the skirting board, one kick, two kicks, done.

Den, kitchen, dining room, study, each room got two seconds and a burst of light, nothing,
up!

Waiting room, consulting room,
yes.
What was happening
outside? Had the watcher called the police? Was he wasting time trying to phone Kleist’s housekeeper?