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“With tragic consequences in London.” The other person in the pool was a round-cheeked man called Allen Falk. Falk, who had wavy hair, oiled and styled in a way that suggested the mid-1950s, had advised the last two Presidents and the present incumbent on Central American matters. He was an influential counsellor whose love affairs were as public as his professional life was wrapped in mystery. He was said to have parlayed his leverage in The White House into a crucial role in defining CIA policy in Central America.

Nobody really knew the extent of Falk's power. How far it reached was a matter of ongoing rumour. In his social and sexual life he dallied with actresses, lady novelists, and on one occasion a beautiful pop singer who later had a nervous breakdown. Falk's fame was of a curiously American kind. Those things of substance he might have achieved played no part in it; only the margins of his life – his women, his cologne, the make of his sunglasses – were taken into account by the gods who decide the credentials of celebrity.

Merkandome, who was approaching his fifty-seventh year, got out of the pool. He was in good shape for his age, better than Al Falk, who was slightly plump and relied on tailors more than exercise for his appearance. Falk swam in his ungainly way to the side of the pool. The stench of chlorine was heavy in the air.

Merkandome draped a towel round his shoulders. “Those are the accidents we learn to live with, Al,” he said in his New England accent. “Tragedies are an occupational hazard. You should know that by now. You should also know that no study can take into account every possible human factor. In this case, a sick German's sexual peccadilloes. Incomplete input, Al, equals incomplete equation.”

Falk would personally have preferred another plan of action from the start, but Merkandome was the expert in plausibility studies, not he. It was the Grim Reaper who created models and ran them through computers in his private lab in a grubby building owned by a front called Dome Electronics in Wilmington, Delaware. The CIA knew the building well because Merkandome was a major consultant to the agency even though he was no longer on any official payroll these days. For thirty years he'd worked at Langley, an organisation man.

In 1961 he had been involved in planning the operation that turned out to be the fiasco at the Bay of Pigs. For the rest of his life Merkandome lived with the idea that not only had he failed to bring down Castro but he had also provided that sonofabitch with one of his most glorious public relations victories – the chance to gloat over the defeat of American-backed forces.

“I pay bright young graduates from MIT a lot of money to run plausibility studies, Al. They don't leave stones unturned. They're smart fellows. More than that, though, they're
thorough
. And give me thorough over smart every time.”

Al Falk climbed up out of the pool, reached for a towel, began to dry himself off. His pectorals sagged, a gloomy fact he noticed in an absent-minded way. “If we hadn't needed the hardware, we wouldn't have needed Ruhr,” he remarked. Falk hated conditionals. They cluttered a man's life.

“Sure, but we needed the hardware,” Merkandome said. “Every single study came up with that, Al. Without hardware, there's no good pretext to go in and get the job done. We worked it through from hundreds of angles. For example. We considered the phony kidnapping of a Senator's son by Cuban agents. We played with the idea of poisoning the water-supply to the US base at Guantanamo and blaming it on Castro. We went through one scenario after another, Al. Some plausible. Some downright stupid. Most of them far too soft. You don't have to hear them all. What it always came back to was the notion of our own shores being menaced. You threaten a fellow in his own back yard, and he becomes irate. Any action he takes to defend his life and property is justifiable. That was the strongest concept of all. But we didn't figure Ruhr's weakness into our equations. How could we? We didn't know about it.”

Allen Falk tossed his towel aside. He looked up at the glass ceiling, beyond which sultry afternoon clouds clung to a weak yellow sun. “Apparently nobody knew,” he said.

“See? The human factor,” Merkandome remarked.

Fuck the human factor
, Falk thought. Why weren't things always cut and dry? Why were they so damned ragged? Falk, even though he was a master of court intrigue and knew how to play the byzantine game of White House politics, nevertheless longed for simplicity at times; a world in which all your plans actually worked – what a terrific place that would be. People always considered Falk a complicated man. They were wrong – he was a simple man in complex circumstances.

Falk got to his feet. He thought of the cops dead in that London suburb, the people injured, the property destroyed. The trouble was that everything had its price. Especially freedom. He had no intention of cancelling the programme now, even if he wanted to, and he didn't. Too much was already involved, too much invested. And not just money.

He glanced at the Grim Reaper and said, “The show goes on.”

“They said you were a trooper, Al,” John Merkandome replied.

London

Shortly before midnight, at a well-preserved eighteenth-century house overlooking the Thames in Chelsea, Jean-Paul Chapotin slipped his key inside the lock, opened the door, stepped into a narrow hall carpeted in vile red. He placed his briefcase on the three-legged table in the hall, then entered the sitting-room, which might have been decorated by a fop. Eighteenth-century furniture was permissible, to be admired even, but Chapotin loathed the powder-blue walls and ceiling and the curtains the colour of a new moon.

He sat on the sofa, which was too narrow for a man of his bulk, but the whole house was too narrow and cramped. He made a telephone call to his wife Gabrielle in Paris. Gabrielle, who would be wearing whatever absurd garment had been mandated by the queens who ruled
haute couture
, answered in a voice made dreamy by tranquillisers.

“I have to stay here another day,” Chapotin said.

“Then I'll see you tomorrow?”

“Yes, yes.” Chapotin heard a floorboard creak at the top of the stairs. “Is everything well?”

“Why shouldn't it be?”

Chapotin shrugged. Conversations with his wife had become impossibly dull over the years. What had once been wild adoration had dwindled during the course of their twenty-year marriage to the kind of mutual tolerance that communicates itself best in silence; and when silence failed, there were always domestic trivialities to crowd the minutes. The plumbing in the house near the Bois de Boulogne, the servant problem at the country estate in Provence, the drunken behaviour of a certain stable-hand at the stud farm in the Loire Valley.

“Will I pick you up at the airport?” she asked.

“Send a car.”

The conversation terminated. He was weary suddenly, and stretched his legs. He yawned. Once again, from the upper part of the house, he heard the creak of a floorboard.

He rose, walked into the hallway, looked up the flight of stairs.

“Melody?” he said.

It was a silly name, he thought. The only thing remotely musical about Melody was her love of the noise made by cash-registers ringing, the song of money, Chapotin's money. But, dear God, the little English débutante was beautiful in a way Chapotin, normally a sensible man of moderate inclinations, found irresistible.

She appeared on the landing, a vague, skinny girl whose large blue eyes, alas empty, dominated her features. She wore an ostrich boa – selected, no doubt, from one of the “junk” shops in the neighbourhood and charged to Chapotin's account – and a 1920s flapper dress with shimmering fringes. She had on very bright pink shoes. Her taste in clothing and interior design was, charitably, eclectic. Her moussed hair was pressed down on her skull and artfully arranged around her ears.

“Ahoy,” she said.

Chapotin was always in two minds about his mistress. The accountant in him wanted to dump her; but the libertine couldn't bear to part with this vacuous, sexy girl. She came down the stairs slowly, trailing the boa behind her.

“Kiss kiss.” She stood on the bottom step.

Chapotin kissed her. She tasted of baby soap and vermouth and was completely desirable.

“Take me places, Chappie. You never take me anywhere. Fly me to new continents.”

“Where would you like to go?” he asked. He could hardly wait to undress her and have her; the lust he experienced was impossible.

“Paree,” she said. “
Naturellement.
”

“I have a little problem with that one,
chérie.
”

“Melly's stuck in boooooring old London while Chappie jets all over creation,” she said.

“Soon we'll go to Hawaii.”

“Luaus chill me. Grass skirts demoralise me. I'm not thrilled.”

“Then where would you like to go?”

Melody shrugged and trailed the boa inside the sitting-room. Chapotin went after her. Why did he put up with this child? What kink did he have in his character? It came down to something really quite simple. His regular life was so demandingly sombre and filled with stress that he'd forgotten how to play and have sheer fun – until Melody, like a creature from some far planet, had crashlanded on his staid, tightly buttoned little world.

She sat down on the sofa. Her white stockings had a lacy design. She wore very black eye make-up. Chapotin sat beside her. He laid one hand on her wrist.

“I'll take you on a world cruise.” When would he ever find the time?

“Ocean waves! I would vomit constantly.”

Chapotin wondered how his fellow Society members would react to this girl if they ever met her – which, of course, could never be allowed to happen: the Society did not permit private lives to touch its affairs. Enrico Caporelli, who had a roving eye, might be charmed by the girl's odd sexuality, but the others – especially those prudish Americans and the slightly sinister Magiwara – might sniff with disdain.

Chapotin understood that his devotion to this child would be considered by some a weakness, but he had a romantic's incurable heart and a lust that gripped him like a hot fist.

He put his hand on her knee.

“We'll come to some accommodation,” he said.

Melody blinked her long false lashes. “We shall see what we shall see, Chappie. In the meantime, I may order new curtains and new rugs to match.”

Chapotin had the gruesome feeling that his mistress would one day come to resemble his wife, that his whole life would be one long barrage of domesticity. Curtains! Plumbing! Carpets! What he needed was the escape route of Melody's sweet young flesh. He lunged towards her but she was as slippery as the material of her dress, and she glided out from under his hands.

“Ah-hah,” he said.

“Ah-hah yourself, Jaypee. No foreign junket, no fuckee.”

Chapotin lunged again. Melody nimbly stepped aside. He was amused. He liked the hunt.

“You can't catch me,” she said, and laughed.

Jean-Paul Chapotin struck out his hand and grabbed the dress, which ripped as soon as she whirled away from him, revealing the extraordinary sight of Melody Logue's pale and lovely inner thigh. A tattooed robin, red-breasted, wings spread, nestled close to her vulva. It was so lifelike it had quite startled Chapotin the first time he'd seen it.

“Leave her royal bloody highness and live with me,” she said.

“Leave my wife?”

Yes, he thought. Yes, yes, yes. To get at that bird he'd do anything, anything at all. Chapotin stretched out one trembling hand but Melody slipped away again.

“Say the word and win the bird!”

Chapotin laughed. This romping eighteen-year-old nincompoop who blessed his life – how could he leave Gabrielle for this? On the other hand, how could he
not
?

He heard the sound of glass breaking, muffled by the thickness of the curtains. Without thinking, Chapotin caught the girl and dragged her to the floor with him. He barely registered the two orbs that rolled across the carpet. He knew what they were, but recognition didn't prompt an instant response. It was a joke, an execrable joke, it wasn't real. The girl clutched him and said
Oooo
just as the grenades exploded.

Chapotin had time only to reflect how strangely quiet the whole thing was, like a noise inside a vacuum. Shrapnel pierced the girl's neck. Her skin-tissue flew through the air into Chapotin's eyes, blinding him. He tried to raise his hands to his face. Severed at the wrists by the hot blast of metal, they were gone.

8

Fife, Scotland

At six-thirteen a.m., a transport plane was cleared for take-off from an air base in Fife on the east coast of Scotland. The plane, a C-130 painted in camouflage, was normally deployed shuttling men and equipment between various NATO bases and the United States. An impressive flying machine over ninety feet long, it was capable of carrying as much as seventy thousand pounds of cargo. On this rainy morning, the C-130's approved flight plan would take it south into England and across the Channel to Germany, where it was scheduled to pick up sixty paratroopers in Wiesbaden and return them to Alabama. The crew consisted of pilot, co-pilot, navigator and flight engineer.

The take-off was smooth. The great plane went out over the North Sea into clouds, then turned back inland and began its climb toward Edinburgh. Cantankerous rain slashed at the fuselage and every so often the craft bucked the turbulence like a whale on the tide. In the cargo area crates of spare parts and tools rattled around and some loose sacking slid back and forth. But something else also moved, unnoticed by the crew on the flight deck, something that had been concealed on board for many hours and waiting, with nervous impatience, for just this occasion.

Directly over the Border Country, that underpopulated and lovely tract of land dividing two nations, three armed men stepped inside the flight deck. They carried automatic pistols and wore fatigues. There were no masks because there was no need to conceal their faces. After all, the men intended to leave no witnesses. The leader of the four was a black-haired man in his early forties called Joseph Sweeney. It was Sweeney who pressed his gun directly into the pilot's skull and ordered him to relinquish the controls. One of Sweeney's men took the pilot's seat. The co-pilot was also ordered to give up his position. He complied. Only the flight engineer complained and he was struck across the mouth for his troubles.