第 19 页

upturned table. Then his eardrums were compressed by the explosion, and then by another one

as the grenade exploded on the ground outside the window. He shuffled to his right, raising his

pistol.

The door had been blown in. Two black-clad men were crowding through it. "Amateurs," he

thought. "They should have tossed a grenade through."

They both held pistols, but were getting in each other's way.

He shot them both in the chest and then glided across the room and put his back against the

wall alongside the door. A third man ran in, hurdling the two bodies. Maxie shot him in the back

while from the foot of the stairs Rene shot him in the chest.

"There's one more," Maxie shouted.

They heard the sound of running footsteps outside, then two shots, and then silence.

"Guido got him," Rene said. "Let's go!"

Rene scooped up the black box and the mobile phone while Maxie grabbed his precious cards.

The pistols went into their shoulder holsters.

Maxie ran up the stairs to the bathroom and spent half a minute reassuring the Trans the danger

was over. He smiled at the children, ruffled their hair, and turned away. Ten seconds later they

were out of the door, into the revving van and on their way to the safe house.

"Do you think they may try again?" Rene asked.

Guido chuckled, and answered: "Not after they've seen what happened to their A-team."

Chapter 35

Creasy held the thin beam of his torch on the lock while The Owl picked it. They both wore

black raincoats with deep pockets, and transparent surgical gloves. It was a modern Chubb lock

and it took The Owl a full two minutes to open it. Creasy listened patiently to his mutterings and

then heard a grunt of satisfaction.

The Owl dropped his implement into his raincoat pocket and gently eased open the door,

shining his torch through.

Creasy waited outside, looking down the alley with the gun held loosely in his hand. He waited

for three minutes until he heard a low whistle from inside the building. He went in and closed the

door quietly behind him. The light from his torch showed The Owl waiting at the top of a short

flight of wooden steps. Creasy moved up them and The Owl whispered: "There are no alarms

that I can see." He pointed his torch to a door that was ajar. "That's the secretary's office.

Beyond there is a small meeting room which opens on to what must be the manager's office."

Creasy pushed open the door. His torch revealed a desk and a chair, two metal filing cabinets

and a fax machine. On the desk was a modern IBM PC and a printer. Creasy moved to the filing

cabinets. They were locked but The Owl had them both opened very quickly.

Inside were the business files of a gem trader. It took Creasy just ten minutes to learn that the

Lucit Trade Company only had three customers. Two were in France, one in Paris and the other

in Lyon; the other was a Chinese company in Hong Kong. Creasy quickly leafed through the

correspondence in French. The letters to the Hong Kong company were in English and were

equally innocuous. He took a small pad and a ballpoint from his pocket, and made a note of the

companies' names.

They moved through into the meeting room, which was bare except for a table and six chairs.

They continued to the manager's office which was very plush, with Persian carpets on the floor

contrasting with Scandinavian-style furniture, a wide pine desk with a leather chair and a

grouping of a coffee table and three chairs. There were abstract paintings on the walls.

The desk had four drawers, all locked. They found the slim file in the third drawer, inside a

metal box. Creasy quickly leafed through it and then stopped at a sheaf of eight-by-ten

photographs.

He looked at the first one and grunted to himself as if in confirmation. Quickly he laid the

photographs and the pages of the file onto the carpet, and then took a small camera and

separate flash from his pocket. The Owl aimed the beam of his torch at the photographs and

papers for added light.

Four minutes later, The Owl was relocking the back door and they slipped away into the dark.

Chapter 36

It was a new acquisition and Connie Crum was very proud of it. It arrived from Bangkok early

in the morning and sat on the table like something out of the next century. Even the placid faces

of her two female bodyguards were animated with interest as she explained how it worked to

Van Luk Wan.

"It's what foreign correspondents use, and also international aid agencies, to communicate from

remote areas of the world."

She pointed upwards with one elegant finger. "It works through a satellite, and from here or

anywhere else I can phone to anyone in the world."

Van was impressed. "How much does it weigh?"

She looked in the instruction book. "Twelve and a half kilos. It has been around for a few years

now, but the early ones were very heavy. They get lighter every year. The agent told me that in

five years' time they'll be about half the size of a briefcase and weigh only two or three kilos. I

bought two. One is being sent to Tuk Luy and will be there tomorrow. It works from

rechargeable batteries." She pointed to a row of buttons and a crystal display.

"These buttons are for preset numbers. I had the agent programme in the ones I use most." She

looked at her watch. "It's nine thirty now. Sok San will have arrived in his office." She turned and

smiled at Van, like a child about to play with a new toy. "Let's surprise him with a phone call. He

knows that I'm supposed to be at Chek and he also knows that we don't have telephones here."

She reached forward and flicked two switches on the side of the matt black metal box. With a

soft thump, an aerial started to extend upwards and stopped at a height of about two metres,

almost reaching the roof of the hut. A red light then appeared at the top left-hand corner. She

waited for half a minute and then picked up the handset and pressed the first of the row of

buttons.

A number flashed up onto the small screen. It had many digits.

She swung her long hair away from her face and placed the phone against her ear. The box

emitted a series of musical tones and then went silent. She tapped her right foot on the wooden

floor as she waited, explaining to Van: "The signal is bouncing off the satellite to an earth station

in Phnom Penh and is then fed into their telephone grid."

Half a minute passed. Then suddenly she was talking excitedly and laughing. "Yes, it is me. Yes,

I am in Chek. No, they haven't put a telephone line in. It's just that I have upgraded our

communications equipment from carrier pigeon to satellite communication...Do you have

anything to report?"

She listened. Van Luk Wan watched her face turn from happy amusement to sharp alertness.

She listened for several minutes without interruption, then said authoritatively: "Don't leave your

office. I'll call you back within an hour."

She clipped the phone back onto the box and stood thoughtfully looking at it. Then she said to

Van: "Two things happened last night. In Saigon, your entire hit team got wiped out in a gun

battle at the follower's home. The follower and his family escaped unhurt."

"I don't understand," Van said. "My instructions were that they were not to attack until Creasy

had left for Phnom Penh."

"He did leave for Phnom Penh. According to Sok San he arrived there with the girl in the

afternoon. It must have been the Italian Arrellio...or somebody else he brought in." Her

expression was now very hard. "He's a clever bastard! The follower must have told him of the

threat to his family. And so he turned the follower by promising him protection."

They looked at each other in silence. Then Van said: "That man moves quickly."

"Yes, he does. Last night the office of the Lucit Trade Company was entered and searched."

"Are you sure?"

For a moment anger flamed in her eyes. Then she took a breath and said: "Of course I'm sure.

Sok San was carefully instructed. The past few nights pieces of cotton thread were lightly fixed to

doors, cabinets and drawers, all of which were locked. This morning all these threads were

displaced. Creasy went through that office and then relocked everything after him."

"Was anything missing?"

"Of course not. He's too clever for that. But we can assume that he checked every file." She was

tapping her foot again impatiently.

Van said: "But wasn't that the intention?"

"Yes, it was; but not so quickly. From the moment that Creasy arrived in Saigon, I expected it

to take him a week or ten days. I'm not ready for him yet and the date is not right. We must find

a way to keep him in Phnom Penh for a few more days. Meanwhile, we leave for Tuk Luy in two

hours."

She reached again for the telephone.

Chapter 37

It was a rare luxury. She lay on the sun bed by the hotel pool with a tall glass of chilled, fresh

orange juice by her side, reading a novel by P. D. James.

It had not crossed her mind to pack a swimsuit, but the hotel boutique had a wide selection, all

from Paris and all wildly expensive. It had pained her to pay nearly three hundred dollars, even if

the skimpy bikini did have a designer label on it. But the pain had eased when she looked in the

mirror, and eased further when she walked out to the pool and saw the heads turn.

Creasy and The Owl were sleeping off the night's work, while Jens had gone off to try to get

Creasy's film developed.

The night before, she had waited up with Jens. He had produced a pocket-size backgammon

set, but after she had lost half a dozen times, he tactfully put it away. They had just talked.

She found herself liking the Dane. He had a dry sense of humour and a charming

self-deprecation which contrasted with what she already knew was a razor-sharp brain. He told

her the story of how he and The Owl had first met Creasy. It sounded like a hilarious adventure

instead of a war against a deadly gang of drug dealers and white slavers. He also talked about his

wife, Birgitte, and their young daughter, and she saw the fondness in his eyes. It was obvious that

while he was enjoying himself in this exotic place, he was missing his family. She liked men like

that.

Creasy and The Owl returned at three a.m. They had the air of a couple of men returning from a

visit to a good nightclub rather than from a dangerous act in a dangerous city. But she noticed

that Creasy took a rare drink, and so did The Owl. Creasy quickly briefed them and then handed

over a tiny roll of film to Jens.

She was very excited, but tried to keep it from her face. In the years that she had worked in the

department, this was the closest she had ever come to solving a case. Keeping her voice calm,

she asked Creasy: "Are you sure it was Jake Bentsen in the photograph?"

He nodded firmly. "Of course it showed him much older, but I'll never forget that face...It was

Jake Bentsen."

"And there were two other Americans?"

He shrugged. "There were two other Caucasians, but they weren't waving the Stars and Stripes."

At that moment she saw the lines of exhaustion around his eyes. She felt a sudden sympathy. He

was a fit man, but not young. In the previous twenty-four hours, he had made love to her and

then driven for hours along one of the worst roads in the world. He had finally gone out in the

middle of the night and risked his life.

"You need sleep," she said.

Creasy nodded. "We all do." He looked at the Dane. "Jens, you have to try to get that film

developed in confidence. And you have to be there while it's being developed and be sure that

nobody else sees the prints."

Jens looked at the film in the palm of his hands and then slipped it into his pocket, saying: "I'll

put my mind to it."

She caught the eye of a white-jacketed waiter and ordered a fresh fruit salad. When it arrived,

she laughed in astonishment. It was a large-bowl set inside an even bigger bowl filled with ice. It

contained at least ten different kinds of tropical fruit, some of which she had never seen before.

She had only managed to eat half of it when she saw The Owl on the other side of the swimming

pool. He looked so incongruous in this luxury setting.

He wore baggy grey trousers, a dark-blue shirt buttoned to his neck and, even in the tropical

heat, a black woollen cardigan. His eyes were moving over the recumbent bodies, obviously

looking for her. She watched as he walked around the pool and saw his eyes focus on her and

then move away. She put down the bowl of fruit, sat up and called out: "Here!"

His eyes swung back to her and he stopped abruptly. She stood up, asking: "What is it?"

He was embarrassed. "I'm sorry, Susanna, I didn't recognize you." He waved a hand at her. "I

mean, I never saw you like that before."

Sternly, she said: "I am a woman, you know."

"So I see." He took a deep breath. "And I might say, Mademoiselle, a very beautiful one."

She inclined her head to acknowledge the compliment and asked: "What's happening?"

"Jens is back. I just woke Creasy. We have a meeting in fifteen minutes."

She was immediately alert. "Did he get the film developed?"

She thought she saw a slight smile as he said: "Of course, Mademoiselle."

She washed off the suntan oil at the poolside shower and strolled back through the luxuriant

garden to the bungalow.

Creasy was finishing off a late breakfast of croissants, ham and cheese. He looked refreshed.

Jens and The Owl were at the other end of the table, leaning over the photographs. From

somewhere, Jens had managed to find a large magnifying glass.

Creasy gestured at the photographs and said: "Take a look, Susanna."

The two men made room for her and she looked down at the large-grain prints. Three of them

were photographs of photographs.