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  Pasco closed his eyes. He didn’t want to admit it, but James was right, of course. He was dead-on. In the gulag, Pasco had seen vengeance as if it were some amorphous cloud. He’d never planned the particulars, never considered the details. He’d just lived inside this shapeless fog where he’d imagined all kinds of destruction and mayhem. This person would be taken out, that person would meet a horrible fate, he’d choke somebody with his bare hands if he had to – there was a whole goddam line of victims and targets. But he didn’t have the stamina, and he didn’t have the wherewithal, and James knew it.

  He stared into James’s face. ‘So what’s the deal?’

  ‘A question first. How badly do you want it?’

  ‘Ten years’ worth,’ Pasco said.

  James rose, went to the window, parted the curtain a second. Pasco wondered if this was some kind of signal to a person in the street; he was having too many of these paranoid flashes, he decided. James turned, smiling. The ginger-ale can in his hand glinted. He produced a brown envelope from the inside pocket of his jacket and passed it to Pasco.

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘Open it,’ James said.

  Pasco ripped the flap. Inside was an American passport made out in his own name; the photograph in the passport was one taken just before his enforced sojourn in Russia. The envelope also contained a savings-account passbook issued by Barclays Bank, also in the name of Richard Pasco. Pasco flicked the pages. The current balance in the account was $500,000.

  ‘What’s all this?’ he asked.

  ‘A token of our credibility, Richard,’ James said. ‘A demonstration of our seriousness. The passport’s authentic. The money’s real. First thing in the morning, you can go to any branch of Barclays and verify it.’

  Pasco raised an eyebrow, glanced at the credit balance again, then looked at James.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Tell me more.’

  They talked for almost four hours.

  When the man called Ralph Donovan came to the room at five minutes before eleven the following morning, he found no sign of Richard Pasco. The new suit still hung in the closet, but the other clothing had gone. All that remained of Pasco’s possessions were the ugly black shoes he’d been wearing on his arrival, a pair of off-white underpants, grey socks, and a soiled shirt.

  Donovan thought: Every so often in goddam life things went off the way they were planned.

  3

  LONDON

  A copy of every London daily lay on George Nimmo’s desk. The headlines in the tabloids were predictably bold and drastic, and the so-called quality press was less than subdued when it came to reporting the previous night’s events at The Hackenbridge Hotel. Nimmo, who had the face of a spoiled choirboy, a pendulous lower lip and plump cheeks, gestured at the newspapers in dismay.

  ‘Death, death and more death,’ he said. He was agitated and pale. He had three telephones on his desk that rang continually. Secretaries and assistants in an outer office picked up the calls. ‘People from all over the world. Two from the States. Two from Saudi Arabia. Another from Mexico. Two from Canada. Three from Germany. On and on.’

  Pagan, seated on the other side of Nimmo’s desk, could read the headlines upside down. The number of reported fatalities varied from paper to paper. Fifty-three in the Sun. Fifty-four in the Mirror. Medical spokespersons, acting on the orders of Nimmo, who was the Commissioner of Scotland Yard, were being tight-lipped about the matter – but you couldn’t keep the sharks of the press at bay for long. They clamoured for detailed information, and if you didn’t accede to their demands, they indulged in speculation. Truth was a malleable commodity anyway.

  Afternoon sunlight burned brilliantly on the window. Pagan shut his eyes against all this brightness, all this news of death. He’d been awake for more than thirty hours but felt no real fatigue. What he experienced instead was a fuse sizzling inside his skull. On one level, it was the spark of anger; on another, it was a fiery line leading to a dynamite-charge of self-reproach. He assaulted himself with ifs. If he hadn’t left the hotel the way he’d done, if he hadn’t jumped as soon as he’d received the phonecall, if he’d been more thorough in investigating the backgrounds of hotel personnel – conditionals were like hot sands in his brain.

  On the other hand, even if he hadn’t made that fruitless trip to The Swan, what could he have done to change the outcome of events in any case? The dinner would have gone on, the conference members would have picked up knives and forks, cut into the food, ferried it to their mouths. He couldn’t have stopped that. This realization was no balm. The bottom line was that he’d been responsible for sixty-three people; and most of them were dead. And they’d died painfully.

  ‘The medical chaps don’t know what kind of poison was used,’ Nimmo said. ‘They’re running tests. The trouble with tests is they don’t bring back the dead, do they?’

  ‘No, they don’t,’ Pagan said.

  ‘So far, all we know is that the non-carnivores in the group didn’t die. Conclusion, the poison was in the meat dish. I’ve got a copy of the menu right here. There was a choice of fish or beef. The fish-eaters survived. The others didn’t. We’ll have the substance identified soon enough, I daresay. Though it isn’t going to do us a lot of good, is it?’ Nimmo shoved his chair back from his desk and picked up a pen, tapped the surface of his desk, rap rap rap.

  Pagan said, ‘According to the head chef, the pastry-chef was responsible for preparing the meat dish—’

  Nimmo looked at the menu and said, ‘The filet de boeuf en croute.’

  ‘Whatever. The task was hers. She was new to the staff. She’d been there three weeks. Came with good references. Hotels in Switzerland, Spain. They checked out. This chef’s the manic type. He’d be very particular about who works in his kitchen. She didn’t mix well, according to him. Kept to herself. Her passport identified her as Carmen Profumo, born Florence 1969. She put the filet de boeuf in the oven, the chef witnessed that much – after which she just disappeared from the kitchen. Later, when I went through her room at the hotel, I found no personal belongings of any significance. A hairbrush. Toothpaste. The usual. No books, papers, magazines, letters, diaries. A solitary woman.’

  ‘And your people did their own preliminary check, correct?’

  ‘Of course we did.’

  ‘But you missed the woman?’

  Pagan detected a small malice in the way the question was posed. ‘The complex employs seventy-nine people, George. We were as thorough as we could be. We checked backgrounds, we ran names through the computers for criminal records, we did the passport routine—’

  ‘But you missed the woman,’ Nimmo said again.

  ‘Her references were verified. The passport was genuine. What else is there to examine? When you’ve got seventy-nine people to run security checks on in the hotel business – which is notorious for its turnover of personnel – there’s always a chance you’re going to miss something. It may be small, it may be utterly insignificant, but there’s always that chance.’

  Nimmo kept rapping the pen. ‘So. Let us backtrack. She puts the dish in the oven, she leaves the kitchen. She telephones you. Asks you to meet her. You dash off. She doesn’t show up. You return to the hotel, by which time—’

  ‘By which time, people are dying,’ Pagan said.

  He remembers opening the doors to the dining-room. He remembers the eerie chaos of the scene. Diners coughing blood, some slumped back in their chairs, others rising from the table and wandering around in pain and confusion, still others lying on the floor, a few motionless, their bodies contorted and stiff, some crawling blindly in the throes of seizure. He remembers the madness, the sounds of choking and coughing, the way plates and cutlery fall to the floor, people slithering from their chairs, the groaning, waiters fluttering around in confusion, a maid screaming, and he remembers thinking – this is a lopsided scene, everything off-centre, appallingly inverted, like something drawn in a lunatic’s sketchbook.

  The memory
froze him. He might have stepped inside a chamber of solid ice.

  Nimmo said, ‘She wants you out of the complex – why?’

  ‘She doesn’t want me to be one of the victims, George. I’m to be spared. She knows just about everyone else is going to be poisoned. She doesn’t want me in that number.’

  ‘Why?’

  Pagan shrugged. There it was; that first little hint of fatigue, something solid as coal behind his eyes. ‘Because she isn’t ready to kill me. Because she wants me to know how easily she can circumvent our security arrangements. Because she wants to humiliate me. Any of the above. All of the above.’

  ‘She has, yo, a personal vendetta against you.’

  Pagan pondered the meaningless yo which Nimmo had the habit of dropping, like a strange grammatical mark, into his sentences. A personal vendetta, he thought. It was one way of describing it.

  ‘Something like that,’ he said. His fatigue passed and his anger came rushing back. He heard it roar to his skull like a locomotive.

  Nimmo appeared pensive, which involved a series of deep furrows in his forehead. ‘Here’s something that really bothers me. We’ve got more than fifty corpses on our hands, courtesy of this bloody woman. No ordinary corpses, mind you. Some of the best counter-terrorist minds in the world. Some of the very best. Visitors here. Invited guests. Distinguished people. A great loss to the world intelligence community, and a great victory for the woman – after all, she’s just wiped out a whole slew of her potential captors, has she not? And we’ve spent – what? – thousands of man-hours searching for the bitch as a consequence of her deplorable terrorist activity last February, and God alone knows how many hundreds of thousands of pounds, and we haven’t even caught a whisper of her. And yet somehow she manages to get herself a job in a hotel and commits this new atrocity. Is that what you’d call a failure, Frank?’

  ‘I’d call it that,’ Pagan said. A hard admission. He couldn’t deny it. Thousands of man-hours, he thought. But this wasn’t a realistic calculation, because it went beyond a mere matter of punching time-clocks. It was the kind of time you couldn’t accurately measure. He’d dreamed of her in his sleep at night. He’d driven randomly around London during extended periods of insomnia in the chance that, by some major miracle, he might happen to see her on a street. A dozen occasions, he’d visited the underground station where she’d detonated the bomb last winter and he’d ridden pointlessly up and down the escalators as if he might somehow be given a sign, by the god who dictated such matters, of her whereabouts. Time like that, time of wishing and hoping and seeking revelations in futile car trips and escalator rides, couldn’t be counted.

  He got out of his chair, strolled round Nimmo’s spartan office, beat his hands against his thighs. He struggled with his anger. He heard her voice in his head: You’re so very obedient, Frank. I like that. Babe, she’d called him. An uninvited familiarity. He thought of people dying on the floor of the dining-room, and it depressed him. He thought of the widows and orphans of these people in countries he’d never visit. Blame. OK, up to a point, he’d shoulder it, even if it only served to further ignite his fury. Fury was useless, unless you channelled it into constructive areas. It was also unprofessional. You were supposed to be detached. You were meant to maintain a certain composure. He’d never quite achieved that state. Not where she was concerned.

  ‘Why the failure, Frank?’ Nimmo asked. ‘Explain.’

  The question was one that could only be stabbed at with the usual old complaints. ‘Because we can’t be everywhere at once, George. We can’t cover every railway station, every airport, every square inch of the country. There’s not enough manpower for that. You could give me ten thousand uniforms, twenty, more than twenty, and I still couldn’t guarantee we’d find her.’

  Nimmo said, ‘We’re powerless. Against one woman. She comes and goes as she pleases. Is that what I’m hearing?’

  ‘George, there are a million places to hide in this green and pleasant land of ours. She could be almost anywhere. What do you expect? A door-to-door search of every house in the country?’

  ‘I expect her to be caught, Frank,’ Nimmo said. ‘That’s the only thing I’ve ever expected. I certainly didn’t anticipate the fact that she’d somehow contrive to kill more than fifty important people at an English hotel crawling with your security personnel.’

  ‘You blame me?’

  ‘I’m not apportioning blame,’ Nimmo said.

  Lying bastard, Pagan thought. Nimmo shovelled blame wherever he could. He was in the business of remaining aloof from disasters, keeping his distance from them. If there was shit, he’d make sure none of it was going to stick to him. He had political ambitions beyond the confines of Scotland Yard. He saw himself in Whitehall, perhaps a future Cabinet position, God knows what. He needed knightly armour to protect his reputation.

  Nimmo said, ‘The public will have to be informed. I see no way around that. The press won’t stand for any obfuscation on my part. Mass murder perpetrated by unknown maniac – I don’t think that will wash, Frank, do you?’

  ‘Probably not.’

  ‘She’ll have to be named. Not as Carmen Profumo. We’ll have to use her real name. Even if I tried to withhold the information, one of our beloved tabloids would invariably ferret out the truth and print it. Which leaves me with egg on my face.’

  Pagan was silent a moment. He tried to imagine the goo of eggs slithering down Nimmo’s face. It wasn’t pretty.

  ‘I’ll catch her, George,’ he said.

  ‘Will you now?’

  ‘Yeah, I’ll catch her.’ His hands, he realized, were clenched, locked tight. He was restricting his own circulation. He opened his hands, flexed his fingers.

  ‘And how exactly do you propose to do that?’ Nimmo asked.

  Pagan looked Nimmo determinedly in the eye. He had no instant answer, he knew. He had no easy come-back to Nimmo’s question. All he had were months of frustration behind him. Months of legwork. Months of false leads. ‘Because she’ll make a mistake, George. Because she’s confident, and she’s got the taste of blood in her mouth, and she’ll take one step too far – and I’ll be there when she does.’

  Nimmo allowed himself a little smile. ‘Let us hope you catch her before she commits yet another atrocity,’ he said. For a moment George Nimmo looked as if he were enjoying himself at Pagan’s expense. And why not? He was no great fan of Pagan. Never had been. In his book, Pagan was a relic of the regime of the former Commissioner, Martin Burr, now sent out to pasture. Pagan sometimes pulled things off, and when that happened Nimmo could bask in success and even take a large measure of responsibility for it. But when Pagan failed, Nimmo found it impossible to resist a small thrill of pleasure. More than fifty people were dead: it took a certain kind of man, one with brutalized sensibilities, to find a kernel of personal satisfaction in that statistic.

  Pagan knew all this. He knew how Nimmo’s clock ticked. The trick in remaining civil toward Nimmo lay in a refusal to descend to Nimmo’s level of mean-spiritedness and spite. To ignore George as much as possible. To understand that he was back-stabbing, unscrupulous in pursuit of personal advancement. He’d kiss a slobbering baby with a rash of chickenpox if he thought it would help him an extra rung up the ladder.

  Pagan wandered to the window, looked down into sunlit shafts between buildings. The world was too bright, he decided. And where you had brightness, you had shadows as well. Sunlight and shadow, and a woman who appeared to live in both dimensions with equal comfort. Another atrocity, he thought.

  ‘Sands are running out,’ Nimmo said.

  ‘That’s the nature of sand, George.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Nimmo. ‘Cherchez la femme, Frank.’

  Pagan understood he was being dismissed, sent back out into the heat of the late afternoon, where turbulence lay ahead of him, where he had questions to ask and no guarantees of answers. He opened the door and looked back at Nimmo, who was already speaking into one of his phones.


  ‘I’ll do a press conference tonight at nine,’ Nimmo was saying to the minion on the other end of the line. ‘Get that information out on the double.’

  Pagan shut the door. Nimmo would appear on TV, his expression one of grave concern. But somewhere along the way he’d rally, change his manner, summon up the bulldog of self-righteousness and let it bark so loud and clear it could be heard all the way across the land. Even as I stand before you, he’d say, even as my heart goes out to those who were murdered, I give you my solemn vow. Justice will prevail.

  What heart? Pagan wondered as he headed in the direction of the elevators.

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  About the Author

  Campbell Armstrong (1944–2013) was an international bestselling author best known for his thriller series featuring British counterterrorism agent Frank Pagan, and his quartet of Glasgow Novels, featuring detective Lou Perlman. Two of these, White Rage and Butcher, were nominated for France’s Prix du Polar. Armstrong’s novels Assassins & Victims and The Punctual Rape won Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Awards.

  Born in Glasgow and educated at the University of Sussex, Armstrong worked as a book editor in London and taught creative writing at universities in the United States.

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