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  ‘You tell me.’

  ‘A woman’s touch.’

  A cruelty, he thought. He said nothing.

  ‘Maybe that’s what you need too, Frank,’ she said. ‘A woman’s touch. Soft, caressing, arousing. Nice and easy, a sweet, slow build-up, prolonged mutual exploration, then the big explosion.’ Her voice was soft now, liltingly seductive, almost a whisper. It was no longer that of some deranged woman enthusiastically praising the efficiency of a poison. The changes she continued to make in herself were seemingly endless. She spun cocoons around herself and each time emerged as a different entity.

  ‘I’ll catch you,’ he said. ‘You know that. Sooner or later, I’ll catch you.’

  ‘Ah, Frank, Frank. You just don’t know when to quit, do you? Which is a perfectly desirable quality in a lover. Are you that kind of lover, Frank? Did Roxanne find you energetic? Did she find you indefatigable?’

  ‘I’m not going to discuss Roxanne with you,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t waste my fucking breath.’

  ‘I’m getting to you,’ she said. ‘I always do. Some things don’t change.’

  ‘Getting to me? You’re not even close,’ he replied.

  ‘You’re a bad liar, Pagan. You don’t know the art of concealment, do you?’

  Foxie came inside the office, holding a slip of paper. He set it down in front of Pagan. There was a telephone number written on it, and a location.

  ‘I have to run,’ she said.

  ‘Wait—’

  ‘Unfinished business,’ she said. ‘Oh, one last thing. I’m leaving something for you inside this phone booth, which no doubt you’ve traced by this time.’ She hung up.

  Pagan put down the receiver and looked at Foxie, then at the slip of paper. ‘Kilburn High Road,’ he said.

  ‘That’s where the call originated, Frank. A public phone.’

  ‘What the hell is she doing in Kilburn?’

  Foxie shrugged. ‘What did she have to say for herself?’

  Pagan told him about the toxic compound. The threat she’d made to the water supply. ‘I want uniformed officers at every reservoir, Foxie. Starting now. I want a twenty-four hour guard wherever drinking-water is stored or treated. And I want them armed.’

  ‘I’ll get on it,’ Foxie said, and frowned. He thought Frank looked pale, a man who’d encountered a ghost beyond the reaches of exorcism.

  Pagan picked up the photograph of the woman and held it in a hand that was trembling just slightly. I’m getting to you. I always do. Yes, he thought, yes, you are. But he wasn’t entirely sure in what ways.

  8

  FREDERICKSBURG, VIRGINIA

  Mallory parked his car outside Max Skidelsky’s country home ten miles from the town of Fredericksburg. It was an enormous Victorian house with a macabre look; the windows of the circular turrets might have scared an imaginative child into thinking the rooms contained mutant offspring fed raw meat through iron bars. Cameras slowly panned the vicinity from beneath the eaves. After dark, automatic sensor lights kicked in; at all times, a highly sophisticated security system was functioning. Max Skidelsky liked peace of mind.

  Mallory got out of his rented Lincoln. His image was conveyed by the cameras to a series of indoor monitors. He rang the front doorbell and one of the cameras, alerted by a microchip, altered its trajectory and tilted downward. A zoom lens whirred.

  The front door was opened by a young man in a three-piece black suit. His name was Larry Quinn, Skidelsky’s number two in what Skidelsky, with a mischievous sense of humour, had called The Artichoke Club – a name derived from Project Artichoke, a crude mind-control programme which the Central Intelligence Agency had instigated in the early 1950s. Skidelsky was fond of little in-jokes.

  Mallory followed Quinn across the parquet foyer and was ushered into a games room where, instead of the predictable billiard table, there was a phalanx of video machines. Here, Max Skidelsky spent hours pursuing monsters, popping electronic bugs, zapping alien creatures from other galaxies.

  Mallory sat down. Quinn, whose black hair was combed back flat, said, ‘Max will be with you soon. He’s running behind schedule this morning.’

  ‘How’s life, Larry?’ Mallory asked.

  ‘Buzzing right along,’ Larry Quinn said. He smiled. He had bright white teeth, a square block of a jaw. ‘Yourself?’

  ‘Fine, just fine,’ said Mallory.

  ‘Trip went well?’

  Mallory said, ‘Yes.’

  ‘You jet-lagged?’

  ‘A touch.’

  ‘You’ll get over it.’ Quinn left, still smiling.

  Skidelsky’s house had a disquieting effect on Mallory. You expected it to be filled with leather-bound volumes and old-fashioned wing-chairs. Instead you got an array of electronic games, canvas-backed director’s chairs, a few minimalist prints on the walls, and piles of computer equipment scattered everywhere. The floor was covered with thick black cables running God knows where.

  Max Skidelsky came into the room. He was dressed in an expensive beige linen suit, loosely cut, so that it created a kind of draped effect on his lean body. The pants were pleated. He wore canvas espadrilles imported from Lisbon. His movements were as loose as his clothing. His glasses had silver frames and lenses that changed according to the light. He had bright blue eyes. When he looked at you, he managed to convey an impression of intense interest in your life. He had the ability to make people think he was engrossed in them, and nothing else mattered.

  ‘Jimmy,’ said Skidelsky. He held out a rather chill hand for Mallory to shake. The handshake, though cold, was firm and confident. Skidelsky, a Yale graduate, a Rhodes scholar who knew a Soutard St Emilion from a Troplong-Mondot and was moved by Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder, was bright, ambitious, and at the age of thirty-three knew, with all the certitude of people who haven’t been on the planet long enough to be totally disenchanted, where he was going. More than that, he knew where the country was going.

  ‘Good flight?’ he asked.

  Mallory nodded. ‘Yes. Good flight.’

  ‘Drink?’

  ‘Soda, if you have it.’

  ‘Perrier? Badoit?’

  Mallory shrugged. One fizzy water was like any other to him. He hadn’t bought into the imported water snobbery prevalent in the land.

  ‘Try some San Pellegrino,’ Skidelsky suggested. He poured two glasses, plopped cubes of ice in them, gave one glass to Mallory and said, ‘Cheers.’

  ‘Cheers,’ Mallory said.

  Skidelsky sipped his drink. ‘Well, Jimmy. Are we in business?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘No, I don’t want impressions, Jimmy. You know I have a hard time with them. Yes or no. Are we in business?’

  Mallory hated the pressure of being backed into corners by Skidelsky’s questions. ‘I can only say it’s looking good.’

  ‘Looking good doesn’t count,’ Skidelsky said. ‘Looking good is something you apply to clothes or shoes or a girl you see walking along the street.’

  ‘I did what you told me, Max. I did everything you wanted. To the letter. On that basis, all I can safely say is that I think it’s going to work out nicely.’

  ‘The fish rose to the hook,’ Skidelsky said. ‘Is this what I’m hearing?’

  ‘I’d say so.’

  Max Skidelsky wandered off toward a video game. He pressed a button and the room was suddenly filled with weird noises, beeps and whistles and sounds suggestive of dolphins singing to their mates. With a look of concentration and aggression on his face, he punched away at buttons and directional controls, and whatever enemies confronted him on the screen were blasted into an electronic purgatory. He played for a couple of minutes, then stopped.

  ‘This machine has infinite levels of difficulty,’ he said. ‘You kill the monsters, move up a level, other monsters take their place. You kill them, pop, you’re on another level. The trick, Jimmy, is to stay alive through the levels. But what you’re really looking for isn’t mere survival. No, the object
of the game is the quest for infinity. Which is something of a conundrum, because infinity, by definition, can never be reached. In that sense, the machine is always ahead of you. Unless …’

  ‘Unless it’s a con, and it doesn’t have infinite levels at all,’ Mallory said.

  ‘You got it.’ Max Skidelsky smiled. It was a beautiful smile, you had to give him that. And he knew how to use it. It was a thing of charm and wonder, a boy’s smile. There was even innocence in it, which was the quality Mallory found most unsettling. It was about as innocent as a laser beam.

  Skidelsky crossed the room and patted Mallory, sixteen years his senior, on the head. ‘The nifty thing about our con, Jimmy, is that we know it doesn’t have infinite levels. We programmed it ourselves, we know how it works, and we know how many levels it has.’

  A parable, Mallory thought. An electronic parable. He sipped his San Pellegrino, which was already losing its effervescence.

  Skidelsky sat down in one of the canvas-backed chairs and kicked off his espadrilles, revealing his bare feet. His big toes were spatulated. He took off his glasses and massaged his eyelids. He replaced the glasses and said, ‘A good con’s always basically simple. Rule number one. Never complicate. And whenever possible, don’t fuck with the truth. The less you lie, the less you have to remember. Get caught in a lie, and the con’s either threatened or dead in the water.’

  Mallory nodded his head. Sometimes Skidelsky’s energy level depleted him. He found he couldn’t stay for long in the young man’s company, as if he were afraid of being drained entirely. It was as if Skidelsky sucked the essence out of the people around him.

  ‘So. The hook dangles, and the fish is rising, Jimmy.’

  ‘Yes,’ Mallory said.

  ‘You can feel the tug, huh?’

  ‘I can feel it, sure.’

  Max Skidelsky frowned, something he rarely did. ‘This poison business – is that going to affect us?’

  ‘I doubt it, Max.’

  ‘You know, she’d be terrific if she didn’t have these psycho impulses. I mean, you don’t just take out Christ knows how many people because you’ve got a bad case of PMS, right?’

  ‘I don’t think she needs PMS or anything like it to do what she does,’ Mallory said. ‘It comes naturally to her. Like breathing. She needs the occasional firework display.’

  ‘She ought to donate her brain to a research foundation, Jimmy. Let them check it out for structural irregularities, flaws, what have you. No matter what way you slice this lady’s toast, she’s not running on any battery known to mankind, that’s certain. What about this cop?’

  ‘Pagan?’

  ‘The word is he’s got something of a hard-on for her.’

  ‘Maybe so. He’s a determined man. He’s had encounters with her in the past, and they’ve left him dented, which only makes him grit his teeth all the more. The way I understand it, she likes to provoke him.’

  ‘Is he going to be a problem?’

  Mallory considered this question before answering. ‘He hasn’t come within a mile of her in seven months. She’s always just one step ahead of him. But if I was a betting man, I’d say he’s the one most likely. She plays with him. And that’s risky business.’

  Skidelsky shrugged and said, ‘If he becomes a genuine problem, there’s always a quick solution. He’s the least of my worries.’

  Max Skidelsky emptied his glass and put it down on the floor. He ran a hand through his thick, shiny fair hair. Trapped in a rectangle of sunlight originating from a window, he looked impossibly young for a moment. He had the smooth unshaven appearance of a thirteen-year-old high-school kid.

  Scary, Mallory thought. This kid, this hunger for power, this brain; and the kicker was always the smile, because you couldn’t attribute anything shadowy to a face like that, you couldn’t find duplicity in it with the aid of a microscope. You’d give this kid your last dime. And yet – he was Deviousness incarnate. He didn’t lift a finger without thinking of the consequences thirty moves down the line. He was all careful planning and blueprints; his mind had to be a series of high mountain ranges from which he could see for ever. And that was scary too, Mallory thought. Satan in a Versace suit.

  ‘When will we know if the fish is truly hooked, Jimmy?’

  ‘In an hour or so, I’d say.’

  Skidelsky tapped the face of his watch. ‘What’s an hour or so when you’re dealing with the future of the United States?’

  ‘I’ll make the call from downtown,’ Mallory said.

  ‘Good idea. Any time you make an important call, use a pay phone.’ Skidelsky, never still for long, bounded up out of his chair. ‘I need some music. Anything you’d like to hear, Jimmy?’

  Mallory shook his head. Skidelsky chose some jazz from the late 1950s, post be-bop. He stood beside the Bose stereo and tapped his foot in time to the music. Then he moved so that he stood directly behind Mallory. He laid both hands on Mallory’s shoulders and gave them a light squeeze.

  ‘We’re going to win, Jimmy,’ he said. ‘You know why?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because we can’t fail.’

  ‘If that was the only reason for winning at anything, everybody would win,’ Mallory said.

  Skidelsky rearranged himself in a squatting position and rocked very slightly on his bare heels. ‘Sometimes I detect this tiny little chime of pessimism in your voice, Jimmy. Do you have doubts? Misgivings about The Artichoke Club?’

  Mallory finished his Italian water. ‘Things can go wrong, people can make mistakes, you know how it goes.’

  ‘Mistakes? I don’t have that word in my vocabulary.’

  ‘Well, the world isn’t perfect, Max. Other people make them.’

  ‘Not when they work for me, they don’t.’ Skidelsky rose to a standing position. The great beam of his smile was focused on Mallory’s face. It was like a magnifying glass through which sunlight was intensified. ‘Perhaps you have doubts you don’t want to express. Little matters of a moral nature, say?’

  Mallory said, ‘I know the country’s in the shit, Max. I only have to look around. I’m not some god-damn ostrich. I see what’s going on. Crime, disintegration, cops and Federal agents that have given up the ghost and turned to corruption. I see the Agency losing prestige. I see sleaze, the breakdown in the quality of our life in general – I’m not missing any of that, Max.’

  ‘Let me guess,’ Skidelsky said. ‘You agree with the principles, you just don’t like the means. Correct?’

  ‘I have some reservations, OK.’

  ‘Ethics,’ Skidelsky said.

  ‘If you like.’

  ‘Odd word, ethics,’ Skidelsky remarked. ‘Derived from the Greek ethos – meaning, man’s normal state.’

  ‘I know where it’s derived from, Max.’

  ‘Man’s normal state, Jimmy. What do you think that means?’

  ‘We could debate that all day,’ Mallory said.

  ‘You think his normal state is anarchy? Crime? A capacity for evil deeds? Murder? Selfishness? Loathing? Or do you think the opposite – the normal state is one of aspirations, dreams of betterment, love, a secure and decent society? Which, Jimmy?’

  Mallory felt he was back in his student days at Rutgers, trapped inside a lecture-hall by a highly irritating professor. ‘You can’t answer stuff like that off the top of your head.’

  ‘Give me your hand,’ Max Skidelsky said.

  Mallory had been waiting for this. He stuck out his right hand and Skidelsky gripped it tightly. This was an odd form of bonding Skidelsky sometimes insisted on. The first time, it had made Mallory nervous. After the third or fourth time, you got used to it.

  ‘Trust me,’ Skidelsky said. He wasn’t smiling. He was a study in the ferocity of concentration now.

  ‘I trust you, Max.’

  ‘No buts. No half measures. All the way, Jimmy.’

  ‘All the way,’ Mallory said.

  Skidelsky’s grip became tighter. Mallory felt great pressure on his
bones. It was a strange thing, but he could swear he often felt a current run between himself and the younger man at these times. Maybe it was the same kind of electricity that flowed out of evangelists and made suckers and sinners rise up out of their chairs and give themselves openly to Christ. Skidelsky believed in himself, and what he was doing, he believed the angels were one and all aligned in his corner, and this business of gripping hands was a process of transfer, an invisible means of communication, even if, to a casual observer, it might appear slightly ludicrous. But it was Skidelsky’s little ritual, his way of making affirmations, of passing on his strength – and as far as he was concerned it was all perfectly normal. There was nothing strange about it.

  ‘Trust me, Jimmy,’ he said. ‘Are you trusting me?’

  Mallory’s hand was hurting. ‘I’m trusting you,’ he said.

  ‘Are you trusting me?’

  ‘Yes, yes. I’m trusting you,’ Mallory said.

  Skidelsky released him, and smiled. There was sweat on the young man’s forehead. A muscular tic worked at the side of his neck. It was clear he put a great deal of mental effort into these bondings.

  ‘Go downtown, Jimmy. Make the call. Then phone me and tell me you trust me, and I’ll know the bait’s been taken.’

  Mallory rubbed his aching hand. ‘Maybe I just don’t like blood,’ he said.

  Skidelsky said, ‘Blood? Or bloodletting?’

  ‘Both.’

  ‘In the old days, when somebody was sick, they used leeches. Think of the country as sick, Jimmy. Think of yourself as one of the physicians applying a few leeches.’

  ‘I’ll try,’ Mallory said.

  ‘I’ll be waiting for your call,’ Max Skidelsky said.

  Mallory drove into the heart of Fredericksburg. The humidity was stultifying. He found a parking-space in a side street and walked to a pay phone and made a long-distance call with his credit card.

  A man answered on the fifth ring. ‘Yes?’

  ‘This is Mallory.’

  ‘Mallory. How are you?’

  ‘I’m OK,’ Mallory said. ‘I’m more interested in what you have to tell me.’