JOHN DENIS
Alistair MacLean’s UNACO Air Force One Is Down

HARPER

Contents

Cover

Title Page

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

By Alistair MacLean

ALISTAIR MACLEAN’S AIR FORCE ONE IS DOWN

Copyright

About the Publisher

ONE

Mister Smith’s watch had long since been taken from him, so he logged the passing seconds in his head. Not all of them, but enough to keep him in touch with reality.

No natural light penetrated the cell, for he was a Category ‘A’ convict, rating a top-security tomb. No everyday sounds of the world outside reached his ears through the solid old walls of Fresnes Prison.

In three years, even during his twice-daily canters round the exercise yard, not a single aeroplane engine had Smith heard, nor the dying snarl of a lorry, nor the aimless twittering of a sparrow.

His hearing had become abnormally and selectively acute, sifting the mélange of man-made, purposeful noises for the odd accidental one to disturb the relentless pattern of normality. But these were few, scattered like grace notes through an otherwise pedestrian score. Yet still, and obsessively, Smith listened – for the catch in the footfalls of his guards that meant a broken step, for the clang of a dropped key and the curse that always followed it, for the scraping of a match as a warder unknowingly bestowed on Smith the priceless gift of lighting a cigarette outside his cell.

These sounds, after a while, slotted subliminally into his mind, and were used by Smith to fuel his determination to avoid mental stagnation in his solitary confinement. He owned one of the truly original criminal minds of the century, and had no intention of letting it rust into disuse.

He exercised his body ruthlessly to keep his muscles finely toned, and drilled his brain no less fanatically with complex chess and bridge problems committed to memory. And when he had dispatched these, he would reconstruct in perfect detail the greatest achievements of his long career, and go on to plan those yet to happen.

That they would happen, Smith never doubted. He had known with a cold certainty on the day that the forces of the United Nations Anti-Crime Organisation defeated his commando army on the Eiffel Tower, that no prison could hold him beyond his calculated tolerance.

Now he had tolerated Fresnes Prison for long enough. Smith had rarely spoken, still more rarely smiled, during his incarceration. But as he sat on his bunk and squinted at the naked light-bulb which he had come to think of as a trusted friend, the ghost of a grin touched his lips.

While his brain schemed at a feverish pitch, he dropped his eyes and absent-mindedly sketched with a fingernail on the palm of his hand the ragged outline of an aeroplane. And he whispered a name.

‘Dunkels.’

Dunkels was Smith’s creature, dragged from the gutters of Berlin. Smith had made Dunkels rich, and fear of Smith kept the German loyal. The time had come for Dunkels to repay his master, to be the catalyst of Smith’s freedom, and of the crime he would perpetrate and which would rock the Western world.

‘Dunkels,’ Smith breathed again, drawing comfort from the sound, for sounds were precious to him. Dunkels would not let Mister Smith down. No one ever did that.

The Swissair DC-9 started its lazy descent into Zurich airport. The ‘No Smoking’ sign came on in the first-class compartment, and Siegfried Dunkels obediently mashed his cigarette into pulp with elegantly powerful fingers.

He teased a flake of ash from the crease of his blue mohair trousers and glanced out of the cabin window. White puffs of cumulus danced on the snow-topped Alpine peaks, basking in their Christmas card complacency under an otherwise china-blue sky. His thin lips twisted. Dunkels detested the smug Swiss, but envied and feared them, too, for their effortless success and smooth financial brigandry. He had been bested, cheated, by Swiss money-men in the past; it would not, he vowed, happen again.

No Zurich gnome had ever beaten Mister Smith, Dunkels mused; and he was in Switzerland on Mister Smith’s business. Nothing must go wrong. On Dunkels’ life, nothing must go wrong.

A pert stewardess, confidently pretty, stopped by his seat and glanced meaningfully at his lap through lowered lids. She was merely checking that his seat-belt was fastened, yet she made it seem like an invitation.

‘I trust,’ Dunkels said in German, ‘that your Swiss doctors are more amenable than your bankers.’

‘I beg your pardon?’ said the girl.

‘You have it,’ Dunkels rejoined, stretching his mouth into a smile.

Fawn-coloured sunlight flooded into the aircraft as the pilot turned on to his final approach. A priest in the window seat struggled with the mini-blind, and Dunkels reached across him to flick it expertly down and mask the sudden glare. The priest bowed his thanks. Men of God, Dunkels thought, should not travel first class. It did not demonstrate a proper humility, though he doubted whether one such as his companion, clearly a bishop, would even bother to affect an attitude of humility.

The tension of the landing mounted in the cabin, and was reflected by seasoned travellers like Dunkels who steeled themselves for the touch-down. A sigh of relief escaped from the bishop when the DC-9’s wheels rode safely on to the tarmac. The prelate crossed himself, and started to say something to Dunkels, who pretended, with an exaggerated pantomime, to be deaf.

Later, Dunkels hefted his alligator-skin case from the baggage-carousel and strolled past the deferential Swiss douaniers to the automatic exit doors. A uniformed chauffeur standing by a black Mercedes signalled to him with a gloved hand. The driver indicated the front passenger seat, but Dunkels pointedly waited for the rear door to be opened. Just as pointedly, he insulated himself from the possibility of small-talk on the journey by leaving the limousine’s plate-glass partition closed.

Dunkels did not look through the tinted window at the breathtaking scenery, but into it at his own reflection. He saw, and admired, a square-jawed, firmly fleshed face with a slightly kinked nose jutting aggressively under his deceptively mild brown eyes. The chin was adequately cleft and the forehead broad and bland. His eyebrows, like his hair, were ash-blond. The hair was kept short and sculpted by an Italian barber who was an artist with a razor. Dunkels drew a comb from his pocket and ran it across his scalp. In its wake, the individual hair follicles snapped smartly back into place like Prussian guardsmen.

A fleeting shadow intruded on his self-absorption. Dunkels frowned and peered more closely. Then he grinned. It was an aeroplane. A Boeing 707.

The undulating silhouette was not unlike the shape Smith had traced on his hand in the Fresnes Prison.

The dignified italic script on the sign said ‘Edelweiss Clinic’ in English, and Dunkels mentally switched to English for the period he was to stay there; a short time, he hoped. Like Smith, Dunkels was an accomplished linguist – though without Smith’s encyclopaedic command of esoteric tongues. Dunkels had known Smith to range languidly through the alphabet from Albanian to Xhosa purely for mental stimulus.

Gravel crackled beneath the wheels of the Mercedes when it left the main road and turned into the clinic’s long drive. Edelweiss, Dunkels assumed, would be an unwelcome intruder into the probably regimented sterility of the clinic, which at last came into view through the front window. It was a newish, chalet-style complex nestling in a fold of the mountain, and built out from it to overlook the vertiginous drop to a rock-strewn valley. Patients of Doctor Richard Stein who were unable to afford his treatment, or failed to benefit from it, could solve their problems simply by walking off his expensive terracing, Dunkels thought. He spread his long, spare body over the rear seat of the Mercedes and waited for the chauffeur to release him. A white-coated figure came out through the swing-doors and descended the steps towards him.

Doctor Richard Stein looked old for his years. He was an acknowledged front-runner in the treatment of rheumatoid-arthritic complaints among the elderly and rich, as well as a gifted psychiatrist. He was also (but less acknowledged) probably the most skilful plastic surgeon in Switzerland. It was a fortunate aptitude to possess in a land where a secret access of fortune often demanded a consequential change in appearance.

Richard Stein oiled rusting joints, cleared cobwebbed minds, and restructured dangerous faces with the same impartial expertise. He was small, dark and frail-seeming, with a prominent aquiline nose. His shoulders were bent, and Dunkels, who towered over him, saw the permanently crooked upper half of his body swivel from the waist as Stein extended a bony hand in greeting. ‘Physician, heal thyself,’ Dunkels murmured indelicately.

‘Mr Dunkels, I presume,’ Stein said in German.

Dunkels ran his tongue along his strong, square teeth and grinned. ‘There’s an answer to that, I believe,’ he replied in English, ‘though I never learned what it was. Doctor Stein: it’s good to meet you at last.’ He gripped Stein’s hand with careless strength, but released it when the Swiss grimaced in pain. ‘Sorry,’ Dunkels said, ‘I wouldn’t hurt your hands for all the money in Zurich.’

‘Even with all the money in Zurich, I doubt that you’d be able to buy their equal,’ Stein remarked, in excellent, though accented, English. He rubbed his abused fingers ruefully and added, ‘I’ll lead the way, then,’ turning as fluidly as a man afflicted with apparent arthritic curvature of the spine can rotate.

The Mercedes slid away, and Dunkels followed the little Swiss doctor along two uniformly pristine corridors until they came to an oak-panelled door bearing the single word ‘Director’. Stein’s office was functional G-plan, with a picture-window framing the valley and mountains like an adjustable holiday-snap. Stein settled himself behind the desk and seemed to grow in stature now that he was exercising his own territorial imperative. He waved Dunkels into a comfortable low hide chair.

‘You have the photographs and the anatomically detailed descriptions?’ Stein asked, breaking the silence.

Dunkels nodded. ‘You have the candidate?’

Stein nodded. Dunkels waited for the exposition, but none came. Finally he sniffed loudly and said, ‘Name?’

Stein linked his fingers and laid them on the desk, leaning forward and gazing intently at Dunkels as if he were on the point of revealing a state secret. ‘Jagger. Cody Jagger.’

Dunkels pursed his lips. ‘It has a somewhat theatrical ring,’ he mused.

‘It’s his real name,’ Stein supplied confidentially.

Dunkels sat up and leaned in towards Stein. ‘He’s here now?’

Stein inclined his impressive head. ‘Would you like to see his picture?’ Dunkels indicated that he would.

It was an ordinary enough face gazing out at him from the first page of the manilla folder which Stein shot across the polished mahogany desk. The ordinariness, Dunkels knew, was a bonus. It was also a strangely pliable-looking face … no highlights or promontories, no points of interest or focus; it could have been moulded from plasticine for all the definition it carried. Another bonus. Dunkels stared hard at the face, then closed his eyes and tried to visualise its contours; and failed. He grinned, and smacked his lips approvingly.

Stein smiled too. ‘I knew you’d like him. Good basic building-material. There are, additionally, certain similarities already between Jagger and the subject, and for total conversion … well, at the very least Jagger’s physiognomy creates no obstacles, as you can see. The colouring, incidentally, is identical, and his height and weight match the subject’s almost exactly.’

‘Almost?’

‘Each man is six feet two inches tall, but Jagger is eight pounds heavier than the subject. This is not a problem, since my clinic specialises in reducing-diets.’

‘Among other things.’

‘As you say,’ Stein acknowledged, ‘among other things.’

Dunkels flipped through the remaining pages of the Jagger file, and grunted in amusement. Stein regarded him questioningly. Dunkels snapped the file shut and remarked, ‘Not exactly a model citizen, our Cody, is he?’

Stein replied, ‘You didn’t tell me you wanted a circuit preacher.’ Dunkels grinned. ‘It makes no difference what he is,’ he conceded, ‘as long as he is the man he claims to be. If he checks out, he’ll do.’

‘He will.’

‘He’ll have to,’ Dunkels said, leaving the implicit warning unstated.

Stein unlaced his fingers and spread them wide in apparent consternation. ‘I’ve never let Smith down before, have I?’ he demanded.

‘Mister Smith,’ Dunkels corrected icily.

‘Mister Smith, I’m sorry,’ Stein apologised. ‘But all the same, I’ve always delivered. Even when it was Mister Smith’s own face. I made him Javanese, if you recall. And Swedish – and Peruvian. No complaints? No.’ Stein’s fingertips agitated like the hands of a blue-rinse matron drying a full house of painted nails.

‘I gave him his present face,’ he protested, ‘the aristocratic look, that’s what he wanted – top-drawer English. And that’s what he got. He could pass for a Duke at Buckingham Palace.’

‘He did,’ Dunkels interposed drily.

‘There you are, then,’ Stein exclaimed, ‘though of course Mister Smith’s face is marvellously – eh – malleable. And unmemorable, too. He tells me he’s quite forgotten what he originally looked like.’

That, Dunkels admitted, rising from the hide chair, was true. ‘OK, Stein,’ he said brusquely, ‘I’ll put Jagger through the mincer, and if he comes out kosher, he’s it.’ Dunkels prided himself on his idiomatic English.

They lunched expansively in Stein’s penthouse, which afforded an even more staggering panorama of Switzerland’s greatest natural asset. When they had finished eating, Stein inquired tentatively whether Dunkels really thought they could get away with the impersonation.

‘What do you think?’ Dunkels replied. ‘You’re doing the important part.’

Stein explained that the assumption of the subject’s physical identity was not difficult. He had made people into other people before. ‘Naturally,’ he went on, ‘I’ll be able to offer a more qualified opinion on Jagger’s chances when you tell me a little more about our subject. At present, all you’ve given me is his face in six different poses, for which I’m grateful, plus the information that he’s connected with the American forces, though which branch I don’t know.’

Dunkels cracked his knuckles and drew a baleful glance from Stein. ‘His name is Joe McCafferty,’ Dunkels said slowly, as if grudging every word. ‘He’s on secondment from the United Nations Anti-Crime Organisation – UNACO – to the elite Secret Service Corps forming the American President’s bodyguard.

Currently, McCafferty has been reseconded to head the security force aboard Air Force One, which is, as you know—’

‘Yes,’ Stein interrupted, ‘I know what Air Force One is. The Boeing – 707, isn’t it? – used by the President as a sort of aerial White House. So …’ he dragged the conjunction out admiringly, and whistled, ‘so McCafferty’s an important man.’

‘He is.’

‘Then you’d better come along and see him,’ Stein twinkled. ‘I mean, of course, his potential doppelgänger, his look-alike, his – other self.’ Stein paused and added, half to himself, ‘How unpleasant it will be for McCafferty to discover that he has suddenly become two people.’

Smith’s computer ‘mincer’, located thirty miles north of the Brazilian city of São Paolo, was extraordinarily swift and adept. It placed its imprimatur on Jagger’s credentials while Dunkels was still waiting for his coffee to arrive. A courteous waiter handed him the telex, and Dunkels himself took the good news to Jagger, who was billeted in a room at the end of a wing that was private even by the reclusive character of the Edelweiss Clinic.

He introduced himself and told Jagger, ‘You’ll be seeing a lot of me from now on.’ The ringer stood up and clasped Dunkels’ hand. He grinned crookedly and said, ‘Cody Jagger – and this is probably the last you’ll ever see of me as I look now.’

Four hours later, Dunkels left the clinic in the same Mercedes that had brought him there. His close interrogation of Jagger had endorsed the computer’s verdict: that Cody Jagger was indeed Cody Jagger. Dunkels was also satisfied, by his own and Smith’s high standards, that Jagger was psychologically as well as physiologically adjusted to becoming one Joseph Eamonn Pearse McCafferty, Colonel USAF, presently Head of Security Operations, Air Force One, and seconded to the 89th Military Airlift Wing at Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland, USA.

The Alpine peaks were almost purple in the waning light when Stein knocked at Jagger’s door, and entered without an invitation. The ringer, who was standing before a back-lit shaving mirror saying goodbye to his face, remarked tersely, ‘He’s hooked.’

‘Excellent,’ Stein beamed. ‘So Smith will be hooked too. Moscow should be very, very pleased.’

‘So they ought to be,’ Jagger retorted. ‘This thing could be bigger than either we or they thought.’ He lapsed into silence, then added, ‘Are you sure Smith will buy it?’

‘Tut, tut, tut,’ Stein said, waving an admonitory finger at him, ‘Mister Smith if you don’t mind. That, Jagger, is your first lesson.’

Smith listened to the days going by. Dunkels’ last message had been affirmative. The ringer was perfect. The caper was on. His freedom lay barely a week away; then the world of sound, sight and scent would assume its normal proportions.

But strangely, that mattered less and less to Smith as the elongated hours passed. What was important was the crime he had planned to celebrate his return to life – the big one, which would destroy the credibility of UNACO and its commander, Malcolm Philpott. Smith deeply hated the man who had condemned him to the scarcely endurable catalepsy of imprisonment – but this time he would triumph and UNACO would fall.

Dunkels would not let him down. Nor would Jagger; nor would Stein. Failure, as always with Mister Smith, was unthinkable. He had felt President Warren G. Wheeler squirming in his hands once before; and he would do so again.

Smith’s mind conjured up anew the vision of the converted Boeing 707 that was, to Warren G. Wheeler, Air Force One. ‘Oh dear,’ he murmured, ‘has the nasty man taken your toy away?’

And for the first time in three years, four months and eighteen days, genuine, unforced laughter filled the lonely prison cell, so near to his beloved Paris that Smith could almost smell the drains.

TWO

Over the next four days, Cody Jagger survived the mental and physical agony of losing his persona.

He could not, though, have been in more skilful or patient hands. Stein’s operating theatre, in which he was joined by only two members of his staff, wholly dependent on him for money and drugs, was set out like a society photographer’s salon.

Every inch of wall space was given over to huge blow-up pictures of McCafferty’s face taken from six different angles, including a shot of the back of his neck, showing the precise set of his flat, trim ears.

The operating table was surrounded by a forest of tripods bearing multi-bracketed floodlights, adjustable vertically and in their angles of concentration. Stein, bent over the table which glowed under its own bank of arc-lamps, constantly barked instructions to his minions to sharpen or illuminate particular features of the subject.

Then, squinting fiercely at the pictures that charted McCafferty’s face with the fine detail of an Ordnance Survey Map, Stein wielded his scalpel on the unconscious Jagger to trade cheek for cheek, jowl for jowl, nose for nose.

With total detachment, and a square centimetre at a time, Stein sliced away slivers of Cody Jagger and moulded them into jigsaw pieces of Joe McCafferty, like Lego bricks of flesh, the common denominators of a man which the surgeon simply rearranged in the shape of a different man.

Finally it was done, the stitches out, the scars pink and fresh. It was 0330 on the morning of the fifth day, and Stein, slumped cross-legged on the floor studying his handiwork in an enlarging mirror set into the ceiling, reflected sourly that in only a day and a half more, the God of Abraham and Isaac had created an entire world. ‘Probably had better hired help than me,’ Stein chuckled malevolently. He had never felt so enervated, so completely exhausted.

He looked at the taped and bandaged head. If there was no tissue infection, the bulk of the hard work was over. But Stein had sensed from the mounting urgency in Dunkels’ voice on the phone that Smith’s plans were coming to a head.

Stein knew he could delay no further in contacting Karilian.

The Mercedes drew up once more at the Edelweiss Clinic, midway through the evening of the same day. Stein, who had spent the intervening hours sleeping, crabbed down the steps to greet the large, square-faced man who had elbowed the respectful chauffeur impatiently aside.

The driver, by inclination a gregarious type, was rapidly tiring of ferrying rude and uncommunicative foreigners to his employer.

Axel Karilian, KGB controller, Switzerland, ignored Stein’s outstretched hand, grasping him instead roughly by the elbow and pivoting him around to face back up the steps. ‘Show me,’ he commanded, propelling the little Swiss doctor through the entry doors.

As a high-ranking and, by definition, high-risk criminal, Smith was customarily fed in his cell, keeping him away from contact with other prisoners. So when his evening meal-tray was removed, and the others in his block (Smith subconsciously counted them, identifying the cells solely by the sounds of their doors closing and the number of steps it took to reach them), he knew that it would be half an hour to the guard’s final round of the day, a further twenty minutes to complete the tour, and an additional fifteen minutes to ‘lights out’. The regimen never varied. Smith would have been distressed if it had.

That evening, while Doctor Richard Stein was entertaining Axel Karilian in the Edelweiss Clinic’s penthouse, Mister Smith ate his dinner in the prison’s isolation wing with more than usual relish.

He was aware that it would be the last meal he would ever take there. He lay back on his bunk and considered the immediate and more distant future, while his mind automatically catalogued the jail’s grinding routine, cell by cell, tray by tray, door by door, step by squeaky-booted step (a squeaking boot! Not two, but one! A pleasing paradox to take out with him).

Smith chuckled his delight, and in his brain the nagging metronome that kept time for him ticked remorselessly on. He fell asleep, but even as he awoke hours later his first conscious impression was of the metronome taking over again, so that he knew for an indisputable fact that the hour was drawing near.

The prison ‘trusty’ bribed to be the prime mover in springing Smith from jail licked his lips and tried to stop his eyes from darting repeatedly to the wall clock in the maintenance block. The second hand clicked over from 0359 to 0400, and the convict jammed the flat of his hand down on the plunger-key of the detonator device that had been smuggled in to him.

In the isolation wing, two hundred yards away, an electric spark leapt out from a junction box to join a trail of black powder. The powder spluttered into flame, and eleven seconds later a can of gasoline exploded in a bedding store at the end of Smith’s corridor. Soon the store and its adjoining rooms were well alight, and the prison staff, squeaky-boot among them, rushed to the scene. That was when Smith’s cell light came on.

The alarm from the prison to the local fire-station was automatic on the location of any uncontrolled outbreak, but still the fire-officers tended to wait for a confirmatory phone call. When it came, six fire appliances – two turntable ladder-wagons, a control vehicle and three water/foam-tenders – roared out at a reckless speed into the night.

The fire spread quickly, yet the prison governor, and the deputy governor and the chief warder, all had to be roused and mobilised before the order to evacuate the threatened areas could be given. The guards drew rifles and riot guns from the armoury, and a nervous police commissioner turned out a cadre of the local CRS detachment, the riot police.

Arc-lamps and sweep-lights illuminated every cranny of the gaunt building, and Smith sat up and then leaned back on his elbows when his cell door burst open.

‘Out!’ the armed guard ordered. ‘There’s a fire. We’re clearing the block. Out!’

‘Where to?’ Smith asked, putting on a show of sudden panic.

‘The main yard. Join the queue. Hurry!’

Mister Smith left the place which had been his home for more than three years without so much as a backward glance.

The fire-engine convoy wailed and clanged its way through the dark streets, to be joined at an intersection by police cars and outriders, adding still more manic noise to the already insane cacophony. At the prison, shouting guards urged streams of convicts from five different directions into the large central yard, herding them into resentful chains to feed water and sand to the flames. The keening of sirens and screeching of tyres announced the arrival of the police, who did little apart from get in each other’s way until the firemen came.

The fire had now spread to the stretch of buildings nearest the high perimeter-wall, and the two big turntable appliances straight away hoisted up their ladders above the wall. Firemen scrambled along them like mountain goats, and trained their hoses on the flames.

Unnoticed by the firemen, but ushered smartly to the wall by the police, a third turntable engine coming from the opposite direction from the main force, also shot its ladder up over the wall. The chief fire-officer in overall charge of operations in the control vehicle screamed directions at the crew for concentrating their water and foam.

The message was passed up the ladder to the man at the top, Leading Fireman Siegfried Dunkels, who acknowledged with a capable wave. Then he waved again, using both arms and trapping his hose between his knees. This time Smith saw him.

The yard was filled with smoke, clamour and confusion, and it was easy for Smith to clutch at his throat, retch noisily, and stumble out of the crocodile, which automatically closed ranks to fill his place.

Smith fell to his knees, apparently choking, then got up and lurched towards a patch of clearer air. It was covered by the harsh white glare of a searchlight, so the prison officer he bumped into en route did not trouble to turn him away from an area that would normally be strictly out-of-bounds to convicts: the foot of the wall.

Dunkels’ ladder, and the hoses of his men, were pointed at the heart of the fire, but gradually the ladder began swinging away from the blaze and towards the yard until it centred over the crumpled figure of Mister Smith. Dunkels dropped a weighted nylon rope-ladder smack into his lap. Smith grasped it and started to scale the wall.

A guard – primed, like his colleagues, to watch for signs of a break-out – caught the unnatural movement of the human fly in the corner of his vision, and shouted a warning. As he charged over to the gyrating figure he saw the rope-ladder, and leapt for its trailing end. But Dunkels had already jerked his hose away from the flames and was swivelling it downwards. Carefully avoiding Smith, he aimed the hose, and the high-pressure jet of water took the guard full in the chest, slamming him to the ground and pinning him there like a butterfly in a specimen case.

Smith reached the top of the wall and clutched the turntable ladder, which retracted, dropped its angle, and deposited him on the ground by the fire-engine. The hard-pressed fire chief also had the bad luck to notice Smith’s escape. He ran in the direction of the third appliance, the presence of which had been bothering him for some little while.

Dunkels, in the still-retracting ladder, gave him the full treatment, bowling him over like a ninepin and then worrying him until he crawled back to his control wagon, where sympathetic hands hauled him inside.

Smith jumped into the cab, and the driver gunned the motor and moved the appliance away at top speed, sirens blaring. Dunkels, perched on the end of the now horizontal ladder, used his hose like a tail-gunner to deadly effect, scattering startled firemen and CRS toughies who tried vainly to stop them.

The madly racing fire-engine left the city limits at an impossible speed five minutes later. In a quiet country road, the appliance stopped. The crew got out, peeled off their uniforms, and six of them piled into a neutral-coloured van which matched the name on their early-shift construction workers’ overalls.

Smith, Dunkels and the remaining three boarded a pair of Citroën cars, where changes of clothing were waiting for them. The limousines moved off together, and Smith heaved a sigh of profound relief.

‘Excellent, Dunkels,’ he said, ‘truly excellent. Now – get me a safe-house and a woman, in that order.’

Dunkels grinned. ‘Should you wish to reverse the order, sir,’ he said, ‘there’s a woman in the back of the other car.’

Karilian had reluctantly allowed Stein to take the lead when the surgeon ordered him to be gloved, masked and gowned, then demonstrated beyond doubt that Jagger was no longer in the operating theatre.

They reached Jagger’s off-limits suite, and Stein kept the bad news from him until they had tiptoed across to Jagger’s bedside. ‘What the hell’s this?’ Karilian burst out, jabbing a stubby finger at the bandaged head. ‘I want to see his face. That’s why I’m here, remember?’

‘Shhh,’ Stein soothed him. ‘Keep the noise down, I beg you. I don’t want him suddenly awoken. He’s still under sedation and mustn’t move quickly.’

Without dropping his voice, Karilian demanded when he could see Jagger properly. Stein had assured him that Jagger would wake naturally in the early hours, when the sedatives and antibiotics had worked through his system. But while there was still the risk of tissue infection, or even rejection, the ringer must remain unconscious. ‘Please do as I ask,’ he entreated Karilian. ‘Come and dine with me upstairs. I have some excellent vodka and Beluga caviare.’

Karilian looked thunderously at him from beneath his shaggy brows, the hard, flinty grey eyes contemptuous and unblinking. Then he gave a half-grunting, half-snorting bark and growled, ‘Make it Glenfiddich, Dom Perignon and a T-bone steak, and I might consider it.’

Stein also relaxed, his body subsiding from warped tension into its normal question mark shape. ‘But I do want to see him – tonight,’ Karilian warned him.

‘So you shall,’ Stein promised, ‘so you shall.’

The little doctor invariably won their minor skirmishes. Richard Stein, who had started life in Switzerland with the less acceptable name, in those days, of Scholomo Asher Silberstein, had known Axel Karilian for thirty-five years. Stein, then a gifted young medical student, had been trapped in Poland at the outbreak of war, and was sent to the nearest concentration camp with his fellow Jews. Luckily, it was a small and indifferently run camp under a weak but perverted commandant. Stein had wheedled his way into the camp’s medical unit, and the commandant’s confidence, and used the stepping-stones to Himmler’s Final Solution to advance himself into a position of power.

Stein pandered grossly to the commandant’s twisted mind (and improved his own knowledge of surgical techniques) by performing ghastly and obscene experimental operations on the inmates. His greatest medical triumph had been grafting organs from a large, fully-grown man on to the body of a seven-year-old girl. The child had lived for six weeks until the poisons trapped inside her literally erupted.

The Red Army surged swiftly through Poland on its way to Germany, and the commandant and his staff were unprepared for the sudden onslaught on the camp. The major in charge of the Soviet force lined up the Germans and shot them out of hand. He did the same with the weakest and most ailing of the Jews.

But Stein, neither sickly nor weak, was handed over to a young Ukrainian Intelligence captain who had just been posted to the advance armies, and so began the long friendship between Axel Karilian and the soon-to-be Richard Stein.

Stein was spirited away when the Ukrainian learned of his special abilities, and to protect him from Jewish revenge, Karilian took him to Odessa, where the Swiss Jew passed on enough of his hideously acquired skill in plastic surgery and skin-grafting to enable local doctors to change his face.

Stein did not stop at that, though; he wanted his shape changed as well. And he told the orthopaedic surgeons how to do it. It was an operation he had performed many times on unanaesthetised Jewish children, with more pliable bones than his, transforming them from human beings into grotesque monsters. Stein laid out every step of the operation for the Russians, endured the agony and, like Jagger, survived.

Richard Stein was no hapless victim of rheumatoid-arthritis. He was a self-made question mark.

After the war the KGB set him up in the Edelweiss Clinic, and Karilian joined him in Switzerland as the Geneva-based controller. It frequently amused Stein, as he amassed considerable wealth with the success of the clinic, that many of his best customers now were even wealthier Jews. On them, of course, he operated with the utmost care and skill. And never forgot the anaesthetic.

Cody Jagger’s path to the embrace of the KGB was equally painful, and was also to involve Axel Karilian.

After a boyhood of petty offences and a brace of unhelpful prison terms when he graduated from a more serious school of crime, Jagger made PFC in the Army and was captured early on in the Vietnam war, waging a bloody and highly personal counter-offensive north of Hué.

He was tough, truculent, a born bully, and no trouble at all to the Viet Cong torture squads, who broke him inside a month.

Jagger was selected for training by a travelling KGB recruiting officer, but far from easing his lot the new status turned Cody’s life into a living hell. Physical torment and mental assault alternated in a pattern of treatment which took him to the very borders of his sanity. Only afterwards did he dimly appreciate that turncoat material was of no use to the Soviet intelligence machine. He had given in too easily to the Viet Cong; therefore, the KGB reasoned, he could just as easily revert back to the Americans. They could not afford that kind of risk, so they handed Jagger over to Axel Karilian, who had picked up any number of useful tips in his fruitful association with Richard Stein.

Karilian’s programme for Jagger was typical in its uncomplicated logic: the American must be cowed and brutalised into abject, unquestioning submission until he became a safe prospect.

It took Jagger three years to realise what was happening. When he did, he submitted – and meant it. Moscow sent him back to Hanoi, where the torture was increased daily for two months, to the point where Jagger lived every waking moment in constant, gibbering terror.

Only then had Karilian been satisfied. Thereafter, the KGB ruled Jagger by fear and fear alone.

He performed well enough for them as an agent in the States, but at a purely basic level, so that when Smith instructed Stein to find ringer-material for him, and Stein had passed on the news to Karilian, even the Ukrainian had been reluctant to use Jagger. But when he reconsidered the proposition, Karilian knew that Jagger must be the perfect candidate, though Stein still had misgivings.

Stein and Karilian entered once more the bedroom of the now restlessly stirring man. Jagger’s eyes opened and regarded them through the slits in his bandages. ‘How is he?’ Stein inquired of the nurse sitting by the bed.

‘Much better,’ she replied. ‘Doctor Grühner had a look at him just now. He says all the tissue has taken well, and there’s no sign of infection. The scars are healing nicely.’

‘Have you seen his face?’ Karilian asked her brusquely. The nurse shook her head. Karilian motioned towards the door with his hand. ‘Out,’ he ordered.

Stein lifted the bandages carefully away, and was arranging them on a metal trolley when the telephone rang. The call was for Karilian.

The Ukrainian spoke only his name, listened, grunted twice and slammed the receiver back in its cradle. ‘That was Paris,’ he said, ‘there’s been a fire at Fresnes Prison. One inmate made a daring escape. Guess who.’

Stein’s eyes lit up. ‘Then it’s about to start?’

Karilian nodded. ‘Your waxwork doll there will be needed sooner than we thought. Well – let’s take a look at him.’

Jagger murmured in distress as Karilian loomed menacingly over the bed. Cody was conditioned to tremble at Russians, and at Karilian in particular. The Ukrainian took photographs from Stein’s folder on the trolley and leaned in closer, holding a 12 x 10 enlargement next to Jagger’s new pink ear. He rose and turned to Stein. ‘Good enough,’ he conceded.

‘Good enough?’ Stein bridled. ‘He would fool Joe McCafferty’s own mother.’

The telephone rang again. Stein picked it up, announced himself, and listened, also in silence. Then he said, ‘Have no fear, he’ll be ready. Yes. Until next week then. Au revoir.’

‘Dunkels,’ Stein said when Karilian raised an inquiring eyebrow. Smith would be at the clinic in a week, he explained, and he wanted the ringer to be fit, unscarred and word-perfect within a further five weeks.

Karilian smiled, with no trace of mirth. ‘Then so do I, my dear Richard. You’d better see to it, hadn’t you?’

Stein promised it would be accomplished. They had tapes of McCafferty’s voice and an elocution expert as back-up, plus mute and sound film of his walk, gestures and mannerisms. Stein had a copy of Smith’s dossier on the UNACO man, which was formidably comprehensive. His background, education, love affairs, close friendships, likes and dislikes … all were documented in detail. Psychiatric assessments and physical reports were attached, together with medical histories and dental records. McCafferty’s relations with his brother officers were charted, and the file also included thumbnail pictures and mini-dossiers of the people closest to him at work, who would clearly expect instant recognition from McCafferty.

One factor was in Jagger’s favour: McCafferty commanded his own unit, so he didn’t have to be too unctuously friendly with anyone, superior or subordinate. Aloofness could be used to cover a temporary lapse. Nonetheless, the ringer would have to memorise not merely the faces, but the backgrounds as well, of all those men and women in McCafferty’s immediate family and circle, especially the officers he had served with on his way up through the ranks. Each of them would have similar combat stories to which the ringer must unhesitatingly respond – and get the details right.

The women in McCafferty’s life, Stein reasoned, could present the major problem. Affairs they knew about were fully outlined, with portraits, curricula vitae, favourite food, music, authors and suchlike, of the leading contenders. Sexual accomplishments and/or deviations were listed where possible, but it would be in bed that Jagger could betray himself. Several authorities rated McCafferty as a considerate and expert lover – whereas Jagger was, at best, an unfeeling rapist, with a conviction to prove it.

Fortunately, Stein had partially solved the problem by circumcising Jagger to match McCafferty, so it would be some time before the ringer could use himself without pain. But as a general rule he would be ordered to avoid sexual contacts, pleading recurrent hepatitis, or a mild case of a social disease, or any other plausible excuse.

Again Stein asked Karilian, as they stood looking down on the scarred ringer, how good their chances were of getting away with it for any length of time.

‘Can Jagger really manage it?’ he insisted. ‘Is he that bright, that adaptable? It needs a considerable actor, you know, Axel, to carry off this part.’

Karilian told him to stop worrying. ‘He’ll do it all right,’ he said grimly, ‘and he’ll do it well. I don’t know why Smith wants him on Air Force One, but it’s got to be something very, very big for an operator like him to go to all this expense and preparation. And for his man to be our man as well, unknown either to Smith or people like UNACO, who’ll be involved now that Smith is free, is a master-stroke. Moscow’s in raptures at the prospect.’

Stein grinned at Karilian’s obvious relish, but suggested that the more Jagger was exposed as McCafferty the greater his vulnerability might become. Karilian shook his huge head. ‘You’re wrong,’ he replied, ‘the more he plays the role the better he’ll get at playing it – that surely follows.’

‘I don’t know,’ Stein muttered, ‘I just don’t know. How can you be so certain?’

‘How? Simple. I know Jagger. He’s terrified of what will happen to him if he doesn’t do it. Something a hundred – a thousand – times worse than death. Can you imagine the depth of his fear, Doctor, a fate as monstrous as that which Jagger believes could be his? But how silly of me; of course you can. You, after all, are an acknowledged expert in pain and terror. For example, you would only have to threaten to “rearrange” him again, but without the anaesthetic. It would not be the first time, would it?’

Stein flushed angrily, but could not look Karilian in the eyes. ‘What about the real McCafferty?’ he muttered. ‘What happens to him?’

Karilian laughed. ‘If Smith doesn’t kill him,’ he said, ‘then of course I will.’

THREE

Basil Swann, a young man with spots, hornrimmed glasses and a string of honours from three universities, bustled into the office of Malcolm G. Philpott, Director of the United Nations Anti-Crime Organisation. The bureau was located in the UN Building in New York City, and Basil was childishly proud to work there, although he would not have dreamed of showing it. He had a predictably sound future with UNACO – provided that UNACO itself had one.

The bureau had never been – and, Philpott feared, never would be – a totally secure operation, free from political pressure and financial stress. Philpott himself had proposed the formation of the top-secret group when he was a research professor at a New England college.

His specialist subjects had been behavioural sciences, but Philpott’s deepest interest lay in the motivation and machination of the criminal mind. He had lobbied furiously to gain UN approval, and won it only because the US government of the day had funded the initial outlay. Philpott resisted the American patronage, and ever since then had fought successive Administrations to keep UNACO independent of the American, or any other, state. The bureau must, he insisted, be at the disposal of all UN member countries, from whichever power-bloc. An enlightened UN secretariat finally saw the point.

Philpott’s other problem – easily foreseen but difficult to resolve – was infiltration by the UN states who were picking up the bills. Philpott fought off patently obvious attempts at penetration by both the CIA and the KGB, but the French, Israeli, British and South African plants were sometimes trickier to uncover. Gradually, the Director established his right to a cordon sanitaire as the only effective means of guaranteeing UNACO’s neutrality and disinterestedness. He managed to cope with the naturally divided feelings of his American-born operatives, who had constantly to fend off appeals to their native patriotism, and relied heavily on his Assistant Director, Sonya Kolchinsky, a Czech national, for ammunition against Warsaw Pact interests.

Lastly, Philpott had to persuade all his clients that UNACO was not in business to play politics … that the American de-stabilisation of Chile and Jamaica, or the Soviet Union’s ruthless repression of Czechoslovakia and Poland, were not international crimes in the accepted sense; deplorable, but not actionable. UNACO’s enemies were criminals who challenged the security of nations and the stability of social order; and of those known to Philpott, Mister Smith came near the top of the list.

An unwanted complication for the UNACO Director was the depth of his personal relationship with the US President, Warren G. Wheeler, a close friend since college days. Wheeler had to be treated as impartially as any other UN head of state, but it created a difficult tight-rope for Philpott to walk. If he leaned too far in either direction, he would fall, and UNACO with him. But then, Malcolm Gregory Philpott had been trained for the risk business. And anyway, it made life interesting.

Now approaching his mid-fifties, Philpott was still a lean, trim and handsome man, though his abundant hair was iron-grey and his sharp, intelligent face was seamed, more from responsibility than age. The principal emotions showing on it as Swann walked into his office were tension and concern, rather belying Philpott’s reputation as a cunning poker player.

The large room through which Swann had passed on his way to see the Director housed the UNACO master computer, plus an electronically operated wall map of the world and a staff of multi-lingual monitors, whose continuous task was to tap listening-posts in a hundred and thirty countries.

Each time a new contact was made, a red light flickered on the wall map, indicating its point of origin. An exact see-through miniature of the map rested on Philpott’s uncluttered desk. Basil Swann approached the desk, stood in silence, coughed discreetly, and handed the Director a computer print-out. It was a brief list, no more than five lines.

USSR : Gold bullion shipment – Klvost to Moscow.

EEC : Brussels. Quarterly NATO conference.

MIDDLE EAST : Bahrain. OPEC ministers to Washington.

: Cairo. Israeli–Egyptian defence talks.

SOUTHERN HEMISPHERE : Cape Town. Diamonds in transit to Amsterdam.

Philpott quickly scanned the entries and accompanying estimate of dates, and then read it over, more slowly. ‘Is this everything?’ he inquired.

‘It is a complete catalogue of the likeliest events within the next three months in which the computer considers our friend might conceivably display a criminal interest,’ Swann replied ponderously.

‘Which friend?’ called a voice from the doorway, ‘and furthermore, what do you mean by bleeping me at the hairdresser’s? You know how sensitive Pepito is. It’d better be important.’

‘It is, Sonya,’ Philpott answered as his Assistant Director, newly and radiantly coiffured, sailed into the room, and sank into a chair proffered by Swann. Sonya Kolchinsky was sumptuously fashioned and of above-average height, with a round face, soft grey eyes and short brown hair, elegantly moulded to her shapely head. She was a good ten years younger than Philpott, but saw no reason to permit minor considerations like age difference or their positions in UNACO to interfere with the affair they had both conducted, guiltlessly and joyfully, ever since she had become part of UNACO and of Philpott’s life.

‘It’s very important,’ Philpott added gravely. ‘Smith’s got out of jail.’

‘O-h-h,’ she breathed, ‘that friend.’

‘That friend.’

Sonya pondered the news. ‘He hadn’t long to serve, had he?’ she said. ‘I remember he bribed his way to a lenient sentence after the Eiffel Tower snatch. It could have had only a few more months to run.’ Philpott nodded his agreement. ‘In which case,’ Sonya pressed, ‘wasn’t it rather foolish of him to break out now?’

‘Maybe,’ Philpott conceded, ‘– or maybe not.’

‘Why “maybe not”?’

‘Because, my pet, it could be he’s planning something so important that only he personally can mastermind it. Ergo, he wanted out of Fresnes.’

Sonya frowned. ‘So – we’re looking for the big one, are we?’ Philpott nodded, and handed her the print-out.

‘The computer’s come up with these,’ he explained, concern in his voice. ‘It could be any of them. They’re all his style, although a couple are more overtly political than usual for Smith.’

A single glance confirmed the impression for Sonya, and she provisionally eliminated the Brussels conference and the Cairo talks. Like Malcolm Philpott, she had become obsessed with Mister Smith when UNACO finally got to grips with him and succeeded in putting him away. Smith was arguably the most enigmatic force in world crime, a rare breed of criminal: dedicated to anarchy, and totally amoral. Perhaps even worse, he was wedded to the abstract concept of crime for its own sake, as a cleansing agent in a second-rate world.

Financial gain seemed hardly to matter to him; he craved solely the power and influence to commit more astounding and more atrocious assaults on people, on governments, institutions and social systems.

Smith did not seek to become the Napoleon, the Alexander or the Tamburlane of crime; in his warped mind, he already was. No one – not those closest to him, even – knew where he had come from, what he had originally looked like (he altered his appearance like other people changed their clothing), or the precise nature of the obsessional paranoia that drove him. He was fabulously rich, well-connected, young for his age (whatever that was), and a man of almost limitless accomplishment, who could have been outstanding in any area of human activity he chose. Yet Mister Smith had chosen one of the lowest forms of human activity and, unfortunately for the world, he had elevated it to an art form.

As Director of UNACO, Philpott had recruited, and still used, international criminals, poachers turned gamekeepers, to fight Smith. They had been successful once, and Philpott was convinced that only UNACO could stop him again.

But if they could not, then whatever the chosen battleground, Philpott had an uneasy foreboding that UNACO, directly or indirectly, would be right in the firing line. Together with its Director and Assistant Director.

‘Right,’ said Philpott, handing the print-out back to Swann, ‘plant agents in sensitive areas of all the operations I’ve marked – including Cairo and Brussels.’

‘But not Bahrain?’ Basil protested.

Philpott cupped his chin in his hand and pursed his lips. ‘No,’ he agreed, ‘not Bahrain. The transport of the OPEC ministers to Washington at, I believe, the end of next month, is being done in Air Force One, and we already have Joe McCafferty on secondment there as Head of Security. We couldn’t possibly have anyone safer in such a sensitive area.’

‘Right, sir,’ said Swann, and was half-way to leaving the room when Sonya called him back. Philpott looked up at her inquiringly.

‘I’m not so sure …’ she said, appearing deep in thought. Philpott cocked a quizzical eyebrow.

It went back, she explained, to their joint suspicion that Smith could be planning some form of revenge upon UNACO, even if only as a by-product of the larger operation. If that were so, might he not select the Bahrain gathering and go for Air Force One because UNACO’s man was seconded to the plane as Head of Security?

‘Deliberately bracket us in the target, you mean,’ said Philpott, pensively.

‘Yes, deliberately. After all, what would destroy our credibility more effectively than that something awful should happen to the US President’s private aircraft, with one of UNACO’s top men in charge?’

Philpott stroked the bridge of his nose, then removed his spectacles and chewed the ear-piece reflectively. It was, he thought, a hell of a position to be in, having to compromise one of their own leading field operatives on secondment by planting a check agent on him; but Sonya had advanced a persuasive argument.

‘He’s so unpredictable,’ she pressed. ‘The big one could be any of these – or none of them.’

‘OK, Basil,’ Philpott conceded, ‘we’ll cover all the options, including Bahrain. I’ll contact McCafferty in general terms and warn him to be especially vigilant on the OPEC trip, and you assign an operative to Air Force One.’

‘With McCafferty’s knowledge and permission?’ Swann inquired.

‘Without it, Basil,’ Philpott said firmly, ‘most definitely without it. Clearly, it must be someone Joe hasn’t served with previously, has never met, and doesn’t even know works for us. We’ve done it before.’

‘Not to top cats like McCafferty,’ Swann persisted. Philpott grinned and said, ‘There’s always a first time for everyone. With Smith, we can’t afford to take chances.’

Basil left, and Sonya regarded Philpott shrewdly. ‘Why the anonymous back-up?’ she inquired. It had not been part of her thinking. She had merely wished to strengthen McCafferty’s hand.

Philpott looked back at her levelly, and liked what he saw. He liked her thought processes, too; they had played seven card draw poker a couple of times in bed, where she had him at a constant and embarrassing disadvantage. ‘Merely covering the options,’ he replied.

She grinned. ‘Or playing both ends against the middle?’

Philpott winked at her. ‘Yeah, well,’ he said, ‘you and Smith aren’t the only clever bastards in this little game.’

The weather was once again a splendid advertisement for Switzerland, with the air as clear and bracing as Stein’s brochure claimed. The Mercedes driver was in excellent humour, too; for once he had a communicative passenger. To Dunkels’ astonishment, Smith had insisted on keeping up a flow of spirited conversation throughout the journey to the Edelweiss Clinic. Dunkels guessed that he might be doing no more than testing out his new accent and persona – aristocratic Boston Irish, with long Harvard vowel-sounds to match his Ivy League suit. The chauffeur, though, had been impressed, not least by Smith’s courtesy in explaining his more obscure witticisms in faultless Swiss patois.

Stein met them at the door and took them straight round to the landscaped gardens at the rear of the clinic, which reached back to the sheer wall of the mountain. Jagger sat in a wheelchair in a far corner, talking to a blonde nurse, recently hired to replace the previous one who had been sacked on Karilian’s orders. The fewer people who knew that Jagger and the plastic surgery case from the private wing were one and the same man, the better, Karilian reasoned.

Before Stein could call out to Jagger, Smith shouted, ‘Colonel McCafferty. Visitors.’

The wheelchair swung about, and Jagger, in what even at that early stage was a passable imitation of McCafferty’s voice, said, ‘I don’t believe we’ve met, have we?’

‘Good, Jagger, good,’ Smith exulted. ‘I have not had the honour of Colonel McCafferty’s acquaintance, and it’s my intention to keep it that way. You’ve done well. Already, you’ve exceeded my expectations.’

He turned to Stein and pressed congratulations on him, too, which the little doctor was compelled modestly to accept. The transformation had, in all truth, been a miracle of plastic surgery.

Stein then mentioned that Jagger was curious about the nature of the assignment he was to carry out as McCafferty, but Smith advised Jagger not to worry; he would be told all in a few weeks. Meanwhile, he was to immerse himself in the role, for he would periodically be examined in his mastery of it by Dunkels. ‘I need hardly have to explain,’ Smith purred, ‘that I shall be most displeased if all the hard work and expense I have gone to proves to be wasted. If you are found ultimately incapable of performing this task, I assure you that you will not survive long enough to ponder your failure.’

Jagger flushed as far as the stretched pink tissue of McCafferty’s face would permit, and made as if to rise from the wheelchair, but Stein and the nurse eased him back down. Stein protested that Smith was being unfair, and could unsettle Jagger’s psychological acceptance of the permanent loss of his identity.

Smith dismissed the possibility with an airy wave of his hand, and reassured Jagger of his confidence in the ringer’s powers. He repeated that Jagger would learn everything he needed to know before long. ‘You, on the other hand, my dear Doctor,’ Smith said to Stein, ‘will not be told the details of the plan. When it becomes a fait accompli, the whole world will know. In the meantime, I am paying as much for your silence as for your undoubted medical skill.’

Stein smiled and inclined his head. Smith need have no fears for his discretion, Stein promised, nor would he seek information from Jagger when the ringer was in full possession of the facts. ‘Then we understand each other, Doctor,’ Smith replied, a satisfied smile on his face.

Stein beamed back at him. Probably no other man alive, he reflected, had ever double-crossed Mister Smith and collected a large fee from him at the same time.

No other man, true. But a woman had …

… and her name was Sabrina Carver.

She had been a member of Smith’s Eiffel Tower commando team, but in reality (and undetected by Smith) had helped bring about his destruction there, for she was also a valued agent of UNACO. Sabrina knew the identity of only one other UNACO field operative – and it was not Joe McCafferty.

Philpott had made it a corner of UNACO’s game-plan to keep his agents anonymous and apart. It protected the agents, and it shielded UNACO, since a captured operative could denounce only himself or herself, or the headquarters staff. And everyone knew who the headquarters staff were; their names were published in official UN documents. Philpott’s only truly secret weapons were his agents, which he employed in every UN member state. A full roster of their names would make a priceless intelligence weapon, and surprising reading, especially to the agents themselves.

When circumstances absolutely required it, Philpott paired agents into a team for a ‘need to know’ one-to-one relationship. Sometimes, teams stayed together – if both members survived. Certain operatives were never twinned, either from disinclination, or because they were politically or strategically sensitive. McCafferty was in the strategically sensitive category.

Philpott drew his field staff from all classes, colours and creeds, and if he had to pair an agent, he took what sometimes seemed to Sonya Kolchinsky to be an almost perverse delight in matching polar opposites.

For example, Joe McCafferty, who now had to be twinned, was an honest and straightforward career airman, a fiercely patriotic American and a high-ranking officer with an outstanding reputation, both in the Pentagon and in the American Secret Service.

Whereas Sabrina Carver, whom Philpott had selected as McCafferty’s partner, was an international jewel thief.

Her fee for the Eiffel Tower job (reluctantly agreed by Philpott) had been the proceeds of an astonishing raid on the Amsterdam Diamond Exchange, which she had carried out to impress Smith into hiring her for his team. Philpott’s ruthless efficiency, and proven success with UNACO, frequently collided head-on with his conscience when the delicate question arose of the head of an anti-crime squad actually aiding and abetting his own pet criminals. Luckily, his conscience invariably fell at the first fence.

UNACO’s finances, never more than grudgingly yielded by the UN member countries, depended on results, and there was very little that Malcolm Philpott would not do to obtain those results. Particularly when he was forced to deal with criminal monsters like Smith.

Philpott gave Swann his instructions on Sabrina’s role of shadow to Joe McCafferty. ‘There’s to be only a one-way “need to know” this time,’ he emphasised. ‘Sabrina must know about McCafferty, but he is not to know about her, unless I expressly order it. Clear?’

Swann left to bring in Sabrina for briefing, and Sonya complained that the situation was still far from clear to her, even if Swann understood it. ‘He doesn’t,’ Philpott declared, ‘but he’ll do as he’s told. The point is that Joe will be a front-line target and won’t want to be bothered with looking after a “twin”. At the same time, he won’t appreciate feeling that we’ve set someone to watch him.

‘But I reckon that if Smith does have designs on Air Force One, then Joe will be able to use all the help he can get, and I’ll deal with his outraged manhood when the whole thing’s over.’

Philpott looked gravely at Sonya, and ventured a weary smile. ‘It could be bad,’ he said slowly. ‘The worst we’ve ever had to face. If Smith launches an action against Air Force One and half a dozen oil sheikhs, I don’t have to tell you that there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, anyone except our people aboard that Boeing can do about it.’

As the long-serving and respected correspondent of the Soviet newspaper Isvestia in Central Europe, Axel Karilian enjoyed an enviably high standard of living in a luxury apartment block near the centre of Geneva. He had resisted all attempts by the Swiss to plant domestic staff in his flat to spy on him, so it was Karilian himself who answered the imperious ring at his doorbell in the early hours of the morning. He recognised his visitor as medium- to top-ranking in the KGB.

‘They did not tell me you were coming,’ Karilian said in greeting.

‘I did not tell them I was going,’ his visitor said coldly. Karilian revised his estimate; there had clearly been a purge in the Gorski Prospekt, and his uninvited caller, code-named Myshkin, was now indisputably top-rank. Karilian produced whisky and cigars, vodka and cigarettes being reserved strictly for lower-order guests.

‘This man Smith,’ the KGB high-flier said, ‘interests us. So does his project, whatever it may turn out to be. We will refer to it in vague terms, please, since –’ he pantomimed a listening device ‘– we cannot be too careful.’

Karilian protested, in suitably oblique language, that the apartment was ‘clean’, but Myshkin waved him to silence. ‘It will be as I say,’ he ordered. Karilian shrugged and nodded.

‘We consider the project,’ Myshkin went on, ‘to be of the utmost significance to us.’ Karilian suddenly felt a thrill of unease steal over him; despite Myshkin’s denial, Moscow had obviously penetrated Smith’s security; they knew his target.

‘An international incident of extreme gravity can be created from the Smith project,’ Myshkin was saying, ‘one which will cause maximum embarrassment to a certain person who is not precisely our closest friend.’

Karilian inclined his head at the blatant clue, while excitement gripped his innards. The reference must be to Warren G. Wheeler, President of the United States of America – and Karilian had found out sufficient details of Air Force One’s future schedule to be certain now that Smith’s target was the OPEC ministers. Nothing else fitted the facts. Only by maximising an incident involving the oil sheikhs could Moscow conceivably create an international situation of ‘extreme gravity’ for the USA and UNACO, and cause the American President supreme embarrassment.

‘You are with me?’ Myshkin inquired. Karilian gravely nodded his head.

‘Good. The plan will succeed. It will not be permitted to fail. The doppelgänger will be everything he purports to be. Do I make myself clear?’

Without waiting for a reply, Myshkin remarked that if all went well, Moscow would be under a deep obligation to Karilian for involving the KGB in Smith’s project. Karilian swallowed, with difficulty.

Not too pleased with me, he prayed silently; not pleased enough to bring me back to Moscow.

As if reading his innermost thoughts, Myshkin grinned slyly and sat forward in his chair. The light from the anglepoise lamp illuminated his sharp, knowing features, from the sheen on his dark hair to the point of his pomaded chin.

He made Karilian feel gross. And afraid. ‘What I mean is that you could be promoted to a posting of your own choice … outside Russia.’

Karilian tried desperately hard not to show his relief.

‘But of course, should Mister Smith’s little venture end in failure, there will nonetheless be a welcome awaiting you in Moscow. On the whole, though, I would advise against failure,’ Myshkin said sympathetically. ‘You know how – eh – warm our welcomes can sometimes be, my dear Axel, don’t you?’

FOUR

Hawley Hemmingsway III stretched his big, well-covered frame in the Sheikh of Bahrain’s bath and paddled the foaming water to make the scents rise. The bath had been prepared for him by a maid, but Hemmingsway guessed that at least three exotic oils had been used to perfume his ablutions, one of them attar of roses. ‘Something about me that even my best Arabian friends won’t confide?’ he mused.

Hemmingsway chuckled in his deep and melodious voice. Only one aspect of an American Energy Secretary could conceivably get up an Arab’s nose, and Hawley had no trouble in that direction. He chortled again as he recalled Warren Wheeler’s acute embarrassment at the White House luncheon party where Hemmingsway was offered the job.

‘You’re absolutely certain, now, Hawley,’ the President had persisted, the anxiety showing in the fork of frown-lines etched into the fingertip of flesh between his eyes. ‘Even three, four generations back – you’re sure, are you? Not a single drop of Hebrew blood anywhere? God knows – and I’m sure you do – that I’m no racist,’ Wheeler had interjected quickly, ‘but I simply cannot afford to annoy these OPEC guys, and one way to get them foaming at the mouth and biting their Persian carpets would be to appoint even a quarter-Jewish Energy Secretary.’

Hemmingsway had assured the President that he was New England WASP clear back to the Pilgrim Fathers. With a sly grin he added, ‘As a matter of fact, the Hemmingsways were playing croquet with the Cabots and the Adamses and the Lodges while the Wheelers were still skinning beaver and raccoon to make a dress for Pocahontas.’

The jibe had gone unremarked but for a slight lift of the President’s eyebrows; Hemmingsway knew his man, however, and had walked away from the West Wing with the Energy portfolio safely in his pocket. His credentials duly passed the scrutiny of the Arabs, and when the OPEC ministers met in Bahrain for talks on a possible East–West oil accord, Hemmingsway had been invited to join them as the house guest of the Ruler. One of the Sheikh’s fleet of Cadillacs was put at his disposal, and Hemmingsway derived satisfaction from roaring unnoticed around the island at the sort of gas-gulping speeds that were firmly outlawed in the States by his own energy conservation programme.

The talks were going well, too, justifying President Wheeler’s decision not only to send Hemmingsway to Bahrain, but also to lay on his personal aeroplane, Air Force One, for the journey via Geneva to Washington, where the second stage of the negotiations would take place.

Hemmingsway drew himself out of the huge round bath, walked to the shower where he sluiced off the oily water, and from there straight into a towelling robe held aloft by the maid, teeth gleaming beneath her yashmak, eyes decorously averted. Hawley grinned and thanked her in Arabic. He was an extremely conscientious Energy Secretary.

Strictly speaking, Air Force One is not Air Force One at all unless the President of the United States is on board. Ferrying the Secretary of State, for example, it becomes Air Force Two, but it is still the same plane – what the USAF called a VC-137C stratoliner, which is their term for a Boeing 707 commercial long-distance airliner. And if the President chose to loan it out as Air Force One, that was his prerogative. The plane was his, together with the name, current since 1962 but now universally known.

The Boeing was converted to include an office and living-suite for the President between the forward and centre passenger compartments. Visitors were not invited to occupy the ‘apartment’, but there was plenty of comfortable and roomy seating in the three passenger areas, flanked by front and rear galleys and rest rooms. Externally, Air Force One carried the streaming legend ‘United States of America’, and the Presidential insignia. She was crewed, always, by personnel of the USAF’s 89th Military Wing at Andrews Air Force Base, Washington DC.

The sun winked blindingly on her fuselage and gleaming wings as the liner turned on to the heading for Muharraq Airport, Bahrain. Major Patrick Latimer brought the big plane down to skim over the threshold; then he ran it to the taxi-way leading to the hardstand. Latimer, though officially designated the pilot, sat in the co-pilot’s seat to the right of the controls. On his left, in the pilot’s seat, was the Commander of Air Force One, Colonel Tom Fairman. Behind them sat the navigator, Lieutenant Colonel Paul Kowalski, and next to him crouched one of the flight’s two engineers, Master Sergeant Chuck Allen. They completed the closing-down procedures, and Sergeant Allen operated the Boeing’s hatch.

Another man – a member of the crew, but with no aeronautical purpose to fulfil – waited for the airport staff to position the moving steps just below the hatch. He was always the first man to leave the plane, the last to board it. He stood by the open hatch, revolver drawn, peering out into the strong, clear sunlight.

Just as it was Colonel Thomas D. Fairman’s task to supervise the flight of Air Force One, so the job of guaranteeing the safety of the Boeing, its crew and occupants, was ultimately the responsibility of only one man: the Head of Security, Colonel Joe McCafferty.

The entire crew filed to the hatch and waited patiently while McCafferty completed his surveillance. Then Mac holstered his gun and walked down the stairway, followed by Fairman, Latimer and the other airmen. Last out of the plane was Bert Cooligan, agent of the US Secret Service, and the only other armed man on the flight.

Fairman increased his stride and came abreast of McCafferty. ‘Seeing the Manama sights before we leave, Mac?’ he inquired. McCafferty treated him to a flinty grin. ‘Your job may be over, Tom,’ he returned, ‘but mine’s just beginning. Not that the vibrant and sinful capital of Bahrain doesn’t hold its attractions for me, but I think I’ll check around a bit and then retire to the hotel with a bottle of Jack Daniels and a good security schedule.’

Fairman grinned. ‘Not even a Gideon Bible?’

‘Here? No, it’s either the Koran or my smuggled copy of Playboy – not to be left laying around for the natives to read. Gives them a bad impression of the flower of American womanhood.’

Both men laughed, and the Arab watching them from the terminal building’s balcony through binoculars minutely adjusted the focus.

Since the age of seven in her native town of Fort Dodge, Iowa, Sabrina Carver had been a thief. She started with a tiny brooch stolen from a fellow passenger on a trip down the Des Moines River. She got two dollars for it, which was a rip-off, for the brooch had three diamonds set into a silver clasp. Sabrina failed to recognise the stones as diamonds; it was a mistake she would not make again.

Ten years later she left her home and Fort Dodge and, as far as she could see, would never need to return to either. She had seventy thousand dollars in a bank account kept for her by an admiring professional fence, and on her eighteenth birthday doubled her nest-egg with a hotel raid that the police said could only have been committed by a squad of acrobatic commandos.

For that was Sabrina Carver’s forte: she channelled her astonishing physical fitness, her sporting prowess, even her beauty and considerable intellect, into becoming one of the greatest cat-burglars ever known. And she used her skill to equip herself, perhaps uniquely, for her ruling passion: not just stealing, but stealing diamonds.

Philpott, who had his finger clamped firmly on the pulse of international crime, became aware of the swiftly rising star (she was still only twenty-seven) and watched her subsequent career with interest and not a little pleasure. He waited for her first mistake, and when she made it in Gstaad, trusting a greedy lover, Philpott had snatched her from the Swiss police and enrolled her as a part-time agent of UNACO.

Philpott paid her lavishly enough for her not to have to steal again, but, as he freely acknowledged, a girl with Sabrina’s brains and stunning beauty had never actually needed to be a thief; she simply enjoyed it. Stealing was what she did best, and neither Philpott nor her position as a UNACO field operative would prevent her from doing it. That was why she was a part-time agent.

She sat in the foyer of Manama’s most splendid hotel and quickly adjusted to the idea that most of the diamonds in Bahrain would be worn by men. She was idly sketching in her mind a plan to penetrate the Sheikh’s palace when she was forced to relinquish pleasure and get back to reality – Joe McCafferty strode in through the ornate revolving doors.

McCafferty spotted her immediately, for she was wearing the uniform of Airman First Class in the USAF. He had been heading for the reception desk, but changed direction when he saw Sabrina. As he got closer his stride faltered and he blinked. Sabrina Carver had that effect on men; she was breathcatchingly lovely, with a cascade of dark brown hair falling to her shoulders, framing a face elliptical in its contours, from the central hair parting high on her forehead to the dimple in her chin. Her brow was deep, her eyes wide-spaced and large, and her nose and mouth were set in exquisite classical proportion.

McCafferty completed the journey with outstretched hand and slightly glazed eyes. ‘You’re Prewett’s replacement, I expect,’ he said. A Flight Traffic Specialist (the equivalent of a stewardess on a civil airline) had dropped out at the last moment, and he had been warned by radio that a substitute would meet Air Force One in Bahrain. Fairman was able to make the outward trip with only one stewardess, but he needed two for the passenger-run to Washington. As always with the President’s jet, all new attachees to the crew reported in the first instance to the Head of Security. Sabrina stood up, saluted and handed over her identification documents, as she had been briefed to do by Basil Swann after Philpott had fixed the Pentagon.

She took McCafferty’s hand and felt his strong fingers enclose her own. She was careful not to return equal pressure, though her hands were undoubtedly a good deal more adaptable and educated even than his. ‘AIC Carver, sir,’ she said, ‘reporting as directed to Air Force One. You’re Colonel McCafferty, sir?’ Mac confirmed the introduction; he was still faintly dizzy from the impact she made on him. ‘Right then, C–Carver,’ he stammered, ‘or may I call you whatever it is, since we’re off duty?’

She smiled winningly and replied, ‘It’s Sabrina – strictly while we’re off duty. Do I keep calling you “sir”, sir? Only for off-duty, that is?’

‘Ah – no. My name’s Joe, but most of my friends call me Mac.’

‘Which do you prefer?’

‘I’ll leave the choice to you.’

‘Well, since we’re apparently going to be friends, perhaps I’d better make it “Mac”,’ Sabrina rejoined with not a trace of coyness. McCafferty smiled a shade awkwardly and she decided that the file photographs of him which Basil Swann had shown her did not do the Colonel justice. He was decidedly handsome in an aggressive and somehow unflattering way, with a hint of pugnacity, or perhaps cruelty, in the determined set of his mouth and chin; his nose was long, wide and straight, and his eyes coloured a piercing blue.

She questioned him about their schedule, and McCafferty explained that they intended making a convenience refuelling stop in Geneva while picking up stores which were not easily obtainable in Bahrain. They would stay in Switzerland overnight. Take-off from Manama (he consulted his watch) was in four hours.

‘Do you have a room here?’ McCafferty asked innocently, then blushed as he realised how his question could be taken. ‘I – I didn’t mean – for God’s sake – well, you know – I’m not that fast a worker. Wh–what I meant was—’

‘What you meant,’ Sabrina replied, enjoying his discomfiture and liking him for it, ‘at least what I hope you meant, was do I, like the rest of the crew, have a room at the hotel where I can freshen up before the trip.’

McCafferty breathed a sigh of relief. ‘Thanks for letting me off so easily. I’m not really that sort of guy – despite anything you may have heard to the contrary.’

Mac groaned when he saw how deeply he had landed both feet in it this time, and sent up his hands to cover the flush that threatened to suffuse his entire face. Sabrina burst out laughing, but quickly apologised to save him from even more acute distress. He could not, after all, possibly know that she was able to recite the names of every woman Mac had slept with over the past five years, as well as their assessments of his capabilities – in and out of bed.

‘I really don’t have that sort of reputation,’ Mac protested earnestly.

‘I’m sure you don’t, Colonel – sorry, “Mac” – but since you’ve given me the impression that you do, maybe I should think twice about accepting that dinner-date in Geneva you were on the point of offering me.’

Mac looked at her in amazement. ‘How did you know I was planning to buy you dinner in Geneva tonight?’ he exploded. ‘I hadn’t even got around to the preliminary – uh—’

‘Preliminary seduction moves?’ she whispered, wide-eyed and girlish. ‘Gosh, gee and golly, I’ve never been seduced by an expert before, by a famous Lothario like the great Joe McCafferty—’

‘Now you’re toying with my emotions,’ Mac protested, drawing himself up sternly. ‘In my capacity as Head of Security on Air Force One, and as the first crew member to set eyes on you, I consider it my military duty to protect you from that crowd of rampant wolves by ordering you, AIC Carver, to dine with me this evening in Geneva. Is that understood?’

‘Aye aye, Colonel,’ she responded, throwing him a second smart salute, ‘as long as it’s purely in the interests of protective discipline, of course.’

It was Mac’s turn to smile. ‘I don’t normally beat the crew,’ he said, ‘but I could always make an exception of you, if that’s what turns you on.’ Sabrina reddened prettily and gulped. ‘I think we’d better end this conversation and continue our “on duty” relationship, sir,’ she said.

‘But you’ll make it for dinner tonight?’ Mac pleaded.

‘You bet.’

They parted, and the Arab sipping an ice-cream soda in the screened-off bar area to their left, laid his binoculars case on the table and jotted an entry in a slim blue notebook.

Sabrina received a message from a man who announced himself as Chief Steward Master Sergeant Pete Wynanski from Air Force One. The Commander, he said, had ordered a crew muster in the hotel lobby. She saw the group at the far end away from the bar as she left the elevator. McCafferty was not with them, and she felt unreasonably disappointed. She saluted Colonel Fairman and met the crew, each of whom looked at her perhaps a little too much, to Fairman’s evident amusement.

‘I can see you’re going to enjoy it with us, Carver,’ he grinned. ‘Even if you don’t, the rest of the crew obviously will.’

Sabrina smiled back and inquired for McCafferty’s whereabouts. ‘Aah,’ moaned the delicately structured, poetic looking Latimer theatrically, ‘already smitten with our dashing Head of Security, I can tell. Swashes his buckle at anything female that moves aboard the plane, does Mac, although I have to admit that this time, for once, he has shown excellent taste.’

‘Stow it, Pat,’ said Fairman, ‘AIC Carver’s a member of this crew, and I do not want her position made any more – eh – difficult than it is at the moment. She’s with Air Force One to work, and I want nothing to interfere with that. To answer your question, Carver, Colonel McCafferty’s gone out to the airport with Agent Cooligan via the route the OPEC ministers will use. Then, if I know Mac, he’ll check, double-check and recheck the plane, the police, the airport guards, the luggage hold, and even look for cracks in the runway. Colonel McCafferty’s damned good at what he does. I only wish that went for the rest of my so-called crew.’

The Commander chuckled easily along with the rest of the flight staff, then returned once more to business, asking Sergeant Wynanski if he was all fixed for provisions. Wynanski replied that he had been furnished by the White House with a list of the ministers’ dietary requirements, which he had augmented through discreet inquiries at the hotel and at the palace. He still had to pick up a few items from the markets in Manama.

‘Good work, Sergeant,’ Fairman commended him, ‘you have about an hour. That applies to everyone. I’ll want cabin personnel aboard by 1600 hours. Flying crew to Ops by 1650. You’ll find minibuses outside this hotel half an hour before reporting times. Roll-out’s at 1805.’

Wynanski and his staff and most of the flying crew drifted away; Fairman stayed to take Sabrina on one side. As a new crew member, she got the Commander’s introduction to Air Force One at full strength on the patriotism scale. Fairman also impressed her with the importance of their current assignment.

‘This isn’t going to be just a milk run,’ the Colonel said gravely. ‘We’re using Air Force One mainly because our own Energy Secretary, Mr Hemmingsway, will be on board – but let me assure you that we do wish to impress the OPEC ministers; we want to make them feel good. I need hardly tell you, if you’ve been keeping up with the news, that if they don’t come in with us on this oil deal, then they’re likely to cut back production so far that we’ll be riding bicycles and reading by candlelight back in the States for years to come. Nothing, but nothing, must go wrong on this trip, Carver; so – be alert, polite and efficient at all times. A good stewardess can make the world of difference to a military flight. Chief Steward Wynanski’s something of a martinet, but I guess you’ll have him eating out of your hand in no time, just like the rest of us.’

Sabrina felt herself going hot and was framing a suitably tart reply when Fairman held up a warning hand. ‘Just teasing, honey, just teasing,’ he assured her.

‘So was Major Latimer, sir,’ she replied sweetly, ‘and, as I recall, you hauled out his ass for it.’

Fairman regarded her appraisingly, and grinned. ‘Somehow I don’t think you really need any advice from me, Carver,’ he said.

Axel Karilian paced the floor of his Geneva apartment and bayed into the telephone. ‘It is important – vital – that Jagger contacts me here as soon as possible,’ he roared. ‘Do you understand that, Stein?’ Karilian sneaked a sideways glance at the menacingly imperturbable Myshkin, lounging on a sofa nursing a generous Chivas Regal.

‘It’s not long to zero-hour there,’ Stein protested. ‘For God’s sake, Axel, Jagger will be very busy, with Smith and Dunkels breathing down his neck the whole time. It’ll be very difficult to contact him.’

‘You must!’ Karilian insisted. ‘There has to be a way.’

Modesty, a strong suit with Doctor Stein, veiled the slyness with which the little Swiss produced his trump card, mostly for the benefit of Myshkin, whom he correctly guessed was in Karilian’s apartment. ‘Of course,’ Stein said smoothly, ‘Jagger can

be contacted discreetly. I have, as it were, an open channel to him.’

‘Then use it! Jagger must call. There are new instructions to be passed to him, which alter the entire picture of the operation. Hot from Moscow, Stein – and they have to be obeyed. Get on with it.’ He banged the telephone down and was uncomfortably aware of Myshkin’s gaze, directed at him through barely-raised eyelids.

It took Jagger half an hour from receiving Stein’s message before he could elude Dunkels for long enough to make a telephone call. The ringer’s blood chilled when the cold, precise voice of Myshkin talked to him first in Russian and then repeated his orders in English to establish absolute clarity.

‘As I understand it, Jagger,’ Myshkin said, ‘Mister Smith’s plan is to – ah – interfere, shall we say, with the operation of Air Force One sufficiently to enable him to make a financial gain from the situation in which the OPEC ministers will consequently be placed. I do not wish to go into further detail on an open line.’

Jagger confirmed the details. Karilian nervously pressed together the damp palms of his hands, and Myshkin continued, ‘Up to a point that is still satisfactory, but we feel that greater advantage can be gained by us if the affair concludes in a more – ah – drastic way. Do you follow me?’

‘I – I don’t, I’m afraid,’ Jagger replied uncertainly.

Myshkin gave an exasperated grunt. ‘I can see I shall have to be more specific,’ he said caustically.

‘It is of crucial importance to us, Jagger, that America comes badly out of this episode – as badly as can possibly be imagined. And there is surely one way to persuade the OPEC states not merely to refuse to sign the oil accord, but actually to sever relations of any kind with the United States.’ Both sides of the conversation were in English now; Myshkin had to make absolutely sure that Jagger understood him.

The ringer gasped in disbelief. ‘You can’t mean – you can’t—’

‘But I do,’ Myshkin said. ‘That is precisely what I mean. You will kill the OPEC ministers, and the surviving crew members of Air Force One. You may leave us to deal with the genuine McCafferty.

‘How you do it, Jagger, is your business. But do not fail me. Whatever happens, do not fail. Even if you are the only person alive on Air Force One when it is finished, that will be acceptable. But you must accomplish this task.’

Jagger put down the receiver in his Bahrain hotel and took the elevator to the ground floor. As he stepped on to the ground floor, Dunkels hurried forward and grabbed his arm.

‘Get into uniform,’ the German snapped brusquely. ‘We leave in five minutes. Achmed’s reported that the pigeon is sitting up begging to be plucked.’

McCafferty and Bert Cooligan came down the steps of Air Force One to meet the advancing posse of uniformed senior Bahraini policemen, all armed to their splendidly white teeth. McCafferty stopped and scuffed one of his shoes over a mark on the hardstand. Cooligan grinned. ‘That is not, sir,’ he whispered, ‘a crack, and even if it were, it’s not on the runway.’

Mac then met the police – who had tactfully placed themselves under his orders – and handed them copies of the security schedule. After their brief exchange, he and Cooligan walked on to the terminal building, where an Arab toyed with the strap of his binoculars case and decided to visit the men’s room. McCafferty looked up at the roof of the terminal, and saw three machine-gunners placed strategically along the parapet.

‘Check those guys out, Bert,’ he murmured. ‘Make sure they know that they’re to fire indiscriminately at any, and I mean any, unauthorised person getting within fifty yards of the Air Force One steps. Give ’em copies of the programme, too; I don’t want to be shot when I lead in the convoy. I’m going back to the hotel. I need a shower and a drink and another chat with Hemmingsway before we get the motorcade under way. OK?’

Cooligan said ‘Ciao,’ and Mac went through the terminal out into the street, in the wake of a tall, well-groomed young Arab in a Savile Row suit, who had a leather binoculars case swinging from his shoulder.

Mac carefully surveyed the front of the airport, where the police detachments were manoeuvring into their positions, and so missed the barely perceptible signal which the Arab, known as Achmed Fayeed, made to a cab-driver who was separated from the main gossiping bunch at the head of the taxi rank. The driver, who had been leaning casually against the side of a car, arms folded, unwound himself and got into the first cab.

As McCafferty lifted his arm to wave, the cab peeled off the rank and screeched to a halt about six inches from the American’s leading foot. Mac yanked open the door, jumped in and gave the name of his hotel. On the route out of the airport, they passed a by-road leading up to the cargo-sheds. A short way along the by-road, its engine revving, sat a shiny black Cadillac. Achmed Fayeed spun the wheel, and cruised out after the cab.

Once he had settled in his seat, Mac returned to his security schedules for Geneva as well as those for Bahrain. Even if he noticed the following Cadillac, it did not register on his mind. Cadillacs – mostly in the Ruler’s fleet – were common enough in Bahrain, and throughout the Gulf States. His driver watched the American carefully in the rear-view mirror.

A causeway links the airport at Muharraq with the main island of Bahrain, and when McCafferty glanced up and saw the road stretching out before him and the sunlight glistening on the water to either side, he dropped his eyes once more to the intricate details of his assignment. He was relaxed, and totally unprepared for the savage wrench at the wheel which took the taxi off the tarmac highway and on to a rutted dirt track that veered off to the right just before the water-crossing.

The track led to a cluster of tiny buildings known to the Bahrainis as borrastis, mean little huts made from palm fronds and mud into wattle beehives. Mac saw none of this. He went instinctively for his gun, but he was fractionally too late. The driver, a handkerchief clamped to his nose and mouth, aimed an aerosol spray over his shoulder, and it took the American full in the face.

McCafferty actually had his revolver in his hand, but it dropped from his unfeeling fingers. He slumped forward against the back of the driver’s seat, and blackness descended on him.

Achmed Fayeed’s car pulled up on the rough ground alongside the taxi, and the Arab pointed in the direction of the borrasti huts, which were hidden from the main road and the perimeter-buildings of the airport by a fringe of palm trees. Both vehicles shot away and were soon lost in the oasis.

Achmed opened the rear door of the taxi and yanked out McCafferty’s body. Dunkels strolled from the hut, looking down at the security chief. Then he turned and regarded a second man emerging from the borrasti. The likeness between the two was staggering, perfect in every detail.

Dunkels ordered Achmed to retrieve Mac’s personal effects, ticking them off on his fingers:

wallet, gun, security shield, documentation, money, pen, handkerchief, lighter (if any). The Arab ransacked the American’s body and handed the articles to Jagger, who stowed them away, checking at the same time that his uniform matched the security chief’s exactly. ‘Take him inside now,’ Dunkels said, ‘and bring him round. There are things we need to know that only he can tell us.’

‘And if he won’t?’ Jagger asked. Dunkels shrugged. ‘He’s going to die anyway. He might as well make it easy for himself.’

‘Not too easy,’ Jagger sneered, and got into the cab. The driver reversed his vehicle in a swirl of dust and took off back down the potholed track towards the causeway. There he turned on to the road-bridge and sped away to Manama.

He was in a hurry but drove with studied care. After all, he carried an important passenger: the Head of Security of Air Force One.

FIVE

Air Force One is a standard-frame Boeing intercontinental jet airliner, 153 feet long and almost as wide with a wingspan of 145 feet, 9 inches. She has four engines – Pratt and Whitney turbojets – which are capable of lifting a maximum take-off weight of more than 150 tons.

With a range of over seven thousand miles, she can land on less than five thousand feet of runway. No pilot with fewer than four thousand flying hours under his belt can sit at her controls – the motto of the 89th Military Aircraft Wing, Special Missions (MAC), which provides the Boeing’s crew, is ‘Experto Crede’ (Trust one who has experience). Many times the President and people of the United States of America have had cause to be grateful to the people who fly Air Force One, and doubtless will have cause again.

The plane has a flight-ceiling of more than forty thousand feet, and never carries less than ten in her crew. The Boeing’s economic cruising speed is 550 mph, and she is unique in American aviation in carrying a Lieutenant Colonel as navigator. Air Force One flight crewmen wear blue uniforms, and the stewards maroon blazers with blue trousers or skirts, each uniform sporting the coveted Presidential Service Badge.

More by accident than design, the President’s aircraft has become something of a cottage industry in its own right. The tableware and accoutrements are purpose-made and supplied gratis by manufacturers eager for the First Citizen’s approval. Since all the articles, from silverware, crystal glasses, dinner plates, cups and saucers, down to ash-trays, match-books and dinner napkins, bear the Presidential seal, they are eagerly sought by souvenir hunters.

Given the thriving black market in Air Force One artifacts, it is axiomatic that those who travel on her will yield to temptation and appropriate the portable items among the plane’s equipment. These are highly prized, and have even been used as a kind of ersatz currency, rather like schoolboys doing ‘swaps’.

The 89th (located, in fact, in Maryland, though the address of Andrews AFB is always given as Washington DC) would prefer to equip their flagship through the orthodox channels of paying for their own supplies and prosecuting people who steal from the plane, but the traditions of patronage and perks are deeply ingrained into American politics.

She had been cleaned, waxed and polished in preparation for the OPEC trip, and her tyres given a wash and brush-up, and she stood now on the runway at Muharraq, proud and gleaming and lovely in the yellowing rays of the sun, waiting for yet another manifest of passengers to board her who would never be charged for their journey.

The starboard engines, three and four, were already running to supply power and air-conditioning and to prepare the Boeing for a rapid start. The stores and spares inventories had been minutely examined and approved and, together with the baggage of the OPEC ministers, sent on ahead. On the flight deck the crew were at their posts for the necessary pre-flight procedures.

Master Sergeant Pete Wynanski, Chief Steward, handed ‘Airman’ Sabrina Carver a print-out of the guest-list. ‘Study it,’ he snapped, ‘because this ain’t a Bunny Dip for Hollywood moguls. These oil ministers are not just VIPs – they’re EDPs.’

‘They’re what?’

‘They’re what – “Sergeant”.’

‘Sorry. They’re what – Sergeant?’

‘EDPs. Exceptionally Distinguished Passengers. I don’t want any of ’em sloshing around in wet socks because you spilled drinks over them. ’Kay?’

‘Completely, chief. Uh – Sergeant,’ Sabrina replied. Master Sergeant Wynanski seemed to be the only crew member with an absolute zero-response to her gorgeous body, and he, she reflected ruefully, had to be the one she picked as her boss. ‘There ain’t no justice,’ she mused.

‘Yerright,’ snapped Wynanski, ‘there ain’t. Now – dooties. You’re drinks. Airman Fenstermaker here –’ (indicating a honey-blonde with tinted glasses and an enormous bosom standing alongside Sabrina) ‘– you’re snacks. ’Kay? You may have to swap later. Depends. ’Kay?’

‘Right, Sergeant,’ they chorused, though Sabrina’s brow was furrowed as her eyes ran down the Arab names. ‘’S’matter, Carver?’ Wynanski grunted.

‘Well, you said I was drinks, but it looks as if most of them will be sticking to tea,’ Sabrina explained.

‘Look, Carver, fer Chrissakes,’ Wynanski moaned. He had once been a waiter on the Staten Island ferry and had seen life. ‘You gotta unnerstan’ – these guys are Ayrabs. Moslems. Goddit?’

‘Uh-uh,’ she said, shaking her head.

‘They ain’t supposed to like booze,’ Wynanski said, patiently, ‘but from time to time, and especially when they’re out of Ayrabia, they – well – indulge, if you get me. But still they can’t appear to, and they don’t like you to know it, nor anybody else. Right? So. Read down the list again – out loud, so Fenstermaker don’t make a tit outa herself as well. Sorry, Fenstermaker. Nothin’ personal about yah boobs.’

Sabrina spluttered, but regained control and recited from the print-out.

‘Tea with milk and sugar.’

‘That’s straight tea – real tea, from leaves; with milk and sugar, like it says,’ Wynanski pronounced.

‘Tea with sugar but no milk,’ Sabrina intoned.

‘Scotch,’ said Wynanski firmly, ‘on the rocks, no water.’

Sabrina’s mouth dropped open. ‘Ohhh,’ she breathed.

‘’Bout time, too,’ Wynanski snarled. ‘Continue.’

‘Tea with lemon.’

‘Vodka. Ice. Lime juice.’ Sabrina made tiny notations.

‘Black coffee, no sugar.’

‘Cognac, neat,’ Wynanski supplied.

‘Tea – no sugar, no milk,’ Sabrina read. Wynanski looked puzzled. ‘Gimme that,’ he ordered, and scanned the list. Then his brow cleared, and a beatific smile illumined his battered face. ‘How about that?’ he whispered, ‘one o’ these guys got the hots fer Jack Daniels. Whooppee!’

Through the open hatch of the Boeing, the far-off wail of police-car sirens reached Sabrina’s ears. The motorcade, she calculated, must be on the causeway by now.

She found herself keenly anticipating the flight, whatever dangers it might hold. Especially, she was looking forward to seeing McCafferty again. He had made, she decided, quite an impression on her.

Philpott gazed meditatively for the umpteenth time at the computer print-out, dog-eared now, which was pinned to the front of Smith’s UNACO file. ‘Two down,’ he said, ‘three to go.’ He darted an exasperated glance at the ominous barrage of clocks, adjusted for time-zones and the individual preferences of more than a score of countries, sitting atop the electronic mural in the bureau’s nerve-centre, naggingly pushing forward the time for action. ‘And one just about coming up.’

‘Sir?’ Basil Swann inquired.

‘Just thinking out loud,’ Philpott returned. ‘All set for Bahrain?’

Swann replied with a trendy ‘Affirmative’. Air Force One, he supplied, would take off inside half an hour, on schedule. Sabrina Carver – ‘Airman First Class Carver’ – was already on board the Boeing, and Colonel Joe McCafferty, according to his invariable procedure, would board last of all, after delivering the OPEC emissaries.

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