"Señor Robinson. My friend. Please, sir. Forgive." Sanchez put a pudgy hand inside the breast of his black suit. "I have come to collect you five hundred dollar. Thank you, sir."
Rooke by now was beginning to fear he was being set up as the victim of an elaborate tourist trap, of which the upshot would be that he was to purchase pre-Columbian artefacts, or a night with the wretched man's sister. But instead Sanchez handed him a thick envelope with the word Crystal embossed on the flap, over what appeared to be a diamond. And from it Rooke drew a handwritten letter from Jonathan in Spanish, wishing the bearer joy of the enclosed one hundred dollars and promising him five hundred more if he would personally deliver the enclosed envelope into the hands of Señor Robinson at the Riande Continental Hotel in Panama City.
Rooke held his breath.
In his secret elation, a new fear had taken hold of him: namely that Sanchez had dreamed up some idiot plan to keep him on the hook in order to increase the reward ― for instance, by dumping the letter in a safe-deposit for the night, or entrusting it to his
"So where's the second envelope?" he asked.
The driver touched his heart. "Señor, it is right here in my pocket. I am an honest driver, sir, and when I saw the letter lying on the floor in the back of the Volvo, my first thought was to drive full speed onto the airfield regardless of regulations and restore it to whichever of my noble clients had been so careless as to leave it there, in the hope but not necessarily the expectation of compensation, for the clients in my car were not of the quality of the clients of my colleague Dominguez, in the car in front. My clients, if I may say so, sir, without disrespect Ito your good friend, were altogether of a humbler nature ― one was so insulting as to refer to me as a Pedro. But then, sir, as soon as I had read the inscription on the envelope, I recognised that my loyalties lay elsewhere...."
Sanchez Jesus-Maria obligingly suspended his narrative while Rooke went to the concierge's desk and cashed five hundred dollars' worth of traveller’s checks.
At Heathrow it was eight in the morning of a sodden English winter's day, and Burr was wearing his Miami clothes. Goodhew, at the arrivals barrier, wore a raincoat and the flat cap he used for bicycling. His features were resolute, but his eyes were overbright. The right eye, Burr noticed, had developed a slight twitch.
"Any news?" Burr demanded when they had barely shaken hands.
"What of? Who? They tell me nothing."
"The jet. Have they tracked it yet?"
"They tell me nothing," Goodhew repeated. "If your man presented himself in shining armour at the British Embassy in Washington, I would hear nothing. Everything's handed down through channels. The Foreign Office. Defence. The River House. Even Cabinet. Everyone's a halfway house to someone else."
"That's twice they've lost that plane in two days," Burr said. He was heading for the cab rank, spurning trolleys, lugging his heavy suitcase by hand. "Once is carelessness, twice is deliberate. It left Colón at nine-twenty at night. My boy was on it, so was Roper, so was Langbourne. They've got AWACs up there, radar on every atoll, you name it. How can they lose a thirteen-seater jet?"
"I'm out of it, Leonard. I try to keep an ear to the ground, but they've taken the ground away. They keep me busy all day long. You know what they call me? The Comptroller of Intelligence. With a p. They thought I would appreciate the ancient spelling. I'm surprised to learn that Darker has a sense of humour."
"They're throwing the book at Strelski," Burr said. "Irresponsible handling of informants. Exceeding his brief. Being too nice to the Brits. They're practically accusing him of Apostoll's murder."
"Flagship," Goodhew muttered under his breath, like a rubric.
A different colouring, Burr noticed. High points of red on the cheeks. A mysterious whiteness round the eyes.
"Where's Rooke?" he asked. "Where's Rob? He should be back by now."
"On his way, I hear. Everybody on his way. Oh, yes."
They joined the taxi queue. A black cab pulled up; a police-woman told Goodhew to get a move on. Two Lebanese tried to push ahead of him. Burr blocked their way and opened the cab door. Goodhew began reciting as soon as he had sat down. His tone was remote. He might have been reliving the traffic accident he had so narrowly missed.
