Message From -Creasy 5 (19 page)

It
started and ended in less than thirty seconds.

The
window across the room shattered, but Maxie did not take his eyes from the
door. He heard a thump on it and guessed it was a clamp explosive. He ducked
his head behind the upturned table. Then his eardrums were compressed by the
explosion, and then by another one as the grenade exploded on the ground
outside the window. He shuffled to his right, raising his pistol.

The
door had been blown in. Two black-clad men were crowding through it.
"Amateurs," he thought. "They should have tossed a grenade
through."

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

He shot
them both in the chest and then glided across the room and put his back against
the wall alongside the door. A third man ran in, hurdling the two bodies. Maxie
shot him in the back while from the foot of the stairs Rene shot him in the
chest.

"There's
one more," Maxie shouted.

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

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

Rene
scooped up the black box and the mobile phone while Maxie grabbed his precious
cards. The pistols went into their shoulder holsters.

Maxie
ran up the stairs to the bathroom and spent half a minute reassuring the Trans
the danger was over. He smiled at the children, ruffled their hair, and turned
away. Ten seconds later they were out of the door, into the revving van and on
their way to the safe house.

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

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

Creasy
held the thin beam of his torch on the lock while The Owl picked it. They both
wore black raincoats with deep pockets, and transparent surgical gloves. It was
a modern Chubb lock and it took The Owl a full two minutes to open it. Creasy
listened patiently to his mutterings and then heard a grunt of satisfaction.

The Owl
dropped his implement into his raincoat pocket and gently eased open the door,
shining his torch through.

Creasy
waited outside, looking down the alley with the gun held loosely in his hand.
He waited for three minutes until he heard a low whistle from inside the
building. He went in and closed the door quietly behind him. The light from his
torch showed The Owl waiting at the top of a short flight of wooden steps.
Creasy moved up them and The Owl whispered: "There are no alarms that I
can see." He pointed his torch to a door that was ajar. "That's the
secretary's office. Beyond there is a small meeting room which opens on to what
must be the manager's office."

Creasy
pushed open the door. His torch revealed a desk and a chair, two metal filing
cabinets and a fax machine. On the desk was a modern IBM PC and a printer.
Creasy moved to the filing cabinets. They were locked but The Owl had them both
opened very quickly.

Inside
were the business files of a gem trader. It took Creasy just ten minutes to learn
that the Lucit Trade Company only had three customers. Two were in France, one
in Paris and the other in Lyon; the other was a Chinese company in Hong Kong.
Creasy quickly leafed through the correspondence in French. The letters to the
Hong Kong company were in English and were equally innocuous. He took a small
pad and a ballpoint from his pocket, and made a note of the companies' names.

They
moved through into the meeting room, which was bare except for a table and six
chairs. They continued to the manager's office which was very plush, with
Persian carpets on the floor contrasting with Scandinavian-style furniture, a
wide pine desk with a leather chair and a grouping of a coffee table and three
chairs. There were abstract paintings on the walls.

The
desk had four drawers, all locked. They found the slim file in the third
drawer, inside a metal box. Creasy quickly leafed through it and then stopped
at a sheaf of eight-by-ten photographs.

He
looked at the first one and grunted to himself as if in confirmation. Quickly
he laid the photographs and the pages of the file onto the carpet, and then
took a small camera and separate flash from his pocket. The Owl aimed the beam
of his torch at the photographs and papers for added light.

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

It was
a new acquisition and Connie Crum was very proud of it. It arrived from Bangkok
early in the morning and sat on the table like something out of the next
century. Even the placid faces of her two female bodyguards were animated with
interest as she explained how it worked to Van Luk Wan.

"It's
what foreign correspondents use, and also international aid agencies, to
communicate from remote areas of the world."

She
pointed upwards with one elegant finger. "It works through a satellite,
and from here or anywhere else I can phone to anyone in the world."

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

She
looked in the instruction book. "Twelve and a half kilos. It has been
around for a few years now, but the early ones were very heavy. They get
lighter every year. The agent told me that in five years' time they'll be about
half the size of a briefcase and weigh only two or three kilos. I bought two. One
is being sent to Tuk Luy and will be there tomorrow. It works from rechargeable
batteries." She pointed to a row of buttons and a crystal display.

"These
buttons are for preset numbers. I had the agent programme in the ones I use
most." She looked at her watch. "It's nine thirty now. Sok San will
have arrived in his office." She turned and smiled at Van, like a child
about to play with a new toy. "Let's surprise him with a phone call. He
knows that I'm supposed to be at Chek and he also knows that we don't have
telephones here."

She
reached forward and flicked two switches on the side of the matt black metal
box. With a soft thump, an aerial started to extend upwards and stopped at a
height of about two metres, almost
reaching the roof of the hut. A red light then appeared at the top left-hand
corner. She waited for half a minute and then picked up the handset and pressed
the first of the row of buttons.

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

She
swung her long hair away from her face and placed the phone against her ear.
The box emitted a series of musical tones and then went silent. She tapped her
right foot on the wooden floor as she waited, explaining to Van: "The
signal is bouncing off the satellite to an earth station in Phnom Penh and is
then fed into their telephone grid."

Half a
minute passed. Then suddenly she was talking excitedly and laughing. "Yes,
it is me. Yes, I am in Chek. No, they haven't put a telephone line in. It's
just that I have upgraded our communications equipment from carrier pigeon to
satellite communication...Do you have anything to report?"

She
listened. Van Luk Wan watched her face turn from happy amusement to sharp
alertness. She listened for several minutes without interruption, then said
authoritatively: "Don't leave your office. I'll call you back within an
hour."

She
clipped the phone back onto the box and stood thoughtfully looking at it. Then
she said to Van: "Two things happened last night. In Saigon, your entire
hit team got wiped out in a gun battle at the follower's home. The follower and
his family escaped unhurt."

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

"He
did leave for Phnom Penh. According to Sok San he arrived there with the girl
in the afternoon. It must have been the Italian Arrellio...or somebody else he
brought in." Her expression was now very hard. "He's a clever
bastard! The follower must have told him of the threat to his family. And so he
turned the follower by promising him protection."

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

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

"Are
you sure?"

For a
moment anger flamed in her eyes. Then she took a breath and said: "Of
course I'm sure. Sok San was carefully instructed. The past few nights pieces
of cotton thread were lightly fixed to doors, cabinets and drawers, all of
which were locked. This morning all these threads were displaced. Creasy went
through that office and then relocked everything after him."

"Was
anything missing?"

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

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

"Yes,
it was; but not so quickly. From the moment that Creasy arrived in Saigon, I
expected it to take him a week or ten days. I'm not ready for him yet and the
date is not right. We must find a way to keep him in Phnom Penh for a few more
days. Meanwhile, we leave for Tuk Luy in two hours."

She
reached again for the telephone.

It was
a rare luxury. She lay on the sun bed by the hotel pool with a tall glass of
chilled, fresh orange juice by her side, reading a novel by P. D. James.

It had
not crossed her mind to pack a swimsuit, but the hotel boutique had a wide
selection, all from Paris and all wildly expensive. It had pained her to pay
nearly three hundred dollars, even if the skimpy bikini did have a designer
label on it. But the pain had eased when she looked in the mirror, and eased
further when she walked out to the pool and saw the heads turn.

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

The
night before, she had waited up with Jens. He had produced a pocket-size
backgammon set, but after she had lost half a dozen times, he tactfully put it
away. They had just talked.

She
found herself liking the Dane. He had a dry sense of humour and a charming
self-deprecation which contrasted with what she already knew was a razor-sharp
brain. He told her the story of how he and The Owl had first met Creasy. It
sounded like a hilarious adventure instead of a war against a deadly gang of
drug dealers and white slavers. He also talked about his wife, Birgitte, and
their young daughter, and she saw the fondness in his eyes. It was obvious that
while he was enjoying himself in this exotic place, he was missing his family.
She liked men like that.

Creasy
and The Owl returned at three a.m. They had the air of a couple of men
returning from a visit to a good nightclub rather than from a dangerous act in
a dangerous city. But she noticed that Creasy took a rare drink, and so did The
Owl. Creasy quickly briefed them and then handed over a tiny roll of film to
Jens.

She was
very excited, but tried to keep it from her face. In the years that she had
worked in the department, this was the closest she had ever come to solving a
case. Keeping her voice calm, she asked Creasy: "Are you sure it was Jake
Bentsen in the photograph?"

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

"And
there were two other Americans?"

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

At that
moment she saw the lines of exhaustion around his eyes. She felt a sudden
sympathy. He was a fit man, but not young. In the previous twenty-four hours,
he had made love to her and then driven for hours along one of the worst roads
in the world. He had finally gone out in the middle of the night and risked his
life.

"You
need sleep," she said.

Creasy
nodded. "We all do." He looked at the Dane. "Jens, you have to
try to get that film developed in confidence. And you have to be there while
it's being developed and be sure that nobody else sees the prints."

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

She
caught the eye of a white-jacketed waiter and ordered a fresh fruit salad. When
it arrived, she laughed in astonishment. It was a large-bowl set inside an even
bigger bowl filled with ice. It contained at least ten different kinds of
tropical fruit, some of which she had never seen before. She had only managed
to eat half of it when she saw The Owl on the other side of the swimming pool.
He looked so incongruous in this luxury setting.

He wore
baggy grey trousers, a dark-blue shirt buttoned to his neck and, even in the
tropical heat, a black woollen cardigan. His eyes were moving over the
recumbent bodies, obviously looking for her. She watched as he walked around
the pool and saw his eyes focus on her and then move away. She put down the
bowl of fruit, sat up and called out: "Here!"

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

He was
embarrassed. "I'm sorry, Susanna, I didn't recognize you." He waved a
hand at her. "I mean, I never saw you like that before."

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

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

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

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

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

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

She
washed off the suntan oil at the poolside shower and strolled back through the
luxuriant garden to the bungalow.