Faust Among Equals (16 page)

The bailiffs had even seized his entire collection of Ninja throwing-knives and death-stars, despite his objection that they were tools of the trade and therefore exempt. The most lethal object left to him was a toothbrush. When you're Kurt Lundqvist, however, a toothbrush will do nicely. It's all a matter of knowing how to use it.

Once he'd finished his meal, therefore, he walked the five miles to the private airstrip on the outskirts of the city and wandered into the first helicopter charter establishment he came across.

‘Hi,' he said to the youth behind the desk. ‘I want a chopper, now.'

The youth looked at him, observing the dusty jacket, the slept-in trousers. ‘You want a helicopter,' he said. ‘Fancy.'

Before he could go on, Lundqvist had vaulted the desk, landed beside him and thrust the toothbrush handle hard into the small hollow just below the lobe of his ear.

‘Yeah,' he said. ‘Is that a problem?'

The youth made a low, guttural noise, like a man gargling with custard; then he raised one shaking hand and pointed.

‘Keys in the ignition?'

‘Yug.'

‘Much obliged to you.' He hopped back over the desk and strode quickly across the tarmac to the helicopter indicated. Nobody even tried to stop him. He jumped in and slammed the door.

A moment later he opened it again.

‘Hey, you,' he shouted to a cowering mechanic. ‘Which one of these goddamned levers is the handbrake?'

 

As he flew, Lundqvist rationalised. He'd found an ancient bar of fruit and nut chocolate in the glove box - a bit grey and fluffy, but the sudden surge in his blood sugar level made his brain roar like the engine of a drag-racer on the starting line.

If I was Lucky George, he asked himself, where would I go?

Yes, well, if I actually
was
Lucky George, I'd cut my own throat this minute, because I'd know Kurt Lundqvist was on my trail, and it's only a matter of time, and I don't want to be sentient when he finds me. That guy is completely something else . . .

So, I'd go somewhere he'd never dream of looking. Three alternatives:

Yes. Well, (a) was a non-starter, because wherever Lucky George went, the one thing he could never be was inconspicuous. His habit of turning things into other things saw to that.

Likewise, (c). The Amsterdam authorities are famous for their ability to look the other way when expedient, but even they would have trouble overlooking armies of marauding windmills and giant attack-cheeses.

Which left (b), and very good thinking it was, too, because the chances of finding him by guesswork were very remote indeed.

He was just coming to these conclusions when the radio crackled and addressed him; peculiar in itself, since it wasn't switched on.

Lundqvist groaned. He really wasn't in the mood.

‘Piss off, Bull,' he said. ‘And switch that thing off before you go.'

Don't be like that, man. There's something really heavy going down, and
. . .

‘Later, Bull, okay? I'm busy. And besides, I still owe you a kicking for that last tip-off you gave me. Remember?'

The radio crackled nervously.
Hey, man, that wasn't my fault. How was I supposed to know
. . .
?

‘Rule number one, Bull, nobody grasses up the Antichrist, even if he is moonlighting. He wasn't pleased, Bull. We had him down at the station five hours before he told us who he was. I nearly got my licence pulled over that one.'

Lundqvist jammed a wedge in his adrenaline and raised an eyebrow. ‘Sure, Bull,' he said. ‘You and every other cheap informer between here and Delphi. Go hustle somebody else.'

‘How?'

‘No, you clown, how do you know where the girl is? Is it just pure intuition, or have you actually seen her?'

Lundqvist snarled. Then he took off his tie, jury-rigged the joystick and put his hands palm-downwards on the console.

‘Holding a seance, Bull. And when you materialise, I'm gonna kick your ectoplasm up through your ears, okay? Now then, have you seen her or not?'

‘I'm losing patience here, Bull. If you don't come clean before I count to five, it's gonna be one sadistic beating for yes, two sadistic beatings for no . . .'

I'm telling the truth, man, I heard it from the Ancestors. Like in Australia, okay? There's all these wild dudes out there who run the songlines, and they're all in the same union with me. As soon as I heard, I thought of you, I thought
. . .

‘Australia?'

You got it. Place called Maralinga. They don't call it that, of course, they call it D sharp minor, F natural, B natural, G flat, but I looked it up on a map and
. . .

Lundqvist grinned and untied the joystick. ‘Thanks, Bull,' he said. ‘I'll check it out. And maybe I'll let you off with exorcism when I see you next. And maybe not.'

The radio switched off.

D
anny Bennett knew for a fact that he had a Destiny, just as a dog knows it has fleas.

It was written in the stars that one day, Danny Bennett would unmask the most staggering conspiracy, lay bare the most Machiavellian cover-up, make the ultimate documentary, win the ultimate award, make the once and future awards ceremony speech. The trouble with the stars is that sometimes they can't read their own handwriting. Either that, or there was another Daniel Woodward Bernstein Bennett out there somewhere who got all his namesake's mail by mistake.

In any event, his latest staggering exposé of corruption and intrigue in the Foodstuffs Colouring and Preservatives Directorate, engagingly titled ‘Offal You Can't Refuse', had made such an impression that here he was, covering the Round-Australia Land-Yacht Race for one of the top forty satellite TV companies. Promotion, you could say, if you're happy with the concept of being promoted downwards.

Media analysts tended to observe that if Isaac Newton had followed Danny's career over the last five years, the apple would have been entirely superfluous.

He pulled in, stared blankly at five miles of featureless, arrow-straight road in front of him, and consulted the map. Even with the map held the wrong way up, the only possible conclusion was that he'd come the wrong way, and that there was nothing for it but to turn round and drive the eighty-seven miles back into Arrampagatta. The fact that by the time he got to where he was supposed to be, the race would be across the state line and heading north was tempered by the certainty that Danny wouldn't be able to recognise a land-yacht if one ran up his backside.

Which is what one promptly did.

Glancing in his rear-view mirror, all Danny could see was a whacking great sail, flolloped untidily across the back window. He frowned, opened the door and got out.

‘Excuse me,' he said. He couldn't help noticing something that looked uncomfortably like a sailing ship on wheels, which seemed for all the world as if it was trying to get into the boot of his car.

‘Why the hell,' said a voice from somewhere inside the canvas, ‘don't you look where you're bloody well going?'

‘I wasn't going,' Danny replied. ‘I was parked. What is that thing?'

Out from behind the sail came about seven feet of man, topped with flashing Ray-Ban mirror sunglasses and idly passing a toothbrush from hand to hand. ‘Is that your car?' he said.

‘It's a hire car,' Danny replied. ‘What's . . . ?'

He became aware that the handle of the toothbrush was level with his heart. Somehow, this frightened him.

‘I need a lift.'

‘Right,' Danny said. ‘That's fine. I'm going back to Arrampagatta; that's about ninety miles that way, but you're welcome to—'

‘No. I need to go this way. Get in and drive.'

The stranger emphasised these words by drawing the bristles of the toothbrush against the pile across the palm of his hand, and some sort of atavistic survival instinct told Danny that this was a really good opportunity to practise being scared shitless. He complied.

As he shut the door and turned the key in the ignition, he realised why. He knew the guy.

‘So you're in the race,' he said, by way of a diversion.

‘What race?'

‘The land-yacht race,' Danny replied, looking straight ahead. ‘That was a land-yacht you were riding, wasn't it?'

‘Yes.'

Lundqvist! It had to be Lundqvist.

Excellence is its own best advertisement, in the covert assassination and dirty tricks business as in everything else. Build a better mantrap and the world will beat a path to your door. As a result, Lundqvist's identity and professional reputation were tolerably well known among certain circles, although nobody with a penchant for waking up two mornings in a row would ever have dreamt of trying to make any sort of fuss about it.

Now Danny had a talent; a quite staggering intuitive ability, which enabled him to see just under half the story in a blinding flash of inspiration. Once the speck of insight had found its way into his brain, he then proceeded to coat it with innumerable layers of his own brand of imaginative gibberish, but that was by the way. His most recent researches had led him to the plain fact that wherever something significant, mysterious and horrible had happened in the last fifteen years, one Kurt Lundqvist had been somewhere in the vicinity at the time - visiting his aunt, seeing his dentist, attending a conference on early church music perhaps, but
there
, nevertheless. Once you'd seen that common factor, the conclusion was obvious.

Danny Bennett knew, instinctively but conclusively, that Lundqvist was the number one torpedo for the Milk Marketing Board. And here he was, in Danny's car, toothbrushed up and twitching with raw adrenaline, out in the middle of the Australian Outback.

‘Um,' Danny said. ‘Where was it you wanted to go, exactly?'

‘George's Sheep Farm. Carry on along this road another seventy miles, it should be the first turning on your left. Got that?'

Danny nodded, his brain teeming all the while.

Sheep farm! What the hell would the Milk Marketing Board want with a sheep farm? Either the MMB bosses were running a covert dairy operation using cows with cotton wool stuck all over their backs, or else the whole thing was a front for something even more sinister. Part of his flesh crawled with feverish excitement. The rest just crawled.

‘Funny thing,' Danny said. ‘I'd got the idea the race didn't go anywhere near here.'

He didn't look round, but he could sense the lenses of the Ray-Bans scorching the side of his head. ‘I'm taking a short cut,' Lundqvist said.

‘A short cut. In a race.'

‘Yeah.'

‘Fine.'

The next hour seemed to pass very slowly. There was Lundqvist in the passenger seat, grimly munching his way through a roll of peppermints he'd found in the glove box, and there was Danny, desperately trying to suss it all out and find the little stray clue that would tie in a New South Wales sheepranch, the Watergate break-in and the Banco Ambrosiano. It was there, he knew it; just a matter of isolating one little wisp of a connection . . .

‘We're here.'

Danny stood on the brake, slewing the car half round. His eyes met Lundqvist's, in roughly the same manner as a hedge-hog meets an eighteen-wheel Mack truck.

‘So,' Danny said. ‘This is where you get out, then.'

‘Yeah.' The door opened, Lundqvist grabbed his rucksack off the back seat and extracted the grotesque lengths of knee and elbow from which he appeared to be largely constructed. He slammed the door and started to walk up the long dirt track.

Discretion is the better part of valour, as the saying goes. By the same author, but not perhaps so well known, are such equally profound saws as, ‘Aspirin is the spice of geography,' and, ‘You can lead a horse to water but never double on three no trumps.' Danny drove on, decided to count to ten, got to seven and backed up. Then he drove on down the narrow track. On the seat beside him there now rested a loaded video camera.