Czytaj książkę: «Air Force One is Down»

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.