Len Deighton - Spy Hook

'This is your captain speaking…'

We'd arrived in Los Angeles: now came the worst part, the line-up at US Customs and Immigration. It took well over an hour standing in line, disconsolately kicking my baggage forward a few inches at a time. But finally I was grudgingly admitted to America.

'Hi there! Mr Samson? Did you have a nice flight?' He was chewing gum, a suntanned man about thirty years old with patient eyes, stretch pants, a half-eaten hamburger and a half-read paperback edition of War and Peace : everything necessary for meeting someone at LAX. We walked through the crowded concourse and into the melee of cabs and cars and buses that served this vast and trainless town.

'Buddy Breukink,' the man introduced himself. He flicked a finger at the dented, unpainted metal case that I'd wrenched from the carousel. 'Is this all your baggage?' If everyone kept saying that to me I was going to start feeling socially disadvantaged.

'That's right,' I said. He took my bag and the corrugated case. I didn't know whether I should politely wrest it from him. There was no way to discover if he was just a driver, sent to collect me, or a senior executive who was going to pick up the bills and give me my orders. The US of A is like that. He marched off and I followed him. He hadn't been through the formalities but I didn't press it. He didn't look the type who would regularly read and update the Notes and Amendments.

'Hungry? We have more than a hour's ride.' He had a sly gap-toothed smile, as if he knew something that the rest of the world didn't know. It wasn't something to be taken personally.

'I'll survive,' I promised. My blood-sugar wasn't so low that I wanted an airport hamburger.

'The buggy's across the street.' He was a coffee-shop cowboy: a tall, slim fellow with a superfluity of good large teeth, tan-coloured tight-fitting trousers, short-sleeve white shirt and a big brown stetson with a bright band of feathers round it. In keeping with the outfit, Buddy Breukink climbed into a jeep, a brand-new Wrangler soft-top complete with phone, personalized plates – BB GUN – and roll bar.

He threw my baggage and Tolstoy into the back before carefully placing his beautiful stetson in a box there. He got in and pushed a lot of buttons, a coded signal to activate his car phone. 'Have to make sure none of these parking-lot jockeys make a long long call to their folks in Bogota,' he said, as if a short freebie hello to Mexico City might be okay with him. He smiled to himself and cleared half a dozen audio cassettes from the passenger seat and dumped them into a box. When he turned the ignition key the tape recorder started playing 'Pavarotti's Greatest Hits' or more specifically 'Funiculi, funicula' delivered in ear-splitting fortissimos. 'It's kind of classical,' he explained with a hint of apology.

He gunned the engine impatiently. 'Let's go!' he yelled even louder than Pavarotti; and even before I was strapped in, the wheels were burning rubber and we were out of the car park and off down the highway.

I had arrived in the New World and was as bemused as Columbus. In this part of the world it was already spring, the air was warm and the sky was that pale shade of blue that portends a steep rise in temperature. The noisy downtown streets were crowded with black roaring Porsches and white Rolls-Royce convertibles, shouting kids rattled round on roller skates and pretty girls preened in sun-tops and shorts.

Up the ramp. On the Freeway that stretches across the city, the anarchy of the busy streets ended. Apart from some kids racing past in a dented pickup, restrained drivers observed lane discipline and moved at a steady pace. The wind roared through the jeep's open sides and threatened to blow me from my seat. I huddled down to shelter behind the windscreen. Buddy turned the music louder and looked at me and grinned.

'Funiculi,' sung Buddy between chewing. 'Funicula.'

Once clear of the 'international airport', its manana-minded airline staff and its hard-eyed bureaucrats, Southern California reaches out to its visitors. The warmth of the sun, the sight of the San Gabriel mountains, dry winds from the desert, the bitter herbal smells of the brushwood flowers, the orange poppies in the bright green landscape that has not yet suffered the cruel heat of summer; at this time of year all these things urge me to stay for ever.

Racing along the road that is slung roof-high above the city, there was a view of the whole of Los Angeles from the ocean to the mountains. Clusters of tall buildings at Century City, and more at Broadway, dominated a town of modest little suburban houses squeezed between pools and palms. Soon Buddy took an off-ramp and cut across town to pick up the Pacific Coast Highway and go north following the signs that point the way to Santa Barbara and eventually San Francisco. At Malibu the traffic thinned, and we sped past an ever more varied selection of elaborate and eccentric beach houses: until houses, and even seafood restaurants, ended and the road followed the very edge of the continent. Here the Pacific Ocean relentlessly assaulted the seashore. Huge green breakers exploded into lacy foam and a mist of water vapour, and roared so loudly that the noise of them could be heard above the sound of the jeep's engine, and that of the music.

Buddy took the gum from his mouth and pitched it out on to the road. 'They told me you'd ask questions,' he confided.

'No,' I said.

'And they said I shouldn't tell you anything.'

'It's working out just fine,' I said.

He nodded, and dodged round a big articulated truck marked Budweiser, before flattening the gas pedal against the floor and showing me what speed his jeep would do.

We passed the place where agile figures dangling from hang-gliders threw themselves off the high cliffs and did figure of eights above the highway and the Pacific Ocean before landing on the narrow strip of beach that provided their only chance of survival. We passed the offshore oil-rigs, standing like anchored aircraft carriers in the mist. By the time we turned off the Pacific Coast Highway into a narrow 'Seven mile canyon' we were well past the county line and into Ventura. And I was getting hungry.

It was a private road, narrow and pot-holed. On the corner a tall wooden post was nailed with half a dozen signs in varying degrees of deterioration: 'Schuster Ranch', 'Greentops quarter-horse Stud – no visits', 'Ogarkov', 'D and M Bishop', 'Rattlesnake Computer Labs' and 'Highacres'. As the jeep climbed up the dirt road into the canyon I wondered which of those establishments we were going to. But as we passed all the mailboxes on the roadside it became clear that we were heading up to some unmarked property nearer the summit.

We were about three miles up the canyon, and high enough to get glimpses of the ocean far below us, when we came to gates in a high chain-link fence that stretched on either side as far as I could see. Alongside the gate a sign said, ' La Buona Nova. Private Property. Beware guard dogs.' Buddy steered the jeep to within reaching distance of a small box on a metal post. He pressed a red button and spoke into the box. 'Hi there! It's Buddy with the visitor. Open up will yuh?'

With a hesitant, jerky motion, and a loud grinding of hidden mechanical devices, the gates slowly opened. From the box a tinny voice said, 'Hang in to see the gates click shut, Buddy. Last week's rain seems to have gotten to them.'

We drove inside and Buddy did as he'd been told. I could see no buildings anywhere but I had the feeling that we were being kept under observation by whoever the tinny voice belonged to. 'Keep your hands inside the car,' Buddy advised. 'Those darn dogs run free in this outer compound.'

We continued up the dirt road, always climbing and leaving hairpins of dust on the trail behind us. Then suddenly, around a spur, another chain fence came into view. There was another gate and a small hut.