Gavin Lyall - Judas Country

He just looked stubborn.

I sighed. 'Well, we'll get the girls to lend us the fare to Beirut and I'll ring my bank and they can cable through a few quid there.' I reached for my room key. 'We'll be checking out, then.'

'But wait…' Kapotas frowned at me. 'What about the plane?'

'It belongs to Castle. Harborne, Gough'll probably send another pilot down to fly it back. You can't expect me to stay on forever without pay, can you?'

'But… the boxes of champagne-'

He jerked his head in a small, significant nod at Ken.

'Don't worry,' I said cheerfully. 'You can speak openly in front of my partner; he's older than he looks. Those boxes? Do what you like with them. They're not mine.'

'But… what is in them…'

Ken said quickly: 'Does anybodyknow what's in them?'

'I don't,' I said. 'They haven't been opened.'

'The one we… I opened here…' Kapotas stuttered.

I shrugged. 'I don't know what happened to that box. But I'm sure that if there was anything, say, illegal in it, then you'd have reported it to the police.'

He glared. 'I can still report it! '

'Twenty-four hours late? And when you've had police crawling all over your hotel for half that time? Dear me.'

There was a long silence.

At last Kapotas said between his teeth: 'I call this blackmail.'

'It's certainly a fascinating moral problem,' Ken said thoughtfully. There's no doubt but that Roy is owed that seventy-five and that you've refused to pay-'

'As receiver,' Kapotas went back to his old refrain; 'I am not responsible for debts incurred before Harborne; Gough took over. Therefore, I am not strictly acting for the old Castle International board, who hired Mr Case, but for the new owners, the debenture holders."

'But strictly,' Ken said, 'we aren't blackmailingyou: it's notyour money we're after. I suppose you might say we're putting the bite on your beloved debenture holders, but only by offering to help conceal what one of their agents – that's you – did while acting on their behalf: to wit and namely, failing to disclose the illegal importation of what may be twelve boxes of unlicensed firearms by Castle International or their agent. That's you,' he said to me.

I said: 'I admire the grammar, but I lost the moral in there somewhere.'

Ttold you it was a fascinating problem. I bet they set it as a passing-out exam for Jesuits one day. And it gets better.' He looked back at Kapotas. 'You see, you don't propose yourself to have anything more to do with those boxes, do you? But in order to protect you completely, we can't be so negative. We have to act positively, possibly even commit a crime, by knowingly taking those boxes somewhere else.

'You see the difficult moral position you're putting us in?' he added.

'I'm putting YOU?' screamed Kapotas.

Ken nodded gently and said: 'And we haven't even begun considering your responsibility towards those boxes as assets of the company, which they must, primafacie, be assumed to be.'

'You're right,' I said. 'I hadn't realised how fascinating it all is.'

There was another long silence, except for Ken tapping on his front teeth and trying to make a tune by opening and closing his mouth while staring blankly at the switchboard.

I asked: 'Whatis that you're trying to do?'

Kapotas said: 'But legally, you understand-'

Ken said: 'Vilja, Oh Vilja from the Merry Widow. It's a difficult one, there's a jump of over an octave in the beginning there.'

'Ah, the Viennese influence, of course.'

'Legally-' said Kapotas.

Ken looked at him, seeming surprised that he was still there. 'Legally, you can go around and look up our old friend Inspector Lazaros and tell him you're sorry you're a day late but you've something important to confess. We won't stop you.'

I said. 'I didn't know anybody had done an arrangement of it for top third molars.'

Kapotas took a cheque-book from his inside pocket.

I phoned in a flight plan for takeoff at 3.45. We went out in a taxi, collecting Eleanor from the Ledra on the way, and she was pleasantly surprised to see me handling my own money again. I didn't bother her with the details of how I'd got it.

The others parked in thecafé while I arranged for refuelling. In fact, the Queen Air still had over thirty gallons aboard, which was enough to reach Beirut although not with legal, reserves. But I was thinking well beyond legality: I wanted' enough in the tanks for a fast departure if somebody blew the, whistle on us. Back to Cyprus or further if the Lebanese got¡ snotty, up to Adana in Turkey if the Cypriots asked for extradition. I didn't really expect either, but a good pilot is always flying a hundred miles or so ahead of his aeroplane.

Of course, one thing I couldn't be sure about was where we'd go if Harborne, Goughlsuddenly woke up and decided we'd stolen the Queen Air. Maybe Baffin Land had some pensionable openings in civil aviation.

Ken came into the Met office with me, just to remind himself. The map showed that last night's storm had been part of a cold front going through; it was now somewhere in Syria, with; its low-pressure hinge up in Turkey. Beirut was reporting about three oktas – or eighths – of cloud and 20-odd knots of wind^,-. from the south-west, visibility five miles. Fair enough; it is a north-east wind that brings the dust and smoke from Beirut out across the airport. I made a few notes and then switched to studying the weather further west and likely to come our way J sooner or later. I'd been out of touch for a couple of days myself.

We all make jokes about the Met boys, but most of ther mistakes are matters of degree. A low gets deeper than expected, a front moves faster. But you can count on both low and front existing. And a pilot lives with the weather like living with a family. He watches the patterns of mood and illnes come and go and, if he stays awake, he knows where he is in the pattern and doesn't get any nasty surprises. If the North Atlantic has measles this week then Europe will haveit in a couple of days; maybe more so, maybe less, but it'll be there. God doesn't wake up in the morning and say: 'Now what shall I give 'em today?' Except with hurricanes, maybe.

Bar a few gaps, I've lived with the weather myself for the past twenty years. I knew what Ken meant when he said not knowing made you feel cut off.

We got aboard at about half past three and the inside smelt like a hot oil well, so I left the door hanging down – the insideof it forms the steps – as long as possible. The interior of a Queen Air is about the height and width of a Volkswagen Microbusbut there's no standard layout. Castle Hotels had chosen to have five largish passenger seats and had scrapped the lavatory in favour of extra luggage space just aft of the door. Now part of that space was filled with the two frontmost seats which had been pulled off their rails to make room for the champagne boxes stacked either side of the narrow aisle, behind the cockpit. It looked a bit clumsy, but it put them right over the centre of gravity. Anyway, I hadn't expected to be flying passengers until I'd got the seats back in place.

Ken was already in the right-hand pilot's seat when I squeezed through and started unpacking the checklists and Aerad guide from my briefcase.

'God, but you keep a shitty aeroplane when I'm not around,' he said. Well, I suppose the floor was just slightly smothered with pipe ash, used matches and crumpled pages off my navigation pad. I'd been meaning to do something…

I said: 'I got involved. Have you remembered which way is up, yet?'

He smiled, jerked his head back towards the stacked boxes and asked softly: 'How did you resist opening that lot?'

'If it's what we think it is, we've got no alibi at all once they're opened.'