Greg Iles - The Spandau Phoenix

Wilson?"

The deputy director stuck his head into the office. "It's that woman,"

he sniffed, meaning Swallow. "She said she'd wait one more minute and

then she's leavin

I 9

"Tell her I won't be a moment."

Wilson sighed with exasperation and withdrew.

I'm sorry, your lordship," Shaw apologized. "Where were we?9?

"Your career," replied a deep voice with a vintage Oxbridge accent. Shaw

was briefly reminded of Alec Guinness"It is felt, Neville, in some

quarters, that you have bungled this whole affair from the beginning. It

was nearly a year ago that some of us suggested that you act to prevent

just this sort of mess."

Sir Neville bridled. "If they'd torn the bloody prison down last year,

the very same thing would have happened. I couldn't control what the

man wrote, for God's sake."

This riposte was met with ri-osty silence. "Yes," the voice said

finally. "Well. What about the African end of the problemT' "It's

being taken care of. TWO or @ days at the most."

"A lot could happen in thine days, Neville. We want every loose end

snipped, every @ erased.".

"It's being done," Shaw insisted.

"Are there any complications we should know aboutt' Shaw thought of

Jonas Stern, and of Swallow waiting just outside his door. "No," he

lied.

"Keep us posted, then." The caller rang off.

Shaw exhaled a great blast of air and began to massage his temples with

his fingertips. He badly needed sleep. He had spent five of the past

six hours on the telephone. Across London, in places like the India

Club, the House of Lords, and the All-England Lawn Tennis and Croquet

Clu@d across Britain in the ramshackle palaces and crumbling stone

castle outposts of the aristocracy-privileged men and women both young

and old were gathering in quiet councils.

Like ripples spreading outward from the epicenter of Buckingham Palace,

waves of apprehension rolled through this most rarefied level of

society; and all, Shaw reflected, because one little stone had dropped

far away in the atrophied heart of Berlin. Slowly but surely, those

frightened men and women were bringing a great deal of pressure to bear

on Sir Neville Shaw. For Shaw, like his predecessors before him, was

not only the possessor but also the protector of their dark secret. Most

of the calls had been like the previous one-a bit of carrot, bags of

stick. Shaw was about to rise and go to his liquor cabinet for a

medicinal Glenfiddich when his office door opened and Wilson ushered in

the woman code-named Swallow.

Sir Neville was stunned. The woman standing before him looked nothing

like the photo in the file he'd been studying.

"Ah ... Miss Gordon, isn't it?" he stammered as Wilson withdrew from

the office.

Swallow did not respond.

"I'm told you insisted on, seeing me personally," he tried again.

"Mind telling me why?"

Still Swallow held her silence. She obviously felt the burden of

explanation lay on the man who had called for her services. Thoroughly

discomfited, Shay looked down at the file. The woman in the photo

looked like a grandmother, a blue-rinsed clubwoman who spent her Sundays

baking biscuits for the church. The woman who stood before him now

looked like ... well, Shaw had never quite seen the analogue that would

describe her. Swallow had iron gray hair cropped &lose against her

skull, perfect for wearing wigs. She carried none of the excess fat

that weighted most women her age and there Shaw paused. For looking at

Swallow now, he couldn't quite get his mind round the fact that she had

been in the war. She'd been practically a child, of course, but It was

downright eerie. The file put her at sixty-one, but she looked nearer

fifty. As he stared, the scent of perfume wafted to him; this single

acknowledgment of femininity surprised him. He couldn't name the

fragrance, but it smelled expensive and vaguely French. To be honest,

Shaw mused, he might have been attracted to Swallow if it wasn't for

what he knew about her. No, he decided, even if he'd imown nothing of

her fiendish work, her eyes would have put him off. They were like

stones. Dull, flat stones. Not that they communicated intellectual

dullness-quite the contrary.

They were rather like slate lids on a blast furnace, protecting those

outside from the fierce hatred that burned behind them. That hatred had

probably served Swallow well through the years, Shaw reflected, for by

trade she was an assassin.

"Yes, well," he began again, "did Wilson tell you this regards Jonas

Stern?"

Swallow nodded soberly.

"What I'd like is for you to follow him, see what he's up to. His last

known location was Berlin, but he's probably on the move. He's

traveling under his own name, which seems odd, so he must not feel he's

in any danger."

Swallow smiled at that.

"As soon as we pick him up, we'll put you onto him. We think he's

trying to get hold of something ... something that we'd prefer the Jews

didn't get hold of. Understood?"

"Perfectly," said Swallow. She had, after all, done her part against

the Zionist terrorists of Palestine.

Shaw cleared his throat. "Yes, well, what kind of payment would you

want? Would twenty thousand pounds cover it?"

Swallow's eyes hooded over at this. It struck Shaw just then that, from

Swallow's perspective, they had come to the point of the meeting. "What

I want," she said in a toneless voice, "is Jonas Stern.

When your little operation is over, I want a free hand with him."

Shaw had no illusions as to what this meant. Swallow wanted official

permission to kill an Israeli citizen. He knew the answer to his next

question, but he asked it anyway.

"What was it, exactly, that Stern did to you?"

"Killed my brother," she replied in a voice that could have come from a

corpse.

"That was quite some time ago, wasn't it?" Shaw commented.

"And every year since, my brother has lain in his grave."

The furnace heat behind Swallow's eyes flashed at the edges.

"They scarcely found enough of him to bury. Bloody Jews."

Shaw nodded with appropriate solemnity. "Yes, well ...

your condition is accepted." He drummed his fingers on his desk.

"Tell me, what's your feeling about Stern as an agent?"

"He's the best I ever saw. If he wasn't, he'd have been dead long ago.

He's got the instincts of a bloody clairvoyant."

"Any ideas on his motive? Why he would leave Israel now?"

Swallow considered this. "To protect it," she said at length.

"Israel is his weakness. He must believe the country is in imminent

danger."

"I see."

"Is Israel in danger?"

"Not that I'm aware of," Shaw replied thoughtfully. "Not any more than

usual."

As Swallow stood thinking, Shaw noticed that she stood with a vaguely

military bearing-not tensely, but with a relaxed kind of readiness,

rather like some Special Forces types he had known. They had all been

men, of course.

"Is there anything else, then?" she asked.

Shaw flipped through the files on his desk with exaggerated casualness.

"There is, as a matter of fact. Another job.

A small one. Domestic job, actually. I thought you might take care of

it for us. But it's a rush job. It must be done by tonight."

Swallow's eyes narrowed in suspicion. "Who is it?"

"Chap named Burton. Michael Burton. Retired. Lives in a cottage

outside Haslemere in Surrey. Raises orchids, I believe. I'm afraid he

knows too much for his own good." Sir Neville cleared his throat again.