The gate was an elaborate, if ancient, job, made from timber and barbed wire, and I had done a damn good job of wrapping the barbed wire through the spokes of the Jaguar’s wire wheels and around the hub wing-nuts. No amount of tugging would do any good; I was faced with the choice of either driving back to London with the gate attached to my wheels, or jacking up the car, removing the wheels, and disentangling the wire in the freezing-cold, pitch dark. Unhappily, the latter was the more realistic of the two alternatives.

I was not, therefore, in the most cheerful of frames of mind when, at a few minutes to six in the morning, I finally drove into the mews, to see that Gelignite’s black Golf GTI was not parked, as it normally was, eight feet away from my front door and blocking the entire mews; in fact, it was not in the mews at all.

I stared again at the note on the hall mirror. Happy fucking birthday. That just about summed it up. I picked up the telephone, and dialled the night operator at Portico.

‘Didn’t you call my home and give the message I asked you to?’

‘We did.’

‘Well – what did she say?’

‘Do you really want to know, Mr Flynn?’ She was hesitant.

‘Yes, I do.’

‘Well – she said, “Bullshit”.’

I dialled Gelignite’s flat. The phone rang, once, twice, three times, four times, then ‘Hello’. It was the voice of someone arousing from a deep sleep.

‘It’s me.’

There was a long pause. ‘Thanks for a great evening.’ Yawn. ‘What time is it?’

‘Five past six.’

‘Was she a good fuck?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Next time you get your secretary to call up your girlfriend and tell her you’re going to be late because you’re strapped to a totem pole and surrounded by savages brandishing tomahawks deep in the Amazon bush, let me give you some advice: make sure your girlfriend hasn’t seen you driving down Park Lane fifteen minutes earlier, and, what’s more, driving like a loony to get out of her line of vision because you think she hasn’t spotted you, because I did spot you, you shit!’ She hung up.

I stood staring into the receiver, and decided that people were right about birthdays: they do get less fun as you get older.

Chapter 14

14

Harry Slan entered the plush reception area of Gebruder Sleder GMBH (US) Inc., on the sixty-fourth floor of 101 Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza, an imposing skyscraper in the United Nations complex between Second and Third Avenues in Manhattan. His glum mood of the past three weeks had finally been lifted somewhere around his third glass of Dom Perignon 66 consumed aboard Deke Sleder’s personal LearJet, approximately half-way between Adamsville, Ohio, and La Guardia Airport, New York.