Mambo by Campbell Armstrong Page A

Cambridge area.”
    â€œI have one in my own office.”
    â€œBring it in here and pin it above my desk, will you?”
    â€œRight away.” Briskly, eager to please, even to pamper him, Foxie stepped out.
    Flat on his back, Pagan raised the computer print-out above his eyes and squinted at the list of names. Beneath each name was nationality, followed by the reasons why the person had been entered in SATO’s computers in the first place. There was a Dutchman called Vanderberg known for his skill in building custom rifles, an American who had some questionable connections in the Lebanon, an Italian journalist notorious for his radical left-wing sympathies and his “exclusive” interviews – florid and sycophantic – with fugitive terrorists. If Pagan couldn’t find the time and manpower to run a check on the people who had access to the allegedly secret route used on the night of the Shepherd’s Bush disaster, how could he justify the investigation of these twenty-nine, not one of whom suggested a plausible bridge to Gunther Ruhr?
    And yet how could he know for sure? Thoroughness was a bloody dictator. If you were Frank Pagan, you were imprisoned by your own exactitude. Everyone on the list would have to be contacted, interviewed, even if only briefly, or watched. The likely outcome was that all twenty-nine would be eliminated from having any association with Gunther Ruhr. End of the matter. Heigh-ho. The joys of police work. The enviable glamour.
    He was about to set the print-out aside, and ponder the matter of delegating the inquiries to cops purloined from some other department, when he noticed a name at the foot of the second page.
    It blinded him at first. He thought he’d hallucinated it, a set of letters created by the morphine-like effect of Pethidine. He shut his eyes, hearing Foxie come inside the room, hearing Foxie say something about a map, noises off-stage, off-centre, as if Foxworth had stepped toward the outer limits of the world and could barely be heard. Pagan opened his eyes. It was still there. Unchanged.
    Dear Christ, how many years had passed ?
    Pagan turned his face toward Foxworth, who was standing on a chair and tacking the map to the wall.
    â€œFoxie,” Pagan said.
    Foxworth stepped down from the chair and moved across the room to the sofa. He thought Frank looked very odd all at once, as if more than pain troubled him.
    â€œWhat’s the matter? Is something wrong?” he asked.
    Pagan pointed to the name on the sheet. Foxie looked closely. It meant nothing to him.
    â€œI’d like to know where this person can be found, Foxie.”
    â€œIt may take a little time.”
    â€œDo it.”
    There was an uncharacteristic note in Pagan’s voice, the grumpy irritability of somebody confronted by a puzzle he couldn’t understand, one he thought he’d solved a long time ago.
    Foxie wrote the name down.
    From the window of her hotel room, Magdalena Torrente saw the expanse of darkness that was Hyde Park. Black and whispering, it created a shadow at the heart of London. It was a long time since Magdalena had been in England. It would be pleasant to come one day as a tourist, spend some time, see sights. This trip, like the last one, was going to be brief.
    The last time here: she didn’t want to think about that.
    She shut the window, looked at her watch. It was two a.m. She moved across the room, pushed the bathroom door open, saw her own reflection in the fluorescent glare of the tiled room, dark circles under her eyes and colourless lips. She considered make-up, but he didn’t like her in cosmetics. A real woman, he sometimes said, doesn’t need to paint herself into falsehood.
    She lay on the bed. The lift rumbled in the shaft along the corridor. It stopped; the doors slid open. Magdalena closed her eyes and listened carefully. The thick carpet in the hallway muffled the movement of anyone passing. Do you trust him