The car wasn’t new. It had five thousand miles on the clock and a few dents on the body. Just as well. He wasn’t supposed to be new to the business so the car should look as though it had fought its way along a few farm tracks in its time.
It was a black 1966 four-door BMW 2000 Neue Klasse. Boxy and unprepossessing. He’d seen better looking jeeps. “Functional” was the most positive description that could be applied to it—red leather upholstery did little to diminish this—and it was probably all he needed, a car that deliberately avoided attracting attention.
Voigt’s mechanic talked him through it. Flipped open the front panel of the passenger-side footwell to show him a specially installed clip to take a handgun. Good grief, did every bugger in Austria know his secrets?
“They’d really have to be looking for it to find it,” the mechanic said.
“Well,” Wilderness replied, “they usually are.”
This was ignored as the man went into a rambling techspeak lecture on the specs of the car, the suping up, of which he was inordinately proud and to which Wilderness was wilfully indifferent.
“Lots of modifications—”
“Don’t tell me … An ejector seat?”
“No. Just tweaks to the engine. Gas-flowing cylinder head, twin forty Dellorto carbs, high-lift camshaft and a less-restricted exhaust. It’ll be a noisy bastard … but with eighty hp it’ll outrun any cop car.”
Eighty hp? Wasn’t that more than the tractors Erdbahn made? And was that eighty hp towing a plough or a harrow?
Outrun a cop car? Wilderness had not anticipated that necessity, and he thought the mechanic hadn’t either. He simply had his toy so he was going to play with it.
“One word of warning,” the mechanic said as Wilderness slid into the driver’s seat wondering what all the knobs and buttons did.
“Didn’t have time to modify the brakes … so mind how you go.”
Ah, the standard farewell of the London beat Bobby … “Evenin’ All” to “Mind how you go.”
Wilderness found this less than reassuring. All he wanted of a car was that it should be comfortable and unobtrusive.
“Put your foot down and you’ll be doing a hundred and fifty before you can blink, and it’ll top out around two hundred kph.”
Two hundred kph. That was … he totted it up … one hundred twenty-five mph. His wife would love this car. Turn her loose on the Kingston bypass in a suped-up BMW and she’d do a hundred twenty-five and love every second of it.
He slipped his Smith & Wesson into the clip behind the footwell. Right now he had no idea if he’d ever need to take it out again. And no wish to take it out again. He was perfectly willing to take Crosland’s advice. Not only would he not go in “guns blazing,” he would go in without a gun and put trust above risk.
Perhaps he wasn’t a secret agent after all?
Perhaps he really was a tractor salesman?
He drove back to his hotel at a stately twenty-five miles per hour.
He was, once more, staying at the Imperial Hotel, burdened, as it was, with a memory.