By midday Friday there is little sign that the cloud cover left behind by Thursday’s depression is ever going to break. And as Bliss and Phillips sit in the muggy warmth of a quayside fish restaurant, the English detective wonders whether it will ever stop raining.
“I can hardly see a thing,” he says, wiping a window in the condensation with a napkin and peering across the fog-shrouded harbour. But there is little to see, apart from a ghostly water bus that fades in and out of the haze as it glides to and from the islands that make up the Vancouver archipelago.
“Now I know how Rick feels,” he carries on while staring at the plate of haddock and chips in front of him. “It just doesn’t seem right to eat while we don’t know what’s happening to Daphne and the poor guy’s wife.”
“But what do you intend doing?” asks Phillips, knowing that he need not add, “If the women never show up.”
Bliss finishes the sentence in his mind. “I can’t just go home and pretend she never existed,” he answers, then puts down his cutlery to stare out of the window into the gloom. “In fact, I don’t see how I’ll ever be able to leave. I’ll be like that dog in Scotland that never left his master’s grave. What was it called — Greyfriars hound or something? Hah! That’s appropriate, isn’t it? Greyfriars — a monastery.”
“So what are your plans?” persists Phillips.
“I’m going back in there, of course,” says Bliss determinedly. “I’ll camp on their bloody doorstep if I have to, and I’ll make such a damned racket that they’ll have to give me some answers.”
“Dave, you can’t be serious. They really will throw you in jail.”
“Only if they catch me,” he declares, almost as if he’s planning it that way. “Anyway, that’ll give them an even bigger headache. Can you imagine the fun the British press will have with that?”
“Assuming the Americans admit that you’re there,” says Phillips ominously as Bliss catches sight of the white prow of a vessel nosing out of the mist.
“Is that a fishing boat?” he asks, picking up his fork and stabbing at the emerging craft with it. But as Phillips squints through the haze, the boat develops into a sleek motor cruiser and he dismisses the million-dollar bauble at a glance.
“No — not unless a fridge full of caviar and oysters count as catch.”
“That place has to be pretty heavy-duty,” continues Bliss, unable to keep his mind off the supposed monastery.
“You’re absolutely certain they are there?”
“I’d stake my pension on it,” says Bliss, as another boat edges gingerly through the fog.
“Look. That’s a trawler,” says Phillips, drawing Bliss’s eyes to Kelly’s chunky vessel as it approaches the quay.
“Oh, yes,” says Bliss, and while the seventy-foot fishing vessel holds no particular significance for him, with nothing else to focus on in the murk he watches the boat manoeuvre alongside where an inspector from the fisheries department waits to examine the meagre haul.
“How did you make out, Vince?” calls the inspector cheerily as Kelly ties off his lines and cuts the engines.
“Mainly cat food,” mutters the skipper, sweeping his hand across half a dozen fish-laden plastic tubs on the stern deck. “It’ll be another few weeks before the sockeye come in — if they come in.”
“The eggheads are predicting a good run this year,” says the inspector, running his eye quickly over the motley assortment in the tubs while picking at it with little interest. But it’s a story the skipper has heard before.
“I’ll believe it when I see it.”
“You just wait,” laughs the inspector over his shoulder as he moseys back to the shelter of a harbour-side coffee house.
A white Ford van being driven slowly along the quayside catches Phillips’s eye, and he’s just saying, “Hey, Dave, this could be him,” when his cell phone interrupts.
“It’s for you, Dave,” he says, passing it over without taking his eyes off the van.
“Dave,” calls Peter Bryan from London, his voice bouncing with excitement. “I think I’ve cracked the suicide job, and it’s got a Canadian connection.”
“Really?”
“He’s stopping at that trawler,” says Phillips, his eyes tight on Buzzer’s van. “But I can’t see the plates from here.”
“Yeah. You’ll never believe what happened to them,” continues Bryan, and he is about to explain the modus operandi to Bliss when Phillips starts to rise.
“Dave,” says Phillips, grabbing his raincoat and heading for the door, “there’s something funny going on.”
“What? Hold on — wait,” says Bliss, talking to both men at the same time, then he shouts, “I’ll call you back!” into the phone and takes off after Phillips.
But the detectives are too late. Buzzer’s white van is already pulling away from the quayside as they emerge from the restaurant and sprint towards the trawler, leaving them with the glimpse of a crew member scurrying back aboard and the sight of the fish trays still on the deck.
“What happened?” asks Bliss breathlessly as they watch the departing vehicle and clearly see that it bears the familiar Washington licence plate.
“Come on,” urges Phillips, dragging Bliss towards his BMW at the far end of the quay, but they have no chance of catching the fleeing vehicle and Bliss calls a halt, demanding, “What the hell did you see, Mike?”
“There were three of them,” he starts, then quickly explains that the men, all bundled in luminescent waterproofs, had come ashore from the trawler, and he had watched, expecting them to start loading the trays of fish into the Ford van. One of the men, the tallest of the three, had opened the rear doors of the van while the other two stood back, then the first man had quickly checked around before ushering the two men inside. “I was just beginning to wonder what they were playing at,” continues Phillips, “when the guy on the quayside slammed the door and the van took off.”
“With the others still inside?”
“Yep.”
“Trafficking,” Bliss immediately surmises, getting a nod of agreement from the Mountie. “They’ve got a nerve,” Phillips says. “Bringing them ashore right under our noses in the middle of the day.”
“But why here?” Bliss wonders, though Phillips knows the answer to that.
“They wouldn’t risk dropping them south of the border. The U.S. Coast Guard is really hot.”
“Okay. So what do we do?” questions Bliss, knowing he’s way off his own patch.
“I should really call it in,” admits Phillips, but he questions the wisdom of doing so, considering he’d lied about his wife’s sickness.
“We could always try to head them off at the border,” suggests Bliss, and they are on the point of leaving when Daisy shows up.
“How’s Rick?” they ask in unison.
“He is sleeping like zhe baby,” says Daisy, though she doesn’t mention that she had spiked his tea with a sleeping tablet.
Rick Button’s wife has also been floored by a soporific and has slept soundly since her capture the previous evening. She wakes mid-afternoon with a mouthful of cotton wool and an empty stomach, but unlike Daphne she has no inkling that the surveillance camera might be inoperative, and she spends several minutes jumping up and down in front of it, calling, “Hey! Let me out… I’m hungry!” and, “Where’s my friend?”
“Oh, for chrissakes,” mutters Dawson as he hears the woman’s feet pounding overhead and her shouts echoing through the corridors. But without the camera, he’s blind to what’s happening.
“Steve — Steve! Stop her, for God’s sake!” he yells hysterically as he downs more painkillers. The stress-induced headache, which has maddened him since Bliss’s televised rant, has reached screaming point and is about to be exacerbated by the shrill ring of the hotline from the main gate.
“I’ve got a couple of official visitors demanding admittance,” the guard tells him when he answers.
“Shit,” he breathes, sensing that his day is heading south faster than stock in a dodgy gold mine. “Official?” he queries.
“Head-office types.”
“Okay, stall them. I’ll be right there,” he says, then turns back to Bumface. “I don’t care what it takes, but you’d better keep those women quiet.”
“Right, John.”
“And keep Allan out of sight.”
“Okay.”
“Steve,” says Dawson, calling him back with a warning look. “Make nice — okay? You don’t need a murder rap on top of everything else.”
The two men outside the gate are unfamiliar to Dawson, though Bliss would recognize them instantly. It’s Brush-head and his muscular mate — the heavyweights who’d first warned him off after his abortive attempt to storm the monastery on Wednesday evening.
Martin Montague, alias Brush-head, is the CIA’s station chief in Seoul — even though his security pass at the embassy in the Korean capital says that he is a press secretary — and he is not only way off his patch, but he’s also way out of line in demanding entry to Dawson’s fiefdom.
“What do you want?” asks Dawson, once he has run his eye over their identification documents.
“Answers, Mr. Dawson,” says Montague, starting forward, but Dawson stands his ground and shakes his head, demanding, “Who authorized you to come here?”
“I don’t need authority…” begins Montague, and his partner steps powerfully forward in support. But Dawson has a uniformed gorilla with a machine gun on his own team and he refuses to budge.
“This place is off-limits to everyone apart from specifically authorized agents,” Dawson carries on firmly, but Montague refuses to be cowed.
“Listen, shithead,” he spits, “I’m not interested in you and your childish games, but when you step on my toes you’re asking for trouble.”
“You’d better check with your director,” suggests Dawson with a degree of finality.
“I don’t check with anyone,” answers Montague, getting physical and pushing Dawson aside.
But a second guard has come to Dawson’s aid, and Montague finds himself facing the spiteful end of a machine gun.
“Go ahead, punk,” scowls Montague as he keeps walking. “We’ll use your office, Mr. Dawson,” he continues, now in the driver’s seat, and Dawson signals the guard to lower his weapon.
“And have someone send in coffee and donuts; this may take a while.”
Bliss and Phillips have been flying since the white van slipped out from under them at the harbourfront, and according to Phillips’s contact in the customs service they’ve beaten their quarry to the border crossing south of Vancouver.
“He must have stopped somewhere else,” suggests Officer Cranley as he looks back up the highway towards Vancouver. “He definitely hasn’t crossed back into the States.”
“Thanks, Roger,” says Phillips, adding confidently, “Hang around. I think we’re going to have some customers for you.”
“What’s with the dick from Scotland Yard?” asks CIA Chief Montague once he and Dawson are in the surveillance room. “Who stoked his boiler?”
“God knows,” says Dawson, keeping a wary eye on Montague’s gorilla, who has yet to grunt. His overtaxed mind spins even harder as he tries to work out what motives and connections the men might have.
“So — what’s the score with these women that he’s looking for? He seems to think they’re here.”
“We ain’t seen no women,” answers Dawson, deciding that his best option is to keep his cards off the table as much as possible.
“Oh come on, Dawson. That cop puts his ass on the line to get in here, and then he goes public. He must know something.”
Dawson sits back and looks at his hand before tossing out a couple of low cards. “I reckon he’s a bit of a loony. Just likes to shoot his mouth off.”
Twenty years’ experience dealing with crooks, double-dealers and political gerrymanderers warns Montague that Dawson is lying, but he lets it go and picks up another theme.
“So, what do you do here?”
“It’s off the record.”
“Don’t start that crap again. We’re supposed to be on the same side — remember? We’re in the same Boy Scout troop.”
“Research,” is all Dawson will admit, sensing that he can’t afford to play a loose game, asking, “Anyway, what’s your interest?”
“I don’t want to have to pull rank,” Montague starts, sounding sympathetic to Dawson’s predicament while making it perfectly clear that he’s not. “But I get to ask the questions. Okay?”
Dawson rolls his eyes and inadvertently draws Montague’s attention to the bank of surveillance screens. Realizing his mistake, he hits a switch. “That’s classified,” he says as the monitors go blank.
Montague eyes him fiercely. “Turn those screens back on, Mr. Dawson, or I’ll nail your ass for insubordination.”
Dawson hesitates a fraction of a second, trying to get a read on Montague’s hand, but the senior man knows where he stands and shouts, “Turn them on!”
Dawson jumps as the words pound through his aching skull. He knows Montague holds a strong hand, so he bluffs. “Sorry — no can do. They’re on a time delay — security.”
“Turn them on now!!” screeches Montague, and his gorilla starts to loosen his shoulders. “Turn them on or I’ll relieve you of duty.”
Dawson stalls. “I told you. You need special clearance.”
But Montague holds at least one ace. “Okay, give me the phone. Who’s your director?”
“I don’t think —” starts Dawson, so Montague gives him an option.
“Give me some paper then.”
It only takes Montague a few seconds to scribble a few words, then he hands the paper back, saying, “There you are. One authorization duly signed by a station chief. Now turn on those screens or start packing.”
Dawson folds, and images of the various buildings, hospital rooms and corridors slowly reappear.
Montague waves for his sidekick to back down and then drops his tone in conciliation. “See, that wasn’t so difficult,” he says as he scans the screens and flicks from camera to camera until he’s apparently satisfied, then he focuses on a number of Asian men playing mah-jongg in a sitting room. “Now what’s the story here, John?” he wants to know.
“I told you — it’s a research centre.”
“Well, let me tell you what bothers me, John,” continues Montague, making it clear that he’s done some homework. “I’ve been in the Boy Scouts since Jimmy Carter cleaned house in ‘77 — you remember, after the Firm went rogue and lurched from catastrophe to disaster and back again. Hah! ‘CIA — Clowns In America,’ they used to call us. Let’s face it, we were a joke, John. I mean, there was the Bay of Pigs, Watergate, Chile, Colombia, Iran — liquidating the wrong people, supporting the wrong side. You name it, we screwed it up. So when I hear rumours from my friends in China and Korea that we’re playing dirty again, I wann’a know what’s going on.”
Dawson’s listening, but he’s not talking. “I just look after security here,” he claims, but Montague isn’t paying attention and stops him with a hand before pointing to the mah-jongg players.
“Maybe I should ask them what they’re doing here.”
“You can’t…” starts Dawson, but Montague’s expression says he can — and will.
A procession of a thousand white vans has filed slowly past Bliss and Phillips at the Pacific Highway border crossing since lunchtime, or so it appears to Bliss. “It’s so bloody frustrating,” he says, sensing that he’s close to the women, yet seemingly can do nothing to find them. “It’s the utter helplessness, Mike,” he carries on with growing anger. “It must be like having cancer — knowing damn well that it’s in there somewhere, growing, getting bigger and bigger, eating you alive — and all you really want to do is grab a knife and just rip it out. But you can’t. All you can do is put on a smile and pretend you’re not scared.”
“I know what you mean,” admits Phillips.
“I just hope I’m not too late…” starts Bliss, and he is reminded that he hasn’t called his son-in-law for news on the suicide cases. “Damn! I forgot to phone Peter,” he muses, but it’s nearing midnight in England, so he lets it go. “I’ll call him in the morning.”
“I still don’t know what you’re plotting,” says Phillips, growing increasingly uneasy about Bliss’s determination to return and infiltrate the monastery.
But Bliss has no intention of compromising his counterpart’s position in the RCMP by involving him in his scheme. “Don’t worry, Mike. I’ll be all right,” he ventures, in a tone he hopes is reassuring.
“I just don’t see how you’re gonna get back in without a visa.”
Bliss has a plan for that as well, although he’s relying on Daisy to provide the means, and he would be relieved to know that the bouncy Frenchwoman has rented a Toyota and is driving south on the Pacific Highway to rendezvous with him.
Just ahead of Daisy, though lost in the miasma of fog and road spray, is a white van with a dubious licence plate. Buzzer and his sidekick are nearing the U.S., and home, and have their minds set on a relaxing weekend in the bar — though since Bliss rammed through the gates ahead of them on Wednesday evening, the establishment has been tense with rumours.
“I still reckon you know what’s going down,” Reggie says, pressing Buzzer for information as they approach the border, but it’s a song he’s been singing all day and the driver sighs with boredom.
“Give it a rest, Reg. I told you: I dunno what’s happenin’. And that’s real fine with me. They only pay for my hands, not my head.”
“Well, something’s happenin’, that’s for sure.”
“How long have you been in the service, Reggie?”
“Two years an’ a bit.”
“God knows why they call it a ‘secret service’ with people like you,” snorts Buzzer as they slow to exit Canada. “You can’t even fart without blabbin’ about it.”
The border is only a hundred metres ahead of them, and Buzzer has his foot ready on the accelerator, knowing that he’ll sail through the checkpoint with a friendly wave.
“What the hell —” he says when a uniformed Canadian customs officer steps out in front of him. “We’re leaving your freakin’ country, jerk,” he mutters under his breath as he is forced to slow, then he turns to Reggie. “Leave the talking to me, aw’right?”
“Your passports, please, gentlemen,” requests Roger Cranley, as Bliss and Phillips slip out of their parked car and start to move in.
“CIA,” says Buzzer, quietly sliding an identity card under the customs officer’s nose without taking the vehicle out of gear.
“Just turn off the vehicle, would you, sir,” orders Cranley.
“What do you want?” asks Buzzer, dropping into neutral and irritably pumping the throttle.
“I want to talk to you —” starts Cranley, but Buzzer drops back into gear and is inching forward.
“Sorry,” he says, shaking his head. “No can do. I’m on official business.”
“I said stop!” yells Cranley, and Mike Phillips begins to loosen the pistol from his shoulder holster and edge forward in support of the unarmed officer as the vehicle continues creeping.
“Look,” says Buzzer, making no attempt to stop, and giving no hint of his intention to do so, “you have no right to interfere with this vehicle. It’s the property of the United States Government.”
“I’m not interfering. You’re still in Canada, and I’m telling you to stop.”
Buzzer starts raising the window and is considering slamming his foot to the floor when Phillips leaps forward and thrusts his gun into the American’s face. “Police! Stop or I’ll shoot.”
Buzzer stops, but he grabs his cell phone and starts to make a call. Bliss rushes in, yanks open the passenger door, reaches past a stunned Reggie and snatches the phone out of Buzzer’s hand.
“Get out,” orders Phillips, with his gun still stuck in Buzzer’s face. Although the driver starts to climb down, he’s still relying on his badge for protection.
“Mister, you’re making one hell of a big mistake,” he says. “Interfering with a CIA operation is a felony.”
“Not in Canada, it isn’t,” says Phillips. “Now open the back doors for this officer, please.”
“You’ve no right to do this,” protests Buzzer. “This is government property. I demand you call the American consul. I know my rights.”
“You’re kidding,” says Phillips. “Open the doors or we’ll jimmy them open.”
“You’re way out’a line, mister. I’m not entering the country — I’m leaving,” Buzzer is still ranting as Bliss steps forward and rips the vehicle’s keys from his hand.
“Methinks he doth protest too much,” mutters the British officer as he leads Cranley to the rear and begins to unlock the door.
“You’ve no right to search my vehicle,” shouts Buzzer.
“That’s where you’re wrong,” says Phillips, still holding the men at gunpoint. “This vehicle isn’t legally registered. So we assume it’s stolen — unless you can prove otherwise.”
“I told you. It’s a government vehicle.”
“Not our government,” says Phillips, “and that’s the only government I answer to, whether you like it or not.”
“Salmon,” muses Cranley, as the open doors expose a deep steel container filled with dead fish.
“Just salmon,” echoes Bliss disappointedly.
“Where did you get these from?” asks Cranley, calling to the driver and his mate, but neither man answers.
“They must have picked them up from another trawler in Vancouver,” suggests Bliss.
“No,” says Cranley. “You’re missing the point. These are Atlantic salmon.”
“So?”
“Well, this is the Pacific coast. The only Atlantic salmon here are from the fish farms, not from a trawler. Anyway, they’ve been frozen. Look at their eyes.”
Bliss peers into the dull sunken eyes of the salmon and finds no memory of life. “Come on, give me a hand,” he says as he starts to scoop the slimy fish aside. “There should be two men in here somewhere.”