‘The next flight out is the Etihad Airways A308 departing Heathrow Terminal Five at nine fifteen this morning,’ said Audrey. ‘Arrives at Tokyo Narita at one p.m. local time tomorrow.’
‘Book me on it,’ said Richard. ‘I’ll pick up any paperwork for the flight at the check-in desk. All my Japan documentation is current. I just have to get to Heathrow inside an hour.’ He looked at his Rolex and hesitated. ‘What’s the next one after the Etihad flight?’
‘BA to Tokyo Hadena International an hour later. Same terminal. Flight Number 007 direct. New service.’
‘Haneda’s thirty miles nearer the city centre. What’s the flight time?’
‘Fifteen hours. You should touch down before ten a.m. local. And you know your cell won’t work in Japan. You’ll have to pick up a local one.’
‘That’s OK, I’ll take my laptop. Email works. Book me a seat on that one too. I’ll decide when I get to Terminal Five.’
‘You want me to call for the chopper, Captain?’
‘No, thanks, Audrey. I think I know a quicker way.’
‘If you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking, the code for your satellite navigation system is TW6 2GA.’
‘Got it. Thanks, Audrey. But I know the way like the back of my hand. I’ll be in touch when I get there.’
Fizzing with excitement, Richard ran through to the bedroom once again. In a specially adapted section of his wardrobe, he kept a travelling case that was always packed with his essentials – even his passport and his Kindle – so that he could grab and go at a moment’s notice. It was designed for use when some great ship somewhere on a vast and distant ocean suddenly found itself without a captain or a senior navigating officer and Richard had to get from Heritage House to its command bridge in the shortest possible time. But the system was just as effective when it came to winning crazy wagers with old friends. It was a neat, efficient piece of kit and simply hefting it out of the wardrobe gave Richard an extra buzz of excitement.
He pulled the case out with gleeful exuberance, therefore, threw it on the tumbled bed, ran back for his laptop and charger, pulling on the jacket to his charcoal-grey suit as he went, slid them into the special compartment, grabbed his cell phone and dropped that into his jacket pocket, slipped on his shoes and hit the front door. He grabbed a light Aquascutum off the coat stand on the way through – Tokyo would be hot and damp, he guessed. Thirty degrees Celsius, with an unseasonable amount of rain forecast for August. Finally, he caught up the keys to his Bentley Continental, which was sitting beside his E-Type Jaguar in the garage below, and tossed them gleefully into the air as he kicked the door closed behind him.
In the lift on the way down, he ran through the familiar checklist in his head. He could rely on Audrey to update everyone who needed to know that he had gone. Heritage Mariner’s senior board were used to Richard and Robin appearing and disappearing at odd times. While the Mariners were increasingly the public faces of the company, they had been careful to put in place teams of executives who were more than capable of running things in their absence.
But the first calls Audrey would make, Richard suspected, would be to finish making his reservation on the Etihad A380 confirming ticket and seat, with maximum legroom possible. Alerting the Mandarin to his flight arrival time, confirming his suite – an open-ended booking. Confirming with Heathrow that he would be occupying the secure slot that Heritage Mariner kept in the Terminal Five Business Car Park – as well as at all the others – for emergencies such as this. Then getting on to BA with his back-up plan and warning the Mandarin that things might change a little in an hour or so’s time.
But high on the list, he knew, would be a quick call to Grimaud in the South of France to update his parents and his children on his latest hare-brained scheme. Then, no doubt, she would see if she could get hold of Katapult or Flint.
With these thoughts tumbling through his mind, he stepped out of the lift into the company car park beneath Heritage House. A few purposeful strides took him to the sleek rear of his matt black Bentley, almost invisible in the shadows. He pressed the remote, unlocked the deadlocks, popped the boot and slid his case in, folded the raincoat and suit jacket in on top of it, closed the cool black metal and all but ran to the driver’s door.
He eased into the red-stitched black leather driver’s seat and felt it adjusting automatically to him as he slid his custom key into the dash. He rolled up his shirtsleeves, popped up the cover, punched in the key code and pushed the starter. The whole car purred into life like a sleepy panther beginning to come awake. He slid his seat belt home, flicked the paddle gearshift into reverse and eased back into the turning area, feeling the car settle on to its haunches, ready to spring forward. It was all he could do not to make the tyres squeal as he let her roll forward, feeling his lips curl into an excited smile and thinking free at last, free at last . . .
A moment later, the sleek black bonnet with its signature winged B came prowling up from the underground car park and out into Cornhill swinging smoothly down towards Mansion House Street like a big cat hunting gazelle. The alarm sounded quietly, reminding him that he was in the Congestion Charging Zone. Audrey would take care of that, he thought, as he tapped the paddle gearshift and eased his foot down on the accelerator. Thirty seconds later he was turning past the Grecian temple frontages of The Bank of England and the Mansion House opposite, and on to Queen Victoria Street. At six fifteen a.m. there was hardly anything else on the road except for delivery vans. Too early for buses or taxis yet; all those millions of tourists still tucked up in bed. Half of them, of course, Japanese. The thought made him chuckle out loud.
Forty seconds later, he had eased carefully past the Central London Magistrates’ Court, and was heading along the all but empty Queen Victoria Street for White Lion Hill. The sun had been up in a clear blue sky for a little over forty minutes, but he was heading west so its brightness only dazzled occasionally in his rear-view, glinting off the windows of the taller buildings ahead. He felt a heady possessiveness as he guided his beloved car through the familiar thoroughfares, past some of the most important and historic buildings in London. This was his city, he felt. He had lived and worked all over the world; owned houses on the Scottish Borders, on the Norfolk coast and just along from the White Cliffs overlooking the Channel; but nevertheless he found himself singing in his best imitation Sinatra voice, ‘It’s my kind of town . . .’
The Bentley rumbled down White Lion Hill into the sudden neon gloom of the Blackfriars Underpass, and for three minutes the bellow of the engine was contained within the tunnel, then Richard sent her – exactly on the speed-limit – out on to the Victoria Embankment. With the Thames on his left at full-flood, brown and golden in the morning light and the Temple Gardens, Somerset House and The Savoy speeding past on his right, he eased past the gilded thrust of Cleopatra’s needle snarled beneath the end of Hungerford Bridge then turned right at the lights on to Northumberland Avenue.
Moments later still, the black panther of the Bentley was grumbling past Charing Cross Station, only just coming alive as the first commuters arrived and meandered, dazzled, out into the still-clear morning. Then, easing past the end of Whitehall under Nelson’s stony gaze – and the somnolent, almost kindred regard of Landseer’s lions, Richard entered the great roundabout of Trafalgar Square. He glanced up at the famous carvings and then he signalled left, sweeping through the gathering traffic and swinging beneath Admiralty Arch.
Then, with a wiggle of her panther hips he eased the Continental into The Mall, giving a mental prayer of thanks that it was too early for the Changing of the Guard. The dusty pink perfection of The Mall led straight as a die through St James’s Park to the roundabout outside Buckingham Palace. Nelson’s gaze was replaced by that of Victoria, Queen Empress, also guarded by regal lions, as he swung round the fountain and past the front of Buckingham Palace itself and on to Constitution Hill.
With the trees of Green Park on the one hand and Buckingham Palace Gardens behind the security wall on the other, he pushed the speed limit for another thirty seconds before swinging left into Duke of Wellington Place, with the Duke of Wellington Arch seeming to wheel around on his right. Then he bore right into Grosvenor Place and almost immediately left on to Knightsbridge.
Easing the pedal down a fraction more, Richard sped past The Sheraton on his left with the Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park almost opposite, past Harvey Nicholls and then, moments later, past Harrods as Knightsbridge became the Brompton Road. Ten minutes later the A4 had metamorphosed through Thurloe Place to the Cromwell Road to the Talgarth Road and leaped up on to the Hammersmith Flyover.
Within half an hour of leaving Heritage House Richard was easing the Bentley through Hogarth Lane and down on to the M4 Motorway with the traffic beginning to thicken around him. A couple of quick flips of the gear-paddle and the Bentley had leaped up from forty mph to eighty, roaring with satisfaction as the little aerodynamic fin rose behind her rear window. Five minutes and seven miles later, he was purring past the slip road signposted Heathrow Terminals One, Two and Three. The six forty-five Virgin Jumbo eased itself into the air above him, heading for New York. He held steady until he reached the M25 turnoff, then disorientatingly followed the signpost to Gatwick, growling down the steep left curve on to the busy southbound motorway. Four minutes later still, he was swinging left again into the lane marked Terminal Five.
Richard parked the Bentley at ten past seven and hefted his kit out of the back before turning down his shirt cuffs, slipping on his jacket, setting the deadlocks and strolling down to the pod stop. He checked the time on his cell phone rather than his Rolex because he was calling Audrey as he waited. The pod rolled up at seven fifteen on the dot, just as he made contact.
‘The Etihad flight was overbooked,’ she announced apologetically as he folded himself with some difficulty into the little remote vehicle, pushing his case and coat on to the seat opposite, thankful that he was the only passenger. ‘But I’ve got you on the BA flight at ten thirty. First class. I take it this is company business because the flight isn’t what you’d call cheap.’
‘First class never is,’ he answered shortly. ‘And yes. I’m going early but I’d still have had to go sometime.’
‘But, on the plus side,’ she answered more gently, ‘there’s the Concorde Lounge for you to wait in.’
Five minutes later, Richard unfolded himself from the pod like a large hermit crab coming out of a small shell outside Terminal Five. He strolled down the length of Departures and arrived at the BA first-class check-in desk at seven thirty on the dot. All his paperwork was waiting for him and he was happy to scan it in, check in the suitcase and sling his laptop bag over one shoulder while the Aquascutum went over the other, before he strolled on through Fast Track Security to the Concorde Lounge.
The steel-haired receptionist on the Concorde Lounge desk checked his documents rather more thoroughly than the man at security had done before she grudgingly permitted him to enter her lair. But once he was past her, he was pleasantly surprised by the spacious brightness of the Concorde Lounge. The floor was of honey-coloured wood overlain with plain chocolate carpets. The ceiling was high and one whole wall appeared to be a series of tall windows opening out on to an exclusive covered balcony. Down the wall at ninety degrees to this there was a bar. On the other side the area opened further into a restaurant with further sections for work and rest beyond. There was even what appeared to be a large shower and spa section. Massage and foot spa were apparently available.
But so, more to the point, was breakfast.
The girl in the restaurant was more approachable than the woman on reception and Richard was able to parlay the mid-Atlantic cuisine offering BLT, organic sausages and scrambled egg with salmon into something approaching a full English breakfast that was beautifully cooked, artfully presented – and it tasted fantastic. It was accompanied by freshly squeezed orange juice and a cafetière of Blue Mountain high roast coffee.
He finished the second cup at eight and wandered through to the work area. Once he had found a plug for his laptop he used the Wi-Fi facility to access the electronic work desk at Heritage Mariner. He spent the next hour scanning and saving to the laptop’s hard drive – and then to a couple of thirty-two gigabyte USB memory sticks that he kept handy for just such emergencies.
All in all, by the time his flight was called he had stored more than enough work in one place or another to keep him going through most of the time he proposed to spend in Tokyo – let alone the time it was going to take him to get there. But he was reckoning on working non-stop on the flight – without the need for Internet access in the air – and then he would email everything he had done back to the office from the Mandarin Oriental – if he had time before Nic took him out to dinner in Tokyo’s best restaurant tomorrow evening. He had heard great things of Akira Kurosawa – as restaurateur as well as film director – but hadn’t got across town to his legendary eatery Kurosawa in Chiyoda district on his last visit. Maybe now was the time . . .
The BA Airbus lifted off at ten thirty on the dot and Richard worked for twelve solid hours with only short breaks for a light and excellent luncheon followed four hours later by an equally excellent dinner. By that time the battery on his laptop was running out of power and his own energy was beginning to diminish as well. In his head it was ten thirty in the evening but outside it was coming up for five, and at 30,000 feet it was already dawn.
A two-hour power nap set Richard up as effectively as a full night’s sleep – and would do so for several nights in a row, he knew – but only if he got a chance to catch up somewhere further down the road. So he was able to spend the last hour filling in the required security documentation, which was a good deal less than he had to complete on his visits to Sharm el Sheikh in Egypt or to Benin la Bas in West Africa, and catching up with his Kindle edition of a couple of adventure thrillers by Clive Cussler and Wilbur Smith.
BA flight 007 whispered on to Tokyo International’s main runway at a little after ten a.m. local time. Richard was in Hadena’s main building by ten thirty and was walking through security with his suitcase before eleven, pausing only at the International Exchange to top up his supply of Yen.
The Airport Express was easy to find and he settled into a seat with Wi-Fi access, opened his laptop and paid the excess for connection. The run to Tokyo station was twenty minutes and before the first five had passed he was in contact with the Mandarin, confirming his booking and arrival time, and arranging for a car to collect him from the Yaesu South exit.
He stepped out of the back of the Mandarin’s limo on Ninobashi and ran up between the columns that might have graced the Bank of England into the Mandarin Oriental at midday on the dot. He strode across towards the reception, fizzing with excitement, only to stop, simply flabbergasted. For there, leaning nonchalantly with an elbow on the polished desktop, deep in conversation with Christian Hassang the manager, was Nic Greenbaum.
And even as Richard stood hesitating in the middle of the bustling lobby, the American swung round with gleeful theatricality. ‘Hey, Richard! Here you are at last!’ he drawled. ‘What kept you, Buddy?’