Barbouze: A heart-stopping international terrorist thriller (Charles Pol Espionage Thrillers Book 1) by Alan Williams

Author:Alan Williams [Williams, Alan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sapere Books
Published: 2019-11-20T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 2

Neil sat with a black coffee and croissant, alone in the café except for the waiter wiping down the zinc bar beside the expresso machine. The time was 10.12. He had left Anne-Marie in the hotel combing out her hair in front of the balcony windows. At exactly nine o’clock her dress had been returned by the Moslem, faultlessly washed and ironed. She had not paid him.

Neil had pressed some money into his hand outside the door, and before leaving had telephoned the Dutch Legation and told them he wanted to attend Van Loon’s funeral. He had arranged to meet Anne-Marie for lunch in Le Berry restaurant at half past one. He had then left the hotel, followed the street round to the Roxy Cinema, and entered the Café Cintra.

He knew, with a sense of perverse pleasure, that in the next few minutes he would reach the point of no return. To have slept with Anne-Marie might be one thing: to deceive her in this ugly game of fratricidal strife was almost certainly fatal.

He sat over his coffee with a sensation of having been drugged against the effects of acute physical pain. At this moment all he wanted was some means of immediate, violent escape: something to get him through the next few hours, days, to stop him thinking, stop him remembering what he had heard in the early hours of the morning. He had come here to find adventure, and he was going to get it.

His midnight call to London had come through at a quarter to three. The number had taken a long time to answer. When it did, Caroline was yawning with sleep, telling him she was going to marry Tommy Drummond next Saturday. He had started to yell at her, and she had said drowsily, ‘No darling, I’m serious.’ He had bawled into the mouthpiece, ‘You must be mad!’ and she had said, ‘I’m very fond of him, and you haven’t written to me for over a month.’

‘I was in a monastery!’ he had protested. ‘I’m stuck in the middle of a revolution!’ — and she had said, ‘Oh darling, it’s too late and I’m so sleepy’ — and he had tried to plead with her, her voice fading with long-distance whines and hummings, as he fought to change her mind, to postpone it, to make her wait till he got back. And far away, beyond the bay and the barricades, she had said, ‘Neil darling, I’ve made up my mind. Really, I love Tommy.’ And so it had gone on, while Anne-Marie slept through it all, the sheet wound round her like a shroud; and all he wanted was Caroline, and in a week’s time Caroline would be stepping out in white (in white, if you please!) to be married at Holy Trinity, Brompton.

The man came up to the table and bowed: ‘Monsieur Ingleby?’ He smiled, holding out a gloved hand: a tall, pale man of about thirty, with rimless glasses, no tie, carrying a raincoat over his left arm.

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