Spy Castle (KM 012) by Nick Carter

Author:Nick Carter [Carter, Nick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-09-18T06:59:15+00:00

Chapter 8

THE DRUM AND MONKEY

Six o’clock Tuesday evening, November 9,1965.

The wintry dusk had fallen early on the sooty head of central London. The lamps along the Embankment were yellow balloons in the murk, each with its nimbus of mist from the steaming Thames, a fore-token of the fog to come soon. Traffic on the great river had already slowed in the rising mist as tugs and steamers hooted and growled and felt for each other in the increasing obscurity.

The tall man walked with a weary limp. He turned off the Strand onto Lancaster Place, past the looming bulk of Somerset House. He ambled past the Thames Police Station, glancing once at the blue lamp and grinning faintly. He didn’t particularly care to encounter a Bobby at the moment. His wallet was still full enough, but his clothes had pretty well had it. He’d probably be run in on suspicion.

He came to Waterloo Bridge and turned right along the Embankment, stopping to light a cigarette—with the lighter very carefully turned back to OFF—and gazed longingly at a bench. He could certainly do with a breather. He was hungry and thirsty and damned beat up. It had been a long hard trek. He had avoided trains and the main roads.

N3 walked on past the bench. No rest for the wicked— or for an AXE agent on a crucial mission. Only four days now until Pendragon’s ultimatum expired. The big man’s face hardened beneath the crust of dirt and stubble. He had been on a treadmill so far. Getting nowhere. He was farther from Blackscape Island, and Pendragon, than he had been in the beginning! He could only pray that Ian Travers had come up with something workable.

His goal was Cleopatra’s Needle. There would be a sidewalk artist working beside the monolith. So the coded instructions had said. N3 hastened his steps, trying not to think of Gwen Leith and what they had done to her with the snake. There was no time for pity—no time for mercy— there was no time for anything now but killing!

It was very late, and too dark, for the sidewalk artists to be at work. Sketching their ephemeral little chalks for the tourist shilling. They would long since have quit work for solace in the nearest pub. And yet his orders had been explicit enough.

Nick came to the Needle. There was one artist still at work beneath a light, a legless man in a wooden dolly propelled by skate wheels. He was busily sketching away on the pavement while a little cluster of people watched without much interest.

N3 moved through the scant crowd and stood looking down at the artist. The man’s legs were missing just below the hips, the stubs enclosed in leather boots. His hands moved deftly as he sketched the face and head of a pretty girl. Nick glanced around. There were no females present. Obviously the man had no commission, was merely doodling the time away.

“Bet you can’t draw a picture of my wife,” Nick said in a harsh voice.

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