Jigsaw

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PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF CAMPBELL ARMSTRONG

“Campbell Armstrong is thriller writing's best-kept secret.” —
The Sunday Times

“Armstrong is among the most intriguing of blockbuster writers … near to unputdownable.” —
GQ

“While touching on suspense with a skill to please hard-core thriller addicts, he manages to please people who … warm to readable novels of substance.” —
Daily Mail

“Armstrong's skill is not just an eye for a criminally good tale but a passion for the people that will populate it.”—
The Scotsman

“Subtle and marvelous … This is a dazzling book.”
—The Daily Telegraph
on
Agents of Darkness

“A consummate psychological thriller … Without doubt, Armstrong is now in the front rank of thriller writers.”—
Books
on
Heat

“Armstrong has outdone both Frederick Forsyth and Ken Follett.” —James Patterson on
Jig

“A full throttle adventure thriller.”
—The Guardian
on
Mambo

“A wonderful puzzle that keeps us guessing right to the end.” —
Publishers Weekly
on
Mazurka

Jigsaw

A Frank Pagan Novel

Campbell Armstrong

For Patrick Janson-Smith, Prince of Blackness

ONE

LONDON

B
RYCE
H
ARCOURT SAID GOOD NIGHT TO THE DUTY OFFICER
,
A BRISKLY
courteous young marine from Alabama, and stepped out of the American Embassy. In Grosvenor Square he was assaulted at once by the numbing chill of the early evening. It had been a winter of uncommon savagery across Europe. Ships locked and forlorn in ice-choked Baltic seaports, relentless blizzards in Germany and the Low Countries, scathing frost in the southern regions of Italy: nothing had escaped the ferocity of the arctic months. London, encased in ice, vandalized by rough winds, was a city embalmed.

Harcourt, hurrying to catch an Underground train, considered it a miserable place altogether, the grey parks immense and dismal, drones scuttling into buses and tubes to escape abrasive winds that snapped down the streets of Mayfair with the tenacity of hounds. It had been grim enough when the city had been adorned by Christmas lights – then at least you had an illusion of warmth and cheer – but the decorations were long gone and the first month of the new year had passed with no relief in sight.

Muffled in a heavy black overcoat, Harcourt had an intense longing for his native Florida, some burning Miami heat, palm trees and high blue skies and pastel buildings. He imagined himself in cotton shirt and bermudas on a balcony overlooking the sunlit ocean. He could taste a lime daiquiri in his throat. He saw flamingoes against a red sun and bronzed babes strutting across sands. A fantasy – but hell, it was one way of getting through these godawful times when the mornings were dark and the afternoons icy and short.

He shivered as he entered the Tube station. The rush-hour crowds thronged around him with the concentrated brutality of people anxious to get to their homes in the suburbs. He was jostled by the mob pushing toward the turnstiles. A city of moles, he thought. They had pinched, pale faces. They'd surrendered to the glum season, hostages of winter, yet they went about their business with that peculiarly English stoicism Harcourt could never understand. They waited in disgruntled silence for buses that were late or stood in Underground trains too crammed and overheated for human dignity. The Spirit of England, ho hum; an empire had disintegrated into incompetence and indifference.

Harcourt clutched his briefcase against his side and stepped on to the escalator, where he collided with a woman trying to rush past him. Her mouth was covered by a red wool scarf, but even so Harcourt was immediately struck by familiarity.

The woman stared at him, then was swept down the escalator by the crowds pushing at her back. Puzzled, Harcourt watched her disappear. He'd seen her before, he was sure of that. He couldn't remember where or when. He ran into a great many people through his work with the Embassy; he couldn't be expected to recall every one of them. He went to dinner parties and receptions and first nights. He was sought out by anxious matrons in Knightsbridge and Swiss Cottage when an amiable bachelor was required for dinner or as an escort. He was deliberately visible, a charmer known to enjoy the company of women.

When he stepped off the escalator he saw the woman again. Her black hair was cut very short and side-parted. She had a strange white-tinted shock on the right of her skull, a touch of punk. Kinky even. She wore small round glasses. Attractive, Harcourt thought, in spite of the curious hair style. An idiosyncratic loveliness, high-cheekboned, bold, intelligent.

There was more than appreciation to Harcourt's reaction. Something buried and forgotten, an old bone. His memory was normally a sharp instrument and this unexpected failure concerned him.

For a second she looked round, caught his eye through the crush. He thought he saw recognition in her expression, perhaps even an element of anticipation, as if she expected him to approach and engage her in conversation.
Don't I know you from somewhere?
But the very idea of stopping to talk was crazy. He had no choice except to keep moving, squeezed towards the platform by the single-minded momentum of the moles. Maybe she'd get on the same train and stand very close beside him, which would be a good opportunity to clarify this feeling of familiarity in circumstances of forced intimacy. A captive audience, so to speak. She might even be obliged to press against him, especially when the train lurched.

Where have we met before?
he'd ask. It was a bad line, but you did what you could to divert yourself from the horror of the Underground rush hour. And maybe she'd remind him, and they'd strap-hang together, and her breasts would touch his arm, and who could predict where that might lead …

The air in the tunnel was hot and unbreathable. The train would be even worse, a clammy ordeal, a sauna on wheels. He wondered about the woman. He wondered why, out of nowhere, he was at once filled with uneasiness. Was it a result of his own nervous state?

Lately he hadn't been sleeping well. The apparent calm he demonstrated daily at the Embassy was all surface. He'd been smoking too many cigarettes, sitting up late at night scanning magazines in the fretful manner of a man whose aids to sleep – brandy and downers – couldn't quite push him over the edge. Insomniac moments, pockets of drowsiness, and then before dawn the blessed vacuum of sleep, albeit shallow and chaotic with dreams. Sometimes Jacob Streik was in these dreams, fat and scared.

Whenever he dreamed of Streik, Harcourt always woke tired. The weary mind, that prankster in the head, played games after a time. You started to imagine things, you were being followed or your phone was bugged. And then you reached a point where you couldn't tell the real from the illusory.

The woman. In which compartment of his life did she belong? Or was this mere imagination, the result of fatigue? She was memorably good-looking and she appeared to recognize him. How
could
he have misplaced her?

The train was heard rolling in the darkness of the tunnel. The crowd moved expectantly toward the edge of the platform. Harcourt was urged forward. He felt powerless. A stick on a tide.

He saw the train appear and slide to a halt. The carriages were already overcrowded, every seat taken, every strap seized, aisles packed. He wondered why he hadn't tried to catch a taxi home, instead of suffering this. He'd begun to vary his routine during the past few weeks – bus, Tube, taxicabs, his Mercedes; although the Merc was presently off the road, courtesy of some recent vandalism.

He didn't travel the same way two days running. Given the uncertain nature of his situation, it was a simple precaution. Sometimes he thought Streik's decision had been correct, and that he should have followed Jacob into obscurity. But there were many differences between himself and Streik. He had a position to maintain at the Embassy, Streik didn't. He was also less prone to panic than the fat man. Streik jumped at the least thing, yielded to intimations of doom, and saw devils after his fourth martini. The last time they'd met, four weeks ago underneath an ancient viaduct in Camden Town – the fat man had a thing about unusual settings – Streik had said:
They are going to kill us, Bryce. They are going to put us on ice
. Jacob had been drunk that day, and desperate, possessed by dark menace.

Why would they kill us, Jake?
Harcourt had asked.

Because we know too much
.

What do we really know, Jake? We shuffled some papers, that's all. That's all we did
.

Streik guzzled vodka.
We didn't just shuffle papers, Bryce. Get your head outta the clouds Chrissakes. It was money, Bryce. Cash. These guys play for keeps. If they think we know too much, that's good enough for them. I'm being followed. Some pretty weird things are going on. I think we've kinda outlived our usefulness and now, shit, we're a threat
.

Streik had never expanded on the nature of these pretty weird things he'd mentioned. He'd been drunk and babbling. The rest of the conversation had drifted off into vagueness.

Later, Harcourt had thought about the money. It had been irregular, sure, but he'd done as he was asked, nothing more. You took orders. You didn't probe, didn't raise needless questions. But it had begun to trouble him since Streik had seen fit to vanish, and only a few days ago he'd asked for an appointment with the Ambassador, William J. Caan, who wasn't always approachable. So Harcourt had been shuffled into Al Quarterman's office and Al, the Ambassador's lackey, had seemed impervious to his misgivings.
It comes with the territory, Bryce. You should know that by now. It's a bit late in the day to be having qualms, don't you think?