Point Blanc (3 page)

He got back on his bike and cycled slowly to the end
of the bridge, and then down toward the parking lot. He left the bike and his
backpack out of sight and continued on foot, moving more slowly as he
approached the jetty. He wasn't afraid of being caught. This was a public
place, and even if Skoda did reappear, there would be nothing he could do. But
he was curious, just what was the dealer doing on board a barge? It seemed a
bizarre place to have stopped. Alex still wasn't sure what he was going
to do, but he wanted to have a look inside. Then he would decide.

The wooden jetty creaked under his feet as he stepped
onto it. The barge was called
Blue
Shadow
, but there was little blue left in the flaking paint, the
rusty ironwork, and the dirty, oil-covered decks. The barge was about thirty
yards long and very square with a single cabin in the center. It was lying low
in the water, and Alex guessed that most of the living quarters would be
underneath. He knelt down on the jetty and pretended to tie his shoelaces, hoping
to look through the narrow, slanting windows. But all the curtains were drawn.
What now?

The barge was moored on one side of the jetty. The two
cabin cruisers were side by side on the other. Skoda wanted privacy--but
he must also need light, and there would be no need to draw the curtains on the
far side, with nothing there but the river. The only trouble was that to look
in the other windows, Alex would have to climb onto the barge itself. He
considered briefly. It had to be worth the risk. He was near enough to the
building site. Nobody was going to try to hurt him in broad daylight.

He placed one foot on the deck, then slowly
transferred his weight onto it. He was afraid that moving the barge would give
him away. Sure enough, the barge dipped under his weight, but Alex had chosen
his moment well. A police launch was sailing past, heading up the river and
back into town. The barge bobbed naturally in its wake, and by the time it
settled, Alex was on board, crouching next to the cabin door.

Now he could hear music coming from inside. The heavy
beat of a rock band. He didn't want to do it, but he knew there was only
one way to look in. He tried to find an area of the deck that wasn't too
covered in oil, then lay flat on his stomach. Clinging on to the handrail, he
lowered his head and shoulders over the side of the barge and shifted himself
forward so that he was hanging almost upside down over the water.

He was right. The curtains on this side of the barge
were open. Looking through the dirty glass of the window, he could see two men.
Skoda was sitting on a bunk, smoking a cigarette. There was a second man,
blond-haired and ugly, with twisted lips and three days' stubble, wearing
a torn sweatshirt and jeans, making a cup of coffee at a small stove. The music
was coming from a boom box perched on a shelf. Alex looked around the cabin.
Besides two bunks and the miniature kitchen, the barge offered no living
accommodations at all. Instead, it had been converted for another purpose.
Skoda and his friend had turned it into a floating laboratory.

There were two metal work surfaces, a sink, and a pair
of electric scales. Everywhere there were test tubes and Bunsen burners,
flasks, glass pipes, and measuring spoons. The whole place was
filthy--obviously neither of the two men cared about hygiene--but
Alex knew that he was looking into the heart of their operation. This was where
they prepared the drugs they sold: cut them down, weighed them, and packaged
them for delivery to local schools. It was an insane idea to put a drug factory
on a boat, almost in the middle of London, and only a stone's throw away
from a police station. But at the same time, it was a clever one. Who would
have looked for it here?

The blond -haired man suddenly turned around, and Alex
hooked his body up and slithered backward onto the deck. For a moment he was
dizzy. Hanging upside down had made the blood drain into his head. He took a
couple of breaths, trying to collect his thoughts. It would be easy enough to
walk over to the police station and tell the officer in charge what he had
seen. The police could take over from there.

But something inside Alex rejected the idea. Maybe he
would have done that a few months before: let someone else take care of it. But
he hadn't cycled all this way just to call the police. He thought back to
his first sighting of the white car outside the school gates. He remembered his
friend Colin shuffling over to it and felt once again a brief blaze of anger. This
was something he wanted to do himself.

But what could he do? If the barge had been equipped
with a plug, Alex would have pulled it out and sunk the entire thing. But of
course it wasn't as easy as that. The barge was tied to the jetty by two
thick ropes. He could untie them, but that wouldn't help either. The
barge would drift away, but this was Putney. There were no whirlpools or
waterfalls. Skoda could simply turn on the engine and cruise back again.

Alex looked around him. On the building site, the
day's work was coming to an end. Some of the men were already leaving,
and as he watched, he saw a trapdoor open about a hundred and fifty yards above
him and a stocky man begin the long climb down from the top of the crane. Alex
closed his eyes. A whole series of images suddenly flashed into his mind, like
different sections of a jigsaw puzzle.

The barge. The building site. The police station. The
crane with its big hook, dangling underneath the jib.

And the Blackpool amusement park. He'd gone
there once with his housekeeper, Jack Starbright, and had watched as she won a
teddy bear, hooking it out of a glass case and carrying it over to a chute.

Could it be done? Alex looked again, working out the
angles. Yes. It probably could.

He stood up and crept back across the deck to the door
that Skoda had entered. A length of wire was lying to one side, and he picked
it up, then wound it several times around the handle of the door. He looped the
wire over a hook in the wall and pulled it tight. The door was effectively
locked. There was a second door at the back of the boat. Alex secured this one
with his own bicycle padlock. As far as he could see, the windows were too
narrow to crawl through. There was no other way in or out.

He crept off the barge and back onto the jetty. Then
he untied it, leaving the thick rope loosely curled up beside the metal
pegs--the stanchions--that had secured it. The river was still. It
would be a while before the barge drifted away.

He straightened up. Satisfied with his work so far, he
began to run.

THE ENTRANCE TO THE BUILDING site was crowded with
construction workers preparing to go home. Alex was reminded of Brookfield an
hour earlier. Nothing really changed when you got older--except that maybe
you weren't given homework. The men and women drifting out of the site
were tired, in a hurry to be away. That was probably why none of them tried to
stop Alex as he slipped in among them, walking purposefully as if he knew where
he was going, as if he had every right to be there.

But the shift wasn't completely finished yet. Other
workers were still carrying tools, stowing away machinery, packing up for the
night. They all wore protective headgear, and seeing a pile of plastic helmets,
Alex snatched one up and put it on. The great sweep of the block of apartments
that was being built loomed up ahead of him. To pass through it, he was forced
into a narrow corridor between two scaffolding towers. Suddenly a heavy-set man
in white overalls stepped in front of him, blocking his way.

"Where are you going?" he demanded.

"My dad..." Alex gestured vaguely in
the direction of another worker and kept walking. The trick worked. The man
didn't challenge him again.

He headed toward the crane. It stood in the open, the
high priest of construction. Alex hadn't realized how very tall it was
until he had reached it. The supporting tower was bolted into a massive block
of concrete. It was very narrow--once he squeezed through the iron
girders, he could reach out and touch all four sides. A ladder ran straight up
the center. Without stopping to think, Alex began to climb.

It's only a ladder, he told himself. You've
climbed ladders before. You've got nothing to worry about. But this was a
ladder with three hundred rungs. If Alex let go or slipped, there would be
nothing to stop him from falling to his death. There were rest platforms at
intervals, but Alex didn't dare stop to catch his breath. Somebody might
look up and see him. And there was always a chance that the barge, loose from
its moorings, might begin to drift. Alex knew he had to hurry.

After two hundred and fifty rungs, the tower narrowed.
Alex could see the crane's control cabin directly above him. He looked
back down. The men on the building site were suddenly very small and far away. He
climbed the last ladder. There was a trapdoor over his head, leading into the
cabin. But the trapdoor was locked.

Fortunately, Alex was ready for this. When MI6 had
sent him on his first mission, they had given him a number of gadgets--he
couldn't exactly call them weapons--to help him out of a tight spot.
One of these was a tube marked ZIT-CLEAN, FOR HEALTHIER SKIN. But the cream
inside the tube did much more than clean up pimples.

Although Alex had used most of it, he had managed to
hold on to the last remnants and often carried the tube with him as a sort of
souvenir. He had it in his pocket now. Holding on to the ladder with one hand,
he took the tube out with the other. There was very little of the cream left,
but Alex knew that a little was all he needed. He opened the tube, squeezed
some of the cream onto the lock, and waited. There was a moment's pause,
then a hiss and a wisp of smoke. The cream was eating into the metal. The lock sprang
open. Alex pushed back the trapdoor and climbed the last few rungs. He was in.

He had to close the trapdoor again to create enough
floor space to stand on. He found himself in a square, metal box, about the
same size as a sit-in arcade game. There was a pilot's chair with two
joysticks--one on each arm--and instead of a screen, a
floor-to-ceiling window with a spectacular view of the building site, the
river, and the whole of West London. A small computer monitor had been built
into one corner, and at knee level, there was a radio transmitter.

The joysticks beside the arms were surprisingly
uncomplicated. Each had just six buttons--two green, two black, and two
red. There were even helpful diagrams to show what they did. The right hand
lifted the hook up and down. The left hand moved it along the jib, closer or
farther from the cabin. The left hand also controlled the whole top of the
crane, rotating it three hundred and sixty degrees. It couldn't have been
much simpler. Even the START button was clearly labeled. A big switch for a big
toy.

He turned the switch and felt power surge into the
control cabin. The computer lit up with a graphic of a barking dog as the
warm-up program spun into life. Alex eased himself into the operator's
chair. There were still twenty or thirty men on the site. Looking down between
his knees, he saw them moving silently far below. Nobody had noticed that
anything was wrong. But still he knew he had to move fast.

He pressed the green button on the right-hand
control--green for go--then touched his fingers against the joystick
and pushed. Nothing happened! Alex frowned. Maybe it was going to be more
complicated than he'd thought. What had he missed? He rested his hands on
the joysticks, looking left and right for another control. His right hand moved
slightly and suddenly the hook soared up from the ground. It was working!

Unknown to Alex, heat sensors concealed inside the
handles of the joysticks had read his body temperature and activated the crane.
All modern cranes have the same security system built into them, in case the
operator has a heart attack and dies. There can be no accidents. Body heat is
needed to make the crane work.

And luckily for him, this crane was a Liebherr 154
EC-H, one of the most modern in the world. The Liebherr is incredibly easy to
use, and also remarkably accurate. Even sitting so high above the ground, the
operator can pick up a tea bag and drop it into a small china pot. Now Alex
pushed sideways with his left hand and gasped as the crane swung around. In front
of him he could see the jib stretching out, swinging high over the rooftops of
London. The more he Alex settled himself in the chair and pulled back,
wondering what would happen next.

Inside the boat, Skoda was opening a bottle of gin. He'd
had a good day, selling more than a hundred and fifty dollars' worth of
merchandise to the kids at his old school. And the best thing was, they'd
all be back for more. Soon, he'd sell them the stuff only if they
promised to introduce it to their friends. Then the friends would become
customers too. It was the easiest market in the world. He'd gotten them
hooked. They were his to do with as he liked.

The fair-haired man working with him was named
Beckett. The two had met in prison and decided to go into business together
when they got out. The boat had been Beckett's idea. There was no real
kitchen and no toilet, and it was freezing in winter ... but it worked. It
even amused them to be so close to a police station. Sometimes they enjoyed
watching the police cars or boats going past. Of course, the pigs would never
think of looking for criminals right on their own doorstep.