Then ..."
"Then you find him, and tell him that there's an emergency, and bring him outside the center."
Caston coughed. "Me?"
"How are you at lying?"
Caston reflected for a moment. "Mediocre."
"Mediocre will be good enough," Ambler said. He reached over and gave Caston an encouraging squeeze on the shoulder. Caston squirmed at his touch. "Sometimes, if it's worth doing, it's worth doing badly."
"If I can help ..." Laurel began.
"I'm going to need you on the logistics front," Ambler told her. He started to explain. "I'll need binoculars or some high-powered device for vision enhancement. There are more than a thousand people at the center. According to the printed agenda, the president of China is scheduled to speak at the Congress Hall."
"That's the biggest hall in the place," Caston said. "Seats a thousand, easily. Maybe more."
"That's a lot of faces, and I'm not going to be able to get near them all."
"You're going to stick out if you start walking around with a pair of binocs around your neck," Laurel cautioned. "You could attract the wrong kind of attention."
"You're talking about security surveillance."
"That place is camera central," Laurel said, "with all the broadcast cameramen around."
"How's that?"
"I had a chat with one of the camera guys," Laurel replied. "Thought it might turn up something useful. Turns out that the WEF records a lot of events for its own purposes, but more than that, the major events-plenary sessions and a few open forums-are taped by some of the major broadcast media. The BBC, CNN International, Sky TV, SBC, like that. Amazing lenses on those cameras-I took a peak through the viewfinder of one."
Ambler tilted his head.
"So I was thinking-you could use one of those, just for the zoom. Those television cameras-they're portable but bulky, and they have a powerful optical zoom. That's better than any binocular. And they're nothing that would attract a second look."
Ambler felt a tiny flutter within him. "My God, Laurel," he said.
"Don't look so shocked that I had a good idea," she joshed. "Only thing I'm wondering is, why would the head of V&S Slovakia be toting a camera through the convention hall?"
"It's not an issue when you're inside," Caston said. "You need the badge to enter. Once you're in, nobody's going to be paying that much attention. The badge itself doesn't display your affiliation, just your name. Once you're inside, it's a whole different ball game."
"What about getting hold of a camera?" Ambler asked.
"Not a problem-I know just how to pick up a couple," Laurel said. "The guys I spoke to showed me a storeroom full of them."
"Listen, Laurel, you're not trained for operational-"
"You're in a life raft and you want to check whether someone has a boater license?" Caston scoffed. "I thought I was supposed to be the rule stickler here."
"Fact is, it's gonna be easier for me than for 'Jozef Vrabel' to get into that storeroom," Laurel said. "And I've already had friendly chats with the boys who go in and out of it." In a mock-vampish tone, she added, "I may not have 'skills,' but I do have ... assets."
Ambler looked at her. "I just don't see a way-"
Laurel gave a half smile. "I do."
The funny thing, Adrian Choi reflected as he sat at Clayton Caston's wonderfully tidy desk, was that his boss managed to create as much work for him when he was away as when he was in the office. Caston's recent telephone calls had been abrupt, hurried, and
cryptic.
Lots of urgent requests, no explanations. It was all very mysterious.
Adrian was loving it.
He was even enjoying his slight hangover this morning-a hangover! An unaccustomed sensation for him. It seemed so very... Derek St. John. In those Clive McCarthy page-turners, Derek St. John was always prone to overindulgence. "Too much is never enough" was among his signature lines; another was "Instant gratification tries my patience." In the line of duty, he was regularly obliged to spend long evenings seducing beautiful women, ordering costly champagnes with French names that Adrian couldn't pronounce, followed by a morning hangover. "It's pronounced cSin-jin'," the superspy would suavely, waggishly, explain to those women who mispronounced his surname. "With the stress falling on sin!'
Derek St. John even had a special hangover recipe, detailed in Clive McCarthy's
Operation Atlantis, but it contained raw eggs, and Adrian didn't think it was a good idea to eat raw eggs.
Not that Adrian had spent the evening with a long-legged supermodel known to be an associate of a villainous quadriplegic who lived in a special zero-gravity satellite circling the