wasn't terror or dread or anything like that. It was just the frisson of knowing. But of course his friends - his living friends - knew nothing at all of that.
Unbeknown to the three, Nikolai Zharov was at Edinburgh Airport to see them off. He had also been across the river with a pair of KGB-issue nite-lite binoculars when Wellesley broke into Harry's house in Bonnyrig. And he'd seen what had left the garden to plod back to their riven plots in a cemetery half a mile away. He'd seen and known what they were, and still looked haggard from knowing it.
But that didn't stop Zharov coding a message and phoning it through to the KGB cell at the embassy. So that in a very short time indeed the Soviet intelligence agencies knew that Harry Keogh was en route to the Mediterranean.
It was 6:30 p.m. local time at Rhodes Airport when Manolis Papastamos met them off their flight; during the taxi ride into the historic town, he told them in his frenetic fashion all he knew of what had transpired. But seeing no connection, he made no mention of Jianni Lazarides.
'What of Ken Layard now?' Darcy wanted to know.
Papastamos was small, slender, all sinew and suntan and shiny-black, wavy hair. Handsome in a fashion, and usually full of zest, now he looked harassed and hagridden. 'I don't know what it is,' he gave a series of questioning, desperate shrugs, held out his hands palms up. 'I don't know, and blame myself because I don't know! But... they are not easy to understand, those two. Policemen? Strange policemen! They seemed to know so much - to be so sure of certain things - but never explained to me how they knew.'
'They're very special,' Darcy agreed. 'But what about Ken?'
'He couldn't swim, had a bump on his head. I dragged him out of the harbour onto some rocks, got the salt water out of him, went for help. Jordan was no use to me: he just sat on the mole under the old windmills babbling to himself. He was suddenly... crazy! And he's stayed that way. But Layard, he was OK, I swear it! Just a bump on the head. And now...'
'Now?' said Harry.
'Now they say he may die!' Papastamos looked like he might cry. 'I did all I could, I swear it!'
'Don't blame yourself, Manolis,' Darcy told him. 'Whatever happened wasn't your fault. But can we see him?'
'Of course, we go to the hospital now. You can see Trevor, too, if you wish it. But,' and again he shrugged, 'you won't get much out of that one. My God, I am so sorry!'
The hospital was off Papalouca, one of the New Town's main roads. It was a big, sprawling place with a frontage all of a hundred yards long. 'One section - a ward, clinic and dispensary - is reserved mainly for the treatment of the tourists,' Papastamos explained as their taxi took them in through the gates. 'It's not much in use now, but in July and August the work doesn't stop. The broken bones, bad sunburns, heatstroke, stings, cuts and bruises. Ken Layard has a room of his own.'
He told their driver to wait, led the way into a side wing where a receptionist sat in her booth clipping her fingernails. As soon as she saw Papastamos she sprang to her feet and spoke to him in breathless, very much subdued Greek. Papastamos at once gasped and went pale. 'My friends, you are too late,' he said. 'He is ... dead!' He looked at Sandra, Darcy and Harry in turn, and shook his head. 'There is nothing I can say.'
They were too dumbstruck to answer for a moment, until Harry said: 'Can we see him anyway?'
Harry looked cool in a pale blue jacket, white shirt and slacks. He and the others had slept on the plane, catching up on a lot of lost sleep. And despite his travails of the night before, he seemed to have come through it better than them. His face was calm, resigned; unlike Sandra's and Darcy's, Papastamos saw no sorrow in it. And the Greek thought: A cold-blooded one, this Harry Keogh.
But he was wrong: it was simply that Harry had learned to view death differently. Ken Layard might be finished 'here' - finished physically, materially, in the corporeal world - but he wasn't all dead. Not all of him. Why, for all Harry knew Ken might be seeking him out right now, desperate