'And right now it's telling my fists to do the talking.'

'That would be unwise.' There were long regular s.p.a.ces between the words.

'Persuade me.'

The man looked at the cold food still left on Hoffer's plate.

'The food here is appalling, isn't it? I was disappointed when you booked into this hotel. I was thinking more the Connaught or the Savoy. Have you ever eaten at the Grill Room?'

'What are you, a food critic?'

'My hobby,' the man said. 'How's your mission going?'

'Mission?'

'Locating the Demolition Man.'

'It's going swell, he's upstairs in my room watching the Disney Channel. Who are you?'

'I work for the Company.'

Hoffer laughed. 'You don't get any points for subtlety, pal.

The Company! What makes any of my business the ClA's business?'

'You're looking for an a.s.sa.s.sin. He has murdered United States citizens. Plus, when he kills, he often kills politicians.'

'Yeah, sc.u.mbags from sweatshop republics.' Hoffer nodded.

'Maybe they're all friends of yours, huh? How come you haven't introduced yourself before?'

'Well, let's say we're more interested now.'

'You mean now he's almost started World War Three? Or now he's killed a journalist? Let's see some ID, pal.'

167.

'I don't have any on me.'

'Don't tell me, you left it in your other burgundy jacket?

Get out of my face.'

The man didn't look inclined to leave. 'I'm very good at reading upside down,' he said.

Hoffer didn't understand, then saw that Bamey's sheet of paper was still spread open by the side of his plate. He folded it and put it away.

'Arms dealers?' the man guessed. When Hoffer didn't say anything, his smile widened. 'We know all about them, we had that information days ago.'

'Ooh, I'm impressed.'

'We even know what you told Chief Inspector Broome yesterday.'

'If you know everything, what do you want with me?'

'We want to warn you. You've managed to get close to the Demolition Man, but you need to be aware that we're close to him too. If there should come a confrontation ...

well, we need to know about you, and you need to know- about us. It wouldn't help if we ended up shooting at one another while the a.s.sa.s.sin escaped.'

'If you're after him, why not just let me tag along?'

'I don't think so, Mr Hoffer.'

'You don't, huh? Know what I don't think? I don't think you're from the Company. I've met Company guys before, they're not a bit like you. You smell of something worse.'

'I can produce ID given time.'

'Yeah, somebody can run you up a fake. There used to be this nifty operator in Tottenham, only he's not at home.'

'All I'm trying to do here is be courteous.'

'Leave courtesy to the Brits. Since when have we ever been courteous?' Hoffer thought he'd placed the man.

'You're armed forces, right?'

'I was in the armed forces for a while.'

Hoffer didn't want to think what he was thinking. He was thinking Special Operations Executive. He was thinking 168.

National Security Council. The CIA was a law unto itself, but the NSC had political clout, friends in the highest and lowest places, which made it infinitely more dangerous.

'Maybe we're beginning to see eye to eye,' the man said at last.

'Give me a name, doesn't matter if it's made up.'

'My name's Don Kline, Mr Hoffer.'

'Want to hear something funny, Don Kline? When I first saw you I thought, Gestapo-style gla.s.ses. Which is strange, because normally I'd think John Lennon. Just shows how prescient you can be sometimes, huh?'

'This doesn't get us very far, Mr Hoffer.' Kline stood up.

'Maybe you should lay off the narcotics, they seem to be affecting your judgement.'

'They couldn't affect my judgement of you. cmo, baby.'

For something to do, Hoffer lit a cigarette. He didn't watch Kline leave. He couldn't even hear him make a noise on the tiled floor. Hoffer didn't know who Kline was exactly, but he knew the species. He'd never had any dealings with the species before, it was alien to him. So how come that species was suddenly interested in the D-Man? Kline hadn't answered Hoffer's question about that. Did it have to do with the journalist? What was it she'd been investigating again?

Cults? Yes, religious cults. Maybe he better find out what that was all about. Wouldn't that be what the D-Man was doing? Of course it would.

He foresaw a triangular shoot-out with the D-Man and Kline. Just for a moment, he didn't know which one of them he'd be aiming at first.

His waitress was back.

'No smoking in this section.'

'You're an angel straight from heaven, do you know that?' he told her, stubbing out his cigarette underfoot. She stared at him blankly. 'I mean it, I didn't think they made them like you any more. You're gorgeous.' These words were obviously new to the waitress, who softened her pose a 169.

14.We took a train from Euston to Glasgow.

I'd decided against renting a car in London. Rentals could always be checked or traced. By now, I reckoned there was a chance the police - or even Hotter - would be finding out about DI West and DC Harris. Plus they had the evidence of my phone call to the radio station. They knew I was still around. They'd be checking things like hotels and car hire.

So I paid cash for our train fares, and paid cash to our hotel when we booked out. I even slipped the receptionist 20, and asked if she could keep a secret. I then told her that Ms Harrison and I weren't supposed to be together, so if anyone should come asking ... She nodded acceptance in the conspiracy. I added that even if she mentioned my name to anyone, I'd appreciate it if she left Eel's name out.

Bel had phoned Max and told him of her plan to go north with me. He hadn't been too thrilled, especially when she said we'd be pa.s.sing him without stopping. She handed the phone to me eventually.

'Max,' I said, 'if you tell me not to take her, you know I'll accept that.'

'If she knows where you're headed and she's got it in her head to go, she'd probably only follow you anyway.'

I smiled at that. 'You know her so well.'

'I should do, she gets it all from me. No trouble so far?'

'No, but we're not a great deal further forward either.'

'You think this trip north will do the trick?'

"I don't know. There should be less danger though.'

'Well, bring her back without a scratch.'

'That's a promise. Goodbye, Max.'

173.

I put Bel back on and went to my room to pack.

On the train, I reread all the notes on the Disciples of Love.

'You must know it by heart by now,' Bel said, between trips to the buffet. We were in first cla.s.s, which was nearly empty, but she liked to go walking down the train, then return with reports of how packed the second-cla.s.s carriages were.

'That's why we're in here,' I said. It's a slow haul to Glasgow, and I had plenty of time for reading. What I read "

didn't give me any sudden inspiration.

The Disciples of Love had been set up by an ex-college professor called Jeremiah Provost. Provost had taught at Berkeley in the 70s. Maybe he was disgruntled at not having caught the 60s, when the town and college had been renamed 'Berserkeley'. By the time he arrived at Berkeley, things were a lot tamer, despite the odd nudist parade. The town still boasted a lot of strung-out hippies and fresher- faced kids trying to rediscover a 'lost California spirit', but all these incomers did was clog the main shopping streets trying to beg or sell beads and hair-braiding.

I was getting all this from newspaper and magazine pieces. They treated Provost as a bit of a joke. While still a junior professor, he'd invited 'chosen' students to his home at weekends. He'd managed to polarise his cla.s.ses into those who adored him and those who were bored by his mix of blather and mysticism. One journalist said he looked like 'Beat Poet Allen Ginsberg before the hair went white'. In photos, Provost had long frizzy dark hair, kept parted at the front, a longish black beard and thick-lensed gla.s.ses. It's hard to get kicked out of college, especially if you're a professor, but Provost managed it. His employers didn't cite aberrant behaviour, but rather managed to dig up some dirt from his past, showing he'd lied in his initial application form and at a later interview.

Provost stuck around. He was busted for peddling drugs, 174.

but it turned out he'd only given them away, never sold them. He was fast turning into a local underground hero.

His shack-style house in a quiet residential street in Berkeley became a haven for travellers, writers, musicians and artists.

The outside of the house boasted a huge paste-and-wire King Kong climbing up it until the authorities dismantled it.

The house itself was painted to resemble a s.p.a.ceship, albeit a low-built cuboid one. Inside the house, Jeremiah Provost was slowly but surely leaving the planet Earth.

Out of this home for strays emerged the Disciples of Love.

It was a small enterprise at first, paid for, as investigative journalism revealed, by a legacy on which Provost had been living. His family was old Southern money, and as the elders pa.s.sed away their money and property kept pa.s.sing to Provost. He sold a couple of plantation houses, one of them to a museum. And he had cash too, as aunts and uncles found he was their sole surviving heir.

An article in a Californian magazine had gone farther than most in tracing Provost back to his childhood home in Georgia. He'd always been pampered as a child, and soundly beaten too, due to a doting mother and a disciplinarian father (whose own father had financed the local Ku Klux Klan). At school he'd been brilliant but erratic, ditto at college. He'd landed a job at a small college in Oklahoma before moving to Nebraska and then California.

He found his vocation at last with the Disciples of Love. He was destined to become leader of a worldwide religious foundation, built on vague ideals which seemed to include s.e.x, drugs and organic vegetables. The American tabloid papers concentrated on the first two of these, talking of 'bizarre initiation rites' and 'mandatory s.e.xual relations with Provost'. There were large photos of him seated on some sort of throne, with long-haired beauties draped all around him, swooning at his feet and gazing longingly into his eyes, wondering if he'd choose them next for the mandatory s.e.xual relations. These acolytes were always 175.

young women, always long-haired, and they all looked much the same. They wore long loose-fitting dresses and had middle-cla.s.s American faces, strong-jawed and thick- eyebrowed and pampered. They were like the same batch of dolls off a production line.

None of which was my concern, except insofar as I envied Provost his chosen career. My purpose, I had to keep reminding myself, was to ask whether this man's organisation could have hired a hit-man. It seemed more likely that they'd use some suicide soldier from their own ranks. But then that would have pointed the finger of the law straight at them. The Disciples of Love were probably cleverer than that.

The Disciples really took off in 1985. Trained emissaries were sent to other states and even abroad, where they set up 'missions' and started touting for volunteers. They offered free shelter and food, plus the usual spiritual sustenance. It was quite an undertaking. One magazine article had costed it and was asking where the money came from. Apparently no new elderly relations had gone to their graves, and it couldn't just be a windfall from investments or suddenly accrued interest.

There had to be something more, and the press didn't like that it couldn't find out what. Reporters staked out the Disciples' HQ, still the old s.p.a.ceship Berkeley, until Provost decided it was time to move. He pulled up sticks and took his charabanc north, first into Oregon, and then Washington State, where they found themselves in the Olympic Peninsula, right on the edge of Olympic National Park. By promising not to develop it, Provost managed to buy a lot of land on the sh.o.r.es of a lake. New cabins were built to look like old ones, gra.s.sland became vegetable plots, and the Disciples got back to work, this time separated from the world by guards and dogs.

Provost was not apocalyptic. There was no sign in any of his writings or public declarations that he thought the end 176.

of the world was coming. For this reason, he didn't get into trouble with the authorities, who were kept busy enough with cults storing weaponry like squirrels burying nuts for the winter. (These reports were mostly written before the Branch Davidian exploded.) The Revenue people were always interested though. They were curious as to how the cult's level of funding was being maintained, and wanted to know if the whole thing was just an excuse for tax avoidance. But they did not find any anomalies, which might only mean Provost had employed the services of a good accountant.

Lately, everything had gone quiet on the Disciples news front. A couple of journalists, attempting to breach the HQ compound, had been intercepted and beaten, but in Ameri- can eyes this was almost no offence at all. (The same eyes, remember, who were only too keen to read new revelations of the s.e.x 'n' drug sect and its 'screwball' leader.) All of which left me where precisely? The answer was, on a train heading north, where maybe I'd learn more from the cult's UK branch. Bel was sitting across from me, and our knees, legs and feet kept touching. She'd slipped off her shoes, and I kept touching her, apologising, then having to explain why I was apologising.

We ate in the dining car. Bel took a while to decide, then chose the cheapest main dish on the menu.

'You can have anything you like,' I told her.

'I know that,' she said, giving my hand a squeeze. We stuck to non-alcoholic drinks. She took a sip of her tonic water, then smiled again.

'What are we going to tell Dad?'

'What about?'

'About us.'

'I don't know, what do you think?'

'Well, it rather depends, doesn't it? I mean, if this is just a ... sort of a holiday romance, we're best off saying nothing.'

177.