Bloody Passage - Jack Higgins [20]
Mist closed in around us and Langley said cheerfully, "All right, old stick?"
"One of life's great experiences," I assured him.
I opened the window beside me and peered out as we taxied forward. The tip of a floating pontoon suddenly pushed out of the mist; Langley cut the engine and we drifted in. As I got the door open and stepped across with the line Langley handed me, a man in a black oilskin and stocking cap appeared from the mist. He had a dark saturnine face and badly needed a shave. Rather incongruously he was carrying an umbrella which he handed to me, relieving me in turn of the line.
I stood holding the umbrella in the pouring rain, wondering what in the hell was keeping Langley and then he scrambled out of the cabin and I saw that he had changed out of his flying kit and was now wearing suede boots and a navy blue nylon raincoat.
"Right, off we go, old stick," he said, completely ignoring the man in the black oilskin and we started along the swaying pontoon through the torrential rain, both sheltering under the umbrella. The baroque palace I had glimpsed from the air loomed out of the mist up there on the side of the mountain.
"Another of Stavrou's weekend places?" I asked.
"Don't be bitter, old stick," Langley said. "It just isn't you."
We crossed a shingle beach to a black Mercedes limousine parked at the end of a narrow asphalt road. As we approached, a uniformed chauffeur emerged and opened the rear door. He took the umbrella as we got in.
He slid behind the wheel and waited. Langley pulled down a flap at the bottom of the dividing screen, took out a bottle and a couple of glasses into each of which he poured a generous measure of an excellent brandy.
He toasted me. "You took that rather well, old stick. You know for an American, you're not half bad. Very strange." He poured himself another one. "On the other hand, you did go to Winchester, didn't you? I suppose that explains it."
To which there could really be no answer and before I could even try, he said casually, "Where to?"
"I thought you were supposed to keep out of my hair?"
"But I will, old stick. Honestly." He even managed to look hurt as he took a foolscap envelope from his inside pocket. "On the other hand, considering what's inside this I should have thought your friend Barzini would be enchanted to make my acquaintance."
I decided to play along with him for the time being, mainly because I'd been expecting something like this anyway. I said, "All right, Via San Marco. It's off the Via Roma near the central railway station and tell him to go through the Piazza Pretoria."
He gave the order over the intercom in Italian and as the Mercedes moved away I, too, helped myself to more brandy. We drove up from the beach, passing the palace or whatever the hell it was supposed to be, at some distance and turned out through some large ironwork gates onto the main Messina-Palermo coast road.
Langley lit a cigarette. "This Barzini, what's so good about him?"
"For a start he's sixty-three years of age," I said. "An advantage when I consider the younger generation."
He refused to be thrown. "In other words, he's a survivor."
I hesitated for a moment and then continued. "That file you had on me, it mentioned a job I did in Albania a few years ago."
"When you pulled the U2 pilot out of the prison in Tirana?"
"There was a little more to it than that. Aldo Barzini was an underwater saboteur with the Italian Navy during the war."
Langley looked interested. "Human torpedoes and so on?"
I nodded. "He sank two British destroyers in Port Said back in 1942. When I met him, he was smuggling cigarettes, penicillin, stuff like that, making regular runs from Brindisi to Albania. He was hired to give me and my team a way out. In the original plan he was supposed to wait two nights in a cove on the Albanian coast about thirty miles from Tirana. Then he got a coded message on his radio telling him we'd been sold out. Ordering him to make a run for it."
"And did he?"
"No, he landed, stole a car and made straight for a farm about fifteen