Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book One - Lawrence Miles [8]
Llewis coughed, and felt a great big bubble of spit, coke, and vodka forming at the back of his throat. Some of the saliva lodged itself in the prickles of his beard.
‘White guy looks American,’ the greasy man said. ‘Don’t know about his gorillas, though. Can’t be government. Must be a private party.’
Llewis turned back to the bar, and reached for his briefcase, the sweat welding his shirt to his body as his beer gut pressed against the bar top. He flicked the clasps on the top of the case, stuffed his fingers into one of the envelope compartments inside. He had to unload half a dozen promo brochures before he found the folder.
‘Got to go,’ he muttered to the greasy man. Then he stuffed the folder into the great damp space under his arm, and hurried away from the bar.
* * *
Llewis flipped the folder open as he crossed the floor, not taking his eyes off the party of three ahead of him. He stumbled into some Saudis on the way, and accidentally trod on the toes of someone who was discussing electric‐shock weaponry in an Eastern European accent, but he doubted that stepping on someone’s foot was a capital offence even for the Russian Mafia.
His hands were still shaking when he plucked the photoportrait out of the folder. Young, white, black spiky hair. Llewis’s eyes flicked between the picture and the man up ahead, the figure’s position marked out by his huge bodyguards even when he was obscured by the crowds of passing suits.
Yes. Yes yes yes. It was him. It was definitely him.
Right.
Now listen up, Alan Llewis. This is important. This is the big one. The sods back at the office are putting money on your messing this up, just like you messed up last time, so keep cool, and keep calm. You know they’d have sent Peter bloody Morgan if they could have. Just remember: this man’s an important contact, but we don’t know a damn thing about him, so make sure you keep it polite. We don’t even know what country he’s from. No jokes about sex or getting drunk, all right? He may be white, but he could still be a Muslim, or a Jew, or –
‘Rrrrruh,’ went one of the bodyguards.
Llewis jumped, but bit his lip, and thus stopped himself making a startled ‘wuuuuh’ noise. It had taken him less time than he’d hoped to cover the floor between the bar and his target. He still hadn’t finished giving himself the pep talk when the bodyguard had loomed over him, like a bloody great mountain of facial hair and bad tailoring.
He looked up into the bodyguard’s face. God, the man was ugly. Piggy nose, bad teeth, and almost completely bald. True, Llewis himself was going a bit thin on top, but the bodyguard looked as though his forehead had actually rebelled against the idea of hair, and scrunched itself up until there just wasn’t any room there for anything except wrinkles.
‘Hello?’ said a voice.
Llewis tried to catch his breath. The contact, the man in the photo, was staring at him. In all honesty, he was just a boy, not a man at all – eighteen, nineteen, no more than twenty. His face was round, but stopped just short of being pudgy, although his eyes did look sort of sunken in, as if his face had been made out of a big white piece of dough, and the eyes had been pushed into the surface Mr‐Potato‐Head style. Llewis wasn’t sure, but he thought he noticed traces of black make‐up around the boy’s eyelids, and there was a sizeable hole in one of his earlobes.
He looked like a punk. Or a Goth. Or whatever they called little poofs who dressed up these days. Admittedly, he was wearing a suit, but he didn’t look happy in it. Probably the son of some company director or other, Llewis guessed, sent here by his dad in the hope of getting him interested in the family business. You got a lot of that in this line of work.
‘Mr Llewis?’ asked the boy, in his pony Home Counties accent.
‘Huuh,’ said Llewis, not quite remembering how to breathe properly.
‘You’re Mr Llewis, yeah? The one we’re supposed to be meeting?’
‘Huuh.’
The boy just blinked at him. Just blinked. That was all.
Oh God almighty Christ Jesus