Mambo by Campbell Armstrong Read Free Book Online Page B

for weeks, is he? He’s an expensive commodity. Somebody paid for him to be here. That same somebody spent a lot of money on the rescue. I suspect we’re looking at a matter of days before Ruhr does whatever he’s here to do. Perhaps less.” Pagan hadn’t spoken more than a couple of short sentences since his wound and now he was hoarse. There was an ache in his chest, a brass screw turning.
    Burr stared at him. “If you’re saying that our real priority is to find Ruhr and put the security breach on the back burner, I wholeheartedly agree. Easier said than done, alas. Half the police force of England is looking for him right now, Frank. We’ve had reports of the bugger in Torquay and Wolverhampton and York and all the way up to Scotland. In terms of false sightings, Gunther Ruhr rivals unidentified flying objects.”
    Pagan had a mild Pethidine rush, a weird little sense of distance from himself. At times he floated beyond everything, spaced-out, drifting, a cosmonaut in his own private galaxy. It was a pleasant sort of feeling. It was easy to see how people became addicted to Pethidine. It relegated terrorists and dead policemen and gunshot wounds to another world.
    Pagan shut his eyes and tried very hard to concentrate. “Ruhr specialises in destruction. The question is, what is he here to destroy? And why was he in Cambridge? What’s so interesting about the place?”
    â€œNot a great deal, Frank.” Martin Burr, an Oxford man with no high regard for the rival university, helped himself to a small glass of Lucozade. He drank, made a face, wondered about the masochism of whole generations of English that had sought good health in the oversweet liquid.
    â€œWhat about the countryside around Cambridge? Aren’t there a couple of military bases?” Pagan asked.
    â€œThere’s a NATO installation about forty miles away in Norfolk. Also a number of RAF bases within a forty-mile radius of Cambridge, plus a couple of army camps. We’ve been doing a spot of map-reading.”
    â€œI thought the NATO base was going out of business.”
    Martin Burr nodded. “To a large extent. The terms of the American-Soviet disarmament treaty call for mid-range ballistic missiles to be removed from bases, shipped back to the United States and then destroyed – with Russian observers on hand to ensure fair play. There’s a laughable contradiction in terms. I’ve yet to hear of a Bolshevik who understood fair play.”
    Pagan rarely paid attention to the Commissioner’s bias against Communism. It was a facet of Burr’s personality: a form of phobia, and really quite harmless.
    â€œAny one of those places is a candidate for Ruhr,” Pagan said.
    â€œThey’ve all beefed up security heavily in the last few days for that very reason. They wouldn’t be easy targets for our German friend.”
    â€œIs there anything else that might attract him to the area?”
    â€œI’ve been thinking about that too. Ruhr’s target could be a person rather than a place. Or a group of people. In which case, where the devil do we begin? At least three international conferences are coming up in the next week or so in Cambridge. The city’s going to be filled with all kinds of experts. Environmentalists, meteorologists, chemists – and that’s only in Cambridge. What if Ruhr’s target lies in Northampton? Or Bury St Edmunds? What then?”
    Pagan considered the Commissioner’s remarks for a moment. Ruhr had become endowed with almost supernatural powers: he was everywhere, and capable of anything. “Here’s another possibility to make things a little more complicated: Ruhr was just passing through Cambridge on the way to somewhere else – London, Birmingham – and he stopped to have some fun, if you can call it that.”
    Pagan remembered the girl who had been with Ruhr at the time of his capture. A skinny