Lorraine clutched at a handhold over her head and tried to move away from him, but Jaeckle held her legs firmly in the fading light as his tongue darted between her thighs.
The Rolls-Royce Corniche sped west from London on the M4. Early morning sunlight filtered weakly through clouds that bellied over the nearby hillocks. Rain hammered the pavement in a steady drone, punctuated by occasional cracks of thunder.
The Rolls was as large and sturdy as a fair-sized truck. Inside it, Harry Meade had no sense of the rainstorm lashing the south of England, hardly any sense of motion at all, the car rode so solidly on the smooth highway. The spacious rear compartment was completely soundproof and the windows were so darkly tinted that the streaking raindrops were invisible. He shifted his large frame within the cramped confines of the jumpseat. Sir Derek Brock-Smythe, dressed in a waistcoat, riding pants, and boots, reclined on a miniature leather chesterfield. A low mahogany table separated the two men.
Sir Derek traced esses in the air with a delicate finger as he speed-read several pages of typescript. On a shelf above the wet bar, brandy lapped gently in a Tyrone crystal decanter. Harry Meade licked his lips.
“Splendid,” said Sir Derek. He removed a fountain pen from his jacket pocket and drew neat circles around certain words on the pages. “This touching conversation between Chakra and his wife contains the key to neutralizing two particularly dastardly toxic-waste molecules. Hisashi Oyamo has no inkling how intelligent and accommodating he can be.”
Sir Derek hummed gaily as he continued extricating coded words from the transcript. Harry Meade pressed his face against the dark window glass. Within his pale reflection, there was only the barest hint of the Berkshire Downs. The island of hair left by his receding hairline looked scraggly. He wiped it with the palm of his hand.
Sir Derek’s humming stopped like the disconnect tone of an old English phone box. Harry Meade had only a general knowledge of the complex code Chakra Ramsanjawi employed to smuggle biochemical information out of Trikon Station over unsecured phone lines. But he knew enough to have recognized that the latter portion of the conversation was devoted to Hugh O’Donnell. Sir Derek was reading that portion now; he did not appear happy.
Meade returned his attention to the window. But instead of searching for landmarks in the dim countryside or features on his lined face, he concentrated on the reflection of Sir Derek flipping through the transcript. After several minutes, Sir Derek cleared his throat.
“Ring up the lab and transmit these pages posthaste,” he said as he tapped the first portion of the transcript into a uniform pile on the knee-high table.
Harry Meade scuttled off the jumpseat and took the pages in hand. Bending over double in a space tailored to Sir Derek’s proportions, he opened the jumpseat adjacent to the limousine’s communications center. The Lancashire lab’s fax number was stored in the machine’s memory. Harry secured a connection quickly. As he fed the pages into the machine, he cast an occasional glance at the window. Sir Derek was again busy circling words with his pen.
Sir Derek abruptly dropped the pages onto the table and got up from the leather couch. He was so tiny that he could almost stand erect inside the Corniche. Leaning forward over the mahogany table, he took the Tyrone decanter and a snifter from the shelf and poured a shot of brandy. Then he sat again facing Harry Meade, the snifter twinkling in his hands, the starched cuffs of his white shirt perfectly placed on his wrists, his booted heels pressed together on the exquisite Persian carpet, barely swaying as the Rolls negotiated a sweeping curve.
“What have you learned about Hugh O’Donnell?” he asked.
Meade heard the static that seemed to buzz between his ears whenever Sir Derek confronted him with the slightest bit of displeasure. What was the latest word on O’Donnell? He felt his fingers involuntarily gripping the lip of the jumpseat as he tried to gather his thoughts.
“We hacked into the computerized personnel files of Simi Bioengineering,” said Meade. “It doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know. He graduated from the University of Oregon in 1984 and has been working for Simi since ’96.”