The surveillance period was the key to success. In Marman’s case, Davies had been patient and professional from the outset. After three weeks, still without a hit plan, he had given de Villiers his considered advice. Go for Marman’s diary, for he keeps it with him and uses it like a yuppy does a Filofax. From his forward planner pick a date when he is out of London and alone in his car, and set up a road accident.
Davies also recommended that they fudge the warning film. Since the days of Kealy, video cameras had become widely available and video film easily edited. In Marman’s case it would be almost impossible to serve him notice of pending death without building a major embuggerance factor into any subsequent accident plan.
The problem with Marman was his unpredictability and his almost obsessive love of human company. He was hardly ever alone. His girlfriend Julia was with him on and off much of the time after she finished her daily job at J amp;B Whiskey, his art student very often spent all day and night at 9 Blandfield Road, and a constant stream of friends, mostly ex-Army, kept dropping in to converse over stiff drinks.
When Marman went out, there was absolutely no pattern to his movements. Job-hunting appeared to be the motive of some of his calls but more often he went instinctively to one of half a dozen pubs, such as the Antelope, where he knew his friends would be. He would join them on extended tours between various “in” watering holes, until a party was mentioned, whereupon the whole group would head off to change for dinner if applicable, or straight to the flat of the party-giver, not returning home until the early hours.
Since the Clinic never reacted to mere happenstance, de Villiers had agreed with Davies and gone for the Marman diary.
At a Tadnams safe house in Trebovir Road, a run-down basement next to a Slav-owned hotel, the photographed pages of Marman’s diary were studied in detail.
“On Saturday he will spend the day wine-tasting at the Hurlingham Club,” Meier observed.
“His girl works there, so she is likely to be with him,” said de Villiers dismissively.
“But afterward,” Meier’s finger stabbed at photographs, “he goes for drinks with Poppo. Saturday night is always good for us. Who is this Poppo?”
“Forget it.” De Villiers flicked to another sheet. “We have only three suitable events in the whole month and all are out of London. He will travel alone in his Citroen. We know that. We have the timing, and the routes will be obvious from any road map. I say we concentrate on these and forget his London life.”
There was no further discussion of the diary entries and Meier began to look like a cat anticipating a bowl of cream.
De Villiers pinned a map of England to the wall. “Marman will be making four specific journeys over a three-week period. Two in the west of the country, one to Suffolk and one to Rugby. The most detailed is down here,” he said, indicating the general area of Salisbury Plain. “We know exactly when Marman will be traveling between two known points… Meier,” he looked up at the Belgian, “what are your thoughts?”
The response was immediate.
“The ‘Boston brakes.’ It must be. It cannot fail yet nobody will ever suspect sabotage.”
Davies was shaking his head. “It failed in Boston, boyo, so why not here?”
“It did not fail,” Meier snapped. “You know that. Circumstances in Boston changed at the last minute so we abandoned my method. But everything was ready and would have worked. I rehearsed for two months on the old airstrip with the Tighe brothers in the stock cars. I could take over control at five hundred yards and by the end I had a hundred percent success. One hundred percent. That is not failure… boyo!”
De Villiers raised his hand. “Okay, okay, keep your skin on, my friend. I have every faith in your brilliance, but what if we go ahead with your Boston brakes on his Salisbury journey and it does fail?”
Meier nodded violently. “In the impossible event of failure there, I move the equipment to the car of another suitable third party and we catch up with him later here.” He indicated Suffolk. “But I tell you for sure: it cannot fail if I am on the controls.”
De Villiers was pensive. “Certainly we need to ensure total lack of suspicion at this stage to avoid any interested party connecting Marman with Kealy and Milling. There can be no doubt that the Boston brakes is perfect from that point of view.”
“If you are both dead set on it,” Davies sighed, “as I can see is the case, then we’d be better off down south. We know some of the coastal geography, at least.”
The previous summer the Clinic had worked for a Paris-based agency that used them from time to time. De Villiers suspected that the client was a drug baron, controlling the Channel route into Britain from Deauville, and wanted a rival group wiped off the map without creating ripples. Although gang warfare was not exactly the Clinic’s field, the fee was good.
Davies had pinpointed the target’s landing and handover spot as a desolate stretch of Pagham Harbor Nature Reserve to the north of Church Norton, in West Sussex. Having observed two previous handover ceremonies, he decided that a seaborne attack by Tadnams heavies in the narrow harbor, or a land attack as the French rendezvoused with their reception party, would both lead to major mayhem. To achieve a surprise attack, the Clinic had obtained through a Saudi purchasing agency a twelve-seater, forty mph hovercraft with a quiet engine and twenty inches of obstacle clearance. The Tadnams group had approached over mud flats, done away with the four-man French crew using silenced HK53 submachine guns, and towed their boat out to sea without reaction from the land-based reception party. They failed to locate the heroin but sank the trawler in forty feet of water before hovering back to the mainland.
“Marman’s Wiltshire return journey is scheduled for the afternoon of Tuesday, November eleventh. Is ten days sufficient time for you, Meier?”
“I will start collecting the gear together immediately with help from the agency. I can see no problem on that score. The difficulty will, of course, be finding a suitable proxy.”
De Villiers did not hesitate. “Marman will be at home this evening, so Davies and I will pay him a visit with the video. You go ahead with a full proposal for Wiltshire on the eleventh that we can decide upon tomorrow.”
Had Meier objected to the timetable, he would have done himself a favor, but his brilliance did not extend to seeing into the future.