Air Force One is Down. John Denis

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СКАЧАТЬ ‘You didn’t tell me you wanted a circuit preacher.’ Dunkels grinned. ‘It makes no difference what he is,’ he conceded, ‘as long as he is the man he claims to be. If he checks out, he’ll do.’

      ‘He will.’

      ‘He’ll have to,’ Dunkels said, leaving the implicit warning unstated.

      Stein unlaced his fingers and spread them wide in apparent consternation. ‘I’ve never let Smith down before, have I?’ he demanded.

      ‘Mister Smith,’ Dunkels corrected icily.

      ‘Mister Smith, I’m sorry,’ Stein apologised. ‘But all the same, I’ve always delivered. Even when it was Mister Smith’s own face. I made him Javanese, if you recall. And Swedish – and Peruvian. No complaints? No.’ Stein’s fingertips agitated like the hands of a blue-rinse matron drying a full house of painted nails.

      ‘I gave him his present face,’ he protested, ‘the aristocratic look, that’s what he wanted – top-drawer English. And that’s what he got. He could pass for a Duke at Buckingham Palace.’

      ‘He did,’ Dunkels interposed drily.

      ‘There you are, then,’ Stein exclaimed, ‘though of course Mister Smith’s face is marvellously – eh – malleable. And unmemorable, too. He tells me he’s quite forgotten what he originally looked like.’

      That, Dunkels admitted, rising from the hide chair, was true. ‘OK, Stein,’ he said brusquely, ‘I’ll put Jagger through the mincer, and if he comes out kosher, he’s it.’ Dunkels prided himself on his idiomatic English.

      They lunched expansively in Stein’s penthouse, which afforded an even more staggering panorama of Switzerland’s greatest natural asset. When they had finished eating, Stein inquired tentatively whether Dunkels really thought they could get away with the impersonation.

      ‘What do you think?’ Dunkels replied. ‘You’re doing the important part.’

      Stein explained that the assumption of the subject’s physical identity was not difficult. He had made people into other people before. ‘Naturally,’ he went on, ‘I’ll be able to offer a more qualified opinion on Jagger’s chances when you tell me a little more about our subject. At present, all you’ve given me is his face in six different poses, for which I’m grateful, plus the information that he’s connected with the American forces, though which branch I don’t know.’

      Dunkels cracked his knuckles and drew a baleful glance from Stein. ‘His name is Joe McCafferty,’ Dunkels said slowly, as if grudging every word. ‘He’s on secondment from the United Nations Anti-Crime Organisation – UNACO – to the elite Secret Service Corps forming the American President’s bodyguard.

      Currently, McCafferty has been reseconded to head the security force aboard Air Force One, which is, as you know—’

      ‘Yes,’ Stein interrupted, ‘I know what Air Force One is. The Boeing – 707, isn’t it? – used by the President as a sort of aerial White House. So …’ he dragged the conjunction out admiringly, and whistled, ‘so McCafferty’s an important man.’

      ‘He is.’

      ‘Then you’d better come along and see him,’ Stein twinkled. ‘I mean, of course, his potential doppelgänger, his look-alike, his – other self.’ Stein paused and added, half to himself, ‘How unpleasant it will be for McCafferty to discover that he has suddenly become two people.’

      Smith’s computer ‘mincer’, located thirty miles north of the Brazilian city of São Paolo, was extraordinarily swift and adept. It placed its imprimatur on Jagger’s credentials while Dunkels was still waiting for his coffee to arrive. A courteous waiter handed him the telex, and Dunkels himself took the good news to Jagger, who was billeted in a room at the end of a wing that was private even by the reclusive character of the Edelweiss Clinic.

      He introduced himself and told Jagger, ‘You’ll be seeing a lot of me from now on.’ The ringer stood up and clasped Dunkels’ hand. He grinned crookedly and said, ‘Cody Jagger – and this is probably the last you’ll ever see of me as I look now.’

      Four hours later, Dunkels left the clinic in the same Mercedes that had brought him there. His close interrogation of Jagger had endorsed the computer’s verdict: that Cody Jagger was indeed Cody Jagger. Dunkels was also satisfied, by his own and Smith’s high standards, that Jagger was psychologically as well as physiologically adjusted to becoming one Joseph Eamonn Pearse McCafferty, Colonel USAF, presently Head of Security Operations, Air Force One, and seconded to the 89th Military Airlift Wing at Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland, USA.

      The Alpine peaks were almost purple in the waning light when Stein knocked at Jagger’s door, and entered without an invitation. The ringer, who was standing before a back-lit shaving mirror saying goodbye to his face, remarked tersely, ‘He’s hooked.’

      ‘Excellent,’ Stein beamed. ‘So Smith will be hooked too. Moscow should be very, very pleased.’

      ‘So they ought to be,’ Jagger retorted. ‘This thing could be bigger than either we or they thought.’ He lapsed into silence, then added, ‘Are you sure Smith will buy it?’

      ‘Tut, tut, tut,’ Stein said, waving an admonitory finger at him, ‘Mister Smith if you don’t mind. That, Jagger, is your first lesson.’

      Smith listened to the days going by. Dunkels’ last message had been affirmative. The ringer was perfect. The caper was on. His freedom lay barely a week away; then the world of sound, sight and scent would assume its normal proportions.

      But strangely, that mattered less and less to Smith as the elongated hours passed. What was important was the crime he had planned to celebrate his return to life – the big one, which would destroy the credibility of UNACO and its commander, Malcolm Philpott. Smith deeply hated the man who had condemned him to the scarcely endurable catalepsy of imprisonment – but this time he would triumph and UNACO would fall.

      Dunkels would not let him down. Nor would Jagger; nor would Stein. Failure, as always with Mister Smith, was unthinkable. He had felt President Warren G. Wheeler squirming in his hands once before; and he would do so again.

      Smith’s mind conjured up anew the vision of the converted Boeing 707 that was, to Warren G. Wheeler, Air Force One. ‘Oh dear,’ he murmured, ‘has the nasty man taken your toy away?’

      And for the first time in three years, four months and eighteen days, genuine, unforced laughter filled the lonely prison cell, so near to his beloved Paris that Smith could almost smell the drains.

       TWO

      Over the next four days, Cody Jagger survived the mental and physical agony of losing his persona.

      He could not, though, have been in more skilful or patient hands. Stein’s operating theatre, in which he was joined by only two members of his staff, wholly dependent on him for money and drugs, was set out like a society photographer’s salon.

      Every inch of wall space was given over to huge blow-up pictures of McCafferty’s face taken from six different angles, including a shot of the back of his neck, showing the precise set of his flat, trim ears.

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