The Spoilers / Juggernaut

IV

Speering headed north-west from Tehran on the road to Qazvin. ‘You get ahead of him and I’ll stick behind,’ said Tozier to Warren. ‘We’ll have him like the meat in a sandwich. If he turns off the road I’ll get on to you on the blower.’

They had kept an all night watch on Speering’s jeep but it had been a waste of time. He had a leisurely breakfast and did not leave Tehran until ten, and with him was a sharp-featured Iranian as chauffeur. They trailed the jeep through thick traffic out of the city and once they were on the main road Warren put on a burst of speed, passed Speering, and then slowed down to keep a comfortable distance ahead. Follet, in the passenger seat, kept a sharp eye astern, using the second rear view mirror which was one of Tozier’s modifications.

To the right rose the snow-capped peaks of the Elburz Mountains but all around was a featureless plain, dusty and monotonous. The road was not particularly good as far as Warren could judge, but he had been educated to more exacting standards than the Iranian driver and he reflected that by Iranian standards it was probably excellent. After all, it was the main arterial highway to Tabriz.

As soon as he became accustomed to driving the Land-Rover he said to Follet abruptly, ‘You were talking to Speering last night. What about?’

‘Just passing the time of day,’ said Follet easily.

‘Don’t make a mistake, Johnny,’ said Warren softly. ‘You could get hurt – badly.’

‘Hell, it was nothing,’ protested Follet. ‘It wasn’t even my doing. He came over to me – what else was I expected to do besides talk to him?’

‘What did you talk about?’

‘This and that. Our jobs. I told him I was with Regent Films. You know – all this crap about the film we’re making. He said he worked for an oil company.’ He laughed. ‘I took some of his money off him, too.’

‘I saw you,’ said Warren acidly. ‘What did you use – a two-headed penny?’

Follet raised his hands in mock horror. ‘As God is my judge, I didn’t cheat him. You know that’s not my style. I didn’t have to, anyway; he was pretty near blind drunk.’ His eyes flicked up to the mirror. ‘Slow down a bit – we’re losing him.’

From Tehran to Qazvin was nearly a hundred miles and it was almost one o’clock when they neared the outskirts of the town. As they were driving through the loudspeaker crackled into life. ‘Calling Regent Two. Calling Regent Two. Over.’

Follet picked up the microphone and thumbed the switch. ‘You’re coming in fine, Regent One. Over.’

Tozier’s voice was thin and distorted. ‘Our man has stopped at a hotel. I think he’s feeding his face. Over.’

‘That’s a damned good idea; I’m hungry myself,’ said Follet, and raised an eyebrow at Warren.

‘We’ll pull off the road at the other side of town,’ said Warren. ‘Tell him that.’ He carried on until he was well past the outskirts of Qazvin and then pulled up on a hard shoulder. ‘There’s a hamper in the back,’ he said. ‘I gave Ben the job of quartermaster; let’s see how good he is.’

Warren felt better after chicken sandwiches and hot coffee from a flask, but Follet seemed gloomy. ‘What a crummy country,’ he said. ‘We’ve travelled a hundred miles and those goddam mountains haven’t changed an inch.’ He pointed to a string of laden camels coming down the road. ‘What’s the betting we end up on the back of a thing like that?’

‘We could do worse,’ said Warren thoughtfully. ‘I have the idea that these Land-Rovers are a shade too conspicuous for a shadowing job like this.’ He picked up a map. ‘I wonder where Speering is going.’

Follet looked over his shoulder. ‘The next town is Zanjan – another hundred goddam miles.’ He looked around. ‘Christ, isn’t this country horrible? Worse than Arizona.’

‘You’ve been there?’

‘Hell, I was born there. I got out by the time I was old enough to run away. I’m a city boy at heart. The bright lights for me.’ He hummed a phrase of Broadway Melody and reached forward and took a pack of cards from the dash shelf. ‘I’ll be going back, too, so I’d better keep in practice.’

Warren heard the crisp flick of the cards and glanced sideways to see Follet riffle-shuffle with unbelievable dexterity, something far removed from the amateur’s awkwardness. ‘I thought you said you didn’t cheat.’

‘I don’t – but I can if I have to. I’m a pretty fair card mechanic when I want to be.’ He grinned engagingly. It’s like this; if you have a piece of a casino like I have back in London, you don’t have to cheat – as long as the house has an edge. It’s the edge that counts, you see. You don’t suppose Monte Carlo gets by because of cheating, do you?’

It’s supposed to be an honest game.’

‘It’s one hundred per cent honest,’ said Follet stoutly. ‘As long as you have the percentages going for you then you’re all right and cheating isn’t necessary. I’ll show you what I mean because right now I feel lucky. On this road we’ve been meeting about twenty cars an hour – I’ll give you even money that in the next hour two of those cars will have the same last two digits in the registration number. Just a game to pass the time.’

Warren thought it out. There were a hundred possible numbers – 00 to 99. If Follet restricted it to twenty cars then it seemed that the odds were on Warren’s side. He said carefully, ‘For the first twenty cars you’re on.’

‘For a hundred pounds,’ said Follet calmly. ‘If I win you can add it to my bonus – if and when. Okay?’

Warren breathed hard, then said, ‘All right.’

The quiet hum from the loudspeaker altered as a carrier wave came on, and then Ben Bryan said, ‘Calling Regent Two. Our man is getting ready to move. Over.’

Warren unhooked the microphone. ‘Thanks, Regent One. We’ll get moving slowly and let him catch up. The grub was pretty good, Ben; you’re elected caterer for the duration. Over.’

The loudspeaker made a rude squawk and lapsed into silence. Warren grinned and pressed the self-starter. ‘Keep an eye to the rear, Johnny, and tell me when Speering shows up.’

Follet produced a pen. ‘You call the numbers – I’ll write them down. Don’t worry; I’ll keep an eye on Speering.’

The game served to while away the time. It was a monotonous drive on a monotonous road and it was something for Warren to do. With Follet keeping watch to the rear there was nothing for him to do except drive and to speed up or slow down at Follet’s instruction so as to keep a safe distance ahead of Speering. Besides he was tending to become sleepy and the game kept him awake.

He called out the numbers as the oncoming cars passed, and Follet scribbled them down. Although Follet’s attention was, in the main, directed towards Speering, Warren noticed that once in a while he would do a spot check of a number called. He smiled – Follet would never trust anyone. When fifteen numbers had been called without duplication Warren had high hopes of winning his hundred pounds and he became more interested – this was more than a way of passing the time.

On the eighteenth number Follet suddenly said, ‘That’s it – number five and number eighteen are the same – thirty-nine. You lose, Warren. You’ve just raised my bonus by a hundred.’ He put the pen back into his shirt pocket. ‘That was what is known as a proposition. Another name for it is a sucker bet. You didn’t have much of a chance.’

‘I don’t see it,’ said Warren.

Follet laughed. ‘That’s because you’re a mathematical ignoramus. You figured that because there were a hundred possibles and only twenty chances that the odds were four to one in your favour, and that I was a chump for offering evens. You were the chump because the odds were actually in my favour – no less than seven to one. It pays to understand mathematics.’

Warren thought it over. ‘I still don’t see it.’

‘Look at it this way. If I’d bet that a specific number would come up twice in the first twenty then I would have been a chump. But I didn’t. I said any two numbers in the first twenty would match.’

Warren frowned. He still did not get the point, but he had always been weak in mathematics. Follet said, ‘A proposition can be defined as a bet which looks good to the sucker but which is actually in favour of the smart guy who offers it. You dig into the holes and corners of mathematics – especially probability theory – and you’ll find dozens of propositions which the suckers fall for every time.’

‘You won’t catch me again,’ said Warren.

Follet chuckled. ‘Want to bet on it? It’s surprising how often a sucker comes back for more. Andy Tozier fell for that one, too. He’ll fall again – I’ll take the whole of his bonus from him before we’re through with this caper.’ He glanced at the mirror. ‘Slow down, will you? This road’s becoming twisty.’

They drove on and on until they came to Zanjan, and Follet said, ‘I see the jeep – I think he’s coming through.’ Two minutes later he said, ‘I’ve lost him.’

The radio broke into life with a crackle of mid-afternoon static caused, presumably, by the stormy weather over the mountains to the west. ‘… turned off to left … hotel … follow … Got that? Over.’

Follet clicked a switch ‘Speering turned off to the left by the hotel and you want us to follow. Is that it, Andy? Over.’

‘That’s it … quickly … out.’

Warren pulled to a halt, and Follet said, ‘I’ll take over – you look a bit beat.’

‘All right,’ said Warren. They changed seats and Warren stretched his shoulders and slumped in the passenger seat. He had been driving all day and the Land-Rover was a bit harder to handle than his saloon car. They went back into Zanjan and by the hotel found a road leading off to the west; it was signposted in Arabic script which Warren could make no sense of. Follet wheeled around and Warren grabbed the maps.

The new road deteriorated rapidly and, because it was heading into the mountains, became more sinuous and tricky. Follet drove a shade faster than was absolutely safe in an effort to catch up with Tozier and Bryan, and the vehicle bumped and shuddered. At last they caught a glimpse of a dust cloud ahead. ‘That should be Andy.’ After a while he said, ‘It’s Andy, all right.’ He eased the speed a little. ‘I’ll drop back a bit – we don’t want to eat his dust from here to hell-and-gone.’

As they drove deeper into the mountains their speed dropped. The road surface was very bad, ridged in bone-jarring corrugations and washed out in places where storm-swelled freshets had swept across. The gradients became steeper and the bends tighter, so much so that Follet was forced to use the extra-low gearing that is the speciality of the Land-Rover. The day wore on to its end.

Warren had the maps on his knee attached to a clipboard and kept his eye on the compass. They were heading westward all the time and, after checking the map again, he said, ‘We’re heading into Kurdistan.’ He knew that this was the traditional route for smuggling opium out of Iran into Syria and Jordan, and again he felt confident that he was right – this was more than a coincidence.

Follet turned another corner and drove down one of the few straight stretches of road. At this point the road clung to the side of a mountain with a sheer cliff on the right and an equally sheer drop on the left. ‘Look at that,’ he said jerkily and nodded across the valley.

The road crossed the valley and rose again to climb the side of the mountain on the other side. In the far distance a cloud of brick-red dust picked out by the sun indicated a speeding car. ‘That’s Speering,’ said Follet. ‘Andy is still in the valley bottom. If we can see Speering then he can see us. If he doesn’t know we’re following him then he’s blind or dead drunk.’

‘It can’t be helped,’ said Warren grimly. ‘That’s the way it is.’

‘You can tell me something,’ said Follet. ‘What the hell happens at sunset? Have you thought of that?’

Warren had thought of it and it had been worrying him. He looked at his watch and estimated that there was less than an hour to go. ‘We’ll keep going as far as we can,’ he said with no expression in his voice.

Which was not very far. Within half an hour they came upon the other Land-Rover parked by the roadside with Ben Bryan flagging them down. Just beyond him Tozier was standing, looking over the mountains. Follet halted and Warren leaned from the window. ‘What’s up, Ben?’

Bryan’s teeth showed white against his dusty face and the mountain wind whipped his hair. ‘He’s beaten us, Nick. Take a look over there where Andy is.’

Warren stepped down and followed him towards Tozier who turned and said, ‘You tell me which way he went.’

There were five possible exits from the rocky area on top of the plateau. ‘Five roads,’ said Tozier. ‘You tell me which one he picked.’

‘No tracks?’

‘The ground is hard where it isn’t naked rock.’ Tozier looked about. ‘This seems to be a main junction, but it isn’t on the map.’

‘The road we’ve been travelling on isn’t on the map, either,’ said Warren. He squatted and balanced the clipboard on his knee. ‘I reckon we’re about there.’ He made a small cross on the map. ‘About thirty miles inside Kurdistan.’ He stood up and walked to the edge of the road and gazed westward to where the setting sun fitfully illumined the storm clouds over the red mountains. ‘Speering could be heading clear to the Iraqi border.’

‘He won’t make it tonight,’ said Tozier. ‘Not on these roads in these mountains. What do we do, Nick?’

‘What the devil can we do?’ said Warren violently. ‘We’ve lost him right at the start of the game. It’s four to one against us that we pick the right road – a sucker bet.’ He suppressed his futile rage. ‘We can’t do much now. It’s nearly dark so we’d better make camp.’

Tozier nodded. ‘All right; but let’s do it out of sight of any of these roads.’

‘Why? What’s the point?’

‘No point, really.’ Tozier shrugged. ‘Just on general security principles. It gets to be a habit in my game.’

He walked towards the trucks leaving Warren in a depressed mood. We’ve blown it at this end, he thought; I hope to God that Mike and Dan have better luck. But he did not feel like betting on it – that would be another sucker bet.