Terpil hit him once on the side of the face—not hard, but enough to indicate there was more where that came from and plenty of it.
“Cut the shit,” he said without animosity. “I’m going to get the truth anyway, one way or the other. Might as well keep it painless—all the same to me. Who are you really working for?”
Rowse let the story come out slowly, as he had been briefed, sometimes recalling things exactly, sometimes having to search his memory.
“Which magazine?”
“Soldier of Fortune.”
“Which edition?”
“April ... May, last year. No, May, not April.”
“What did the ad say?”
“ ‘Weapons expert needed, European area, for interesting assignment’ ... something like that. A box number.”
“Bullshit. I take that magazine every month. There was no such ad.”
“There was. You can check.”
“Oh, we will,” murmured al-Mansour from the corner of the room. He was making notes with a slim gold pen on a Gucci pad.
Rowse knew Terpil was bluffing. There had been such an ad in the columns of Soldier of Fortune. McCready had found it, and a few calls to his friends in the CIA and the FBI had ensured—or so Rowse fervently hoped—that the placer of the ad would not be available to deny he had ever received a reply from Mr. Thomas Rowse of England.
“So you wrote back.”
“Yep. Plain paper. Accommodation address. Giving my background, areas of expertise. Instructions for a reply, if any.”
“Which were?”
“Small ad in the London Daily Telegraph.” He recited the wording. He had memorized it.
“The ad appeared? They made contact?”
“Yep.”
“What date?”
Rowse gave it. Previous October. McCready had found that ad as well. It had been chosen at random, a perfectly genuine small advertisement from an innocent British citizen, but with wording that would suit. The Telegraph staff had agreed to alter the records to show it had been placed by someone in America and paid for in cash.
The interrogation went on. The phone call he had taken from America after placing a further ad in The New York Times. (That too had been found after hours of searching—a real ad listing a British phone number. Rowse’s own unlisted number had been changed to tally with it.)
“Why the roundabout way of getting in touch?”
“I figured I needed discretion in case the placer of the original ad was crazy. Also that my s
ecretiveness might impress whoever it was.”
“And did it?”
“Apparently. The speaker said he liked it. Set up a meet.”
When? Last November. Where? The Georges Cinq in Paris. What was he like?
“Youngish, well dressed, well spoken. Not registered at the hotel. I checked. Called himself Galvin Pollard. Certainly phony. A yuppie type.”
“A what?”