Free The Insulators by John Creasey

of them looked at him; and each one, like the porter and the airline hostess, could be from The Project. Then he heard Palfrey’s voice, clear and distinct yet gentle; a voice which could not possibly be mistaken.
    “Hallo, Philip,” he said. “It’s good to know you’re in London. You’ve nothing to worry about at the moment. The Jamaican porter and the Jewish air hostess are our people. Do you see a man close to the telephone booth, holding a brown briefcase with Qantas and a T.W.A. label tied to the handle?”
    There was such a man, in his early thirties, athletic-looking and of medium height.
    “Yes,” Philip answered, forcing his voice down low.
    “He will follow you to Number 1, Romain Square, and I will be there to see you as soon as I possibly can. Very good to have you back,” repeated Palfrey, and rang off.
    Very slowly, and almost dizzy with relief, Philip put up the receiver and stepped out of the booth. A young girl with silky fair hair curling down to her shoulders and a black maxi coat reaching her ankles, pushed past him to get in. The man with the briefcase made a beeline for another booth which became empty, and Philip wondered how he could follow; but on such things he had never known Palfrey wrong. He walked down the stairs to the concrete caverns where taxis arrived, it seemed, from all directions. A dozen people waited, the young Jamaican porter was there with his truckload of baggage.
    Philip’s taxi driver was also a Jamaican.
    “Where to, sir?” he asked, making the ‘sir’ sound very like ‘sah’.
    “Number 1, Romain Square, Pimlico,” answered Philip; it must be like asking the man to find a needle in a haystack, and he wasn’t surprised when the man asked: “Do you know where Romain Square is, sir?”
    “I’m afraid I don’t.”
    “Never mind, then; we’ll find it.” The taxi started off, and Philip sat back and watched the streaming traffic and the crowded pavements, the huge red buses and the heavy lorries. There was a heavy smell inside the cab, in fact everywhere, smell caused by smog of a million exhaust pipes which spewed their poison, and tens of thousands of factory chimneys.
    And there was noise.
    It struck at him when he pulled a window down, hoping vainly for fresh air, ear-shattering noise from a lorry and a bus and a heavy motorcycle – noise which made the streets shudder and vibrate, a constant roar almost as bad as the roar at The Project. Even when he pushed the window up, it wasn’t much better. But he saw a car draw alongside in a traffic block at some control lights, and also recognised the driver as the man who had held the briefcase which Palfrey had described.
     
    So from the moment he had stepped off the train, Palfrey’s men and women had been watching him, probably while he had been on the train, too. He had caught it at Wolverhampton after catching a bus from a village called Sibley, which was about six miles from the ‘prison’ from which he had escaped. Before going into The Project he had learned the times of buses, and exactly where to go. He had telephoned Palfrey from an Automobile Association box, outside the village, spent the night in a small hotel near the station at Wolverhampton and caught the train which had arrived a few minutes late at Euston – at 1.52 p.m. It was amazing how quickly things had happened once he had escaped.
    This same time must have seemed an age to Janey.
    Especially if they had used torture to make her talk.
    He tried to shut the vision of such torture out of his mind, and settled back in a corner. There were the good things, such as the evidence of Z5’s concentration on him and on the problem. Palfrey’s name was legendary, and everything Carr knew about the man was supporting evidence for that legend.
    They reached Oxford Street, then Park Lane, bowled fast alongside the Park, the noise different now because of greater speed but still very loud. Hyde Park Corner was a mass of slow-moving traffic,