Confessor (7 page)

After that, he thought of Myfanwy whenever he saw Carole, even after she and Gus came out of the closet, went through the wormwood and gall of Gus’s divorce—and the sweetness of their marriage. He heard it now:

Were you a prefect and head of your dormit’ry?

Were you a hockey girl, tennis or gym?

Who was your favorite? Who had a crush on you?

Which were the baths where they taught you to swim?

“Carole. Come on. Is Herb, come to talk. Let’s talk this horror through, Carole. I loved him as well.”

Another step forward.

Then what sardines in the half-lighted passages!

Locking of fingers in long hide and seek.

You will protect me, my silken Myfanwy,

Ringleader, tom-boy, and chum to the weak.

“Carole. I’m your friend. No need to explain to me. Let’s talk, yes?”

Her shoulders moved first—a little rising and falling—then her arm went up and a hand felt in the air behind her, as though trying to cling to something. Herb took another pace, grasped the hand, heard her choke and, with the daintiness given only to big men, swung around the side of the settee and held her sobbing body in his arms.

Old Herb; Herb the comforter; Herb, always there when you needed him; Herb the hero, blubbing away with her. Friend and wife, weeping together over the death of friend and husband, appalled at the knowledge that life was not fair. He enfolded her small body in his bearlike arms and waited for the storm of tears to pass.

He did not know how long it lasted, but it felt like an hour before Carole was all wept out, with her body just twitching occasionally, like the corpse of an animal in spasm long after death.

“Carole, I’ll find them. You know that. My job now. Find the buggers who did it to him.”

She slowly disentangled herself from him and looked up, her face a wreck with tears and the horror of it all; the disbelief still there deep in her eyes.

“Why, Herb?”

“Why not, my dear? Is how I always tried to reconcile these things. Why me? Why not? Is the answer to all life’s riddles.”

“Gus was …” she began, then took the handkerchief he offered, plunging her face into it as though it were a towel. Then: “Gus was everything. You know that, Herb? For me, everything. Gus was my father, my brother, friend, lover, the whole thing rolled into one. God knows I’m liberated enough. Fought for women’s bloody rights like a tiger. You know that, but this is something I can’t deny to myself or anyone else. Gus was a reason for me. He was safety. Peace.”

“I know, like I know what this is like. I had my share.”

“But who in hell, Herb? Who’d want …?”

“Possibly terrorists, love. Gus had his moments with terrorists, yes?”

She nodded. Silent. Not really believing it.

“That’s the Office line, and there’s truth in it.” He sought, almost frantically, for words. “Look, Carole, I got to ask you a couple of things, and time … time … well, is important.”

“Yes.” Not looking at him. The sound dead on her lips.

“Gus,” he said. “Gus, did he use a Zippo?”

“A Zippo?”

“A Zippo. Lighter for his cigarettes or pipe.”

“He only smoked a pipe, and he always said you should light a pipe with matches. Pipes and cigars, he said. Matches always. Used those Swan Vesta things.”

“Ah. Then did he carry a Zippo?”

She looked up at him, sly. “Yes. A joke. I gave it to him a couple of Christmases ago. In his stocking. Zippo with the KGB crest on it.”

“And he carried that?”

“Said it was his lucky Zippo.” Her voice cracked.

Herb swung in before she could start crying again. “And a little pin, like a badge? Did he wear a little badge in his lapel? I never saw him wear one.”

“Yes, sometimes. Yes, he wore a little badge.”

“What was it?”

The pause was a shade too long and the answer a mite too fast. “British Legion, I think. I never looked properly.”

He did not believe it and, for a fraction, wondered if Carole was simply a very good actress. He dismissed the idea, nodding and repeating, “British Legion. Okay.”

“Why?”

“You know why, Carole.”

Again the silent nod.

“I got news for you,” he started again. “We’re all in some danger. Could be anyway, if it
was
terrorists. Particularly Middle East.”

“Danger?” she repeated, still flat, the voice dead like her eyes.

“The Office says you got to move out. Go down to the Guest Quarters. Stay there for a while. They’re sending people to keep you company.”

“I have to leave here?”

“You’ll only be a ten-minute walk away. It’s just for the time being. They’ll let you come back and stay.”

“I have to leave my …It has everything here. All of Gus is …Oh, yes, sorry, Herb. They want you to go through the place. Toss it? Isn’t that the word they use?”

“I’ll only be going through the notes and manuscript. His book. Not going to toss the place. But you need to be out. There
is
serious danger, Carole.”

“Truth. Cross your heart and hope to …”

His hand clamped around her wrist. Just a squeeze of comfort again and she began to cry once more, burying her head in his shoulder. Christ, Herbie thought, I need time, a lot of time, with this one. I need a couple of days minimum. Maybe more.

Presently she said that she really did understand. Saw the wisdom of it. “Can I get some things together? Is there time for that?”

“Sure. Also I’d like to see where Gus was working. Where he kept his manuscript and research notes. This is
very
important, the manuscript.”

She nodded. “He wanted to call it
Ask No Questions and You’ll Get No Lies
, but the publishers didn’t like it. Then he tried
A Question of Fact
. They didn’t like that either.” She rose and he had to steady her with his hand, but she pushed him away.

“Bitsy’ll help you get your things together.”

“I’ll show you where Gus worked.” She started towards the door.

“Oh, one small thing, Carole.”

She turned, eyebrows raised in query.

“Why was he in Salisbury that night?”

“Gus?”

“Of course Gus.”

She gave a little shake of the head. “Had a meeting. I don’t know who it was. Except for the times we worked together on interrogations, I never asked details. He still behaved as though he were working for the Office. You know? He took all the right precautions. Said he had to see someone in Salisbury, so I didn’t ask.”

“What did you suspect?”

“I …” she began, then stopped short. Jamming on the brakes, Herbie thought. “I had a feeling that it was an old client.” She completed the sentence as if it had just come into her head.

“An old client?”

“Someone who had been through his personal wringer, yes.”

“Like me? I been through both your personal wringers.”

“No, not like you, Herb. It was just an impression. You know how it is when you live with someone a long time. You get a kind of ESP. I thought he was meeting someone he caught out along the road.”

“What gave you that idea?”

“Just the way he was so casual about going to Salisbury. I didn’t think it was altogether kosher.”

“Could’ve been another woman?”

“No.” Firm and uncompromising. “There were never any other women. I promise you that.”

Bitsy awaited them in the hall. She stood by the front door, well back from the room in which they had talked. Above them they could hear Ginger roaming around, getting the geography, which was his job.

The hall was large, with doors to the left and right and a passage that ran along the right side of the staircase to a very big room that occupied almost the whole of the rear of the house. Short passages lay to the left and right of this rather bare room. On the left the kitchen; on the right Gus’s study.

She left him at the door. “Please tell Bitsy which are the best rooms for us to sleep in,” he asked her. “We’re not here to pry, Carole.”

“I know.” A wan, sad smile and a “Thanks, Herb,” and she was off to pack a case and go underground, where the defectors used to live in the days that were now history.

About an hour later, two heavies from the Office arrived—Kenny Boyden and Mickey Crichton—together with a nurse whose name he could not put to the face. Pru something, he thought. Carole was going to be well looked after.

In New York the cell had made themselves very comfortable. They had two apartments next door to each other in a service building about two grades down from Trump Tower. This building was on Park Avenue, near the corner of Park and East Forty-eighth, and the apartments made them very happy for they were luxurious affairs full of comfortable furniture, kitchen appliances, Jacuzzis and the latest stereo equipment. No one would have blamed the New York cell for sitting back and doing very little.

They split the team in two, two men and one girl in each apartment—Walid, Samih and Khami in one; Awdah, Kayid and Jamilla in the other. Walid did not like sharing Khami with Samih but had no other option, for Samih was the cell’s leader, a very mature thirty-eight, with long hair and a taste for beautiful clothes: Armani suits and silk shirts. A man of the world and a carrier of death. It was said that he had originally been trained in one of the famous Libyan camps. Certainly he could put together a bomb that would not fail. Awdah and Kayid were, Walid thought, mere boys, in their early twenties. But they were boys who knew the discipline of the field. They were also devoted to Samih and would die for him as quickly as they would face death from the Leader of their country.

Both Khami and Jamilla were not simply women to be used like whores; they had already proved themselves to be tenacious fighters and they feared nothing, so they were treated with respect. Because the girls both knew exactly what was expected of them, neither ever turned down the sexual advances of the males.

They were both attractive, particularly succulent in Western clothes: Khami had dark hair, which she had cut short into a bubble of curls; she was also not as tall as Jamilla, who was blessed with long raven hair which hung, shining, to her shoulders. Both were dark-eyed and—like the men—had paler skin than was normal for their countrymen. To be truthful, there was a spirit of competition between the two, and this was fanned by the fact that Jamilla had obtained most of the documents that allowed all of them to live in peace, without fear of the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

During her three years at Duke University, Jamilla had posed as the daughter of a wealthy Jewish doctor and had pulled the whole thing off magnificently. She had assistance, of course, from her country’s intelligence people. The doctor was completely fictitious, though his name and address showed up on the federal computers. He even paid his federal and states taxes, and on one occasion a member of her backup group had come to the university posing as her father.

Jamilla had seduced a high-ranking official of the INS, and her backup team had sprung the honey trap so that it looked as though the man—who was married to money—were in as much danger as Jamilla. The team had extorted various visas and passport stamps, which were eventually used by
Intiqam
.

When they had completed the entire job, the INS man had been involved in a road accident that left his wife a widow. They knew things were completely safe when the widow married again within a year.

On the evening that Big Herbie Kruger had arrived at Warminster, Samih called a meeting of the cell in the apartment he occupied with Walid and Khami. They sat around on pillows and spoke English as usual. Part of their briefing had stressed that they should never lapse into their native tongue.

Samih began by telling them how lucky they were to have been appointed to the United States. “I prefer doing the work here rather than in Europe,” he began, going on to explain that Europe was attuned to freedom fighters or revenge squads. “Their security agencies are more active, and their police are constantly aware. They can read the signs of our kind of activity as a blind man reads braille. We must pray for our brothers and sisters who work in that hostile environment.”

He talked for some time about the way people in the United States were of the opinion that so-called terrorist activities could never happen on a large scale. He told them that during the war their beefed-up security measures lasted only a minimum amount of time. “For instance, they suspended curbside check-in of airline baggage during the time they called Desert Shield and Desert Storm, but lifted this ordinance almost before the war was over.” He spoke about the strict checks made on people who flew out of the United States—particularly on British Airways and El Al—yet the folly that surrounded other measures.

“There was panic for a few days after that bungled bombing attempt at the World Trade Center in New York in February of ’93. But when no other attempts took place, the man in the street shrugged and took no real precautions. It would have been very different in Europe.” He nodded. “Also, the media here is less sophisticated than in countries which have been subject to righteous attacks by freedom fighters. After the World Trade Center bombing, the media announced, on live television, that certain suspects were about to be arrested, giving the suspects time to escape. Here the media has no conception of security.”

He then said that, because of this, they would be apt to take chances, reminding them that in the Trade Center incident the various agencies had got their hands on the culprits relatively quickly. “In spite of being lax in some ways, the American police force, the FBI, CIA and others were dogged in the apprehension of suspects. We must not forget that.”

Then he began to speak of the next targets they would attack. This time they would use the Semtex explosive that had been smuggled into the country almost two years before their mission. “Tomorrow.” He smiled with pleasure. “Tomorrow the Americans will hear explosions.”

During the next twenty-four hours a car bomb exploded in the center of Manhattan, during the rush hour, while a briefcase bomb shut down a portion of the subway for three days. There were forty deaths and over one hundred and fifty injured, some maimed for life.