Absolute Friends (47 page)

One writer, from the _New York Times,__ knew above all others that there was. Under a sworn oath of secrecy, she said, she had received her story straight from the horse's mouth: an American Intelligence professional as modest as he is elusive, the acknowledged mastermind who had single-handedly brought Sasha and his British accomplice to justice. No physical or other description of this fine operative was vouchsafed by the gushing journalist, beyond the revelation that he was tall, rather formal in his manner and "the kind of man I just _dream__ of being taken out to dinner by, and never am."

Sasha habitually spoke of the desert as his _wilderness,__ this superhero had confided to her: "You may think I'm crazy, Sally, but I personally am convinced that while Sasha was out there in what he called his _wilderness,__ he underwent some kind of very yucky, self-induced religious conversion. Okay, he was an atheist. But he was a reverend's son and he hallucinated. Maybe he used drugs, though I have no direct evidence of that," he added, speaking as a man who takes the truth seriously.

But it was Ted Mundy who put their penetrative powers to the test. It was the Pakistan-born public-school cricketer, son of a soldier, Oxford dropout, Berlin anarchist, British Council flunky, failed teacher and Muslim sympathizer, who received the full benefit of the dissectors' knives. One tabloid even went in pursuit of the dog called Mo. _MO--OR MAO?__ it screamed, and for a couple of issues Mo became the canine equivalent of Citizen Kane's Rosebud.

Much quiet compassion was lavished on Mundy's ex-wife Kate, New Labor's ambitious member for Doncaster Trent, now happily wedded to one of the party's leading backroom policy makers, but with her shining future suddenly uncertain.

"Though our marriage lasted eleven years, it was in reality short-lived," said Kate, reluctantly facing the cameras on her second husband's arm to read a prepared statement. "There was never any overt friction. Ted was a loving man in his way, but very secretive. For most of the time we were together his thoughts were a complete mystery to me, as I am afraid they will be today to many people round the world. I cannot begin to explain how he became what he apparently became. I never heard him speak of Sasha. I was totally unaware of his political activities while he was studying in Berlin."

Jake, standing at her other side, was even briefer. "My mother and I are extremely distressed and confused," he declared through his tears. "We ask you to respect our grief as we struggle to come to terms with this tragedy." And in a grammatical solecism that must have had Mundy spinning in his grave: "As my natural father, I shall always feel there is a hole in my life I can never fill."

Gradually, however, under the intense scrutiny of commentators, Mundy the closet terrorist was winkled out of his shell.

His early obsession with Islam was confirmed by school contemporaries: _Mundy insisted on referring to school chapel as the mosque,__ said one.

So was his angry nature. One former schoolmate referred to the near-manic ferocity of his fast bowling: _He was just so f***ing aggressive__ (_Daily Mail__).

Another shed light on his unhealthy preoccupation with anything German. _There was an old chap who taught cello and German. He called himself Mallory. Some of the boys reckoned he was a Nazi in hiding. Ted made an absolute beeline for him. He used to spout German poetry at us until we told him to belt up.__

A leaked American intelligence report revealed that, during an unexplained period of residence in Taos, New Mexico, Mundy had formed a relationship with two Soviet agents presently serving prison sentences: the notorious Bernie Luger, who used his cover as a painter to obtain photographs of U. S. defense facilities in the Nevada desert, and his Cuban accomplice, Nita.

Speculation about how the British Council had come to employ someone with a West Berlin police record of mob violence and no university degree led to calls for a public inquiry.

Murmurings that Mundy had maintained secret contact with "cultural attachés" from Communist embassies in London were not directly denied by the Council's spokesman. _WHY THE HELL DIDN'T THEY SACK HIM?__ a tabloid demanded, over a disturbing statement from one of Mundy's former colleagues: _Ted was a total drone. None of us understood how he survived. All he did was work the Commie arts circuit and sit about drinking coffee in the canteen.__

The bouncer of a Soho strip club claimed to recognize his photograph. _I'd know him anywhere. Big, gangly bloke, one of the overfriendly ones. Give me the grubby mackintosh brigade anytime.__

But for the final clue to this complex man, it was widely agreed, the world would have to wait until the woman Zara, a retired prostitute and Mundy's common-law wife in Munich, could be persuaded to reveal her story. British checkbook journalists were already storming the prison outside Ankara.

Zara, who significantly had fled to Turkey with her eleven-year-old son on the very day of the siege, was arrested on arrival and was presently being questioned. There was speculation that the Americans had only allowed her to return to her homeland because Turkish interrogation methods were known to be robust. She had arrived in Germany as the bride of a Turkish laborer now in a Berlin jail serving a seven-year sentence for aggravated assault. Zara herself was described as religiously observant, intelligent, near-silent and strong-willed. The imam of her mosque in Munich, who was being held indefinitely under investigative detention, insisted that she was "no sort of fanatic," but this view was challenged by one of her co-religionists, who refused to be named. _She's the type we must purge from our community as we progress into the twenty-first century.__ It was later learned that Zara had borrowed a coat from her, and failed to return it before she left for Turkey.

Recent reports from Turkish police sources indicated that Zara, though a tough nut to crack, was beginning to see the wisdom of cooperating with the forces of justice.

So it was inevitable, once the mainstream media on both sides of the Atlantic had beaten their brains out solving the question of how Britain and Germany could have spawned two such heinous characters, that the usual Alternative Voices should have their irritating day.

The most prominent was to be found on a not-for-profit Web site pledged to transparency in politics. The offending article was entitled THE SECOND BURNING OF THE REICHSTAG--THE AMERICAN RIGHTISTS' CONSPIRACRY AGAINST CONSPIRACY AGAINST DEMOCRACY, and its author was described as a long-serving field operative of British Intelligence who had recently resigned his post and was writing "at risk of his pension and even prosecution." The main plank of the article was that the entire siege, like Hitler's notorious burning of the Reichstag, was a sham, perpetrated by what he termed "agents of a self-elected junta of Washington neoconservative theologians close to the presidential throne." The two dead men were as innocent of their trumped-up crimes as was poor Van der Lubbe, the Reichstag's alleged arsonist.

Signing himself ARNOLD--whether as a surname, first name or cover name was not vouchsafed, though the use of capitals suggested the last--the writer identified "a shadowy former coperative of the CIA" as the creator of the deception, and Sasha and Mundy as his sacrificial victims. The accused man, referred to by ARNOLD with the letter J and described as a "latter-day born-again Christian of Irish-American descent," was regarded by the orthodox intelligence community as a dangerous maverick.

J's unholy accomplice in the "Second Burning" was an equally unsavory Georgian-Russian known only as DIMITRI, a professional agent provocateur and intelligence peddler with pretensions as a poet and failed actor. Having worked--sometimes concurrently--for the KGB, the CIA and the Deuxième Bureau, he was presently living in Montana under the Witness Protection Act as a reward for providing details of a bomb attack on an American Air Force base which he himself had inspired.

The same ARNOLD further claimed that while Downing Street officials had refused to be party to advance details of the "Second Burning," they had made clear in off-the-record conversations with their Washington partners that they would welcome any initiative that silenced once and for all Franco-German carping at America's conduct of the War Against Terrorism, not to mention Britain's.

As evidence of this he pointed to the so-called Heidelberg-Sorbonne Axis of Evil so beloved of the British right-wing press, and the witch hunt mounted by those who wished to name and shame the "freethinking" French and German intellectuals featured in Sasha's now notorious lists of "mind poisoners" (_Daily Telegraph__) who had willingly signed up (according to the same newspaper) to "indoctrinate impressionable minds in the three R's of pseudo-liberalism: Radicalism, Revolution and Revenge."

ARNOLD's fulminations became wilder as his article ran on. Ted Mundy may have looked like an ex-British Council deadbeat, he wrote, but he was an unsung hero of the Cold War, and his friend Sasha was another. Together, the two men had over a number of years supplied the Western Alliance with priceless intelligence on the Communist threat. ARNOLD even maintained that Mundy was the holder of a secretly awarded British gallantry medal, a claim promptly denied by palace sources.

And as a _bonne bouche,__ ARNOLD alleged that J, by means of a sophisticated smokescreen of proxies, was the sole shareholder of a security company specializing in bulletproof cars, personal protection and survival counseling for prominent Americans in the corporate and entertainment fields who were contemplating a trip to terrorist-stricken Europe. The same company owned the copyright in the only piece of video footage of the siege ever to appear. This showed a posse of unidentifiable heroes in full antiterror rig storming through clouds of Hollywood smoke across the roof of the school building. In the background, just distinguishable between the chimney pots, lies the body of the Euro-terrorist Sasha, shot dead in the very act of flight. Medics are running over the cobbles towards him; a battered briefcase lies beside him. The clip, run and rerun on every television station in the world, had earned millions of dollars for its owner.

Downing Street's reaction to the ARNOLD piece was appropriately contemptuous. If ARNOLD exists, let him come forward and his allegations will be looked into. More likely, the offending article was the work of rogue elements of British Intelligence whose evident aim was to discredit New Labor and undermine Britain's Special Relationship with the United States. The Downing Street spokesman urged his audience to address larger issues such as real world outcomes, step-changes and effectuality indicators. The _Daily Mail__ carried a searing attack on the "latest whistle-blower to emerge from the shadows of the secret world" and pondered darkly on the hidden agenda of "closet saboteurs of our nation's good name, masquerading as its protectors."

Summing up the whole tawdry affair, a well-placed and reliable senior official with access to the highest levels of government was reported as saying that some people these days were getting a bit too George Orwell for their own health. He was referring, of course, not to Downing Street or Washington, but to the spies.

The political consequences of the siege were not slow to manifest themselves. Sasha's prediction that an Islamist-inspired Euro-anarchist outrage on German soil would have its citizens rushing to the shelter of their American Big Brother was no exaggeration. At first, the Social Democratic German chancellor evinced a churlish reluctance to take the point. An early statement actually contested the _tendentious and premature conclusions__ of the German right, which since the night of the siege had assumed a substantial lead in the polls. Realizing that he was running counter to popular opinion, he was, however, forced to change tack, first by announcing an independent investigation by German agencies, then by lamenting that his country, having played unwitting host to several of the perpetrators of 9/11, should _apparently have been selected as the showplace for further senseless acts of violence against our American friends.__

For his conservative critics the statement was insufficiently abject. Why wait a full week before speaking out? they demanded to know. Why bother with an independent investigation when the evidence is there for every idiot to see? And what's this weaselly _apparently__ that has crept into the text? Go down on your knees, Mr. Chancellor! Grovel! Have you looked at Germany's bank statements recently? Don't you know that America will only do business with its _friends?__ Don't you realize they still hate us for siding with the French and Russians over Iraq? And now _this,__ for God's sake!

But in the end, all was well. The chancellor did everything short of sending Washington his head on a charger. The Bundestag's opposition parties joined the chorus. The dire fiscal punishments threatened by the U. S. administration were deferred on the understanding that the federal government would adopt a more helpful attitude in "the next stage of the war on terror," by which was clearly meant Iran. A further understanding--implicit if not stated--was that the federal government, God willing, would by that time be a conservative one.

Sasha was right too about the Frankfurt stock exchange, which after a period in the doldrums recovered its spirits. A gleeful columnist of Germany's powerful right-wing press boasted that Günter Grass was more prescient than he knew when he declared that we are all Americans now.

Only France, truculent as ever, refused to be moved by her neighbor's display of self-flagellation. An unnamed spokesman for French Intelligence pronounced the list of French left-wing academics supposedly linked to "the Heidelberg school of Euro-terror" to be "an Anglo-Saxon phantasm." The integrity of France's fabled thinkers and academics would remain unscathed. A statement by a French presidential spokeswoman to the effect that "the entire episode reeked of news manipulation of the most amateurish kind" was dismissed as particularly arrogant. More bottles of French wine were poured down American drains, french fries became freedom fries, and the Tricolor was ceremoniously burned in the streets of Washington.