The Devil's Breath (16 page)

‘Have you been in Germany long?’ he said.

‘All my life.’

‘Are you German?’

‘Yes.’

‘Truly?’

She looked sideways at him, the smile still on her face. There were traces of his own accent in her English. ‘Truly,’ she said.

Telemann looked at her for a moment, an answering smile, aware of how naïve his question must have seemed, an abrupt breach of protocol. There were moves you didn’t make in these situations, things you didn’t say, and one of them was ‘Truly?’ ‘Truly?’ was an act of unpardonable intimacy. It was a casting-aside of the make-believe, and the double names, and the elaborate cover, the bluffs and the counter-bluffs. It was a reaching-out, an act of exhaustion, perhaps even despair, and the girl knew it.

Telemann turned away and broke off another square of chocolate. They were way past the inner German border now, the frontier posts empty and abandoned, part of an older, colder Europe. He put the chocolate into his mouth, letting it melt slowly, savouring the rich, bitter taste. Last time he’d been this way, the autobahn had been empty, the odd Trabant, the occasional convoy of squat trucks out on manoeuvres from one of the huge army camps that dotted the flat wooded country that stretched east, towards Poland. Now, though, the traffic had thickened. West German plates. Hamburg. Lübeck. Dusseldorf. Speeding clots of BMWs, nose to tail, businessmen in dark suits, jowly, unsmiling, pushing 180 k.p.h. on the broken
asphalt, West German fingers in the East German pie. Telemann watched them hurrying past and shook his head, a wistful smile.

‘
Die sind ja verrückt
,’ he said softly.

‘
Sprechen sie Deutsch
?’

‘
Ja
.’ Telemann closed his eyes and yawned. ‘
Ja
. But I prefer English.’

‘OK.’

The car slowed for a moment, then the girl fed in the throttle again and they were back at cruising speed, the tyres thrumming on the road. Telemann swallowed the last of the chocolate, letting it trickle slowly down his throat. He felt curiously lightheaded. It wasn’t an unpleasant sensation.

‘Why are we going to Halle?’ he said.

The girl said nothing for a moment. Then she glanced in the mirror. ‘You have to meet someone else.’

‘Who says I do?’ Telemann opened one eye. ‘Who says I have to meet this person?’ The girl looked at him for a moment, an almost imperceptible movement of her head. In profile, she belonged on the cover of a magazine. She had a classic beauty, fine-boned, generations in the making. Telemann wondered about her mother, her grandmother, where she’d really come from. She didn’t look Jewish, but that didn’t mean a thing.

‘Tell me,’ he said softly. ‘Tell me why you’re here.’

She frowned. ‘I’m here to take you to Halle,’ she said.

‘Why?’

‘Because you want to go.’

‘Do I?’

‘Yes.’ She looked at him again. ‘You have to go. If you’re serious.’

‘And am I? Am I serious?’

‘Yes.’

‘How do you know?’

She shook her head, emphatic, looking away. He’d snared her into this pointless exchange, and she was irritated enough to let it show. Telemann said nothing for at least a kilometre. On the horizon, away to the right, he could see a curl of smoke from a factory chimney. Otherwise there was nothing but pine trees and the huge blue bowl of the sky. He thought, briefly,
about Emery, and Juanita, and the offices on ‘F’ Street. Soon, he knew, he should find a phone, check in, start the wheels turning on the German, Klausmann. All he had so far was a three-hour story, carefully stage-managed, and some fancy stuff about Iraqi links with the East German chemical industry. It was promising enough for starters, but there had to be a whole lot more. He looked at the girl again. She’d taken off the Ray-Bans. Her eyes were green.

‘There’s a name we ought to mention,’ she said, her voice low, her eyes back on the road now. ‘You’ve probably heard of him,’ she said carefully. ‘His name’s Wulf.’

Telemann blinked, staring at her, pure disbelief. ‘Otto Wulf?’

She nodded again. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Otto Wulf. He kept a mistress in Halle. We’re expected at seven.’

*

The note and the Polaroid arrived at 10 Downing Street within an hour of the call from the House of Commons. Ross, as it happened, was privy to both.

The conversation with the MP had been brief. The man had managed to find an empty office. Expecting to be interrupted at any moment, he’d kept the details to a minimum. Listening, Ross had drawn a pad towards him, noting the key points as they emerged. A five-gallon drum of chemical had gone missing from a waste disposal warehouse near Newbury. Overnight tests suggested that the contents might be nerve gas. One man had already died in an incident associated with the drum but knowledge of the analysis results was – as far as the MP understood the situation – still limited to the managing director and one other member of the firm. So far, they’d decided against contacting the police, believing that the public interest – for the time being at least – might be better served by keeping the news in the family. As a board member, the MP agreed with the managing director that the issue was complex. Waste management was a growth industry, and Dispozall was a leader in the field. The company was currently pitching for a major contract overseas. Jobs and exports must be weighed against the obvious risk to public safety. It was a difficult balance to strike. Hence the call to Downing Street.

Ross, listening, understood at once that the issues didn’t stop at jobs and exports. Nerve gas was a phrase that would sell a great many newspapers. Any system of waste disposal that permitted 5 gallons of the stuff simply to disappear was clearly flawed. The Government, inevitably, would have to shoulder the ultimate blame, and with the country on the verge of a major war the political consequences would be, to put it mildly, tricky. But what, in God’s name, had happened to the missing drum?

Now, the door locked, Ross gazed down at the polaroid. It had been hand-delivered to the police sergeant at the gates of Downing Street some forty minutes earlier. It had come in a plain brown envelope, together with a note, plus a photocopy of a single sheet of paper. The envelope had been addressed to the Prime Minister. In accordance with standard procedures, it had been screened in a small private office in the basement of Downing Street, then added to the pile of other mail in one of the wire trays regularly emptied by the messengers. The word ‘Personal’ in neat capitals on the envelope’s top left-hand corner meant it qualified for Ross’s attention.

Ross picked up the Polaroid. The photograph showed a red drum. On the drum was a skull and crossbones and the single word ‘Poison’. Ross studied the Polaroid a moment longer and then turned to the note. The message, on a single sheet of white A4 paper, was handwritten in brown ink. Across the top, underlined, was the name of an organization he didn’t recognize. ‘AAA’ went the careful capitals, ‘Action Against Armageddon’. Ross scribbled the name on his pad, then read the message. The message was simple. It invited the Prime Minister to read the attached list of companies, together with the numbers, dates and details of the export certificates granted by the Department of Trade and Industry. It then suggested that she refer back to a series of recent speeches in which she had denounced Saddam Hussein and the war-machine with which he was now threatening the entire Middle East.

Frowning, Ross turned to the photocopy. It offered a carefully typed list of companies. Beside each company was a list of goods cleared for export. His eye ran down the list. One
company, in the Home Counties, had exported 100 grams of depleted uranium. Another, in the West Midlands, several consignments of gun-ranging equipment. A third, in the North-East, had shipped several thousand gallons of a chemical called thiodyl chloride. At the bottom of the list, under ‘Destination’, was the single word ‘Iraq’.

Ross read the note again, looking for some hint, a ransom demand, or a motive to explain the abrupt arrival of these carefully tabulated hypocrisies. But there was nothing, simply the invitation to read, and absorb, and consider. That, and the terrifying implications of the polaroid. Ross, who admired understatement, gazed at the photograph. The shot was badly lit, the colour far from perfect, but if it was the same drum he’d learned about that very morning, then the folk from ‘Action Against Armageddon’ could name their price. The political damage implicit in the export list was awesome, an epitaph for any government, while the public order consequences of five stray gallons of nerve gas defied imagination.

Ross studied the Polaroid a moment longer, thinking of the video locked away in the filing cabinet. There had to be a connection. Had to be. Reaching for the phone, he dialled the Department of Trade and Industry and spoke briefly to a contact he trusted in the Export Guarantee section. He read him the listed companies at dictation speed. The voice at the other end chuckled, unsurprised, and promised to call back. Ross thanked him, put the phone down and reached for the polaroid again. Then he leaned back in his chair and gazed out of the window. Before the reorganization, he’d had a fine view of Horse Guards and the plump reaches of St James’s Park. Now, though technically more senior, he could see nothing but a newly painted fire escape and a brick wall. He waited a moment longer, wondering whether – for once – it might be better to go through channels, to assign this whole sorry business to the proper agencies. But then he looked at the note again and knew that the old instincts were always the best, and that twelve years in power had proved it. Keep it tight. Keep it private. Trust only those who owe you.

He picked up the phone again and dialled a number from
memory. ‘Godfrey,’ he said pleasantly, when the number answered, ‘something else has turned up.’

*

By late afternoon, his first day in Tel Aviv, McVeigh had located the flat.

It lay in a side-street at the edge of the old town of Jaffa, part of a low-rise block, four storeys of concrete and sandstone facings, shuttered windows and tiny balconies cantilevered out over the busy pavement below. Number seven belonged to Yakov Arendt, the name neatly typed beneath the bell-push on the security phone beside the common entrance on the street.

McVeigh tried the bell through the early evening, watching the entrance from the hire car, parked 50 metres down the street. He rang the bell every half-hour, in case Cela had been sleeping, or perhaps in with a neighbour. Getting no reply, he’d saunter back down the street, smelling the hot, dusty Levantine smells from the open-air cafés, the smells of kebab and fresh mint, the babble of voices from the men bent over tiny glasses of Turkish coffee, the foreign tourists out on the street, monied, wary, sauntering carefully by. One or two of them, McVeigh noted, carried gas masks, slung from their belts or looped casually over one shoulder. Already they’d become almost a fashion accessory, the badge of a certain kind of commitment. Tel Aviv, they said. September ’90. Ground Zero.

Back in the car, McVeigh kept a log of comings and goings from the apartment block: a young single woman who hurried up the street and disappeared inside without a backward glance, an older couple who stepped out of a big blue Peugeot taxi and couldn’t find their key, a mother with a young child who spent an age trying to collapse her buggy. Each time someone new arrived, McVeigh watched carefully, counting the seconds between the moment when they pushed in through the big glass front door and their reappearance two or three storeys up, throwing open the doors on to the balcony, watering a plant on the kitchen window-sill, pulling a curtain or two, or – when darkness began to fall – turning on a light. By midnight, McVeigh had accounted for all but two of the flats. One, on the second floor, was still empty, the curtains drawn, no lights
inside. The other, on the top floor, was also dark, no evidence of movement, no response to the bell-push down at street level. In all there were eight flats. Which meant that number seven was probably the one at the top.

McVeigh, finishing his second kebab of the evening, knew he’d have to break in. Already, he’d studied the adjoining buildings. On the seaward side, separated by the width of a narrow alley, was a low, two-storey tenement, converted at street level to a shoe shop. The distance between the two buildings was modest enough, but the separate roof heights ruled the place out. On the other side, though, there was a taller building, five storeys at least, and although the roof looked tricky, it was physically attached to Yakov’s apartment block. At street level, the place housed a restaurant, place-set tables visible inside a long picture window, tapestries on the walls, fancy prices on the handwritten menu pinned to the board beside the entrance.

At dusk, the street nicely shadowed, McVeigh had wandered around the back of the restaurant, gazing up at the rough brickwork, noting the hand-holds, the line of the drain-pipes, and the single route upwards that would shield him from the view of the adjoining buildings. The simplest solution, by far, would have been to scale the back of Yakov’s apartment block, but it was overlooked by at least two other buildings. If it was to work at all, then it had to be next door, up the back of the restaurant, and a couple of minutes’ careful study told McVeigh that it might just be possible.

At two in the morning, the hire car parked in a cul-de-sac near the harbour, McVeigh walked back to the apartment. He’d stripped down to a dark blue T-shirt and a pair of old jeans. On his feet he wore a pair of newish Reeboks, cut high round the ankle, and he’d french-chalked his hands. Wrapped in a handkerchief in his pocket were the two tools he’d need to get into Yakov’s flat. The big double doors from the balcony looked the safest route.

Outside the apartment block, as a precaution, he tried the entry-phone a final time, blowing the french chalk off the plastic bell-push and waiting for the voice that never came. As
certain as he could be that the flat was empty, he shrugged ostentatiously and sauntered off, walking the length of the street before turning left again, and picking his way back through the warren of houses. The rear of the block was in darkness. The restaurant next door was shuttered and silent.