The Devil's Breath (8 page)

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah.’

Telemann closed his eyes again. They had three kids, all adopted. They’d tried for their own and failed. They’d had tests, both of them, and when the physicians finally confirmed that it was Telemann’s fault, some problem with his sperm-count, they’d thought seriously about never having kids at all. But the marriage had matured and deepened, a big warm feeling, utterly secure, and they’d both wanted to share it, to spread the good news around a little, and so they’d gone to an agency and opened their lives to the counsellor, and waited a year or two and finally gotten a plump little half-caste called Martha. Two years later, from a slum in Detroit, came Jamie. Then Bree. At times, like any family, it had been difficult, and tiring, and chaotic. But never more than that. Until now.

Telemann opened one eye again, looking up. Laura was standing beside the bed. She’d taken off her jacket and was loosening the belt on her jeans. She began to take them off, wriggling out of them, kicking her sandals into the middle of the room. Then she pulled the singlet over her head and stood by the bed, looking down. She had wide shoulders, big breasts. She was beautifully made. Telemann watched her, the old excitement, his woman.

‘Is it me?’ he said. ‘Or are you hot?’

She didn’t look at him, didn’t answer. She knelt on the bed beside him, half-smile, busy fingers, and began to unbutton his
shirt down to the navel, her hands on his belly, teasing downwards, loosening the zip in his trousers, easing them off. He heard them fall softly to the floor. Then she was over him again, pulling down the cover of the bed, the sheets beneath, slipping out of her knickers, straddling him backwards, her head between his thighs, her hands beneath him. Naked, they made love, a long, wordless half-hour, lapping and sucking and nibbling on the big cool bed. Afterwards, her head on his shoulder, she traced the line of his upper lip with her forefinger.

‘Pete phoned,’ she said quietly.

Telemann nodded. Peter Emery was a friend from the Agency. He headed a section in the Analytic Directorate at Langley. He was brilliant, and gentle, and played the piano with a rare grace. Laura trusted him completely, an anchor for her errant husband.

Telemann looked down at her. ‘And?’

‘He said you’d been fired.’

‘What?’

‘He said you were out. He said he hoped we were coping.’ She paused. ‘He said he was sorry.’

Telemann was up on one elbow, blinking. ‘Fired?’ he said. ‘When?’

‘Yesterday.’ She looked up at him. ‘So why didn’t you tell me?’

‘Because I didn’t know.’

He looked at her for a moment longer, wondering whether to pursue it now, get through to Emery on the private line, find out what was really happening. Then he remembered Sullivan, the last time they’d spoken, the terms they were offering, the way the job had to be framed. Out of channels, the man had said. Totally freelance. Totally deniable. No footprints. No paper chase. Not a single goddamn chalk-mark on a single fucking tree. He’d have a secure office and limitless back-up, but as far as the bureaucracies were concerned – State, Defense, NSA, FBI – Telemann was to become a non-person. He’d report directly to Sullivan and shed the rest of his professional life. At the time, preoccupied and slightly awed by the scale of
the assignment, Telemann had simply agreed. That it might mean the formal end of his CIA days hadn’t occurred to him. It was like waking up to snow in August. It was slightly unreal.

He looked at Laura again. ‘You ask why they fired me?’

Laura nodded. ‘Sure.’

‘He tell you?’

‘Yeah. He said you’d written some stuff about the Agency, why it screwed up so much. He said he’d read it. He said it was excellent. The exact word he used was sensational.’

Telemann nodded. His eight months at Langley had given him a focus for all his professional frustrations. For a decade, out in the field, he’d wondered why so many initiatives went wrong. Millions of dollars, thousands of man-hours, and important, indefinable things like loyalty and courage, all wasted, just piss in the wind. As a taxpayer, at the very least, he’d been obliged to act –
my
money,
my
effort. And so he’d named names, detailed specific operations, provided dates, locations, supporting evidence. After a day’s pause for thought, he’d sealed the twenty-odd pages of typescript in a plain brown envelope and sent it to a top aide at the White House. Not via the mail-room at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, but by hand, after dark, to the man’s home address. Afterwards, sitting in the car on a leafy street in north-west Washington, Telemann had wondered where the gesture might lead. Now he knew.

‘Pete think I was dumb to do it?’

‘No …’ Laura hesitated.

‘What, then?’

‘He thought you were dumb to send it.’

Telemann nodded, rolling over, looking at her. ‘And you? What do you think?’

Laura smiled up at him, her face still flushed. Then the smile faded and the other look came back, the look he’d noticed when she first came in, careful, appraising, reserved.

‘Me?’ she said. ‘I don’t care whether they’ve fired you. Or what you’ve done. I’m just wondering why we aren’t all at the beach. If what Pete says is true.’

*

Godfrey Friedland toyed with his pencil, two-thirds of the way through the
Daily Telegraph
crossword, still wondering about McVeigh.

Ross had called mid-morning from the Private Office at Downing Street. The conversation, as ever, had been brisk. An associate from the Middle East would shortly be giving Friedland a ring. His name was Mr Al Zahra. He had substantial oil interests in the Gulf and elsewhere. He was incensed by the media coverage of the Queen’s Gate shooting, and by the general assumption that the blame lay with one or other of the Palestinian guerrilla groups. It was, he said, a gross slander, and he’d crossed his suite at the Dorchester and lifted the telephone to tell the Government so. Normally, the Private Office secretariat would have shrugged the complaint aside, but circumstances made that course of action unwise. Mr Al Zahra had a deep pocket. He was generous with political donations. It would be a shame to disappoint him.

Friedland had made a note of the name, recognizing it at once, and enquired what he should do. Ross had grunted impatiently and told him to service the Arab as best he could. Seventy-five thousand pounds, he reminded Friedland, was a lot of money. A sum like that could matter if the next election was as sticky as the Treasury was beginning to suggest. He’d ended the conversation by enquiring about progress on the report. The seventy-two hours were up. Where was it? Friedland, still toying with the crossword, had fended him off. Enquiries were proceeding, he’d said. He’d be in touch.

Mr Al Zahra had phoned an hour later, a quiet voice, speaking perfect English. He’d apologized for taking a little of Friedland’s time and had confirmed the gist of what Friedland already knew. The incident in Queen’s Gate was, he’d said, a tragedy, but he’d been disappointed at the way the English newspapers had simply taken Israeli accusations at face-value. In a free country one might expect a little more of a free press. Doubtless the police would apply themselves to the task in hand, and perhaps one day they’d be able to give the lie to the Zionist slur, but the fact was that most of the damage had already been
done, and time for setting the record straight was fast running out.

Friedland, listening, had agreed. But what did Mr Al Zahra want him to do?

At this, there’d been a brief silence. Then the Arab had returned to the phone, a little sharper, a little more businesslike. He understood that Friedland ran a security consultancy. He understood that he had access to investigators, to men of integrity who would take a spade to the earth and do a little digging of their own. Friedland had smiled at this, recognizing the elaborate metaphors, the extravagant courtesies, from his own years in the Middle East. Yes, he’d said, he knew such men.

The Arab had paused again, then given him a name. McVeigh, he’d said. A man called McVeigh. Friedland had scribbled the name on his pad, frowning, not recognizing it immediately.

‘McVeigh?’ he’d said.

‘Yes. Pat McVeigh. He lives in North London somewhere. He works for a number of clients. He has a great deal of experience. Friends of mine speak well of him.’

Friedland had boxed the name on the pad, heavy lines, beginning to recall the name at last, an ex-Marine, Arctic and Mountain Warfare Cadre, a little outside the tight inner circle of Special Forces veterans on whom agencies like his own normally relied. McVeigh, he murmured to himself, writing down the Arab’s telephone number and promising to put the two men in touch, Pat McVeigh.

Now, late afternoon, Friedland glanced at his watch. He’d found McVeigh’s address through an associate. He’d phoned him. He’d established his availability. Soon, traffic permitting, he would arrive.

Friedland laid the crossword carefully to one side, got up and walked to the window. The street outside was empty. Soon, perhaps in an hour or so, the better class of secretaries and PAs would start returning home, those tall, well-educated girls with their Peugeot 205s and their pale, set faces, whose fathers could afford a flat in this area. He watched them most nights, stepping out on to the pavement, their groceries in the back of the car,
plastic bags full of kiwi fruit, hand-wrapped cheeses and a bottle or two of Sainsbury’s Pinot Noir. Occasionally, he tried to imagine the way their flats would look, their choice of decor, what kind of pictures they hung, what kind of sheets they slept between. The nights he worked late, he’d take a turn round the square before getting into his own car, walking slowly, a man at war with late middle age, risking a glance at a window or two. Many of the girls had boyfriends. They’d arrive in the middle of the evening for a meal. When it was hot, they never bothered to pull the curtains, and passing by he could hear the music, and the clink of glasses, and the low hum of conversation, the faces of those same stern secretaries softened by laughter and wine. Beside one basement flat in particular, Friedland sometimes paused, stooping to do up his shoe-lace. The table stood beside the window, and the girl often ate alone. She was small, thin-boned, sharp-featured. She often played Bruckner, the later symphonies. In a certain light, she reminded Friedland of his own daughter, still down in Sussex, still in the nursing-home, as addicted now to Methadone as she’d once been to heroin.

A taxi appeared at the head of the square. It stopped below the window. A tall, lean figure stepped out of the back, pausing to check the address and pay the driver. A face looked up, blond hair, cropped short, open-neck shirt, light cotton jacket, and Friedland instinctively withdrew into the shadows, sensing at once that it was McVeigh.

McVeigh stayed perhaps half an hour. Friedland thanked him for coming and made a careful note of what little the man was prepared to tell him. He’d been in the Marines for ten years. He was Arctic Warfare-trained and had done the Mountain Leader course. Latterly, after a fall in Norway and a particularly nasty fracture to his left leg, he’d transferred to the Investigation Branch. It hadn’t been the kind of soldiering he’d joined up for, but he’d been surprised at his own interest in the job, and how good he’d been at it. The clerical back-up was hopeless, but so were most of the villains, so the thing had worked out OK in the end.

After the Marines, life had been dull. He’d tried to convert a
passion into a way of life, tucking away some of his gratuity on the deposit for a small flat and investing the rest in a climbing consultancy. For a fee, he’d lead mountaineering parties anywhere on earth. The idea had been great, but the overheads were crippling and the recession had killed it stone-dead. For the last two years, in the absence of anything better, McVeigh had therefore gone back to doing what he knew best: investigative work, with a modest helping of physical violence.

Friedland, listening, had been amused. McVeigh, like so many of the Special Forces people, was nicely understated. But there was something else, too. A sense of irony and hints of a rogue mind behind the deadpan voice and the watchful eyes.

Friedland mentioned Al Zahra. McVeigh said he’d never heard of him. Friedland looked surprised. ‘He says he knows you.’

‘Does he?’

‘Yes. He says you are very good. Highly recommended.’

‘Who by?’

‘Friends of his. Fellow Arabs. Chums.’

McVeigh nodded. He’d often bodyguarded for visiting Arabs, dividing his time between a table in the shadows of various Mayfair casinos and a chair in the upper corridors of some of Park Lane’s more exclusive hotels. It was cheerless work, but it paid two fifty a day. For that money, he also ran errands, volunteering to, collect what one young sheikh from Dubai called ‘the groceries’. The groceries turned out to be a succession of expensive call-girls, some of whom McVeigh now knew moderately well. Maybe Al Zahra was from Dubai, too. Maybe it was his cue for yet another circuit of the flats off Shepherd’s Market.

‘What’s he want?’

Friedland explained, briefly, what the Arab had told him on the telephone.

McVeigh listened, expressionless. Friedland got to the end of the story.

‘So what
does
he want?’ McVeigh said again.

Friedland shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘You’ll have to go and see him.’

‘Tonight?’

‘Half-past seven.’ Friedland paused. ‘He’s expecting you.’

McVeigh looked at him for a moment, then glanced at his watch and nodded. ‘Say I take the job,’ he said, ‘whatever it is …’

‘Yes?’

‘Who do I work for? Him or you?’

Friedland leaned back in the chair, smiling, remembering Ross’s parting words. This bit, at least, was simple.

‘Me,’ he said. ‘I want to know exactly what happens.’

McVeigh took a cab to the Dorchester. On the way, he thought about Friedland. He’d never met the man before, never heard of him. The address had been expensive and the office looked genuine enough, but there was something about the man, a strange diffidence, that disturbed him. Most of the agencies he worked for were run by ‘Ruperts’, recently retired Regular Army officers, late thirties, early forties, good regiments, good families, nice accents, well dressed, excellent connections, urban go-getters who trawled for the fat contracts and dished out the action to the Special Forces lads. It was good business all round, and McVeigh was glad for a slice of it, but Friedland didn’t seem to fit that mould at all. Too old. Too battered. Too weary.