The Night Manager (12 page)

"Boring VCPs. Nothing to it."

"I'm not much of a one for initials, I'm afraid, Jonathan."

"Vehicle Control Points. You'd pick a blind hill or a corner, then pop up out of a ditch and hold up the cars. Occasionally you'd come across a player."

"And if you did?"

"You got through on the Cougar, and your controller told you which course of action to take. Stop and search. Wave him through. Question him. Whatever they wanted."

"Any other jobs on the menu, apart from VCPs?"

The same blandness as Jonathan made a show of remembering.

"Buzzing around in a helicopter a bit. Each group had a piece of land to cover. You'd book your Lynx, take a bivibag, camp out for a couple of nights, then come home and have a beer."

"How about contact with the enemy?"

Jonathan gave a deprecating smile. "Why should they come out and fight us when they could blow us up in our jeeps by remote control?"

"Why indeed?" Burr always played his best cards slowly. He sipped his drink, he shook his head and smiled as if it were all a bit of a conundrum. "So what were these special duties you got up to, then?" he asked. "All those special training courses you did, that wore me out just reading about them? I get frightened every time I see you pick up a spoon and fork, to be frank. I think you're going to skewer me."

Jonathan's reluctance was like a sudden slowing down. "There were things called Close Observation Platoons."

"Which were?"

"The senior platoon in each regiment, artificially created."

"Out of?"

"Anyone who wanted to join."

"I thought they were the elite."

Short, tight sentences, Burr noticed. Monitored as he spoke them. Eyelids down, lips tense.

"You were trained. You learned to watch, recognise the players. Make hides, get in and out of them in darkness. Lie up for a couple of nights. In lofts. Bushes. Ditches."

"What weapons did they give you?"

Jonathan shrugged as if to say, Who cares? "Uzis. Hecklers. Shotguns. They teach them all. You select. Sounds exciting from the outside. Once you're into it, it's just a job."

"What was your choice?"

"Heckler gave you the best chance."

"Which brings us to Operation Night Owl," Burr suggested, with no change in the inflexion of his voice. And sat back to watch the no-change in Jonathan's expression.

Jonathan was talking in his sleep. His eyes were open, but his mind was in another country. He had not expected lunch to be a tour of the worst pans of his life.

"We had a tip-off that some players were coming across the border into Armagh to relocate a stash of weapons. RPGs."

This time Burr did not ask what the initials meant. "We lay up for a couple of days, and finally they showed. We took out three. The unit was pretty chuffed. Everyone went round whispering 'three' and holding up three fingers at the Irish."

"I'm sorry?" Burr seemed not to have heard. "Take out in this context meaning killed?"

"Yup."

"Did you do the taking out yourself? Single-handed, as it were?"

"I was part of it, sure."

"Of the fire team?"

"Of a cutoff group."

"Of how many?"

"We were a pair. Two. Brian and me."

"Brian."

"He was my oppo. Lance corporal."

"What were you?"

"Corporal. Acting sergeant. Our job was to catch them when they ran."

His face had grown a harder skin, Burr noticed. The muscles round the jaw were flexed.

"It was absolute luck," Jonathan said with clean-and-press casualness. "Everyone dreams of taking out a terrorist. We got the chance. We were just terribly lucky."

"And you took out three. You and Brian. Killed three men."

"Sure. I told you. Luck."

Rigid, Burr noticed. Rigid ease and deafening understatement.

"One and two? Two and one? Who scored highest?"

"One each and one shared. We quarrelled over it at first, then settled on half each. Hard to tell who bags who in the heat of battle quite often."

Suddenly Burr didn't need to prod him anymore. It was as if Jonathan had decided to tell the story for the first time. And perhaps he had.

"There was this clapped-out farmhouse right on the border. The owner was a subsidies cowboy, smuggling the same cows over the border and claiming farming subsidies both sides. He had a Volvo and a brand-new Merc and this slummy little farm. Intelligence said three players would be coming across from the South after the pubs had closed, names supplied. We hunkered down and waited. Their cache was in a barn. Our hide was a bush a hundred and fifty yards away from it. Our brief was to sit in our hide and watch without being watched."

That's what he likes to do, thought Burr: watch without being watched.

"We were to let them go into the barn and collect their toys. When they left the barn we were to signal their direction and get out unobserved. Another team would throw up a roadblock five miles on, hold a random check, pretend it was all sheer chance. That was to protect the source. Then they'd take them out. Only trouble was, the players weren't planning to drive the weapons anywhere. They'd decided to bury them in a ditch ten yards from our hide. Sunk a box into the ground in advance."

He was lying on his belly in the sweet moss of a South Armagh hillside, gazing through light-intensifiers at three green men lugging green boxes across a green moonscape. Languidly the man on the left rises on his toes, lets go his box and spins gracefully round, his arms extended for the cross. That dark green ink is his blood. I'm raking him out, and the silly bugger isn't even complaining, Jonathan decides as he becomes aware of the bucking of his Heckler.

"So you shot them," Burr suggested.

"We had to use our initiative. We each took one, then we both took the third. The whole thing lasted seconds."

"Did they shoot back?"

"No," said Jonathan. He smiled, still rigid. "We were lucky, I suppose. Get your first shot in, you're home free. That all you want to know?"

"Ever been back since?"

"To Ireland?"

"To England."

"Not really. Neither."

"And the divorce?"

"That was all taken care of in England."

"By?"

"Her. I left her the flat, all my money and whatever friends we had. She called that fifty-fifty."

"You left her England too."

"Yes."

Jonathan had finished speaking, but Burr was still listening to him. "I guess what I really want to know, Jonathan," he resumed at last, in the commonplace voice he had used for most of their discussion, "is whether you'd be at all attracted by the idea of having another go. Not at marriage. At serving your country." He heard himself say it, but for all the response he got he could have been staring at a granite wall. He beckoned for the bill. And then: To hell with it, he thought; sometimes the worst moments are the best. So he said it anyway, which was his nature, while he counted Swiss bank notes into a white saucer.

"Suppose I asked you to trash your whole life till now in favour of a better one," he suggested. "Not better for you maybe, but better for what you and I are pleased to call the common good. A five-star unimpeachable cause, guaranteed to improve the lot of mankind or your money back in full. Bye-bye to the old Jonathan, enter the new blue improved product. Resettlement afterwards, a new identity, money, the usual. There's a lot of people I know might find that quite attractive. I'm not sure I mightn't, to be frank, except it wouldn't be fair on Mary. But who've you got to be fair to except yourself? Nobody, not so far as I know. You'll be feeding the rat three meals a day, hanging on by your fingernails in force-twelve gales, there's not a scrap of you won't be used, not an hour you won't be frightened stiff. And you'll be doing it for your country, same as your dad, whatever you thought of Ireland. Or Cyprus, for that matter. And you'll be doing it for Sophie, too. Tell him I need a receipt, will you? Benton. Lunch for two. What do I give? Another five? I won't ask you to sign for me, not like some. Let's move."

They were strolling beside the lake. The snow had disappeared. An afternoon sun shimmered on the steaming pathway. Teenaged drug addicts, huddled in costly overcoats, gazed at the disintegrating ice. Jonathan had thrust his hands into the pockets of his overcoat, and he was listening to Sophie congratulating him on his gentleness as a lover.

"My English husband was also very gentle," she was saying while she drew her fingers admiringly over his face. "I had preserved my virginity so jealously that it took him days to persuade me I was better off without it." Then a presentiment seized her, and she drew him against her for protection. "Just remember you have a future, Mr. Pine. Never again renounce it. Not for me or for anyone. Promise me."

So he had promised her. As we promise anything in love. but he was talking about justice. "When I get to run the world," he announced comfortably to the steaming lake, "I'm going to hold the Nuremberg Trials Part Two. I'm going to get all the arms dealers and shit scientists, and all the smooth salesmen who push the crazies one step further than they thought of going, because it's good for business, and all the lying politicians and the lawyers and accountants and bankers, and I'm going to put them in the dock to answer for their lives. And you know what they'll say? 'If we hadn't done it someone else would have.' And you know what I'll say? I'll say, 'Oh, I see. And if you hadn't raped the girl some other fellow would have raped her. And that's your justification for rape. Noted.' Then I'd napalm the lot of them. Fizz."

"What's Roper done?" Jonathan asked in a kind of angry frustration. "Apart from... Hamid, all that."

"It's what he's doing now that matters."

"If he stopped today. How bad is he? How bad's he been?"

He was remembering Roper's shoulder riding unconsciously against him. Pergola over the top, view of the sea at the end. He remembered Jed: Most beautiful place on earth.

"He plunders," said Burr.

"Where? Who?"

"Everywhere and everyone. If the deal is bent, our chum is in there cutting it, and getting Corkoran to sign for him. He's got his white operation, and that's Ironbrand: venture capital, hairy land deals, minerals, tractors, turbines, commodities, a couple of tankers, a bit of corporate raiding. Offices in the whitest part of Nassau, smart young men with short-back-and-sides, tapping at computers. That's the part that's in deep trouble, and that's the part you've read about."

"I'm afraid I haven't."

"Well, you should have done. His last year's results were bloody awful, and this year's will be worse. His shares are down to seventy from one sixty, and three months ago he took a bold position on platinum just in time to see it go through the floor. He's not seriously concerned; he's just desperate." He drew breath and began again. "And tucked underneath his Ironbrand umbrella he's got his little uglies. There's the five Caribbean classics--money laundering, gold, emeralds, wood from the rain forests, arms and more arms. There's phony Pharmaceuticals, phony aid packages with bent health ministers and fake fertilisers with bent agricultural ministers." The anger in Burr's voice was like a slowly rising storm, and the more alarming because it didn't break. "But weapons are his first love. Toys, he calls them. If you're into power, there's nothing like toys to feed the habit. Don't ever believe that crap about 'just another commodity service industry.' Arms are a drug, and Roper's hooked. Trouble with arms is, everyone thought they were recession-proof, but they're not. Iran-Iraq was an arms dealers' charter, and they thought it would never end. Since then it's been downhill all the way. Too many manufacturers chasing too few wars. Too much loose hardware being dumped on the market. Too much peace about and not enough hard currency. Our Dicky did a bit of the Serbo-Croat thing, of course--Croats via Athens, Serbs via Poland--but the numbers weren't in his league and there were too many dogs in the hunt. Cuba's gone dead; so's South Africa--they make their own. Ireland isn't worth a light, or he'd have done that too. Peru, he's got a thing going there, supplying the Shining Path boys. And he's been making a play for the Muslim insurgents in the southern Philippines, but the North Koreans are in there ahead of him and I've a suspicion he's going to get his nose bloodied again."

"Well, who lets him?" Jonathan asked aggressively. And when Burr for once was taken aback: "It's a hell of a lot to get away with, isn't it, with people like you breathing down his neck?"

For a moment longer Burr was stuck for a rejoinder. Exactly the same question, with its disgraceful answer, had been coursing in his own mind as he spoke: The River House lets him, he wanted to say. Whitehall lets him. Geoffrey Darker and his pals in Procurement Studies let him. Goodhew's master puts his telescope to both blind eyes and he lets him. If his toys are British, anyone will let him do anything he bloody likes. But his good luck delivered a distraction: "Well, I'm damned!" he exclaimed, grasping Jonathan's arm. "Where's her father, then?"

Watched by her boyfriend, a girl of about seventeen was rolling up the leg of her jeans. Patches like wet insect bites covered her calf. She inserted the needle and didn't wince. But Burr winced for her, and his disgust sent him into himself for a while, so that they walked a distance in silence while Jonathan for a moment forgot Sophie and remembered instead Jed's endless baby-pink legs coming down Meister's ornamental staircase, and her smile as she just happened to catch his eye.

"So what is he?" Jonathan asked.

"I told you what he is. He's a bastard."

"What's his background? What makes him run?"

Burr shrugged. "Father a small-time auctioneer and valuer in the shires. Mother a pillar of the local church. One brother. Private schools the parents couldn't afford--"

"Eton?"

"Why should he be?"

"It's that voice. No pronouns. No articles. The slur."

"I've only ever overheard him on the telephone. That'll do me fine. He's got one of those voices that make me vomit."

"Is Roper the elder or younger brother?"

"Younger."