The Night Manager (17 page)

"Just the lure of the new," he said.

We'll desert, the captain's untameable daughter had whispered as she spread her sublime body over his. If I have to eat one more army dinner I'll blow up this whole barracks single-handed.

Fuck me, Jonathan. Make me a woman. Fuck me and take me somewhere I can breathe.

"How's the painting doing?" he asked, remembering how they had both worshiped her great talent, how he had abased himself in order to elevate it, cooked and carried and swept for her, believing she would paint the better for his self-denial.

She snorted. "My last exhibition was three years ago. Sold six out of thirty, all to Miles's rich friends. Probably needed someone like you to make a basket case out of me. Jesus, you led me a dance. What the hell did you want? I wanted to be van Gogh--what did you want? Apart from being the army's answer to Rambo?"

You, he thought. I wanted you, but you weren't there. He could say none of it. He wished he could be worse-mannered.

Bad manners are freedom, she used to say. Fucking is bad manners. But there was no point to her argument anymore. He had come to ask forgiveness for the future, not the past.

"Anyway, why didn't you want me to tell Miles I was seeing you?" she asked accusingly.

Jonathan pulled the old false smile. "I didn't want us to upset him," he said.

For a magic moment he saw her as he had first possessed her in the days when she was the belle of his regimental depot: the crisp rebellious face tilted in desire, lips parted, the angry smoulder in her eyes. Come back, he shouted in his heart. Let's try again.

The young ghost vanished and the old one reappeared.

"Why on earth don't you pay in plastic?" she asked as he counted out the bank notes with his left hand. "Far easier to tell where the pennies are going, darling."

Burr was right, he thought. I'm a single man.

EIGHT

Hunched in the passenger seat of Rooke's car as they plunged through the gathering Cornish dusk, Burr pulled his overcoat collar more tightly about his ears and returned his soul to the suite of windowless rooms on the outskirts of Miami where not forty-eight hours earlier the covert action team for Operation Limpet had been holding its exceptional Open Day.

Covert action teams do not normally admit espiocrats and other sophists to their midst, but Burr and Strelski have their reasons. The atmosphere is of a Holiday Inn sales conference held in battle conditions. Delegates arrive singly, identify themselves, descend in steel elevators, identify themselves again and greet each other carefully. Each wears his name and occupation on his lapel, even if some names have been chosen only for this day and some occupations are so obscure that old hands pause to work them out. dep dr ops coords, reads one. supt narcs & fms sw, reads another. And between them, like refreshing smiles of clarity, u. s. senator, federal prosecutor or u. k. liaison.

The River House is represented by an enormous Englishwoman in perfect curls and Thatcherite twin set, known universally as Darling Katie and officially as Mrs. Katherine Handyside Dulling, Economic Counsellor of the British Embassy in Washington. For ten years Darling Katie has held the golden key to Whitehall's special relationship with America's numberless intelligence agencies. From Military to Naval to Air to State through Central and National to the omnipotent murmurers of the White House palace guard--from the sane to the harmlessly mad to the dangerously ridiculous--the secret overworld of American might is Katie's parish, to explore, bludgeon, bargain with and win to her celebrated dinner table.

"Do you hear what he called me, Cy, this monster here, this thing?" Katie bellows to a tight-lipped senator in a double-breasted suit, while she holds an accusing finger, pistol-like, to Rex Goodhew's temple. "A femagogue! Me! A femagogue! Isn't that the most politically incorrect thing you ever heard? I'm a mouse, you beast. A wilting violet! And calls himself a Christian!"

Jolly laughter fills the room. Katie's iconoclastic boom is the theme music of insiders. More delegates arrive. Groups break up, re-form. "Why, Martha, hullo!... Walt, hi. Good to see you... Marie, great!"

Someone has given the signal. A dry clatter as delegates toss their paper cups into trash bags and troop to the projection room. The lowliest, led by Amato, head for the front rows.

Farther back, in the expensive seats, Darker's deputy in Procurement Studies, Neal Marjoram, shares cosy laughter with a ginger-headed American espiocrat whose name card reveals him only as "Central America--Funding." Their laughter fades with the lights. Somebody funny says, "Action!" Burr takes a last look at Goodhew. He is leaning back in his chair, smiling at the ceiling, like a concertgoer who knows the music well.

Joe Strelski embarks on his address.

And Joe Strelski as a purveyor of disinformation is word perfect.

Burr is bemused. After a decade of deception, it has never occurred to him until today that the best deceivers are the bores. If Strelski were wired from head to toe with lie detectors, Burr is convinced, the needles would not flinch. They would be too bored. Strelski speaks for fifty minutes, and by the time he has finished, fifty are as much as anyone can take.

In his word-heavy monotone, the most sensational intelligence is turned to ash. The name of Richard Onslow Roper barely escapes his lips. In London he had used it without compunction.

Roper is our target; Roper is the centre of the web. But today in Miami, before a mixed audience of Purists and Enforcers, Roper is relegated to obscurity, and when Strelski trails a half-hearted slide show of the cast, it is Dr. Paul Apostoll who gets star billing as known to us for the last seven years as the cartels' principal intermediary and dealmaker in this hemisphere.

Strelski now logs the wearisome process of pinpointing Apostoll as the primary axis of our initial investigations and offers a laboured account of the successful activities of agents Flynn and Amato in placing a bug in the doctor's New Orleans offices. If Flynn and Amato had repaired a leaking pipe in the men's room, Strelski could not have sounded less thrilled. With a superbly tedious sentence, read from a prepared text, unpunctuated and full of false emphases, he hastens his audience on its way to sleep: "The basis for Operation Limpet is intelligence indicators from a variety of technical sources to the effect that the three leading Colombian cartels have signed a mutual nonaggression deal with each other as a prerequisite to providing themselves with a military shield commensurate with the financial muscle available and equal to the twin threats foremost in their conceptual thinking." Breath. "These threats are, one"--another breath--"armed interdiction by the United States at the behest of the Colombian government." Almost done, but not quite.

"Two, the growing strength of the non-Colombian cartels primarily in Venezuela and Bolivia. Three, the Colombian government acting on its own account but with the hands-on encouragement of U. S. agencies."

Amen, thinks Burr, transfixed with admiration.

The history of the case appears to interest nobody, which is probably why Strelski supplies it. Over the last eight years, he says--another slump in interest--several attempts have been made by "a variety of parties lured by the cartels' unlimited financial resources" to persuade them to get the habit of buying serious weapons. French, Israelis and Cubans have all pressed their cases, as have a bunch of independent manufacturers and dealers, most with the tacit connivance of their parent governments.

The Israelis, assisted by British mercenaries, actually succeeded in selling them a few Galil assault rifles and a training package.

"But the cartels," says Strelski, "well, after a while the cartels kind of lose interest."

The audience knows exactly how the cartels feel.

Screen atmospherics as Dr. Apostoll is discovered on the island of Tortola, in long shot from across the street, seated inside the offices of the Caribbean law firm of Langbourne, Rosen and de Souta, notaries to the nefarious. Two whey-faced Swiss bankers from Grand Cayman are identified at the same table. Major Corkoran sits between them, and to Burr's secret pleasure the signer is holding a drawn fountain pen in his right hand. Across the table from him sits an unidentified Latin American. The languid male beauty next to him, hair tied prettily at the nape, is none other than Lord Langbourne, alias Sandy, legal adviser to Mr. Richard Onslow Roper of the Ironbrand Land, Ore & Precious Metals Company of Nassau, the Bahamas.

"Who took this footage, please, Mr. Strelski?" a very legal American male voice demands sharply in the darkness.

"We did," Burr replies complacently, and the company at once relaxes again: Agent Strelski has not, after all, exceeded his territorial powers.

But now even Strelski cannot keep the excitement out of his voice, and for a brief moment Roper's name is fair and square before them.

"In direct consequence of the nonaggression deal to which I have just had reference, the cartels instructed their representative to take soundings with a couple of illegal arms traders in the hemisphere," he says. "What we see here, according to our sources, but filmed unfortunately without sound, is the first overt approach made by Apostoll to hands-off intermediaries of Richard Roper."

As Strelski sits down, Rex Goodhew bobs to his feet. Goodhew plays it straight today. He isn't funny, he uses none of the English linguistic frills that so infuriate Americans. He openly regrets the involvement of British nationals in the affair, some of them with distinguished names. He regrets that they are able to shelter behind the laws of British protectorates in the Bahamas and the Caribbean. He is heartened by the good relations established at working level between the British and American sides. He wants blood, and he wants Pure Intelligence to help him draw it.

"Our shared aim is to catch the culprits and make a public example of them," he declares, with Truman-like simplicity.

"With your help, we want to enforce the rule of law, prevent the proliferation of arms in a volatile region and cut off the supply of drugs"--in Goodhew's mouth the word sounds like a mild form of aspirin--"which we believe to be the currency in which the amis bill will be paid--to wherever they are destined. To this end, we are asking for your full, unquestioning support-in-aid as intelligence-gathering agencies. Thank you."

Goodhew is followed by the federal prosecutor, an ambitious young man whose voice growls like a racing car engine turning over in the pits. He vows he will "bring this thing to court in record time."

Burr and Strelski take questions.

"How about humint in this one, Joe?" a woman's voice calls at Strelski from the back of the hall. The British contingent is momentarily baffled by this piece of Cousins jargon. Humint!

Strelski almost blushes. It is clear he would have preferred her not to ask. His expression is that of a loser who refuses to admit defeat. "We're working on it, Joanne, believe me. Human sources on a thing like this, you have to wait and pray. We have lines, we have hopes, we have our people in there sniffing, and we believe that somebody out there soon is going to need to buy himself some witness protection, is going to call us up one night and ask us to arrange it for him. It's going to happen, Joanne." He nods determinedly, as if he agreed with himself where nobody else did. "It's going to happen," he repeats, as unconvincingly as before.

It is lunchtime. The smoke screen is in place, even if they cannot see it. Nobody remarks that Joanne is one of Strelski's close assistants. The procession toward the door has started.

Goodhew departs with Darling Katie and a couple of espiocrats.

"Now listen, you men," Katie can be heard saying as they leave. "No fobbing me off with two fat-free lettuce leaves, d'you hear? I want meat and three veg and plum duff, or I ain't goin' no place. Femagogue indeed, Rex Goodhew. And then you come to us with your begging bowl. I'm going to break your pious neck."

It is evening. Flynn, Burr and Strelski sit on the deck of Strelski's beach house, watching the moon path flutter in the wake of returning pleasure boats. Agent Flynn is nursing a large glass of Bushmills single malt. He sensibly keeps the bottle at his side. The conversation is sporadic. Nobody wants to talk out of turn about the day's proceedings. Last month, says Strelski, my daughter was a vegan. This month she's in love with the butcher. Flynn and Burr laugh dutifully. Another silence falls.

"When's your boy cut loose?" Strelski asks quietly.

"End of the week," Burr replies in the same low tone. "God and Whitehall willing."

"With your boy inside pulling and our boy outside pushing, I guess that makes us a closed loop," says Strelski.

Flynn laughs richly, nodding his great dark head like a deaf-mute in the half-darkness. Burr asks what a closed loop is.

"A closed loop, Leonard--that's using every part of the pig except the squeal," says Strelski. Another pause while they sit and watch the sea. When Strelski speaks again, Burr has to lean close to catch his words.

"Thirty-three grown people in that room," he murmurs. "Nine different agencies, seven pols. Must be a couple of 'em telling the cartels Joe Strelski and Leonard Burr don't have a humint source worth shit--right, Pat?"

Flynn's soft Irish laughter is almost drowned by the rustle of the sea.

But Burr, though he keeps it to himself, cannot quite share his hosts' complacency. The Purists had not asked too many questions, it was true. In Burr's uneasy judgment, they had asked too few.

Two ivy-coated granite posts loomed out of the mist. The engraved inscription said Lanyon Rose. There was no house.

Farmer probably died before he got round to building it, thought Burr.

They had been driving seven hours. Above the granite hedges and the blackthorn, an uneasy sky was darkening to dusk. The shadows on the pitted track were liquid and elusive, so that the car kept bucking as if it had been hit. It was a Rover and Rooke's pride. His powerful hands wrestled with the steering wheel. They passed deserted farm buildings and a Celtic cross. Rooke switched his headlights to bright, then switched them down again. Since they had crossed the Tamar River they had known only dusk and rolling mist.