The Night Manager (43 page)

"Thomas, take Dans for a walk," Roper ordered down the table. "Bring him back when he's sorted out his manners."

But while Roper was saying this--without too much conviction, since Daniel on this evening of departure was deserving of indulgence--a lobster salad went by. Corkoran saw it. And Corkoran grabbed the wrist of the black waiter who was carrying it and wrenched him to his side.

"Hey, man" the startled waiter cried, then grinned sheepishly round the room in the hope that he was part of some weird happening.

The proprietor was hastening across the room. Frisky and Tabby, seated at the gunmen's table in the corner, had risen to their feet, unbuttoning their blazers. Everybody froze.

Corkoran was standing. And Corkoran with unexpected power was bearing down on the waiter's arm and making the poor man twist against his inclination so that the tray tipped alarmingly. Corkoran's face was brick red, his chin was up and he was shouting at the proprietor.

"Do you speak English, sir?" he demanded, loud enough for the whole restaurant to hear. "I do. Our lady here ordered lobster, sir. You said there was no more lobster. You are a liar, sir. And you have offended our lady and her consort, sir. There was more lobster!"

"Was ordered in advance!" the proprietor protested, with more spirit than Jonathan had credited him with. "Was special order. Ten o'clock this morning. You want be sure of lobster? You order special. Let go this man!"

Nobody at the table had moved. Grand opera has its own authority. Even Roper seemed momentarily unsure whether to intervene.

"What is your name?" Corkoran asked the proprietor.

"Enzo Fabrizzi."

"Leave it out, Corks," Roper ordered, "Don't be a bore. You're being a bore."

"Corks, stop it," said Jed.

"If there is a dish our lady wants, Mr. Fabrizzi, whether it's lobster, or liver, or fish, or something very ordinary like steak, or a piece of veal--you always give it to our lady. Because if you don't, Mr. Fabrizzi, I shall buy this restaurant. I am vastly rich, sir. And you will sweep the street, sir, while Mr. Thomas here purrs past in his Rolls-Royce."

Jonathan, resplendent in his new suit at the further end of the table, has risen to his feet and is smiling his Meister's smile.

"Time to break the party up, don't you think, Chief?" he says, awfully pleasantly, strolling to Roper's end of the table. "Everyone a bit travel weary. Mr. Fabrizzi, I don't remember when I had a better meal. All we really need now is a bill, if your people could kindly run one up."

Jed stands to go, looking nowhere. Roper lays her wrap over her shoulders. Jonathan pulls back her chair, and she smiles her distant gratitude. A MacDanby pays. There is a muffled cry as Corkoran lunges at Fabrizzi with serious intent--but Frisky and Tabby are there to restrain him, which is fortunate because by now several of the restaurant staff are spoiling to avenge their comrade. Somehow everybody makes it to the pavement as the Rolls pulls alongside.

I'm not going anywhere, she had said vehemently, as she held Jonathan's face and stared into his solitary eyes. I've faked it before, I can fake it again. I can fake it for as long as it takes.

He'll kill you, Jonathan had said. He'll find out. He's certain to. Everybody's talking about us behind his back.

But, like Sophie, she seemed to think she was immortal.

TWENTY

Quiet autumn rain is falling in the Whitehall streets as Rex Goodhew goes to war. Quietly. In the autumn of his career. In the mature certainty of his cause. Without drama or trumpets or large statements. A quiet outing of his fighting self. A personal but also an altruistic war against what he has come inevitably to refer to as the Forces of Darker.

A war to the death, he tells his wife, without alarms. My head or theirs. A Whitehall knife fight, let's stay close. If you're sure, darling, she says. I am. His every move carefully considered. Nothing hasty, nothing too young, too furtive. He is sending clear signals to his hidden enemies in Pure Intelligence.

Let them hear me, let them see me, he says. Let them tremble. Goodhew plays with open cards. More or less.

It is not only Neal Marjoram's disgraceful proposition that has spurred Goodhew into action. A week ago, he was nearly crushed to death cycling to his office. Selecting his favourite scenic route--first west across Hampstead Heath, respecting the permitted cycle paths, thence by way of Saint John's Wood and Regent's Park to Whitehall--Goodhew found himself wedged between two high-sided vans, one a dirty white colour with flaking lettering he couldn't read, and the other green and blank. If he braked, they braked also. If he pedalled harder, they accelerated. His perplexity turned to anger. Why did the drivers eye him so coldly in their wing mirrors, then eye each other as they edged ever closer, boxing him in? What was this third van doing behind him, blocking his escape?

He shouted, "Look out! Move over!" but they ignored him.

The van behind was riding tight against the rear bumpers of the other two. Its windscreen was grubby, obscuring the driver's face. The vans on either side had drawn so close that if he had turned the handlebar, it would have knocked against one or the other of them.

Rising in his saddle, Goodhew drove his gloved fist against the panel of the van to his left, then pushed himself away from it to recover his balance. The dead eyes in the wing mirror studied him without curiosity. He attacked the van to his right in the same way. It responded by inching nearer.

Only a red traffic light saved him from being crushed. The vans stopped, but Goodhew, for the first time in his life, rode over on red, narrowly escaping death as he skimmed in front of the polished nose of a Mercedes.

The same afternoon, Rex Goodhew rewrites his will. Next day, using his in-house wiles, he circumnavigates the laborious machinery of his own ministry--and his master's private office--and sequesters part of the top floor, a rambling set of attic rooms, already a museum piece, packed with electronic stay-behind equipment installed against the day, just around the corner, when Britain will be overrun by Bolshevism. The likelihood is now past, but the grey men of Goodhew's Administration Section have yet to be advised of this, and when Goodhew requests the floor for secret purposes, they could not be more helpful. Overnight, millions of pounds' worth of obsolete equipment is sent to rot in a lorry park in Aldershot.

Next day Burr's little team becomes the tenant of twelve musty attic rooms, two malfunctioning lavatories the size of tennis courts, a denuded signals room, a private staircase with a marble balustrade and holes in the linoleum treads, and a steel door by Chubb, with a turnkey's peephole. On the day after, Goodhew has the place electronically swept and removes all telephone lines susceptible to River House tampering.

In the matter of extracting public money from his ministry, Goodhew's quarter-century before the Whitehall mast is not in vain. He becomes a bureaucratic Robin Hood, fiddling the government's accounts in order to ensnare its wayward servants.

Burr needs three more staff and knows where he can find them? Hire them, Leonard, hire them.

An informant has a tale to tell but needs a couple of thousand up front? Pay him, Leonard, give him whatever he needs.

Rob Rooke would like to take a brace of watchers with him to Curaçao? Is a brace enough, Rob? Wouldn't a foursome be a safer bet?

Gone as if they had never been are Goodhew's niggling objections, the quips, the fey asides. He has only to pass through the steel door to Burr's new attic eyrie for the persiflage to fall from him like the cloak it always was. Each evening, at the close of the day's official play, he presents himself for what he modestly calls his night work, and Burr is pressed to match the energy with which he goes about his business. On Goodhew's insistence, the dingiest room has been set aside for him. It lies at the end of a deserted corridor, its windows give onto a parapet colonised by pigeons. Their billing and cooing would have driven a lesser man crazy, but Goodhew barely hears them. Determined not to trespass on Burr's operational territory, he emerges only to grab another handful of reports or make himself a cup of rose hip tea and exchange courteous pleasantries with the night staff. Then back to his desk and his review of the enemy's latest dispositions.

"I intend to sink their Operation Flagship with all hands, Leonard," he tells Burr with a twitch of his head that Burr has not seen him do before. "Darker won't have a Mariner left when I've done with him. And your Dicky Blasted Roper will be safe behind bars, you mark my words."

Burr marks them but is uncertain of their truth. It is not that he doubts Goodhew's strength of purpose. Nor does he have any problem believing that Darker's people deliberately set out to harass, scare or even hospitalise their adversary. For months, Burr himself has been maintaining a careful watchfulness over his own movements. Whenever possible he has driven his children to school in the mornings, and always arranged for their collection in the evenings. Burr's concern is that, even now.

Goodhew is unaware of the scale of the octopus. Three times in the last week alone, Burr has been denied access to papers that he knows to be in current circulation. Three times in vain he has protested. On the last occasion he presented himself in person to the Foreign Office Registrar in his lair.

"I fear you are misinformed, Mr. Burr," said the registrar, who wore an undertaker's black tie, and black protectors on the sleeves of his black jacket. "The file in question was cleared for destruction many months ago."

"You mean it's Flagship classified. Why don't you say so?"

"It's what, sir? I don't think I follow you. Do you mind explaining yourself more clearly?"

"Limpet is my case, Mr. Atkins. I personally opened the file that I am now requesting. It's one of half a dozen Limpet-related files opened and cross-referred by my department: two subject, two organisation, two personal. There's not one of them that's been in existence above eighteen months. Who ever heard of a registrar authorising the destruction of a file eighteen months after it went into action?"

"I'm sorry, Mr. Burr. Limpet may indeed be your case. I have no reason to disbelieve you, sir. But as we say in Registry, just because you own the case, you don't always own the file."

Nevertheless, the flow of information continues at an impressive rate. Both Burr and Strelski have their sources: The deal is firming up... the Panama connection is on line... six Panama-registered container ships on charter to Ironbrand of Nassau are heading across the South Atlantic bound for Curaçao, estimated date of arrival five to eight days from now. Between them they carry close to four hundred containers en route for the Panama Canal... the description of their freight varies from tractor parts to agricultural machinery to mining equipment to miscellaneous luxury goods....

Handpicked military trainers, including four French paras, two Israeli ex-colonels of special forces, and six ex-Soviet Spetsnaz, met in Amsterdam last week for a munificent farewell rijstafel in the city's best Indonesian restaurant. Afterwards they were flown to Panama....

Tales of large orders of materiel by Roper's nominees have been circulating in the arms bazaars for several months, but there has been a new gloss, which is to say that Palfrey's predictions of a switch in Roper's shopping list have found independent confirmation. Strelski's Brother Michael alias Apostoll has been talking to a fellow cartel lawyer named Moranti. The said Moranti operates out of Caracas and is held to be the mainstay of the shaky alliance between the cartels.

"Your Mr. Roper is going patriotic," Strelski announces to Burr over the secure telephone. "He's buying American."

Burr's heart sinks, but he plays unconcerned. "That's not patriotic, Joe! A Brit should be buying British."

"He's selling a new message to the cartels," says Strelski, undeterred. "If their perceived enemy is Uncle Sam, they're best off using Uncle Sam's toys. That way they have direct access to spares, they have captured enemy weapons they can assimilate, they are familiar with the enemy's techniques. British Starstreak HVMs, shoulder-held, British flag grenades, British tech, that's part of the package. Sure. But their mainstream toys, they have to be a mirror image of the perceived enemy. Some Brit, the rest American."

"So what do the cartels say?" Burr asks.

"They love it. They're in love with American technology. British too. They love Roper. They want the best."

"Does anybody explain what brought on this change of heart?"

Burr detects a concern comparable with his own below the surface of Strelski's voice.

"No, Leonard. Nobody explains a fucking thing. Not to Enforcement. Not in Miami. Maybe not in London either."

The story was confirmed a day later by a dealer of Burr's acquaintance in Belgrade. Sir Anthony Joyston Bradshaw, well known as Roper's signer in the shadier marketplaces, had the previous day switched a three-million-dollar pilot order for Czech Kalashnikovs to a similar order for American Armalites, destined theoretically for Tunisia. The guns were to be lost in transit and rerouted as agricultural machinery to Gdansk, where storage and onward transportation on a Panama-bound container ship had been arranged. Joyston Bradshaw had also expressed interest in British-built ground-to-air rockets but was allegedly demanding an inordinate side commission for himself.

But while Burr grimly noted this development, Goodhew appeared unable to grasp its implications: "I don't care whether they're buying American guns or Chinese pea-shooters, Leonard. I don't care whether they're stripping the British bare. It's drugs for arms whichever way you look at it, and there's not a court on earth will condone it."

Burr noticed that as Goodhew said this he flushed and seemed to have difficulty keeping his temper.

Still, the information pours in: No location for the exchange of goods has so far been agreed upon. Only the two principals will know the final details in advance....

The cartels have set aside the port of Buenaventura on the west coast of Colombia as the point of departure for their shipment, and past practice suggests that the same port will be used as the reception point for the incoming materiel....