When Laura told the police what had happened, Flynn turned very white. He had had no chance to hear it before and had assumed that the fire was some kind of a freak accident. He reckoned to be careful with his chemicals and equipment, but anyone could make a mistake or be plain unlucky. The idea of men breaking into his apartment, starting a fire and deliberately locking his woman in with it chilled him to his very soul. And more, not less, because he felt he should have expected it.
For seven years he had worked as a news photographer. In that comparatively short time—shorter if you subtracted the months he had spent hors de combat—he had become one of the top names in the field: partly for the quality of his images, which were strange and violent and disturbing and lingered on the mind long after the headlines had passed on, but partly too for his reputation for capturing these arresting images by sticking his neck out further than was common or wise.
This was not the first time someone had had a go at him. He had displeased a lot of violent, corrupt and unscrupulous people in seven years. He had been threatened, he had been hurt because of it. He expected that, tried to watch his back for it. But this he had never expected, and he thought now that he should have done.
They adjourned to the police station. Laura—they had found her some more suitable clothes—made her statement, then they set her to work with a PhotoFit expert. Meanwhile Inspector Ford, who had clearly received some surprising information about Flynn via his computer, sat him down with a mug of coffee and eyed him speculatively.
“We have requests from two foreign police forces to keep an eye on you.”
Flynn was too drained, mentally and physically, to manage much of a reaction. “Only two?”
“A friendly eye,” explained the Inspector, “a protective eye, but an eye for all that.”
Flynn’s tired gaze found him through the steam. “So where were you this morning?”
Ford sighed. “Keeping a less friendly eye on a lot of other people. What can I tell you?—we can’t mount a twenty-four-hour guard on people for years at a time. It was a good job you got back when you did.”
Flame bloomed again in Flynn’s eyes and he shuddered. “It was a bloody miracle.”
“So who might hate you this much, Mr. Flynn?”
Flynn thought for a moment. “Alphabetically or chronologically?”
He had had “I’ll get you for this” hurled at him more times than he could remember. Mostly it was rhetoric, spat out by people who would not have known how to set about making him pay even if they had stayed mad long enough to want to. Mostly the people who had the money, the clout and the reason to vent their serious displeasure on him also had the sense not to warn him first.
But this was no spur-of-the-moment retaliation, a flung fist, a drawn knife, even a car grinding him into the brick wall of a dark alley. It was colder than that, more calculating. If they had wanted to burn him they would not have waited until mid-morning when his car was gone. They wanted to burn something dear to him instead, and not just his home. Four days Laura had been here with him. Before that there had been nobody he would have grieved over. So they had waited and watched.
Four names he could think of, four men who might have hated him that much, and that coldly, that they would watch for months or years until he had something he cared about and then destroy it. Obregon, Loriston, Wylie and Fahad; not necessarily in that order.
He saw from Ford’s face that none of the names were new to
him. Still he asked, “Who are they? What did you do to them?”
Flynn shrugged. “I took their photographs.”
Without question, Tomas Obregon was the most evil of the four. He was probably the most evil man Flynn had ever met; also one of the most urbane, cultured, charming. The walls of his white house in Florida were covered with mostly modern masters: Picasso, van Gogh, Salvador Dali, Modigliani. He supported a youth theatre in Miami, a writers’commune in Nassau, several orphanages and a resettlement programme for Cuban exiles. He paid his taxes, and his big white car obeyed speed limits.
But the money for the car, and the paintings, and the house, and the assorted orphans and exiles and writers, came from the drug trade. Tomas Obregon was one of the top half-dozen drug barons in the world, and everyone in that world knew it. The difficulty lay in proving it. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration had tried. Some of their agents had died trying, but it was no easier to prove him a murderer.
It was not so much that Flynn had succeeded where the FBI had failed, more that he could do things which it could not, and achieve his effect with mere careful suggestion where the FBI required hard evidence that would stand up in a court of law.
Thus began a brilliant, bizarre campaign that over a period of five months shredded the apparently impervious cloak of respectability Obregon had spent fifteen years weaving; a campaign that made no allegations against Obregon, that only once mentioned him by name; a campaign spread through a dozen newspapers in as many cities.
The first photograph appeared in all the papers, to the considerable if short-lived gratification of its subject. It showed Mr. Obregon stepping out of his distinctive long white car to attend the opening night of the Miami youth theatre that bore his name. It was a very pleasant photograph, if a shade tame by Mickey Flynn’s standards, and the kindly mien of the dapper middle-aged Hispanic, the stylish opulence of his favourite car and the happy pride of the multi-coloured ragamuffins welcoming their patron ensured it a prominence that perhaps its content alone could not have justified.
The second photograph was also taken in Miami, a dramatic study of the docks made one thunderous early morning with the heavy clouds picked up by a moody filter. Three-quarters of the frame was filled by the high flaring bow of a Panamanian freighter, her name Cartagena in rusty white letters at top right, behind her the Miami skyline. Bottom left, parked on the quay by the freighter’s gangway, was a long white car. The picture carried Flynn’s by-line and some cosy caption about day beginning early for those who work on the Miami waterfront.
Elsewhere on the page, connected by nothing more substantial than coincidence, was a paragraph about the Cartagena being allowed to proceed on her passage from Miami to Norfolk, Virginia, after being delayed by a customs search.
The third photograph showed a great panorama of fall coming to the wooded mountains of Pennsylvania. It was in colour, which was hardly more archetypal Flynn than the Wonders of Nature style of photography but which showed the autumn growing down the sides of the hills from the scalped peaks, through as many shades of red and yellow and auburn and umber as there were leaves on the myriad trees, to meet the green of late summer in the valley. Behind the peaks the sky was that particular pale, intense blue that comes with the first cold.
From edge to edge the picture must have captured four miles and two thousand feet of Allegheny Mountain land, and in all that vast expanse there was only one indication of human intrusion. Halfway up the mountain, visible through the thinning boughs, ran a road and on the road, nose to nose, tiny as toys from a Christmas cracker, were two cars. One was long and white. The other had steer horns on the grill.
And elsewhere on the page was a reference to the arrest, on charges of drug trafficking, of a Philadelphia businessman whose sole interest was hitherto believed to be beef cattle and whose stocky figure, Stetson hat and horn-bedecked limousine were a familiar sight at state fairs the length and breadth of the country.
By now those most closely involved, and a good many others besides, were alert to the game being played and watching for its next move with feelings ranging from glee to black fury, depending on the degree and nature of their involvement. They were not kept waiting long.
In New York Flynn photographed the long white car outside a lawyer’s office. The ostensible subject of the picture was some street theatre. On the same page was news that the lawyer had been retained to defend two men accused of breaking legs in a dispute over who should sell what drugs on which street corner.
In Washington Flynn photographed the long white car in traffic alongside a delivery van for a major, and wholly respectable, pharmaceuticals outlet. Both vehicles had been held up for the parade that was the alleged focus of the picture. But the placement of the caption describing it had necessitated cropping most of the van’s side panel including its owners’ names. Only the word “druggist” hung over the top of the white car like an accusation.
Then Obregon took his two young nephews to a flying display. He had his car parked as centrally as a generous tip could ensure, and adjacent to a static display of veteran planes. If he noticed that one of them had its propellers on the trailing edges of the wings he thought nothing of it until Flynn’s photograph of the plane, the white car clearly visible in the background, appeared under the headline PUSHER.
Tomas Obregon was not the man to take all this lying down. But even the high-powered help he could afford found it difficult to formulate a tenable complaint. A series of unconnected newspapers had published a series of unconnected photographs on divers topics, in which the assiduous reader armed with a magnifying glass might spot in the background a car which might possibly be Mr. Obregon’s. So? There was no suggestion, in words or pictures, that the vehicle was anywhere it should not have been, or doing anything it should not have been doing. Was Mr. Obregon denying that he had been to a flying display? Was there libel potential in indicating that he had driven through a Pennsylvanian wood?
Obregon might not have restricted himself to legal remedies, nor probably to breaking legs; but about that time the snowball Flynn had so carefully shaped and set rolling began to develop a momentum of its own. Things that had been secret were now public knowledge, the stuff of jokes. One New York cartoonist began to include a white car, vanishingly small but still quite distinct, in the background of his sketches. Embarrassment at past failures led to a political will to deal with Obregon which had previously been lacking. A new determination and a new priority, together with new funds, entered a renewed investigation of Tomas Obregon.
And at just that time Obregon gave up his house in Florida and shipped his paintings, and his car, to a property he owned in Barranquilla, across the Caribbean in Colombia, out of reach of U.S. law. It was not the best end that Flynn had hoped for when he began his crusade, but nor was it the worst. Crimes had been acknowledged, and even if the criminal had escaped justice for now, his time might yet come. All the rewards of his crime, except for the money, were forfeit: the respect he had enjoyed, the status. The youth theatre closed down and the orphanages changed their names.
And for a little while Mickey Flynn was as careful as he knew how to be. But there was no hint of retaliation, no sign that Obregon deigned to acknowledge his existence. Until one morning the post brought him an envelope plastered with South American stamps. There was no letter inside, only a small cartoon. It showed a graveyard, and a stone cross from the shoulders of which hung a camera, and in the background driving away was a long white car.
Flynn framed the cartoon and hung it in his bathroom.
Peter Loriston was not an evil man. He was not even a dishonest one, although following the scandal that led to his resigning his seat at Westminster he was perceived almost universally as not merely dishonest but corrupt.
As the Honorable Member for Chingley South and a junior minister at the Ministry of Defence, Loriston made three serious mistakes in the course of one heady week that turned him from one of the government’s young lions into one of its banana skins.
The first mistake he would probably have been forgiven, since it was merely cheating on his wife and there was ample parliamentary precedent for that. The second, which was lying to the House, was much more serious, but even that he might have got away with if he had refrained from providing proof of the rumours that ran at the speed of an inspired leak through the corridors of power. The real mistake he made, the fatal one, the one that clinched it and made him overnight into a politician with a great future behind him, was being photographed on a yacht with the daughter of the man to whose company Loriston’s ministry had just awarded a fat contract.
There was only one way the press, the public and particularly Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition were going to read that. Like the name of the latest soap-opera starlet, suddenly the cry “Corruption!” was on everyone’s lips. Hadn’t Peter Loriston, MP, been in a position to influence the award of this important defence contract? Hadn’t the choice of Coxton Electronics been a controversial one? Hadn’t Mr. Loriston assured the House, in the most direct and unambiguous terms, that neither he nor anyone else involved in allocating the contract had any association with Coxtons prior to or other than their dealings on the current matter?
And then hadn’t Mr. Loriston, MP, forty-six-year-old ex-Guards officer, married man and father of two, been photographed aboard a floating gin-palace at anchor in a remote Sardinian bay washed by the wine-dark Tyrrhenian Sea, plainly engaged in an illicit Mediterranean idyll with the twenty-one-year-old daughter of the eponymous head of Coxton Electronics?
Those closest to the affair knew that Loriston’s involvement with the girl was a bit of mid-summer madness, a frivolity, nothing more. It had in no way affected the government’s business with Coxtons—nor could it have been allowed to, because what Coxtons had to offer was worth a great deal more than one junior minister at the MoD. Unfortunately for Loriston, what Coxtons had to offer was also secret, so that the award of the contract could not be publicly explained and justified.
Besides, the Honorable Member for Chingley South had lied to the House. There was no alternative but the Chiltern Hundreds. That one heady week had cost the ambitious, arrogant, able Mr. Loriston his career, his wife, his home and even, now her father had found out, his bit on the side. A week is indeed a long time in politics.
Flynn had no particular scruples about invading the privacy of a junior minister playing hooky with the daughter of a defence contractor, but nor did he consider the photograph one of the highlights of his professional career. He would not have included the embittered but probably still essentially honest Mr. Loriston on his list of Men Most Likely except for one thing. He rather thought Mr. Loriston had tried to kill him once before.
It was hard to be sure. It might have been only a moment’s carelessness. It might have been a rather vicious joke devised to extract a small revenge for the damage Flynn had done him. But Flynn had seen his face in the split-second before he was leaping for his life, and it was his firm and abiding impression that Loriston was in absolute earnest.
Nine months had passed since their previous encounter, through a telephoto lens off the coast of Sardinia. Flynn had hardly thought of Loriston in that time. Now here he was on the public relations staff of a firm of architects showing him round the shell of a Wapping warehouse they were converting into a vertical village using startlingly modern technology that Flynn wanted to photograph.
They exchanged cool greetings and made no allusion to their earlier confrontation, but Loriston had neither forgiven nor forgotten. It showed in the stiff squareness of his broad shoulders, the almost gladiatorial way he moved round Flynn. Of course, he had been a soldier.
Flynn was not interested in Loriston. He was interested in the monster machines, in the play of structures hung over London at church-spire level, in the stark surreal views he hoped to see from the roof. Height had always fascinated him.
A rigger took them up as far as was safe. Flynn wanted to go higher. The rigger objected but Loriston saw no problem and, leaving his coat across a beam, began to climb. They scaled steel for another storey. Loriston pointed out the views downriver towards the Thames Barrier and up it towards St. Paul’s. Flynn grafted himself to a girder by casually crooking one long leg round it and unshipped the camera he carried round his neck.
It was then that he saw Loriston looking at him. A moment later a cry of alarm and warning above him took his gaze racing up in time to see the grab of a crane opening to drop its contents of broken masonry and mortar dust into a skip below.
Looking back he was not sure that, if he had stayed where he was, rooted to the girder like ivy to an oak, the debris would have hit him. It might have poured straight past. Leaping back from the girder with no clear idea where he would find another was probably more dangerous than staying put, and he was lucky to have escaped with nothing worse than a racing heart and a lost filter. But in his own mind he was sure of one thing. Loriston had hoped the roaring debris would tear him from the face of the building and smash him to bloody pulp in the skip thirty feet below.
Even in his own mind, Flynn had never been able to decide whether Michael Wylie was an evil man or not. What he did was certainly illegal in the places where he did it, but in those places it was not always safe to equate illegality with wrongdoing. Besides, when Wylie was successful, very often the laws were changed. As history is written by victors, there were places where Wylie was regarded as a hero of the liberation and others where his life stood forfeit for revolutionary insurgency. Often these places stood cheek by jowl on the map, alternating like squares on a chess-board.
Wylie was a mercenary. War was his trade. He had learned it as an American soldier in the closing phase of the Vietnam adventure, had refined it in covert operations in South American jungles, had finally faced the choice of serving in the make-believe world of a peace-time army or getting out and finding some real battles to fight. Once he had thought of it in those terms it was no contest. Now he ran his own army.
Of the four men who might seek his death, Wylie was the only one Flynn reckoned to know in any degree personally. It might have been the shared nationality, or the three months he spent with Wylie’s group in Africa which gave him the chance to talk to this tough, hard, infinitely professional man as he had not with the others. But there was another element too, and Flynn suspected that it was something as much in him as in Wylie. They had things in common, not so much experiences as attitudes. The way they worked, the way they lived, were not that dissimilar.
A casual observer would not have seen it. There were thirteen years, a generation, between them, the compact, intense violenthearted man and the long-limbed footloose photographer with his kind eyes and his wicked grin. Wylie dealt in death, Flynn strictly in dollars. Flynn swore constantly and foully and it meant nothing. Wylie almost never raised his voice, but his displeasure was so abrasive it flayed the skin and drew blood.
But Flynn sensed what, having no particular skill with words, he could not describe: that he and Wylie were fellow-travellers on the same current of time and events, exiles mostly by choice with no allegiances and no master under a god neither of them believed in. Both sold their services where need, inclination and an ability to pay were conjoined. Neither paid even lip-service to the conventional morality that condemned them, yet neither was without a morality of his own. Flynn would not sell his camera, and found that Wylie would not sell his guns, where only the money was attractive. Wylie was a man who made almost a religion of being unlikeable; but Flynn liked him and found much to admire in him, and came finally to respect him, which was harder.
At the end of his time with Wylie, Flynn returned to London. They had arranged that he would publish nothing until the opening shots had been fired in the small war which Wylie was preparing for. It was always Flynn’s intention to abide by that. But when news came through of a fire-fight on the border between government forces and alleged ivory poachers, Flynn assumed it was the signal he was waiting for and called the magazine he had sold the pictures to and told them to print.
Before the first copies reached London he knew he had made a mistake, that the alleged poachers were poachers indeed and Wylie was still manoeuvring his forces into position. The next he heard Wylie had been taken prisoner.
For ten days Flynn dwelt in an agony of guilt and horrid imaginings. He had spent long enough with the mercenaries to have learned something about this particular cashew republic, and what he had learned left him with no illusions as to its policy on human rights. That was one reason there were enough disaffected citizens to pay for professional help to overthrow their government.
Then word came out of fighting in the streets of the capital. The revolt had begun, the partisan forces organised and led by the mercenary army under the command of Wylie’s lieutenant. The government must have thought itself safe for as long as they had the rebels’leader, and were wrong-footed by the attack, coming long enough after Wylie’s capture for them to have relaxed and not long enough for them to have realised that a professional army which puts its own interests before those of the paying customers quickly runs out of paying customers.
By the time the government troops were mobilized the rebels had seized the power-station, the radio-station, the airport and the main armoury. Fighting continued all that day and throughout the night, but it was increasingly a rearguard action by government forces attempting to safeguard a negotiating position for their political masters. But the partisans had scented victory and were not interested in negotiating. Government House fell at dawn on the second day, and all remaining government installations were ceded to them by noon. Including the prison.
When Flynn learned that Wylie had been taken from the prison alive he tried desperately to obtain more information. But he could not get into the country—all flights had been cancelled and land borders closed—and when he tried to contact the new regime all he got was a message from Wylie’s lieutenant saying, “Haven’t you done enough?”
Flynn never succeeded in speaking to Wylie. He wrote explaining what had happened but had no way of knowing if the letter reached him; certainly Wylie never wrote back. But five months later Wylie was commanding his small army in a promising little war in Central America, and Flynn inferred that he must have recovered from whatever abuse he had received during his ten days of captivity.
But Flynn remained deeply uneasy about how his actions must have seemed to Wylie and his men. Some sins he was quite happy to have attributed to him, but betrayal was not one of them. He had respected Wylie, and would have liked his respect in return. After all that had happened, it seemed an optimistic ambition. Even more, he would have chosen to avoid Wylie’s enmity. He suspected that Wylie’s enemies slept as lightly and woke as nervously as turkeys in the first three weeks of December.
Then there was Fahad.
Very little of what happened to Fahad’s organisation was Flynn’s fault, but he doubted if Fahad saw it that way. The Israel Defence Forces had used Flynn, without his knowledge—he was about the last man involved in the operation, on either side, to find out—to infiltrate the Palestinian base Fahad had established in the desert by the Dead Sea.
When the IDF cleared it out, everyone there was either captured or killed. Except Fahad. His bomb expert was serving a life sentence. His chief of staff was dead. An entire intake of PFLP recruits, young Palestinian men and women come to him for training, together with those there to train them, had been lost to the intifada. Jamil Fahad’s escape left him a general without an army.
Flynn knew that Fahad had intended to kill him at one time. It would come as no surprise to learn that he still did. The timing was a little odd. It was three years since the episode at Bab el Jihad: if Fahad had wanted vengeance for it, why had he waited so long? Of course, the first year Flynn would have been harder to get at. He was a prosecution witness at trials not only in Israel but also in Holland, and the assorted police involved were keeping a more than just friendly eye on him.
And after that he had moved around a lot. Perhaps Fahad would have tried for him then if he could have found him. New York, Nebraska, Mexico, Peru; the Obregon episode up and down the eastern states; at other times he was in Australia, in the Mediterranean where he caught up with Loriston, and in Africa for three months with Wylie’s mercenaries.
He had only been back in England four months. Perhaps this was the first time he had stayed put long enough for Fahad to do something about him. After three years he had thought he was safe enough slowing down. It looked as if he had been wrong.
Inspector Ford gave a long low whistle. He looked impressed but not in the least envious. “You fairly get around, don’t you?”
“It seemed like a good idea. Maybe I should have kept it up longer.”
“And any of these four could hate you enough to want to—”
“To incinerate my girlfriend. Yes. But I don’t know that any of them did.”
“Anyone else?”
Flynn considered, shook his head helplessly. “Maybe. Maybe someone who took something I did more seriously than I thought. But I don’t know who.”
“OK,” said Ford. “Well, we’ll get to work on it, see what we can find out.” He fingered the intercom. “How’s the PhotoFit coming?”
“We’ve got one decent likeness,” said a man’s voice. “Shall I bring it in?”
It was more than a decent likeness, it was a picture of a man Flynn knew. He let his eyes close and his head rocked back. Then he drew a deep breath. “Fahad,” he said.