For the most part a mercenary soldier conducts his business in the shadows. He has no friends. The people who hired him last year, and were glad to do so because bought guns were all that stood between them and the pit, want nothing more to do with him; and the better the job he did for them, the less anxious they are to see him again. For if their cause succeeded they replaced their enemies and now stand as vulnerable themselves to the assault of a hired army.
Michael Wylie had lost count of the number of times he had been asked to stay on as Commander-in-Chief of a new national force. Partly it was an expression of satisfaction with his work, but mostly it was to prevent him accepting a fresh contract from the people he had just ousted. But Wylie had no interest in gold braid and ostrich plumes, and anyway he had a strict rule about not changing sides in the same conflict within five years of accepting the king’s/sheikh’s/Grand Panjandrum’s shilling. Except that he worked in Swiss francs.
There were two points at which he had to step out of the shadows: to recruit, and to fight. Once it was time to fight the need for secrecy was over: if Wylie got his men trained, equipped and in position before anyone knew where they were, it did not matter who saw what after that. Given secrecy up to the moment of the first strike, Wylie’s men could have their battle won in a matter of hours, and whole wars over in just a few days. Or it could stretch to months, limited only by the amount of money available to buy ammunition.
Recruiting was more of a problem. It could not be done in absolute secrecy. As far as he could Wylie recruited men who had worked for him before, whose strengths and skills he knew and whose discretion he knew he could rely on. Very often they introduced other men with an interest in the work, with the sort of qualities that amounted to mercenary potential, and among them too Wylie could do his recruiting quietly. Men he accepted had a vested interest in preserving the secrecy that protected them all; those he rejected—it was almost always that way, not many men drawn to the job lost their nerve at the last minute—he was careful to leave with the hope of being chosen next time, which was enough to ensure their silence too.
But at some point, if the job was a big one, Wylie had to go beyond personal contacts and let it be known he was in the market for manpower. He left it as late as he could, built in what safeguards he could, but from that point onwards people beyond the circle of those he trusted implicitly knew that he was preparing for action.
So he lived with the prospect that one of the men applying to join him was a spy. He was careful. He did not tell recruits where they would be fighting, only what the job paid. He never discussed politics. Men who wanted to fight out of conviction could volunteer for causes which appealed to them but they had no business being mercenaries.
He never recruited in the same city twice running. He did not advertise his activities. He had core staff, men who worked permanently with him, strategically located to weed out no-hopers and warn him of anyone showing too much interest. Once signed up, men never left the company of their colleagues until the job was done. If they had to tell their mothers they would not be home, they wrote and the letters were checked. If they had to go shopping they went together, each watching the others for the sake of his own safety. It was not fool-proof. It was the best he could do.
When all the precautions had been taken, the time came when Wylie had to set up shop if he was going to have something to sell. Once he did that—announced his presence, however discreetly, and his willingness to do business—he had very little idea or control over who might come through his door.
So when he looked up from the papers on his desk—a wooden board across two trestles in an upstairs room overlooking the port of Tangiers—and the first thing he saw was a plaster cast, he thought Jacquard downstairs had flipped his lid and was sending him cripples now. He said, “I never heard of anybody being invalided into an army before.”
Then his eyes reached the face above the plaster and he sucked a little breath between his teeth and fell silent. Like everything else about him, his silences were dynamic, alive and crawling with import, not merely an absence of sound.
Mickey Flynn said, “Nobody else’s army would consider you fit to fight, Michael.”
In circumstances like these, ten seconds with nobody saying anything can feel a very long time. It was time for Wylie to hear and think about that odd hollowness in Flynn’s tone that was echoed in the fractionally abnormal wideness of his eyes. Partly it was uncertainty as to the welcome he could expect, which was understandable enough. Partly it was because he had not seen Wylie since before the disaster he was inadvertently responsible for, so he had not seen what happened to Wylie’s face. That too was understandable. Wylie had grown used to causing a certain amount of shock. Actually he rather enjoyed it.
The same ten seconds were also time for Flynn to take in the extent of the damage Wylie had sustained as a result of his error. He had lost an eye. A Moshe Dayan patch covered the empty socket. It might have been a land of reverse vanity, but the deeply puckered scar extending above and below the patch suggested that, with or without a glass stopper, Wylie’s left eye was not something people would want to see.
Whatever had taken his eye and left that ragged scar in its place had also torn half his cheek away. The granulation tissue which had replaced it was thick and uneven and incapable of much mobility, so that his expression was as lop-sided as a stroke victim’s. It took practice now to read what he was thinking. So Flynn could have been mistaken, but that glint in Wylie’s one eye looked like a kind of feral humour.
As his left eye-socket was covered by a black patch, so was his left hand encased in a black glove. Because he was right-handed he was not doing anything with it just now to indicate the extent of his disability. Preternaturally still, it lay on the board among the papers he had been reading and managed to dominate the little whitewashed room. Below the window, open to the breeze, the town sloped away to the sea.
Wylie said, with conviction, “You cannot be serious.”
Flynn managed the flicker of a smile. “About joining up, no. About needing to see you, absolutely serious.”
The soldier’s first thought was for the integrity of his operation. “How did you find me?”
“With difficulty. It’s taken me ten days, and I struck lucky at that. I found one of the guys who was with us in …” Flynn stammered and could not name the place where his honest mistake had cost Wylie so much. He had to rephrase it. “One of the men who worked for you. He sent me here. He wasn’t going to. I persuaded him you’d want to see me.”
“You did what?” A coal sparked in Wylie’s one eye.
Flynn had forgotten that persuasion means something different to men whose trade is violence. “No, I mean— What do you think, I’m going round hitting professional soldiers with my plaster cast? I asked him and he told me.”
“Who was it? I must have a word with him about security some time.”
What was it Todd used to say? “No names, no pack-drill. Anyway, you’ve nothing to worry about. He only sent me here because he expected you to beat my head in.”
Wylie leaned back in his chair, leaving his left hand on the desk. He was a man in his forties, with twenty years of this sort of work behind him and, given luck, another ten ahead. He was not a good-looking man, and had not been before his experience in Africa. He was inches shorter than Flynn, a handspan broader, and he was losing his hair. Mostly he wore black—a T-shirt today in deference to the Moroccan heat. Autumn had not reached here yet. The muscles of his arms and torso were square and hard, built by years of physical stress and owing nothing to a home gym. The Mr. Universe panel would not have looked at him twice, but you needed to know nothing at all about him to know not to jostle him in bars. He wore the potential for violence like a cloak, so visible he rarely had to resort to it.
He said, “Is that what you’re expecting?” His voice was deep and no longer held more than a trace of the accent he had grown as a steel-worker’s son in Cleveland, Ohio. Not since the end of the Vietnam War had he worked in mainly American company, and standard English was better for directing a multi-national, multi-lingual operation.
Flynn shrugged awkwardly. “I don’t know what to expect. I had to come anyway.”
Wylie had a disconcerting habit of coming right to the point. “Why?”
“There was something I had to ask you. It doesn’t matter now—I know the answer.” He paused then and his upper lip wrinkled: not with distaste, perhaps with regret. “Michael—I’m sorry about what happened.”
Wylie was still leaning back in his chair, watching ambivalently. “I know.”
“It was—Jesus Christ, it sounds stupid but it was a mistake. I didn’t mean—I didn’t mean to give you away.”
“I know that too.” Even the side of his face that could move was devoid of expression, his one eye half-hooded under its lowered lid.
“I thought—what we said, that you were already in action. There was a report of fighting along the border. By the time I found out it wasn’t you, it was too late to stop the pictures. If there’d been anything I could have done I’d have done it but—I couldn’t even find out what was happening. I couldn’t get back—they closed down all the transport. After the government fell I tried again. I got the brush-off from your chief of staff. I knew you were alive, but I couldn’t find out—” Embarrassed, he waved his good hand at Wylie’s face. “Hell, Michael, you know what I’m saying.”
Wylie smiled. It was not a pretty sight. “Sure I do. You wanted to know what they’d done to me and nobody’d tell you.”
Flynn flushed. But it was near enough the truth that he could not deny it. “I suppose I wanted to know that you were OK.”
“That’s why nobody’d talk to you. I wasn’t.”
“I know.” He shrugged again, helplessly. “I’m—”
“Let me guess,” interjected Wylie, “you’re sorry. Listen, kid. What happened was pure Fortunes of War stuff. Not your fault, not anybody’s fault, just bad luck. It happens. Oh, I called you every name under the sun and wished interesting tropical diseases on you, but I didn’t blame you. Not then and not since. You want your head beaten in, you’ll have to take it someplace else.”
Flynn nodded slowly. He hardly knew what to say and anyway for the moment lacked the voice to say it. He had not suspected Wylie of generosity. Or perhaps he was not so much generous as detached, a man who could distinguish between acts and their consequences even when he was himself their victim.
Either way, it was clear he harboured no ill-will towards Flynn. It had been worth the ten days and the miles Flynn had covered to learn that. Quite separately from his feelings about Flight 98, Flynn felt relief like a lightening burden to have made his peace with Wylie.
Wylie said, “So what was it you had to ask me?”
Flynn smiled. “I told you, I already know the answer.”
“So tell me the question and the answer.”
He could have refused. He could have lied. He considered both and, in view of Wylie’s straightness with him, dismissed them. A shade ruefully he said, “I came to ask if you’ve been trying to kill me.”
There were only two or three ways a man could react to a question like that. Again there was that pause of a few seconds before Wylie reacted at all, seconds in which Flynn held his breath. The reconciliation had been good, but it could prove to have been very short.
Wylie ended the waiting by laughing out loud, immoderately. A harsh deep cackle of laughter like defective drains shook his powerful frame and squeezed tears from his eye. He thumped the desk with his gloved hand and still he laughed. Finally the need to breathe intervened and the cackle gave way to a throaty chuckle. “It’s a good job you can take photographs, kid,” he managed then. “You’d make a rubbish soldier.”
The idea of Flynn spending ten days tracking him down and then manoeuvring himself into a private interview in order to ask that was too much for Wylie. “What if I’d said yes and blown your head off?”
“Then I’d have known,” said Flynn.
Still chuckling, Wylie shut the office up and took Flynn out to lunch. Lamb stew and couscous, eaten under the awning of a pavement cafe and washed down with mint tea. Flynn had not liked couscous the first time he came to Morocco with Todd, and the recipe had not changed.
Wylie said, “So what’s this all about?” and Flynn told him. During the telling Wylie stopped seeing the funny side. He listened, watchful, a black and brooding presence much bigger than the space he took up. When Flynn had finished he said, his voice rough with barely contained anger, “What kind of a bastard do you take me for?”
Transfixed by Wylie’s fierce unwinking stare, pinned between the couscous and the sea, Flynn found himself pleading. “Michael, try to understand. Somebody’s been doing these things. Somebody killed two hundred and twenty people on a plane I should have been on. Somebody fire-bombed my apartment, with my woman in it. Somebody hates me like crazy. All I could think to do was track down people I might have given cause to hate me that much.
“Until just now I didn’t know if you wanted my blood or not. I knew you could have organised and carried out something like this. I knew that, when I knew you two years ago, you wouldn’t have gone in for that kind of open-ended mayhem. But things happened to you, Michael, that were enough to change anyone. Yes, in all the circumstances I could imagine you becoming—that obsessed by hatred of me. I hoped it wasn’t you, but I had to find out.”
“And now you know?”
“Oh yes. Your malice takes a subtler form. Like taking a hungry man out to lunch and feeding him sawdust.”
Wylie smiled slowly. Then he grinned. “So if it wasn’t me, who was it?”
Flynn told him about the short-list, the four names now whittled down to one. “Fahad was always going to be involved one way or another. Laura saw him at the apartment. But somehow I still can’t see him doing the plane. A knife in an alley, a bomb in my car, a sniper in an upstairs window—yeah, sure, the guy wants me dead and, like yourself, he’s in a line of business that fits him to do something about it. He could have bombed the plane, no question. But I’m not convinced he did. I’d ask him, but I don’t know how to find him.”
“Sonny,” Wylie said heavily, “you keep knocking on trapdoors, sooner or later one of them’s going to open.”
Flynn shook his head. “I have a charmed life.” He had said it so often now he was in danger of believing it. “It should have been Obregon, and even if it hadn’t been he should have killed me. But it wasn’t and he didn’t—only this.” He held up the grimy plaster. “I didn’t expect it to be Loriston and it wasn’t. I hoped it wouldn’t be you and it wasn’t. Now there’s only Fahad. Oh God, Michael, I hope it wasn’t Fahad.”
Wylie did not understand. “If it wasn’t Fahad, who was it?”
Flynn’s eyes were a little crazy with hope. “If it wasn’t Fahad, who the hell cares? If it wasn’t Fahad, it wasn’t because of me. It was all a meaningless coincidence—the fire at my place, Obregon’s courier being on the plane and then getting off it. Why not? I owe my life to the coincidence of taking the same short-cut as a black kid in a Porsche. There’s no law says everything has to connect, you’re only entitled to one coincidence every twenty-five thousand miles.”
“No,” Wylie agreed slowly. “But I mistrust coincidence. Most coincidences are conspiracies that never came to light.”
Flynn laughed. “Michael, you’re a cynic.”
“A man with one eye has to be,” Wylie observed obscurely.
After lunch they strolled back up the hill to Wylie’s office. There were people waiting to see him so he did not ask Flynn in. They stood in the alley below.
Wylie said, “How will you find Fahad?”
Flynn shook his head. “I wish I knew. I spent ten days looking for you, and the reason I did that was I couldn’t think how to start looking for Fahad. If he’d been more accessible I’d have talked to him long enough since.”
“Then he’d have killed you.”
“Not necessarily. Maybe it wasn’t him either—”
“Forget the plane. He burned your apartment. What makes you think he’s had a change of heart since then? The rest of us were people who might have had an interest in killing you, but according to you Fahad’s already tried it. How are you going to stop him trying again?”
“Why do you say it like that? According to me. Do you think I’m lying?”
Wylie grinned wolfishly. “Kid, we both know you’re capable of making mistakes. I don’t know, something doesn’t hang together here. If Fahad wanted you dead, why call when you were out?—and if he didn’t, why call at all? An international terrorist with the police of several countries after him should have more on his mind than playing practical jokes, even vicious ones. And that’s all this was. If he wanted you dead, you’d be dead; and if he’d wanted your woman dead, she wouldn’t have been picking his picture out of the cops’family album three hours later.”
“She didn’t. She made up one of those composites—you know, the PhotoFit things. But it was Fahad. It couldn’t have been anyone else.”
“It was that good a likeness?”
“Sure.”
Wylie shook his head. “Well, it shouldn’t have been. Those things never look like anybody—the best they can do is rule out a lot of people it couldn’t have been.”
Flynn was growing impatient. He did not understand what Wylie was driving at. He seemed to be questioning the very few things about the episode that were known facts. Flynn felt the ground shifting under his feet and it made him uneasy and rather querulous. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. What are you saying—that Laura made up a picture of someone who wasn’t there?”
Someone with a donkey came up the alley. It was not a very wide alley, but after a glance at Wylie both the man and the donkey gave them a clear berth. Wylie had that effect, even when he was not trying. There was an aura of latent power about the way he moved and, when he was not moving, his very deliberate stillness. He was still now. He said, “Mickey—how well do you know this girl?”
Intimately and hardly at all. He had known her a little over a week. He had known every fold of her body. He had known, when he entered a large building, whether she was inside. He had not known whether she liked musical comedies, or Italian food. He knew the precise shade of every part of her in every light. He did not know when her birthday was.
He tried to say, very matter-of-factly, “I don’t believe you said that.” But his voice cracked.