I put the walkie-talkies in the boot of my car and gave Pedro the film from my camera.
‘I’ll develop the film tonight,’ he told me. ‘I’d like to show those photos around and check on the car hire firm, so call me after eleven tomorrow.’
‘OK. First thing tomorrow I’ll give Cimate our bid and try to see what he does with it. I’ll bid half a million.’
‘Dollars?’
‘Pounds.’
In those days the exchange rate was $2.40 to the pound so it made a big difference.
‘You’re joking. The DG can’t have authorised that much.’
‘So what? They’ll probably assume we’re bluffing. But if they don’t it may keep us in the running. We probably can’t win but we certainly can’t lose.’
Once Pedro had gone there didn’t seem much point in my staying. For one thing I was hungry. Nothing seemed to be happening in the villa and I had just decided to leave when the lights of a car appeared in front of the villa and came down the drive. The car stopped at the lodge and the driver opened the gates. Then it came out and turned left, away from Rio and towards the parked Volkswagen.
Stumbling through the trees I rounded the bend in the road and saw an old Ford with its lights on stopped behind the Volkswagen. There were two people in the Ford; Barcisa, or Budermann as I now had to think of him, got out and approached the other car whose driver was now fiddling with the Volkswagen’s engine on his own. Budermann seemed to be asking what was wrong. The other man shook his head, slipped behind the driving seat and tried the engine. It started immediately.
Budermann rejoined his companion who had remained in the car, turned round and drove back towards the villa.
Budermann had come out of the villa just to check on the car parked outside: how had he known it was there?
I moved back to check that the Ford really had gone into the villa and saw its lights passing up the drive.
Then the Volkswagen appeared a minute or two later with two occupants, heading towards Rio. As I turned away there was a flash of movement in the moonlight. Somebody was walking up the drive from the gate. Evidently Budermann or his companion had stayed at the lodge, so they had seen that the Volkswagen now contained two men. What would they make of that?
With Budermann now inside the villa, I felt safe in driving past it and accelerating after the Volkswagen. I didn’t catch it up until Avenida Brasil.
I dropped back but kept it in sight. They stopped at a petrol station and I drove on. There was another almost immediately. I filled up, then checked the tyre pressures, radiator, oil and battery. Plenty of Volkswagens passed but not the one I had been following. These men were professionals. I bought a Guarana and sipped it slowly but then gave up the wait and drove back, through the city centre, to Copacabana.
‘There is one message for you, Senhor,’ Cimate greeted me at the hotel.
‘It says the bidding’s delayed,’ a voice informed me from behind.
Gary Stover was sitting in the lounge, grinning widely. I ripped open the envelope.
‘One of the parties has asked for a delay. One day will be allowed. Bids must reach Senhor Cimate by midnight Thursday. Each bidder will receive a reply by Saturday noon.’
‘It wasn’t us,’ Gary explained. ‘You been requesting any delays?’
‘Could be. You relaxing or on duty?’
‘Both. Pat Conniston thinks you’re up to something, so I’m supposed to keep an eye on you.’
‘Well I’m going to have a shower. Then you can buy me a gin and tonic and we’ll go and find a good restaurant.’
‘Fine by me. I’ll be in the bar.’
I turned back to Cimate and collected my key. He said nothing and retired to his room behind the desk. I counted his silence a distinct blessing: that was a mistake.
I was thinking about the delay in the bidding when I stepped out of the shower. It might be a ploy to make the losing bidders relax. More likely it meant the Russians needed time to get the gold into the country. Martines had made a mistake in not telling them earlier. I dried and reached for a clean shirt; its collar was bent back.
I was almost sure it hadn’t been before. I’m obsessive about that sort of thing. But why would anybody search my room? What could they hope to find? The answer was quickly clear: nothing. The room had not been searched. The intruder had something else in mind.
The bottom of the drawer was lined with brown paper, one edge of which was now creased: somebody had lifted it up to put half a dozen pamphlets underneath. They were crudely duplicated sheets bearing slogans like ‘Only the armed people will overthrow the dictatorship’. None of them were signed or contained the name of any organisation.
I made a quick search of the room. I only had time to look in the most obvious places. In the bottom of the bed were three more. This time one of them bore the signature ‘MR-26’.
That confirmed what I had suspected from the slogans. The Movimiento Revolucionário 26, named after Castro’s attack on the Moncada barracks on 26 July 1953, was now defunct and had been for some time. The pamphlets were years out of date. Obviously they were a plant, but what for? The three in the bed I had been bound to discover. Therefore either I was supposed to find them or else somebody was going to march in and discover them before I went to sleep. In any event they had to be disposed of. I couldn’t burn them in my room or risk blocking the toilet so I stuffed them in my pocket.
I left the drawer slightly open at one end and a hair balanced on the handle so it should be obvious if it was searched again.
Gary was in the bar with my drink beside him and a whisky in his hand. The bar was not crowded and in the corner sat the person I least wanted to see, Jânio Gomes, the police captain I’d seen leaving the Villa Nhambiquaras.
‘You’ve taken your time,’ said Gary.
‘Sorry about that. Let’s drink up and go and eat.’
Gary’s car was parked outside the hotel. He threw me the keys.
‘You know this town. Take me to a good size steak and I’ll do the rest.’
I chose the nearest good restaurant, the Ouro Verde on Avenida Atlantica. As we climbed out, I slipped the pamphlets under the front seat.
‘What are you doing here, Tom?’ Gary asked after we’d ordered. On the Langley course he had insisted on calling me Tom, a name nobody else ever used.
‘Presumably I’m here for the same reason you are. To take part in an auction.’
‘Really!’ he exclaimed with affected disbelief. ‘You must realise you haven’t a hope of matching our bid. Your budget’s way too small. And I just can’t believe the English government will even let you bid for something stolen from us. We could get you kicked out, you know. A word from the State Department to your Foreign Office and you would be on the first plane home. Or a word to the locals here. After the Lechlade business in London DIS is not our favourite intelligence partner. Does your MI6 know you’re here?’
I studied the menu and said nothing.
‘Come on Tom, you’re here because there’s some sort of English connection in all this. Pat’s sure of it and he’s dealt with these people before. What do you know about an Englishman named Rupert Stanley Ashton? Arrived in Chicago last Thursday from Toronto. Flew out the next day, to London. Or Julia Louise French, arrived in Miami the same day, flew to Chicago and then on to Toronto, also English. And there’s another name to play with, Nicholas Broadbent, Canadian, also in Chicago at the same time.’
‘What have they done?’ I asked innocently.
Gary looked at me with justified suspicion. ‘Paul Donnell gets killed on the floor of the Chicago Options Exchange and we find a taxi driver who’s taken two Brits from The Drake to the Options Exchange just a few minutes earlier, two Brits who had no idea where they were going, two Brits the hotel identifies as Ashton and French. Clearly they were following Donnell and they got him. But when we ask Brasenose for help, nothing.’
‘Brasenose?’ I interrupted, remembering the man Mendale and I had seen at the House of Lords.
‘Justin Brasenose, our MI6 liaison. Don’t you guys ever talk to each other over there? Anyway, we ask Brasenose for help and all he can tell us is that the names are phoney. This Rupert Ashton has landed in London using a phoney passport and then vanished into thin air. The way we figure it Donnell had a deal with these English guys. He would steal Griffin and sell it to them but what he didn’t know is that they had no intention of paying him. They followed him around Chicago and when they had their opportunity killed him and stole the Interrogator thing themselves. Then they brought it here.’
From Gary’s perspective the story made some sort of sense although it didn’t explain how and why Donnell had gone on to the floor of the Options Exchange wearing an Options Exchange uniform. And it didn’t make sense in another way. Gary had mentioned the names Ashton, French and Broadbent. Ashton and French I could understand. The taxi driver would certainly have remembered Julia and me jumping into his taxi at The Drake and it wouldn’t have been difficult to identify us from the hotel records. But where did the name Broadbent come from? How had the Americans managed to connect Nick Broadbent with us?
I was soon to find out. ‘How did the auctioneers contact you people?’ Gary asked.
There didn’t seem to be any reason not to tell him.
‘They phoned our man at the Embassy in Washington. Told us to put a coded announcement in a London paper if we were interested.’
‘And your man didn’t ask for any proof they had the Griffin Interrogator?’
‘Not that I know of. Why? Did you get proof?’
‘Sort of. They phoned Rick Newell in Langley and said they had Griffin. I don’t know this Newell guy, he’s ONI liaison, but he’s evidently smart and he starts asking them questions about how they got hold of it. Says he doesn’t believe they really have it. They’d obviously expected something like that. They tell Newell they bought Griffin at The Drake in Chicago from two English intermediaries: Julia French and Nick Broadbent.’
It was easy to see what the auctioneers were doing. By providing the French and Broadbent names they had given the Americans something solid, something they could check, but at the same time something that would distract their attention and lead their investigation down a blind alley. But why hadn’t they given them my name as well? Perhaps because they didn’t want to draw attention to my misadventure at O’Hare airport. And the same question still remained: how had the auctioneers discovered Nick Broadbent?
‘The English connection again,’ Gary continued. ‘Tom, let me tell you something. If the DIS were involved in anything that happened in Chicago you’re making a big mistake. The top brass aren’t going to like you poaching on our pitch. I’m amazed that Pat hasn’t just insisted that you be called back home. He could do that. If Washington laid it on the line to London you would be on the first plane out.’
I tried to change the subject. ‘Is Brazil your preserve too?’
‘For our purposes, yes. It’s Western Hemisphere, Monroe doctrine and all that.’
Even as we talked I realised that Gary was right. Of course we could not match an American bid, and not just because our budget was smaller. The Griffin Interrogator was American, stolen from an American research facility. The Americans were now trying to get it back and the idea that any British government would ever countenance us openly trying to stop them doing so was ridiculous. That’s not how the ‘special relationship’ between the UK and US worked. It was one thing sending me surreptitiously to Chicago and not advising the Americans, it was quite another for me to be out in the open competing with the CIA.
Gary voiced just what I was thinking. ‘This whole operation stinks. We’re not getting any cooperation from the Brazilians after we’ve been helping them for years. Our Station down here is supposed to be right up the ass of the whole regime, military and civilian.’
‘Perhaps they don’t need your help any more. They’ve perfected their own torture techniques,’ I reposted cynically.
‘That’s a bit too near the bone. No, it’s our guess that the auctioneers are well in with the regime, or even part of it.’
‘That’s a pretty obvious guess,’ I agreed.
We split a bottle of Dreher wine and lapsed into silence as the steaks arrived.
Somebody behind laughed loudly and instinctively I turned round. A Brazilian family were celebrating something, the father slightly inebriated. By the door a man was dining alone, Captain Mackenzie. It’s a small world, although the restaurant was renowned for its steaks.
Gary returned to his theme. ‘We’ve done a lot for this country, not just for their security apparatus. They rely on the US and now when it comes to us wanting something we get nowhere. The men at the top are helpful. There’s a guy here called Nebulo that the local Station knows well. He’s been scurrying all over the place, but he’s just not producing anything. Hell, think of all the money we’ve poured in here. The government’s pumped it in, and private firms. Everybody knocks us but just look around, every modern industry we’ve helped along, even the state oil monopoly.’
‘That’s a bit simple-minded,’ I interrupted. ‘Look at the profits American corporations are making here. You can’t tell me General Motors is down here just to help the poor natives live a better life. Take a close look at those foreign aid programmes. Forget the military stuff. Remember Kennedy’s “Alliance for Progress”? They shipped a rusty old synthetic rubber plant down here from Louisville, nearly fifty million dollars to produce five hundred new jobs. And what happens? It causes so much pollution that a thousand local fishermen are made unemployed.’
Gary grinned. ‘Sometimes I forget which side you’re supposed to be on. Let’s change the subject before I ask to see your security clearance.’
We passed the time in desultory conversation about the state of the world. Gary had just been on another course at ‘The Farm’: the CIA’s training school at Camp Perry near Williamsburg, Virginia. It sounded as useless as the one we’d been on together. It was late by the time we left, Captain Mackenzie had already gone, but neither of us were tired. I’d forgotten the pamphlets and decided to leave them in Gary’s car. If anybody found them covered with my fingerprints that was unfortunate.
‘Let’s have a nightcap,’ Gary suggested at the hotel.
Captain Gomes was still in the bar. ‘I’ve got a better idea,’ I offered. ‘We’ll get a bottle of Scotch and take it up to my room.’ Gary smiled broadly, especially when I paid for the whisky. Again Cimate said nothing when he gave me the key.
In my room I checked the drawer I’d taken the leaflets from. It hadn’t been touched.
The whisky was made locally from Scotch essence imported in bulk to avoid the prohibitive customs duties on real Scotch. I’d tasted better, but it went down well.
‘Have you been watching Bitri and Abdel Rassem?’ I asked.
‘Off and on. You think they’re Russians? We’ve had Nebulo’s boys working on it for us and they haven’t come up with much either way. We’re waiting for a report from our Damascus Station. There is a Syrian trade group here and Bitri spent today with them.’
Clearly the Americans had not been sent the message that I was given when I arrived listing my competitors in the auction. Why not? Or more importantly why had I been given the names?
I tried to think of a way to ask Gary about the size of the American team down here. I was still toying with the idea that the men watching the villa might be American. Gary had other priorities and stood up.
‘Just a second. That liquor wants to be let out. OK if I use your can?’
I nodded. They were his last words.