11

Norfolk

Middlebury Comprehensive School, located between Norwich and the ancient Saxon town of Thetford, was a new building that resembled a car-assembly plant, as if each pupil were a machine to be bolted, buffed, waxed and wheeled out into the world – which, Pagan supposed, was true in a limited kind of way. According to the headmaster, a man named Frew who had the deep fatalism of the jaded schoolteacher, a pupil called Stephanie Brough had been missing overnight. Steffie’s pet horse had returned home, saddled and riderless. Country policemen, defeated by darkness, had begun a systematic search at first light. By three o’clock in the afternoon, seven hours after the theft of the missile, not only had the missing girl continued to elude detection, but a constable on the case had vanished as well.

By five o’clock inquiries made of estate agents in a twenty-mile radius of Steffie’s home had revealed the recent rental of a dilapidated farmhouse. The nice old dear who told Pagan about the tenancy had the quietly confidential air one sometimes finds in people whose occupations involve discretion. She would give nothing away unless the authority that needed answers had unimpeachable reasons. Pagan’s needs, backed by his imposing credentials from Scotland Yard, fell into that category.

It was the woman’s opinion that the man who’d rented the house was a “foreigner”, although remarkably “civilised” for all that.

Had there been only one renter? Pagan asked.

The agent remembered no other. Of course, a tenant could do pretty much what he liked as soon as he had a key, especially in a rural area without nosy neighbours. She would be happy to find a copy of the tenant’s signature, but it would take an hour or so. Her office was not, she remarked proudly, computerised. Pagan thanked her and said he’d return.

The farmhouse was dismal, buried in a black hollow. Moss grew against walls and the chimney had partially collapsed. Tyre tracks were found outside the house; on the slope behind the building were varied muddy footprints, some large, a few rather small, small enough to be Steffie Brough’s. Pagan stood for a while on the rainy incline, a photo of the girl, provided by her school, in one hand. She was pretty, a lovely devilment in the face, a puckish little smile, tiny pointed ears suggesting other-worldliness. A pixie. He tried to imagine Steffie Brough on this slope, watching the farmhouse.

Was this the place where she’d come? And then what? Had Ruhr surprised her? Pagan ran a fingertip across the image of the girl’s face. If he squinted, there was a very strong resemblance between Steffie Brough and the girl with whom Gunther Ruhr had been captured in Cambridge. It was an unpleasant realisation: if this child were in Ruhr’s possession, then he not only had a hostage but one who was practically a duplicate of somebody he’d desired into the bargain. Pagan pushed this thought aside and squelched back down to the house where Foxie – whose red hair was the only bright thing in the place – was wandering around.

“I don’t doubt Ruhr and his chums found accommodation here, Frank,” Foxie said. “Look at this. Presumably they kept the child here.”

Foxie led Pagan inside a narrow room where an old iron bed had been placed under the wall. Lengths of rope were attached to the frame; somebody had clearly been bound here. On a threadbare bedside rug lay a small white bra, streaked with hardened mud. Foxie picked it up and passed it to Pagan, who handled the garment as if he were afraid of finding blood inside it. He looked for stencilled initials, laundry marks, but found none. He gave it back to Foxworth, who folded it in the pocket of his raincoat.

Pagan gazed at the bed again, the ropes, the strict knots. The idea of the child being imprisoned here upset him. He wandered uneasily through the rest of the house. Except for the remarkably tidy kitchen, the place was a mess. The smell of dampness was overpowering. Pagan went from room to room, most of them small low-ceilinged enclosures with narrow windows. Upstairs several old mattresses lay on the floorboards. Rodents scratched in the attic.

“This must be the terrorist dormitory,” Foxie said. “Not very well appointed, is it?”

Pagan moved to the window. The view was uninspiring. Flat and dead fields, stricken by the breath of coming winter, stark trees from which a couple of crows arose. Only the big black birds created any kind of movement. Pagan pressed his moist forehead against the windowpane. The motion of the birds – floating, searching – intrigued him, though for the moment he wasn’t sure exactly why.

He went back downstairs to the main part of the house. In the living-room dirty glasses stood on a ping-pong table, newspapers were strewn everywhere, spent matches, cigarette butts, beer bottles on the cracked lino. He re-examined Steffie’s picture, turning it over and over before passing it to Foxie.

“Ruhr likes them pale and thin, doesn’t he?” Foxworth said in a quiet voice.

“That’s the way it looks.” Pagan bunched his hands in the pockets of his sodden raincoat. “When they’re finished with the Range Rover, the fingerprint boys better get over here next. The way I see it, nobody’s been very careful about hiding their prints.”

“Arrogant lot,” Foxie said.

“With an arrogant leader. I’ll tell you what else pisses me right off, Foxie. How could this damned place be overlooked in the general search for Ruhr? How could it be missed, for Christ’s sake? It has all the necessary credentials for a hiding-place. Isolated. Recently rented. You’d think it would be obvious to any cop.”

Foxie was silent. He might have said that the countryside was large, the police force relatively small, and this house well concealed but he could see that Frank was in no mood for platitudes, even truthful ones.

Pagan walked round the room, thinking how some places defeated the imagination – they were empty stages, and you could never imagine anybody playing on them. Other houses, by contrast, were vibrant long after their vacancy, and seemed to echo with laughter that although old was cheerful just the same. But this house was a slum, like an abandoned inner-city house where drunks came to defecate, and light could never alter it. The presence of happy people couldn’t change the structural gloom. Misery claimed this house, and misery was a clammy tenant, tenaciously silent.

Ghosts, Pagan thought. He stood at the foot of the stairs. For some reason he thought of Magdalena Torrente; at least her intrusion into his mind was a bright occurrence. He tried to imagine how her laughter, floating deliriously from room to room, might make a difference to this hideous dump. He thought of how he’d kissed her before walking away from her, and he could still feel her tongue against his own – another ghost.

How had it come about that Magdalena, who despised Castro’s regime, whose father had been shot down and killed at the Bay of Pigs, had become the lover of Castro’s Minister of Finance? Rosabal had reputedly been hand-picked by Fidel to mend Cuba’s broken finances and restore economic order to a nation allegedly going under. Castro sent him on fund-raising trips to Russia and Czechoslovakia and anywhere else a purse might be forced open for Cuban coffers. Why did Magdalena associate with such a man? Was Rosabal part of some anti-Castro movement? was that the connection with Magdalena? Had she perhaps changed and become a secret supporter of Castro? God, how unlikely that seemed! Perhaps they were simply lovers. He pinched the bridge of his nose and frowned.

Dear Christ, what did Rosabal and Magdalena matter? He had a missing girl and a crazy terrorist to deal with. Steffie Brough had stumbled on to this place, and Ruhr had seized her. A simple story really, a variation on Beauty and the Beast, with the contemporary addition of a stolen nuclear missile. He wondered if Ruhr had hurt the girl yet in any way, or whether Gunther preferred to savour such possibilities and prolong them, getting the timing and the flavour just right before he made his move.

Or did Ruhr understand how the idea of the frail girl’s life and security would go round and round maddeningly in Frank Pagan’s mind? And did he enjoy the feeling? Of course he did. Ruhr had one of those instinctive minds that quickly pick up on the personalities of others, almost a mimic’s skill; in their few encounters he had come to know Frank Pagan somewhat. He would also know where to open Pagan’s skin and lay bare the appropriate nerve.

Pagan saw now that the German was doing more than what Foxworth had called “thumbing his nose”: he was torturing Pagan. The scarf, the bra, these weren’t mere gestures. It was as if the girl were being forced to perform a slow striptease. And Frank Pagan, like some devoted father desperately searching for his missing daughter through a maze of sleazy nightclubs, was doomed to find only the girl’s discarded clothes.

Impatiently, Pagan stepped to the door and looked out across the yard. The birds were on the ground now, pecking with dedicated industry at something concealed under leaves. For one dreadful moment Pagan’s heart lurched in his chest as he walked across the mud. He thought that perhaps the birds were feasting on Stephanie Brough, that she hadn’t been kidnapped at all, that Ruhr’s clues had been cruel jokes. The girl lay here, demolished by black-feathered morticians who picked their corpses down to bone.

Disturbed, the ravens fluttered a couple of feet away, landed, observed Pagan with bleak resentment. They were patient creatures who often had to take their meals cold. Pagan kicked some dry leaves aside. The face that appeared was missing one eye, half the lower lip had been ripped away, a cheek gouged. There was a deep wound in the neck. The man wore a police constable’s dark-blue uniform made all the more dark by blood that had dried around his chest. Pagan turned away from the sight, picked up a couple of rocks, tossed them at the big birds, who flew quietly to a nearby tree, there to wait.

Foxie came out of the house and glanced at the corpse. All colour went out of his face. “Christ,” he said quietly.

Pagan rubbed his hands together. His entire body was suddenly cold.

Foxworth said, “I’ve had enough of this place, Frank. Do we need to linger here?”

Pagan got into the car without saying anything. He heard Foxie on the car telephone, reporting the discovery of the dead constable. The afternoon was darkening, the English autumn yielding to the coming winter with customary melancholy. Pagan sat in a hunched position, bent slightly forward to find relief from his renewed pain. Along country lanes a fresh wind blew moist fallen leaves at the car. All the little scraps of a perforated season were falling finally apart.

The office of the lady who had rented the farmhouse was located in a village seventeen miles from Norwich. It was an eccentric operation, manila folders stuffed in drawers, a big old-fashioned black telephone left over from more poetic times when exchanges had proper names. Joanna Lassiter wore her greying hair up, held in place by a marvellous array of coloured pins that Foxworth and Pagan admired. It was as if her skull were a map and the pins pointers to various locations.

She was a pleasantly confused woman who mislaid files and papers. On her desk scores of yellowing receipts had been impaled on a metal spike. The presence of the two policemen unsettled her. She suggested herbal tea, which both men declined. Pagan was impatient to go back out into the darkness of the early evening.

While she searched her desk for the necessary information, Joanna Lassiter said she personally supervised the rental and management of more than a hundred houses and apartments throughout the area, that business was good, and that once – funny, weren’t they, these tiny coincidences? – she’d owned a pet dog called Pagan. As she rummaged she flitted breathlessly from topic to topic as if the pins that held her hair in place had punctured the brain itself, destroying the routes along which mental signals were meant to travel. When she wasn’t speaking she kept up a sequence of little noises – mmms and arrumms and drrmms. There was battiness here, relief from a grim world.

“He was, I recall, a pleasant sort of fellow. Wore black glasses, which I don’t usually like. I only met him once, and then briefly. Our business was done mostly by phone and mail. Can’t possibly imagine him connected to any wrongdoing.” Joanna Lassiter poked through a thick folder from which slips of paper fell to the floor and were not retrieved. “Most of the tenants give me absolutely no trouble. Well, I always say I have an instinct about people, Mr Pagan. I sense vibrations from them, you see. It’s a gift.”

And on and on.

Finally she pulled a sheet of paper out of the folder and held it aloft. “I rather think this is the naughty little chappie we’ve been seeking, Mr Pagan.” She held the paper directly under her desk-lamp and squinted at it. Pagan leaned across the desk with interest but the handwriting on the sheet was like Pitman’s shorthand.

“The man rented the old Yardley place for six months. Paid the whole thing in advance with a money order. I think he said he was some kind of naturalist, actually. Needed a place to assemble his notes on a book. Mmmm. He was only two weeks into his tenancy. Well. It’s not an easy property to rent, I’m afraid. Has bad feelings. Don’t much like going over there myself. Dreary. Spot of paint might help a bit.”

“Is there a name?” Pagan asked.

“Name?” Joanna Lassiter looked surprised, as if this were a whole new concept to her.

“Did the tenant have a name?” Pagan asked a second time.

When she smiled thirty years fell away from her face. It was almost as if her bone structure altered. She put her fingertips up to her lips. “Silly me. Of course there’s a name, Mr Pagan. Couldn’t very well rent a house to a man without a name, could I now?”

“I’ve heard of stranger things,” Pagan said.

“I daresay you have.” Joanna Lassiter pushed the sheet of paper across the desk. “There. See for yourself. Funny kind of name. Foreign, of course.”

Pagan picked up the paper and read.

“Does it help, Mr Pagan?” she asked.

Pagan passed the sheet to Fox worth.

He didn’t answer Joanna Lassiter’s question because he wasn’t sure how. He stared through the black window at the village street beyond. The pub sign hanging on the other side of the road, pale and inviting, reminded him of a thirst he’d been suffering for hours.

Marrakech, Morocco

Steffie Brough’s head roared and her whole body, locked for ages in one stiff position, felt like iron. Even though somebody had stuffed small pieces of foam rubber inside her ears the great noise of the plane, like that of a locomotive infinitely screaming in an infinite tunnel, had drilled through her skull anyway. She was sick and tired, shaken by the long turbulent flight. Every now and then she’d felt the craft drop suddenly, like something about to fall out of the sky.

She didn’t know how many hours she’d actually lain in the cabin of the truck, conscious of cockpit lights up ahead and the shadows of men moving back and forth. It was very weird being conveyed inside one kind of transportation that was being transported inside another.

When the plane began to lose altitude she became aware of pressure building up in the hollows behind her eyes and then rolling painfully through all the dark cavities of her head. Then the plane skimmed over land, bouncing. After that, the silence was wonderful as the craft slid slowly along the runway.

Now, when the door of the truck opened, she twisted her head back and saw Ruhr. Silently, he undid the ropes that bound her and she tried to sit up but her bones seemed to have jammed in place. Her brain throbbed and the ache in her bladder was unbearable.

“I need to go to a toilet,” she said. The rasp in her own voice surprised her. She sounded just the way her Aunt Ruth had before she died last year from throat cancer. She thought I’d rather be dead from that than trapped in this bloody awful place.

She glanced toward the back of the big truck, whose cargo was concealed under a long green canvas cover. She didn’t want to think what it might be or why Ruhr and his friends had gone to so much trouble to steal it, because then she’d start remembering all the gunfire and how tear gas and smoke had choked her.

But she thought she knew anyway. What else could it be but a missile? What else was there worth killing for in her small corner of the world? She’d always known there were missiles as close as ten miles from her home because she’d watched people walk along narrow country lanes on protest marches – but like many things in her young, protected life, missiles were abstractions outside her own limits and interests. They belonged in a world beyond horses and rock music and boys. Now it was different. She could reach up, she could actually touch one of the things if she wanted.

Ruhr led her through the aircraft. She was aware of two men sitting in the half-light and how they looked at her as she passed. The air was thick with the smell of fuel and tobacco. The lavatory was tiny, filthy, the floor puddled, and somebody had removed the lock from the door, but she was beyond embarrassment.

She splashed cold water all over her face, then drank thirstily even though the water tasted stale and dusty. She pushed her wet fingers through her hair. Her reflection in a small mirror was white and dreadful. She seemed to have diminished. She looked like a pygmy, a shrunken head. She hardly recognised herself.

She dried her face with paper towels and wished the lavatory had a window so she could look out. She didn’t know where she was, she had no idea where she was going. Her parents – oh Christ they would be completely frantic with worry now. Even her stupid brother would have expressed concern in his own stumbling fashion. She raised her face to the mirror a second time. The rough paper towels had at least brought some colour back to her cheeks. And even if she felt like crying, she knew she wouldn’t.

Ruhr had a global network of men and women who owed him favours. This airfield, for example, had been made available by an old associate, somebody close to the Moroccan royal family. Situated twenty-five miles from the city of Marrakech, it had, until recently, been used by Moroccan Air Force fighter planes flying against Western Saharan rebels, but its age and condition had caused it to be abandoned.

The huge transport plane taxied over potholes towards an enormous hangar made from prefabricated metal which had rotted years ago. In the fading afternoon sun, the building’s vastness was strangely exaggerated. Bats flew in and out of the disintegrated roof, fulfilling some odd rodent urge to veer close to the strips of blinking fluorescent light that hung from the ceiling.

The plane came to a stop outside the hangar, where a large fuel truck was parked. Joseph Sweeney stepped out of the flight deck and moved into the rear cabin, where Ruhr stood. The two men who had come with Ruhr, Trevaskis and the Argentinian, sat against the wall and looked sullen. Sweeney opened one of the paratroop doors and tossed a rope ladder down. Ruhr said, “Keep your eye on the girl, Trevaskis,” and then swung down the ladder to the tarmac. Sweeney followed him.

When he had his feet firmly on the ground, Sweeney worked a small finger inside his ear. “That damned roar deafens the hell out of me,” he said. He shook his head a couple of times, then pinched his nostrils and puffed up his cheeks.

Sweeney glanced a moment at the fuel truck, which was moving slowly towards the plane. Born in County Cork and swept off to Boston at the age of ten, he’d worked with Ruhr a dozen times all over the world and if anybody could be said to know the German it was Joseph James Sweeney. And while Sweeney wouldn’t have enjoyed a night’s drinking with Gunther, nor let the man anywhere near his teenaged nieces, he had a certain admiration for him.

Sweeney gestured toward the plane. He asked a question he’d been hesitant about. “I suppose the kid somehow fits your general plan?”

Ruhr said, “She may provide insurance. Or diversion.”

Sweeney nodded, then dropped the subject. He knew when to persist and when to let go. Ruhr could be incommunicative and distant when it suited him, and it obviously suited him now. Sweeney felt a passing pity for the girl, but like most of his emotions it was allowed to evaporate quickly.

“You had me worried, Gunther.”

“How so?”

“When they took you in Cambridge, I thought it was all over.”

Ruhr made a dismissive gesture and laughed abruptly. “You know me better than that. I have many lives.”

Sweeney watched the fuel truck park alongside the plane. In half an hour or so they’d be out of this godawful place and flying the Atlantic. Frankly, he’d be glad when this one was over and he could go back to the anonymous life he’d worked hard to build for himself in the USA, a quiet house in a quiet street in Newburyport, Massachusetts. His neighbours thought he was living off land investments, an illusion he gladly encouraged.

He wasn’t sure why this particular undertaking made him so goddam uneasy. The presence of the kid obviously contributed to it, but something was different about Ruhr as well. He had a cold distance about him, a weariness. Sweeney felt these were danger signals although he couldn’t interpret them. He’d stay away from Gunther as much as he could for the duration.

He watched the hose from the fuel truck extend to the fuselage of the big plane and remembered the thought that had occurred to him a couple of times recently: in his lifetime, he’d killed more men than he’d fucked women. Somehow this realisation had shocked him. He said, “I really think this is my last time, amigo.”

“You’ve said so before. You’ve always come back.” Ruhr was conscious of Trevaskis watching him in a hostile way from the door of the plane.

“This time I’m beginning to hear the creak of my bones,” Sweeney said. “And the thrill’s not in it any more. Or maybe there’s too much for me to handle. I’m forty-two, Gunther. I’ve lived this life since I was twenty-two and that’s a long time. And I’m not including the five years before that when I was in the United States Air Force. How long can a man go on? Can you imagine doing this when you’re sixty?”

Ruhr had also been living this life for a long time. Unlike Sweeney, he couldn’t imagine retirement. The real trick was to find new ways to keep the game fresh, to introduce new elements. Even new risks. The alternative was dullness and Ruhr couldn’t tolerate that. A bat flew out of the sun and flapped close to his face and he lashed out at the thing.

Sweeney said, “I can get absorbed real smoothly into what they call the mainstream of American life.”

The mainstream of American life. Sweeney must have been reading Time magazine. Ruhr said, “Barbecues and Budweisers and little girls with metal on their teeth and tedium without end.”

“You make it sound comforting.”

“All anaesthetics give comfort,” Ruhr remarked. “But only on a temporary basis.”

Both men walked some distance from the fuel truck. In the extensive network of reliable men Ruhr had built over the years, none had proved more valuable than Joseph Sweeney. Whenever Ruhr needed something – an individual’s name, or a certain kind of weapon, or in this case a plane – somehow Sweeney always managed to find it. He had become, in a sense, Ruhr’s quartermaster, resourceful, reassuring.

Sweeney combined the soothing charm of a confidence man with the hardness of an assassin. Since he’d experienced at first hand the staggering ineptitude of the military mind, he knew how to exploit it ruthlessly, how to gain access to military bases and installations; how to impersonate an officer with such authority that no guard or military policeman ever questioned his presence. He was the best at his craft.

It was Sweeney who had identified the Duty Officer responsible for the transportation of missiles at the site in Norfolk; and even if it was Ruhr who had seduced the man into treachery, nevertheless it had been Sweeney who’d first uncovered the essential information: name and rank and serial number; date of birth; marital status; specific duties; known weaknesses.

Known weaknesses, Ruhr thought. He’d never yet found a man without a faultline to be widened; he’d never encountered a man who didn’t have a purchase price of some kind. With some it was very simple – a need for money, for drugs, certain kinds of sex. With others it was more complicated – the moment of shame recaptured, the dark skeleton in the unopened closet. The Duty Officer at the site belonged in the latter category.

A thirty-five-year-old man from Nashville, the Duty Officer had a wife and child living in Tennessee. At the same time, he was deeply involved with a woman who lived in Norwich, a mistress with definite ambitions of her own. It was a situation Ruhr considered pathetic; loneliness had driven the Duty Officer into the grasp of a woman whose connivance overwhelmed the man’s naïvety. He was basically a nice, easy-going fellow with the kind of dull good looks essential to the success of any garden party. What the mistress wanted was marriage and an escape route out of the damp miseries of Norwich. She was about to write a letter to the wife in Tennessee. If the man wasn’t willing to talk divorce, then, by God, she’d force his hand!

Lurid lives, Ruhr had thought. Especially in the quiet suburbs of boring cities, lurid lives. He felt as if he hovered above this human swamp like a minor god, indifferent. And so, after observing his victim for several days, he’d swooped down from his lofty place into the young man’s life, both as saviour and deceiver. He found the pub where the officer sometimes drank, engineered an introduction. He posed as a Swiss photographer who’d unfortunately lost his fingers shooting film in Vietnam. It struck a sympathetic chord in the Duty Officer, who’d served in Vietnam too, towards the bitter end – a fact Ruhr already knew, of course, courtesy of Joseph Sweeney.

A quiet companionship grew; it was nothing substantial. A few beers now and again, under circumstances that appeared to be sheer chance. Once or twice they ran into each other in Cambridge as well as Norwich. It’s a small world, Ruhr would say, and smile his most appealing smile, the one in which his lips didn’t disappear. Gradually the facts of the Duty Officer’s life emerged. He was bogged down, the woman in Norwich was goddam demanding, why had he ever let himself in for this godalmighty mess in the first place? Ah, Sweet Jesus! He loved his wife and kid, he didn’t want to hurt them or lose them. But his wife, Louanne, couldn’t come to England because she had a sick mother in Knoxville. It was complicated, and getting more out of hand every day. Once the Duty Officer had actually said, I wish I was dead.

That, Ruhr suggested, was the wrong solution; the wrong party would be eliminated in that event.

Ruhr had thought up something much better.

If there was to be a candidate for a coffin, the choice was obvious: the mistress – who else?

But how? How could that kind of thing happen? the Duty Officer had asked.

Ruhr was sly then, almost coy in his cunning. He offered a few suggestions, crumbs, nothing more. What it came down to was this simple: the woman in Norwich had to be … disposed of. The Duty Officer shuddered at the notion. He’d entertained it, of course. Who wouldn’t? But in the end he knew he couldn’t commit murder – other than in his heart, he’d added, as if to reassure Ruhr of his masculinity.

Then find somebody else to do it, Ruhr had said.

The idea, once planted, grew in the dark. Ruhr, master gardener, nurtured it, made it sprout. And when it was fully grown and luxuriant in the Duty Officer’s mind, Ruhr administered the final flourish one night while he and his new American friend were drinking schnapps at a pub on St Andrew’s Hill in the centre of Norwich. Ruhr needed something from the Duty Officer. Something simple really. But classified. Ruhr hinted broadly that in exchange for this small item of information the Duty Officer’s life could be “rectified”. He wouldn’t ever have to worry about his girlfriend again. Ruhr understood, of course, that the “drastic” solution he was suggesting might be offensive, alien even, to the young man, and if he wanted to refuse Ruhr’s offer, well, what difference would it make to their friendship?

Why did Ruhr want the classified information? the Duty Officer asked in the manner of a pharmacist asking a customer why he needed a restricted medicine for which he had no prescription.

Ruhr answered that it was a trifle really, a journalistic matter, an opportunity to photograph a missile in transit from a site, an exclusive. He was convincing in an odd, hypnotic way. He could use a stock shot of the kind supplied by military press liaison offices, but he resented the idea. No, what he wanted was the real thing on a real road surrounded by a real escort. The feel of authenticity – that was important. The way things truly looked, that was what he was after. For a photo-journalist, veracity was what mattered.

He needed a timetable, a calendar of forthcoming events, places and times, routes. In return for these snippets Ruhr would ensure the total security of the young man’s marriage and with it his peace of mind. And what was life when you had no serenity? How could one pursue a career distracted by emotional problems that could be clarified in an instant?

That night of beer and schnapps on St Andrew’s Hill, everything was neatly slotted in place. Ruhr knew he’d get the kind of information so exclusive it made him indispensable. He knew what the route of the missile was to be; he knew the exact time and place. Information was power, especially when it was information his employers didn’t have.

It was a triumph to turn the young American round, and yet easy too, because the Duty Officer was so vulnerable. Murder and treachery. Now it pleased Ruhr to think he’d made this very ordinary young man, who was neither terribly bright nor terribly stupid, an accomplice in both crimes!

Three nights later Ruhr sneaked into the woman’s house and stabbed her directly through the heart while she slept. He waited until he heard her die, then he left. By the next evening, Ruhr had the information he wanted. It had taken him exactly twenty-three days to get it. He never saw the Duty Officer again.

Now the truck had finished refuelling the plane. Joseph Sweeney lit a cigarette. He watched the sun, in a great explosion the colour of burgundy, slide towards darkness on the rocky horizon. A chill was already in the air.

“It’s time to go,” Sweeney said.

“I am ready,” Ruhr remarked. “As always.”

“We should dump the cab first.”

“Of course.”

The cab of the truck that had conveyed the missile and the launch system was uncoupled from the trailer. It was excess weight on the plane, and useless now. It was detached from the trailer and allowed to roll down the ramp to the airstrip, there to be abandoned.

Havana, Cuba

In the early afternoon, Rafael Rosabal walked on the crowded, humid Calle Obispo in Old Havana. The breeze that blew over the sea wall, the Malecón, faded in the streets in a series of quiet little gasps that would barely shake a shrub. Today everything smelled of salt. Today you could practically hear metal corrode as rust devoured it. There was rust everywhere, in the decorative iron grilles of windows and doorways, on the panels and underbodies of the old American automobiles cluttering the streets, even in the paintwork of the new Cuban-built buses and the imported Fiats and Ladas. Where rain had run through rust, coppery stains, suggestive of very old tears, discoloured the façades of buildings.

Rosabal reached the entrance to the Hotel Bristol. He was jostled on all sides by pedestrians who filled the cobbled street. Rectangular posters fluttered twenty feet overhead, advertisements announcing an exhibition of modern Cuban artists at the Casa de Bano de la Catedral. Rosabal loathed Cuban art, which he considered dull and derivative. Socialism, as it was conceived by the Lider Maximo, hadn’t altogether electrified creativity.

He went inside the Bristol, passing the registration desk where a clerk was reading a copy of Granma, the Party’s newspaper. According to the headline, the Lider Maximo was going to make a speech sometime that day on TV.

Rosabal kept walking until he came to the small dark bar at the rear, a narrow room lit by two dim bulbs. He asked for a mojito only to be told by an apologetic barman that lemon and lime juice were both temporarily out of stock. He settled for a beer, which he took to a table.

Apart from himself, there was one other customer, a tall, bony man in a dark blue two piece suit. This was Rosabal’s contact, Teodoro Diaz-Alonso. The word that always popped into Rosabal’s head when he saw Diaz-Alonso was remilgado, prim. Diaz-Alonso wore small glasses parked near the tip of his nose. His stiff bearing suggested a professor of the kind you no longer saw in the city. Diaz-Alonso was drinking cola from a tall glass. Rosabal sat down beside him.

Rosabal was a little uneasy whenever he had meetings with Diaz-Alonso in Havana. And yet why shouldn’t there be a point of connection between Rosabal’s Ministry of Finance and MINFAR, the Ministry of the Armed Forces, for which Diaz-Alonso worked as a senior advisor? Both men were government servants, after all. They knew the same people, went to the same restaurants and parties, enjoyed the same privileges of rank. Besides, Diaz-Alonso was a frequent visitor to Rosabal’s apartment in the Vedado. This encounter would look perfectly natural to any casual observer. So why worry about it?

Diaz-Alonso said, “The General has asked me to convey his greetings, Rafael.”

“Thank the General.”

“I am also to give you a message.” Diaz-Alonso paused and looked like a scholar recalling a quotation. “The General says that the conditions you require will be ready.”

Rosabal sat back in his chair and tried to relax. It was extraordinary how, when you were so involved with the architecture of a conspiracy, when one blueprint had obsessed you for so long, you forgot simple pleasures – the taste of a beer, the aroma of a good cigar. It was like living in a room with the shades constantly drawn. Nothing happened beyond the shades, no cars passed in the street, no women strolled on the boulevards, no sun, no moon. The room was everything.

“Tell the General this will not be forgotten,” he said. “Nor will any of the recent services he has provided.”

Diaz-Alonso was expressionless as he remarked, “The General does not underestimate the importance of his role in this whole project, Rafael. He is not a man who favours false modesty. But for himself he expects no monetary rewards, of course. He is no mercenary. The General seeks only the post of Minister of the Armed Forces.”

“That’s understood.”

Diaz-Alonso raised his hand very slightly, as if to admonish Rosabal, in the gentlest way, for interrupting him. “The General also expects a certain seniority among Ministers, naturally. First among equals, so to speak.”

Rosabal said, “The General will be accommodated. Assure him of that.” General Alfonso Capablanca, second in command of the Armed Forces to Raul Castro, had always been consistent in what he wanted. Negotiating with the General through his intermediary had been part of the arrangement from the beginning. The General liked the distance. He also thought it observed a certain kind of protocol which even conspirators must obey, lest they become mere anarchists. There was such a thing as form, Capablanca said. If Rosabal was to become one day the President of this nation – with the help of the General and a number of his senior officers, of course – he would understand that form often meant more than substance. Politics, in the final analysis, was not to be confused with the real world. Politics was a matter of appearance.

Rosabal was equal to the General’s cynicism. He found Capablanca an extreme bore, but indispensable. Without his inclusion, and the role of his officers, the scheme would fall to pieces. And without the General’s ability to acquire the Lider Maximo’s signature on a certain document, the plot – if it existed in any form – would have taken a different shape. Therefore Rosabal, out of a gratitude more pragmatic than sincere, met the General’s demands, and was very polite even as he looked forward to the day when Capablanca might be “retired” by a firing squad.

Diaz-Alonso inclined his head a little. The gaunt, tight-lipped face yielded very little emotion. “The General will also need to know about any changes in schedule as soon as they occur.”

“I expect none.” Rosabal was thinking of Gunther Ruhr now, and the missile. He looked at his watch. Ruhr would be in North Africa, if all had gone well. And since there was no news to indicate otherwise, Rosabal assumed everything was in order. Anyhow, he would have heard from Caporelli if anything had altered. They usually exchanged messages by telephone. Caporelli called Mexico City, and the message was conveyed to Havana by one of the Italian’s employees. Rosabal smiled a little as he thought of the Italian. Caporelli’s problem was the way he deemed himself smarter and sharper than anyone else.

Diaz-Alonso said, “These are very strange times for our nation, Rafael. Once upon a time, I remember, we all had high hopes. Very high. Now, everywhere I look I see discontent.” He shrugged and finished his soda. “Change must come. Every day, a little more pressure builds up, and steam always seeks an outlet. I wish there was a legal way of achieving change, but there is no longer any legality in the system. The Party is the only voice. And the Party is a big problem, Rafael. It is governed by men who cannot hear the voices of the people.”

“Not for much longer,” Rosabal said.

“Let us hope so, Rafael.” Diaz-Alonso set his empty glass down on the table. He rose to his feet. “You know how to contact me if you have to.”

Rosabal watched Diaz-Alonso cross the room, then took another sip of his beer. He put on his black sunglasses and prepared to leave. As he passed in front of the bar, the bartender asked, “Did you hear?”

“Hear?”

“On the radio a moment ago. Fidel has cancelled his speech today. They didn’t say why. He must be pretty damn sick if he can’t make a speech, heh?”

Rosabal, who worked to maintain a low profile in Castro’s government because he found anonymity a more useful tool than renown, said nothing. He thought he saw a slight look of recognition cross the barman’s face, but then it was gone.

“I heard a story he has ulcers,” the barman remarked. “Maybe they’re acting up. I don’t remember a time when he ever cancelled.”

Rosabal replied with a platitude and continued walking past the bar and the reception desk and back on to Obispo Street, where the breeze had gathered strength and shook the posters that hung in the air. The Lider Maximo was too sick to make his speech. For the first time in history, Rosabal thought.

He walked past the herbal shop, El Herbolario. The scent of mint drifted toward him, evoking an unwelcome memory of Guantanamo and Rosabal’s impoverished childhood there. Hierbabuena, which so many people found pleasing, had grown in profusion near his home. His father had been a poor, illiterate cane-cutter, his house a miserable hut through which hot winds blew dust and which, in the rainy season, became flooded and filled with mosquitoes. People were said to be better off in Guantanamo these days, but that was a relative thing. Poverty, no matter what the Communist statisticians told you, still existed. The only difference was that increased life expectancy and low infant mortality meant there were many more people around to enjoy it.

Rosabal, thinking how far he had travelled from his wretched origins and how close he was to his goal, paused on the corner. He was rich now, he had access to vast sums of money and investments all over the world and he rarely ever thought about his background. Who needed it anyway? Who needed to recall the lack of nutrition and the mosquitoes that fed on thin bodies and the sheer hopelessness that the land instilled in people? He remembered his emphysematic father cutting cane, cutting cane, on and on, season after monotonous season, stooped and burned black by the harsh sun in the cane-fields, a prisoner of King Sugar. He remembered his mother, dour, thick-hipped from too many births, dead at the age of thirty-five. She had never smiled, never. These memories bored into him, one despised picture after another, until he felt tension rise in his throat and a hammer knocking the inside of his skull.

He remembered the terrible day in 1962, two years after the death of his mother, when his father had tried to seek political asylum at the American naval base in Guantanamo; he recalled clutching his father’s hand and being surrounded by Yanquis in khaki uniforms who asked his father tough questions and laughed at some of the answers. Rosabal recalled the fear he’d felt at the strangeness of it all, the alien language, the unfamiliar uniforms. The cowed look in his father’s eyes had haunted him ever since. The Americans turned father and son back. They rejected a dying man and his nine-year-old boy. They spoke of immigration quotas and application forms and the need for sponsors, things neither Rosabal nor his father understood.

A day later, as a direct consequence of his attempt to flee Cuba, Felipe Rosabal was taken away by fidelistas. He was never seen again. For years, Rafael Rosabal couldn’t decide whom he hated more, Castro or the Yanquis.

He took a handkerchief from a pocket, wiped sweat from his forehead. You had to control these memories. You had to fight them back, suppress them. They were dead and gone, they had nothing to do with you. You escaped from your childhood, from that dank brutality, from humiliation. Every now and again it reaches out darkly as if to drag you back to your beginnings, but it means nothing. It means absolutely nothing.

Thanks to the Revolution, to the opportunities given to you by Castro’s regime, you fled your origins. The poverty. The futility.

The irony of this – his gratitude to the Revolution – was pointedly amusing. After all, he intended to destroy the same State that had educated and raised him at its own expense.

He was calm again as his chauffeur-driven black BMW rolled quietly toward him. He opened the back door and stepped inside where a young woman, who had the intense good looks of a flamenco dancer, smiled and reached out to him. She wore her very black hair pulled back tightly across her scalp and ribboned with red satin. Her lips, whose lipstick matched her ribbon exactly, pressed on his mouth, and she placed the palms of her hands lightly against the sides of his face. It was a gesture in part love, in part possessiveness.

“My darling,” she said, a little breathlessly.

Rafael Rosabal held the woman, but not with any great enthusiasm. Her skin smelled of a perfume called Diva, which he had brought back for her from Europe.

“Can we go home for lunch …?” She blew softly in his ear; she behaved as if the chauffeur didn’t exist.

“We can go home for lunch,” he said, holding her hand between his own. Later, she would make love with a kind of serenity that was in total contrast to Magdalena, with whom sex was all fire and final damp exhaustion. Magdalena was like a magnificent whore, Rosabal thought. A wife never, a mistress always.

“Do I make you happy?” the young woman asked.

“Yes.”

“You regret nothing?”

“Nothing,” Rosabal said in an absent way.

The gold ring on the young woman’s hand caught the light and glinted. She turned her hand over, studied the band from different angles. Until three months ago, the girl’s name had been Estela Alvarez Capablanca, daughter of the General. From time to time Estela still thought of herself as bearing her unmarried name. She hadn’t yet become accustomed to her change in marital status. Being the wife of Rafael Rosabal was a new condition for her, and one she thought fortunate. It had all happened so quickly, a fast courtship, a very quiet wedding unannounced in newspapers – because Rafael had wanted it that way – a brief honeymoon in Mexico.

Other Ministers’ wives, who had sometimes contrived to play matchmaker for Rosabal in the past, considered them a marvellous couple who needed only a baby to make their marriage a perfect union. Certainly Estela wanted a child. She adored children. Sometimes she wept quietly when she read of atrocities enacted upon infants in the war zones of the world, or her heart ached when she saw some poor sad-eyed kid on the streets of Havana.

Every time she felt Rafael’s sperm flood her womb, she prayed for fertility. And her prayers, it seemed, had been answered. Only fifteen minutes before her rendezvous with Rafael she’d gone to her doctor to learn that she was pregnant. Now, quietly joyful, she waited for the right moment to share this news with her husband, who was so often distracted these days.

A mother-to-be, yes, a clinging wife no. She wasn’t at all the mindless little wife so many people, Rosabal included, perceived her to be. She had some private core to her, an independence she may have inherited from the General, a stubbornness, a native intelligence that was inviolate. She was domestic, in the sense that she enjoyed both the Havana apartment and the country house near Sancti Spiritus, but it would have been a gross underestimation to think that was the complete picture. Estela Rosabal was her own person. A fire burned inside her that few had ever seen.

For his part, Rosabal believed that being the son-in-law of General Capablanca was a profitable connection: it kept conspiracy in the family. It was a great match, even if it had been made more by power brokers and opportunities than by heaven and heart.

The weary man in the grey and blue plaid jacket carried a Canadian passport that falsely identified him as J. S. Mazarek. The document was a good forgery he’d been given in Miami. He had come to Havana on a cut-rate package tour from Montreal. The group with whom he’d travelled called themselves The Explorers’ Association, mostly an alliance of single middle-aged men and women whose only interest in exploration seemingly involved one another’s bodily parts. Mazarek had already had to avoid the energetic advances of an opera-humming, large-breasted widow from Trois Rivières.

Mazarek, a big man with hair the colour and texture of froth on a cappuccino, had been tracking his quarry along Obispo and Mercaderes Streets, surreptitiously taking photographs. He did this expertly because he’d been doing it for much of his life. Usually his cases involved errant husbands and wandering wives, who tended to be more paranoid than the cocksure Mr Smooth, whose face and movements rarely betrayed a sign of nerves.

Mazarek watched the Minister of Finance open the door of the BMW. Then he got off one more quick shot with his tiny camera. He had enough data on Rafael Rosabal. His employer would be satisfied, though perhaps not absolutely happy. In this line of work – often more a probe of men’s hearts than mere detection – satisfaction wasn’t always followed by contentment.