12
London
At nine o’clock in the evening Frank Pagan sat in his office and listened to the constant ringing of telephones and the clack of printers. Despite all this incoming information, he was frustrated. What had he learned after all? The answer that came back was disheartening: damn little. He hung his jacket on the back of the chair and pressed his fingertips against his tired eyes, ignoring the bothersome sparrow of pain pecking away at his chest.
Foxie came into the room with a bunch of papers in his hand. He took a sheet off the top and scanned it. “The chopper was stolen three weeks ago from the Moroccan Air Force, who assumed it was seized by West Saharan rebels. The crew members were Syrians. As you could predict, they didn’t enter the country with a shred of legality. Known terrorists, according to the Syrian press attaché in London.”
A Moroccan Cobra helicopter, a Syrian crew; terrorism observed no boundaries. It was sovereign unto itself.
“The other men dead at the site were Richard Mayer, a native of Buffalo, New York, and one Roderigo Flavell, a citizen of Argentina. Mayer was trained by the US Army in the fine art of explosives and was renowned for his demolition skills. Flavell is wanted for questioning in connection with the bombing of a synagogue in Paris a couple of years ago. A merry sort of bunch, Frank.”
Pagan shifted his position. It was hard to concentrate on what Foxworth was telling him. His mind, or some dark aspect of it, kept pulling him away. Too many puzzles, each demanding his attention at the same time, nagged him.
Foxie said, “The prints we got from the Yardley farm belong to Ruhr, Mayer, and another American named Trevaskis, who has a police record in San Diego: extortion, conspiracy to sell explosives and firearms, gun-running into Mexico. Considered dangerous. We also found prints belonging to the late Flavell as well as a fellow countryman of his called Enrico Zapino. Zapino is also wanted by the French police. Same synagogue bombing.”
The Yardley Farm. Now there was one puzzle that kept coming back like a bad taste. He couldn’t figure out the association between the man who had rented the place and Gunther Ruhr. Impatiently he looked at his watch; the tenant’s wife had been sent for an hour ago – what was keeping her? She only had to come from The Connaught, which wasn’t more than a ten-minute taxi-ride away. Pagan hoped she might be able to cast a little light on the dark area, if she ever arrived.
Since the gunshot wound he’d felt morose. Now he felt even more bleak about the fate of Steffie Brough. He’d met her parents before leaving Norwich, two very unhappy people trying to varnish their sorrow with good old-fashioned English stoicism and finding that the stiff upper lip wasn’t all the advertising claimed it to be.
We’ll do our best, Pagan had told them. We’ll find her.
What makes you think so? Mrs Brough had asked in that kind of ringing voice which is a cousin to outright hysteria. It was a question to which Pagan had no answer. In the policeman’s almanac of platitudes, absolutely none was capable of creating a shield against grief. He kept seeing Mrs Brough’s face, which resembled an older version of the Stephanie in the school photograph. Sheer anxiety had stripped her features of any expression other than desperation. Pagan was filled with helpless sorrow and an anger he laboured to control.
Billy Ewing appeared in the doorway, half in, half out of the office. He held a slip of thin yellow paper in one hand.
“Item, gentlemen,” he said.
“I hope it’s good news,” Pagan said.
Billy Ewing shrugged. “Good, bad, I just deliver, Frank. You’re the swami, you interpret. Now according to this little gem a transport plane was stolen this very morning from right under the vigilant nose of our Royal Air Force.”
“Stolen?” Pagan asked.
“That’s what it says here. On a routine, approved flight from Fife to Germany, an American C-130, which had flown unspecified matériel into a base in Fife the day before, was apparently hijacked by persons unknown. The location of the craft is also unknown.”
“How did it take so damned long to provide us with that item?” Pagan said.
“Injured pride,” Foxie suggested. “The RAF is awfully sensitive.”
“I suppose,” Pagan said, but without conviction. There was no real co-ordination at times between law enforcement agencies and branches of the military. Each was its own little dominion of egotism.
“Lose big plane, look very foolish,” said Billy Ewing.
“How can they lose a big plane?” Pagan asked. “I can see the hijacking. Fine. Anything can be hijacked if you want it bad enough. What I don’t see is the failure to find the thing.”
With the authority of a man who is halfway to attaining his pilot’s licence, Foxie said, “First, bad weather. Clouds, Frank. And many of them. Second, it’s a big sky, and one plane is very tiny in it, no matter how big it looks on the ground. Third, the Air Force has only a limited number of interceptors at its disposal. And where do they look? The North Sea? The English Channel? The Atlantic? If the transport plane’s flying low enough, radar’s no help.”
“Do you think the RAF has informed the Americans?” Pagan asked.
Billy Ewing said, “What a scene. The Air Marshal going on his knees to the Americans.” Ewing assumed a sharp English accent, upper-class, accurate. “Sorry, old boy. One of your planes got away from us. Damndest thing.”
Pagan rose from his chair very slowly. He walked across the room and turned on a small portable radio. He wanted something raucous and mind-clearing, something to shake up the synapses and cover the quiet drumming noise panic made inside his head. If Steffie Brough was still alive, she was inside an aeroplane with Ruhr and nobody knew where. In his imagination he saw Ruhr skywriting the words Find Me, Frank.
Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally” roared into the room. The sound, which to some might have been torture – Foxworth, out of Pagan’s vision, winced – was balm to Pagan’s troubled heart. Like most great rock music, it was meaningless if you thought about it. But meaning wasn’t the point. Rock hypnotised you into a condition where you didn’t need to think. That was the beauty of it. Pagan, an old rock buff, knew such arcane things as the names of the original Shirelles, the first hit song recorded by Gene Vincent, and the date and place of Buddy Holly’s death.
Billy Ewing left. His musical tastes went no further than Peter, Paul and Mary and his own whisky-inspired version of Auld Lang Syne every New Year’s Eve.
Pagan returned to his desk. He couldn’t remember when he’d last slept. His eyelids felt heavy. He needed a brisk infusion of coffee. He was about to ask Foxworth to bring a cup of very strong brew, when the woman suddenly appeared in the doorway.
She was in her middle forties and had reached that condition known as her prime. To look at Gabrielle Chapotin was to understand the word in a way no dictionary could ever define. She had a calm confidence about her, and a style found only in women who have both the means and ambition to haunt the salons of high fashion and those expensive clinics where clever cosmetologists concoct creams and lotions to halt the ruin of the flesh. She had the air of a fortress against whose buttresses decay and deterioration may batter but make little headway.
She was beautiful in a daunting way. The high cheekbones, the hollows in the cheeks that suggested a sour lozenge of candy in her mouth, the long, groomed red-brown hair, the tailored trouser-suit that was pinstriped and authoritative; she was a woman who knew herself very well. She reminded Pagan of a former fashion model, somebody of well-trained elegance.
“Frank Pagan?” she asked in very good English.
“You must be Gabrielle Chapotin.” Pagan rose, walked to the radio, turned it off.
Foxie scurried with a chair for her. She nodded to him as she would to all servants, then sat down with a very straight back. She gazed up at the big silk screen of Buddy Holly, as if she were amused.
“My regrets,” Pagan said. He extended a hand. Gabrielle’s clasp was slack and quick. She wanted out of here in a hurry.
“Regrets?” she asked.
“Your husband. The tragedy.”
“Some marriages are in name only, Mr Pagan,” she said.
Madame Frost, Pagan thought. He cleared his throat, asked Foxworth for coffee. Gabrielle declined, saying she couldn’t drink what passed for coffee in England. Pagan made a mild joke about the similarity between British coffee and transmission fluid, but Madame didn’t even smile politely. Foxworth brought coffee in a plastic cup and Pagan sipped. The temperature of the room had fallen; the woman had ushered in a brisk chill.
“I have so much to do,” she said. “There is tape red.”
“Red tape,” Pagan said. “But your way sounds more poetic.”
“However you say it. Also funeral arrangements. I have to ship my late husband’s body back to Paris for burial. You understand, of course.”
“I don’t intend to keep you for very long. A few questions, nothing more.” Pagan set his cup down. “You realise my interest isn’t in solving your husband’s murder, don’t you? This isn’t a homicide operation.”
She looked surprised. “Then why am I here?”
“Because I sent for you, Madame. When I learned you’d come to London, I thought it would save me a trip to Paris.”
“By why, if it has nothing to do with my husband’s murder?”
“I’m more interested in your husband’s life than his death.”
“Which life would that be, Mr Pagan? After all, he had more than one.”
It was a good point. Which life? Did they overlap? Had old Jean-Paul kept them completely separated? One world in Paris with Madame, another in London with his doomed Melody. Was there perhaps even a third life, something he kept apart from the other two? J.-P. Chapotin, grandmaster of deception.
“Your late husband rented a farm in the countryside,” Pagan said.
“He hated the countryside.”
“Just the same, the information we have is that a farmhouse was leased to him by an estate agency in Norfolk. So far as we know, he never occupied the house personally.”
“Why does it interest you if he never lived there?” she asked. She was impatient. She sat defensively, as if she thought a prolonged stay in this room might contaminate her.
“I’m intrigued by the connection between your husband and the people who did occupy the house. They were … criminals. I’m simply trying to work out the relationship between these men and Monsieur Chapotin.”
“Criminals? I don’t know why he would associate with such types. I can’t help you, Mr Pagan. You see, I know so very little.”
She placed her hands in her lap and looked down at them. They were excellent hands, long fingers, strong nails subtly varnished. They were made for summoning head-waiters and dismissing servants. Gabrielle may have been the spirit of winter incarnate, but she had class.
“Let’s try something simpler. What kind of business was he in?”
“I paid no attention to his affairs,” she replied, skating over – perhaps ignorant of – the double meaning.
“You must have some knowledge,” Pagan said.
“I ran his houses for him, Mr Pagan. That is all I did. I was his housekeeper.”
Pagan didn’t think she could ever be anybody’s housekeeper. Nor could he imagine Jean-Paul concealing very much from this woman. She was strong, self-willed. She wouldn’t be easy to deceive. He resisted the temptation to scoff. He would press on as if he hadn’t heard a word she’d said. He’d simply tuck his head down and keep charging. The battering-ram principle.
“Did he have business interests in England?”
She looked slightly exasperated. “I do not know.”
“I assume he had a bank account here. He would have to pay household expenses in Chelsea. I could easily find out. With a little luck, I might even discover the source of his income. If there was an account, deposits had to be made somehow. There would be microfilm copies of cheques. The bank manager would probably help. They usually do when I ask them.”
“I had thought your bankers were more discreet,” she said.
“Nobody’s discreet when you start breaking their bones, Madame,” Pagan said.
“Breaking their bones?”
“Figuratively.”
“How very colourful.”
Gabrielle Chapotin was silent a moment. She smiled for the first time, a rehearsed cover-girl smile but gorgeous anyway. “Speaking of banks reminds me that Jean-Paul had an interest in an Italian financial institution. I don’t remember the name. ‘Commerciante’ something. It should not be too difficult to find if you need to. He also had, I believe, some South African investments.”
Ah. Pagan found it fascinating how responsive people could be when they imagined a stranger poking around in their bank accounts. There was always something to hide, and it was usually money. Obviously Madame knew more about Jean-Paul’s business than she was saying, at least enough to become communicative when she faced the prospect of Pagan interviewing a bank manager. What other financial irregularities might be uncovered? What fiscal misdeeds might be stumbled upon? Whatever they were – and Pagan wasn’t interested in them – Gabrielle surely knew. It was a great smile, though, and it warmed him.
“I’m glad to see your memory’s finally working,” he said.
Gabrielle shrugged. “Sometimes a small connection is all you need. A spark, you might say. Memory is a strange thing.”
“Very strange,” Pagan said. “What about his business interests in this country? Can we find a spark for those?”
She opened her purse and took out a Disque Bleu. Foxie found a match, struck it, held it to the cigarette. She smoked without inhaling. Blue clouds gathered around her head, making her look wistful. She gazed at Pagan and for a second he enjoyed a certain intimacy with her, the meaningful locking of eyes, the vague feeling that at some other time they might have met in circumstances more conducive to, well, mutual understanding. He was flattered.
He pushed his chair back against the wall, glanced at Foxie, then waited for Madame to go on. She held out her cigarette and Foxie, the perfect butler, produced an ashtray in which she crushed the butt vigorously. Too vigorously, Pagan thought. She was tense.
She looked away from him now. “He went to Scotland.”
“Do you know why he went there?”
“He had some kind of business meeting, I believe. But I don’t know the details.”
“Do you know exactly where he went?”
Madame Chapotin said, “I understand he flew to Glasgow. I happened to see the airline ticket when his secretary sent it to the house.”
Pagan was sure that things didn’t just “happen” in Gabrielle’s life. She probably found the ticket and sneaked a look at it; she would have spied like an expert. He wondered if she’d known about Chapotin’s other life all along but chose to ignore it for reasons of her own.
“Did he stay in Glasgow?”
She didn’t know the answer. Nor did she know his business there, or if he hired a car, or whether he was picked up at the airport. She only knew the date of his airline ticket, which she was happy to remember. Pagan believed her. The interview was coming to an end. Foxie, who knew what was expected of him in the light of Gabrielle’s slender information, had already slipped out of the room. Pagan stood up.
She said, “You know, the more I think of this, the more I consider it unlikely that Jean-Paul rented the farmhouse. I cannot imagine him ever doing that. He hated quiet. He loathed country living. Perhaps another man with the same name was responsible. Could that not be?”
“Chapotin’s a pretty unusual name,” Pagan said.
“You can check it out, no?”
“My assistant obtained a photograph of your late husband from the police conducting the homicide investigation. A copy is on its way to the woman who rented the farmhouse. If it turns out that the renter wasn’t your husband, why would somebody want to pose as him? What would an imposter stand to gain?”
Gabrielle Chapotin had no answer for that one. She drifted out into the corridor, where she stood for a time in thoughtful silence. Then she smiled half-heartedly at Pagan and was gone, leaving behind the faintest trace of expensive perfume.
Pagan didn’t like the idea of an imposter. He’d assumed that Jean-Paul had rented the place on behalf of the terrorists, that some connection existed between Chapotin and Ruhr. Perhaps Chapotin was even the man behind Ruhr. To introduce the hypothesis of a fraud at this stage was a complication Pagan didn’t need. If J.-P. hadn’t rented the place, then why would somebody use his name to do it? Of course, there might be two different Jean-Paul Chapotins, but in England the chances were remote.
Foxworth came back into the room. “I just had a word with the Glasgow Police. They’ll get back to me.”
“Soon, I hope.”
“A.s.a.p. I leaned on them, Frank,” Foxie said, enjoying the phrase. He had a familiar manila folder tucked under his arm, his dogeared odds and ends file. He opened it on Pagan’s desk and began leafing through sheets. He found what he wanted, plucked it out and said, “When I heard Madame say Scotland, I thought I remembered this titbit. Tell me it’s mere coincidence.”
Pagan looked at the sheet, spreading it on his desk.
It was one of the sheets Foxie had somehow contrived to coax out of his old school pal in intelligence. It reported the movements of Rafael Rosabal, complete with dates and times – when he entered the country, where he went, where he stayed, who he saw. There was no mention of Magdalena, which meant that Rafael had presumably given his followers the slip during that interlude or that somehow they’d lost him for a while. Busy sort, Pagan thought. Buzzing around. London to Glasgow.
Pagan raised his face and looked at Foxworth. “Can you tell me what’s so special about Glasgow at this time of year?”
“It must have its attractions,” Foxworth replied. “Chapotin went there. So did Rafael Rosabal. At precisely the same time too. Do you think they might have met, Frank?” Foxie looked puzzled. His otherwise smooth young forehead was creased with a severe frown.
“What for?” Pagan asked. “What kind of connection could there possibly be between Chapotin and Rosabal? And if a connection existed, why go all the way to Glasgow to get together? They each had, shall we say, interests of the heart right here in London, so why travel four hundred miles north to meet? Frankly, I’d hate to see any connection between them. I don’t want to unravel some damned mess that involves Rosabal because if a Cuban’s up to his arse in this mischief it could turn out to be a real can of worms. I’d be quite happy with just Chapotin.”
Pagan looked beyond Foxworth to the window. The darkness over Golden Square was laced with a thin rain that had begun to fall. He tried to imagine Rafael Rosabal and Chapotin meeting in Glasgow – for God’s sake, why? (He remembered the closed bathroom door in Magdalena’s hotel room, the light beneath it, the presence of Rosabal: was that why he was so anxious to discount Rosabal – because it meant Magdalena had no involvement either?) And even if he established a link, so what? How would it bring him any closer to Ruhr?
Too many questions. Too few answers. A coincidence of place and time and people he didn’t like at all. He had so little to go on. Chapotin was the only thread he had to Steffie Brough and Ruhr, and a dead man’s name wasn’t much.
As if he’d just trespassed on Pagan’s ragged thoughts, Foxie said, “One wonders where Steffie Brough is right now.” There was a grim note in his usually cheerful voice.
Pagan was restless. He got out of his chair and walked to the window; everything in the building had gone silent at the same time. No phones rang, no computers buzzed, no printers rattled. A fragile little island of quiet existed. Pagan looked down into Golden Square. Rain, turned to silver by electricity, coursed through the streetlamps. He took from his inside jacket pocket the small school picture of Steffie Brough, and tacked it to his cork bulletin board.
“One wonders,” he said quietly.
Washington DC
It was a fall afternoon of rare beauty. Washington’s monuments might have been erected less to honour some democratic ideal and more to celebrate the way leaves turned and how the smoky orange sun, larger than any ever seen in summer, burnished landmarks, seeming to isolate them in flame.
Harry Hurt always felt good in Washington. As a patriot, he considered it his true home. He loved the statues and monuments; he’d stood at the Vietnam Memorial once, reading the names of the dead and feeling a shiver of gratitude toward the fallen. The city touched him like this, made him conscious of his country, the fact he was above all else an American. He had no shame and no embarrassment at being a patriot.
As he walked along a quiet street some blocks from George Washington University, he was conscious of Sheridan Perry trying to keep up with him. Perry was out of shape. Unlike Harry Hurt, he didn’t jog, play handball, eat the proper foods. He had no pride in his body.
Both men paused on a corner. Blinded, buffed by a crisp wind that had begun to blow, Harry Hurt stuck his hands in the pockets of his grey cashmere overcoat. His bony face looked more angular than usual; cords in his neck stood out. There was a question he wanted to put to Perry but he wasn’t sure how. There was simply no diplomatic way of asking his compatriot if he was the man behind the murders of Chapotin and Magiwara and Kluger. It wasn’t the kind of question guaranteed to promote mutual confidence.
Hurt had spent a restless few hours on Concorde from Paris. He hated unanswered questions. Who was killing off the membership? Who had knowledge of their identities? Somewhere over the Atlantic it had occurred to Hurt that Perry, by virtue of his need for control, was as much a candidate as anyone else and that the best way to proceed was to ask a straight question and be damned. Despite the united front he and Sheridan presented to the Society, Harry Hurt didn’t care all that much for Perry in any case, thinking him just a little too self-centred.
Besides, Perry’s philosophy was suspect. Like Harry, he called himself a patriot, but Hurt thought he was stretching the definition. He’d once listened to Perry explain the greatness of the USA, a diatribe that caused Hurt some dismay.
According to Perry, the Constitution was a wonderful document, sure; but what made America great was the other marvellous invention it had given the world – the loophole. There were loopholes in the Constitution, in the legal system, in the tax codes; here, there, everywhere a loophole, and Perry thrived on them. America was a wonderful country just so long as you recognised the loopholes. Perry had grown quite animated at the time. Hurt often thought about the cynicism behind The Loophole Speech. The tragedy was that Sheridan Perry didn’t think it cynical at all.
The midnight-blue limousine that had been following Hurt and Perry at a distance of a hundred feet rolled a little closer. Three armed bodyguards sat in the vehicle. They observed the two men closely, watched the street, studied windows, shop fronts, rooftops. Hurt had suggested this stroll so that he could phrase his question in private, without having to embarrass Perry in front of the bodyguards. But the car, the protection, was never very far away, while Hurt’s sensitive question was further away than ever.
How could he possibly come right out and ask Perry such a terrible thing? It’s a process of elimination, Sheridan. Since I know it’s not me, it either has to be you or Caporelli or Kinnaird. Caporelli’s a possible, Kinnaird less so, which leaves you and Enrico as the best possible candidates. It couldn’t be asked. Perry would be deeply offended, a wedge of mistrust would be driven between them. It was, Hurt thought, a no-win situation.
The shop front at which Hurt and Perry paused belonged to a tailoring establishment so exclusive it made suits with no labels, no identifying marks save a special little cross-stitch applied beneath the collar, where it was invisible. Had the needlework been evident, it would have been recognised by only a hundred men at most. It was the apotheosis of elitism. The grubby windows were curtained. No fancy displays here. Nor was there a sign to indicate the business of the shop, simply a street number on a plain metal disc. People who came here tended to have Rolodexes filled with unlisted numbers. These men used Charles Katzner & Sons, Tailors, Established 1925, as a kind of club in which they also happened to have their suits made.
Hurt rang the doorbell; the door was opened within seconds by a tall quiet man who wore a black jacket and pin-striped trousers. A tape measure was draped around his shoulders. With a slightly effeminate gesture, he indicated that Hurt and Perry should follow him – between long tables covered with tweeds and linens, wools and silks, up a narrow flight of stairs and through double doors into a large unfurnished room panelled in dark-brown wood. The air had the universal scent of tailoring shops, composed of the smells of dozens of brand new fabrics, all so completely intermingled they were impossible to separate. Blinds, discoloured by too many summers, hung against the windows. The little light that filtered through had a strange brownish hue.
A red-cheeked man stood by the only furniture in the room, a long table on which lay a number of bulky volumes filled with fabric samples. The man wore very black glasses and a blue suit. He leafed through the swatches, pausing every now and then when one took his interest.
“This is a nice linen,” he said. “I’ve always liked linen, more so in the pale colours.” He spoke softly. He didn’t have to raise his voice to make people listen to him. When Allen Falk entered a room people turned to look. Neither handsome nor trim nor elegant, he had the elusive quality known as “presence”.
Falk closed the fabric book. “Let me bring you up to date, gentlemen, in case you’ve missed anything en route. Gunther Ruhr seized the missile, as expected. A nice job too, I understand. He managed, however, to introduce a little complexity we didn’t anticipate. He’s got a hostage, a young girl. It’s no big deal. But the unpredictable throws us off balance.”
“A hostage?” Sheridan Perry had been expecting something strange from the German. “Why the hell did he need a hostage?”
Al Falk stepped in front of the table. “We’ll get back to the child later. The only important thing is the missile arriving at its destination. And Ruhr’s plane, I’m informed, is presently only three hours from landing.”
Harry Hurt felt a little tense. He looked at his watch. Three hours seemed to him a very long time. He didn’t like the notion of a hostage any more than Perry did, but only because he disliked unscripted occurrences. He had never married and had absolutely no empathy with children. He sometimes saw them out of the corner of his eye and thought they were hyperactive and too robust, too loud. He had no real admiration for Gunther Ruhr – the man’s life lacked principle. Personally, thank God, he’d had no dealings with the German. When Ruhr had supplied the complicated technical specifications for his needs they had come to Harry Hurt via Caporelli, who had received them from Rosabal. Such was the complex chain of obligations. In turn, Hurt had supplied the data to Levy and Possony. This was as close as he’d come to Gunther Ruhr, and he was grateful.
Falk continued. “There should be absolutely no problems to interfere with the arrival. Our spy satellites, which would have identified the plane, have been ‘malfunctioning’ for the last eight hours and will continue to do so for at least another three. Odd timing, don’t you think?”
“Oh, very,” Hurt remarked.
Falk smiled his famous smile. His cheeks, already plump, swelled to the size of crab apples, suggesting the face of a very jolly man, which he wasn’t. He was too involved in controlling Presidents and starfucking to be either carefree or generous. The smile was secretive, and knowing, that of a man who imagines he alone has the blueprint to the power circuits of the country.
Sometimes Hurt had a suspicion that Falk knew about the Society. If so, he gave no indication that he understood Hurt and Perry were part of any organisation. Perhaps he knew nothing, but only gave an impression of knowing. Or he simply thought that his old Princeton friend, Harold S. Hurt, was one half of a two-man partnership with Perry, nothing more.
“I’ve received information that Fidel has come down with an unspecified illness,” Falk said. “Which is exactly what we’ve been waiting for.”
“Beautiful,” Harry Hurt remarked.
Falk said, “Brother Raul, who could be a significant problem because he commands loyalty among some officers, is still in Africa. Events will delay him there until it’s too late for him to return to Cuba. According to my information, South African mercenaries are scheduled to launch a border attack on Angola of sufficient ferocity to keep Raul bouncing around the continent for a few more days.”
Harry Hurt was always impressed by the intricacy of the plan; it was a remarkable conception that involved not only Falk, but also the fragmented anti-Castro movement inside Cuba, a handful of terrorists under the direction of Ruhr, and the forces Hurt himself had assembled in Honduras. And behind it all, a benign overseer, a great masonic eye, the Society of Friends.
Hurt also assumed a clique existed at the CIA under Falk’s control, although like most things involving that organisation it couldn’t be confirmed. But how else could spy satellites be manipulated? How else could the presence of a small army at Cabo Gracias a Dios be kept beyond the reach of those inquisitive journalists who were professional Central America watchers? And how could a South African mercenary assault on Angola be so precisely orchestrated?
Hurt had times when he wondered if the President himself were involved, or if he knew about the scheme but could never in a hundred lifetimes admit it, far less endorse it, for fear of alienating the allies and perhaps enraging the Soviets. It was a slippery speculation and there could never be a definitive answer. The Presidency was, as usual, a mystifying law unto itself, more myth than substance, more shadow than actuality. Besides, Hurt had all along known that the United States could only be involved in this whole project in a manner that was, so to speak, on the periphery of the periphery.
Al Falk walked to the windows, where he stood with his back to the room. “It goes well,” he said. He rubbed the palms of his hands as if he thought he could strike flame from the friction of skin. Hurt had the feeling that Al Falk confidently believed himself capable of anything, walking on water, raising the dead, you name it.
Falk turned round. “You get Cuba. We get an end to Fidel. What a terrific arrangement.”
Hurt smiled in his usual lean manner. He pondered the success with which different interests had been gathered together under a common banner. The last of fidelismo, and the control of Cuba by the Society of Friends fronted by a reasonable and malleable President in the form of Rafael Rosabal. As Falk said, a terrific arrangement. The only shadow across Hurt’s otherwise undiluted enthusiasm was the way the Society was being depleted. Apart from the fact that the situation had produced paranoia, Harry Hurt didn’t like being a target on anybody’s hit list. Of course, new blood could be encouraged, new members carefully inducted into the inner sanctum of the Society – but that was hardly the point. What he really wanted to believe was that the killings had come to an end with Magiwara, Chapotin and Kluger, that these three had been murdered by a party or parties they had somehow managed to injure. A thin little hope, but he clutched it anyhow. It was better than paranoia.
Falk released a blind, which snapped up. The light in the room was tangerine now, and cold. Harry Hurt watched the Presidential advisor as the light struck him. Small reddish veins were stitched across Falk’s face, like some form of embroidery. The black glasses glowed as if the eyes behind them had turned orange. Falk appeared quite demonic.
He said, “I’ve been watching Cuba for more than thirty years. I’ve watched over it the way a physician monitors vital signs. I’ve sniffed the wind from the place, and let me tell you it doesn’t smell like sugar. It smells the way the dogshit of Communism always smells. That’s what we don’t need down there. So let’s deodorise the Caribbean. And if the United States can’t do it officially, then let it be done the only way it can.”
Falk paused. His loathing of Communism had surfaced in 1956 during the failed Hungarian revolution, and had seized him with the passion of a first love affair. In 1968, brutal events in Czechoslovakia had strengthened this hatred. Recent occurrences in China confirmed his beliefs.
The silence in the room was broken only by the sound of his wristwatch beeping twice. He ignored it and went on, “Whenever the CIA tried in the past to assassinate Fidel, it was always ridiculed. The USA was always the oversized bully trying to push little Fidel round the schoolyard, with no justification except for the fact we were bigger than Cuba and could kick its ass all the livelong day. A stinking image, friends. In the feckless court of world opinion, which is the only international court that really matters these days, we had no justification for killing the cretin and clearing the excrement out of Cuba.” Here Falk puffed out his cheeks. “It’s another ballgame now. This time we’ll have evidence that’s damned hard and incontrovertible. The trick of victory in our day and age is to present to a reproachful world a fait accompli which is perceived as utterly regrettable but inevitable. We don’t want to upset the Organisation of American States, some of whose member countries have close relations with Cuba, and we don’t want to upset our NATO allies, some of whom enjoy lucrative trade with Fidel. We need the mumble of world approval in everything we do because that’s how goddam sensitive we’ve become. A nation of images. We’re not people. We’re holographs. All we want to do is look good, for Christ’s sake.”
Falk paused, swallowed. “Consequently, we can’t go in with a big stick. No, we go in sideways, obliquely, pretending we have absolutely nothing to do with it. We use surrogates. And if by some slight chance we are associated with them, we stand in the courtroom and wring our hands, filled with terrible remorse for having helped recover a missile from a sick despot. But what were we supposed to do? That missile was being pointed directly at our goddam throat, after all. So we gave some assistance to a small army of Cuban exiles just to show that we weren’t bullying poor little Cuba again. And we laid out our photographs of the missile for all the judges to see. Case closed. Amen.”
Hurt, who enjoyed the way Falk talked, looked down into the narrow street. The limousine was parked across the way, engine running. A white Ford Taurus passed, then stopped.
Falk reached under his glasses with a finger and rubbed an eye. “Now. The hostage. I think a simple message to Ruhr is going to be enough. Something to the effect that no excess baggage is allowed. No hysterical little eyewitnesses. He knows what to do. He’s been around.”
Harry Hurt was about to agree when he noticed the Ford Taurus backing up very quickly until it was aligned with the parked limousine. Something was going on down there. Hurt started to mention the suspicious appearance of the Taurus in the centre of the street, a great plume of exhaust hanging behind it like an angry wraith. He got out the words I wonder what the hell and then stopped, because the Ford moved forward very quickly, tyres whining on concrete, leaving the limousine exposed to view.
But only for a second. There was a flash of extraordinary light. The limousine exploded. It rose a foot in the air. Windows shattered, metal buckled, a wheel flew off. A great sphere of smoke, dark, thick, rich, billowed around the limousine. Shockwaves blew across the street and shattered the window where Hurt stood. He managed to step away before thin razors of glass lanced into the room. Allen Falk, less nimble, received a scalpful of slivers. Perry, who stood by the table, was unscathed.
“Dear Jesus,” Falk said. Blood flowed over his forehead and down his well-fed cheeks.
Hurt took out a handkerchief and helped Falk mop blood from his face. He glanced at Perry, who had moved to the broken window and was looking down into the street.
The trashed limousine straddled the sidewalk. The hood was gone, the fender mangled, the trunk crumpled. The doors had been blown open. Two motionless men lay in the back, one upon the other. In the front a man was twisted over the steering-wheel.
Hurt said nothing. Clearly somebody had been under the impression that he and Perry were inside the limo. Somebody had thought them sitting targets. Somebody had been mistaken. This time.
Falk touched the side of his skull with the bloodied handkerchief. “We ought to be long gone by the time the police arrive and start looking for eye witnesses. I suggest we get the hell out of here now.”
Neither Hurt nor Perry hesitated. The room was filling up with vile, rubbery smoke that drifted across the street from the ruined limousine. As Hurt walked toward the door behind Falk, he considered the question: who knew? Who the hell knew that he and Perry were travelling in that particular vehicle?
On the staircase down he was struck by a thought that would make some sense to him later: Perry. Perry knew.