Fifteen

In war, whichever side may call itself the victor,

there are no winners, but all are losers.

N. CHAMBERLAIN

So the two strands of my life met in Prague.

Prague was where Sarah had gone, and Prague was where the Americans were sending me for the first stage of what they insisted on calling Operation Dead Wood. I told them straight away that I thought it was a terrible name, but either somebody important had chosen it, or they'd already had the writing paper done, because they refused to budge. Dead Wood is what it's called, Tom.

The operation itself, officially at least, was a standard, off-the-shelf scheme to infiltrate a group of terrorists and, once there, to muck up their lives, and the lives of their suppliers, paymasters, sympathisers and loved ones, as far as was practicable. Nothing remotely special about it. Intelligence agencies all over the world are trying this kind of thing all the time, with varying degrees of failure.

The second strand, the Sarah strand, the Barnes, Murdah, Graduate Studies strand, was all about selling helicopters to nasty despotic governments, and I gave this a name of my own choosing. I called it Oh Christ.

Both strands met in Prague.

I was due to fly out on the Friday night, which meant six days of briefing from the Americans, and five nights of tea-drinking and hand-holding with Ronnie.

The boy Philip flew to Prague the day I nearly broke his wrist, to cut some high-powered deals with the velvet revolutionaries, and he left Ronnie confused and more than a little miserable. Her life may not have been a thrill-packed roller-coaster before I happened, but it wasn't exactly a rack of pain either, and this sudden jerk into the world of terrorism and assassination, coupled with a rapidly disintegrating relationship, didn't help to make a woman feel at her most relaxed.

I kissed her once.

The Dead Wood briefings took place in a red brick thirties mansion just outside Henley. It had about two square miles of parquet floor, every third board of which was curling up with damp, and only one of the lavatories flushed properly.

They'd brought furniture with them, a few chairs and desks and some camp beds, and slung them round the house without much thought. Most of my time was spent in the drawing-room, watching slide shows, listening to tapes, memorising contact procedures, and reading about life as a farm hand in Minnesota. I can't say it was like being back at school, because they made me work harder than I ever did as a teenager, but it was an oddly familiar atmosphere all the same.

I took myself down there every day on the Kawasaki, which they had arranged to have repaired for me. They wanted me to stay overnight, but I told them I needed to take a few deep draughts of London before I left, and they seemed to like that. Americans respect patriotism.

The cast changed constantly, and never dropped below six. There was a gofer called Sam, Barnes was in and out, and a few Carls hung around in the kitchen, drinking herbal tea and doing chin-ups in the doorways. And then there were the specialists.

The first called himself Smith, which was so unlikely that I believed him. He was a puffy little chap with glasses and a tight waistcoat, who talked a lot about the sixties and seventies, the great days of terrorism if you were in Smith's line of work - which seemed to consist of following Baaders and Meinhofs and assorted Red Brigaders round the world like a teenage girl tracking a Jackson Five tour. Posters, badges, signed photographs, the lot.

The Marxist revolutionaries were a big disappointment to Smith, most of them having packed it in and got themselves mortgages and life insurance in the early eighties, although the Italian Red Brigades occasionally re-formed to sing some of the old songs. The Shining Path and its like in Central and South America were not Smith's thing at all. They were as jazz to a Motown buff, and hardly worth mentioning. I dropped in what I thought were a couple of telling questions about the Provisional IRA, but Smith put on a Cheshire cat face and changed the subject.

Goldman came next, tall and thin and enjoying the fact that he didn't enjoy his work. Goldman's preoccupation seemed to be etiquette. He had a right way and a wrong way of doing everything, from hanging up a telephone receiver to licking a stamp, and he would brook no deviation. After a day of his tutoring I felt like Eliza Doolittle.

Goldman told me that henceforth I should answer to the name of Durrell. I asked him if I could pick my own name, and he said no, Durrell was already entered on the case file of Operation Dead Wood. I asked him if he'd heard of Tippex, and he said that was a silly name, and I'd better just get used to Durrell.

Travis was unarmed combat, and when they told him he only had an hour with me, he just sighed, said 'eyes and genitals', and left.

On the last day the planners arrived; two men and two women, dressed like bankers and carrying huge briefcases. I tried flirting with the women but they weren't having any of it. The shorter of the two men might have been on, though.

The tall one, Louis, was the friendliest of the four, and did most of the talking. He seemed to know his stuff, without ever really letting on what his stuff was, which sort of showed how well he knew it. He called me Tom.

One thing, and only one thing, was obvious from all of this. Dead Wood was not being improvised, and these people hadn't just sat down the day before with the Ladybird book of international terrorism. This train had been running for many months before I was dragged aboard.

'Kintex mean anything to you, Tom?' Louis crossed his legs and leaned towards me like some kind of David Frost.

'Nothing, Louis,' I said. 'I am a blank canvas.' I lit another cigarette just to annoy them all.

'That's just fine. First thing you should know, and I guess you know this already - there are no idealists left in the world.'

'Except for you and me, Louis.'

One of the women looked at her watch.

'Right, Tom,' he said. 'You and me. But freedom fighters, liberators, architects of the new dawn, all that stuff went the way of flared pants. Terrorists these days are businessmen.' A female throat cleared, somewhere at the back of the room. 'And businesswomen. And terror is a great-looking career for a modern kid. Really. Good prospects, lot of travel, expense account, early retirement. If I had a son, I'd say to him either law or terrorism. And let's face it, maybe terrorists do less harm.'

This was a joke.

'Maybe you wonder where the money comes from?' He raised his eyebrows at me, and I nodded like a Playschool presenter. 'Well there are the bad guys, the Syrians, the Libyans, the Cubans, who still look at terror as a state industry. They write big cheques now and then, and if an American Embassy gets a brick through the window as a result, they're happy. But in the last ten years, they've kind of taken a back seat. Nowadays, profit's the thing, and when it comes to profit, all roads lead to Bulgaria.'

He sat back in his seat, which was the cue for one of the women to step forward and read from a clipboard, although she obviously knew her speech by heart and just had the clipboard for comfort.

'Kintex,' she began, 'is ostensibly a state-run trading agency, based out of Sofia, where five hundred and twenty-nine personnel are employed on import-export activities. Covertly, Kintex handles upwards of eighty per cent of narcotics traffic from the Middle East into western Europe and North America, frequently in exchange for licit and illicit arms consignments resold to Middle Eastern insurgency groups. The heroin is similarly resold, to selected central and western European trafficking rings. Personnel involved in these operations are mostly non-Bulgarians, but are given storage and accommodation facilities in Varna and Burgas on the Black Sea. Kintex, under a new operating name of Globus, also participates in the laundering of drug profits from all over Europe, exchanging cash for gold and precious stones and redistributing funds to their clients via a chain of business operations in Turkey and eastern Europe.'

She looked up at Louis, to see whether he wanted to hear more, but Louis looked at me, saw that I had started to glaze over, and gave a tiny shake of his head.

'Nice guys, right?' he said. 'Also the folks who gave a gun to Mehmet Ali Agca.' That didn't mean a lot to me either. 'Took a shot at Pope John Paul in '81. Made a few headlines.'

I went ah yes, and wagged my head to show how impressed I was.

'Kintex,' he continued, 'is a regular one-stop shop, Tom. You want to make some trouble in the world, wreck a few countries, blight a few million lives, then just grab your credit card and head down to Kintex. Nobody beats their prices.'

Louis was smiling, but I could tell he was blazing with righteous anger. So I looked round the room, and sure enough, the other three had the same kind of zealous fire hanging round their heads.

'And Kintex,' I said, desperately hoping that they would answer no, 'are the people Alexander Woolf was dealing with.'

'Yes,' said Louis.

Which is when and why I realised, in a very horrible moment indeed, that none of these people, not even Louis, had the faintest idea of what Graduate Studies was really about - or what Operation Dead Wood was really supposed to achieve. These people actually thought they were fighting a straightforward battle against narco-terrorism, or terro-narcotics, or whatever the hell they called it, on behalf of a grateful Uncle Sam and Auntie Rest Of The World. This was run-of-the-mill CIA business, with not a kink to be seen. They were putting me into a second division terrorist group in the simple, uncomplicated hope that I'd nip down to a phone box on my evening off and fill them in with a lot of names and addresses.

I was being taught how to drive by blind instructors, and the realisation shook me a bit.

They laid out the plan for the infiltration and made me repeat every stage of it a million times. I think that, because I was English, they were worried I wouldn't be able to hold more than one thought in my head at a time, and when they saw that I'd picked the whole thing up pretty easily, they slapped each other on the back and said 'good job' a lot.

After a revolting supper of meat balls and Lambrusco, served up by a harassed-looking Sam, Louis and his fellows packed up their briefcases, pumped my hand and nodded their heads meaningfully, before climbing into their cars and setting off back down the yellow brick road. I didn't wave.

Instead, I told the Carls that I was going for a walk and went through to the garden at the back of the house, where a lawn ran down to the river and a view of the most beautiful reach in the whole length of the Thames.

It was a warm night, and on the opposite bank young couples and elderly dog-walkers were still promenading. A few cabin-cruisers had moored nearby, water patting gently against their hulls, and the lights at their windows glowed a soft and welcoming yellow. People were laughing, and I could smell their tinned soup.

I was in deep shit.

Barnes arrived just after midnight, and he was a very different sight from our first meeting. The Brooks Brothers stuff had gone, and he now looked like he was ready to head into the Nicaraguan jungle at the drop of a bomb. Khaki trousers, dark-green twill shirt, Red Wing boots. A military-looking watch with canvas strap had taken the place of the dress Rolex. I had the feeling that for two pins he'd have been in front of a mirror, slapping camouflage paint on to his face. The lines were deeper than ever.

He dismissed the Carls and the two of us settled ourselves in the drawing-room, where he unpacked a half-bottle of Jack Daniels, a carton of Marlboro and a camouflage-painted Zippo lighter.

'How's Sarah?' I said.

It felt like a silly question, but it had to be asked. After all, she was the reason I was doing all this - and if it turned out that she'd stepped under a bus that morning, or died of malaria, I was definitely off the case. Not that Barnes would tell me if she had, but I might get something from his face when he answered.

'Fine,' he said. 'She's just fine.' He poured bourbon into two glasses, and skidded one of them across the parquet floor tome.

'I want to speak to her,' I said. He didn't flinch. 'I need to know she's all right. Still alive and still all right.'

'I'm telling you she's fine.' He took a suck at his glass.

'I know you're telling me that,' I said. 'But you're a psychopath, whose word isn't worth a flake of sick.'

'I don't like you much either, Thomas.'

We were sitting opposite each other now, drinking whisky and smoking cigarettes, but the atmosphere fell short of the ideal agent-handler relationship, and was falling shorter by the second.

'You know what your problem is?' said Barnes, after a while.

'Yes, I know perfectly well what my problem is. It buys its clothes from an L.L. Bean catalogue, and is sitting opposite me right now.'

He pretended he hadn't heard. Maybe he hadn't.

'Your problem, Thomas, is that you're British.' He started rotating his head in odd movements. Every now and then a bone cracked in his neck, which seemed to give him pleasure. 'The things that are wrong with you, are wrong with this whole godforsaken pisspot of an island.'

'Wait a minute,' I said. 'Wait a full, well-rounded minute. This can't be right. This can't be a fucking American, telling me what's wrong with this country.'

'Got no balls, Thomas. You ain't got them. This country ain't got them. Maybe you had them once, and you lost them. I don't know, and I don't care so much.'

'Now Rusty, be careful,' I said. T ought to warn you that over here, people take the word "balls" to mean courage. We don't understand the American meaning, of having a big mouth and getting an erection every time you say "Delta" and "strike" and "kick ass". Important cultural difference there. And by cultural difference,' I added, because the blood was running a bit hot I must admit, 'we don't mean a divergence of values. We mean fuck you up the arse with a wire brush.'

He laughed at that. Which was not the reaction I'd been hoping for. Quite a large part of me had hoped that he'd try and hit me, so that I'd be able to punch him in the throat and ride off into the night with an easy mind.

'Well, Thomas,' he said, T hope we've cleared some air there. Hope you feel better now.'

'Much better, thank you,' I said.

'Me too.'

He got up to refill my glass, and then dropped the cigarettes and lighter in my lap.

'Thomas, I'll be straight. You can't see, or speak to, Sarah Woolf right now. Just ain't possible. But at the same time, I won't expect you to lift a finger for me until you have seen hen How's that? Sound fair enough to you?'

I sipped at the whisky and eased a cigarette from the packet.

'You haven't got her, have you?'

He laughed again. I was going to have to put a stop to this somehow.

'I never said we did, Thomas. What did you think, that we had her chained to a bedpost somewhere? Come on, give us a little credit, will you? We do this for a living, you know. We're not right off the boat here.' He dropped back into his chair and resumed his neck-stretching, and I wished I could have helped. 'Sarah is where we can reach her if we need to. Right now, seeing as how you're being such a nice little English boy, we don't need to. Okay?'

'No, not okay.' I stubbed out the cigarette and got to my feet. It didn't seem to bother Barnes. 'I see her, make sure she's all right, or I don't do this. Not only don't I do this, I might even kill you just to prove exactly how much I'm not going do it. Okay?'

I started slowly to move towards him. I thought he might cry out to the Carls, but that didn't worry me. If it came to it, I only needed a few seconds - whereas the Carls would take about an hour to get those ridiculous bodies kick-started into action. Then I realised why he was so relaxed.

He'd dropped his hand into the briefcase at his side, and there was a glint of grey metal as the hand emerged. It was a big gun, and he held it loosely over his crotch, aimed at my midriff, range about eight feet.

'Well Jiminy Cricket,' I said. 'You're about to get an erection, Mr Barnes. Isn't that a Colt Delta Elite you've got there in your lap?'

He didn't answer this time. Just looked.

'Ten millimetre,' I said. 'A gun for people who've either got a small penis or little faith in their ability to hit the middle of the target.' I was wondering how to cover those eight feet without him hitting me with a decent body shot. It wasn't going to be easy, but it was possible. Provided one had balls. Before and after the event.

He must have sensed what I was thinking, because he cocked the hammer. Very slowly. It did make a satisfying click, I must admit.

'You know what a Glaser slug is, Thomas?' He spoke softly, almost dreamily.

'No, Rusty,' I said, 'I don't know what a Glaser slug is. Sounds like it's a chance for you to bore me to death instead of shoot me. Off you go.'

'The bullet of the Glaser Safety Slug, Thomas, is a small cup made of copper. Filled with fine lead shot in liquid teflon.' He waited for me to take this in, knowing I would know what it meant. 'On impact, the Glaser is guaranteed to dump ninety-five per cent of its energy on the target. No shoot-throughs, no ricochets, just a lot of knocking down.' He paused, and took a sip of whisky. 'Big, big holes in your body.'

We must have stayed like that for quite a while. Barnes tasting whisky, me tasting life. I could feel myself sweating and my shoulder blades started to itch.

'Okay,' I said. 'Maybe I won't try and kill you just at the moment.'

'Glad to hear it,' said Barnes after a long while, but the Colt didn't move.

'Putting a big hole in my body isn't going to help you much.'

'Ain't gonna hurt me much either.'

'I need to speak to her, Barnes,' I said. 'She's why I'm here. If I don't speak to her, there's no point to any of this.'

Another couple of hundred years went by, and then I started thinking that Barnes was smiling. But I didn't know why, or when he'd begun. It was like sitting in a cinema before the main feature, trying to work out whether the lights really were going down.

And then it hit me. Or caressed me, rather. Nina Ricci's Fleur de Fleurs, one part per billion.

We were down on the river bank. Just the two of us. The Carls paced somewhere, but Barnes had told them to keep their distance and they did. The moon was out and it spilt across the water towards where we sat, lighting her face with a milky glow.

Sarah looked terrible and wonderful. She'd lost some weight, and she'd been crying more than was good for her. They'd told her that her father was dead twelve hours before, and at that moment I wanted to put my arm round her more than I've ever wanted to do anything. But it wouldn't have been right. I don't know why.

We sat in silence for a while, looking out over the water. The cabin-cruisers had switched off their lights, and the ducks had turned in long ago. Either side of the moon stain, the river was black and quiet.

'So,' she said.

'Yeah,'I said.

There was another long silence, as we thought about what had to be said. It was like a big concrete ball that you know you've got to lift. You can walk round and round looking for a place to take hold of it, but it just isn't there.

Sarah had the first try.

'Be honest. You didn't believe us, did you?'

She nearly laughed, so I nearly answered by saying that she hadn't believed that I wasn't trying to kill her father. I stopped myself in time.

'No, I didn't,' I said.

'You thought we were a joke. Mad pair of Americans seeing ghosts in the night.'

'Something like that.'

She started to cry again, and I sat and waited until the squall passed. When it did, I lit a couple of cigarettes and handed her one. She drew on it heavily, and then flicked nonexistent ash into the river every few seconds. I watched her and pretended not to.

'Sarah,' I said. 'I'm very sorry. For everything. For what's happened. And for you. I want...' I couldn't for the life of me think of the right thing to say. I just felt I ought to be saying something. 'I want to put things right, somehow. I mean, I know that your father ...'

She looked up at me and smiled, to tell me not to worry.

'But there's always a choice,' I blundered on, 'between doing the right thing or the wrong thing, no matter what's happened. And I want to do the right thing. Do you understand?'

She nodded. Which was damn good of her, because I hadn't the faintest idea what I meant. I had too many things to say, and too small a brain to sort them out with. Post Office, three days before Christmas, that was my head.

She sighed.

'He was a good man, Thomas.'

Well, what do you say?

'I'm sure he was,' I said. 'I liked him.' That was true.

'Didn't really know it until a year ago,' she said. 'You kind of don't think of your parents as being anything, do you? Good or bad. They're just there.' She paused. 'Until they're not.'

We stared at the river for a while.

'Your parents alive?'

'No,' I said. 'My father died when I was thirteen. Heart attack. My mother four years ago.'

'I'm sorry.' I couldn't believe it. She was being polite, in the middle of all this.

'That's all right,' I said. 'She was sixty-eight.'

Sarah leaned towards me and I realised I'd been speaking very softly. I'm not sure why. Maybe it was respect for her grief, or perhaps I didn't want my voice to puncture the little composure she had.

'What's your favourite memory of your mother?'

It wasn't a sad question. It really sounded as if she wanted to know, as if she was getting ready to enjoy some story of my childhood.

'Favourite memory.' I thought for a moment. 'Every day, between seven and eight o'clock in the evening.'

'Why?'

'She'd have a gin and tonic. Seven o'clock on the dot. Just one. And for that hour she became the happiest, funniest woman I've ever known.'

'What about afterwards?'

'Sad,' I said. 'No other word for it. She was a very sad woman, my mother. Sad about my father, and about herself. If I'd been her doctor, I'd have prescribed gin six times a day.' For a moment, I felt like I wanted to cry. It passed. 'What about you?'

She didn't have to think very hard for hers, but she waited anyway, playing it over in her mind and making herself smile.

'I don't have any happy memories of my mother. She started fucking her tennis coach when I was twelve and disappeared the next summer. Best thing that ever happened to us. My father,' and she closed her eyes at the warmth of the memory, 'taught my brother and me to play chess. When we were eight or nine. Michael was good, took it up real quick. I was pretty good, too, but Michael was better. But when we were learning, my dad used to play us without his queen. He'd always take the black pieces and he'd always play without the queen. And as Michael and I got better and better, he never took the piece back. Kept playing without his queen, even when Michael was beating him in ten moves. Got to the point where Michael could have played without his own queen and still won. But my dad just kept on, losing game after game, and never once played with a full set of pieces.'

She laughed, and the movement of it stretched her out until she was lying back, resting on her elbows.

'On Dad's fiftieth birthday, Michael gave him a black queen, in a little wooden box. He cried. Weird, seeing your dad cry. But I think it just gave him so much pleasure to see us learn, and get strong, that he never wanted to lose the feeling of it. He wanted us to win.'

And then, suddenly, the tears arrived in a huge wave, crashing over her and shaking her thin body until she could hardly breathe. I lay down and put my arms around her, squeezing her tight to shield her from everything.

'It's all right,' I said. 'Everything is all right.'

But of course it wasn't all right. Not by miles.