Old Enemies

by Michael Dobbs

  ‘Take all the time you want. Until Christmas. If no five million euro by Christmas Day, the boy end up like Jan.’

  ‘But that’s less than two weeks,’ Terri cried.

  ‘Get busy, bitch.’

  Drinking. On your own again, Jones. He knew he was doing too much of both and neither had brought him happiness. Harry stared into the fire. This was Mayfair, a smokeless zone, so the fire consisted of nothing more than ribbons of designer gas flame, but it was better than staring at a blank wall and an empty glass. Anyway, wasn’t he supposed to be celebrating? He’d told Mary he wanted to come to Downing Street to finalize the details on the new job and she’d put some time in the diary for early the following week, so now he sat in his den beneath the stark light of a reading lamp and raised a toast in glorious farewell to his old life as a backbench politician, a life in which he had no real responsibilities apart from his constituents and making an occasional speech that was noticed by almost no one except the record-takers of Hansard. Not much of a life. At least as Foreign Secretary he would be able to pretend.

  His melancholy was interrupted by the telephone. It was Sloppy. ‘Evening, you inglorious bastard. Remember you asked me to keep you up to speed on any stories of wickedness and worries around the Breslin camp?’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ Harry sighed, trying to summon up enthusiasm from the dregs.

  ‘Well, bingo, old buddy. Word is he’s trying to sell. Everything. And in a hurry, poor sod.’

  ‘Sorry, I don’t understand . . .’

  ‘Wake up at the back of the class, Jones! The newspaper’s up to its rafters in debt and the whisper in the gutter is that the bum-bandits at his bank have recalled the loans, so he’s trying to raise new money on everything he’s got, including his house. Sounds desperate. Wolves waiting in the wings on this one, old chap.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Suggestion is he may even have to bail out of the newspaper. One minute he’s telling everyone there’s light at the end of the tunnel, next he’s desperate to jump ship.’

  ‘Ship in a tunnel, Sloppy?’

  ‘You don’t pay me for my command of syntax, old chap. But take it from me, Breslin’s for the high jump. There’s a smell of death around this one.’

  ‘Thanks, Sloppy. I owe you. But I’ve got to go. I think someone’s trying to kick down my front door . . .’

  Sloppy was chuntering on about Harry’s taste for desperate women when Harry cut him off. The banging was persistent, along with the ringing of the bell, and as he opened the door he found the last person in the world he wanted to see. Terri. She was standing on the doorstep, her face pale in the lamplight.

  ‘I’d better come in,’ she said quietly.

  He moved aside to let her in, reluctant, and led her into his den. She shrugged off her coat, allowing it to fall aimlessly on the floor, and when she turned, he was startled how much she had aged. It was more than just the stark, atmospheric lighting; her features were drawn, sallow, the eyes exhausted.

  ‘They still have Ruari,’ she said softly.

  ‘Dear God, I’m so sorry,’ he said, cautious, defensive, not wanting to get too close to her. ‘What happened?’

  ‘A total bloody screw-up. The police, they raided the hideout – near Trieste. Yes, you were right about that, too. It was this morning, before the handover. Found two bodies. They think that one of them was the man we call Jan.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘They’re guessing, but the Trieste police believe the kidnap has been taken over by the hired help. Changed the rules of the game. It’s all just got worse.’

  Harry was shaking his head in bewilderment.

  ‘They want five million euros, Harry. Five million. By Christmas Day. Or they will kill Ruari.’

  Harry winced inside. ‘Kidnappers have to say those sort of things.’

  ‘I think they mean it. They’ve already left bodies scattered across Switzerland and now Italy. What’s one more? They mean it.’

  He couldn’t deny her logic. ‘You seem . . . remarkably composed, in the circumstances.’

  ‘I don’t have a choice. If I wobble, lose control, even for a moment, I’ll fall apart. But I’m not going to. Ruari needs help not hysterics.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘J.J.’s running through town trying to find the money. Selling investments. Raising loans.’ She was about to say more, but changed her mind. There was no point. With the newspaper already drowning in debt, they’d already discovered that no one wanted to lend them more.

  ‘I heard. Will you be OK with that?’

  ‘It’s tough. Sean has said he’ll help.’

  ‘It seems he was right. That old bugger never did trust the police.’

  She took a step towards him. ‘What can we do, Harry?’

  ‘It’s not for me to tell you and your husband—’

  ‘No, Harry, we! You and me.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘You have to help me!’ Her composure was beginning to slip. An urgency had crept into her voice and her body was beginning to shake. ‘J.J.’s dying under the pressure, can’t think, can barely function any more. The police have no clues, Archer is useless, we sent Hiley to Rome to wait for Ruari’s release . . . That only leaves you and me, Harry.’

  ‘Not me, Terri. I have no further part to play in this. Anyway, what can I do?’

  ‘Something, Harry! Do something, for God’s sake!’

  Do something. The curse of the politician throughout the ages. Harry had never been one to make fatuous promises and he wasn’t in the mood for it now, particularly with a woman he desperately wanted out of his life. It wasn’t punishment, merely self-protection. Harry shook his head defiantly. ‘I can’t think of a thing that would make the slightest difference.’

  ‘There must be. You’re Harry Jones,’ she whispered.

  And still he shook his head.

  ‘Even Sean’s going to Trieste,’ she said, her eyes brimming with accusation.

  ‘What’s the point? He’s unlikely to stumble over him on a street corner.’

  ‘At least he’s trying!’

  ‘He’s family.’

  She was shaking with emotion, and despite all her defiance suddenly very close to falling apart. She took another step towards him, hesitant, uncertain, within touching distance now. ‘Harry, about the other night . . .’

  ‘When you—’ Immediately he regretted starting on the thought, couldn’t finish it, couldn’t be that cruel. But she knew where his mind had lodged.

  ‘When I ran out on you yet again.’

  He sipped his whisky rather than respond or look into her eyes, but then quickly cast the glass to one side. Getting drunk wasn’t the answer. Her voice was steadier now.

  ‘I ran because I was afraid, Harry. I ran because I care so much about you.’

  ‘Seemed a strange way of showing it.’

  ‘You have no idea what you mean to me, do you?’ She was reaching for him, just as she had done in the park.

  He took a sharp breath. He had no idea she would stoop this low. ‘What I think, Terri, is that you would do anything, say anything, to help Ruari.’

  ‘They’re not just words . . .’

  ‘I’ve done everything I can to help. Now leave me out of this. Please.’

  She grabbed his arms. ‘You can’t be left out!’

  ‘Oh, just watch me.’ He tried to turn away, reach once more for his drink, but she held him too tight.

  ‘You can’t!’ The words came as a wail of anguish, and her hands began flailing at his chest with such wretchedness that Harry was taken aback. Her pain seemed so much more than an act. She was sobbing profoundly, battling to take each breath, her face fallen forward and buried in his chest, the tears real and already soaking through his shirt.

  ‘You can’t leave Ruari,’ she whimpered.

  She raised her eyes to him, the tears flickering in the firelight like a necklace of diamonds.

  ‘Harry, he’s your son.’

&
nbsp; CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Harry had once been close, too close, to a mortar round. It was outside Baghdad, on that mission to snatch an Iraqi general shortly before that first Gulf War. He and his buddy had already been wounded, and then in the dark some outfit of the Republican Guard had started lobbing mortars, pretty lightweight stuff but they’d got lucky and one of the shells had blown Harry and his chum clean off their feet. There were plenty of fragments, too; Harry escaped serious injury but the shrapnel found his partner, and that’s what eventually killed him. Harry could never forget the sensation that immediately followed the blast. He had no idea where he was, even who he was, the disorientation was total, his thoughts scrambled, his lungs bursting, until eventually he woke up to find himself crawling through the sand. And that was precisely how he felt now.

  ‘It can’t be.’

  Harry had to struggle to produce each word, forcing it out, yet even as he tried to deny what Terri had told him he began to doubt himself. Suddenly he realized he had no idea how old Ruari was, early teens to judge by the family photographs, but that’s all they were, photographs, already out of date even by the time they were put in their frames.

  It had been seventeen years, and then a few months, since Paris. June. The sixth, to be exact. How deeply it had carved its way inside his memory.

  She took a step back from him to give him room to breathe, and to think. ‘I was already seeing J.J. by then, and I’d decided I couldn’t carry on with you, even though I loved you so much, Harry. It’s true. I didn’t know I was pregnant, and by the time I did, I couldn’t even be sure whose child it was.’

  Harry’s mouth had gone dry, his words seemed to stumble over each other. ‘When did you find out?’

  ‘Not until much later. By that time I was married to J.J., and you were back with Julia.’

  ‘And you never let me know.’

  ‘How could I? What would you have done, Harry? Torn all our worlds apart, that’s what you would have done. Neither J.J. nor Julia deserved that.’

  ‘How did you find out? About me and Ruari?’

  ‘Oh, Harry, you only have to know you both to see that. He has little features, his ears, his fingers, the shape of his head, that are pure you, but it’s inside, in his character, that you find it most. He’s wilful. Ridiculously stubborn. Totally determined. Typical Jones.’ Somehow she was smiling through her tears.

  He turned away, trying to shield himself, only to be forced back. ‘And . . . J.J.? Does he know?’

  ‘We’ve never talked about it. Sometimes I think he’s guessed but . . . Harry, he’s been a brilliant father to Ruari. He may not be the most gifted athlete, he’s rubbish at football and far too serious for his own good, but he loves Ruari and has always done his best.’

  ‘I think he knows.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ she said sadly.

  ‘We’ll all have a lot of sorting out to do after this.’

  ‘After what?’

  ‘After we’ve got Ruari back.’

  ‘So you’ll help?’

  ‘You do ask the most ridiculous questions.’

  And before he could say any more she was in his arms once again, and this time she didn’t run away.

  Barriers had come down, past lies and all the hurts that went with them had been ripped away. From this point their worlds were never going to be the same. The longing was mutual and they said not another word until they had satisfied it. It was madness, it was escape, it was both celebration and selfish distraction, it was love, greed, desperation, lust, all those things. They spoke without words, reliving old times, trying to lose themselves, and when they had finished they lay back amongst the cushions in front of the fire, seeing their bodies as though for the first time, and remembering. It was so much like it had once been – and then it seemed too much so. Their pasts had been irreconcilable, their obligations inescapable, and reliving those long-lost moments served to remind them only that they were buried as deeply and as inextricably as ever within the troubles of the present.

  ‘Have we just made everything worse?’ she whispered.

  Worse? How much worse could it get? Everything had changed, and not just between the two of them. The nature of the kidnap had changed, too. What had once been political had now turned to money, and a huge amount of it, while the deadline had been cut from months to days. Bodies with their throats ripped out suggested their adversaries lacked any shred of pity, and they no longer had any idea who their adversaries were, or where they and Ruari might be.

  ‘I’m not sure we can handle it any more, Harry,’ she said. ‘We’, that wonderful, exquisitely tormenting pronoun, so short and yet bursting with significance, for he knew she was back to talking about her and her husband. She sighed, rested her head on Harry’s shoulder. ‘J.J.’s in another place. I think he’s in danger of breaking, Harry. He knows that if he manages to raise the ransom money it will destroy everything he’s ever tried to create, but if we don’t get Ruari back, that will destroy him even more completely. It’s more than one life at stake here. I don’t know how much more he can take.’ She had just cheated on her husband, but there was no mistaking her care for him. Harry tried to remember whether he had felt like that with Julia.

  ‘Let me help pay the ransom.’

  ‘You?’ She ran a finger gently down his cheek until it stopped on his lips. ‘No, I can’t let you do that. J.J. has enough people trying to crucify him, and you would be the last nail. He doesn’t deserve that. He mustn’t know about you, Harry, not yet at least.’

  ‘I can’t let Ruari suffer simply because J.J. isn’t able to raise the money.’

  She took his face in her hands, brought it close. ‘And I won’t let J.J. suffer simply because you can.’ This wasn’t just about Ruari, it was about them all, and she was taking charge, navigating through the reefs that surrounded them. ‘He’ll do his bit, whatever it takes. The Breslins are stubborn, too.’

  ‘Ah, I almost forgot. Sean.’

  ‘He’s said he’ll help, of course. With the money. And he’s booked on the morning flight to Trieste. Somewhere to start picking up the threads once more. He says it’s better than simply sitting here waiting.’

  ‘He’s probably right.’ No, certainly right, Harry realized. There was no substitute for having a man on the ground, behind enemy lines. That had often been his job. ‘I’ll go with him,’ he heard himself saying.

  ‘You? And Sean?’ She couldn’t hide her incredulity.

  ‘Share resources. Experiences.’

  ‘You and Sean?’ she repeated.

  ‘It’s about Ruari, not about him and me. He told me that himself.’

  And he reminded Sean of those words when he phoned him a few minutes later, after he’d torn himself away from Terri and thrown on some clothes.

  ‘So you’ll be coming with me, will you, Mr Jones?’ the Irishman responded. ‘Covering all the bases, you say? One man at high table, the other in the gutter. So tell me, which one of us is the better equipped for the gutter?’

  ‘Only one way to find out, Sean.’

  ‘You may be right.’

  ‘I’ll see you tomorrow, then.’

  Sean was about to put down the phone when he hesitated, another thought in the air. ‘Are you with my daughter-in-law by any chance?’

  The old bastard knew. No point in dodging the fact. ‘I am.’

  There was a silence, a short hesitation as Sean digested the news. Harry thought he was working up some form of rebuke, but even as he waited for the outburst of denunciation, the line went dead. He found the silence more damning than words.

  They met the following morning at Gatwick Airport. They didn’t fly direct to Trieste with Ryanair, the Irish airline, but flew instead to Venice on a rival carrier. When Harry asked why he was told in the curtest terms that Sean had once had a falling out with what he called ‘those dozy gombeens at Ryanair’ and hadn’t flown them since.

  It seemed to Harry that the Irish could never let go of a slight
, even with each other. So they had flown into Italy across the dark, silted lagoons of Venice, where they hired a car and took the coastal road to Trieste, which brought them to the centre of the city by nightfall. Throughout the entire journey, although they sat together, Harry and Sean exchanged barely a word.

  Trieste had once been one of the major ports of Europe, the main outlet to the sea of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which lavished pomp and riches upon it in a manner they thought befitting their status as the pre-eminent power on the continent. And typical of the Habsburg mind, they ended up with a city that was solid and familiar, logical and spacious, but lacking in any great landmark or signature; it was all trombones and dumplings, with barely a Latin flourish in sight. Whatever eminence the place had came to an abrupt end with two bullets fired at Sarajevo in the summer of 1914 that killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the imperial throne, and his wife, Sophie. Their coffins were brought back in sombre procession through Trieste, and some said the city had been in mourning ever since. A century later it was a small town by the sea, with a population of two hundred thousand souls and declining, its port much redundant, its mercantile princes largely fled, its old quarter that dated back to Roman times half-updated but never finished, a little bit of Austria on the Italian coast where the local osterias still served boiled pork in the middle-European way and many of the old barmen in this town of watering holes and coffee shops still greeted their guests with a very Germanic ‘Bitte?’. Yet as Harry and Sean made their way towards their hotel on the central piazza, they saw people promenading in the typical North Italian manner, the women walking arm in arm, wrapped in their furs against the winter breeze, the miniature dogs strutting on their short legs and leads, the menfolk following dutifully behind. Some writers complained that Trieste had no clear character, yet it was perhaps nearer the truth to suggest that it had many different characters, and the inhabitants simply hadn’t bothered to decide which they preferred. Many newcomers and transients like D’Amato made the glib mistake of identifying character with authority, but when they had passed away or simply passed on, like so many before them, the Bora would still blow, the ferry would still leave for Albania, and Trieste would remain staring out across the Adriatic, as it always had, waiting for whomever or whatever came next.