The Private Sector (A Peter Marlow spy thriller)

by Joseph Hone

  “But His Excellency insists on meeting them. And the film people told me they don’t have enough cable to reach the apron for their cameras—the power connections—”

  “Don’t they have batteries?”

  “Ah, not these days I’m afraid, Colonel. As you know yourself we can get very little imported material now. And our own batteries, I’m afraid …” Selim shrugged his shoulders, raised both hands briefly, policing the air, and began to chatter again about the Will of God and about the lack of even the smallest comforts in Egypt today, and the Colonel nodded in agreement, thinking what a liar Selim was, knowing that he and all his more cherished friends got everything they wanted from the tax-free airport shop downstairs. When would they stop lying? the Colonel thought again. When? But then he remembered his own life-long deception and tried to think of something else. He couldn’t.

  How and why had Edwards met up with Yunis? This meeting was just one more query in a succession of inexplicable events which had plagued the Colonel for the past twenty-four hours, another part of the mystery, which was something he had always rigorously avoided in his work. When he sensed it he was like an animal downwind of the gun and he had to fight the panic that came over him, the need he felt to run.

  Someone, for once, knew more about what was going on than he did—was arranging things behind his back, manipulating people, had him in his sights perhaps as well. He had to force himself to stay where he was, do nothing, behave normally. And Selim’s grubby, anonymous little office was the ideal cover for his mood. He could bury himself in the idle bureaucratic chatter, use it as a camouflage. Selim’s venal pursuits, which he had despised before, were part of a safe world he wanted to belong to now.

  “They’ve recently had a very fine consignment of Japanese transistors downstairs. I’ve put in for one on our allowance. You might like to look at them … My wife wants to go to Ras el Bar for the summer … Hate the place myself—the girls, you know, they put the price up … It’s impossible. Yes, I’d like to see him get promotion but his father’s a complete farmer …”

  The Colonel nodded his head and said “Yes” and “No” and “Of course” and sipped his coffee. And he thought about Edwards.

  Where was the trick? There must be one. What was it? The first part of the problem made sense, or might do: the message which he had received the day before from his Control in Tel Aviv: that Edwards, a British SIS man in their Mid-East section, was a KGB double and was on his way back to Moscow via Cairo, with the names of a group of Israeli intelligence men in Egypt. And the message had been crystal clear: stop him immediately, at the airport if possible—kill him with the utmost dispatch; the security of the entire Tel Aviv circle in Egypt depended on it.

  There was a slight problem in this, of course, which Tel Aviv didn’t know about: Edwards was one of his own men, an Egyptian agent, doubling in Holborn—had been for seventeen years. It was an essential part of the Colonel’s cover with Egyptian Intelligence that he form his own quite separate network of people working genuinely for Cairo and that these people should never be known to Tel Aviv. It was a problem he could rise above, the Colonel thought. It was easier after all to kill someone face to face, rather than at a distance, with pills or silencers: the close approach—sighing in the man’s ear, turning the knife delicately between the ribs—that was far easier. But Mohammed Yunis had got in the way of all that.

  How—and why—had Edwards met up with him? the Colonel wondered again. What purpose could they have had other than that of swapping notes? The puzzle began to fit then: Moscow would give Yunis the names of the Israeli circle in Egypt in return for his co-operation in toppling the President. With those names Yunis would be in a nearly unassailable position of power: he would be able to expose the President and his intelligence services as bumbling fools, save Egypt from dishonour and emerge as the natural successor and hero—and Soviet puppet.

  It was for just such reasons that Yunis, at this moment, on instructions from the President, was on his way to an unexpected appointment in Heliopolis: he had been chattering too much in Moscow already. And it was no more possible to stop him talking now than it had been to do away with the messenger who had accompanied him. The two men had taken the precaution of sticking together all the way, one protecting the other, on the plane and through the airport welcome. The only way of separating them was to risk going to Heliopolis himself, hoping that neither of them had talked yet. Edwards, after all, was his own man—with Military Intelligence, not Home Security. There was just a chance he hadn’t opened his mouth about the Tel Aviv circle in Egypt. If he could get him away, he would ensure that he never did.

  “Tell me, Colonel, would you like to take a look at one of these transistors? They fit in your pocket …”

  Selim interrupted the Colonel’s calculations so that he looked up and said “Yes” before he knew what he was doing.

  7

  Edwards began to enjoy being with Yunis, not so much for his chatter about Egypt’s economy—he couldn’t in fact, understand why, after so many visits to the country in the guise of journalist and the fruitless attempts to see people like Yunis for his articles, the man should suddenly now have taken an interest in him—but because he knew that as long as he stayed with him he was safe. No one was going to pick him up—or off—in the big Black Mercedes with its electric windows, glass partitions and bullet-proofing.

  It was a pity though, he thought, with the windows shut, in the false air—there was not that real sense of his coming back to the country which he always looked forward to, the sudden overwhelming indication that he had really come home: the dry chalky smell of baking concrete and lime dust, the sharp breath of paraffin and rotting newspapers swirling up from the rissole carts in the back-streets of Heliopolis which they were passing through. Before, on every other journey, this had been the unmistakable evidence that he’d come back into his own world—that, and seeing Bridget again. The two had so often gone together in the past, when she’d met him at the airport and they’d driven back, taking the old road into the city past the City of the Dead, to the warm cedar smell of the house in Maadi where she lived alone.

  This time she hadn’t come; he hadn’t told her. He was supposed to be defecting. If only it had been as simple as that.

  Yunis had been talking all the time—about Egypt’s economic problems and the price of rice and what the Arab Socialist Union was going to do about it all if they could manage another loan from the World Bank—and Edwards had barely heard him.

  “… I’m afraid the economic outlook is not bright—a hard currency crisis … I feel our real hope lies with Moscow. Unfortunately they are not prepared to consider any more barter deals. They want something better than that, nearly all our cotton, which of course would give them a financial stranglehold, something which the President naturally is not prepared to consider. The canal and tourist currency …? No one knows where it goes to—to the Army in some shape or form, for sure. They get everything in Egypt nowadays. We are in trouble …”

  Edwards nodded his head sagely, still thinking about other times, as if he were chatting with some knowledgeable but boring economist from the Financial Times in El Vino: until he realized that no Egyptian, least of all someone in Yunis’s position, had ever talked to him with such bluntness, and would never do so, except for the most appalling reason.

  He looked round at Yunis sharply, sensing in his words, not the scoop that would have otherwise occurred to him, but something dangerously candid, a frantic upset in the whole temper of Egyptian official life, in the rigidly secretive attitudes of Cairo officialdom with which he was so familiar.

  Yunis looked at Edwards quizzically, as though he’d failed to understand something very simple, something obvious, behind his words.

  “What do you mean—‘We’re in trouble’?”

  Edwards was calm, but only through an effort born of long practice; the empty, windless feeling in his stomach and the sudden consciousness of sweat r
ising up the back of his neck giving him sure warning before his mind had told him anything.

  “Just what I said. The doors are locked. I’m sure they are. They do it from the outside.”

  The questions in Yunis’s face disappeared in crinkly lines which spread up his cheek and over his eyes, just the beginnings of a wan smile, as though he were congratulating himself on having at last made himself clear to Edwards.

  *

  When thought flooded back a moment later it was about Williams. Why had he arranged for Yunis to pick him up? And he saw Yunis in a policeman’s uniform for a second, as a London bobby in a tall black helmet: it wasn’t possible. And then as the car drew in past the main gates of the Armour depot and barracks in Heliopolis and Yunis was frog-marched in front of him towards a group of old Nissen huts, he realized that Yunis was the victim, not he, that he’d just been taken along for the ride.

  Certainly Edwards was more than an embarrassment to the Major who met them at the entrance of the building, which must have been exactly Yunis’s intention, the partitions in the hut were far too thin to allow any immediate rough stuff to go undetected.

  “Who is he?” the Major spoke abruptly in Arabic to one of a group of men in civilian clothes who had drawn up behind them in a car a few minutes afterwards. Edwards had noticed the man among the crowd of journalists who’d flocked around Yunis’s car at the airport—a particularly compact, tough little man with an acid expression and tooth-brush moustache: an upright swagger—one of the President’s personal security men, Edwards thought, an élite corps of some fifty or so people, most of them junior colleagues of the President during his Army days, and now his Praetorian guard.

  “Well? Who is it?”

  “A British journalist. We’ve got his papers.”

  “What’s his connection—with—” the Major paused, but admitted—“His Excellency?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Who does he work for?”

  “There’s no mention of any paper. Visa through the Press section of the London Embassy. He’s been here often before. Arab affairs. Middle East expert …”

  The officer looked across at Edwards with a completely blank expression, as if attempting some complex mental arithmetic which would connect Edwards with Yunis, and failing to add up the figures he became angry.

  “A journalist? Middle East expert—but how? Why here at this moment? Explain.”

  “Yunis joined him on the flight. After Munich. Wanted him along for protection. He must have known we were going to pick him up. It’s obvious.”

  The swagger man licked his moustache and pursed his lips aggressively, pulling his rank in Nasser’s secret army; he wasn’t going to be browbeaten by any mere officer in uniform.

  “There was nothing to do about it. Yunis offered him a lift back to the city. We had to let him go along with him. There would have been trouble—passengers, the press—he was surrounded; we couldn’t have pulled him at the airport. You knew that. And it doesn’t matter. Just a freelance. They won’t be looking for him in London. We can keep him. We’ll have to.”

  Edwards looked across to where Yunis was standing by the opposite wall, between two officers, his neat black briefcase by his feet, mopping his face, still holding a copy of the Economist under his arm like any weary stockbroker waiting for the 5:25 at Waterloo. A weary but somehow contented man as he returned Edwards’s look with another of his brief miniature smiles.

  Behind him was a window and through it Edwards could see a group of soldiers in singlets and black underpants playing soccer in the first coolness of the day and some others hanging up their laundry and boxing each other good-naturedly about the ears. It was evening and in another half hour it would be quite dark with stars, and Edwards longed with sharpness for the bath and the terraced room smelling of hot plaster looking out over the river in the Semiramis, and the meal on the roof restaurant later on, at one of the small tables with their Edwardian lamps next to the parapet: the first taste again, which he missed even after a few weeks, of the spongy flat bread, the moist tartness of the local cheese which he ordered specially, and the purple Omar Khayyam from Gianaclis’s vineyards outside Alexandria—wanted it sharply, for he knew it wasn’t going to happen that night and, like sex, he wanted it then, right away.

  He thought how he’d tailored his pleasures in life to the few he knew without question he could always have, to unadventurous things he could rely on: not happiness or girls in night clubs or the long-awaited letter. He’d accepted long ago that these things didn’t work: the letter never came, the girl had someone else. And it was happiness enough just to know that these things were so, to be sure of them.

  The intense flavour of certain tastes and places—and the feeling of ease in a strange land, these were the diversions he’d come to take for granted, which depended on him alone, which were really his life, and he cursed again the profession which had encouraged such dilettante pursuits in him over the years and had now, just as haphazardly, withdrawn them.

  His mouth was dry and salty and he felt dizzy as if he’d swum a long way without pleasure. He began to wonder what role he should play now and the thought made him feel sick. But when he spoke it was with bruised conviction, an actor coming midway into the lines of an old and well-remembered character.

  “Do you think I might have a drink of water?” His tone was pompous and old-fashioned and very English, jumping a class into the outraged accents of someone who believed wogs began at Dover and had never known another tongue. It was as well to preserve that fiction as long as possible. The Major turned from the doorway and gestured to the man next to Yunis.

  “Take him.” Yunis was led away down a corridor.

  “I’m sorry. There has been a mistake. Come.” The Major pointed to a seat in his own room, without ceremony or abruptness, but mystified, thinking.

  “A mistake …” He pushed a bell on his desk.

  “That’s what I was going to say. You’ve taken the words out of my mouth.”

  “I don’t understand …?”

  And he didn’t, Edwards thought. He was dealing with a senior man. He’d used the colloquialism intentionally, to see where he stood, to gauge the officer’s importance in Egyptian military security. One could place a man in this hierarchy almost exactly by his knowledge of English. Knowing too much of that or any foreign language had always been regarded with the greatest misgivings in their service. It dated from the time of Nasser’s orginal coup de palais against Farouk when almost everyone concerned had been junior officers who had never had the oportunity of learning a second language, and in the security divisions at least this linguistic frailty had since been encouraged; it was thought to be a guarantee against outside infiltration or influence while at the same time it had made Cairo a haven for every sort of pentration. Egyptian security there—eavesdropping or interrogating—often didn’t really understand what their target was saying.

  “Would you like a Coke or some coffee?”

  “I’d like to know what I’m doing here.”

  “I’m sorry. You ask for something to drink. That will come now. But no questions. You must wait for some—for another man before you ask questions. There has been a mistake.”

  He repeated the phrase as if his future safety depended on the words being fully understood.

  They left him alone in the office with a warm Coca-Cola. Edwards swallowed a mouthful and then rubbed the lip of the bottle carefully with his cuff.

  Colonel Hamdy, out of his linen suit and in uniform now, came into the room an hour later. He smiled at Edwards and glanced at the three empty Coke bottles on the desk.

  “You’re drinking too much, Henry. Relax.”

  8

  “Marlow’s coming at three. You’ve seen his preliminary report? Rather cagey, I thought How close was he with Edwards?”

  Williams sat down and looked at Marcus through his “In” tray. There was nothing there; it was just after nine o’clock and none of the s
ecretaries had arrived. He and Marcus had come from breakfast at Carlton Gardens.

  “They were close—very close as far as I can gather. It was when Crowther was Principal Officer in the Cairo Circle, so one can’t be too sure about anything. The files are very skimpy over that period. But they were close, certainly. That’s one of the essential factors in the operation after all.”

  “Homosexual?” Williams inquired brightly.

  “No. Marlow was married at our Consulate in 1958. Apparently it was part of some deal we arranged—to get him to work for us. It gave us a lever. His wife was with us too at the time as a stringer. She’d been Edwards’s mistress—and that was part of the deal we had with him. Edwards said she was necessary cover for him—he was a real whoremaster then. As well as everything else. But the woman did a good job, as far as one can tell from the files. The marriage broke up, dissolved some years later, and Marlow was put on the strength in London. Recommendation from the Cairo Resident. Marlow seems a decent enough fellow, quiet, fall guy material I suppose, though even so there’s a chance he may not go along with all this.”

  Williams looked at Marcus walking in and out of the morning light that flooded through the bright shaft from the half-drawn curtains.

  “He’ll agree. He’s agreed to everything here in the past eight years, as long as I’ve known him. Civil servant material—the same as ‘fall guy’ material, as you put it. A good fellow, certainly—and very good on those Arabic rags too. I’ll be sorry if I have to lose him. But he’ll agree all right. It will be a matter of honour for him. He’ll want to prove something—either my stupidity or his friendship for Edwards. Or both. He’s a reliable fellow.”