Vagabond

by Seymour, Gerald

  ‘I’m suggesting, Matthew, that the cowboy world of Northern Ireland twenty years ago has had its day. He doesn’t seem to understand that I will give the instructions and—’

  ‘If you have ten minutes to spare, Gaby, before getting your bits and pieces together and hitting the road for the airport, why don’t you go into Archive? I’ll send authorisation ahead of you. The file you’ll want is called vagabond. Some definitions of the word – disreputable, worthless, a rogue and a knave or having an uncertain or irregular course of direction. Call in before you go. Thank you, Gaby.’

  He was typing.

  She thought fleetingly of the woman who was married to him, lived in a suburban street and was surrounded by neighbours who thought of her as ‘martyred’, eking out a life in a loveless marriage. Poor woman.

  She went out and closed the door after her. From what she had heard, only Jocelyn down the corridor could work alongside him. Hadn’t much time, but could slot ten minutes. She took a lift down.

  Jocelyn had sidled in. She could talk, listen or prompt.

  Bentinick said, ‘I have to have him there because the agent is the key. But who would trust an agent? Not me. An agent is a liar. He must lead us forward, but he’ll want marshalling – he needs a collar round his throat and a restraining leash. Vagabond will hold the leash and keep it tight. He’ll attempt deceit because of his terror of the Siberian rock and the east Tyrone hard place.’

  ‘That’s why I said you had to have the best.’

  The place had the atmosphere of church. She was in Archive in the basement. The days of the card-index system were dead and there were two central piers. On either side there were cubicles and two women to open and close specific files. No voice was raised there, and the only sounds were the clicking of keyboards and the whine from the air-conditioners. The building worked on ‘need to know’ and Archive protected that agenda. She flitted over screen pages and glimpsed photographs. Other men’s features were distorted, but Curnow’s face was clear. He had barely changed in twenty years – even the haircut was the same. The eyes still lacked warmth.

  A brusque middle-aged woman had opened the file, offering no small-talk, but Gaby had tried: ‘You had the authorisation from Mr Bentinick?’

  ‘Yes, which is why I’m opening it.’

  ‘I work with him.’

  ‘I gathered.’

  ‘Have you known him long?’

  ‘Probably from his first week with us. There you are. vagabond.’

  ‘Is there family?’

  ‘I’m sure Mr Bentinick tells colleagues what he wants them to know about his family. At your grade you can’t download or print this file.’

  She saw what had been written about Danny Curnow of the Force Reconnaissance Unit: the call-sign he’d used and the day-to-day name, ‘Desperate’, the man who had looked after his back, had been driver and protection; there were referrals to the testimonials of ranking army officers and a commendation from Special Branch, which was usually blood drawn from granite. There were the code titles given to agents – she scrolled past them and was able to read how long they had been on the payroll. A red cross against a name indicated ‘deceased’. The final agent had been listed as dead on a date in late 1994.

  Danny Curnow’s face was not that of a thug. Gaby Davies had spent time, on attachment, with the international police in Bosnia and had searched for the last war criminals against whom secret warrants had been issued. There had been Serbs, Croats, Muslim Bosnians, and some among them had the faces of beasts skilled in brutality. Danny Curnow’s was not a brute’s face but it was lifeless, as though part of its owner had died. She could have said, as the woman from Archive closed down the screen and shut away the file, that Curnow and Bentinick shared the same absence of animation.

  ‘Does he know I’m in charge or not?’

  She stood in the doorway. Bentinick sat. Their eyes did not meet.

  ‘I’m sure, Gaby, it’ll all shake down.’

  ‘Archive says he ushered a whole host of men to premature graves. In case everyone’s forgotten, it’s our job to protect our sources. We’re responsible for our agents.’

  ‘Anything else to get off your chest, Gaby?’

  ‘I may be out of order, Matthew, but it’s worth saying. You’ve pulled an old army chum, who’ll have prehistoric attitudes, back into service. To me, that’s insulting.’

  Now Bentinick looked up. His eyes ranged the room, then found hers. He said, ‘You have a good relationship with your agent, Ralph Exton?’

  ‘Yes, and you know it.’

  ‘Co-operative, relaxed, friendly.’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘And productive?’

  ‘Very.’

  He was playing with her. It shouldn’t have happened in the modern, inclusive Service. His voice was softer: ‘Sorry, Gaby, I didn’t quite hear that.’

  She took a step forward, then another. She saw, from the corner of her eye, the pair of dirty trainers, mud still on them, remembered them from the gardens, and the muddy jeans. She had told Danny Curnow that an outsider couldn’t be admitted to Thames House.

  She raised her voice. ‘I said “very”. I have an excellent relationship and it’s productive.’

  ‘And the source of the weapons that Riordan will test-fire?’

  ‘A Russian. You can read my reports.’

  ‘Vague, Gaby. You have a name and precious little else. He has deflected you on the background to their dealings. He’s not coming bearing gifts, is he?’

  ‘He will.’

  She thought she had sold herself short. Ralph Exton had sat upright and hadn’t looked at her. He had watched Bentinick – the source of patronage. Quite crude, really. She had been elbowed aside. The truth: each time the source had been queried, Ralph Exton had eased the question into the long grass. The fact: she had the name and little else. She was Exton’s friend.

  He spoke with an edge: ‘Third floor, west wing, room ninety-one is where you’ll find the complaints desk and counselling for bruised-ego syndrome. You’ll be alongside him, and you’ll listen to what you’re told and learn or, Gaby, you’re out. Fancy being given the same treatment as the wretched Woolmer? Please yourself. Stop whining or step aside. I can guarantee you won’t be missed.’

  She was Exton’s friend and had hoped, with time, to win him over. She knew too little about the Russian. There was a coffee machine in the corridor outside, and she had on ‘sensible shoes’. She kicked the base of the machine. She had extracted too little from Ralph Exton. Now she was running late – and her foot hurt. She hobbled away.

  He waved Danny Curnow out of his office and into the corridor. Once the door had been shut and he was alone, Matthew Bentinick picked up his phone and dialled. She answered. He said he would be away that night, and probably on Tuesday. He didn’t like to be away, but the mission was important, and one day he might tell her about it. Curtly, he rang off. Better to be quick and strong.

  There was a wholesale greengrocer, who also had a stall in one of Reading’s old alleyways, with whom Ralph Exton had done a good deal a half-dozen years before, vegetables coming in from Turkey. The man had offered him the parking space in the wholesale section. Useful. He didn’t often use it but it seemed a good idea today. Did he want coffee, tea, mango juice? He didn’t. How was life? He was hanging on, he said, grinned, and was rewarded with a slap on the shoulder. How long would the car be there? A week, no more. If he wasn’t back in a week to collect it, he’d be either in a Prague mortuary or in the intensive-care unit of some clinic with the team digging for fragments of .38 calibre bullets and probably on his way to the mortuary. He walked through the streets towards the stop where the airport coach would pull up. Who did he fear most? The Irish would blow him away. The Russian? Not much difference. There were few certainties in life, he thought, as he went down a high street emptied in the dregs of recession, but the woman – Gabrielle, Gaby, who dressed like a derelict, wanted to be liked and seemed, to Ra
lph, as lonely as sin – wasn’t up there with them. Decent kid: he didn’t have to fear her. Small mercy.

  He wasn’t going to war as most would know it: they were not in an armoured car. He sat alongside the driver of the Ford Mondeo and Bentinick spread himself out on the back seat with his evening paper. No crowd would be waiting, with growing apprehension, in an operations room for a patrol to come back from hostile territory, and there would be no parades through market towns where the regiment recruited handlers, precious few medals and no reunions. They didn’t do reunions because few who had done the work wanted to stir up old memories and admit to the past. Handlers couldn’t josh and brag about the Service years in a corner of a pub with other veterans or in a British Legion bar. Talk of running agents, and losing them, was off limits. Danny had no flak vest and no firearm, and the only man he would trust to keep him clear of ambush was – a glance at his watch – at the wheel of the minibus, leaving the dunes and the quiet. Others might have told Matthew Bentinick that they’d no interest in his proposition, but not Danny. It was clear in his mind: whatever the risks to his own hard-won mental stability, he would never have turned down a request – instruction – to return to the fold. He would have walked on hot coals to be there. The rush-hour traffic was building, and the light would soon fail. There was a rustle behind him. A newspaper was folded untidily, then dropped onto the seat.

  ‘Desperate, are you all right?’

  ‘Thank you for asking, Mr Bentinick. I’m fine.’

  The hand rested on his shoulder and the fingers went for his muscles. ‘Desperate, you know what I told the Boss? Oscar, you’re deaf.’

  The driver answered, ‘See nothing, hear nothing and never knew anything, Mr Bentinick, same as always.’

  ‘Desperate, I told the Boss we’re going to nail that bastard to the floor. Nobody gets in the way of us doing that. We nail the bastard to the floor. Nothing less.’

  ‘Yes, Mr Bentinick.’ A tough war, and dirty, like the ones he’d fought before.

  Chapter 6

  And Danny Curnow did not go to war in a troop carrier with an Apache flying top cover and squaddies all round him, the aircraft, which might have been targeted with a surface-to-air job, corkscrewing down to land. It was an Airbus that carried him and Matthew Bentinick into Václav Havel, the Prague airport. The flight was not quiet, as it would have been if squaddies were entering a combat zone. It was a war, and Danny had no doubt of that, but removed from a battlefield. There were two stag groups on board. The ones at the front of the cabin were from Swindon, in Wiltshire, and the ones at the back were from Kettering, in Northamptonshire. The team from the West Country were Liverpool fans and the one from the East Midlands supported Wigan Athletic. They all drank heavily, and the prospective grooms were already half cut. The flight attendants had given up on them, and a couple of the Swindon boys had thrown up in the aisle. Danny drank little. He had a small beer or two in the Dickens Bar on the rue Basse with a game of cards or a newspaper, and hadn’t drunk when he was at Gough. He handled and manipulated agents, and felt no loyalty to those who betrayed their colleagues and took whatever money was on offer. There was no way that any of the guys with the stag groups would have noticed the middle-aged man in casual clothes and muddy trainers. They wouldn’t have registered him. He turned men into puppets, and could sentence or reprieve them. He thought of where he should have been, and with whom.

  There was weight on his shoulder and he could smell pipe tobacco. They were on descent. Ahead of and behind him, the cabin crew were attempting to take the names, addresses and seat numbers of those who had vomited. They were also swabbing, and some older passengers had started to complain. Matthew Bentinick slept, snoring. His head rested easily on Danny’s collar-bone. Danny wondered how often Matthew Bentinick slept without disturbance. He sensed exhaustion in the man – the burden of work perhaps. His belt wasn’t fastened. Danny leaned across. With care, he lifted Bentinick’s arm, no resistance, and found the end of the belt. He lowered the arm on to the belt, found the second length and fastened the lock. It gave him a degree of satisfaction that the man hadn’t woken as the aircraft yawed on the final approach.

  The stag groups yelled support for the pilot, for Liverpool Football Club and for Wigan Athletic. The wheels hit.

  The head jerked up. He was awake. His fingers locked together and he flexed them so that they cracked. Danny wondered whether the burdens on the mind of Matthew Bentinick were as loaded as his own, or whether he was better able to bear them. The mood changed.

  The smell from down the aisle was rank.

  The agent would now be in the air, up from Heathrow. And he had not learned lessons because they had not been taught in the curriculum Gaby Davies had followed.

  ‘Are you all right, Mr Bentinick?’

  ‘Of course I am. Why should I not be?’

  ‘You been here before?’

  ‘Never. No call to. I’ll say it once, not again.’

  ‘Say what, Mr Bentinick?’

  ‘Where I work, Danny, there is a fault line. Two organisations that spend most of their lives in combat mode. There are the “modernists” and there are the old fogeys. There are the calculatingly ambitious and they regard the other crowd as idle, conservative and unwilling to embrace new practices. I was shut in a toilet cubicle when I heard someone say, “The old fool! Do you think he was with Harry Hotspur at Shrewsbury in 1403, giving bad advice that cost Harry his head? Probably he was getting it wrong then as often as he gets it wrong now. No idea what the DG sees in him.” As I did in Ireland, Danny, I do things my way, tried and tested. With me?’

  Danny Curnow had the rucksack on his shoulder and nodded bleakly. He followed Bentinick, who led with the stride of a man who owned the place.

  Bentinick’s phone warbled. He eased away, stopping short of the passport desks, the phone to his ear. He listened. Danny Curnow was house-trained, gave him space.

  He had said, ‘Yes?’ at the start of the call, then listened. He did not need to write down what he had been told but committed it to memory. At the end, he omitted to thank his caller. He switched off his phone.

  He was close again to Curnow. ‘Our boy from the mountain, Riordan, is on the move. That was his travel schedule. Won’t be here before tomorrow evening. All slotting down well.’

  A young man came forward. He had the high cheekbones of an ethnic Slav, and was wrapped against the cold in a heavy anorak and a tartan scarf. The face fitted the photograph, and the coat matched what he had been told. The accent was central European but he spoke fluent English. Bentinick had heard about him and asked for him – Karol Pilar. Danny gave only his first name. Pilar addressed Bentinick as ‘sir’. The face seemed sour.

  They went through the passport checks and Pilar flashed a card. His group was waved through. He seemed sullen, his eyes hangdog.

  Bentinick challenged him: ‘Was it inconvenient to meet us, Karol?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You weren’t at the end of a shift and having to stay late?’

  ‘My grade don’t work in shift patterns. Very few in the UOOZ do regular hours.’

  ‘Did you know we specifically asked for you as our liaison?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘For your skills and knowledge.’

  ‘My skills in dealing with Irish terrorism are limited. My knowledge of Irish affairs is zero. I’ll do my best.’

  And Matthew Bentinick understood. An approximation of a smile flickered across his lips. They were through the exit doors. What he liked about ‘Desperate’ was that he stayed back and did not intrude. He took Pilar’s arm and, as they drifted towards but not inside a coffee outlet, he told him. A smile lightened the man’s face. The sourness and sullenness slipped away. He had said what he needed to say. The Czech detective was in his early thirties, he estimated, poor as a church mouse, his career withering because he was not corrupt. He talked of targets, and won the man. They went out into the early-evening light.

 
It was a decent enough hotel, halfway along the north-east side of Wenceslas Square. The policeman said it had been used by the general leading the Soviet invasion in 1968 as his headquarters. There were no drunks reeling in the hall, but a coach full of South Koreans had beaten them to Reception. Danny did not intrude.

  The Czech had Matthew Bentinick’s attention. Danny knew from long ago that information would be shared when Bentinick decided it was needed. The tiredness was catching up with him. When he had his key, he left them in the lobby and took the lift to his room. He didn’t know why the Red Army had invaded a fellow Warsaw Pact member country. He had been a kid at school when it had happened. He fell on to the bed. On both sides they asked when it was possible to turn a clock back and step away. The agent couldn’t. Once an agent had taken their money he or she couldn’t walk out on them. It was as difficult for the handler to take flight if – when – the guilt rose.