by Chris Petit
His receptionist was on the desk. He reminded her who he was and she confirmed that the photograph of Nick he showed her was the boy she remembered. It did nothing to prompt her memory about the man Nick had been with.
He asked to make a reservation for that night in the room Nick had stayed in. The young woman had to look up the room number. It was technically booked, she said, but as the guest hadn’t checked in she arranged for Collard to have it.
Schäfer was waiting outside the Sheraton in an old Mercedes 200, the colour of rust. Collard had to clear empty cartons, old bottles and newspapers yellowed with age off the back seat.
Stack sat in the front and put on dark glasses against the low winter sun that came out as they drove the fast link road over the river into a city more modern than anything in England, with its American-style towers and sleek highways, all rebuilt after the city was bombed flat in the war. The result looked neither American nor European, more like a city in Esperanto.
‘I’ll show you what I know,’ Schäfer said. ‘This afternoon we will talk to a Customs man at the airport. First I can take you where they now say the bomb was made.’
‘ “Say” the bomb was made?’ Collard asked.
Schäfer shrugged and drove them to Neuss, an hour away on the autobahn. He spoke German to Stack, who translated.
‘He says they conducted an extensive surveillance operation last autumn into a plot to bomb an airliner which led to many arrests.’
At first Schäfer’s unit had been watching an apartment in Frankfurt on an intelligence tip-off. A man had flown in from Damascus on a false British passport and paid cash for the rental. He contacted another Palestinian, also travelling on a false passport. The second man had only one leg and gave the purpose of his visit as medical treatment.
Stack turned round and asked, ‘How would you feel if Nick turned out to be implicated?’
Collard thought the question tactless. He sensed she was fishing for her story.
‘I can’t accept he was involved willingly.’
His sour look upset her. He thought she was about to cry.
‘I hate this job sometimes. Get this. Get that. Find out how they feel losing a loved one. How they really feel. I don’t have children. I can’t imagine.’
‘Everything else is conditional. Children aren’t.’
He turned away and stared out of the window, aware of a hard anger. He had gone to Scotland to mourn and left with a broken marriage and not knowing whether his son was dead or alive.
He wanted to hold someone accountable for his life being ruined. His anger took the form of cold fantasies in which he took his revenge on those responsible, and enjoyed watching their faces as he pulled the trigger. He knew it was childish. On the flight he had tried to imagine the moment of detonation and everything blowing apart; Stack sitting close enough for him to smell her skin.
Neuss, part of the seamless conurbation of Düsseldorf, was raw-edged and little loved. Collard saw traditional German bakers and cake shops alongside Turkish food stores, travel bureaux advertising cheap flights to the Middle East and a store selling electrical goods whose brand names he did not recognize. No one looked pleased to be out.
Schäfer drove them to a street off the centre, and pulled up and pointed to a grocery store with a broad orange awning.
‘We had the shop under surveillance because the Palestinian with the one leg had stayed at the owner’s apartment.’
The store struck Collard as an unlikely companion to terror, with its open trading and modest, respectable shoppers. The goods on display included a huge cardboard container holding more white cabbage than he had ever seen.
‘The man drove here the morning we arrested him. We picked him up after he made a call from the phone booth there.’
The phone was further down the street. Past it were a main road and a gantry with directions to the autobahn.
‘In the boot of the car we found a Toshiba radio-cassette player, which had been converted into a bomb designed to explode at altitude.’
Collard said, ‘They were looking for a Toshiba in Scotland.’
‘The bomb-maker was in the car too. We found a telephone number on him for his terrorist headquarters in Damascus.’
It seemed incredible that all the scars and damage of the crash funnelled into this forlorn street. Collard could only marvel at the expertise involved in tracking such a haphazard trail.
‘If it was all so neat and easy at the time, how did the disaster happen?’
Schäfer said, ‘That’s the big question.’
Collard decided he could learn from Schäfer, who seemed to question the investigation in the way he was learning to.
He looked out of the car window and thought: Why this street, why this town, why this country? Why Nick? What quality made someone single him out? Was there something about him that made him easy to exploit, perhaps even expendable. Or were there other characteristics Collard had chosen to ignore: opportunism, ruthlessness and calculation?
It left him questioning his own role. He hadn’t been the best father, too absent, physically and emotionally. Had he cared in a precise enough way?
‘Tell me about the bomb-maker,’ he asked Schäfer.
‘His name is Marwan Qudsi. He was a TV repair man living in Amman. He flew in from Jordan with his wife. The man with one leg picked them up from the airport and drove them to the store-owner’s apartment where they stayed.’
Collard thought it hardly credible someone with such expertise should work at something so mundane.
Stack said she needed to make a call from the phone in the street. Collard and Schäfer bought 7-Ups from the store. Schäfer said the owner had sold up after Marwan’s arrest.
The shop had the same dry-goods smell as cut-price shops the world over, the universal chilled trench displaying cheap cuts of meat, and cigarettes behind the till. They sold brands like Kent, which he hadn’t seen for years.
Collard waited by the car with Schäfer, sipping his drink. The simple act of leaning against the bonnet reminded him how little respite there had been.
‘How did your unit feel about the arrests?’
‘They were punching the air.’
‘Not you?’
Schäfer shrugged. ‘The police in this country are very security-conscious.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘We had twenty-four-hour monitoring of sixteen targets in six cities. The size of the exercise seemed more important than the result. We were ordered to go in too early.’
‘When was that?’
‘At the end of October.’
‘And nearly two months later one of the bombs made by Marwan found its way onto the plane.’
Schäfer shook a Gauloise out of its packet.
‘That’s what they want you to believe.’
They were joined by Stack, and Schäfer said, ‘I can show you the apartment where the bombs were made.’
They drove under the autobahn and turned off the main road, over a railway line and into an area of housing blocks fringed by an industrial estate.
They pulled into a large residential car park in front of a five-storey building with balconies. The fourth-floor apartment had a rolled-up awning that matched the orange canopy of the grocery store. Collard thought it the last place anyone would think to look. It was hiding in plain sight.
For a moment he believed he could will the explosion into reverse, like a film rewinding, so the plane reassembled, and the damage became recoverable, letting those on board fly on unharmed.
Schäfer showed them a surveillance picture taken with a telephoto lens of two men talking in front of the same block. He drew their attention to the one on the left. Tubby was the only word that came to Collard’s mind, not one he had consciously applied to anyone in years.
‘Marwan Qudsi, the bomb-maker.’
‘If he is under arrest why hasn’t he been charged? Why haven’t the others been named?’
Schäfer
smiled at some private joke. ‘We watched Marwan for a long time and so little went on we thought we had the wrong man. Day after day we had to listen to the store owner’s young son practise on his electric keyboard while Marwan sat around and his wife did housework. When we questioned the intelligence we were told Marwan had blown up a Swissair jet in 1970 and an Austrian jet on the same day, both from Frankfurt, and in 1972 he was the main suspect in the bombing of an El Al plane flying out of Rome.’
Collard looked at him again: a swarthy, benign-looking man with a moustache and thinning black hair, a picture of indolence.
‘Soon after that, two deliveries were made to the apartment: one by the man with one leg and, the following night, by another man in a Peugeot 205 with Paris plates.’
Schäfer showed them a second surveillance photograph, a fuzzy picture of the Peugeot’s driver about to enter the building. The last time Collard had seen him he had been wearing a long dark overcoat in the surveillance image shown him by Churton.
‘That’s Nazir,’ said Stack.
‘I still don’t get it,’ said Collard. ‘Why wasn’t all this dealt with after the crash, with all this evidence?’
‘My question too,’ said Schäfer. ‘But there are two things to understand.’
He spoke to Stack in German; she translated.
‘The usual arrangement with the Palestinians was they were left alone so long as they didn’t carry out operations in West Germany.’
‘There’s a deal with these people?’ asked Collard, astounded. He had presumed terrorism was so far outside the law it was beyond negotiation.
Schäfer said, ‘I don’t know about deals. I’m not a politician.’
He spoke in German again.
Stack said, ‘For his department the Palestinians were never a problem, so he was surprised by the size and scale of the operation, especially as the Palestinians had never previously done anything to jeopardize their position.’
Schäfer spoke again and Stack translated. ‘He says he doesn’t understand what the Palestinians thought they were doing. He knows from talking to anti-terrorist units in other countries that the Palestinians are smart, they are careful and they are capable of working in secret, where this operation was wide open from the start.’
Collard asked, ‘But if it was so easy to follow these people before their arrest why – if the same people were responsible for the bomb – did nobody stop them?’
‘You tell me,’ Schäfer said. ‘When Marwan’s arrest warrant needed an extension the judge refused. We had to let him go.’
‘You caught Marwan red-handed and they released him on a technicality?’
‘We lost others the same way.’
Collard turned to Stack. ‘Why isn’t this news?’
‘The investigators have vetoed any naming of suspects until after arrest.’
‘You mean re-arrest.’
Stack’s admission suggested the press was controlled as Churton had said. Collard drew some comfort. With Churton’s protection at least Nick’s story was safe.
‘Where’s Marwan now?’
‘Back in Jordan as far as anyone knows.’
‘Repairing TVs!’ Collard looked at them. ‘It’s incredible. Is it incompetence?’
Schäfer said, ‘That’s what they want it look like, making out we fucked up.’
‘Wasn’t there a big scandal when Marwan was released?’
Schäfer put his finger to his lips.
‘They kept it very quiet.’
‘And you’re saying there’s a big gap between arresting Marwan and one of his bombs being put on the plane.’
Schäfer nodded. Since the anti-terrorist unit made the arrests their intelligence had gone cold. Whatever had happened between then and the bombing was a black hole.
The Waiting Room
After the war Angleton had used Corsican muscle to control the docks to stop them from going over to Italian communists; the same in Marseille. The untold price in the equation was the establishing of the French Connection, which made the more or less sanctioned supply and distribution of drugs a central invisible fault line of the Cold War. Ditto the Frankfurt Connection, which was an extension of the same deal, with a different set of players. In the long sleepless nights Angleton regretted the decadence and degeneracy he had inadvertently caused: youth rioting in the streets, smoking pot and shooting up, and still dressing up like they were in the nursery.
He suspected Philby’s guiding hand behind Nazir: was that so out of the question? Everyone wanted a piece of Nazir. Nazir swam in Bill Casey’s back channels as sleek as a salmon. Nazir had become indispensable, working the Iranian end of Casey’s channel while Sandy Beech took care of the other end, which Casey had looped through the Brits in order to create space and distance from the doves in Congress. The Brits coveted Nazir too. Angleton knew all this and it got him nowhere nearer to understanding the events of December 21. What Barry had known had died with him. Angleton, a hapless Poirot, was confident that Nazir had done it but had no wind-up speech. What he couldn’t see was who had ordered Nazir. Someone had, because Nazir was an enabler not an instigator. They would have to get rid of Nazir of course because he knew too much.
Angleton predicted that would play out the way he had set it up all those years ago: subcontract to Mossad; no questions asked. If he were Churton he would be thinking of Collard, stumbling around lost and in search of his son, the perfect patsy.
Airside
Schäfer said the German Customs officer they were to meet had been part of airside security on the day of the crash, but he wasn’t optimistic. ‘No one is saying very much. Everyone is too busy covering his ass. We can only ask.’
They parked in a multi-storey at the airport and went from the terminal into an area marked Crew Only. An official in a glass booth checked their names against a list and issued temporary passes. Schäfer then led them away from familiar airport corridors into a scuffed warren where nothing was signposted and there was no evidence of security. Twice they crossed a grubby underground road system. The grilles and gantries reminded Collard of a submarine. He had a sense of being in the guts of something enormous and complex.
At the centre of the lair they found Schäfer’s Customs man, Becker, alone in front of a bank of monitors in a room not much bigger than a cupboard, the screens showing smeared images of anonymous corridors and baggage areas.
Becker looked like he had been exiled to the equivalent of a remote colonial posting. Wherever the central monitoring area was, this wasn’t it. Collard wondered if his banishment was a result of the security investigation since the crash.
Becker was a weary, ageing man with thinning hair and pouches under his eyes, and sounded nervous as he and Schäfer spoke in low, fast German.
Schäfer turned to Stack and Collard. ‘He says he is under orders not to talk to anyone but he will show you the baggage system.’
The monitors displayed a complex array of conveyor belts arranged on different levels, like something that might have been constructed for an amusement park. The sorting system was computerized and the most advanced of its kind.
‘Bags at check-in are placed in tagged plastic containers and sensors direct them to the right baggage cart,’ Schäfer said. ‘There are nearly a hundred kilometres of conveyor belts.’
‘That’s an awful lot of baggage,’ Stack said.
‘And a big job for security. Twelve thousand pieces an hour, up to one hundred thousand a day.’
‘And the margin of error?’
‘One or two cases every thousand, but there’s a double-check at the end.’
Watching the luggage trundle along, Collard understood the point of the Frankfurt Connection for Nazir. Its automated system made it less prone to human intervention and the security cameras could do only so much. There were always blind spots.
He asked, ‘How long are the tapes kept before they are wiped?’
Becker was reluctant to answer.
Co
llard said to Schäfer, ‘Tell him I’m looking for my son. I am worried he was used in whatever went on. He was seen with a man who is an American agent. I’m not trying to get Mr Becker into trouble, but they were using kids to smuggle drugs through this airport. Does Mr Becker have children?’
Becker stared at the ground. Collard thought he wouldn’t say anything, but eventually he asked for a description of the man seen with Nick.
Collard described the white crew cut, thin face, the predator’s look, knowing he was probably being indiscreet mentioning Quinn in front of Stack.
Becker said in slow English, ‘I have two children. The answer to your question about the tapes is they are wiped after twenty-four hours. But in the case of an incident they are kept longer.’
He anticipated Collard’s next question. ‘The tapes from the twenty-first were removed. No one knows where they are. Some persons say they have been wiped.’
‘Through inefficiency or because they contained something compromising?’
‘I said too much already. Talk to the Americans.’
‘The Americans?’
Becker explained in German to Schäfer, who said, ‘The Americans have been calling the shots since the crash and everyone else has been cut out of the picture.’
‘Who are these Americans?’
Schäfer again translated. ‘He doesn’t know if they are airline security or government investigators. The point is they say our security is to blame and we lost the tapes.’
The Americans were operating the way they had in Scotland, overriding the local authorities. Collard presumed Barry’s operation, whatever that had entailed, was behind all the panic.
Collard was sure they were close to something. Schäfer knew it too but was unable to persuade Becker. They stood there looking at each other, sensing the importance of the moment, then Becker turned away.
They trooped off, disconsolate.
Schäfer said, ‘Becker is coming up for his pension. He said his superiors have threatened to take it away.’