The Passenger

by Chris Petit

  Collard saw then what Hoover wanted from him.

  ‘Plenty of blood was shed in Croatia during the war and plenty of heads rolled. Croatian genocide preceded the Nazis and even they blanched at its barbarities. The Roman Catholic Church saw itself in the front line of the struggle against evil. The priest not only incited his congregation to savagery, but Stavinsky found eye-witness accounts that he led by example in massacres of Orthodox Serbs, cutting throats, smashing skulls and gouging eyeballs.’

  There was more. Stavinsky found evidence of a mistress in Zagreb who in 1940 gave birth to the priest’s son, the man now known as Brennan Jarrald.

  Hoover looked at Collard and asked, ‘Are you with me on this?’

  ‘What was your role in all of that?’

  ‘Liaison. Go-between. Gofer. Driver. Dogsbody. Punchbag.’

  ‘Spy?’

  Hoover grunted. ‘Spy is too simple a word.’

  Cargo

  Angleton followed Collard’s disappearance with intense interest. Watching Hoover school him hard, he grew optimistic. A frequent problem when creating a lure was how messy to make it. The perfect, most believable fly often caught nothing, while the ones in which he had no faith – the clumsy, beaten-up ones like Collard – got the fish.

  Collard looked different, thinner and starting to grey. He found it hard to remember the man he used to be. Angleton’s voice grew louder in his head. Angleton, had he been Collard, would have asked Hoover if he had exploited Nick’s relationship with Sheehan’s daughter – maybe instigating it – and ushered her on the plane, knowing it would destroy Sheehan. Play that fast and loose, someone was going to get hurt.

  Collard left the country as cargo on a freight plane in an empty horse palette, the route and loopholes of his vanishing readily available to a man like Hoover. Collard remained unable to decide whether this was the end or the beginning.

  His first destination was a summer chalet on an estate of garden allotments somewhere in Europe; under a flight path near an airport was all he knew.

  Hoover followed, his impassive presence a reminder it wasn’t over. He gave Collard a list of apartments and sets of numbers to memorize, including a telephone number for a Swiss bank account, with passwords. Collard asked where the money came from and was told leaky pipelines. He thought about it and said OK. He asked Hoover if he was on his own and was told up to a point.

  Collard became another man. With access to a large slush fund – a drop compared to the huge ocean of Bill Casey’s black economy – he travelled on a South African passport provided by Hoover, bearer in the name of James Troughton. Har-dee-har! thought Angleton. Perhaps Hoover had a sense of humour after all.

  Collard, watched by his black guardian angel, Angleton, gravitated towards a world where deals were done on the edge, where the geopolitical equivalent to future investments were made: Syria up; Iraq down; a world of limitless air miles, identical luxury hotels, slow drinks on terraces overlooking tennis courts where good-looking young men stood joined to attractive women, demonstrating the correct forehand, the first stage of a formal foreplay (memories of Stack); where arrivals and departure boards had more meaning than their destinations; of advisers in cities where you wouldn’t expect to find them (Tranter, last in Malaysia); an insulated world. Black lines at the bottom of swimming pools, wriggling from the optical effect, became symbolic of the larger ripple of clandestine movement, equally hypnotic and hard on the eye. All the while, tracking from a distance. It was not a straightforward trajectory.

  An ex-Rolling Stone reporter named Burgh, whose counter-culture credentials Angleton thought otherwise impeccable, researched Jarrald for Collard, on a weekly retainer of more than he usually earned a month. Burgh was impressed an Englishman had even heard of Jarrald.

  (Angleton knew it could only end badly.)

  Jarrald was in armaments, officially electronics, and held lucrative government contracts almost exclusively for the defence industry. Jarrald sponsored think tanks with bland quasi-academic names that had problems with racial integration.

  Collard’s problem was that Jarrald lived an insulated life, protected by a quilt of money beyond the average dolt’s comprehension, inhabiting an exclusive territory of armed response and privilege that yielded to no one and came dressed up in politeness and good manners, with shirts and ties imported from Jermyn Street in London (Angleton’s old stamping ground). Brennan Jarrald, cushioned by deep conservatism, never met people outside his circle, conducting all alien business by telephone, ring-fenced by lawyers, investors and businessmen. To keep the shit at a distance there existed an informal network of local and national law enforcement, reporters and private security men that maintained a discreet presence in the man’s everyday life; and below them dependable thugs to dispose of any nuisance, and rearrange the furniture, while teams of accountants, brokers and investors devoted their ingenuity to the real business of tax avoidance, off-shore investment and insider dealing. Money made money, effortlessly, because of the quality of the expensively maintained machine.

  Burgh made waves. Cracks started to appear, filling Angleton with hope and dread. Fuckers get their comeuppance, always a cause for celebration, but what of his role in the affair: posthumous disgrace? Angleton recoiled like Nosferatu greeting the dawn (a memory of Rome rooftops all those years ago).

  Collard’s break came when he learned that rare and antiquarian books were Brennan Jarrald’s indulgence, the one reason he ever met strangers. His passion was twentieth-century first editions, specializing in Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, D. H. Lawrence, P. G. Wodehouse, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, and the Irish writers W. B. Yeats and Francis Stuart. The library had long been assembled but Jarrald still hunted duplicates, dedicated signed copies, associated works, correspondence and ephemera. Collard thought it odd such a reactionary man should, with the exception of Wodehouse, opt for visionaries and modernists.

  Collard moved deeper into the limbo of men like Hoover and Angleton, jettisoning the usual reassurances of human contact. Yet he was rarely lonely. He felt called. His life became vocational. He learned to appreciate the knowledge of books. He took time to read. He bought second-hand copies of the books Angleton had in Wales and read them, thinking of Angleton.

  He became familiar with the exclusive end of the rare-book trade, where dealers sat in palatial surroundings that looked like minor embassies. After the same small display advertisement appeared in several collectors’ magazines wanting the authors Jarrald collected, Collard called the New York State number to offer Francis Stuart’s first slim volume of poetry, We Have Kept the Faith, published in 1922. He expected to talk to a machine, but when a man answered without identifying himself, Collard felt that it must be Jarrald. When Collard told him what he had he said, ‘I might be interested,’ but arranged for an antiquarian bookseller in New York to handle the sale. Collard was nowhere near sitting down with the man.

  He attended a New York auction, hoping his adversary would be lured by a copy of Ezra Pound’s A Lume Spento, one of 150 published in 1908 in Venice, its rarity greatly increased by the signed dedication to Hilda Doolittle, to whom Pound had been engaged.

  Jarrald entered the crowded auction room alone, looking comfortable and anything but rich in a shabby brown corduroy jacket. Collard experienced none of the expected bristle of hostility, only disappointment at finally seeing this mild, innocuous man who sat down at the end of his row.

  Collard drove up the bidding until Jarrald was forced to turn and assess him. The price spiralled until even the impassive auctioneer looked embarrassed on Jarrald’s behalf.

  Jarrald stopped suddenly, got up and walked out. In their brief eye contact, Collard noted a flicker of cold amusement.

  Furioso

  As Angleton could have predicted, Jarrald’s opening gambit took the form of a dead journalist in a motel. He added Burgh’s name to a long list, a loose affiliation of mysterious deaths, a maze of the dead, and the deaths never just came in ones, all str
ange overdoses or apparent heart attacks: lonely room deaths. The death made a couple of papers as a dozen lines at the foot of a page, listed as suicide, the result of depression.

  In Burgh’s unquestioned death Collard foresaw his in another motel suicide; the heartbroken father unable to face the loss of his son. He ceased to be amazed by the ease with which these things were arranged. He doubted if news of his demise would even reach the ear of the charitable man with the soft, frayed collar of his imported shirt and his deeply held Christianity.

  Angleton welcomed Collard’s return to the nightmare. Everything was starting to shift. Now Collard knew how Lee Harvey Oswald had felt, and Khaled, strung out as history made its moves around them, the low whirr of conspiracy humming, which anyone else would have said was just the air-conditioning.

  Collard haunted bookshops, searching. Angleton wanted to tell him he was wasting time, but even he was impressed by Collard’s next calling card, found in a suburban bookshop in Washington DC – Angleton’s personal copy of Furioso magazine, edited by him at Yale, with a contribution from Pound, signed, and a letter tipped in, from Pound declaring Angleton ‘One of the most important hopes of literary magazines, in the US.’

  Collard drove away down streets Angleton recognized, a journey into an irretrievable past that ended outside a suburban house at 4814 North 33rd Road, Arlington.

  Angleton thought: How modest a home for a man who had called himself chief of counter-intelligence (and held destinies in his hand). He saw his old silver Mercedes parked in the drive. He saw his wife leave the house and take the car to go shopping.

  He listened to Collard weep for his lost life.

  Collard thought Furioso was worth as much as four figures to Jarrald, perhaps more with the Angleton association. He called the books-wanted number and got a machine. He left messages, naming for sale A Lume Spento and the Furioso with Pound’s letter. The third time, his call was answered by the same man who named a diner in Hastings-on-Hudson, a small town on the river above New York. Collard took a suburban train.

  Angleton thought the cars on the highway looked like something from a lost civilization as old as Ancient Egypt.

  Collard got to the diner first, a regular old-fashioned eatery on the main street, with elderly waitresses in white socks.

  Jarrald crossed the street at an angle, alone and looking nervously both ways for non-existent traffic. He seemed exposed by such ordinary surroundings. Collard noted the man’s air of furtive excitement. He supposed book collecting was Jarrald’s secret life in the way sexual affairs might be another man’s. Jarrald hesitated when he saw Collard then gave a slight incline of recognition as he sat down in the booth opposite him.

  He asked the waitress for a milkshake and inspected Collard with guileless eyes. Wanting to find meanness and gracelessness, Collard saw only the engagement of the collector. Furioso was the lure he hoped it would be.

  Jarrald knew Angleton and Pound had met in Rapallo in 1938 after Angleton’s freshman year at Yale, and that Angleton had persuaded Pound to contribute to his magazine and even travel to Yale to read.

  ‘He had his father’s salesmanship.’

  ‘Did you know Angleton personally?’

  ‘Now why do you ask that?’ Jarrald asked. His glasses caught the light, making him hard to read.

  ‘He went to the same school as I did, in England.’

  ‘As a matter of fact, I did know him, slightly. He was a friend of my father’s rather in the way Pound was a friend of Angleton’s father.’

  Jarrald returned his attention to the magazine.

  In Hoover’s safe rooms in different cities, firearms rested neatly in bedside drawers, alternatives to the Gideon Bible, tempting; Angleton doubted they were Collard’s answer. Collard could have brought a gun and shot the man where he sat and walked out, but it was about more than that. It was about making plain what was at stake, confronting him with what he had done. Vengeance.

  ‘Do you have children?’ Collard asked.

  Jarrald gave him a puzzled look. ‘Whatever for?’

  Collard knew in that moment of casual indifference lay what he couldn’t prove: Jarrald had done it.

  Jarrald was what Angleton called one of Casey’s cowboys: civilian entrepreneurs in whom Casey confided. Jarrald appreciated how much the vested interest needed to be protected and that the state was not necessarily the best provider.

  Jarrald understood how a world of billions was run by a handful of people. Presidents or prime ministers and politicians were just window dressing.

  Jarrald inherited Casey’s hip-pocket operations after Casey’s death, fulfilling the initial stage of a vision of privatized, invisible security, indistinguishable from the real thing, beyond the interference of government: the ultimate hip-pocket operation on a global scale. Jarrald understood the real power of the black economy.

  But Colonel Charles ‘Chuck’ Barry didn’t see it that way, especially after Casey’s botch of Al Haines’s kidnap. Barry had tracked Haines down, but was blocked by Casey, hamstrung by Haines’s confession, and the risk that all Casey’s secrets would be put on the table.

  Given Casey’s incompetence in the case of Al Haines’s kidnap, Angleton had believed he had no choice except to mount his own operation to rescue Quinn, funded with slush funds put aside for a rainy day. Operation Ghost was assembled in under twenty-four hours, utilizing Hoover, Beech and Barry, who was recommended as the best man on the ground. It was a good-guys’ mission. Barry’s team was back in the Lebanon, scoping the hostage situation.

  Then Quinn was released without explanation and Angleton had never found out why.

  After that Ghost mutated into an anti-Casey operation. The plain fact was Angleton didn’t like Casey. Casey offended his dandy’s sensibility. Angleton could dress it up all he liked but Operation Ghost turned into a vanity project until he realized the quality of what he was getting. Barry was too good: joining up dots the White House didn’t know about or deliberately hadn’t been told about (drug connections all the way down the line). Once he had seen the consequences, Angleton tried to make amends for his own flawed career and resolved to expose the dirty tricks he had once practised, which had got looser and dirtier with Casey. Barry was his white knight. Who betrayed Barry, he didn’t know.

  Ghost survived Angleton’s and Casey’s deaths. Operations that were barely under control in Casey’s time span into chaos. Barry learned that US agents were using Nazir’s connection – protected for years by Casey and Churton – for rogue operations, using confiscated drugs to pay for arms deals. Once it was realized how much Barry had exposed, and would reveal, he was a marked man.

  As the endgame played out, the only remaining arrangements were the last personal ones: for Stavinsky to be routed via Frankfurt, which would have been easy to arrange by dangling another link in his case; and for Sheehan to fix Nick.

  The more Collard thought about it, he was convinced Sheehan wanted Nick killed on that plane. Had Jarrald celebrated the news with a special book purchase and a milkshake? Collard wondered, as the man slurped up the last of the froth through his straw.

  Collard carefully placed Angleton’s magazine back in its cellophane, mimicking Jarrald’s reverence.

  A brief shiver passed through him.

  Jarrald said dreamily, ‘Someone just walked over your grave.’

  ‘What led you to collect writers like Pound?’

  ‘They had interesting minds.’

  Jarrald sounded vague. Collard understood. Their appeal lay in their fascist, anti-Semitic associations, including Wodehouse.

  ‘Bring what you have to the house, tomorrow evening about seven. We can continue our conversation there. I look forward to that.’

  Jarrald lived further upriver, in a mansion on an estate, with the finest views, servants and an old colonial atmosphere. Collard took a car and drove out in plenty of time, booking into an empty motel not far from the house. He put the gun from his safe room in the glove co
mpartment but didn’t take it into the house in case he was searched.

  Collard walked across a gravelled drive and was admitted by a manservant. He noted the inlay on the expensive parquet floor as he was escorted across the hall and shown into Jarrald’s study, a large mahogany room lined with priceless books. Jarrald was not alone. A fire had been lit and Jarrald’s companion stood with his back to Collard, facing the flames.

  Jarrald looked fussy and awkward as he said, ‘I took the liberty of inviting another collector. This is Mr Remington.’

  Sheehan turned and stared at Collard like they had never met.

  The Greater Scheme

  For Sheehan, nothing matched reading the passenger list of 103, seeing how those several different people had been sucked into the conduit, unaware of the orchestration, believing they had taken that flight on that day at that time through choice rather than his organization of their fate. In his largesse, he had arranged for Barry to be moved up to first class and wondered at what moment, exactly, the smugness of upgrade had evaporated and Barry realized Sheehan was disaster’s architect.

  Conspiracy had no palaces. It belonged in transit areas, lonely hotel rooms, temporary accommodations, in the interstices, in cargo sheds in remote airfields, in departure lounges, in travel schedules, in the hidden exchange of money, in venal practice, sexual peccadillo, false passports, faked photographs, anonymous bank accounts, deep-cover fictions, false biographies. There was nothing grand about conspiracies. Their application dealt in first symptoms, after which viral infections travelled on the wind, multiplying out of all proportion to the events they had caused. They were clichés, close to predictable, at best an act of hope. Many conspiracies were stillborn. Conspiracy was heretical and voluptuous, denied while rampant. Those he enjoyed most were the ones where there was no conspiracy beyond the invention of overactive imaginations.