by Henry Porter
The Chief came on. ‘Isis, I’m going to be direct about this. You’re off the case. I believe you’re suffering from exhaustion. Christine Selvey will be down in a few minutes. She is going to see to it that you get to a doctor in Upper Sloane Street.’
‘But there’s still work to do,’ she said feebly.
‘Not by you. You’re prohibited from entering this building until I am satisfied you are fit for work. I don’t expect to hear from you for at least two weeks. Is that understood? You have earned the rest. Now take it.’
Selvey was already at the door of her office as she put the phone down.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
A young doctor at the private practice saw her quickly. He was short, with wiry black hair curling over a receding hairline and red blotches either side of his nose. Within a few minutes of Herrick describing her symptoms, he started nodding.
‘You’re suffering from an anxiety disorder,’ he said. There was a slight hiss on the ‘s’ in disorder.
‘You mean panic attacks,’ she said aggressively.
‘Yes. I don’t mean to be rude, but judging by your appearance, they’re caused by all-round exhaustion – lack of sleep, poor diet, too many stimulants – and of course general pressure. Do you take any exercise?’
‘No time.’
‘You should make time, and you should certainly look into your diet and eating habits. Do you bolt your food? Eat irregularly? Sleep poorly?’
She nodded to all three.
‘And you have a fair degree of unpredictable stress in your life? Do you ever relax?’
She shook her head. She knew this man was SIS-approved and must have seen the odd case of burnt-out spy before. Although the Service was notoriously bad at helping the casualties of the trade, it reacted quickly to any hint of psychological disrepair.
‘So, how long is this going to last? What can you give me for it?’ As she talked, the heaviness in her chest began to disappear and she breathed more easily.
‘Nothing. As soon as you take some rest the symptoms will leave you but in future you’ll have to learn to manage your stress levels. I suggest regular physical activity, maybe some abdominal breathing exercises. Perhaps you should consider yoga?’
‘Yoga!’ she said contemptuously.
He shrugged. ‘Look, it’s up to you. I can’t give you a pill to affect the choices you make. You have an overactive fight and flight response. This releases your body’s hormones to enable you to meet a dangerous situation, or flee from it. You’re leading your life at such a pitch that your body is unable to distinguish between what is real danger and what is simply pressure. You’re constantly on the alert, boiling over with unspent hormones. This is the first episode and there is very little to concern yourself about. It’s an amber light, that’s all. If I were you, I’d go home, have a sleep and then take some time off. If you don’t accept this advice, you will eventually find yourself with more serious problems – possibly a nervous breakdown, alcohol dependency, that sort of thing. You have to look after yourself, you’re getting on.’
‘I’m in my early thirties!’
‘As I said, getting on.’
‘Do you have any advice for the short term?’ she said sharply.
‘If you experience the hyperventilation again, you can stop it by breathing into a paper bag to slow your intake of oxygen. But it’s not ideal. It may not give the right impression. ’
‘I see that,’ she said.
She left the surgery with Christine Selvey, whom she found sitting primly in the waiting room reading the Economist.
‘Everything all right?’ asked Selvey pointedly.
‘Iron deficiency,’ said Herrick. ‘A few supplements and some rest and I’ll be fine.’
‘Good. Then we’ll see you in a couple of weeks or so. I hope you don’t mind me saying that the Chief was quite emphatic you take the time off.’
They parted, Selvey giving her a last matronly nod.
‘Fuck it,’ said Herrick, as she made her way up Sloane Street to find a cab.
When she reached home she had no difficulty in falling asleep. She woke at 2.00 p.m. feeling disorientated and vaguely guilty. How the hell was she meant to turn off just like that? She called her father, but found herself being evasive when he asked why she had so much time to talk. He was busy painting – the light was right, the tempera just mixed – and he would prefer to ring her later on. She read the paper and ate some salad with self-conscious restraint, then phoned St Mary’s Hospital. Dolph and Lapping were still too poorly to receive visitors, but Harland was sitting up in his room. She asked them to tell him to expect her.
On the drive there, she stopped at Wild at Heart on Westbourne Grove and chose another bunch of flowers. As she waited for the credit card payment to go through, her eyes drifted to the couples sitting outside the cafes along the north side of the street, and she thought that the doctor was right. She really must find a way of taking more time off, having more fun.
It was 3.25 by the time she found Harland’s room. He was sitting by an open window, in the shade of half-drawn curtains that lifted into the room on the breeze. One shoulder was bare, but the rest of his torso was wrapped in bandages. He sat forward so as not to risk his back coming in contact with the chair, and winced a greeting at her.
‘What happened?’ he snapped. ‘Why were you out of the office? I phoned you. They said you were on holiday. What’s going on, Isis?’
‘I felt a little faint in the meeting this morning and suddenly I’m pegged as a borderline neurotic. I was given two weeks’ gardening leave. More important, how are you?’
His eyes turned to the floor. ‘Shitty. They won’t give me any more painkillers.’
‘Did you get the things I brought last night?’ She was aware they were talking like a married couple, concern somehow metabolising into briskness and formality.
He nodded.
‘Don’t you have some painkillers in the sponge bag?’
‘You’re right.’ He gestured to the bedside cabinet.
She gave him the bag and knelt down beside him, determined to end the difficulty. ‘I don’t know how to say this…’
‘You don’t have to. She wouldn’t have hit you. I just put myself in the line of fire. Bloody stupid of me.’
She shook her head. ‘That’s not what the police say. They say you pushed me out of the way, and I know that to be the case. Please, I want to thank you… I mean, I am thanking you… I’m just not very good at putting it into words.’
‘Isis, this doesn’t suit you.’ He smiled. ‘Please get up and tell me what’s going on. There are a few hints on the news, but they must be keeping most of it quiet.’
‘They’ve arrested the lot of them, plus Rahe’s associate in Bristol. But it was more serious than anyone suspected – nerve agents, suicide bombers. They still don’t know what four of them were planning to do. That’s as of this morning, when I was last in the loop.’
There was silence. Harland looked at the window. ‘I’ve just had a call from Eva. She said she needed to see me in New York.’
‘So it’s back on – you and her?’ asked Herrick.
‘Don’t be bloody stupid, Isis.’ He paused. ‘She told me there had been some activity on a website that had been dormant these past three weeks. It’s an important site and before it went down they were gaining useful information from it.’
‘You’re talking about the thing on Rahe’s computer. The encrypted messages in the screensaver?’
‘No, this is something they kept to themselves.’
‘By they, you mean Ha Mossad Le Teum,’ she said.
‘Yes, the dear old Institute for Coordination in Israel,’ he said.
At this moment a nurse walked through the open door with Herrick’s flowers in a vase. ‘I hope you’re telling Mr Harland that he’s not allowed to use his mobile phone in here. Just because he’s darling of the ward doesn’t mean he can break all the rules.’ She fussed over the
flowers and bent down to look into Harland’s face.
‘I saw a doctor using one ten minutes ago,’ he said.
‘If you kept to the odd text message, no one would know.’
‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ he said.
Harland swallowed a couple of pills with a gulp of water, then the nurse left with a friendly wink at Herrick.
‘The Institute had been watching the activities of Sammi Loz for some while,’ he said. ‘And I know Eva well enough to be certain that she wouldn’t leave her dying mother to go to New York unless it was absolutely essential. Second, if she called me about it, she probably needs help. And I’m not exactly in a position to give that help.’
‘You say this website has been down for the last three weeks. You’re thinking that was the time Loz was with us?’
He nodded.
‘What did you tell her?’
‘I said you would go, and that you would meet her in the breakfast room of the Algonquin tomorrow morning. That’s why I was trying to call you, to tell you to get on a plane.’
‘You said I would go to New York to see your ex-mistress! You must be suffering from shock.’
‘Well,’ he said, his eyes brimming with mischief, ‘I imagined you might have thought you owed me. It was cheap of me, I know.’
‘And you think what she’s got to say is serious?’
‘Yes. And I’ve been thinking about something else. Loz is utterly obsessed with the Empire State building. He goes on about it like it was his second love.’
‘His first love being a contest between Khan and himself?’
‘I’m serious, he’s got a thing about it, and about the meaning of those tall buildings in New York. He picked up a quote from Benjamin Jaidi. After Loz mentioned it I got a copy of E.B. White’s Here is New York, where it comes from.’
Herrick looked blank.
Harland turned to the window. ‘ “A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy.” ’
‘Well remembered,’ she said.
‘There’s more. “This race – this race between the destroying planes and the struggling Parliament of Man – it sticks in all heads. The city at last perfectly illustrates the universal dilemma and the general solution; this riddle in steel and stone is at once the perfect target and the demonstration of non-violence, of racial brotherhood; this lofty target scraping the skies and meeting the destroying planes halfway, home of all people and all nations, capital of everything, housing the deliberations by which the planes are to be stayed and their errand forestalled.” ’
Herrick had sat down on the bed. ‘That’s some prescience. But surely it’s about the United Nations building, not the Empire State?’
‘True, but this has some meaning for him in a general sense. Look, I don’t know if the little bastard is still alive. But if Eva called me, I know it’s important. She’s agreed to pass on everything she has to you. I told her you were trustworthy and that you were the most natural talent I’d seen since I met your father. That intrigued her.’
‘Thanks. But you’re forgetting I’m washed up. Besides, I am not that good. I’ve made a lot of mistakes over the last month.’
‘Self pity doesn’t suit you.’ His tone softened. ‘You’re not yourself. Who would be, after finding a pair of armed thugs in their house, being on the end of a brace of missiles and watching their friends being shot up? The Chief is only concerned not to lose you. Let’s face it, he took the right decision sending you home.’ He paused. ‘I think you should go to New York. It would be good for you. You can catch the last flight. It’s always half-empty.’
‘I’ve never been to New York.’
‘Time to lose your virginity then. Hand me my bag.’
He took out the address book. ‘That was very thoughtful of you,’ he said, waving it at her. ‘Look up the number for Frank Ollins. He’s with the FBI – an awkward sod, but straight and reliable. He was in charge of the Sammi Loz inquiries.’ She found the number and copied it down.
He asked her to get his wallet out of the bedside cabinet and then offered her ten hundred-dollar bills. ‘You’ll need it, and it will save you time. There’s a flight at midnight.’
‘I can’t take it.’
‘Why not? You’re working for me now, you’re my agent, and you’re going to be dealing with Eva. That certainly requires payment of some kind.’
‘That reminds me of something in Shakespeare. I forget where it’s from. My father made me memorise it for obvious reasons. “Friendship is constant in all other things, save in the office and affairs of love. Therefore all hearts in love use their own tongues. Let every eye negotiate for itself, and trust no agent.” ’ She took the money and put it in her pocket. ‘Don’t trust me to say what you should be saying yourself.’
‘Okay, okay. Now, go catch that plane. You have my mobile number and here’s Eva’s.’ He pulled a card from his wallet and handed it to her. ‘Stay in touch. If there’s anything important I’ll let the Chief know.’
She bent down, kissed his cheek and let her head hang by his so that she looked myopically into his eyes. ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘I do owe you.’ Then she straightened, a hand still lingering on his forearm. ‘I’ll call you first thing tomorrow.’
She walked from the room without a backward glance.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
The last plane from Heathrow landed at JFK at 2.30 a.m. Herrick slept most of the way, having been given an upgrade by a kindly man on the check-in desk. By the time the cab dropped her at the Algonquin Hotel on 44th Street she was beginning to feel herself again. She slept a further six hours in her modest single room, then got up and hurried to the Rose Room to meet Eva Rath. She ate breakfast, read the New York Times and watched agitated New York professionals pick at bowls of fruit and granola. After forty-five minutes she dialled Harland in hospital.
‘Your girlfriend’s a no-show.’
‘Wait a little longer. She may’ve been delayed.’
‘She did know I was coming? I mean, you are certain you told her?’
‘Have you tried the number I gave you?’
‘I will. I hope she bloody well answers. Speak to you later.’
She signed the bill and went upstairs to make the call, and consider what she should do if Eva Rath didn’t make an appearance. As she sat by a window looking out on an already steamy Midtown, her cell phone rang.
‘Hey, Isis, it’s Nathan. How’re you doing?’
‘Fine, really. Totally recovered. Just got up.’
‘The big sleep. It’s way past three.’
‘How can I help you?’ she said tartly.
‘We know what the four other suspects were doing, or at least we think we do. A vial of mysterious fluid was found in a fridge in Copenhagen, and an empty one in Sarajevo. We think the four may have infected themselves with some kind of disease. None of them has track marks, so we believe they’ve inhaled it or simply administered it orally.’
‘Has it been analysed?’
‘The Danes think it’s some kind of cold virus. That set off alarms because genetic engineers have used a modified adenovirus as a vehicle to carry messages into the body.’
‘What?’
‘Sorry, going too fast for you, Isis? Basically, the cold virus is killed by the immune system, leaving whatever is inside the virus to do its work.’
‘Another virus?’
‘Who knows? We don’t really have a handle on that right now, but if these guys are using it we can assume they’re treating it as a suicide bomb. So they’re all in isolation until we know what the hell they’re carrying.’
‘And the people who arrested them, are they in quarantine? ’
‘Sure, all the members of the relevant helper cells, too. The apartments where they lived have been hosed down with every kind of anti-bacterial and anti-viral agent known to man.’
‘Tell me about the Haj switch. How many men have you come up with?’
‘So how many in the picture from Bosnia?’
‘Isis, should I be telling you this?’
‘Whose desk are you sitting at, Nathan? I want everything you’ve got. How many people from Bosnia?’
‘The French lady is here with Philip Sarre. I talked to her last night. She’s hot stuff…’
‘What about the photograph?’
‘So, we’ve got the two Rahes and Sammi Loz. Plus there’s the American named Larry. We think his second name is Langer, but we’re not certain. There is one other in the photo, a Jordanian named Aziz Khalil. Helene also remembered another man of unknown origin joined the group later. His name was Ajami, but he’s not in the shot. She’s given us a lot of general material on the Brothers. We’re getting a picture of a very tight little group, a prototypical al-Qaeda cell, though the general feeling here is that we are not dealing with al-Qaeda per se, but an earlier formation. As you know, a few of these men trained in Afghanistan, but just as many holed up in the tri-border region in South America. North Africa is important and the crucial thing is that the three big civil wars – Lebanon, Bosnia and Algeria – have all contributed to the Brothers’ membership. There’s a lot of retributive energy in them. That’s a strong theme.’
‘Has the attack date let out by Sammi Loz been confirmed? ’
‘Shit, I was forgetting. Yeah, three of them have said it’s tomorrow, beginning early in the morning with a suicide bombing of the conventional kind in Hungary.’
‘And ending where? In America, later the same day?’
‘No, we don’t think so. There’s been no indication of that.’
‘Let’s go back to the photo. We’ve got three faces – three members of the Brothers unaccounted for in the arrests – Larry Langer, Aziz Khalil and Ajami. Do they match with the Haj switch?’
‘We think so. But it’s difficult. Dolph did all the work on this. He’s still in really poor shape.’
‘But he hasn’t got worse?’