When I’d finished the transcription work, I began to search through the web. There were dozens of sites that offered help with Latin-to-English translation services. Reading through one of these, I began to understand one of the reasons why, back in my Stratford hotel room, I’d had trouble understanding even the few Latin phrases that I’d been able to decipher from the original papers. Although I’d always thought of Latin as a language that hadn’t altered since the time of the Romans, it had actually evolved over the years, in much the same way as English had changed since Shakespeare’s day. If I was to translate the papers, I would need to augment my own recollections of the language with some guides to the way Latin grammar had worked in the seventeenth century.
Fortunately, one of the Internet sites held all the information I needed. I started to translate the papers, word by word and line by line. Each sentence was a challenge: often, I would write down my English version of the words only to find that it made no sense in the context of other sentences. Then, I would read through the web site again and try to find alternative interpretations and nuances that would make sense of the text. Sometimes, I just had to guess at what the correct meaning might have been.
It was laborious, detailed work. The day slipped away as I hunched over the desk. Some time in the late afternoon, Chantelle wandered in and stood behind me, placing a slender hand on my neck and kneading my knotted-up muscles. After a while, she left and fetched a book by Schopenhauer, lying on my bed to read until it was time for her to go to work. I waved to her, stretched my arms, looked around. The sunlight was fading outside my window and I turned on the light and returned to my self-imposed task.
By 11pm, I was starving but had translated about half of the Latin document. I leaned back and read through it, satisfying myself that it made sense. When I tried to resume my translation the words seemed to slide sideways off the computer screen and I realized I needed to stop for the night and try to pick up again in the morning. I gazed at the screen images of the original papers for a few more minutes, frustrated that I couldn’t yet understand the message they were trying to convey to me over four centuries of time. It couldn’t be helped, though. I sighed and went downstairs and made myself a sandwich in George’s kitchen before trudging back up to my room.
***
Just as I was falling asleep, Miranda called to tell me she’d talked again to Ghassan Salim and was ready to make arrangements for us to fly to the States from Heathrow. She made no comment when I told her that I’d be traveling under the name of Peter Millard but simply gave me a flight number and a time, around the middle of the next day, to meet her at the airport.
I wondered for the thousandth time how far I could trust her. When she was near, the effect she had on me was stunning. But I understand only too well how false faces hide what false minds know.
Chapter 21
I resumed my translating work early the next morning, pausing only at nine o’clock to make a series of phone calls. The first of these was to a senior executive in one of London’s more select private banks, a former client with reason to be grateful for my tact over a potentially-embarrassing incident, three years previously, with a Belgrade call-girl. With his help, I established myself a new bank account at a financial institution in the Cayman Islands.
Next, I called Alex Thornton, an ex-soldier like me and one with whom I had something else in common, his military career having also come to an abrupt and unfortunate end. I’d met Thornton during a tour of duty, prior to my posting to Kosovo, in military intelligence. He’d been a star player – even lecturing at the British military intel training facility at Croydon – until an unfortunate incident with a private soldier and a plain-clothes policeman in a public toilet near the Mall. The consequent court case had resulted in his departure from the army and the removal of the allowance he’d been used to receiving from his minor-aristocracy family. Now he suffered the ignominy of having to live off a salary, which he earned by working in the agency’s intelligence section. He was ready for my call – I’d emailed him the previous night – and he wasted no time with pleasantries.
“This chap you wanted the gen on…” he drawled.
“Ghassan Salim.”
“Yes, indeed. Interesting little man. First of all, I can tell you that he has no convictions for anything, according to Interpol and our own records. Not even a parking fine.” I heard his measured intake of breath and I guessed he was reading information from the agency’s database. “Wish I had one percent of what his wealth was rumored to be back in the nineteen nineties. I wouldn’t be slaving away here, I can tell you.”
“Self-made man?” I asked.
“Partly. It seems he came from a well-to-do family. He went to Eton, as a matter of fact. Can’t say I remember him personally, but I suspect he may have been a year or two ahead of me. Always lots of these Arab chappies there. Tended to keep themselves to themselves, for the most part.”
Not that they’d necessarily have had much choice in the matter, I thought to myself. “So his family were in oil?”
“Ah well, not really. General traders, importers-exporters, Levantine trade, that sort of thing.”
“I’m told he doesn’t like to travel.”
“I should think not. About a dozen Middle Eastern para-military organizations would be rather keen to get their hands on him.”
“Oh? Why’s that?”
“Let’s see.” There was a pause and I heard the sound of fingers on a keyboard. “Looks like a few of his business deals may have offended their delicate sensibilities.”
“Such as?”
“Well, our information is that he was once what our American friends would call a ‘go-to guy’ for information in that part of the world. If you wanted to know who was behind what assassination attempt or where which leader of Hezbollah or Hamas was hiding out, he’d be the man to see.”
“This made him unpopular?”
“Not as long as neither side in the conflict realized he was also working for the other.”
“And they didn’t?”
“At the time, I’d guess that only the CIA knew that. Mr. Salim obviously covered his tracks rather well. Extended his areas of interest and got into the arms business as well. Made lots of loot for a time.”
“Until?”
Another pause, more sounds from the keyboard. “Seems that some gentlemen in the PFLP intercepted one of his arms shipments and discovered it was intended for one of the Christian militia groups in Beirut. His popularity waned somewhat.”
“So he left Lebanon?”
“Indeed. My guess is that the CIA got him out just before the bomb-makers found him. Apparently, he holes up in some hideaway in northern New York state nowadays. He probably still has his tentacles in Europe and the Middle East, though. Our matrices contain oblique references to him in France, Greece, Syria...”
That was interesting. The ‘matrices’ Thornton referred to were held within the agency’s intelligence computer system. All these systems work the same way. They look for connections between diverse pieces of information and try to connect them into elaborate patterns. Thus, a people smuggler might be connected through a suspect building to a drugs dealer, who might be connected through an intermediary corporation to a radical politician, who might be connected through a confiscated false passport to a terrorist cell. The job of assembling these matrices fell to analysts, who, Hollywood movies notwithstanding, did the lion’s share of the work in any intelligence agency.
“So Salim is still active?” I asked.
“People like that don’t retire,” Thornton told me. “He doesn’t venture out into the world, though, if he can possibly help it. And only then when he has plenty of his own bodyguards around him.”
I rubbed my shoulder absent-mindedly – as the wound had started to heal, the itching in the surrounding skin had intensified – then held the phone back to my ear. “How accurate is our intelligence about all this stuff?”
I heard Th
ornton suck in his breath. “I can’t tell you where any of it came from but you’ll remember from when we worked together that the practice of intelligence consists of gathering information from as many sources as possible and then assessing it…”
“I remember,” I told him. It was all part of the ‘intelligence cycle’, which went from setting strategy through to collecting, collating and judging the reliability of information.
“So, if I tell you that the Admiralty Rating on some of this stuff is equal to or better than B-2…”
I tapped my fingers on my desk. The Admiralty Rating system is used by British intelligence agencies to assess both the reliability of information received and the credibility of the source. B-2 is a high rating on both scores: anything above that, you could bet your pension on. “So to sum up, Salim got tumbled and did a runner but he’s still in the game. Motivation? Is he moved by money or ideology?”
“Oh,” said Thornton slowly “no doubt which of those it is. You see, this is where our more recent information gets really interesting.”
I listened carefully to the rest of Thornton’s information. When he hung up, though, I still wasn’t sure what to make of it all.
***
By ten-thirty, I’d produced a complete translation of the Stratford papers. It probably contained more errors that a novice student’s homework but it would have to do. I had enough to understand the gist of the documents and I was too short of time to worry about perfection. I saved the full translation into a Word file which I stored with the scanned documents on the secure Internet backup site. That done, I selected pages from the documents I had on the computer and printed them out as I packed my overnight bag.
I called for a cab and walked downstairs to the street. As I waited on the sidewalk, two thoughts about the translation kept recurring. The first was that if my translated phrases were only half-right, they should give me more than enough information to bluff my way through when I finally met Ghassan Salim.
The second thought I had was that if my translation was only half right, these papers were almost too incredible to be true.
Chapter 22
Miranda was waiting for me outside terminal 4 at Heathrow. I walked up to her and she smiled, kissed my cheek, touched her fingers to my arm. I felt a sensation like static over my skin and I wondered if she understood the effect she had on me. Sure she did, I told myself: she’d grown up knowing she had this effect on every man she met and she’d long since accepted it and lodged it as a weapon in her armory.
We’d picked a busy time to travel. Inside the terminal, children ran and whooped like puppy dogs around piles of suitcases and their holidaymaking parents pressed in around us. We queued to check in and, afterwards, I bought us coffee in one of the airport cafes. She sat at a table with her back to the wall, sipped latte and gazed at me over her sunglasses.
“You got the papers?” she asked.
“They’re in my overnight bag,” I told her. This wasn’t entirely true: the documents I’d printed were really in a money belt around my waist. I watched her eyes flick towards the bag, which lay on the floor with its strap looped around my right leg as a precaution against theft: Heathrow might not be downtown Mogadishu but it’s not a bad idea to assume everyone in an airport is a potential thief.
“You sure you wouldn’t like me to hold onto them for you?” She sipped her coffee and, after she’d drunk, her upper lip wore a faint moustache of brown-white latte foam. I pointed to my own mouth and she wiped away the suds on hers with a napkin, her movements delicate and precise, her eyes sparkling as though she knew that looking ridiculous would enhance rather than decrease her charm. She was a different person every day, every minute. Right now, it was the international traveler, the Manhattan sophisticate, too cool to be languid. “I spoke to Ghassan Salim on the phone again this morning,” she said. “He’s having his driver meet us at the other end. I emailed him my photo so the driver would recognize us. Salim said he was very anxious to see what we had.”
I smiled, playing the part she expected. “Does he have the money ready?”
“He says it’s in a Swiss bank account. Me, I’d have liked to have it in cash. I always like the feel of real dollar bills. But I have to admit that two million bucks would take up a lot of space in a suitcase. Also, there are laws about moving large amounts of liquid currency between countries.”
“I guess there are. I have to admit shifting millions of dollars around has never been too much of an issue for me before.”
“Oh? You didn’t come back from your various wars with your kit-bag stuffed with booty?”
“I must have fought the wrong wars.”
“You’d have been too much the perfect soldier to carry off the spoils anyway, am I right?”
“It was rather frowned upon in the Regiment…”
“Too bad. Anyway, I figured I could use an international funds transfer-”
“I thought the same thing,” I interrupted. I told her about the back account I’d established in the Cayman Islands. “We’ll simply get Salim to transfer the money there. I’ll confirm it’s arrived and then let you have your half when we get back to Britain.”
She pouted. “Let’s just split the money into separate bank accounts. As I already have one in Bermuda, we can simply have Salim transfer my half directly to my bank and your half to yours.”
“That’ll work, I suppose.”
She looked at me coolly for a moment, then the smile lit up her face. California girl was back. “You better drink your coffee. They’re calling our flight.”
***
Miranda told me that she always fell asleep on planes but, for a while after we took off, she seemed to want to talk. She asked me about my childhood and my time in English boarding schools and I told her of the various regimes I’d experienced in my junior and secondary education.
“Did you like boarding?” she asked.
“Not much. It wasn’t so bad when I was older but, when I was small, I used to miss my family.”
“When you were small? How old were you when you first went?”
“Seven,” I said.
“Jeez.” A stewardess stopped a trolley next to us and handed us drinks, orange juice for me and a diet lemonade for Miranda. When she’d moved on, Miranda touched my arm and moved her head closer to mine so that I could hear her over the noise of the engines. “It must have been hard when they dropped you off for the first time.”
I thought about that first time, standing at the school gates as the little boy next to me burst into tears, refusing to cry myself because I knew I had to be a soldier, even then. Watching as my mother and father walked away. My father turned after a dozen paces and flicked me a salute which I returned, my little hand quivering beside my right eye. “I don’t really remember,” I told her.
Her hand dropped and her fingers traced the seam on the side of the arm-rest. “I’d have loved to go away to school.”
“You didn’t like living at home?”
“Hell, no. We lived in Chicago but Daddy was from Alabama. He was a strict Baptist – strict the way only a real Southern man can be – and I was expected to be a god-fearing girl from day one. The first words he taught me were the Lord’s Prayer.”
“What about your mother?”
“I guess she went along with it. I never worked out whether she really believed in it all or just pretended to keep him happy. Me, I was okay when I was a kid but...”
“You were a rebellious teenager?”
The plane rose above the clouds into clear sky, banked sideways and then leveled up. I looked from the window but London was covered by a dense white shroud. Sunlight speared through the window and Miranda reached for her sunglasses. “How did you know?” she asked me.
“I can picture it.”
“All kids rebel at that age.”
“I didn’t.”
She sipped her drink, pushed the sunglasses back on her nose, wiped her lips, the movements all precise like
she was an actress following direction. “For real?”
“I was a child of duty. Everything mapped out for me. In my family, no-one ever disobeyed an order or flouted a convention.”
“So when you were a big boy, you followed in Daddy’s footsteps and joined up.”
It wasn’t a statement and I wondered how much she knew about my past. “Something like that.”
“You don’t like to talk about yourself, do you, Hastings? I mean, you never even told me your first name.”
I looked at her levelly. “It’s Horatio.”
“For real? Like that English Admiral guy?”
“Nelson. The same. One of the family legends is that he was the godfather of my great-great-great-great-grandfather. The baby was named after him and the handle’s stayed in the family as a kind of tradition.”
“So, would you like me to call you Horatio?”
“What do you think?”
“I guess not, huh?”
“That might be safer.”
“I like ‘Hastings’, anyway. It has an authentic military ring to it. So, military family, you join up as soon as you can, then, one day, you quit. What happened?”
I wondered again how much she knew. “Mid-life crisis.”
“Not saying, huh? Ever married?”
“Once. That came to an end, too, not long after I left the army. You?”
“Lived with a guy in New York once. It was OK until he wanted to know where I was all the time, come with me if I was going to the theater, stay in if I was having at day at home. I figured co-habiting didn’t suit me so I booked a flight to London. Didn’t tell him. Feel bad about that sometimes but not often.”
“What about when you were younger? How did the rebellion pan out?”
She raised her glass in mock self-salute. “I won a Trustee scholarship to good old Boston University.”
“Not bad going.”
“The best thing about it was, it was a long way from Chicago. Daddy wanted me to go to bible college. It was our last big bust-up. I walked out and never went back.”
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