'That's right.'
'I think we've nailed that little point down. You know of no individual who is paid to hire out deadly weapons, nor have you ever handled such weapons, in particular a Browning automatic pistol or a Smith & Wesson revolver. You confirm that?'
'Never, sir, that's correct.'
He'd heard it said in the staff common room, with the inevitable accompanying snigger, that men usually chose a mistress who was the spitting image of the wife back home. Barbara, the wife, had short-cut fair hair and so did Hannah, the mistress. Both had good hips, and both were endowed with breasts that could be snuggled in the palms of his hands…so similar. But–big but–one slept with her back to him and the other–God was kind–didn't expect to sleep at all in a long night. He had not been able to get to Hannah last weekend: Kathy's school concert, back row of the recorders, had denied him the well-worn excuse utilized to get him eight hours in Hannah's bed.
'Thank you. Now we're going to move on. Right, Mr Curtis, do you know what a "bag man" is?'
'I believe I've heard that expression.'
'What does a "bag man" do? What's his speciality? I doubt the members of the jury know.'
'Well, he's a money guy, isn't he? He takes care of the money.'
Sheets pulled back, the light left on as Hannah liked it. Hannah crouched beside him and the carpet covered with her scattered blouse and skirt, bra, tights and knickers. Hannah stroking him so gently. God, she was bloody marvellous…Babs didn't do sex except on his damn birthday or if he'd managed to lower half a bottle down her, and that was rare. He squeezed his eyes shut.
'Most members of the jury, I assume, use a bank to take care of their money, so where does a bag man enter the equation?'
'Criminal money. A bag man looks after thieved money, money from drugs deals, that sort of money.'
'Mr Curtis, among your circle, is there a bag man? A man who handles and launders the monies gained from criminal enterprises?'
'Not that I know of, sir. As a reputable businessman, I wouldn't associate with such persons, sir.'
He felt spent, exhausted, as he did when Hannah slid off him.
'It's a big ask, Nat. You could say that it's a very big ask.'
'Yes, Benny, but it has the potential of being rather a well-paid big ask.'
Nathaniel Wilson saw a quick smirk cross Benny Edwards's lips. They were in a café's annexe; the main area was nearly empty so they had the overspill to themselves. A colleague of the Nobbler's lounged in the doorway, blocking entry. Friday had gone by, and the weekend, and this week's Monday, but the Nobbler had been at his pad in a village outside Fuengirola and he had a tan that shouted he went there often.
'And the trial's near run its time?'
'The jury will be out within two weeks, and I don't reckon they'll be taking long.'
'Open and shut?'
'More shut than open. They're going down. There's no time to be wasted.'
'Not an easy one'
'They're looking at big stretches, but not looking forward to them. I can't see there's a cat in hell's chance of getting an acquittal, but with the jury down to ten I reckon that nine to one against means a retrial. Only bit of luck we've had is two jurors dropping down the tube. A retrial could be a year away, or a year and a half, and all that time I'd be yapping for bail and might just get it. What's more important is the chief prosecution witness, just a bit of a girl, up for it now but might not be in eighteen months. She's had a witness liaison officer assigned and been moved to a safe-house–she's had a witness protection scheme team. For another eighteen months, with the cost of that, I reckon they'd cut her adrift because the cost'll hurt them. She might just go off the boil if she didn't have liaison and protection in tow, might find her enthusiasm dwindling–and, not my business of course, she might show up where she's spotted or her family might be induced to lean on her…That's all in the future. What's for now is to ensure the jury's hung this time round, can't reach a guilty verdict. What do you think, Benny? Are you up for it or not?'
They were a mile from the Snaresbrook complex. Nathaniel Wilson had walked over and, after his lengthy association with players in serious and organized crime and a lifetime of sitting in court listening to police evidence, he had good perceptions of the arts of close surveillance. At one moment he had been sitting on the bench behind the barrister, the next he had been gone–as if needing a comfort call–and he'd been walking hard to be clear of the place. Only if he'd given a telegraphed warning, and looked furtive, would there have been the possibility of a tail. He'd done the routines including two dog-legs in side-streets and was happy enough that his security was intact. The business needed total secrecy if the Nobbler was to have a chance.
'I don't come cheap, Nat.'
'But your reputation says you're the best, Benny, and no one's expecting you to do it for charity rates.'
'Those blaggers, are they dumb? I thought blagging, going into jewellery shops waving guns, went out with the Ark. Why don't they do coke, smack, like everyone else?'
'See that as beneath them. I think it's the adrenaline rush…No, don't ask me. They make a healthy living from whatever they do, pleasantly healthy. I'm not authorized to bargain, but I'm permitted to offer–take it or leave it–the sum of fifty K win or lose on a retrial and paid up front, a further twenty-five K paid in the event one juror becomes the Great Persuader and it's an acquittal. Then there would be, also up front, twenty-five K as an inducement should it be a carrot rather than a stick. How does that sound?'
'That's all cash?'
'Cash and handed over on trust.'
'Handed over when?'
'Tomorrow–it's in place.'
'When I'm satisfied I don't argue.'
A hand snaked across the table, took the solicitor's, shook it gently, and the reverberation of the deal's conclusion slid through Nathaniel Wilson, as the implications invaded his whole body. Why? Why get involved? Something about perceived slights from established lawyers in the distant past, something about sneered and curled lips when he was young, had had suit trousers with a shiny seat, and had put together a basic law degree at night classes and from correspondence courses. Truth to tell, he had some admiration for the criminal classes, their esprit, their limited code of honour, even their bloody-minded–arrogant and obstinate–determination to breach the system: it was not something he often thought of. He leaned closer across the empty coffee cups. 'I've done some notes on the jury. There's five males and five women–does the sex matter?'
He made a show of ignorance that was not justified. Nathaniel Wilson had not used Benny Edwards as a Nobbler before but he'd been on defence teams who had, and he could recognize that they now moved on to high-risk territory. Yes, he knew very well what the answer would be to his question.
'Carrot and stick, right? I don't like using women. Dangle the carrot; but women aren't that interested in cash–they don't worry about the mortgage arrears, and don't give a stuff if the credit card's stacked with debt. Wave the stick and women are likely to throw the big wobble, tears and screaming, shrieking and howling, and then it's all gone out of control. No, men are the better bet…Five, you say?'
That morning, in court, before he slid off his seat, Nathaniel Wilson's note-taking had not involved the evidence given by Ozzie Curtis. Instead he had jotted down a description of each juror and their clothing. He pushed the single sheet of paper across the table. The Nobbler scanned it. His finger rested on the new foreman for a moment, then eased on down the sparse pen-portrait of the Afro-Caribbean, the young, keen one, the moaner who looked to have a permanent ache in his ear or his tooth, then to the one who could barely stay awake and wore a purple shirt with bloody sandals. When he'd read it, absorbed it, the Nobbler took a cigarette-lighter from his pocket and burned the paper, leaving the flakes to fall into the table's ashtray. Then he gave a first name and an address to which, the next day, a suitcase of banknotes should be delivered.
Nathaniel Wilson hurried bac
k to court eighteen.
Eight more full working days to go.
Sitting in his small, closed-in territory as though he were a subsistence farmer with minimal ground, Naylor's mind scraped over the wretched, irritating little spat before he had left home that morning. The sniped exchange with Anne weighed on him.
'Dickie, you're just a sore-headed bear and making a fuss about the inevitable. For Heaven's sake, everyone has to retire and pack it in. Daddy accepted it–and started a new life–and so can you,' she'd said, exasperated.
Her father's new life, and he'd responded churlishly with it, had been three mornings a week on a south-coast links course and membership of the golf club's catering committee. It had gone downhill from there. Unwisely, he'd commented that he wanted more from the future than worrying about the price of breaded cod fillets served up in a golf club bar and whether tartare sauce should be served in a bowl or from sealed sachets. She'd retaliated that her father had carried a burden of greater responsibility when he'd finished than Dickie had ever been given, and he'd flounced away to the cupboard under the stairs for his raincoat and umbrella. He'd been bending to pick up his briefcase from its place under the hall table when she'd punched him, verbally, in the flab of his stomach.
'Oh, I forgot–Mary in your office rang yesterday, quite slipped my memory'
'I was sitting a dozen feet from her all day. What did she want that she couldn't have said to me?'
'God, you're in a foul mood. Mary– she seems a sweet girl–rang, behind your back, to talk about the leaving bash they're giving you, and what you'd like as a present. The DG can't make it, and the deputy DG is on leave, but one of the assistant DGs hopes to be there…Anyway, your present. Well, I said that we had clocks littered all over the house, and didn't want another. I also said that we had a perfectly good cut-glass drinks set and no room for more of the same. I suggested a greenhouse, not a big one, but where you can grow tomatoes in the summer and keep the geraniums and fuchsias in the winter, somewhere you can potter. That's what you're getting–Mary thought it an excellent idea. There'll be vouchers for it.'
He should have gone on out through the front door, after kissing Anne's cheek, and should have started out on a brisk walk to the station. He'd turned. Said malevolently, 'And what did Daddy have, bloody golf clubs?'
'You know he did.'
'And was the director general at his bash to make the speech and hand them over?'
'You know he was.'
Then, too late, he'd tried to do the kiss but her head had turned away and his lips had pursed against thin air. He'd snorted and gone. It had been a cross he'd carried since his first day with the Service, thirty-nine years before, that his father-in-law had not only been an iconic counterintelligence figure with legendary status and the right to take an early-evening sherry or gin with successive DGs, but had put a word in an ear that had ensured his son-in-law was recruited for employment as a junior general-duties intelligence officer. He had never matched the importance in the Service carried by Anne's father–but only when he goaded her was he reminded of his failings. Her, father, before heading off to the golf links, had tracked traitors, the pathetic, dangerous creatures who had sold out their loyalty to their country and passed military secrets to the agencies of the Soviet Union. Those creatures had gone to the Old Bailey for high-profile trials and inordinately long sentences of imprisonment. Dickie Naylor, after thirty-nine years' hacking at anything thrown down on his desk, had never rivalled her father's favoured position. The proof of it for all to see: the top cats would not be at his party, and he would be getting a flat-pack greenhouse–if he were ever able to assemble it–for tomatoes and frost-endangered plants. All arranged by Mary Reakes.
So little time left, and what made it worse–hardest to accept–was that there was bugger-all, sweet damn all of nothing, for him to look back at and feel a shimmer of pride in. He was a journeyman. He had failed at nothing but succeeded at less, and a week on Monday would see him wrestling with the sections of a greenhouse, and no one would have noticed his going. He snorted annoyance. There was nothing on his computer screen now that had not been there the day before.
The section he headed, overseeing Mary Reakes who had officer rank and four women who did not, had twin responsibilities in Riverside Villas. It was tasked with identifying the possible arrival into the United Kingdom of a suicide-bomber of foreign origin, and–considered of greater importance and therefore greater threat–the arrival of what the neighbouring sister 'Firm' in Ceauescu Towers across the river called a 'coordinator' and the residents of the Villas described as a 'facilitator'. Since Nine-Eleven and the formation of his section, neither had appeared on the horizon…Dickie and Anne had not been blessed with children, therefore were denied grandchildren. There would be no small boy to sit on his knee and ask, 'What did you do in the war, Gramps?' and get the answer, 'Nothing, darling, because on my watch the bloody enemy never came.' Plenty to tell the kid, who didn't exist, if he had been following the money trails of that enemy's credit-card frauds, which financially supported their planning; too much to tell, if he had been setting up informants in mosques and madrassa schools where the principles of the Koran were taught and the texts learned by heart; or he could have talked of the computer records of those youths from north London or the west Midlands who shuffled passports and took flights to Karachi or Rawalpindi…Nothing to recount and nothing to speak of, and Dickie Naylor's time was slipping away.
He rehearsed what he would say, turned away from his screen and dialled home. He apologized, curtly and awkwardly, stuttered through it.
Naylor heard her: 'Don't be silly, nothing to be sorry for. Everyone has to do it, retire and start a new life, as I said. You just caught me as I was going to the supermarket–it'll be nice, you being able to come with me.'
He grimaced, and replaced the receiver.
In a room high in the principal building inside the protected complex of the American Embassy in the Saudi Arabian capital of Riyadh, Cindy read aloud from the situation reports that had come through on the teleprinter. She had a fine voice, and Joe Hegner listened. In his mind he played pictures of the carnage she described from the flimsy, neatly bullet-pointed sheets.
SitRep, Task Force Olympia, Northern Command, Mosul: Triple car-bomb attack in our Area of Responsibility. Attack One: Target was a Contractors' Convoy. Attack Two: Target was the Follow-Up reaction of Coalition Forces, 300 metres from first strike. Attack Three: Target was approach to Coalition base as reaction forces returned. Casualties include 2 civilian security guards from convoy, KIA. 3 Coalition Forces from Follow-Up, KIA. 8 Iraqi civilians at Coalition base, KIA. WIA in 3 attacks not yet available but expected as 'substantial': Message Ends.
Without interruption, Joe Hegner heard her as she stood in the open doorway and read to him. He knew the men who worked as civilians and guarded the electricity-supply engineers, or who came in to fix the sewage plants, or who tried to keep the oil flowing through the pipelines that crossed the desert sands. With them, a bad bet for life insurance, were their guards. Many of the guards were from the old apartheid days of South Africa, some were prematurely retired paratroops and special forces from the UK; more were from the Midwest states of America and had left behind broken relationships and mounting debts. They could earn, for riding shotgun in armoured SUVs with the contractors, five thousand US dollars a week. They had, as a stereotype, shaven heads, muscles pumped up by weights and steroids, and skin covered with the permanence of crap-done tattoos…and now two were dead. Later that day, from the safety of an office in Johannesburg, London or Los Angeles, an email or a telegram would be winging to an abandoned family, and in a few days a bag would be packed with the censored contents of a locker, the porno magazines not included. In the evening, Budweisers and slugs of Jack Daniel's would be downed by the survivors, and toasts made…Joe Hegner liked them as free spirits, liked them well. He felt it more keenly because his experience of Mosul had scarred him.
&
nbsp; SitRep, Central Command, Ar-Ramadi: Double vehicle-bomb attack. Liquid gas tanker driven at improvised defences at Police Barracks, followed by car used as rescue and medical help reached site of tanker strike. Killed and Wounded casualties not yet assessed, but will be categorized as 'heavy' among police personnel and civilians: Message Ends.
His shoes off, Joe Hegner had his feet on the desk, and there was a hole in the heel of his right sock, but there didn't seem time, these days, to call up a driver assigned to the Bureau and the necessary security people and travel downtown to get new pairs. His stick was propped against the desk edge. Many times he had been into police barracks, and he had good friends among the newly recruited officers. He had a rapport with them that verged on love. Most Iraqis living in the goddamn Triangle preferred to go short; see their family half starve from privation, rather than risk signing up and taking the American dollar, but a few were prepared to break the mould of fear. They had such damn awful equipment–shitty vehicles, shitty weapons and shifty barricades round their barracks–but they seemed so cheerful when he was over there, one week in four. For seven days in every month he was out of the embassy in Riyadh, holed up in the protected Green Zone on the Tigris river that split Baghdad, and before he caught the flight back to the Saudi capital, he would make damn certain:- even if he had to get there inside the armour-plated walls of a Main Battle Tank–that he visited policemen in their barracks. There were Agency boys in the Green Zone, and agents from the Bureau, but they never moved off their asses and never went to meet the men at the real front line. He seemed to hear the keening wail of widows, brothers and mothers, as the bodies of policemen were identified–what-was left of them, after the explosion of a liquid fuel tanker. He knew Ar-Ramadi as a place of rare hatred, of particular cruelty.
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