by John Gardner
“There, we might be able to use these. Four half-dollars. Two American dollars.”
The silver coins remained in view, spread towards the front of the table, as Damautus’s hands moved quickly, clearing away the other items and replacing them with a wineglass, a packet of cigarettes, a small round silver box with a lid, and an oblong glass casket with brass corner pieces. This casket was around three by seven inches, and about three inches deep.
“We’ve made a couple of dollars so far.” Damautus never once went out of character, and he spoke each word as though passing some confidential secret to each individual member of the audience. “Let’s see if we can keep the money this time.”
Picking up the casket, he showed that the top was a hinged lid, then he placed it in the center of the table.
“Smoking can damage your health”—he picked up the pack of cigarettes—“so I won’t smoke.” He laid the packet across the top of the wineglass and covered the whole thing with a square of black silk. “Let’s cover all the glass, just in case we get a lightning strike,” throwing another black-and-silver cloth across the casket. “Now, the coins.” He scooped the four half-dollars into his right hand and picked up the round silver box, clearly putting the four coins into it, one at a time, then dropping the lid on top. This he placed onto the covered pack of cigarettes, snapped his fingers and immediately picked the box up again, lifting the lid, turning it over to show the four coins had vanished.
“Into thin air,” he said, lifting the packet of cigarettes and the silk from the glass, which was now filled with thick, boiling smoke. “Or thick smoke.”
For the first time that evening, Damautus rose and lifted the glass full of smoke. “Maybe,” he said, “if I pour the smoke towards the covered casket, you might just see where the coins went. You’ll certainly hear them.”
His hand holding the glass was almost two feet above the covered casket. He tipped the glass and the smoke poured downwards like liquid. The camera held both the glass and the casket in frame and Herbie swore that he saw at least two of the coins drift down towards the casket in slow motion through the smoke. He also heard the sounds as one by one the coins thudded and clinked against the casket, and the moment the fourth coin was heard, Damautus put the glass down and whipped the silk from the casket, picking it up and holding it high so that the four coins now inside could be seen clearly. In case someone was not quite certain, he opened the lid and took the coins out one at a time, tossing them back onto the table as he took his final bow.
“You see that?” Herbie was as excited as a schoolboy. “Bex, did you see those coins drifting through the smoke?”
“I thought I did, but I bet it was a camera trick; they fell too slowly.”
“They said no camera tricks.”
“What do we know? They all lie, that’s one of the things I’m unhappy about. The magician gets up there and does incredible things, defies logic, yet you know he’s telling you one thing while something else is happening.”
“How do you know that, Bex? You tell your kids there’s no Santa Claus?”
“I haven’t got any kids.”
“So? So, you miss the fun. Me, I still believe in Santa Claus, and I believe in what old Gus did on that tape. Completely I believed it.”
“You’re sure that was Gus?”
“One hundred percent proof.”
“A good and clever disguise.”
“A very good disguise: a wonderful wig, a little change here and there, and he’s a different person.”
“But you’re sure it’s Gus?”
“Completely sure. Know him anywhere.”
“But you said …”
“You want to watch another tape?”
“No, I’m ready for bed. What’re we doing tomorrow?”
“We’re talking to the good widow Keene whether Tony Worboys likes it or not.”
She stood, her eyes on him, an eyebrow cocked, the look one of disbelief. “You believe in elves and fairies as well?” She was still harping on his delight at Gus’s magic show.
“Not quite. But I think people like that … like Gus … can bring wonders into our lives. Entertainment, bewilderment. Maybe a return to childhood isn’t so bad.”
Bex grunted. Then: “Even if you’re right, how does it assist in a murder investigation—probably a terrorist murder?”
“Probably because this is a part of Gus’s life that none of his friends shared. I’ve known him for years, yet never guessed he could perform like this. It’s a new dimension—that’s the right word, Bex? Yes?”
“Dimension, sure. But I still don’t see how it helps.”
“In the long run, who knows? All I’m saying is that until now I did not know what Gus could do. Maybe it has no bearing but, again, nobody knew and it’s odd that someone who was a guardian of secrets led a second secret life. Somehow it jars.”
“Uh-huh.” She nodded. “I understand that. What about the widow Keene? Hasn’t she been given a once-over already?”
“Just lightly browned on both sides. The powers that be really didn’t want her put to the torture until the shock of Gus’s death had begun to wear off.”
“But—”
“But, I know, Bex. I know. Should have been done straightaway. I tried, but it wasn’t to be. We hit her tomorrow. You sure you don’t want to watch another video?”
“I’m absolutely positive. I would like to use the telephone, though. What’s the situation regarding private use of phones here?”
“Whatever you like. Might have a trace on them. All art-of-the-state here. But you can ring your boyfriend, no problem.”
She colored, a flash of anger crossing her eyes like a summer squall. “I don’t have a boyfriend.”
“Husband then.”
“You’d better know, here and now, so that you won’t put your foot in it again. I have a girlfriend, okay?”
“Sure. Okay. Fine. No problem.” So, he thought, what’s wrong with that? Why the drama?
He went back into what he had called Merlin’s cave and sought out another video, spending half an hour watching Gus, as Claudius Damautus, do impossible things. He named a word only thought of by a spectator leafing through a book. He synchronized his wristwatch with that of a lady, then asked her just to think of a time and write it down; when the time was revealed, he showed that the hands of his own watch had moved to the time thought of by the lady.
He caused three finger rings, borrowed from his audience, to become linked together—each spectator identifying his or her ring—and then unlink. He did amazing things with playing cards—not just card tricks, but mysteries of impossibility where cards were simply thought of and then revealed to be missing from the deck; another card, merely thought of, was discovered under the person—on the chair upon which the man had been sitting. Gus, in his guise as Damautus, prophesied colors chosen at random; gave details of the contents of a woman’s handbag and many other impossibilities.
Herbie went to bed, his mind reeling from watching the Gus he had known become a man he would never in a thousand years have truly known. Foolishly, he took a book from the secret library to bed with him and learned about the first stirrings of this art in the childhood of the planet. He read about people of whom he had never heard, for the book reached back through the sands of time to early religious magic: the conjuring up of gods and oracles in Egypt; the magical methods of priests in Greece and Rome; Dedi, who had lived twenty-six hundred years before Christ and was reputed to have decapitated and restored the heads of geese and an ox; Zoroaster; Simon Magus; Elymas the Sorcerer; Apollonius of Tyana; and the Oracle of Abonotica.
As he finally drifted into sleep, he wondered at the knowledge Gus Keene would have had to acquire in order to perform these seemingly incredible feats. He slept restlessly, dreaming of sticks that turned into serpents and ghostly figures appearing on the walls of Greek temples.
Out in the other world, Yussif was talking to the Intiqam teams.
&nbs
p; 12
YUSSIF, THE LOGISTICS AND communication backup for the two Intiqam teams, consisted of six men. Three hidden away in a remote cottage in the Hudson Valley, upstate New York, and another three living deep in the heart of rural Oxfordshire, England, near the thriving market town of Wantage.
Even these men who received and passed on instructions to the Intiqam teams did not possess the full, sweeping and demonic details of the master plan that was at the heart of Intiqam. Only one man carried all the facts, and he was guarded day and night in a pleasant villa outside Baghdad. He was also not known by name. The many people who made up the various teams called him the Biwãba—the Gatekeeper.
He was more than just the keeper of plots, this silent, secretive tall man with a huge hooked nose, and eyes that seemed to blaze into men’s souls, making his immediate body servants consider him to be like some enormous bird of prey.
He had heard himself referred to as a giant hawk, and he laughed at the description, for in many ways that was what he was—a night hawk, deadly and undetectable in the job at hand. The entire operation had been entrusted to him, and nobody else—not even the Leader in one of his many palaces or hiding places—knew the full scope. All they had been told was that the Gatekeeper could, and would, bring their old enemies to their knees.
He was laughing now, having just received, via Yussif in Great Britain, the news that the arrangements had gone well between his Intiqam squad in London and the splinter group of the IRA: the FFIRA. The “putty”—the message said—would be delivered for the price of four lives. Only four? he thought. There was some irony there, for thousands of lives would be forfeit. The “putty” was, of course, Semtex, and even that was a blind; naturally, they would use it, but it was not the heart of the great terror that this one man was near to unleashing.
The decadent forces of the West thought solely in terms of bombs and assassinations. It was as though they could see freedom fighters or revenge soldiers—terrorists, as they liked to call them—only as men and women who dealt death by dagger, pistol and explosive.
Certainly the Coalition Forces, during the Time of the Wars, had been concerned about what they called weapons of mass destruction. Mainly nuclear holocausts, though there was a little panic in the United States now concerning the possibility that some troops had been in contact with biological agents.
The West was made up mainly of fools who could not see that nuclear warfare was a self-destructive way to go. For the years preceding the war, the work in Iraqi laboratories had been concerned with neutron bombs, those that would kill men and women but leave the ground relatively intact. The Americans and British used propaganda that persuaded people to think that the countries in the Middle East—and in particular the organizations they considered terroristic—were fighting to get their hands on nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them by rocket, if only to use as a powerful bargaining chip.
Certainly the Gatekeeper had played a significant role in the development of neutron devices, but his first aim had been something he considered more deadly and less destructive.
When the men and women came to Iraq from the so-called International Atomic Energy Agency, they looked mainly at the plants in which work on the development of nuclear weapons had been going on. Of course, the nuclear road was one to be taken, yet the thinking within the powerful circle of military and scientific advisers to the leader was that the old way—the great balance of power, using nuclear arms as the compensatory spring—was now dead. In four or five years they would be able to use a nuclear threat, complete with the means to deliver warheads to every major city in Europe and the United States, putting them on equal terms with what was known as the nuclear club. In the meantime, the West would become terrified and even more unstable by the use of other means.
As he started to draft instructions to both the Intiqam teams, the Gatekeeper wondered how long it would be before either the Americans or British would pick up on the real power he wielded.
His country’s enemies constantly referred to the fact that Iraq was bankrupt. They had not the wit to think of the old saying “When the money is gone, you must make more to take its place.”
He was amazed that when the IAEA had sent their men and women to sniff out nuclear plants, they had actually visited the modern building where the money was, in fact, being made. They had been told that this was a new printing plant for books—textbooks for schools. The Leader set great store by the education of children. The group from the International Atomic Energy Agency had nodded gravely and left after twenty minutes. They had not descended to the lower floors where the four German forgers worked.
The making of money had begun almost six years before, and they had searched the world for the people with the greatest skills, finding them in what had been the former DDR—East Germany. These men were so adroit that only in the past few months had the American FBI stumbled across the forgeries of one-hundred-dollar bills, and they had publicly admitted that this currency was all but undetectable from the real thing. Even with that announcement, the American and British media had played down the threat.
Already, billions of the forged hundred-dollar bills were circulating and in use in America and Europe, as, indeed, they had been during the time of Desert Storm. The forgeries had brought in billions in real currency, hidden away in banks, which meant it was simply great riches on paper. They could, as the Gatekeeper had told his Leader, buy anything they wanted. The great forgery campaign had given them the wealth of ages. With it, Iraq was the most prosperous country in the world. The trick was getting the weapons of choice over borders, across seas and through airspace to beat the arms embargo. With time, and the Intiqam teams, there would be no problem in bringing anything they desired into the country. Then the world, fractured by this current operation, would be held to ransom. Their time would come and the great age of Islam would be at hand.
If the truth were known, the Gatekeeper did not care much for their Leader. The man was, to his mind, unbalanced and not a person who was a true Muslim, but that mattered little. What did matter was that Islam would at last become the leading religion of the world. It was of no consequence that people would be drawn into the faithful by fear. Fear was a good and holy weapon by which the decadent infidels and their leaders would seek the truth. To seek the truth, they first must be humbled.
Big Herbie Kruger could not sleep. He dozed for a couple of hours, then got up again, showered, shaved, dressed and went down to Gus’s old study. There, at the Confessor’s desk, he read a book of magic history and learned about the eighteenth-century Isaac Fawkes and how he used an egg bag—a common device still in demand—from which he produced dozens of eggs; about his prowess with playing cards and how he would make pips change to court cards; and also about how he performed the old Indian trick of growing a small tree in a matter of minutes. The book said that this made one wonder if there were any new tricks under the sun.
Also, he read of Matthew Buchinger, born in 1674 without legs, thighs or hands—simply a trunk with a head and stumps growing from his shoulders. He was most amazing because he could perform the cups and balls—magic’s oldest trick—with amazing dexterity. Herbie had seen magicians doing the cups and balls. Balls appeared and disappeared from under and above three metal cups; finally, a lemon or some such fruit seemed magically to have taken the place of the little balls. In Buchinger’s performance, live birds would appear from the cups at the end of the routine. This strange, handicapped man also became well known for his drawings and calligraphy. The book had reproductions of some of his work, which was so deft that you could hardly believe that it had been done by a man with only malformed stumps and no hands.
Herbie considered there was far more to magic than pulling rabbits from hats, making women appear from boxes, or escaping, like Houdini, from chains and straitjackets. This was incredibly absorbing stuff.
At seven o’clock he heard stirrings in the house, but by then he was back into Gus’s file
s, leafing through every contact the man had made with terrorist groups.
The telephone rang at just before eight. Worboys on the secure line from London.
“Herb, something damned odd is going on.”
“So what’s new?”
“Our friends in the Security Service have been tipped that there will be four more bombs in London today. They even have the locations and times.”
“These IRA Freedom Fighters, or whatever they’re calling themselves—FFIRA?”
“Our sisters say no. They’re telling us the main terrorist group here, and in the States, is called the Vengeance of Iraq. Not the kind of thing we’d want to appear in the newspapers.”
“The ruthless Arabs, eh?”
“Iraqis, yes, but this isn’t their style. They don’t issue warnings. What would your opinion be? Our sister service receiving this kind of information?”
“You tell me where it’s going to happen?”
“Sure. This afternoon, between six and seven. One at Piccadilly Circus Underground, another in Bond Street. They also say there will be a big one at the base of Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square; and a medium-sized bomb near Berwick Street Market in Soho.”
“And America? We know anything about Vengeance of Iraq in America?”
“Very nasty. One inside the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in L.A.; a second one in New Orleans—the French Quarter—and a third in Grand Central Station, New York.”
“We’re taking it seriously?”
“Of course we are. But the Security Service has asked the police to be discreet. Discreet! I ask you!”