Diplomatic Immunity

by Grant Sutherland

  I have decided not to take the job with Goldman at Columbia. If Patrick had stayed, if things had worked out differently with Jennifer, I guess then maybe I would have gone. Someday I might regret not making the move, but at this moment in my life it seems the right decision. When I was young I was going to change the world. Now in my maturity I face the harder labor, to change myself, to work to become a better man. Maybe Toshio’s life can be something for me to live up to. Not the headlines or the history books, but just this, people to whom my absence truly matters when my turn comes to leave the world behind.

  The man in white coveralls throws a tarpaulin across the flags on the coffin, then climbs aboard the cart. When Asahaki gives the signal, the cart and the trolley move off: Toshio Hatanaka’s body is going home. In solemn cortege we three bow our heads and follow the coffin out into the softly falling rain.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Nita Taublib, Deputy Publisher Beth de Guzman, Executive Editor Betsy Hulsebosch, Creative Marketing Director Yook Louie, Art Director Susan Corcoran, Associate Director of Publicity Kelly Chian, Glen Edelstein, Maggie Hart, Madeline Hopkins, and Production

  Praise for Grant Sutherland and

  DIPLOMATIC IMMUNITY

  “[Diplomatic Immunity] takes us into the seedier reaches of UN diplomacy. . . . nicely plotted.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “A crackerjack novel, teeming with

  suspense. . . entirely satisfying.”

  —The Grand Rapids Press

  “A fast, furious, and immensely exciting look inside the oh-so-secret world of international diplomacy. Grant Sutherland has written a fine novel: informative, gripping, and, finally, unsettling. So this is how the United Nations really works!”

  —Christopher Reich, New York Times bestselling author of Numbered Account

  “Grant Sutherland is a wonderful find with a fresh voice. Diplomatic Immunity has a puzzle as complex as the Sunday crossword inside a thriller that is as intriguing as its subject— the arcane world of the United Nations.”

  —Stephen White, New York Times bestselling author of Cold Case

  Turn the page for a sneak

  preview of Grant Sutherland’s

  next hardcover

  THE CONSIGNMENT

  Coming in Spring 2003

  from Bantam Books

  YOU’LL RECOGNIZE TREVANIAN?” “I’ll know him,” I said.

  “Tell him who you are, background history.”

  I looked up from my coffee to Milton Rossiter, the major shareholder and president of Haplon Systems, my employer.

  “Who I am?”

  “Ex-Army, that bit.” He skirted around behind our stand, sucking in his gut, then he came back out with a big cardboard cutout of a rifle and propped it against the table. He clicked his fingers and pointed at me. “Hey, didn’t he have somethin’ to do with Grenada? Maybe give you two somethin’ to talk about.”

  “I was never in Grenada.”

  Rossiter frowned and went on adjusting the cardboard cutout, standing back, then stepping in to adjust it some more.

  The doors of the aerodrome hangar had been open half an hour, the buyers were streaming down the aisles, there was a lively buzz of business in the air. It was my second fair at Springfield, and my second year in the employ of Haplon Systems. The basic layout of the fair hadn’t changed. The buyers entered through the main doors onto a quarter acre of royal blue carpet where a collection of young women greeted them, offering glossy brochures. From there the buyers moved down one of six aisles into a gridlike array of stands where suited men like me plied them with information and stats, then ran videos to show the materiel in action.

  “Trevanian won’t be signing up for anything right now,” Rossiter told me. “But I don’t want him walking away from here thinking we’re not interested in his money.”

  He held up the PC lead and looked faintly bewildered. I went over and stuck the plug into the adapter, then leaned across and switched on the screen. Rossiter nodded as a Mercator projection of the earth appeared, explosive flashes of light bursting and dying across war zones where Haplon weapons were currently in use. Rossiter touched the PC screen as if he were trying out the latest Nintendo—push here for nuclear armagedon—while I went back to my office.

  I’d been marketing manager for Milton Rossiter’s company for more than a year by this time; I think I knew him pretty well. Normally he dealt munitions the way a stockbroker deals shares, without a second thought. But that morning at Springfield he seemed anxious. His father founded Haplon in the aftermath of World War II, buying up surplus rifles from redundant arsenals in Europe, then selling them into the U.S. sports market. After that, Haplon rode a wave of profitability through Korea and Vietnam, expanded into production, and when Milton finally inherited the business he’d already been his father’s right-hand man for fifteen years. His aim ever since had been to keep Haplon profitable and growing, ready to be handed over to his children, three unmarried women in their twenties whose interest in Haplon Systems seemed to be the dividend check they each received quarterly.

  With his long background in the business, Milton Rossiter’s self-belief was normally total, but in the months leading up to Springfield some of his usual arrogance had deserted him. Partly, I suppose, because the construction of the new Haplon plant out in California was falling behind schedule. Not a disaster on its own, but along with some recent Pentagon cutbacks, and the shrinking Haplon order book, the situation was causing heartburn in a few of Rossiter’s bankers. They were pressuring him to refill the order book. He was relaying the pressure down the line to us.

  He left the PC and came back to me.

  “Ned,” he said, making a face. He set his hands on the table and leaned toward me. “Ned, you look like shit.” He shook his head while I looked down at my shirt and tie. “Not your fucking clothes. You. Jesus Christ,” he said quietly, the customers flowing down the aisle behind him. “Place has been open twenty minutes, you’ve been sittin’ there nursin’ coffees, rubbin’ your goddamn eyes.” He clicked his fingers near my face. “Come on. Wake up.”

  I raised my eyes slowly.

  “Geez,” he said.

  I got out from behind the table.

  “Christ, it moves. You going all giddy like that? Maybe you want to sit down again.” Someone in the crowd of buyers caught Rossiter’s eye. Rossiter hailed him over the passing heads, then pistoled his fingers at me before moving off through the suits. “Stay sharp, Ned. You miss Trevanian, I will personally fucking slay you.”

  Around midmorning I saw Trevanian. He was joking with someone down at the Scitex stand, looking relaxed and tan. Clean-shaven and sandy-haired, not quite six feet, he looked just like the mug shots I’d seen of him, only he wasn’t in uniform, he was wearing a blazer and tie. When he left the Scitex stand and came in our direction I signalled for Micky Baker, our junior salesman, to rescue me from a Paraguayan time-waster, a colonel wearing full battle dress and shades who was requesting a rerun of our artillery video.

  By the time Trevanian arrived at our stand, I was pretending to study one of our brochures. He offered me his hand, we did the introductions, then he beckoned forward a striking black woman in a beige slacks suit. She slipped her Gucci purse beneath her arm. As we shook hands, her collection of chunky gold bracelets clinked.

  “Cecille Lagundi,” Trevanian said. “My associate.”

  I smiled. Associate. Colleague. Partner. In the arms business, all flexible terms. Straight to the point, Trevanian said they’d like some information on the P23. I sat them down, then slid two leaflets across the table, launching into my spiel. “The P23’s an excellent close-range weapon. Probably Haplon’s top line. We’ve been shipping them twelve months”—I gestured toward the PC, the bursts of light and accompanying sound effects—“they’re battle tested—”

  Trevanian lifted a finger. “We don’t need the pitch,” he said mildly.

  We looked at each other. His eyes were pal
e green.

  “The numbers,” I said, reaching over and touching the leaflet beneath his hand, “are on the back.”

  He flipped over the leaflet and studied the numbers, the P23’s vital stats. Dimensions. Rate of fire. Range. Everything you could know about the weapon short of using it. While he was doing that my eyes cheated across to Cecille Lagundi. She was looking at the numbers on her leaflet too, but casually. How did I figure her? A female friend picked up by Trevanian on an African tour of duty? One of his U.S. employees?

  Jack Trevanian was ex–British Army, a free agent who ran his own private military company. This is one aspect of the peace dividend the average citizen never hears about, the swelling band of Jack Trevanians running private companies of mercenaries around the globe. Freebooters who wade into trouble spots where Western governments no longer care to venture. Rebels and insurgents repressed, all checks to Switzerland. When not buying weapons for their own companies, guys like Trevanian spend their time advising tin-pot regimes on how best to equip their ragtag armies. I figured Trevanian’s connection with Cecille Lagundi was probably professional, but there were other possibilities. Her security badge said DEFENSE CONSULTANT, but she didn’t look like any other defense consultant roaming the fair. She couldn’t have been more than thirty-five. Her skin was a perfect, unlined ebony.

  She raised her eyes and caught me studying her. She kept her eyes on mine as she slid the leaflet back across the table.

  “So tell me why I shouldn’t buy it,” said Trevanian.

  The gun’s weaknesses, he meant. I told him that we’d engineered them all away on the draftboard.

  “You believe that?”

  “No weapon’s perfect.”

  He raised a brow. “You going to tell me what’s wrong with the gun or shall I just move on and see Fettners?”

  Fettner & Sons were our main competitor. We both dealt in the same sort of equipment, a niche too low-tech for the likes of Hughes or McDonnell Douglas and too high-tech to be undercut by the cheap foreign manufacturers. If Trevanian had gone down to the Fettners stand and placed an order, Rossiter would have skinned me alive.

  “It’s not great over distance,” I admitted. Gesturing behind me, I offered to take them behind the screen and show them the weapon. “If you want, we can take it out to the firing range, you can let off a few rounds.”

  Trevanian remarked dryly that the Springfield firing range—a temporary structure bulldozed out of the earth beyond the hangar—was only fifty yards long. Not exactly a rigorous test for a weapon whose weakness, as I’d just told him, was over distance. I shrugged, conceding the point.

  Trevanian seemed to relax some then. He tossed his head toward the screen. “What else you got back there?”

  Opening a hand, I invited them into the Aladdin’s cave behind me. We went through the door in the rear screen, up a ramp into a cargo container that had been fitted out especially for fairs like Springfield. Milton Rossiter had even employed an interior designer to ensure we got the appropriately masculine, high-tech effect. The walls were black beneath a polished aluminum ceiling; spotlights mounted on two chrome tracks ran the length of the container. Haplon product was racked on chrome tubing along the side walls. The heavier equipment—the antitank gear, launchers, mortars—was lined up on the steel-plated floor.

  Cecille Lagundi seemed slightly lost; she folded her arms and looked around.

  I unracked the P23. Trevanian asked if we could strip it, so we moved to the rear of the container, where I got down on my knees and dismantled the gun, talking Trevanian through each stage, answering his questions. When I was done pulling it apart and then reassembling it, I handed the gun to Trevanian. He weighed it in his hands, raised it to his shoulder and sighted along the barrel to the rear wall.

  “Good feel,” he said, passing the gun back to me.

  We talked some more about the gun. He had that clipped Brit way of speaking, direct, and he asked all the right questions; he probably thought we were getting along fine. After a while he tilted his head.

  “You ex-Services?” he asked me.

  “Army.”

  “Poor bastard,” he said and smiled. Then he touched Cecille Lagundi’s arm. Give us two minutes, he told me, and the pair of them walked down to the front of the container, talking quietly, while I reracked the gun. I’d been in the business long enough by that time to know when I’d made a sale, and I knew right then they were hooked. They came back to me after a minute’s whispered conference.

  “We’re interested in the gun.”

  I nodded. Good decision. Wise choice.

  “Also these,” he said, and she handed him a list and he gave it to me.

  Glancing down the list, I felt my heart flutter like a startled bird in my chest. Gatling miniguns, mortars, rockets and rocketlaunchers, night-sights—and beside each item was a number designating quantities required. A major shipment. I looked up.

  “How soon would you need delivery?”

  He gestured vaguely, brushing my question aside. Then looking around the container, he asked me to show them what we had on site.

  I went and told my sales team that the container was off-limits for the next hour, then returned inside and worked my way through Trevanian’s list, talking him and Cecille Lagundi through each item. Trevanian asked the questions, but he always deferred, in the end, to Lagundi, making sure she was satisfied before moving on to the next weapon. I still couldn’t pin her down. Her accent sounded improbably Irish, a soft burr. My best guess by this time was that she was some kind of representative for whoever was financing Trevanian’s spree; there was just too much firepower on his wish list for it to be going to any private military company. He must have been buying on someone’s behalf. Cecille Lagundi must have been making sure Trevanian’s client wasn’t getting screwed. That’s how I figured it.

  When we were through, we reemerged from the container to the front of the Haplon stand, and I gave Trevanian my own sales file, the one with the prices and volume discounts clearly marked. He seemed to appreciate the gesture. He put my file beneath his arm, gave me his card and took mine. He shook my hand, then she shook my hand.

  “We’ll be in touch,” he told me, and that was it, the pair of them walked away. They passed the Fettners stand without pausing.

  Milton Rossiter immediately appeared at my side. When I explained what had happened his smile nearly split his face. He clapped me on the back and told me I was a goddamn star. My palms were sweating. My heart thumped hard. While Rossiter went over to the rest of the sales team to blow the trumpet, inspire them to sell more guns, I opened a drawer and searched for a new sales file.

  “Hey.”

  When I looked up, Dimitri was looming over me, his hands braced on the table. I hadn’t seen Dimitri face-to-face for at least six months, a brief encounter at an arms fair out in Kuwait. Back then I’d been surprised by how he’d suddenly let himself go. Now as I looked him over, I wasn’t so much surprised as alarmed. His face was puffy. His stomach pressed over the belt of his pants. The rigors of army life, it was pretty clear, were fast becoming a distant memory to his body. In Kuwait, I’d wondered if he wasn’t turning himself into one of those salesmen who do most of their business in bars, lots of backslapping and hearty laughter, then a trawl through the raunchier nightspots after midnight. But I couldn’t really believe it. That wasn’t the Dimitri I knew.

  “Dimitri,” I said flatly.

  “Have they placed an order with you?” His tone was surprisingly belligerent.

  I lifted a brow. Order?

  He stabbed a finger on the tabletop. “Trevanian and Lagundi were back in your candy shop a full hour. Don’t jerk me around, Ned. Did they give you the order or not?”

  “As I recall, you still work for Fettners.”

  He thumbed his chest. “That’s my order. My order.”

  I’d heard some talk that he’d started leaning on the bottle, but I hadn’t taken it too seriously. Now I wasn’t so s
ure.

  “I haven’t taken the order,” I said quietly. “But you’re asking for my professional opinion, I’m going to. Now get lost.”

  His eyes filmed over. “You haven’t taken it.” I jerked my head sharply in the direction of the Fettners stand. Dimitri finally seemed to get a grip on himself. “Right,” he said, nodding as he backed away. “Okay.” Then he turned and hurried back toward the Fettners stand.

  I watched him go.

  “Fettners, yeah?” Rossiter, my boss. He’d left the others and now he was standing at my shoulder watching Dimitri thread his way through the suits.

  I nodded.

  “He see Trevanian here? Worried he’s lost a customer?”

  I nodded again as Dimitri disappeared.

  “Guy’s a loser, right?” Rossiter put a hand on my shoulder and squeezed. “You fucked him,” he said cheerfully.

  The rest of the morning I spent catching up with old customers, fielding inquiries, and reining in the misplaced enthusiasm of young Micky Baker, our newly minted marketing grad. Around 1:00 P.M., people started thinking about taking lunch in the giant pavilion outside; there was a general drift away from the hangar. Rossiter came across to the stand and ran a sharp eye over the morning’s paperwork: provisional orders, genuine inquiries, and a dozen leads that would probably come to nothing.

  “Trevanian’s joinin’ us for lunch,” Rossiter told me, closing the file.

  I rose and buttoned my jacket. “The woman?” When his eyes shot up, I lifted my hands. Casual inquiry, I said.

  He laughed. “Keep your pecker in your pants. She’s gone back into town. Shopping her way down Fifth Avenue, something like that.” He remarked that we seemed to be getting low on brochures. I took that hint and volunteered to fetch a fresh box from my car before joining him in the pavilion.