A Different War mg-4

by Craig Thomas

"Not normally, no. But two hundred thousand isn't a normal fee, either. And there's the pressure of time, my friend." Even to himself, he sensed his accent thicken as his voice darkened. Strickland seemed unimpressed by implicit threat.

  "Why the rush? OK, don't answer that. Stocks and shares. Loss of blood, internal haemorrhage, even. Yes, there would be a desire to hurry… but I don't work in that way. It's too messy."

  Roussillon murmured: There could be more money perhaps as much as another fifty thousand."

  Strickland glanced swiftly at Fraser and realised that the two men were not engaging in some negotiating ploy. Fraser was surprised.

  "Out of the petty cash, Michel?" he sneered.

  "I didn't realise the DST were chipping in to bale my employer out or I'd have kept something back for myself." He laughed. The French Intelligence officer smiled and shrugged.

  "I wish Mr. Strickland to feel we value him, Robert. Merely I that'

  "And Balzac-Stendhal will, in any case, pay the price. You I won't be left short."

  Strickland left his chair and walked to the window. He began absently stroking the cat, who was still half-immersed in the sink, licking at the drops of water the tap had spilt. While it licked, it purred.

  Fraser thought there was something reluctant about the man's posture, something like the merest suggestion of an internal argument, violent and intense. Then he turned to face them.

  Three hundred thousand. For an on-site operation and one that is untraceable, even by someone as clever as Gant."

  That was the pilot Vance used, right?"

  Strickland nodded.

  "Yes. An accident investigator, too. He could appear in the play again. I'll bear it in mind, this time."

  "You know him? Was he CIA, too?"

  "From time to time. When things needed to be flown."

  "Oh, yes. I remember him now. Another of Aubrey's cowboy operators. I was working for Far East desk in those days. I wondered where I'd heard the name before."

  "You should try reading newspapers with information rather than bosoms," Roussillon commented.

  "One learns such things from such newspapers."

  "When must this operation be completed?"

  Two days three at the outside."

  That quickly?" Strickland pondered, his large hands knuckled on the knotted, scratched wood of the scrubbed table. After some moments, he announced: "I've been working on some refinements to that fuel computer malfunction."

  The copyright remained with you, according to the contract."

  "As always. I've had one or two other ideas since I got back. Perhaps you could make yourself comfortable? Give me an hour or two and I'll give you a definite answer. If I can do it, then I'll accept for three hundred thousand. But I'd like to make certain. Help yourselves to coffee, beer, anything else. You'll stay to dinner?"

  He walked to the door, then added: The work you bring is always

  Challenging. I like that. I won't keep you long—" Fraser watched his large frame disappear from the doorway. The early-evening sunlight spilt innocently into the kitchen, haloing the cat's fur as it followed Strickland towards a large converted barn behind the house.

  "Shall I be mother?" Fraser asked, waggling the kettle at Roussillon.

  "Merci, mon ami." Roussillon stretched luxuriously.

  "I feel so comfortable here," he observed, yawning and linking his hands together at arm's-length above his head.

  "As if the place belonged to my grandmother."

  "Instead of a psychopath with a genius for sabotage? I know what you mean—" The kettle began to steam.

  "It was the good fortune of the private sector that the CIA could never prove he blew up his own Head of Station with a car bomb. I wonder what the guy had done to annoy him?"

  "Probably the man did not like cats?"

  "It would be enough," Fraser agreed.

  "I always feel around Strickland that I'm around a polite cobra." He laughed.

  "D'you think he'd be offended if we checked under the car when we leave?" He handed Roussillon his coffee, sipped at his own.

  "Cheers. Here's to him and to us. And to the private sector. Free enterprise."

  "Ah, Fraser how could I join such a toast? I am a servant of the state."

  "First, last and always?"

  "Of course."

  "If I'd worked for a service like the DST, I think I might have stayed in and waited for the pension." He sipped again at his coffee.

  "It's so much easier when defence of the realm the territoire-and the national interest coincide exactly with what every businessman wants.

  When the security service can do anything it likes, just so long as another Froggie benefits!" Roussillon scowled.

  "We had Protestantism, though," Fraser continued.

  "Puritanism, conscience, guilt. And however much you try to keep them out of intelligence work, they always turn up to spoil the party… unlike your lot. If you want to blow up the Greenpeace boat, you just go ahead and do it, for example—" That was the DGSE, not DST.

  Intelligence, not Security."

  "Sorry," Fraser mocked. Then he asked: "D'you think Strick-land's a good cook?

  Worth staying for dinner, would it be?"

  She paused in the Close and looked up at the three spires of the small market town's cathedral. The darkening air above seemed filled with wheeling swallows. Marian breathed deeply, unaffected by the meaning of the building, touched only by the swallows. One skimmed near her head. The choirmaster, whom she recognised, smiled in her direction as he hurried towards the west door. She walked on after a few moments, hands thrust into the deep pockets of her flared yellow skirt, her head bent as if to study her flat slippers or the uneven cobbles.

  She left the Close and walked beside the minster pool. Children were being encouraged to feed ducks; the sullen, empty noises of early drunks echoed across the water. A winding street of medieval houses, mostly craft shops and cramped coffee houses, meandered towards the market square containing the banks, building societies, the cheap shoe shops and the church that had become a craft and visitor centre. She turned beside the pool, beneath darkening trees, her mood almost tranquil. Michael Lloyd's funeral was the middle of the following week and she could not attend. It had been awkward and guilty, the act of telling the aunt in Crewkerne that she would not be there.

  The market town that was also a cathedral city in a polite, impoverished imitation of one of the cathedral cities of southern England was on the eastern edge of the constituency. Recently bloated by a small industrial estate and new executive housing — street upon street of declamatory triple garages and barbecue patios it had become a commuter suburb for the raw, sprawling industrial conurbation to its west and south. Some of the poorer council estates and tower block encampments of the conurbation fell within the boundaries of her constituency, as did rural pockets of north Warwickshire.

  Marian had won the constituency during a general election, inheriting it from a knight of the shire who had succumbed — they said either to complete inertia or to an apoplectic fit brought on by the thought of the sheer physical and mental effort of continuing the Thatcherite revolution. She smiled at the recollected joke, first relayed to her by her party agent, Bill.

  She had spoken to Bill before leaving the small flat she rented, in a building that clung like ivy to the cathedral close but which a local builder had bought up, knocked about and recreated as three executive apartments… that word again. She was on her way to meet that builder at one of the town's new, anonymous wine bars which catered for the influx of executives to the town's new estates.

  The man had left a message on her answer phone He seemed both angry and hesitant, secretive and outraged. She had agreed that, since he could not possibly, under any circumstances, be in the town the following morning and attend her regular surgery, she would give him an hour that evening. After all, she quite liked the flat and the rent was not exploitative. His workmen came quickly to effect minor repai
rs. She only vaguely wondered whether, since he was a minor contractor on the Urban Regeneration Project, it was something to do with that Venice of the Midlands grandiosity.

  Gnats rose in slow, smoky columns above the still water of the pool. A duck followed her desultorily for a few yards along the bank on the other side of the low iron railings that fenced the water. Then she mounted steps and turned into a pedestrianised street of narrow, tall houses whose upper storeys seemed to rest uncertainly on a video hire shop, restaurants, an electrical retailer and the wine bar.

  Ray Banks waved to her from a window seat, climbing immediately to his feet, his stomach brushing the table, his florid tie almost draping itself into his glass of house white. He seemed eager and dubious as he took her hand.

  "A glass of white would be fine," she murmured, seating herself.

  There's only a trace of antifreeze in the bouquet." Her smile was not returned. Banks seemed inordinately mortified, as if he had committed some serious social gaffe.

  "Cheers," she offered when he returned with the glass.

  "Cheers," he replied gloomily. There was the self-consciousness of a man seeking her good offices, even influence, about him.

  Marian lit a cigarette and considerately waved the smoke away from Banks.

  Empty laughter from the street outside and the bark of a dog.

  "Your phone call sounded urgent," she prompted.

  "Sorry I couldn't make it tomorrow didn't want to put you out…

  Marian." He always approached the familiarity of her name as he might have done an explosive device. His hobby was war-gaming; her father's military career rendered him deferential towards her together with his lack of assurance when in the company of successful women. His wife and two teenage daughters seemed to Marian to have remained, mentally, in the back-to-back where the Bankses' married life had begun, when Ray had been a jobbing building with one workman, a decrepit truck and an overdraft. 'I — er…"

  "Yes?" She tried to sound casually interested. Now, Ray had a dozen vans and small trucks, a building supply business, a successful industrial contracting company.

  "Is there anything I can do to help?" She was reluctant to make the offer, but intrigued by his hesitancy.

  "Dunno I, well… I'm in trouble. The company, that is. I just don't know what's going on…"

  Marian was careful to exclude all expression from her features. A youth stared at her through the window, then, probably assessing her age beneath her good looks, passed on with a shrug. The conversation of the wine bar revolved around money, football, barbecues, sun beds step aerobics and sex. Ray Banks wanted her intercession in some matter; a favour.

  Her thoughts wandered to her conversation with her agent.

  The local party chairman had been badgered again by Central Office with regard to her profound Euroscepticism. The PM was endlessly and yet again calling for unity; which meant silence from all who disagreed.

  There was a women's coffee morning after surgery, an encounter with the remnants of blue rinse loyalty and the fanatical devotion to whatever leadership was in place of the bottle-blonde, sun bed new generation of local committee-women who were the inheritors and perhaps even the daughters of the blue-rinse matrons.

  '… bankrupt," she heard, startled into attention. His features indicated that he understood she was inappropriately unheeding.

  "I'm sorry, Ray, but I don't understand," she recovered. Things have been bad in the construction industry, I know, but—" 'I didn't come for the party line," he replied sourly, then immediately altered his expression to one of apology. There's work, but there's no bloody money for it.

  That's what's wrong — Marian."

  "Cash flow, is that it?"

  "Cash flow? There's not a bloody trickle, I can tell you!"

  "But you've work?"

  He nodded vehemently.

  "If you can call it that. I've got contracts is more like the truth."

  He sipped viciously at his wine and drops spattered the florid tie and the lapels of his grey suit. She blew smoke at the ceiling. He continued: "It's this bloody Millennium Project the Venice of the Midlands crap! I won supply contracts, grants, contracts for construction… it all looked bloody marvelous on paper which is where most of it stayed, on paper!"

  "Money from Brussels hasn't materialised?"

  "It did, at first. Trickle-down economics at its best money trickling down from the main contractors, handed out to them by the appropriate officials and departments. Wonderful artists' impressions and architects' models, great site clearance lots of hype… We were all over the bloody moon, for months!" He paused, staring into his empty glass.

  "You ready for another?" She shook her head.

  "Won't be a mo—" The Millennium Project was vast and crucial to the conurbation. Only a tiny fragment of the huge urban redevelopment fell within the boundaries of her constituency some canal side prettifying, some executive apartment buildings from resurrected waterside factories and warehouses, a small part of the huge leisure complex around the canal basin. The rest of the development the symphony hall, the conference centre, the office blocks and living and playing acreage, the new roads, the airport expansion… all lay outside the constituency. Thankfully, she had always thought, taking into account her own Euro-sceptic credentials and the hundreds of millions that Brussels was pouring into the entire project. Wise old birds with long experience of Whitehall and Westminster murmured, out of the hearing of Whips and Permanent Secretaries, that it was simply a way of bribing the most sceptical electorate in Europe that the EU was a good thing, a source of endless bounty.

  She was not disinclined to believe such judgements. Now — unfortunately, she considered one of her constituents had brought the problem to her doorstep.

  What problem—?

  Banks returned to the table, making it scrape on the flag-stoned floor of the wine bar as he clumsily, angrily sat down. This time, he had bought a bottle of the house white. He drank greedily and refilled his glass at once, waggling the bottle at her. She nodded, out of insinuation, and he topped up her glass. Marian lit another cigarette.

  "What precisely is wrong, Ray?" she soothed.

  "Bloody everything!" he announced in a hoarse whisper, leaning across the table at her almost in challenge.

  "Look, I raised this matter' his Midlands accent had become more pronounced, as if he was consciously reinventing a former self, the rough, pushy, relatively honest jobbing building from the Black Country

  'at the last meeting with the main contractors. Fat lot of bloody use that was!" He seemed to become distracted by his anger.

  "I could have sold the business five years ago for over two million you know that? I didn't. Bloody my business and it stays my business, I thought. Wish I bloody had, now!"

  "What's wrong?" she insisted. The undisguised emotion, the sense of a long perspective of bitterness, intrigued her further.

  "The main contractors asked me to be patient! The grants or whatever from Brussels had been delayed, they were in the bloody post or something!" Despite himself, he grinned.

  "I told 'em I thought they were hanging on to the money and us small fry could get stuffed, just so long as the flash projects were on schedule! They didn't like that!"

  "Neither would I," she murmured, 'if I had a knighthood and an income of three quarters of a million a year and sat on the boards of four other companies." He returned the smile.

  "No, not Sir Desmond only the whole bloody gang of 'em. Banks, the local politicians, the main contractors, the architects. Yes, the bloody symphony hall's on schedule, and the most pricey apartments, the office blocks. That's the facade.

  There's bugger all being done on other parts of the project. Piles of bricks and mountains of conduits lying around. Bloody scandal! And us poor buggers not getting paid, not even being allowed to get on with the first stages. So I'm left hanging on by my balls with the bank manager trying to climb up my backside to pull my teeth out!" His features were cri
mson, then suddenly abashed.

  "Sorry…"

  "Could you really become bankrupt?"

  Two months at most." He refilled his glass.

  "Two bloody months before they wipe out twenty bloody years. And I'm not on my own. There's dozens of chippies and sparks, all small firms, suppliers and fitters, carpet, lighting, double-glazing… I was speaking for them as well as myself."

  "How much isn't being done to time?"

  "About twenty-five per cent, maybe more… half a billion? A third, anyway. There's local money, from the councils, not up front yet. But that's normal for those tightfisted buggers. And the Brussels money.

  Fifty, sixty million that's not appeared monthslale."

  "You want me to make a fuss, is that it?" His eyes glowed, as if he had somehow encountered a movie actress long admired.

  "Questions in the House, see the Minister, invite someone in front of the Select Committee…?" He was nodding as eagerly as if she were proposing a series of increasingly bizarre erotic fantasies.

  "Could you? I mean would you?"

  "I don't see why not. I'd like more information before I do, though and no, not this evening. I have a lot of preparation for my surgery tomorrow. Can I ring you next week?" It was as if she had whisked away the prospect of sexual gratification, and with it his wallet. His lugubrious disappointment amused Marian.

  "I will ring you, Ray don't worry."

  Reluctantly, he acquiesced, then burst out:

  "You could try asking them to stop putting the frighteners on, too, while you're at it!" His voice was barely above a fierce whisper, his face close to hers, his breath rancid with cheap wine. His sincerity was not in doubt, nor was his sudden, unnerved fear.

  "I don't like it—"

  "What's happening? What sort of thing?" There was a momentary image, no more than a single, subliminal frame of film, of Lloyd's body. There was the same impression of endangerment about Banks' words, the sweat on his damp brow, his high colour.

  Two small companies a sparks and an air-conditioning contractor.

  They've both had recent fires at their premises. Yobbos, the police say. Vandals." He breathed noisily.