Dead End

by Brian Freemantle

  The Greek had very definitely adopted the role of deputy leader, Parnell recognized. Which was good, providing it didn’t arouse any jealousy or resentment among the others. And that didn’t seem to have happened so far. ‘Sounds a good plan to me,’ agreed Parnell. ‘I’ll go across the corridor sometime to see how Benn and his people are working …’

  ‘I really don’t know how you’ve got the resilience to consider working yourself,’ said Beverley.

  ‘I’m not sure I have,’ admitted Parnell.

  Harry Johnson was Grant’s second visitor of the day to the discreet Plaza Hotel suite, the bell summons repeated impatiently before Grant opened the door. The Dubette security chief was dressed for what he imagined the occasion to be, in a suit and tie but with the permanently shined, plasticized Dubette uniform shoes. The suit was baggy and stained, the shirt crumpled from previous wear.

  ‘Nobody saw me arrive,’ assured Johnson. ‘What’s going down here?’ His visit had been arranged in the same cellphone-to-cellphone way.

  ‘That’s what I want to talk about,’ said Grant. The hotel security needed overhauling, not to have questioned Johnson’s dishevelled presence. Grant hoped the man wouldn’t be remembered if any hotel staff were called upon to do so.

  Johnson collapsed, uninvited, into an encompassing armchair, looked around the suite and said: ‘Nice place. Class. That’s what I like, class.’

  When, wondered Grant, had the man sitting opposite ever experienced it? But then he sometimes frequented places that would have surprised anyone who knew him. ‘How the fuck did AF209 get into the frame?’

  ‘You wanted to discredit Parnell. Create a situation where you could dispense with him in such a way as to make him unemployable,’ reminded Johnson. ‘I didn’t know Rebecca Lang was dead – how she’d died. I didn’t stir this shit, like you did once before. Don’t forget that.’

  ‘Will I ever be allowed to?’

  ‘We’re a long way from the cliff edge,’ said Johnson, helping himself to the now virtually cold coffee.

  ‘You’ve involved the FBI, for fuck’s sake!’

  ‘I didn’t know Rebecca Lang was going to die! Didn’t know until I got the call from the Metro DC police guys. At which time I didn’t have the opportunity to talk to you. I had to improvise – use my own judgement.’

  ‘This isn’t good,’ insisted Grant. ‘It could all unravel.’

  ‘How’d she die? How – why – did Rebecca die?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Sir, a lot of unusual things – strangely coincidental things – happened that Sunday. Things I didn’t expect to happen. Rebecca Lang’s death the most unexpected of all. Can you help me with that?’

  ‘I told you, I don’t know.’

  ‘We gotta smelly bunch of shit to pick our way through,’ judged Johnson. ‘You wanna point out the path we’re going to take together, to make the stories chime?’

  Edward C. Grant’s recitation was practically a repeat of his earlier conversation with Dwight Newton. At the end of it, Johnson said: ‘Could hold, if everyone in turn holds their nerve.’

  ‘What about the two Metro DC shitheads?’ demanded Grant.

  ‘They’re looking at the drop, if they start to flake. Know they’re looking at steak and cake if they stay cool. But they didn’t know it was murder, when we did the deal. If I’ve got to keep a handle on this, I need to know the facts …’ He sniggered. ‘Remember that, what they used to say in Dragnet. “Just the facts; just give me the facts.” I used to love that show.’

  ‘It’s too long ago to remember,’ sighed Grant, who considered Harry Johnson to be the one unavoidable, forever inescapable, mistake he had ever allowed to happen. ‘Don’t forget your drop, Harry.’

  ‘Or yours,’ came back the security chief, at once. ‘Everything’s superglued: nothing’s going to fall apart.’

  ‘You absolutely sure about that?’

  ‘I’m absolutely sure about that,’ echoed the fat-bellied man. ‘That’s what I’m employed to be, isn’t it – to be absolutely sure about everything?’

  ‘That’s what you’re employed for,’ agreed Grant, softly. ‘I won’t forget that. Nor should you, ever.’ But Johnson had forgotten, Grant thought. He’d become complacent, not properly – fully – thinking things through to their logical conclusion. Which made him a liability. Grant didn’t like liabilities, his own most of all.

  ‘So, we don’t have a problem,’ said Johnson.

  ‘You ensure that we don’t,’ insisted Grant.

  ‘You gotta drink anywhere here?’

  ‘Find a bar downtown,’ ordered Grant. ‘A long way downtown.’

  The greeting was even more effusive than it had initially been on the day of Parnell’s threatened resignation. Dwight Newton was already around his desk, leg hitched upon its front. At Parnell’s entry he thrust forward and enclosed the Englishman’s hand in both of his, changing the grip as he was pumping up and down to slap Parnell on the shoulder. The gesture was timed to the second, abruptly ending for Parnell to be ushered into the already prepared chair, the grave look already in place when the head of research regained his own side of the desk.

  ‘Good to see you back, Dick. Damned good. A tragedy, an absolute tragedy, about Rebecca. You got my sympathy. The sympathy of the entire upper management of Dubette.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Parnell. Illogically he felt the sort of embarrassment he guessed everyone had been feeling at encountering him, earlier.

  ‘I’ve got some things to tell you,’ announced Newton, carefully listing every assistance proposed by Edward C. Grant earlier that day in New York. ‘That’s from the president himself. And I’m to tell you you’re to take off as much time as you want. None of us can imagine what it was like – is like – for you. Just can’t imagine.’

  ‘What I’d like is to get back to work, as quickly and as uninterrupted as possible,’ said Parnell, repeating what he’d told his own team. ‘I’m not sure how Rebecca’s uncle will take the offer of help. I get the feeling he’s a pretty proud and independent old guy.’

  ‘Nothing for you to worry about. That’s for Wayne Denny and personnel. I want you to know something, on a personal level. I never believed for a moment that you could be in any way involved.’

  ‘Why not?’ The question blurted from Parnell, unthinkingly, and his surprise at uttering it was increased at Newton’s obvious and immediate confusion.

  ‘It was unthinkable … inconceivable. You were a couple. In love. Everybody knew that. You don’t murder the woman you love!’

  Did everyone know it? Parnell supposed they did. ‘Someone murdered her and tried to frame me.’ Someone who certainly knew them both – knew their cars and their movements. Certainly Rebecca’s, when she’d left Washington Circle. But whoever it was couldn’t have known she wasn’t staying over. So, he and Rebecca would have had to have been watched, all the time. The killer would have had to follow her from Bethesda on Sunday morning, seen them leave the apartment in Rebecca’s car – both tightly, safely, seat-belted – been at an adjoining bench at Chesapeake Bay maybe, and driven behind them all the way back again. And then sat and waited and watched some more, as long as they had to, until Rebecca got into a position to be ambushed. Whoever had done that couldn’t have known Rebecca wouldn’t be staying overnight. So, the surveillance had to have been absolute, around the clock. It was obvious but Parnell hadn’t thought the sequence through. It would be more than obvious to the trained investigators from the FBI, too, but he’d still mention it, set it out to illustrate how meticulously it had all been planned.

  ‘What’s that flight number all about?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ insisted Parnell.

  ‘You didn’t know it was in Rebecca’s purse?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘She didn’t talk to you about it?’

  ‘No.’ The switch – and the interrogation – was intriguing, thought Parnell.

  ‘I can’t believe it, an
y of it!’ protested the head-shaking vice president. ‘It’s monstrous. The work of a monster.’ How many? wondered Newton. And led – or ordered – by the head monster? He was glad he’d changed into the white laboratory coat, sure the sweat that was gluing his body at the effort he was having to make would have soaked through his shirt to become visible.

  ‘I hear there’s a big project underway?’ said Parnell, anxious to move the conversation on, accepting that this interview was a required courtesy – sympathy offered, help extended – but there seemed little point or purpose.

  ‘I told you it didn’t work …’ started Newton, but then, quickly, said: ‘The flu research, sure. We’re really under the gun on this one. You think you’re going to be able to help?’

  ‘Flu – animal and human – is viral, that’s how it’s medically feasible for those viruses to mutate into one killer strain,’ said Parnell. ‘And viruses have genes we can isolate and experiment with. Which isn’t a promise for any sort of discovery, just my agreeing with you and Russell Benn that it’s well within the pharmacogenomics discipline.’

  ‘You work closely with Russ,’ urged Newton.

  ‘I plan to.’

  ‘Remember everything I said,’ insisted Newton. ‘Don’t forget Dubette’s family orientation.’

  ‘I won’t,’ undertook Parnell.

  Kathy Richardson was waiting for his return, jotting pad in hand, to tell him Barbara Spacey wanted to see him.

  He said: ‘Call her back and say thanks but I don’t want – or need – to see her.’

  ‘She said you’d say that.’

  ‘Makes her good at her job,’ said Parnell. ‘Call her.’

  It wasn’t until he recovered the papers that he’d abandoned on the Monday morning that Parnell properly recalled what he had been working on, the compilation of their separate cancer file, which he’d been in the process of subdividing, eventually to establish a working routine when it became a project for the entire department. Now there was another more urgent project, one it was important they devoted as much of their undivided attention to as possible, which meant the cancer undertaking would have to be further postponed. But then it always had been one for the future, when they had exhausted all the immediate examination of possible Dubette updates. He’d attach himself to the flu research, Parnell decided. It was the first specific demand that had been directed at them, so it was right – would be expected – that he should lead it, as head of the department. Parnell felt a flicker of anticipation: it would, in many ways, be getting back to the pure research he’d known on the genome project in England.

  Parnell was reassembling the cancer folder, to give to Kathy Richardson to file, when there was a sharp rap at the door just ahead of the secretary’s warning, and the shawled and long-skirted figure of Barbara Spacey surged into his office like a ship under full sail.

  The psychologist said: ‘You didn’t want to see me but I wanted to see you.’

  ‘And Dwight Newton can see us both if he bothers to look, so you can’t smoke.’

  ‘See the sacrifice I’m making!’

  ‘You needn’t. I’ve banned the remark from the department but for just one last time I’m OK and I don’t need counselling.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because I do.’ Child-talk, he recognized.

  ‘Your fiancée just got killed and you got charged with it and there’s an FBI terrorism investigation linked to an obvious murder, and you’re telling me you feel fine and just want to get on with the job?’

  ‘No. I’m telling you I feel anything but fine, because how could I feel fine after what’s happened, and I want the bastards who did it caught. But that I’m not suffering any psychological problem. But if I begin to think that I am, I’ll come back to you, OK?’ How often, too often, that word, those two letters, entered every conversation!

  Barbara Spacey pulled a chair forward, to be closer to Parnell, as she had been at their previous session, and slumped into it. The voluminous clothes concealed her like an enveloping curtain, but beneath the folds Parnell knew she would be overlapping the seat.

  She said: ‘Sorry buddy. Company instructions. Every care for someone in distress. They want another assessment.’

  ‘I’m not in …’ started Parnell and stopped, his mind focused, far ahead of this conversation. ‘Two assessments?’

  The you-know-how-it-is movement ruffled Barbara Spacey’s layers of clothes like feathers. ‘You really want to discuss – to try to discuss – the circumstances? Let’s give everyone a break here! How do families look after families?’

  ‘Most of the time by not smothering each other.’

  ‘No, that’s a cop-out. You realize how much support Dubette are offering?’

  ‘I won’t be smothered! The way it’s going, you’ll know – Dubette will know – more about me than I know about myself.’

  ‘Isn’t that what families do?’ persisted the woman. Her hands were twitching over her handbag, which Parnell guessed contained her cigarettes.

  ‘No, that’s smothering, as I already told you.’

  ‘I’ve got to do what I’ve got to do,’ said the woman. ‘Give me a break, OK?’

  To co-operate would be the quickest way to get rid of the psychologist, Parnell realized. ‘OK.’

  ‘Tell me how you feel?’

  ‘I already told you.’

  ‘Tell me again.’

  ‘Confused.’

  ‘Frightened?’

  Parnell examined the question. ‘No, I don’t feel frightened. I suppose I should, but at this moment I don’t.’

  ‘Why not? You’re right, you should.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You think you can solve it, all by yourself?’

  Parnell hesitated again. ‘No, of course I don’t think that! I’m a scientist, not a detective.’

  ‘But you’ve thought about it, solving it by yourself, exacting your own justice maybe?’

  Barbara Spacey’s prescience was unnerving. ‘Sure I’ve thought about it! Wouldn’t anyone?’

  ‘I’m glad you’re being honest.’

  ‘How can you tell?’

  ‘We did this before, remember?’

  Parnell didn’t. ‘Is that it?’

  ‘I think so.’ Her hands were actually moving, scratching at her handbag.

  ‘Do I get a copy, like before?’

  ‘It’s the law,’ she reminded him.

  ‘Like not smoking?’

  ‘What’s your point?’

  ‘What’s your verdict?’

  Barbara Spacey smiled. ‘That confirms it.’

  ‘What the hell’s that mean?’

  ‘What I was deciding.’

  ‘You ducking my question?’

  The psychologist shook her head. ‘You’re not so much of the asshole that you were before.’

  For several moments Parnell stared at her across the desk, stunned. At last he said: ‘So, what’s that make me now?’

  ‘That’s the mystery,’ admitted Barbara Spacey. ‘I don’tknow.’

  From behind the dividing glass between the two offices, Kathy Richardson was gesturing towards the telephone. To the psychologist, Parnell said: ‘Maybe you’ll never know. I analyse mysteries. I don’t want to have it happen to me.’

  Barbara Spacey smiled. ‘I’ve got to go. I’m dying for a cigarette.’

  Kathy Richardson was at the door, waiting to enter, as the psychologist left. The secretary said: ‘The FBI want a meet with you tomorrow, wherever you want. They’re suggesting ten o’clock.’

  ‘Tell them ten o’clock’s fine. At the Washington field office, to save him coming all the way out here.’

  Fifteen

  But for the fact that there was no facial resemblance – which didn’t alter Parnell’s immediate impression – the two men confronting him in the FBI’s Washington field office could have been twins. They were both of the same indeterminate height and build and wore their mousy hair short an
d neatly parted to the left. The spectacles were rimless, the style minimal, their faces unlined by apparent worry or concentration. They didn’t smile, either. The suits were grey, the faint check difficult to detect, the ties matching but subdued red. Parnell guessed the identical pins in their lapels represented a college fraternity. Howard Dingley, his seniority marked by his being behind the uncluttered desk, wore a signet ring on the little finger of his left hand. His partner, David Benton, didn’t. Instead a copper rheumatism-preventing bracelet protruded slightly from beneath the left arm of his double-cuffed shirt.

  Dingley said: ‘We’ve got ourselves a very high-profile investigation here, Mr Parnell – high-profile because of what was attempted against you after Ms Lang’s murder. You any idea how lucky you were that Ms Lang made that call?’

  ‘No, I don’t suppose I have, not fully,’ admitted Parnell. ‘I’m still trying to understand what the hell’s going on.’ There was the familiar buzz-saw sound to Ms.

  ‘That’s what we’re trying to do. Have to do,’ said Benton.

  ‘And why you’re the key to everything,’ said Dingley.

  Predictably the accents matched, clipped, in-a-hurry East Coast, which Parnell believed he could already isolate – guess at least – from the more leisurely Midwest or West Coast. ‘That’s why I’m here, to do all – everything – I can do to help.’

  ‘That’s what we wanted to hear,’ said Benton. ‘Tell us about AF209.’

  ‘There’s nothing to tell,’ said Parnell. ‘I don’t know what it was doing in Rebecca’s bag. Her job was to liaise with Dubette’s overseas subsidiaries. There are a lot. It has to be something to do with that: a flight on which a shipment came in.’

  ‘A particular flight which both your GCHQ and our National Security Agency picked up while listening to suspected terrorist chatter,’ said Dingley. ‘As well as French security. Which was why it was cancelled four times.’

  ‘I know. I can’t help you,’ said Parnell.

  ‘How do you know?’ seized Benton.