Dead End

by Brian Freemantle

  ‘They are,’ said Dingley. ‘They’re just here, by court order, to stop anyone who isn’t authorized going near the place.’

  ‘That’s going to piss them off.’

  ‘It can’t piss them off any more than they already are.’

  ‘So, how do you know they’re doing their job?’ demanded Jackson.

  ‘We got temporary – but inconspicuous – CCTV in every room. And external, in every direction. And a tap on the telephone.’

  ‘You didn’t tell us that,’ complained Jackson.

  ‘I’ve got all the court orders,’ said Pullinger.

  ‘We should have been told!’ insisted the other lawyer.

  ‘The house isn’t your jurisdiction,’ said Pullinger.

  ‘Ed, it’s our co-operation you’re asking for. You’re not doing a lot to encourage it,’ warned Jackson.

  The three FBI men began to move off towards the house but Jackson didn’t move, keeping Parnell with him. Softly he said: ‘You want to go through with it?’

  ‘Don’t you think I should?’

  ‘I don’t think we should look as if we’re accepting it.’

  ‘Your call,’ said Parnell.

  The others had stopped, about ten yards away. Pullinger shouted: ‘Is there a problem?’

  ‘We can’t hear you,’ Jackson yelled back.

  There was a hesitation before the three men walked back. Pullinger said: ‘I asked if there was a problem?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jackson. ‘We going to operate on level ground or we going to fuck about?’

  ‘You want me to say sorry?’ asked Pullinger.

  ‘I want you to do it right, like we’re doing it right.’

  ‘You’ve made your point. I’ve taken it,’ said Pullinger. ‘Shall we go on inside?’

  Jackson held them for another moment or two before moving towards the house, bringing the rest with him. It was Dingley who opened the door, standing back for Parnell to go in first. The last time – when? he thought, unable to remember – had been with Rebecca, hurrying in ahead of him, carrying the lightest of the grocery shopping, him the packhorse behind, she talking as she always talked, butterflying from point to point, never properly, fully, finishing what she was saying before fluttering to something else, queen of her own castle, self-proclaimed queen of his, dropping the bags, gesturing where she wanted him to drop his, turning on lights, music, opening windows, hurrying him back to the car for what they hadn’t been able to bring in the first time. No, he thought suddenly, moving through the living room into the kitchen. Rebecca hadn’t been neat and tidy. Organized, certainly, written-out shopping lists for stores and markets listed in convenient order, but not like this, not as if the house had been made ready, prepared, for a prospective buyer. In quick recollection he looked into the double sink, then the empty dishwasher and finally to the coffee pot, opening it to confirm the filter chamber was clean.

  ‘What?’ asked Benton.

  ‘On the Sunday morning, when Rebecca came to pick me up,’ remembered Parnell. ‘I asked her if she wanted coffee, because I was just making some. She said she’d already had some. And juice. There’s no cups or glasses …’

  ‘And the coffee pot’s empty and clean,’ Dingley accepted.

  Parnell led the way into the den, dominated by the television and music system and saw the regimented books and the orderly magazine arrangement and then up to the bedrooms – the bedroom he and Rebecca had occupied and loved in and partially discovered each other in first – and made himself look around it and open and close drawers, although he didn’t know now what for, and then he looked around the other two bedrooms, knowing even less what he was supposed to find out of place – or, rather, wrongly in place, before he retreated downstairs.

  ‘Well?’ demanded Dingley.

  ‘It’s an impression,’ said Parnell. ‘That’s all it can be.’

  ‘That’s all we’re asking for.’

  ‘No,’ said Parnell. ‘It’s not right. Doesn’t feel right. That’s all I can say. This doesn’t look, feel, like the house that Rebecca left that Sunday morning to pick me up …’ He stopped, at another recollection. ‘That’s why the coffee pot’s wrong … no cup in the washer. She was late, said we had a drive to get where we were going – she wouldn’t tell me where we were going – in time. It was in time to get a table, for lunch, although she wouldn’t tell me that, either. If she was late, in a hurry, she wouldn’t have cleared away, would she?’

  ‘Not unless she was particularly fastidious,’ said Benton.

  ‘Rebecca wasn’t particularly fastidious,’ said Parnell.

  ‘Then no, she wouldn’t.’ agreed Dingley.

  ‘Where’s this all got us?’ demanded Jackson.

  ‘We don’t know, not yet,’ said Pullinger. ‘We’re looking forward to something we can understand that does get us somewhere.’

  Once more it was pointlessly too late for Parnell to drive out to McLean. He telephoned from the apartment that he would be in the following morning before going out again to shop uninterestedly for essentials, bread and milk and packaged meals he could heat in seconds in the microwave. He also, just as uninterestedly, bought three litre-sized bottles of screw-topped red wine, which he thought was as much as he could carry. On his way back to the apartment he saw one man whom he thought might be watching him, but there wasn’t any longer a stomach lurch. Before he reached him the downtown bus arrived and the man got on it.

  Back in the apartment Parnell unpacked and opened one of the bottles of wine, slumping with the glass between his cupped hands, reviewing the day. He hadn’t done well – he had, in fact, been stupid, losing his temper. Too late now, for self-recrimination. He’d got it wrong, again, and deserved Jackson’s rebuke, and next time he’d try to remember and behave better. He had little doubt there would be a next time: maybe even a time after that. Bethesda had disorientated him, although not in the way Jackson suggested the FBI agents had expected him to be disorientated. He hadn’t suddenly collapsed, said anything or done anything, on being somewhere where he’d been with Rebecca, to indicate any guilt or awareness of something he hadn’t told the investigators. The disorientation had actually been far deeper than any of them had imagined. On the near-wordless return to Washington, Parnell had confronted a truth he hadn’t wanted to admit to himself, let alone to anyone else. He didn’t think he’d loved Rebecca. He had feelings, of course – maybe, in time, he would even have come to love her, although that was the most scourging of uncertainties. But not that Sunday when he’d unthinkingly talked of their living together. And not now, not ever. So, he had a lie to live, pitied by the few who knew him here, as someone who’d lost a woman whom he’d planned to marry. How difficult, he wondered, would that be to live with? Something else he didn’t know, like so much else.

  He jumped, startled, at the telephone, recognizing his mother’s voice as soon as he’d answered. ‘What’s going on?’ she demanded at once.

  ‘You know. I told you. It’s all right.’

  ‘It’s not all right! I’ve been questioned. So have people at Cambridge.’

  ‘What!’ Some of Parnell’s wine spilled, with the urgency with which he came up out of his chair.

  ‘Two Americans. FBI, from the London embassy. They wanted to know if you were political. If you belonged to any organizations. That’s what they asked the people at Cambridge. I’ve had two calls, one from Alex Bell, your old tutor. Everyone here is worried about you.’

  ‘There’s nothing to worry about. It’s an unusual investigation.’

  ‘I want to come out.’

  ‘No,’ refused Parnell. ‘It’s not necessary and I don’t want you to.’ If he were a target, so would she be, he supposed.

  ‘Who’s looking after you?’

  ‘I’m looking after myself, very well.’

  ‘Why not come back? Quit and come back?’

  ‘That isn’t a question I thought I’d hear you ask. At this stage of the enquiry I doubt I�
�d be allowed to leave the country anyway. And I don’t want – or intend – to leave the country.’

  ‘There was an attempt to frame you once. How do you know it won’t happen again? Succeed this time?’

  ‘Because it won’t. I’ve got a good lawyer and I’m not going to be framed.’

  ‘I didn’t like being questioned as I was, as if you were still a suspect or in some way involved in terrorism.’

  ‘Is that what they talked about, terrorism?’

  ‘Of course it was! Asked about foreign countries you’d visited, how long you’d stayed there. That’s what they asked everyone else here, the same questions.’

  ‘I’m sorry. Call me back, with the names of everyone who was bothered. I’ll call them and apologize. And I’m sorry to you, too. I didn’t imagine it would come to that.’

  ‘They’re hysterical, about terrorism.’

  ‘Everybody is.’

  ‘Not everybody,’ she contradicted. ‘You want anything? Money?’

  ‘No, thank you.’

  ‘You’ll tell me if you do.’

  ‘Yes,’ lied Parnell.

  ‘Call me. I want you to call me every day.’

  ‘Not every day, Mother. Often.’

  ‘I want your lawyer’s name and contact numbers. Just in case.’

  ‘Just in case of what?’

  ‘Just in case.’

  Nineteen

  It was a welcome change for Dwight Newton to enter the Dubette corporate building on Wall Street at the same time as everyone else and take a public elevator to the executive floor. He’d been able to catch a later shuttle, too, but he’d still allowed himself time for waffles and maple syrup, unsure if the emergency meeting of the parent board and its subsidiaries would run over lunch time. He entered Edward C. Grant’s office through the secretarial cordon, to smiles and insistences it was good to see him again. The moment Newton was inside, without any greeting from behind his enormous desk, Grant demanded: ‘Bring me up to date. I need to know everything!’

  The other man was frightened, Newton guessed, enjoying the thought. Prepared, having even made himself prompt notes to read on the plane from Washington, the research vice president recounted his encounter with the FBI agents, for once without any interruption from Grant.

  ‘The lawyers have to intervene to prevent any awkward questions?’

  ‘No,’ said Newton. He’d have to disclose the problem, but not this early.

  ‘That’s good. Right they should have been there but we don’t want to give the impression of having anything to hide.’

  ‘I thought we’d decided, you and I, that we didn’t have anything to hide?’ Newton actually felt superior to Grant and he enjoyed that, too.

  ‘What about that godamned flight number?’ Grant ignored him.

  ‘They didn’t ask.’

  ‘That’s good, as well,’ nodded Grant. ‘How did it go with the others?’

  The upset wasn’t far away, accepted Newton. ‘We got a bit out of synch there.’

  ‘What do you mean, out of synch?’ The concern was immediate.

  ‘The way they set out their interview request was to see me first, then Russell Benn and after him Harry Johnson. That’s how I arranged it, to have the lawyers with me, waiting, before going on to Russell’s interview and after that to Harry’s. But they saw Harry first.’

  ‘Alone!’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Shit!’

  ‘I think it’s all right.’

  ‘It’d sure as hell better be! I want it – all of it – in every little detail!’

  ‘Harry’s a former Metro DC officer.’

  ‘I know that. Do they?’

  ‘They didn’t ask. He didn’t tell them.’

  ‘What did they ask?’

  ‘If AF209 ever carried anything addressed to Dubette. Which it didn’t, did it?’

  Grant stared across his desk, momentarily unspeaking. Then: ‘Baldwin think that’s OK?’

  ‘I haven’t talked it through with him.’ Because I don’t want to be complicit, Newton thought.

  ‘No, perhaps not. What do you think?’

  ‘I’m a scientist, not a lawyer,’ refused Newton.

  Grant stirred, irritably. ‘What’s Johnson say, from his police experience?’

  ‘That he answered all their questions completely honestly – that that’s how it could be argued in court, if it ever got to a court – that he was asked a specific question to which he provided a specific answer,’ said Newton.

  Grant remained unmoving, his face fixed. With witch-doctor clairvoyance, he said: ‘What else?’

  ‘He didn’t tell them anything about the phone-tapping.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘They didn’t ask, so he didn’t offer. His interpretation of the law, you answer the questions you’re asked, not those that you’re not asked.’

  ‘He shouldn’t have been left by himself.’

  ‘It wasn’t intended he should be left by himself! I told you how it happened!’

  ‘He’s not to be alone if the FBI come back to him.’

  ‘I know that! He won’t be. If there’s another approach, he’s to tell me before it happens and we’ll get the attorneys back, with Baldwin.’

  ‘Did Johnson set the tap up by himself?’

  ‘He says so – says he learned to do it when he was with the police, and that he didn’t need help, from any electronics guys.’

  ‘The switchboard must have known something!’

  ‘It’s automated. Just a few supervisory staff and Johnson says it was easy to use his security authority to get by them and work unobserved.’

  ‘It still in place?’

  ‘I wanted your views, today.’

  ‘Take it off. Get rid of it. Today, as soon as you get back.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘We got some frayed edges,’ decided the president. ‘Too many frayed edges. You seen the Journal?’

  He should have bought the Wall Street Journal at the airport, Newton immediately realized. A bad mistake. ‘I didn’t have time.’

  ‘They’ve picked up on today’s meeting. We’ve dropped three points already.’

  Your problem, not mine, thought Newton. ‘We had to be affected, in the circumstances.’

  ‘We’ve got to lose this terrorism tag. I don’t want this to become a mess.’

  ‘I don’t see why it should. Dubette hasn’t done anything wrong – doesn’t have any skeletons in any closets, does it?’

  ‘You know what I mean,’ said Grant, carelessly.

  ‘No, I’m not sure that I do.’ Newton thought he’d made that refusal before. He wondered how many more times he was going to have to say it again. He became aware how creased, unkempt, Grant’s suit appeared to be. Newton was glad he’d had his pressed.

  The boardroom, normally over-large, was today inadequate for its intended function of reassuring unsettled boards. The cause was the electronic paraphernalia needed to link every other subsidiary board by satellite on to a wall-dominating screen, in many cases in what was the middle of their nights or early mornings. Each location was served by three cameras, the primary to provide a single, encompassing view of each and every board composition, the others to enable split-screen close-ups, against that general view, of individual speakers. To make that visually possible, none was able to sit, in the normal way, around a complete table, but had to be in a horseshoe, each chief executive at its middle, Edwin C. Grant heading the assembly – and the global gathering – from New York. Irrationally – but even more unfittingly – Dwight Newton had a mental image of the Last Supper, even before noticing that, including himself in New York, there were a total of thirteen men. He refused to extend the Judas reflection.

  The worldwide gathering began, oddly, with the unnecessary introductions of individual boards and each member from each country. That done, the master camera came back upon Grant. They were, said the president, caught up in a situation beyond their control. The
tragic death of a valued member of their headquarters staff was upsetting enough – the repercussions of her having in her possession the number of an Air France flight which had been the subject of a terrorist alert was severely affecting the company. Already, that morning, the stock was down three points on the Dow Jones after this conference had been publicized, which brought to a twelve-point drop the total loss since Rebecca Lang’s killing and the discovery of the flight details. Certain people at McLean were co-operating fully with the FBI investigation. The parent board hoped for an early and successful conclusion of that investigation, until which time they had reluctantly to expect Dubette to be the subject of unsubstantiated speculation. To restrict that as much as possible – and by so doing limit any further stock-market uncertainty – the parent board’s lawyers were retaining additional attorneys to initiate immediate action against publication of any material judged malicious or likely adversely to affect the reputation of the company. There was going to be a full media release at the end of today’s meeting, in which this precaution was going to feature prominently, as a warning to the media. The parent board wanted that release simultaneously issued by each subsidiary. Additionally, legal teams were to be established by each overseas board he was addressing, to take similar action against any confidence-damaging publication in their respective countries.

  One by one the chief executives of the subsidiaries recounted the individual effects upon them of what publicity there had already been. There had been stock-slippage in England, Germany, France and Japan. There had been no drop so far in Italy, Spain or Australia. Anti-terrorist police or agencies had examined company laboratories in England, Germany and France. It was chief executive Henri Saby who spoke from Paris. Newton only just stopped himself physically coming forward, and thought he detected a similar held-back shift from Grant. The thinning-haired, urbane Saby appeared quite relaxed on the satellite link, the superbly cut grey suit a sharp contrast to that of the president. In addition to scientifically examining everything in their laboratory, French anti-terrorism officers had personally questioned him about the AF209 flight listing being in Rebecca Lang’s possession. Like everyone at Dubette headquarters, he had been unable to explain it but had assured the investigators of his full co-operation on any future developments.