Shadowplay

by Norman Hartley

  ‘Was the problem that he didn’t want anyone to know he had been in Chad, Sally?’

  ‘It had to be,’ she said. ‘But it was so silly. No one would think anything about a stupid mistake of fourteen dollars.’

  ‘Do you remember the date?’

  ‘July 1977. But I don’t remember the day.’

  ‘Sally, I’m grateful,’ I said, ‘and I’m sorry about the fuss. If you want a reference or a job, you can have either. I’ll see to it personally. Thanks and have a good trip.’

  Cox helped Jopling operate the VDU and at first there were no clues. The stories all related to the guerrilla fighting in the north, then Seagull said suddenly: ‘Testing ground. That was the year I left the Institute. The Black Eagle consortium was going to lose its testing ground in Libya. They were trying to get into Zaire; maybe they were also trying to get into Chad.’

  ‘It would be Chad,’ I said. ‘It’s one of our few weak spots. Our routine coverage is lousy; we only staff for revolutions and big stuff.’

  I called Robert Messenet, the director of the Agence France Presse in Paris, and passed the problem to him. I didn’t tell him why—only that it was personal and not news—and asked him for the name of the correspondent they had had in Chad during that period. He called back ten minutes later. The man, Christian Brovelli, had resigned and now worked for ORTF. Four more calls and we traced him to the Rome bureau. He was at lunch but he had left a contact number. After that, we really started to roll because Seagull had guessed right: a mission from the Black Eagle consortium had taken a look at Chad. They wanted a site for the early tests and Chad had the right combination of forest and desert. But it had fallen through and they’d signed a deal with Zaire instead.

  We still had a long way to go, but Brovelli gave us ten names: businessmen, journalists, and tradesmen who knew the Chad scene well at that period. It took two hours for Marge to find them all, and one—a retired hotelier called Andre Buisson—had the piece we wanted. He had run the Hotel des Chasses in Ndjamena in 1977 and he remembered Paul Sellinger and his meeting with the Black Eagle people. At first, he was reluctant to name any consortium members, but eventually he gave us two, and at that point Nick Jopling took over. He stopped playing journalist and used the magic switchboard to plug into his private accountancy network. As a journalist, Nick was an intelligent dilettante who had observed professionals a long time; but as an accountant he was a wizard, and his network of contacts spread far out of London to all five continents. But that didn’t worry Marge, who had the magician’s gift of turning night into day. She simply ignored time zones. If a respondent growled that it was five o’clock in the morning in Sydney, she didn’t argue. She knew it was five o’clock; she had banks of clocks showing the world’s time zones right over her switchboard. She simply gave them eight seconds to wake up and said, cheerily, ‘Thank you,’ and connected the call.

  I made Nick work alone, which took longer, but there were still early breakthroughs. Nick was told by a friend in Bonn that he ought to look at the share prices of the companies connected with the consortium over the past two weeks. Nick looked and wasn’t certain, so he called in Joss Myers in the Economic Division. Myers decided that there was something wrong. Not a striking thing: the companies had been depressed after the successful firing of Starburst, but not quite as much as should have been expected. What was bolstering confidence in them? Nick looked at the possible sources of funds and slowly, fragment by fragment, the picture came together.

  At one point Pike took a break from his position at Jopling’s elbow and as he drank a cup of coffee, he said admiringly, ‘You never can tell, can you? For a man who collects china horses, that’s one helluva rough operator.’

  Nick almost purred at the compliment and I thought, Yes, it’s true. There’s a psychopath lurking in all of us. The little man of violence waiting for an excuse to have his day.

  This was accountant’s violence and Nick knew the weaknesses and pressure points of his colleagues as surely as any martial-arts expert. In his gentle, educated voice, he blackmailed, threatened, and cajoled. Cox fetched and carried data from the Economic Division and finally, Nick looked up and said, ‘Well, I think we have it. We can’t prove it all yet. But I think we have the picture.’

  I called Ryder. When he arrived, I left the briefing to Nick; it was his moment, and I gave him my chair and stood behind him as he arranged his pages of neat handwritten notes on the table in front of him.

  He coughed, and said, ‘I admit I’m a bit in awe. I detest everything Paul Sellinger stands for, but I have to admire his artistry in my field. It’s a masterpiece. It really is. A delicate, intricate masterpiece.’

  As he began to outline it, I remembered Ryder’s phrase: ‘People like the Sellingers walk the world believing they are giants.’ The scheme was monstrous in its arrogance; it took no account of East or West, or nations, or politics, or the aspirations or the safety of peoples. It was, quite simply, a project for profit and revenge. Revenge on the brother whose ascendancy he resented came with the destruction of Starburst, the decline of Sellinger Defense Industries, and the eclipse of Robert’s political career. That was half of the mosaic; the other was the delicate, subtle insinuation of funds into the companies connected with the Black Eagle consortium without disturbing the market.

  ‘It really is an astonishingly difficult technical exercise,’ Jopling said. ‘With Starburst in the ascendancy, the Black Eagle group shares fall. It’s a perfect situation for buying in with insider knowledge—in this case the knowledge that Starburst is heading for cancellation. But if there’s even the tiniest whisper that someone is moving in money, the word will amplify instantly: Why? What’s happening? Who knows something we don’t know? Sellinger’s got about twelve groups acting for him as intermediaries and straw men; but he goes about it so obliquely, it really has style.’

  Nick picked up one of his pages of notes. ‘This one is typical. When the Starburst test firing at Fort Benedict was declared a success, one of the companies badly hit was the firm manufacturing the lightweight plastic for Black Eagle. Their shares slipped badly. Paul could have made a killing. Instead, he waited to see how the plastic company was planning its own survival. They chose diversification and announced plans to merge part of their operations with another firm outside the defense field. Paul used that piece of news as a cover and bought in quickly, so it looked as though the shares were responding to a well-thought-out self-rescue operation. One of his groups is now close to a majority holding.’

  When he had finished his summary, it was obvious that Sellinger had succeeded almost perfectly: the share movements had been only fractionally uncharacteristic, but thanks to Jopling’s perceptiveness and his network of contacts, we had enough to be confident.

  I’d been listening very carefully to Nick’s briefing and as he talked I’d been making a few notes on my own. When he’d finished, I said, ‘Nick, we’re still one stage short. Do you think you can take it a bit further?’

  Pike let out a chuckle. ‘Christ, mister, you really want jam on it, don’t you.’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said, ‘but knowing what Paul’s doing is beautiful. The question is, how do we stop him?’

  ‘Expose him,’ Pike said.

  ‘Not so easy,’ I said. ‘What would happen, Nick, if we shouted this from the housetops?’

  ‘The evidence would disappear like summer snow. The syndicates would break up and there’d be so much shuffling of paper you’d never know who bought what from whom, and you’d probably be accused of slandering Sellinger out of personal hatred.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Ryder said. ‘The rest of the scheme couldn’t be proved either. We know what Paul plans to do, but he hasn’t actually done anything. He hasn’t leaked any information about Starburst to the Soviets. Dammit, he hasn’t personally even bought any Black Eagle shares. In his own name, that is.’

  ‘I agree,’ I said. ‘I think Paul planned to move very slowly. I think he has a str
ictly long-term game plan. If I had to stick my neck out, I’d say it went something like this: I think he intended to set me up as a traitor, with Jennifer as my contact, then have us both killed so we couldn’t disprove it. When he failed to get us in St. Tropez, he put Nancy up as next in line. The next step was to leak the information and have the Soviets make it so widely known that the Starburst program would have to be canceled as useless.

  ‘But I don’t think Paul would have moved in with Black Eagle. I think he’d have stayed within the bosom of the Sellinger family and consoled poor Robert for his lost political base and, probably, his political career. I think he’d have helped pick up the pieces within the Sellinger Corporation and gradually worked his way toward Black Eagle. You can imagine the rhetoric a year from now: The West needs a defense system; Black Eagle is the obvious choice and it’s got support in Europe already. With an operator like Paul, I wouldn’t put it past him to arrange a merger—Sellinger Defense Industries with the Black Eagle Consortium—he’d have enough clout in the consortium to rig it any way he wanted it. Three years from now what would you have? Another missile program. Black Eagle is ready—bigger, better, more beautiful than Starburst. The West is safe for another decade. Only this time it’s Paul at the top, not Robert.’

  Ryder grunted. ‘John, I have to give you top marks. Now do you want to try for the grand prize and tell me how we stop him?’

  ‘Not by a simple exposé,’ I said. ‘Nick’s right. He’d just fold his tents and steal away. But there has to be leverage against him, if only from inside his own family.’

  ‘How do you mean?’ Ryder said.

  ‘If Paul has bought himself far enough into the Black Eagle consortium to be close to indirect control, he can’t have been using just his own personal fortune. He must have been using Family money, at least as collateral.’

  ‘That takes a bit of nerve,’ Jopling said. ‘But I agree. It has to be.’

  ‘So how would it be if we went to the key bankers and brokers in the scheme and put the word out that he’s not using authorized funds? Threaten them with legal complications? Demand a freeze?’

  ‘It would be fine,’ Nick said, ‘except that I couldn’t pinpoint the key people for you. I could make a few guesses. But no more.’

  ‘Could anyone?’

  ‘Neville Farmer could probably make the best guess, but he wouldn’t do it.’

  Farmer was the head of the World News Economic Services, but he had come from Global and he was a committed Sellinger man who had strongly opposed my appointment.

  ‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘Neville knows Paul’s mind inside out but he wouldn’t help, and if we approached him, he’d run straight to Paul.’

  ‘So what do you propose?’ Ryder said. He grinned. ‘Since you haven’t done half bad since you took control of your own destiny, as you called it, do you have any suggestions?’

  I grinned. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I have one very specific one. The great principle of American business is always try to go to the top man. Nick, I think it’s time you booked yourself a seat on the Concorde and went and had a talk with Mr. Jacob Sellinger to let him know what his son is up to.’

  21

  Meanwhile, Paul proceeded as though his only purpose in life were to oust me as head of World News. Even I had to admire his cool. He must have known he was in the middle of a major crisis. He knew I was alive and that Nancy probably was, too. The potential usefulness of the Dahran file was fading rapidly and though he couldn’t have known how much we’d found out already about his financial dealings, he must have realized from the activity inside World News that I was pulling out every stop.

  But he behaved as though I were the one on the run and he had only to press home for his advantage.

  He stayed at Samman’s and avoided any direct contact with the World News building, but I found out how active he had been as soon as I went back to my office.

  My secretary had been told not to disturb me in the annex, but when I came out she was looking worried.

  ‘Lord Branston’s been trying to reach you,’ she said. ‘Then he tried Mr. Jopling. Then you again. When I said you were both tied up, he said one of you should contact him immediately. He’ll be in his office for the rest of the afternoon, then he’ll be dining at the Braganza in Soho. He sounded very severe,’ she added. ‘Not friendly as he usually is.’

  ‘Nick, find out what that’s all about,’ I said. ‘I want a word with Haycroft about the union negotiations.’

  But I didn’t get as far as seeing Haycroft.

  I was in my office, preparing a list of negotiating options, when Cox came in with Pike.

  ‘Chief. More trouble,’ he said. ‘Wint’s been at it again. He’s called the Mirror and the Sun and told them he has more stuff about the Allenby scandal. Says he has a guest list for the party which he’ll sell to the highest bidder.’

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘We’ll just see what Branston’s up to, then I’ll deal with Mr. Wint personally.’

  Nick came back and he looked downcast.

  ‘Paul’s been very busy,’ he said. ‘I think he’s bought Branston.’

  ‘Nick, how the fuck can you buy someone who already owns half of London.’

  ‘With a seat on the board of the New York Metropolitan Opera. Branston’s life ambition. I couldn’t get Howard right away so I talked to someone I know in his organization. When I did get Howard, he gave me the complete cold treatment. Said he’d considered the matter carefully and decided there was no point in arranging a meeting with you. He said evidence like that photograph couldn’t be faked, it simply wasn’t possible. He felt he had no choice but to argue strongly for your resignation. He has a lot of friends on the board, most of them your friends, too. He can be very dangerous to you.’

  ‘Yes, I know. But I’ll sort out Lord bloody Branston. If he can switch his support from me for the sake of a seat on the Met board, then he has a very sharp comeuppance due to him. Cox, call Simon and Medlar, the advertising agency. The number’s on my pad. Ask for Ronald Simon, personal from me. Branston’s dining at the Braganza, so tell Simon to meet us at the Fox and Grapes in Wardour Street. Seven o’clock.’

  ‘What if he isn’t free?’

  ‘He’ll make himself free. If he argues, tell him I said it was grateful time.’ I turned to Jopling.

  ‘Nick, get your backside onto a plane and get to New York. Call me every three hours to report developments. Come through the switchboard. Marge will arrange to keep the calls private.

  ‘Jim, now that Seagull’s with us, can you spare two men?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. Put one on Branston’s tail and set the other one digging. I want everything you can get on Branston in the next few hours. Cox will help. He’ll give you everything we have from the World News side.’

  ‘What about Wint?’ Cox said. ‘The Mirror and the Sun won’t waste time starting to bid. The Mirror’s considering now. I had the tip from a friend in their features department.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I’m going to see Mr. Wint right now. I’ve had enough of that bastard, along with all the rest of Mister Paul Sellinger’s acolytes and business associates.’

  ‘Are you planning on going by yourself?’ Pike said. ‘Ryder was telling me about Wint. He sounds like a real tough boy. The SIS people sweated him hard. He wouldn’t give them anything.’

  ‘Oh yes, I know all about Mr. Wint,’ I said. ‘He has some lovely tricks. Like pretending to be drunk, then beating the hell out of some soft-bellied innocent in the Press Club, then saying later it was all a drunken mistake and he didn’t mean it. Knocked eleven teeth out of a kid from the Standard just a few weeks ago.’

  ‘You could try to buy the list,’ Jopling said tentatively. ‘If he’d accept a reasonable figure.’

  Cox laughed. ‘That’s the Nick we know and love. Even with the West in the grip of Ming the Merciless, he still wants to keep the expenses down.’

  ‘Don’t worr
y. I’m not going to pay anything, Nick,’ I said. ‘And I know what a gesture of friendship it was for you to suggest it. I’m going to deal with Mr. Wint personally. Alone. On my own responsibility.’

  Pike looked doubtful. ‘You think you can handle him alone? You’re not as young as you were and you’re a gentleman now.’

  ‘I was a gentleman,’ I said, ‘until I got finally and definitely pissed off lying bare-ass naked in a flower bed outside a French hotel being sprayed with broken glass.’

  I winked at Pike. ‘For Christ’s sake, stop being a mother hen. I had this friend in the military police who taught me never to get into fights.’ I gave a passable imitation of Pike’s growling tone. ‘When you’re dealing with a real hard man, mister, never get into a fight. Get in control.’

  Wint had an office in a warren-like building on Ludgate Hill called Allbury House which was used mainly by foreign correspondents whose organizations couldn’t afford the rents at the International Press Center, and by freelancers who just wanted a place for a phone and a typewriter.

  I had Cox check that he was there, and Pike drove me across in his Rover. He had parked at the top of Ludgate Hill and as I was getting out he tapped a large briefcase resting between his legs.

  ‘I’ve been keeping this around in case we needed it,’ he said. ‘Do you think you can make use of it?’

  Inside was a military police nightstick; it was white and highly polished to indicate it was a ‘special,’ hollowed out probably, and modified with lovingly balanced bits of lead. Seeing it brought back instantly all the horror of life as a redcap: the boredom and the brutality of depot life, the savage jokes, brass polish on the testicles, and the smell of sawdust and vomit on barroom floors during the nightly round of brawling.

  ‘No, Jim, I’ll pass,’ I said. ‘I might just kill him with it. I’ll just give him a Pike special.’

  Jim nodded. ‘How are you going to get in? There’s a security desk.’