The Devil's Breath

by Hurley, Graham

  ‘Yakov,’ he’d said, ‘Yakov Arendt.’

  The relationship had prospered. With a nudge from McVeigh, Yakov had made his number with the team’s manager. He said he lived near by. He loved football. He’d been watching the team for a while. He had a little spare time. Could he possibly help?

  Next week, he turned up in an old, much-used Nike tracksuit. The kids, cautious at first, watched him strip off. Ten minutes or so on the pitch and the job was his. He played football the way he talked, with a deceptive languor, moving sweetly over the muddy pitch, perfect ball control, perfect balance, riding tackle after tackle, finding space for himself where none existed, setting up the showier kids with passes of rare elegance. They loved him for it: the goals he enabled them to score, the way he taught them to play, out-thinking the opposition, making the ball do the work, baiting traps, inflicting defeat after defeat.

  Billy, especially, worshipped the man. At the boy’s insistent invitation, he began to come back to the flat, sharing toast and Marmite and pots of tea in front of the ancient gas fire. McVeigh liked him too, his warmth, his obvious enthusiasm, the gentle fun he made of himself, the sense of apartness he carried with him, nothing fretful, nothing heavy, just a good-humoured awareness of being slightly at odds with the rest of the world.

  After a while, he’d begun to talk a little about himself. He had a wife, Cela, back in Tel Aviv. He carried photographs of her, a small, cheerful, attractive woman in her early thirties, with huge, shadowed eyes and jet-black hair. They had a tiny apartment in Jaffa, near the old quarter. They’d been married for six years, and he missed her more and more, and one day soon, God willing, he might go back. Quite what he was doing in London, Yakov never made clear. McVeigh had his own ideas – the accent, the nationality, the look of the bloke – but he himself moved in a world where the questions always outnumbered the answers, and he respected the man’s reticence.

  Lately, high summer, the league season over, the three of them had spent a little time together, spontaneous excursions, mostly at Yakov’s suggestion. A couple of fine weekends had taken them out of London in Yakov’s car. He owned a red MGB convertible, a recent acquisition he treated with enormous pride, and he drove it fast, outside lane on the M4 overpass, Billy wedged in sideways on the tiny back seat, his huge grin partly masked by the Ray-Bans he always stole from Yakov’s jacket pocket. The last time they’d been west, a hot Sunday in late July, they’d ended up at a small village in the Thames Valley. Yakov had seemed to know the place. He’d taken them to a pub by the river. He’d ordered burger and chips for Billy, and they’d sat outside in the sunshine, watching the swans paddling by. His plate empty, Billy had drifted across to a play area where a couple of older kids were kicking listlessly at a plastic football, and the two men had sat at the table, McVeigh talking about Billy’s new school. Listening, Yakov had nodded, watching the boy make a goal with two careful piles of T-shirts. After a while, he’d looked at McVeigh.

  ‘You miss being married?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You regret being married?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You ever see your wife?’

  ‘Not properly. Not to talk to. Just …’

  McVeigh had shrugged, looking at Billy again, installed between the goal-posts. It was the first time the two men had ventured on to this kind of territory. After dozens of conversations about kids and football and the smallprint of living in London, it had seemed abruptly intimate. Yakov had smiled, saying nothing, and McVeigh had reached for his glass, swallowing the last of the beer.

  ‘Find the right woman,’ he’d said, ‘and you’re a lucky man.’

  ‘I know.’

  McVeigh had looked at him, puzzled by a new note in his voice, something unmistakably wistful, something close to regret.

  ‘I thought—’ he’d frowned ‘—you and Cela?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I thought—’ he’d shrugged, embarrassed ‘—it was all great.’

  ‘It is. That’s the problem.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It is great. Very great.’

  ‘Is … that a problem?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  McVeigh had looked at him, waiting for an answer, some kind of explanation, but Yakov had simply shaken his head, that same quiet smile, an expression of impenetrable sadness, and then he’d stood up, calling to Billy, taking the spin off the boy’s pass with a deft flick of his foot, redirecting it to one of the older youths.

  A week later, McVeigh was still brooding on the conversation, certain that Yakov had wanted to tell him something, half-convinced that he should phone up, suggest a quiet pint, just the two of them, no Billy, but in the end he’d done nothing about it, telling himself that he’d got it wrong, that the man had simply been lost for words, one too many shandies, that the moment had come and gone and meant very little.

  Until three days ago, when every newspaper in the country carried pictures of a body sprawled in a Kensington street. One leg was in the gutter, and the head was at an odd angle, but the half-smile on the man’s face gave the lie to the Israeli Embassy’s careful evasions. Yakov Arendt. The wizard in the Nike track-suit. The Sunday drinker with something on his mind.

  McVeigh shuddered and turned over, shutting his eyes again. He had yet to break the news to Billy. And still, even now, he hadn’t got a clue how to do it.

  *

  The incident at the Manhattan Plaza Hotel was still in the hands of the New York Police Department when the American Embassy in Amman, Jordan, received a small brown envelope from a youth on a motor-cycle. The youth left no name and offered no further point of contact. The envelope was addressed, in typescript, to the President of the United States.

  It was opened by one of the Embassy’s senior attachés. He read the two typed paragraphs twice and then reached for the phone. Halfway through dialling he put the phone down and ran upstairs to the Ambassador’s office. The Ambassador, he knew, had a crisis meeting scheduled for noon. The meeting was to include top members of the Jordanian administration and a cousin of the King. Since the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, two weeks back, there’d been lots of crisis meetings. It was 11.45.

  The Ambassador read the note, shook his head, read it again. An active service unit had entered the United States. They were presently established somewhere on the East Coast. Soon they would be moving to New York. They were under Headquarters Command. They had been training for their mission for many months. Their mission would answer American aggression in the Gulf. It would remind US citizens that war, if it came, would be total. Total war included the indiscriminate, unannounced use of chemical weapons. A further communiqué would follow. The note was signed ‘The Martyrs of 7th June’.

  Encrypted at the highest security classification, the contents of the note were on a desk in Washington, DC before the first of the Ambassador’s guests drove in through the Embassy gates. The gates, recently installed against possible kamikaze attacks, were blast-proof and electronically controlled. The attaché who’d first read the note watched them swing shut behind the big limousine. Ironic, he thought, remembering the terrible threat behind the letter’s last paragraph. One hundred and ninety thousand dollars’ worth of hi-tech engineering. And it wouldn’t make a cent’s worth of difference.

  *

  In Washington, the note from Amman was preserved – eyes only – until the arrival of the named addressee. Normally Sullivan was at his desk in the West Wing of the White House by 7 a.m. On this particular Tuesday, after a crippling day in London and an overnight flight back, he was two hours late.

  Sullivan hung his coat on the back of the door and sank into the big leather chair behind the desk. An early shower had caught him as he stepped out of the car. His hair was still wet. He gazed down at the note without reading it. Impending war, as he was beginning to understand, played havoc with the ageing process. Already, after a fortnight of crisis management, of back-to-back meetings
and helicopter dashes to Andrews Air Force Base, he felt several hundred years old. His wife, as concerned and patriotic as the next administration spouse, was beginning to make impatient noises about nuclear strikes, an eye for an eye, the importance of getting the whole damn thing buttoned up before her precious husband succumbed to the incessant deadlines and self-destructed. Who knows? he thought. Had Saddam Hussein kept his hands off Kuwait, they might even now be back-packing along the more remote Yosemite trails, three weeks of wilderness they’d been promising each other for nearly two years, a chance – at last – to shed a little of the bulk that seemed to come with the job. Some hope.

  He reached for the note and read it. Lifting the phone, he checked with the decrypt office in the basement of the Executive Office Building across the street. He made another call to a New York number, briefer still. Then he picked up the note and walked along the blue-carpeted corridor to the Oval Office. The President had been at his desk since dawn, one eye on the CNN transmissions piped through to the middle of the three televisions installed beneath the big framed painting of Gettysburg. Rumour was, the President never slept. Didn’t need to. Mistrusted the stuff.

  The decrypt from Amman passed across the desk. The President read it, fidgeting with a pencil as he did so. Then he looked up.

  ‘What do we know about this business in New York?’

  ‘Nothing, sir. Yet.’

  ‘OK. So let’s have us find out.’

  ‘It’s in hand. They’re checking now. They’ll phone.’

  There was a long silence. The two men looked at each other. Then the President ran a tired hand over his face. Soon now he’d be going back to Maine, a little fishing, a little sunshine, a little fun. It was important to try to kid the rest of the world that life went on as normal. Even with the Middle East about to blow up. The President looked down again at the note.

  ‘What’s the worst?’ he said.

  ‘The worst?’ Sullivan frowned. ‘The worst is, that it’s true.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And …?’ He shrugged. ‘We close New York.’

  The President gazed at him. Fatigue, or some trick of the light, had somehow flattened the planes of his face. He looked terrible.

  ‘You serious?’

  Sullivan nodded.

  ‘Yeah.’

  The President looked at him some more. Then he shook his head.

  ‘We can’t,’ he said. He brooded for a long moment, turning in his chair and staring out of the window. ‘That’s what the bastard wants. And that’s why we can’t do it.’

  One of the three telephones on the President’s desk trilled softly. He lifted it to his ear. He was still staring out of the window, the pencil between his teeth. He listened intently for a full minute, then he put down the phone without a word. He looked at Sullivan across the desk and nodded at the telephone.

  ‘It is true,’ he muttered. ‘They ran the full analysis this morning. Takes a while in New York.’

  ‘Are they sure?’

  ‘You bet.’

  Sullivan nodded slowly but said nothing. The President looked at him, a moment of frank appraisal, then got up and walked to the window. After a while, Sullivan cleared his throat. ‘We need a fireman,’ he suggested. ‘Someone to take care of this.’

  The President nodded, grunting assent. Then he turned back into the room. He was frowning.

  ‘Like who?’ he said.

  Sullivan thought for a moment, trying to resist the temptation to play the old White House game. Instant decisions were the currency of most administrations, including this one. They were supposed to demonstrate a certain macho domination over events. They were supposed to put you where the job description said you should be. In control.

  ‘Someone good,’ Sullivan said carefully. ‘Someone solid.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Someone who’s worked in the Middle East. Knows the ground. Knows the Israelis …’

  The President nodded again, the impatience evident in his voice. ‘You bet.’

  ‘Someone …’ Sullivan shrugged, running out of words.

  The President looked at him a moment, distracted by some passing thought, then he began to frown again, leaning forward, stabbing the air with his finger, suddenly urgent. ‘Listen, John. Whoever picks it up, it has to be tight. And it has to be quick. The invisible mend. With me?’

  Sullivan blinked. Even thirty years’ citizenship couldn’t, just sometimes, keep the Irish out of his voice. It was there now, exhaustion mostly, and real concern. ‘That’s freelancing,’ he said quietly.

  The President nodded. ‘Damn right.’

  ‘The Chiefs’ll hate it. The Chairman, too.’

  ‘Who says they’ll ever know?’ The President paused. ‘Who says they even deserve to know?’

  The President shot Sullivan a look. August 2nd, the day the Iraqis invaded Kuwait, had left the United States high and dry. None of the Intelligence services had predicted it was going to happen, and when it did, the Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon had precious little in the drawer to deal with it. It had taken Saddam just four hours to seize Kuwait City. Yet for days afterwards in Washington, the President and the military had sat at opposite ends of the city, stewing quietly, wondering what in God’s name they could do. After years of supporting Iraq, the President felt utterly betrayed.

  ‘Tight,’ he said again, ‘real tight.’

  Sullivan nodded, the point made, the argument over.

  ‘You want to meet this guy? Whoever he is?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You want me to handle it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You sure, sir?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Sullivan nodded again. Personal contacts were usually essential for the President. People didn’t exist for him unless he’d actually met them. The fact that this normally iron rule was not to apply was itself significant. Whoever he found, whatever his name, the guy he’d task was to be totally out of channels, totally his own man, the ultimate freelance. Sullivan shrugged, his orders clear, the reservation in his voice quite gone. ‘OK,’ he said.

  The President stared at him for a moment, then strode across the room, back towards the desk. In ten hectic days, with the Iraqi army massing on the Saudi border, peering south, eyeing 20 per cent of the world’s oil reserves, he’d banged heads and bent arms, and committed the world’s most powerful nation to the defence of King Fahd. He’d ordered carrier attack groups into the Persian Gulf. He’d mobilized a quarter of a million troops. And now he was close to slipping an economic noose around Saddam’s neck in the shape of binding UN sanctions against the Iraqi regime. In response, Saddam had annexed Kuwait, closed Iraq’s borders and taken thousands of foreigners hostage. Some of them – lots of them – were American. That was bad enough. But what was far, far worse – now – were the two brief paragraphs still lying on the desk.

  The President picked up the decrypt. The implications were terrifying. New York. A weekday. Five p.m. The height of the commuter hour. One of the main thoroughfares. Hundreds of cars. Thousands of pedestrians, shoppers, office workers, kids for Chrissakes, totally innocent, totally unawares. And they had the stuff. He knew they had the stuff. The guy up in New York had said so. He’d said it was industrial grade. That was the phrase he’d used, just now, on the phone. Industrial grade. One hundred per cent. The real McCoy. As good as anything to come out of Dugway or the Rocky Mountain Arsenal. And it wouldn’t stop there, either. If they did it once, they could do it again. And again. And again. Until no one with any brains left would ever risk New York. An entire city. America’s finest. Empty. The Big Apple. Gone.

  The President let the decrypt flutter to the desk. It landed, as it happened, upside down. He stared at it for a moment.

  ‘Find your guy and get him to Tel Aviv,’ he said. ‘The Israelis know more about these bastards than we ever will. Tell them they’re on the team. Tell them we’ll take care of the rest of it.’

  ‘Rest of it?’ />
  ‘Yeah …’ The President looked at him a moment, then gazed out of the window again. ‘Saddam.’

  *

  McVeigh sat in the Crouch End branch of McDonald’s, spooning sugar into a lukewarm cup of coffee. He’d told Billy about Yakov an hour ago. He’d freed up half a day, and collected the kid from school and broken the news as casually as he could, in a traffic jam on Muswell Hill. His plan was to keep the thing as low-key as possible – no drama, no big announcement, just a word or two about an accident, something entirely innocent, something that might have happened to anyone. Put this way, McVeigh hoped the news might simply come and go, the simplest explanation for Yakov’s abrupt departure from the football field. He was completely wrong.

  Billy sat across from him. His burger was untouched. ‘What happened?’ he said for the second time.

  McVeigh glanced round, uncomfortable. The place was full of kids, mothers, prams, shopping. There was lots of laughter from a birthday party in the corner. He’d have chosen somewhere else for a real conversation. Not here. McVeigh glanced across at Billy. The boy hadn’t taken his eyes off his father’s face. He wanted an answer.

  ‘I don’t know,’ McVeigh said.

  ‘Yes, you do.’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘It was in the papers.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘A boy told me. Jason.’

  McVeigh looked at him for a moment, then nodded, conceding the point. Jason was the team’s goalkeeper. His father owned a small corner shop. The shop sold papers. Sometimes Jason helped behind the counter. McVeigh toyed with his coffee. Not even sugar made it taste right.

  ‘He was shot,’ he said slowly. ‘Someone shot him.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Why did they shoot him?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  The questions came to an end. Billy sat completely still, more still than McVeigh could ever remember, his face a mask, no trace of emotion. McVeigh reached out for him, trying to comfort him, trying to say in some simple, direct way that he was truly sorry, but the boy withdrew his folded arms, tucking them in against himself, a warning for McVeigh to keep his distance. McVeigh looked him in the eye, trying to move the conversation along, playing the parent, trying to coax the boy out of the hole he was digging for himself, but the questions still lay on the table between them. Why did Yakov die? And who killed him?