The Devil's Breath

by Hurley, Graham

  Now, five miles above Kentucky, Emery sat at the back of the executive cabin, a tumbler of bourbon at his elbow, wondering how best to trick his body into sleep. Three weeks without meaningful rest had begun to take its toll. Every day had brought more intelligence into the big, shadowed office on ‘F’ Street, boxes of analysis, raw data, Agency reports, decrypts, ELINT transcriptions, satellite intercepts, top-level stuff sourced from both sides of the Atlantic. Sifting through this material, page by page, he’d sought to detect a pattern, a sequence of events, that would begin to explain the curt ultimata tightening the noose around New York.

  The obvious explanation was the best: that a new terror group spawned from the political swamp that had once been Palestine was acting as an agent for Saddam Hussein, carrying the impending war to the enemy’s heartlands. That made perfect sense. That was the way the President saw it. That was the theory that Emery had to garnish with names and faces – the key coordinates that would safeguard New York. But it wasn’t working. As hard as he looked, there was nothing there. No real evidence of a new terror group. No quiet confirmations from Baghdad. Not a single word from sources which – under normal circumstances – would have been queueing up for a discreet word in some far-flung bar. Only the sign-off on the original note from Amman. The Martyrs of 7th June. Hardly the firmest of leads.

  Sullivan, with whom he now met daily, was getting impatient. He could see it in the man’s face, in his body-language. He was a politician. His was the currency of means and ends, initiatives and results. He trod the corridor to the Oval Office more often than most Presidential aides, and the message he brought back was no less plain for being unvoiced. We have a problem here, a city we can’t afford to lose, damage we can’t afford to sustain. We’re big players, the biggest. We have a position to protect, a coalition to keep together, a war to fight. The problem’s getting outa hand. Solve it.

  Sullivan’s appetite for progress reports was voracious, and Emery was doing his best to satisfy it with as many titbits as he thought wise. Most of the closely typed digests the couriers hand-carried across to the White House were innocuous enough, the odd peak on the Intelligence trace, the odd anomaly, but in his heart, Emery knew that Sullivan was far too smart to be fooled that easily. So far, he’d offered the man about half a dozen solid leads – some inexplicable messages out of Tripoli, ripples from the murder of a Canadian ballistics expert in Brussels, the name of an English guy cropping up in traffic out of the Israeli Embassy in London – and he guessed that Sullivan would be commissioning a little action of his own. But nothing he’d shared to date offered anything more than another dead end. Of that he was certain.

  Even Telemann’s latest call from Hamburg was, in his view, of limited significance. Otto Wulf had fingers in all kinds of pies, sure. He ran a huge commercial empire. He boasted openly about his ‘achievements’ in the East. He was very big in chemicals. But so what? All that gave the guy was an interest in profit, to which – as a businessman – he had every right. On the phone, Telemann had muttered sternly about contacts with the Iraqis, but that, too, was barely past first base. God knows, there wasn’t a company in the West that hadn’t been queueing for a slice of the Iraqi oil revenues, and if the smell of Saddam’s money had suddenly become offensive, then that told you more about political morality than Otto Wulf. The guy had been operating in a democracy. And we, like it or not, were all consenting adults.

  No, Ron had to do better than that. An hour in a Halle restaurant, and the name of a burned-out Palestinian terrorist, was hardly pork and beans. The Palestinian guy, Attali, had certainly been front-line and the bus attacks had put him near the top of the Israeli hit-list. But the guy hadn’t once looked outside Israel, hadn’t once shown any aptitude for running operations abroad. Indeed, in certain circles on the West Bank, he’d earned derision for his decision to cash in, retire to Europe, and spend his winnings on the services of a small army of bodyguards. That was one of the reasons he pissed the Israelis so much. Try as they might, they’d never managed to get near the guy. When they did, they’d doubtless waste him, but so far all the guy was doing was getting older.

  Emery inched back his recliner and swallowed the last of the bourbon. The plane was only a third full, a sign of the deepening recession, and he’d had no trouble getting a seat. Laura, when he’d called by in the early evening, had offered to run him out to Dulles, save him the hassle of taking his own car, but he’d turned the offer down, staying only long enough to check that she and the kids were OK. His description of Juanita’s place – semi-roofless, three windows out – had served to put her own piece of hurricane in perspective, and she’d begun to apologize for bothering him as they walked back to the car. He’d paused in the driveway, cupping her face with his big hands and staunching the apology with a kiss, and they’d both laughed when Bree appeared at the upstairs bathroom window, a huge grin behind the rain-stained glass, clapping her hands in wild approval.

  At the car, in the windless dusk, he’d paused again before opening the door. She hadn’t heard from Ron, he could tell. It was there in her face, an expression that gave the lie to her parting smile. He’d kissed her again and told her that it would be OK, that everything would resolve itself, that the man was strong enough to cope. She’d nodded, unconvinced, and he’d watched her in the mirror as he drove away, the tilt of the head, the farewell wave, the way she turned on her heel and dug her hands in the pockets of her jeans, way deep, walking back towards the house.

  The plane bumped a little, invisible cobble-stones in the night sky, and he watched lazily for the seat-belt signs to light over the forward bulkhead, thinking of Laura again, the spaces she’d always cleared in his head for herself, how young she could make him feel. Telling her he loved her had been an embarrassment, and he’d stopped doing it now. The obvious, in any case, had never been his style. Obvious? Style? Me? Laura? He closed his eyes, smiling.

  Four hours later, dawn at LAX, Emery met Andy Fischer. He was standing beside the Budget Rent-a-Car counter, the place they’d agreed, a thin, sallow-faced man, younger than Emery had expected. He was wearing a rumpled, ill-fitting suit over a once-white T-shirt. He looked like a refugee from an all-night rock concert.

  They drove east against the traffic, the rising sun curtained behind the pall of smog. Fischer chain-smoked at the wheel, grumbling softly about the music on a succession of local radio stations. Emery, whose musical knowledge stopped at Debussy, said very little. Soon, he guessed, they’d get down to business. For now, the guy might as well have been talking Swahili.

  Past Whittier, without warning, Fischer pulled the little Honda into a Dunkin’ Donuts lot. They went inside, the younger man greeting the black waitress by name, leading Emery to a table in the corner. They sat down, Emery eyeing the door to the washroom. He needed a shave and a mouthwash. It was still barely seven o’clock.

  Fischer pushed the menu aside and took out a folded sheet of paper, laying it carefully on the table between them. Emery, uninvited, picked it up. At the top, underlined, was a woman’s name, Lola Borg, followed by a series of numbers. Emery recognized a bank sort-code, six digits, plus another number. Beneath the name, neatly tabulated, were more figures, each one prefaced with a date and a dollar sign. Emery ran quickly through the entries. The lowest was $1300. The highest was $270,000. The entries bracketed a period of eleven months. In all, they totalled more than half a million dollars. Emery glanced up. Fischer was talking soul music with the waitress. She touched him lightly on the hand, laughing, and began to pour coffee in Emery’s cup. Emery nodded at the figures.

  ‘Who’s Lola?’ he said.

  ‘Gold’s wife.’

  ‘Using her maiden name?’

  ‘Right.’ Fischer picked up the piece of paper. ‘She’s got three accounts of her own. This is the one that matters.’

  ‘Why?’

  Fischer looked at him for a moment, and Emery suddenly recognized how tightly wound the springs were beneath the hip ba
nter and the charity-store camouflage.

  ‘Why?’ he said again. ‘What do these figures mean?’

  Fischer leaned forward, expressive hands, long pale fingers, tracing patterns on the fake marble table top.

  ‘Gold,’ he said. ‘Made a name for himself in ECM. Any idea what that means?’

  Emery nodded. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘The guy designed for the big players. Northrop. McDonnell Douglas. I’ve seen the file. What little there is.’

  ‘And ECM?’

  ‘Electronic Counter Measures. Keeping the bad guys away.’

  ‘OK. You got it.’ Fischer nodded vigorously. ‘But the thing to realize about this guy is he’s unusual. He’s hands-on. He does the stuff himself and he does it brilliantly. Makes all those lateral leaps we all dream about. Ace designer. Computer wizard. Earns himself a great reputation. So …’ He paused. ‘Other firms want him. If this was baseball, we’d be talking megabucks. Big money.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Yeah. But that ain’t all. Because the guy’s got a nose for business, too. Likes the smell of money, real money. Knows what he’s worth and ain’t about to take some dumb fucking offer from the company down the street. No, sir—’ Fischer tapped the table, emphatic ‘—this is one brainy son of a bitch that ain’t about to get rolled.’

  ‘So the guy goes freelance?’ Emery shrugged. ‘Is that what we’re saying?’

  ‘Sure. He sets up a consultancy. He’s selling his own talents, his own contacts, fifteen years at the cutting edge. The guy has real collateral. He knows what he’s worth, and he’s got one of those logical minds that tells him who pays top dollar.’

  ‘The Israelis?’

  ‘You got it. Route One. Tel Aviv.’

  Emery nodding, looking down at Fischer’s sheet of paper, remembering Telemann’s description of the body in the morgue. Six hundred and thirty-four thousand dollars, he thought. For a shelf in a fridge. Fischer was looking at him. He was smiling.

  ‘You think that’s Israeli money?’ He shook his head. ‘Gold stopped working for the Israelis last year. Fiscal ’89. That’s this year’s money. That comes from somewhere else.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Can’t exactly say.’ Fischer paused. ‘Not for certain.’

  There was a long silence, and Emery sat back in his seat, closing his eyes, rubbing his face, letting his dissatisfaction register. It’s early in the morning, he wanted to say. I’ve come a long way. I’m tired. Back home, on the other side of the continent, there are questions to answer, a city to protect. If you have something solid, something real, let’s see it for Chrissakes. He opened his eyes. Fischer was looking at him, the young conjuror in the grandpa suit.

  Emery nodded at the figures. ‘The guy was crooked? Is that what you’re saying?’

  Fischer shook his head. ‘No, sir. Quite the reverse. The guy was straight arrow. The stuff we’ve been talking about, the Israeli stuff, it’s all there in the accounts and returns. I’ve been through it. It’s right to the last cent. Total disclosure. Mr Clean.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You sure you can be sure?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘So—’ Emery picked up the sheet of paper ‘—what about all this? You say it’s not Israeli?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Home-grown? Domestic projects?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Foreign?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Emery glanced up, alerted by a new tone in Fischer’s voice, excitement. He looked at the figures again. ‘Soviet? Would that make any sense?’

  ‘None. I told you. The guy’s honest. Plus, he’s a patriot. Plus, the Soviets havn’t got any money, even if he was for sale.’ He shook his head, ‘No, we can do better than that. Whole lot better.’ He paused, nodding at the basket of doughnuts, newly arrived from the kitchen. ‘Which I guess is why you came.’

  From Whittier they drove east again, up the San Bernadino Freeway towards San Antonio Heights. By now Fischer had shed the last vestige of his old persona, hunched over the wheel, shredding the cellophane from yet another pack of Winston, intense, articulate, worrying at the theories as they began to emerge from the evidence, qualifying himself time and again in case, in his own words, Emery got the whole fucking thing entirely out of proportion.

  What he knew for sure, he said, was that Lennox Gold had made a legitimate business out of the consultancy. He’d taken on the Israelis as bona fide customers. He’d been scrupulous about not sharing US secrets and had dealt exclusively on the basis of technology to which they already had access. Where there was room for improvement on their own production lines, he’d told them so, designing a number of add-on packages that had given the Israelis a significant combat edge. For this they had paid him well.

  Then, a year back, the Israeli connection had been abruptly broken. Thereafter, the consultancy accounts reported no appreciable income. At the time of Gold’s death, on paper at least, the business was in deep stall, the revenue flows 850 per cent down on fiscal ’89, loans unserviced, two separate banks threatening foreclosure.

  At this stage, given the figures, Fischer had begun to wonder about suicide. Experience told him that most businessmen had a great deal of pride. Gold wouldn’t have been the first to have gone under. Fischer paused here, nursing the Honda into the slow lane, glancing across at Emery. ‘You think the guy may have wasted himself?’ he said. ‘I have to ask.’

  Emery shook his head, a grim smile, remembering Telemann’s report again, the state of the hotel bathroom, the terrible chemistry of Tabun GA. ‘No,’ he said. ‘He’d have had to be nuts to have done that.’

  ‘Suicides are nuts.’

  ‘No, but really nuts. Going the way he went, you’d have to be certifiable.’ He paused, shaking his head. ‘No,’ he said again. ‘Definitely not suicide.’

  Fischer nodded. He sounded relieved. ‘So we’re talking homicide?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Emery glanced across again. ‘That OK by you?’

  ‘Sure,’ Fischer said, smiling.

  They drove on. The key, Fischer said, was Lola, Gold’s wife. At first she’d denied all knowledge of her husband’s business affairs. Only lately had Fischer been able to dig deep enough to disinter the evidence he needed to coax her into a real conversation. Using IRS powers of disclosure, he’d accessed thousands of privately held S & L accounts. The search had taken several weeks. Then, a couple of days back, he’d found what he’d been looking for. Lola Borg. The Glendale S & L Association. Account No. 37568498. Stuffed full of her husband’s money.

  Fischer slowed for the San Antonio exit. It was recent money, he said, recently earned. He knew it was recent because she’d told him so. She’d told him so because he’d arrived on a bad day, and on bad days her patience and her resolve sometimes gave out. Listening, watching the unfenced, ample lots rolling slowly by, Emery became curious, as he was supposed to. Who is she, this Lola? What kind of woman? What kind of wife? He put the question directly to Fischer, realizing the importance of Lola Borg, realizing that this was the point of the conversation he’d flown 9000 miles to conduct.

  Fischer sat motionless behind the wheel, the car stopped, the window wound down, a nice view of the acres of lawn and swimming-pools that passed, in Southern California, for suburbia.

  ‘I guess it’s a question of motive,’ Fischer said softly. ‘The last year of his life, our friend stepped outa line. He was an honest man. There had to be a reason.’

  ‘His wife?’

  ‘Yeah. Maybe.’

  ‘Where does she live?’

  ‘Over there.’

  Fischer nodded across the street. A low, single-storey dwelling, painted white, big picture windows, drapes inside, blue and white. In the drive stood a big Dodge van, a conversion of some kind, windows in the side, a folding hydraulic hoist fitted beneath the rear doors. Emery had been similar vehicles before, mainly outside hospitals. He turned back to Fischer, remembering the line about the ba
d days.

  ‘She sick?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Very sick?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Emery looked at him, beginning at last to understand. ‘Since when?’

  Fischer smiled, reaching for the door-handle. ‘A year ago,’ he said. ‘I’ve got the cuttings.’

  8

  Sullivan took the call mid-morning, Washington time, in the back of a Government Chrysler, en route to yet another meeting. On his lap, open, were the latest updates from the Joint Chiefs. Six weeks of the heaviest staff work he could remember had finally proved, beyond doubt, that the US would be in no shape for a land war in the Gulf for at least two months. Sealift for the heavy M-1 Abrahms battle-tanks had been chaotic. Elderly ships’ engines were constantly breaking down. Supply schedules were in tatters, and – even worse – the stuff that had made it as far as the desert was, in the cold prose of the Department of Defense, ‘subject to heavy environmental attrition’.

  Sand in the goddam helicopter engines, thought Sullivan, reaching for the proffered telephone, irritated that this small moment of peace between the White House and the Pentagon should have proven so brief. Hunched in the corner of the car, he put the phone to his ear. The voice, when it came, was English. The guy from Number Ten. Ross.

  ‘Hi,’ Sullivan said wearily. ‘How ya doin’?’

  Ross spoke for perhaps a minute. Listening, Sullivan reached inside his jacket pocket and began to make scribbled notes on a small jotter. When Ross finished, Sullivan grunted. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Al Zahra’s a generous guy …’ He paused. ‘So this McVeigh. Who the fuck is he?’