“Open all the windows,” Langbourne told Gus. He was worried about hands again. “On the dash where they can see them. Chief, shove ’em on the seat in front of you. You too, Thomas.”
With unaccustomed meekness Roper did as he was told. The air was cool. The smell of oil mingled with the smells of sea and metal. Jonathan was in Ireland. Then he was in Pugwash docks, stowed aboard the filthy freighter, waiting to steal ashore by darkness. Two white flashlights appeared either side of the car. Their beams scanned the hands and faces, then the car floor.
“Mr. Thomas and party,” Langbourne announced. “Come to inspect some tractors, pay the other half.”
“Which is Thomas?” said a man’s voice.
“Me.”
A pause.
“Okay.”
“Everybody get out slowly,” Langbourne ordered. “Thomas, behind me. Single file.”
Their guide was lank and tall and seemed too young to be carrying the Heckler that swung at his right side. The gangway was short. Reaching the deck, Jonathan saw across the black water to the lights of the town again, and the flare stacks of the refinery.
The ship was old and small. Jonathan guessed four thousand tons at most, converted from other lives. A wooden door stood open in a raised hatch. Inside, a bulkhead lamp glowed over a spiral flight of steel stairs. The guide once more went first. The echo of their feet was like the tramp of a chain gang. By the poor light Jonathan made out more of the man who was leading them. He wore jeans and sneakers. He had a blond forelock, which he flipped back with his left hand when it got in his way. The right hand still held the Heckler, the forefinger crooked snugly round the trigger. The ship too was beginning to reveal herself. She was fitted for mixed cargo. Capacity around sixty containers. She was a tub, a roll-on-roll-off workhorse at the end of her usefulness. She was a throwaway if things went wrong.
The party had come to a halt. Three men stood facing them, all white, all fair, all young. Behind them was a steel door, closed. Jonathan guessed on no evidence that they were Swedes. Like the guide, they carried Hecklers. It was now apparent that the guide was their leader. Something about his ease, his choice of posture as he joined them. His hacked and dangerous smile.
“How is the aristocracy these days, Sandy?” he called. Jonathan could still not place his accent.
“Hullo, Pepe,” said Langbourne. “In the pink, thanks. How’s yourself?”
“You all students of agriculture? You like tractors? Machine parts? You want to grow crops, feed all the poor people?”
“Let’s just get on with the fucking job,” Langbourne said. “Where’s Moranti?”
Pepe grabbed the steel door and pulled it open at the same moment that Moranti appeared out of the shadows.
My Lord Langbourne is a weapons freak, Burr had said. Played gentleman soldier in half a dozen dirty wars . . . prides himself on his killing skills . . . in his spare time he dabbles as a collector, same as the Roper . . . it makes them feel better to think they’re part of history.
The hold constituted most of the belly of the ship. Pepe was playing host, Langbourne and Moranti walked beside him, Jonathan and Roper followed, then came the help: Frisky, Tabby and the three ship’s hands with their Hecklers. Twenty containers were chained to the deck. On the lashing straps, Jonathan read a medley of transfer points: Lisbon, the Azores, Antwerp, Gdansk.
“This one we are calling the Saudi box,” Pepe announced proudly. “They make it side-opening so Saudi customs can get inside and sniff around for booze.”
The customs seals were steel pins banged into each other. Pepe’s men hacked them apart with cutters.
“Don’t worry, we got spares,” Pepe confided to Jonathan. “Tomorrow morning everything look fine again. Customs don’t give a shit.”
The side of the container was slowly lowered. Guns have their own silence. It is the silence of the dead to come.
“Vulcans,” Langbourne was saying, for the edification of Moranti. “High-tech version of the Gatling. Six twenty-millimeter barrels fire three thousand rounds a minute. State of the art. Ammo to match, more to follow. Each bullet’s as big as your finger. One burst sounds like a horde of killer bees. Choppers and light aircraft don’t stand a chance. Brand-new. Ten of ’em. Okay?”
Moranti said nothing at all. Only the barest nod betrayed his satisfaction. They moved to the next container. It was end-loaded, which meant they could view the contents only from the front. But what they saw was already enough.
“Quad fifties,” Langbourne announced. “Four coaxially mounted point-five-oh-caliber machine guns designed to fire simultaneously at a single target. Shred any aircraft you like with a single burst. Trucks, troop transports, light armor—the Quad’ll take ’em out. Mount ’em on a two-and-a-half-ton chassis, they’re mobile and they hurt like hell. Also brand-new.”
With Pepe leading, they crossed to the starboard side of the ship, where two men were gingerly extracting a cigar-shaped missile from a fibreglass cylinder. This time Jonathan had no need of Langbourne’s expertise. He had seen the demonstration films. He had heard the tales. If the Micks ever get their hands on these, you’re dead, the bomb-happy sergeant major had promised. And they will, he added cheerfully. They’ll nick them off Yankee ammo dumps in Germany, they’ll buy them for a bloody fortune off the Afghans, the Izzies or the Pals or whoever else the Yanks have seen fit to hand them out to. They’re supersonic, man-packed, they’re three to a carton, they’re Stingers by name and they’re Stingers by nature . . .
The tour continued. Light anti-tank guns. Field radios. Medical gear. Uniforms. Ammunition. Meals Ready to Eat. British Starstreaks. Boxes made in Birmingham. Steel cannisters made in Manchester. Not everything could be examined. There was too much stuff, too little time.
“Likee?” Roper asked Jonathan quietly.
Their faces were very close. The expression on Roper’s was intense and strangely victorious, as if his point were somehow proved.
“It’s good stuff,” Jonathan said, not knowing what else he was supposed to say.
“Bit of everything in each shipment. That’s the trick. Boat goes astray, you lose a bit of everything, not all of something. Common sense.”
“I suppose it is.”
Roper wasn’t hearing him. He was in the presence of his own accomplishment. He was in a state of grace.
“Thomas?” It was Langbourne, calling from the aft end of the hold. “Over here. Signing time.”
Roper went with him. On a military clipboard, Langbourne had a typed receipt for turbines, tractor parts and heavy machinery as per attached schedule, inspected and certified to be in good order by Derek S. Thomas, managing director for and on behalf of Tradepaths Limited. Jonathan signed the receipt, then initialed the schedule. He gave the clipboard to Roper, who showed it to Moranti, then passed it back to Langbourne, who handed it to Pepe. A cellular telephone lay on a shelf beside the door. Pepe picked it up and dialed a number from the piece of paper that Roper was holding out to him. Moranti stood a little distance from them, with his hands curled to his sides and stomach out, like a Russian at a cenotaph. Pepe passed the phone to Roper. They heard the banker’s voice saying hullo.
“Piet?” said Roper. “Friend of mine. Wants to give you an important message.”
Roper handed the phone to Jonathan, together with a second piece of paper from his pocket.
Jonathan glanced at the paper, then read aloud. “This is your friend George speaking to you,” he said. “Thank you for staying awake tonight.”
“Put Pepe on the line please, Derek,” said the banker’s voice. “I would like to confirm some nice news for him.”
Jonathan handed the receiver to Pepe, who listened, laughed, rang off and clapped a hand on Jonathan’s shoulder.
“You’re a generous fellow!”
His laughter stopped as Langbourne drew a typed sheet of paper from his briefcase. “Receipt,” he said curtly.
Pepe grabbed Jonathan’s pen and, watched
by all of them, signed a receipt to Tradepaths Limited for the sum of twenty-five million U.S. dollars, being the third and penultimate payment for the agreed consignment of turbines, tractor parts and heavy machinery delivered to Curaçao as per contract for onward transit on the SS Lombardy.
It was four in the morning when she rang.
“We’re leaving for the Pasha tomorrow,” she said. “Me and Corky.”
Jonathan said nothing at all.
“He says I’m to bolt. Forget the cruise, bolt while there’s still a chance.”
“He’s right,” Jonathan murmured.
“It’s no good bolting, Jonathan. It doesn’t work. We both know that. You just meet yourself again in the next place.”
“Just get out. Go anywhere. Please.”
They lay still again, side by side on their separate beds, listening to each other’s breathing.
“Jonathan,” she whispered. “Jonathan.”
23
Everything had been going swimmingly with Operation Limpet. Burr, from his grim gray desk in Miami, said so. So did Strelski, next door along from him. Goodhew, telephoning twice a day on the secure line from London, had no doubt of it. “The powers that be are coming round, Leonard. All we need now is the summation.”
“Which powers?” said Burr, suspicious as ever.
“My master for one.”
“Your master?”
“He’s turning, Leonard. He says so, and I have to give him the benefit of the doubt. How can I go over his head if he’s offering me his full support? He took me to his heart yesterday.”
“I’m glad to hear he’s got one.”
But Goodhew, these days, was in no mood for such sallies. “He said we should stay in much closer touch. I agree with him. There are too many people about with vested interests. He said there was a whiff of something rotten in the air. I couldn’t have put it better myself. He would like to go on record as one of those who wasn’t afraid to track it down. I shall see he does. He didn’t mention Flagship by name, neither did I. Sometimes it pays better to be reticent, but he was greatly taken by your list, Leonard. The list did the trick. It was bald, it was uncompromising. There was no getting round it.”
“My list?”
“The list, Leonard. The one our friend photographed. The backers. The investors. The runners and starters, you called it. There was an imploring note in Goodhew’s voice that Burr wished he couldn’t hear. “The smoking gun, for heaven’s sake. The thing that nobody ever finds, you said, except that our friend did. Leonard, you’re being willfully obtuse.”
But Goodhew had misread the cause of Burr’s confusion. Burr had known immediately which list. What he couldn’t understand was the use that Goodhew had made of it.
“You don’t mean you’ve shown the list of backers to your minister, do you?”
“Good heavens, not the raw material, how could I? Just the names and numbers. Properly recycled, naturally. They could have come from a telephone intercept, a microphone, anything. We could have filched it from the post.”
“Roper didn’t dictate that list or read it over the phone, Rex. He didn’t put it in a letter box. He wrote it on a yellow legal pad, and there’s only one of it in the world and one man who took a photograph of it.”
“Don’t split hairs with me, Leonard! My master is appalled, that’s my point. He recognizes that a summation is close and heads must roll. He feels—so he tells me, and I shall believe him until I am proved wrong—he has his pride, Leonard, as we all do, our own ways of avoiding unpleasant truths until they are thrust upon us—he feels that the time has come for him to get off the fence and be counted.” He attempted a valiant joke. “You know his way with metaphors. I’m surprised he didn’t throw in some new brooms rising from the ashes.”
If Goodhew was expecting a peal of jolly laughter, Burr did not provide it.
Goodhew became agitated: “Leonard, I had no alternative. I am a servant of the Crown. I serve a minister of the Crown. It is my duty to inform my master of the progress of your case. If my master tells me he has seen the light, I am not employed to tell him he’s a liar. I have my loyalties, Leonard. To my principles as well as to him and to you. We’re having lunch on Thursday after his meeting with the Cabinet Secretary. I’m to expect important news. I’d hoped you’d be pleased, not sour.”
“Who else has seen the list of backers, Rex?”
“Other than my master, nobody. I drew his attention to its secrecy, naturally. One can’t go on telling people to keep their mouths shut; one can cry wolf too often. Obviously the substance of it will go before the Cabinet Secretary when they meet on Thursday, but we may be sure that’s where it will stop.”
Burr’s silence became too much for him.
“Leonard, I fear you are forgetting first principles. All my efforts over the last months have been devoted to achieving greater openness in the new era. Secrecy is the curse of our British system. I shall not encourage my master or any other minister of the Crown to hide behind its skirts. They do quite enough of that as it is. I won’t hear you, Leonard. I won’t have you fall back into your old River House ways.”
Burr took a deep breath. “Point taken, Rex. Understood. From now on, I’ll observe first principles.”
“I’m glad to hear it, Leonard.”
Burr rang off, then called Rooke. “Rex Goodhew gets no more unrefined Limpet reports from us, Rob. That’s with immediate effect. I’ll confirm in writing by tomorrow’s bag.”
Nevertheless, everything else had been going well, and if Burr continued to fret over Goodhew’s lapse, neither he nor Strelski lived with any sense of impending doom. What Goodhew had called the summation was what Burr and Strelski called the hit, and the hit was what they now dreamed of. It was the moment when the drugs and arms and players would all be in the same place and money trail would be visible and—assuming the joint team had the necessary rights and permissions—its warriors would fall out of the trees and shout “Hands up!” and the bad guys would give their rueful smile, and say “It’s a fair cop, Officer”—or, if they were American, “I’ll get you for this, Strelski, you bastard.”
Or so they facetiously portrayed it to each other.
“We let it ride as far as it can go,” Strelski kept insisting—at meetings, on the telephone, over coffee, striding on the beach. “The further down the line they are, the fewer places they have to hide, the nearer we are to God.”
Burr agreed. Catching crooks is no different from catching spies, he said: all you need is a well-lit street corner, your cameras in position, one man in a trench coat with the plans, the other in a bowler with the suitcase full of used bills. Then, if you’re very lucky, you’ve got a case. The problem with Operation Limpet was: Whose Street? Whose city? Whose sea? Whose jurisdiction? For one thing was already clear: neither Richard Onslow Roper nor his Colombian trading partners had the smallest intention of completing their business on American soil.
Another source of support and satisfaction was the new Federal Prosecutor who had been assigned to the case. His name was Prescott, and he was more exalted than the usual federal prosecutor: he was a Deputy Assistant Attorney General, and everybody whom Strelski checked him out with said Ed Prescott was the best Deputy Assistant Attorney General there was, just the best, Joe, take it from me. The Prescotts were old Yale people, of course, and a couple of them had Agency connections—how could they not have?—and there was even a rumor, which Ed had never specifically denied, that he was in some way related to old Prescott Bush, George Bush’s father. But Ed—well, Ed had never bothered with that stuff, he wanted you to know. He was a serious Washington player with his own agenda, and when he went to work he left his parentage outside the door.
“What happened to the fellow we had till last week?” Burr asked.
“Guess he got tired of waiting,” Strelski replied. “Those guys don’t hang around.”
Bemused as ever by the American pace of hiring and firing, Burr said no more. On
ly when it was too late did he realize that he and Strelski were harboring the same reservations but, out of deference to each other, refusing to express them. Meanwhile, like everybody else, Burr and Strelski flung themselves upon the impossible task of persuading Washington to sanction an act of interdiction on the high seas against the SS Lombardy, registered in Panama, sailing out of Curaçao and bound for the Free Zone of Colón, known to be carrying fifty million dollars’ worth of sophisticated weaponry described in the ship’s manifest as turbines, tractor parts and agricultural machinery. Here again Burr afterwards blamed himself—as he blamed himself for pretty much everything—for spending too many hours succumbing to the tweedy charm and old-boy manners of Ed Prescott in his grand offices downtown, and too few in the joint planning team’s operations room, attending to his responsibilities as a case officer.
Yet what else was he to do? The secret airwaves between Miami and Washington were busy day and night. A procession of legal and less legal experts had been mustered, and it was not long before familiar British faces started to appear among them: Darling Katie from the Washington embassy, Manderson from naval liaison staff, Hardacre from Signals Intelligence and a young lawyer from the River House who, according to rumor, was being groomed to replace Palfrey as legal adviser to the Procurement Studies Group.
Some days Washington seemed to empty itself into Miami; on others, the prosecutor’s office was reduced to two typists and a switchboard operator, while Deputy Assistant Attorney General Prescott and his staff decamped to do battle on the Hill. And Burr, determinedly ignorant of the niceties of American political infighting, drew comfort from the hectic activity, assuming, rather like Jed’s whippet, that where you have so much circumstance and movement, you must surely have progress too.
So really there had been no heavy augurs, only the minor alarms that are part and parcel of a clandestine operation: for instance, the nagging reminders that vital data such as selected intercepts and reconnaissance photographs and area intelligence reports from Langley were somehow jamming in the pipeline on their way to Strelski’s desk; and the eerie feeling, known separately to Burr and Strelski but not yet shared, that Operation Limpet was being run in tandem with another operation, whose presence they could feel but not see.
The Night Manager Page 39