Maestro

by John Gardner

  “C still has overall control, but yes. Yes, things are different.”

  “A committee tell you to come and see me?”

  “In a way.”

  “Gus? You said a car bomb? We talking terrorists? We talking Gus as a specific target?”

  “Possibly. We don’t know.”

  “So who’s handling it?”

  “The local Plod—well, the Plod in Salisbury.”

  “Sure. The cops. What about anti-terrorist cops?”

  “They’ll be in on it. Probably take over the investigation in a couple of days.”

  “So, what’s in it for me?”

  Slowly Worboys removed a laminated card from his pocket and placed it on the small table next to his mug of coffee.

  Kruger picked it up, squinting at it as though he had trouble focusing. Then, with a sound of irritation, he flicked the card away, so that it spun through the air, hitting a wall and finally landing in the middle of the room. “I told you, Tony. I won’t come back. Never again. Through. Finished.”

  “We’re not asking you to come back, Herb. If you look at the ID, it says you’re a consultant. There’s no money attached, though you’ll get all the support within reason. Peeps into the files, transport, minders even.”

  “Why would I consult for you, and why me?”

  “Because you’re one of a very few left who were close to Gus. Lord, Herb, you knew the man probably better than anyone. You were even interrogated by him. …”

  “For a year, sure. For a year after my bit of trouble in what was East Germany, sure. A year in the country. A year with Gus at his cleverest.”

  “But you were close. Knew him from other things.”

  “Carole was closer. Why not use the wife?”

  “Come on, man, how in hell can we use Carole?”

  Kruger did not answer. Instead he went through to the kitchen and made himself another mug of coffee.

  “You want me to liaise with the Plod, the anti-terrorist boys?”

  “Of course. We also want you to put Gus’s life under the microscope. Read the manuscript he was writing, look at his research, go through his jacket, talk to friends outside the Office. Discover the answer to the big question.”

  “Find out why someone blew him to bits? Yes, easy. There must be hundreds of people out there who had reason to turn Gus into a bonfire.” He raised his head and looked at his old colleague. “You think I’m a fit person to do this? Now you’ve seen me again, you think I’m even trustworthy anymore?”

  “I can see you’re not yourself, but give it a go, Herb. Could be it’s the answer to a lot of your problems. You’ve been sitting down here brooding, building up a head of grief and anger.”

  “Like an old rusty kettle, yes? Be honest, Tony. I know what life’s become for me. If it were up to you, would you put me on to this?”

  The pause went on for thirty seconds too long.

  “Yes.” Kruger laughed for the first time—his old laugh, not a pale imitation. “You wouldn’t even send me out to clean floors in a safe house, right?”

  “Right, Herb. Now that I’ve seen you for myself.”

  “So, it’s easy. You go back and tell them Herbie Kruger ain’t big no more. Gone to seed. Not the man for the job.”

  “I can’t do that, Herb.”

  “Your job at stake, Tony?”

  “I’ve been instructed to deliver you.”

  “Ha! Would you buy a used microdot from this man? Seriously, would you?”

  “Not in your present state, Herb. No. No, I wouldn’t, but I have to. It also appears that I have to get you off the sauce and back in trim. Go and get a shower and shave. You have to meet the local Plod before eleven o’clock.”

  Kruger dry-washed his face with both hands. “Tony, I can’t. I’m out of it. Haven’t got the balls for it anymore.”

  “Herb, this isn’t fieldwork. All you have to do is move backwards and forwards through Gus Keene’s life and come up with a couple of suggestions. Piece of cake. Couple of weeks, that’s all. You’ve got nothing better to do, have you?”

  Kruger gave a great sigh, shook his head and said that he’d take a shower and think about it.

  “Give me your door key.” Worboys flashed him a smile that betokened great affection. “Got a bit of shopping to do.”

  Herbie did not argue, handed him the key and went slowly up the stairs to his bathroom.

  He stripped and caught sight of himself in the mirror, saw the folds of flesh hanging off his long bones and the ravage he had brought to his face. As he showered, Kruger suddenly felt the old tingle, the sensation he had known for all his adult life. As he stepped from the shower, he muttered, “Herbie’s himself again.” Paused, then added, “Well, almost.”

  In Washington it was two forty-five in the morning. Walid and the girl they called Khami had flown in from the New York cell of Intiqam earlier that evening. Their intention was to hit one of the targets of opportunity that had been well researched for them by an intelligence group known to both Intiqam teams by one name, Yussif.

  Walid, in his early forties, was probably the most distinctive man in either group: short and muscular, but with a face badly scarred from smallpox. It was a face he could not disguise, even with the mustache he grew, then shaved off, in six-month cycles.

  Khami was more striking than beautiful. As with so many girls from the Middle East, her hair was black, as were her large eyes. When she wished to make a point, she would open them wide. Men often thought they could drown in the pools of her eyes. More than one had drowned in his own blood while held hypnotically by her gaze.

  They booked into the Willard Hotel as man and wife because the latest information told them that the station chief of Italian foreign intelligence, who had diplomatic cover in D.C., spent most weekends at the Willard in the company of his American girlfriend. It was well known among diplomats, and even the switchboard operators at the Italian Embassy on Fuller Street had a room number for him, with a code word to establish bona fides should he be required to return to the Embassy.

  About the same time that Herbie Kruger was showering in England, Khami called the Italian’s room and gave the code word, Dividersi. Then, in faultless Italian, she told him the Ambassador required him at the Embassy as quickly as possible.

  As soon as Khami put down the telephone, Walid took the elevator to the sixth floor. The Italian was only two doors from the bank of elevators serving the street end of the guest rooms.

  When the Italian emerged quietly, Walid shot him three times in the face with a Walther P4, which has a long noise suppressor permanently attached to the muzzle. Walid wore gloves and the weapon was untraceable, so he simply dropped it next to the body, stepped back into the elevator and, within three minutes, was back in the room with Khami.

  Like the other three women, she knew that part of their work would be both seduction and sexually servicing the men of the network. She probably enjoyed this side of her duties more than any other, and this was obvious to the police who interrogated everyone in the hotel following the discovery of the Italian’s body. They crossed the pair off as even possible killers, for their eyes and demeanor shone with physical lust. Another couple in from New York to see the sights and make the most of the nights, they thought.

  Showered, shaved, for the first time in four days, and smelling slightly of a cologne he had not used in weeks, Herbie Kruger came downstairs to the aroma of bacon and eggs. He had changed into a pair of slacks that, while still a shade loose around the waist, looked as though they almost fitted him. The shirt and jacket he had also put on did seem a trifle large. He had a lot of weight to reclaim, or a new wardrobe to buy.

  Worboys had driven into Lyndhurst and bought bacon, eggs, sausages and a decent coffee. He stood at the stove, spatula in one hand, frying pan in the other. “Welcome to the best breakfast you’ve had in weeks,” he cheerily greeted Herbie, as though the kitchen belonged to him alone.

  Kruger swallowed hard, bile i
n his mouth, for he had eaten little of late. The alcohol, in its strange way, had sustained him while it drained away energy.

  The first few mouthfuls were difficult, but at last his stomach settled, and by the time he had done away with three eggs, two sausages and four rashers of bacon, he even began to feel a little like his old self. So much so that he started to grieve for Gus Keene.

  “So, give me my marching orders.” A touch of the old confidence.

  Now Worboys spelled it out for him, just in case he had missed it the first time. Gus’s car had gone off the road and exploded. Herb had to see the Plod, take a look at the site, hear the story, then come to London and sit with the captains and the kings. Tell them the tale in his own words. Speak to them in tongues and let them hear how he saw it.

  “Okay, I got to talk with the local Plod. Which local Plod?”

  “Salisbury. A Detective Inspector, name of Roach …”

  “Bet they call him ‘Cock.’ Provincial Plod is usually predictable, ja?”

  “Probably, Herb, but listen. You’ll have to drive to Salisbury. See the Plod, see where Gus died and then come back to the office, okay?”

  “I should go and see Carole?” Herb asked. Gus’s widow haunted his mind. He thought he knew what a widow must feel when this thing called death struck so unexpectedly.

  “The Chief went down an hour ago, Herb. Went down with one of the girls. Stay away for a while. Let’s see what we’ve got here: accident or malice aforethought.”

  “Murder most foul.” Kruger had already made up his mind.

  2

  “NOT MUCH CALL FOR you fellows these days, I suppose?” Detective Inspector Roach, a tall, thin man, all angles and sharp features, was trying to make polite conversation as they drove to the accident site between Salisbury and the old garrison town of Warminster.

  “So they say.” Herbie felt sick, troubled and noncommittal. His head still ached; what he had already seen made him want to throw up. What was left of Gus Keene’s car had been towed into the big garage behind the Salisbury police station, and the picture of that would remain in his mind for a long time. A pile of blackened, twisted scrap metal from which no human could have got out alive. Death at the snap of fingers. There one minute, gone the next in a tangle of flame and steel. Forensics were going over it with their plastic bags, scraping here and there, examining and measuring, combing through the wreckage like buzzards.

  Herb had also read the two statements that DI Roach placed before him, like an acolyte opening the gospel for a priest.

  The first was signed by William Dunne, a Military Police sergeant on attachment to one of the many units stationed in the town of Warminster, which, being adjacent to Salisbury Plain, has known the presence of soldiers for centuries.

  Sergeant Dunne had been driving back to his barracks following an evening spent with a young lady in Salisbury. About a mile from the small village of Wylye, on the Warminster Road, he had seen a car half pulled off on the grass verge. Being a man of instinctive powers of observation, he had identified the vehicle as a Rover with the registration number ED439B. In plain language, Gus Keene’s car. Two men stood talking near the front of the Rover, and both had turned their backs to his headlights as he passed. The time was four minutes to three in the morning.

  The second statement told how a Mrs. Doreen Hood, who lived in one of the cottages on the outskirts of Wylye, had been awakened by what she called “a terrible bang”—a phrase that had caused much ribald comment among the police who knew Mrs. Doreen Hood’s mode of life, which involved many hours in bed with numerous local worthies. On looking from her window, Mrs. Hood saw the car, later identified as Gus Keene’s Rover, engulfed in flame, lying on its side a good five meters off the road. “It was one of them explosions like you see at the pictures: in those Arnold Schwartzanagle’s films. Like Legal Weapon.” It was Mrs. Hood who telephoned for police and ambulance. They had logged the time as three-oh-four in the morning. It was summer. July. The date/time was on the tape, spoken by an electronic voice. Such is progress.

  DI Roach drove with the immense care of a police officer out to teach by example. In truth, Kruger interested him, for he was the first member of the SIS Charlie Roach had ever come across. “You weren’t born in England, were you?” he asked.

  Kruger gave not a flicker of a smile. “Thought I’d fooled you.”

  “I detected an accent. I suppose during the Cold War you spent time abroad?” Abroad for DI Roach really meant package deals to Malta or Marbella, but he was aware of the dark freezing days when secret men and women plied their trade across the Berlin Wall. Like millions of others, he had read The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, so he knew it all. Now he glanced at the big man with a drawn and haunted face. In the wink of an eye, he saw Herbie in the shadows of ruined Berlin, or stepping from a doorway like Orson Welles in The Third Man. “It must be an adventurous life,” he added.

  “Sure. Dead adventurous. I still go abroad. More call than you’d think for people like me. Even now.”

  “Really? I’ve always wondered what it was like. Spying and that.”

  “Not what it’s cracked up to be.” Herb stared straight ahead. They were approaching the place where Gus Keene’s Rover had gone off the road. He knew this particular route as well as the lines on his own hand.

  The gray stone of Wylye village lay ahead. They were deep in the Wylye Valley, which is not as beautiful as it sounds. The river is more of a brook for most of the way, pollarded willows dotting its banks, which stretch out indefinitely into little pools of marshland. On some days the view could be downright depressing. Herb hardly ever passed this way without hearing words about a willow aslant a brook, and thinking of dead, drowned Ophelia.

  In a couple of minutes he was standing in the open, looking at the deep dark scars in the grass where the Rover had plowed in and blown up. DI Roach heard the choke in the back of the tall man’s throat, and the look of grief spread like blood across his face.

  “You knew the gentleman well?” Roach asked, as though he had to make conversation.

  “Alas poor Gus. I knew him, Inspector. Where be your gibes now? Your gambols? Your songs?”

  “Your what?”

  “He’ll be mourned by many.” Herb simplified it.

  The drive to London was slow and infuriating. Herbie had the radio on and there was some panic. Two mainline railway stations had been bomb targets. The FFIRA had telephoned code words two minutes before the devices blew, killing seven and injuring two dozen more.

  In the center of London’s West End two other bombs had exploded in cars—one carrying an American official to the Embassy in Grosvenor Square, the other taking a senior diplomat to Heathrow Airport. Both men and their drivers had been killed. The names would not be released until the families had been informed. The FFIRA had made a second statement, declaring that they had had nothing to do with the car bombs.

  “So that’s it,” Herbie said later to those assembled on the fifth floor. “No skid marks. No sign old Gus had to throw out the anchors. Just a couple of long deep ruts in the grass, then a wet burned patch. More like the car was detonated. Looked like a mortar bomb hit, not a car accident.”

  “It’s what the local law are saying.” Worboys looked down at the typewritten pages already stacking up in their red card folder. “Jesus, poor old Gus.”

  “Also, they’re saying identification’s going to be difficult.” Herbie steepled his fingers.

  Tony Worboys nodded and looked, as if for help, around the room. The Chief was still down at Warminster, comforting the bereaved, but he had called two other people in to listen to Herbie. They were in a kind of shock, for Herbie had been right about Gus being mourned by many. They all knew they had lost a part of themselves—something that often happens with an unexpected death.

  Four of them, including Herb and Worboys; Martin Brook, portly, bespectacled, owlish, once Gus Keene’s pupil, now his successor, and a young man from Registry called Angus C
rook, who held a thick buffcolored folder containing a printout of Keene’s record. Worboys’s eyes settled on Crook. “Identifying marks?” he asked, as though this were a real question.

  “If he’s been burned to a frazzle, there’s going to be no way.” Crook was an earnest young man; a computer wizard, which is the main required skill for people who work in Registry these days. Nowadays you fed subjects into a computer that asked for code words and clearances before it spat out documents, and the SIS Registry was safe as proverbial houses because it was cut off from the world of modems and easy access by computer hackers. It had also led to many redundancies, for Angus ran the place with the aid of one other officer and three female Registry Clerks, who were also computer experts. Those in the know called them the Secret Five.

  “They’re going to be hard put to.” Crook had a gruff Scottish accent, which some said was an affectation. “If Gus is now just burned bone, they’re not going to make a positive on him. Bits of wristwatch. Maybe some coins.”

  “Surely dental records …?” Worboys began, but Crook smiled grimly and shook his head. “That’s for thrillers. Gus had perfect teeth. All his own. Never saw a dentist in his life as far as I can see.”

  Martin Brook got up and walked to the window, looking down the river Thames from this perch above London. “So, what’s the drill, Tony?”

  “The drill?” Worboys shrugged. “The drill is that we really don’t want the law scratching deeply into Gus’s life. The Chief’s insistent on that. He says I have to do a deal.”

  “Call off the Plod and use one of our own sleuths?” Brook queried.

  “Call off the Plod and use Herb.”

  Kruger growled, “Now I play Sherlock?”

  “That’s the way it goes. Our Lord and Master is talking to the Chief Constable of Wiltshire e’en as we speak, but that won’t keep everyone off our necks.” Worboys looked hard at Kruger. “So, give it to us, Herb. Words of one syllable, eh? Your immediate thoughts.”