Maestro

by John Gardner

  “Absolutely, Herb.”

  After they had eaten and Herb had complimented Bitsy on her cooking—“You’d make someone a good wife, Bits, if that’s not politically incorrect to say”—he called Martin Brook at the main house to tell him they would be over shortly.

  “This guy, Ramsi? He settled in okay? Plenty of space between him and Carole?”

  “Carole doesn’t even know he’s here.” At one time, Martin Brook had been very smitten with Carole. Since then he had always treated her with care and respect. “Our visitor seems very pleased with his quarters. You need me tonight?”

  “Would like to have the tapes running so you can listen before you join any interrogation.”

  “It’ll be done.”

  At around ten-thirty Herbie and Bex entered the area of the Guest Quarters allocated to Ramsi al-Disi, who appeared to be very relaxed.

  Herbie introduced himself and DCI Olesker, asked him if he was comfortable and being treated properly. He was ecstatic, and told them he had not lived in such luxury since the days when he was with his father and mother, long ago now.

  “And you seem to speak English very well?” Bex’s remark was half query and half statement.

  “Yes, I speak English very good indeed.”

  “Lucky for us.” Herbie smiled. Ramsi was a short, somewhat tubby little man with a strangely pink, European complexion. He also spoke a lot with his hands in a kind of flamboyant manner.

  “Sit, Ramsi.” Herbie realized, as he said it, that it was like giving an order to a dog, but he let it ride. “We’re going to ask you a lot of questions in the next few days, but I can promise you that if you cooperate with us, we can almost certainly grant you complete immunity from prosecution.”

  “But I am bomb maker.” The little man pushed out his chest proudly. “It is because of me that many have died. I was a major force in the Intiqam.”

  “And what exactly is Intiqam?” Bex asked, as though she had never heard the expression before.

  “I will cooperate.” Ramsi cocked his head on one side. “I will cooperate and put myself in the hands of Allah. You must deal with me as you see fit.”

  “If you give us what we want, we’ll give you immunity, Ramsi. I’ve already told you.”

  “What exactly is Intiqam?” Bex repeated, seeing the drift in conversation as Ramsi’s first attempt to tread water.

  He turned towards Bex and looked her straight in the eyes. “Intiqam is Vengeance of the highest order. Members of the Teams of Vengeance were especially chosen from among many. We were sent here to bring terror and revenge on behalf of the Leader.”

  “Revenge for what?”

  “Naturally, Revenge is the highest order for the humiliation you heaped upon our Leader and our people in the war. Our soldiers, sailors and airmen fought bravely. You know as well as I that they held out until the last man in some cases. They flew great sorties against you. But you—by which I mean all the countries who ranged themselves against us for no good reason—you had superior forces and more men to call upon. We killed you by the thousand and you kept on coming. You British, the Americans and the other countries were not concerned with loss of life. You just sent more men and machines, so you eventually overcame us. The Leader called for Revenge and I was lucky to be chosen. Happy to take part in the Vengeance, which our Leader says will bring about a complete subjugation.”

  “You believe all this bullshit?” Herbie asked with a laugh.

  “No, of course I don’t believe it. But I am sworn to the Leader. I kept from trouble and was chosen to do the work. A man has to do some work. I am good bomb maker. Besides, our rewards are to be great.”

  “How great, and what rewards?” Herbie sighed and leaned back in the armchair upon which he had perched until now.

  “When the governments of Britain, America, Italy, France and the other powers who stood against us are overcome, then we will be rich men and women.”

  “Rich, as in money?”

  “Of course. The Leader and our country are very rich in money.”

  “Would you be surprised if I told you that your country is almost bare-arsed poor? Excuse me, Bex.”

  Ramsi smiled broadly. “I think this is first real question you are putting to me. We have billions, trillions of dollars. This is true. The leaders of the Vengeance teams brought great wealth with them. I have seen it in London, and I know there is more.”

  “Secret bank accounts in Switzerland and that kind of thing?” Bex was making notes.

  Ramsi laughed as if he were really enjoying himself. “Oh, ma’am, no. The money is made in our country and then exchanged by the banks all over Europe and America.”

  “Made in Iraq?”

  “Of course. I know that the authorities are aware of this money, but it is indistinguishable from the real thing. I am telling you this so that you will know I am sincere.”

  “Okay, Ramsi. As I said, we have a lot to ask you, but let me take you one small step along the road. What is the name of your leader here in Britain?”

  Ramsi nodded, quite happy with the question. “Our leader here is a man called Hisham Silwani. A good fighter and with many weapons.”

  Sure, Herbie thought. Ishmael. Great. Very strong on weapons. Aloud he asked, “Name some of his weapons.”

  “You expect me to say the bomb, the gun, the knife, the strangling cord, but I won’t say those things. They are obvious. To prove beyond doubt that I am willing to tell you all I know, I will give you his greatest weapon. This place you have brought me to. It is called Warminster by you, yes?”

  “Yes.” No harm, if he already knew, Herb considered.

  “Well, know this, sir. Hisham has control of someone right here at this place. This person is providing him with information, though the person does not realize our cause is being assisted by what is told to Hisham.”

  Both Herb and Bex told each other later that they both only just restrained themselves from blaspheming aloud.

  “You know a great deal, Ramsi. You know my name?”

  “You would be the Mr. Kruger who is on our death list?”

  “That’s me, large as life, Ramsi. One of your people tried to do for me tonight.”

  “Ah, but you escaped?”

  “I wouldn’t be sitting here now if I hadn’t escaped. Ms. Olesker here, she wouldn’t be sitting here on her pretty little—Ah, no. Sorry, Bex.”

  “I’m flattered.” She gave him a friendly, knowing look, then turned to Ramsi again. “You know all the names on this death list?”

  He nodded. “Yes, but you are our targets so that we can receive a favor from FFIRA—you’re conversant with FFIRA?”

  “We’ve heard of them.” Herb looked a shade blank. What he called his dumb ox look. “So, tell us the names on the death list, Ramsi. Just to humor me.”

  “Certainly, sir. The list was four names. Yourself, Mr. Kruger; a man called Blount-Wilson; another—an officer of some kind—by name Anthony Worboys; and a fourth, Mr. Augustus Keene.”

  “And you’re the bomb maker?”

  “That was my role.”

  “So you’re the bastard who made the bomb that exploded in Mr. Keene’s car.”

  Ramsi looked bemused for a second, then his face cleared. “Oh, no, Mr. Kruger. You see, when we were given the list, we found that Mr. Keene had already been killed. I did not know it was a bomb. But we didn’t have to bother ourselves with him because he was already dead.”

  22

  THEY HAD CONCLUDED THE first session with Ramsi almost directly after hearing that Hisham had some kind of penetration into Warminster; that the Iraqis had vast sums of almost undetectable forged hundred-dollar bills; and that, according to the little bomb maker, the British Intiqam team had nothing to do with Gus’s death.

  They eased out of it gently, of course, bearing in mind the rule that when you have picked one small bone clean, you do not let the subject know he has passed on vital facts.

  Big Herbie immediately calle
d Worboys, telling him what their first trawl had gleaned and asking for extra minders at the Warminster facility. He, of all people, knew that even though the electronic warning system had been beefed up, the huge grounds surrounding the main house, not to mention the Dower House, could still be dangerous. There were always gaps through which determined fanatics could penetrate.

  Herbie’s constant nightmare returned to the time, only a few years ago, when he had been called back to deal with the inquisition of the world-famous orchestral conductor, Maestro Louis Passau. On that occasion there had been a breach of security, and people had been shot to death on the grounds. In London they still argued about the Warminster security.

  Worboys was clear on the subject. He would have to get the nod from the CSIS before the manpower could be released.

  “I’ll try and get someone to you before tomorrow,” he said, his voice sounding weary. “I feel like a prisoner here.”

  “So you should.” Herb paused and then became almost Shakespearean: “Soft you, Tony. They’re running out of manpower, but they’ll still try to get you. Stay safe.”

  “If they try my home, they’ll be in for a shock. The Old Man’s let me have some of the lads standing by there.”

  Herbie also said he wanted the latest telephone logs, covering the past three days. “Is most important, Tony. We got a pigeon’s stool here, and I want to know if it’s Carole. There’s something not quite right about the widow Keene. She knows something we’re not privy to. Nothing surprises me anymore.”

  “If the Iraqis didn’t blow Gus to pieces, who in hell did?” Worboys was musing aloud.

  “Maybe the Irish. Maybe not. It’s always possible that it was done private, if you follow me.”

  “The bloody bomb had these Vengeance people’s fingerprints all over it.”

  “Handwriting, Tony, not fingerprints.”

  “What’s in a name?”

  The minders who had traveled with Kruger to and from London were not, as he had first thought, freelance old hands called back for temporary work.

  He had felt the fear, tasted the bitter wormwood and gall of near death on the road to Warminster, just as Gus had tasted it for the last time. It had been so sudden that he had to sit quietly and reconstruct the events in his head. The two sudden flashes and detonations in the car that had overtaken them. The smell of explosives. The calm words of the man traveling shotgun in their car: “Get down. Right down in the back.” Then the flash of thigh as Bex’s skirt rode high, and the softness of her body, her hands grabbing him as they lay there. The roller-coaster feeling as the car squealed sideways. The stutter of the Heckler & Koch, then the view of the men from the chase car, plus the driver and shotgun, circling in the road. They had put their three charges first, not even going to see if they could assist the driver of the private car, which had borne the brunt of the explosions.

  The ski masks and the soft, unhurried way in which the minders had closed ranks around the car carrying him, Bex and the Fat Boy had a recognizable deadly choreography. It was in the way they moved, the tension, the readiness. These were SAS officers, troopers and NCOs. Things had to be at a high-crisis level for the CSIS to get the okay to use the Special Air Service men as bodyguards.

  Herbie was pulled from his daydream by a soft knock at the door. Bex Olesker came into the room looking shaken, her face still pallid from the experience earlier that evening. She had gone through the interview with Ramsi like the pro she was. Now, the fear had set in, and she looked terribly vulnerable.

  “Sorry to bother you, Herb.” Her voice was soft and throaty.

  “You never bother me, Bex.” He saw that she was trembling.

  “Delayed shock, I think.” She sat down and rested her head against the back of the high chair, breathing out as though letting go a long sigh of relief. It was now that she told him she had felt no fear until she had seen the men with ski masks surrounding the car. “I thought we were finished. The first time in my career that I’ve felt real fear.”

  She said that, up to then, she had done surveillance on known terrorists, and had even been at the sites of three terrorist actions within minutes of the bombs or guns doing their deadly work. “But this really had me terrified. I don’t honestly know if I should stay with SO 13.”

  “You get use to it, Bex. Is like any other job that has danger at its heart. Hours of boredom punctuated by moments of fear. You think I wasn’t frightened?”

  “You didn’t seem to be. Nor did Mr. Brook.”

  “Martin? Martin’s a Confessor, an inquisitor. Trained by Gus. You notice he didn’t show any sign of wanting to be with us when we talked to Ramsi? My guess is that he was too busy throwing up.”

  “You really do get used to it, Herb?”

  “Matter of having to get into the swing of things.” He gave a laugh that sounded like broken glass, then moved softly across the room, stood behind her chair and put his fat arms around her, his forearms resting on her breasts and his big rugged lived-in face buried in her short black hair. Her hair smelled of sunshine. It was the only analogy Herb could draw from the scent.

  “Thanks, Herb,” she choked. “I’m still bloody frightened.”

  “You got me, babe,” he crooned, remembering, through the smoke in his brain, some 1960s pop song: back in the days when Cher was Sonny and Cher and not an actress with a picture in the attic.

  “I’ve got you, babe,” she said softly. “That’s a voice from the past.”

  “For me, most things are voices from the past.” Big Herbie Kruger closed his eyes and breathed in the sunshine.

  At the house known as The Hall in Harrow Weald on the outskirts of the Metropolis, three two-man teams from the SAS headquarters at Stirling Lines, outside Hereford, lay in wait. Two watched the rear of the property, two lay in cover that gave them excellent views across the drive and the gardens leading up to the house. The last pair was actually in the house.

  They had set up portable sensors in a ring some hundred yards from the place, plus a small infrared TV camera that they controlled with a joystick, watching the images of the night as they swept it in a 180-degree arc. They lay unmoving, almost quiet, except for one of the men softly humming “Music of the Night,” as they watched and listened.

  Hisham, against his better judgment, had sent Ahmad and Dinah out to Harrow Weald before the news of Samira’s botched attempt had come through. Now, at two in the morning, Ahmad lay in thick grass next to Dinah, well inside the grounds of The Hall, watching and waiting for some sign of life.

  They knew that the target’s car was there. Not even in the garage. The Range Rover was parked in the turning circle right in front of the house, and had been there since they had crawled into position. They had watched the lights go on and off in various parts of the building, and now only one bulb was burning in what they took to be a bathroom on the first floor.

  All this, of course, was courtesy of the SAS team inside the house. Now, one of the troopers inside had quietly climbed the stairs and switched off the light in the master bathroom. Waited for a minute so that his eyes could adjust, then returned to his partner in what was normally Worboys’s study at the front of the house. The curtains were drawn over the two windows facing the drive, so that the tiny diffused light from the TV monitor would not be visible from outside.

  It was just on two-thirty when one of the men beside the monitor heard two distinct clicks in his radio earpiece. One of their comrades on the grounds had spotted movement, so they slowly traversed the camera over its full 180 degrees. They picked up the first figure, crouched by a line of rhododendron bushes near the end of the drive, almost at the edge of the turning circle right in front of the main door.

  The clicks on the radios, they hoped, indicated that their people outside were tracking whoever had penetrated the grounds. They moved the camera very slowly so as not to alert the intruders. There were two of them, black shapes carrying what looked to be automatic weapons, and they came quietly towards the f
ront of the house, one on each side of the drive. Then, one of the shapes detached itself from the bushes and moved towards the Range Rover, knelt down and unslung a satchel, placing it by the front offside wheel. The figure had moved like a woman, and her companion joined her for a moment, whispering softly and then making his way to the back of the car, covering her, looking in the direction of the house as she carefully turned onto her back and slid under the vehicle.

  Did they think they could get away with a car bomb in these days of red alert? Every possible target would examine the underside of his personal vehicle before getting into the driver’s seat. So pondered the officer in charge of the detail as he lay, unmoving, less than fifty yards away.

  This was the moment, he decided. As long as there were only two of them. With one occupied under the Range Rover and the other watching the front of the house, they might even bring the pair in unharmed. His thumb came down on the SEND button of his Pace Landmaster transceiver. He gave a series of rapid clicks, and before he had even stopped sending, the portable floods came on.

  They had placed the floods while there was still plenty of light. Twelve portable high-intensity floodlights, secured at intervals in a crescent around the front and side of the building. The sergeant who controlled this battery of lights had switched them on the moment the rapid clicks had started to come through his earpiece.

  “Stand still! Police! Do not move!” the officer in command shouted in vain.

  Dazzled by the sudden brilliant light, Ahmad had reflexed, turned in his crouching position and let go two bursts of automatic fire from the Uzi tucked into his hip. He died instantly, an SAS man rushing from the bushes and putting four bullets into him from a 9mm Browning.

  Dinah pushed her heels into the gravel and shot her body backwards from under the Range Rover. As she moved, she grabbed for the mini-Uzi lying beside the satchel. She brought the weapon up in one hand and fired three short bursts, turning between each burst, then getting to her feet, realizing that her only chance would be to blow out the searing, blinding lights.