Maestro

by John Gardner

  “Going to be difficult to make them look respectable, Herb.” It was Bex speaking for the first time.

  “You got to work with what you got, Bex. When this is all set, I want to bring Carole up to take a shiftee at them through the mirror.”

  “Shufti,” Worboys corrected, then saw Herb’s grin. It was like old times, he thought. Herb had the bit between his teeth and probably smelled blood. Maybe he was close to the truth.

  It took almost an hour to set things up. The SAS were a little difficult about being in what was virtually—as Herb explained to them—an identity lineup. They finally settled on the right four and brought a tired Hisham over from the guest facilities.

  Herbie, Bex and Worboys were behind the mirror, and Martin Brook came over with Carole. The booth behind the mirror was soundproofed, so none of the five men in the ID room heard a word.

  “So what’s this, Herb?” Carole sounded edgy.

  “Just want to rule out a couple of things.” He patted her shoulder in an avuncular manner, something that Worboys rightly interpreted as a bad sign for Carole. “Today we’re going through the oblong mirror.” Herb was aping a children’s TV show in which the anchor would take toddlers through triangular, square or oblong windows out into a fantasy world behind them.

  “Take a very careful look, Carole. Just let me know if you recognize any of the men out there.” He then turned and watched Carole rather than the men sitting uncomfortably before them. He watched her closely, his eyes flitting between her eyes and hands. He detected no sudden revelations so was not surprised when she said no. “Nary a one, Herbie. None of them mean anything to me. Never ever seen them before.”

  “Okay.” Kruger sounded a shade too bright. “Tell you what, Carole, Bex and I’ll be down to talk a bit later.”

  “Well, I hope you’re going to tell me when I can get on with my life and leave this place.” She was serious and did not even smile.

  They gave Brook plenty of time to get her back to the set of rooms she occupied in the guest facilities, then they broke up the party and took Hisham back to his suite, from where they soon removed him to the soft interrogation room.

  Bex went back to the Dower House with Herbie, and they looked over the most recent telephone logs, which showed calls in and out of the main house, Dower House, and even the guest facilities.

  “Interesting stuff, here.” Herbie pointed to half a dozen calls.

  “You want to talk with her now, or later.”

  “Later would be best. Let’s give Hisham—Ishmael—a marathon going-over before we talk with the lady.”

  “Whatever you say, O Genie of the Lamp.” Bex gave his arm a little squeeze and they both laughed. Herbie was not quite sure why they laughed, but he was not in the mood for any lengthy analysis at this point.

  Fortified with coffee, they started what would be a crucial interview with the Iraqi.

  “Now, Hisham, old sheep,” Herbie began, all bright, happy and friendly. “We need to go over a few things with you.”

  “Anything. Whatever you want to know, I’ll cooperate.” Herbie thought that, for loyal Iraqis, both Ramsi and Hisham were not the people he would have chosen. He nodded at Bex, who took over.

  “I’d like to ask you one or two things about 1983, when you became an active agent for our Security Service under the work name Ishmael.”

  “Yes.”

  “And I should caution you that we have a lot of information regarding your activities both as Ishmael and leader of the Vengeance team in Europe.”

  “You’ll get the truth.” Hisham was almost belligerent in his tone, as though shocked that Bex might think him capable of being dishonest with them. “I came to you,” he added, as if this made matters clear, “I came to you in order to tell you the truth.”

  “Good.” Bex sounded like a bright schoolteacher. “First of all, would you tell me the name of the man who did the final interrogation and instructed you under the work name Ishmael?”

  “His name was Keene. He told me to call him Gus, then, later, when we got down to worknames, I was to call him Ajax.”

  “Never Claudius?”

  Hisham shook his head. “No. Always Ajax. I used the name when I telephoned. Ajax was my control.”

  “But you knew who you were working for?”

  “For your Security Service.”

  “And over the years you provided some excellent information regarding the activities of other terrorist groups.”

  “I gave Ajax all I could, and more. It wasn’t easy, and—”

  “It’s never easy,” murmured Herb, as if he were sharing part of his own secret life with the target.

  “Particularly when I was appointed to lead a group undercover here in Europe.”

  “An Intiqam group, we understand?”

  “Vengeance, yes. You’d call it Vengeance, or Revenge.”

  “Good. Now I’ll tell you something. Mr. Keene—”

  “Is dead. They told me that.”

  “Yes, he’s dead, but I was going to tell you that he was not a regular officer of our Security Service. He worked for our Intelligence Service. This is an Intelligence Service facility. Occasionally, Intelligence loaned him out to Security. He recruited and ran you from the Security Service. We did not find out about you until quite late in the game.”

  “So?”

  “So, when Mr. Keene was coaching you in your successful role as Ishmael, did he ever bring you here? This place is known as Warminster. It’s also sometimes known as the College. Ever been here before, Hisham?”

  “No. Ajax went through things with me in London. After I became an agent for him, he thought it best that I should carry on with the work I was doing for the Leader of my country. We would meet in a flat near Marylebone High Street. He would coach me there: communications, tradecraft, paper, signals. All that I did under the cover of meeting a young woman.”

  “Did you really meet a young woman there, Hisham, old sheep?” Herbie sounded as though he had just awakened from a long sleep.

  “Oh, yes. She was a good friend of Mr. Keene’s—of Ajax. Ajax was very professional. Said that it was no good just pretending that I came to the flat for what you people call a bit of nooky. If I came here to see him, I must always have the bit of nooky.”

  “You speak good English.” Herb grinned. “A bit of nooky is good.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Always the same girl?”

  “Always. She said she was under discipline to Ajax.”

  “You get her name?”

  “Sure, she was called Betsy. I think it was her real name.”

  “Can you describe her, after all these years?”

  “Difficult, but I try.” He described her. Later, when the session was over, Herbie said to Bex that Hisham must have enjoyed her greatly. “That’s just about what she would have looked like in the early ’80s.”

  “Still waters run deep.” Bex nearly giggled. “Just think of it.”

  “Next, Hisham, I want to ask you about certain things connected with your dealings with the Security Service when you came in with your group—your Intiqam people—on this trip.”

  Hisham nodded, looked unhappy and then shrugged, as if to say it was all in the line of duty.

  “Did you make contact with Ajax?”

  “No. The Security people contacted me, and I thought I had got into the country unnoticed.” He told them about the woman bumping into him outside the real estate office and the note she had slipped into his breast pocket: “Call us or we’ll call your superiors in Baghdad.”

  “Not very sporting,” Herbie laughed. Then: “We understand that you said certain things to the people who began to handle you. For instance, you told them that, should they take your little cell out, there would be others to take its place immediately.”

  Hisham remembered the night they had pulled him into the car after he had seen Les Misérables with the Irishman, Declan. “Yes. Yes, I told them that.”

 
“The real question is, was that true? Is there another team waiting to come in?”

  Hisham gave a little soapy smile and shrugged again. “I really don’t know. There were plenty of people under selection, but the infiltration process takes a long while. My team came in separately. Then we lived in one place to blend in with the scenery. The Biwãba called it becoming chameleons.”

  “And who’s the Biwãba when he’s at home?” Herbie made it into a throwaway question.

  “The Biwãba is a very wise man. He is also a holy man. In our language Biwãba means Gatekeeper. He is the Gatekeeper to our actions against the West. This will sound offensive to you, I know. But the time of Islam is coming again, and the Biwãba is the one who prepares, trains and chooses those who must first go out and fight the spiritual and political battles against the unbelievers.”

  “You believe all this?” Herbie recalled asking a similar question of Ramsi on the previous night.

  “It is not a question of belief or unbelief. I am a Muslim, but my faith is not as it should be. I suppose I am a Muslim agnostic. I have lost touch with what is true and what may not be true. Mr. Kruger, I have grave doubts about our Leader and his methods. He rules by constant fear. This is one of the reasons I came to you as a final recourse. I know what would happen to me if I returned home. The Biwãba would speak on my behalf, but it would be to no avail. I would simply cease to be.”

  Bex nodded. “You’re an experienced man, though, Hisham. You know the way your freedom fighters are being prepared. We are simply asking your opinion. In your opinion, is there another team ready to move in?”

  He hesitated slightly. “To be truthful, I think the Biwãba would counsel a waiting period. In fact, I believe he has already made up his mind. He will let the American operation run its course and leave Europe for some time in the near future. This is why I have my orders to go straight to New York and link up with the Intiqam there. I know the American team was exactly the same strength as mine, and like mine they have been drastically reduced.”

  “Okay. You’ve promised to tell us the truth now, Hisham. You’ve made a sacred promise. You told the Security people that you would not, or could not, tell them the truth about Magic Lightning. Can you, in fact, tell us anything?”

  “Even what little you might know,” Herbie said in a flat voice.

  “I will tell what I know.” Hisham took a deep breath. “Magic Lightning is the end of our joint operation. First, the bombings and shootings. Next the complete disruption of important Western governments—your own British government, the American government, the French and the Italian. There was to be a serious softening up, using large bombs. Here there were two major bombings arranged—the statue of your Queen Victoria outside Buckingham Palace was to be obliterated.”

  “A worthy action.” Herb laughed. “A lot of people think that statue is a monstrosity, but don’t quote me on that. Where else?”

  “Also your Foreign Office in Whitehall. These were to be two huge bombs.”

  “With what object?”

  “To make sure that your government—your House of Commons—would be called to a special sitting.”

  “And then a bomb for them?”

  Hisham shook his head. “No. For them it was to be something else. Something which would, in all probability, strike them very quickly and leave the country without a solid leadership. Don’t ask me what Magic Lightning really is, because I don’t know. I only know that it is the unleashing of something very unpleasant, to cripple the government. The same was to happen in France and Italy. As far as I can see, it is still going to happen to the American government.”

  “Okay.” Herbie shifted in his chair. “You had a deal with our Security Service. Two deals in fact. First, you were going to alert them to any bombs, giving the place and time—and with enough warning to let them take remedial action.”

  “Yes, and I would have kept that promise.”

  “You would?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then why didn’t you keep your other promise?”

  “What other promise?” Hisham’s legs turned to jelly.

  “The FFIRA, in the person of Declan Norton, promised you a large shipment of Semtex if you assassinated four targets.”

  “We didn’t really need the Semtex. It was a deal to get them off our backs. They wanted plenty of warning regarding when we would carry out bomb attacks or executions. The Semtex would have been handy to provoke more fear once Magic Lightning had occurred, but the promise was made to calm them down. I have had very good contacts with the Irish for a long time. These people—the Freedom Fighters—are men and women out of control. Yes, I agreed to their terms …”

  “You even carried them out.”

  “I told the Security Service people that I would have to make it look good.”

  “You made it more than good, Hisham. For one thing you killed an old friend of mine, Mr. Blount-Wilson; you tried to kill me by burning my fucking cottage down.” He was standing up now and raising his voice, as though the calm, reasonable character had been taken over by some terrible demon. “And to cap it all, you very nearly killed DCI Olesker here, last night, and you were within an ace of killing me—for the second time. Then you have the audacity to try and blow one of the Deputy Chiefs of our Intelligence Service to kingdom come.”

  “They were not meant to happen. Not meant to be successful.”

  “Well, I don’t know what your idea of success happens to be, Hisham, but from my viewpoint you had a serious go—”

  “And ended up with no team. Ended up running to you for protection.”

  “Yes, indeed, and, by God, you’re going to need it. First, these Yussif people. I want confirmation of the telephone number you’ve been contacting, and I want it now.”

  Hisham looked stunned at what was an exhibition of violence—for Herbie had banged the table, almost shattering it, and kicked at one of the stand chairs, sending it skittering across the room. “I want that telephone number now. This minute.”

  Hisham reeled off the number. Twice, then a third time, very fast just for good measure. “I said I would do anything.”

  “Good, then let me tell you what you are going to do. You are going to get onto an airplane and fly to New York, just as Yussif told you to do. Then you are going to telephone the number he gave you. After that, you’re going to telephone one of our people in New York and he’ll advise you. I’ll get you on a flight late today, and you’ll have my people on your back all the way. Understand? Hisham, you sonofabitch child of a syphilitic whore, you dense, cretinous coward, you pig-faced, evil, murdering, unholy low-life bastard. You understand?”

  In a very small voice, with his head nodding like one of those appalling toy dogs people put in the back of their cars, Hisham whispered, “Yes, Mr. Kruger. I will do all you ask.”

  “Damn right you will. If you don’t then we’ll pick you up, tie a label onto you, pack you in a crate with a recording of this conversation and everything the Security Service has on you, then send you sea mail to your pissant little country.”

  “That was impressive,” Bex Olesker said, sounding happy, as they made their way back to the Dower House.

  “I’m great when I’m roused, Bex.” The goofy grin as he looked down at her, his hand resting on the small of her back. He noticed that she did not try to remove it.

  “Oh, good. You’ve just got back in time. I have a nice soup and some smoked salmon and salad ready for you,” Bitsy greeted them as they came through the door.

  “Couple of things to do.” Herbie picked up the pile of Gus’s mail that lay on the table in the hall. Every day since it had begun, his practice was to go through the mail, sort what required, diverting to Carole and give the rest a quick onceover.

  Bex went upstairs to wash and tidy herself up for lunch, while Herbie sat at Gus’s desk and went through the day’s bills, circulars, junk mail and magazines.

  Not much today. Then his eye caught one of the
magazines. It was simply titled Magic and it had come from the United States. He removed the wrapper and began to flick through it. He had already seen copies in Gus’s secret Merlin’s Cave, so he turned to an article by someone called Max Maven, who, he thought, wrote a fairly erudite column. While trying to find it, his eye caught a double-spread advertisement. He looked at it with some kind of bewilderment. Then grabbed the telephone and dialed a number in Virginia.

  “Collector’s Workshop,” said a friendly female at the distant end.

  “I am calling about your convention.” Herb tried to keep his voice level.

  “The World Magic Summit, yes? You want to register?”

  “Only if your ad in the current edition of Magic is correct.”

  “Yes, it’s quite correct.”

  “You say that among those appearing in the Grand Show is Claudius Damautus. Is this true?”

  “Yes, he’s definitely going to be there. I spoke to him only yesterday. He’s doing a new act called The History of Magic in Twenty Minutes. Paul Daniels is going to be there and The Pendragons. I’m sure you’ll enjoy it, Mr. …”

  “Kruger. Eberhardt Kruger, but I answer to Herbie.”

  “I’m sure you’ll love it, Herbie. Where’re you calling from, Germany?”

  “No, I’m in London,” he lied. “But you can put me down for two registrations.” He gave her his name again and a credit card number.

  “Don’t forget to book the hotel accommodations yourself.” She gave him a number. Then: “I’ll need an address.”

  “Can I pick the tickets up at the hotel?”

  “When you come in to register, of course. And I’ll need the name for the other registration.”

  “Olesker, I’ll spell it, O-L-E-S-K-E-R. Rebecca Olesker.”

  “We’ll see you at the World Magic Summit, then, Mr. Kruger. Look out for me—Jane Smith Ruggiero.”

  “Look forward to it.”

  He went through to the dining room, beaming and looking generally as though he were a cat who had just licked all the cream.