‘Sure. But …’
‘Are you keeping in touch with the news?’
‘Sort of.’
‘Read about Scowcroft and Eagleburger going to Beijing last week?’
‘Yeah. What of it?’
‘I think it’s all connected. Curtis. Bourdil. You. Hexter. And China.’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘Kissinger was in China earlier in the autumn as well. Did you know that?’
‘What if he was?’
He glanced around nervously again. ‘Let’s go somewhere else. I’d like … space around us.’
Space around us? He was beginning to sound paranoid. I led him by the quickest route through to Piazza Navona. But the Befana Christmas market had started up that weekend. The piazza’s wide open spaces had been filled with stalls selling nativity scenes, toys, decorations and refreshments. There weren’t many people about at that hour, however. And none of them paid us any attention.
I bought a cup of mulled wine to keep myself warm and bought Norrback one as well. He swallowed his first mouthfuls like someone badly in need of a stiff drink.
‘What do you think’s going on, Tahvo?’ I asked as we moved towards the quieter end of the piazza.
‘You follow the news,’ he said, speaking so softly I had to crane my head to hear him clearly. ‘A non-Communist government in Czechoslovakia. Violence on the streets in Bucharest. The Berlin Wall crumbling. German reunification a real possibility. The Soviet Union has lost control of its empire. Sounds good, yes?’
‘To me, certainly.’
‘But not to the people who backed Slavsky.’
‘No one’s admitting to having done that, Tahvo.’
‘No. But they did. You know that. So, ask yourself this. Who benefited most from Slavsky’s death?’
‘Gorbachev, I suppose. Maybe without even knowing it.’
‘How about the Chinese?’
‘The Chinese?’
‘They were condemned by everybody after Tiananmen. The US banned arms sales to China and forced the World Bank to suspend loans to them. Now all that looks like being reversed. Why?’
‘You’re going to tell me the answer has something to do with Slavsky?’
‘Slavsky heeded the lesson of Tiananmen. Cracking down is the only way for a totalitarian regime to survive. Liberalization is death. And liberalization is Gorbachev’s path. Thanks to Slavsky’s plane blowing up, he never got the chance to end glasnost. The result? A weaker Soviet Union. Good, you say. So do I. And so does the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. They’ve seen the Soviets as a bigger threat than the Americans for the past twenty years. That’s why Mao sat down with Nixon in seventy-two. Their enemy’s enemy is their friend. But that friendship went cold after Tiananmen. Now it’s warmed up again. Despite the Chinese army gunning down thousands of their own people … and maybe blowing Slavsky out of the sky.’
So this was it. Norrback was suggesting the Chinese had planted the bomb on Slavsky’s plane and sabotaged the coup he was planning. They didn’t want Gorbachev to be stopped from pursuing policies they regarded as disastrous for the Soviet Union – because the Soviet Union was their enemy. ‘The Chinese had no way of knowing about Slavsky’s trip to Helsinki, Tahvo,’ I objected. ‘Barely anyone knew about it.’
Norrback’s voice dropped still further as he responded. ‘Then one of the few who knew must have told them.’
I considered the implications of what he’d said for a few queasy seconds. ‘Are you serious?’
‘Think about it. If they knew, they had – and still have – evidence that the British, French and American governments were willing to back a coup against Gorbachev. How would that look now? How would all those east Europeans cheering a liberal future react to the discovery that their supposed defenders in the west were plotting to take that future away from them?’ It was a question that didn’t need an answer. It would be a disaster. Careers would end. Governments would fall. ‘The threat of revealing such evidence buys a lot of normalization of relations, my friend. Like the kind we saw in Beijing last week. A lot of smiles. A lot of handshakes. A lot of big fat loans. A lot of kiss and make up and let’s be friends.’
I stopped walking and turned to face Norrback. ‘You’re saying someone betrayed us, Tahvo. Who?’
‘Someone who knew before the meeting why it was being held.’
‘And who was present at the meeting?’
‘Yes. For the timing of the explosion. There needed to be a warning Slavsky was leaving.’
‘I get the feeling you don’t suspect Curtis or Bourdil.’
‘No. I think they were killed because they could corroborate the Chinese claims if they were made public.’
‘That goes for me too.’
‘Yes. It does. Have you ever told anyone I guessed why you were meeting Slavsky?’
‘Not a soul.’
‘Then I’m betting I’m safe. But you’re not, my friend. You got me out of a heap of trouble back in seventy-five. I was grateful then and I’m grateful now. That’s why I came to Rome. To warn you.’
‘How can you be sure I’m not the traitor?’
‘I know you too well. And you’re here, out of the action, which looks to me like you’re being set up. Plus … you don’t speak Chinese, do you?’
‘Barely a word.’
‘Know someone who does?’
I did, of course. Hexter. But I wasn’t quite ready to tell Norrback that. Though his expression suggested I didn’t actually need to.
‘I took my own precautions during your meeting with Slavsky,’ he went on. ‘I wasn’t happy with what was going on. I needed to be sure I wasn’t being dragged into something that could come back and bite me. So, I recorded all incoming and outgoing telephone calls. Just to see who was saying what to who.’ He reached into his coat and pulled out a pocket tape player, with a single earphone dangling from it. ‘Press Play when you’re ready,’ he said, handing me the machine. ‘Outgoing call to a car phone number, late afternoon, Sunday September twenty-fourth. Just around the time Slavsky left.’
I put the earphone in and looked at Norrback. He nodded. Then I pressed Play.
It was just a few minutes of two men talking in Chinese. I couldn’t understand any of it. Neither mentioned Slavsky, as far as I could tell. But that hardly mattered. Because I was more or less certain I recognized one of the voices. It had a different intonation in Chinese. But still it was familiar.
‘Is it Hexter’s voice?’ he asked.
I nodded. ‘I think so, yes.’
‘How sure are you?’
‘I can’t be absolutely certain. But … it sounds like him to me.’
Norrback sighed. ‘There it is, then.’
‘What are they saying?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Surely you’ve had it translated.’
‘No! Who could I trust to translate it? And it doesn’t really matter what the actual words spoken mean. You know what it means.’
Yes. I knew. We both knew. ‘You’re not going to let me have a copy of that tape, are you, Tahvo?’
He shook his head. ‘If I did, I’d be in as much danger as you are.’
‘Maybe you shouldn’t have let me hear it.’
‘Maybe. But you know the truth now. This way, you have a chance. I couldn’t deny you that.’
‘Thanks.’ I meant it. Norrback had taken a risk coming to me. I couldn’t blame him for shying away from a still bigger risk.
‘I’ll be back in Helsinki by Wednesday. If you need to contact me, phone this number.’ He pushed a folded square of paper into my hand. ‘The man who’ll answer is my brother Alvar. You can trust him to pass a message on to me. No one else. To be sure, ask him what our parents gave him for his twenty-first birthday.’ He told me what it was. ‘This is for an emergency only, you understand?’
‘I understand, Tahvo. If I need to contact you, I will. Otherwise …’
‘I hope it goe
s well for you, my friend. I do not know what the best thing is for you to do.’
‘Neither do I. Yet. But I’ll work it out. Keep that tape safe, won’t you? And thanks again.’
We shook hands. Then he hugged me. ‘Onnea,’ he murmured. It was one of the very few Finnish words I knew. He was wishing me luck. And we both knew I was going to need it.
Norrback headed south from the piazza. I watched him vanish from view and satisfied myself no one had followed him. Then I threaded my way through the Christmas market and made for my apartment.
I hadn’t decided what I was going to do, but making myself scarce was the only way to start. I hadn’t spent sixteen years working in the intelligence world without learning that an ability to abandon the known and familiar if the need arose was essential. I’d thought about what to do in a situation like this many times. I’d even prepared for it in a few basic ways. But even so, now it was happening, I didn’t really feel prepared at all.
I was filled with rage at Hexter. But I had to stifle my rage and concentrate calmly on protecting myself. Everything I did now I had to stand back from and assess dispassionately. Every choice I made had to be the right choice. One mistake could be the end. One slip could finish me.
I stuck close to the walls of the alley as I approached the apartment building so I’d be hard to spot from an upper floor. I let myself in carefully, with no scraping of the key or slamming of the door. And I took the stairs up rather than the wheezy, clanking lift. I didn’t want to advertise my arrival to anyone.
As soon as I slid the key silently into the lock on the door of my flat, I knew there was something wrong. The double lock hadn’t been engaged. If Norrback hadn’t warned me, I might have written that off as carelessness on my part. Not now.
I threw the door open and launched myself in. If the intruder was still there, my only advantage was surprise.
A figure moved across my field of vision, entering the kitchen in a rush. Rinaldo. If that really was his name.
I saw him grab a knife from the table. He might have been waiting a long time for me to return. And time can undermine concentration. Whatever the reason, he wasn’t as ready for me as he should have been.
I kept a heavy round ebony ruler on the lintel above the kitchen door. You can never be too careful. And Rinaldo hadn’t been careful enough. The ruler was still there when I stretched up for it. I swung it down as Rinaldo turned towards me, grasping the knife.
The first blow took him on the wrist. His fingers lost their grip. The knife fell to the floor. The second, third and fourth blows were to his head. He went down. And he stayed down.
He wasn’t dead. How long he’d remain unconscious I had no way of knowing, so I dragged him into the bathroom and tied him to the pedestal of the handbasin. Then I went through his pockets. There was no identification on him. But there was a nude photograph of Cinzia which looked as if it was intended to be used in some scene-setting.
The plan was to write my death off as murder by my girlfriend’s cuckolded husband. That was clear. So, Cinzia was in on it too. She was the bait in the trap. What I felt for her was what she’d been instructed to make me feel. And what she felt for me was … nothing.
I checked as thoroughly as I could to see if Rinaldo had planted anything incriminating in the flat. I needed to move fast, but I also needed to know what I was up against.
I found it in the wobbly bureau I kept my paperwork in. A blank buff envelope I didn’t recognize. Inside, a sheaf of statements for a bank account in Hong Kong in my name. There were a lot of deposits. One larger than most on the twenty-fifth of September, the day after Slavsky was killed. Neat. Very neat. To those who didn’t know any better, this would look like a Chinese-funded nest egg. My reward for treacherous services rendered.
I wasn’t going to leave the statements there, of course, but I knew it wouldn’t make any difference. Hexter would make sure the account was discovered one way or another. And Rinaldo, having botched my murder, would be edited out of the official version of events. I’d survived, but only for now. I was going to become a hunted man. And the advantage was all with the hunters.
Rinaldo was beginning to come round when I left. I pulled the telephone wire out of the wall to make it more difficult for him to raise the alarm, but, even if he couldn’t work his way free, they’d come looking for him eventually. I only had a limited amount of time to make my escape. All I took with me was a hurriedly packed shoulder-bag. For the journey I was embarking on, travelling light was going to be essential.
The ebony ruler wasn’t the only thing Rinaldo had overlooked. He’d failed to find where I’d hidden my reserve passport. Not the reserve supplied by the Service, but one I’d got hold of on my own initiative as a precaution. I’d never supposed I’d actually have to use my alternative identity. But now I did. Duncan Forrester was born.
Or reborn. The original Duncan Forrester died in a motorcycle accident in 1968, aged seventeen. He’d never held a passport. And the one I held in his name had never been used. But soon it would be.
I picked up a taxi from the rank at the northern end of Piazza Navona and made straight for Termini station. I had no particular destination in mind. Getting out of Rome as quickly as possible was my number one priority.
Six hours later, I was in Genoa. I walked out of the station into gathering darkness and an unknowable future. I could have gone on to Milan, but a busy port city full of foreigners and loners struck me as a better bet. There were plenty of onward train and ferry routes to choose from and the tangled network of piazzas, alleys and flights of steps in the old centre were ideal for getting lost. And lost was what I most needed to be.
I booked into a small, cheap hotel and spent the evening drifting from bar to bar, debating what I should do and where I should go. I had little confidence in talking my way out of the trap Hexter had sprung on me. The only hard evidence against him was in Norrback’s possession and I couldn’t expect Norrback to endanger himself by letting me use it. Worse still, there was the very real possibility we wouldn’t be believed, with the tape dismissed as a fake and Hexter proclaimed innocent. By contrast, the bank account in my name, with all those Hong Kong dollars in it, was damning.
I hardly slept that night, tormented by uncertainty about what to do for the best and imagining revenges I was unlikely ever to be able to inflict. I’d believed Cinzia loved me. Even allowing for my reservations about him, I’d believed Hexter was loyal. They’d both betrayed me. And Hexter had betrayed his country. I’d failed utterly to see any of this coming.
I headed out before dawn and found a caffè not far from the hotel where there was a metered phone the owner was willing to let me use for a long-distance call, although I had to part with a deposit of a couple of thousand lire before I was allowed to dial the number.
I strongly suspected Hexter had returned to London and was probably at home, given how early it was there. But what would speaking to him achieve? What exactly was I going to say? I didn’t know. All I knew was that I wanted to hear his voice when he denied what he’d done.
It rang a long time, in that Chelsea flat of his I’d never been inside. Eventually, he picked up.
‘Hexter,’ he announced.
‘It’s me,’ I responded.
‘Well, well. This is a surprise. Where are you?’
‘Not where you want me to be.’
‘I gather you’ve got yourself in a spot of bother. There are some serious questions for you to answer.’
‘You already know the answers to those questions, Clive.’
‘Why don’t you come into HQ and sort it all out?’
‘You tipped the Chinese off to kill Slavsky. Chen Shufan as well, I assume, when we were supposed to be bringing him over the border after Tiananmen Square. Was he going to name you as a traitor? Is that why he had to die? How many others have there been whose death warrants you’ve signed?’
‘You’re not making any sense.’
‘Why the
Chinese? Why sell out to them? How did they turn you? And when? How long have you been in their pocket?’
‘Tell me where you are. I could come and meet you if it would help.’
‘For the avoidance of doubt, Clive, let me tell you I intend to make you pay for what you’ve done.’
‘It’s what you’ve done that’s the issue. There’s been quite a flap here. Not everyone finds the accusations that have been made against you as hard to believe as I do.’
‘Just tell me why you did it. Doesn’t your country mean anything to you?’
‘Let me give you a piece of advice, old boy. Don’t threaten what you can’t deliver. If you’re confident of proving your innocence, come and do it. If not, disappear. I think you might have the aptitude for that. You’ve always struck me as somehow … insubstantial. The stuff of shadows, so to speak. So, slip away into those shadows. And stay there. Then no one will ever know for sure what you did or didn’t do. You’ll remain an officially unsettled question. I’ll certainly argue there’s nothing to be gained by searching for you indefinitely. How does that sound?’
‘Like you’re frightened of me, Clive. That’s how it sounds.’
‘Think about what I’ve said. Think about it long and hard. You won’t get a better offer.’
‘Is that what this is? An offer? From you to me?’
‘What this is, old boy, is goodbye. Don’t call again.’
He hung up then. After staring stupidly at the receiver in my hand for several moments, I hung up too.
I traded the balance of my deposit for a brandy-laced doppio espresso and sat drinking it by the bar, watching the rain fall on the cobbles outside. Another customer came in and started an animated conversation with the owner. The world shrank around me. I’d never felt more alone.
Later that day, I boarded a ferry bound for Tunis. Sailing time twenty-four hours. Long enough, I reckoned, for me to settle in my mind what I was going to do.
I couldn’t win. That was the dismal truth I faced, gazing out from the stern of the ferry at its wake churning the grey Mediterranean water. I couldn’t win.
But maybe I could avoid losing. In the end, Hexter’s advice began to make a perverse kind of sense. If the Service was willing to back him against me, then let them. I was no stranger to solitude or misrepresentation. I could survive.
One False Move Page 16