The Dealer and the Dead (26 page)

Harvey said, ‘I think you should know, Mr Roscoe, that in a lifetime of business I’ve accumulated influential customers – the Ministry of Defence, the Secret Intelligence Service and …’

A glint lightened the policeman’s eyes. ‘I wouldn’t know about that, sir. But if you’re confident of them whistling up a platoon of the Parachute Regiment and sending them down here …’

‘I have friends.’

‘Pleased to hear it, sir. Any time you need me, just call. Good afternoon, Mrs Gillot. Good afternoon, sir.’

‘Friends, and don’t forget it.’

No answer. The group had already turned their backs on the patio and were on the driveway, going to their car.

She had never been inside the halls where the fair was staged. Organised by Defence Systems and Equipment International, it was a closed, demonised place for Megs Behan.

She was in the front row. Those who had penetrated the place in previous years – by forging passes or conning a naïve exhibitor into verifying an application – were the élite on the barrier. It had been an early start, a little after seven thirty, and she was almost alone. Another hour to go before the first of the exhibitors were pitching up. It was now early afternoon and visitors were drifting away, but she hadn’t seen the bastard. What had shocked her most was that two policemen, one younger and one older than herself, had offered her a sip from their plastic coffee cups and turned the cup round for hygiene. One had called her ‘sunshine’ and the other ‘love’.

Those who had been inside – top of the tree – reported variously. The big companies had major stands with videos blaring as they demonstrated their products, champagne flowing. The small firms were in the electronics world, did the titanium plating for an attack aircraft’s cockpit or the mounts for machine-guns
in the hatches of helicopters. An American stand manager complained that his government’s tighter fist meant Mexican human-traffickers out of Tijuana had better scanners than the US Border Guard. A South African, on a stand exhibiting anything from an armoured personnel carrier to a sniper rifle, claimed that trade was flat but that the Middle East was still holding up well. A British officer in uniform was heard to say that equipment had become so sophisticated that it was easy to forget fighting was done by people and ‘the simplest thing in infantry is man against man’. Someone reported, ‘You don’t see a mention anywhere of
killing.
A mocked-up frontier post is manned by
peace-keeping troops.
The videos shout about
fighting for peace.’
One justification – rejected out of hand by Megs Behan – was that a hundred and fifty thousand jobs depended on the ‘trade of murder’. She would have given a right arm, maybe even a right boob, to insinuate herself inside the ‘Death Supermarket’.

The bastard – Harvey Gillot – had not shown.

There had been good years when huge crowds had been penned back and police lines had bulged as they defended the entrance to the exhibition centre, when arrests had conferred a badge of honour – all gone. Then her ears would have been ringing with the abuse thrown at arriving guests, potential buyers and the likes of Harvey Gillot, and the police would have been doing gratuitous violence.

It was a mark of shame that the picket on the barrier was barely three deep and the placards were thin. It certainly hurt that the police were so goddamn friendly. She had, indeed, drunk their coffee. One had nearly made a pass at her, and had offered to open the barrier links so that she could get more easily to the DLR station if she was caught short.

A waste of time. She had thrown no paint bombs, had fired no ball-bearings from a catapult, hadn’t even chucked a shoe. There had been a few photographers an age earlier but they’d gone now.

And Harvey Gillot wasn’t there, so there was little point in vaulting the barrier and making an exhibition of herself if nobody
had hung around to witness it. She thought the policemen would have been embarrassed for her if they’d had to haul her off to a van.

For herself, she felt almost ashamed. A reedy voice used a bullhorn to her right and squealed insults at the distant building, and the police were smiling. She was ashamed because she felt the betrayal of all those kids – alive and dead, scarred and traumatised, homeless and hungry – who were the victims, ‘collateral’ was the vogue word, of the arms trade: their photographs were neatly catalogued in her filing cabinet.

She had to learn Shock and Awe.

She had a rucksack at her feet, against the barrier, and bent to pick it up, then started the struggle to get her arms through the straps. Another policeman helped her. He was smiling. ‘Off home, then? Your crowd have been damn good today. Anyway, hope a few stay on – this is double bubble, a nice little earner. It isn’t like it used to be, proper scrap then. Have a safe journey.’

She headed off, humiliated, racking her mind for what might represent
shock
and
awe
and for something to lift her morale.

In a hide of camouflage netting, on the edge of a covert of birches, Benjie Arbuthnot let a shooting stick take his weight as he puffed a cigarillo. Beside him his grandson, a week back from boarding-school, aged fourteen and not yet in the fifth form, smoked a cigarette provided for him, and together they watched the field that had been harvested the day before. The target would be pretty much everything that breathed, kicked, flew or moved in any way. Benjie had, broken, a twelve-bore over and under from James Purdey – worth a fortune, his retirement present from Deirdre, and the sprog was armed with a single barrel four-ten of mongrel manufacture. A mobile rang.

He swore, had the shotgun under his arm so he used his free hand to tap his pockets and identify where the damn thing was. He produced his phone, realised it was silent and looked at his grandson. The blush spread crimson. The boy fumbled through
his pockets and brought out his. It glowed from under its protective case. It was old, almost a museum piece in the development of mobile phones. All thumbs, his grandson answered it. ‘Yes?’

A pause.

‘Yes. He’s with me. Who’s calling, please?’

‘Thank you very much. It’s Harvey Gillot.’

He heard the young voice say that it was a man with the name of Harvey Gillot, and then he heard the older, familiar tone, a vile oath and a cough. It was good to have the number of a marginally senior officer in the Secret Intelligence Service … A hotel in Kyrenia, the north coast of Cyprus. Bits and pieces going from Armenia to the Kurds in northern Iraq, in the Saddam days, long before the old boy had dropped through the trap. Benjie Arbuthnot had taken a call on a phone in the hotel lobby and had given the caller his mobile number, which had gone straight on to the skin of Harvey’s hand. Then he’d headed for the toilets, written the number on his notepad and scrubbed his skin clean. Just a number that he might want one day. ‘Yes? Benjie here. Gillot? What the hell are you calling this number for?’

‘I have a problem.’

‘Don’t we all? Prostate, Inland Revenue? It’s almost a vintage phone and it’s been in a drawer for ten years. I gave it to my grandson last week and now you call it. Won’t ask where you snitched the number from, but be assured the card and the number will be at the bottom of a dustbin within an hour. So, what’s the problem?’

‘Rijeka, the docks, a shipment and …’

‘Breaking up, Harvey, and you’re leaving me far behind. What’s the problem? Make it snappy – and it’s damn decent of me not to have stamped this thing to extinction.’

Harvey took a deep breath. He was on the patio, hadn’t moved off it or eaten anything. The container that carried the Malyutka MANPADS had been shipped out of Gdansk, and the cargo in the container was on a manifest as ‘agricultural equipment’. It was on the final approach to the harbour at Rijeka, Customs
were squared, there was a lorry on the quayside and men up the line to take the stuff into the cornfields and up to a rendezvous. In his room at the hotel there was a plastic bag of rubbish jewellery, the deeds of homes that were getting the shit shelled out of them and wristwatches a street trader wouldn’t take. He had been able to see the ship, in a close November fog, coming near to the quay, and the big man had drifted close and used his given name.

Harvey Gillot hadn’t seen Benjie Arbuthnot for seven years – hadn’t set eyes on him since Green’s Hotel in Peshawar and the sending on of the Blowpipes, bloody useless things. A murmur, very soft for a big man, in his ear about ‘sanctions busting’ and a little lecture on the maximum and minimum sentences available to a criminal-court judge when a punter was found guilty of ignoring the will of the United Nations Security Council. An aside, barely audible, indicated a good market, a fatter fee, if the container went on to Aqaba, and the start of a very healthy relationship with the Jordanians. A little smile on Benjie Arbuthnot’s face, and a slap of encouragement on Harvey’s back. He had known by then that the jewellery and house deeds were valueless, and the deal would cost him so … He had stood the agent down, paid off the lorry, watched timber unloaded from the freighter, then seen it sail. He had dumped the bag in a wastebin behind the hotel kitchens, then fled fast to the north and into Slovenia. Had supposed it was an act of policy for Her Majesty’s Government to see that the Jordanian military had good equipment, and Russian-made stuff was always useful in the maze puzzle of the Middle East. The Jordanians had paid well then and later. It had been Harvey’s first big deal since Solly Lieberman’s death, and he had been, at the age of twenty-eight, an international arms broker and had the protection of the intelligence community. He exhaled, and spat it out.

‘The deal you made me cancel in Croatia, at Rijeka, it’s come back at me and—’

‘Did you say
made,
Harvey? I seem to recall offering advice.’

‘It’s come back at me. There’s a contract out. The people who
were buying the gear have raised the money. I’m walking dead and—’

He had said, on his patio,
I’ve accumulated influential customers … I have friends.
Christ. Now it had a hollow ring.

‘I’m out now, just another Whitehall warrior on a pension. If I have anything sensible to say, I’ll call you. If not you won’t hear from me. Oh, and, Harvey, always remember it’s swings and roundabouts, a bit bleak today but you had some good times off my prompting. A blame game and spouting about responsibility aren’t applicable. Take care and good luck.’

The call was cut. He counted to ten, then dialled the number again. It was unobtainable.
Take care and good luck.
He sagged back into a chair.

It had been the white-puff smudges on the slopes across the bay, at Lulworth, that had kick-started Harvey Gillot’s brain: the firing grounds used by the army for training artillery gun crews and the tank people. There was a good chance they were using the phosphorous shells he had supplied. He did not supply the ammunition they were using in Afghanistan, but they needed cheap stuff for knocking holes out of the chalk hills leading to the cliffs at Lulworth. The ministry, of course, did not do deals with the new élite of Bucharest, Sofia or Bratislava, or even Moldova and the spivs in Chi
in
u. At that distance, he couldn’t hear the guns but the impact points were obvious. The ministry bought from anybody who had stockpiles of the correct calibre, and if artillery or armour officers bitched, they’d be told it was what they had and where they were. The good times were over. It had been a useful contract for Harvey Gillot.

He had moped through what remained of the morning, and into the afternoon. Two alternatives jostled for his attention: quit and run, or raise the drawbridge and make a fortress of his home. But the firing had put a third dimension on the table: go into
denial –
it would never happen – and get back to work.

He started by reactivating a deal that had seemed attractive last year, then withered. Baghdad – where else? It had been a brilliant marketplace in the couple of years after the invasion, then had dribbled fewer opportunities but had seemed, last year, to pick up. The United States flag was being hauled down: they were going. The government, the local people, seemed to want equipping but not just from an American warehouse. He had detail on the computer that he wouldn’t have minded sharing
with investigators from an Alpha outfit at Revenue and Customs. The stuff had been joshing around for more than a couple of years, People’s Republic of China small arms and ammunition, and Harvey Gillot knew of three others who were deep into it. The stuff had come out of storage depots in Albania and hadn’t been kept well. It was good business to supply to Baghdad: officialdom tended to give it an automatic stamp and the bulk was signed off by officers and bureaucrats on the take in the Green Zone. It would be a long-dead trail by the time some poor bastard at a roadblock, wearing a police uniform that didn’t fit, found out he’d a jam in his AK or that the percussion cap wouldn’t ignite. Nothing wrong with Harvey Gillot getting a bit of the deal up-and-running again. The dog slept by his feet. He was on the phone.