The Night Manager (44 page)

Well-armed if incompetent units of the Colombian army in the cartels' pay have been dispatched to the Buenaventura area to provide cover for the transaction....

A hundred empty army trucks are mustered in the dockside warehouses--but when Strelski requests a sight of the satellite photographs that could confirm or deny this information, so he tells Burr, he hits a brick wall. The espiocrats of Langley decree that he does not possess the necessary clearance.

"Leonard, will you please tell me something. What the fuck is Flagship in all this?"

Burr's head reels. It is his understanding that in Whitehall, code name Flagship is doubly restricted. Not only is it confined to those who are Flagship cleared, it is graded Guard, keep away from Americans. So what on earth is Strelski doing, an American, being refused access to code name Flagship by the barons of Pure Intelligence in Langley, Virginia?

"Flagship is nothing but a fence to keep us out," Burr fumes to Goodhew, minutes later. "If Langley can know about it, why can't we? For Flagship read Darker and his friends across the pond."

Goodhew is deaf to Burr's indignation. He pores over shipping maps, draws himself routes in coloured crayons, reads up on compass bearings, stop-over times and port formalities. He buries himself in works on maritime law and beards a grand legal authority he was at school with: "Now, what do you know, Brian, if anything," Burr hears him piping down the bare corridor, "about interdiction at sea? Certainly I'm not going to pay your ridiculous fees! I'm going to give you a very bad lunch at my club and steal two hours of your grossly inflated professional time in the interest of your country. How's your wife putting up with you now you're a lord? Well, give her my sympathy and meet me on Thursday prompt at one."

You're coming on too strong, Rex, thinks Burr. Slow down.

We're still a long way from home.

Names, Rooke had said: names and numbers. Jonathan is providing them by the score. To the uninitiated his offerings might seem at first glance trivial: nicknames culled from place cards at the dinner table, fugitive conversations partly overheard, the glimpse of a letter lying on Roper's desk, Roper's jottings to himself about the who, the how much, the how and when.

Taken singly, such snippets made poor fare beside Pat Flynn's clandestine photographs of Spetsnaz-turned-mercenaries arriving at Bogota airport; or Amato's hair-raising accounts of Corkoran's secret rampages in the Nassau fleshpots; or intercepted bank draughts from respectable financial houses, showing tens of millions of dollars homing on Roper-related offshore companies in Curaçao.

Yet properly assembled, Jonathan's reports provided revelations that were as sensational as any great dramatic coup. After a night of them, Burr declared that he felt seasick. After two, Goodhew remarked that he would not be surprised to read of his own high-street bank manager showing up in Crystal with a suitcase full of clients' cash.

It was not so much the tentacles of the octopus as its ability to enter the most hallowed shrines that left them aghast. It was the involvement of institutions that even Burr had till now presumed inviolate, of names above reproach.

For Goodhew, it was as if the very pageantry of England was dying before his eyes. Dragging himself homeward in the small hours, he would pause to stare feverishly at a parked police car and wonder whether the daily stories of police violence and corruption were true after all, not the invention of journalists and malcontents. Entering his club, he would spot eminent merchant bankers or stockbrokers of his acquaintance and--instead of flapping a hand at them in cheery greeting, as he would have done three months ago--would study them from under lowered brows across the dining room, asking them in his mind: Are you another of them? Are you? Are you?

"I shall make a demarche," he declared at one of their late-night threesomes. "I've decided. I'll convene Joint Steering. I'll mobilise the Foreign Office for a start; they're always good for a fight against the Darkists. Merridew will stand up and be counted, I'm sure he will."

"Why should he?" said Burr.

"Why shouldn't he?"

"Merridew's brother is top man in Jason Warhole, if I remember rightly. Jason's put in for five hundred bearer bonds in the Curaçao company at half a million a crack last week."

"Dreadfully sorry about this, old boy," Palfrey whispered, from the shadows that seemed always to surround him.

"About what, Harry?" said Goodhew kindly.

Palfrey's haunted eyes glanced past him at the doorway. He was sitting in a North London pub of his own choosing, not far from Goodhew's house in Kentish Town. "Panicking. Ringing your office. Distress rocket. How did you get here so fast?"

"Bike, of course. What's the matter, Harry? You look as though you've seen a ghost. They haven't been threatening your life too, have they?"

"Bike," Palfrey repeated, taking a pull of Scotch and immediately wiping his mouth with a handkerchief as if to remove the guilty traces. "About the best thing anyone can do, bike. Fellows on the pavement can't keep up. Fellows in cars have to keep going round the block. Mind if we go next door? Noisier."

They sat in the games room, where there was a jukebox to drown their conversation. Two muscular-looking boys with crew cuts were playing bar billiards. Palfrey and Goodhew sat side by side on a wooden settle.

Palfrey struck a match and had difficulty bringing the flame to his cigarette. "Things are hotting up," he murmured. "Burr's getting a bit warm. I warned them, but they wouldn't listen. Time to take the gloves off."

"You warned them, Harry?" Goodhew said, mystified as ever by the complexity of Palfrey's systems of betrayal. "Warned whom? Not Darker? You don't mean you warned Darker, do you?"

"Got to play both sides of the net, old boy," said Palfrey, wrinkling his nose and casting another nervous glance around the bar. "Only way to survive. Got to keep up your credibility. Both ends." A frantic smile. "Tapping my phone," he explained, pointing at his ear.

"Who is?"

"Geoffrey. Geoffrey's people. Mariners. Flagship people."

"How do you know?"

"Oh, you don't. Can't tell. No one can. Not these days. Not unless it's sort of Third World. Or the police doing it with their feet. No way." He drank, shaking his head. "It's hitting the fan, Rex. Getting a bit big." He drank again, quick sips. He muttered "Cheers," forgetting he had said Cheers already. "They tip me the word. Secretaries. Old buddies from Legal Department. They don't say it, you see. Don't have to. Not, 'Excuse me, Harry, my boss is tapping your phone.' It's hints." Two men in motorcycle leathers had begun a game of shove-halfpenny. "I say, would you mind if we went somewhere else?"

There was an empty trattoria opposite the cinema. The time was six-thirty. The Italian waiter despised them.

"The boys have done over my flat too," Palfrey said, sniggering as if he were relating a smutty joke. "Didn't pinch anything. My landlord told me. Two chums of mine. Said I'd given them the key."

"Had you?"

"No."

"Have you given a key to anyone else?"

"Well, you know. Girls and things. Most of 'em give 'em back."

"So they have been threatening you; I was right." Goodhew ordered spaghetti and a bottle of Chianti. The waiter pulled a sour face and yelled through the kitchen door. Palfrey's fear was all over him. It was like a breeze, plucking at his knees and taking his breath away before he spoke.

"Bit hard to unlock oneself, actually, Rex," Palfrey explained apologetically. "Habits of a lifetime, I suppose. Can't get the toothpaste back in the tube once you've sat on it. Problem."

He ducked his mouth to the brim of his glass to catch the wine before it spilled. "Need a helping hand, as it were. Sorry about that."

As so often with Palfrey, Goodhew felt he was listening to a faulty broadcast of which the meaning came only in garbled bursts. "I can't promise you anything, Harry. You know that. There are no free dispensations in life. Everything has to be earned. I believe that. I think you do too."

"Yes, but you've got the guts," Palfrey objected.

"And you've got the knowledge," said Goodhew.

Palfrey's eyes popped wide in amazement. "That's what Darker said! Bang on! Too much knowledge. Dangerous knowledge. My bad luck! You're a marvel, Rex. Bloody clairvoyant."

"So you've been talking to Geoffrey Darker. What about?"

"Well, him to me, really. I just listened."

"When?"

"Yesterday. No, Friday. Came and saw me in my room. Ten to one. Just putting on my mac. 'What are you doing for lunch?' Thought he was going to invite me. 'Well, just a vague date at my club,' I said. 'Nothing I can't cancel.' So he said, 'Good. Cancel it.' So I cancelled. Then we talked. In the lunch hour. In my office. Nobody around. Not even a glass of Perrier or a dry biscuit. Good tradecraft, though. Geoffrey always had good tradecraft."

He grinned again.

"And he said?" Goodhew prompted.

"He said"--Palfrey took a huge breath, like somebody about to do a length under water--"he said it was time for good men to come to the aid of the party. Said the Cousins wanted a clear run on the Limpet thing. They could take care of their Enforcement people all right, but they counted on us to take care of ours. Wanted to be sure I was aboard."

"And you said?"

"I was. Hundred percent. Well, I am. Aren't I?" He bridled. "You're not suggesting I should have told him to stuff it, are you? Christ!"

"Of course I'm not, Harry. You must do what is best for you. I understand that. So you said you were aboard. What did he say then?"

Palfrey relapsed into an aggressive sullenness. "He wanted a legal reading of the River House's demarcation deal with the Burr agency by Wednesday five p. m. The deal I drafted for you. I undertook to provide it."

"And?"

"That's all there is. Wednesday five p. m. is my deadline. The Flagship team will be holding a meeting the next morning. He'll need time to study my report first. I said, No problem."

The abrupt halt, on a high note, accompanied by a lifting of the brows, gave Goodhew pause. When his son made the same gesture, it meant that he was concealing something. Goodhew had a similar suspicion about Palfrey.

"Is that all?"

"Why shouldn't it be?"

"Was Darker pleased with you?"

"Very, as a matter of fact."

"Why? You'd only agreed to obey orders, Harry. Why should he be pleased with you? Did you agree to do something else for him?" Goodhew had the strange sense that Palfrey was urging him to press harder. "Did you tell him something perhaps?" he suggested, smiling in order to make confession more attractive.

Palfrey gave an anguished grin.

"But, Harry--what could you possibly have told Darker that he didn't know already?"

Palfrey was really trying. It was as if he was taking repeated runs at the same hurdle, determined to clear it sooner or later.

"Did you tell him about me?" Goodhew suggested. "You couldn't have done. It would have been suicide. Did you?"

Palfrey was shaking his head. "Never," he whispered. "Scout's honour, Rex. Wouldn't cross my mind."

"Then what?"

"Just a theory, Rex. Presumption, that's all. Hypothesis. Law of probabilities. Not secrets, nothing bad. Theories. Idle theories. Chitchat. Pass the time of day. Chap standing in my room. Lunchtime. Staring at me. Got to tell him something."

"Theories based on what?"

"The submission I prepared for you. About the sort of criminal case against Roper that would stick under English law. I worked on it in your office. You remember."

"Of course I remember. What was your theory?"

"There was this American secret annex that got it all going, prepared by their Enforcement people in Miami. The summary of evidence to date. Strelski, that the chap? Roper's original pitch to the cartels, the broad elements of the deal, all very shrouded, very top secret. Yours and Burr's eyes only."

"And your eyes too, of course," Goodhew suggested, pulling back from him in a presentiment of disgust.

"I played this game, you see. The one you can't help playing when you read a report like that. Well, we all do, don't we? Can't help it. Natural curiosity. Can't stop your mind going... spot the snitch. These long passages with only three chaps in the room. Two sometimes. Wherever they were, there was always this reliable source peaching on them. Well, I know modern technology is the cat's whiskers, but this was ridiculous."

"So you spotted the snitch."

Palfrey looked really proud, like a man who has finally put his courage together and done his duty for the day.

"And you told Darker whom you'd spotted," Goodhew suggested.

"The Greek chap. Hand in glove with the cartels and ratting on them to Enforcement as soon as their backs were turned. Apostoll. Lawyer, just like me."

Informed by Goodhew that same night of Palfrey's indiscretion, Burr faced the dilemma every agent-runner dreads most.

His first response typically was from the heart. He drafted an urgent personal signal to Strelski in Miami, saying he had reason to believe that "unfriendly Purists are now conscious of the identity of your Brother Michael." He changed "conscious" to "witting" out of deference to the American espiocrats' jargon and sent it. He forbore from suggesting that the leak was British. Strelski could work that out for himself. His duty by Strelski done, the descendant of Yorkshire handloom weavers sat stoically in his attic room, staring through the skylight at the orange Whitehall sky. No longer was Burr eating out his heart for a sign, any sign, of his agent. Now it was his duty to decide whether to pull his agent out or swallow the risk and carry on. Still pondering, he ambled down the long corridor and perched himself, hands in pockets, on the radiator in Goodhew's office, while the pigeons argued on the parapet.

"Shall we do worst case?" Goodhew suggested.

"Worst case is, they put Apo under a bright light and he tells them he had orders from us to discredit Corkoran as a signer," said Burr. "Then they target my boy as the new signer."

"Who is they in this scenario, Leonard?"