Vagabond (48 page)

‘He’s hard, as I said.’

‘Wrong. We get taught profile recognition. He’s lonely, nervous, twisted with emotion. I loathed him at the start and now I’m a sympathiser. He’s a wall-builder. If anyone comes close to him, he’s mixing mortar and slapping on the bricks. He’s one of the men or women we have a use for but are kept outside the gates. They’re increments, employed like street-sweepers. He’s a creature of Matthew Bentinick and . . . What’s the matter?’

His hands eased her sideways. ‘Gaby, can we do it again?’

‘No . . . I’m going back to the battlefield. Get some sleep – you won’t tomorrow. It’s always difficult when the betrayal gets called in.’

She kissed him and swung her legs off the bed. He wasn’t much of a catch but he was what she had. Would anyone care? She went to her pile of clothes and started to dress. Probably not. Not even the agent handler if she delivered. Not even Matthew Bentinick.

The pattern was well established. There was a chair in the corridor for Matthew Bentinick. The door was left open and his shoes rested on the line where the carpets changed. Rosie was inside. Truth was, and he freely acknowledged it, he didn’t have the strength to be inside the room for the weekly one-hour visit.

Nothing much changed. The days of head X-rays and magnetic resonance imaging scans were long past. Their daughter was in ‘trauma’. In fair physical health but psychiatrically wrecked. She sat in an easy chair. She could swallow solids and drink. She could use a toilet with help. Most afternoons she was brought downstairs into a common recreational area. On dry summer days, once a week, she might be allowed to sit in the sunshine by a large lime tree under observation. But Mary Bentinick never spoke. Her mother and father had not heard her voice since they had met the air ambulance and hurried beside the gurney as she was wheeled through the airport passageways. She had the TV on: she did not watch it but stared at it. She seemed to recognise neither her parents nor members of the nursing staff. Matthew no longer bothered to quiz consultants. He had been told years before that his daughter had the acute symptoms of catatonic schizophrenia:
Catatonia is a state of neurogenic motor immobility and behavioural abnormality manifested by stupor
. That was enough. How long would it last? ‘Sorry, Mr Bentinick, we have no idea.’ The fee at the clinic was around a thousand a week and the insurers of the charity that had sent her to Africa paid a lump of it. The previous director general had done some creative accounting so the Security Service chipped in. A little more came from the Bentinick funds.

If she had spoken it would have been better. If they had been given an approximation of an end date it would have been easier. It was the blank stare that destroyed him. Much of the time he was there he focused on the carpet. Rosie had a cheerful voice and talked for both of them. She was describing now how well the tomatoes were doing in the greenhouse in spite of the aphids. Mary’s condition did not change. When he imagined what had been done to her, the torture was almost beyond what he could bear. There could not be closure, but he hoped for redress. Maybe tomorrow evening.

‘Of course, I wasn’t actually there.’

‘I think you’ve a good idea of events as they played out.’

‘I suppose I have. It’s like a nightmare, but not a dream. It happened.’

Jocelyn sat opposite him. He was the stereotype of an aid worker. She had travelled to his office that afternoon: too complicated to have him inside Thames House, and unsuitable for their business to be talked through in a public place. There was a small conference room at the back of the first floor of the building. She had a mug of coffee, and the charity’s logo was flaking off – a child in its mother’s arms against a backdrop of Africa. He had close-cut blond hair, sun-bleached, a wind-tanned face, and wore a safari shirt with frayed jeans. Her estimation: a grandparent’s trust fund supported him. He seemed irritable, and she assumed that was because her questioning reminded him of where he’d been – useful, involved – and where he was now.

‘She didn’t make the radio link. She was supposed to do it whether she had malaria, was at death’s door, in the middle of a clinic, taking classes or delivering babies. Two days without contact – we pressed the panic button. Mary Bentinick was important to us. She was conscientious, stubborn and played by the rules. She should have left, but had refused. The area director was scheduled to go up and drag her out by the hair if he had to. It was not something we’d have done lightly – two hundred klicks there and another two hundred back. We’d decided to bring her back after the first shipment had gone in. We left it too long. It happened, we think, a couple of days afterwards.’

Jocelyn took the note. The story was substantially the same as that told by the Revenue & Customs team, but the slant was different so it was useful.

‘It isn’t a pretty story.’

‘I wasn’t expecting it to be.’

‘Her father’s been told.’

‘In the raw?’

He grimaced. ‘With edits for sensitivity.’

‘I’ll take the unexpurgated version, thank you.’

‘It was an Antonov plane and had been given an arrival time on an old strip – mineral explorers had built it. The Russians had a contract to provide the M23 people with more modern firepower, better weapons than the UN people down the road – where I was with the area director. The local commander was Brother Hastings – that was what he called himself – and he paid with illicitly mined rough diamonds. Twenty-five tons of hardware were ferried in. A Russian handled the transaction, a former intelligence officer named Simonov. There were people in the theatre who had big radios and could download stuff – spooks did it. Simonov brought the weapons in – threw in a crate or two of Scotch – and flew out. It was illegal. It violated a UN resolution and an embargo. There was a nun who nursed in the clinic and she’s the main source. Don’t ask for her email address. She kept a diary, wrote it down and fled. She was caught and butchered. The document was stuffed down her front – they weren’t interested in removing clothing from above the waist so they didn’t find it. Her body was located by troops of the UN force, Indonesians. They recovered the document. How are you doing?’

‘Thank God my parents sent me to shorthand classes. I’m doing fine but I’ll want a photocopy of the document she carried out.’ Her coffee had cooled.

‘The first night was tense. The M23 people were mostly blind drunk. Mary Bentinick stayed in the clinic and made it into something of a refuge. There were two nuns and a priest there, and patients who were recovering after minor surgery from the doctor’s last visit. In the morning, apparently, they came looking for food and assumed the building was a good start point.’

She wrote.

‘They took what food was there, went away for a couple of hours, then came back. Mary Bentinick could have done a runner, but she didn’t. It’s a familiar enough story for foreign aid workers in bad places at bad times. They’re surrounded by the kids they’ve taught and nursed, and the friends they’ve made – they find it impossible just to leave them. So she didn’t go. The priest was bayoneted, the nuns were raped. Any of the men who tried to stand in the militia’s way were shot or clubbed. Then they got to her. What they did is in the document. I can’t bring myself to spell it out.’

He lit a cigarette.

‘In brief. She’d already have seen the brutality of the killings. At some stage she was clubbed across the skull or thrown down and hit her head on concrete. She was raped. It would have been a frenzy. Unprotected sexual penetration with more than a platoon of them. They were high on alcohol and higher on the power given them by the cargo brought by Timofey Simonov. I don’t know whether she was HIV-infected – it’d be a miracle if she wasn’t. There would have been a bit more of it the next day. The graves had been dug and the dead buried. The woman who had written up the document went that night, and other villagers left singly or in family groups. The militia still had the dregs of the whisky. Someone took her out but she was already wounded – had a bullet in the stomach. She was found by the Indonesians about five klicks up the road. She was sitting by a tree with her legs apart and her knees up, as if she were just waiting for the next in line and being ready meant it hurt less. The wounded man had bled to death. Do you want a full résumé on the UN mandate?’

‘I think I know where you’re going.’

‘The Indonesians didn’t think they had the firepower to win a decisive victory over the M23 people. They believed it would be inconclusive and they would take casualties. They never went as far as the air strip, but took her back with them, along with any survivors lucky enough to be close to the track. Those who were in the bush had to take their chance. You know the rest. Air-ambulance evacuation. I’m afraid I’ve lost touch with it. I do southern Sudan now. How is . . . ?’

‘Not much changed. I’m grateful for your time.’ Jocelyn gathered together her clutter, dumped her pad and pencil in her bag, and had her scarf out. She stood up.

He gazed at her. ‘It was all because of those bloody weapons being sent in, some bastards making a fortune out of the trade. Are you actually going to do something about it?’

‘Don’t push me.’

‘There’ve been enough weasel words over the years, promises of decisive intervention. The thugs of the bush and savannahs have never been better armed.’

‘Watch this space.’

She headed for the door and the stairs.

It was not for an officer of her rank and standing at Thames House to discuss policy with a desk prisoner of an obscure underfunded charity. A young staffer in the analysis corner of the building had produced a paper three years earlier. It had dealt with internal threats to the UK’s homeland. The staffer was of Pakistani origin, from the West Midlands, and reckoned a top-grade talent. Her paper had been widely circulated – the Islamist threat to British cities and lives, and to the communities of close allies in the country’s inner cities, but was then franchised out to safe havens abroad. The safest of the havens had shifted from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen to unpopulated wildernesses in Africa where well-armed war lords ruled. They held sway in Nigeria, Mali, Mauretania, the mountains of southern Algeria, Libya, Somalia and many other corners of destitution and Islamic fundamentalism. Their power was based on bullets and weapons. Their faith was fuelled by a perversion of Islam and the naked pursuit of power. The weapon in the hand was the strongest element of the equation. Crates of rifles and mortars loaded on pallets and airlifted into remote parts of an unpoliced and ungoverned continent would provide, ultimately, the threat in Britain’s cities.

Each plane load tilted a balance; each illegal arms dealer was to be classified as an enemy. Her message was absorbed. The Americans – ‘the Cousins’ – had incarcerated Viktor Bout and had rejoiced at the success of an overseas operation that had netted the Merchant of Death, but Jocelyn and her colleagues worked quietly. She would never have considered hinting to the charity worker that the affairs of Timofey Simonov were on the point of possible closure. The problem was the lack of evidence to lay before a court. It was hard to find any – which meant that risks had to be run. She knew most of Vagabond’s history and thought Bentinick had chosen well. It was not only about the assault on Mary Bentinick but concerned the threats posed to the United Kingdom and the need to expose an enemy. She took the bus back to the Thames-side building.

He prepared for his visit to Milovice, once the headquarters garrison camp of Central Command (Europe
)
.

What had happened to Milovice was a disgrace. The brigadier was in the utility room ironing the grey shirt he would wear, and the tie that went with ‘best uniform dress’. Timofey Simonov was at the smaller wardrobe of the dressing room that led off his bedroom. The larger one held the majority of his clothes. The other was for the two uniforms he possessed and the greatcoat of the Red Army, with headgear for summer, winter and a combat helmet.

Milovice was a disgrace that shamed the Czech people, who had shown no gratitude for their liberation from Fascism. Equally deserving of opprobrium was the Russian government, led by Gorbachev, Yeltsin and Putin. He would not wear the combat uniform with the camouflage pattern, but the one designed for an officer of his rank in the GRU. He fingered the material, pinched the tunic between thumb and forefinger.

The site of the camp had been allowed to sink into disrepair. It had become home to gypsies and squatters, then been abandoned. Trees grew where there had been tended grass, and undergrowth carpeted the areas between runways and hangars, control towers and bunkers.

Veterans’ groups should have been there at weekends, with monuments to the different units of infantry, armour and air force that had been stationed there, and a museum to show the superb technology of the equipment based in the camp. There was nothing. Timofey Simonov believed it brought ignominy on the heads of Russians and Czechs.