Unofficial and Deniable

by John Gordon Davis

  ‘Did you write about all those subjects?’ He had not seen any cuttings about the environment in her CCB file.

  ‘You bet. I’ll show you my file of cuttings one day.’

  She wanted to set the world on fire. ‘But I’m not a communist, Jack. I’m all for enterprise, it’s the unacceptable face of capitalism I’m against. The monopolies, the exploitation, the sweated labour.’ She waved a hand. ‘Of course, when I was a starry-eyed freshman at university I went through the usual phase of communist idealism, but I grew out of that. And I think the world had to go through this period of communist revolution to sweep aside the feudal injustices of centuries, to redress the obscene imbalance of wealth and power that existed at the time. I admire the communists’ achievements.’

  Like what? Harker was about to say, but changed it in his mouth: ‘Which ones?’

  ‘It’s undeniable,’ she said earnestly, ‘that the average Russian and Chinese peasant – the vast majority of those two massive countries – it’s undeniable that they’re much better off now than before their revolutions.’

  Harker didn’t want to argue but he had to say, ‘But it’s 1998 now, and though the average Russian and Chinese probably is better off than his grandparents, he’s still very poor compared to his modern Western counterpart.’

  ‘Yeah? What about the poor of South America? The masses of India? They’re supposedly “Western” too in the sense that they’re in the West’s sphere, of influence.’

  ‘But the moral wrongs in those countries don’t make the economic and moral wrongs in Russia and China right, do they?’

  ‘True.’ She grinned. ‘So we’re coming up with profound truths. And I’m feeling more profound every minute.’ She pointed her finger at his nose. ‘But only a revolution will sweep aside the wrongs of most Third World countries, and the only power capable of making such a revolution is communism. All the other kinds are pussy-footing and piss-weak. So I applaud those underground communists who’re plotting to overthrow the repressive governments of Argentina and Chile and the like. I applaud the likes of Fidel Castro – I support the Cubans in Africa because even if they are driven back into the sea as you want, I betcha –’ she jabbed a finger – ‘that win or lose the Cubans will have been a big factor in the eventual collapse of apartheid.’

  She looked at him an earnest moment, then thrust her warm smooth hand on his. ‘But even though you don’t like that, Major Jack Harker, sir –’ she gave a little salute – ‘will you please please please still consider publishing my shit-hot humdinger of a book?’

  Harker threw back his head and laughed. It all seemed terribly funny.

  ‘Oh …’ she laughed, ‘I’m having a lovely day …’

  Yes, it was a lovely day. On their second Irish coffee he just wanted to take her hand and walk with this lovely young woman through this lovely park with its trees in full summer bloom, its lovers and roller-skaters and musicians and horse-drawn carriages – just walk hand in hand, being frightfully learned and amusing, telling each other more about each other, going through that delightfully earnest process of impressing: that’s what Jack Harker wanted to do, then hail a taxi to take them back to his nice old apartment off Gramercy Park, then fold her in his arms. But there was going to be none of that delightful business: it was a non-starter because Josephine wanted to rush home to work.

  ‘While my writing blood is up! I’m not going to waste all this booze, I’m going to go’n pound out the prose so I bowl you over next Saturday, Jack Harker of Harvest House fame …’ She blew him a dazzling kiss as her taxi pulled away from the Tavern on the Green.

  Harker watched her go with regret. As her cab disappeared she twiddled her fingers over her shoulder at him. He grinned and waved. Then he pulled out his cellphone and dialled Clements.

  ‘The eagle is on her way back,’ he said.

  ‘I’m clear,’ Clements replied.

  ‘Anything new?’

  ‘Some.’

  ‘So, drop everything around to me tonight.’

  It was a wistful Harker who walked through Central Park, sat in the Sherry-Netherland’s bar and drank a row of whiskies. He had spent a lovely day with a lovely young woman and he wanted to savour it – and he was going to report none of it to Felix Dupont.

  But when he got back to his apartment there was a coded message from Dupont on his answering machine, ordering him to proceed to Washington the next day for a conference. The following Saturday Harker could not meet Josephine Valentine as arranged because he was preparing to commit murder.

  6

  Colonel Felix Dupont, Director of Region One of the Civil Cooperation Bureau, ran a good, small hotel called the Royalton in a side street not far from Pennsylvania Avenue. It had only fifty rooms and the place was rather British: the interior was half-panelled in dark mahogany, the reception area had potted palms. Hunting trophies adorned the walls, antique chandeliers hung from the ornate ceiling. It had a handsome horseshoe bar called Churchill’s, also fitted out in mahogany with dark booths. All the bar staff were busty ladies – Felix Dupont didn’t hire any other kind. Churchill’s did good trade. The Royalton had no restaurant so it was inexpensive by Washington standards and therefore popular with travelling salesmen and husbands cheating on their wives. It was a profitable little hotel because of the low overheads, and its administration was undemanding, which left Dupont plenty of time for his covert Civil Cooperation Bureau duties.

  Felix Dupont was a man of about fifty with dark bushy eyebrows over a round, bearded face. He had piercing blue eyes that could be jolly. He was a devout Afrikaner, but an Anglicized one from Cape Town. He had gone to the best private school of British persuasion and had even considered going to Oxford University before he opted for a career in the South African army. He had a very good military reputation. Harker respected his abilities but didn’t like him. The man was an unmitigated racist. The antagonism was mutual: Dupont respected Harker’s record as a soldier but he resented his Sandhurst background, his British culture and manners. Ninety years ago Dupont’s father and grandfather had fought the likes of Harker’s in the long and bitter Boer War, his grandmother and most of her children had perished of disease and malnutrition in the British concentration camps along with twenty-six thousand other Boers. If Dupont had had his way Harker would have been transferred to Region Two, London, where he could ‘ponce about with those English sonsabitches’. Now Dupont had a nasty job for Harker, codenamed Operation Marigold, and he relished the man’s reaction.

  ‘Jesus.’ It was the first time in his CCB career that Harker had been ordered to kill anybody.

  Dupont waited, amused, his blue eyes hooded.

  ‘How?’ Harker demanded.

  ‘Softly-softly. We want to know what exactly these guys are planning before we bump them off – who their accomplices are, where they are, et cetera. And we want all the documents they may have in their possession. So before you hit them you record their party talk with a long-range listening device which the CIA will provide.’ He smiled wolfishly. ‘Then, when the dear boys are sleepy and go to bed, you burst in there and shoot the shit out of them. You then collect up every document you can find, every scrap of evidence in their wallets and briefcases, then you plant explosive charges and you blow them all to Kingdom Come.’ He added, ‘In fact you not only blow up the house, you also strap explosives to the bodies and blow them to smithereens too, so there’s no possibility of identification afterwards.’

  Jesus. ‘And supposing I don’t hear anything incriminating on the listening device? Supposing they’re not planning sabotage?’

  Dupont said, ‘You just listen until they’re getting ready for bed, then you attack. First you lob a few stun grenades through the windows, then burst in the back and front door simultaneously.’

  Harker shook his head grimly. ‘But how do we know this tip-off is reliable? The identity of the targets, for starters. Who exactly in the CIA gave you the information? They’ve been known to be w
rong in the past.’

  ‘You have no need to know who. Just take my word for it – and my orders.’

  ‘But how do we know they’re plotting sabotage inside South Africa?’

  ‘I repeat, you have no need to know. Suffice it to say the CIA have informers amongst the Cuban military. The ANC guys have just completed a course in urban terrorism in Havana. Brigadier Moreno is the Cuban army’s top intelligence officer in Angola.’

  ‘But,’ Harker said, ‘why the hell are these guys meeting in America? This is very hostile territory for them.’

  ‘Yours not to reason why, Major. Just accept the CIA’s information gratefully. Suffice it to say they’re here under false identities and they’re here for good reason.’

  ‘But does the Chairman know about this?’

  ‘You take your orders from me, Major!’ Dupont said sharply. ‘But, yes, he knows. And approves.’

  Harker did not like this. He had killed plenty of men on the battlefield without compunction but he had never killed in cold blood.

  ‘It’s a golden opportunity,’ Dupont said.

  Harker could see the military desirability of the action: an opportunity to kill two top Cuban officers meeting three senior ANC officials trained in urban terrorism to discuss sabotage strategies within South Africa was not to be missed. He just wished it wasn’t he who had to do it, particularly on American soil. ‘And where is this ANC safe-house where they’re meeting?’

  ‘It’s a Russian safe-house. It’s a farmhouse, in a lonely part of Long Island, New York. No other houses nearby. The CIA have given us a plan of the place.’ He tapped a roll of architectural drawings. ‘And skeleton keys.’

  ‘Why the hell don’t the CIA do the damn job themselves if they’re so keen to be helpful?’

  Dupont was enjoying Harker’s anxiety. ‘Because they want to keep their noses clean. They want us to do their dirty work for them.’ He added: ‘They’ll blame the job on the anti-Castro exile community in Miami.’

  ‘But why me? I’m not an assassin. You’ve got plenty of other operatives who could do the job, why me?’

  ‘You received training in termination techniques, didn’t you? You signed the fucking oath of faithful service?’

  ‘But the Chairman told me I wouldn’t have to get my hands bloody!’

  ‘Well the Chairman was wrong, wasn’t he? Things have got a bit tougher since he recruited you.’ He glared. ‘And if there’s any insubordination you’ll be posted back home. And court-martialled! And you can kiss your high-brow Harvest House goodbye. Do you hear me?’

  Court-martialled? Harker clenched his teeth: it wasn’t an offence under the Defence Force Act to refuse to commit murder on foreign soil. But losing Harvest House? He glanced back at Dupont, then muttered: ‘I hear you.’

  Dupont sat back. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he glowered, ‘here we have the opportunity to get rid of two top Cuban officers, Sanchez and Moreno, the two top bastards who’re killing our boys in the bush, and they’re meeting three ANC swines to plot murder of innocent civilians with their bombs and sabotage – and you’re squeamish!’

  Harker glared at him. ‘I fully recognize them as legitimate military targets – I also went to war-school. I would bump them off joyfully if I could get near enough to them in the war zone. But you’re damn right if you mean I’m scared of doing it in the civilian environs of America – sir. If anything goes wrong I’ll be tried for murder. Sir.’

  Dupont smiled carnivorously. ‘When you say “sir” you’d better sound as if you mean it, old boy.’

  Harker sighed angrily. Dupont looked at him icily, but decided to let it go. ‘Major, if you land in trouble the CIA will see that you get out of it. They’re as keen on this job as we are. And they assure me that when you’ve reconnoitred the killing ground you’ll see it’s a cinch.’

  Harker snorted. Dupont glanced at his wristwatch and said, ‘Okay, tell me about Bigmouth.’

  Harker groaned angrily. He said, ‘I’ve reviewed everything Clements got from her apartment yesterday, her notebooks, her disks. Here’s my report.’ He put his hand in his pocket, withdrew an envelope and tossed it in front of his boss.

  ‘And?’

  ‘And,’ Harker said, ‘she’s harmless. There is nothing of significance that we don’t know already. Apart from her war photography she’s no different from all the other bleeding hearts in the anti-apartheid movement.’

  Dupont pushed the report aside and said grimly, ‘She’s not fucking harmless, she’s a troublemaker. All those demonstrations and fund-raising, all the crap she writes. It’s not just a movement, it’s an industry – all these “Free Mandela” T-shirts and crap. Did she tell you about this book she’s supposed to be writing?’

  ‘No,’ Harker said.

  ‘When are you seeing her again?’

  ‘I can meet her again through the yacht club.’

  Dupont jabbed his finger. ‘Well, get on to it. And find out about this book – tell her you want to read it, you’re a fancy publisher. And if it looks like getting published you publish it. And kill it. Tell her you’re printing thousands of copies but print a few hundred and bury the fucking thing …’

  7

  It was touch-and-go whether Harker refused to obey orders concerning the assassination, resigned his commission in the army, kissed goodbye to Harvest House and tried to make a new career for himself at the age of thirty-eight. He had no moral compunction about killing General Sanchez and Brigadier Moreno of the Cuban army – he had been killing their soldiers for years on the battlefield, as they had been trying to kill him. He wasn’t even much concerned about his own skin: the CIA with their wheels within wheels would cover his tracks if he left any and if he still got in the shit they would pull the right strings to fish him out – unless it suited them to let him take the rap, but he didn’t seriously think they would do that. Nor was it fear of danger; he had penetrated behind enemy lines to reconnoitre targets over terrain much more dangerous than an empty farmhouse in the tranquil American countryside. Nor was it fear of the poverty that might ensue if he resigned in protest: true, he would lose Harvest House, the job of publisher he really enjoyed, but he had a good reputation in New York and he could surely get another position in publishing. Nor was it fear of his own army that worried him: sure, if he resigned in protest they would watch him like hawks, he would be a dead man if he dared spill the beans – but Harker would not spill any beans. No, it was murdering those three ANC officials that worried him.

  They were civilians, not soldiers. Okay, they were going to be plotting sabotage within South Africa, and that made them murderers – five years ago ANC agents had planted a car-bomb outside the South African air force headquarters in Pretoria and killed and injured many people, most of them civilian passers-by. That was despicable, but on the other hand wasn’t the air force headquarters a legitimate military target for the ANC, hadn’t the bomb blown out all the windows and a fucking great hole in the wall? Sure it was despicable to blow up civilians, but hadn’t the explosion impressed the shit out of South Africans, delivered the message that apartheid was a dangerous, bloody business? And then had come the murder of Dulcie September; the whole world had had no doubt that South Africa had done the job, and Harker now had no doubt that the CCB was responsible. The thought had sickened him. Christ – soldiers were legitimate targets, but unarmed civilians who had committed no wrong other than espouse a political cause opposed to your political masters’ credo stuck in his craw. Jesus, he’d hoped such action would never be required of him.

  ‘They’re plotting murder,’ Dupont had said.

  Yes, most probably, Harker admitted to the passing twinkling lights beyond the Amtrak dining saloon carrying him back to New York with the suitcase of explosives the CIA had provided; yes, most probably they would be plotting murder, but how do we know for sure? We have only the CIA’s word for it. Perhaps they’re discussing something like children’s nutritional aid, or the ANC’s next tactic around
the corridors of the United Nations which Harker would hear all about from his salesmen anyway …

  ‘Of course they’re saboteurs,’ Dupont had shouted. ‘Why else are they meeting Sanchez and Moreno?’

  Yes, they must be, but he wished he knew their names so he could try to verify the fact, and he wished he had more than the CIA’s word for the purpose of the meeting.

  It took him a long time to go to sleep that Monday night, staring out of the train window, watching the night lights of America slip by.

  The reconnaissance was easy.

  Harker did not do it himself because his CCB cover as a publisher would have been blown if he had been caught. He sent one of his senior salesmen, Derek Clements, the very tough American who had been a US Marine and a mercenary in the Rhodesian army. He was one of the best soldiers Harker had known, the right sort to have on your side in a tight corner: amongst other military accomplish-ments he was a tracking and survival expert, an instructor in hand-to-hand combat, an expert in demolition work. Clements had been in the CCB longer than Harker, who had inherited him from Dupont. His front-business in America was a car-hire firm much patronized by United Nations officials: his rank and pay scale in Military Intelligence was that of lieutenant. But he was really staff-sergeant material, one of the breed of men who kick ass and make an army function.

  Harker drove Clements to Long Island that Tuesday afternoon in a Hertz car rented in a false name. They located the area of the farm, then went to eat at a roadhouse. When darkness fell they synchronized watches and drove back to the area. Clements was dropped off at the roadside. He disappeared into the dark, and Harker drove on.

  The farmhouse was surrounded by woods and, as Dupont had promised, it was deserted. There wasn’t another dwelling for over a mile. Clements approached carefully. There was no light. He observed the old clapboard house for half an hour, looking for signs of life, then he crept to the back door and let himself in with the keys Dupont had given to Harker.