Little Sister (A James Palatine Novel)

by Giles O'Bryen

  ‘Please excuse the absence of domestic cheer,’ said Zender. ‘I do not spend as much time here as I would like. Sit by the fire, such as it is.’

  A log fire had been lit in a pitifully small grate, its waxy flickers sporadically illuminating the chimney’s yawning interior. She went back to the sofa, seeing no alternative. He had extracted the blue satin dress from its carrier bag, the bottom-hugging blue satin dress she had bought to wear for James, and was holding it up.

  ‘You might put this on for dinner.’

  She watched him fingering the material, and saw the sadness in his big, restless eyes, the sadness she’d always taken for a touching intimation of his essential humanity. It was nothing of the kind – merely regret that he could not have absolutely everything he wanted. The request that she wear the dress filled her with revulsion. What he was after was not her, Natalya Kocharian, but a pleasing accessory to the dinner he’d planned. The sofa was so deep that her feet would not touch the floor and she had to tuck them beneath her, though it would look as if she were getting cosy when she meant to appear implacable. She had never felt so crushed. He brought her a flute of Champagne and bowed.

  ‘And so, my dear Natalya—’

  ‘Don’t say anything. I’m too upset to speak to you.’

  ‘C’est bien compris.’

  He bowed his head and they sat in silence.

  ‘I heard what occurred in the tent of that devil Makhlani. I am so—’

  ‘No! How could you know, Claude, how the fuck could you know that?’

  ‘Two of his men survived—’

  ‘What, did you arrange it? Was I part of the deal? He said he did business with you, before he stuffed his fingers inside me.’

  ‘Don’t, Natalya, please. You must know that I would never do such a thing, it is beyond imagining. Makhlani and I have had dealings in the past, but this time the scoundrel simply robbed me. He then killed my driver, obliging me to navigate to the border without him!’

  Nat was too distraught to reply. Sobs crowded her throat as if there were a whole queue of them struggling to escape.

  ‘My poor Natalya.’

  Zender pulled out a white linen handkerchief and passed it to her. She took it, and her mind suddenly replayed the scene outside Adela’s, on the evening he’d been shot. He’d mopped his neck with a white linen handkerchief while she’d pulled aside his jacket to reveal an oval of blood-soaked shirt. What had happened next? Her memories of everything before the night in the tent with Prince Makhlani al Makhlani were mangled like old cars in a scrapheap. At last she managed to compose herself. She drank her Champagne and Claude Zender flew from his chair to refill her glass.

  ‘Why did you run away from the compound?’ she asked.

  ‘One develops a nose for a bad ending. The whiff began with a panic-stricken phone call from your colleague Clive Silk informing me that the IPD400 had reported its presence to London, and became quite unsavoury when I became aware that my old adversary Mehmet al Hamra was plotting the demise of my clients the Polisario. In the circumstances, the sudden arrival of a troupe of MINURSO officials seemed ominous. I was not to know they were in fact your family and friends in disguise.’

  ‘Why do you live this horrible life?’ she said. ‘Why do you surround yourself with people like Djouhroub and the doctor who almost cut my arm off? What do you have to show for it?’

  He looked at her as if she were a child being deliberately obtuse.

  ‘You may pour scorn on my head, but I operate at the rough end of a dirty trade and must perforce play rough myself. Djouhroub and his men are guards and enforcers, Dronika is a doctor. The wheels of commerce turn and make their particular demands, which I contrive to meet. Eh bien?’

  ‘You don’t understand.’

  ‘But perhaps I do. You wish to hear some soul-searching of Augustinian rigour, followed by a bout of self-castigation and a confession fit to impress the sniffiest deity. I offer none of these things.’

  ‘You don’t regret any of it.’

  ‘A foolish emotion. Certainly I wish I could have found a more felicitous way to conclude this business of ours – I wish it as devoutly as an impious man could – but regret? Non.’

  ‘Let’s finish it, then.’

  ‘For that, we need the IPD400. I always knew you to be a remarkable woman, Natalya, but to steal the thing back from Makhlani – really, it is your finest hour. But now I believe it is in the possession of the amorous Dr Palatine?’

  ‘Amorous? Fuck you for a filthy snoop, Claude Zender. I suppose you had a spy outside my hotel room door, did you? Taking notes to sell to the big man for a wad of used dirhams?’

  ‘Forgive me, Natalya, the adjective was ill-advised. But I cannot easily forget the pleasures we have shared, you and I, and I confess that the shadow which has fallen between us distresses me greatly. Perhaps I have no right to feel jealous—’

  ‘What distresses you is not having the IPD400, and James will never hand it over, not to you, never in a million years.’

  ‘I believe I may count on that chivalrous gentleman to return my property in exchange for the honour of escorting you back to London.’

  He studied her fondly, enjoying the effect on my dear Natalya of this carefully composed denouement. He was like a fat spider scuttling round and round her, spinning the thread that bound her into his web, tighter and tighter with every turn, with every word he spoke, swaddling her up like a treat he’d been promising himself ever since the day they had met.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Seven-thirty. James had been so absorbed in hacking the Playpen’s closely guarded data repositories that he hadn’t noticed how late it was. Still, Little Sister had done the job – the only real task it would ever perform, if James had his way. He packed it in the computer box and called DHL. When the courier arrived, he gave the address of Grosvenor’s warehouse in Essex, put the value as less than €45, and ticked the box that said Overland.

  ‘Very slowly service,’ said the DHL man. ‘Many, many weeks.’

  ‘Perfect,’ said James.

  The DHL man wheeled the trolley out of the door. Bye-bye, Little Sister, said James. The sense of relief was so enjoyable it seemed wasteful not to extend it, so he went out into the corridor to watch the DHL man manoeuvre the box into the service lift. Then he sat on the bed and ran through the events of the last three weeks, tallying them with what Little Sister had ferreted out of MI6’s servers. The jigsaw puzzle was almost complete. He picked up his cellphone and called Sir Peter Beddoes.

  ‘Yes,’ said the chairman of Grosvenor Systems, in the brusque voice of a man accustomed to receiving phone calls from inferiors.

  ‘Palatine.’

  ‘Palatine?’ Now he sounded horrified. ‘Hold on a moment.’ James heard him hissing instructions, then a door banging.

  ‘Sorry about that, James. Now we can talk.’

  ‘This isn’t a social call. Thanks to Natalya Kocharian, the IPD400 is on its way back to your warehouse. It’ll arrive by sea from Algiers – good value, I thought.’

  ‘That’s marvellous news, James. Has it already left? I can get our shippers onto it?’

  ‘No need. Regarding Ms Kocharian, whom you sacked a few weeks ago—’

  ‘We didn’t, in fact—’

  ‘Compensation of half a million pounds would be appropriate, given what she has suffered on your behalf. Unless the money is showing in her account by lunchtime on Monday, I’ll release full details of the farcical circumstances surrounding your sale of the IPD400 to Claude Zender. Then I’ll issue a statement saying that my relationship with Grosvenor is at an end and I will never allow commercial exploitation of the technologies I developed. I think the reaction of the markets will make settlement of an unfair dismissal case look rather judicious.’

  ‘James, can’t we sort this out properly? I understand you’re angry, but these threats really make no sense—’

  ‘You think not? She’ll check her bank account on
Monday. You won’t be able to contact me in the meantime. Goodbye.’

  Beddoes was a toady, a ship-steadier. The money would be there. He picked up the notepad on which he’d written the number allocated for contacting the MI6 Director-General in a crisis: it had taken some quite imaginative work with Little Sister to prise it out of the day’s security log. Sir Iain Strang answered on the third ring.

  ‘Palatine,’ said James. ‘Calling from the grave. No, seriously, Strang, I thought I should tell you that I know all about Operation Anemone. That is, everything. I want you, de la Mere and Silk here in Algiers tonight. There’s a flight at nine-fifteen – you’ll catch it if you leave now. Of course, Silk may still be here, after his little errand.’

  There was a moment’s silence. James fancied he could hear Strang’s blood starting to simmer. ‘We need to get off this line,’ he said eventually. ‘Come back to London, Dr Palatine. Take some recovery time, yes? Let the dust settle.’

  ‘I’ve deposited what we may as well call the Anemone Files with law firms in three different jurisdictions. Hotel el-Djazaïr – 1 a.m.’

  He hung up and called Nat from the hotel phone. She didn’t answer so he went to her door, saw the Do Not Disturb sign. He left the hotel and walked in circles for half an hour. Swallows dashed across the darkening skies. He stopped to drink coffee and observe the antics of the man from the hotel lobby who was creeping round after him. He shook him off and returned to the Hotel el-Djazaïr by the back entrance. He rode the service elevator to Nat’s floor. The Do Not Disturb sign was still in place. He knocked. No answer.

  Approaching the door to his room, he saw that the architrave had been neatly cut to give access to the lock. An electric tool had been used, and there were rub marks where a strip of plastic had been eased in to spring the mortise. He put his key in his pocket and stood close to the door, listening. Silence. A baby started to wail from a room down the corridor. Then the latch clicked and the door opened.

  The man almost walked straight into him – he had a cellphone out and was dabbing at the keypad. James punched him hard in the solar plexus, and the man staggered back into the room. He was winded and sucking for breath, but managed to lower his shoulder and try to charge past. James side-stepped, seized his arm as he careered past, leaned back and swung him face-first into the edge of the half-open door. The man dropped to his knees and cradled his head. He was wearing dark green overalls with a maintenance company logo. Maybe forty, with thinning hair and a horsey face. James dragged him to the corner by the TV. The door banged shut behind him. The cellphone had fallen from the man’s hand. James picked it up. He’d been sending a text.

  Chambre examiné – rien trouvé. Room searched – nothing found. One of Zender’s men, after Little Sister.

  James pressed send, then yanked the power cord from the TV set and used it to tie the man’s hands. He searched him and found the battery-powered cutting tool he’d used to get access to the door lock, and an old .32 calibre French-made MAB C handgun in a holster strapped to his calf. He got a glass of water from the bathroom, threw it in the man’s face, and waited for him to come round.

  Claude Zender consulted his watch. ‘Dinner will be served in a few minutes’ time, and the first course is a soufflé for which it is advisable to be comfortably settled, appetite primed and cutlery in hand. May I escort you to the salle à manger?’

  They sat at one end of a mahogany dining table intended for twelve, in a room with fog-green wallpaper decorated with a pattern of ivory ribbons, excessively flounced. A stout, nervous woman in her fifties came in and lit a brass candelabra set with a dozen cheap candles that would not stand straight. The candles stank of paraffin, and when she came back with the soufflé, Zender told her to take them away. To his irritation, she blew them out first, filling the room with smoke.

  ‘To eat a delicacy such as this in a cloud of paraffin smut. . . See how the papery golden skin of the soufflé shrinks from the insult. She comes with the chef, her husband, otherwise I would serve the food myself.’

  The soufflé was followed by a translucent fillet of white fish in a saffron velouté. Claude prattled on, extolling the virtues of the bone-dry white Burgundy he had found – which he had judged (correctly, as it turned out) would provide the perfect backdrop for the aromatic palette of the fish. When Nat could stand the flow of gourmandese no longer, she said:

  ‘Why didn’t you let Nikolai go, when you found out who he was?’

  ‘By then, Tony Schliemann was demanding that something be done about you. I thought to reunite you with your brother and take you out of harm’s way.’

  ‘You knew all along that he tried to have me killed in the souk?’

  ‘My dear Natalya, he asked me to do it. Me! I refused. I make it a point of principle not to kill on anyone else’s account. But it is simply superb, my dear Natalya, that you blackmailed Tony Schliemann. They will have to invent a new word, for chutzpah doesn’t do it justice. Kocharianesque, we will say.’

  ‘I misjudged Grey Tony. I thought he was just a man with a pen.’

  ‘He is just a man with a pen, and it is men with pens who rule the world. Yet you treated him as something akin to a stubborn cow at a country fair.’

  ‘I thought he had no choice.’

  ‘Schliemann doesn’t think like that. What do I want, he will have asked himself, and how do I use the power I have accumulated over three decades in the NSA to get it? The response, in this order I suggest: one, the evidence you used to blackmail him; two, your head on a plate; three, the IPD400. It seems he is already working on the first and I doubt there is a lawyer’s office in the world where it is safe. As for your head, one might say that it has been closely contemplating the pattern on the platter intended to bear it.’

  ‘And the IPD400?’

  ‘That was my assignment.’

  She could not prevent a gasp escaping her lips.

  ‘Schliemann? Grey Tony is your buyer, too?’

  The moment the question was asked, the full extent of her stupidity came into horrible focus. Her plan to buy back the IPD400 from Zender and sell it to the NSA had been doomed before she’d even thought of it, and every one of her conversations on the subject, with Grey Tony and with Zender, had been a sham.

  ‘All this starts with the NSA’s insatiable lust for your Dr Palatine’s magic box,’ Zender was saying smugly. ‘Nothing can be allowed to frustrate them – not Grosvenor, nor their friends in London, nor Dr Palatine, nor you, nor me. It isn’t just what they can do with it, but what they can prevent others doing to them. Secrecy is a very pernicious and seductive narcotic, and the prospect of having it withdrawn simply terrifies them.’

  ‘You kidnapped an English computer scientist on Grey Tony’s say-so?’

  ‘Dear me no.’ Zender gave a brisk laugh, as if to dispel a jinx Nat had conjured into being with her inappropriately bald question. ‘My commission was to secure an operational IPD400. The details were not discussed, but I imagine Tony thought I would buy Palatine’s co-operation. That seemed improbable, given what I discovered about his character. But I got him to the compound and teamed him up with a technician I hired at ridiculous expense, a thoroughly feeble man called Rakesh Nazli. At one stage it looked as if we might succeed, but the nerd-in-chief was more troublesome than expected – which is an understatement of Homeric proportion.’

  The chef’s wife came in bearing two plates hidden beneath tarnished silver cloches, which wobbled and clanked as she lowered them to the table. When they were in situ, she reached for the handles and lifted them up, then clashed them together like a pair of cymbals as she drew them out between the two diners.

  ‘A gruelling performance,’ said Zender, ‘I hope it will not spoil the dish for you. Gigot, lightly spiced, with a purée of aubergines and tamarind. You will not find it in any restaurant since Maurice and I worked it out together. To accompany, a Pauillac 2000 from a little-known chateau I patronise, whose wines put the Petruses of this world to shame.�
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  Nat felt nauseous. The lamb looked almost raw and the purée was the colour of wet china clay.

  ‘I need the bathroom,’ she said.

  ‘I do urge you to try the lamb first, Maurice is most particular about the temperature—’

  The look on Nat’s face cut him short. Zender directed her to a suite off the entrance hall consisting of a washroom with cracked enamel sink and a closet with a cistern mounted six feet in the air. As she unbuttoned her jeans, she discovered the pre-pay mobile James had bought for her stuffed in the hip pocket – the silly precaution she’d teased him about and then completely forgotten. At any moment he might call and the phone would chirp and give her away. She pulled up her jeans and listened. Was that him breathing just the other side of the door? She threw it open to confront him, but he wasn’t there.

  The pre-pay phone buzzed in James’s pocket.

  ‘Nat, where are you?’

  ‘At Zender’s.’ She spoke very softly.

  ‘Leave. Leave now.’

  ‘I can’t. I’m locked in.’

  ‘I’ll come. What’s the address?’

  ‘I was snatched outside the hotel. It’s up in the hills behind town. I tried to look for street signs but there weren’t any.’

  ‘I’ll find you.’

  ‘How will you find me, James?’ She sounded close to tears.

  ‘Tell him I know you are with him. Tell him if anything happens to you I will hunt him down and kill him.’

  ‘Don’t, though. I should never have done what I did.’

  ‘I found one of Zender’s men searching my room. He’ll tell me the address.’

  ‘Zender doesn’t tell anyone where he lives – I’ve known him for years and I don’t have any idea.’