Old Enemies

by Michael Dobbs

  ‘English, please, Glenny.’

  ‘How brief do you want it?’

  ‘How far do you want to run?’

  Harry’s question was met with a glance that would have sliced the froth off a pint of beer. ‘OK, craphead, here’s what it comes down to. We got the country, the area, even the mast the signal came through. When you switch on your phone it’s continuously looking for the nearest mast. Sometimes it can often see more than one, and then it chooses the hottest signal. And if it’s travelling, it will switch masts to maintain the signal.’

  ‘You mean—’

  ‘We can even tell you which direction he was travelling in. Took a little while, mind you, what with all that duff information you fed me.’

  ‘What duff information?’

  Crossing waited several breaths before replying, deliberately punishing his friend while trying to pretend he was enjoying the exercise. ‘You said the phone call came from Switzerland. It didn’t. It was made in Italy.’

  They ran on, more painful paces for Crossing while Harry digested what he had been told, grinding out yard after remorseless yard, almost heedless of what was around him, until his friend began to gasp. ‘Look, Harry, it’s good news. We can trace the next phone call in the same way.’

  ‘Trouble is, they’re not communicating by phone.’

  ‘Shit. How?’

  ‘Skype.’

  Crossing skidded to a halt on the icy pathway as if he’d thrown an anchor, his eyes no longer glazed but ablaze with agitation. ‘Then, my friend,’ he panted, ‘you are truly fucked.’

  Harry stopped and turned to face his friend. Crossing bent over, hands on his knees as he tried to fill his lungs with oxygen, only to discover it came in packets of lung-scraping ice air. A bead of sweat trembled like a dewdrop on the end of his nose. ‘Look, Skype uses what’s called VoIP. Voice over Internet Protocol. Ugly acronym – you know how we techies love ’em – but it’s a system that borders on the beautiful. All the info is routed directly between the two end points and it’s encrypted with so much industrial strength cryptography that it’s got balls like an elephant. The boys and girls at GCHQ and A Branch hate it. Can’t stop it, can’t intercept it, not unless you’re freakishly lucky, and even if you are it’s so heavily encrypted you get jumble, nothing that makes any more sense than the contents of my wife’s handbag. It’s peer-to-peer stuff. Only works if it’s meant for you.’

  ‘You mean the police can’t crack it? Trace it?’

  ‘What’s to trace? It’s got no moving parts, no machinery, it’s stunningly simple, fabulously flexible, almost impregnable. You can’t bomb it, block it, break it . . .’ He was gasping once again, but this time in enthusiasm, on his own turf now. Slowly he straightened up. ‘Skype,’ he said slowly, the word condensing into a little cloud in front of his face, ‘is a kidnapper’s wet dream, old chum. Too damned clever for our own good, sometimes we are. You’ve got your work cut out on this one, Harry.’

  Harry didn’t wait to change out of his jogging kit, he simply ran on from Hyde Park to Notting Hill. He found a security man blocking his way at the Breslins’ front door. The man was typical of his type, an hour every day in the gym and two in the pub, with muscles and stomach to match that stretched the seams of his cheap suit and whose every opinion was fed to him through a pink plastic earpiece.

  ‘Are they expecting you?’ the security man asked gruffly, blowing on his fingertips for warmth.

  ‘I very much doubt it,’ Harry replied.

  The man began to mutter into a microphone at his lapel, and a little while later the front door opened. It was a woman, the housekeeper, Harry guessed, who showed him up the stairs and immediately disappeared. He found Terri kneeling beside the Christmas tree, which was no longer leaning but firmly anchored and upright in its base. She was decorating the tree with tinsel and threading a string of lights through its branches. A pile of wrapped presents waited nearby. She looked up defiantly, but her eyes were raw and her fingers trembling. She seemed older than the woman he had met the night before. Something had happened.

  Her fingers led a trail of silvered paper around the tree. ‘I’m getting it ready,’ she said forlornly, ‘for when Ruari comes home. What do you think?’

  ‘He’ll love it.’

  ‘Thank you, Harry.’ She offered a forced smile, then nodded in the direction of a far door. ‘They’re in the dining room,’ she said, as though they were entirely separate to her, then went back to her task, filling her time, leaving as little space as possible for her fears.

  Harry’s immediate impression was that the negotiating team had already fallen apart. The men were scattered disjointedly around the room – J.J. sat alone at the table, distractedly drumming his fingers, Archer and Hiley, the risk assessor, had their heads together, muttering, while Sean Breslin sat in the corner in the manner of a chess player, waiting for the next move. At the end of the table was a computer surrounded by trailing wires that fed into other pieces of kit that Harry assumed were for monitoring and recording. The curtains were drawn, covering the windows that overlooked the street, and the atmosphere was thick enough to chew.

  ‘Hope I’m not disturbing you,’ Harry began, addressing J.J. ‘I know you don’t want me here, but I’ve stumbled across something I think might help.’

  From the corner, the older Breslin’s eyes burned with mistrust, as if to say that the only way Harry could help was if a hole opened beneath him and he dropped to the Devil, but the son appeared less hostile. ‘If you’re able to help, then you are welcome,’ he sighed. His voice was thick with exhaustion.

  ‘It’s the call from Ruari’s phone.’

  ‘You know about that?’ J.J asked, less kindly.

  ‘I told him,’ Terri said. She was behind Harry, standing by the door.

  ‘I’d like to know what else you’ve heard,’ J.J. said, his eyes honed with suspicion, his gaze fixed unblinkingly on his wife.

  ‘The call – it didn’t come from Switzerland. It came out of Italy.’

  The other men stirred. Patiently, Harry began to repeat what Crossing had explained to him. J.J. listened attentively, Hiley nodded thoughtfully, Archer chewed his cheek, Sean Breslin continued to stare like a hawk. It was left to Terri to show emotion. Harry was explaining about the switching between masts when she moved closer and grabbed his sleeve. ‘Where was it, Harry?’ she demanded suddenly, urgent. ‘Show me, please show me.’

  She continued to hold him, as if she was afraid he might leave without telling everything he knew. It was a gesture too intimate for comfort, and Harry turned back to her husband. ‘Would you mind if I used the computer?’

  J.J. nodded at the screen, and in a moment Harry was fiddling with the mouse while the rest slowly gathered round, like moths drawn to the flame, even the older Breslin. Harry brought up a satellite image from Google Earth and soon they were staring down upon the Southern Alps from a height that was diminishing all the time. ‘Where were the bodies of the girl and the instructor found?’ he asked.

  Hiley pointed to the screen, locations that were in the vicinity of Zermatt.

  ‘OK, so the call was made from here. Near a place called Ceppo Morelli,’ Harry announced. The screen zoomed in until it showed a cluster of rooftops hidden in the foothills.

  ‘But that’s barely inside Italy at all,’ protested Archer.

  ‘The location updates tell us they were flying east.’

  ‘Yes, but for how long?’ Archer muttered, ever the unbeliever and professional pain.

  ‘They were coming out of the Alps. No need to fly in anything other than a pretty direct route. My guess is they continued travelling east.’

  ‘Guesswork’s all very good but—’ Archer began yet again until Terri cut him off. She was leaning over Harry’s shoulder, her eyes fixed to the screen, breathing in his ear, rattling his memories. Her finger began tracing the route from Villars through the places where the bodies had been found and across to Ceppo Morelli, as if she
could almost touch her son. ‘Thank you, Harry,’ she whispered, ‘thank you so much.’

  ‘But how do you know all this, Mr Jones?’ J.J. said, breaking up the huddle. ‘Surely this information is all confidential.’

  Harry smiled ruefully. ‘I have friends in low places. A bit like a newspaper.’

  ‘Need to check it, of course,’ Archer continued doggedly.

  ‘And why the bloody hell didn’t we know this already?’ J.J. demanded, growing exasperated with Archer’s remorseless scepticism. He was Ruari’s father, for God’s sake, he needed hope as much as he needed to draw breath.

  But Archer wasn’t to be thrown off course so easily. ‘As you say, J.J., the records are confidential, and Mr Jones here has probably broken the law. We have to go through official channels, and in Switzerland that takes time.’

  ‘We don’t have time!’ J.J. burst out, banging his fist on the table.

  ‘So give them what they want!’ It was Terri. She glowered at her husband from the other end of the table; he wasn’t the only one who was feeling pain and had a right to express it. An uncomfortable silence spread through the room.

  ‘What do they want?’

  It was Harry who broke the tension, much to his own surprise. He hadn’t meant to interfere, to get himself in the middle of what was clearly a growing battle of wills, but he found himself asking anyway.

  J.J. moaned softly, his fists clenched tight with frustration. ‘They were in contact again, last night.’ He took several deep breaths, trying to summon up reserves of strength. ‘It seems this kidnapping isn’t about money after all. It’s about some diaries. Written by Nelson Mandela.’

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Mandela diaries. The words rattled through Chombo’s mind like a curse, as they did every day. He was sitting on a balcony of his favourite hotel, sipping a cooling beer and gazing out across the swimming pool to the landscaped gardens beyond. The breeze was gentle, the rain gone, yet he could find no peace, and knew he wouldn’t, not until Mandela’s ghost had finally been buried and his diaries along with it.

  The name of the former South African leader was still sacrosanct, the most powerful political force in this part of Africa, and no one dared touch his memory. His official diaries had long since been published but in their wake had come whispers of another, more private and far darker set of scribblings, comments and conclusions written down in his final years that took an uncharacteristically venomous line for a man whose reputation had been built on an infinite smile. But these writings were different, an old man’s chance to get even, from beyond the grave. Three months ago word had spread that the diaries were being touted around, that they would not only rewrite history but also screw up a fair bit of the future, too, by humiliating many powerful men. Chombo, so it was said, was one of them.

  Like every leader, Chombo was not all that he seemed. He had avoided the retributions and prolific recriminations of the Mugabe years, partly by ensuring that he could never be identified as a threat to the old dog, and in still larger part because of his reputation as one of the original freedom fighters, a man who, even as a boy, had fought for the ZANU guerrillas against the white regime of Ian Smith. He’d run messages, endured many dangers, flitted between bush and barracks to bring instructions to the black troops on whose loyalty the Smith regime depended but on which it could no longer rely. It was even said that when the bush war had spread into the towns, Chombo had helped plant a bomb in Woolworth’s in the capital, then named Salisbury, that had killed and injured almost a hundred people. Yet such bravery came at a price. Chombo had been caught and had suffered grievously in the prisons of the white man, and wasn’t the scar on his face proof of that, a constant reminder of what he had given to his country? But all this was a lie, a story put around by a few of his friends to kick-start his political career; it had seemed to matter little at first but like so many of these things it had gained a life of its own. He had developed a habit in front of audiences of running the tips of his fingers along the scar, which was deep and slithered down his face from above his eye line to below his lip. The crowd would notice, whisper amongst themselves that it was a symbol of the struggle, of white oppression, and every time he touched it was like the beating of a drum to muster people to the cause. It was an unconscious habit, he said, even to himself; he had never deliberately played up to it, had he?

  Chombo’s thoughts were interrupted by a servant – no, steward, that was the modern word, and in all things apart from tribal loyalties Chombo was determined to be modern. The man bowed, took a pace closer and refreshed Chombo’s beer while a yellow-breasted seedeater hopped along the balcony rail, waiting expectantly for crumbs. Chombo loved this spot. Beneath him a group of schoolchildren was playing in the pool; they were splashing and laughing, like all children should. Theirs was a private school, of course, not one of the gutter schools that had been left in tatters through the Mugabe years, but they were children nonetheless and they deserved their games in the sun. He had to start somewhere, rebuilding his country, and this place was as good a spot as any from which to begin, for this wasn’t simply his favourite hotel it was also his hotel, at least in part, owned by a white businessman who had felt the need for a friend on the inside of the black establishment and so had sold twenty per cent of the hotel to Chombo. Not that Chombo had paid any money, but the money would come, eventually, from the profits of the hotel, profits that because of Chombo’s participation were swelling, which was why he had just that morning agreed to take another twenty per cent stake and . . . And so forth. This was Chombo’s Zimbabwe, modern, clean, thriving, with contented children and respectful staff, and if it didn’t represent more than a tiny fraction of the country, then perhaps one day it would, under his leadership. If he survived the election. And the wretched diaries.

  Somehow Mandela had discovered the truth, that Chombo’s wounds had come not from torture at the hands of white men but as the result of a self-inflicted car crash on the Massachusetts Turnpike while he had been a student in Boston, that he had never played a part in the bush war, that he had never risked his life, except through drunk driving, and that he had never been inside Ian Smith’s jails or felt the swipe of his blade. Oh, it wasn’t a sin in Mandela’s eyes that Chombo had never fought or even that he preferred a master’s degree to martyrdom, but what Mandela would never forgive, as a man who had spent twenty-seven years of his life locked away in a prison, was someone like Chombo who claimed the moral authority of African suffering while in fact he’d been screwing his brains out between the legs of white girls on the other side of the world. Chombo was no better than a jackal that had come to steal the carcass after the lions had done all the dirty work. That was Mandela’s view, he’d written it down in his diaries, and opening them before the elections would be as good as splitting Chombo’s skull with an axe.

  He had to stop the diaries, prevent Mandela’s ghost rattling its chains. Everything depended on it. That would take sacrifices, of course, but what weighed more heavily on his conscience, one white boy whose name he didn’t even know, or children like those who were splashing and squealing in front of him, the future of Zimbabwe? For Chombo, it was no contest. And as he sat there, reflecting on it all, he was delighted to discover that it didn’t prick his conscience, not a bit. He was turning over a new page. He smiled in contentment; his file would get thicker after all. He swatted away a fly and called for another drink.

  ‘For God’s sake, give them the sodding diaries!’ Terri demanded, her voice rising.

  ‘You know I can’t,’ her husband whispered, struggling for control.

  ‘What the bloody hell matters most to you, J.J.? Those diaries – or the life of your son?’

  J.J.’s grey, drawn face suddenly flushed with anger. How dare she? ‘You know it’s not like that.’

  ‘From where I’m standing, it looks very much like that!’ Terri broke away. She picked up a photograph of Ruari that stood on the sideboard, one in a funky teenager
frame – Harry noticed there seemed to be many more images of the boy about the place since he’d last been here, staring out from every corner. She thrust the portrait defiantly at her husband, her words squeezing through tears. ‘He’s worth more than any book.’

  ‘I know he is,’ J.J. snapped back. ‘But how many times do I have to tell you? That’s not my decision to make, and getting hysterical isn’t going to help him either.’

  Her lips moved, but for the moment words seemed to fail her. Instead she cried out in despair. For a moment it seemed as though she might slap his face, she was trembling, tears pouring down her cheeks, but she turned away. ‘Harry, help me!’ she whispered. Her husband flinched. Then she fled from the room, clutching the photograph to her breast.

  ‘I apologize for that,’ J.J. muttered to the others as they listened to her running up the stairs to her bedroom. ‘Neither of us had any sleep. It’s so very hard . . .’ His own eyes were overflowing with exhaustion.

  ‘Which is why, J.J., I think we should call in the authorities. We need all the help we can get,’ Archer said.

  Breslin turned on him. ‘I’ll not put my son’s life at risk. You know what the kidnappers said!’ He was panting in anger, his head lowered like a bull preparing to charge, his lips twisting and ready to abuse the other man for his insensitivity, for taking advantage of the moment, but even as the curses came to his tongue his shoulders sagged in resignation. The man was doing no more than his job.

  Hiley joined the game, too. ‘It sort of makes sense, Mr Breslin. Our hands are tied without them.’

  Breslin turned, feeling outnumbered. ‘What about you, Dad?’

  ‘Me?’ Breslin senior stirred from his perch in the corner where he’d been sitting quietly. He was a watcher, not a rusher. He scratched his chin. ‘Personally, I never was much for running to the police.’ As he spoke, his eyes were fixed firmly on Harry. ‘And the Swiss police don’t seem to be making much progress, two bodies and bugger-all else.’