by Hugh Miller
‘We better move back down the hill,’ Lenny said. ‘Somebody will be back to look for this guy.’
Mike tied up the horseman, who was still unconscious, while Lenny led the horse up the slope on the far side of the road. At the top of the slope there was a narrow wind-blasted ridge with gnarled remnants of trees sticking up. Lenny tied the horse to one of them and went back to help Mike push the sacks down the hillside.
In less than five minutes they had transferred the sacks and the horseman to the shelter of the cluster of trees. The man was conscious now, sitting against a tree with his hands tied behind his back. In the shielded torchlight he looked profoundly menacing, although so far he hadn’t even struggled. He sat staring at the pile of sacks as Lenny split one open and tasted the powder.
‘Heroin.’
‘Good quality?’
‘Incredibly bad,’ Lenny said. ‘It’s already been cut with something, chalk maybe, and there’s husks and dirt in it.’
‘So this guy doesn’t work for the upmarket peddlers.’
The man moved suddenly, lashing out his foot as Mike eased past him.
‘Steady, my friend.’ Mike held up his pistol and waggled it. The man spat.
‘Like I said a while ago,’ Lenny murmured. ‘No point being subtle. If you want to impress him with the gun, smack him on the nose with it.’
Mike stared at the hillock of sacks. ‘We should start getting this down to the wagon.’ Their jeep was parked in bushes half a kilometre away. ‘We can drop it off at police HQ in Srinagar, together with old grouchy here.’
Lenny stood and held out his arms. Mike began piling on the sacks. ‘Six is just fine,’ Lenny said, grunting. ‘Hernia’s a treat I’d like to save for old age.’
Mike bent to pick up the sixth sack and heard the man make a gulping sound. Mike turned and the man was still staring, looking into the torchlight.
‘What the hell …’
The stare was different. Glazed.
‘God almighty.’ Lenny put down the sacks and knelt beside the man. ‘He’s dead.’ He felt for a carotid pulse. ‘Stone dead.’
‘How?’
Lenny was running his fingers along the man’s neck. He forced open the mouth and shone the torch inside. ‘He swallowed his tongue.’
Mike looked, saw the thick, mauve blob at the back of the man’s throat. ‘I always thought that was a myth.’
Lenny put down the torch. ‘He must have done it a minute ago, when we were distracted. It’s a thuggee technique. Death before dishonour.’
They stared at the motionless face, the eyes half closed now, drowsy looking.
‘Every day I learn something new,’ Mike said. ‘I only wish, now and then, it would be something nice.’
13
‘Malcolm, I picked up an amazing book in Barnes and Noble’s annexe a couple of months ago,’ Harry Lewis said. ‘I should have brought it to let you see. It’s called Scotland Yard, Bastion of Justice, and there’s a picture of you and me in it.’
Philpott stared at him. ‘Really? How long ago was it taken?’
‘The book was published in 1970, so it was a while ago. But there we are, all young and keen, coming out of a house in Shepherd’s Bush where some people had got themselves murdered.’
‘You must bring it and let me see. I half hate looking at old pictures of myself, but the other half’s fascination, I — ah, here’s the waiter.’
They were in Il Mulino in Greenwich Village, a restaurant Philpott favoured for lunch because, quite apart from the excellent food they served, the place had a stylishly spartan air — exposed brick, bentwood chairs — that made him feel he wasn’t being too self-indulgent.
‘Maybe I should have resisted the lagniappe,’ Lewis said. ‘Fried courgettes are delicious, but they also make me feel I’m halfway through my lunch already.’
He settled on a scaloppina alla valdostana and Philpott ordered osso bucco. The waiter poured the Chianti and they toasted each other in silence.
Aeons ago, it seemed to Philpott, they had been detectives together at Scotland Yard. They had both followed a rapid-promotion path but Harry Lewis was the one the reporters always latched on to for scene-of-crime statements, because Harry was the one they wanted pictures of; he had been strikingly handsome, a moviegoer’s idea of a detective, and he had a good presentational style, firm but always affable, even under the worst kinds of pressure. Philpott, on the other hand, had always been consulted by criminologists, politicians and the more serious, less well-known journalists.
Lewis was still a fine-looking man, Philpott supposed, and his special skills in crime detection and public relations had served him well: for eight years now he had been an Investigative Director with the World Health Organization.
‘Before our food comes, Harry, I want you to tell me the worst.’
‘You mean the scuttlebutt from Policy Control?’
‘That’s what I mean, yes. Don’t make me have to say it.’
‘When there’s a back-stabbing afoot,’ Lewis said, ‘they have a tendency to talk behind hands and with averted heads. Working from that criterion, I’d say they’re determined you should face the music.’
‘I guessed that anyway.’
‘Well, if you want specifics, there’s been a memo from the Director of Policy Control, Tom Lubbock, and the Secretary, Desmond Crane —’
‘Tweedledum and Tweedledee …’
‘Quite. The memo was sent to the Director General. It says that in view of procedural irregularities and a general lack of harmony with other elements within the UN organization, the administration of UNACO should be subjected to a policy scrutiny, with a view to tightening rules and guidelines.’
‘Well again, Harry, I guessed —’
‘Let me finish, Malcolm. They add that if it takes a change of Director to ensure the implementation of more satisfactory working methods, then no one should baulk at taking steps to appoint a replacement.’
Philpott stared at his wine glass for a moment. He looked up at Lewis. ‘So they don’t just want to put me on a leash. They want to get rid of me.’
‘That appears to be the thinking. They’re currently planting the notion among heads of departments that whatever is suggested to improve UNACO’s, um …’
‘Obedience?’
‘… whatever is suggested, however liberal, you will reject it out of hand. In the words of Secretary Crane, you are a man with scant respect for discipline and even less for authority.’
Philpott sighed. ‘We used to work with people like that, didn’t we?’
‘Everywhere you go in life you work with or near people like that,’ Lewis said. ‘They’re a law of the workplace, something you have to put up with.’
‘Like viruses.’
‘And bilious attacks.’
The food came. Philpott attacked his and didn’t speak again until he had finished. He sat back and watched Lewis toy with the last triangle of his veal.
‘I don’t want to talk any more about Policy Control, Harry.’
‘Then talk to me about work. What’s holding your attention at the moment?’
Philpott outlined a job being handled by Task Force One in Tirana, where criminal elements from former Eastern Bloc countries were taking advantage of the Albanian crisis to set up black market operations and spurious money-for-land deals.
‘We also have a team out in Zaire. Rebels have taken hold of the Kinsangani, in the east, and they’re posing a threat to the diamond mines there. The economy would go downhill without the diamonds, so we’re keeping a watching brief at present, waiting for the usual band of international gem barons to step in and try to rob the country blind. Elsewhere, Task Force Three are investigating a crime-based upheaval in Kashmir that might boil over into big trouble if it’s not defused.’
‘Have they come across Dr Simon Arberry, by any chance?’
‘Graham and Jarwal, an Area Observer, had dinner with him the other evening.’
‘Arberry’s an incredible chap. Brains and drive in equal measure. He’d be a godsend in our Third World aid programmes.’
‘Why so?’
‘He’s a born organizer, and he’s a magnificent persuader.’
‘So your foreign aid work’s suffering?’
‘It’s being undermined.’
Philpott looked interested. ‘By politicians? Criminals?’
‘Today, Malcolm, corruption eats into the heart of every charitable venture. Red Cross aid is stolen and sold in street markets to people with the money to buy luxuries like condensed milk, white sugar and aspirin tablets.’
‘What’s the scale of the loss?’
‘In some areas criminal co-operatives absorb eighty, eighty-five per cent of all material aid from the West.’
‘You’re the Investigative Director, aren’t you?’ Philpott said. ‘What are you doing about it?’
‘I have good, detailed evidence on the worldwide black marketing of charity aid. But I don’t have the resources it would take to root it out.’
Philpott was drumming the table now, thinking. ‘Send me round some details on this, would you?’
‘You mean you’ve never heard about how rotten everything’s gone lately?’
‘I didn’t realize the scale.’
‘I’ll send you the full depressing details, then.’
‘And maybe I’ll find some small way in which I can help.’ Philpott smiled tightly. ‘That’s enough about work. Let’s talk about something else.’
‘Anything you say. You’re buying, after all.’
‘I’ll tell you something about that,’ Philpott said. ‘I just worked it out. The ten per cent tip I’ll leave here today is about fifteen per cent more than I used to spend on a three-course lunch for the two of us in a Fleet Street pub.’
* * *
Sabrina crossed the border into Kashmir at Dalhousie, forty kilometres south-west of Jammu. The guard at the border post, after scowling at her and demanding to see her documentation, became suddenly deferential when he saw the UN symbol on her WHO accreditation. He stamped the appropriate blank page with a flourish and waved her through.
It was late afternoon and she had driven since dawn. Assuming her maps were reliable, she estimated that if she drove till dusk, rested and made an early start, she could be in Srinagar by noon the next day.
On a wide stretch of road to the west of Jammu she pulled over, took half a dozen items from her shoulder bag and laid them out on the seat beside her. They were a mirror in a rigid folding case, a comb, a rectangular powder compact, a dog-eared paperback of Jane Eyre, a ballpoint pen and a small pair of opera glasses.
‘Begin with the mirror,’ she muttered, recalling the training session where she had finally managed to work this conversion without looking. That had been two months ago; there was no one here to impress, so on this occasion she would watch what she was doing.
When the mirror case was held open with the hinge pointing upward, the mirror tipped out of its housing and hung down. Sabrina reached behind it and folded out a thin circuit board; from behind that she folded out another. With the mirror and the two boards in place, she was holding a ten-centimetre cube with one open side.
She put down the cube and opened the paperback. The first eighty pages were real but after that it was a box. She took out a flat ten-centimetre panel with a circular hole in the centre and laid it on one side of the cube. By dismantling the opera glasses she produced a neat zoom lens with a ratio of 60 to 1; she added a manual operating ring by combining the ridged bezels of the binoculars. She screwed the lens into the hole in the square panel, put it down and stared. For a moment she was lost.
‘Viewfinder, ‘ she said, remembering.
She opened the compact, carefully removed the powder tray and took out a plastic bag containing a flattened, hinged housing and the four glass viewfinder components. She fitted them together and clipped the unit to the top of the cube. The back of the comb came off and gave access to a slender titanium antenna with a miniature powered booster above its socket plug.
The main power source and electronic storage medium were in the book; she fitted them into slots inside the cube, tipped six screws and a tiny screwdriver from the barrel of the ballpoint pen and used them to stabilize the instrument. Finally she teased a laminated cover from the pen, unrolled it and fixed it with adhesive tape around the body of the cube.
‘Et voilà.’
The neat finished instrument she held between her hands was the EVC12A, designed, refined and perfected at a cost of six million dollars. It was a camera capable of taking and electronically storing twenty colour pictures, which it could transmit in digital form to a satellite, via its boosted antenna.
‘After all that, let’s hope I get a chance to use it.’
Philpott had told her he wanted broad-scale input, which meant he wanted alert observation, creative snooping and, if necessary, selective theft. It also meant pictures. No mission was a failure if it could be reinforced by random intelligence, and although Sabrina had the sheaf of papers she took from Hafi, she didn’t know if they would be any help to anyone. Even if they were, even if they turned out to be solid gold, it would still be marvellous, on top of all that, to knock out the old man’s eye with some top-rate photographic intelligence.
She put the camera carefully in the glove box. Juan Pereda, chief designer on the camera project, had warned her, again and again, that such an instrument would be prized by any foreign power without the resources to spend on advanced electronic development.
‘This is breakthrough technology,’ he told her in his thick Mexican accent. ‘Cutting-edge kit, you understand? You must not expose the camera to jeopardy, señorita.’
Philpott said the best way to safeguard the camera was not to assemble it until she knew she was in relatively safe surroundings.
‘Another way to make sure you don’t let any harm befall the instrument,’ he added, ‘is to bear in mind that if it gets damaged or lost, Juan might just get mad enough to insist a replacement be paid for from my budget. If that were to happen, your salary would be the first indirect casualty.’
This place looked safe. Sabrina had not stopped at any communities since crossing the border, but she guessed the bandits had as tight a grip on populations here as they had further south. The big difference was, this was open country. In the spaces between towns and villages she did not find herself on roads with blind corners or ominously close woodland or menacing overhangs. This was territory where she could see who was coming in any direction, and be ready for them.
A sharp rap on the window made her jump. Her first thought was, Thank God I kept the windows shut. It was possible to drive around all day with them closed: a concealed feature of the car, operated by a foot switch behind the brake pedal, was its air-conditioning unit, which kept the sealed-up interior at a steady 16 degrees Celsius.
Sabrina took a loose grip on the pistol tucked between the front seats. She turned her head slowly and looked.
‘Jeez …’
The man at the window looked horrible. He wore a voluminous yellow turban which emphasized the bony sparseness of his face, like a skull with eyes. His teeth protruded evilly, yellow and crooked, and as Sabrina stared at him his purple tongue snaked out and ran along his lips.
‘What do you want?’ she shouted, simultaneously thinking, so much for seeing them coming.
The man said something. She couldn’t hear. She watched his eyes go narrow. Her fingers tightened on the gun, her thumb eased off the safety. She looked to right and left. There was no sign of anybody else, but that went for nothing.
‘Speak up!’ she shouted.
The man’s expression changed. His eyes wrinkled at the corners and he made a helpless gesture with his hand. Now he didn’t look so menacing. Sabrina wound down the window a couple of inches, bringing the gun out from between the seats and letting it lie alongside her leg.
The first thing she noticed as the
window came down was the scent of jasmine. The man was wearing cologne. She was so conditioned to bandits smelling bad that his scent disconcerted her.
‘You are English?’ he said. His voice was surprisingly soft, entirely lacking the harsh edge she expected.
‘American. How can I help you?’
‘First of all let me apologize for disturbing you,’ he said. ‘I do not make a practice of encroaching on privacy or solitude.’
‘Um, that’s OK.’
The man sounded like an actor, she thought. His voice was finely modulated; his one-handed gestures rhythmically underscored his words.
‘I thought it a duty, no less, to warn you that the rear left side light of your motor is broken.’
‘Oh.’ Sabrina felt deflated, and a little charmed. ‘Well thank you …’
‘My name is Aziz,’ the man said, making a little bow. ‘I am a teacher in the village three kilometres from here.’
‘Well, Aziz, I’ll have the light fixed first chance I get. Thanks again.’
As he stepped back Sabrina saw he leaned heavily on a walking stick. He nodded and began hobbling away. Sabrina considered her position for a moment, and decided her humanity needed more exercise than her caution.
‘Can I offer you a lift, Aziz?’
He stopped and turned. ‘That is most generous.’
‘Not at all.’ Sabrina opened the passenger door and slid the gun back down into its hiding place. ‘It won’t be the smoothest ride, I’m afraid. The suspension’s kind of stiff.’
She was surprised at herself. A minute ago she was reading a life of dissipation and crime into the old man’s appearance. Now as he clambered in beside her she saw nothing but frail gentility and kindly warmth in his eyes.
‘We’ll have you home in no time.’ She started up the engine. ‘Have you lived here all your life?’
‘For seventy-six of my seventy-seven years,’ Aziz said. ‘I am technically an outsider. My parents moved here to live when I was just over a year old.’
‘And you still work as a teacher?’
