by Chris Petit
Round left, turning his collar up against the rain. Given the timing, Collard wondered if he had known about Sheehan’s visit.
He locked up the house and went up the hill to the hotel for his meeting with Stack. He was late. She was even later.
Her lack of punctuality was starting to irritate him when she hurried in. Her arrival caused a stir as men turned to look. It was not a dignified entrance. She clutched several plastic bags, including a couple from the local Europa supermarket, which suggested she was carrying her supper. The bar waiter was more attentive than he had been to Collard. She asked for a gin and tonic and apologized to Collard, who decided he was pleased she was there after all.
‘I saw Evelyn this afternoon.’
‘I know. He told me about the man you met at Frankfurt.’
Sensing his annoyance at Evelyn’s breach of confidence, she was quick to reassure.
‘Don’t worry. He only told me because he’s not well enough to work so we’re pooling sources. What do you think happened?’
Collard repeated what he had decided. ‘I should have been on that flight – I suppose I fantasized the episode.’
That didn’t really answer the question, except as a way of externalizing whatever deep impulse had prevented him from flying. There was the guilt too.
‘But that doesn’t explain the other connections,’ he went on. ‘Angleton led me to Wales and Barry – and Barry was on the flight.’
Collard looked at her and didn’t want to be alone, with all this talk of death. He pushed the thought aside.
‘Are you sure the man you saw at Frankfurt was Colonel Barry?’
It was obvious what she meant. With the sighting of Angleton discredited, Collard became a less reliable witness.
‘Are you about to tell me I am wrong about him too?’
‘The passenger list shows Barry flying direct from Cyprus to Heathrow on the morning of the twenty-first, connecting with Flight 103. According to the record, he never went through Frankfurt.’
According to the record. However much he doubted himself, Collard was sure it was Barry he had seen. Perhaps the record was about others now wanting to make it look like Barry had never been in Frankfurt.
Collard couldn’t tell if Stack was sympathetic or sceptical.
‘What are you doing tomorrow? Can you take a day off?’
He stalled, not knowing what to say.
‘Come with me to Frankfurt. I’ve got a date with my contact in German intelligence. We’re going to speak with a Customs man who was on security the day of the crash.’
Collard wondered at her keenness to include him and whether she was the one being sent by Churton to watch him.
‘All right,’ he said.
‘There’s another reason to do with your son.’
Collard recoiled at the unexpected mention of Nick.
‘What exactly are you being told about him?’
‘Are we talking off the record?’
Stack looked hurt. ‘Of course.’
‘That he’s mixed up in something, drugs at the very least. They’re saying there’s a connection to Khaled.’
‘That’s what I’m hearing. I’m getting fed a lead that Khaled was often in the company of an English boy.’
‘Are you going to print any of this?’
He could see Nick’s pictures all over the papers, a deliberately bad one, like that they had used of Khaled, contriving to make him appear stupid, sinister and furtive.
‘It’s not a reliable source.’ She touched his arm. ‘I’m sure it will turn out to be nothing.’
Collard wasn’t so sure.
Limited Omniscience
No flights were called. Departures was a campsite. Bad weather all over, the worst in his head. Whenever Angleton’s thoughts turned to what might have happened on December 21 he found the way blocked, whole memory terrains cut off by adverse conditions, to be replaced by unbidden, cranked-out stuff over which he had no control: the flickers of a dying man, except he was already dead.
Washington blizzards, thermometer falling: the winter of 1950/51, he guessed, and what would be a mixed year, good for him, bad for Philby. Greene would publish The End of the Affair, prompting Angleton to snigger, ‘Which one?’ Icicles hung from gutters: Cold War weather, hard sunlight and snow whitening everything. Half-blinded by winter sun, Angleton imagined the nuclear flash; it was only a matter of time. Galoshes worn to protect his shoes, frosty exhalations as he cleared the path to the house, breathing from the exertion, the harsh drag of spade metal on tarmac, the postman getting through, hand raised in greeting like he was some fucking hero.
Then he was out on the river night fishing with Cord Meyer, taking a canoe out into the open still water for the big cannibal-trout. They cast a short line with a fake mouse. There was a huge smash when the trout took the mouse and it was another twenty minutes before the fish was on the boat.
He told his daughter, ‘You enter the life of the trout, and you try and see the world he lives in, in terms of his world, but you’re fooling him. You give the illusion of a real fly, with the colouring of your hackle and wings and the feathers you put on, and it floats down the river, and you give it a little twitch, and the trout really believes it is a fly – and that’s when you strike.’
And which was I, thought Angleton, the feather or the trout?
Movies with snowfall he always liked, for the white. Bob Mitchum (again) in Wild Bill Wellman’s Track of the Cat, Mitch in a plaid jacket, fighting a bitch of a mountain. And McCabe and Mrs Miller, not for the foreground but for the carpentry of the town they built for the set and the dead sound of a land under snow, and ‘The Gambler’s Song’: waiting for a card so high and wild he would never have to deal another. You bet. Story of my life, thought Angleton, who hoped he was bound some place like the one in McCabe, sometimes plodding (the sound of fresh snow packing underfoot like no other), sometimes skating free. In life he had not appreciated death’s variable offensive, how close it had been to attack: it could have happened any time. He saw road accidents missed by seconds, imminent river drownings from slipping while wading, at least two KGB plots that could have gone either way, and so on and so on, including nights when he could have died from the amount of alcohol ingested, and even now he missed cigarettes.
All flights delayed. He had no idea how long anything took any more. Clocks made no sense. 46.5 seconds was a lifetime. It was a fucking eternity. No one warned you that afterwards involved constant enfeeblement. Once in an effort to board a flight (and what an effort) without a card, he was told for everyone to hear: ‘This man is too sick to fly.’
On the loudspeakers the cancellations were repeated in three languages. He heard a small boy say, ‘That’s good because no planes can crash.’ Angleton couldn’t tell about people, whether they were regular Joes or waiting, in quotes, like him. There seemed to be no Masonic code of recognition. It was pretty solitary. He hadn’t found anyone to talk to.
Then, without warning, clear reception, all the way back to the days of rock and roll. He was the Lonely Dancer again, doing those weird, solitary fandango steps to a thin Elvis; imagine, a thin Elvis. Among those in the house, Toni and Ben Bradlee, Cord Meyer, prematurely white, and his wife Mary who would cause them big grief later on, getting murdered on a Washington tow-path, forcing Angleton to houseclean in person ahead of the cops because Mary’s diary was flagrant about her affair with Jack Kennedy (also deceased): Jack the jack-rabbit man, on and off in jig time and Mary taking it upon her to slow him down, except he was too busy chasing his date with destiny. Mary Meyer – another MM, he’d never noticed that before; how inobservant could a man be! – had needed a lot of watching with her free-spirited, artistic ways, dropping LSD with that old charlatan Tim Leary, then ‘turning on’ the fucking President. Jesus, what would Moscow have made of that?
‘Hi, Mary,’ he’d said as she came through the door to watch him dance. There was a Navajo rug on the wall behind her head and
she looked just perfect. Men wanted to fall in love with Mary. He too, except his solitary vocation required him to be the unrequited type.
‘Is it a blue moon?’ she asked, taking her cue from the song.
‘It’s always a blue moon,’ he said, laughing. ‘What are you drinking?’
He couldn’t recall why he had been so happy. It was one of the few occasions when he had been able to say he was at the time. Happy. Wherever he was now, the concept was alien. He knew what it meant and knew it was important but he could no longer describe it.
He wanted to ask Mary who’d really killed her but she faded too fast.
There were a lot of parties in Washington, mostly innocent, Pick-a-Stick, after-dinner games, entertainment at home because people had kids. In charades he’d done Ace in the Hole and The Lemon Drop Kid, a Bob Hope picture through which he had sat stony-faced.
His days bled into each other, the start of his retreat into that cold place in his head. He could be charming but there was always something withheld. Guilty phone calls home when there was nothing to feel guilty about except domophobia: he was not a domestic animal, but he was functional, he managed a passable imitation, rinsing and drying the dishes, not that the family ever ate together. Mental snapshots included him mowing the grass, in May to judge from the blossom – how domestic could you get? – using an old Atco diesel mower bought second-hand off the British Embassy. Sitting in the car in the shuttered garage, listening to the engine settle, a small moment of respite between the divisions of his life. The sound of leather sole scraping on garage concrete; he had always liked his shoes, what he called Oxfords and the British called brogues. Guy Burgess wore suede. Burgess in his jackets with double vents. Graham Greene years earlier, droll in the Red Lion – or was it the Duke of York? – saying not apropos of Burgess: ‘Never trust a man with double vents.’ And the questions always asked of Angleton after Burgess and Philby were gone: Did you know? Did you suspect? Did you guess?
Never the important one: Did you care?
Nazir’s Trail
It was difficult going back to Frankfurt, difficult flying again, after Collard’s overexposure to the crash, and strange to think of spending the day in the company of an attractive woman he barely knew. Their only association was through the disaster, which made them kind of intimates already. In spite of his slurry of anxiety as the plane taxied down the runway, he marvelled at the wonder of flight as the big lump of metal dragged itself off the ground and up into the air.
While Stack worked, he read a selection of papers that, in the context of flying, made uncomfortable reading. The articles all shaped a Middle East terrorist plot to explain what had happened to Flight 103, with reference to previous atrocities – the Achille Lauro, the massacre of passengers at Vienna airport, back to Carlos the Jackal and the plane hijackings of the 1970s. Several pointed out the attack of Flight 103 represented a major strategic shift, with the demolition of a United States civil carrier. One of the more considered articles wrote of a new age of threat, with increased security an inevitable consequence. An unpalatable irony of the affair was that it would be good for Collard’s business.
What was not questioned was the whereabouts of a missing English youth whose bag went on the plane when he did not, but how long before it was? Collard wondered whether the press was muzzled as Churton had hinted. Again he questioned the motive of the apparently sympathetic young woman next to him.
He put the papers aside.
‘How did it work?’
‘How did what work?’
‘The Frankfurt Connection. Nazir used the profits from arms and drugs to fund terror. How does it work?’
‘Nazir smuggled drugs on regular flights from Frankfurt using baggage handlers infiltrated into the system. A lot are foreign, many of them Turks.’
Collard associated drug smuggling with light aircraft and remote airstrips or high-speed boats – it was disturbing to think of huge quantities of narcotics being moved around in exactly the same way as people’s personal belongings.
‘How did the regular runs work?’
He was thinking of Nick more than Khaled.
‘A suitcase gets checked in as normal. That’s swapped in the baggage-handling process for an identical one, containing the drugs, which is collected the other end at arrivals in the usual way.’
‘What happens to the original case?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Why not check in the drugs at the airline counter? Who’s to know?’
‘They say it was done by a swap.’
‘It doesn’t strike me as the most reliable way to smuggle drugs when you have to walk it past US Customs. How do you beat the random search?’
‘Through sheer weight of numbers, I suppose. Thousands of people pass through airports every day so the odds must be in your favour.’
Collard brooded on the problem for the rest of the flight. There was something not right about the Khaled story. He couldn’t see what but was afraid it would affect Nick.
‘Two things,’ Collard said as they were told to fasten their seat belts for landing. ‘Why should Nazir blow up his own connection?’
‘It’s a good question. I don’t know the answer.’
‘And why the swap?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Normally a bag gets swapped for the drugs. Now people are saying the drugs were swapped for the bomb. But if it’s a matter of getting a bomb on the plane why not just feed it into the baggage system? Why the complication of a swap? That’s what I don’t understand.’
‘I don’t know. I only know what they’re saying.’ Stack sounded defensive.
Collard wondered where that left the case of heroin found at the crash site. Was it Khaled’s – which meant the bomb hadn’t been a swap – or part of another consignment, maybe even to do with Nick?
They were to meet Stack’s contact at the airport viewing terrace. This was reached by a broad rooftop walkway between office blocks whose windows revealed an array of functional, repeating rooms. The scale of the airport was more apparent than in the terminal: office after office; rooftops housing miles of complex ducting; blocks five or six storeys high housing thousands of workers. It was a small city, dedicated to processing people. As many as ten thousand could work there, in addition to thousands of passengers passing through every day. However good security was there was always a way round.
Nearer the terrace they walked past glass arrivals corridors in which they could see passengers disembarking, who looked to Collard as though they were part of a strange posthumous process.
They stepped out of the shelter of the buildings into a brisk wind. The universal airport smells of aviation fuel and scorched tyre dumped Collard right back in the crash zone.
A man waited for them by the railings. Stack introduced him as Schäfer. He was leonine-looking with long hair and a pleasant, puzzled expression, and scruffily dressed. Stack explained that he had been part of the original anti-terrorist operation.
Schäfer spoke fast American-style English, learned, he told them, from the American Forces Network. Stack spoke good German and they switched between languages for Collard’s benefit. As a policeman Schäfer struck him as the opposite of Parker: thoughtful and intelligent and not in the job for the power and the bullying.
A cold January morning was not a popular time for visiting the terrace and they had it to themselves. Spread out below lay a vast arena in which hundreds of planes took off and landed in an unceasing flow. At that time of day they came in every minute, lined up and waiting.
Stack and Schäfer talked in German while Collard watched a jumbo jet being towed to the gate below them. The empty expanse of airport made the activity around the plane seem toy-like. A catering truck arrived to remove the food containers. The holds fore and aft were opened and the huge steel luggage containers were craned down to flatbed trucks then transferred to floats pulled by buggies, which trundled a quarter-mile across tarmac into the
belly of the arrivals building.
At some point on the day of the 21st the journey had been made in reverse, with a bomb.
Collard said to Schäfer, ‘It looks terrifyingly easy to put a bomb on a plane. Where’s the security?’
‘The emphasis is on schedules. Real security means delays, which cut into profits. Tens of thousands of passengers and items pass through here every day.’
Watching the industrious scurry back and forth from his privileged angle, Collard knew getting the bomb on the plane would have been the easiest part of the process. But the placing of the bag needed to be precise. If the bomb was shielded by other bags, it wouldn’t have had the force to blow a hole in the container and damage the fuselage, causing the plane to break up. It was one thing feeding a bag into the system, quite another to make sure it was positioned.
By definition someone airside had to be involved.
They returned to the terminal. The place was so big staff rode bicycles down the corridors. Collard thought: Anyone could be doing anything.
Schäfer went off to buy cigarettes and Collard showed Stack where he had seen Angleton and Barry. The casino-like riffle of the departures boards shuffled through their destinations. With as many as six planes leaving at once, the sound was constant.
‘Angleton was there,’ he said, pointing, the distance closer than he remembered. ‘The shop where I saw him talking to Nick is over there.’ Schäfer was walking in the shop’s direction. ‘Barry was where those seats are, though he came forward a couple of times to look at the board and I wondered what he did. I’m positive it was him.’
Stack cocked her head. ‘Why?’
Collard realized she didn’t know about Wales.
‘I spoke to someone who knew him.’
He made a poor liar and knew she could tell.
When Schäfer returned Collard excused himself, saying he had to make some calls. They agreed to meet outside the Sheraton.
He took the walkway to the hotel and called Round’s office from reception. The secretary gave him a time and address for that evening. The name of the man he was to meet was Patrick Bauer. Collard hung up, realizing he had brought nothing to wear for the party, not even a suit.
