by Chris Petit
Angleton’s broodings on Nazir produced a strong sense of déjà vu. Every way he looked at it, he was sure it connected back to Amazon and Rome at the end of the war.
Someone had closed down the Palestinian channel but kept it running, as Angleton had with Amazon, pretending it was gone when it wasn’t. What had started as a vanity project run smoothly to his command ended in gut-wrenching spasms that reduced him to shaking cold sweats and clutching the toilet bowl like it was flotsam from the wreckage.
At the time the impressionable young Lieutenant Angleton had been distracted by the cloak and dagger of it all, by the splendour of the dark maze of the Vatican, the silky insinuations of ecclesiastical minds, the muted swish of cardinals’ robes and sense of effortless ritual and power designed to humiliate (no humility there): godlessness the enemy with communism poised to sweep the Holy Church aside in central Europe, reaching as far west as Germany, with, God forbid, France and Italy in jeopardy, resulting in a besieged Vatican or, the unthinkable, a Papacy in exile.
Cardinal Montini, future Pope, at their first meeting: ‘It is our business to be informed. Rome is, with due deference, our city. We know its ways and those of our more wayward children.’
The Vatican took its job seriously, smuggling Angleton in and out of secret meetings in a laundry van, leaving him to wonder who was really running Amazon. He was not naive enough to believe he was, despite Philby’s reassurance it was his show. At the second meeting the cardinal suggested Angleton use the Amazon traffic to insert information the cardinal wished to have passed on in secret to Washington.
‘We would tell you what to include, broadly speaking. Then, even as a fake, it would, so to speak, have our imprimatur and be less of a fake than Amazon’s real fakes.’
The cardinal permitted himself a smile and said the matter was between them.
After Amazon’s exposure, as planned and to the enhancement of Angleton, the cardinal offered a toast to the operation’s successful conclusion, which Angleton saw as no conclusion, merely the shutting of one door. From what he had thought was in his control, he found himself in the uncomfortable position of not having a fucking clue what was going on. He could hear Philby’s hollow laughter, welcoming him to the big boys’ game.
Angleton wondered if the cardinal was now assigned to the same worldly limbo as he was or was snug in a heavenly Vatican annexe, safe from the travails of transit. Sometimes Angleton knew he was in Frankfurt. Other times he seemed to be stuck somewhere else, caught up in the same endless loop, far from omniscient and wanting to tell Collard he would never really find out what he wanted. There would be no single moment of revelation or understanding, just a gradual acceptance, which would also be a depression, of how events probably unfolded. Angleton looked back at the Amazon operation in terms of its bare necessities, devoid of emotion or involvement, as scratching in the dust; what he needed to do was detach enough to find the similar pattern behind the destruction of Flight 103.
Conscious of his failure at Frankfurt, he was at pains to attach a chronology to what had happened. He recognized all the old patterns of shift and blame. He could read the muddied trail of an operational cover-up like he was an Indian scout. He was the acknowledged master of the same: the Elvis of cover-ups. He saw something of the ghost of Lee Harvey Oswald in the way they had set up Khaled, maybe even the other boy. Poor Lee, a nice bright young man undeserving of what history had in mind. Angleton had always enjoyed that process of set up, creating a fiction, sometimes with the subject’s connivance, and watching how the two slid together.
He had missed Khaled on the day, despite searching hard. Recognizing Collard as a product of the same venerable institution that had educated him was of no earthly or heavenly use under the circumstances (the curse of the old school tie). Now he was left with the hopeless task of trying to will Collard into being his agent, the elected representative of his ghost; he who had been fundamentally sceptical about all those mind-control psy-ops experiments that had obsessed the CIA. Collard was all he could find; a man bereft, redeemed only by the prospect of getting Stack in the sack. The joke kept Angleton going. That was another surprise, that there were still jokes, albeit only bad ones, which was pretty much the case everywhere.
Customs
A message at the Sheraton desk told Collard to call Oliver Round urgently. Stack had one from Schäfer, saying he had something important for her and where he could be found that evening.
Round had left several numbers. Collard noted the sevens scored in the Continental way. The desk staff warned him against driving into town because of a bad smash on the airport road causing long delays. Images of the traffic jams were on TV when he switched it on in the room. He thought of Nazir’s fake lighter, the needless unpleasantness of his stupid, rich friends and the pointlessness of all their lives in the face of disaster.
He and Stack had got a commercial flight back from Nice to Frankfurt, after hitching a ride to the airport. The episode seemed typical of Nazir’s final unreliability.
Stack had said he must think she was just a rich girl playing around. Collard reassured her that wasn’t the case while privately thinking that she was closer to Nazir’s world than to his. He doubted if she would spend the rest of her life reporting.
His impression of the day was that it had been stage-managed from top to bottom. Nazir had told them only what he wanted, no more, and his purpose was to deliver a veiled threat to Churton. Collard wondered if the meeting really was anything to do with the plot rather than the fallout surrounding it. All these feints and secret appointments were another way of saying business as usual; whatever that was.
It left him more fearful for Nick’s safety, given how casually people were used and discarded in these extraordinary fabrications. His guilt or innocence was no longer the point. It was about what Nick knew. Perhaps it wasn’t even about that; it was about what others thought he knew.
They were in Nick’s old room at the Sheraton, ill at ease and acutely aware of each other.
Stack said the last thing she felt like doing was going out again. With the highway blocked she would have to get the train. He could see she wanted him to take control, which he was reluctant to do beyond making a half-hearted offer to go with her. She shook her head and said she was fine. She still seemed embarrassed by Nazir’s revelation about her father. Collard suspected she worked very hard keeping it secret. He doubted if her colleagues at work knew, not even Evelyn.
As she left the room Collard caught sight of his reflection in the mirror, warning him against doing anything impulsive. He was aware of a shared desperation. What their sleeping arrangement was for that night he had no idea. It seemed rude to tell her to get her own room. He had seen the way Bobby looked at her.
He was about to take a bath before calling Round when the phone rang. It was his tame receptionist downstairs saying she had something for him. Collard took the lift, wondering what it was. Ute, her name was, he remembered; she had a tag on her uniform to say so. He tried to imagine her life, restricted to her desk and the thousands of faces that passed each day, and always the obligation to be polite.
With it being the start of her shift, Ute’s smile was still fresh.
‘I was thinking about our conversations and I have found this for you.’
She handed over a large brown envelope. Collard opened it, puzzled. It was a blurred photograph of the hotel lobby taken by a security camera, with Nick talking to a man immediately recognizable as Quinn. The time on the photograph read 10.36 on the morning of the crash.
Quinn and Nick in a Cyprus café several weeks before the crash was quite a different proposition from Quinn with Nick together in Frankfurt on the day. It put Nick right back in that tight mystery surrounding the explosion.
‘Where did you get this?’
‘I was in the staff restaurant with one of the security people. Because the hotel is part of the airport he told me they kept the material from the day of the crash as a precauti
on. It took ten minutes to find the right picture. I made a photograph from it.’
Collard was touched by this unexpected act of generosity. He was curious to know if anyone else had shown interest in the hotel footage from that day. Ute knew the answer. Her friend in security had told her no one had, even though it had been offered to the German police, airline investigators and the airport authority.
He wondered if Nick had appeared elsewhere on the tape and whether it would show Fatima Bey.
‘Is there any way I can see the rest of the tapes?’
Ute seemed reluctant faced with this new request.
‘I have pestered you enough but it is a matter of my son’s life.’
‘I thought he was killed in the crash.’
‘So did I but now I’m not sure.’
She looked surprised as she picked up the phone. She spoke to the security desk. Her friend wasn’t on duty until the following morning.
‘I will talk to him tomorrow.’
Collard, aware of a guest waiting impatiently for them to finish, thanked her.
‘You’re welcome,’ she said formally. ‘Have a good evening.’
Collard returned to the room and forgot about his bath. He tried Round’s home first as it was Sunday. Round’s wife answered, sounding fed up, and fetched him.
‘I hear the meeting with Nazir went well.’
This casual detonation shook Collard. Round was being mysterious and teasing but the remark only served to leave him feeling marginalized and expendable.
If it wasn’t Stack reporting back, it meant Churton had a spy, or, more likely, another route to Nazir. Collard remembered his first sight of the man, on the phone. Who had he been talking to then? In any configuration of Nazir, Stack, Churton and himself, he was the odd one out.
‘If you know already what was the point of sending me?’
‘More as a favour to you. We’re sure Nazir’s people know about Nick.’
‘Nazir says it’s you I should be asking about Nick.’
‘Me?’
‘As one of Churton’s people.’
‘I am not. I am merely trying to act in your best interests.’
‘You said “we” just now, referring to Churton.’
‘You’re being paranoid. Anyway, that’s not the reason I’m calling.’
‘I’m calling you.’
Collard was spoiling for a fight. Round knew him well enough to recognize that and think little of it.
‘This is serious. When are you coming back?’
‘Tomorrow, unless Churton has more assignations in mind. Isn’t it rather pathetic, having to use someone like me?’
‘Forget about that. This is far more serious. The shit has hit the fan with Customs and Excise. There’s a warrant out for your arrest.’
Collard laughed in disbelief. He couldn’t imagine what he was supposed to have done.
‘You’ll be arrested when you come back into the country. Do you have you any idea what you’re mixed up in?’
‘Don’t leave me to guess. Just tell me.’
‘Illegal trading.’
His first reaction was Nazir’s: that someone was putting a frame round him. If it wasn’t so desperate it would be funny. He had apparently gone from being an unofficial go-between for a senior government official to a common criminal in one move, without the faintest idea how.
Round took his silence as an indication of his compromise.
‘You can be frank with me. Nothing has been going on, has it, I should know about?’
‘You tell me. You know more than I do.’
‘I’m sorry. Yes, of course. Are you sitting down? Customs say from 1986 you consistently broke trade embargoes by dealing with Iraq and concealed the transactions with false documentation.’
‘This is so far-fetched it’s not even ridiculous. Don’t they know the bulk of my business is domestic? I flog security to supermarkets, for God’s sake. Why would someone have it in for me? It doesn’t make sense any other way.’
‘I’m sure it’s nothing sinister. Try not to worry. I’ve spoken to our best lawyer and we’ll pick up the tab for any legal bills.’
‘They could cost hundreds of thousands.’
‘I’m going to fight this. In the meantime you will have to go through the rather undignified process of being taken off the plane at Heathrow in handcuffs by Churton’s people, so be sure to let me know what flight you are on. That way we can avoid Customs.’
‘What happens after that?’
‘A council of war. Our lawyers will get on the case.’
Round’s call brought back memories of Sheehan’s determination to corral Nick into his investigation and make the facts fit. Collard imagined being interrogated by dreary men and women who believed it was human nature to cheat.
When Stack returned he was in bed, with the light out, trying to sleep. He kept his eyes shut, listening to her undress and clean her teeth. She got into her bed. They lay there a long time, aware of the other pretending to sleep. Perhaps five minutes passed, perhaps half an hour. He had the impression of drifting off a couple of times. The atmosphere remained tense. His thoughts were starting to turn to dreams when Stack spoke.
‘It was Schäfer in that smashed-up car on the way from the airport.’
She had waited in the bar where Schäfer was supposed to be. A man had tried to pick her up. Mention of Schäfer was enough to cause his retreat. Schäfer was a local there. The man said he was surprised by Schäfer’s absence. It was unlike him to pass up a drink with such a desirable companion.
Her table had a view of the street and she watched police cars draw up outside a block of flats, followed by a TV crew. She hadn’t made the connection until what she had seen being filmed turned up as a report on the television in the bar.
‘I’m drunk. They made me toast Schäfer. I’m scared too.’
He got into her bed. He wanted to say something but she put her hand over his mouth and soon lost herself in a space of her own, leaving him to wonder if it was her escape from the blackness of the crash. Their bodies met in a rough collision of desire, fear and desperation. Sex and death were inextricable. Collard let her exorcize Charlotte, in awe of the energy she released in him while thinking that without Schäfer’s death they would not be doing this. He drove into her harder, to obliterate the guilty memory of standing outside the room they were in, listening to the girl’s moans of abandon as she came to climax.
They were woken by an early call from Stack’s editor summoning her back to London for immediate conference. Collard watched her frown, aware of her odour on his body.
He wondered whether to go with her then decided the indignity of being escorted off the plane was something he would prefer to face alone.
She dressed in a hurry and put on lipstick, leaning into the mirror.
‘Yardley’s Reckless Red,’ she said, taking the excess away with a perfect imprint of her lips on a tissue, which she left as a souvenir.
‘See you back in London,’ she said and was gone.
The Frame
Collard got up slowly, showered and went down late for the buffet breakfast. The other guests had already eaten and the dining room was nearly empty. What had happened with Stack – their raw emotional and physical rashness with no regard of the consequences – left him even more confused.
Confronted with the trays of waiting food he had no appetite and went back upstairs, lay down and tried to work his way inside his son’s head. Nick had been in Frankfurt at least five days but did not see Fatima Bey, except on the last night when he asked her to marry him. The following morning he had been seen with Quinn in the lobby.
It was like trying to cup water in his hands. Details made sense individually but nothing added up. Was the proposal to Fatima Bey an act of desperation because Nick suspected he was in much more trouble than he realized? Was she part of the plot? Collard was fairly certain she wasn’t the girl in the Polaroid. Nick was attractive. There could have b
een other girls.
He got up and watched planes take off and land. It was a stormy morning. The glass of the window was cold against his forehead. Outside was freezing. He remembered standing under the awning of the Heathrow hotel after hearing news of the crash and feeling very isolated. Now he was aware of a stirring of deep resistance stemming from the realization he was truly alone. There was only his private resolve.
He checked out. There was a note from Ute the receptionist leaving the name and number of her friend in security. The man who came down was younger than Collard expected, fresh-faced and in his twenties, with a cow-lick of fair hair. He told Collard about the decision to keep the security tapes from the day of the crash and how nobody had shown any interest except him and an American who had turned up that morning and taken them away.
‘Did you make him sign for them?’
The man nodded. Collard asked to look at the name on the release form. He was expecting Sheehan’s signature, but what he saw brought him up short. The tapes had been signed for by Angleton’s mysterious cohort in Wales, Hoover.
Of all those from Wales, Hoover was the one about whom he had been able to find out the least: an address in West Berlin; an American originally from Belgium; Valerie Traherne’s description of him as mysterious, the apparent bearer of bad news, changing Angleton’s early excitement to panic. Hoover’s company name on the release form told him nothing. He wondered if Hoover was still in the hotel and had been watching him all along. He had never thought to look over his shoulder.
Collard flew home through a thunderstorm. The cabin crew went through the safety exercises, following the announcement that ‘in the unlikely event of an emergency . . .’, then spent the flight with their seat belts on. The plane creaked and rattled like an old three-master when it hit turbulence, lurched and then dropped through an air pocket. Collard waited for the first sound of tearing metal and looked for signs of panic in the other passengers. The majority were businessmen working or reading financial newspapers. An overhead baggage locker sprang open. A coat flew out, like a large bat. Someone screamed. Had the dying on Flight 103 been able to see their breath as they plummeted through the freezing night or had the air been ripped from their lungs by the velocity of their descent? What was the stress factor on a human body pitched from such a height? Collard doubted if all the panic in his life amounted to a fraction of what they had endured.
