The Passenger

by Chris Petit

  In the end, Angleton came to the conclusion that Flight 103 came down to what could not be admitted. Her name was Afghanistan.

  Syria, Iran and Iraq were casual dates. Afghanistan was what had to be kept off the table, the geopolitical equivalent to Al Haines’s confession if it were revealed. Afghanistan was planned as payback time for Vietnam, a chance to tie up the Soviets in a costly and morale-sapping war. Casey’s problem was covert sponsorship without accountability, no audits or bookkeeping, a bottomless pit into which money was thrown, with kickbacks and bribes all the way down, and skimming off the top. It was a short, logical step to exploit the region’s most valuable crop – the poppy – to feed the pipeline. The Frankfurt Connection became expendable. More money than anyone would admit: huge, leaping subterranean rivers of the stuff – profits of between one and two hundred billion, give or take a billion, after everyone had taken their cut, and that was a lot of cut, from the Afghan Connection alone.

  All this Barry had uncovered with evidence against those Jarrald and Sheehan were prepared to protect by blowing up a civil airliner.

  Barry’s betrayer, the last mystery.

  Force of Impact

  Collard rented a house overlooking the country-club course where Jarrald played golf. There was no sign of him, week in week out. There was no report of any untoward incident at the motel, which meant the number Hoover had given him for a house cleaner had done its job.

  Collard overlooked the fairway of the second hole and kept a telescope trained on the course.

  Then on a still morning, just after nine, he saw Jarrald with three other men playing off the second tee. They had a cart but no caddies. Jarrald ended off the fairway with his drive. For his second shot he dug his iron in short, sending the ball a few feet. Collard watched him look around to make sure no one had seen then take a free stroke.

  For five holes Jarrald played to the fairway. On the par five eighth he mishit his drive. Jarrald’s tendency to slice had decided which side of the fairway Collard waited and he was rewarded by the sound of the man’s ball clattering into the trees not far from where he hid.

  He had no silencer for the gun. He had wrapped the barrel in a couple of shirts and a jersey, meaning to get close enough not to miss and for the wadding to deaden the report.

  Jarrald began searching in the wrong place. Collard was about to move when a quiet voice behind him said, ‘Drop it.’

  A gun pressed against his head. He did as he was told. Jarrald moved further down the hill searching for his lost ball.

  ‘Call Jarrald. Tell him his ball’s over here.’

  Again Collard did as he was told.

  Jarrald looked up angrily. Collard shouted again, pointing, berating himself for believing he ever could have succeeded. Jarrald’s like always got away with it. Such men were never accountable.

  Jarrald demanded to know who they were. He turned livid at the sight of Collard.

  ‘What are you doing here? This is private ground. You are a dangerous animal. You also have no right to be here. Do what you have to do, Mr Quinn. I have a game of golf to continue.’

  Collard thought: So the man behind me is Quinn, the most elusive of them all, and now I will die without ever seeing him.

  ‘How is your father, the old priest?’ Collard asked. ‘Is that the dirty secret you didn’t want to come out?’

  He experienced the brief satisfaction of seeing Jarrald riled. Jarrald swung his club, clipping the side of Collard’s head, dazing him and leaving him on the ground.

  He waited for Quinn to shoot him. Instead Jarrald fell down beside him, his face contorted. Quinn straddled him and stuffed his mouth with one of the shirts Collard had used to wrap around his gun. A soft percussive tap was followed by a wet, shattering noise. Jarrald bellowed into the gag, eyes wide with shock.

  Quinn ordered Collard to get up.

  Quinn had shot away Jarrald’s knee. The force of impact had sent fragments of splintered bone through the material of his checked golf pants. The knee was shredded, a soft mess of pulp soaked in blood. Jarrald’s gagged screams turned to sobs as he inspected the damage. Quinn aimed at the other one. Jarrald scrabbled with his good foot in a futile effort to get away.

  ‘That was for Barry,’ Quinn said.

  Jarrald was like a frightened little boy. Tears ran down his face. Snot bubbled from his nose. Collard felt almost sorry for him.

  Quinn asked, ‘You killed Barry, didn’t you, because of what he knew?’

  Jarrald nodded furiously, transparent in his hope that anything agreed to would save his life.

  Quinn handed his pistol to Collard. ‘He’s yours.’

  Collard thought about it, took the gun, pressed the muzzle against the head of the whimpering Jarrald, looked away at the trees and pulled the trigger, sensing rather than seeing the life leave the man.

  The eyes were gone. The legs scrabbled at the bed of pine needles, still trying to escape.

  Collard followed Quinn up the hill away from the course where Jarrald’s companions were calling out. They reached the end of the tree line.

  Quinn turned and said, ‘You should have made sure Sheehan was dead.’

  ‘Sheehan’s alive? He can’t be.’

  ‘He is.’

  Quinn’s economy of movement spoke of precise and dangerous skills. The eyes indicated profound indifference.

  ‘Sheehan sent you?’

  ‘That’s why I am here.’

  It didn’t matter now, Collard thought. He had done his job. Jarrald was gone. He supposed it didn’t make any difference to Quinn who he killed. It was a cruel piece of logic that the man who had inveigled Nick into the plot was now the one sent to finish him.

  ‘Tell me one thing before I go. What did Barry know?’

  ‘Enough to ruin the house of cards men like Jarrald build. They’re the playmakers. If their puppets are exposed they feel threatened. What’s an airliner in their scheme of things? Newspaper headlines for a month or two.’

  Quinn was not a man of words and that probably constituted a major speech.

  Collard realized Quinn wasn’t going to shoot him after all.

  ‘What will you tell Sheehan?’

  ‘That you were gone. You’d got Jarrald and moved on. Make sure we don’t meet again, because next time I do the job I’m paid for. A contract is a contract.’

  The Catacombs

  Collard spent Hoover’s funds, cushioned and corrupted, a tourist of the world of black economy, a strange and restless traveller. The more he journeyed, the more he had the sense of being nowhere, a life stitched together by air miles, in futile search of a son he believed against all evidence was still alive. He hardened. He contemplated the murder of the sons of the President of the United States and the Prime Minister of Great Britain, so they as parents could experience his grief.

  Both countries had colluded in looking away from the truth, building a case around lies and false evidence, involving that old pariah and whipping dog, Libya, so on a limb and unwanted she could be blamed for anything.

  Any big event was about what preceded it and Angleton argued that always went further back than anyone allowed. Angleton had in fact been instructing Casey before Reagan’s election. Casey went to Angleton because Reagan’s people were worried Jimmy Carter would win re-election if he secured the release of the hostages held by the Ayatollah’s people in the US Embassy in Tehran. Angleton showed Casey how to open up a back channel and do a deal that fucked Jimmy Carter. Reagan announced their release on his inauguration day. Hallelujah! If Angleton had been British he would have been made a lord.

  When it was Vice-President Bush’s turn to run for President, eight years later, he demanded a repeat of Reagan’s triumph and got turned down. The Syrians called the shots and blackmailed Bush into reversing US hard-line policy. Syria was broke. The Soviet economy was in a shambles. America had money to burn. Al Haines’s confession and what Syria knew about Iran–Contra – far more than was allowed to come
out – culminated in any connection to the bomb plot being forgotten and Bush’s statement, which signalled the change of direction in the investigation, that Syria had taken a bum rap on terrorism. So would Libya, thought Angleton.

  Collard came to understand Angleton’s world was one turned inside out, held together by secret deals and illegal money. And behind that world still lurked the Vatican as it had in 1946. In Rome, Collard talked to an old connection of Angleton’s, Cardinal Xavier Mallory, an Englishman who had fallen under Angleton’s spell while in British intelligence during the war, before taking holy orders and becoming a Vatican expert in foreign affairs. Mallory, with his patrician looks, had the demeanour to which Churton could only aspire. He admitted hiring Hoover to watch Angleton in Wales because a whisper had reached him that Philby and Angleton were about to meet. Mallory professed a personal curiosity because he had never worked out which was the real double agent. Whatever happened in Wales, no one was saying.

  Collard suspected Mallory had played a deciding role in the events of 1986 because he was consulted by the two principal players, Angleton and Casey.

  Collard asked if Mallory had passed on Angleton’s confidences to Casey. Mallory said it was his belief that Casey had never found out about Barry. He held Collard’s gaze with the eyes of a born dissembler.

  ‘Did you know about Flight 103?’

  ‘My soul will rot in hell for many reasons but not for that.’

  They remained on vaguely cordial terms. Collard never trapped him into any admission but he managed to use him to effect an introduction to Graham Greene in the South of France.

  Greene, another Roman Catholic, and Mallory were the last ones left.

  Greene was very tall, with a limp handshake, an insolent gaze and a schoolboy laugh that occasionally lit up his sour face. They met in one of Greene’s regular bars. Greene was on doctor’s orders to take no more than one drink a day, which made him a poor companion. He appeared bored and evasive, trapped by his own sense of superiority. Collard read his books with difficulty. He preferred Patricia Highsmith, admired by Greene. The anxiety in Highsmith’s writing, caught in the everyday fears, corresponded to Collard’s.

  ‘She’s a lesbian, of course,’ Greene said, offering only small talk.

  At Collard’s account of Wales, he shrugged and said, ‘It sounds like the kind of thing I might have written about.’

  Greene remained supremely unconcerned, revealing not even a flicker of surprise. Collard found him like the riddle in one of the Borges short stories Angleton read; enigma replaced answer. Faced at last by one of the men he had been shadowing for so long, Collard got nothing. Greene seemed mildly inconvenienced by his presence and showed more interest in his drink and the pretty young waitress. His attitude and body language told Collard whatever secrets he held weren’t going to be shared. Greene’s lofty indifference reminded him of Churton. They shared the same languid assumption that someone like Collard, lower down the pecking order, wasn’t there to be confided to.

  He ran into Greene again, shopping alone in the fish market by the harbour. In a short-sleeved blue shirt and tan trousers and wearing large sunglasses, he looked very English. He professed at first not to remember Collard and thought he was a fan. Greene seemed at home among the dead fish.

  ‘I’ll tell you about Wales,’ he said, inspecting a large octopus. ‘If it’ll make you go away.’

  The stalls smelled of ammonia. The angler fish and the big squid pulled from the deep looked otherworldly. Collard wondered why Greene had changed his mind and decided it was because Greene enjoyed showing off his superiority. Valerie Traherne had noted his trivial, contrary behaviour, complaining about ice in his drink one night and its lack the next.

  Greene asked with false modesty if Collard remembered The Third Man. The film had been due to be set in Rome because the producer Alexander Korda had lire there from before the war. Greene had been considering the catacombs as a location and sketched an idea based around the black market.

  ‘Kim’s pet, Angleton, was in Rome. I had heard he was consorting with all kinds of strange people, from local Mafia to Lucky Luciano. My plan was he would introduce me to his connections. Angleton had always been willing and obsequious in the past, but Rome had turned him paranoid, and rather above his station. He was convinced Philby had sent me to spy on him.’

  Certain things had happened in Rome, for which Greene blamed Angleton, though he had him to thank for a diversion to Vienna, with which the film became inseparable.

  ‘As for Kim, I stayed in touch after he did his flit in sixty-three and we met up from time to time in Budapest or Bucharest or one of the Soviet resorts. The Catholic Church was softening its line on communism and sometimes Kim and I were allowed to get together to chat about it.’

  ‘Were you acting for the Vatican?’

  ‘Nothing so grand,’ said Greene airily.

  ‘What was Wales about?’

  Greene sniggered. ‘Angleton’s comeuppance.’

  Philby had never forgiven Angleton for going after him in 1963 before his defection. In 1985, he made contact with Angleton, suggested a reunion using Greene as go-between. Angleton was led to believe it was about Philby wanting to come home and repent and Angleton was his choice for debriefing.

  Angleton had gone to Wales thinking he was about to pull off his greatest coup, only to find the whole thing was a practical joke at his expense and Greene’s revenge for a minor episode in Rome that Angleton had quite forgotten. He had once fixed Greene up with a woman, knowing she would give him a dose of the clap.

  Greene said the last laugh was on Angleton because the episode had given him his penicillin plot for The Third Man. ‘Harry Lime was based on Kim, of course.’

  Angleton was the model for the naive American writer of cowboy stories, played by Joseph Cotten, in a swipe at Angleton’s intellectual pretensions.

  ‘He didn’t read half as much as he pretended. He was a terrible cheat and those dime-store cowboy stories were a proper indication of his real level. Without his father’s contacts he would have been nothing.’

  Greene turned away without saying goodbye and soon was another head in the crowd, taller than the rest.

  Greene was being disingenuous. Philby had played his trump in Wales, Angleton’s final humiliation. Quinn’s confession. It was Philby who had arranged Quinn’s kidnap, flown to Beirut and struck a deal with Quinn in exchange for release. Twelve hours of tape followed. Stenographers worked around the clock transcribing them in time for Philby to return to Russia and take his cargo boat to Tilbury, with a bound copy of Quinn’s confession, naming Angleton’s involvement in deniable operations, his black Valentine to Angleton who shook with humiliation when presented with it. Greene smirked. Philby was more gracious. ‘Just between the three of us, Jimbo.’ A demonstration of his final superiority. A time bomb.

  Angleton thought about the hollow wunderkind he had been, with his affected cough, way out of his depth, kept afloat by Daddy’s fascist contacts, whose castles and palaces had hidden the procession of migrating German assets. He thought of the plans others had for him (Allen Dulles, the Holy See of Rome, the Jews, the Jewish gangster Meyer Lansky, and Luciano in Rome, taking meetings, with scarcely an arch of the eyebrow, to discuss the threat of communism to free enterprise). Angleton was an existential cipher with an ulcer, the complexity of his nervous system matched by the enormous mental labyrinth created over the years. Angleton, cackling master of the hip-pocket operation, had found himself so deep in the pockets of others there was no way out. He had a family he didn’t want to go home to, a son whose existence he denied. He had been cast in the shadow of his father. He was desperate to get out, wanted a civilian life. Yet when the time came, and his father told him of the fortunes to be made in the post-war rebuilding, he said no. The truth was too many people wanted him in. The Jewish gangster Lansky said to him: ‘You can make it work for you too.’ So many connections. Lansky did big laundry in the new state o
f Israel whose founding he had helped underwrite.

  He remembered Lansky in later years, wry, on a pool lounger with a little yapper of a dog, the only thing to spoil the party. Angleton, hot in a suit, played the stuffed shirt for the benefit of the bathing beauties, bikinied goddesses. Angleton watched the drift of an inflatable mat across the surface of the water wiggling hypnotically, inviting him to throw off his clothes and jump in. It hadn’t turned out so bad after all, the American dream.

  ‘This is heaven,’ said one of the bikinied goddesses.

  Some mornings Angleton looked in the mirror, after scraping away the surface residue that had accumulated on his tongue, a thick fur from excesses of alcohol and nicotine (spiny fingers elegantly opening yet another packet of Virginia Slims, as delicately as though it were a lover he was unclothing), and imitated Lansky: ‘Jimmy, we’ve got you fucked all the way up your back channel.’

  In Sheehan’s final destination, Angleton read his own legacy, a central African rat-hole, a collapsed state, caught up in meaningless civil war and undermined by epidemic, where the long game was played out, with rebel and government forces armed by Nazir’s people. Angleton thought he saw Nazir once in the lobby of a first-class hotel; technically as impossible as Collard’s sighting of Angleton in Frankfurt.

  Sheehan, wearing his eyepatch, drifting though a city Angleton had never heard of, in a country which failed to register as a cause for humanitarian concern, on a journey into the surreal darkness of the stinking jungle of the old colonial continent, beyond television crews and the reports of correspondents, into a realm of fiction and bad imagination. The inside-out world in its extreme.

  In a gutted town, full of destroyed prefab concrete, Angleton saw the future: the one hotel still open, lit by 40-watt bulbs, and in dingy corridors the swamp smell of toilets and sex offered by pre-teenage girls for next to nothing while downstairs the band played on, a strange phonetic rendering of 1960s’ British pop ‘He’s Not Heavy (He’s My Brother)’, in a country where the official language remained French. The promise, the futile hope, was that the Americans were coming. Nothing made sense except the mortar fire that occasionally fell on the town. No one knew why or what they were fighting. Sheehan moved up country, ahead, as always. His body had turned into a temple to disease, scabbed, bloated and oozing running sores. The molecular conflict battling for its possession had been as savage as the war going on around him.