Spy ah-4

by Ted Bell

  Fly below the radar.

  Die below the radar.

  17

  HAMPSTEAD HEATH

  C ongreve pushed back from the table and laced his fingers atop the plump pillow of his tightly buttoned yellow waistcoat. Suppressing a sigh of pleasure, he surveyed the sunny scene of domesticity before him. Basking in the morning light, shafts of pure gold streaming through his windows, the famous detective had the look of a man who had finally grabbed life by the lapels and shook it for all it was worth.

  Life was worth, he was now convinced, a very great deal. He’d had a near miss a year ago. A would-be killer’s bullet had lodged very near his spine. It had all been quite touch and go for a while. To be honest, though he’d never told a soul, there were not a few times, lying there in the dark in his hospital bed, when he’d heard the angels calling. It was sweet and seductive, the music from heaven. But he’d turned a deaf ear, and it had finally stopped.

  Yes, yes, Ambrose thought. Life was certainly hurrying by, running away at breakneck speed. Too fast to stop, and too sweet to lose.

  May Purvis, his housekeeper, who’d been quietly arranging a dozen dewy peonies in a silver jug, was suddenly up on her toes. She had her hands clasped to her bosom, and seemed on the verge of a pirouette.

  “Well, well, Chief Inspector, look who’s come to call of a morning,” said a beaming Mrs. Purvis. Ambrose looked over his shoulder and saw Alex Hawke framed in the doorway.

  “Ah, good morning, Alex,” Congreve said, putting down his Times crossword. The man was half an hour early. He’d called the night before. Something about visiting some diplomat in hospital. Very tight-lipped about it and wouldn’t say more.

  Hawke, never one for a lazy entrance, didn’t falter now. Before you could blink, he was kissing the back of Mrs. Purvis’s fluttering hand.

  “Mrs. Purvis’s younger daughter, are you not?” Hawke said, bowing slightly from the waist. “We meet at last!”

  “Oh, my! Don’t be ridiculous! It’s only me, of course. It’s poor old May, you silly boy!” she said, giving a half-curtsy.

  Hawke took a seat.

  “Tea?” May asked Alex, pouring.

  She was buzzing about his lordship, teapot in hand, like a bee round a stamen. It was a bit much this early in the morning.

  “You might put a patch on mine as well, please, Mrs. Purvis,” Congreve said, holding up his cup, a trace of peevishness in his voice.

  “Did I tell you I bumped into C, of all people,” Hawke said, putting down his cup and passing the linen over his lips. “After our splendid luncheon at Black’s yesterday.”

  “Did you indeed?” Congreve affected his most innocent smile, his baby blue eyes conveying nothing but simple curiosity. For now he’d decided to let the green ink on the dropped note remain where it had fallen.

  “Yes. Bumped into him at Harrods, believe it or not. Buying a tie.”

  “Harrods?”

  “Yes, Harrods. Rather large emporium in Knightsbridge. Surely you know it?”

  “Alex. Please. Spare me this day your ridiculous sense of humor.”

  “Anyway, I saw him.”

  “Hmm. Anything in particular on his mind? Other than neckwear?”

  “Nothing in particular, really.”

  “I don’t believe you for a moment. Marching to the colors again, are we? That’s my guess. Drawing steel once more. Is that right, Alex?”

  “Hmm.”

  “What was on that formidable mind?”

  “This and that.”

  Hawke looked at his watch. “We’re late. Our meeting with this German chap. We’d better shove off.”

  “German? Who said anything about Germans?”

  “I did. Let’s take your Morgan, shall we? The Yellow Peril?”

  “ZIMMERMANN IS his name?” Ambrose asked above the wind and engine noise. “This chap I’m to interrogate?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Why does that name sound so familiar?”

  “Just thinking that very thing. Something to do with the Great War, wasn’t it?” Hawke replied.

  “Hold on, it will come to me. Ah, yes, the Zimmermann Telegram. The cryptographic lads in Room 40 at Whitehall intercepted and decoded it. Dispatched by the German Foreign Secretary in 1917. Instructing his German Ambassador in Mexico City to approach the Mexicans about forming an alliance against the United States.”

  “Exactly. To keep the Yanks out of Europe while the dreaded Hun polished us off?”

  “Yes. The Kaiser believed the Americans would get so bogged down fighting a war on their southern border they’d leave us in the lurch. The Mexicans were leaping at the chance to recover Texas, Arizona, and California. Might have worked, too, but for the fact that we cut the Germans’ suboceanic cables and rerouted all their transmissions to—”

  “Ambrose,” Hawke said, “the man you’re about to meet was somehow involved in a plot to blow up Heathrow. Herr Rudolf Zimmermann is also the former German ambassador to Brazil. C is a clever man. He’s read my report and now he’s sending us to interview someone who may possess vital information relevant to the region.”

  “I still need more details before I interrogate this man.”

  “I’m afraid details are incomplete.”

  Congreve smiled. “I pray we make them less so.”

  Hawke swung the Morgan into the car park. Twenty minutes later, the two men were standing at the dying man’s door.

  A burly SIS type, an ill-concealed weapon bulging beneath his jacket, sat outside chatting up a pretty nurse.

  The SIS man stood, opened the door, and waved them inside an ill-lit and ill-smelling room. It was also stifling. Someone had sealed the windows and pushed the thermostat to ninety. The bed was against the far wall, surrounded by more new technology devoted to keeping people around when by all rights they should be gone.

  The patient was a sickish shade of gray and breathing rapid, shallow breaths. Tubes and electrodes ran from all parts of his being to the anti-death machinery. Hawke bent forward and peered at the fellow, bending the gooseneck light so that it shone on his face. He was clearly feverish and suffering chills beneath his blankets. There was something else, Hawke saw, lifting the covers back.

  The man was covered with the beginnings of blood blisters. Identical to the same awful thing he’d seen on the man crashing through the jungle. One of the untouchables from the medical compound.

  “He looks like death,” Hawke whispered, glad of his gloves and mask.

  Zimmermann’s eyelids fluttered and he croaked something indecipherable. It was German all right, but not any German Hawke had ever heard before.

  “It’s Hochdeutsch,” Ambrose said, as if that explained the matter. “Leavened by some strange continental accent. Must be his dementia speaking.”

  Congreve leaned down close to the man’s face and spoke quietly. “Grüss Gott, Herr Zimmermann. Ich bin Dr. Franz Tobel. Wie geht es Ihnen?”

  The pale face turned away and faced the wall.

  After a minute or so of this, the man feebly slid his hand under his pillow and withdrew an envelope attached to a small package in gift wrapping of faded roses. His hoarse whisper was full of incomprehensible pleading as he handed these to Congreve.

  “What’s he saying?” Hawke asked. “What’s he given you?”

  “He says these are gifts for his wife in Manaus. A book, perhaps, and a farewell poem of some sort. He wants me to make absolutely sure she receives them.”

  “One has to honor a deathbed wish,” Hawke said.

  “Hmm,” Congreve allowed.

  “I think I’ll bid you both auf wiedersehen,” Hawke said to Ambrose, taking the wrapped gift and letter. Hawke looked around as if searching for an escape hatch.

  “Please don’t feel the need to stay. I think he’s mildly insane with fever, actually. You go. I’ll do the interrogation. Go to Reception and read a magazine. Or, that farewell letter if you really want to pry.”

  “I do want to
pry. It’s my métier, you know.”

  Hawke turned and was out the door in an instant, his face flooded with relief at escaping the noxious oven.

  Ambrose moved a chair into position beside the bed and sat down. He took the man’s skeletal hand and held it under the dim lamp, examining his skin and fingernails. After a few moments, he put the hand down and leaned in toward the face for closer inspection.

  The mouth was conveniently agape. Congreve pulled the white linen handkerchief from his breast pocket, wrapped it round his fingers, and grasped the German’s tongue twixt thumb and forefinger, extracting it.

  “Good lord,” he said, under his breath.

  The tongue, in the small pool of light, was horribly furry and spotted white. Malarial, possibly something far more interesting. Hemorrhagic fever perhaps, although it was quite rare, and confined primarily thus far to West Africa.

  “Listen to me, Herr Zimmermann,” Ambrose said to the man in flawless idiomatic German, “I perceive that you are dying. You seem to have some kind of parasitic infection. Viral, or, possibly microbial.”

  “Poison,” Zimmermann croaked.

  “I don’t think so. I think you caught something. Tell me, have you recently been traveling in the Amazon Basin, Ambassador Zimmermann?”

  “Igapo,” the man managed to say. “The Black River. They—tried to kill me—they tried many times. I was thrown overboard. But, I am still here and—”

  “Who tried to kill you, Ambassador?”

  He closed his eyes and whispered in Spanish, “Las Medianoches.”

  Ambrose had heard the name from Hawke.

  “My wife…she’s in danger…”

  “Mr. Ambassador, I want to hear your story. But I fear we haven’t a good deal of time.”

  The man lay back upon the pillow and closed his eyes.

  And then he began to speak softly but most volubly and Ambrose leaned in to listen, nodding his head periodically as a dead man’s tale came rolling off his discolored tongue.

  While he sat there, he learned a few terrifying facts about a union of radical Islamists, guerillas, and narcoterrorists. About the size of their infrastructure, and the power of their influence in Latin politics. Their possible links to Castro and Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chávez.

  If this man was to be believed, it seemed the whole of the southern hemisphere was about to blow up in the Americans’ faces. And, if Zimmermann’s information was correct, ground zero was going to be the Texas-Mexico borderline. It was frighteningly familiar. A third-party plot to use Mexico against the Americans. Just like 1917. Only this time it wasn’t Germans doing the plotting. It was Middle Eastern terrorists.

  The German’s clawlike grip was surprisingly strong. Congreve looked down and saw the man’s head had come up off the pillow and was straining toward him, his watery eyes bulging.

  “There is a man in the jungle,” he said, his voice raw. “He knows I’ve betrayed him once. You must stop him before he attacks again. Do you hear me?”

  “Give us his name.”

  “Muhammad. Muhammad Top.”

  “Papa Top?”

  “Ja.”

  Congreve said, “Where will he attack next?”

  “It is written.”

  “I don’t have time for biblical references. Tell me where to find him.”

  “It is written, I tell you! Written in…in—”

  Zimmermann was gone.

  18

  LA SELVA NEGRA

  M uhammad Top ended his morning prayers with a special flourish, three ascending notes flung to the curved bowl of ceiling above his head. He gave a small sigh, allowing himself the brief luxury of repose. Yes. Allahu Akbar. Mighty Allah had replenished his soul during the night hours and now prayer chased sleep from every cobwebbed corner of his waking mind. As he sat kneeling on the hard wooden floor, with nothing but his thin prayer rug for comfort, he shivered.

  But, it was not the deep jungle cold that had seeped inside his bones during the night that stirred him.

  No, this was a frisson of pure excitement. Papa Top, as he was known to his adoring legions, felt the electric promise of the coming day as a sharp, tingling sensation, one that raced up and down his spine and sped along nerve endings to his extremities. Every day now promised to be a great day, even an historic one. The Day when all wrongs would be righted. And all sins punished. Inshallah. God willing.

  The Hour of Retribution.

  The Reckoning.

  Hello, there! Is that you?

  Yes, this feeling was so delightfully pleasant he looked down, half expecting to see an erection sprouting from his groin. But no, the sleepy serpent had not bestirred himself, had not yet risen from the dead calm of the predawn hours. Alas, there had been no concubine in his bed last night, nor did he feel need or want of having one sent up now. No. There was far too much work to be done this day.

  Let sleeping snakes lie.

  Dawn was just breaking in the leafy green stillness beyond his opened doors and windows. It would still be an hour or more before any trickle of sunlight managed to penetrate the gloom at the very top of the rain forest. Even though his small room was suspended just beneath the deep green canopy of the treetops, only thin rivulets of watery pink light ever managed to leak down his walls as the sun rose over the jungle.

  Upon rising from his pallet, Papa Top lit one of the many iron torches that ringed the wall of his spare circular bedchamber high in the trees. During morning prayers, the light from the single flickering kerosene torch threw stark orange and black shadows upon the thatched walls of his room. Torchlight was both eerie and comforting and he would have it no other way. He had become, after all, primarily a creature of darkness.

  Like running water, though, electricity was now readily available throughout this strange village. Early on, Muhammad Top had decided to erect his empire high in the trees. Because of the heavy flooding that swept through this remote area during the rainy season, it was critical to be above ground level. And, as all military commanders know, one wanted the high ground in battle. Not that he ever intended to fight here.

  His life’s mission was to take the fight to the enemy.

  The newly installed high-capacity power stations meant all manner of wonders were possible. There was a new underground communications bunker, the command center, from which he would soon wage his great jihad on the infidels to the north. Electric powered buggies and troop trams, for instance, now sped across the suspended rope bridges that formed the network of the warlike community. Battery-powered aerial drones patrolled the skies above looking for intruders. And Trolls that spat lead rolled through the jungle looking for invaders.

  Still, in his primary bedchamber, he chose not to have power at all. He preferred candles or torches in spaces where he lived his solitary life.

  Of all elements, Papa Top vastly preferred fire.

  Once, when Muhammad was a child, he had visited his paternal ancestral village on the parched banks of the Euphrates in Syria. One day an old crone came to visit his house. She was a Syrian Hama, a witch, veiled and wearing a black cotton garment, called an ezar. Embroidered with symbols of wind, earth, and fire, the flowing ezar enveloped most of her frail body and head. Little Muhammad Top had seen only the witch’s fierce black eyes and, as she had bent and whispered a strange riddle, smelled her sour breath.

  “If your house was burning, Muhammad Top,” the woman said to the small boy, “and God in his wisdom allowed you to rush in to save only one single thing, what would that one thing be?”

  “I know the answer,” the boy had said, deep vertical creases of concentration forming above his long, already commanding nose. “Wait, it will come.”

  “I am patient beyond words,” the witch said.

  “If I could save only one thing,” Muhammad Top said, “it would be the fire.”

  “Yes,” she whispered, placing her hand atop the boy’s head. “Guard the fire,” she whispered. “You must save the fire.”

&
nbsp; He had made her words his life’s calling.

  The big man now stood, rose to his full height, six and a half feet, stretched, yawned, and walked through his opened bedroom door and out onto his circular veranda. A gourd hung from a peg beside the door and he dipped it into a wooden bucket of water. He drank. He placed his hands upon the wooden railing still wet with dew and gazed down with complete satisfaction at the tranquil scene below.

  Enraptured by the sight of his sleeping treetop village, he almost missed the black scorpion moving swiftly along the railing toward his left hand. The little beast was feeling aggressive, waving his lobsterlike pincers in the air. The poisonous jointed tail was held aloft, curved over his back, ready to strike. He’d found one of these ferocious and deadly monsters in his boot yesterday. He was ill disposed toward them this morning.

  He lifted his hand a few centimeters to allow the insect passage beneath it and then slammed his hand down on the rail and smashed the creature with a satisfying crunch beneath his palm.

  Life was short, but good, he sighed to himself, scraping the remains of the insect from his hand.

  Swirling spirals of mist rose from the damp jungle floor. The damp air created perfect halos around the bobbing torches, the countless fireflies of light streaming below. These were the servants and guard changes. His men rushed with guttering torches across the suspended ropewalks linking the circular thatched and tin rooftops of varying diameter below. These were called roundhouses. The larger ones, like the mosque, were built nearer the ground.

  Wisps of smoke curled from chimneys, mingling with the mist. In two of the larger roundhouses, built only fifty feet in the air, fires were now being stoked for cooking. Fans drew off smoke during working hours, to prevent even a wisp from escaping the canopy above.

  The day was beginning.

  Around the great blue dome of the central mosque (the only tiled roof he allowed) were the larger circles of the great common roundhouses and storage rooms built in the last few years. They provided barracks for House Guards, food and water storerooms, dining, emergency generators, and, of course, vast stores of weapons and ammunition stockpiles.