by Henry Porter
Harland didn’t press the point. ‘And in Washington was there a hotel he stayed at regularly?’
‘Yes, he went to the Fillmore Hotel on Tenth Street – he knows the manager there. He had some kind of deal.’
‘He knew the manager?’
‘Yes, but I forget his name.’
‘Do you have any idea what he was doing in Washington?’
‘Well, I guess he went to Langley. I know the Agency helped him with stuff like aerial pictures and radio intercepts. He visited there often because he was anxious to get these guys in Yugoslavia prosecuted.’ She paused and glanced away, focusing on a pot of parsley on the window. ‘We haven’t got Al back yet. His body, I mean. That really hurts. It’s ironic because Al said one of the things that obsessed those people in Bosnia was that they never found the bodies of their loved ones. They couldn’t bear for them to be not buried properly. Did you know that?’
Harland shook his head.
‘He told me it was a big thing for them,’ she said, ‘and I really begin to understand that now. It matters.’
The boys came back with the disc player and a portable speaker. ‘I listened to some of this upstairs,’ he said. ‘Nothing strange about it, except Beethoven and Chopin was definitely not Dad’s taste.’
They listened to the disc. Then Harland realised that the music playing was different to what was described on the disc cover, which listed highlights of orchestral works by Brahms, Chopin and Mendelssohn. What was playing now was the second movement of the Archduke trio by Beethoven. He picked up the cover and examined it.
‘I noticed that too,’ said Eric. ‘This is the wrong cover for the disc.’
Before the next piece there was a sustained tapping – something between a Geiger counter and a door creaking open. The noise lasted five minutes more and was followed by the first bars of a Chopin nocturne. They listened to see if the noise returned, but heard nothing. Then Eric suggested that he could make a tape of the noise and slow it down. Both of them went off together, relieved to have something to do.
They returned ten minutes later, bearing Eric’s recording equipment and arguing like young teenagers.
‘It’s code,’ said Eric definitely.
‘How would you know?’
‘I just do. Listen.’
Eric played the tape he’d made, slowing it as much as he could on his equipment. There did seem to be a definite structure to the sound, almost like a pulse. As they listened, they realised that the individual taps consisted of many different elements. ‘If we could bring this down real slow, I think we’d find something there.’
‘Maybe I could find someone to do that,’ said Harland. ‘Would you like me to?’ Sally nodded. ‘I’ll take the original disc, then, and the slowed recording if that’s okay.’
‘I’ve got a copy,’ said Eric, ‘so if you lose it you’ll know where to come.’
‘Good. Look, I’m not going to mention this to anyone. Let’s keep it between ourselves. If there is something here, I certainly don’t want anyone thinking that you’ve got it.’
Soon afterwards, Sally drove him to the station. They waited in the car park until the train was about to arrive. ‘Bob,’ she said, staring ahead of her, ‘find out if something’s been going on – you know what I mean. Find out for my sake and Al’s – he would want that.’
Harland promised he’d do everything he could.
He got to the UN late in the afternoon as the setting sun washed a pink light over the west side of the great monolith. There were still a few tourists about but the restricted areas were deserted. He was glad. He wanted to work in quiet and avoid the fuss which would certainly accompany his return to work on Monday.
He unlocked his office, noted the two-weeks’ worth of mail and sat down at his desk to think. He got the number of the Fillmore Hotel in Washington, dialled and asked to speak to the manager, saying that he was a friend and colleague of Alan Griswald’s. At length a wary English voice came on the line. Harland explained that he was making some inquiries for the UN about Griswald’s expenditure prior to his death. Just tying up some loose ends, was the way he put it. If this worried the manager, he was welcome to call him back on the main UN switchboard. Harland heard the voice relax.
‘You can never be too careful,’ said the manager.
Harland smiled at the motto of British caution and continued in a flat bureaucratic voice. ‘We’re dealing with the expenses incurred on his last trip. In the circumstances, we are concerned that they are fully reimbursed. I believe Mr Griswald was travelling with another gentleman who was also on United Nations business.’
‘And you’re doing this on a Sunday?’ said the man.
‘It’s the Christmas rush. We need to make sure that his family is reimbursed before the holidays.’ He grimaced at the lameness of his explanation and continued. ‘The trouble is that we cannot immediately lay our hands on the name of the second party. Would that be something you have in your records?’
He heard the manager ask reception to look up the previous week’s bookings. While he waited, the manager told him how he had met Alan Griswald some fifteen years before when he was deputy manager at the Jefferson Hotel. The death was indeed a tragedy, he said. Harland detected just the slightest strain of campness in his manner.
A voice sounded on the distant intercom. Two rooms were booked for two nights and paid for by Mr Griswald. Harland jerked his fist in front of him.
‘The name of the other gentleman does not appear on the account,’ said the manager, repeating what he had heard, ‘but it does on the registration card. It is Luc Bézier, a French citizen apparently. No home address is given.’
‘Anything else?’
‘No. No passport number, no vehicle registration or contact number. Just the name Bézier.’
‘Were there any additional charges to the bill – telephone calls? Meals?’
The manager replied that there were some other items. In a very short while Harland had persuaded him to fax copies of the bill and the registration cards. Five minutes later they slipped noiselessly from the machine by Marika’s desk. He found what he was looking for halfway down on the second sheet of the bill – a telephone number recorded by the hotel’s switchboard which began with the country code for France. There were two calls to the same number on successive afternoons, lasting seven and fourteen minutes respectively. Harland bet himself a cigarette that Luc Bézier was calling his wife or girlfriend.
He checked the number with International Information and found that it came from the Carcassonne area. It was nearing five – too late to ring. Besides, he wanted to know if the person who would answer the phone in France had been informed of Bézier’s death. It seemed quite possible that they did not know, although they surely must have begun to suspect that something was amiss when the regular calls abruptly stopped after Monday. They would have started making inquiries, perhaps contacting Griswald’s office in The Hague or the French embassy in Washington, and sooner or later someone would have suggested that Luc Bézier had been on the flight with Griswald.
Harland now felt sure that the FBI must have gone back over Griswald’s journey and stumbled on Bézier’s name. Ollins had been so interested in the fact that he had seen the compact-looking foreigner with Griswald at the airport that he must have traced the hotel booking and then, in all probability, located his name on a passenger list from France over the previous weekend. It would have taken one further call to acquire Bézier’s passport details from the US Immigration Service. And that meant Ollins knew as much as he needed about Luc Bézier. So why hadn’t he included Bézier in the final toll? Was that the reason for his shiftiness out at the airport? Had he been prevailed upon to keep Bézier’s name secret, or was he doing it for reasons of his own?
Harland rang Sally Griswald and asked if she had heard of Bézier. The name meant nothing to her. Al had not mentioned that he was dealing with anyone from France. Harland was about to ring off when she told him that she had been
going through Griswald’s recent mail and had found a sheaf of interview transcripts that had been expressed from his office in The Hague after he left. She had only skimmed them but thought they might be interesting. She would send the pages to his fax.
He made two further calls, the first to his sister, Harriet, to say that he would be in London for Christmas. Then he dialled the mobile number which Tomas Rath had left him. He assumed the phone was on a European service and so didn’t expect an answer, nor was there one. He composed himself for the message service. ‘This is Robert Harland,’ he said evenly. ‘I will be in London next week, so we can continue our conversation of last night. I hope that nothing is wrong. You departed in quite a hurry.’ He finished by leaving his new mobile number and Harriet’s home number and told him not to call before Tuesday.
He kicked his legs off the desk and went over to the fax to see if the documents had come. The engaged light was on. He waited while the cover sheet and the first of thirty-two numbered pages dropped into the tray. He read part of an interview with a Bosnian Muslim named Selma Simic. It didn’t seem particularly important so he went off to the kitchen area to make himself some tea.
The floor was silent, except for the gentle background hum of the empty building. Most of the offices around him were dark. He made his tea, thinking about the order of phone calls he would place to Europe in the early hours of the morning, then returned towards his office.
As he stepped through the partition by Marika’s desk he was aware of a rush of air to his left. He saw nothing, but felt a powerful blow to the ribs on his left side which hit the disc and glanced upwards to his Adam’s apple. At the same time another force assailed him from behind. Two blows to the back of the neck, a jab to the kidneys, followed by a kick to the small of the back. Harland doubled up and threw himself backwards with all his might, flinging the tea, which astonishingly he still held, towards his left. A man cried out and lunged at him, but missed. Harland encountered the bulk of a second man whom he managed to propel with a crash into the partition on the other side of the corridor. He heard a gasp behind him but the fellow was strong and was soon up on his feet. Harland whistled round, aimed two punches to the stomach and brought his knee up to the man’s chin. He fell. Then he felt a stunning blow to his head and knew nothing more.
8
WAKE-VORTEX
He came round with a flashlight in his eyes. Two men were standing over him. His office was very cold and he could hear the wind tearing at some papers on the window-sill. He lifted his head from the floor. A voice told him to stay still. Everything was going to be okay; an ambulance was on its way. Harland took no notice. He raised his head again and pushed the light away.
There was a chemical taste on his tongue and at the back of his throat. He moved a little more. His head hurt and his ribs and back were throbbing with new bruises. He rolled on to his side and pushed himself up to face two UN security guards who were crouching in front of him. He looked round, vaguely wondering why the window was open, and realised that he was some distance from where he had fallen. He had been out in the corridor and now he was beside his desk and there was a hell of a mess and the window was open.
‘How are you feeling?’ asked one of the guards, trying to get a clear look at his eyes.
‘I’m okay.’ In fact, he felt nauseous and irritable. ‘Look, will someone bloody well close that window?’
‘We can’t,’ said the other guard. ‘It’s jammed open – it’s broken.’
Harland sat for a few minutes, consciously trying to still his stomach. Then he wiped his nose with the back of his hand, cleared his throat and looked up at the guards.
‘What happened?’
‘Jim found you five minutes ago,’ said one. ‘He reckons he must have disturbed them when he came out of the elevator.’
Harland now recognised the taste in his mouth as cocaine. It was making him a lot sharper than he might normally feel after being hit over the head. He turned to the window and focused on the vibrating slats of the Venetian blind. Now he understood why the window was open. They were going to tip him out of it and make it look as though he had been on a cocaine binge and jumped. His single thought about this astonishingly crude plan was that Walter Vigo had nothing to do with it. Whatever the deficiencies and moral laxity of his former colleagues at Vauxhall Cross, they rarely behaved like gangsters.
‘Did they take anything?’ asked the guard called Jim.
Harland got up shakily and held on to the desk. Then he felt for the tape and disc in his breast pocket. They’d gone. ‘I had some loose cash,’ he said. ‘Several hundred dollars – it’s been taken.’
‘They took your wallet?’
‘The cash was in my pocket. My wallet was in my coat over there on the back of the door. Can you check for me?’
While one of the guards went over to check the coat, Harland scanned his desk. The copy of the hotel bill was still there and a glance at the fax machine told him that Sally Griswald’s documents had arrived undisturbed. So, whoever had jumped him was simply interested in the disc and the tape. He thought of the copy that Eric Griswald had kept for himself and wondered if the Griswalds were in any danger. However, he was sure that he had not been followed out to the Hudson valley that day because he had taken the usual dry-cleaning precautions before leaving Penn Station, which had included loudly asking for a ticket to Trenton, New Jersey. Besides, he was absolutely certain no one else had got off the train at his stop. So for the moment he guessed Sally and her boys were okay.
‘Sir, the wallet’s here in your coat,’ said the guard.
He picked up the hotel bill and went to collect Sally’s fax, ignoring the entreaties of the guards. Once he had checked that all thirty-two pages were there, he sat down in Marika’s chair and asked for a glass of water.
The hospital had tried to keep him overnight for observation, but Harland had been at his most hostile with the young doctor and had eventually just walked out and gone home. The next day he felt as well as could be expected with a bruise across the back of his head, which a paramedic had ventured was the colour and size of a small aubergine. He had no doubt that somebody had been about to kill him, and that frightened him a great deal. But in another way it intrigued him and put him on his mettle. Old juices were beginning to flow.
He left his apartment at eight, having packed for a week, and took a cab to the UN building. When he arrived, he found his office had been tidied up and the window fitted with new locks. Marika was there and gave him a gushing welcome which involved a long hug. Harland had never quite got used to the American embrace and didn’t know when to let go. Eventually he was released from her ample chest and allowed to make his phone calls. She said nothing about the strip of plaster at the back of his head, possibly because she assumed it was a result of the crash.
The first call was to Sara Hezemanns, Griswald’s assistant in The Hague, who immediately insisted that she check his credentials with Sally Griswald.
Five minutes later she called him back and listened while he explained that he was interested in Alan Griswald’s last investigation.
‘It was the one involving a French contact.’
‘I’m sorry I cannot help you with this,’ she said warily. ‘It is all confidential.’
‘But you know the identity of the Frenchman and you knew he was on the plane with Griswald?’
She said nothing.
‘Am I right in thinking that his name is Luc Bézier?’
Still no answer.
‘Do you know whether he had any family in France – someone I could phone and ask what this is about?’
‘I know nothing about him. He came to Mr Griswald out of the blue. Just rang up and asked to meet him. I was the first person he talked to which is how I know his name. Mr Griswald said very little about it afterwards and that is all I can tell you.’
‘Have you been asked not to talk about this?’
‘Look, Mr Harland, you must understand
that much of the work we do here is very secret. I am not allowed to talk about current investigations with outsiders.’ She was speaking very quietly now. Harland guessed that someone had come into her office.
‘I’m going to ask you some questions and you can answer with yes or no, okay?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did this case involve the killings in north-eastern Bosnia in 1995? Is that what he was investigating?’
‘Yes … and … also no.’
‘Have you tried to contact Monsieur Bézier’s relatives in France?’
‘No.’
‘So you don’t know whether they have been told?’
‘No.’
‘Has anyone from the War Crimes Tribunal discussed the death of Mr Griswald and Monsieur Bézier?’
‘Yes.’
‘Who, the Chief Prosecutor? The Chief Investigating Officers?’
‘Yes … yes.’
‘Did they suspect the plane was sabotaged?’
‘No, I don’t think so.’
‘I have some documents which were sent to Alan Griswald’s home by your office last week. Sally Griswald let me have them. They appear to be interview transcripts from 1995 and 1996. Are they relevant to the last case that Alan Griswald was investigating?’
‘Maybe.’
Harland remembered Griswald’s painstaking approach to any problem, the marshalling of every possible scrap of intelligence.
‘Was he going to read them in the hope of finding something which may have been overlooked in the past?’
‘Yes,’ she said. He could hear she was pleased that he had guessed right and he knew she really wanted to talk to him.
‘Perhaps it would be better for me to read these documents thoroughly, then ring you later?’
‘Yes, that’s a good idea.’
‘Some time in the evening your time, say eight o’clock today, or tomorrow?’
‘Yes,’ she said, and abruptly hung up.
Harland looked at the number Bézier had rung from Washington and weighed up whether to dial it now or wait until he had talked to Sara Hezemanns again. A little reluctantly, he decided that it was better not to blunder in.
