Galbraith was as persuasive in argument as he was imposing in girth. Few politicians ever liked to contend with him, and fewer still demanded a reckoning, although there were always a couple who longed for his blood, small-minded men who called themselves – proudly, mind you – ‘moralists’, and who waited a chance to pounce on the fat man, catching him in some ugly covert operation with blood on his palms. These were men, usually from states where the electorate was corn-fed, who had a smell of old bibles and damp pulpits about them, and who drew their constituencies from the same people who donated money to TV ministries. They were stupid men, and narrow-minded, but they were not to be underestimated because they wielded the kind of power that could punish intelligence efforts where it really hurt-in the old pocketbook. And they waited, with withdrawn fangs, for Galbraith to commit a public faux pas, or fall into an espionage scandal. But not even these critics realised that Galbraith was effectively separating himself from the DIA – the Defense Intelligence Agency – to establish an autonomous branch, an inner sanctum, in the tranquil countryside of Virginia. The operation became known, to those who knew such things, as the GIA, Galbraith’s Intelligence Agency.
The funds were approved and Galbraith moved the computer operation out of the capital, although he left most of his staff behind in the old quarters. He took with him only a handful of specialists, men and women trained to interpret the data provided by the computer. These were people he’d hired personally and who tended to see the world through the same prism as Galbraith himself did, which was one of self-preservation and what the fat man thought of as ‘sophisticated’ patriotism – to differentiate it from ‘frontier’ patriotism, which he considered a mindless kind of thing, a redneck instinct, a mere wormlike reflex. Galbraith’s version was grounded in the simple assumption, which needed no drum-rolls to accompany it, no National Rifle Association to maintain it, that the continued existence of the United States as the primary power in the world guaranteed the continued existence of the world itself.
“Good of you to come at this hour, Gary. Smoke?” And he pushed a box of Craven A across the glass surface of the coffee table. Iverson declined. With a remote control device, Galbraith switched off the consoles. Iverson noticed the absence of electronic humming in the room now.
Galbraith said, “Here’s a fine illustration of the limits of modern technology, Gary. While we sit in this lovely house and can keep track, say, of a couple of penguins merrily fornicating in Antarctica, we still haven’t reached a situation where we can do a damn thing to predict human behaviour. In other words, just as we think we have matters under control, up pops some human idiot to scramble the whole equation.”
“Which human idiot do you have in mind, sir?”
Galbraith stood up. His huge robe flowed around him like a collapsing tent. He went to a closet, opened it, took out a packet of English chocolate digestive biscuits and nibbled on one. Then, disgusted by his own needs, he tossed the half-eaten biscuit into a waste-basket. “They’ve ordered me to diet again, Gary. Which makes me cranky as hell. It came down from no less an authority than the White House physician, who speaks in a voice like God’s. Galbraith, he says, there’s a svelte person inside you, and he’s dying to get out. Either you let him out, or you die. Svelte, I ask you. Do I look like there’s a thin bugger inside me pining for freedom?”
Iverson said nothing because he’d never known how to make small talk. Years of military service and discipline had robbed him of most social graces. He was all business. He smiled uneasily as he looked at the fat man, knowing full well that Galbraith’s obesity was his trademark as much as Aunt Jemima’s face on a packet of pancake mix. On the Washington dinner-party circuit, at least along that inner track where the real power-brokers wined and dined, several people had perfected an imitation of the Galbraith waddle, which the fat man responded to in a good-natured fashion. None of his impersonators knew for sure what he did for a living, an ignorance Galbraith fostered by behaving in a self-deprecating way. He made fat jokes at his own expense. My obesity, he’d once told Iverson, is my cover – in more ways than one.
Iverson said, “You were talking about a human idiot, sir.”
“Yes, so I was.” Galbraith returned to the sofa and plumped himself down. Iverson’s presence was comforting to him because Gary was a man without hidden emotions. No neuroses, no festering depths. Galbraith sometimes thought that Iverson was a relic from the Eisenhower years, when no shadows disturbed the American psyche, a time when the boy next door was exactly that, not some secret cock-flasher or dope fiend or peeping-tom. Iverson made Galbraith positively nostalgic for the simpler days of the Cold War, the apple-pie days.
“I’m talking about an idiot who has scuppered our friend Vabadus, and has thus threatened White Light.”
“Scuppered?”
Galbraith looked wan suddenly. “Vabadus is dead, Gary. He was shot by someone unknown to us.”
Iverson went straight to the only point that mattered to him. “Before or after the connection?”
“Before, alas. It wouldn’t have mattered had it happened after. Then we’d know everything was secured.” Galbraith made a fist out of one of his plump hands in a rare gesture of irritation. “It’s my understanding that dear old Scotland Yard has become involved, which may pose problems for us.”
“Of course,” Iverson said.
“With luck, they may miss the point. They may simply overlook it. On the other hand …”
“On the other hand the Yard may become a little too alert,” Iverson said.
“Precisely, Gary. And we can hardly tell our British allies what’s going on, can we? Nobody tells them anything these days in any event, so why awaken them from their well-deserved slumber now and talk to them about White Light?” Galbraith sat back and sighed. He turned the name White Light around in his head for a moment. It was the in-house code for the Baltic project. Galbraith, who had grown up in intelligence agencies at a time when code-names were bestowed on anything that moved, had christened this project White Light in memory of his one trip through the Baltic countries at the height of the so-called Khrushchev ‘thaw’. What the fat man most remembered, aside from a rather depressing socialist shabbiness in the capital cities of the Baltic, was the extraordinary length of summer nights and how the sky was suffused by an odd white clarity.
“So what do we do?” Iverson asked.
Galbraith stared at the younger man. “I think the only reasonable thing is to keep a very close eye on the situation in London and if it gets out of hand – if, say, certain persons at the Yard get a little too alert – then we may have to do a dark deed.”
Iverson, who knew what was meant by the phrase dark deed, nodded his head slowly. “What do we know about the killer?”
Galbraith took a folded sheet of paper from the pocket of his huge robe and passed it to Iverson. “So far only a name, which I’ve written down for you.”
Iverson stared at the name. “You want me to look into his background?”
“I think it’s essential.” Galbraith picked up the remote device and pressed a button and all two dozen screens flickered back to life. He stared at one screen in particular, which showed a list of all fighter planes, mainly F-16s, allotted to NATO, and their schedule for that day. “At least I don’t see any problem with this aspect of the matter,” and he waved a hand at the screen.
“That’s the easy part,” Iverson agreed.
“I love smooth sailing, Gary. I love it when the parts click nicely together. It’s like solving Rubik’s Cube by sound alone.” Galbraith tapped the remote device on the surface of the table. “But I just hate unexpected problems. And I especially hate the idea of anything unfortunate happening to Scotland Yard personnel, God knows. Sometimes, though, self-interest takes precedence over sentiment, Gary. It’s that kind of world these days. I wish it were otherwise. But we’re all realists in this neck of the woods.”
Iverson agreed again. It was another thing Galbraith
liked about Gary. He was such an agreeable fellow. Galbraith dismissed him, heard him go back up the stairs, then there was the sound of the door closing. Alone, the fat man stared at his black and white electronic universe in an absent manner. He was thinking about Vabadus again. He felt he’d lost a friend, even though he’d never met the man. Vabadus, in Estonian, meant freedom. Galbraith thought it a very appropriate choice for the late Aleksis Romanenko.
London
Frank Pagan’s flat in Holland Park had more than a touch of squalor about it. It was the kind of place in which a man clearly lived a solitary life. Somehow, Pagan had the feeling that it was always late in this apartment, always dark, as if sunlight never managed to find its way through the curtains. When he stepped into the living-room, the first thing he did was to pour himself a glass of Glenlivet. He surveyed the chaos of things like a stranger who finds himself suddenly tossed into another man’s world. There was a milk bottle with curdled contents and three slices of hardened toast and a glass of orange-juice that had alchemised into an antibiotic. Pagan shut his eyes and savoured the drink.
In Roxanne’s day, of course, everything had been different. But there was an abyss of self-pity here Pagan didn’t want to encounter. Recollections of a dead wife were at best numbing, at worst excruciating. Loneliness had a gravity all its own and it pulled you down into its bleak centre. He stepped into the bedroom and wondered how long it had been since he’d laid flowers on Roxanne’s grave. Weeks now, he supposed. There had been a time when he’d gone daily to that terrible fucking place and stared at the headstone as if, through the sheer mystic effort of will, he might conjure the dead woman up out of the cold earth and love her again.
He sat on the edge of the unmade bed and stared into his drink. He wondered if he was somehow getting better, if he was finding a quiet place to put his grief, like some safe-deposit box of the heart where it could be left locked and hidden. He’d removed Roxanne’s photograph from the bedside table three months ago but in some odd way it was still there and he imagined it always would be. He closed his eyes again and sipped his drink and tried not to think about his wife and the way she’d died that Christmas because of the festive activities of a mad Irish bomber who’d detonated a killing device on a crowded London street. All he knew was that the planet without her was not exactly a better place. And perhaps this was the loneliest and most dreadful realisation of all – the world was reduced, diminished, by her absence.
These painful recognitions dismayed him. He rose, wandered to his stereo, found a record and set it on the turntable. It was an old Bo Diddley tune named Mona, with the kind of hard, driving rhythm that was almost a form of anaesthetic. He turned up the volume and let the noise crowd the room. Pure therapy, raucous and uncomplicated. Then, as if compelled to move by the music, he strolled around the room.
Consider simpler things that are not connected to love and grief. Consider the violence that had taken place at Waverley Station – when? Had it only been ten hours ago? The music had stopped now and the apartment was eerily quiet and he poured himself a second Glenlivet.
Perhaps it was more than his injured ego that made him want to impose a mystery on the event in Edinburgh, that made him want to look for hidden depths where Tommy Witherspoon claimed there were none. Perhaps it was the fact that his life, which had been about as exciting as that of a guppy mooning around inside an aquarium, had taken an interesting turn. It might be nothing but a brief illusion of mystery – even that was more intriguing than the blunted way things had been before.
He turned his thoughts once more to the contents of Romanenko’s briefcase and as he was wondering whether Danus Oates had translated the material, he was surprised to hear the sound of his doorbell ringing. He went to the intercom and turned it on.
A woman’s voice, distorted by the outmoded electrical system, said, “Mr Pagan?”
“Speaking,” was all Pagan could think to reply.
“I know it’s late, but I’d like to see you.”
The accent was American. Pagan looked quickly around the apartment. How in the name of God could he have a visitor in a dump like this, especially a woman?
“My name’s Kristina Vaska,” the woman said. “I realise we don’t know each other, Mr Pagan.”
“Can it wait?” Pagan asked. “It’s been a long day and I’m tired.”
“I appreciate that. But if’s very important I see you. It concerns Aleksis Romanenko.”
“You better come up. I’m on the second floor.”
He pressed the buzzer that unlocked the front door. Immediately he began to clear some of the mess from the dining-room table, a futile effort because no sooner had he carried the glass of penicillin and the milk bottle into the kitchen than he heard the woman knocking lightly on his door.
She was in her late twenties, possibly early thirties, and as soon as he looked at her Pagan realised it was the person he’d seen driving the yellow VW around Grosvenor Square. He was struck at once by the intensity of her eyes, which were that shade of brown that comes close to blackness, the absence of light. And yet there were lights, tiny flecks that seemed almost silver to Pagan. She had a wonderful square jaw that suggested tenacity. Her dark hair, cut very short, was curled tightly against her head. There was no makeup on her face. She wore a white linen jacket and blue jeans, all very casual, and she carried a bulky shoulderbag. She was lovely in the effortless way some women seem to be, as if by pure chance, a happy collision of disparate elements. The word Pagan wanted was serendipity.
“My humble abode,” he said, thinking he might make some excuse about how his cleaning lady had the pox and couldn’t come, poor old dear, and he was sorry about the shambles.
Pagan stared at breadcrumbs on the soiled table linen and cursed the odd nervousness that had afflicted him suddenly, the unease. It was almost as if the ghost of Roxanne Pagan sat in the bedroom, resentful at the intrusion of a woman into the apartment. Pagan underwent a mild sense of guilt. It was pure bloody nonsense, he thought. It was something a man had to grow out of. The spirits had their own lives to lead. And the living had living to do. But why was it so difficult?
The woman held out her hand and Pagan shook it a little too quickly. Her skin was cool against his own.
“I’m sorry it’s this late,” she said.
Pagan was too restless for sleep anyway. He gestured towards a chair and Kristina Vaska sat down. He noticed she was very slender in the way dancers sometimes are, that she moved as if her body were an instrument she played unconsciously. Pagan was so unaccustomed to company in this place that he didn’t think to offer her a drink. Besides, now that she had impressed him with her appearance, now that he’d looked carefully at her, he had a more important question to ask.
“Do you usually follow people around?”
Kristina Vaska smiled. “Would you believe I was in Grosvenor Square at the same time as you by pure chance?”
“I’ve been known to entertain a few weird beliefs in my time,” he answered. “That wouldn’t be one of them.”
“I wanted to talk to you.”
“And so you followed me.”
She nodded her head, still smiling. It was the smile that did it, he thought. He’d always been a sucker for a mischievous grin, for that certain elfin quality. He saw at once that Kristina Vaska was the kind of woman with whom you couldn’t be angry for very long, which put him at an emotional disadvantage because he’d lost one of his more potent wéapons – the forceful annoyance, the irritated flash of the eyes, which sometimes made people very wary of Frank Pagan because they sensed dangerous levels inside him.
“I’ve been following you ever since you left Scotland Yard. I trailed you all the way here. Then I got nervous. So I drove around for a while. After that, what the hell,” and she shrugged. “I just pulled out the old courage and rang your doorbell. I figured I had nothing to lose.”
The quality of persistence, Pagan thought, and a suspicion formed in his mind that he
didn’t much like. “Let me guess,” he said. “You want a story. You want Frank Pagan’s eyewitness account of murder in Edinburgh. Sorry to disappoint you, love, but I don’t talk to the press.”
Kristina Vaska gazed at him, and her look was as cool as her hand had been a moment before. “I don’t have any association with the press, Mr Pagan.”
Pagan said nothing for a moment. He had a sense of sheer awkwardness. He fussed with the tablecloth, moving crumbs around. Empty gestures. He wished he could find something terrific to do with his hands. “You mentioned Romanenko,” he said finally. “Is there something you want to tell me?”
“Let me ask you a question first,” she said. “What do you know about him?”
Pagan had an interrogator’s dislike of having questions directed against him. “Not much,” he replied.
“What do you know about the country he came from?”
“Russia?”
Kristina Vaska shook her head. “Estonia, Mr Pagan.”
“I only know if’s part of the Soviet Union –”
“According to whom?” The tone of her question was as sharp as the point of a needle.
Pagan saw it coming. He knew what he was in for and he felt himself cringe. She was going to be one of those slightly cracked ladies, all spit and intensity, who had a firm political stand she shouted about at every opportunity, a portable platform she could assemble in no time at all out of the carpentry of her convictions. Apolitical himself, despite some left-wing leanings that had been stronger in his twenties, Pagan was very uncomfortable with zealots. In his personal experience they were either dangerous or deranged, and sometimes both at once. They had a habit of shaping the world to meet their own political requirements. To Pagan’s way of thinking, zealots were first cousins to terrorists. It was just a matter of degree.
“The United States doesn’t recognise Estonia as Soviet territory,” Kristina Vaska said. “Nor does your own country. So far as the US and the UK are concerned, the Soviet Union illegally seized all three Baltic nations in 1940, after they’d been independent for twenty years.”
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