by Gil Hogg
I therefore received the news without emotion. “How do you propose?”
“We’ll set it up for you,” Schmiesser said, with evident pleasure, assuming my acceptance.
No more was said. We cruised to our various hotels and apartments in silence. It was like the silence immediately after sexual intercourse, replete with pleasure and relief – for my companions. There was nothing to add to this conversation; it was unsurpassable. Vital matters had been dealt with in a rational and effective way, leaving a lightness, a sense of ease – but not with me.
30
I explained my new assignment to Yarham on our morning walk. This was a complete breach of security, but I had to trust somebody. His chin hung down, and he smiled at the passing girls as though I was describing an afternoon tea party.
“I know Madison is a pain in the hawk establishment’s ass, but isn’t this going a bit far, sir?”
“Just a bit, Yarham. Any thoughts?”
“Apart from getting the earliest possible bus to Tierra Del Fuego, it’s difficult. If you refuse the assignment, you’ll fall out of favour, so to speak.”
“So to speak,” I echoed grimly.
It was an impossible situation. I had clambered to the top of the intelligence pile, and I expected to spend some time in the sun. Instead of that, I was confronted with a task which was dangerous to the point of being suicidal. And I remembered Marius Jacob’s prophetic words about being a kamikaze. If I declined, I would be regarded as a failure, and probably a failure who knew too much. I might receive the Nick Stavros treatment.
We strolled on for a while. I stopped to talk to a panhandler, gave him a dollar, and then went back to Yarham saying, “Do you think it’s a situation where we could rely on the TIFU factor to work its way?” The TIFU, Typical Intelligence Fuck-Up, was as well-known and as ever present a phenomenon in our business, as in every disciplined service.
“You mean allow events to take their course, and rely on… ?” Yarham’s eyes opened wide.
“Rely on the carefully laid plan to go awry.”
“With a nudge or two,” Yarham added.
It was chancy, but I didn’t doubt that Yarham could cleverly drop a bolt in the crankcase. I said, “Look, I want to come out of this with distinction, man. My credentials are excellent now, and I don’t want shit all over them. We’ll have to be very imaginative.”
“I appreciate that, sir,” Yarham said, frowning and shaking his head negatively.
Otto Reich called me about a week later, and we met in a secluded corner of the Georgetown University campus. We sat in the shade under a tree. Reich had a handful of books which he placed between his legs. The book on top of the pile was Hobbes’ Leviathan. Reich was certainly a major proponent in the war of all against all. In his jeans and tweed jacket, he looked the part of the greying, tousled professor with the student he was tutoring. But underneath his superficially laid-back manner was an icy and cunning machine.
“We’ve been giving the project a good deal of thought, Roger. And what we want, broadly, is an event which is an accident, or at least ambiguous in the public mind as possibly an accident. It might be thought of as an act of terrorism, if not an accident. Do you follow me?”
“You don’t want a John Kennedy-style assassination.”
“No. Too crude. And too shocking for the people. We have the means at our disposal and we have to be sophisticated.”
“I’m glad to hear it, Dr Reich. I’m a good shot, but not a marksman. So what have you got in mind, gas, poison?”
Reich twisted his neck and looked at me, his cavernous eye-sockets very close, with misty eyes. His lips rose to reveal his brown teeth in a rictus. “Call me Otto. You like to have your little joke, don’t you Roger? You’re very cool. No, certainly not gas or poison. This is an accident, remember.”
“There are chemicals that disappear.”
“But leave awful suspicions. We don’t want the national media on an everlasting crusade asking Who and what killed Madison? We want a national tragedy, a funeral, a memorial service, sweet and fading memories. And that is why we rule out any event at Madison’s home. Violence in the home disturbs the nation, especially when it happens at this high level.”
“No violence in the home. Quite.”
“We could defeat the security of any home easily, but it wouldn’t solve the problem. A car bomb is a possibility – that would be terrorism, not an accident, but it’s neat…”
I intervened again in the learned professor’s thoughts. “Extremely neat and quite conclusive, sir, but Madison’s car will be screened every day, probably twice a day, immediately before his driver uses it. It means you’d have to bring other people in to subvert the screening, and they’d have direct knowledge. If you help to put a bomb in a man’s car, there’s not much doubt about your intentions, Otto.”
Reich parted with the idea reluctantly. “The thing about a car bomb is that if you do it right, it’s only the occupants who get hurt.”
“That’s a humanitarian thought, Otto.”
Reich jerked his head around toward me fiercely. “I’m serious, Roger. We don’t want to kill any innocent bystanders.”
“I’ll remember that. And since Madison works in the State Department, his work environment is practically invulnerable. That leaves weekends when he’s moving around the state with his family…”
“No, weekends with the family are sancrosanct, Roger, like inside the home.”
“Of course, family values. Then, when Madison makes a public appearance.”
“That’s a possibility. There’s a confidential visit of the big brass to a new missile site coming up, and a ceremony for war veterans which might include the President. These are real possibilities. We don’t know which. We’re working on it, and we’ll let you know. But let me ask you, how do you feel about this project?”
I looked him straight in the eyes, unblinking. His eyes looked messy, like oysters on the half-shell. “If it’s my duty, I’ll do it.”
He put his hand on my shoulder warmly. “Good man. I knew we could rely on you. It’s an act of patriotism. The act of a brave man.”
“There’s only one thing that troubles me, Otto.”
“Tell me, and I’ll fix it.”
“A close-out.”
Reich looked at me blankly at first, and then his wet eyes ignited, and he began to savour the technique of killing the assassin after his work is done, often used by the Mafia, and in top political killings. The tactic was to cover the trail back to those who gave the order. He moved his cheeks to suggest good humour. “As a good agent, I expect you to think of everything, Roger. But no, there is no possibility of a close-out here. We trust you completely. You must trust us. You are one of a handful of the most valued agents we have. We honour you, Roger.”
I came away from the meeting with Reich with very grave misgivings. Yarham’s suggestion about a bus for South America seemed a possibility. I fingered the tiny recorder in my pocket as I walked down the hill. It was no answer to the forces that were gathering around me.
I had a telephone call from Marie Ducane. I arranged to meet her for coffee in M Street in the afternoon, and then took her to my apartment. She proved, as I had thought, to be a strong-smelling woman of seething passion, and I had a few carefree hours with her. But I was all too soon back to my cogitative walk with Yarham. I recounted the conversation with Reich, which Yarham received with slight amusement. “What’s funny?” I asked him.
“It bodes well for us, sir. A ceremonial event gives us a measure of control, and can be… derailed.”
I didn’t feel so confident. “Really? What about the close-out?”
“A ninety per cent certainty, wouldn’t you think?”
“You believe they’d do that to me?” I was affronted for a second, the uniquely valuable and important me?
“You are, if you’ll forgive me saying so, Captain, a small part of a grand design which nothing and nobody must prejudice. E
liminating you – us probably – afterwards would be a prudent move.”
I had wanted to believe the earnest Professor Reich. We honour you, Roger. Did they mean to honour me posthumously? Their concern was the supremacy of our kind of world. The Disciples undoubtedly held the constitutions and laws of our two countries above and beyond all else, except where, in their view, the constitutions and laws had to be broken in order to preserve and strengthen them. My untutored mind detected something cock-eyed in this position. But the point was that Yarham was right, deflating at it was. A mere life, my life, was as nothing to them.
“Very well, then. We calculate that there will be a close-out,” I said.
“The wisest thing, sir. And, I suggest, an advantage in some ways.”
“I don’t follow that at all!” I snapped.
“Suppose we were to find out details of the close-out plan. We would have a ready-made band of miscreants who could take the blame for… anything untoward which happened.”
“We turn the close-out team, trying to kill us, into crazed subversives, terrorists responsible for… whatever happens?
“Simple, isn’t it?” Yarham laughed, caressing his chin.
“Oh, an elegant solution as the academics say. But we’re going to save Madison, not kill him.”
“Quite, but somebody may get killed and it pays to have somebody to blame.”
“Like love, easy to imagine, but not quite so easy to achieve in practice.”
“We don’t have any option, Captain.”
“I could get a fast camel out of here, or have a nervous breakdown and ask to be shipped home.”
“My advice about Tierra del Fuego was hasty, sir. Wouldn’t the Disciples come after you on the next bus, with all the formidable tracking technology of this millennium?”
“What about losing my marbles?”
“Would you be entirely happy resting in bed, knowing who might be outside the door with a gun or a needle?”
We agonised about it, but I finally came round to Yarham’s view that I was locked into a venture from which it would be difficult to extract my life, let alone any credit. This was where my ingenuity, skill and self-sacrificing service to Anglo-American intelligence had taken me.
31
In the days that followed, I determined that the only way to save myself was to attempt to think ahead of the moves of the Disciples. It was a near-impossible task, because they were largely invisible, and they had seeped into fissures in our society at which I could only guess. Naked on a street corner in effect, I was enclosed in the Reich-Bolding-Amory-Fernandez-Schmiesser cell. I would be placed in a set-piece action to carry out my task of killing Madison at a public ceremony, not knowing who my enemies were.
I could be shot down by any guard, soldier or guest. Yarham and I conferred endlessly as we walked the days away in the pale sunlight of autumn. I had instructed him to redouble his efforts on the OPB trawl, and extend it as far as possible with safety, to try to determine what our hidden enemies were doing.
“Nothing found at all, sir, so far, except that there’s going to be a small reception for you on Capitol Hill, the Defense Committee, possibly the President, and the British Ambassador. Top secret. They want to hear at first hand how you saved America.”
It didn’t surprise me, and in a way, it was my due. Although I would always have to remain largely anonymous, the Cuban Crisis II as an incident itself was gradually beginning to emerge in the press, as journalists collected the facts. A sudden impetus had been given to disclosure by the Cuban government, which had made a complaint to the United Nations about armed aggression by US Special Forces. The raid at Campismo Mercados and the holocaust at Mariel were now part of the public record, and it was only a matter of time before the US president would be forced to make a statement to the nation. Intense curiosity was building up, not least on Capitol Hill.
“Those who know a little can’t believe how close disaster was,” I said.
As Yarham foresaw, I received an invitation, and on the day, at the appointed hour of six o’clock in the evening, made my way through the security barriers at the Capitol, in the wake of Rachel Fernandez. We passed through shadowy corridors, where anterooms buzzed with other unknown earth-shaking events, to a small reception room. The room had plentiful green velvet cushioned chairs arranged casually, a thick green carpet, and a table loaded with pastries, cakes, and bottles of red and white wine. I was introduced to the British Foreign Secretary, as well as the British Ambassador, a variety of members of the general staff – including General Schmiesser, and the Secretary of State General Madison. The director of the CIA, and the head of the NSA, and of course, a selection of senators from the Defense Committee were also present. They all seemed to be hungry and thirsty. I ate and drank very little during the introductions and preliminary talk, although I did not feel overawed by these important people who really knew very little about my world, or indeed the world they were trying to govern.
The chairman of the Defense Committee called the room to order, and mumbled that the events that were about to be disclosed were top secret. Rachel Fernandez made a short speech in which she emphasised the key role of C3, and the proof, as a result of the Cuba episode, of the critical practical part our intelligence services played in the security of the nation. “Now,” she said, “I want to introduce Captain Roger Conway of MI6, who works for C3 as part of our Anglo-US intelligence partnership, and who led our forces in the crisis.”
The audience settled themselves in chairs, and I leaned back on a table, half-sitting, facing them. I had honed my story in a dozen debriefings since Cuba. In some respects it was certainly a travesty of the truth, but the leaders of a nation do not want to hear that one of their intelligence forces is squabbling with another, committing internecine burglary, assault and murder. My narrative revealed the joint discovery by the CIA and the NSA of grave terrorist subversion which had to be investigated on the ground, by humint immediately and which might have been a mere rumour. And then the further discovery, by me alone, that the urgency was more than we had ever thought, and the consequent need for immediate action to wipe out the threat. I took them through the bloody night at the camp, and the raid on the missile site, emphasising the courage of our men, with a degree of cool understatement. I’m a good storyteller, and every one of my listeners was rapt, some were pale, living the terror of those few hours. With their hunger for gory facts, the audience reminded me of the US debriefing team and the war correspondents in Afghanistan. I gorged them. At the end, they were silent, sated.
The chairman of the Defense Committee creaked to his feet, recovering himself, and giving his fulsome thanks. “Our people will only know in heaven what you have done for them, Captain Conway.” Then there was warm round of applause, and I was surrounded by questioners.
One senator asked me about Agents Carmelli, Harkness and the luckless Burton, still languishing in a Cuban prison. “How did Burton get into the hands of the Cuban authorities as an alleged drug smuggler, Captain Conway?”
I had skipped over these details in my account. “I was working with Carmelli and his men, and we hired a boat to skirt the coast on a reconnaissance. The Cuban coastguard tried to board us, and Carmelli thought we could outrun them. The patrol boat had a machine gun which cut us up. The incident ended with Carmelli and Harkness dead, and Burton captured – presumably handed to the police later. I escaped with two men, diving overboard and swimming to shore in the dark.”
“Misjudgment, huh? Carmelli’s decision to run.”
“No. Bad luck being caught by a patrol boat. We couldn’t afford to be taken, or we’d all be in jail in Havana now, and New York and Washington wouldn’t exist…”
“God forbid,” somebody gasped.
General Schmiesser came up to me at the end, when I was about to leave with Rachel Fernandez, his face puckered into dozens of deep vertical lines, and his eyes quivering as though they were about to overflow. “You spoke very well, Roger.
You did us credit. I don’t know what we’re going to do with you.” I felt his huge, rough hand encircle mine.
In the middle of that night I dreamed that Schmiesser was crouching before me, as he had that night we rode in the black Lincoln, and the plan was hatched. He repeated his words of the afternoon. What I had interpreted at the time as a compliment, that I deserved a reward for my efforts that was so great as to be hardly quantifiable, had now become a malign reflection, almost a threat from this supremely powerful man. I don’t know what we’re going to do with you.
“You’re having a bad dream, Roger,” Laurie said, moving the warm palm of her hand across my chest.
“Just solving a problem, my love.”
“Solved?”
“Yes.”
“Then turn over and give me a cuddle.”
It was true that my dream had given me an insight into how the last phase of Operation Screwdriver should be handled. I awoke with a sense of a burden lifted, had an American breakfast with hotcakes cooked by Laurie, while I mixed a couple of large Buck’s Fizz.
I tried out my idea on Yarham when we left the office that morning, at coffee time, for our stroll.
“They don’t trust me, man.”
Yarham brushed a thoughtful hand across his flaming hair. “It would be wise to assume that, sir. It goes with the close-out.”
The truth was, I had up to now had difficulty believing that the Disciples meant to kill me. I was brilliant and I was loyal – so far, at least. I hadn’t really subscribed to Yarham’s comic cynicism as far as it applied to me. The Disciples could kill anybody, but I was unique, and uniquely useful, honoured by the most powerful people in the US. Surely they couldn’t eliminate me like a bug? This unduly optimistic trend of thought had been dissipated by the malevolent wrinkles of General Schmiesser, the alien touch of his hand, like a bunch of thistles, and those words, reinterpreted in my nightmare: I don’t know what we’re going to do with you.
