“That’s the right stuff!” The recently demoted Dexter McPhee, pounding both fists on the table, none of his enthusiasm lost.
“Let’s all take a moment to read something.” Clara nodded to Percival, who rose and began passing out minutes of the Anglo-Atlantic meeting as she summarized: Anglo was claiming they could free the Calgarians within a week; if Wolverine were to backfire, Anglo would go public with its offer.
In the stillness that followed, she studied the TV monitors, the silent talking heads. She looked down to see an array of sour faces absorbing the implications of Anglo’s entry into the mix. Charley Thiessen looked up, grinning. “Sascratchewan? Is that near Brit-itch Columbia?”
He seemed back to his old corny self, after a bout of weirdness that Clara believed had been brought on by misgivings over letting Crumwell bug an M.P.’s home phone. Clara didn’t know why she abided Charley. His looks, his boyish, clumsy innocence maybe. But he’d been too chummy with Crumwell, too easily taken in.
Commissioner Lessard showed up just then, and Clara took a few minutes to fill him in, then said, “Okay, let’s bat this around. They’re offering to bring our people home without risk.”
The woman colonel seemed ready to lead an armed revolt were Clara to abort the mission. A force field emanated from the other veteran warriors, all scrutinizing her for backbone, maybe seeing her doubts behind her facade of barely maintained cool. But she was determined not to be cowed by them. She must do the right thing.
“I want an honest appraisal of our chances, General. Unqualified, unambiguous. Don’t put a shine on it.” Looking right into Buchanan’s eyes, until he gave way, looked down at his hands.
“Nothing is guaranteed in the field of combat, Prime Minister. We may have losses. Light losses. Theirs will be twentyfold higher.”
“How would you feel if we postponed this for a week?”
“I would not say betrayed, ma’am, but pretty close to it.”
“That is much too harshly put.” E.K., fiercely. “We are dealing with human lives. A brief delay while we assess alternative possibilities may waste time but won’t cost lives.”
“A brief delay, sir, means we may be confronting four additional companies of enemy troops in Özbeg.”
“Let’s go around the table.” Enervated by her dilemma, Clara fiddled with the gavel while people talked over each other, pros and cons, options, the best and worst scenarios. Denunciations of Anglo-Atlantic, doubts about their probity, about whether they could deliver. Dexter McPhee was in full-throated support of “our boys over there,” proclaiming himself ready, by God, to put on his uniform and join them.
Lessard sat intently but quietly through all this, impeccably attired in his civvies, a lean man with a high-domed forehead. Clara had seen his calm nod of satisfaction on observing that his rival, Crumwell, was no longer in the inner circle.
She had to swallow hard to admit it, but she wished Gerard Lafayette was here. His crafty mind, his eloquence, his occasional brilliance. She played with the thought of seeking his counsel, then almost gagged.
Opinion was divided equally, a failure of consensus. “At what point will it be too late to call back the Hercs, General?”
“Zulu minus seven.”
“Give that to me in English.”
“Almost exactly two days from now, five o’clock in the afternoon of Monday, January tenth, Ottawa time. Three a.m. the next day in Bhashyistan. Tuesday.”
E.K., one of his rare smiles. “I don’t believe they have a Tuesday. It’s called Timur. Monday is called Genghis.”
“We’ll make a final decision on Genghis afternoon,” Clara said.
Clara felt the coming of another migraine as she digested the proofs of CSIS incompetence served up by Luc Lessard, beside her in the limo. RCMP analysts had laughed off the tar sands plot; the spy agency had been buffaloed by eco-schemers.
Lessard had expressed these views to Crumwell only a few days before. “I assumed he would pass word to you through appropriate channels.” Meaning, obviously, Security Minister Thiessen, the broken link in the chain of command.
Percival was also in the limo, facing them, making notes, dead-pan. He’d urged her to back-bench Thiessen. She hadn’t listened.
She wiped the condensation from the window. Snowplows were hard at work on the Airport Parkway, but barely making headway against the thick spew from the cloud-black sky. Clara’s driver hewed to a narrow traffic lane, manoeuvring around stuck or abandoned vehicles.
Flights were still being cleared, and with God’s blessing she wouldn’t be late for her Vancouver event. Photo ops all next day, trawling among ethnic communities. On Sunday, a hopscotch tour of Vancouver Island, its scheduled low point a clasping of the muscle bound hand of the Viking, her throwaway candidate in Cow Islands.
“I regret to burden you further, Prime Minister,” Lessard said, “but one of our members has learned of an unusual visit last month by M. Thiessen to a suite in the Château Laurier.”
Clara tightened with dread as Lessard explained that a hotel security officer, despite orders by management to still his tongue, had spilled everything but the beer he was sharing with an RCMP pal. Sex scandal, that was Clara’s first thought.
The truth was more bizarre. For a quarter of an hour, Thiessen had crawled about that suite in apparent pursuit of a lost cufflink. The room appeared to have hosted a rowdy, lewd party, was littered with its detritus and reeked of marijuana. The minister of justice had been seen pawing at a hookah pipe.
Percival uttered a squeal of horror, his eyes wide with incredulity. Clara’s brain whirled as she assessed the awful implications. Disaster loomed if this blew up before January 24.
Lessard wasn’t through. “The registered guests of that suite have been determined to be two young gentlemen from British Columbia. They gave their address as Rural Route One, Garibaldi Island.”
Margaret Blake’s home base. What in bloody hell had Thiessen been up to? Clara shakily lit a cigarette, looked out again at the relentlessly falling snow. Maybe she would be lucky, spin off the road and die. Or go down in flames on Air Cleavage.
Using all the might she could muster, she affected an insouciance: did not a search for a cufflink seem innocent enough on the surface? Might Lessard agree that this silly-seeming business really didn’t warrant any further inquiries?
Lessard wasn’t buying that but offered a salve. “I assure you matters will remain confidential while we make such inquiries.”
“And you’ll have my government’s complete cooperation. A sensitive matter. I’d imagine your investigation will take a while.” Eighteen days, make it eighteen days.
“I can assure you, madam, that we have no wish to be accused of influencing the election’s outcome.”
She took relief from that offer of breathing room. A glance at Percival. His surreptitious nod. He will get on it, gag Charley, scrabble together an innocent-seeming scenario.
“Thank you for being so forthcoming, Commissioner.”
“It’s not the main reason I wished to see you, Prime Minister.”
Now what? Clara closed her eyes.
“Abzal Erzhan has surfaced.”
31
Arthur had pulled rank on Superintendent McIlhargey, co-opting the most sumptuous chair in this Ohrid chalet, a goatskin-draped La-Z-Boy. Feet up, thirty degrees from the horizontal, he was enjoying a feast of newsprint, a bundle of Globes and Citizens that McIlhargey had brought from Ottawa. Unusually thoughtful of the cranky bugger.
Arthur had rank on him because he’d won all but a handful of trials in which McIlhargey had been senior investigator, back in the days when Arthur was a lush, thirsting for gin and justice, and Hugh McIlhargey a toiling detective with Serious Crimes at E Division.
“This has made Luc’s day,” McIlhargey had confided on arrival in Ohrid. Commissioner Lessard, he meant, bitter at having been shunted to the sidelines by CSIS.
Arthur had never known McIlhargey to be a chess
player — maybe he’d learned the skill after being seconded to Ottawa — but he was in the throes of a match with Djon Bajramovic. A break in the interrogation of Abzal Erzhan, now napping upstairs, after having kept Arthur awake all night in his hotel suite — fretting, pacing, flipping through TV channels, seeking updates on the unrest in his birth country. Finally, Arthur had retreated to his room, leaving Abzal to find what sleep he could on the sofa bed.
The day before, Abzal had been exhilarated, at breathing the free air, at the prospect of soon being with his family. But that had quickly dampened, and he’d refused Arthur entry to his private, haunted thoughts. He was entitled to his black mood — and to far more, to revengeful passion, hatred. The beast of Bhashyistan had ordered the execution of his parents, the arrest of his two brothers and his sister, all tortured, the girl defiled. Arthur had been unable to find words enough of consolation.
Abzal’s escape had been remarkable only for its simplicity. At dawn, after the shift change, the night captain had driven off with him in the trunk of his car. Dordana met them on a country byway, sped off with him to a lakeside village where Djon had already closed the deal on the dinghy. Resourceful Djon Bajramovic and his intrepid associate had earned their million dollars.
Dordana’s distant cousin had got a lesser but substantial reward — there was little change left from the $43,000. The scuttlebutt from the night captain was harrowing: a couple of Albanian high officials had been paid a hefty sum by anonymous foreign donors to ensure that Erzhan would leave Prison 303 in a body bag. But timorous Warden Chocoli, entrusted with the deed, couldn’t bring himself to perform it.
Arthur had initiated a series of phone calls late in the day to Ottawa, finally connecting with McIlhargey, who excitedly raced into Lessard’s office and, as his reward for being Arthur’s friend and confidant, earned the privilege of leading a team — two inspectors and a staff sergeant — to the southern Balkans.
They’d pulled in to the little local airport five hours earlier, bushed from the long flight via Frankfurt and Skopje but eager to get under way. With the Ohrid music festival in full swing, few rooms were available, but they’d done better: a private chalet, a half-hour walk from Arthur’s hotel. Five bedrooms, richly furnished, by a lakeside grove of olive trees, the grounds protected by a spearpoint steel fence. All arranged through diplomatic channels. Macedonia’s minister of security, eager to embarrass his unloved Albanian neighbours, was also providing official cars, technical support, sentries at the villa gate. He’d promised that the RCMP’s inquiries would be kept under wraps.
Arthur folded open a paper from Friday, with its headlines about Anglo-Atlantic’s connivery and the many hostile reactions. Here were the latest poll results: the Tories had clawed their way to twelve points below the Liberals, whose campaign was faltering. The three main smaller parties were inching up, as was Lafayette’s Progressive Reform, accelerating past the Marijuana Party.
Margaret Blake was quoted as blasting the Anglo-Atlantic deal — an item jarringly juxtaposed with that company’s ad proclaiming its commitment to “green energy solutions.” She was on Vancouver Island, soon to begin her cross-country whistle-stop tour. It was two o’clock here, four a.m. wherever she was abed. He’d phone at her breakfast hour.
The two inspectors, Fyfe and Longstreet, were bustling about, preparing to drive to Gjirokaster to interview Hanife Bejko, then to Tirana to bring the good news to DiPalma and to arrange for his safe exit from Albania. “Where is Dordana going to meet us?” Longstreet asked.
“At Sveti Naum border crossing,” Djon said. “In case of problems, chief of customs can be trusted. Also maybe you talk to nervous Nellie warden, Chocoli.”
McIlhargey looked up from the board. “You might want to thank Mr. Chocoli for saving Abzal’s life. Is that right, Djon, the warden should get a medal?” McIlhargey’s hand hovered over a possibly lucrative pawn—bishop exchange.
“Thank him because he is true coward, no stomach for simple act of murder.”
McIlhargey asked if he had any theories as to why the two Tirana colluders had passed the buck to Chocoli. “They must’ve got paid off pretty good to zap Abzal. Millions.”
“Maybe hard to understand, but Albania mired in Third World, different than Canada, contracts not always honoured. You get nice bribe, you lose interest in deal. Plus Abzal Erzhan, he is good Muslim and also hero for bumping off hated dictator like clone of Enver Hoxha.” Looking pleased with this analysis, Djon showed no dismay as he lost his bishop. “Mate in three,” he said.
McIlhargey studied his position. “Jesus wept.” He laid his king to rest on the board. “Nice sacrifice,” he said gruffly, waving Fyfe and Longstreet out the door to their Land Cruiser.
“I not play for years so was lucky. Now start making special Christmas dinner.” Djon went off to the kitchen. Arthur had encouraged him to show off his kebab prowess; it might put him in better stead with McIlhargey, who had a typical policeman’s distrust of proselytizers of the left. The superintendent was equally uncomfortable with Abzal, a revolutionary, an acquitted assassin. But he was an honest cop. Honi soit qui mal y pense.
“Hugh, I’ll want to escort my client back soon. He’ll need his passport.” McIlhargey had brought it, along with his certificate of citizenship, but wasn’t releasing them until he wrapped up inquiries.
“We’ll see how it goes, Counsellor. No one is wandering off anywhere for a while. We’re trying to keep this operation covert.” He snorted. “We’ll see how long that lasts.”
McIlhargey didn’t trust the Macedonians. Communists had ruled here under Marshall Tito. The street outside was named after him, and his portrait, in a resplendent white uniform, dominated the entrance foyer of this house.
Arthur followed McIlhargey into the adjoining sunroom, which Staff-Sergeant Daphne Chow, a computer adept, had commandeered for her office. A miniature jungle of potted plants, a south-facing bank of windows overlooking patio and pool, stone steps spiralling to a craggy shoreline.
Chow was online now, sending encrypted updates to Ottawa, downloading from the RCMP’s trove of classified files. “HQ says there’s been some international traffic over this mission.” She didn’t look up from her screen. “Mostly from the Russians. They want confirmation that Mr. Erzhan is in Canadian hands in the southern Balkans.”
McIlhargey swore. “I knew these bums wouldn’t keep their yaps shut. Yeah, they had to boast to their pals the Russkies.” Another distrusted populace. “Now we’re going to have a swarm of press.”
Chow’s laser printer was coughing out head-and-shoulder shots of eighteen unsmiling men. Three pages, six to a sheet. “It was tricky getting these,” McIlhargey said. “We had to go over some heads while we stayed below Crumwell’s radar. Five are CSIS agents.”
No one protested when Arthur picked them up — in return for his client’s cooperation, nothing was to be kept from him. McIlhargey had balked at that, but Arthur wore him down.
“Which one is Sully Clugg?” he asked. The Christmas party crotch-grabber had been a long shot, now was a contender. Antoine Salzarro had learned that Blackwater sent Clugg home after he shot to death three members of a family who’d been acting suspiciously — they’d been pushing a stalled car toward the official limousine he was guarding, and had not stopped when ordered. Innocent civilians, it turned out. Though investigators saw Clugg as reckless, they’d deemed him to have been following regulations.
McIlhargey pointed to number nine, second page. The ex-Blackwater martial arts master was in a suit, staring bull-like at the camera. Abzal had described a big man, broad forehead, a thick neck, for which Clugg qualified.
“Number eighteen, that’s Clugg’s buddy, Rod Klein.”
He was younger and taller than Clugg, a thin, lopsided face. According to the RCMP’s trusted sources at CSIS, the two men, loose on whiskey and cocaine, had been overheard at the CSIS Christmas party joshing about their first ghost flight.
Abzal had risen —
he could be heard talking to Djon.
“Let’s do this,” McIlhargey said. Arthur followed him to the kitchen, where Djon was slicing meat into strips. Abzal was staring out the window at the bare-limbed olive trees. His hair was wet and gleaming from a shower, and he was dressed in newly bought casual clothes.
He was more thin waisted than in the photos Arthur had seen, most of them from fifteen years ago, from his arrest, his trial for murder. His chest had filled out, but he still had the wiry look of a marathon runner. Dark, intelligent eyes with a smile he bestowed infrequently, but full and bright when it came, creasing his bronzed, sculpted face.
But now he seemed lost in his thoughts, and he started when Arthur spoke his name. “I’m not quite oriented here, Mr. Beauchamp.” The only accent Arthur could detect was French.
“Your mind was elsewhere, Abzal.”
“With my people, the patriots of Bhashyistan. I’ve sat silent for too many years, and now my people are being hunted and murdered. I’m still doing nothing and I can barely live with myself.”
My people. There was pride of self in the way he said that. Arthur suspected this former soldier was very much a hero among the oppressed of his former homeland. He had wanted Arthur to know that the Turkic name Erzhan meant soul of a hero.
“Liberate Bhashyistan from fascist tyranny!” Djon shouted.
McIlhargey’s face darkened. “We’re ready to go.”
Arthur told Abzal he was wanted for a photo lineup. “Study each man carefully before committing yourself.”
Back in the sunroom, they directed Abzal to a table on which were arrayed the three pages of headshots. Arthur watched tensely as Abzal perused them.
“No,” he said, rejecting the first page. Then he stabbed a finger at number nine, second page. “This guy.” Clugg.
Arthur cautioned him. “Wait, Abzal. Look at them all.”
“No, it’s him! This bruiser, the first one out of the car. He’s the bastard who chopped me across the neck.” He quickly scanned the others. “No, no, not this one, no one even close …” Then another finger stab, this time landing on Klein, number eighteen. “Yeah, this is the other one. With the thin face and cold eyes. He’s the guy who asked about a liquor store.”
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