Rory shook his head. ‘No.’
‘OK.’ I shrugged. ‘So let’s just pretend. Let’s just say that’s the way it was. They’d need a couple of guys, one each side, people they trusted.’
‘What for?’
‘I just told you. The deal.’
‘Deal? What deal?’
I looked at Rory a moment. His questions were beginning to irritate me, bends in my road.
I leaned forward, ever patient. ‘It’s December,’ I said, ‘and Bush knows that the war he’s about to fight could be incredibly expensive. Not money. He’s stitched all that up already. No,’ I shook my head, ‘blood, casualties, lives. That’s what he needs to control. And it’s dawned on him that he can’t. So the man needs a deal.’
‘With the enemy?’
‘With Saddam.’
‘Same thing,’ Rory gazed at me, ‘isn’t it?’
‘Not necessarily. Not when you’ve just spent most of the last ten years arming the guy.’
‘You’re saying Bush and Saddam were on the same side?’
‘No. I’m saying Saddam got it wrong by going into Kuwait. That upset Bush. Quite genuinely. But in the end, before the fighting started … they both had a common interest.’
‘And what might that have been?’
I looked at Rory a moment, recognizing exactly the shape of the argument, hearing Wesley’s voice in the background, derisive, contemptuous and very probably right.
‘Survival,’ I said. ‘They both wanted to survive. Bush, politically. Saddam,’ I shrugged, ‘for real. That’s why there had to be a deal, a limit to the war. That’s why the Americans stopped when they did. That’s why they didn’t go after Saddam.’
‘And Saddam?’
‘Agreed to pull his punches.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘Yes, listen.’ I leaned forward again. ‘The deal’s agreed through the middlemen. Thanks to the deal, there’s a timetable. First the air war. Then the land war. Everyone knew that’s the way it would go. Stood to reason. You said so yourself. I remember you saying it. Air war, you said, five days. Real blitz. Bang bang. Then the big push, the land war, six weeks or so of solid fighting, up through all those berms and trenches and minefields.’ I was enjoying myself now, power without responsibility, total conjecture, ten parts cynicism to one part fact, the Wesley Keogh view of history. Rory was following me closely again and I wondered for a moment how much of all this was new to him, too. The way intelligence works, no one gets the big picture, or at least no one at Rory’s level. Or, indeed, at mine. I leaned across, patting him on the knee, a friendly, festive gesture. Maybe, after all, we should have opened the crackers. Maybe it would have helped. ‘The air war,’ I said again, ‘and then the land war. Five days, and six weeks. Problem was, it didn’t happen that way at all. No, we had a long air war, then a brief land war. Helped no end with the allied casualties. Got Bush out of the hole.’
Rory was eyeing me with a strange expression, a mixture of impatience and disbelief. ‘The way it happened was perfectly logical,’ he said, ‘if you know anything about war.’
‘Sure.’ I nodded. ‘But seventy-nine dead? Do you believe that bit, too? Against an army a million strong?’
Rory shrugged. ‘Luck,’ he said tersely, ‘and bloody good planning.’
We fell silent for a while. Outside, it was getting dark. I wondered about going through the whole thing: Grant, Raoul, Eric Stollmann, but decided against it. Better to concentrate on the essentials. The hinges on the door. The guys that made it happen.
‘Ghattan and his bodyguard,’ I began, ‘are both off the plot. One’s dead. And Khalil seems to have disappeared. Mr Invisible.’
‘So?’
‘You know as well as I do the way it works.’
‘What works?’
‘Deniability. If you run an operation like that, the one thing you have to remove afterwards is the evidence.’ I paused. ‘In Curzon House, we called it weeding.’ I smiled. ‘What’s your word?’
Rory ignored the question. He was staring into his empty glass, brooding.
‘You think Ghattan and the other bloke were fronting for the Iraqis?’ he said at last. ‘Is that it?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘that’s it.’
‘And us? The Brits?’
‘We weren’t in the loop. Not until afterwards. Until Khalil came over. Joined us in Cyprus.’ I smiled. ‘Then we had leverage.’
‘On who?’
‘The Americans.’
‘And who was dealing for them?’
I hesitated a moment. I could hear carols from the television in the next room. ‘Silent Night’, followed by a commercial for some Baptist sect or other.
‘Beckermann?’ I suggested.
Rory frowned. ‘But why? Why would he do it?’
‘Money? Big fat share of all those contracts? Plus a chance to make a little history? Mr America? The president’s man?’
Rory stared at me, still holding the empty glass. ‘But Beckermann’s dead,’ he said, ‘so who’d know?’
I nodded, smiling again. ‘Exactly,’ I said softly.
An hour later, still wet from the shower, I towelled my hair dry, sitting at the vanity unit. Rory was slumped in an armchair across the room, his head back, eyes closed. He’d been on the phone while I was in the bathroom. I hadn’t a clue who he’d been talking to or what he’d said, but I’d checked in my case for Raoul’s report and the photos, and they’d both gone. Later, when the time was right, I’d do my best to get them back, but for now, reaching for a glass and the bottle of Chardonnay, I tried to revive the conversation.
‘Say I come back,’ I said, ‘to the UK.’ Rory opened one eye. ‘What happens then?’
He shrugged. ‘That’s up to you,’ he said. ‘Your life. Your decision. Not mine.’
‘But say I go to the press? The media?’
‘With what?’
‘The story.’
‘What story?’
I paused, sipping the wine, taking the point.
‘Then say I write about it?’ I said. ‘Say I get it all down? All the stuff we’ve talked about? Plus the stuff I’ve not told you? The whole lot? The right facts in the right order? Find a publisher? Get it into print? What then?’
Rory said nothing for a while. Then he got up, rubbing his eyes. He sounded, if anything, bored.
‘Then I imagine people will read it,’ he said, yawning, ‘and draw their own conclusions.’
Wesley died the day before I got back to England. Eileen told me the news when I phoned from Heathrow Airport and I was still numb by the time I got off the train at Exeter. She and Pete met me at the station and drove me down to the nursing home at Exmouth. It was a beautiful afternoon, still and blue and cold, and we walked along the beach, all three of us, while they told me the way it had been.
On Christmas Day he’d gone into a coma. Hopelessly out of their depth, they’d called for an ambulance. Within an hour, Wesley was in hospital in Exeter, a room of his own on the fourth floor. Not getting him into hospital earlier had been a mistake. Without the right cocktail of drugs, his defences virtually destroyed, infection had run riot. His mouth was thick with fungus. Pus had swamped his lungs. A violent rash covered the whole of his upper body. He was three quarters blind. His brain had started to go.
Eileen, a kind woman, told me it was better that I’d never seen him like this, and listening, I believed her. At the end of the beach, where the sand laps up to the cliffs, we paused a moment. I knew what I wanted. I wanted a last sign, some signal, a message he’d left me, something to hang on to. I looked at her, trying to put the question into words, but it was Pete who stepped across and slipped his arm round my shoulders, knowing exactly what I was trying to say, breaking the news as gently as he could.
‘At the end,’ he said, ‘there was nothing.’
Wesley was cremated at Exeter on 2 January 1992. In the flat I found a note he’d written me about the arrangements. He wanted
nobody there except his mother, Mark and myself. All his money was to go to his mother. The rest of what he owned was to come to me. This bequest included his books, notes, tapes, diaries, everything he’d been collecting since he’d met Grant Wallace in Geneva. It also included his ashes, plus a detailed set of instructions about their disposal.
Wesley’s last few weeks at Exmouth had evidently made a real impression on him. He’d loved the view from where we’d lived, the sound of the waves on the beach below the flat. Accordingly, he’d asked me to scatter his ashes at sea, in the deep-water channel, within sight of land. The weather had to be awful. The sea had to be rough and if possible, he wrote, it ought to be pissing down with rain.
The crematorium gave me his ashes in a small metal box. I put them on the mantelpiece in the flat, consulting the television forecasts every night, waiting for the weather to worsen. When a particularly deep depression appeared in the western Atlantic, I made friends with a fishing skipper in the docks. For £50 he’d take me to sea in any weather. For another £50, he’d bring me back.
I waited two days. On the third morning, I got up to the howl of gale-force winds. The trees on the Beacon were bent double and sand was blowing knee-high across the beach. Even my fisherman was having second thoughts.
I’d brought the money in cash. We set sail around noon. The little boat, sturdy enough, bucked and rolled in the heavy sea. The clouds were like smoke, torn and ragged in the wind, and there was a thin yellow light, eerie, almost livid. If Wesley had been there, he’d have found a word for it. Operatic would have done nicely.
We made it as far as the dog-leg that takes the deep-water channel into the open sea. The weather, if anything, had worsened, the wind stronger, the seas longer, the clouds occasionally parting, fingers of light lancing through. The skipper put the wheel over, bringing us bow-first into the weather, steadying the boat as best he could. In the tiny wheelhouse, we exchanged glances.
‘Now?’
He nodded, and I inched open the door and squeezed through, trying not to lose my footing on the slippery deck. At the back of the boat, I steadied myself against the low rail, freeing my hands, trying to prise the lid off the box. The boat was pitching up and down, taking me with it, the sea boiling an angry brown beneath the stern.
Finally, I got the lid off. Inside, to my surprise, was a thick grey sludge, more solid and more sticky than I’d imagined. I looked at it a moment, nonplussed. There was a layer or two of ash on top, quite granular, and it was already blowing everywhere. I closed my eyes a moment and muttered a simple prayer, good luck, God bless. Then I threw the lot overboard. In the wind and the rain, I didn’t even see the splash, which is probably the way Wesley would have wanted it. The music, he always told me, not the fucking players.
Epilogue
Finishing this book has taken me deep into autumn. The garden outside my bedroom window is glorious, the best possible evidence that my father’s time is now his own, and he potters around it for most of the day, returning to the house for meals and the odd cup of tea. Things between us have eased a lot over the summer, give and take on both sides, and once or twice, nearing the end of this account, I’ve wondered about telling him what it contains, letting him into our little secret, Wesley’s story, but every time the opportunity comes up, something holds me back. My father’s life, after all, has been based on a certain view of the way things are. He believes in the integrity of Westminster and Whitehall. In uniform, he’s risked his life to defend the system. Who am I to tell him that much of it has been a sham? That money and power count for more than mere principle?
This little quandary has preoccupied me a great deal in recent weeks. Then, yesterday, came the perfect opening. The morning paper arrived late. I took it into the living room. My father was eating a boiled egg at the table in the window. I gave him the paper, turning away, hearing him chuckle.
‘What is it?’ I said.
‘Here.’
He showed me the paper. Across the top, for once, was good news. A multi-billion-pound arms deal, preserved in the teeth of American competition. ‘SAUDIS CONFIRM TERMS’ went the headline, ‘HUGE BOOST FOR UK JOBS’. My eye ran on down the page, pausing at the photo in the middle, the DTI junior minister who’d helped clinch the deal. It was a head and shoulders shot, less than flattering. I gave the paper back to my father. He was beaming.
‘Thank God someone’s still up to the mark,’ he said, peering at the caption beneath the photo. ‘What’s his name?’
‘Priddy,’ I said, ‘Lawrence Priddy.’
‘Quite.’ My father glanced up. ‘Where would we be without people like him?’
Thunder in the Blood Page 40
