Fire Hawk

by Geoffrey Archer

  ‘—you more than it hurts me.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Don’t be a cunt, Duncan.’

  Waddell recoiled.

  ‘Anyway, have you finished?’ Sam stood up abruptly. ‘Because if that’s it, I’ve got things to see to at home.’

  ‘Finished for now, yes.’ Waddell remained seated, knowing he would be dwarfed if he stood. ‘We’ve heard what you’ve said, old son. We’ll need to talk with you again at some stage. But for now, you’d better take some time off.’

  ‘Time off?’ Sam’s heart sank. Were they suspending him?

  ‘You deserve a break after what you’ve been through. Entryline are in the picture. They’re not expecting to hear from you for a week or two.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘We’ll see.’ Waddell had the grace to look embarrassed. ‘We’ll talk about the future when the dust’s settled.’

  ‘Gardening leave. Is that what you’re saying?’

  Waddell shrugged. ‘We just have to work out how this whole mess came about, Sam. You surely understand that?’

  ‘Oh yes. I understand all right. My problem is I don’t trust you to look in the right place for the answers.’ The words tumbled out before he could stop them.

  Waddell glanced at Charles and smiled smugly. ‘Don’t underestimate the Service, Sam. I can assure you it’s our job to know where to look.’ He stood up. ‘You can go now. The car’s waiting outside. It’ll take you to the clinic first. If they give the all clear then you can head off home. We’ll contact you in a day or two. And you can always call me, remember. Maybe something else’ll come to you. Some recollection of a little conversation over a jar that you might have overlooked.’

  ‘Like fuck, Duncan. Like fuck it will.’

  Charles reached out his hand. ‘Good luck. And I’m truly sorry for having to put you through this.’

  Waddell led him back through the kitchen towards the fire escape. He opened the back door for him.

  ‘It’s funny, you know . . .’ He puckered his boyish brows as Sam brushed past him. ‘I would never have guessed that Chrissie was your type.’

  Sam restrained his urge to hit him.

  ‘Have yourself a good rest, old man,’ said Waddell. He went back inside and closed the door.

  Sam stood on the top grating of the rusty staircase. Below was the waiting Granada. He was seething with anger, but also with dread. Because more potent than the shock of being disbelieved by the men inside the flat was his certainty that some vital trick was being missed. That by focusing on his broken cover, they were ignoring the real danger.

  Somewhere in the world there was a lunatic on the loose. And he had a load of anthrax to play with.

  9

  HIS FLAT SMELLED musty, a dusty airlessness combined with kitchen odours. The apartment had been locked since he left England. Dumping his case on the parquet floor of the tiny hallway he stood still for a moment, letting the place envelop him. There’d been moments when he’d feared he would never stand here again. He bent down to pick up the weeks of bills and junk mail splayed across the doormat, turned to close the front door then clicked on the overhead lamp to boost the pale daylight spilling from the living room. On the walls of the hall hung a few old square-rigger prints unearthed years ago in a Plymouth junk shop, together with a silent bracket clock that had belonged to his father. It displayed the hour at which its spring had unwound several days ago.

  The mental mauling he’d received at the debrief had left him bruised, as had the fresh prodding he’d just undergone at the hands of an MI6 doctor. Instead of lifting from him, his anger at what the Iraqis had done to him in Baghdad clung like varnish. The doctor had told him he should find someone to talk to, in order to get it out of his system. Inevitably he’d thought of Chrissie.

  The medical man had checked him over with great thoroughness before confirming that no lasting physical harm should result from his maltreatment. The growth of new skin over his shins would show progress in days, he’d said, making the fresh dressings he’d put on redundant. The medic had been more concerned about post-traumatic stress. He’d offered counselling, but Sam insisted a few days’ rest would see him right.

  He was still in the hall. Hadn’t moved a step further into the flat, because instead of feeling relieved at being home, he was experiencing a thudding emptiness. He walked into the living room and crossed to the sash windows that overlooked the river. But instead of taking in the view as he’d intended, he swung round, dogged by the feeling that someone else had been here while he was away.

  Of course. They would have been. Charles’s people, going through his things – hands down the sides of the sofa, a line by line check through the contents of his filing cabinet, and a readout of the hard disk on the Pentium PC.

  ‘Bugger!’

  He felt as violated by their treatment of him as by the beatings in Baghdad. He’d not deserved any of this. Life was being outrageously unjust. And he’d always railed against the unfairness of fate, ever since being deprived as a young child of the father he’d worshipped.

  ‘Bollocks to them all.’

  He unscrewed the security bolt on the centre sash then shoved it upwards to let in fresh air. Three floors below, a red bus droned past the front of the 1930s block. On the other side of the road a man exercised a black dog along the towpath. The tide was coming in, the water’s surface ruffled by a contrary wind. Sam took a deep breath, hungry for the air that belonged to rivers, to their estuaries and to the sea. A smell of decay, but also of peace.

  He turned his head to look down river, past the nature reserve of the old Barnes reservoirs. A pleasure craft cut through the water, bringing the last of the summer’s tourists to Kew Gardens and Hampton Court. In the suburban maze to the right of the riverbank was where Chrissie lived with her reconciled husband, the Kessler home only a few minutes’ walk from his own. A neat coincidence of residential location which they’d shamelessly exploited for so bloody long . . .

  Like his maltreatment in Baghdad, she was something else he needed to expunge from his mind. But how could he if it was his child she was carrying?

  He turned away from the window. Chrissie had been rude about this flat, saying it reflected his years of institutionalisation in the Royal Navy. Sofa and armchairs in floral print. Pine green carpet. Built-in wall units, with a small hi-fi and TV set wedged among the paperbacks. Metal-framed prints of Turner seascapes. Not bad taste, she used to complain, more like no taste at all. She had a need to be surrounded by beautiful things, she’d told him, and marvelled at his ability to live without them.

  For him the main trouble with this room was that he couldn’t look at it without seeing her in it. She would appear without warning late at night after some spat with her husband and throw her arms round his neck, clinging to him like a drowning child. Jammed on the sofa like Siamese twins they would sit and drink wine while she unwound. Sometimes she would talk volumes, pouring out her troubles in a slalom ride of anger at her husband’s stunted emotions and at her own stupidity for marrying him. Sometimes she would merely stare at the walls while he played Verdi on the CD, letting the demons fight their battles inside her.

  But always her tension would eventually ebb. Then a smile as fragile as a mayfly would signal that she was ready for what she’d come for. Later, after they’d had their fill of each other in the bedroom and he’d drifted into post-coital slumber, she would dress again and leave him, descending the communal staircase as silently as she had climbed it to walk or drive the few hundred yards that would take her back to her husband.

  And Martin had never known. That’s what Chrissie had said. Her husband had never once suspected she was having an affair. Always imagined that when his wife disappeared late at night, not returning for hours, she was driving round in her car letting off steam or parked up somewhere smoking cigarette after cigarette until she calmed down enough to return to him. Never known the truth until this summer. And Martin Kessler was by pro
fession a spymaster.

  Sam walked back to the hall, picked up his bag and took it to the bedroom to unpack, putting his things away with a neatness bred by years spent in cabins too small to swing a cat in. Chrissie had teased him about his tidy ways, asking where he would stow a woman if one were ever to move in with him. His life was too ordered, she’d told him, too complete for a woman to be let in permanently.

  He changed into jeans and a T-shirt and, resisting the temptation to sink a large scotch, perched in the galley-like kitchen and brewed some tea in a mug that bore the crest of the last ship he’d served in.

  It was late afternoon. The doctor had suggested he do things that were normal and routine. Might drop into the pub later for a couple of pints and some inconsequential chatter, then pick up a takeaway at the local Tandoori before dosing himself with the sleeping pills the medic had prescribed and try for a night without bad dreams.

  He began checking the food cupboard and the fridge, with the idea of a visit to the supermarket – anything for distraction. But Baghdad came winging back into his head. The beatings, the endless questions about the messenger’s whispers, the sheer bloody terror of believing he would be killed . . .

  ‘Hell!’

  This wouldn’t do. He needed to fill his head with something else. He got up from the kitchen stool, stomped into the living room and switched on the TV for the news.

  It turned out the world had moved little since he’d last been in touch with it. On the other side of the Atlantic the US presidential election campaign was as lacklustre as ever. At home Conservative MPs were still fighting like rats in a sack, and in Israel Palestinians were protesting violently against new Jewish settlements on the West Bank.

  Then Saddam Hussein’s picture came on the screen. He turned up the sound. The voice-over reported the Iraqi leader launching a stinging verbal attack on Jerusalem and Washington over their ‘betrayal of the Oslo accords’. A warning that a failure of Middle East peace could lead to global war.

  A war waged with biological weapons. Was that what the madman planned?

  A shiver ran through him. Anthrax weapons were out there and he was doing nothing to find them. But what could he do? Like the man strung up by his hands in the Baghdad prison, he was just a messenger. He’d done his duty. Passed on all he knew to his masters. Not his responsibility any more. The hard part was to stop thinking that it was.

  What he needed was to wash his brain out. The whiff of the sea might do it. A few days on his boat with a stiff sailing breeze and some sun on his back. Why the hell not? They’d told him to take leave.

  He looked at his watch. Not yet six. To learn where the sloop was moored, he would need to talk with his sailing partner who’d used her during his absence. And Tom Wallace wouldn’t be back at his Chichester home for another fifteen minutes or so.

  Bored by the TV news, Sam switched off and stood by the window again looking at the river. Water was a balm for him. Always had been, from the moment his long dead father first taught him to sail.

  He would need to let Waddell know that he was disappearing for a few days. It smarted just to think of the man. In your guts. Like in the Kiev affair? It’s facts we need, Sam, not judgements based on hunches.

  Kiev. A balls-up of mega proportions which he’d never got to the bottom of. A sting run jointly by the intelligence organisations of three nations which had turned into a farce. The operation to crush an international drugs ring had been triggered by information from the Ukrainian SBU – part of the former Soviet KGB. Ecstasy tablets produced in Ukraine had been flooding markets in Germany and Britain. The lab producing them had been located but they wanted to nail the distribution network too. According to sources in Germany and Ukraine a huge consignment of drugs was to be transported to western Europe hidden inside trucks carting display material back from a trade fair in Kiev. Conveniently, Entryline Exhibitions had had the contract for the British companies represented at the fair. Sam had been dispatched to Kiev as site manager.

  Coincidentally, Chrissie had been there too, acting as backup for the new SIS resident at the British Embassy who’d only been in the post a few weeks. With a charm that could suck foxes from their holes, she’d assembled a contact list to die for during her career with the Foreign Office and SIS. One of those contacts was a man named Viktor Rybkin whom she’d met in Washington two years earlier. Rybkin was SBU, resident in the American capital then, but on his return to Kiev he had become SBU liaison officer on transnational crime. It was he who had been running the Kiev end of the ecstasy investigation.

  On that occasion too Sam had used the Terry Malone pseudonym, but his real identity was known to Viktor Rybkin. No reason not to be. In that operation they had been on the same side. He and Chrissie had kept at arm’s length from one another to preserve the secrecy of their relationship, but one night at his hotel there had been a message to meet her outside a café on vulitsya Khreshchatyk, Kiev’s tree-lined, lamp-lit main boulevard.

  He’d arrived at the appointed hour but Chrissie hadn’t. Instead, he’d watched coming towards him the burly shape of Viktor Rybkin.

  ‘I want to show you the sights,’ he’d grinned. The SBU man had a small scar on his cheek and a lopsided jaw. ‘Chrissie said she’d fix for you to be here.’ His English had a heavy American accent. ‘Now we all got the same enemy – hoodlums, Mafiya – you should take a closer look at our ones.’

  Rybkin had whisked him round the city by car, pointing out restaurants and clubs from where the gangs operated. There were more than six hundred Mafiya-style mobs active in Ukraine, he’d said.

  ‘We call them Mafiya, but they are New Russian criminals,’ he’d explained in smooth, educated English, ‘not like the Italian families. Except in one way. They kill just as easy. Every week here in Kiev there are maybe five, maybe six murders, half of them contract killings.’

  The tour had ended at a banya. In a well-equipped gym, tough, fit men in designer track-suits and Lycra hipsters sweated over the machines and downed imported energy drinks. All Mafiya, Rybkin had warned. They’d stripped off their own clothes to mingle with the naked bathers in the steam room. The Ukrainian’s torso had been exceptionally hairy, Sam remembered, and his penis unusually small. ‘But I use it well,’ Rybkin had assured him.

  They’d sat in an alcove and Rybkin, his voice muffled by the hiss of steam, had pointed out some of the kings of Kiev’s underworld, the tsars of the Ukrainian black economy.

  ‘They know who I am, I know who they are. It’s a game. We watch each other. What I’m telling them is that if they cross the line I shall know where to get them.’

  Being exposed like that to men who might have been running the very drug ring they were trying to crush had felt like professional suicide. But it was the way they did things in Ukraine, Rybkin had assured him.

  That same night, surveillance cameras he’d set up at the Kiev fair site had recorded ‘drugs’ being hidden in British and German trucks. He’d reported a good ‘gut feeling’ about it to London. But when the vehicles got home, no one had come for the hidden cargoes. Eventually, a police forensic team had examined the load and found it to be chalk. Ecstasy tablets from Kiev had turned up on the streets a few weeks later. They’d gone by another route.

  In the SIS witch hunt that had followed, suspicion for the blowing of the operation had focused on Rybkin, but some had stuck to Sam. Chrissie had begged him to say nothing about her unwittingly setting him up for the visit to the banya, because if the powers that be knew about it, she’d be for the Star Chamber.

  Bugger Waddell, digging all that up again. Bugger his suspicious little puritan mind.

  The time had come for a proper drink, he decided. He took his mug back to the kitchen then poured a couple of fingers of whisky in a glass, topping it up with a little water from the tap. He gulped down a good slug.

  There was a good chance Tom Wallace would be home by now. He grabbed the phone from the wall by the kitchen door and dialled. He’d kn
own his sailing partner for fifteen years, ever since they studied at Dartmouth together. Tom had left the Navy three years after him, to take over an antique business started by his father.

  The phone was answered on the third ring.

  ‘Wallace, you dog!’ Sam growled.

  ‘Packer! Where’ve you been?’

  ‘Some hell hole or other. The usual, you know . . .’

  Wallace had a good idea that he did dodgy work for the government and never asked for details.

  ‘Expected you back ages ago. Backgammon’s in bloody Cherbourg. Been there nearly three weeks. You were supposed to bring her back to the Hamble, you sod.’

  ‘I know. I was away longer than expected.’

  ‘Living it up at somebody else’s expense no doubt.’

  ‘No doubt.’

  ‘The marina charges’ll be horrendous by now. Take your gold card with you. You are going to get her, I take it? That is why you’re ringing?’ Wallace liked people to do what they’d agreed to do.

  ‘Yes. I plan to get the ferry over as soon as I’ve got a crew sorted. I don’t suppose you’re free . . .’

  ‘No. Can’t leave the shop this week. But I’m sure you can whistle up some bint from your little black book.’

  Tom Wallace had a vivid fantasy image of Sam’s love life, mainly because he never told him about it except to say it was active and complicated. Wallace himself had been married for eleven years but was now divorced, with two daughters he seldom saw. He lived alone, making little effort to attract a new partner. From time to time he talked of getting a Thai bride by mail order.

  ‘You’ll need to keep an eye on the engine, Sam. Bit of a water leak when she’s running. God knows where from. Pump the bilges every few hours and you’ll be okay. Hope the boat’s clean enough for you. Took a couple of friends from the trade over with me last time. One of them was sick everywhere.’

  ‘Oh thanks a lot.’

  ‘No prob. Washed it off the seat covers for you.’