by John Gardner
“It’s terrible.” Bitsy was hovering, and the table was laid out with cold meats, hard-boiled eggs and seven kinds of salad. Enough to feed a couple of armies.
“Ach, is nothing.” Kruger grinned. “What’s one lousy house between enemies? The insurance’ll make me almost rich. I can buy several houses with it. I’m alive. They meant for me to be dead, so we fooled them.” He helped himself to a huge plate of lettuce, tomato, cucumber, ham and hard-boiled eggs, waved away the wine that Bitsy suggested and asked for Perrier water. “Kisses, cool as cucumbers,” he remarked as he placed the salad on his plate. Then: “So, how was the Mage of Salisbury?”
“Nice.” Bex chewed on a hunk of French bread. “Very nice. About a hundred and three, but he talked quite openly to me about Gus’s visit to his magic society. They call themselves, the Old Sarum Sorcerers …”
“Yesu!” Herb looked heavenwards.
“He said it was an honor to have Claudius there for the evening. Said it was one of the greatest experiences of his magic life.” Her tone was mocking.
“Don’ extract the urine, Bex. These guys are mainly very serious.”
“Okay, but he went on a good deal about it. Even told me what Gus did for them.”
“Some other time. What about Gus’s demeanor? What about when he left?”
“On very good form. Stayed for longer than most lecturers. Did you know there’s a whole great lecture circuit in the magic business? Just about worldwide. He said Gus stayed, answered questions. Left on his own. Seemed to be in good spirits.”
“You got the time he left?”
“It was late for the Old Sarum Sorcerers. As he remembered, it was almost one in the morning.”
“That leaves about two hours unaccounted for—well, say one and a bit hours. Not a long drive from Salisbury to where Gus died. A lot of time missing, so we’re none the wiser.”
“We know he was there. We know that’s what he was doing. Well, we know he left at around one, and the car blew up just after three.”
“Doesn’t explain him standing by the roadside near his car, talking to someone as yet unidentified. Chatting one minute, driving off the road and blowing up the next.”
“No, it really doesn’t explain a damned thing. I think we should have a little pry into the telephone logs. The big house and here.”
“They’d still log calls from here? Even though it was virtually Gus’s private residence?”
“You’d be surprised at what they log. Every incoming and outgoing call. The lot. Must be on file somewhere.”
They finished lunch eventually and headed across to the Guest Quarters to have another chat with Carole. “I do the talking on this one, Bex, ’cause you don’ know the right questions. Just stand by to pick up Carole in case she gets the vapors.”
Carole was all sweetness. “I thought you’d be over this morning.” She gestured to the chairs as though she were still the lady of the manor—which had been Gus’s joke about her when he ruled the roost at Warminster.
“No, had a little problem.” Herb grinned. “My house blew up, Carole.”
“You’re joking.”
“I don’ yoke about houses blowing up.”
“You leave the gas on or something?”
“No, someone put some explosives and gas around the place and whoosh! Went up, ignited the gas line and boom, as in my house used to be here.”
“Oh, Herb, I’m—”
He held up a hand to stop here. “Carole, you said there was a tape of Gus’s special lecture to all those important people.”
She nodded. “In the archives at the main house,” leaning forward and picking up a videotape from a side table. “All yours, Herb. I got them to let me take it for you.”
“You did? Naughty. They should’ve asked me.”
“Well, I told them you wanted it. They know me well enough and I’m not taking any risks.”
“Okay, we’ll take a look later on,” and like a soccer player swerving and booting the ball away at ninety degrees, he switched: “Carole, tell me about Jasmine.”
Her face went hard as granite for a few seconds and he would have sworn that her eyes blazed anger. “Jasmine?” she asked.
“She was here at one time—1984 I think. You gotta remember Jasmine, Carole. Old Gus was stuck on her.”
For a moment he thought he had blown it. Then Carole relaxed. “Yes, Herb. Jasmine. Pain and grief, but Gus never knew. He was mightily stuck on Jasmine because of the potential. I’m pretty certain of that. You clever devil, Herb. Gus never knew, but you dragged it out of the past, though I couldn’t tell how you did it.”
“Just tell us about it, Carole, my dear.”
“Okay. The one and only time I was ever unfaithful to Gus.”
“Yes?”
“He brought this guy—an Iraqi, I think—down here. Usual business. He came at night, blindfolded. Gus said he was a possible recruit to do some bits of snooping in the Middle East. Said he had worked for the Office as a lab technician for some time. Now they wanted him to go back. It was risky. I remember laughing when I was told to refer to him only as Jasmine. Work name, I suppose.” Her tongue slid out and she licked her lips.
“He was a very attractive hunk, if you want to know.” She was almost belligerent about it. “Gus had to be away a lot.” She sighed. “Really never forgave myself for it. Gus said, ‘Keep him happy while I’m gone for a couple of days.’ Gus was my life, Herb. Why would I do such a thing? Never forgave myself.”
“It happens.” Herbie reached out and fondled her hand.
She withdrew it quickly. “I spent most of the first day just talking to him. We went for a walk, I recall. On the grounds, of course. The staff kept their eyes out for him—us. It was the second night. He was so attractive. Like silk, and with a beautiful voice, though what that has to do with it I don’t know. Yes, on the second night I slept with him. The only time, Herb. I promise it was the only time I was ever unfaithful to my dear, dearest Gus.”
“And did the earth move?”
“As a matter of fact it did,” she snapped. “But I wanted out. I felt filthy for days. Went through a routine of showering about three times a day. Even destroyed some of the clothes I was wearing. Please, Herb. Please, this hasn’t got anything to do with Gus being dead, has it?”
“No. No, not directly.” He was away, trying to work out why Gus had left a document that was a direct deceit. Calling Jasmine a woman, with whom he had taken a trot around the park. “No,” he added. “Carole, Bex and I got to talk. We’ll watch Gus’s lecture and come back tomorrow. Long session tomorrow.”
As he rose, Carole asked, “You don’t think I’m a trollop, Herb?”
“Don’ be stupid, Carole. You know I always lusted after you. No, you’re not a trollop.”
Far away in the underground facilities a telephone purred. Instinctively Herb knew it was for him, and showed no surprise when the switchboard patched it through to Carole’s room.
“Herb.” Young Worboys was breathless from London. “You with Carole?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t say a word, but I have a shock for you.”
“My house hasn’t blown up again, has it?”
“No, Herb. Today’s Times. There’s an answerback.”
“What?”
“Go and read it yourself. Somewhere private. Certainly not in front of Carole.”
“Sure. Sure, Tony, I’ll do that.”
“And call me back.”
“And when I’ve done it, I’ll call you back.”
He almost dragged Bex out through the passage that led directly to the main house. All the way she pummeled him with questions: “Herb, what is it? Please, Herb. Tell me what it is?”
There was a copy of The Times in the Mess. Kruger pounced on it like a huge bear wanting to do it an injury, tearing the pages apart.
It was in the third column of the personal ads:
JASMINE, my queen. Your news is wondrous and I can even smell your rich p
erfumes from where I am. Call me tomorrow night around seven at either 234-2210 or 234-2261. I yearn for you. Your beloved Claudius
16
EARLIER, IN NEW YORK, WALID COULD NOT sleep. New York is the city that never sleeps, and Walid remained wide awake. First, Samih and Khami had made noisy love. To be fair, Khami had offered herself to Walid also, once the team’s leader, Samih, had dropped into a deep sleep, but Walid had refused. He cared greatly for her, but hated the thought of her having been touched by Samih. His instinct told him that she would rather be alone with him, but what was instinct?
He still could not sleep, and realized suddenly at five in the morning that it was the silence that worried him. Even in the plush apartment building there was always noise. Twenty-four hours a day there was noise. The normal city traffic sounds of the day, and at night if it was not the street-cleaning crews, it was the wail of police sirens.
Now, here in the early hours, there was no noise. Quietly he climbed out of bed and went over to the long window that looked down on Park Avenue. With a jolt to his heart he realized why it was so silent. Below him, and on the other side of the street, the light of police cruisers twinkled their red and blue strobes. There were three ambulances drawn up across the street and a pair of buses.
Walid reasoned that there was a SWAT team out there. Possibly negotiators, in case something went wrong, maybe even the FBI fast-reaction hostage team from Quantico. He did not know how long he had to get clear, and his first thought was to waken Samih as the leader, show him what was waiting for them and take orders directly from him.
He must have puzzled at it for the best part of five minutes, and in that time he came to an unthinkable conclusion. They would not all get away: of that he was certain. Better for two to jump clear now than all of them perishing.
Gently he woke Khami, placing a hand over her mouth and putting a finger to his own lips so that she would not be afraid. Carefully he led her to the window and saw her eyes open wide in fear, so he whispered to her, telling her to get dressed, that he had a plan.
Now he also dressed and found one of the pistols that had a noise-reduction unit fitted to its barrel. He told Khami to find a weapon and ammunition as he went about getting a spare pistol and even more shells.
Drawing Khami to the door, he reminded her of what they had been told in Baghdad. If there was danger, particularly a situation where local police or intelligence agencies were likely to take the entire team, then one or two—no more than two—members would have to take the initiative.
Her eyes widened again. Those instructions had been given in graphic detail. If this circumstance arose, they would be cleansed of destroying their brothers and sisters, for the survival of one or two members of the team was essential, even at the cost of the others’ lives.
Walid instructed her to go into the hallway that separated the two apartments. When she left, there was no doubt in her mind regarding what Walid was about to do. He did it by pressing a pillow quickly against Samih’s head and firing into the pillow. With the noise-reduction unit, the shot sounded like a small popping noise, as though it had come from far away. Samih’s head burst open, thick blood and gray matter flowering out from under the pillow.
He took the small briefcase in which Samih kept the bank account details, the checks, credit cards, passports and over two million dollars in forged hundred-dollar bills. Outside, in the passage, he handed the briefcase to Khami and told her to go past the lift and through the emergency door, which would take them down the stairs. She nodded and immediately did as she was asked.
Only when she had gone through the door did he lean on the bell beside the other apartment door. Eventually, a voice croaked something about not making so much noise. It was Jamilla who had peeped through the little security fish lens set into the door. Jamilla, he thought, would be an asset to him, but he dared not allow her to live. He shot her between the eyes as soon as she opened the door, then, swiftly, he moved into the bedroom and saw Awdah sitting on the bed, dazed with sleep. He killed him before Awdah even realized what he was about to do. One popping shot to the head.
Walid was a meticulous man, and he checked the pulses to make certain there was no life left in them before he let himself out and closed the door behind him. Khami was at the top of the emergency stairs waiting for him. She touched his hand and then his face in an action meant to signify her sorrow for what he had been forced to do. He did not even think about it. The trick now was to get out of the building without the police catching them. After that, he would have to get a report to Yussif. Then Khami would have to be told the real facts of life.
The emergency stairs, he realized, would not be safe unless they could use them to get access to the twin building of the apartment block. Once the SWAT teams moved in, they would shut off the bank of elevators and come up these stairs. That kind of people did not trust elevators. He gave Khami an encouraging smile, to pass resolve and courage to her. Then he explained what they must do, and do quickly.
Big Herbie sat Bex down in Gus Keene’s old study and laid out an overview of the situation. He needed her to listen, he said, and then tell him what conclusion she came to.
“First off, Bex, you’re a cop, a detective, trained in this kind of business. You can probably make sense from nonsense. Okay?”
“If you say so, Herb.”
He went through everything that had transpired since the night Gus Keene’s car left the road and exploded near the village of Wylye. With great care he took her through the knowledge that there was an Iraqi terrorist team out for vengeance here in the U.K., and another in the States. That his own life was threatened, together with Worboys’s and another officer’s. He did not mention that Gus had been included in the hit list. Then he gave her the complex details of Gus’s having recruited and virtually run an asset in Iraq for some years; how they did not have any handling details; how Gus had left a document giving the impression that the asset—Jasmine—was a woman with whom he had carried on an affair; and now, as she had just heard, it was Carole who had slept with Jasmine, who turned out to be a man. Like someone explaining a difficult concept to a small child, he told her of the Jasmine notice in The Times, and now of an answerback, which, by all that was secret, should have come only from Gus Keene.
“So, what you make of all that, Bex?”
“These telephone numbers, which you say are supposed to be map coordinates?”
“Yes?”
“They mean anything?”
“Don’t know, Bex. Haven’t checked them out yet. I hope Head Office is at work on them now. In the computer age, you would have thought that’d be easy as falling off a leg.”
“Log.”
“What?”
“You mean log, Herb.”
“Sure,” he said with a grin, and Bex Olesker knew then, at that moment, that Herb was completely himself again. Deputy Chief Worboys had gone into Kruger’s most irritating habits in some detail, and when she had first met him, Bex had thought that Herbie was a broken man with all the bounce knocked out of him.
“Okay,” she continued. “So we don’t know if they work …”
“We will. Given time and a following wind, which with Bitsy’s cooking shouldn’t be difficult. Sorry, I embarrass you. The quick answer is we’ll soon know if a map reference’ll come out of the numbers.”
“You knew Gus for a long time, Herb.”
“Since I was first found in Berlin by the Office. Gus was Military Intelligence in those days. The Office talked with him a lot. I was present, often.”
“You want to tell me about Berlin? How they latched on to you?”
“Not really. My father was a Luftwaffe pilot, killed during Battle of Britain. I hated Hitler from then on, even though I was just a kid. Not even teenager. My mother was killed during battle for Berlin. I kept my head down. The Americans picked me up and interrogated me. Found I was anti-Nazi. The old American OSS put me to work. I trawled the camps they had for displaced pe
rsons. DPs they called them, which is pretty obvious. There were a lot of Nazis—real high-ranking Nazis—hiding out in the camps. They called me a ferret. Got a lot of them—not ferrets, Nazis.
“Then OSS was closed down—well, it stopped being OSS. Lots of guys went home, out of a job, but a lot stayed on and eventually became CIA. I was being run by a guy called Farthing. He left, but before he flew out he took me to an SIS friend, name of Railton. Donald Railton, though everyone called him Naldo—family nickname. Lives in America now. Retired. He used me for the same job a couple of times, then brought me out and the Office trained me. That’s how it all began. Now I’m a dodo. I’m a dinosaur. Near extinction. Prowling around watching the end of an era, beginning a new one. That’s my history in a shell.”
“A nutshell.”
“Sure.”
“You really think of yourself as a dinosaur?”
“A little. Espionage, stealing secrets, is still very much in business, but there are new boys coming in all the time. Young Worboys was my junior—straight out of training—when I first knew him. They used to call the game the second oldest profession. But, now this is funny, Bex. I read in one of Gus’s magic books that magic is second oldest profession. Interesting, huh?”
“But you knew Gus from way back then?”
“Sure. Well, maybe I didn’t actually know him. He knew me, though. Gus Keene had amazing memory. When I next time met him, he knew me. Said that we had met in Berlin in the late 1940s. Incredible with faces and names. Never forgot anything.”
“Would you say that you’ve always know he was devious?”
“Not always. No. Came to see it after my little spot of bother.”
“And what was that?”
“Worboys didn’t tell you? Ha! I was naughty. East Berlin was out of bounds to me and the Office was letting an old network of mine go to whack and ruin. They tried to set it up again, running long-range, but I flew over cuckoo’s nest …”
Wrack and ruin, plus flew the coop, Bex thought, but did not fall into the trap by opening her mouth.
“I slipped over the wall. Bingo, got picked up by the Ks—KGB, that’s what we called them. They dried me out, and when I got back, the Office had me down here for a year—in this very house, this very room. Gus hosed me down, cleaned me out. A year with Gus interrogating is like twenty years real time. Got to know him then … and when it was over. Spent a lot of time with Gus.”
