The Devil's Breath

by Hurley, Graham

  The old man, confused, had asked why, negotiating the busy sliproad on to the New Jersey turnpike, half-listening while the Arab told him what was to be done. Soon, he’d said, they’d take delivery of a sealed drum. In the drum would be a liquid. The drum was equipped with a special one-way valve. The old man’s job would be to install the drum in the trunk of the Oldsmobile and figure out a method of getting the liquid out of the drum, turning it into some kind of mist, and piping it on to the streets outside. The old man, thinking already of the gear he’d use, how simple the proposition was, had asked about the liquid in the drum.

  ‘What is it?’ he’d said. ‘What is this stuff?’

  Kabbaul had said nothing for a moment, fingering the tarnished chrome trim around the door. Then he’d looked across at the old man. ‘You remember Balata? The first time?’

  The old man had nodded. Balata was a refugee camp near Nablus, an hour and a half north of Ramallah. The Intifada had started there after a two-day riot in Gaza. The old man hadn’t seen it for himself, but the Israelis had applied the same tactics a thousand times since. Water-cannon. And riot sticks. And tear gas. And, when everything else failed, a sudden fusillade of bullets, totally indiscriminate, kids lying dead on the street. The old man had glanced across, safe now on the New Jersey pike.

  ‘So what’s the stuff?’ he’d said again. ‘The stuff in the trunk?’

  ‘Gas.’

  ‘What kind of gas?’

  ‘Tear gas. The gas the Israelis use.’

  The old man had nodded. The Israelis used the gas a lot, whenever there was trouble. He’d seen the spent canisters himself, lying on the street after yet another riot. Even empty, they still smelled vile, that sour, acrid, choking stench that reached inside your head and made your eyes burn, your tears fall. He’d been gassed himself, everyone had. It was the smell of early summer, the start of the season of riots, the hot, windy days when you only walked the streets with a damp handkerchief, something to cover your nose and mouth, just in case. The kids called it ‘drat’, giggling. In Arabic, ‘drat’ means farts, Israeli farts.

  Pulling off the pike at the Newark Airport exit, the old man had brought the conversation to a close, one last question, aware of his own tiny role in this clever, clever plan of theirs. ‘So I do the job in the trunk,’ he’d said. ‘What then?’

  ‘Then we drive the car.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Here.’

  ‘Here? In Newark?’

  ‘No.’ Kabbaul had nodded across to the left, towards the soaring cliffs of downtown Manhattan, a brief, contemptuous tilt of the head. ‘There.’

  Now, working in the airless garage, checking his seals, testing the wiring, the old man pondered the proposition again. The work on the car had been no problem. The drum of gas had yet to arrive, but he’d been given an empty replica. He’d examined the drum carefully. He’d never seen anything quite like it. It was heavier gauge steel than usual, and the vertical seam had been sealed with a double weld. The valve, likewise, was the work of someone who’d known what they were doing. It was heavy-duty, steel and brass, a 20-mm throat, properly seated.

  His plans made, he’d measured the drum and built a retaining cradle in the trunk of the Oldsmobile, fitting it snugly against the rear bulkhead. He’d plumbed a route out of the drum, using 20-mm copper piping from a hardware store six blocks away. He’d bought a small, neat, high-pressure pump, and supplied it with a power-feed from the car’s wiring-loom. From the pump, more piping led to a vaporizer he’d acquired from a garden centre up in Westwood. The stuff from the drum would be pumped into the vaporizer. The vaporizer would turn it into a thin mist. More pipe, galvanized steel, slightly larger bore, looped down from the vaporizer and disappeared through the floor pan of the trunk. Bracketed to the chassis of the Olds, it ran beside the car’s exhaust-pipe, protruding slightly beneath the fender. To any passer-by, it looked like the work of an Olds enthusiast, some guy who wanted to stay ahead of the pack. Only the extra switch on the dash might invite unwelcome questions, but the old man had even done his best to camouflage this. ‘Air Conditioning Boost’ read the Dynotape label he’d stuck beneath the white switch. ‘Depress to Activate.’

  Looking at it now, he smiled. The label had been his idea, a late addition after he’d been able to view the video they’d made. It looked neater, more professional. He reached out and turned on the ignition. Then his finger strayed left, towards the white switch. The pump in the trunk began to hum, then the vaporizer cut in, and he walked round behind the car, looking down at the false exhaust-pipe. Only yesterday, he’d dismantled the oneway valve and filled the empty tank with water. Now he could see the fine mist of tiny droplets, a dark stain on the garage door, a metre or two from the back of the Olds. The stain spread and elongated. Water began to pool on the concrete floor.

  The old man looked at it, wiping his hands on the cotton waste, feeling pleased with the job he’d done, how neat it was, how well it worked. Justice, he thought, remembering Ramallah again, the drifting clouds of tear gas, the faces masked by handkerchiefs, picturing the scenes at the kerbside over in Manhattan, smiling.

  *

  Sitting at his desk, Ross read the letter again. It was handwritten in a child’s careful capitals. It was addressed to the Israeli Embassy, dated three days previous.

  ‘Dear Mr Ambassador,’ it began. ‘Last week a friend of me and my dad’s got killed. His name was Yakov. He was brilliant at football. He trained our team. Now my dad’s going to find out who did it. My dad used to be in the Marines. He goes all over the world. He knows about guns and sometimes he carries one. I’ve seen it. When he finds the man, he’ll kill him too …’

  Ross paused, his finger on the last line. The letter, a photocopy, had arrived in the midday bag from the Intercepts Office at Mount Pleasant, one of the derisory titbits the people at MI5 occasionally tossed his way. Mail addressed to a handful of key embassies was regularly screened, and some of it was permitted to filter through to Downing Street. Ross had always recognized the ploy for what it was, a gesture of contempt, an innocuous whiff or two of the real thing to keep the politicians happy, but he’d built a very successful career on other people’s discarded opportunities, and now he sat back, gazing out of the window, wondering again about the man Arendt.

  The killing itself had been brazen, broad daylight, Central London. The tabloids had run the pictures on the front page and there’d been plenty of outraged leaders about Middle Eastern terrorism spilling on to English streets. Elements in the Cabinet had been less than amused, and he’d seen memos urging a wide-ranging inquiry into the implications of Arendt’s death. The latter had been firmly squashed by the Home Office, evidently at the request of the Israelis, and Ross now knew for certain that even the police investigation had, in the parlance, been allowed to wither on the vine. Quite why that should be so was anyone’s guess, but Ross knew enough about the workings of the Intelligence community to suspect that it represented the settlement of some kind of debt. Someone important owed the Israelis. And now the favour had been returned.

  Ross stood up and walked across to the big filing cabinet in the corner. The video was still in the bottom drawer. He loaded it on to the VCR and turned on the television. The images spooled through: the boot of the big American car, the tangle of pipework, the double exhaust, the gnarled old fingers pointing at the switch on the dashboard, then the view of Manhattan, the East River gleaming in the foreground, the big glass sweep of the UN building clearly visible. The screen went blank and he hesitated for a moment, one finger on the remote control, watching the pictures winding backwards, thinking again about the American, Sullivan.

  He’d spoken to him twice in the last week. On both occasions the call had come from Washington, urgent decisions for the Cabinet about the military build-up in the Gulf. The Americans had abruptly rediscovered the merits of the United Nations, and they wanted a seamless stich-up in the Security Council. British cooperation was taken as re
ad, and each of Sullivan’s calls had simply added more items to the shopping list, but both times Ross had prolonged the conversation, wondering aloud about the terrorist threat, about the possibility of Saddam preempting the Americans and exporting the war to the West. He’d never mentioned the video directly, preferring to let Sullivan make the running, but the big American had only grunted at his suggestions, telling him he was paranoid, that the real war was in the Gulf, upfront, 100 per cent visible, the good guys versus the bad guys, yet another crusade for freedom and democracy. The terrorists were a fact of life, sure, but just now the only game in town was Desert Shield.

  Ross, unconvinced, had pondered both conversations, certain that the Americans must have received a similar warning, maybe the same video, and now he returned to the desk, picking up the kid’s letter, wondering whether there might – after all – be some kind of link between the killing of the Israeli and the pictures still spooling backwards on the VCR. What he needed, as ever, was a little independent advice, a little analysis untainted by either the Americans or, God forbid, the British Intelligence establishment. He studied the name on the bottom of the letter for a moment. The kid’s father was evidently in the security business. He’d known the Israeli. He might respond to the right kind of invitation. Ross hesitated for a moment longer, then reached for the telephone. His secretary answered.

  ‘Get me the Dorchester,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Suite 701.’

  *

  Telemann met his wife, Laura, in a hotel room overlooking New York’s Central Park. She’d flown north from Washington. The meeting was her idea, her request, a curt one-sentence telephone message left with the hotel’s reception, awaiting Telemann’s return. In fourteen years of marriage, he’d never seen her so angry.

  ‘Don’t bother me with secrets,’ she said, ‘because I won’t listen.’

  Telemann looked at her across the room. She was standing by the window with the light behind her. She was wearing a two-piece denim suit with a black cotton singlet underneath. She had open sandals, half-inch heels, and a light summer tan. With a hamper and a couple of towels, and the usual stuff for the kids, she could have been five minutes from the beach.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said again. ‘It wasn’t on the schedule.’

  ‘It never is.’

  ‘It’s different this time.’

  ‘That’s what you always say.’

  ‘It’s true. It is different.’

  ‘Why?’

  Telemann sank on to the big king-sized bed and loosened his tie. Then he propped a pillow against the wooden headboard and lay back, closing his eyes. His eyes had been playing tricks again, losing focus, hurting. There’d been no result from the tests Laura had insisted he take, so he’d decided to ignore it.

  She was still looking at him. ‘Why?’ she said again.

  ‘That’s a secret,’ he said. ‘And you hate secrets.’

  He heard the soft clack-clack of her sandals as she crossed the room. Then she was sitting on the bed, looking down at him. He could smell her. Despite the anger, and the heat, and New York, she smelled great. He opened one eye, expecting a scowl, or tears, or worse. Instead, she was perfectly upright on the edge of the bed, with a detached, reflective look on her face, an expression of curiosity or perhaps regret, the storm quite spent.

  ‘You want me to tell you about the kids?’ she said quietly. ‘Spell it out?’

  Telemann shook his head. ‘No.’

  ‘How excited they were? Martha? Jamie? Bree?’

  ‘No.’

  She looked down at him for a long moment. ‘If you weren’t such a great father,’ she said finally, ‘it wouldn’t much matter.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  She shrugged. ‘It means we’d just go off by ourselves. Like we always used to. We’d get by. Like we always did. We’d find some other orphans. God knows, America’s full of them, especially vacation time …’

  Telemann got up on one elbow, marshalling the old argument, the old excuse. ‘I have a job,’ he said. ‘It’s important. It’s what we live on. What I do.’

  ‘What you do is sit behind a desk and get pissed with it. With us. With everything.’

  ‘Yeah, I know, but it’s—’

  ‘What?’

  He looked at her for a moment, wondering whether it might be better to tell her. Not the details. Nothing that could burn him. But enough to get him off this particular hook. It’s OK, he’d say, the problem’s gone away, I’m out from behind the desk, I’m back in the field, where I always belonged. Instead, he reached out and took her hand.

  ‘You should’ve,’ he said. ‘You should’ve gone to the beach. That’s what you should’ve done.’

  ‘We didn’t want to.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because you weren’t there. Because the kids had been planning it all for months and months, and thinking about it, and getting real excited. Us all for once. Us all, together. Hey—’ she walked her fingertips along the back of his hand, an old gesture ‘—that a lot to ask for?’

  Telemann shook his head, wondering why they hadn’t had this conversation on the phone. There had to be more to it. Had to be. He kissed her hand and half-rolled on to his side. In a world of second and third marriages, endless buddy-talk of alimony, and lawyers, and guilt about the kids, this woman of his, this wife, had always been the very middle of his life, ground zero, the one person on God’s earth without whom he couldn’t function.

  Lately, with the job, it had been more difficult. A dozen years with the Agency had given Laura a remarkable tolerance of midnight phone calls and crazy hours. Often, zilch notice, he’d been sent abroad, leaving her to cope. But that, somehow, had been OK. Working for the CIA, the Operations Directorate, you expected it. Abrupt departures for the airport, scribbled notes from exotic locations came with the job. That kind of stuff was even, in its way, an excitement, something you could share, a curious form of aphrodisiac. But the last eight months had been different. Since Christmas, he’d been back in the Agency HQ at Langley full-time, wrestling with a desk and a promotion and a daily schedule of meetings. For the first time in his professional life, he’d collided head-on with company politics, inter-agency feuding and the constant games with the oversight committees up on the Hill. The experience had drained him more thoroughly than any field assignment he could ever remember. He’d hated it, the compromises, the sheer inertia of the place, and he knew that had made him a lousy husband. He’d come back to lead a regular life, to be home by seven every night, and it hadn’t worked out at all.

  He reached up for her and tried to pull her down. There was lots he wanted to say, but he wasn’t sure that words were quite enough. She looked at him for a moment, resisting. He sank back on to the pillows, suddenly exhausted again, rubbing his eyes.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Tell the kids that. I owe them.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Telemann closed his eyes again. They had three kids, all adopted. They’d tried for their own and failed. They’d had tests, both of them, and when the physicians finally confirmed that it was Telemann’s fault, some problem with his sperm-count, they’d thought seriously about never having kids at all. But the marriage had matured and deepened, a big warm feeling, utterly secure, and they’d both wanted to share it, to spread the good news around a little, and so they’d gone to an agency and opened their lives to the counsellor, and waited a year or two and finally gotten a plump little half-caste called Martha. Two years later, from a slum in Detroit, came Jamie. Then Bree. At times, like any family, it had been difficult, and tiring, and chaotic. But never more than that. Until now.

  Telemann opened one eye again, looking up. Laura was standing beside the bed. She’d taken off her jacket and was loosening the belt on her jeans. She began to take them off, wriggling out of them, kicking her sandals into the middle of the room. Then she pulled the singlet over her head and stood by the bed, looking down. She had wide sho
ulders, big breasts. She was beautifully made. Telemann watched her, the old excitement, his woman.

  ‘Is it me?’ he said. ‘Or are you hot?’

  She didn’t look at him, didn’t answer. She knelt on the bed beside him, half-smile, busy fingers, and began to unbutton his shirt down to the navel, her hands on his belly, teasing downwards, loosening the zip in his trousers, easing them off. He heard them fall softly to the floor. Then she was over him again, pulling down the cover of the bed, the sheets beneath, slipping out of her knickers, straddling him backwards, her head between his thighs, her hands beneath him. Naked, they made love, a long, wordless half-hour, lapping and sucking and nibbling on the big cool bed. Afterwards, her head on his shoulder, she traced the line of his upper lip with her forefinger.

  ‘Pete phoned,’ she said quietly.

  Telemann nodded. Peter Emery was a friend from the Agency. He headed a section in the Analytic Directorate at Langley. He was brilliant, and gentle, and played the piano with a rare grace. Laura trusted him completely, an anchor for her errant husband.

  Telemann looked down at her. ‘And?’

  ‘He said you’d been fired.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He said you were out. He said he hoped we were coping.’ She paused. ‘He said he was sorry.’

  Telemann was up on one elbow, blinking. ‘Fired?’ he said. ‘When?’

  ‘Yesterday.’ She looked up at him. ‘So why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘Because I didn’t know.’

  He looked at her for a moment longer, wondering whether to pursue it now, get through to Emery on the private line, find out what was really happening. Then he remembered Sullivan, the last time they’d spoken, the terms they were offering, the way the job had to be framed. Out of channels, the man had said. Totally freelance. Totally deniable. No footprints. No paper chase. Not a single goddamn chalk-mark on a single fucking tree. He’d have a secure office and limitless back-up, but as far as the bureaucracies were concerned – State, Defense, NSA, FBI – Telemann was to become a non-person. He’d report directly to Sullivan and shed the rest of his professional life. At the time, preoccupied and slightly awed by the scale of the assignment, Telemann had simply agreed. That it might mean the formal end of his CIA days hadn’t occurred to him. It was like waking up to snow in August. It was slightly unreal.