The Devil's Breath

by Hurley, Graham

  Sullivan was muttering something else, his voice low and blurry. Sometimes, from fatigue or anger or sheer laziness, he had trouble getting the words out. Telemann bent to the speaker. ‘Pardon me?’ he said.

  ‘Analysis.’ Sullivan raised his voice. ‘We got you some help.’

  ‘Who? What help?’

  ‘Guy from the Agency.’

  ‘Who?’

  Sullivan’s voice faded again, break-up on the transmission, and by the time the interference had cleared, he’d gone.

  Telemann was downtown, his car parked, by seven-thirty. He walked the two blocks from the parking stack and took the elevator to the fourth floor. Juanita was already at her desk, a big woman, middle-aged, impeccably groomed. What little time Telemann had managed to spare for social chit-chat had gone nowhere. She’d moved north from Atlanta. She’d once worked for the Pepsi Corporation. There’d been a husband, maybe even kids, but now she lived alone, somewhere out in Silver Spring, riding the Métro to work every day. In this city, in every sense that mattered, she belonged to Sullivan. Now she smiled a welcome and picked up a small pile of mail. Beautiful hands. Long, scarlet nails. Telemann sifted quickly through the mail, standing by the desk. The promised ULTRA intercepts were nowhere. He glanced up.

  ‘Stuff from NSA?’ he said.

  ‘In there. Waiting for you.’

  Juanita indicated the smaller of the two inner offices. When Telemann had left for New York, it had been empty. Now, evidently, someone had moved in. He frowned, began to pursue it, but Juanita was back at the big IBM, her fingers moving sweetly over the keyboard. Telemann hesitated for a moment, then crossed to the office door. He went in without knocking. The desk had been moved from the window to the darkest corner. Bent over a pool of light from an Anglepoise was a familiar figure: lightly striped shirt, blue braces, bony face, sallow complexion, the thin cap of hair beginning to recede from the huge forehead. He looked up. He had a pen in his hand, the 15-dollar Shaeffer that never left him.

  Telemann grinned. ‘Pete,’ he said. ‘Pete Emery.’

  The other man smiled. ‘Hi.’

  ‘You on board? Mr Analysis?’

  ‘Yep,’ he said drily. ‘Saddled and signed up.’

  The two men shook hands. Juanita appeared with two polystyrene cups and a flask of coffee. Telemann reversed a chair, pulling it up to Emery’s desk. It was still grey outside, the light diffused through the blinds. It felt, Telemann thought, slightly spooky. Two novices in some new religious order, picking their way, a strange mixture of excitement and dread.

  ‘How did he sell it to you?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Sullivan.’

  ‘He didn’t. I was ordered over here. I didn’t have a whole lot of choice.’

  ‘They sack you, too?’

  ‘Yeah. Sort of.’

  ‘You object?’

  ‘Not at all,’ he said wryly. ‘Peace and quiet. Regular salary. Security. Retirement benefits. Who needs it?’

  He glanced down at the desk, and Telemann recognized the red-bordered ULTRA files. The computers over at NSA were programmed to recognize key words in the hundreds of daily pages of decoded intercepts. One of Telemann’s first requests had been for Middle Eastern cable and telephone traffic, dating back to June. The stuff had come sieved through one of the big Fort Meade mainframes, and he’d been dreading yet more paperwork. Now, though, he didn’t have to worry. As promised, Sullivan had solved his little problem. More to the point, he’d recruited one of the best brains in the CIA’s Analytical Directorate.

  Telemann looked up at Emery. ‘You got the whole story?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Believe it?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Why?’

  Emery hesitated for a moment, gazing down at the NSA reports, the long bony fingers riffling through the sheets of light blue paper. Then he looked up. ‘Because it’s simple,’ he said. ‘And effective. Plus it checks out.’

  ‘Already?’

  ‘Sure.’ His eyes returned to the NSA intercepts. He lifted one from a separate pile near the phone. ‘I had the data re-run,’ he said, ‘with new key words. Whole bunch of stuff.’

  ‘And they came up?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Lots of them?’

  ‘Enough.’

  Telemann nodded. ‘Baghdad come up?’ he wondered aloud, thinking of the kid who’d disappeared from the Manhattan Plaza, Benitez’s little bombshell.

  Emery watched him for a long moment. The light from the Anglepoise shadowed the planes of his face. ‘No,’ he said at last, ‘it didn’t.’

  ‘Damascus?’

  ‘Negative.’

  ‘Tripoli?’

  Emery shook his head again. Then he leaned back in his chair, hands behind his head, eyes studying a small crack in the ceiling beside the air-conditioning louvre. ‘There’s nothing outgoing from where you’d think to look first,’ he said carefully. ‘Nothing that I can find. Nothing obvious. But then there’s no reason why there should be. Run a major operation, and you hide it under the biggest stones.’ He looked at Telemann. ‘Even the rag-heads would figure that.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘So—’ the eyes were back on the ceiling again ‘—who else might be interested? Given the simple things? Like proximity?’

  ‘Tel Aviv.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Emery nodded slowly. ‘You bet.’

  ‘You got stuff out of Tel Aviv?’

  Emery nodded again. The eyes were closed now. He looked tired. ‘A little,’ he said. ‘Enough.’

  Telemann reached for his coffee and swallowed a mouthful. He’d first met Emery back in ’81. Telemann had been running a covert liaison programme with the Argentinian Junta out of the Embassy in Buenos Aires. Argentinian military intelligence, G2, were obsessed with the Monteneros, up in Nicaragua, and their paranoia about Marxism extended to training a largish team of guerrillas in neighbouring Honduras. Emery, back at his desk in CIA headquarters in Langley, had mocked the operation from the start. Buenos Aires was 3000 miles away from Nicaragua. The Argentine generals were a bunch of fascist thugs. All they wanted was leverage in Washington. US interests would have been better served by the Mafia.

  Telemann, an eager convert to the can-do ethic of the new administration, had flown back from Buenos Aires, enraged by what Emery was doing to his operation, by the latest acid memo from his desk. He’d stormed into Emery’s office. He’d accused him of disloyalty, of betrayal. The row had gone on for most of the afternoon, ending in a bar in downtown Washington, with Emery at the wrong end of a bottle of bourbon but still smiling, still sceptical, still pointing out the difference between White House hype and genuine yield. We do Intelligence, he kept saying. We deal in facts. And to deal in facts you need three things. You need to source it. You need to prove it. And then you need to sit down awhiles and think about it.

  In the end, he’d been right. As the decade developed, the CIA had become the tool of an administration bent on forcing its view on the world. Spread a map and the proof was there. The CIA supported right-wing tyrants around the world. Zia in Pakistan. Doe in Liberia. Marcos in the Philippines. Duarte in El Salvador. Look, Emery used to say, late in the evening in Charlie’s Bar, over in Georgetown, look at the deals we cut. Fancy guns, and the latest helicopter, and the world’s best personal security, and a couple of million bucks. For what? For a foot in the door and a hand on the tiller. At this, with decreasing conviction, Telemann would say his piece about world communism and the global conspiracy, vintage Reagan, and Emery would smile, swaying gently on his bar stool, and pat him on the shoulder, his pet commando. ‘Sure, buddy,’ he’d say, ‘you wanna get into bed with the slave owners, just you go ahead. Only never kid yourself who gets fucked …’

  They’d become friends. Despite the differences in their age and temperament, despite their very different views of the world, they’d found it comfortable to be around each other. Emery, the older man, was a sceptic, almost Jesuitical,
the perfect foil for Telemann. Telemann ran on 100 octane, always had. Emery favoured the slow lane, taking his time, enjoying the view, consulting the map from time to time to plot the most interesting route. He lived out in Maryland. He had a loveless marriage, no kids, and kept a sailboat on the Bay. Laura adored him, and so, in his own way, did Telemann. He was wise. You could trust the man, depend on him, and he cared, too. Recently, after three perfect days on the water, the kids had started calling him Uncle.

  Now Telemann studied Emery across the desk. The surprise of finding him in the office had gone. In its place was a dim recognition of the kind of team Sullivan had put together. Telemann, at heart, had never stopped being a commando. His own brief spell behind a desk had proved it. He missed the action. He loved it out there. He knew he was good, and he was gratified that Sullivan had thought so too, but having the right guy at the sharp end wasn’t enough. You needed someone at the heart of it, someone strong and experienced and independent enough to take a careful look at the bits of the jigsaw Telemann would shake on to the tray. That was Emery’s talent. That was what he was doing in this dark little office. Emery would be his case officer. Emery would run him.

  Now Telemann studied Emery across the desk. Already, the man was poking at the jigsaw. Telemann nodded at the pile of intercepts. ‘Our friends in Tel Aviv …’ he prompted.

  Emery nodded. ‘I think they’re watching,’ he said carefully, ‘but I don’t know how much they can see.’

  ‘But they’ll know something.’

  ‘Sure,’ he smiled. ‘Bound to.’

  Telemann got up and walked to the window, peering down through the slats in the venetian blind. Four floors below, the traffic was backed up from the intersection. The Israelis had the tightest security service in the world, no question. The Middle East was theirs. In Intelligence terms, they practically owned it. They had priceless human-source assets all over. Damascus. Cairo. Baghdad. You name it. They took extraordinary risks, but the planning and the back-up were impeccable. Telemann had worked in Tel Aviv, and knew the Mossad headquarters on King Saul Boulevard, the ugly grey building with the discreetly armoured windows, and knew some of the agents, too. They were good. They were the best. They trusted nobody. They’d go to any lengths to secure a particular operation, achieve a particular hit. They were ruthless as hell and they seldom got burned. For years, Telemann’s idea of heaven was to drive into the car park out at Langley and find the building full of Israelis. Only then, he’d always thought, would – could – the Agency really deliver.

  Telemann stepped away from the window and returned to the desk. ‘So what do we have?’

  Emery glanced down and picked up a yellow legal pad. Telemann recognized the careful script, key words underlined, the odd exclamation mark.

  Emery was frowning. ‘There was some traffic into Hamburg last month …’ he began.

  Telemann nodded. Mossad loved Hamburg. They had a cosy relationship with the West German anti-terrorist police, a legacy from the Munich débâcle in ’72, but of all the German cities Hamburg offered them the warmest welcome. Mossad kept a small permanent outpost there, housed in the fortified basement of the Israeli Consulate on Alsterufer.

  Emery glanced up, then bent his head again and went on. ‘We picked up a cable on the sixteenth,’ he said, ‘requesting information on a list of firms.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘There are seven companies, four of them German.’ He peered at his own writing. ‘Two of the others are Belgian. The other one’s Dutch. They’re listed, one to seven.’

  ‘And what do they do, these firms?’

  ‘They make chemicals of various kinds. Trimethyl phosphite, for instance.’

  ‘Is that important?’

  ‘It might be.’

  ‘Why?’

  Emery looked up. He wasn’t smiling. ‘Because trimethyl is an organic compound. Add potassium chloride and phosphorus oxychloride and you get Tabun GA.’ He paused. ‘These firms do the other chemicals, too. They sell the stuff for export. I guess Tel Aviv want checks on the major European ports. They’re looking to establish channels, names, dates …’ He paused again. ‘End-users.’

  Telemann nodded slowly, glad already that Emery was on the team, that he was spared a day and a half with the industrial chemists, that a chain of events was beginning to shape. He gazed at the paperwork on the desk. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Yes.’ Emery bent to the yellow pad again. ‘There’s another intercept. It’s sourced from Vortex. They’ve been targeting the EEC negotiations in Brussels. This happened into the net a coupla days ago.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s a sign-off. Single phrase.’

  Telemann frowned. ‘And what does it say?’

  ‘It says that number six went out through Antwerp. Three days ago.’

  Telemann looked at the earlier intercept, the list of companies. ‘Number six?’ he queried.

  Emery didn’t bother checking. ‘Littmann Chemie,’ he said. ‘Company in Halle.’

  ‘Halle’s East Germany. Or was.’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘So why Antwerp? Why not Rotterdam?’ He shrugged. ‘Or Hamburg?’

  Emery leaned back in his chair for a moment. ‘Drive due west from Halle, takes you straight to Antwerp. It’s a big port. Millions of tons of stuff. No one asks too many questions.’ He paused. ‘Ideal.’

  Telemann nodded. ‘So what do we have on the German company?’

  ‘Nothing. Yet. They definitely produce the basic chemicals, but I’ve nothing specific.’ He paused. ‘The rest of the firms are in the same game. If it ain’t chemicals, it’s industrial plant, bits and pieces of the manufacturing process, expertise you’d need to make the stuff. From Baghdad, I guess it reads like a shopping list.’

  Telemann rubbed his eyes for a moment, looking away, towards the window. Outside, the traffic was moving again. ‘Antwerp …’ he mused.

  ‘Right.’

  ‘And the Israelis have been there already. Is that what we’re saying?’ Emery looked at him for a moment, then his hand strayed to the pile of NSA intercepts. He lifted it several inches in the air, then let it fall to the desk. Telemann watched his coffee dancing in the cup.

  ‘Electronic intelligence—’ Emery shrugged ‘—There’s a limit. What we need here is a good human source.’

  Telemann looked at him. ‘Me?’ he said at last.

  Emery nodded, reaching for his own coffee. ‘Yes,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘You.’

  *

  It was three days before the harbour-master at Ramsgate heard news of his 5-gallon drum.

  The local fire brigade had driven down the same afternoon, arriving within an hour of his call. They’d parked the big tender on the quayside and pulled on protective clothing before approaching the drum. Fishermen sorting out their nets had watched curiously as they bent over it, two men in one-piece yellow suits, the bulky breathing sets strapped to their backs, their faces half-hidden behind the clear perspex masks. They’d turned the drum over, squatting beside it, noting the skull and crossbones and the terse single word, ‘Poison’, and the painted-over line of German at the base, looking for extra information. As far as they could judge, the drum was in good condition. Inset into the lid was a heavy screw-cap. One of the fireman had flexed his fingers in the thick rubber gloves and tried it. It wouldn’t budge.

  The firemen delivered the drum to a warehouse on a trading estate at the back of the town. The warehouse belonged to the Highways Department. The drum stayed inside the secure container, parked between an air compressor and a neat row of traffic cones.

  Eighteen hours later, a van from a company called Dispozall arrived at the Highways Department depot. Two men got out and inspected the drum. They had a brief conversation. Then one of them returned to the van and used the mobile phone to contact the local authority. Neither of them had ever seen a drum quite like this one. Better to ship it west, to the Waste Transfer Station at Newbury, than risk an on-the-s
pot analysis. The oil pollution officer, on the other end of the line, agreed. He’d raise the paperwork, and they’d take care of the rest of it.

  Half an hour later, the contract authorized, he phoned the harbour-master. The two men had an occasionally difficult relationship. Information was one way of keeping it sweet.

  ‘That drum of yours,’ he said cheerfully, when the harbour-master answered, ‘we’ve sent it away.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Analysis,’ he said. ‘No one’s got a clue what’s inside.’

  *

  By the time McVeigh arrived, mid-morning, the antiques shop around the corner from Queen’s Gate was open. He stepped in through the door, closing it carefully behind him. A heatwave had settled on London, and already the temperature was in the eighties.

  The shop appeared to be empty, and for a moment or two McVeigh browsed amongst the tapestries and the discreetly mounted brass lantern-clocks. There were very few pieces of furniture, but the stuff looked good. In the middle of the shop stood a large mahogany dining-table. There were eight chairs arranged around it, upholstered in pale yellow. McVeigh looked at it for a moment, trying to guess the price. Foreigners and royalty, George had told him on the phone, no riff-raff.

  There was a movement at the back of the room and McVeigh glanced up. A small, slight man stood at an open door. McVeigh could see a flight of stairs, carpeted in red, behind him.

  ‘Can I help you?’

  McVeigh nodded, and crossed the room towards him. The man stepped out of the shadows. He looked sixty, maybe older. The suit was nicely understated, and a pair of gold-rimmed glasses hung by a chain from his neck. Latvian Jew, George had said. Third-generation import from Riga.

  ‘Mr Enders?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘My name’s McVeigh. I wondered if you could spare me a little of your time.’ He paused. ‘It’s about last week. The shooting …’ McVeigh inclined his head towards the door. Yakov had died ten paces down the street.