Maestro

by John Gardner

  “Yes, it’s Cyril,” Apted said with a sly smile. “Could’ve killed my old man. Not a name I often own to.” He, as Herb knew, had owned to quite a number of different names in his time. At the Office there was a rumor that their sister service had Apted on their payroll as well. Cyril Apted, the Security Service’s long-term penetration within the Intelligence Service.

  “Best do a resignation as well, while you’re preparing that statement,” Cyril said at one point. “They’re going to shoot us like fish in a barrel.”

  “You sending in your papers, then?” Herb asked between trying to work out sentences, with Vicki doing her best to correct his grammar.

  “Me? Don’t need to, old Herb. Me? I’m the cat with nine lives and I’m only on number five. Think I’ll go for a stroll and see if I can tie up some loose ends. I’ll see you later, so.” This last in a quick Irish brogue.

  So Herbie prepared his statement, not knowing that Gus had already taken over and was sending people shooting around town doing good works; lighting bombs under them; doing, not just thinking; waving, not just drowning.

  At around five the Whizz called to say get the evening papers. “Our bloody horoscopes prophesy death and disaster. Oh, yes. The Chief’s gone off to the South of France and his closest Deputy’s caught the first plane to Malta. No forwarding addresses.”

  So Herb sent Vicki out to get the papers and she came back white-faced. Until then Herbie had hoped that, by some miracle, the press would trumpet a victory against the evil and illegal army in the North of Ireland, but they were taking the high moral ground. One of the evening papers had even hired a famous novelist, whose beat was the secret world and Whitehall, to put down the guidelines. “Can we stand by and see murder done in our streets by trained thugs who hide behind the government’s skirts, to shoot first and ask questions later? Questions must be asked now.” He went on to say something about seeing a glint of granite death in the eyes of policemen on the beat that day.

  The lead story described the killings inaccurately and with an overabundance of gore, while the big news was that the PM had made a statement at two o’clock that afternoon. The words, as they often are, were fighting words, chock-full of reasonableness. A full and exhaustive inquiry would be undertaken. A judicial inquiry, by men and women who stood only by truth. “London is not a boom town of the old Wild West,” the PM had said. “If these deaths are, in fact, the result of illegality, and turn out to lie at the door of any government or police agency, then the true culprits will be brought to justice. But I suspect we shall find they can be laid at the door of the heartless and cowardly men of the Provisional Irish Republican Army.”

  The Minister had stated that he had not been informed of any irregular operations being run against terrorists, and, no, certainly not, COBRA had not met for months.

  Big Herbie Kruger prepared his second resignation. Then, around six in the evening, when he was wondering if it was worthwhile going home only to be called back in again, the Church Militants—Messers Parsons and Deacon—arrived, their faces wreathed in smiles and their eyes glittering with hope.

  “Got the buggers,” Billy Parsons said, as though that explained everything.

  “Bloody Met. Should have done their job with more care,” from Dave Deacon.

  “Which buggers and what care?” Herbie asked, a shade angrily. Parsons and Deacon were, in fact, on his payroll. His responsibility.

  “We were sent back.”

  “With a couple of senior police officers.”

  “Couple of Chief Supers.”

  “Told to pull the place apart.”

  They were like a pair of old music hall fast comedy men—boom-boom.

  “What place?” Herbie asked, suspicious to the hilt.

  “Bloody bomb factory.” Parsons.

  “Where the Micks got chopped.” Deacon, arms outstretched as though he were about to do a buck-and-wing.

  “What you talking about?”

  “We were sent back to the bomb factory. Scotland Yard, it seems, gave it only the most cursory going over.”

  “So?”

  “So, we tossed the drum proper.” Again the boom-boom tag line from Deacon, which, oddly, Herbie understood very well. It meant they had torn the place apart.

  “And?” Herb asked.

  “And we come up with the goods. Four nine-mill, auto shooters, an Uzi and all their maps, plus some code words and a very interesting diary.”

  “Very sloppy tradecraft.” Parsons.

  “Really?”

  “Of course, really. In front of the two Chief Supers. They took Polaroid pictures, time and date stuff. All Sir Garnet.”

  “Sir which?” For a second Herbie was lost.

  “All jonnick.”

  “Honest,” Parsons finally translated. “Honest, aboveboard, Mr. Kruger. Straight up, only they were under the floorboards.”

  “And who told you to return, go back?”

  “Mr. Keene, sir. He’s, like, in charge of what they’re calling damage control. Good, isn’t he, Bill?”

  “Shit hot. Oh, sorry, miss.” Vicki waved her hand as though swatting a fly.

  “Mr. Keene told you exactly what?” Kruger lowered his head, like a charging bull, and gazed at the pair with an undisguised malevolence.

  “He said he did not think the Plod had done the place over thoroughly enough. Said it in front of the Plod, Mr. Kruger. Told us to go back and find something. Anything. The Plod were to be witnesses.”

  “And repeat what you found.”

  “Four nine-mill. Brownings and enough ammo to blow away the Horse Guards. Also a pouch full of maps and drawings …”

  “And the diary with instructions and code words for using on the blower.” Deacon.

  “They’d committed these things to paper?”

  “Stupid of them, eh?”

  At that moment the telephone rang and the Whizz was on the other end, breathless. “Herb, you heard the good news?”

  “Which particular piece of good news we talking about?”

  “The cache of stuff at what we thought was the bomb factory for starters. Then there’s—”

  “You got Gus Keene there, giving orders?”

  “Gus’s in charge, actually, thank God.”

  “So.”

  “So, he wants you to attend a little soirée he’s holding over here at the witching hour.”

  “You mean midnight?”

  “Twenty-three fifty-nine, to use army lingo, yes. Everyone’s going to be there. Old chums’ reunion.”

  The Whizz sounded so relieved that Kruger could hardly believe what he was hearing. Though he never at any future point admitted it to anyone, there was always a lingering doubt in his mind about the cache discovered at the so-called bomb factory. If he reached deep into his conscience, he had doubts about a great number of things concerning the saving of Cataract, but one fact could never be denied: Gus Keene made all the right moves and saved the day magnificently.

  They met, like plotters, at midnight at Head Office. Deep in what were known as the bunkers. To be exact, Briefing Room Two, which was all done up like a private screening theater, with plush seats, subdued lighting and facilities for everything. All that was missing was the organ that rises from the bowels of the earth, follow the bouncing ball, and usherettes—as they used to be called—ready to serve choc-ices from those little trays hung around their necks by straps.

  Instead, there were coffee and sandwiches—smoked salmon, to be precise—and as the Whizz had predicted, everyone was there, including Tony Worboys, looking content and more like a city broker than an Irish farmer, and the SAS team with their Colonel, plus a large contingent of cops.

  Gus Keene was certainly there. Tall, imposing, his dark hair falling limply across his leathery brow. Completely imperturbable, and very much on the ball.

  “We have to take care of certain matters,” he began. “The general reaction to the quite lawful killing of four terrorists this morning appears to
have boomeranged and it is our job to get the fact across. This I propose to do in the Coroner’s Court, and I have already applied for anonymity for both members of my service and for the gentlemen from the SAS. Also for certain police officers. The Prime Minister may bleat about judicial inquiries, but we don’t need them, and we shall avoid such a thing, even though the latest intelligence is that the families of the dead terrorists are planning legal action against HM Government. In Ireland the deaths are seen as overkill.”

  He went on, carefully enumerating the weak points—“the weaknesses of our case, and how they will be dealt with,” as he put it.

  First, there was the time frame. Officialdom, to save their scented backsides, had openly divorced themselves from the whole business. This called, Gus maintained, for a defense that showed everything happened so quickly and in such a potentially dangerous order that there was no time for the niceties of establishing a political chain of command. He brought on Tony Worboys, who carried with him a series of tape recordings: conversations filched from telephones and snatched from the air.

  Herbie listened to these with a growing interest, for all four members of the Active-Service Unit were heard planning the monstrous act, their voices captured, clear and unmistakable, by every kind of microphone that existed in the business. There was even a last-minute telephone conversation between Mary Frances Duggan and her Battalion Commander, who was giving her the “go.”

  “It’s too fast,” she had remonstrated.

  “It’s the only chance you’ll have to get Lancer in your sights before the summer. I need this thing doing now, so do it and get the bloody thing over with.”

  Suddenly, as he listened, Herbie recalled from the trivia stored in his mind that their crypto—Lancer—for the target—Rich and Famous, as they had nominated—was the crypto in use by the United States Secret Service for John F. Kennedy on the day of his assassination.

  It was also clear that the argument was going to be that Tony had discovered the operation a bare twenty-four hours before the attempted arrests. With amazement he realized that Tony’s original telephone call, plus his own trip to Dublin, was being cut from the history, which had been skillfully rewritten.

  Gus next called in the watchers, alerted by himself, who had latched on to the four identified members of the Provos’ unit. Gus was not just sorting things out, but making himself the major actor. The watchers, one by one, stood up to be counted, giving evidence on the way they had identified and followed the Gang of Four. The exception was the team—a man and woman—who had lost Mary Frances Duggan for several hours.

  “This can now happily be accounted for. Cyril?” Gus said, speaking to Apted, who climbed onto the platform like a phantom and asked if the projectionist was ready.

  That very afternoon, he told them, he had gone to see some of his friends in their sister service. He had remembered that he had knowledge of a surveillance operation they were running on a house in Camberwell. The house was a suspected Provo safe house, and there was a tiny piece of evidence that could mean explosives and other bomb-making items were being stored there.

  His friends in the surveillance operation had been most cooperative and had provided him with some photographs, and there, suddenly, like a surprise witness at a murder trial, was a series of grainy black and whites that showed Mary Frances Duggan arriving at the Camberwell house. Then a tape captured by a stand-off mike that caught a conversation from vibrations from one of the windows.

  The tape told them little, but that little could easily be worked up into damning evidence. Then there were more pictures, time-and date-stamped like the previous ones, of Mary Frances Duggan leaving the house.

  “I am pleased to tell you,” Gus continued, almost pushing Apted out of the way, “that the Camberwell house was raided earlier this evening by Special Branch with an SAS backup team.”

  This was considered prudent when you bore in mind the events of the morning. Five people had been arrested and a considerable amount of explosives, together with all the other paraphernalia of bomb makers, had been removed. The most interesting discovery had been a bomb in actual preparation, with an electronic remote control made from a converted walkie-talkie.

  This, Gus claimed, was the bomb that would have been used on this very day to murder. He purposely did not use the true identity of the royal target, but gave the two cryptos: the Provos’—Lancer—and theirs—Rich and Famous.

  Finally, he switched to the events of the previous morning, for it was now almost one-thirty in the morning of day two. He described how he, as duty officer, had received the news of the imminent threat, together with the evidence that the assassination team was holed up in what they truly thought was a bomb factory in the middle of the West End of London.

  “I shall simply tell the truth,” he lied. “How a decision was made between myself, people on a committee within my organization, and a senior police officer at Scotland Yard.” He then played some further evidence tapes that were very real and included conversations among the Gang of Four in their hideout in the warren of streets running between Regent and Oxford streets.

  Herbie had already heard those tapes, and the evidence was damning if only because the four Provos had said, clearly and unequivocally, that their operation was on for that day. No Coroner or—come to that—judicial inquiry could possibly have a problem with those particular conversations.

  The Commander from Scotland Yard went up at Gus’s bidding and did his thing, saying that he had asked for, and got, a small SAS detachment from Hereford. It was his belief that the situation was, as he put it, “exceptionally dangerous and could possibly become a siege, which, in turn, could become a suicide bombing which might devastate a whole section of the West End. At that point, we all believed that considerable amounts of explosive were in that house. Therefore, I felt a fast-action professional team was essential.”

  Gus did some cross-examination, which Kruger remembered as being tremendously professional.

  “Are you aware of the rules of engagement regarding members of Her Majesty’s Armed Services and terrorist groups?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then why didn’t you seek out someone with the necessary authority? It appears that you, together with certain other officers, just went out of your way to exacerbate an already dangerous situation.” The “certain other officers” were, of course, members of the intelligence community, but in those days nobody ever said “Secret Intelligence Service” aloud. There was an unspoken arrangement with the Security Service to the effect that, should an SIS officer have to appear incognito as a trial witness, the SIS brother or sister would be referred to as a member of the Security Forces—doublespeak-spookspeak.

  “It was my opinion, and my judgment”—the Commander was very smooth—“that a token force of SAS soldiers would be helpful in making certain the arrests took place with minimum danger to the general public.”

  “In the final analysis, the danger was to the four poor young men and women within the house,” Gus drawled like a barrister making a big point.

  “Because of what happened I am now doubly sure that I did the right thing.” Confident and relaxed. Absolutely convinced of being in the right.

  The SAS Colonel was on next, and he was magnificent. Rules of engagement tripped off his tongue like deadly poetry. He was even able to justify their presence as “a perfectly normal operational requirement.” Adding, “We did not expect to be forced to resort to violence.”

  Gus played it this way and that, then brought in two P4 lawyers—P4 then being the branch of secret affairs that provided necessary professionals like doctors, lawyers, Indian chiefs and compliant senior fire officers (when arson became a dangerous subject).

  This pair laid into the policeman and the soldier, pulling tricks that they would never have got away with in court.

  Then, just about everyone had a go at the four SAS men who had done the shooting, and it became obvious that they had not been chosen for their
warlike skills alone. Each of them was bland, intelligent and, seemingly, very honest.

  Last, about four in the morning, they played the video. Again and again the Gang of Four walked from their front door as the hooded pair of soldiers appeared from the end of the cul-de-sac and the words “Police! Stop! Stand still!” echoed from noises off. Then the moves, and the word Bailiff.

  Gus froze the frame to ask who had said “Bailiff” and what it had meant. The Commander and the Colonel both owned to what was basically an order to use force.

  “Why?”

  “You have eyes, sir, haven’t you?” For the first time the Colonel sounded sharp and piqued.

  So, again and again they watched the grisly ballet. Then, to Herbie’s immense surprise, after the SAS had disappeared as if by a warlock’s spell, the cameras moved in close on each of the bodies. Two police officers, with an ambulance man in tow, turned over the corpse of Mary Frances Duggan and there, for everyone to see, was a 9mm Browning in her hand, slipping from the fingers onto the pavement. So with Patrick Sean Glass, only he had a small frag grenade.

  The entire disclosure worried Big Herbie at the time, but everyone appeared to think this was exactly what had happened, and you could not see the join on the tape.

  Now, going through the papers in Gus’s study by the glow from a green-shaded student lamp, it worried him even more because these papers contained a lot more detail. Payments made to certain specialists; logs that told of videotape being reprocessed and copied over a period of four and a half hours. Audio laboratory logs. Small ex gratia payments to a pair of actors. All unexplained, leaving the odor of sulfur in his mind.

  Twice, as he sat in the locked study, Bitsy Williams knocked on the door. “There’s food, Herbie. Come and have something to eat.” To which he replied, “Later. Not now. Busy now.”