Maestro

by John Gardner

  He remembered how things had gone in the Coroner’s Court the next afternoon. How Gus, with his law degree (which he had never used), held forth. How the SAS boys, Tony Worboys and a couple of others gave evidence from behind screens with electronic voice-altering throat mikes. The faces of the four solicitors hurriedly engaged by the families of the four victims, as they took in the magnitude of the planned crime, and the honest, straightforward and legal methods used to entrap the team.

  He heard again one of the SAS men responding to the Coroner himself. “Sir, it is not an easy thing to do, kill another person close up. But we were cleared to take action and, as you’ve seen, we were in grave danger.”

  While the Provos pledged revenge, and a small demonstration took place outside the court, the Coroner brought in the inescapable verdict: “Lawful Killing,” for all four victims.

  The incident remained big for some time, and security was noticeably tighter around Rich and Famous, or Lancer, depending where you were standing. Two books sold well: one from the Provos’ angle by a Jesuit priest no less; the other by an in-depth news team from one of the Sunday heavies. Within the Office, the entire thing was noted as Gus Keene’s triumph. Some said he was given a medal, and now Herbie saw from the documents that this was indeed the case. Why, though, he wondered? Why did Gus have what was virtually incriminating evidence in his files when the stuff should have been shredded long ago? He also recalled that it was only a year later that he resigned, for the second time, intent upon giving the marriage to Martha one last try. In the end, the Office helped put paid to that as well.

  It was impossible to sleep, so eventually Herb went off to the kitchen and took a plate of Bitsy’s sandwiches from the fridge, made coffee and carried the plate and mug back to Gus’s study.

  Gus himself seemed to be sitting across the desk from him, nodding and quietly telling him to get on with it. Herbie shuddered, for he could hear, in his mind, Gus’s voice: “You’re on the right track, old Herb.”

  In his time, Gus had been almost paranoid about security, and Cataract was something nobody talked about once it was over. Yet here was the entire file, open and unashamed on Gus’s desk.

  At the time, he recalled being very worried that Gus—a Confessor by trade—had been called in for damage control, which he did wonderfully. Why Gus? He asked for the umpteenth time. Who called him in?

  He flicked through the pages and, finally, there it was, the transcript of a telephone call—kept, no doubt, by Gus himself—stapled to a memo, signed and sealed, giving the job to Willis Maitland-Wood, First Deputy Chief. The old Chief’s signature was scrawled at the bottom, with an instruction, direct from COBRA, saying use the very best man. Gus was obviously thought to be the best man, for the transcript of the telephone call showed Maitland-Wood calling Gus at Warminster and saying, “Gus, I want you at Head Office faster than light. There’s something we need to take care of.”

  “Can’t it wait till tomorrow, Willis?”

  “Now, Gus. They need you now. Christ, man, I’ve got COBRA waiting on the other line.”

  “Give me a clue.” Herbie could just hear Gus lazily asking for the clue.

  Then, the bit that really shook Herbie. No crypto, no telephone spookspeak. Maitland-Wood just came right out with it. “SAS blew away four bad guys on Herbie’s watch—Herbie and young Worboys. Got to be put right, because nobody on the inside is going to take a fall. I have to fly out within the hour.”

  Herbie leaned back, one huge hand clamped to his temples. He gave an enormous sigh, wondering if the Provos, or even the splinter group FFIRA, would come back and snuff Gus after all this time? The car bomb was very professional, though he had a solid intuition that this was not the work of the Irish extremists.

  Out of the corner of his eye he saw that the silent phone was blinking its little red light.

  He picked it up. “Yes?”

  “Thought you might be working, old Herb,” Worboys said from the distant end. “You always were a night bird. Just wanted to tell you that I’ve got a watcher’s van for Monday—Gus’s funeral. The lot—son et lumière and a beautiful parking place. Talk to you tomorrow.”

  Herb sighed again, gathered up the Cataract file and dumped it into the small safe. Of one thing he was certain: he had one hell of a lot of digging to do in his travels backwards and forwards through Gus Keene’s life.

  While Herbie looked at this dubious past piece of secret history, the bombs were exploding in Paris. Four on the Metro, just as the early birds were off to work. Fifteen dead, twenty-four badly injured. One in a baggage hall at Charles de Gaulle just as passengers from a New York flight were collecting their luggage. There was also a shooting. A very senior army officer, leaving his mistress’s apartment at four in the morning, was gunned down on the street.

  There were no witnesses, though a waiter in a nearby café described a young couple who had dropped in for coffee around three-thirty. He told the police and the press that he did not think they had anything to do with it. “They were so in love,” he said. “I think they were on their way back to a hotel. I think they had only one thing on their mind.” Which in a way was true about Hisham and Samira.

  8

  THE INTIQAM GROUPS IN London and New York were getting a great deal of media coverage. In London the TV news anchors gave the almost daily shootings and bombings their usual, almost diffident, matter-of-fact style, while the newspapers pulled out all the plugs—“These cowardly acts of random violence can only stiffen the resolve of the British people …” was a sentence worked and reworked by editorial writers. The Prime Minister made several statements concerning what was obviously a campaign being stepped up throughout Europe.

  Beneath the surface came the hints. The FFIRA were denying this new wave of attacks, but journalists—from print media and TV alike—sent a message, sandwiched between the lines of their stories, that bluntly said that they did not believe the FFIRA. Within the various agencies, including the Anti-Terrorist Department from Scotland Yard—SO 13—it was known that the FFIRA had an elusive Active Service Unit in the United Kingdom, so they tended to lean towards the possibility that this was a rogue splinter group that had no access to the most favored explosive, the ubiquitous Semtex, in its various forms. Yet there was sophistication in the devices, and the most experienced officers claimed privately that the menace was truly new and came from the Middle East. There were pointers, they declared at conferences and briefings.

  In the United States there was, as the President said in a special broadcast to the people, “a heightened sense of concern that our enemies have resorted to these terrible and deadly acts, which brought forth death and destruction.” He pledged that the “wolves in sheep’s clothing, which seem to be in our midst,” would be hunted down and handed over to those who dispensed justice. In the meantime, every citizen—man, woman and child—would have to be on guard.

  Privately, in the Oval Office, he fumed to his Security Adviser, together with the Director of Central Intelligence, the Director of the FBI and the head of the NSA.

  “I’m not going to allow the United States to become a hunting ground as the Brits have allowed their country to be used as a killing ground for terrorists. I won’t have it,” he all but screamed. Then he questioned his experts in turn as to any leads they might have. There were none, except the certain fact that they were not being sucked into the British/Irish problem.

  The consensus was that these attacks came from renegade Middle East groups.

  “Well, track them down and kill them,” the President ordered. “You could take a leaf out of the Brits’ book. They know more about this kind of thing than we do.”

  The men who dealt with security went away, renewed their efforts and talked at length to their opposite numbers in London.

  Also in London, early in the week, Detective Chief Inspector Olesker, having been rapped over the knuckles for losing sight of the FFIRA unit, was told of a new assignment. The DCI would soon be wor
king in harness with the spooks, for the recent wave of terror appeared to have begun with the assassination of one of their own. The DCI was not happy, having heard strange stories about the “funnies,” as the police usually called members of both the Security Service and the SIS.

  Nobody had the slightest idea why Gus Keene had wanted to be buried in the graveyard of a small country church that served three hamlets lying in a triangle some seven miles west of Stonehenge. As far as they knew, Gus originally hailed from Berkshire, though this was a moot point these days because a section of Berkshire had been swallowed up by the hungry jaws of Oxfordshire in some political scheme that appeared to benefit nobody, but probably did.

  On the Sunday afternoon Big Herbie Kruger drove from the Warminster complex to take a look at what would be Gus’s last resting place. The church itself was small and originally Norman, with a great deal of well-meaning Victorian refurbishing: ST JAMES. ALL WELCOME. HOLY COMMUNION 8 A.M. SUNDAY AND WEDNESDAY. MATINS SUNDAY. 11 A.M. EVENSONG 6 P.M. VICAR: THE REVD. BRIAN TEMPLE. It was midafternoon and the west door was locked: a sign of the times in which we live that church doors have to be locked against possible theft and vandalism. The entire world, Herbie thought, will soon have to be locked against the mindless brutality and disingenuousness of crazy, morally bankrupt and uncaring people, and that did not include the terrorists.

  Herbie scratched his head and did a slow walk around the building and into the churchyard. There he discovered three other Keene graves: mother, father and, he thought, sister. That solved the problem. Gus had wanted to lie next to his kinfolk, and probably already had a plot marked out for Carole as well. Gus, if nothing else, was a realist. In life he had always taken care of things well in advance, if possible. When there was panic, he was just about the fastest thinker on his feet. Old Ambrose Hill used to say that his brain did the two-minute mile—regularly.

  At the top of the graveyard a splay of oak trees formed a demarcation line, with a thicket of hedge running in front of them. Kruger walked up the gravel path, past the graves of Smiths, Hails, Martens, Graces and Collins—all local names, it seemed. At the hedge he saw exactly where Worboys intended to put his van. A long meadow, with hay already stacked, reached up a shallow slope to the horizon, and a tractor path followed the line of the hedge. He craned right and left and thought he could glimpse a five-barred gate leading to a narrow metaled lane. They would bring the watchers’ van up behind the trees, sort out the best views, shove directional mikes towards the grave itself, hack holes in the hedge for the telephoto lenses and the infrared night stuff, and sit there for twenty-four hours.

  He had asked Worboys, yet again, why he was so set on having the watchers out for the funeral and its immediate aftermath.

  “Herb, old sport”—Worboys sighed wearily—“I’m doing everything by the book: covering my bum, if you like. Some odd mark turns up at the funeral, or comes visiting afterwards, I want to know, because as sure as eggs someone will know and I’ll be in the potage.”

  “Shouldn’t mess with potage,” said Herb, straight-voiced and -faced.

  This was when Herbie called Worboys on the afternoon of the sixteenth—the Tuesday—with a mouthful of questions and desires.

  He had gone quickly through the mounds of files on Gus’s desk, discovering that most of them contained information that should have—as the argot said—gone out of style long ago, meaning it was ultraclassified; some of it flagged “Secure A,” indicating the take must not get into the hands of either their relatives in D.C. or the sister service. “Out of style” meant into the shredders.

  “Tony,” Herb began, and Young Worboys became immediately alert, for he sensed in Herbie’s voice the smoothness of some phony mind reader hearing code words from his stooge.

  “Yes, Herb. What d’you want?”

  “We have a couple of problems. More than a brace, actually.”

  “Speak.”

  “Is what I’m doing, old horse. You know what Gus had down here?”

  “Surprise me.”

  “A lot of things that should be buried. Five fathom full—”

  “Full fathom five, Herb.” At the distant end, Worboys bit his tongue as he heard Herbie chuckle.

  “Sure. You got it. Anyway, old sheep, there’s stuff here I don’t want lying around.”

  “Oh, come on, Herb. You’re within the sacred circle there.”

  “Is the bloody sacred circle that worries me, Tony. Everyone’s after a piece of the action these days. Bitsy’s a nice girl, but I don’t even want her rooting through this stuff, so be a good chip and send something really secure, like one of those new safes that cannot be cracked even by experts. Get the okay from Homes and Gardens and have it sunk into the floor. Homes and Gardens haven’t been lopped off, have they? We still own them?”

  “Yes, but, Herb—”

  “I’m serious, Tony. I mean it. I’m in charge of this and I don’t want things lying around where the hired help can take a peep. Gus has nice locks on his doors, but I’m being careful.”

  It took another ten minutes for Worboys to agree, then Herbie made his big pitch. “Look, old sheep,” he began, in a way that made Worboys’s hair stand on end. “Look, you put me in charge, right? You said go find the people who did Gus, right? Just for old times’ sake. No pay, no packdrill, nothing. Then the Chief talked to me, private, person-to-person on a safe line, right? Repeated it. Read me my rights, okay?”

  “Yes. Right.” Very tentative.

  “Well, Tony, I want some paper.”

  “What kind of paper?”

  “I want authority to question people.”

  “What kind of people?”

  “From the past. Old Office people.”

  “Such as whom?”

  “Such as I ain’t even going to mention on a secure line.”

  “What exactly do you want, Herb? And is your journey really necessary?”

  “Completely. I need a document of authorization that’ll cut the red tape and make people talk to me. Something under the Chief’s signature. Finding whoever did Gus in, I think, pretty full of importance, no?”

  “Yes, for peace of mind. Yes.”

  “Then you give me peace of mind, Young Worboys. You’re covering your bum, I also want steel plates over my own rectum. You never know where this kind of thing can lead now that voices from the past are always popping up to haunt us. So, I want paper, the Chief’s signature, stuff that everyone will feel comfortable with. Verstanden?”

  Grudgingly, Worboys agreed.

  “Send it down with the safe, eh?”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  “Best ain’t good enough. Send the paper down, either with the safe or by special courier. Remind the Chief what he said. Said I could have anything.”

  “Okay, Herb, something else you want? Like an unlimited budget or something simple like that?”

  “Could do with use of one of your minders who’s looking out for Carole. Just for the odd few hours occasionally. Like tomorrow morning. Maybe Sunday as well. Okay?”

  “I’ll let Mickey know that you might need him …What for, Herb? Really, what for?”

  “Sit across Bitsy’s door when I’m away.”

  “You’re not happy with Bitsy?”

  A long pause during which Herbie made some odd whining and grunting sounds. At last he said, “Look, Bitsy’s a nice girl. Got her knees brown, know what I mean? But, maybe I’m uncomfortable …” He stopped, a knee-jerk in his mind causing a small stab of pain. “To be honest, I don’t want her operational. If she’d simply agree to minding this place, like she does with safe houses, that would be okay. But not operational. You follow?”

  In his office looking out on London, embraced by an unusual heat haze, Worboys knew what it was really about. Bitsy Williams had been the close female friend of Herbie’s now lost, and last, love.

  “Okay, Herb. Message received and understood. She is ecstatic to be working with you, though, so I’ll keep her on
until after the funeral. Then I’ll put it to her in plain language.”

  “Thank you many times over, old scout.” In the back of his mind, Herb wondered how Worboys knew Bitsy was ecstatic about working with him. Worboys’s personal sneak, he figured. The school leper who sucked up to the staff. Worboys and the Chief, just keeping an eye on old Herbie. He could even hear the conversations:

  “Old Kruger could be dead in the water, Worboys. I agreed he’d be the best man for the job. Agreed to bring him back with no paper. But …”

  “Oh, I don’t think …”

  “He took one hell of a knock. Seen men stronger than Kruger go doolally from less. Shell shock, battle fatigue, LMF …”

  “I don’t think you could ever charge Herb with LMF, Chief.” Worboys was quite put out. LMF meant Lack of Moral Fiber, a term out-dated in these days of political correctness, but still used by people like the Chief.

  “Keep an eye on him, Worboys. Once upon a time he had odd tendencies to go a-roving. Don’t want to have him weighed in the balance and found wanting, do we?”

  Herbie pulled himself back to the here and now with Worboys at the other end of the line. “Just in case you’re wondering, Tony, I still got all my marbles. Every last one, okay?”

  “Of course, okay.”

  “Good, then I expect the paper and the safe down here today. Seven o’clock latest. Right?”

  “Any difficulties and I’ll call, Herb.”

  “If there are difficulties, I’m long gone before the night’s out.”

  There were no difficulties. First, the paper arrived, by a tall courier, leather-clad on a fast bike. A very official document charging anyone with knowledge of Office business, past or present, to assist Mr. Kruger in every possible way. Doubts should be telephoned direct to Head Office. Time was of the essence. The Legal Department’s fingerprints were all over the thing, and Herbie nodded his big head, smiled his daft smile and chuckled with glee, silently so neither Ginger nor Bitsy could hear him.

  Five men and a van turned up around five and took two hours fitting the safe into the floor of Gus’s study, under Herbie’s instructions.