(2013) Collateral Damage (7 page)

'Yes, I'll be back,' said Dove. He was not sure whether he meant
it.

After dinner, while his hostess washed the dishes, he and Day
drank Scotch, a measure of the importance Day attached to the occasion. Young married
teachers at state schools do not, as a rule, keep spirits in the house.

'How long do you think you'll be in London?' asked Day.

'Oh, about a week I expect.'

'And then the Middle East?'

'Yes.'

'Have you sorted out what bits yet?'

'Not really. I'm leaving that to the travel agent. Egypt mostly,
I think. You know, pyramids, Alexandria, and down to Luxor for the Valley of the
Kings. Then Baal beck to see the ruins ...'

'Isn't that in Lebanon?'

'Yes, I think it is.'

'Not really a spot for tourists just now, I should have thought?'

'No, well, I wouldn't go if there was any danger,' said Dove
hastily. My God, he suspects something, thought Dove. 'I'll probably go to Crete
as well,' he said, to throw him off.
'More likely to go there
than the Lebanon really.
Might go to Israel, have a look at Jerusalem too.'

'It'll cost a few quid, won't it?'

'Well, I've nothing else to spend it on, have I?' Dove sensed
that the questions were over. He didn't like lying to Roger, but was frightened
that he might do something to try and stop him. 'You'll keep in touch?' said Day.
'You know, the cultural postcard reeking of sun-tan oil, that sort of thing.'

'Of course, me on a camel.
From D. H.
to T. E. Lawrence in one giant stride.'

That's better, thought Day. More like his old self. For a moment
there the
most crazy
idea had flashed across his mind.
He dismissed it. Stephen was much too steady for that. Now if he was in his position
things might be
different ...

A little while later he asked: 'Anything new on who did it?'

'Only what I've read in the press. The police seem to think he's
probably a German connected with one of the Arab terrorist movements.'

'Not much to go on, then?'

'Do you think they want to catch him?' said Dove, suddenly angry.
'Christ, do you honestly think they really want to and have a plane of package tourists
hijacked from Torremolinos or some precious bloody ambassador marched out of his
garden party into a bloody coal cellar and kept there until we let the bastard go?
Nobody, unless you count the Israelis, wants to catch these people. They're on to
the safest thing since duckshooting.'

'Oh I don't know ...'

'Well, I do,' said Dove. 'Look at that Palestinian bird Leila
Khaled. The police actually pulled her out of the hands of an El AI crew at Heathrow,
locked her up for a few days, and then kissed her goodbye after her friends had
hijacked a VC-10.'

'Times have changed. Governments have learned to be tougher.
They've taken their cue from the Israelis. They were pretty good terrorists themselves
at one time.'

Day was older than Dove. He had newspaper memories of the booby-trapped
bodies of British sergeants banging in Palestinian orange groves and a bomb collapsing
the King David's hotel in Jerusalem over ninety people.

'Oh, I know that,' said Dove. 'It's these freelancers, these
Europeans who get involved I don't understand. What motivates them?
Money?
Boredom - more fun robbing banks than working in them?
They like killing?
The bloody world revolution?
The KGB,
the CIA or some other set of initials we've never heard of? What?'

Koller held the envelope up to the naked light-bulb again. 'Can
you see it now?' he said. Ruth was standing next to him in the planned kitchen,
nodding her
head,
her eyes open wide like a child watching
a magician. She was holding the lamp-shade.

He had re-folded the envelope so what had been its edges were
now in the centre. Against the bulb it was possible to see that what had been the
top edge had been cut over half-way down the length of the envelope and then glued
together so that a narrow margin of adhesive was visible either side.

Koller ran through the other letters in the day's delivery just
as he had that morning, motivated by boredom more than anything else, when Ruth
was out showing solidarity at the picket line of some immigrant workers. A similar
shadow could be seen on two more envelopes. The third was a letter from the Inland
Revenue to the journalist who owned the flat and the OHMS printed all over it had
evidently secured it an unread passage.

'Congratulations,' said the German. 'You have finally made the
big time. They're opening your mail.'

'What made you suspect?'

'I didn't, but I have nothing better to do than check these things.'
It was ten days since the bombing and he had not left her flat once.

He told her about the advances the security services had made
since the days of the steaming kettle and scalded hands. There were basically three
ways of opening somebody's mail. There was this way, the sharp cut and the repair
which could only be detected by somebody who knew what he was looking for. Then
there was the gadget known as the spinning-needle used on more sensitive mail, diplomatic
for example. The needle was inserted into a small hole in the side of the envelope
and, powered by an electric
motor,
it spun the letter into
a tight little cylinder so that, with care, it could be extracted through the hole.
The third method was to use infra-red photography, but generally speaking this was
only satisfactory if the letter covered no more than one side of a single sheet
of paper. Even then, the way it was folded could create problems.

'Christ,' she said. 'They're watching the flat.'

'Not necessarily. It depends how interested they are. At the
moment they're sufficiently interested to open your mail -'

'And tap the bloody telephone,' she interrupted.

'I don't think so. Not the way you mean. Do you really think
you are so important? It takes hours transcribing a lot of tapes. Don't flatter
yourself, honey. I think for you, if they do anything, they connect a printometer.'

'A what?'
She ignored the condescending
tone. He often spoke to her like that.

'They don't listen but this machine, the printometer, is connected
to your line at the exchange and prints out a record of all the numbers you call.
They find out who your contacts are. It's a German invention.'

'So was Zyklon B.'
Sometimes
she could
not resist reminding him of her Jewishness because it was his most vulnerable point.
When he was a little drunk, he only ever got a little
drunk,
he would talk about his father the Nazi and what a bastard he was. There was a long
pause; for a moment she thought he was going to hit her, but all he said was: 'That
is not very funny.'

'No, it wasn't. Sorry.' Don't be a bloody fool, she thought.
Don't needle him, he's under strain. How would you feel in his position? She had
wanted to talk about the woman he killed with his bomb, but they never did. She
knew she was technically an accomplice,
an accessory
after
the facts. She had never intended to get in this deep. Not even for him.

They sat at the kitchen table drinking cognac out of balloon
glasses. She lit a cigarette. 'The telephone has been sounding a bit funny,' she
said. It was not a serious observation. It was a remark intended to put the conversation
back into gear.

'That's shitbull. You can never tell, believe me.'

'The word's bullshit.'
'

'Can you say it in German?'

'Why are we arguing?' Now she wished she had never mentioned
the telephone. It was an amateur's remark. She hated to sound like an amateur when
she was with him.

'We are arguing,' he said with one of his flashing grins, like
a neon
light lighting up a dark street, 'because I have
been imprisoned here for ten days. It is a very pleasant prison and the prisoner
has certain privileges most prisoners do not have.' She touched his hand, pleased.
He very rarely referred to their sex life or made the slightest demonstration of
affection out of bed. 'But it is still a prison. Sometimes I would like to go out
for a walk - even in the rain.'

'What happens now?' The limbo existence was wearing Ruth down
as well. Each day was a struggle to disguise her fear. Immediately after the bomb
the television and newspaper reports had sustained her. The enemy was out in front,
giving press conferences, making appeals for witnesses. Then, after a couple of
days, the bomb didn't receive a single mention in the bulletins or a paragraph in
the newspapers. It was as if the whole thing hadn't happened. Yet she knew that
it had and there were people out there hunting him - and with him, her. She wanted
to see a big headline saying: 'Police baffled'.
Or - why not?
-
some
innocent picked up and charged, preferably some
fascist Irishman who wanted to blow up members of another Christian sect. But nothing
had happened. This business with the mail was the first development.

She would have liked to talk about it with her comrades in the
party, even raise the matter at one of the self-criticism sessions, but she knew
she would only be told to break off her association with him or leave. It would
be like a nun confessing to an affair with the gardener. They might even grass on
him. They didn't like elitists and, besides, she had just been elected to the central
committee.

He sipped his brandy slowly and asked her about the committtee.
She was quite surprised. She never imagined he would bother to retain such trivia.
His attitude towards the party was always one of amused contempt.
The middle classes playing at revolution.
Sometimes, in her darker
moments, she had even doubted if he was a socialist.

'Can you remember the exact date when you were elected?' Yes,
of course she could. It was only five days ago.

'Please, have you got any envelopes left from letters you received
before then?'

She found two. He held them up to the light. No mark. 'I think
you have an informer on your central committee,' he said.

'Oh, c'mon ...'

He made a clucking sound and jerked his blond head up and to
the right. It was an Arabic gesture of disbelief he had first acquired in a Palestinian
training camp almost ten years before.

'Listen. Your letters are now being opened. A week ago, before
you were on the committee, they were not being opened. Special Branch doesn't bother
with the little fish, you see. Now you're on the committee they take an interest.'

'But nobody knows I'm ...'

'Exactly.
Except the
committee.
How many people?'

'Sixteen.'

'Sixteen people and the people they sleep with. That makes thirty-two
people at least, probably more. And one of them is getting his ten pounds a month
from the Branch just in case you swap your printing press for gelignite and plan
to blow up the Houses of Parliament.'

She knew it was true. She thought of all the earnest comrades
on the committee and wondered which one. Of course, they would suspect her, daughter
of the establishment.

'Christ,' she said, 'you're a cynic.'

'I'm alive.'

'What are you going to do?'

'I think I'm going to leave a little sooner than I planned.'

'But if they're watching -'

'I don't think they will have a close watch on you. They don't
like your politics so you're under surveillance. They read your mail, tap your telephone
maybe. These things are automatic once you have reached a certain position in your
sort of party. They do it to the communists all the time. But to watch your apartment,
follow you around,
that's
a big operation, expensive. They
would need to have a big team to do it. There might be talk. It might get back to
your father. They would have to have a very good reason.'

He was verbalizing something he had spent a long and worrying
time working out that afternoon. He was giving her what he had come to call the
good scenario. There was also a bad scenario. It went like this. They knew he was
in the flat, they had placed a cordon around it and there was no chance of him getting
away. Once they knew where he was they were taking their time, in case he wasn't
working alone and somebody else
swam
into the net. It was
also safer for them to grab him outside. They could do it with less warning. Not
give him time to get the Browning out. So even if nobody else did come along much
better, from their viewpoint, to wait until he thought it safe enough to venture
out and then get him.

He didn't want to tell the girl about the bad scenario because
he suspected that she was already on the edge of hysteria. He would just have to
take his chances. He had already decided to go out unarmed. With the British police
there was a good chance of survival. For a terrorist they would be armed, but compared
with the Germans or the French they were not generally triggerhappy. The main reason
for this was that they had not been shot at as much. Of course, he couldn't be sure.
It depended on how nervous they were or whether among them there was a man bored
with target practice longing to put a bullet into a real terrorist. Then again there
might be some political encouragement not to catch him alive for fear of embarrassing
reprisals by his comrades. The British were such accomplished hypocrites. He imagined
a conversation between the Home Secretary and the Metropolitan Police Commissioner
- he would be much too sly to put it on paper and both parties would make tape recordings.
The politician would tell the policeman that he would quite understand, and could
rely on his absolute support if, in the circumstances, this crazy German terrorist
proved much too dangerous to take alive.