Confessor (27 page)

He must have puzzled at it for the best part of five minutes, and in that time he came to an unthinkable conclusion. They would not all get away: of that he was certain. Better for two to jump clear now than all of them perishing.

Gently he woke Khami, placing a hand over her mouth and putting a finger to his own lips so that she would not be afraid. Carefully he led her to the window and saw her eyes open wide in fear, so he whispered to her, telling her to get dressed, that he had a plan.

Now he also dressed and found one of the pistols that had a noise-reduction unit fitted to its barrel. He told Khami to find a weapon and ammunition as he went about getting a spare pistol and even more shells.

Drawing Khami to the door, he reminded her of what they had been told in Baghdad. If there was danger, particularly a situation where local police or intelligence agencies were likely to take the entire team, then one or two—no more than two—members would have to take the initiative.

Her eyes widened again. Those instructions had been given in graphic detail. If this circumstance arose, they would be cleansed of destroying their brothers and sisters, for the survival of one or two members of the team was essential, even at the cost of the others’ lives.

Walid instructed her to go into the hallway that separated the two apartments. When she left, there was no doubt in her mind regarding what Walid was about to do. He did it by pressing a pillow quickly against Samih’s head and firing into the pillow. With the noise-reduction unit, the shot sounded like a small popping noise, as though it had come from far away. Samih’s head burst open, thick blood and gray matter flowering out from under the pillow.

He took the small briefcase in which Samih kept the bank account details, the checks, credit cards, passports and over two million dollars in forged hundred-dollar bills. Outside, in the passage, he handed the briefcase to Khami and told her to go past the lift and through the emergency door, which would take them down the stairs. She nodded and immediately did as she was asked.

Only when she had gone through the door did he lean on the bell beside the other apartment door. Eventually, a voice croaked something about not making so much noise. It was Jamilla who had peeped through the little security fish lens set into the door. Jamilla, he thought, would be an asset to him, but he dared not allow her to live. He shot her between the eyes as soon as she opened the door, then, swiftly, he moved into the bedroom and saw Awdah sitting on the bed, dazed with sleep. He killed him before Awdah even realized what he was about to do. One popping shot to the head.

Walid was a meticulous man, and he checked the pulses to make certain there was no life left in them before he let himself out and closed the door behind him. Khami was at the top of the emergency stairs waiting for him. She touched his hand and then his face in an action meant to signify her sorrow for what he had been forced to do. He did not even think about it. The trick now was to get out of the building without the police catching them. After that, he would have to get a report to
Yussif
. Then Khami would have to be told the real facts of life.

The emergency stairs, he realized, would not be safe unless they could use them to get access to the twin building of the apartment block. Once the SWAT teams moved in, they would shut off the bank of elevators and come up these stairs. That kind of people did not trust elevators. He gave Khami an encouraging smile, to pass resolve and courage to her. Then he explained what they must do, and do quickly.

Big Herbie sat Bex down in Gus Keene’s old study and laid out an overview of the situation. He needed her to listen, he said, and then tell him what conclusion she came to.

“First off, Bex, you’re a cop, a detective, trained in this kind of business. You can probably make sense from nonsense. Okay?”

“If you say so, Herb.”

He went through everything that had transpired since the night Gus Keene’s car left the road and exploded near the village of Wylye. With great care he took her through the knowledge that there was an Iraqi terrorist team out for vengeance here in the U.K., and another in the States. That his own life was threatened, together with Worboys’s and another officer’s. He did not mention that Gus had been included in the hit list. Then he gave her the complex details of Gus’s having recruited and virtually run an asset in Iraq for some years; how they did not have any handling details; how Gus had left a document giving the impression that the asset—
Jasmine
—was a woman with whom he had carried on an affair; and now, as she had just heard, it was Carole who had slept with
Jasmine
, who turned out to be a man. Like someone explaining a difficult concept to a small child, he told her of the
Jasmine
notice in
The Times
, and now of an answerback, which, by all that was secret, should have come only from Gus Keene.

“So, what you make of all that, Bex?”

“These telephone numbers, which you say are supposed to be map coordinates?”

“Yes?”

“They mean anything?”

“Don’t know, Bex. Haven’t checked them out yet. I hope Head Office is at work on them now. In the computer age, you would have thought that’d be easy as falling off a leg.”

“Log.”

“What?”

“You mean log, Herb.”

“Sure,” he said with a grin, and Bex Olesker knew then, at that moment, that Herb was completely himself again. Deputy Chief Worboys had gone into Kruger’s most irritating habits in some detail, and when she had first met him, Bex had thought that Herbie was a broken man with all the bounce knocked out of him.

“Okay,” she continued. “So we don’t know if they work …”

“We will. Given time and a following wind, which with Bitsy’s cooking shouldn’t be difficult. Sorry, I embarrass you. The quick answer is we’ll soon know if a map reference’ll come out of the numbers.”

“You knew Gus for a long time, Herb.”

“Since I was first found in Berlin by the Office. Gus was Military Intelligence in those days. The Office talked with him a lot. I was present, often.”

“You want to tell me about Berlin? How they latched on to you?”

“Not really. My father was a Luftwaffe pilot, killed during Battle of Britain. I hated Hitler from then on, even though I was just a kid. Not even teenager. My mother was killed during battle for Berlin. I kept my head down. The Americans picked me up and interrogated me. Found I was anti-Nazi. The old American OSS put me to work. I trawled the camps they had for displaced persons. DPs they called them, which is pretty obvious. There were a lot of Nazis—real high-ranking Nazis—hiding out in the camps. They called me a ferret. Got a lot of them—not ferrets, Nazis.

“Then OSS was closed down—well, it stopped being OSS. Lots of guys went home, out of a job, but a lot stayed on and eventually became CIA. I was being run by a guy called Farthing. He left, but before he flew out he took me to an SIS friend, name of Railton. Donald Railton, though everyone called him Naldo—family nickname. Lives in America now. Retired. He used me for the same job a couple of times, then brought me out and the Office trained me. That’s how it all began. Now I’m a dodo. I’m a dinosaur. Near extinction. Prowling around watching the end of an era, beginning a new one. That’s my history in a shell.”

“A nutshell.”

“Sure.”

“You really think of yourself as a dinosaur?”

“A little. Espionage, stealing secrets, is still very much in business, but there are new boys coming in all the time. Young Worboys was my junior—straight out of training—when I first knew him. They used to call the game the second oldest profession. But, now this is funny, Bex. I read in one of Gus’s magic books that magic is second oldest profession. Interesting, huh?”

“But you knew Gus from way back then?”

“Sure. Well, maybe I didn’t actually
know
him. He knew me, though. Gus Keene had amazing memory. When I next time met him, he knew me. Said that we had met in Berlin in the late 1940s. Incredible with faces and names. Never forgot anything.”

“Would you say that you’ve always know he was devious?”

“Not always. No. Came to see it after my little spot of bother.”

“And what was that?”

“Worboys didn’t tell you? Ha! I was naughty. East Berlin was out of bounds to me and the Office was letting an old network of mine go to whack and ruin. They tried to set it up again, running long-range, but I flew over cuckoo’s nest …”

Wrack and ruin, plus flew the coop, Bex thought, but did not fall into the trap by opening her mouth.

“I slipped over the wall. Bingo, got picked up by the Ks—KGB, that’s what we called them. They dried me out, and when I got back, the Office had me down here for a year—in this very house, this very room. Gus hosed me down, cleaned me out. A year with Gus interrogating is like twenty years real time. Got to know him then … and when it was over. Spent a lot of time with Gus.”

“And by then you knew he was devious?”

“Sure. Devious like barrel of monkeys. Devious is too good a word. Gus was the best. Guileful, shifty, underhanded, sneaky. That was Gus. Had all the good attributes for interrogator—Confessor, like we called him—or for a case officer in the field. Yeah, I knew then how devious he was. Secretive also.”

“Secretive, like a magician.”

“Didn’t have any idea about that. Not until I found out when he was dead. What you getting at, Bex?”

She raised her face, and for the first time Herbie saw that she could look quite beautiful. A line of poetry slid through his mind:

And beauty making beautiful old rime.

In praise of ladies dead and lovely knights.

He thought it was probably Shakespeare, yet, out of context, it had a certain poignancy for him. “What you getting at?” he repeated.

“It seems to me that your old friend Gus was even more devious than you ever imagined. The fact that he was a performing magician, under a pseudonym, makes a great deal of difference. He obviously thought like a good magician, and while I don’t find that breed terribly amusing as entertainers, I
do
appreciate their certain skills. The thought has crossed my mind that Gus Keene’s been leading us by the nose. He left a document where, if you followed certain clues, you’d find it. I’m talking about the
Jasmine
thing you unearthed. I also wonder—and it’s just a kind of sneaking thought—if Gus the magician and Gus the intelligence officer managed to disappear. To leap from the world in which you knew him into another world.”

“You mean he could be alive?”

“Maybe. It’s an option, isn’t it?”

Herbie looked as if he were suddenly and completely fatigued with sorrow. “There was a body,” he said, as though this were all he needed to prove that Gus had died in the inferno.

“So?”

“There was his watch, his Zippo, the stick pin. A body is a body.”

“Perhaps he met another body—coming through the rye,” she added.

“So that would make Gus a murderer. A killer.”

“In deceit he wouldn’t have the stomach for
that
?”

Herbie thought for a long time. “Yes,” he said, low and with a voice that seemed old beyond his age. Old and sad. “Yes. Yes, I guess Gus was ruthless enough if the stakes were really high.”

“Then I’d put money on it as a possibility. Just a possibility.”

“That makes for more problems. Why, Bex? Why, if you’re right, why would he do this? It couldn’t have been sudden, like the spurs of the moment. Something like this calls for great planning. If you’re right, he would have had to know what he was about to do for weeks before.”

“Yes.” Then quickly, as though reassuring him: “It’s only a possibility, Herb. Not necessarily true.”

Kruger grunted and reached for the telephone.

“Don’t tell anyone yet.”

“Not going to tell anyone. Wait.”

He dialed the Office and they put him through to Worboys. “Hey, Tony, you running those numbers through the magic machines yet?”

“Since we got them, Herb.”

“Make any sense? Got a match on some map reference yet?”

“No matches as yet, Herb. I’ll get back to you as soon as we have anything—even if it’s nothing, if you follow me.”

“Sure, Tony. Thanks.” Then, as though he had just thought of it: “Can you get me the telephone logs for this place—big house and this one—over the period of, oh, a month before and a week after Gus died?”

“You’re not thinking of an inside job, are you?”

“Not going to tell you, Tone. Just get me the logs. Is possible, yes?”

At the distant end, looking out on the view of the Thames and the London skyline, Worboys thought, That’s the old Big Herbie I know and love. Aloud, he said, “Okay, Herb. I can get the lot to you by the morning.” Privately, he thought, After I’ve had a sniff of them.

“Not tonight?”

“No way, Herb. First thing in the morning. I’ll get them to you by courier. Incidentally, I don’t suppose you’ve seen or heard the news yet?”

“Which news we talking about?”

“Two car bombs. Big. One directly outside the Luxembourg Palace, the other close to the Bourbon Palace. A lot of damage.”

“This is direct attack on the government, then?”

“That’s what it would seem like.” The Luxembourg Palace is home to the French Senate, while the Bourbon is the meeting place of the French lower house of parliament—the National Assembly or Chamber of Deputies.

“Responsibility?” Herbie asked.

“Nobody as yet.”

Kruger responded with his favorite obscenity. He replaced the receiver and turned to Bex. “Let’s go to the movies,” he said.

Ramsi, Samira and Nabil had left London on an early British Airways flight to Paris. They hired a car and drove in from Charles de Gaulle. They left the car in the underground park near Notre-Dame and took a taxi across to the Gare du Nord, where they picked up the explosive devices—two heavy steel cases left for them in two different lockboxes.

Samira and Nabil ate lunch at the station while Ramsi went off and stole a car—a small elderly British Austin. Samira took one of the cases, set the timer and left the car as close as she could get to the Luxembourg Palace. She then headed back to Notre-Dame, which was shrouded in scaffolding. Half Paris seemed to be under reconstruction, but the great church was open and she passed the time inside while Nabil was stealing a second car—a Citroën this time. Nabil and Ramsi both took the second car to the Bourbon Palace, set the bomb and took their time to find an empty parking slot.