Hidden Man (25 page)

She came out pretty quickly. Looking beautiful, the way she always did, a terrible temptation for a man
and aware of that power and using it all the time. They didn’t kiss as she stepped into the car, but that was probably just a precaution for the neighbours. Instead there was a movement, a kind of visible friction in the front seat, and Roth appeared to hand Alice what must have been a present. And then they were off, his hand stroking the back of her neck, then changing gear, then touching her again. Ian felt terrible for Benjamin.

He followed them to the Lanes borough Hotel. They went in separately and stayed for more than four hours. While he was waiting, Ian discovered that the room had been booked under a false name. A Mr Dulong, of Edinburgh. It was a week before he discovered just how sick that was, just how conceited Roth had been. At one point Ian phoned Taploe and told him what was going on, but the boss had just sounded vindicated, as if Roth’s behaviour justified the increased surveillance, proving a larger crime.

The only thing that surprised Ian about the whole sorry, shabby affair was how angry Alice looked when she emerged from the hotel at 4.46 p.m. As if they’d had a row. It wasn’t the look, at least, of a woman who’d had herself a good time. But then Ian had never been very good at reading the female face; perhaps that was why he had never risen any higher within the Service. His own wife, after all, had tricked him for months: all that time saying she was going to be late back from workand all that time fucking another man. Ian thought about Ben again and
wondered if it would be unethical to get a message to him through Blindside.

Coming down the steps of the hotel, Alice pulled a phone from her bag. Ian noticed that her hair was still slightly wet at the back of her neck, a flush in her cheeks from the shower. She dialled a number and began looking round for a cab. And then she was talking, arguing, jabbing the air with her hand. Ian had a good idea who she was speaking to, a hunch of intuition. Ten quid, he said, laying a little wager with himself as Alice stepped into a cab. Ten quid that the spoilt little bitch is feeling guilty about what she’s just done and is taking it out on
him
.

36

‘Alice, what I’m trying to tell you is that I just don’t have time to talk about this now…’

Ian was right. Ben was standing outside a smoky pub in Russell Square, Bone’s letter in his hand, fending off an Alice moan.

‘All I’m asking,’ she said, ‘is that you show me a little sympathy. I’ve been at work all day and nobody was around to help me out and I just wanted someone to understand that. All you’ve done is spent the last five minutes saying it’s not that big a problem. It’s just typical male behaviour.’

Ben momentarily moved the phone away from his ear, staring at it in disbelief.

‘That’s all I
was
doing,’ he said. He could see McCreery staring at him from inside the pub. ‘I was
trying
to understand, Alice, trying to show you a little sympathy. But you aren’t interested in seeing that, in listening to what I’m saying. You just want to use your situation at work as an excuse to get angry with me, as a way of making me feel bad instead of you. And now you’re saying that it’s “typical male behaviour”. I can’t fucking believe that we’re even having this conversation…’

He heard the squeal of the taxi’s brakes.

‘Are you in a cab?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘Look, try to understand this.’ Ben hoped that he could end the conversation with one swift speech. ‘I am your husband. I automatically understand and share anything that affects you. That’s what it means to love somebody. You hurt when they hurt. So take it as read that I am
sympathetic
. Take it as read that if my wife calls me up in the pub while she’s having a shitty day at work, I am
understanding
. But if all you want is sympathy and a kind of mute approbation, get a dog.’ McCreery was now standing at the bar, buying them a third pint. ‘The difference between me and a cocker spaniel is that I am able to offer you something more than a dog can; that is, a
solution
to your problem. And I don’t know why it’s suddenly fashionable for women to consider that as some sort of male flaw. If I were you, I’d be grateful for the second opinion.’

‘So what
is
your solution?’ she said.

‘I’ve just told you. I told you ten minutes ago, at the start of this fucking conversation. Go home, take a bath, watch a DVD and relax. You can go back in tomorrow, get one of the work experience people to help with your research and finish the piece. Now I’m here with Jock, we’re talking about the letter. I can’t do anything about this at the moment. I have to go.’

If he hadn’t hung up, she would have kept him on the line for another half an hour. Ben ended the call, switched off the phone and put it in his jacket pocket. McCreery was still at the bar, a pint of Guinness
settling on the counter next to a tumbler of whisky.

‘Everything all right, old chap?’

‘Sure. That was Alice on the phone.’

‘Woman trouble?’

‘Woman trouble.’

He handed the letter to McCreery.

‘Like I was saying before, I’m only showing you this because I think you have a right to see it. I can’t go to the police because I don’t know how the Secrets Act works. But it seems important that you should get a look at it.’

Very calmly, McCreery extracted Bone’s letter from the envelope.

‘This is the photocopy?’ he said.

‘That’s the photocopy.’

At a nearby table, a group of men erupted into laughter and one of them knocked over a glass. Ironic applause amid mutterings of ‘Nice one, Dave.’ McCreery frowned as he held the letter in his hand, six pages of crumpled A4.

‘How long did you say you’ve had this?’ he said.

‘Just a few days. I made the copy when I received it. For Mark,’ Ben lied. He did not yet want to tell McCreery that he had been planning to give the copy to a contact in Customs and Excise.

‘Mark didn’t get one himself?’

‘I have no idea. I haven’t spoken to him in days.’

‘Why don’t we sit down? I’d like to read it.’

They returned to their table in a quieter corner of the pub. Ben felt that he had drunk too much on an
empty stomach, two pints of Guinness as McCreery regaled him with stories about his father. His head felt light and dizzy. It took Jockten minutes to read the letter, his face occasionally jolting into a look of disbelief, and when he had finished, he said, ‘Do you mind if I read it again?’

Ben took the opportunity to visit the gents. Before he returned, he bought himself a packet of cigarettes from a vending machine and some crisps and peanuts at the bar. McCreery was on the final page as he sat down.

‘Yes. Bob has always had some fairly potty theories about what went on in Afghanistan.’

‘So you knew him?’

‘Oh, absolutely.’

‘What kind of theories?’ Ben asked.

McCreery waved his hand dismissively over the table, as if to swot them away.

‘Oh, I won’t bore you with that now. Suffice to say the Yanks have had it up to here with his conspiracies.’ He chopped a hand against his forehead and took a swig of his double Scotch. ‘I had a nasty feeling he’d do something like this.’

‘So it’s true.’

Ben laughed nervously as he asked the question.

‘Oh God, no. Well, not all of it, in any event. All this stuff about Bob being Station Chief in Berlin is complete balls, for a start. I don’t know what he’s talking about. Bone was a Cousin, certainly, but very low on the food chain.’

‘A Cousin?’ Ben asked.

‘CIA.’ McCreery assumed a quieter voice. ‘He did end up in Afghanistan, but Christopher would hardly have regarded him as a friend. Far as I’m aware, they only met half a dozen times. Bob was a bit fuck struck by the Brits, to be honest, a complete Anglophile. Boodles and the Queen, all that empire jazz, made him drool like a puppy. So an old-school operator like your father would have been right up his street. Old Bobby Bone loved a bit of posh.’

McCreery appeared to look back at the letter and emitted a gusty laugh on page four.

‘And this bit’s absolute cock,’ he said, waving the paper noisily in his hand. Ben couldn’t tell whether McCreery was genuinely irritated or just being loyal to the firm. ‘Neither was your father continually based in Kabul, nor was he undeclared. He simply made visits to the Afghan capital from time to time. Until later on, Bone was mostly working for an aid organization, and then only as a conduit for American funding. The Yanks were chucking so much money at the Soviet problem they didn’t know if it was arseholes or breakfast time.’

‘So why would Bone just make all this stuff up?’

With a theatrical lurch of his eyebrows, McCreery intimated that the American was simply demented.

‘God knows,’ he said. ‘Perhaps some of it’s true. I ran agents for years that Christopher knew nothing about. That’s the business we were in. And Bob’s analysis of the Soviet army is pretty accurate. The
drugs, the bullying, the corruption. But the idea that a foreign diplomat - particularly a tall, white, elegantly attired Brit like Christopher Keen - could just walk around the bazaars of Kabul calmly recruiting disgruntled Russian soldiers is frankly lunatic. One might as well try hitchhiking in Piccadilly. Your father was a pedigree intelligence officer, my God, but even that would have been beyond his considerable talents. Besides, one didn’t have authorization to go after members of the occupying forces. That wasn’t our brief. We were anxious to get our hands on Soviet military technology, certainly, but their officers were exceptionally well disciplined and very unlikely to turn. As for their subordinates, the Office already had highly placed sources in Moscow who completely negated the need to pitch lower echelons.’

‘Echelons’, like ‘Cousins’, was another euphemism with which Ben was unfamiliar, but he felt too embarrassed to ask for a translation. Instead, he said, ‘What about what Bone says about the SAS? About you training the mujahaddin?’

McCreery hesitated.

‘Quasi-accurate, at best. We certainly sponsored de-badged British soldiers to report on the muj, and SAS did take a contingent to Scotland for training. But not to the Highlands, as our friend attests. The exercises took place in the Hebrides.’

‘And you were there?’

McCreery rolled his neck and implied with a glance that Ben should ask a different question.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to pry.’

‘Oh heavens, don’t worry. I’m just not at liberty to discuss specific operations in which I may or may not have been involved. Bit old-fashioned like that. Take my responsibilities rather seriously.’

‘Of course.’

‘Unlike dear Mr Bone, it seems, who has committed a flagrant breach of security. Still, that’s the American way. Shoot first, ask questions later.’

‘Friendly fire,’ Ben said, without really meaning to, and Jocksmiled. ‘So what
was
my father doing in Afghanistan? Can you at least tell me that? Can you tell me if there’s any link between him and this guy Kostov?’

McCreery coughed.

‘Let me give you a little history lesson,’ he said. Whisky in hand, hair faintly dishevelled now, McCreery might have been a professor of poetry discussing Yeats down the pub. ‘Throughout the 1980s, the Afghan resistance received arms and ammunition from a number of different sources: China, Egypt, the Pakistani intelligence service, even bloody Gaddafi got in on the act. Additional bulk funding was provided by the Saudis, the Reagan administration and, to a lesser extent, the Frogs, the Japs and our own Conservative government. Mrs Thatcher was a huge fan of Abdul Haq, for example, a key mujahadd in figure who was eventually murdered by the Taleban. Quite an alliance, I’m sure you’d agree, but we were all aware that the Soviets were
trying to surround the oil fields of the Gulf, which would have been catastrophic for the international community. At that time the CIA station in Islamabad was America’s largest international intelligence operation, far bigger than Nicaragua, Angola and El Salvador combined. Bone is right about a lot of this. Now there was a hawk in Texas, man by the name of Charles Wilson, a boneheaded Congressman of the McCarthy mould, who was paranoid up to his eyeballs about reds under the bed. Yes, for him - and for others with Reagan’s ear - Afghanistan
was
to be the Soviet Vietnam, no question. Wilson was a big fish in the House Armed Services and Intelligence Committee and he pushed a lot of money the way of the mujahaddin.’

Ben was beginning to glaze over with facts. He felt suddenly cold from the open pub door and put on his coat.

‘Alas, Wilson and others in Congress backed the wrong horse, and America has been paying for it ever since. Bone, as a CIA man, has a vested interest in playing down those failings at the expense of my own - and your father’s - organization. Allow me, for example, to illustrate the mess that many of us are still to this day cleaning up. Bill Casey, the head of the CIA whom Bone refers to in his letter, took a liking to an individual by the name of Gulbaddin Hekmatyar, who was the leader of the most fanatical group of mujahaddin, Hezb-i-Islami. By fanatical, I mean panIslam, that is to say an organization virulently opposed
to all things Western, from
Dallas
to Warren Buffett. This was an irony apparently lost on the Pentagon, who clearly thought he was Mahatma Gandhi. Both the Pakistani government and its intelligence service - without either of whom the Cousins simply couldn’t operate - were also card-carrying members of the Hekmatyar fan club, which rather explains the relationship. No matter that he’d organized the killing of other mujahaddin leaders in order to cement his power base, and had never been directly involved in any confrontation with the Soviet invasionary forces. That didn’t seem to bother the Yanks. Perhaps eventually they wanted a fundamentalist regime in Kabul to destabilize the communists in the north. Who knows? Always playing God, the Americans, never keep things simple. And, of course, these US-backed fundamentalists have had a field day ever since, knocking off Sad at in ‘81, blowing up US Marines in Lebanon. When it came to the Gulf War, in fact, Hekmatyar was one of the first public figures to denounce American involvement in Kuwait. Lovely way of repaying the favour, don’t you think?’