The Devil's Breath (2 page)

The decrypt from Amman passed across the desk. The President read it, fidgeting with a pencil as he did so. Then he looked up.

‘What do we know about this business in New York?’

‘Nothing, sir. Yet.’

‘OK. So let’s have us find out.’

‘It’s in hand. They’re checking now. They’ll phone.’

There was a long silence. The two men looked at each other. Then the President ran a tired hand over his face. Soon now he’d be going back to Maine, a little fishing, a little sunshine, a little fun. It was important to try to kid the rest of the world that life went on as normal. Even with the Middle East about to blow up. The President looked down again at the note.

‘What’s the worst?’ he said.

‘The worst?’ Sullivan frowned. ‘The worst is, that it’s true.’

‘And?’

‘And …?’ He shrugged. ‘We close New York.’

The President gazed at him. Fatigue, or some trick of the light, had somehow flattened the planes of his face. He looked terrible.

‘You serious?’

Sullivan nodded.

‘Yeah.’

The President looked at him some more. Then he shook his head.

‘We can’t,’ he said. He brooded for a long moment, turning in his chair and staring out of the window. ‘That’s what the bastard wants. And that’s why we can’t do it.’

One of the three telephones on the President’s desk trilled softly. He lifted it to his ear. He was still staring out of the window, the pencil between his teeth. He listened intently for a full minute, then he put down the phone without a word. He looked at Sullivan across the desk and nodded at the telephone.

‘It
is
true,’ he muttered. ‘They ran the full analysis this morning. Takes a while in New York.’

‘Are they sure?’

‘You bet.’

Sullivan nodded slowly but said nothing. The President looked at him, a moment of frank appraisal, then got up and walked to the window. After a while, Sullivan cleared his throat. ‘We need a fireman,’ he suggested. ‘Someone to take care of this.’

The President nodded, grunting assent. Then he turned back into the room. He was frowning.

‘Like who?’ he said.

Sullivan thought for a moment, trying to resist the temptation to play the old White House game. Instant decisions were the currency of most administrations, including this one. They were supposed to demonstrate a certain macho domination over events. They were supposed to put you where the job description said you should be. In control.

‘Someone good,’ Sullivan said carefully. ‘Someone solid.’

‘Sure.’

‘Someone who’s worked in the Middle East. Knows the ground. Knows the Israelis …’

The President nodded again, the impatience evident in his voice. ‘You bet.’

‘Someone …’ Sullivan shrugged, running out of words.

The President looked at him a moment, distracted by some passing thought, then he began to frown again, leaning forward, stabbing the air with his finger, suddenly urgent. ‘Listen, John.
Whoever picks it up, it has to be tight. And it has to be quick. The invisible mend. With me?’

Sullivan blinked. Even thirty years’ citizenship couldn’t, just sometimes, keep the Irish out of his voice. It was there now, exhaustion mostly, and real concern. ‘That’s freelancing,’ he said quietly.

The President nodded. ‘Damn right.’

‘The Chiefs’ll hate it. The Chairman, too.’

‘Who says they’ll ever know?’ The President paused. ‘Who says they even
deserve
to know?’

The President shot Sullivan a look. August 2nd, the day the Iraqis invaded Kuwait, had left the United States high and dry. None of the Intelligence services had predicted it was going to happen, and when it did, the Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon had precious little in the drawer to deal with it. It had taken Saddam just four hours to seize Kuwait City. Yet for days afterwards in Washington, the President and the military had sat at opposite ends of the city, stewing quietly, wondering what in God’s name they could do. After years of supporting Iraq, the President felt utterly betrayed.

‘Tight,’ he said again, ‘
real
tight.’

Sullivan nodded, the point made, the argument over.

‘You want to meet this guy? Whoever he is?’

‘No.’

‘You want me to handle it?’

‘Yes.’

‘You sure, sir?’

‘Yes.’

Sullivan nodded again. Personal contacts were usually essential for the President. People didn’t exist for him unless he’d actually met them. The fact that this normally iron rule was not to apply was itself significant. Whoever he found, whatever his name, the guy he’d task was to be totally out of channels, totally his own man, the ultimate freelance. Sullivan shrugged, his orders clear, the reservation in his voice quite gone. ‘OK,’ he said.

The President stared at him for a moment, then strode across the room, back towards the desk. In ten hectic days, with the Iraqi army massing on the Saudi border, peering south, eyeing
20 per cent of the world’s oil reserves, he’d banged heads and bent arms, and committed the world’s most powerful nation to the defence of King Fahd. He’d ordered carrier attack groups into the Persian Gulf. He’d mobilized a quarter of a million troops. And now he was close to slipping an economic noose around Saddam’s neck in the shape of binding UN sanctions against the Iraqi regime. In response, Saddam had annexed Kuwait, closed Iraq’s borders and taken thousands of foreigners hostage. Some of them – lots of them – were American. That was bad enough. But what was far, far worse – now – were the two brief paragraphs still lying on the desk.

The President picked up the decrypt. The implications were terrifying. New York. A weekday. Five p.m. The height of the commuter hour. One of the main thoroughfares. Hundreds of cars. Thousands of pedestrians, shoppers, office workers,
kids
for Chrissakes, totally innocent, totally unawares. And they had the stuff. He knew they had the stuff. The guy up in New York had said so. He’d said it was industrial grade. That was the phrase he’d used, just now, on the phone. Industrial grade. One hundred per cent. The real McCoy. As good as anything to come out of Dugway or the Rocky Mountain Arsenal. And it wouldn’t stop there, either. If they did it once, they could do it again. And again. And again. Until no one with any brains left would
ever
risk New York. An entire city. America’s finest. Empty. The Big Apple. Gone.

The President let the decrypt flutter to the desk. It landed, as it happened, upside down. He stared at it for a moment.

‘Find your guy and get him to Tel Aviv,’ he said. ‘The Israelis know more about these bastards than we ever will. Tell them they’re on the team. Tell them we’ll take care of the rest of it.’

‘Rest of it?’

‘Yeah …’ The President looked at him a moment, then gazed out of the window again. ‘Saddam.’

*

McVeigh sat in the Crouch End branch of McDonald’s, spooning sugar into a lukewarm cup of coffee. He’d told Billy about Yakov an hour ago. He’d freed up half a day, and collected the kid from school and broken the news as casually as he could, in
a traffic jam on Muswell Hill. His plan was to keep the thing as low-key as possible – no drama, no big announcement, just a word or two about an accident, something entirely innocent, something that might have happened to anyone. Put this way, McVeigh hoped the news might simply come and go, the simplest explanation for Yakov’s abrupt departure from the football field. He was completely wrong.

Billy sat across from him. His burger was untouched. ‘What happened?’ he said for the second time.

McVeigh glanced round, uncomfortable. The place was full of kids, mothers, prams, shopping. There was lots of laughter from a birthday party in the corner. He’d have chosen somewhere else for a real conversation. Not here. McVeigh glanced across at Billy. The boy hadn’t taken his eyes off his father’s face. He wanted an answer.

‘I don’t know,’ McVeigh said.

‘Yes, you do.’

‘I don’t.’

‘It was in the papers.’

‘How do you know?’

‘A boy told me. Jason.’

McVeigh looked at him for a moment, then nodded, conceding the point. Jason was the team’s goalkeeper. His father owned a small corner shop. The shop sold papers. Sometimes Jason helped behind the counter. McVeigh toyed with his coffee. Not even sugar made it taste right.

‘He was shot,’ he said slowly. ‘Someone shot him.’

‘Who?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Why did they shoot him?’

‘I don’t know.’

The questions came to an end. Billy sat completely still, more still than McVeigh could ever remember, his face a mask, no trace of emotion. McVeigh reached out for him, trying to comfort him, trying to say in some simple, direct way that he was truly sorry, but the boy withdrew his folded arms, tucking them in against himself, a warning for McVeigh to keep his distance. McVeigh looked him in the eye, trying to move the
conversation along, playing the parent, trying to coax the boy out of the hole he was digging for himself, but the questions still lay on the table between them. Why did Yakov die? And who killed him?

Abruptly, McVeigh changed tack.

‘Have you talked to your mother about this?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘She didn’t know him.’

McVeigh nodded, trapped anew by his own questions. Part of him was beginning to understand what it was that made Billy such a good centre-forward, why he scored so many goals. The boy was utterly determined. He never took his eye off the ball. Yakov again, exactly his analysis. McVeigh frowned.

‘You think I should know how he died? Who did it?’

‘Dunno.’

‘You think I should try and find out?’

He glanced up. The boy was still looking at him, expressionless, unblinking. ‘Yes,’ he said at last.

‘Why?’

‘Because he was our friend.’ He glanced suddenly at his father. ‘Wasn’t he?’

McVeigh nodded slowly. A woman at the next table was trying to spoon-feed a baby and listen at the same time. He wondered what she made of their conversation. He looked at Billy again.

‘So how would I do that?’ he said. ‘How would I go about it?’

Billy shrugged. ‘Dunno,’ he said. ‘That’s what you do, isn’t it? Find out things?’

McVeigh smiled for the first time, amused by the small truth of his answer. He picked up the coffee cup and risked a second mouthful. Billy was still watching him, still waiting. ‘Well?’ he said.

McVeigh frowned. There was something in the boy’s voice that he couldn’t quite place. At first it sounded like hostility, something close to bitterness, then he realized that it was something else entirely. Without using the words, the boy was
indicating a responsibility, telling him what he should do. Yakov had died. There had to be a reason. He’d been a friend of theirs. So it was McVeigh’s job to find out. McVeigh put the coffee down.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘My turn.’

‘What?’

‘My turn. My turn to ask questions.’

Billy shrugged again. ‘OK,’ he said.

McVeigh looked at him for a long moment.

‘Say I found out why he died. Who did it. Who shot him …’

‘Yeah?’

‘What difference would it make?’

‘
Difference?
’ The child stared at him, the stare of someone who can’t quite believe their ears.

McVeigh leaned forward. ‘Yes. Why should I do it? Why should anyone?’

‘Because …’ Billy’s eyes widened with a sudden anger. ‘Because he’s dead. Because they shot him. Because …’ His voice faltered a moment, racing ahead of what he was trying to say, ‘because he was so
good
.’ He clung on to the word for a moment, then – for the first time – he looked away, down at the yellow styrofoam box with the cold burger and the limp thatch of shredded lettuce. He picked at a chip for a moment, inconsolable, then his head fell forward into his hands and he began to sob, his whole body shaking, pushing McVeigh away when he reached across the table, trying to comfort him.

Afterwards, back outside, it was raining. Billy sat in the passenger seat of the car, staring ahead, his face quite blank again. McVeigh fumbled for the ignition. He wanted to reassure the boy, to tell him that everything would be all right, that he’d probably make a few enquiries, find out what he could, call in a favour or two. Instead, on an impulse, he suggested they drove across to Upton Park. West Ham were playing a pre-season friendly. He’d seen it advertised in the paper. They could have doughnuts at half-time, and Coke. Billy was still staring through the windscreen. He didn’t appear to be listening. ‘I want to go home,’ he said numbly. ‘Please.’

*

Ron Telemann left his wife’s BMW on the fourth floor of the ‘M’ Street Colonial parking lot, and walked two blocks to the address his secretary had typed on the index card. The call, she said, had come through at 10.57. The meeting was scheduled for noon. On no account was he to be late.

Already sweating in the sticky heat, Telemann glanced at his watch and quickened his step through the start of the lunch-time crowds. His secretary had been lucky to find him at all. Three days into his annual leave, he’d been minutes away from leaving Washington and driving south, the kids in the back of the beaten-up old Volvo, the windsurfer and the rubber dinghy on the roof, a fortnight’s provisions in the back, his wife leafing through the Rand McNally, looking for yet another route to the tiny North Carolina resort they’d been visiting for nearly a decade. ‘Sullivan,’ his secretary had warned when he’d exploded on the phone. ‘The man says do it, you do it.’

Telemann rounded the corner of ‘K’ Street and crossed the road on the green light. He’d met Sullivan on a number of occasions, a big, heavy-set White House staffer, a rising star with the Bush crowd. He’d put in good solid years at State during the sixties and early seventies, buffered himself with a small fortune from real estate during the Carter presidency, and worked his ticket back to the centre of the Republican administration under Reagan. Now, word was he’d made himself irreplaceable at the NSA, acquiring a desk at the White House and a nice view of the Ellipse. Telemann’s previous dealings with Sullivan had left him acutely wary. The guy was Irish. A lot of what he said was blarney. But he had real muscle, the kind that comes with age and good connections, and he never hesitated to use it. With Telemann’s own career in the balance, it was probably worth being half a day late on the beach.