The Night Manager (49 page)

"He says I'm to bolt. Forget the cruise, bolt while there's still a chance."

"He's right," Jonathan murmured.

"It's no use bolting, Jonathan. It doesn't work. We both know that. You just meet yourself again in the next place."

"Just get out. Go anywhere. Please."

They lay still again, side by side on their separate beds, listening to each other's breathing.

"Jonathan, " she whispered. "Jonathan. "

TWENTY-THREE

Everything had been going swimmingly with Operation Limpet.

Burr, from his grim grey desk in Miami, said so. So did Strelski, next door along from him. Goodhew, telephoning twice a day on the secure line from London, had no doubt of it. "The powers that be are coming round, Leonard. All we need now is the summation."

"Which powers?" said Burr, suspicious as ever.

"My master for one."

"Your master?"

"He's turning, Leonard. He says so, and I have to give him the benefit of the doubt. How can I go over his head if he's offering me his full support? He took me to his heart yesterday."

"I'm glad to hear he's got one."

But Goodhew, these days, was in no mood for such sallies.

"He said we should stay in much closer touch. I agree with him. There are too many people about with vested interests. He said there was a whiff of something rotten in the air. I couldn't have put it better myself. He would like to go on record as one of those who wasn't afraid to track it down. I shall see he does. He didn't mention Flagship by name, neither did I. Sometimes it pays better to be reticent. But he was greatly taken by your list, Leonard. The list did the trick. It was bald, it was uncompromising. There was no getting round it."

"My list?"

"The list, Leonard. The one our friend photographed. The backers. The investors. The runners and starters, you called it."

There was an imploring note in Goodhew's voice that Burr wished he couldn't hear. "The smoking gun, for heaven's sake. The thing that nobody ever finds, you said, except that our friend did. Leonard, you're being willfully obtuse."

But Goodhew had misread the cause of Burr's confusion. Burr had known immediately which list. What he couldn't understand was the use that Goodhew had made of it.

"You don't mean you've shown the list of backers to your minister, do you?"

"Good heavens, not the raw material, how could I? Just the names and numbers. Properly recycled, naturally. They could have come from a telephone intercept, a microphone, anything. We could have filched it from the post."

"Roper didn't dictate that list or read it over the phone, Rex. He didn't put it in a letter box. He wrote it on a yellow legal pad, and there's only one of it in the world and one man who took a photograph of it."

"Don't split hairs with me, Leonard! My master is appalled, that's my point. He recognises that a summation is close and heads must roll. He feels--so he tells me, and I shall believe him until I am proved wrong--he has his pride, Leonard, as we all do, our own ways of avoiding unpleasant truths until they are thrust upon us--he feels that the time has come for him to get off the fence and be counted." He attempted a valiant joke. "You know his way with metaphors. I'm surprised he didn't throw in some new brooms rising from the ashes."

If Goodhew was expecting a peal of jolly laughter, Burr did not provide it.

Goodhew became agitated: "Leonard, I had no alternative. I am a servant of the Crown. I serve a minister of the Crown. It is my duty to inform my master of the progress of your case. If my master tells me he has seen the light, I am not employed to tell him he's a liar. I have my loyalties, Leonard. To my principles as well as to him and to you. We're having lunch on Thursday after his meeting with the Cabinet Secretary. I'm to expect important news. I'd hoped you'd be pleased, not sour."

"Who else has seen the list of backers, Rex?"

"Other than my master, nobody. I drew his attention to its secrecy, naturally. One can't go on telling people to keep their mouths shut; one can cry wolf too often. Obviously the substance of it will go before the Cabinet Secretary when they meet on Thursday, but we may be sure that's where it will stop."

Burr's silence became too much for him.

"Leonard, I fear you are forgetting first principles. All my efforts over the last months have been devoted to achieving greater openness in the new era. Secrecy is the curse of our British system. I shall not encourage my master or any other minister of the Crown to hide behind its skirts. They do quite enough of that as it is. I won't hear you, Leonard. I won't have you fall back into your old River House ways."

Burr took a deep breath. "Point taken, Rex. Understood. From now on, I'll observe first principles."

"I'm glad to hear it, Leonard."

Burr rang off, then called Rooke. "Rex Goodhew gets no more unrefined Limpet reports from us, Rob. That's with immediate effect. I'll confirm in writing by tomorrow's bag."

Nevertheless, everything else had been going well, and if Burr continued to fret over Goodhew's lapse, neither he nor Strelski lived with any sense of impending doom. What Goodhew had called the summation was what Burr and Strelski called the hit, and the hit was what they now dreamed of. It was the moment when the drugs and arms and players would all be in the same place and the money trail would be visible and--assuming the joint team had the necessary rights and permissions--its warriors would fall out of the trees and shout "Hands up!" and the bad guys would give their rueful smile, and say "It's a fair cop, Officer"--or, if they were American, "I'll get you for this, Strelski, you bastard."

Or so they facetiously portrayed it to each other.

"We let it ride as far as it can go," Strelski kept insisting--at meetings, on the telephone, over coffee, striding on the beach. "The further down the line they are, the fewer places they have to hide, the nearer we are to God."

Burr agreed. Catching crooks is no different from catching spies, he said: all you need is a well-lit street corner, your cameras in position, one man in a trench coat with the plans, the other in a bowler with the suitcase full of used bills. Then, if you're very lucky, you've got a case. The problem with Operation Limpet was: Whose street? Whose city? Whose sea? Whose jurisdiction? For one thing was already clear: neither Richard Onslow Roper nor his Colombian trading partners had the smallest intention of completing their business on American soil.

Another source of support and satisfaction was the new Federal Prosecutor who had been assigned to the case. His name was Prescott, and he was more exalted than the usual federal prosecutor: he was a Deputy Assistant Attorney General, and everybody whom Strelski checked him out with said Ed Prescott was the best Deputy Assistant Attorney General there was. Just the best, Joe, take it from me. The Prescotts were old Yale people, of course, and a couple of them had Agency connections--how could they not have?--and there was even a rumour, which Ed had never specifically denied, that he was in some way related to old Prescott Bush, George Bush's father.

But Ed--well, Ed had never bothered with that stuff, he wanted you to know. He was a serious Washington player with his own agenda, and when he went to work he left his parentage outside the door.

"What happened to the fellow we had till last week?" Burr asked.

"Guess he got tired of waiting," Strelski replied. "Those guys don't hang around."

Bemused as ever by the American pace of hiring and firing, Burr said no more. Only when it was too late did he realise that he and Strelski were harbouring the same reservations but, out of deference to each other, refusing to express them. Meanwhile, like everybody else, Burr and Strelski flung themselves upon the impossible task of persuading Washington to sanction an act of interdiction on the high seas against the SS Lombardy, registered in Panama, sailing out of Curaçao and bound for the Free Zone of Colón, known to be carrying fifty million dollars' worth of sophisticated weaponry described in the ship's manifest as turbines, tractor parts and agricultural machinery.

Here again Burr afterwards blamed himself--as he blamed himself for pretty much everything--for spending too many hours succumbing to the tweedy charm and old-boy manners of Ed Prescott in his grand offices downtown, and too few in the joint planning team's operations room, attending to his responsibilities as a case officer.

Yet what else was he to do? The secret airwaves between Miami and Washington were busy day and night. A procession of legal and less legal experts had been mustered, and it was not long before familiar British faces started to appear among them: Darling Katie from the Washington embassy, Manderson from naval liaison staff, Hardacre from Signals Intelligence and a young lawyer from the River House who, according to rumour, was being groomed to replace Palfrey as legal adviser to the Procurement Studies Group.

Some days Washington seemed to empty itself into Miami; on others, the prosecutor's office was reduced to two typists and a switchboard operator, while Deputy Assistant Attorney General Prescott and his staff decamped to do battle on the Hill. And Burr, determinedly ignorant of the niceties of American political in-fighting, drew comfort from the hectic activity, assuming, rather like Jed's whippet, that where you have so much circumstance and movement, you must surely have progress too.

So really there had been no heavy augurs, only the minor alarms that are part and parcel of a clandestine operation: for instance, the nagging reminders that vital data such as selected intercepts and reconnaissance photographs and area intelligence reports from Langley were somehow jamming in the pipeline on their way to Strelski's desk; and the eerie feeling, known separately to Burr and Strelski but not yet shared, that Operation Limpet was being run in tandem with another operation, whose presence they could feel but not see.

Otherwise the only headache was as usual Apostoll, who, not for the first time in his mercurial career as Flynn's supersnitch, had done a disappearing act. And this was all the more tiresome because Flynn had flown to Curaçao specially in order to be on hand for him and was now sitting about in an expensive hotel, feeling like the girl who has been stood up at the ball. But even on this score, Burr felt no cause for alarm.

Indeed, if Burr was honest, Apo had a case. His handlers had been pushing him hard. Perhaps too hard. For weeks, Apo had been voicing his resentment and threatening to down tools until his amnesty was signed and sealed. It was not surprising, as the heat gathered, if he preferred to keep his distance rather than run the risk of attracting another six life sentences as an accessory before and after what looked like being the biggest drugs-and-arms haul in recent history.

"Pat just called Father Lucan," Strelski reported to Burr. "Lucan hasn't had a peep out of him. Pat neither."

"Probably wants to teach him a lesson," Burr suggested.

The same evening, the monitors turned in a bonus intercept, picked up on a random sweep of phone calls out of Curaçao: Lord Langbourne to the offices of Menez & Garcia, attorneys, of Cali, Colombia, associates of Dr. Apostoll and identified front men for the Cali cartel. Dr. Juan Menez takes the incoming call.

"Juanito? Sandy. What's happened to our friend the Doctor? He hasn't shown."

Eighteen-second silence. "Ask Jesus."

"What the hell does that mean?"

"Our friend is a religious person, Sandy. Maybe he has taken a retreat."

It is agreed that in view of the proximity of Caracas to Curaçao, Dr. Moranti will step in as a replacement.

And once again, as both Burr and Strelski admitted afterwards, they were shielding each other from their true thoughts.

Other intercepts described the frantic efforts of Sir Anthony Joyston Bradshaw to call Roper from a succession of public telephones scattered round the Berkshire countryside. First he tried to use his AT&T card, but a recorded voice told him it was no longer operative. He demanded the supervisor, paraded his title, sounded drunk, and was courteously but firmly cut off. The Ironbrand offices in Nassau were scarcely more helpful.

On the first run, the switchboard refused to accept his collect call; on the second, a MacDanby accepted it but only in order to freeze him off. Finally he bullied his way to the skipper of the Iron Pasha, now berthed in Antigua: "Well, where is he, then? I tried Crystal. He's not at Crystal. I tried Ironbrand and some cheeky bugger told me he was selling farms. Now you tell me he's 'expected.' I don't fucking care whether he's expected! I want him now! I'm Sir Anthony Joyston Bradshaw. It's an emergency. Do you know what an emergency is?"

The skipper suggested he try Corkoran's private number in Nassau. Bradshaw had already tried it, without success.

Nevertheless, somewhere, somehow, he found his man and spoke to him without troubling the monitors, as later events abundantly revealed.

The call from the duty officer came at dawn. It had the absolute calm of Mission Control when the rocket is threatening to blow itself to smithereens.

"Mr. Burr, sir? Could you get down here right away, sir? Mr. Strelski's on his way already. We have a problem."

Strelski made the journey alone. He would have preferred to take Flynn, but Flynn was still eating his heart out in Curaçao, and Amato was helping him, so Strelski went along for both of them. Burr had offered to come, but Strelski was having a certain difficulty with the British involvement in this thing. Not with Burr--Leonard was a pal. But being pals didn't cover the whole issue. Not just now.

So Strelski left Burr at headquarters, with the flickering screens and the appalled night staff and strict orders that nobody was to make a move of any sort, in any direction, not to Pat Ryan or the prosecutor or anyone, until he had checked this thing out and called through with a yes or a no.

"Right, Leonard? You hear me?"

"I hear you."

"Then good."

His driver was waiting for him in the car park--Wilbur, his name was, nice enough guy but basically had reached his ceiling--and together they drove with flashing lights and sirens wailing through the empty centre of town, which struck Strelski as pretty damn stupid when, after all, what was the hurry and why wake everybody up? But he didn't say anything to Wilbur because, deep down, he knew that if he had been driving he would have driven the same way. Sometimes you do those things out of respect. Sometimes they're the only things left to do.