The Night Manager (8 page)

Once more Goodhew waited for Burr to finish his tirade.

"Now for the next question--my master's again, Leonard, not mine, so don't shoot the messenger! When do you propose to advise our friends across the river?"

He was referring this time to Burr's former service and present rival, which traded in Pure Intelligence from a grim tower block on the South Bank.

"Never," Burr retorted belligerently.

"Well, I think you should."

"Why?"

"My master regards your old colleagues as realists. Far too easy, in a small, very new and, dare he say it, idealistic new agency such as yours, not to see beyond one's fence. He'd feel more comfortable if you had the River boys aboard."

The last of Burr's self-restraint gave way. "You mean your master would like to see someone else bludgeoned to death in a Cairo flat, is that it?"

Rooke had risen to his feet and was standing like a traffic policeman, his right hand raised for "halt." On the telephone, Goodhew's flippancy gave way to something harder.

"What are you suggesting, Leonard? Perhaps you'd better not explain."

"I'm suggesting nothing. I'm telling you. I've worked with your master's realists, Rex. I've lived with them. Lied with them. I know them. I know Geoffrey Darker. And I know his Procurement Studies Group. I know their houses in Marbella, and their second Porsches in the garage, and their unstinted devotion to the free market economy, provided it's their freedom and somebody else's economy. Because I've been there!"

"Leonard, I will not hear you, and you know I won't."

"And I know there's more crockery in that shop, more bad promises to keep, more lunching with the enemy, and gamekeepers turned poachers, than is healthy for my operation, or my agency!"

"Just stop," Rooke advised quietly.

As Burr slammed down the telephone, a sash window slipped its ancient fastening and toppled like a guillotine. Patiently, Rooke folded a used brown envelope, raised the sash and wedged it in place.

Burr was still sitting with his hands buried in his face, speaking through his splayed fingers. "What the hell does he want, Rob? One minute I'm to frustrate Geoffrey Darker and all his wicked works, the next he's ordering me to collaborate with Darker. What the bloody hell does he want?"

"He wants you to ring him back," said Rooke patiently.

"Darker is wicked. You know that, I know that. On a clear day, so does Rex Goodhew. So why do we have to ponce around pretending Darker's a realist?"

Burr rang Goodhew back nonetheless, which was only proper because, as Rooke constantly reminded him, Goodhew was the best and only champion he had.

In appearance Rooke and Burr could scarcely have been more different: Rooke the military parade horse in his nearly good suits, Burr as slovenly in his manner as his speech. There was a Celt in Burr somewhere, an artist and a rebel--Goodhew said a gypsy. When he troubled to dress himself for an occasion, he only contrived to look more disreputable than when he wasn't bothering. Burr, as he would tell you himself, was the other kind of Yorkshireman. His forebears were not miners but handloom weavers, which meant they had owned their lives instead of being vassals in a corporate endeavour. The blackened sandstone village where Burr had grown to manhood was built onto a south-facing hillside, with each house looking at the sun and each attic window stretched to catch the most of it. In their solitary lofts, Burr's forefathers had woven all alone and all day long, while the womenfolk downstairs chattered and did the spinning. The men led lives of monotony in communion with the sky. And while their hands mechanically performed the daily drudgery, their minds took off in all sorts of startling directions. In that one small town, there are tales to fill a book about the poets, chess players and mathematicians whose brains grew to fruition in the long daylight of their attic eyries.

And Burr, all the way to Oxford and beyond, was the inheritor of their collective thrift, their virtue and their mysticism.

So that it was somehow written in the stars, from the day Goodhew plucked Burr from the River House and gave him his own underfinanced, underwanted agency, that Burr should appoint Richard Onslow Roper as his personal Antichrist.

Oh, there had been others before Roper. In the dying years of the Cold War, before the new agency was a twinkle in Goodhew's eye, when Burr was already dreaming of the post-Thatcher Jerusalem and even his most honourable colleagues in Pure Intelligence were casting about for other people's enemies and jobs, there were few insiders who did not remember Burr's vendettas against such renowned illegals of the eighties as the grey-suited billionaire "scrap-metal dealer" Tyler, who flew standby, or the monosyllabic "accountant" Lorimer, who made all his calls from public pay phones, or the odious Sir Anthony Joyston Bradshaw, gentleman and occasional satrap of Darker's so-called Procurement Studies Group, who ran a vast estate on the fringes of Newbury and rode to hounds with his butler mounted at his side, equipped with stirrup cup and foie gras sandwiches.

But Richard Onslow Roper, said the Burr-watchers, was the adversary Leonard had always dreamed of. Everything Leonard was looking for to appease his Fabian conscience, Dicky Roper possessed in trumps. In Roper's past there was neither striving nor disadvantage. Class, privilege, everything Burr loathed, had been handed to Roper on a salver. Burr even had a special voice for talking about him: "our Dicky," he would call him, with a shove of his Yorkshire accent; or, for variety, "the Roper."

"He's tempting God, is our Dicky. Everything God's got, the Roper's got to have two of, and it'll be the undoing of him."

Such obsession did not always make for balance. Embattled in his shoestring agency, Burr had a tendency to see conspiracy everywhere. A file had only to go missing, a permission be delayed, for him to scent the long arm of Darker's people.

"I tell you, Rob, if the Roper committed daylight armed robbery in full view of the Lord Chief Justice of England--"

"The Chief Justice would lend him his jemmy," Rooke suggested.

"And Darker would have bought it for him. Come on. Lunch."

In their dingy offices in Victoria Street, the two men would prowl and brood till late into the evenings. The Roper's file ran to eleven volumes and half a dozen secret annexes, flagged and cross-referred. Put together, it documented his steady glide from the grey or semi-tolerated arms deal all the way to what Burr called dark black.

But the Roper had other files: at Defence, the Foreign Office, the Home Office, the Bank of England, the Treasury, Overseas Development, the Inland Revenue. To obtain them without arousing curiosity in the circles where Darker might have allies required stealth and luck, and occasionally Rex Goodhew's devious connivance. Pretexts had to be invented, unwanted papers requested, in order to confuse the scent.

Gradually, nevertheless, an archive was assembled. First thing in the morning a policeman's daughter called Pearl would trundle in a metal trolley with the purloined records patched and bandaged like casualties of war, and Burr's little team of dedicated assistants would resume its work. Last thing at night she trundled them back to their cell. The trolley had a wonky wheel, and you could hear it whistling down the linoleum corridor. They called it Roper's tumbril.

But even in the midst of these exertions, Burr never took his mind's eye off Jonathan. "Don't let him risk his hand now, Reggie," he urged Quayle over the secure telephone while he champed and waited for what Goodhew sarcastically referred to as his master's official, final maybe. "He's not to go stealing any more faxes or listening at keyholes, Reggie. He's to tread water and act natural. Is he still angry with us over Cairo? I'll not flirt with him till I know I can have him. I've been that road before." And to Rooke, "I'm telling no one, Rob. He's Mr. Brown for the lot of them. Darker and his friend Ogilvey have taught me a lesson I'll not ignore."

As a further desperate precaution, Burr opened a decoy file for Jonathan, gave it a fictitious name, fronted it with the particulars of a fictitious agent, and surrounded it with a conspicuous secrecy, which he hoped would draw the eye of any predator. Paranoia? Rooke suggested. Burr swore it was no more than a sensible precaution. He knew too well the lengths that Darker would go to in order to do down a rival--even one as humble as Burr's tin-pot outfit.

Meanwhile in his neat script Burr added note after note to Jonathan's fast-expanding dossier, which he kept in an unfiled folder in the dreariest corner of the registry. Through intermediaries, Rooke drew the army papers on Jonathan's father. The son was barely six years old when Sergeant Peter Pine won his posthumous Military Medal in Aden for "outstanding courage in the face of the enemy." A press cutting showed a ghostly child displaying it on the breast of his blue mackintosh outside the palace gates. A weeping aunt escorted him. His mother was not well enough to attend. A year later she too was dead.

"Those are usually the chaps who love the army best," Rooke commented in his simple way. "Can't think why he gave it up."

By the age of thirty-three, Peter Pine had fought the Mau Mau in Kenya, chased Grivas across Cyprus and battled with guerrillas in Malaya and northern Greece. Nobody had a bad word to say of him.

"A sergeant and a gentleman," Burr the anti-colonialist told Goodhew wryly.

Returning to the son, Burr pored over reports of Jonathan's progress through army foster homes, civilian orphanages and the Duke of York's Military School in Dover. Their inconsistency quickly incensed him. Timid, ran one; plucky, another; a solitary, a grand mixer, an inward boy, an outgoing one, a natural leader, lacks charisma, back and forth like a pendulum.

And once, very involved with foreign languages, as if this were a morbid symptom of something better left alone. But it was the word unreconciled that got Burr's goat.

"Who the hell ever decreed," he demanded indignantly, "that a sixteen-year-old boy of no fixed abode, who's never had a chance to know parental love, should be reconciled?"

Rooke took his pipe from his mouth and frowned, which was about as near as he came to indulging in an abstract argument.

"What does cabby mean?" Burr demanded from deep in his reading.

"Streetwise, among other things. Pushy."

Burr was at once offended. "Jonathan's not streetwise. He's not wise at all. He's putty. What's a roulement?"

"A five-month tour," Rooke replied patiently.

Burr had come upon Jonathan's record in Ireland, where, after a succession of special training courses, for which he had volunteered, he had been assigned to close observation duties in the bandit country of South Armagh.

"What was Operation Night Owl?"

"I haven't the foggiest idea."

"Come on, Rob. You're the soldier in the family."

Rooke rang the Ministry of Defence, to be told the Night Owl papers were too highly classified to be released to an unchartered agency.

"Unchartered?" Rooke exploded, blushing darker than his moustache. "What the devil do they think we are? Some Whitehall bucket shop? Good Lord!"

But Burr was too preoccupied to relish Rooke's rare outburst.

He had fixed upon the image of the pale boy wearing his father's medal for the convenience of photographers. Burr was by now moulding Jonathan in his mind. Jonathan was their man, he was sure of it. No cautious words from Rooke could soften his conviction.

"When God finished putting together Dicky Roper," he told Rooke earnestly over a Friday evening curry, "He took a deep breath and shuddered a bit, then He ran up our Jonathan to restore the ecological balance."

The news Burr had been praying for came exactly a week later. They had stayed in to wait for it. Goodhew had told them to.

"Leonard?"

"Yes, Rex."

"May we agree that this conversation is not taking place? Or not until after Monday's meeting of the Joint Steering Committee?"

"If you like."

"Here's the bottom line. We've had to toss them a few trinkets, or they'd have sulked. You know how the Treasury is."

Burr didn't. "Number one. It's an Enforcement case, one hundred percent. Planning and execution to be yours exclusively, the River House to provide support in aid, theirs not to reason why. Do I hear shouts of hooray? I don't think I do."

"How exclusive is exclusively?" said Burr the wary Yorkshireman.

"Where you have to use outside resources, you obviously take potluck. One can't, for instance, expect the River boys to run a telephone check for one and not take a peek at the product before they lick the envelope. Can one?"

"I'll say one can't. What about our gallant American Cousins?"

"Langley, Virginia, like their counterparts across the Thames, will remain outside the charmed circle. It's like to like. The Lex Goodhew. If Pure Intelligence is to be held at bay in London, then it stands to reason that their opposite numbers in Langley must also be held at bay. Thus have I argued, and thus has my master heard me. Leonard...? Leonard, are you sleeping there below?"

"Goodhew, you're a bloody genius."

"Number three--or is it D? My master in his capacity as minister responsible will nominally hold your tiny hand, but only with the thickest possible gloves, because his latest phobia is scandal." The flightiness disappeared from Goodhew's voice, and the proconsul came through. "So nothing direct from you to him at all, thank you, Leonard. There's one route only to my master, and that's me. If I'm putting my reputation at risk, I don't want you muddling. Agreed?"

"How about my financial estimates?"

"What do you mean, how about them?"

"Have they been approved?"

The English damn fool returned: "Oh my goodness no, you silly boy! They have not been approved. They have been endured through gritted teeth. I've had to carve them up between three ministries and cadge some extra from my aunt. And since I personally shall be cooking the books, will you please account to me for your money as well as for your sins?"

Burr was too excited to bother with any more fine print. "So it's the green light," he said, as much for Rooke as for himself.