The Night Manager (9 page)

"With more than a dash of amber, thank you," Goodhew retorted.

"No more snide digs at the Darker Procurement octopus, or silly talk about secret servants feathering their own nests. You're to be all honey with your American Enforcement buddies, but you will be, anyway, and you're not to lose my master his safe seat or his shiny car. How would you like to report? Hourly? Three times a day before meals? Just remember we didn't have this conversation until after Monday's agonised deliberations, which on this occasion are a formality."

Yet it was not till the U. S. Enforcement team actually set foot in London that Burr allowed himself to believe he had won the day. The American policemen brought a whiff of action with them that washed away the taste of interdepartmental haggling.

Burr liked them at first sight, and they liked him, better than they liked the less winnable Rooke, whose army back stiffened as soon as he sat down with them. They warmed to Burr's blunt language and his short way with bureaucracy. They liked him better still when it became clear that he had forsaken the unsavoury preserves of Pure Intelligence for the hard tack of defeating the enemy. Pure Intelligence for them meant all things bad, whether it resided in Langley or the River House. It meant turning a blind eye to some of the biggest crooks in the hemisphere for the sake of nebulous advantages elsewhere. It meant operations inexplicably abandoned in midstream and orders countermanded from on high. It meant callow Yale fantasists in button-down shirts who believed they could outwit the worst cutthroats in Latin America and always had six unbeatable arguments for doing the wrong thing.

First of the enforcers to arrive was the celebrated Joseph Strelski from Miami, a tight-jawed American-born Slav in training shoes and a leather jacket. When Burr had first heard his name five years before, Strelski had been leading Washington's uncertain campaign against the illegal arms traffickers who were Burr's declared foe. In his fight against them, he had crashed head-on with the very people who should have been his allies. Hastily transferred to other duties, Strelski had enlisted himself in the war against the South American cocaine cartels and their appendages in the States: the crooked percentage lawyers and silk-shirt wholesalers, the arm's-length transportation syndicates and money launderers, and what he called the no-see-'em politicians and administrators who cleared the path and took their cut.

The dope cartels were now Strelski's obsession. America spends more money on dope than food, Leonard! he would protest, in a taxi, in a corridor, across a glass of 7-Up. We're talking the cost of the entire Vietnam war, Rob, every year, untaxed!

After which he would rattle off the prevailing dope prices with the same enthusiasm with which other addicts quote the Dow-Jones index, starting with raw coca leaves at a dollar a kilo in Bolivia, rising to two thousand for a kilo of base in Colombia, to twenty thousand a wholesale kilo in Miami, to two hundred thousand a kilo at street. Then, as if he had caught himself being a bore again, he would pull a hard grin and say he was damned if he knew how anyone could pass up a profit of a hundred dollars to a dollar. But the grin did nothing to quench the cold fire in his eyes.

This permanent anger seemed to make Strelski almost physically unbearable to himself. Each morning early and each evening, whatever the weather, he went jogging in the royal parks, to Burr's simulated horror.

"Joe, for God's sake, have a big slice of plum pudding and sit still," Burr urged him, with mock severity. "You're giving us all heart attacks, just thinking about you."

Everyone laughed. Among the enforcers it was that kind of locker-room atmosphere. Only Amato, who was Strelski's Venezuelan-American sidekick, refused to smile. At their conferences, he sat with his mouth clamped into a grimace and his wine-black eyes staring into the horizon. Then suddenly on the Thursday he was beaming like an idiot. His wife had had a little girl.

Strelski's unlikely other arm was an overweight, meat-faced Irishman named Pat Flynn from U. S. Customs: the kind of policeman, Burr told Goodhew with relish, who typed his reports with his hat on. Legend attached to Flynn, and with reason. It was Pat Flynn, said the word, who had invented the first pinhole-lens camera, known as a pole camera and disguised as a junction box, that could be fixed to any stray telegraph post or pylon in a matter of seconds. It was Pat Flynn who had pioneered the art of bugging small boats from under water. And Pat Flynn had other skills, Strelski confided to Burr while the two men strolled together one early evening in St. James's Park, Strelski in his jogging gear and Burr in his crumpled suit.

"Pat was the one who knew the one who knew the one," said Strelski. "Without Pat, we'd never have gotten to Brother Michael."

Strelski was talking about his most sacred and delicate source, and this was holy ground. Burr never ventured onto it except at Strelski's invitation.

If the enforcers bonded closer every day, the espiocrats from Pure Intelligence did not take lightly to their role as second-class citizens. The first exchange of gunfire occurred when Strelski let slip his agency's intention of putting Roper behind bars. Knew the very prison he had in mind for him, he cheerfully informed the company. "Sure do, sir. Little place called Marion, Illinois. Twenty-three and a half hours a day in solitary lock-down, no association, exercise in cuffs, food off a tray they shove at you through a slit in the cell. Ground floor's toughest, no views. Top floor's better, but the smell's worse."

Icy silence greeted this revelation, broken by an acid-voiced solicitor from the Cabinet Office.

"Are you sure this is the sort of thing we should be discussing, Mr. Strelski?" he asked with courtroom arrogance. "I had rather understood that an identified rogue was of more use to society when he was left at large. For as long as he's out and about, you can do what you want with him: identify his conspirators, identify their conspirators, listen, watch. Once you lock him up, you have to start the same game all over again with someone new. Unless you think you can stamp out this sort of thing altogether. Nobody here thinks that, do they? Not in this room?"

"Sir, in my submission there's basically two ways you can go," Strelski replied, with the respectful smile of an attentive pupil. "You can be exploitative, or you can enforce. Be exploitative, that's a never-ending story: that's recruiting the enemy so that you catch the next enemy. Then recruit the next enemy so that you catch the next one, ad infinitum. Enforce, that's what we have in mind for Mr. Roper. A fugitive from justice, in my book you apprehend him, you charge him under the International Trafficking in Arms regulations, and you lock him up. Exploitation, in the end you get to ask yourself who's being exploited: the fugitive, or the public, or justice."

"Strelski is a maverick," Goodhew confided to Burr with undisguised pleasure as they stood on the pavement under umbrellas.

"You're two of a kind. No wonder the legal people have misgivings."

"Me, I've got misgivings about legal people."

Goodhew glanced up and down the rain-swept street. He was in sparkling mood. The previous day, his daughter had won a scholarship to South Hampstead, and his son, Julian, had been accepted by Clare College, Cambridge. "My master is having a severe case of the croup, Leonard. He has been talking to people again. Worse than scandal, he now fears he will look a bully. He is offended by the notion that he is instigating a wide-flung plot, mounted by two powerful governments against a lone British trader locked in battle against the recession. His sense of fair play tells him you are being disproportionate."

"Bully," Burr echoed softly, remembering Roper's eleven volumes of file, the tons of sophisticated weaponry lavished upon unsophisticated people. "Who's the bully? Jesus."

"Leave Jesus out of it, thank you. I need a counterblast. For Monday at first light. Brief enough to go on a postcard, no adjectives. And tell your nice man Strelski I adored his aria. Ah. We're saved. A bus."

Whitehall is a jungle, but like other jungles, it has a few watering holes where creatures who at any other hour of the day would rip each other to pieces may assemble at sunset and drink their fill in precarious companionship. Such a place was the Fiddler's Club, situated in an upper room on the Thames Embankment and named after a pub called the Fiddler's Elbow, which used to stand next door.

"I think Rex is in the pay of a foreign power, don't you, Geoffrey?" said the solicitor from the Cabinet Office to Darker, while together they drew themselves a pint from the keg in the corner and signed a chit. "Don't you? I think he's taking Frog gold to undermine the effectiveness of British government. Cheers."

Darker was a small man, as men of power often are, with hollowed cheeks and sunken, steady eyes. He dressed in sharp blue suits and lots of cuff, and this evening he wore brown suede shoes as well, which gave a hint of Ascot to his gallows smile.

"Oh, Roger, however did you guess?" Goodhew replied with willed cheerfulness, determined to take the sally in good part. "I've been on the take for years, haven't I, Harry?"--passing the question down the line to Harry Palfrey. "How else could I afford my shiny new bicycle?"

Darker continued smiling. And since he had no sense of humour, his smile was a little sinister, even mad. Eight men and Goodhew sat at the long refectory table: a Foreign Office mandarin, a baron from Treasury, the Cabinet Office solicitor, two squat-suited earthlings from the Tory middle benches, and three espiocrats, of whom Darker was the grandest and poor Harry Palfrey the most derelict. The room was fuggy and smoke-stained. Nothing commended it other than its handiness to Whitehall, to the House of Commons and to Darker's concrete kingdom across the river.

"Rex is dividing and ruling, if you ask me, Roger," said a Tory earthling who spent so much of his time sitting on secret committees that he was often mistaken for a civil servant.

"Power mania got up as constitutional cant. He's deliberately eroding the citadel from within, aren't you, Rex? Admit it."

"Sheer balderdash, thank you," Goodhew replied lightly.

"My master is merely concerned to drag the intelligence services into the new era and help them to set down their old burdens. You should be grateful to him."

"I don't think Rex has got a master," the mandarin from the Foreign Office objected, to laughter. "Has anyone ever seen the wretched fellow? I think Rex makes him up."

"Why are we so squeamish about drugs, anyway?" a Treasury man complained, his thin fingertips propped together like a bamboo bridge. "Service industry. Willing buyer, willing seller. Vast profits to the Third World, some of it's going to the right places, must be. We accept tobacco, booze, pollution, pox. Why are we such prudes about drugs? I wouldn't mind an order for a couple of billion quids' worth of arms, even if there was a bit of cocaine on the bank notes; I'll tell you that for nothing!"

A drenched voice cut through their merriment. It came from Harry Palfrey, a River House lawyer now on permanent loan to Darker's Procurement Studies Group. "Burr's real," he warned huskily, with no particular prompting from anybody. He was drinking a large Scotch, not his first. "Burr does what he says."

"Oh my God," cried the Foreign Office in horror. "Then we're all for the high jump! Right, Geoffrey? Right?"

But Geoffrey Darker just listened with his eyes and smiled his mirthless smile.

Yet of all those present at the Fiddler's Club that night, only the leftover lawyer Harry Palfrey had any notion of the scope of Rex Goodhew's crusade. Palfrey was a degenerate. In every British organisation there is always one man who makes an art form of going to the devil, and in this one respect Hairy Palfrey was the River House's prize exhibit. Whatever he had done well in the first half of his life, Palfrey had systematically undone in the second--whether it was his law practice, his marriage or the preservation of his pride, of which the last shameful tatters lingered in his apologetic grin. Why Darker kept him on, why anybody did, was no mystery at all: Palfrey was the failure who made everyone look successful by comparison.

Nothing was too humble for him, nothing too demeaning. If there was scandal, Palfrey was ever willing to be slaughtered. If murder was to be done, Palfrey was on hand with a bucket and cloth to mop up the blood and find you three eyewitnesses to say you were never there. And Palfrey, with the wisdom of the corrupt, knew Rex Goodhew's story as if it were his own--which in a sense it was, since he had long ago made the same perceptions as Goodhew, even if he had never had the courage to draw the same conclusions.

The story was that after twenty-five years before the Whitehall mast, something inside Goodhew had discreetly snapped.

Perhaps it was the ending of the Cold War that had caused it.

Goodhew had the modesty not to know.

The story was that one Monday morning Goodhew woke as usual and decided with no premeditation that for far too long, in the misused name of freedom, he had been sacrificing scruple and principle to the great god expediency, and that the excuse for doing so was dead.

And that he was suffering from all the bad habits of the Cold War without their justification. He must mend his ways or perish in his soul. Because the threat outside the gates had gone. Decamped. Vanished.

But where to begin? A perilous bicycle ride supplied him with his answer. On the same rainy February morning, the eighteenth--Rex Goodhew never forgot a date--he was cycling from his home in Kentish Town to Whitehall as usual, weaving between the choked columns of commuter cars, when he experienced a silent epiphany. He would crop the secret octopus.

He would give away its powers to separate, smaller agencies and make each of them separately accountable. He would deconstruct, decentralise, humanise. And he would begin with the most corrupting influence of all: the unholy marriage between Pure Intelligence, Westminster and the covert weapons trade, presided over by Geoffrey Darker of the River House.

How did Harry Palfrey know all this? Goodhew had told him.