The Devil's Breath Page 3

  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.

  He checked the address against the card in his pocket. The fourth floor belonged to a prominent firm of Washington attorneys. Telemann recognized the name from way back. Sullivan, he knew, had once been a partner there.

  Telemann took the elevator to the fourth floor where a secretary led him through the cool, open-plan office. At the end of the office was a door. The secretary knocked once and walked in. Sullivan sat in a big recliner behind a desk. He looked exhausted and a good deal fatter than Telemann remembered. Even six months, he thought, can make a difference.

  Sullivan looked up. The secretary had gone. ‘Better here,’ he said, ‘than the White House.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Quieter. No fucking interruptions.’

  ‘You bet.’

  Telemann hesitated for a moment, then sat down. Sullivan studied him for perhaps a minute, the usual treatment, the small close-set eyes, the pudgy face, the tie-knot never quite in place. Then he began to talk, his voice low, confidential, an implicit invitation to join the boys, shut the door, put his feet up. He outlined what was really happening in the Gulf, the insider’s brief, the story behind the headlines, the big meaty hands describing the shape of the coming alliance against Saddam. He detailed the pressure-points, the places where they were putting on the real squeeze, the speed with which the Iraqis had understood the likely consequences. And finally – utterly logical in the sequence of events – he told Telemann about the morning’s decrypt from Amman, two brief paragraphs which had brought the Administration to a thoroughly nasty bend in the pike.

  Telemann followed the story without comment. With these guys, you never hurried things. Reacting off the top was third-grade stuff, your first and last mistake. Sullivan watched him, leaning back in the big recliner, playing with a paper-clip, waiting for a response.

  Telemann at last obliged. ‘A hit squad,’ he said carefully.

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘Iraqi-based.’

  ‘We can’t say that.’

  ‘But Iraqi-funded.’

  ‘We assume so.’

  ‘With orders to hit New York.’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘With several gallons of Tabun GA.’

  ‘You got it.’

  Telemann nodded. It seemed, on the face of it, a logical proposition. Pinned down in the Gulf, threatened by the biggest war-machine on the planet, you struck elsewhere. And where better than New York? The First World’s golden city? Home of the UN? Home for all those sanction-backing diplomats?

  Telemann blinked, looking at Sullivan again. Tabun GA was nerve gas, civilization’s waking nightmare, the weapon that
even the Nazis had refrained from using. It got to you in seconds, tiny droplets of the stuff, the thinnest mist. You breathed it in, or it penetrated your skin, or it found some other way to get at you. You gagged. You staggered. You began to choke. Telemann shuddered. His knowledge of the chemistry of Tabun was crude in the extreme, but even the threat was enough, the simple phrase ‘nerve gas’, the thought of the muscles cramping tight, all control gone, the body decoupled from itself, death a merciful release. He looked at Sullivan afresh. News like this you didn’t share. Not unless you had some other end in view. Telemann drew in a long breath and held it for a moment before letting the air out slowly, the softest of whistles. August on the beach was fast receding.

  ‘So what do you want?’ he said.

  Sullivan tipped forward, towards the desk. For a moment, Telemann thought the chair was going to collapse. It didn’t.

  ‘We want you to find them,’ he said carefully, ‘and stop them. Quietly. Quickly. Nobody the wiser.’ He paused. ‘We want you to talk to your Israeli friends and anyone else you think might help. You’ll have every asset we can give you, short of publicity. You’ll have stand-alone status and unlimited reach. Logistically, you’re looking at a blank cheque …’ He paused again, fingering the paper-clip, trying to bend it back into shape. Telemann watched him, letting the phrases sink in, promises of a kind he’d never heard in his life.

  ‘Why me?’ he said at last.

  Sullivan considered the question. Then he tossed the paper-clip towards the bin. It missed.

  ‘Because you’re smart,’ he said, ‘and difficult, and speak the right language.’ He paused for a moment, ‘And we were impressed by your CIA paper, too. That took guts.’ He paused again, reaching for another paper-clip.

  ‘Thanks,’ Telemann said drily.

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Yeah …’ Telemann looked away a moment. The question had been bothering him for a while, and as soon as he’d framed it, he knew it was directed at himself as much as at Sullivan. Ambition was a fine thing. But even his had limits. He looked up again. ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘do I have any choice?’

  Sullivan gazed at him for a long time, the beginnings of a smile on his face. Then he shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘The word on the President’s lips is duty.’

  *

  Godfrey Friedland arrived at the Ritz Hotel thirty minutes late. The traffic in Central London was jammed solid, the second grid-lock in less than a month, and the cab up from Fulham had finally dropped him nearly a mile away. The walk had done him no good whatsoever. At fifty-eight, for the first time in his life, he was beginning to feel his age.

  He walked into the hotel and took the lift to the sixth floor. MI6 had kept a suite for nearly a decade now, a permanent arrangement heavily subsidized by a leading Tory Party backer. Friedland knew the arrangement well. One of his last jobs at MI6 had been to draw up a schedule of regular electronic sweeps.

  He paused in the corridor and knocked at the door. A voice told him to come in, a voice he recognized. The man from Number Ten. Ross.

  Friedland opened the door and stepped into the suite. He hadn’t been here for nearly a year, not since the last big crisis, but nothing had changed. Still the same fake Louis-Quinze chairs. Still the same heavy brocade, with the thick pile carpet and the hideous velvet curtains. Ross, sitting at the conference table, waved him into a chair. He didn’t bother with a handshake or even the courtesy of a formal greeting.

  Friedland took off his coat, folding it carefully over the back of a chair, taking his time. Had he stayed in the Service, he’d doubtless be still outranking Ross, even though the young civil servant had become a Whitehall byword for preferment and a certain steely arrogance. As it was, though, he’d elected for the offer of early retirement, placing his own interpretation on the series of covert meetings he’d attended with a tiny coterie of Smith Square luminaries. Then, back in ’82, the deal had been quite explicit: in return for generous ‘support’, he was to put his knowledge and his contacts at the service of the Downing Street private office. Post-Falklands, with the wind filling the Tories’ sails, he was to ride shotgun on the heavyweights of the Intelligence Service, providing independent guidance and advice to an administration with an almost pathological mistrust of the established machinery of government. He was to be permanently on call, at the end of a telephone or a fax, a bottomless source of second opinions. In practice, this arrangement meant premises of his own, regular consultancy fees and a certain maverick satisfaction with his new-found freedoms. At last he could say what he liked about whom he liked. He could form his own opinions, offer his own judgements. He could subject raw data to the kind of coldly objective assessment that had long been a memory in mainstream Intelligence. To his own amusement, in the parlance of his trade, he’d been ‘turned’.

  Now, though, there was Ross. The man looked up and offered a thin smile.

  ‘What did you make of the video?’

  Friedland shrugged. Light conversation with the likes of Ross had never been his forte.

  ‘A man in a car,’ he said, ‘making a series of points. Not too difficult to follow.’

  ‘You understood it?’

  ‘Out of context?’ He shook his head. ‘No.’

  Ross nodded, letting the silence between them make his point. The currency of the game they played was knowledge. And he, as ever, was banker. He glanced down at the pad. ‘The video came via the Consulate in Nicosia. Simply handed in.’

  ‘By whom?’

  ‘No one knows.’

  Friedland nodded. He knew Nicosia well. He’d served there for a while in the mid-sixties, running agents into the Middle East. It was very tatty. He’d rather liked it. He looked across at Ross. ‘If someone’s sending a message,’ he said lightly, ‘there have to be other elements. I can’t build a sentence out of your video.’

  Ross nodded. ‘There are. Or at least we think there are.’ He paused for a moment, then told Friedland about a rumour they’d picked up from a diplomatic source in Tel Aviv, the emergence of yet another Palestinian terror group, totally unknown, new faces, new name.

  Friedland looked at him. ‘What is it?’ he said. ‘What’s the name?’

  ‘Seventh June.’

  ‘Just that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Friedland nodded slowly, drawing the obvious conclusion. June 7th 1981 was the day the Israelis had bombed the Iraqi nuclear reactor, waves of F-16s wheeling over the top-secret site on the outskirts of Baghdad, reducing the place to rubble. Nine years later, with the Iraqis back on the nuclear threshold, Saddam Hussein now offered the Palestinians fresh hope of driving the Israelis into the sea. Small wonder they were doing their best to help him.

  Friedland made a note of the name of the new group, then glanced up again. ‘So,’ he said, ‘we have a man with a tank in his boot. And we have some interesting plumbing. And we have a false exhaust-pipe …’ He paused, frowning. ‘We also have a nice view of Manhattan, and a brand-new Palestinian terror group …’ He fell silent, his pen poised, his eyes gazing at the heavy folds of curtain. Outside in the street, the traffic was beginning to move again. He could hear the buses grinding down Piccadilly. Strictly first gear. Ross was looking at him carefully. The exchange was developing into a seminar. ‘The Iraqis may have the bomb,’ he said slowly. ‘As you well know.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So what else do they have?’

  Friedland at last took his eye off the curtains, favouring Ross with a blank stare. If it pleased the younger man to patronize him, so be it.

  ‘Gas?’ he said mildly.

  ‘Exactly.’ Ross looked at him, saying nothing more, refusing to elaborate, waiting for Friedland to catch up.

  Friedland, compliant as ever, obliged. ‘The Iraqis have nerve gas,’ he said slowly, ‘and the Palestinians have a new terror group … and someone in New York has a tank in his car boot, and probably a diffuser too, and a video-camera to show the world …’

>   ‘Quite.’

  ‘So—’ Friedland frowned. ‘—we might reasonably infer … might we not … that whatever they’ve got planned for Manhattan …?’ He broke off and shrugged, letting the point make itself. The Americans were sending troops into Saudi Arabia. The Prime Minister would doubtless follow suit, and when that happened, Oxford Street would be as legitimate a target as Broadway. Friedland looked at Ross and raised a single eyebrow.

  Ross nodded. ‘We need to know what we’re in for,’ he said. ‘Best case. Worst case. And we want the thing kept tight. So—’ he shrugged, gesturing round ‘—I thought we’d commission a little research.’

  Friedland nodded, unsurprised. ‘Research’ was the usual euphemism, code for the neatly typed reports that Ross seemed to thrive on, a mix of gossip, speculation and hard Intelligence that Friedland was able to cull from thirty years in the field. Evidently, the reports gave Ross bullets for the gun he carried to the endless round of Whitehall meetings. It meant that Downing Street had sources of its own and didn’t have to rely on the official briefings. The Intelligence establishment hated the practice. They thought it close to treason.

  Friedland looked Ross in the eye. ‘How soon?’ he said.

  ‘Very soon. As soon as possible.’

  Friedland frowned. It was a difficult commission. Doing it properly would take weeks of analysis. ‘Why don’t you ask the Americans?’ he said mildly. ‘That might be productive.’

  Ross looked at him, saying nothing, favouring the suggestion with a chilly half-smile. Then, abruptly, he stood up. ‘Seventy-two hours,’ he said, heading for the door.

  *

  McVeigh sat alone in his flat, the window half-open. The rain had gone now and the night was warm. Down the street, several houses away, the kids from the Poly were having a party. Heavy Metal. Iron Maiden. Mercifully low.