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 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 arms. 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 Flynn 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 center 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.
Besides, there was a hurry. When things start happening to key witnesses, you may safely say there is a hurry. When everything has been going a little too wrong for a little too long—when you have been living further and further out on the margin while everyone has been bending over backward to convince you that you are right there at the center of influence: Christ, Joe, where would we be without you?—when you have been overhearing just a little too much strange political theorizing in the corridors—talk of Flagship, not just as a code name but as an operation—talk of moving goalposts and getting a little order into our own backyard—when you have been treated to just five too many smiling faces, and five too many helpful intelligence reports and none that is worth shit—when nothing is changing around you, except that the world you thought you were moving in is quietly easing away from you, leaving you feeling like one man on a raft in the middle of a slow-moving crocodile-infested river going in the wrong direction—and, Joe, for Christ’s sake, Joe, you are just the best officer Enforcement has—well, yes, you may safely say there is something of a hurry to find out who the fuck is doing what to whom.
Sometimes you watch yourself lose, thought Strelski. He loved tennis, and he loved it best when they gave you the TV close-ups of the guys drinking Coke between games, and you could see the face of the winner getting ready to win and the face of the loser getting ready to lose. And the losers looked the way he felt just now. They were playing their shots and working their hearts out, but in the end the score’s the score, and the score at the dawn of this new day was not very good at all. It looked like set and match to the princes of Pure Intelligence on both sides of the Atlantic.
They passed the Grand Bay Hotel, Strelski’s favorite watering hole when he needed to believe that the world was elegant and calm. They turned up the hill, away from the waterfront and the marina and the park. They drove through a pair of electrically controlled wrought-iron gates into a place that Strelski had never entered—a piss-elegant block called Sunglades, where the drug-rich cheat and fuck and have their being, with black security guards and black porters, and a white desk and white elevators. and a feeling, once you have passed through the gates, of having arrived somewhere more dangerous than the world the gates are trying to protect you from. Because being as rich as this in a city like this is so dangerous it’s amazing that everyone here hasn’t woken up dead in his emperorsized bed long ago.
Except that, on this dawn, the forecourt was jammed with police cars and TV vans and ambulances and all the apparatus of controlled hysteria, which is supposed to quell a crisis but actually celebrates it. The clamor and the lights added to the sense of dislocation that had been dogging Strelski ever since the husky-voiced policeman had called through with the news, because “we note you have an interest in this guy.” I’m not here, he thought. I’ve dreamed this scene already.
He recognized a couple of men from Homicide. Curt greetings. Hi, Glebe. Hi, Rackham. Good to see you. Jesus, Joe, what kept you? Good question, Jeff; maybe somebody just wanted it that way. He recognized people from his own agency. MaryJo, whom he had once screwed, to their mutual surprise, after an office party, and a serious boy called Metzger, who looked as though he needed fresh air fast, but in Miami there isn’t any.
“Who’s up there, Metzger?”
“Sir, the police have about everyone they know up there.
It’s bad, sir. Five days without AC righ
t up there next to the sun—it’s really disgusting. Why did they turn the AC off? I mean, that’s just barbarous.”
“Who told you to come here, Metzger?”
“Homicide, sir.”
“How long ago was that?”
“Sir, one hour.”
“Why didn’t you call me, Metzger?”
“Sir, they said you were tied up in the ops room but on your way.” They, thought Strelski.
They sending another signal. Joe Strelski: fine officer but getting a little old for casework. Joe Strelski: too slow to be taken aboard the Flagship.
The center elevator took him to the top floor without pausing on the way. It was the penthouse elevator. The architect’s idea was this: you arrived in this starlit glass gallery that was also a security chamber, and while you stood in the gallery wondering whether you would be fed to the pit bulls or given a gourmet dinner and a nubile hooker to wash it down, you could admire the swimming pool and the Jacuzzi and the roof garden and the solarium and the fornicatorium and the other essential furbishments of a modest dope lawyer’s life-style.
A young cop in a white mask needed to see Strelski’s ID. Strelski showed it to him, rather than waste words. The young cop offered him a mask for himself as if Strelski had just joined the club. After that there were photographic lights and people in coveralls to be steered around and there was the stench, which was somehow more pungent through the mask. And there was saying “Hi” to Scranton from Pure Intelligence, and “Hi” to Rukowski from the prosecutor’s office. And there was wondering how the fuck Pure Intelligence got to arrive on the scene ahead of you. And there was saying “Hi” to anyone who looked as if he might block your path, until you somehow elbowed your way to the most brightly lit part of the auction house, which was what the crowded apartment was like, except for the stench: everyone looking at the objets d’art and making notes and calculating prices, and not a lot of attention being paid to anyone else.
And when you had reached your destination, you could see, not a likeness, or a waxwork, but the authentic originals of Dr. Paul Apostoll and his current or late mistress, both undressed, which was how Apo liked to spend his leisure hours—always on his knees, as they used to say, and usually on his elbows—both greatly discolored, kneeling facing each other, their hands and heels tied and their throats cut, and their tongues pulled through the incision to make what is called a Colombian necktie.
Burr had known at the moment when Strelski took the message, long before he knew what the message said. Just the awful relaxation in Strelski’s body as the message hit him was enough, and the way Strelski’s eyes instinctively found Burr’s and then dismissed them, preferring some other subject to fix on while he listened to the rest. The glance and the glance-away said everything. They were accusing and valedictory, both at once. They said: You did it to me, your people. And: From now on, it’s a nuisance we’re sitting in the same room.
While Strelski was listening, he jotted down a couple of notes, then he asked who had made the identification, and absently scribbled something else. Then he tore off the piece of paper and shoved it in his pocket, and Burr supposed it was an address and, from Strelski’s stony face as he stood up, that he was going there and that it was a filthy death. Then Burr had to watch while Strelski strapped on his shoulder holster, and reflect how in the old days, in different circumstances, he would have asked Strelski why he needed a gun to visit a corpse, and Strelski would have found some supposedly Anglophobic answer, and they’d have got along.
So as Burt remembered the moment forever afterwards, he was actually being told of two deaths at once. Apostoll’s, and that of their own professional companionship.
“Cops say a man’s been found dead in Brother Michael’s apartment up in Coconut Grove. Suspicious circumstances. I’m going to check it out.”
And then the warning, given to everyone except Burr, yet directed at Burr particularly:
“Could be anyone. Could be his cook, his driver, his brother, who the fuck. Nobody moves till I say. Hear me?”
They heard him but, like Burr, knew it wasn’t his cook, his driver or his brother. And now Strelski had called from the scene of the crime, and yes, it was Apostoll, and Burr was doing the things he had prepared in his mind to do as soon as the confirmation came, in the order he had planned. His first call was to Rooke, to tell him that the Limpet operation must as of now be considered compromised. And that accordingly Jonathan should be given the emergency signal for the first phase of the evacuation plan, which required him to escape from the company of Roper and his entourage and go to ground, preferably in the nearest British consulate, but, failing that, in a police station, where he should give himself up as the hunted criminal Pine as a prelude to fast-lane repatriation.
But the call was too late. By the time Burr tracked Rooke down in the passenger seat of Amati’s surveillance van, the two men were admiring the Roper jet lifting into the rising sun as it took off for Panama. True to his known behavior pattern, the Chief was flying at first light.
“Which airport in Panama, Rob?” Burr asked, pencil in hand.
“Destination to the control tower was Panama, no details. Better ask air surveillance.”
Burr was already doing so, on another line.
After that Burr called the British Embassy in Panama and spoke to the economic secretary, who happened also to represent Burr’s agency and had a line to the Panamanian police.
Lastly he spoke to Goodhew, explaining that there was evidence on Apostoll’s body that he had been tortured before he was murdered, and that the possibility that Jonathan was blown must be regarded, for operation purposes, as a certainty.
“Oh, yes, well, I see,” said Goodhew distractedly. Was he unmoved, or was he in shock?
“It doesn’t mean we can’t go for Roper,” Burr insisted, realizing that by breathing hope into Goodhew he was trying to keep up his own courage.
“I agree. You mustn’t let go. Grip, that’s the thing. You’ve plenty of it, I know.”
It always used to be we, thought Burr.
“Apo had it coming to him, Rex. He was a snitch. He was living on borrowed time. That’s the name of the game. If the Feds don’t eat you, the crooks will. He knew that all along. Our job is to pull out our man. We can do that. It’s not a problem. You’ll see. It’s just a lot happening at once. Rex?”
“Yes, I’m still here.”
Wrestling with his own turmoil, Burr was filled with a feverish pity for Goodhew. Rex shouldn’t be subjected to this stuff. He’s got no armor, he takes it too much to heart! Burr remembered that in London it was afternoon. Goodhew had been lunching with his master.
“How did it go, then? What was this important news?” Burr asked, still trying to beg an optimistic word out of him. “Is the Cabinet Secretary coming over to our side at last?”
“Oh, yes, thank you, yes, very pleasant,” said Goodhew, terribly politely. “Club food, but that’s what one joins clubs for.” He’s under anesthetic, thought Burr. He’s wandering. “There’s a new department being set up, you’ll be glad to hear. A Whitehall Watch Committee, the first of its kind, I’m told. It stands for everything we’ve been fighting for, and I shall be its head. It will report directly to the Cabinet Secretary, which is rather grand. Everyone’s given it their blessing; even the River House has pledged full support. I’m to make an in-depth study of all aspects of the secret overworld: recruitment, streamlining, cost effectiveness, load sharing, accountability. Pretty well everything I thought I’d done already, but I’m to do it again and better. I’m to start at once. Not a moment to be lost. It will mean giving up my present work, naturally. But he did rather imply there was a knighthood at the end of the rainbow, which will be nice for Hester.”
Air surveillance was back on the other line. The Roper jet had dropped below radar level as it approached Panama. The best guess was it had turned northwest, heading toward the Mosquito Coast.
“So where the hell is it?” Burr
shouted in his despair.
“Mr. Burr, sir,” said a boy called Hank. “It disappeared.”
Burr stood alone in the monitoring room in Miami. He had been standing there so long the monitors had ceased to notice him. They had their backs to him, and their control panels to play with, and their hundred other things to worry about. And Burr had the earphones on. And the thing about earphones is, there is no compromise, no sharing, no talking the material down. It’s you and the sound. Or the lack of it.
“This one’s for you, Mr. Burr,” a woman monitor had told him briskly, showing him the switches on the machine. “Looks like you got yourself a problem there.”
That was the extent of her sympathy. Not that she was an unsympathetic woman, far from it. But she was a professional, and other matters needed her attention
He played the tape once, but he was so stressed and fuddled that he decided not to understand it at all. Even the label confused him. Marshall in Nassau to Thomas in Curaçao. Who the devil was Marshall when he was at home? And what on earth was he doing calling my joe in Curaçao in the middle of the night, just when the operation was beginning to spread its wings?
For who would ever have supposed, at first glance, with so much else to think of, that a Marshall was a girl? And not only a girl, but a Jemima alias Jed alias Jeds, calling from the Roper’s Nassau residence?
Fourteen times.
Between midnight and four a.m.
Ten to eighteen minutes between each call.
The first thirteen times politely asking the hotel switchboard for Mr. Thomas, please, and being told, after due attempts to connect her, that Mr. Thomas was not answering his telephone.
But on the fourteenth shot, her industry is rewarded. At three minutes to four in the morning, to be precise. Marshall in Nassau connected with Thomas in Curaçao. For twenty-seven minutes of Roper telephone time. Jonathan at first furious. Rightly. But then less furious. And finally, if Burr read the music right, not furious at all. So that by the end of their twenty-seven minutes, it’s nothing but Jonathan . . . Jonathan . . . Jonathan . . . and a lot of huffing and puffing while they get off listening each other’s breathing.