A Spy's Life (11 page)

‘You don’t know any more about this last case?’ asked Harland.

‘No, why do you ask?’

He would have to take this gently, he thought. Sally was as quick as her husband and he didn’t want to alarm her.

‘Well, there is an awful lot of interest in what Al may or may not have been carrying with him to New York.’

‘From whom?’

‘From the FBI, which is investigating the crash as a matter of routine, and, rather curiously, from my old lot.’

‘British Intelligence? Why would they be interested?’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘Are you saying something else, Bob? Are you saying there was something sinister about the crash? I know the media was speculating, but that was just loose talk – wasn’t it?’

‘As far as I know, the crash was an accident. The Safety Board are going to announce their findings, and they apparently believe it was an accident.’

‘Right, so what is it you’re saying?’

Harland hesitated and looked at Eric and Sam, and the image of Tomas Rath flashed into his mind. He remembered Griswald’s pride in his boys and he fleetingly wondered what it was like to have a son. Then he pulled from his pocket the wallet that he had kept with him since leaving hospital.

‘I know this may seem odd, but I took this from Al’s body when I answered the phone. I can’t absolutely recall what was in my mind, but I suppose I wanted to make sure there was some identification. Yesterday, I remembered he said he was carrying some crucial evidence.’ He placed the wallet on the other side of the table.

Confronted with something so close to her husband’s extinction, Sally Griswald had put her hands up to her face and was looking at the wallet with horrified fascination. She picked it up and felt the hard, desiccated surface of the leather with her fingertips.

She said nothing as she went through the contents. Eventually he took the mini-disc out and handed it to Eric who shook his head.

‘This isn’t Dad’s music,’ he said. ‘There are four hundred records in the den and not one piece of music was composed before 1920. You know he was a jazz fanatic?’

Harland nodded. ‘Famously so.’

‘Have you played it?’ asked Sam.

‘No, I only remembered that I had the wallet yesterday. Anyway, I don’t have a player for these things. Do you?’

Sam said he had one, picked up the disc and got up to fetch it. Eric went to join him, and Sally and Harland were left looking at each other.

Harland broke the silence. ‘Is there someone at The Hague I can talk to discreetly about the investigations that Al was working on – a secretary, an assistant?’

‘Yes, her name is Sara Hezemanns. She was Al’s secretary but I’m not sure how much she will be able to tell you. You know how cagey Al was.’ She wrote the name and Griswald’s old office number on the kitchen pad.

‘And what about this person he was travelling with?’

‘On the plane? I don’t believe he was with anyone, apart from you.’

Harland didn’t press the point. ‘And in Washington was there a hotel he stayed at regularly?’

‘Yes, he went to the Fillmore Hotel on Tenth Street – he knows the manager there. He had some kind of deal.’

‘He knew the manager?’

‘Yes, but I forget his name.’

‘Do you have any idea what he was doing in Washington?’

‘Well, I guess he went to Langley. I know the Agency helped him with stuff like aerial pictures and radio intercepts. He visited there often because he was anxious to get these guys in Yugoslavia prosecuted.’ She paused and glanced away, focusing on a pot of parsley on the window. ‘We haven’t got Al back yet. His body, I mean. That really hurts. It’s ironic because Al said one of the things that obsessed those people in Bosnia was that they never found the bodies of their loved ones. They couldn’t bear for them to be not buried properly. Did you know that?’

Harland shook his head.

‘He told me it was a big thing for them,’ she said, ‘and I really begin to understand that now. It matters.’

The boys came back with the disc player and a portable speaker. ‘I listened to some of this upstairs,’ he said. ‘Nothing strange about it, except Beethoven and Chopin was definitely not Dad’s taste.’

They listened to the disc. Then Harland realised that the music playing was different to what was described on the disc cover, which listed highlights of orchestral works by Brahms, Chopin and Mendelssohn. What was playing now was the second movement of the Archduke trio by Beethoven. He picked up the cover and examined it.

‘I noticed that too,’ said Eric. ‘This is the wrong cover for the disc.’

Before the next piece there was a sustained tapping – something between a Geiger counter and a door creaking open. The noise lasted five minutes more and was followed by the first bars of a Chopin nocturne. They listened to see if the noise returned, but heard nothing. Then Eric suggested that he could make a tape of the noise and slow it down. Both of them went off together, relieved to have something to do.

They returned ten minutes later, bearing Eric’s recording equipment and arguing like young teenagers.

‘It’s code,’ said Eric definitely.

‘How would
you
know?’

‘I just do. Listen.’

Eric played the tape he’d made, slowing it as much as he could on his equipment. There did seem to be a definite structure to the sound, almost like a pulse. As they listened, they realised that the individual taps consisted of many different elements. ‘If we could bring this down real slow, I think we’d find something there.’

‘Maybe I could find someone to do that,’ said Harland. ‘Would you like me to?’ Sally nodded. ‘I’ll take the original disc, then, and the slowed recording if that’s okay.’

‘I’ve got a copy,’ said Eric, ‘so if you lose it you’ll know where to come.’

‘Good. Look, I’m not going to mention this to anyone. Let’s keep it between ourselves. If there is something here, I certainly don’t want anyone thinking that you’ve got it.’

Soon afterwards, Sally drove him to the station. They waited in the car park until the train was about to arrive. ‘Bob,’ she said, staring ahead of her, ‘find out if something’s been going on – you know what I mean. Find out for my sake and Al’s – he would want that.’

Harland promised he’d do everything he could.

He got to the UN late in the afternoon as the setting sun washed a pink light over the west side of the great monolith. There were still a few tourists about but the restricted areas were deserted. He was glad. He wanted to work in quiet and avoid the fuss which would certainly accompany his return to work on Monday.

He unlocked his office, noted the two-weeks’ worth of mail and sat down at his desk to think. He got the number of the Fillmore Hotel in Washington, dialled and asked to speak to the manager, saying that he was a friend and colleague of Alan Griswald’s. At length a wary English voice came on the line. Harland explained that he was making some inquiries for the UN about Griswald’s expenditure prior to his death. Just tying up some loose ends, was the way he put it. If this worried the manager, he was welcome to call him back on the main UN switchboard. Harland heard the voice relax.

‘You can never be too careful,’ said the manager.

Harland smiled at the motto of British caution and continued in a flat bureaucratic voice. ‘We’re dealing with the expenses incurred on his last trip. In the circumstances, we are concerned that they are fully reimbursed. I believe Mr Griswald was travelling with another gentleman who was also on United Nations business.’

‘And you’re doing this on a Sunday?’ said the man.

‘It’s the Christmas rush. We need to make sure that his family is reimbursed before the holidays.’ He grimaced at the lameness of his explanation and continued. ‘The trouble is that we cannot immediately lay our hands on the name of the second party. Would that be something you have in your records?’

He heard the manager ask reception to look up the previous week’s bookings. While he waited, the manager told him how he had met Alan Griswald some fifteen years before when he was deputy manager at the Jefferson Hotel. The death was indeed a tragedy, he said. Harland detected just the slightest strain of campness in his manner.

A voice sounded on the distant intercom. Two rooms were booked for two nights and paid for by Mr Griswald. Harland jerked his fist in front of him.

‘The name of the other gentleman does not appear on the account,’ said the manager, repeating what he had heard, ‘but it does on the registration card. It is Luc Bézier, a French citizen apparently. No home address is given.’

‘Anything else?’

‘No. No passport number, no vehicle registration or contact number. Just the name Bézier.’

‘Were there any additional charges to the bill – telephone calls? Meals?’

The manager replied that there were some other items. In a very short while Harland had persuaded him to fax copies of the bill and the registration cards. Five minutes later they slipped noiselessly from the machine by Marika’s desk. He found what he was looking for halfway down on the second sheet of the bill – a telephone number recorded by the hotel’s switchboard which began with the country code for France. There were two calls to the same number on successive afternoons, lasting seven and fourteen minutes respectively. Harland bet himself a cigarette that Luc Bézier was calling his wife or girlfriend.

He checked the number with International Information and found that it came from the Carcassonne area. It was nearing five – too late to ring. Besides, he wanted to know if the person who would answer the phone in France had been informed of Bézier’s death. It seemed quite possible that they did not know, although they surely must have begun to suspect that something was amiss when the regular calls abruptly stopped after Monday. They would have started making inquiries, perhaps contacting Griswald’s office in The Hague or the French embassy in Washington, and sooner or later someone would have suggested that Luc Bézier had been on the flight with Griswald.

Harland now felt sure that the FBI must have gone back over Griswald’s journey and stumbled on Bézier’s name. Ollins had been so interested in the fact that he had seen the compact-looking foreigner with Griswald at the airport that he must have traced the hotel booking and then, in all probability, located his name on a passenger list from France over the previous weekend. It would have taken one further call to acquire Bézier’s passport details from the US Immigration Service. And that meant Ollins knew as much as he needed about Luc Bézier. So why hadn’t he included Bézier in the final toll? Was that the reason for his shiftiness out at the airport? Had he been prevailed upon to keep Bézier’s name secret, or was he doing it for reasons of his own?

Harland rang Sally Griswald and asked if she had heard of Bézier. The name meant nothing to her. Al had not mentioned that he was dealing with anyone from France. Harland was about to ring off when she told him that she had been going through Griswald’s recent mail and had found a sheaf of interview transcripts that had been expressed from his office in The Hague after he left. She had only skimmed them but thought they might be interesting. She would send the pages to his fax.

He made two further calls, the first to his sister, Harriet, to say that he would be in London for Christmas. Then he dialled the mobile number which Tomas Rath had left him. He assumed the phone was on a European service and so didn’t expect an answer, nor was there one. He composed himself for the message service. ‘This is Robert Harland,’ he said evenly. ‘I will be in London next week, so we can continue our conversation of last night. I hope that nothing is wrong. You departed in quite a hurry.’ He finished by leaving his new mobile number and Harriet’s home number and told him not to call before Tuesday.

He kicked his legs off the desk and went over to the fax to see if the documents had come. The engaged light was on. He waited while the cover sheet and the first of thirty-two numbered pages dropped into the tray. He read part of an interview with a Bosnian Muslim named Selma Simic. It didn’t seem particularly important so he went off to the kitchen area to make himself some tea.

The floor was silent, except for the gentle background hum of the empty building. Most of the offices around him were dark. He made his tea, thinking about the order of phone calls he would place to Europe in the early hours of the morning, then returned towards his office.

As he stepped through the partition by Marika’s desk he was aware of a rush of air to his left. He saw nothing, but felt a powerful blow to the ribs on his left side which hit the disc and glanced upwards to his Adam’s apple. At the same time another force assailed him from behind. Two blows to the back of the neck, a jab to the kidneys, followed by a kick to the small of the back. Harland doubled up and threw himself backwards with all his might, flinging the tea, which astonishingly he still held, towards his left. A man cried out and lunged at him, but missed. Harland encountered the bulk of a second man whom he managed to propel with a crash into the partition on the other side of the corridor. He heard a gasp behind him but the fellow was strong and was soon up on his feet. Harland whistled round, aimed two punches to the stomach and brought his knee up to the man’s chin. He fell. Then he felt a stunning blow to his head and knew nothing more.

8

WAKE-VORTEX

He came round with a flashlight in his eyes. Two men were standing over him. His office was very cold and he could hear the wind tearing at some papers on the window-sill. He lifted his head from the floor. A voice told him to stay still. Everything was going to be okay; an ambulance was on its way. Harland took no notice. He raised his head again and pushed the light away.

There was a chemical taste on his tongue and at the back of his throat. He moved a little more. His head hurt and his ribs and back were throbbing with new bruises. He rolled on to his side and pushed himself up to face two UN security guards who were crouching in front of him. He looked round, vaguely wondering why the window was open, and realised that he was some distance from where he had fallen. He had been out in the corridor and now he was beside his desk and there was a hell of a mess and the window was open.