A Spy's Life (12 page)

‘How are you feeling?’ asked one of the guards, trying to get a clear look at his eyes.

‘I’m okay.’ In fact, he felt nauseous and irritable. ‘Look, will someone bloody well close that window?’

‘We can’t,’ said the other guard. ‘It’s jammed open – it’s broken.’

Harland sat for a few minutes, consciously trying to still his stomach. Then he wiped his nose with the back of his hand, cleared his throat and looked up at the guards.

‘What happened?’

‘Jim found you five minutes ago,’ said one. ‘He reckons he must have disturbed them when he came out of the elevator.’

Harland now recognised the taste in his mouth as cocaine. It was making him a lot sharper than he might normally feel after being hit over the head. He turned to the window and focused on the vibrating slats of the Venetian blind. Now he understood why the window was open. They were going to tip him out of it and make it look as though he had been on a cocaine binge and jumped. His single thought about this astonishingly crude plan was that Walter Vigo had nothing to do with it. Whatever the deficiencies and moral laxity of his former colleagues at Vauxhall Cross, they rarely behaved like gangsters.

‘Did they take anything?’ asked the guard called Jim.

Harland got up shakily and held on to the desk. Then he felt for the tape and disc in his breast pocket. They’d gone. ‘I had some loose cash,’ he said. ‘Several hundred dollars – it’s been taken.’

‘They took your wallet?’

‘The cash was in my pocket. My wallet was in my coat over there on the back of the door. Can you check for me?’

While one of the guards went over to check the coat, Harland scanned his desk. The copy of the hotel bill was still there and a glance at the fax machine told him that Sally Griswald’s documents had arrived undisturbed. So, whoever had jumped him was simply interested in the disc and the tape. He thought of the copy that Eric Griswald had kept for himself and wondered if the Griswalds were in any danger. However, he was sure that he had not been followed out to the Hudson valley that day because he had taken the usual dry-cleaning precautions before leaving Penn Station, which had included loudly asking for a ticket to Trenton, New Jersey. Besides, he was absolutely certain no one else had got off the train at his stop. So for the moment he guessed Sally and her boys were okay.

‘Sir, the wallet’s here in your coat,’ said the guard.

He picked up the hotel bill and went to collect Sally’s fax, ignoring the entreaties of the guards. Once he had checked that all thirty-two pages were there, he sat down in Marika’s chair and asked for a glass of water.

The hospital had tried to keep him overnight for observation, but Harland had been at his most hostile with the young doctor and had eventually just walked out and gone home. The next day he felt as well as could be expected with a bruise across the back of his head, which a paramedic had ventured was the colour and size of a small aubergine. He had no doubt that somebody had been about to kill him, and that frightened him a great deal. But in another way it intrigued him and put him on his mettle. Old juices were beginning to flow.

He left his apartment at eight, having packed for a week, and took a cab to the UN building. When he arrived, he found his office had been tidied up and the window fitted with new locks. Marika was there and gave him a gushing welcome which involved a long hug. Harland had never quite got used to the American embrace and didn’t know when to let go. Eventually he was released from her ample chest and allowed to make his phone calls. She said nothing about the strip of plaster at the back of his head, possibly because she assumed it was a result of the crash.

The first call was to Sara Hezemanns, Griswald’s assistant in The Hague, who immediately insisted that she check his credentials with Sally Griswald.

Five minutes later she called him back and listened while he explained that he was interested in Alan Griswald’s last investigation.

‘It was the one involving a French contact.’

‘I’m sorry I cannot help you with this,’ she said warily. ‘It is all confidential.’

‘But you know the identity of the Frenchman and you knew he was on the plane with Griswald?’

She said nothing.

‘Am I right in thinking that his name is Luc Bézier?’

Still no answer.

‘Do you know whether he had any family in France – someone I could phone and ask what this is about?’

‘I know nothing about him. He came to Mr Griswald out of the blue. Just rang up and asked to meet him. I was the first person he talked to which is how I know his name. Mr Griswald said very little about it afterwards and that is all I can tell you.’

‘Have you been asked not to talk about this?’

‘Look, Mr Harland, you must understand that much of the work we do here is very secret. I am not allowed to talk about current investigations with outsiders.’ She was speaking very quietly now. Harland guessed that someone had come into her office.

‘I’m going to ask you some questions and you can answer with yes or no, okay?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did this case involve the killings in north-eastern Bosnia in 1995? Is that what he was investigating?’

‘Yes … and … also no.’

‘Have you tried to contact Monsieur Bézier’s relatives in France?’

‘No.’

‘So you don’t know whether they have been told?’

‘No.’

‘Has anyone from the War Crimes Tribunal discussed the death of Mr Griswald and Monsieur Bézier?’

‘Yes.’

‘Who, the Chief Prosecutor? The Chief Investigating Officers?’

‘Yes … yes.’

‘Did they suspect the plane was sabotaged?’

‘No, I don’t think so.’

‘I have some documents which were sent to Alan Griswald’s home by your office last week. Sally Griswald let me have them. They appear to be interview transcripts from 1995 and 1996. Are they relevant to the last case that Alan Griswald was investigating?’

‘Maybe.’

Harland remembered Griswald’s painstaking approach to any problem, the marshalling of every possible scrap of intelligence.

‘Was he going to read them in the hope of finding something which may have been overlooked in the past?’

‘Yes,’ she said. He could hear she was pleased that he had guessed right and he knew she really wanted to talk to him.

‘Perhaps it would be better for me to read these documents thoroughly, then ring you later?’

‘Yes, that’s a good idea.’

‘Some time in the evening your time, say eight o’clock today, or tomorrow?’

‘Yes,’ she said, and abruptly hung up.

Harland looked at the number Bézier had rung from Washington and weighed up whether to dial it now or wait until he had talked to Sara Hezemanns again. A little reluctantly, he decided that it was better not to blunder in.

His next concern was the disc. Clearly the theft was significant, but he didn’t want to alarm Sally Griswald, so when he rang he simply told her that the disc and tape had been stolen overnight from his office. He omitted all mention of the attack. Even so, it worried her that Eric had made a copy and she said that she felt threatened by its presence in her home. Harland suggested that it would be possible for them to send the recording by attachment to his e-mail address, or to express it to Harriet’s home. He gave her both addresses, after fending off several more inquiries about the theft. For the next hour or so he sat, closeted in his office, thinking and making little diagrams. They resembled electrical circuit boards, with each component related to the other. Where Harland was unsure, which was often, he put a dotted line to indicate the tentative or unproven nature of the connection. He spent a good deal of time standing at the window looking at the gradations of blue in the distance of Long Island. Every so often he would dart back to his desk to add a few more lines or another box to the diagram. None of what he produced was very satisfactory because there could be no single interpretation to such random events – yet – but he was coming to grips with the problem, and when Marika brought him some coffee he was at least clearer in his mind about the nature of his task.

She set the cup down and looked over his shoulder with unconcealed interest. Harland asked her to book him on to the six o’clock flight to London and chase up the expenses from a trip in early November. At this, Marika clapped her hand to her forehead and said that she had quite forgotten to tell him about the press conference on the crash that was due to start on the third floor. Maybe he would like to go? Yes, thought Harland, he wanted very much to hear what the Safety Board was going to say about the crash.

He loitered a little distance from the conference room, mingling with a large group that had just emerged from the Security Council, and waited for the press briefing to get under way. Then he realised that he didn’t have to go in. Behind him was a monitor showing the proceedings. He could see Frank Ollins from the FBI and Murray Clark from the Safety Board on either side of Martin Dowl, one of the UN press officers.

Clark, looking rather larger than normal against the background of UN blue, had just risen and was taking the reporters through the procedure that followed the retrieval of the two black boxes. He said that the preliminary findings of the Safety Board meant that sabotage had been ruled out.

‘This was an accident,’ he said. Then he looked up and repeated the word ‘accident’.

He reached behind him for some display boards which he held away from his audience of journalists. ‘We now know that the Canadian Government Falcon 900, on loan to the United Nations, was subjected to exceptional turbulence caused by the preceding USAir flight that landed at La Guardia eighty seconds prior to the crash. This disturbance is called wake-vortex and it is associated with large airplanes, particularly the Boeing 757 which has a wing-flap design that generates a powerful vortex of air. This can force a following airplane into an unrecoverable loss of control. In this accident the preceding airplane was a Boeing 767 which is capable of creating the same type of hazard, although there are fewer recorded incidents involving 767s.’

Clark spun one of the boards round his fingertips to show a diagram of two planes on the same flight path, three nautical miles apart. The camera zoomed in and Harland could see that behind each wing was drawn a spiral.

‘These are the vortices,’ said Clark, pointing with his knuckle. ‘At their core the airspeed may be as much as ninety knots. They can linger for a minute and a half after the plane has passed. Eventually they dissipate or move away. Some descend to the ground before dissipation and bounce right back up into the path of a following aircraft. And that is one of the big problems with this invisible phenomenon. The velocity at the core of the vortices is so powerful that it can affect a big plane like a McDonnell Douglas 88 – which is about three times the weight of a Falcon.’ He turned to his audience. ‘For your information that comes in at around twenty-two thousand pounds.’

He let this sink in then set off again. ‘There used to be five or six serious incidents a year due to this phenomenon. There are fewer today because the Federal Aviation Authority and the National Safety Transportation Board have stipulated minimum distances between landing aircraft. These recommendations and the latest data on vortex incidents are printed in the
Airman’s Information Manual
, which is readily available to all pilots.’

He turned another board which showed how the vortex had hit the ground and then risen to a height of 120 feet, where it encountered the Falcon.

‘It’s hard to estimate the speed and lifespan of a vortex because it varies according to wind gradient and strength. However we believe that a bouncing vortex intersected with the path of the Falcon at the threshold of the runway. The pilot experienced an uncommanded ninety-degree roll and pitch. He had no time to regain control and the aircraft continued in a right motion until the starboard wing appears to have collided with a light tower. There’s evidence from the flight data recorder that the pilot applied a full left deflection of the rudder and aileron, but could not bring the aircraft under control in time. The pilot had only a fraction of a second to react. All the indications are that he did the best he could to respond to the situation.’

Clark paused to take a sip of water which allowed a journalist from the
New York Times
to throw in a question. ‘The speed of reaction does not entirely release the pilot from blame,’ he said. ‘Your diagram shows that he was close enough to the Boeing to expose his airplane to these vortices. Was this his fault or Air Traffic Control’s?’

Martin Dowl lumbered into action. He evidently knew the reporter.

‘Mr Parsons, we will take questions at the end of this conference.’

Clark leaned forward and said he didn’t mind answering because it was important for the pilot’s family. ‘Our feeling is that he was well within the safety margin and he had little reason to believe the conditions were conducive to wake-vortex. No warning had been given by Air Traffic Control. This means that aircraft landing on the same runway during the hour prior to the crash had experienced nothing like the catastrophic vortex that he encountered.’

A woman’s voice asked about the casualty list.

‘We’re coming to that now,’ said Dowl testily. He picked up a prepared statement, which he began to read with the gravity of a judge. Harland listened intently, waiting for the official toll. But Dowl was taking his time, first describing the business of the UN officials on board, which turned out to be an informal briefing of Congress on the resources needed for peace-keeping operations, then touching on the reason for Canada’s loan of the plane for the Secretary-General’s forthcoming tour of South American capitals. He concluded with a passage about the Secretary-General’s great sorrow at the death of twelve dedicated professionals in the service of the United Nations.

So, thought Harland, the corpse known as Male C was as good as dumped in the East River. Luc Bézier was never on the plane.

Dowl put the statement down. Then the camera focused on Parsons who had stood up and was asking another question. ‘All through last week we were told that thirteen UN people had been killed on the plane. Now you’re saying only twelve were killed. How could anyone make a mistake like that?’