The Night Manager

EIGHT

Hunched in the passenger seat of Rooke's car as they plunged through the gathering Cornish dusk, Burr pulled his overcoat collar more tightly about his ears and returned his soul to the suite of windowless rooms on the outskirts of Miami where not forty-eight hours earlier the covert action team for Operation Limpet had been holding its exceptional Open Day.

* * *

Covert action teams do not normally admit espiocrats and other sophists to their midst, but Burr and Strelski have their reasons. The atmosphere is of a Holiday Inn sales conference held in battle conditions. Delegates arrive singly, identify themselves, descend in steel elevators, identify themselves again and greet each other carefully. Each wears his name and occupation on his lapel, even if some names have been chosen only for this day and some occupations are so obscure that old hands pause to work them out. DEP DR OPS COORDS, reads one. SUPT NARCS & FMS SW, reads another. And between them, like refreshing smiles of clarity, U. S. SENATOR, FEDERAL PROSECUTOR or U. K. LIAISON.

The River House is represented by an enormous Englishwoman in perfect curls and Thatcherite twin set, known universally as Darling Katie and officially as Mrs. Katherine Handyside Dulling, Economic Counsellor of the British Embassy in Washington. For ten years Darling Katie has held the golden key to Whitehall's special relationship with America's numberless intelligence agencies. From Military to Naval to Air to State through Central and National to the omnipotent murmurers of the White House palace guard ― from the sane to the harmlessly mad to the dangerously ridiculous ― the secret overworld of American might is Katie's parish, to explore, bludgeon, bargain with and win to her celebrated dinner table.

"Do you hear what he called me, Cy, this monster here, this thing?" Katie bellows to a tight-lipped senator in a double-breasted suit, while she holds an accusing finger, pistol-like, to Rex Goodhew's temple. "A femagogue! Me! A femagogue! Isn't that the most politically incorrect thing you ever heard? I'm a mouse, you beast. A wilting violet! And calls himself a Christian!"

Jolly laughter fills the room. Katie's iconoclastic boom is the theme music of insiders. More delegates arrive. Groups break up, re-form. "Why, Martha, hullo!... Walt, hi. Good to see you... Marie, great!"

Someone has given the signal. A dry clatter as delegates toss their paper cups into trash bags and troop to the projection room. The lowliest, led by Amato, head for the front rows. Farther back, in the expensive seats, Darker's deputy in Procurement Studies, Neal Marjoram, shares cosy laughter with a ginger-headed American espiocrat whose name card reveals him only as "Central America ― Funding." Their laughter fades with the lights. Somebody funny says, "Action!" Burr takes a last look at Goodhew. He is leaning back in his chair, smiling at the ceiling, like a concertgoer who knows the music well.

Joe Strelski embarks on his address.

* * *

And Joe Strelski as a purveyor of disinformation is word perfect.

Burr is bemused. After a decade of deception, it has never occurred to him until today that the best deceivers are the bores. If Strelski were wired from head to toe with lie detectors, Burr is convinced, the needles would not flinch. They would be too bored. Strelski speaks for fifty minutes, and by the time he has finished, fifty are as much as anyone can take. In his word-heavy monotone, the most sensational intelligence is turned to ash. The name of Richard Onslow Roper barely escapes his lips. In London he had used it without compunction. Roper is our target; Roper is the centre of the web. But today in Miami, before a mixed audience of Purists and Enforcers, Roper is relegated to obscurity, and when Strelski trails a half-hearted slide show of the cast, it is Dr. Paul Apostoll who gets star billing as known to us for the last seven years as the cartels' principal intermediary and dealmaker in this hemisphere...

Strelski now logs the wearisome process of pinpointing Apostoll as the primary axis of our initial investigations and offers a laboured account of the successful activities of agents Flynn and Amato in placing a bug in the doctor's New Orleans offices. If Flynn and Amato had repaired a leaking pipe in the men's room, Strelski could not have sounded less thrilled. With a superbly tedious sentence, read from a prepared text, unpunctuated and full of false emphases, he hastens his audience on its way to sleep:

"The basis for Operation Limpet is intelligence indicators from a variety of technical sources to the effect that the three leading Colombian cartels have signed a mutual nonaggression deal with each other as a prerequisite to providing themselves with a military shield commensurate with the financial muscle available and equal to the twin threats foremost in their conceptual thinking." Breath. "These threats are, one" ― another breath ― "armed interdiction by the United States at the behest of the Colombian government." Almost done, but not quite. "Two, the growing strength of the non-Colombian cartels primarily in Venezuela and Bolivia. Three, the Colombian government acting on its own account but with the hands-on encouragement of U. S. agencies."

Amen, thinks Burr, transfixed with admiration.

The history of the case appears to interest nobody, which is probably why Strelski supplies it. Over the last eight years, he says ― another slump in interest ― several attempts have been made by "a variety of parties lured by the cartels' unlimited financial resources" to persuade them to get the habit of buying serious weapons. French, Israelis and Cubans have all pressed their cases, as have a bunch of independent manufacturers and dealers, most with the tacit connivance of their parent governments. The Israelis, assisted by British mercenaries, actually succeeded in selling them a few Galil assault rifles and a training package.

"But the cartels," says Strelski, "well, after a while the cartels kind of lose interest."

The audience knows exactly how the cartels feel.

Screen atmospherics as Dr. Apostoll is discovered on the island of Tortola, in long shot from across the street, seated inside the offices of the Caribbean law firm of Langbourne, Rosen and de Souta, notaries to the nefarious. Two whey-faced Swiss bankers from Grand Cayman are identified at the same table. Major Corkoran sits between them, and to Burr's secret pleasure the signer is holding a drawn fountain pen in his right hand. Across the table from him sits an unidentified Latin American. The languid male beauty next to him, hair tied prettily at the nape, is none other than Lord Langbourne, alias Sandy, legal adviser to Mr. Richard Onslow Roper of the Ironbrand Land, Ore & Precious Metals Company of Nassau, the Bahamas.

"Who took this footage, please, Mr. Strelski?" a very legal American male voice demands sharply in the darkness.

"We did," Burr replies complacently, and the company at once relaxes again: Agent Strelski has not, after all, exceeded his territorial powers.

But now even Strelski cannot keep the excitement out of his voice, and for a brief moment Roper's name is fair and square before them.

"In direct consequence of the nonaggression deal to which I have just had reference, the cartels instructed their representative to take soundings with a couple of illegal arms traders in the hemisphere," he says. "What we see here, according to our sources, but filmed unfortunately without sound, is the first overt approach made by Apostoll to hands-off intermediaries of Richard Roper."

As Strelski sits down, Rex Goodhew bobs to his feet. Goodhew plays it straight today. He isn't funny, he uses none of the English linguistic frills that so infuriate Americans. He openly regrets the involvement of British nationals in the affair, some of them with distinguished names. He regrets that they are able to shelter behind the laws of British protectorates in the Bahamas and the Caribbean. He is heartened by the good relations established at working level between the British and American sides. He wants blood, and he wants Pure Intelligence to help him draw it:

"Our shared aim is to catch the culprits and make a public example of them," he declares, with Truman-like simplicity. "With your help, we want to enforce the rule of law, prevent the proliferation of arms in a volatile region and cut off the supply of drugs" ― in Goodhew's mouth the word sounds like a mild form of aspirin ― "which we believe to be the currency in which the amis bill will be paid ― to wherever they are destined. To this end, we are asking for your full, unquestioning support-in-aid as intelligence-gathering agencies. Thank you."

Goodhew is followed by the federal prosecutor, an ambitious young man whose voice growls like a racing car engine turning over in the pits. He vows he will "bring this thing to court in record time."

Burr and Strelski take questions.

"How about humint in this one, Joe?" a woman's voice calls at Strelski from the back of the hall. The British contingent is momentarily baffled by this piece of Cousins jargon. Humint!

Strelski almost blushes. It is clear he would have preferred her not to ask. His expression is that of a loser who refuses to admit defeat. "We're working on it, Joanne, believe me. Human sources on a thing like this, you have to wait and pray. We have lines, we have hopes, we have our people in there sniffing, and we believe that somebody out there soon is going to need to buy himself some witness protection, is going to call us up one night and ask us to arrange it for him. It's going to happen, Joanne." He nods determinedly, as if he agreed with himself where nobody else did. "It's going to happen," he repeats, as unconvincingly as before.

It is lunchtime. The smoke screen is in place, even if they cannot see it. Nobody remarks that Joanne is one of Strelski's close assistants. The procession toward the door has started. Goodhew departs with Darling Katie and a couple of espiocrats.

"Now listen, you men," Katie can be heard saying as they leave. "No fobbing me off with two fat-free lettuce leaves, d'you hear? I want meat and three veg and plum duff, or I ain't goin' no place. Femagogue indeed, Rex Goodhew. And then you come to us with your begging bowl. I'm going to break your pious neck."

* * *

It is evening. Flynn, Burr and Strelski sit on the deck of Strelski's beach house, watching the moon path flutter in the wake of returning pleasure boats. Agent Flynn is nursing a large glass of Bushmills single malt. He sensibly keeps the bottle at his side. The conversation is sporadic. Nobody wants to talk out of turn about the day's proceedings. Last month, says Strelski, my daughter was a vegan. This month she's in love with the butcher. Flynn and Burr laugh dutifully. Another silence falls.

"When's your boy cut loose?" Strelski asks quietly.

"End of the week," Burr replies in the same low tone. "God and Whitehall willing."

"With your boy inside pulling and our boy outside pushing, I guess that makes us a closed loop," says Strelski.

Flynn laughs richly, nodding his great dark head like a deaf-mute in the half-darkness. Burr asks what a closed loop is.

"A closed loop, Leonard ― that's using every part of the pig except the squeal," says Strelski. Another pause while they sit and watch the sea. When Strelski speaks again, Burr has to lean close to catch his words.

"Thirty-three grown people in that room," he murmurs. "Nine different agencies, seven pols. Must be a couple of 'em telling the cartels Joe Strelski and Leonard Burr don't have a humint source worth shit ― right, Pat?"

Flynn's soft Irish laughter is almost drowned by the rustle of the sea.

But Burr, though he keeps it to himself, cannot quite share his hosts' complacency. The Purists had not asked too many questions, it was true. In Burr's uneasy judgment, they had asked too few.

* * *

Two ivy-coated granite posts loomed out of the mist. The engraved inscription said Lanyon Rose. There was no house. Farmer probably died before he got round to building it, thought Burr.

They had been driving seven hours. Above the granite hedges and the blackthorn, an uneasy sky was darkening to dusk. The shadows on the pitted track were liquid and elusive, so that the car kept bucking as if it had been hit. It was a Rover and Rooke's pride. His powerful hands wrestled with the steering wheel. They passed deserted farm buildings and a Celtic cross. Rooke switched his headlights to bright, then switched them down again. Since they had crossed the Tamar River they had known only dusk and rolling mist.

The track rose, the mist vanished. Suddenly all they saw through the windscreen was canyons of white cloud. A salvo of raindrops rattled against the car's left side. The car rocked, then tipped over the edge in a free-fall, its nose pointing at the Atlantic. They made the last turn, the steepest. A gust of warring birds clattered over them. Rooke braked to a crawl until the fury passed. A fresh burst of rain hit them. As it cleared, they saw the grey cottage crouching on a saddle of black bracken.

He's hanged himself. Burr decided, catching sight of Jonathan's crooked silhouette as it dangled in the porch light. But the hanged man lifted an arm in greeting and stepped forward into the blackness before switching on his torch. A patch of granite chip made a crude parking place. Rooke climbed out, and Burr heard the two men hailing each other like a pair of travellers. "Good to see you! Great! Christ, what a wind!" Burr in his nervousness stayed stubbornly in his seat, grimacing to heaven while he forced the top button of his overcoat through its hole. The wind was booming round the car, shaking the aerial.

"Get a move on, Leonard!" Rooke yelled. "You can powder your nose later!"

"You'll have to wriggle across, I'm afraid, Leonard," Jonathan said through the driver's window. "We're evacuating you to leeward, if that's all right."

Grabbing his right knee with both hands, Burr navigated it over the gear lever and the driving seat, then did the same for the left. He lowered one city shoe onto the gravel. Jonathan was shining the torch straight at him. Burr made out boots and a seaman's knitted cap.

"How've you been?" Burr shouted, as if they hadn't seen each other for years. "Fit?"

"Well, yes, I think I really am, actually."

"Good lad."

Rooke went ahead with his briefcase. Burr and Jonathan followed him side by side up the hacked path.

"And that went all right, did it'?" Burr asked, nodding at Jonathan's bandaged hand. "He didn't amputate it by mistake, then."

"No, no, it was fine. Slice, stitch, wrap it up ― didn't take above half an hour, the whole job."

They were standing in the kitchen. Burr's face was still stinging from the wind. Scrubbed pine table, he noticed. Polished flagstones. Polished copper kettle.

"No pain?"

"Not beyond the call of duty," Jonathan replied.

They laughed shyly, strangers to each other.

"I've had to bring you a piece of paper," Burr said, coming as usual straight to what was weighing on his mind. "You're supposed to sign it, with me and Rooke as witnesses."

"What does it say, then?" said Jonathan.

"Humbug's what it says" ― laying the blame on a convenient bureaucracy. "Damage limitation. Their insurance policy. We didn't push you, you'll never sue us, you have no case against the government for neglect, malfeasance or rabies. If you fall out of a plane it's your fault. Et cetera."

"Getting cold feet, are they?"

Burr caught the transferred question and turned it back, "Well, are you, Jonathan? That's more the point, isn't it?" Jonathan started to protest, but Burr said, "Shut up and listen. This time tomorrow you'll be a wanted man. Unwanted is more like it. Anyone who ever knew you will be saying, 'I told you so.' Anyone who didn't will be studying your photograph for evidence of homicidal tendencies. That's a life sentence, Jonathan. It'll never go away."

Jonathan had a stray memory of Sophie among the splendours of Luxor. She was sitting on a plinth, arms around her knees, staring down the aisle of columns. I need the comfort of eternity, Mr. Pine, she said.

"I can still stop the clock, if that's what you want, and no harm done except to my ego," Burr continued. "But if you're wanting to pull out and haven't the bottle to say, or if you're being too nice to your Uncle Leonard or some such idiocy, I'll trouble you to get up your courage and declare yourself now, not later. We can have a nice supper, goodbye, drive home, no hard feelings, none that last. We can't do that tomorrow night, or any night after."

Heavier shadows in the face, Burr was thinking. The watcher's stare that stays on you after he's looked away. What have we spawned? He glanced round the kitchen again. Wool pictures of ships in full sail. Bits of treen, Newlyn copperware. A luster plate that read "Thou see'st me, God."

"Are you sure you don't want me to put this stuff in store for you?" Burr asked.

"No, honestly. It's fine. Just sell it. Whatever's easiest."

"You could want it one day, when you settle down."

"Better to travel light, really. And it's all there still, is it ― the target, I mean? He's still doing what he's doing, living where he lives and so on? Nothing's changed?"

"Not that I know of, Jonathan," said Burr with a slightly puzzled smile. "And I keep pretty much in touch. He's just bought himself a Canaletto, if that's a guide. And a couple more Arab horses for his stud. And a nice diamond collar for his lady. I didn't know they called them collars. Sounds like a lapdog. Well, I suppose that's what she is."

"Perhaps it's all she can afford to be," said Jonathan. He was holding out his bandaged hand, and for a moment Burr thought he wanted him to shake it. Then he realised Jonathan was asking for the document, so he delved in his pockets, first his overcoat, then his jacket, and drew out the heavy sealed envelope.

"I'm serious," Burr said. "It's your decision."

With his left hand, Jonathan selected a steak knife from the kitchen drawer, tapped the sealing wax with the handle to break it, then cut open the envelope along the flap. Burr wondered why he bothered to break the wax, unless he was showing off his dexterity.

"Read it," Burr ordered. "Every stupid word as many times as you like. You're Mr. Brown, in case you hadn't guessed. An unnamed volunteer in our employ. In official papers, people like you are always Mr. Brown."

Drafted by Harry Palfrey for Rex Goodhew. Handed down to Leonard Burr for Mr. Brown to sign.

"Just never tell me his name," Goodhew had insisted. "If I've seen it, I've forgotten it. Let's keep it that way."

Jonathan held the letter to the oil lamp in order to read it.

What is he? Burr wondered for the hundredth time, studying the hard-soft contours of his face. I thought I knew. I don't.

"Think about it," Burr urged. "Whitehall did. I've had them rewrite it twice." He had one last try. "Just tell me for myself, will you? 'I, Jonathan, am sure.' You know what you're about, you've worked it through. And you're still sure."

The smile again, putting Burr still less at ease. Jonathan was holding out his bandaged hand again, this time for Burr's pen.

"I'm sure, Leonard. I, Jonathan. And I'll be sure tomorrow morning. How do I sign? Jonathan Brown?"

"John," Burr replied. "In your usual handwriting." The image of Corkoran the signer with his drawn fountain pen flitted across Burr's inner eye as he painstakingly wrote John Brown.

"All done," he said brightly to console him.

But Burr still wanted more of something. Drama, a greater feeling of occasion. He stood up, making an old man's labour of it, and let Jonathan help him out of his coat. They walked together to the parlour, Jonathan leading.

The dining table was set for ceremony. Linen napkins, Burr noticed indignantly. Three lobster cocktails in their glasses. Silver-plate knives and forks like a three-star restaurant. A decent Pommard uncorked to breathe. A smell of roasting meat.

What the hell's he trying to do to me?

Rooke was standing with his back to them, hands in pockets, studying Marilyn's latest watercolour.

"I say, I rather like this one," he said in a rare effort at flattery.

"Thanks," said Jonathan.

* * *

Jonathan had heard them approaching long before he saw them. And even before he heard them he knew they were there because alone on the cliff the close observer had learned to hear sounds in the making. The wind was his ally. When the fog came down and all he seemed to hear was the moaning of the lighthouse, it was the wind that brought him the chatter of the fishermen out to sea.

So he had felt the trembling of the Rover's engine before ever its growl rolled down the cliff to him, and he braced himself as he stood waiting in the wind. When its headlights appeared, aimed straight at him, he aimed back at them in his mind, estimating the Rover's speed by the telegraph poles and calculating the distance ahead that he would have to aim if he were sighting a rocket-propelled grenade. Meanwhile a corner of his vision waited on the hilltop in case they had a chase car or were sending in a decoy.

And when Rooke parked and Jonathan walked smiling through the gale with his torch, he had imagined shooting his two guests down the torch's beam, blowing off their green faces in alternate bursts. Players successfully negotiated. Sophie avenged.

But now as they left he was calm and saw different things. The storm had vanished, leaving torn-off shreds of cloud. A few stars lingered. Grey bullet holes made a spray pattern round the moon. Jonathan watched the Rover's tail-lights pass the meadow where he had planted his iris bulbs. In a few weeks, he thought, if the rabbits don't get through the wire, that meadow will be mauve. The taillights passed a bull warren, and he remembered how one warm evening, returning from Falmouth, he had surprised Jacob Pengelly and his girlfriend there, stripped of everything except each other, Jacob in transport straining back from her, the girl arched to him like an acrobat.

Next month will be a blue month on account of the bluebells, Pete Pengelly had told him. But this month now, Jack, this one is a gold month getting golder, with the gorse and cowslips and wild daffodils winning against all comers. Just you see if they don't, Jack. Cheers.

To complete me, Jonathan rehearsed to himself. To find the missing parts of me.

To make a man of me, which was what my father said the army did: one man.

To be useful. To stand upright. To rid my conscience of its burden.

He felt sick. Going to the kitchen, he gave himself a glass of water. A brass ship's clock hung above the door, and without pausing to think why, he wound it up. Then he went to the drawing room, where he kept his treasure: a grandmother long-case clock in fruitwood with a single weight, bought of Daphne's in Chapel Street for a song. He pulled the brass chain till the weight was at the top. Then he set the pendulum in motion.

"Reckon I'll go up my Aunt Hilary's in Teignmouth for a bit, then," Marilyn had said, no longer weeping. "Be a break, Teignmouth will, won't it?"

Jonathan had had an Aunt Hilary too, in Wales beside a golf club. She had followed him round the house putting the lights out, and prayed aloud to her dear Lord Jesus in the dark.

* * *

"Don't go," he had begged Sophie, in every way he knew, as they waited for the taxi to take them back to Luxor airport. "Don't go," he had begged her on the plane. "Leave him, he'll kill you, don't take the risk," he had begged her as he saw her into the cab that would take her back to her apartment, and Freddie Hamid.

"We both have our appointments with life, Mr. Pine," she had told him with her battered smile. "There are worse indignities, for an Arab woman, than being beaten by her lover. Freddie is very wealthy. He has made me certain practical promises. I have to consider my old age,"