David Hewson (46 page)

The
mission didn't exist. The combatants, as far as their relatives were
concerned, remained incommunicado on private training exercises in the Gulf
until, two months later, an army captain visited their homes with stories of
dead heroes in the real conflict, which was now under way. There could be no
medals, no public mourning. Not even a private Purple Heart. None of them was
officially in the military. Dead spooks wear no honours.

Wars
make noise. In the tumult of the conflict the loss of nine unknown, unseen
individuals made little impact. Money went around to keep families and others
quiet. The men and women who survived went back to their jobs, in the
diplomatic and intelligence services, and in civilian life too. They kept their
secrets, they got on with their lives. The battle was won. Saddam went home,
leaving a trail of corpses in his wake, claiming victory. And Kuwait was free
beneath the smoke of burning oil fields.

All
in all, Leapman said, the verdict was that the war was half a job well done. There
were people who thought they should have gone all the way into Saddam's
palaces in Baghdad. But that wasn't part of the UN brief, and military
people lived by UN briefs back then. The objective had been to recover Kuwait
and hope that Saddam learned his lesson. They got part of what they wanted.

He
took a swig of the bottle of water he'd brought with him and stared at
each of them in turn.

"You
get all that for free," Leapman said. "It's history now,
anyway, and who gives a shit? What comes next, though, is different. If this
goes public, then everything goes way over our heads, gentlemen. It won't
be me or Viale here who's screaming blue murder. It'll be bureau
chiefs and generals or worse and none of us wants that. Understood?"

Peroni
found himself nodding automatically, as if he had a choice.

What
happened next, Leapman said, was they realized Baghdad had got insight. Postwar,
someone somewhere was helping Saddam.

"Helping
him how?" Falcone demanded.

"Background,"
Leapman answered. "It was a question of adding things up and working out
what didn't make sense. There were sanctions in place by then. Tough
sanctions, ones that worked, as well as sanctions can, anyway. All the same, we
knew Saddam was getting wind of things he shouldn't. He understood some
of our military hardware better than he ought. He took out three Iraqis
we'd placed near him to keep an eye on what was going on. He had
intelligence, stuff he wasn't supposed to know. So we had to ask
ourselves what was going on."

"Kaspar?"
Peroni wondered. "I thought you said he was a hero."

"Yeah.
I also said he was dead. Great cover twice over, huh? We went back and talked
to people in Deacon's team again. They were uncomfortable about it. I guess
if you go through that kind of experience, you don't want to think ill of
your comrades. But a couple of them, Deacon included, had their suspicions. Or
so they said after a lot of prompting. Don't forget, at that stage we
thought Kaspar was blown away along with the rest of his team. But maybe that
was what we were supposed to believe. And all the while he was living the good
life in some quiet palace out in the desert, counting his money, gradually
spilling out every last thing he knew, while Saddam lapped it up. So if
that's true, what do you do?"

You
didn't have much in the way of options, Peroni thought. "You look
for proof."

"Exactly."

Leapman
nodded at Viale. "SISDE already had someone secreted inside Iraq. Dan
Deacon came back to Rome for a couple of months and worked alongside Viale here
to send in a new team, see if anyone was saying anything about an American on
their side. Four officers went in. One came back. The others..."

Leapman
shook his head. "I don't even want to think what happened there. One
report we got said Uday disposed of the poor bastards personally. You heard the
stories about how he used to feed the lions?"

He
let them digest that in silence.

"They
weren't fairy tales," Leapman continued. "But they
weren't the full story either. Anyway, it was Deacon's man who came
back and he had some news. There was an American there. He was talking. And he
was some big tough guy who seemed to know everything. Fitted Kaspar in every
respect. Some hero, huh? And you know something? We couldn't touch him.
He was just going to sit there gossiping day and night until we came back
another time. We were working with kid gloves then. It took all the persuasion
we had to get that covert team in just to look for intelligence. We
couldn't be seen to be running heavier missions, maybe to capture him or
take him out, because that would screw up any chance we had of rebuilding a
coalition to finish the job. Not that
that
worked either. We were in a
deep pile of shit and there was nothing we could do about it."

"Still,"
Peroni said, "you got there in the end."

"Yes,
we did!" Leapman barked back at him. "And one day you people might
realize what a damn big favour we did you."

Falcone
shook his head. "You're getting away from the subject,
Leapman."

"Yeah,"
he grumbled. "None of you ever like that conversation. OK. So, come last
spring, we get back to Iraq. And we say to some of our intelligence people,
look out for this guy called Bill Kaspar. And when you find him, throw him in a
cell somewhere, call home and leave him alone with us for a little
while."

Peroni
had to ask. "Us being?"

"What's
it matter? What's in a name?"

"It
matters because you're supposed to be FBI," Falcone pointed out.

"Sue
me," Leapman grunted. "The point is this. Ten days into the war we
find Bill Kaspar running like hell in some little town outside Baghdad. Our
guys do just as they're told. Lock him up and wait for a special team to
come and take out the trash. And you know what he does?"

What men like that always did
, Peroni thought.

"I
can imagine," he said.

"No."
Leapman shook his head vigorously. "You can't. The men who picked
him up were low-level grunts. They understood he was supposed to be a bad guy. They
told him so. I
know
Bill Kaspar. He could've taken them out one
by one if he'd wanted. What he did instead was go crazy. I mean angry
crazy. Outraged. Some stupid sergeant knocked him around a little and told him
he was a traitor. Kaspar went ballistic. He demanded to see the platoon
commander, the guy above him, the regional commander, Dubya himself. Why?
Because we'd got it all wrong. He hadn't been sitting there in some
Iraqi palace trading secrets for dough. The poor bastard had been in jail all
along, probably getting tortured daily after a breakfast of dust and shit, not
saying a word because that's what Bill Kaspar is like."

Leapman
took a big deep breath before going on. "We got fooled and Kaspar knew it
long before we did. He listens to this dumb sergeant for a couple of minutes,
thinks it through, and then he's out of there. Doesn't even kill
one of the grunts on the way, either, though a couple of them won't walk
too well for a while. And all we know is some lowly soldiers got a report from
an American prisoner that doesn't add up to much, then let the guy we
wanted so badly escape out into the mess that was going on all over the place. We
didn't stand a chance of catching up with Kaspar after that. And for one
good reason. He didn't want to be caught."

"He
had no money," Peroni objected. "No one to help him."

"
He's
Bill Kaspar
!" Leapman yelled. "I keep telling you. Kaspar
wrote the book on every last trick and scam you can pull in circumstances like
that. You could parachute him onto Mars, come back six months later and he
wouldn't just be alive, he'd be sitting in a nice house with
lobster on the table, fresh champagne on ice in a bucket and some goddamn
hippie CD from the seventies on the stereo. Kaspar survives. He's the
best there is at it."

"When
did you know?" Falcone asked.

Leapman
grimaced. "It took a while. We didn't even realize Kaspar had made
it to the US. We thought he'd hide out in Syria or somewhere. These
people in Deacon's team... most of them were civilians by this time. We
didn't put two and two together until those deaths in Virginia. By then
there were just too many coincidences. All the same we still couldn't
work out what he was up to. As far as we were concerned, Bill Kaspar was a
renegade, a wanted criminal. We couldn't figure out what possible reason
he'd have for risking his neck by coming home and killing these people. Then..."

He
mulled over how far to go. "Then we realized that the only evidence we
had against Kaspar came from Deacon's man who'd gone on that covert
mission a few years earlier. Nothing else corroborated the story. Certainly not
the other three guys who never made it out of there. So we started taking a few
peeks at the bank accounts of some of the others, the ones who did get out. They'd
done their best to keep it hidden at first. I guess after time you get lazy.
There's a whole lot we don't know. Was this arranged before Deacon
and Kaspar went into Iraq? Did one or two of the team plan it and just face the
rest with the choice when they all got there? Live and be a rich traitor or die
and be an unsung hero? It's all guesswork now. Operations like these
don't keep records for good reasons and everyone involved except Bill
Kaspar is dead. But we were starting to firm up our suspicions by the time he
made it to Dan Deacon in Beijing. After that, we were certain. Deacon had half
a million dollars stashed away in a bank account in the Philippines. The moron
never even spent a penny of it. Can you believe it?"

"The
woman who died in the Pantheon?" Falcone asked.

"What
about her?" Leapman asked.

"She
knew. She must have known. You brought her here."

"Yeah,"
he snarled. "So we screwed up. I had five men watching her. How Kaspar
got past them sure beats me."

Falcone
wasn't letting go. "And she came here because... ?"

"Because,
Inspector, I didn't give her any choice. She was a criminal. I could have
snapped my fingers and she'd be gone for good anyway. She knew nothing.
She got shot by accident after Deacon and Kaspar went in and scarcely knew what
happened. So I gave her a chance to make up. Had it worked, she could have
walked free."

"Generous,"
Peroni observed. "Why didn't you just try talking to him
direct?"

Leapman
reached over the table and scattered Costa's papers.

"
We've
been trying
! What do you think all these messages are about? If I could
just get him on the phone... I'd apologize. Then I'd tell him
it's time to end this crap and throw himself on our mercy. Except
now..."

They
waited. It had to come from him.

"Now
he's killed again," Leapman muttered. "Which shouldn't
have happened. He'd killed everyone who'd gone into Iraq with him
and betrayed him. The only one still standing is him. There's no reason
he should take out someone who had nothing to do with this. But Bill Kaspar
always had a pretty old-fashioned view about patriotism. He came out of some
Iraqi prison thinking he'd be home and free with everyone telling him he
was a hero. Instead, he walked into all this crap. Us treating him as if he was
a turncoat. If he feels his country's abandoned him--written him off
as a traitor--I suppose he thinks anything goes these days."

"I
suppose he's right," Peroni grumbled.

"Finally,"
Leapman said, with a long, pained sigh, "we agree on something."

COSTA
MET TERESA where they'd arranged by phone, close to Largo Argentina, and
briefed her on what he'd discovered. Then the two of them walked the
short distance to the cafe where Emily had said she'd be waiting for
them. He didn't recognize her at first. She was standing at the counter
of an empty Tazza d'Oro, close by the Pantheon, anonymous inside a
too-big khaki winter parka with the hood still up. He nodded at her, got a
couple of coffees, and the three of them retreated to a table.

Emily
Deacon looked a little frightened, but a little excited too. Costa reached
forward and gently pulled the hood down to her neckline, revealing her face. She
managed the ghost of a smile and shook her long blonde hair automatically. It
seemed lank and dirty.

Emily
glanced at Teresa. "I thought perhaps it would be you and Gianni."

"Gianni's
tied up," Teresa said instantly. "I'm the best you've
got."

"No."
There was a flash of a smile. "I didn't mean that. Sorry. You've
got something out?"

Costa
nodded at Teresa. "We think so. But put us in the picture first, Emily. What
the hell happened last night? How did you find Kaspar?"

"I
didn't. He found me. You fell asleep." She felt awkward with Teresa
there, Costa guessed. "I went outside... I'm sorry. It's
the last thing I wanted, believe me. But maybe..." She bit her lip.
"This could be the one chance we get. It's important you understand
the situation. Look."

She
flipped down the collar of the jacket and pointed to a tiny black plastic
square. "It's a mike. Kaspar's listening somewhere. He can
hear every word I say. He'll be able to do that all the time until this
is over, so please don't get any smart ideas. And if the mike goes dead, so
do I. Kaspar knows what he's doing. You've both got to understand
that. We can't mess with him."