The Deceiver (48 page)

Stephen Johnson was led past. He paused to look down at the two Englishmen. His accent was as thick as the heather of the west coast.

“Our day will come,” he said. It was the slogan of the Provisional IRA.

McCready looked up and shook his head. “No, Mr. Johnson, your day has long gone.”

Two orderlies loaded the body of the dead IRA man onto a stretcher and removed it.

“Why did she do it, Sam? Why the hell did she do it?” asked Rowse.

McCready leaned forward and drew the sheet back over the face of Monica Browne. The orderlies returned to take her away.

“Because she believed, Tom. In the wrong thing, of course. But she believed.”

He rose, pulling Rowse up with him.

“Come on, lad, we’re going home. Let it be, Tom. Let it be. She’s gone the way she wanted, by her own wish. Now she’s just another casualty of war. Like you, Tom. Like all of us.”

THURSDAY, WHEN THE HEARING BEGAN
for its fourth day, was the day that Timothy Edwards had determined would be its last. Before Denis Gaunt could begin, Edwards decided to preempt him.

Edwards had become aware that his two colleagues behind the table, the Controllers for Domestic Operations and Western Hemisphere, had indicated a softening of their attitudes and were prepared to make an exception in the case of Sam McCready and retain him by some ruse or other. After the close of the Wednesday hearing, his two colleagues had taken Edwards to a quiet corner of the Century House bar and made their feelings more than plain, proposing that somehow the old Deceiver be retained within the Service.

That was emphatically not in Edwards’s scenario. Unlike the others, he knew that the decision to make a class action out of the case for the early retirement of the Deceiver stemmed from the Permanent Under-Secretary of the Foreign Office, a man who one day would sit in conclave with four others and decide the identity of the next Chief of the SIS. It would be foolish to antagonize such a man.

“Denis, we have all listened with the greatest interest to your recall of Sam’s many services, and we are all mightily impressed. The fact is, however, that we now have to face the challenge of the nineties, a period when certain—how shall I put it?—active measures, riding roughshod over agreed procedures, will have no place. Must I remind you of the brouhaha occasioned by Sam’s chosen course of action in the Caribbean last winter?”

“Not in the slightest, Timothy,” said Gaunt. “I had in mind to recall the episode myself, as my last instance of Sam’s continuing value to the Service.”

“Then please do so,” invited Edwards, relieved that this was the last plea he would have to listen to before proceeding to his unavoidable judgment. Besides, he reasoned, this episode would surely sway his two colleagues to the view that McCready’s actions had been more those of a cowboy than of a local representative of her Gracious Majesty. It was all very well for the juniors to give Sam a round of applause when he walked into the Hole in the Wall bar on his return, just before the New Year, but it was he, Edwards, who had had to interrupt his festivities to smooth the ruffled feathers of Scotland Yard, the Home Office, and the outraged Foreign Office, an interlude he still recalled with intense exasperation.

Denis Gaunt reluctantly crossed the room to the desk of the Records clerk and took the proffered folder. Despite what he had said, the Caribbean affair was the one he would most have liked to avoid. Deep though his admiration for his desk chief ran, he knew that Sam had really taken the bit between his teeth on that one.

He recalled only too well the memoranda that had rained on Century House early in the New Year, and the lengthy one-on-one meeting with the Chief to which McCready had been summoned in mid-January.

The new Chief had taken over the Service only a fortnight earlier, and his New Year present had been to have details of Sam’s Caribbean exploits land on his desk. Fortunately, Sir Mark and the Deceiver went back a long way, and after the official fireworks the Chief had, apparently, produced a six-pack of McCready’s favorite ale for a New Year toast and a promise—no more rule-bending.

Six months later, for reasons McCready could only guess at, the Chief had been much less accessible to him.

Gaunt assumed, wrongly, that Sir Mark had bided his time and waited until the summer to ease McCready out. He had no idea from how high a level the order had really come.

McCready knew. He did not need to be told, had no requirement of proof. But he knew the Chief. Like a good commanding officer, Sir Mark would tell you to your face if you were out of line, chew you off if he felt you deserved it, even fire you if things were that bad. But he would do it personally. Otherwise, he would fight like a tiger for his own people against the outsiders. So this business had come from higher up, and the Chief himself had been overruled.

As Denis Gaunt returned to his own side of the room with the file, Timothy Edwards caught McCready’s eye and smiled.

You really are a bloody menace, Sam, he thought. Brilliantly talented, but you just don’t fit anymore. Such a pity, really. If only you’d smarten yourself up and abide by the rules, there could be a place for you. But not now. Not now that you have really upset people like Robert Inglis. It will be a different world in the nineties—my world, a world for people like me. In three years, maybe four, I shall have the Chief’s desk, and there will be no place for people like you anyway. Might as well go now, Sam, old boy. We’ll have a whole new officer group by then—bright young staffers who do what they’re told, abide by the rules, and do not upset people.

Sam McCready smiled back.

You really are a prize asshole, Timothy, he thought. You really think the gathering of intelligence is about committee meetings and computer print-outs and kissing Langley’s butt. All right, it’s good, the American signals-intelligence, and their electronic intelligence. The best in the world—they have the technology with their satellites and listening devices. But it can be fooled, Timothy, old boy.

There’s a thing called
maskirovka
, which you have hardly heard of. It’s Russian, Timothy, and it means the art of building phony airfields, hangars, bridges—entire tank divisions—out of tinplate and plywood, and it can fool the American Big Birds. So sometimes you simply have to go in on the ground, put an agent deep inside the citadel, recruit a malcontent, employ a defector-in-place. Timothy, you’d never have made a field man, with all your club ties and your aristocratic wife. The KGB would have had your balls for cocktail olives in two weeks flat.

Gaunt was beginning his last defense, trying to justify what had happened in the Caribbean, trying not to lose the sympathy of the two Controllers who last night had appeared willing to change their minds and recommend a reprieve. McCready stared out of the window.

Things were changing, all right, but not the way Timothy Edwards thought. The world, in the aftermath of the Cold War, was going quietly crazy—the noise would come later.

In Russia, the bumper harvest was still ungathered for lack of equipment, and by the autumn it would be rotting in the sidings for lack of rolling stock. Famine would come in December, maybe January, driving Gorbachev back into the arms of the KGB and the High Command, and they would exact their price for his heresy of this summer of 1990. The year 1991 would be no fun at all.

The Middle East was a powder keg, and the best-informed agency in the region, the Israeli Mossad, was being treated like a pariah by Washington, and Timothy Edwards was taking his cue from there. McCready sighed. The hell with them all. Perhaps a fishing boat in Devon was the answer after all.

“It all really began,” said Gaunt, opening the file in front of him, “in early December, on a small island in the northern Caribbean.”

McCready was jerked back to the realities of Century House. Ah yes, the Caribbean, he thought—the bloody Caribbean.

THE
GULF LADY
CAME HOME
across a bright and glittering sea an hour before the sun went down. Julio Gomez sat forward, his ample rear end supported by the cabin roof, his moccasined feet upon the foredeck. He drew contentedly on one of his Puerto Rican cheroots, whose foul odors were blown away across the uncomplaining Caribbean waters.

He was, in that moment, a truly happy man. Ten miles behind him lay the underwater drop-off, where the Great Bahama Bank falls into the Santaren Channel; where the kingfish run with the wahoo, and the tuna hunt the bonito, who in turn hunt the ballyhoo and all on occasions are pursued by the sailfish and the big martin.

In the scarred old box astern of the open fishing deck lay two fine dorado, one for him and one for the skipper, who now held the tiller and steered his game fisherman home to Port Plaisance.

Not that two fish had been his entire day’s take; there had been a fine sailfish that had been tagged and returned to the ocean; a mess of smaller bonito that had been used for baitfish; a yellowfin tuna that he had estimated at seventy pounds before it dived so hard and so deep he had had to cut line or see his reel stripped before his eyes; and two big amberjack that he had fought for thirty minutes each. He had returned the big fish to the sea, taking only the dorado because they are among the finest eating fish in the tropics.

Julio Gomez did not like to kill. What brought him on his annual pilgrimage to these waters was the thrill of the hissing reel and the running line, the tension of the bowed rod, and the sheer excitement of the contest between air-breathing man and monstrously strong fighting fish. It had been a wonderful day.

Far away to his left, way out beyond the Dry Tortugas, invisible well below the western horizon, the big red ball of the sun was dropping to meet the sea, giving up its skin-flaying heat, conceding finally to the cool of the evening breeze and the oncoming night.

Three miles ahead of the
Gulf Lady
, the island straddled the water. They would berth in twenty minutes. Gomez flicked the stub of his cheroot to a sputtering grave in the water and rubbed his forearms. Despite his naturally saturnine complexion and olive skin, he would need to apply a good layer of after-sun cream when he got back to his boarding house. Jimmy Dobbs on the tiller had no such problem: He was an islander born and bred, and he owned his boat and chartered it for the visiting tourists who wanted to fish. On his deep ebony skin, the sun had no effect.

Julio Gomez swung his feet off the foredeck and dropped from the cabin roof into the stern.

“I’ll take over, Jimmy. Give you a chance to swab down.”

Jimmy Dobbs gave his ear-to-ear grin, handed over the tiller, took bucket and broom, and began to swab the fish scales and fragments of gut out through the scuppers. Half a dozen terns appeared from nowhere and took the floating scraps from the wake. Nothing goes to waste in the ocean— nothing organic, that is.

There were, of course, more modern charter fishing boats plying the Caribbean—boats with engine-linked power hoses for cleaning down, with cocktail bars, with television and even video shows; with banks of electronic technology for finding fish, and enough navigational aids to go around the world.
Gulf Lady
had none of these things. She was an old and chipped clinker-built timber vessel powered by a smoky Perkins diesel, but she had seen more white water than the smart boys from the Florida Keys could shake a radar scanner at. She had a small forward cabin, a tangle of rods and lines, redolent of fish and oil, and an open afterdeck with ten rod-holders and a single fighting chair homemade in oak, cushions extra.

Jimmy Dobbs had no silicon chips to find the fish for him; he found them himself, the way his father had taught him, with eyes for the slightest hint of change in the water color, the ripple on the surface that should not be there, the diving of a frigate bird far, far away; he had the gut instinct to know where they were running this week and what they were feeding on. But find them he did, every day. That was why Julio Gomez came every vacation to fish with him.

The sheer lack of sophistication of the islands pleased Julio, the lack of technology of the
Gulf Lady
. He spent much of his professional life handling America’s modern technology, tapping queries into a computer, steering a car through the tangled traffic of central Miami. For his vacation, he wanted the sea, the sun, and the wind—those and the fish, for Julio Gomez only had two passions in life, his job, and his fishing. He had had five days of the latter, and just two more to go, Friday and Saturday. On Sunday he would have to fly home to Florida and on Monday morning report for work with Eddie. He sighed at the prospect.

Jimmy Dobbs was also a happy man. He had had a good day with his client and friend, he had a few dollars in his pocket to buy a dress for his old lady and a fine fish to make supper for them both and their brood of kids. What more, he reasoned, had life to offer?

They berthed just after five at the rickety old wooden fishing quay that ought to have fallen down years ago but never had. The previous Governor had said he would ask London for a grant to build a new one, but then he had been replaced by the present man, and Sir Marston Moberley had no interest in fishing. Nor in the islanders, if the bar talk in Shantytown was to be believed—and it always was.

There was the usual scuttling of children to see what the catch had been and to help carry the fish ashore, and the usual banter in the lilting, singsong accents of the islanders as the
Gulf Lady
was made fast for the night.

“You free tomorrow, Jimmy?” asked Gomez.

“Sure am. You wanna go again?”

“That’s what I’m here for. See you at eight.”

Julio Gomez paid a small boy a dollar to carry his fish for him, and together the pair walked off the dock and into the dusky streets of Port Plaisance. They had not far to go, for no distance was far in Port Plaisance. It was not a large town—more a village really.

It was the sort of town found in most of the smaller Caribbean islands, a jumble of mainly wooden houses painted in bright colors with shingle roofs and lanes of crushed shells between them. Along the seashore, around the small harbor bounded by a curving mole of coral blocks against which the weekly trading steamer berthed, stood the more resplendent structures—the custom house, the court house, and the war memorial. All were built of blocks of coral, cut and mortared long ago.