Vagabond (17 page)

She told him that she was Gabrielle, usually Gaby. She said she had been yesterday in the Province and that she handled an agent. She expanded on him, as if he was her property: cheerful, probably one of life’s losers, a minor crook and a major dealer in anything that showed a profit percentage, light on his tax and VAT if he qualified, heavy in dealings with the new Irish. He had started with cigarettes coming in off trawlers to the south-west, a Kerry port, or containers into Cork harbour. He was trusted . . . trusted enough to be asked – as a dealer in about anything – if his contact book went as far as a weapon supplier’s name.

He sat and listened, holding the beaker in both hands and gazing at the man with the limp, whose back was straight enough for him to be ex-army: another damaged and discarded guy who now gardened for a living. He listened. She had been there the day before, with a guy who was on a higher grade. The agent had gone forward in fog and had had fuck-all back-up. Her boss – ‘wanker’ – had given a demonstration of post-traumatic stress disorder, and was now on sick leave. She was to lead; they were going that evening. It would be an exodus. The Joe was flying out and would do the business with a Russian from far back in his life, the vendor. The purchaser was in County Tyrone.

Danny Curnow did not say where he had been, or why.

She would manage the operation from the ground, would have control. Danny – for reasons not explained to her – was going on a separate Prague flight with Matthew Bentinick. Did he go back with Bentinick? He saw no need to answer. She drained her coffee. He declined to pass judgement yet on whether she was good, bad or indifferent. There had been women in the Force Recce Unit, good and not pushy. Also – he had never met her, but stories were legion – there had been a Five girl who worked out of Belfast and ran a Joe called Mossie Nugent on the mountain. They’d taken down a big man, and he was in one of the graveyards. Mossie Nugent was in the same one but his plot was on the far side; the Nugent widow still lived there, shunned. He had not met the Five girl, but had been with Special Forces and they would have gone through fire for her. He had also heard that she was a shell of what she had been. That was what the Province and the job did to the handlers.

Had he any questions? None. Her coffee was finished, and she stood. ‘Sorry and all that, but I can’t bring you inside. Security protocol, you understand.’

‘Of course.’

‘I think Mr Bentinick will come and pick you up from here when he’s ready to leave. Anything you’d like to say, Danny?’

They probably taught that approach – bank manager to a client – to the young people coming into the building. ‘Only one thing.’

‘Please, go ahead.’

‘You seemed to imply I’d be behind you, that you’d lead.’

‘I did, and I will. What’s the one thing.’

‘Miss Davies, if I’m behind you then the temptation to kick you hard in the butt and out of my way – no offence – might be irresistible.’

He assumed there would be a look that might have killed, but his back was to her. He went to the bin and dropped the coffee beaker into it. He thought of where he should have been, pictured it, and the safety of the place.

They always formed a little cluster close to the guide. Such a vast place, from the harbour jutting into the sea to their left and the expanse of the dunes to the right. In front of them was the beach, and the tide was out. The guide would try to convey the noise and crisis of those days when 400,000 British and French soldiers had been there without any vestige of cover. He would speak of the small mercy of low cloud cover on some of the ten days of the evacuation, a hindrance to the dive bombers. The tourists would look towards the sea and conjure images of burning or listing ships and of the lines of soldiers stretched towards and into the water. They might imagine how many had drowned when the tide had ebbed in. Always a guide mentioned how close Great Britain and Northern Ireland had been to the catastrophe of defeat in total war, and how the King had led prayers for the nation. Big ships and little boats had come in, through the inferno, and had taken off around thirty-five thousand men each day for ten days. The tourists were always quietest when told of the sacrifice. Whole units had fought with their backs to the beach, had resisted the panzer forces and held a blood-soaked perimeter line. They had done it so that others might get home – might fight again. A third of the 350,000 were French, and they had sailed for the Kentish ports. They had gone back to France from Portsmouth, in time to re-enlist, then crumbled again and surrendered. Men had died to give them that chance. Little gasps came from the tourists when they heard that.

A young couple jogged near the water line and three men were in the low surf, riding two-wheeled carts drawn by frisky horses, and far out to sea, halfway to England, container ships and tankers edged north and south, to and from Rotterdam. So little to see and so much to imagine. The tourists would struggle to compose pictures for their little cameras that did justice to the events of the place. The chaos and suffering would have been so great.

Dusty watched them, and the guide’s reedy voice was carried to him over the wind. He thought he might have lost a limb.

Bad to be without Danny Curnow and not to know where he was. Danny would have been at the edge of the group, not interrupting or interfering. A wise guide would catch his eye and Danny would inject a little dose of truth, perhaps about the French who had gone back, resisting the chance to stay in England. They had returned to their own military, then spent the rest of the war in prison camps or as forced labour in factories. Dusty listened to the guide and remembered the day when playing God had led to success, and others when it had left the handler scarred. He remembered what Desperate had done.

An active-service unit had planned to hit a bar in loyalist Bangor, where the Union Flags flew and the kerbstones were red, white and blue. The tout was on the team that was going to drive out from west Belfast, well armed. The bar would be full and they’d spray the bullets around. If they put a ring of steel and road blocks round the bar then it would be obvious to the ASU’s people that there had been a leak – the tout would be fingered, break under torture and end up dead in a ditch. All the handler’s time spent on him, and the money, would have gone to waste. Desperate had come up with a counter-plan, and Captain Bentinick had sanctioned it. They knew what car the active-service unit were using to come into Bangor, and the action would take place when it passed through Crawfordsburn. Time would be tight – a road accident. Two undercover police cars had a shunt outside the bar, glass in the road, wings and sides dented. The blue lights were there fast, sirens and an ambulance. The boys of the ASU, with the tout on the back seat, gripping his AK, came up the street, saw the lights, the chaos and the watching crowd. They did a three-point and got the hell out. The best result. A new lease on life for the tout, and God wasn’t bothered.

Dusty saw the tourists start to meander up the beach. A few took a last photograph, and all were subdued.

‘It’s intolerable. He’s rude, boorish, and probably a dinosaur.’

‘An interesting evaluation, Gaby.’

‘It’s a delicate mission, high stakes to play for.’

‘Quite.’

He let her speak. An infuriating tactic Matthew Bentinick employed was to continue to work at his screen, seeming to listen but apparently paying little attention to what he was told. The outsider was left to stand. Perhaps she was amused that an old hand would play games of precedence. It was a dreary room, but Gaby Davies, from a north-east city where money was tight and interior décor minimal, was no expert in wallpaper designs and lampshades. She wondered why any vestige of humanity in the man was so artfully hidden: no family photographs, no pot plant on the windowsill, no painting of a rural scene. His jacket hung from a hook behind the door, with his raincoat and a trilby; his waistcoat was unbuttoned and his tie loosened. There was a floor safe and two padlocked shoulder-high filing cabinets. The leave chart was stuck to the wall: the last time she had been in the room she had checked her name and seen the dates entered for a break she planned in northern Spain at the end of October; and his column was bare for the year. His wife must have been a saint, or detached, and she’d never heard of children. It was the indifference he showed, and the failure to respond to her accusation of rudeness –
then the temptation to kick you hard in the butt and out of my way – no offence – might be irresistible
– that riled her most. A direct threat of physical violence. She pushed on.

‘I’m suggesting, Matthew, that the cowboy world of Northern Ireland twenty years ago has had its day. He doesn’t seem to understand that I will give the instructions and—’

‘If you have ten minutes to spare, Gaby, before getting your bits and pieces together and hitting the road for the airport, why don’t you go into Archive? I’ll send authorisation ahead of you. The file you’ll want is called
vagabond
. Some definitions of the word – disreputable, worthless, a rogue and a knave or having an uncertain or irregular course of direction. Call in before you go. Thank you, Gaby.’

He was typing.

She thought fleetingly of the woman who was married to him, lived in a suburban street and was surrounded by neighbours who thought of her as ‘martyred’, eking out a life in a loveless marriage. Poor woman.

She went out and closed the door after her. From what she had heard, only Jocelyn down the corridor could work alongside him. Hadn’t much time, but could slot ten minutes. She took a lift down.

Jocelyn had sidled in. She could talk, listen or prompt.

Bentinick said, ‘I have to have him there because the agent is the key. But who would trust an agent? Not me. An agent is a liar. He must lead us forward, but he’ll want marshalling – he needs a collar round his throat and a restraining leash. Vagabond will hold the leash and keep it tight. He’ll attempt deceit because of his terror of the Siberian rock and the east Tyrone hard place.’

‘That’s why I said you had to have the best.’

The place had the atmosphere of church. She was in Archive in the basement. The days of the card-index system were dead and there were two central piers. On either side there were cubicles and two women to open and close specific files. No voice was raised there, and the only sounds were the clicking of keyboards and the whine from the air-conditioners. The building worked on ‘need to know’ and Archive protected that agenda. She flitted over screen pages and glimpsed photographs. Other men’s features were distorted, but Curnow’s face was clear. He had barely changed in twenty years – even the haircut was the same. The eyes still lacked warmth.

A brusque middle-aged woman had opened the file, offering no small-talk, but Gaby had tried: ‘You had the authorisation from Mr Bentinick?’

‘Yes, which is why I’m opening it.’

‘I work with him.’

‘I gathered.’

‘Have you known him long?’

‘Probably from his first week with us. There you are.
vagabond
.’

‘Is there family?’

‘I’m sure Mr Bentinick tells colleagues what he wants them to know about his family. At your grade you can’t download or print this file.’

She saw what had been written about Danny Curnow of the Force Reconnaissance Unit: the call-sign he’d used and the day-to-day name, ‘Desperate’, the man who had looked after his back, had been driver and protection; there were referrals to the testimonials of ranking army officers and a commendation from Special Branch, which was usually blood drawn from granite. There were the code titles given to agents – she scrolled past them and was able to read how long they had been on the payroll. A red cross against a name indicated ‘deceased’. The final agent had been listed as dead on a date in late 1994.

Danny Curnow’s face was not that of a thug. Gaby Davies had spent time, on attachment, with the international police in Bosnia and had searched for the last war criminals against whom secret warrants had been issued. There had been Serbs, Croats, Muslim Bosnians, and some among them had the faces of beasts skilled in brutality. Danny Curnow’s was not a brute’s face but it was lifeless, as though part of its owner had died. She could have said, as the woman from Archive closed down the screen and shut away the file, that Curnow and Bentinick shared the same absence of animation.

‘Does he know I’m in charge or not?’

She stood in the doorway. Bentinick sat. Their eyes did not meet.

‘I’m sure, Gaby, it’ll all shake down.’

‘Archive says he ushered a whole host of men to premature graves. In case everyone’s forgotten, it’s our job to protect our sources. We’re responsible for our agents.’