Borrowed Time u-11 Page 3

  Mike was still bewildered at the turn of events. He had been sure Philpott had thrown this one out. ‘You’re saying we can go in as a team?’

  ‘Indeed,’ Philpott said. ‘I believe a little collective defusing would be in order.’ He passed three clipped documents along the table. ‘These are preliminary strategic manoeuvres worked out between Sufi Gopal and myself. Let me have your comments and any suggested revisions of strategy by this time tomorrow.’

  Sabrina frowned. ‘Is that it? Is the meeting over?’

  Philpott nodded. They all stood.

  ‘That means I’ve got to hang about in these clothes for another two hours and still turn up at the Arcadia looking glitzy and fresh.’

  ‘Go home and take them off,’ Whitlock said.

  ‘I can’t do that. I can’t take clothes off, then put them on again in a couple of hours. I’d feel like I was wearing stuff that should be in the cleaner’s. And if I feel that way, I’ll look that way. In front of her.’

  ‘Go shopping,’ Mike said. ‘That’ll keep you on your feet for two hours without noticing it, and you won’t get your duds creased.’

  Sabrina beamed at him. ‘Great idea,’ she said.

  Whitlock stayed behind when Sabrina and Mike had gone. ‘I spoke to Carl Grubb earlier,’ he told Philpott.

  ‘The private investigator?’

  ‘I asked him to keep a watch on the funeral home where they’re holding Arno Skuttnik’s body. Quite a few people have shown up to pay their respects. Other staff from the hotel where he worked, his neighbours …’

  Philpott was drumming the table softly. ‘C.W.,’ he said, ‘you wouldn’t have volunteered this information if it had been devoid of relevance, am I correct?’

  ‘I was working up to it, the relevant bit.’

  ‘Just skip the presentation. What’s the story?’

  ‘Adam Korwin showed up.’

  ‘What?’ Philpott’s eyes grew wide. ‘To look at the body?’

  ‘Grubb was watching from an adjoining room. He said the way Korwin looked at the corpse, he was there to satisfy himself it was who people said it was.’

  Philpott shook his head slowly. ‘Can we be sure it was Korwin?’

  ‘I have the Polaroids. It was him, all right.’

  ‘I don’t know whether to feel good or bad about this.’

  ‘It’s intriguing,’ Whitlock said. ‘An old immigrant with no family, no skills, no interesting history, no status you could measure, dies suddenly, and who shows up to run an eye over the body?’

  ‘Adam Korwin,’ Philpott breathed. ‘Surprise, surprise …’

  Korwin was the doyen of US East Coast spy-masters. During the cold war his name had been cited by three Kremlin defectors, and his status as a principal Russian spy-handler had been confirmed by highly-placed Eastern Bloc sources. But Korwin was so good at his job that he had worked for thirty years under the noses of the FBI and CIA without once doing anything even remotely suspicious. To all appearances he was a harmless self-employed upholsterer, and no one could muster enough on him to work up a believable extradition order.

  ‘What the hell was his connection with Skuttnik?’ Philpott said.

  ‘That’s my next avenue of enquiry. Assuming you want me to take this further.’

  ‘I’ll say I do.’

  ‘It’ll take time. What about Kashmir?’

  ‘With a touch of re-jigging and enough local help, that’s a job Mike and Sabrina can tackle. Don’t worry about it. Concentrate on the link between the late Arno Skuttnik and the boys from Red Square.’

  * * *

  Lenny Trent called that afternoon while Mike was in the TF3 suite, boning up on the geography of northern India and Kashmir. Maps and books were spread across two tables and a gazetteer lay open on the carpet. When the phone rang he had to dig it out from under the concertina folds of a Delhi street directory.

  ‘Mike. It’s Lenny. You still interested in pin-pointing the whereabouts of Paul Seaton?’

  ‘It’s only been one day, Lenny. Of course I’m still interested. I’m flying out to India before the end of the week, so you could say I’m really anxious to get a line on him.’

  ‘I may have something for you.’

  ‘So soon?’

  ‘Idle conversation can be a golden shovel, Mike. You never know what it’ll turn up.’

  ‘I’ll put that on the cork board.’

  ‘At lunch today I talked to my colleagues in general terms about what you and I discussed yesterday — the Afghanistan initiative, the way terrorist groups and drug routes have blossomed since the Russkies moved out — and I asked if anybody had ever had confirmation of the alleged drug convoys running from Kashmir down the western territories into the Punjab. Louise, who is in liaison with our north-west Indian contacts all year round, said she’d heard the convoys had stopped. Pakistani Army hotshots on the border had made it too dangerous.’

  ‘Oh, well…’

  ‘Hang on,’ Lenny said. ‘Louise then told me she’d heard from a good source that the American guy who led the big convoy was running another one now.’

  ‘Did she say where?’

  ‘From up near the Wular Lake region in northwest Kashmir, down the western territories to a destination unknown. It could be Batala or Kangra — they’re places where you’ll find run-on links for any kind of contraband.’

  ‘Fascinating, Lenny. But it still sounds like hearsay.’

  ‘You’re not letting me unfold this the way I want,’ Lenny complained. ‘Just listen. When Louise told us about the new convoy route, up pipes Jonathan, our satellite communications guy. He said he visited the Aerial Defence Department’s tracking and reconnaissance centre at Arlington six weeks ago, and they showed him some high-definition photographs, computer enhanced, taken from three miles up. He was impressed, especially by one that showed a suspected bandit convoy in the Pirpanjal Mountains in western Kashmir.’

  ‘That sounds more promising.’

  ‘Let me finish. The faces of several of the men in the horse convoy were clearly visible, so Jonathan says. I asked him if the leader’s face was showing but he wasn’t sure, he just recalled they were great pictures.’

  ‘Lenny, you just made my day. I’m really grateful.’

  ‘What are you gonna do? Get hold of the pictures?’

  ‘Not easy, but yes, that’s what I plan to do,’ Mike said.

  ‘Don’t mention me or my people, will you? Jonathan was shown the stuff as a favour, and because I suppose the Aerial Defence guys couldn’t help showing off. It was classified material and Jonathan was warned not to talk about any of it outside his professional circle.’

  ‘And he didn’t.’

  ‘But I did. So keep shtum, unless you want Customs at Delhi to find an embarrassment of heroin in your baggage.’

  ‘Noted. Thanks again, Lenny. You’re a sweetheart.’

  It took twenty minutes to raise anyone at Aerial Defence in Arlington who would speak to Mike. When he finally located a USAF lieutenant attached to Satellite Reconnaissance, the man was not keen to route the call to anyone with more authority.

  ‘Lieutenant Ross, I need to discuss access to possibly classified aerial photographs,’ Mike said, setting out his case all over again. ‘I have Level One security clearance, you can make an integrity check with your own central computer right now. My security rating, plus my connection with the UN Security Council, permits me access to individuals and to data at the most sensitive levels.’

  ‘I daresay all that is correct, Mr Graham, but I have no authorization to connect you with any other person at this facility.’

  ‘Then who can patch me through to where I need to go?’

  ‘Certainly not me,’ Ross said coldly. ‘And even if I knew of such an individual, I haven’t the authorization to connect you with him in order that he might help you.’

  ‘This is crazy.’

  ‘You’re entitled to your interpretation, sir.’

  Mike
put down the phone to kill the connection, then picked it up again. He tapped in the number of C.W. Whitlock’s mobile. When Whitlock answered, Mike explained the Catch-22 conversation he’d had with the man at Aerial Defence.

  ‘You went by the wrong route,’ Whitlock said. ‘They don’t talk to anybody they don’t know. The officer who froze you out, he would have checked the list of known characters. The short of it is, unless you’ve first of all been on face-to-face terms with someone up there, they won’t give you the time of day by phone or fax.’

  ‘Do they know you?’

  ‘Of course they do,’ Whitlock said smoothly.

  Mike explained what he was trying to get. He added that he would deem it a favour if Whitlock said nothing to Philpott about the matter.

  ‘What have you got going there?’ Whitlock demanded. ‘A vendetta?’

  ‘Something of the kind,’ Mike said; he knew an outright lie wouldn’t work. ‘It’s a long story.’ He paused. ‘Well, no, it isn’t really, but this is not the time …’

  ‘Tell you what,’ Whitlock said. ‘If I get hold of what you’re after, you’ll tell me what’s behind it. Deal?’

  ‘For Pete’s sake, C. W…’

  ‘Deal?’

  Mike nodded at the receiver. ‘Deal.’

  4

  Next morning the plans for the Kashmir assignment were firmed up and finalized in the briefing suite. It was agreed that Mike would be flown directly to Delhi, then taken north by helicopter to the mountains north-west of the Vale of Kashmir. There he would receive an intensive introduction to the region from a Kashmiri Indian, Ram Jarwal, who was a UN Area Observer stationed near Srinagar, in the west of the Indian-administered territory of Kashmir.

  Sabrina would spend a single day being briefed by a team of WHO specialists before she travelled to a US-operated commercial airfield at Dehra Dun, eighty kilometres north-west of Delhi. From there she would be spirited northward and would finally become fully visible driving a car into the town of Kulu, in the Pradesh region, 160 kilometres south of the Kashmir border.

  ‘As ever with agents collecting peripheral intelligence,’ Philpott said, ‘we want Sabrina to appear to have been around for a while, without anyone being able to pinpoint the place or time she arrived. The rule here is always worth remembering — a reassuring presence and a hazy history make for convincing cover.’

  On her journey northward, Sabrina would carry the credentials of a WHO Ecology Monitor.

  ‘Since you will both arrive in the Vale of Kashmir by different means and at different rates of progress,’ Philpott continued, ‘it’s to be hoped you’ll pick up widely different intelligence in the early stages of your assignment. What we need to know, principally, is the severity of criminal activity — of recent origin, remember — in the target region. Long-standing problems are already accommodated by a number of means; we need to know what’s being added to make the pot boil over, as it were. The causes could be far more widespread than Reverend Young or our observers think. The short version is, we badly need hard intelligence.’

  ‘Nothing to be taken for granted,’ Sabrina murmured, scribbling.

  ‘Quite so,’ Philpott said. ‘We need to know the nature of the beast, where it’s from and how far it sprawls. In more realistic terms, we need to find out how best to counter and prevent a series of political reactions which could result in an Indo-Chinese bloodbath.’

  Mike wanted to know if current intelligence still indicated that the main troubles were orchestrated by one or two terrorist groups.

  ‘That is still the view of our best-informed observers,’ Philpott said. ‘You may find differently once you get past the various façades, of course. If you do discover you’re up against something that calls for a small army rather than a couple of smart saboteurs, then don’t indulge in heroics. Evaluate the position, report to me, then clear out.’

  Before dismissing them Philpott issued a caution. ‘At all times, remain aware that UNACO’s function is to combat and neutralize crime without impinging on local politics or customs. In this case it won’t be easy to avoid trespassing on sensitive ground, so damage-limitation must be a priority. Making matters worse will be a lot easier than making them better.’

  In the corridor outside, Mike and Sabrina wished each other luck. Sabrina even put a peck on Mike’s cheek before they parted.

  ‘My, but that was cordial and civilized,’ Whitlock observed, stepping out of the recessed doorway of the briefing room. ‘Not like you two at all.’

  ‘Truces come and go,’ Mike said. ‘For a while now it’s been OK between us.’

  ‘Because you haven’t been working closely with one another.’

  ‘Precisely, C.W. The peace can’t hold. Sooner or later we’ll find ourselves sharing a predicament, and then she’ll try to assert what she feels is her natural authority —’

  ‘Over what you know to be yours.’ Whitlock held up his attaché case and tapped the side. ‘I’ve got something for you. Let’s go to Secure Comms.’

  Mike had expected photographs, but what C.W. took out of the case was a mini CD.

  ‘This was the only way to do it.’ He powered up a graphics computer on a steel table in the middle of the floor. ‘Photographic prints at Aerial Defence are numbered and accounted for. They are also magnetically tagged through a ferrous component in the paper emulsion, so there was no way anybody was going to get one out of there. However, I have a resourceful friend on the strength, and he knows the code that unlocks the negative disks.’

  ‘Negative disks?’

  ‘The negatives aren’t on film. They’re electronic and they’re stored on hard disks. So my compadre unlocked the negs and transferred identical copies to this minidisk.’

  Whitlock opened a zippered pouch and took out a Sony MZ-R3 minidisk recorder. He plugged one end of a transfer cord into the tiny silver machine and put the other end into a socket in the back of the computer. He put the CD into the Sony and a moment later a picture began to appear on the screen. It built slowly at first, then accelerated until the whole screen was filled with a sharp photographic image of eleven turbaned men on horses travelling through mountainous countryside. No faces were visible.

  ‘That’s no good,’ Mike said. ‘I was told they could be identified …’

  ‘There are over twenty still to go,’ Whitlock said. ‘Be patient, can’t you?’

  He began tapping a button on top of the Sony. With each tap the picture on the screen changed.

  ‘Stop!’ Mike pointed as the eighth picture came up. ‘Stop right there!’

  The image was a closer view and a different angle from the ones before. The faces of three men were visible. One was the leader, but he had moved his head at the moment of exposure and the features were blurred.

  ‘Damn!’ Mike growled.

  Whitlock brought up the next shot. The same three faces were visible, but this time the leader gazed straight ahead, caught full face and pin sharp.

  ‘My God.’

  Whitlock watched Mike. He had the look of a man who had been searching for something under a stone and had found it; fascinated repulsion was the description that came to mind.

  ‘That’s the man?’

  ‘That’s him.’

  Mike took in the wide clear eyes, the firm arrogant set of the mouth; the nose, once straight, had gone through a few changes of shape since boyhood. It had even changed since Mike last saw it.

  ‘Ugly, isn’t he?’

  Whitlock frowned at the picture. ‘He looks normal to me. Quite handsome, even.’

  ‘OK. I’m prejudiced.’

  ‘Tell me about him.’

  Mike made a face.

  ‘You promised.’

  Mike got two Styrofoam cups of coffee from the machine by the door and brought them to the table. They sat down in front of the big monitor.

  ‘Lenny Trent asked me if I had a private agenda where this man is concerned,’ Mike said. ‘You asked me if it was a vendetta. Well,
yes to both questions. The agenda is bedded in a time long ago, when I was a kid. When I was, to be precise, a rookie quarterback for the New York Giants.’

  ‘If this is a football story I may fall asleep.’

  ‘Stay with me, you’ll be all right. During my second week with the team one of the star players, Lou Kelly, got his career ended abruptly in the parking lot behind the ball park. He was beaten half to death. At that time I had never seen anyone injured so badly. He lost an eye and had his left arm broken in so many places it had to be amputated below the elbow.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘I didn’t get the full story until years later. A certain senator had offered Lou Kelly money to perform badly in a crucial game. He only had to play badly enough to give the other team the edge, that was all they needed. Lou Kelly refused and he was promptly offered twice as much money. He still refused. So a man was sent to punish him for being so intractable.’

  ‘A contract beating.’

  ‘Yeah. It turned out worse than a killing for Lou. I still remember seeing the man waiting for him outside the players’ exit and thinking, that guy is bad news. It was a long time ago and everybody was much younger then, but I’ve got no doubts. The man who destroyed Lou Kelly’s career that night was Paul Seaton.’

  They were silent for a minute, drinking coffee, staring at the picture on the screen.

  ‘According to my contact at Aerial Defence,’ Whitlock said, ‘Seaton and his bandits are a bunch of crazies. They don’t limit their activities to running drugs. They’re into fundamentalist agitation, sabotage, even random murder. They could be a part of Reverend Young’s local problem.’

  ‘How much intelligence does Aerial Defence have on the bandits?’

  ‘I just gave you all of it. The one other thing they know for sure is that nobody offers the bandits any resistance. People are too scared. Look over your shoulder at these guys, you won’t survive past sunset.’