Confessor (51 page)

Gus was completing his act—making thought-of cards rise from a deck placed in a goblet. The final card rose high above the goblet and was caught in Gus’s hands.

Herb shouted, “Stop! Police!” bringing up the Beretta as the figure in front of him brought his pistol to bear on Gus.

Kruger was about to fire when someone detached herself from the crowd cowering back in the wings.

The audience was stamping and applauding as Gus spread his arms in acknowledgment. Nobody out there heard the shot. The slim girlish figure simply put the pistol to the would-be assassin’s head and pulled the trigger. There was a gout of blood from the back of the man’s skull as it blew apart and he fell sideways.

“Oh, shit!” Herbie mouthed. “The fool. He should have known he couldn’t get away with it forever—whatever it is he’s trying to get away with.” He began to walk forward as Bex came in through the stage door.

Slowly, with Bex just behind him, he walked towards the crumpled body. “Tony,” Herbie choked. “Tony Worboys, you bloody idiot.” Young Worboys’s blood kept pumping.

Carole stepped from the knot of people who seemed to be rooted, unmoving. She looked towards Bex then saw Kruger’s almost wilting smile. He put an arm around her, gave her a squeeze and moved back to stand with Bex as they watched Gus take his final calls.

“I don’t understand.” Bex looked at him and then at the body.

“Gus’ll have some of the answers. He’d better have some answers.”

The applause washed up, joined by the stamping of feet, as Claudius Damautus took ovation after ovation. At last the curtain came down and Carole ran out to embrace her husband.

Herbie and Bex followed her. “You’d better have a damned good story, my old friend,” Herb said, then looked to see that another figure had joined them out of the darkness. Herbie recognized the girl as Khami Qasim and saw that her right hand now hung by her side, the pistol pointing at the ground. “And this, I suppose, is
Jasmine
?” he said, looking over Gus’s shoulder. “She saved your life.”

Gus nodded and pulled Khami into an embrace. “I think she’s saved a lot of lives.”

“And taken some,” Herbie said quietly.

“She finally took out the man Walid. I think the one here—Hisham—is down to Declan Norton. Where is he, by the way?”

“They just took him downtown,” Bex told them. “He’ll have a nasty headache when he wakes up.”

“Gus, Young Worboys is dead.” Herbie’s face crumpled as he said it.

“I’m sorry.” Gus shook his head. “I’m sorry, but perhaps it’s for the best. I doubt if he could’ve coped with the rest of his life in jail.”

“As bad as that?”

“Worse.” Gus put an arm around his old friend. “He was my reason for dying. It’s a shock to you, Herb, but he had got himself badly mixed up with the FFIRA, and others. I suspect that bastard Declan Norton had a contract out on him in any case. Tony Worboys just knew too damned much. That’s why I had to disappear by dying. It’s a long story, Herb. Can I tell it tomorrow?”

“Sure, why not?” Herbie put his arm out to bring Bex into the conversation. “Gus, a funny thing happened to me on my way to the theater tonight. It was this nice Detective Chief Inspector from the anti-terrorist squad.”

Gus extended his hand to Bex and told her that when eating with Herbie Kruger you really had to sup with a long spoon.

“I know,” she said. “I know just how long Herb’s spoon is.”

“
YOU’LL HAVE SEEN NOTHING
about it in the files,” Gus began. “But I was assigned to interrogate Tony Worboys about eighteen months before I retired. It began as just a routine matter, nothing solid, straws in the wind.”

They sat together in Herbie’s suite at the Grand Hyatt. The FBI, CIA and police heads from
Conductor
had agreed to let Kruger and Bex talk to Gus Keene before they carried out their own debriefing. Khami had been taken away to what the FBI termed a place of safety, and Washington breathed a collective sigh of relief when the President made a statement to the effect that the entire team of terrorists connected to the appalling incidents of the past few days was now accounted for. “This does not mean we can relax our vigilance,” he said in a televised statement from the Oval Office. “Our beloved country has experienced the cowardly and deadly actions of international terrorism on a scale never before seen here. More could follow.”

“Straws in the wind?” Herb asked. “What kind of straws?”

“There was a lot on.” Gus gave a weary sigh. “We had you and that old orchestral conductor filling up the guest facilities. You’ll remember that I was hearing everyone’s confession at the time—including your former German girlfriend’s, Herb. Sorry, but I had to mention that. Anyway, out of the blue, the Office called me to London. We were still at Century House then.” Century House had been the Office headquarters for a long time. “They told me that nobody had done a positive on Deputy CSIS Worboys for years.”

By a “positive” Gus meant a Positive Vetting. These were routine examinations of members of the Office or the Security Service. Checkups to make certain that members of the Office remained clean. The CIA did it with a lie detector and called it “fluttering.” The Brits preferred to work on people’s backgrounds on a face-to-face basis.

“So you gave him a going-over?” Herbie leaned back in his chair. He had been upset, even desolate, since the previous night. After all, he had virtually trained Tony Worboys. The man had been his closest associate during the worst times of the Cold War.

“Yes, I gave him a going-over. He was tremendous when the Soviets were the main target, but once the Evil Empire seemed to fall apart, Tony Worboys went through a kind of change. A lot of people did, and you can’t blame them. Everyone thought their jobs were on the line. They weren’t, of course, because our old profession never dies, and when the Soviets crumbled, things became even worse. The world was more dangerous than it had been for almost fifty years.

“As you know, Herb, only a hundred and twenty people were let go from the Office, and most of them were on the brink of retirement anyway.”

“Sure, I was one myself.”

“That was years ago, Herb. Anyway, they were always hauling on your string to get you back.”

“Worboys was going through a kind of change, Gus?” Herbie pushed on.

“Yes. I had him out at Warminster a couple of times. Talked to him in London, detected something was not right. He’d become more arrogant, but they all do when they climb the ladder and end up close to the Chief’s door.” He sipped from the coffee they had brought up for him. “But Tony’s lifestyle seemed to have changed. He’d bought that big place out at Harrow Weald. His kids were at expensive schools. His wife spent money like it grew on trees. He appeared to be living beyond his means—none of us can make a fortune in the espionage business. He told me several stories. His wife had money of her own. He’d had a legacy from some long-forgotten uncle.”

“Long-forgotten uncles can be useful.” Herbie nodded.

“I checked it out, and on the surface it seemed true. His wife
did
have money, and he
did
come into a legacy. There was something more, though. I worked away at it and he became more belligerent. So, I finally got the okay to use the magic machines on his bank accounts—and his wife’s, of course. A lot of money had come his way, but not quite the right amount. In fact, a good deal more than he’d admit to. Wife was the same.” He gave a deep sigh. “So, as often happens, I gave him an okay on the vetting, then did something illegal.”

“You, Gus?” It was mock surprise because Herbie knew Gus well enough to be ninety-nine percent sure that the foxy Confessor had often got hold of evidence by illegal wiretaps, unauthorized surveillance and quite irregular computer hacking into financial houses. Often senior officers turned a blind eye or backdated forms of consent. “What wicked ways did you go?”

“Put a team on Worboys. Good lads. My people from Warminster up for refresher courses, boys and girls like that. We also tapped his telephone. In the office and at home. I also had some of the computer whiz kids take a little walk through overseas bank accounts.”

“What do you mean by overseas? Switzerland?”

“Switzerland, Liechtenstein and the like.”

“You can get into the databases of those places nowadays?”

“It’s an art, Herb. I had guys that could have found out every investment made by the royal family, with nobody ever the wiser. We came up with some rich results regarding Tony. A numbered account in Switzerland, which was topped up at regular intervals. Once we had that, all we had to do was trace back. Find out where the top-ups were coming from.”

“So you did that?”

“Not at first. We got him during the surveillance. It’s odd how experienced intelligence officers sometimes make tiny errors when they go off the rails. They usually cover themselves well enough—as he did—but by then I was searching for a chink in his armor.”

“So which rails did he go off?”

“First of all, the ones that led to Belfast or Armagh. I couldn’t prove it, but I
knew
. If he’d been faced with it, I’m certain that he would have had his own version—written backwards, if you follow me.”

Herbie nodded.

“I logged every meeting he ever had with people acting for terrorist groups, of all shades and conditions, in Ireland. I logged every telephone call—even stuff we got with directional mikes aimed at public telephones. Yet I’m certain that if I had laid it all out, Tony would’ve laid out his cards next to each piece I’d collected. He would have been able to show a good intelligence take; claim that he was working informers. The old trick, Herb. You know how it works. The informer becomes the informed. I
knew
he had answers to each and every piece of evidence. For each meeting he would have chicken feed claimed to have been passed to him. But I knew he was really doing the passing. Then he widened his field of operations.”

“He moved to the Middle East hoodlums?”

“Middle East; the old Soviet satellites; name it and he had his fingers in the pie. Tony Worboys was passing a great deal of high-octane material to practically everyone.”

Herb nodded again. “And that led to the usual problems?”

“He should’ve known better. I don’t have to tell you the pattern that develops in cases like this. He got in so deep that people demanded more of him. They demanded more personally.

“They wanted a favor performed here, and another one done there. By the time I decided to retire, Worboys was in hock really badly. Two or three years ago he would never have been led by the nose by the likes of Declan Norton, who’s just a hired gun when all’s said and done.”

“But people like Declan had him bang to rights. You scratch our backs if we scratch yours.”

“That’s it, Herbie. I know of several groups who had him by the short-and-curlies. Seriously. He’d have committed murder for them …Well, he nearly did last night.”

“So, what you do with all this information, Gus?”

“Kept it. Just before I retired, I was very foolish. Had Tony down to dinner, then laid the news on him. I told him the lot. Said I had tapes and video and Lord knows what else.”

“Reaction?”

“He just laughed at me. Said he would have no difficulty in disputing anything I handed over—I said I’d hand it over unless he promised to come clean, give it all up and take an early retirement.”

“And he just laughed? Well, he would really, Gus. Why the hell you tell him?”

“Because I’d got myself mightily pissed off at everything. Worboys just walked away and told me I should watch my back. I retired and started the book. You know, Herb, I was going to include everything—
Cataract
; the way the Security Service used me to run that idiot asset,
Ishmael
—Hisham; my own folly in running
Jasmine
for my own ends. I was going to air every piece of dirty laundry we had—including friend Worboys. In fact, I had all the Worboys material put into a safe lockbox at my bank. It’s still there, so I guess we’ll have to haul it out again.”

“The fact you were using
Cataract
shook me rigid.”

“It was meant to shake you, Herb. I knew you’d be the one doing the donkey work, so I left everything for you to find. Everything except Worboys, because I reckoned that would put you in real danger.”

“How did you know it’d be me?”

Gus fiddled with the old pipe he always carried, and did not look Herbie in the eyes. “Oh, I knew.”

“More, Gus. Come on. How?”

“There were indications. He began to threaten me. Subtle, but enough to scare me off. By that time I had lost all interest. In a way, Herb, I felt I’d wasted my life. You now know what my real passion is. You don’t know how many times I wanted to leave and make some kind of a life as a professional performer. It’s strange, how the two arts run together, the magic and the method. Smoke and mirrors. So, one day I sat down with Carole and we planned how I could do it by killing off the old Gus Keene and resurrecting a full-time Damautus.”

“You still haven’t told me, Gus.”

“Told you what?”

“How you knew I’d be dealing with the case.”

“Ah. Herb, it’s quite embarrassing. Tony himself said to me that, should I drop dead, there was one person he could rely on.”

“Me? Why?”

“You were on the booze, old love. You’d lost weight, you were cracking up. He decided you’d be ideal. You’d screw up.”

Herbie nodded sagely. “He was right. He was quite right.” A pause of around a hundred years seemed to pass. “You know, Gus, your sudden death saved my life. Thought about it often. You’re such a good old friend that I became driven. Got back in line, started eating and working—Oh, and of course, I discovered the wonderful art of magic.”

It was Bex’s turn to give a deep sigh. “He’s doing card tricks all the time, Gus.”

“Better than boozing.” Gus nodded at her. “Much better, I promise you, Bex.”

Herbie’s brow wrinkled. “Gus, if people like Declan Norton had Tony on a string, why’d he put out a contract on him with the Vengeance team?”

“The usual. The frighteners. Norton would know that Worboys—once he knew—would move heaven and earth to get back in the FFIRA’s good books. Once that contract was out, nobody had any real control over the
Intiqam.
You saw what he did, Herb? Moved himself and his family into safety and stayed there.”