The Untouchable (47 page)

He told her about the Bunica valley.

Each time she interrupted him, he made a little gesture with his finger, tapped his lips, then went on.

He talked until she no longer interjected, brought the valley into the steaming heat of the Portakabin, and his voice was quiet against the murmur of the arching fan on the window shelf beside his desk.

He talked until she reached into the pocket of her shoulder-padded jacket, took out a handkerchief and dabbed her eyes.

He said, There are a thousand such valleys. I play God. I preside over committees that decide the order in which they should be cleared. Some are disgustingly ugly and ruined with factory complexes, some are as beautiful as this one. What they have in common is that they are all destroying lives . . . When I can justify it, the valley will be cleared.'

'Testicles were pinched, Mr Gough, and it hurt.'

' I'm sure it did, Mr Cork.'

'One to one with the minister - whatever thoughts we have of the relevance of our political masters - is not a happy experience. It was like being in the middle of an incendiary bomb attack. He was powerfully angry. Unity is his text for the day.'

'What does the minister want, Mr Cork? Does he want togetherness, or does he want Packer behind bars?'

'He wants a report.'

'We searched the property, of course, and didn't find anything of importance but, then, we didn't expect to . . . Tell him, Mr Cork, in your report that it's about flushing foxes from cover, driving them on to the guns.'

'The only fox he'll ever have seen will have been on Wandsworth Common.'

'What you don't tell him is what I'm asking you to do. I want a total trawl to identify any call on a mobile this morning from the Pimlico district of London to Sarajevo. Shouldn't be that difficult, but I need the help of your old crowd, and GCHQ and the National Security Agency.'

'Are we moving from foxes to rotten apples?'

'Jarring them up, Mr Cork, creating mistakes.'

' I'll do that - and what do I tell, because I don't have time on my side, my esteemed minister?'

'Give him your word that there will be, in the future, total co-operation between the Sierra Quebec Golf team and the National Crime Squad.'

'Starting when? I have to tell him when.'

'Before Christmas.'

'Dammit, today's the nineteenth of March!'

He heard Dougie Gough's fulsome chuckle from the door, and then the chief investigation officer was alone in his room. For a full minute he paced the carpet. Images raced in his mind.

Dennis Cork had never been to the Ardnamurchan peninsula, but he knew Mull, Morvern and Moidart.

He saw dark hills set with granite escarpments and rough slopes. The guns waited. Old farmers and post-men, estate labourers, crab fishermen and Dougie Gough, with his pipe lit, made a picket line. They were out on the hillside to kill the vermin that took the lambs. Down the hill came the beaters with their dogs running free. With the beaters was the young man with the heavy-lensed spectacles, struggling to keep up . . . Cann. The big dog fox sprang from a peat ditch and tried to double back through the beaters, but the spaniels, Labradors and lurchers turned it. The mistake of the dog fox was to run towards the guns. It was a fine animal, strong and healthy, a lamb-taker. Now Cann was first among the beaters chasing it. The dog fox was a bright colour on the dark slope of crushed bracken. Dougie Gough had the shotgun up to his shoulder, aimed, fired, and Packer fell. The beaters and the guns did not bother to retrieve the carcass They left it as carrion for the crows.

The images were gone.

Dennis Cork dialled the number of room 709 at Vauxhall Bridge Cross. He played the old boys' network and asked for the trawl to be tasked through GCHQ and on through the Americans' National Security Agency listening post at Menwith Hill on the Yorkshire moors, where the great dishes sucked in the pulses of mobile-call transmissions. He pleaded priority for the precious resources of the computers.

He walked an uncertain line.

He was exposed. He made a second call, to the minister's principal private secretary. Powerful enemies faced him. He promised that full co-operation with the National Crime Squad would begin soon.

He relied for the survival of his career on the dour Gough and the young man, Cann, and events in a far-away place over which he had no control.

' Is it all right?' The Eagle sought reassurance.

' It's fine.'

' Is he all right?'

'He's grand.'

'Did you tell him that, Mister?'

' I told him.'

Not in these days, of course, but a long time ago, when the Eagle had been at boarding school and showing an interest in law, classics masters preached the value of the study of Latin and Greek, talked about 'expansion of the mind' and 'intellectual discipline'. The Eagle, then sixteen years old, had embarked on a two-year study of which, now, little was remembered. The fighting had been the most interesting part to a teenager, the description of warfare, and the generals who directed it. A Greek general and historian, writing four centuries before the birth of Christ, had identified the surest way to win loyalty.

Xenophon had written: 'The sweetest of all sounds is praise.' The old Greek warlord and writer had been ahead in man management, and Mister had learned the same art.

' . . . I told him he was indispensable. I gave him all the smarm he needed.'

'You should watch him, Mister.'

'He doesn't fart without me knowing it. Yes, I'm watching him.'

'He's not one of us.'

'Leave it, Eagle. I hear you. You're "one of us", aren't you?'

'You know I am. You . . . '

It was Mister's way, the Eagle recognized it, to win from the disciples, the acolytes, blustered, spluttered declarations of loyalty. It demeaned them, it gave him power over them. He looked into Mister's dull eyes as he made his protestation. His voice died. The Eagle had been left at the street corner above the house while Mister and Atkins had driven on up the hill to the open ground where they'd found the line of sight the day before. Now Mister had walked back, leaving Atkins, the Mitsubishi and the launcher there.

The dusk was settling on the city.

Mister said casually, 'His place was turned over this morning - Atkins's place was done by the Church.'

'He told you?'

'He doesn't know.'

' Is he going to know?'

'Not sure . . . '

'Who told you?'

'Crime Squad - there's white heat between Crime Squad and the Church. The Church isn't sharing.'

' I don't want to know about "friends" in Crime Squad, but when did they tell you?'

'A lot of questions, Eagle . . . I heard this morning.'

'Shouldn't you have told me? I am your legal adviser, Mister.'

'What you going to do about it? You're here, they're there. It'll keep.'

'Mister, I am telling you, as your trusted adviser, we have been away too long. Be careful.'

'You worry too much. I pay you to worry, but not to overdose on it.'

The lights sprinkled below them were cut by the dark line of the river, which in its turn was bisected by the shafts of headlights criss-crossing the bridges.

With the evening came the cold, but it was not the cold that made the Eagle shiver. The dark line was the abyss into which the Cruncher had fallen. Never could the Eagle have said or thought that he was fond of the Cruncher. Sometimes he'd said, to himself, that the Cruncher was a barrow-boy, sometimes a low-life little shit. The Cruncher had always competed with him, had intervened in matters that were not his. A contract was drawn up, but Cruncher wanted to check out each paragraph and each sub-section. Days of damn work and Mister would tear it up, because of the poison fed into his ear by the Cruncher. The Eagle had never had Mister's ear the way the Cruncher had. But that had not stopped the Cruncher from disappearing into the dark line that was the river cutting through the lights of the city below. He heard a distant squealing of wheels, the scrape of unoiled metal pieces. He shivered hard. He remembered the Cruncher the last time he'd seen him, in the Clerkenwell office over the launderette, and his feet as always on the Eagle's desk, his heels resting carelessly on files, his body tipped back in a chair, the monogrammed cigarette in his hand, and the scent, the conceit as he'd talked about his plan for Mister's future in Sarajevo, his vision: You're a businessman, Mister . . . any businessman who's top of the tree in the UK

expands his interests, goes abroad, doesn't sit on his hands, goes looking for wider horizons. The Cruncher had been in the river for half a night and a day and another whole night, like a drowned mongrel, before he'd been pulled out. It had been a dog's death.

'When are you going to do it, Mister - do something about the Cruncher?'

'You think I'd forgotten about the Cruncher?'

' I didn't say you'd forgot—'

'You think I'm scared to do something about the Cruncher?'

' I didn't say you were scared.'

'You ever known me forget anything about disrespect? You ever seen fear in me?'

' I only asked when.'

' It'll happen, Eagle, when I'm ready. What I said, Eagle, you worry too much. A man with your brain, your brilliance, you don't have a call to worry.'

The wheels' squeal came closer, was beyond the pool of light thrown down by the only high lamp on the street. The sweetest of all sounds is praise. He was not a man of violence; his own weapon was in his supreme understanding of the law . . . And yet he had made the devil's bargain. He had never hit a man in his life; he had reduced a grown man, an experienced surveillance executive officer - through the ammu nition given to the QC - to a muttering shambling wreck, destroyed him more effectively than if he'd been hit with a pickaxe handle, broken him. With his forensic intellect, it was the Eagle who had sprung Mister from the trial. But . . . but . .. but, for all his scruples, the violence inherent in Mister was strangely mesmerizing to the Eagle. He had a place there, beside the bully. He was sheltered by the bully. And it fascinated him. When he thought of the violence, he sweated hot excitement. He wanted to see the launcher fired, because that was Mister's response to a judge who had dared to stand against them . . . and he had the brain, knew it because Mister had told him so, and the brilliance. They came up the hill, into the pool of light, and the city was below them. Mister had seen them.

The squeal of the wheels came with them.

The Eagle doubted it was a labour of love, thought it a labour of duty. He didn't think he, with his weight, his stomach and his heart, could have pushed the wheelchair up the incline. They stopped on the nearer edge of the pool and the man leaned on the handles while the woman hung on to the wheels as if she feared she would slip back down the slope. There was a wheeze in the man's chest. If he didn't have a car it was because he was a fool. The Eagle didn't know a judge at the Bailey, or at Snaresbrook, Belmarsh, or at Uxbridge Crown Court, who treasured principles more than a black car and a driver. He saw the wheels hit a stone and the chair rocked, but it came on, came closer to them. And he didn't know a judge who would have lived in a hovel as the price of guarding his principles - certainly not his own bloody father, for whom the status, the robes, the bloody protocol were all that mattered.

When they were level with their house, what there was of it, and half lit by the one street-lamp, the Eagle felt the punch of a fist in the small of his back, and Mister stepped from the shadows. The Eagle did not have to follow him. He was the voyeur, a mere observer.

'Judge Delic?' Mister asked affably. ' I understand you speak English, that's what my friends say. And you're Miss Jasmina Delic? I'd like a word, please.'

The judge stiffened. His daughter cringed, then straightened herself and her jaw jutted. The Eagle couldn't see Mister's face, but he would have been smiling. He always smiled when he pitchforked his way into people's lives.

'What about? Who are you?' The words were almost obscured by the panting from his exertion.

There was pride there, and spirit, but no strength.

'One question at a time, Judge. About the past and the p r e s e n t . . . I am Albert Packer, Mr Packer, Mister.

I am the subject, authorized by you, of an intrusive-surveillance order issued to Joey Cann of the Customs and Excise in London, and it has caused me serious inconvenience. That's what it's about and that's who I am.'

Always the voice was quiet, and they would have had to strain to hear him, as the Eagle did, and in spite of the smile they'd have thought themselves locked in a ferret's gaze. There were no cars on the street, no other workers hurrying home, and they'd have known it. Mister walked to them, not hurrying, measured stride.

'What do you want with us?'

The Eagle thought the judge tried to marshal his courage. Mister, in his overcoat, would have seemed huge to them, and they'd have seen the size of his hands, and Cann would have told them the case history. They would know all about this man, the importance of the Church's Target One . . . Mister reached out to them. The Eagle saw his hands drop to the chair's armrest, and grip it. The chair shook, rocked gently by Mister. It would be so easy for him to tip it over, to spreadeagle her onto the street, and he would have been smiling.

'I'd like you, Judge, and Miss Jasmina, to come for a short walk with me - nothing too far, only take a few minutes.'

'Do we have the choice?' she asked.

' I wouldn't want you to feel threatened, that's not my intention, sincerely . . . Come on, Eagle, come and lend a hand.'

With Mister, he pushed the chair on up the hill and into the blanket of darkness. The street went parallel to the side wall of the Jewish cemetery. Above them was a black tree-line topped by clear evening skies and a scattering of stars. There were no lights in the ruined buildings they went past, no ears to hear him if he screamed for help. The judge could not protect his daughter, nor would he leave her. They went meekly together. Mister and the Eagle propelled the chair but the judge walked close behind it, had reached his hand forward and she held it. He wondered at their dignity, that neither shouted or struggled, however hopeless it was to shout, to struggle If Mo knew what he did, she would leave him, be gone in the hour, as would the girls. He smelt the sweat of the long-worn clothes on the judge's body, and the urine in his daughter's bag. They reached the small patch of level ground, where a shed had stood, where the Mitsubishi was parked. The shed's wooden walls were gone, blown away when the house was holed, but its concrete base remained.