Flint sniffed back his tears; his BO smelled of fear but at least he hadn’t peed himself. ‘Calls himself John Leonard, he’s been feeding me for years.’
‘Feeding?’
‘You know — twigging me to stories, pointing me in a direction?’
‘No,’ said Gallen. ‘I don’t know. Tell me.’
Flint sighed. ‘He’s a businessman, based in Vancouver. But he’s usually got a tan so I assume LA. He never denied it.’
‘So what does John do for you?’
‘He might bump into me in the street, take me to lunch, that sort of thing.’
‘What do you talk about?’
‘He usually has a snippet, an insider view, on something interesting.’
‘Such as?’
‘Well, the Oasis connection with Russian oil was fairly interesting. Or Canadian government interests in the US defence industry, or details of a left-wing politician’s secret bank accounts, or a bureaucrat’s undeclared share trading. That sort of thing.’
‘The sort of thing that makes Canadians look bad?’
Flint fiddled his fingers. ‘Okay, so he’s probably a spook. Big deal. The stories are always true and that’s my job: to tell the truth.’
‘So you’re working on a piece about how a senior writer at the Herald is a cipher for US foreign policy? ‘
‘Fuck off.’
‘Perhaps a story on how a lifelong newspaper guy is buying a mansion in Pump Hill? How, in a row of million-dollar houses, he was offered one for four hundred thousand and all the paperwork and bank loans were all ready to sign? Just a fluke, really.’
Flint turned his sweatshirt-wrapped head towards Gallen. ‘You Greenpeace or Save the Whales? Something like that?’
‘I’m the guy who’s gonna make the pain go away, Lars,’ said Gallen.
‘Just like the others, right? You people are all so full of shit.’
‘Others?’ said Gallen. ‘What others, Lars?’
‘The ones who came into my house this morning,’ said Flint, exasperated. ‘Came downstairs for a cup of coffee and they’re standing there, in the damn kitchen, while Wendy’s at the supermarket.’
‘Who?’
‘Spooks, heavies. They didn’t have name tags.’
‘What did they want, Lars?’
‘The leader wanted to know what you want to know.’
‘About John Leonard?’
‘Yep, and I couldn’t help him any more than I can help you,’ said Flint. ‘I don’t have a number; he always contacts me.’
‘And that was it? ‘
‘No, this guy wanted to see the report.’
‘What report? ‘
Flint chuckled. ‘That’s what I told this guy, and he hit me.’
‘The report,’ said Gallen. ‘Does it have a name?’
‘No,’ said Flint. ‘But it has a colour. Red.’
‘What’s in it? ‘
‘He didn’t say. He just accused me of having been given the report before I wrote the story.’
‘Did you have a report about Russian oil interests and Oasis?’
‘No,’ said Flint, ‘I just took notes. When I said I’d have to see something, Leonard laughed and told me to ring Oasis and see what happened when I repeated the allegations.’
‘So who’s the guy?’
‘The leader?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Early forties, receding black hair,’ said Flint, with a reporter’s eye for detail. ‘About six-one and strong, but not athletic, if you see what I mean.’
Gallen saw exactly what he meant but refused to jump to that conclusion.
‘What did he sound like?’ said Gallen.
‘Like a businessman more than a heavy,’ said Flint. ‘And he had a weird way of addressing me.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah, he kept calling me “Ace”.’
CHAPTER 48
Dropping Flint gently to the ground behind a series of large headstones, Gallen checked the darkness of the Union Cemetery and jogged back to the van. They accelerated along one of the wide boulevards and swung into the sweep of traffic on 25th, before joining the Macleod Trail, which would take them north and back to downtown. It was four minutes before either Gallen or Aaron said a word.
Gallen lit a smoke, turned down the radio. ‘So, I guess this is the part where I demand an explanation or I’m taking my crew and going home.’
‘Shit, Gerry,’ said Aaron.
‘Shit yourself, Aaron Michaels. I signed on to this in good faith, but I ain’t putting my boys out there until someone fills me in.’
Aaron exhaled. ‘How do I make it good again?’
‘You can start by telling me why Harry cut Mulligan loose,’ said Gallen. ‘Then we can discuss what it is about this Nanook report that makes Mulligan want to double back and make life difficult. I have a CEO to protect, remember? And to do that I have to keep my team in one piece.’
‘Can we get a drink? ‘
‘We can get a haircut, if that’s what you want,’ said Gallen. ‘I just want answers.’
Gallen finished a phone-in with Winter as Aaron arrived at the booth with two beers.
‘I was Mulligan’s 2IC,’ said Aaron, opening a bag of nuts and pouring them into a wooden bowl. ‘I was new, learning the ropes, realising that Harry was a bit of a handful.’
‘With the company he kept? ‘
‘Yeah, the drinking and fighting, the whoring. The whole nine yards. I’d been on the job ten, eleven days and Harry wanted to hit Vegas — it was two in the freaking morning. He was on the tables and drinking by five am and he went for fifteen hours straight.’
‘Really?’ said Gallen.
‘I swear to God. And I mean those were hard hours, man.’
‘Tough gig’
‘Shit, yeah,’ said Aaron, leaning back and sipping at the beer. ‘In my previous life I’d spent time in-country, running counter-intel around the consular community, so Mulligan thought I was the guy to create a perimeter on Harry.’
‘Get to the spies before they got to him? ‘
‘Precisely,’ said Aaron, casing the bar. ‘The job description was basic, but you try doing that with Harry Durville when he’s drunk and dragging a posse of hookers up to his suite. You can’t be with the man all the time, so we had Piers and the other Brits.’
‘What happened?’
‘We were starting to do these meetings up in the Arctic Circle with the Inuit and it became obvious these natives had some serious muscle and intel behind them.’
‘You knew this?’
‘No, Gerry,’ said Aaron. ‘I just knew, right? Just like you know there’s pros around when you walk into an airport concourse that’s under surveillance. You just know.’
Gallen nodded. ‘So what happened?’
‘I went to Mulligan and told him that I’d like to do a project on the natives and the TTC, the Transarctic Tribal Council.’
‘Just get the upper hand?’
‘Sure,’ said Aaron. ‘So Mulligan, who knew exactly what I was saying, ‘cos the asshole’s been a military spook in combat zones, he stonewalls me.’
‘How?’
‘Says he’s got it covered, says I’m imagining things, says he has total one hundred per cent faith in me and the Brits.’
‘Okay,’ said Gallen, chuckling at the fob-off.
‘It annoyed me but I decided to do it from the bottom up instead, and I briefed the Brits. Turns out Piers — the ex-Para — had been getting the bad vibe too. We’d been at a settlement in the Davis Strait, between Baffin and Greenland, and the Brits had been screwing around with their Harris, scanning channels while they waited for the meeting to end.’
‘And?’
‘And they picked up the kind of interference that one of them — a Royal Marines Commando — had been trained to detect during Operation Iraqi Freedom.’
‘What was it?’