And on the there and here Burr flung Palfrey like a rag doll, using his armpits to lift him and sitting him down very heavily each time. "I'm feeling rough today, Harry," he explained apologetically. "You'll just have to bear with me. I think it's the thought of young Pine sitting there being burned alive by flicky Roper's beauties. I must be getting too old for the job." He slapped a file on the table. It was stamped FLAGSHIP in red. "The purport of these papers that I wish you to peruse is, Harry: you are singly and collectively fucked. Rex Goodhew is not the buffoon you took him for. More under his flat hat than we ever knew. Now read on."
Palfrey read on, but it cannot have been an easy read, which was what Burr had intended when he went to such lengths to rob him of his repose. And before Palfrey had quite finished reading he started weeping, so copiously that some of his tears blotted the signatures and Dear Ministers and Yours evers that topped and tailed the faked correspondence.
While Palfrey was still weeping, Burr produced a Home Office warrant, which so far bore nobody's signature at all. It was not a plenary warrant. It was merely a warrant of interference, authorising the listeners to impose a technical fault on three telephone numbers, two in London and one in Suffolk. This simulated fault would have the effect of misrouting all calls made to the three numbers to yet a fourth number, of which the coordinates were given in the appropriate space. Palfrey stared at the warrant; Palfrey shook his head and tried to make noises of refusal through his clogged mouth.
"Those are Darker's numbers," he objected. "Country, town, office. I can't sign that. He'd kill me."
"But if you don't sign, Harry, I'II kill you. Because if you go through channels and take this warrant to the appropriate minister, the said minister will go running to his Uncle Geoffrey. So we're not doing that, Harry. You personally are going to sign the warrant on your own authority, which is what you're empowered to do in exceptional circumstances. And I personally am going to send the warrant to the listeners by very safe messenger. And you personally are going to spend a quiet social evening with my friend Rob Rooke in his office, so that you personally don't run the temptation of ratting in the meantime out of habit. And if you do make any fuss, my good friend Rob will most likely chain you to a radiator until you repent yourself of your many sins, because he's a hulk. Here. Use my pen. That's the way. In triplicate, please. You know what these civil servants are. Who do you talk to over at the listeners, these days?"
"No one. Maisie Watts."
"Who's Maisie, Harry? I'm not in touch these days."
"Queen bee. Maisie makes it happen."
"And if Maisie's out to lunch with her Uncle Geoffrey?"
"Gates. Pearly, we call him." A weak grin. "Pearly's a bit of a boy."
Burr picked Palfrey up again and dropped him heavily before a green telephone.
"Call Maisie. Is that what you'd do in an emergency?"
Palfrey whistled a kind of yes.
"Say there's a very hot authorization on its way by special courier. She's to handle it herself. Or Gates is. No secretaries, no lower decks, no answering back, no raised eyebrows. You want slavish, mute obedience. Say it's signed by you, and the highest ministerial confirmation in the land will follow soonest. Why are you shaking your head at me?" He slapped him. "I don't like you shaking your head at me. Don't do it."
Palfrey managed a tearful smile while he held a hand to his lip. "I'd be jokier, Leonard, that's all. Specially if it's as big as this. Maisie likes a laugh. So does Pearly. 'Hey Maisie! Wait till you get a load of this one! It'll blow your socks off!' Clever gal, you see. Gets bored. Hates us all. Only interested in who's next up the guillotine steps."
"Then that's how you play it, isn't it?" said Burr, putting a friendly hand on Palfrey's shoulder. "Just don't fox with me, Harry, or the next one up the steps is you."
All eagerness to oblige, Palfrey lifted the receiver of the green Whitehall internal telephone and, under Burr's gaze, dialled the five digits that every River rat learns at his mother's knee.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Deputy Assistant Attorney General Ed Prescott was a man's man, as Yale men of his generation tend to be, and when Joe Strelski entered his big white office in downtown Miami after being kept waiting half an hour in the anteroom, Ed gave him the news as one man should to another, cutting out the bullshit, straight from the shoulder the way a man likes it, whether he's old New England stock like Ed, or plain Kentucky hillbilly like Strelski. Because frankly, Joe, those boys have fucked me over too: dragged me here from Washington to do this thing, had me turn down some very attractive work at a time when everyone, and I mean everyone, even the guys right up there, needs the work. Joe, I have to say it to you ― these people have not been square with us. So I want you to appreciate we're together in this. It's been a year of your life, but by the time I've put my house back in order it will have been a year of my life too. And at my age, Joe ― well, hell, how many years do I have?
"I'm sorry for you, Ed," said Strelski.
And if Ed Prescott caught the undertone, he preferred to let it pass him by, in the interest of being two men together, solving a shared dilemma.
"Joe, just exactly how much did the Brits tell you about this undercover man they had, this Pine, this fellow with the names?"
Strelski did not fail to notice the past tense.
"Not too much," said Strelski.
"So how much?" said Prescott, man-to-man.
"He wasn't a professional. He was some kind of volunteer."
"A walk-in? I never trusted walk-ins, Joe. In the days when the Agency paid me the compliment of consulting me from time to time, back in the Cold War, which seems like a century ago, I always counselled caution toward these would-be Soviet defectors clamouring to make us a present of their wares. What, else did they tell you about him, Joe, or did they keep him wrapped in a flattering shroud of mystery?"
Strelski's manner was deliberately deadpan. With men like Prescott that was all you could do: parry until you had worked out what he wanted you to say, then either say it, or plead the Fifth, or tell him to shove it up his ass.
"They told me they had structured him in some way," he replied. "They'd given him extra background to make him more attractive to the target."
"Who told you, Joe?"
"Burr."
"Did Burr tell you the nature of this background at all, Joe?"
"No."
"Did Burr indicate to you how much background was there already, and how much came out of the makeup box?"
"No."
"Memory is a whore, Joe. Think back. Did he tell you that this man was alleged to have committed a homicide? Maybe more than one?"
"No."
"Smuggled drugs? In Cairo as well as Britain? Maybe in Switzerland also? We're checking."
"He was not specific. He said they had fitted the guy out with this background, and that now that he had this back-pound we could have Apostoll badmouth one of Roper's lieutenants and figure Roper would take to the new guy as a signer. Roper uses signers. So they gave him a signer. He likes his people flaky. So they gave him flaky."
"So the Brits were witting to Apostoll. I don't think I knew ."
"Sure they were. We made a meeting with him. Burr, Agent Flynn and myself."
"Was that wise, Joe?"
"It was collaboration," said Strelski with a tightening of his tie. "We were into collaboration, remember? It's come apart, the seams a little. But in those days we had joint planning."
Time stopped while Ed Prescott took a tour around his very large office. Its darkened windows were of inch-deep armoured glass, turning the morning sunlight into afternoon. The double doors, closed against intruders, were of reinforced steel. Miami was enduring a season of home invasions, Strelski remembered. Teams of masked men held up everybody in the house, then helped themselves to whatever caught their eye. Strelski wondered whether he would go to Apo's funeral this afternoon. The day is young. See what I decide. After that he wondered whether he would go back to his wife. When things got this lousy, that was what he always wondered. Sometimes being away from her was like being out on parole. It wasn't freedom, and sometimes you seriously wondered whether it was any better than the alternative. He thought of Pat Flynn and wished he had Pat's composure. Pat took to being an outcast like other people take to fame and money. When they told Pat not to bother with coming into the office till this thing was cleared up, Pat thanked them, shook all their hands, had a bath and drank a bottle of Bushmills. This morning, still drunk, he had called Strelski to warn him of a new form of AIDS that was afflicting Miami. It was called Hearing Aids, Pat said, and came from listening to too many assholes from Washington. When Strelski asked him whether he happened to have heard any news about the Lombardy ― for instance, whether anybody had seized it, sunk it or married it ― Flynn had given the best rendering of an Ivy League exquisite that Strelski could remember: "Oh now, Joe, you bad boy, you know better than to ask a man a secret thing like that, with your clearance." Where the hell does Pat get all those voices from? he wondered. Maybe if I drank a bottle of Irish a day, I could do some too. Deputy Assistant Attorney General Ed Prescott was trying to put more words into his mouth, so he supposed he'd better pay attention.