His master was younger than Goodhew by twenty years, a rich brawler with a safe seat and a rugger blue, which so far as Goodhew could ascertain was the sum of his educational accomplishment. His eyes were dull, but what he lacked in vision he made up for in ambition. Barbara Vandon from the American Embassy sat to one side of him, and on the other. Neal Marjoram of Procurement Studies, whom Goodhew had always rather taken to, perhaps because of his record in the navy, his trustworthy eyes and air of decent quiet. Indeed, it had always puzzled Goodhew how a man whose honesty was written on his sleeve could possibly survive as Geoffrey Darker's understudy. Gait, another Darker apparatchik, sat at Marjoram's elbow and was more in Darker's image: too well dressed, too much the estate agent in the boom. The third member of the River House delegation was a hard-jawed beauty called Hazel Bundy, rumoured to share Darker's bed as well as his work load. But Goodhew made a point of never listening to that sort of rumour.
His master was explaining the reason for their meeting, and there was altogether too much buoyancy in his tone. "A bunch of us have been touring the U. K. / U. S. liaison machinery, Rex," he said, waving his cigar in a vague arc. "We came up with a couple of rather bothersome conclusions, to be honest, and thought we'd try them out on you. Off the record. No minutes, no pack drill. Discussion about principles. Kicking the ball around. All right by you?"
"Why should it not be?"
"Barbara, darling."
Barbara Vandon was the Cousins' station chief in London.
She had studied at Vassar, wintered in Aspen and summered on the Vineyard. Yet her voice was like a shrill scream of deprival.
"Rex, this Limpet thing is right off the wall," she howled. "We're pygmies in this. Totally. The real game is right up there; it's orbital, and it's now."
Goodhew's confusion must have been legible at once. "Barbara feels we're out of step with Langley, Rex," Marjoram explained, aside.
"Who's we?"
"Well, us really. The River House."
Goodhew rounded sharply on his master. "You told me this was a discussion about principles ― "
"Hang on, hang on!" His master flicked his cigar at Barbara Vandon. "Girl's hardly off the ground. Talk about short fuse. Christ."
But Goodhew would not be put off. "The River House out of step with Langley on the Limpet case?" he said incredulously to Marjoram. "The River House isn't even involved in the Limpet case, other than supplying support-in-aid. Limpet's an Enforcement case."
"Well, that's what Barbara feels we ought to be discussing," Marjoram explained, with enough distance in his voice to suggest that he didn't necessarily agree.
Barbara Vandon stormed back into the breach: "Rex, we have to do some major, major housecleaning, not just in Langley but right here in U. K.," she resumed, in what was sounding increasingly like a prepared speech. "We have to take this Limpet thing down to basics and begin again from the bottom up. Rex, Langley's been railroaded. Not so much railroaded as shunted into a siding." This time Marjoram did not offer his services as interpreter. "Rex, our pols are not going to buy this. Any day now they will go ballistic. What we have here, Rex. is something that has to be looked at very slowly and carefully from fifty-five ways up, and what do we find? It's a joint operational deal between ― one ― a very fringe, very new British agency ― forgive me: fine, dedicated, but fringe. And, two ― a bunch of Enforcement cowboys from Miami with no geopolitics. It's tail and dog, Rex. The dog is way up here" ― her hand was already above her head ― "and the tail is this. And right now the tail's winning."
A wave of self-recrimination swept over Goodhew. Palfrey warned me, but I didn't take him seriously: Darker is launching a putsch to recover his lost territories, Rex, Palfrey had said. He's proposing to go in behind the American flag.
"Rex," Barbara Vandon bellowed, so stridently that Goodhew braced himself in his chair, "what we have here is a major geopolitical power shift happening in our own backyard, and it's being handled by amateurs who are not qualified to play in this league, who are running with the ball when they should be passing it, who are out of touch with the issues. The cartels pushing dope, that's one thing. It's a dope problem, and there are people out there whose job it is to deal with that problem. We've lived with that, Rex. We've paid a heavy price for that."
"Oh, top dollar, Barbara, from all one hears," Goodhew agreed gravely. But after four years in London, Barbara Vandon was gun-deaf to irony. She forged on.
"The cartels pushing pacts with each other, Rex, making nice to each other, buying themselves big-time matériel, training their boys, getting their act together ― Rex, that's a different ballpark. There just aren't that number of people in South America who do that stuff. In South America, getting your act together is power. It's as simple as that. This isn't an assignment for Enforcement. This isn't cops and robbers and shooting yourself in the foot. This is geopolitics, Rex. And what we have to do here is, we have to be able to go to the Hill and say, 'Guys, we accept the imperatives in this. We have spoken with Enforcement, Enforcement have gracefully backed off, Enforcement will do their own thing in the fullness of time, which is their right and duty as cops. Meantime this is geopolitical, this is sophisticated, this has a lot of angles and is therefore an agreed Pure Intelligence responsibility, we have the way clear for sophisticated input, by tried and trusted professionals in Pure Intelligence, acting to a geopolitical brief.' "
She had evidently finished, for like an actress pleased with her performance, she turned full face to Marjoram as if to ask, How was I? But Marjoram affected a benevolent disdain for her fighting words.
"Well, I do think there's a lot of substance in what Barbara says," he remarked, with that decent, straightforward smile he had. "Obviously, we wouldn't stand in the way of a revision of responsibilities between the services. But then the decision is hardly up to us."
Goodhew's face was set in stone. His hands lay lifelessly before him, refusing to participate.
"No," he agreed. "It is not up to you at all. It's up to the Joint Steering Committee and no one else."
"Of which your master here is chairman and you, Rex, are secretary, founder and principal benefactor," Marjoram reminded him with another collegial smile. "And, if I may say so, moral arbiter."
But Goodhew would not be mollified, not even by someone as patently conciliatory as Neal Marjoram. "A revision of responsibilities, as you call it, is in no circumstances within the gift of rival agencies, Neal," he said sternly. "Even assuming that Enforcement were prepared voluntarily to quit the field, which I gravely doubt, the agencies are not empowered to carve up their responsibilities among themselves without reference to Steering. No side deals. That's one of the things Steering stands for. Ask its chairman ― "with a pointed nod at his master.
For a moment nobody asked anybody anything, until Goodhew's master emitted a kind of slurrying grunt which contrived to indicate doubt, irritation and a touch of indigestion at the same time.
"Well, obviously, Rex," he said, striking that nasal whinny peculiar to the Conservative front benches, "if the Cousins are going to take over the Limpet case on their side of the pond, willy-nilly, we here on this side are going to have to take a cool position about whether to follow suit. Aren't we? I say if, because these are informal discussions. Nothing's come through on the formal net so far. Has it?"