Burr's heart sinks, but he plays unconcerned. "That's not patriotic, Joe! A Brit should be buying British."
"He's selling a new message to the cartels," says Strelski, undeterred. "If their perceived enemy is Uncle Sam, they're best off using Uncle Sam's toys. That way they have direct access to spares, they have captured enemy weapons they can assimilate, they are familiar with the enemy's techniques. British Starstreak HVMs, shoulder-held, British flag grenades, British tech, that's part of the package. Sure. But their mainstream toys, they have to be a mirror image of the perceived enemy. Some Brit, the rest American."
"So what do the cartels say?" Burr asks.
"They love it. They're in love with American technology. British too. They love Roper. They want the best."
"Does anybody explain what brought on this change of heart?"
Burr detects a concern comparable with his own below the surface of Strelski's voice.
"No, Leonard. Nobody explains a fucking thing. Not to Enforcement. Not in Miami. Maybe not in London either."
The story was confirmed a day later by a dealer of Burr's acquaintance in Belgrade. Sir Anthony Joyston Bradshaw, well known as Roper's signer in the shadier marketplaces, had the previous day switched a three-million-dollar pilot order for Czech Kalashnikovs to a similar order for American Armalites, destined theoretically for Tunisia. The guns were to be lost in transit and rerouted as agricultural machinery to Gdansk, where storage and onward transportation on a Panama-bound container ship had been arranged. Joyston Bradshaw had also expressed interest in British-built ground-to-air rockets but was allegedly demanding an inordinate side commission for himself.
But while Burr grimly noted this development, Goodhew appeared unable to grasp its implications: "I don't care whether they're buying American guns or Chinese pea-shooters, Leonard. I don't care whether they're stripping the British bare. It's drugs for arms whichever way you look at it, and there's not a court on earth will condone it."
Burr noticed that as Goodhew said this he flushed and seemed to have difficulty keeping his temper.
* * *
Still, the information pours in:
No location for the exchange of goods has so far been agreed upon. Only the two principals will know the final details in advance....
The cartels have set aside the port of Buenaventura on the west coast of Colombia as the point of departure for their shipment, and past practice suggests that the same port will be used as the reception point for the incoming matériel....
Well-armed if incompetent units of the Colombian army in the cartels' pay have been dispatched to the Buenaventura area to provide cover for the transaction....
A hundred empty army trucks are mustered in the dockside warehouses ― but when Strelski requests a sight of the satellite photographs that could confirm or deny this information, so he tells Burr, he hits a brick wall. The espiocrats of Langley decree that he does not possess the necessary clearance.
"Leonard, will you please tell me something. What the fuck is Flagship in all this?"
Burr's head reels. It is his understanding that in Whitehall, code name Flagship is doubly restricted. Not only is it confined to those who are Flagship cleared, it is graded Guard, keep away from Americans. So what on earth is Strelski doing, an American, being refused access to code name Flagship by the barons of Pure Intelligence in Langley, Virginia?
"Flagship is nothing but a fence to keep us out," Burr fumes to Goodhew, minutes later. "If Langley can know about it, why can't we? For Flagship read Darker and his friends across the pond."
Goodhew is deaf to Burr's indignation. He pores over shipping maps, draws himself routes in coloured crayons, reads up on compass bearings, stop-over times and port formalities. He buries himself in works on maritime law and beards a grand legal authority he was at school with: "Now, what do you know, Brian, if anything," Burr hears him piping down the bare corridor, "about interdiction at sea? Certainly I'm not going to pay your ridiculous fees! I'm going to give you a very bad lunch at my club and steal two hours of your grossly inflated professional time in the interest of your country. How's your wife putting up with you now you're a lord? Well, give her my sympathy and meet me on Thursday prompt at one."
You're coming on too strong, Rex, thinks Burr. Slow down. We're still a long way from home.
* * *
Names, Rooke had said: names and numbers. Jonathan is providing them by the score. To the uninitiated his offerings might seem at first glance triviaclass="underline" nicknames culled from place cards at the dinner table, fugitive conversations partly overheard, the glimpse of a letter lying on Roper's desk, Roper's jottings to himself about the who, the how much, the how and when. Taken singly, such snippets made poor fare beside Pat Flynn's clandestine photographs of Spetsnaz-turned-mercenaries arriving at Bogota airport; or Amato's hair-raising accounts of Corkoran's secret rampages in the Nassau fleshpots; or intercepted bank draughts from respectable financial houses, showing tens of millions of dollars homing on Roper-related offshore companies in Curaçao.
Yet properly assembled, Jonathan's reports provided revelations that were as sensational as any great dramatic coup. After a night of them, Burr declared that he felt seasick. After two, Goodhew remarked that he would not be surprised to read of his own high-street bank manager showing up in Crystal with a suitcase full of clients' cash.
It was not so much the tentacles of the octopus as its ability to enter the most hallowed shrines that left them aghast. It was the involvement of institutions that even Burr had till now presumed inviolate, of names above reproach.
For Goodhew, it was as if the very pageantry of England was dying before his eyes. Dragging himself homeward in the small hours, he would pause to stare feverishly at a parked police car and wonder whether the daily stories of police violence and corruption were true after all, not the invention of journalists and malcontents. Entering his club, he would spot eminent merchant bankers or stockbrokers of his acquaintance and ― instead of flapping a hand at them in cheery greeting, as he would have done three months ago ― would study them from under lowered brows across the dining room, asking them in his mind: Are you another of them? Are you? Are you?
"I shall make a démarche," he declared at one of their late-night threesomes. "I've decided. I'll convene Joint Steering. I'll mobilise the Foreign Office for a start; they're always good for a fight against the Darkists. Merridew will stand up and be counted, I'm sure he will."
"Why should he?" said Burr.
"Why shouldn't he?"
"Merridew's brother is top man in Jason Warhole, if I remember rightly. Jason's put in for five hundred bearer bonds in the Curaçao company at half a million a crack last week."
* * *
"Dreadfully sorry about this, old boy," Palfrey whispered, from the shadows that seemed always to surround him.
"About what, Harry?" said Goodhew kindly.
Palfrey's haunted eyes glanced past him at the doorway. He was sitting in a North London pub of his own choosing, not far from Goodhew's house in Kentish Town. "Panicking. Ringing your office. Distress rocket. How did you get here so fast?"
"Bike, of course. What's the matter, Harry? You look as though you've seen a ghost. They haven't been threatening your life too, have they?"
"Bike," Palfrey repeated, taking a pull of Scotch and immediately wiping his mouth with a handkerchief as if to remove the guilty traces. "About the best thing anyone can do, bike. Fellows on the pavement can't keep up. Fellows in cars have to keep going round the block. Mind if we go next door? Noisier."
They sat in the games room, where there was a jukebox to drown their conversation. Two muscular-looking boys with crew cuts were playing bar billiards. Palfrey and Goodhew sat side by side on a wooden settle.