And once again, as both Burr and Strelski admitted afterwards, they were shielding each other from their true thoughts.
Other intercepts described the frantic efforts of Sir Anthony Joyston Bradshaw to call Roper from a succession of public telephones scattered round the Berkshire countryside. First he tried to use his AT&T card, but a recorded voice told him it was no longer operative. He demanded the supervisor, paraded his title, sounded drunk, and was courteously but firmly cut off. The Ironbrand offices in Nassau were scarcely more helpful. On the first run, the switchboard refused to accept his collect call; on the second, a MacDanby accepted it but only in order to freeze him off. Finally he bullied his way to the skipper of the Iron Pasha, now berthed in Antigua:
"Well, where is he, then? I tried Crystal. He's not at Crystal. I tried Ironbrand and some cheeky bugger told me he was selling farms. Now you tell me he's 'expected.' I don't fucking care whether he's expected! I want him now! I'm Sir Anthony Joyston Bradshaw. It's an emergency. Do you know what an emergency is?"
The skipper suggested he try Corkoran's private number in Nassau. Bradshaw had already tried it, without success.
Nevertheless, somewhere, somehow, he found his man and spoke to him without troubling the monitors, as later events abundantly revealed.
The call from the duty officer came at dawn. It had the absolute calm of Mission Control when the rocket is threatening to blow itself to smithereens.
"Mr. Burr, sir? Could you get down here right away, sir? Mr. Strelski's on his way already. We have a problem."
* * *
Strelski made the journey alone. He would have preferred to take Flynn, but Flynn was still eating his heart out in Curaçao, and Amato was helping him, so Strelski went along for both of them. Burr had offered to come, but Strelski was having a certain difficulty with the British involvement in this thing. Not with Burr ― Leonard was a pal. But being pals didn't cover the whole issue. Not just now.
So Strelski left Burr at headquarters, with the flickering screens and the appalled night staff and strict orders that nobody was to make a move of any sort, in any direction, not to Pat Ryan or the prosecutor or anyone, until he had checked this thing out and called through with a yes or a no.
"Right, Leonard? You hear me?"
"I hear you."
"Then good."
His driver was waiting for him in the car park ― Wilbur, his name was, nice enough guy but basically had reached his ceiling ― and together they drove with flashing lights and sirens wailing through the empty centre of town, which struck Strelski as pretty damn stupid when, after all, what was the hurry and why wake everybody up? But he didn't say anything to Wilbur because, deep down, he knew that if he had been driving he would have driven the same way. Sometimes you do those things out of respect. Sometimes they're the only things left to do.
Besides, there was a hurry. When things start happening to key witnesses, you may safely say there is a hurry. When everything has been going a little too wrong for a little too long ― when you have been living further and further out on the margin while everyone has been bending over backward to convince you that you are right there at the centre of influence: Christ, Joe, where would we be without you? ― when you have been overhearing just a little too much strange political theorising in the corridors ― talk of Flagship, not just as a code name but as an operation ― talk of moving goalposts and getting a little order into our own backyard ― when you have been treated to just five too many smiling faces, and five too many helpful intelligence reports and none that is worth shit ― when nothing is changing around you, except that the world you thought you were moving in is quietly easing away from you, leaving you feeling like one man on a raft in the middle of a slow-moving crocodile-infested river going in the wrong direction ― and, Joe, for Christ's sake, Joe, you are just the best officer Enforcement has ― well, yes, you may safely say there is something of a hurry to find out who the fuck is doing what to whom.
Sometimes you watch yourself lose, thought Strelski. He loved tennis, and he loved it best when they gave you the TV close-ups of the guys drinking Coke between games, and you could see the face of the winner getting ready to win and the face of the loser getting ready to lose. And the losers looked the way he felt just now. They were playing their shots and working their hearts out, but in the end the score's the score, and the score at the dawn of this new day was not very good at all. It looked like set and match to the princes of Pure Intelligence on both sides of the Atlantic.
They passed the Grand Bay Hotel, Strelski's favourite watering hole when he needed to believe that the world was elegant and calm. They turned up the hill, away from the waterfront and the marina and the park. They drove through a pair of electrically controlled wrought-iron gates into a place that Strelski had never entered ― a piss-elegant block called Sunglades, where the drug-rich cheat and fuck and have their being, with black security guards and black porters, and a white desk and white elevators, and a feeling, once you have passed through the gates, of having arrived somewhere more dangerous than the world the gates are trying to protect you from. Because being as rich as this in a city like this is so dangerous it's amazing that everyone here hasn't woken up dead in his emperor-sized bed long ago.
Except that, on this dawn, the forecourt was jammed with police cars and TV vans and ambulances and all the apparatus of controlled hysteria, which is supposed to quell a crisis but actually celebrates it. The clamour and the lights added to the sense of dislocation that had been dogging Strelski ever since the husky-voiced policeman had called through with the news, because "we note you have an interest in this guy." I'm not here, he thought. I've dreamed this scene already.
He recogniIed a couple of men from Homicide. Curt greetings. Hi, Glebe. Hi, Rackham. Good to see you. Jesus, Joe, what kept you? Good question, Jeff; maybe somebody just wanted it that way. He recognised people from his own agency. MaryJo, whom he had once screwed, to their mutual surprise, after an office party, and a serious boy called Metzger, who looked as though he needed fresh air fast, but in Miami there isn't any.
"Who's up there, Metzger?"
"Sir, the police have about everyone they know up there. It's bad, sir. Five days without AC right up there next to the sun ― it's really disgusting. Why did they turn the AC off? I mean, that's just barbarous."
"Who told you to come here, Metzger?"
"Homicide, sir."
"How long ago was that?"
"Sir, one hour."
"Why didn't you call me, Metzger?"
"Sir, they said you were tied up in the ops room but on your way."
They, thought Strelski. They sending another signal. Joe Strelski: fine officer but getting a little old for casework. Joe Strelski: too slow to be taken aboard the Flagship.
The centre elevator took him to the top floor without pausing on the way. It was the penthouse elevator. The architect's idea was this: you arrived in this starlit glass gallery that was also a security chamber, and while you stood in the gallery wondering whether you would be fed to the pit bulls or given a gourmet dinner and a nubile hooker to wash it down, you could admire the swimming pool and the Jacuzzi and the roof garden and the solarium and the fornicatorium and the other essential furbishments of a modest dope lawyer's lifestyle.
A young cop in a white mask needed to see Strelski's ID. Strelski showed it to him, rather than waste words. The young cop offered him a mask for himself, as if Strelski had just joined the club. After that there were photographic lights and people in coveralls to be steered around, and there was the stench, which was somehow more pungent through the mask.