Costa’s brain was working overtime. “He was in the photograph? This American?”
“He didn’t want to be! The poor man was walking home just as we were lining up out there. We insisted. A little vino had been drunk, you understand. He didn’t have a choice.” She paused to let this point go home. “We can be very persuasive when we want to be, you know.”
“I can believe that. When?”
She frowned. “I really couldn’t say. I’ve so many photographs.”
“Possibly ten, fifteen years ago?”
She crossed the room, picked up a couple of photos, took off her glasses to peer at them, then returned with one in her frail hand and passed it to him. Costa scanned the faces there. He looked at the back. There was a year, scribbled in penciclass="underline" 1990.
Bingo.
“You want to know who Bill Kaspar is?”
Joel Leapman looked like a man speaking from personal experience, and there was something in his eyes-impending pleasure, or a hint of a nasty surprise around the corner-that Gianni Peroni really didn’t like.
“OK. I’ll tell you. Kind of a soldier. Kind of a spy. A mercenary. A go-between running shuttle between men who, like Kaspar, didn’t really exist either. One of the best. Take it from me. He was the sort of guy you’d follow anywhere, right into hell if that’s where he wanted to go. An American hero, we thought. Not that anyone would ever call him that out loud, you understand. And now we’re going to hang him out to dry. Life’s a bitch sometimes.”
Leapman’s tale confirmed just about everything Emily Deacon had discovered. Back in 1990, William F. Kaspar had been called to lead one of two covert teams into Iraq on an intelligence mission well behind hostile lines. The venture was a disaster. The day after they arrived to establish a forward base inside an ancient monument outside Babylon, the Republican Guard had attacked in force. Dan Deacon was out on patrol with his own team when it happened. Deacon radioed for assistance and was ordered not to engage. Forty-five minutes later, two Black Hawks, backed by fighter support, arrived on the scene. The ziggurat was a smoking shell. From what surveillance could see, Kaspar and his team were dead. Deacon’s crew managed to escape to a deserted farm two miles away, where a helicopter snatched them from the approaching enemy, though one female member was badly wounded along the way.
The mission didn’t exist. The combatants, as far as their relatives were concerned, remained incommunicado on private training exercises in the Gulf until, two months later, an army captain visited their homes with stories of dead heroes in the real conflict, which was now under way. There could be no medals, no public mourning. Not even a private Purple Heart. None of them was officially in the military. Dead spooks wear no honours.
Wars make noise. In the tumult of the conflict the loss of nine unknown, unseen individuals made little impact. Money went around to keep families and others quiet. The men and women who survived went back to their jobs, in the diplomatic and intelligence services, and in civilian life too. They kept their secrets, they got on with their lives. The battle was won. Saddam went home, leaving a trail of corpses in his wake, claiming victory. And Kuwait was free beneath the smoke of burning oil fields.
All in all, Leapman said, the verdict was that the war was half a job well done. There were people who thought they should have gone all the way into Saddam’s palaces in Baghdad. But that wasn’t part of the UN brief, and military people lived by UN briefs back then. The objective had been to recover Kuwait and hope that Saddam learned his lesson. They got part of what they wanted.
He took a swig of the bottle of water he’d brought with him and stared at each of them in turn.
“You get all that for free,” Leapman said. “It’s history now, anyway, and who gives a shit? What comes next, though, is different. If this goes public, then everything goes way over our heads, gentlemen. It won’t be me or Viale here who’s screaming blue murder. It’ll be bureau chiefs and generals or worse and none of us wants that. Understood?”
Peroni found himself nodding automatically, as if he had a choice.
What happened next, Leapman said, was they realized Baghdad had got insight. Postwar, someone somewhere was helping Saddam.
“Helping him how?” Falcone demanded.
“Background,” Leapman answered. “It was a question of adding things up and working out what didn’t make sense. There were sanctions in place by then. Tough sanctions, ones that worked, as well as sanctions can, anyway. All the same, we knew Saddam was getting wind of things he shouldn’t. He understood some of our military hardware better than he ought. He took out three Iraqis we’d placed near him to keep an eye on what was going on. He had intelligence, stuff he wasn’t supposed to know. So we had to ask ourselves what was going on.”
“Kaspar?” Peroni wondered. “I thought you said he was a hero.”
“Yeah. I also said he was dead. Great cover twice over, huh? We went back and talked to people in Deacon’s team again. They were uncomfortable about it. I guess if you go through that kind of experience, you don’t want to think ill of your comrades. But a couple of them, Deacon included, had their suspicions. Or so they said after a lot of prompting. Don’t forget, at that stage we thought Kaspar was blown away along with the rest of his team. But maybe that was what we were supposed to believe. And all the while he was living the good life in some quiet palace out in the desert, counting his money, gradually spilling out every last thing he knew, while Saddam lapped it up. So if that’s true, what do you do?”
You didn’t have much in the way of options, Peroni thought. “You look for proof.”
“Exactly.”
Leapman nodded at Viale. “SISDE already had someone secreted inside Iraq. Dan Deacon came back to Rome for a couple of months and worked alongside Viale here to send in a new team, see if anyone was saying anything about an American on their side. Four officers went in. One came back. The others…”
Leapman shook his head. “I don’t even want to think what happened there. One report we got said Uday disposed of the poor bastards personally. You heard the stories about how he used to feed the lions?”
He let them digest that in silence.
“They weren’t fairy tales,” Leapman continued. “But they weren’t the full story either. Anyway, it was Deacon’s man who came back and he had some news. There was an American there. He was talking. And he was some big tough guy who seemed to know everything. Fitted Kaspar in every respect. Some hero, huh? And you know something? We couldn’t touch him. He was just going to sit there gossiping day and night until we came back another time. We were working with kid gloves then. It took all the persuasion we had to get that covert team in just to look for intelligence. We couldn’t be seen to be running heavier missions, maybe to capture him or take him out, because that would screw up any chance we had of rebuilding a coalition to finish the job. Not that that worked either. We were in a deep pile of shit and there was nothing we could do about it.”
“Still,” Peroni said, “you got there in the end.”
“Yes, we did!” Leapman barked back at him. “And one day you people might realize what a damn big favour we did you.”
Falcone shook his head. “You’re getting away from the subject, Leapman.”
“Yeah,” he grumbled. “None of you ever like that conversation. OK. So, come last spring, we get back to Iraq. And we say to some of our intelligence people, look out for this guy called Bill Kaspar. And when you find him, throw him in a cell somewhere, call home and leave him alone with us for a little while.”