“I’m sure Mrs. Parry is only pointing out—”
“Why isn’t she here today?” The Home Secretary’s voice had risen enough for his underling to glance up. “I’ll tell you why, Mr. Elder, because she didn’t have the guts to face me on this. So she sent you instead. And who are you, Mr. Elder?” The finger pointing at him was long and thick with a gleaming, manicured nail. “You’re in retirement. You’re in London on a consultancy basis. What the hell is going on in Joyce Parry’s department, that’s what I’d like to know? And believe me, I intend asking her.”
“What Mrs. Parry means,” said Elder, “is that you can’t cordon off central London. The IRA learned that a long time ago. You can’t be secure in London.”
“This assassin, though, she’s not IRA, is she?”
“She doesn’t belong to a group.”
“People hire her?”
“Sometimes, not always. Look, people like Witch don’t want peace. They’re not the types to sit in hotel rooms and around conference tables. Look at Hamas in Palestine — the PLO were getting too much like the establishment. Witch is a one-woman splinter group.”
“Then what is her ideal?”
Elder smiled. “People keep asking me that. Why does she have to have one?” He paused, aware that Trilling’s foot was touching his beneath the table. It was a warning. It was telling him not to explode.
Barker sat for a few moments in silence, his face implacable. His voice when he spoke again was cool, not quite objective.
“We’re going to go through the security arrangements again. Step by step. Don’t bother looking at your watches because we’ll be in this room as long as it takes.” He slipped out of his jacket and hung it over the back of his chair. He began to roll up his shirtsleeves. “Sandwiches will be brought in, as will tea and soft drinks. There’s water available whenever required. You may know that the Foreign Secretary has urgent business in the Middle East, so I’m going to be attending more of his bloody summit than was the intention. This being the case, I don’t want any fuckups.” He paused, glancing from man to man to man. “So, gentlemen... perhaps we’d better begin?”
Elder looked down at the table. He knew that several pairs of accusing eyes were on him. The Army, the SAS, Intelligence. Stuck in here because of his department, because of a letter sent by his boss. Elder knew why Joyce had written the letter. She’d written it because, having checked security at the Conference Centre and beyond, having read Greenleaf’s impressive report on the security arrangements, Elder had warned her to. He just hadn’t expected she would take his advice.
“Let’s cover ourselves,” had been his exact words. “Let’s cover ourselves from criticism.”
Yet now he felt naked as the day he’d been born.
Herr Grunner of the Burgwede Maximum Security Prison was far too polite a man to tell the two young people in front of him that their request for an interview with Wolfgang Bandorff had upset his whole weekend. His wife and he had been due to visit their son in Geneva. The son was a physicist and worked at the huge CERN project beneath the Swiss-French border. Herr Grunner knew that the letters CERN stood for Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire. He also knew that “nucléaire” in this case had nothing to do with nuclear bombs or anything military. The people on the project were scientists, and they were trying to probe the secrets of particle physics — hence “nucléaire,” the nucleus.
The proud parents had been taken before on a tour of the CERN complex, their heads dizzied by the size and complexity of the underground machines. But, though Herr Grunner had listened closely to Fritz’s explanations, he hadn’t really understood much of anything. So this trip was to be pleasure only: a trip to the mountains, a few meals, a chance to meet Fritz’s Swiss lady friend Cristel.
And now he’d had to make telephone calls, to explain matters to his wife. The trip was put back until the following weekend. Herr Grunner’s wife was not at all amused. Which was perhaps why he had brooded on the visit to his prison by a member of the French internal security agency, accompanied by a member of British internal security. It was curious after all, wasn’t it? Curious that those two countries’ very adequate external intelligence agencies shouldn’t be involved. Curious enough certainly to merit a call to his country’s own internal security agency, the BfV.
Still, when Mademoiselle Herault and Mr. Barclay arrived, Herr Grunner was polite, obliging, deferential. They had to take tea in his office while he told them something of the prison’s history. Not that he wanted to keep them from their appointment, you understand; this was a matter of courtesy alone, and the young couple seemed to acknowledge this.
All the same, Mr. Barclay had questions for Herr Grunner.
“Has Bandorff had any visitors lately?”
“Visitors are kept to a minimum.”
“Lately, though?”
Herr Grunner looked as though he might become difficult, then relented. He pressed two digits on his telephone and repeated Barclay’s question in German, then waited. After a moment he began to scribble on a notepad, then gave a grunt of acknowledgment and put down the receiver.
“His mother and his sister.”
“On the same day?”
“No, on different days.”
“When did the sister visit?”
“March the twentieth,” Herr Grunner looked up from the notepad, “at ten o’clock.”
“I take it you check the identities of visitors?”
“Of course.” Herr Grunner looked at his watch. “Now, if we are ready...?”
They were ready.
Bandorff’s cell was large, more like a hospital room than part of a prison. Bandorff was allowed, as Herr Grunner had explained, a lot of his own things: books, tapes, a cassette player, his own clothes even. There was a typewriter and plenty of writing paper, and even a portable color TV. The walls had been painted sunflower gold, and then decorated with maps and posters, including a smiling photograph of the Pope.
Two wardens entered the cell first, and would remain there throughout. Wolf Bandorff was watching television. He lay on his bed, hands behind his head, legs stretched out, feet crossed at the ankles. He seemed to be watching a quiz show. Herr Grunner bowed towards Bandorff — who nodded his head slightly in response — then left for his office. Two chairs had been placed on the same side of a small desk, both the chairs facing Bandorff. It did not look as though the terrorist was about to shift either his body or his gaze.
But as Dominique sat down, she saw Bandorff’s eyes move to just below the level of the desk. He was staring at her legs. Instinctively, she tugged her skirt down a little farther. He looked up at her, light glinting from his round wire-framed spectacles, saw that her wriggling was his doing, and grinned. He was in his early fifties, his hair long and silvered and swept back. Had it been thicker, it might have been described as a “mane,” but it was thin and unwashed. He was thinner than the photos — those old photos in the Witch file — had intimated. He no doubt kept in shape in the prison gymnasium. He was a good-looking man who had not gone to seed.
“You’re beautiful,” he told Dominique in German.
“Thank you,” she said crisply in English.
“You’re French?” he asked her in French.
“Yes,” she said, still in English.
“But you want to conduct this interview in English,” he said, nodding. He turned his attention to Barclay. “Therefore I take it you, my friend, are either American or British?”
“I’m English,” said Barclay.
“And I,” said Bandorff, “am German.” He began watching the quiz show again. “And this,” he said, waving a hand towards the TV, “is as good a theory of terrorism as I’ve ever seen.” His hand curled into a fist, index finger extended like a pistol barrel. The hand bucked, an imaginary bullet finding the all-too-real target.