Spoils of War, page 16
‘All right,’ Reg said with a sigh. ‘I’m beginning to think Salman Rushdie would be easier after all. How’s Alison, by the way?’
‘Oh, you know. Difficult.’
Leaving Reg to ponder on that, Jack finished his whisky and tramped up to his newly single bedroom.
14
The next morning Jack awoke in a strangely optimistic mood. He couldn’t pin down the reason, but he thought his conversation with Alison had something to do with it. It had cleared the air if nothing else, ending what he could now see had been months, perhaps even years, of uncertainty between them.
Within a few minutes, a heaviness returned to his thoughts as he considered a future of separation from the twins. Would he end up like other divorced men he knew, pathetically collecting his children for their weekly period of ‘access’? Maybe he should fight for custody, or contest the divorce: was that even possible nowadays? And if so, could he afford it?
He found it hard to contemplate the horror of such a business, and he didn’t feel like facing Alison this morning. She was moving about downstairs, getting the twins ready for school, and a few minutes later he heard the three of them trooping out to her car. As soon as she had driven off he went down to the phone, taking advantage of her absence to call the number of the lawyer who had represented Dr Hamadi in Zurich.
He stated his name to the answering telephonist and within a few moments he was speaking to Dr Karl Zunckel. A man with a gravelly voice and precise English diction, he seemed keen at once to take charge of the conversation.
‘Good morning, Mr Rushton. Our mutual client has already informed me that you would be in touch with me. No names, if you please – it is advisable not to be too specific on the telephone, I think. I should make it clear at once that I don’t believe I can be of any more help to you than I have been to him. He knows everything there is to know about this matter. To be quite frank, I am not at all sure what purpose would be served by your coming to see me.’
‘I have to start somewhere, Dr Zunckel, and I think a discussion with you could be very useful. I’m thinking of –’
‘I understand what your principal’s intentions are,’ Zunckel interrupted. ‘Unfortunately, it has been difficult to convince him that I have no way of taking the matter any further. It is in a state of impasse. A legally binding covenant is involved, as well as strict banking regulations which cannot be circumvented.’
‘I’m sure you know a lot more about them than I do,’ Jack said firmly. ‘Which is why I’d appreciate the benefit of your advice. I hope to fly to Zurich tomorrow morning and I’d be grateful if you’d fit in a meeting with me early in the afternoon.’
‘At so little notice, I am not sure that will be possible.’
‘Since your client is paying both of us, Dr Zunckel, I think we ought to treat his problem with some urgency. In the meantime I’d like you to, set up an appointment for me for later tomorrow with someone from the Handelsbank Bauer.’
‘Mr Rushton . . .’ The lawyer’s tone became patronizing. ‘Perhaps you’re not familiar with the confidential nature of Swiss banking. Nobody there is going to talk to you.’
‘Not even if I want to invest some money with them? That’s all I have in mind for the moment.’
‘I see,’ said Zunckel, nonplussed. ‘Very well, I’ll see what I can do. To be perfectly candid, I think you and our client are looking for a miracle.’
‘I’ll phone again and tell you when I’m arriving.’
Pompous ass, Jack thought, putting down the receiver. Dr Zunckel sounded like the kind of lawyer who was fonder of talking than of listening. And behind his expressions of candour he seemed extraordinarily determined to discourage Jack’s efforts. Well, Hamadi had suggested that the man would be difficult to deal with, and Jack hoped he would not have to depend on him too much. Meanwhile, he had other business to attend to.
He went back upstairs and showered, shaved and dressed. He was ready to leave the house just before ten o’clock when the phone rang. It was Reg, mumbling furtively from his desk at Hellig’s.
‘I’ve got what you were looking for,’ he said.
‘The report? That’s terrific. Can I come and collect it?’
‘Not here, please,’ Reg said hastily. ‘Let’s meet for a quick bite of lunch at Walpole’s. I may have made some progress on that other thing by then.’
‘Abdel Karim? That’s even better. Dare I ask if you got anything on Camberley?’
‘Not much luck there, as I warned you. I’ve lost touch with the people who stayed on in the Army after I’d left. But I do have an old pal who remembered that one of our company commanders moved to the college as an instructor around the time you were talking about. Man named Thorpe. Major David Thorpe. Retired now, but still lives somewhere around Camberley. What he might remember about any one officer who did a course there is anybody’s guess. That’s the best I can do for you.’
‘I’ll try and find him,’ Jack said.
‘Remind him about our regiment: the Royal Green Jackets. That’ll be your entrée. See you later. One o’clock all right?’
‘Fine.’
‘Oh, and bring some serious ID with your photograph on it, just in case. Preferably your passport.’
Jack called directory enquiries and asked for the number of a Major David Thorpe in the Camberley area. After some delay, the nearest they could get to it was a Colonel A.D. Thorpe with an address in Green Lane, Sandhurst. Jack tried the number but got no reply. It occurred to him that the place was less than half an hour’s drive away; he might just have time to get over there, if only to establish whether the major and the colonel were one and the same person. But the only car he and Alison had between them these days was her Honda Civic, and he did not want to have to ask her for the use of it.
He heard her coming in by the back door just then, and he went through to the kitchen to find her unpacking some shopping. They greeted each other with studied politeness, neither of them mentioning the discussion of the night before. He told her he would be out until at least mid-afternoon, and sensed that she shared his own relief that they would escape each other’s company.
It was a blustery spring day, sunshine alternating with fast-moving rain clouds. He walked the short distance to his bank in Banstead High Street, where he paid the two sterling drafts from Kuwait into his deposit account. He also bought five thousand Swiss francs’ worth of travellers’ cheques before crossing the road to a travel agency. He paid for a return ticket to Zurich and got a reservation on a flight leaving at ten o’clock the next morning, together with a booking for one night at a hotel where he had stayed before. Finally he walked to the station and caught a train to Waterloo.
‘I don’t know if you realize quite how cagey they have to be,’ said Reg Kilmartin. ‘These Kurdish exile people, I mean. They don’t take any chances. They’ve got an office over at Bethnal Green, but naturally you can’t just walk in there and ask for Abdel Karim. There’s a drill to be followed, the same one they use for arranging clandestine press and television interviews. They trust me because I’m from Hellig’s. I take you there and introduce you, vouch for you, and after that you’re on your own. I gather that if they accept your bona fides they’ll arrange a further rendezvous and take you to meet the man somewhere else.’
‘Thanks, Reg. You’ve been terrific.’
‘I’m not going to say it was nothing, because actually it was quite something. Smuggling that thing out wasn’t exactly easy, either.’ Reg pointed at the report, in a large manila envelope, which lay between them on the bar counter at Walpole’s. ‘Not to be shown to anybody else, and none of the information in it to be attributed to Hellig’s or to me. For God’s sake, don’t leave it in the taxi.’
‘Don’t worry, I know the score.’
They sat with plates of beef salad and a glass of wine each at one end of the bar. Jack wasn’t sure whether his former partner appreciated the irony of choosing Walpole’s as their meeting place. It was off Moorgate in the heart of the City, just around the corner from the offices of Hellig Associates, and it was where the two of them had often furtively retreated to plot their escape from Hellig’s all those years ago. A staid Dickensian chop-house in those days, it had since succumbed to fashion and become a wine bar, serving quiches and salads and vegetarian lasagne to health-conscious yuppies from the financial service companies.
As well as producing the report by Kroll Associates of New York, Reg had greeted him with the news that he had managed to arrange an appointment for that afternoon with Abdel Karim. It was in Reg’s nature to complain of the impossibility of doing things and then to do them all the same. As he had reminded Jack last night, he hadn’t been cut out for the Army, but neither did he seem very much at home in the City. A big, soft-featured man who favoured blazers and slacks over the ubiquitous double-breasted suits, he had something of the look of a golf-club secretary slightly gone to seed.
‘Better eat up,’ he said, glancing at his watch. ‘We’ve got to leave in five minutes.’
Jack took the report out of the envelope and glanced through it. It was a hefty document of a hundred pages or so, with a glossy cover bearing the Kroll Associates logo and the word Confidential. There was a general introduction, followed by a series of chapters detailing the movement of funds out of Iraq over the past several years and the equities that had been purchased with them. These were broken down in turn into legitimate government investments and private, apparently irregular ones made by individuals or through companies set up in foreign countries. Lot of figures, lots of names: the report would no doubt repay detailed study, but its scope was far too wide to understand at a glance. There were two or three appendices at the back, giving more detailed lists of equities and of Iraqi nationals who owned them.
A name sprang out of one page, making Jack pause midway through raising a forkful of salad. Mohamed Ghani. The name on Colonel Jalloul’s false passport, the one he had used on the night he had collected Noura Hamadi from her house.
Ghani, Mohamed, the entry read. Baghdad businessman. Holdings: 200,000 Unilever 5%, 1988-93; 150,000 First Chicago Overseas Finance 4%, 1986-96; 175,000 Hamersley Iron Finance . . .
‘Time to go,’ Reg interrupted.
The list went on. Mohamed Ghani was named as the owner of around a dozen European and American securities. The figures quoted were their par values in a number of different currencies: dollars, Swiss francs, Dutch guilders, German marks. In anybody’s money, the supposedly fictitious Mr Ghani was clearly a millionaire.
This added a puzzling new dimension to the business. But Reg was fidgeting and there was no time to read further. Jack paid for their lunch and they left.
The taxi that they hailed in Moorgate ploughed through heavy traffic, past the Bank of England, the Stock Exchange and the towers of steel and glass that had sprung up around them in the years since Jack and Reg had first worked in the City. Soon they were out of it, however, passing through Whitechapel into shabbier regions of the East End that he hardly knew. Turning up Cambridge Heath Road, the taxi stopped after half a mile or so just past Bethnal Green tube station. Reg told the driver to wait, and led Jack past a strip of lawn to a cul-de-sac where a row of three-storeyed Victorian houses stood in odd isolation, facing the busy road and backing on to a railway cutting. A few of them were in residential use to judge by the fresh paint on their doorframes and window boxes full of spring flowers; the others had the down-at-heel appearance of low-rent office accommodation and conformed to the generally depressed look of their surroundings. A street sign identified the place as Paradise Row.
One of the buildings had strong iron bars over the windows of its two lower floors. Removing any doubt that this was their destination, there was also a police car parked conspicuously outside, its two occupants eyeing Jack and Reg as they halted at the door. The brass plate beside it said: Kurdish People’s Democratic Party.
In spite of its run-down appearance the building had impressive security, a stout oak door with two deadlocks, a peephole and a videophone entry system. A speaker beside the door crackled into life when Reg pressed the buzzer.
‘Mr Kilmartin from Hellig Associates,’ he announced himself.
‘What’s your business, Mr Kilmartin?’ said a disembodied male voice.
‘I’ve brought Mr Rushton for the appointment made through my office. I have a letter of introduction here.’
‘Put it through the letterbox, please.’
Reg did as he was told. A minute went by before the voice said: ‘Does Mr Rushton have some identification?’
Reg raised an eyebrow at Jack, who fished out his passport and held it up for inspection through the video scanner.
‘Anything else?’ said the voice.
‘A business card. A driver’s licence.’
‘Put them all through the letterbox, please. They’ll be returned to you in due course.’
The documents vanished through the flap. Jack and Reg waited awkwardly on the doorstep for another two or three minutes, conscious of the camera’s scrutiny, before the speaker came to life again. Instead of inviting them in, the man behind the door said: ‘Mr Rushton, please follow these instructions carefully. Walk back the way you came. Cross Bethnal Green Road and turn right. Go as far as the post office and wait in front of it. Thank you.’
They looked at each other and shrugged. Apparently this was all that the Kurdish People’s Democratic Party intended to reveal of itself. They went back to the roadside, where Jack thanked Reg and watched him leave in the taxi before following the directions he’d been given.
Among the run-down, almost featureless East End streets, he found the post office after a five-minute walk. He stopped outside it and stood looking about, not knowing what he was waiting for. The roadway was choked with traffic. A motorbike pulled in a few yards away and he thought for a moment it had come to meet him; but its rider, a courier in a black-visored helmet, ignored him and trotted into a newsagent’s shop.
Ten minutes went by and Jack began to feel faintly absurd. He supposed the Kurdish exiles had good reason to be nervous but he failed to see the point of such crude subterfuge. He also began to wonder whether he’d been wise to surrender his passport and driver’s licence to someone he hadn’t even seen.
A few spots of rain fell and he took shelter in the doorway of the post office. As he turned to face the road again a battered Bedford van drew up sharply at the kerb. The sliding door on its near side was drawn back and a dark-skinned man was beckoning from the opening.
‘Mr Rushton! Here!’
He went over to the van. ‘Get in, get in,’ the man said, smiling in spite of the urgency of his tone, making room for Jack to clamber through the door. It was rammed shut immediately, and almost before he could take stock of his surroundings the vehicle was nudging out into the traffic.
He sat down on one of two long benches behind the driver’s seat. Apart from the driver there were two men in the dim, windowless rear of the van: the one who had called to him and another who sat beside him, facing Jack. They both wore leather jackets and jeans and they had the muscular, seam-splitting build of Middle Eastern wrestlers. They looked friendly, however, and the one with the smile said: ‘We are Abdel Karim’s bodyguards, Mr Rushton. This is how we must deal with everyone who meets him. Please let me search you.’
Jack submitted to the probing of powerful hands that patted his body up and down in search of weapons or hidden microphones. The Kurd peered into the envelope containing the Kroll report and passed it back. From a pocket of his jacket he took Jack’s passport and driving licence. He studied the passport photograph briefly, comparing it with the face in front of him, before handing the documents over. He seemed anxious to be reassuring, and a moment later Jack understood why.
‘We’re going to blindfold you, Mr Rushton,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘It’s a necessary precaution.’ Still smiling, the bodyguard produced a broad strip of heavy black cloth. ‘It’s better that you don’t know where we are going.’
‘Who do you suppose I’m going to tell, for God’s sake?’
‘I have to insist that you co-operate. It’s safer for Abdel Karim, and safer for you.’
Jack sat back with a sigh and allowed the Kurd to fit the blindfold over his eyes, knotting it behind his head. Just now they didn’t seem to be going anywhere much, for the van had barely travelled a few yards before getting caught in a snarl of traffic. From behind, he thought he heard the growl of a motorbike starting up; perhaps that was another of the necessary precautions.
They drove, slowly at first and then at increasing speed, for what seemed about forty minutes. The Kurds conversed quietly in their own language, leaving Jack feeling even more isolated behind his blindfold. Out of idle curiosity he tried to work out the direction they were taking, but soon he became disorientated. To judge by the diminished sound of traffic, they had reached somewhere in the outer suburbs when the van came to a decisive stop. The driver did a slow reverse turn and cut the engine.
‘We’re here, Mr Rushton.’
He heard the door slide open. The Kurd whom he thought of as Smiler took his arm and helped him out. They went a few steps before passing through a doorway into an atmosphere of spicy cooking smells: a kitchen. From there he was led along a carpeted floor, turned to the left and guided to a seat. He felt fingers fiddling with the knot of his blindfold and suddenly it was whipped away.
The light around him wasn’t strong but it made him flinch and close his eyes for some seconds. They watered as soon as he opened them and he had to wipe them with his fingertips, gradually bringing his surroundings into focus. He was in a room of modest size that was apparently doing double duty as a drawing room and office. The high ceiling and the bay window suggested it was part of an older type of house. The curtains were drawn and the only light came from a lamp standing on a desk; untidy heaps of papers and bulging file covers overflowed from the desk and covered every other level surface: the tops of two filing cabinets, a coffee-table, even an area of the floor. Otherwise the furnishings were comfortable in a shabby, nondescript way, among them the sofa on which he found himself sitting and a swivel chair behind the desk, from which Abdel Karim had risen to greet him.
