Spoils of War, page 19
‘And what happened?’
‘Well, the CO didn’t want the college involved. He had its reputation to consider. It was bad enough that a student had got involved in an extra-marital affair, but it would be a lot worse if Camberley came to be seen as a place where foreign officers were recruited to spy on their own countries. He called in a couple of us – the instructors who knew Jalloul best – to help him make a decision.
‘The view that prevailed was that we ought to put Military Intelligence discreetly into the picture and let them take it from there. Personally I thought they would be mad not to try and do a deal with Jalloul. His idea wasn’t at all far-fetched. Iraq wasn’t just some tin-pot dictatorship; it was a major oil producer engaged in a war with another one. Everything that happens in the Gulf affects the strategic interests of the West. Firsthand intelligence from out there would have been invaluable.
‘What happened did nobody any good in the end. It became a hot potato that no-one wanted to handle. MI passed it on to the spooks in London, the Secret Intelligence Service, who in turn felt obliged to put it up to their political masters. We never heard officially what the outcome was, but the CO was quietly tipped off that the answer was no. SIS said they thought Jalloul’s motives were suspect. Behind that, I imagine, was the fact that our government saw the Iranians and their Islamic revolution as the real threat at the time. Even if we were technically neutral we were secretly hoping for Iraq to win that war. It might not look very nice if one of their officers should happen to be exposed as a British agent.
‘In the catalogue of lost opportunities, that must rank with the man who said nobody would buy sliced bread. Can you imagine what it might have meant to have someone supplying intelligence from Iraq right through the early eighties? If we’d had a proper assessment of their intentions and capabilities, we might have been forewarned about the invasion of Kuwait, perhaps even have prevented it. But that’s the wisdom of hindsight again.’
‘So what did become of Jalloul?’ Jack asked.
‘The story ends in an anticlimax, I’m afraid.’ Thorpe shrugged and sipped his whisky. ‘He wasn’t summoned back early, he finished his course in December and had no option but to go home. Nadine went back to France and duly had her baby, I gather. Ralph Purchase’s wife stayed in touch with her for a while. Perhaps she and Jalloul had some agreement to join up again one day, but from what you tell me it can’t have happened. Perhaps the passion fizzled out.’
‘Have you any idea where I could find Nadine now? Would Mrs Purchase know?’
‘Well, I wonder,’ Thorpe said dubiously. ‘You could be raking up some painful memories. And the business about the spying is still sensitive.’
‘That needn’t be mentioned. And I’d be as discreet as possible about everything else.’
‘All right, I’ll ring her. Pour yourself another drink.’
Thorpe left the room and a minute later could be heard murmuring into the phone in the hall. Jack stood up but did not refill his glass, conscious of some need to keep all his wits about him. Instead he wandered around the room, examining the colonel’s exotic artefacts until he returned, flourishing a slip of paper torn from a notepad.
‘I don’t know if this will help,’ he said. ‘The Purchases and the girl did write to each other occasionally – well, woman, she’d be thirty-three or four now – for about three years after she went home. Then they lost touch. She’d had a baby boy in April, eighty-one, and at the time of her last letter she and the child were still living with her family. This is the address. It’s a village not far from Belfort, I gather. But, of course, she could be anywhere by now.’
Jack took the note and read what Thorpe had written: Nadine Schuster, Vaux-sur-Autruche 90203, Territoire de Belfort.
‘There’s no phone number. Or if there is, she never gave it. She also never mentioned Jalloul in her letters. You could be on a wild-goose chase.
‘I feel as if I’ve been on one for several days,’ Jack said with a grin. ‘But thank you, Colonel, this could be very helpful. I’m grateful for your time, and I won’t waste any more of it.’
‘Just leave my name right out of any other discussions you have,’ Thorpe said, ‘and that will be thanks enough.’
‘By the way, I got a glimpse of some files on Jalloul while I was in Kuwait,’ Jack said. ‘Intelligence files. And there were some notes typed in English among them. Do you suppose the SIS might have passed their old report on to the Kuwaitis?’
‘It wouldn’t surprise me. They’re supposed to be our latest allies, after all. If we couldn’t make use of him, perhaps they could. Goodbye, then. And good luck with your investigation.’
‘Good luck with your vegetables.’
They shook hands and Jack left the house. The taxi driver had dozed off in his seat and he started when Jack opened the rear door.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I’ve had a long day.’
‘I don’t suppose you feel like driving me to Banstead, then?’
‘Banstead? Halfway across London, isn’t it?’
‘It isn’t that far. But God knows how long it would take me on the trains.’
‘It’s your money,’ the driver said, pulling away from the kerb and glancing at the meter, which already showed a healthy tally. A short way down the narrow lane he winced at a dazzle in his mirror as a car started up behind them and its lights came on at high beam.
‘Country drivers,’ he muttered. ‘Never dip their bloody lights. Never yield properly at junctions. Drive slowly in the fast lane and don’t keep their distance.’
Confounding two of these generalizations, the car behind immediately dimmed its beams and then maintained a respectable gap between itself and the cab as they threaded their way out of Sandhurst. Undeterred, the driver kept up his litany of complaints about rural motorists, but this time Jack wasn’t even half-listening. He had learned a great deal in the past few hours and he was trying to put it all into some kind of order.
Alison wasn’t in when he got home just after eight o’clock. It turned out that she’d gone across the road for a drink with the Reynolds, and their teenaged daughter and her boyfriend had come over to babysit. They had hired a couple of videos and asked if he minded their staying to watch them. He told them to take their time. He checked on the twins, found them fast asleep and went back downstairs to the kitchen. There was no sign that Alison had included him in her catering arrangements for the evening, no cartoon-style dinner-in-the-oven note: he guessed the two of them were long past the stage where he could expect that sort of thing. Last night’s meal had been in the nature of a farewell feast.
He heated soup from a can and took it through to the dining room. When he had eaten he opened the Kroll report and read it, for the first time, from cover to cover. Then he spread the pages of Abdel Karim’s index on the table and turned back to the section of the report that listed the names of those Iraqis favoured with the ownership of substantial foreign assets. Making notes on a pad, he began the same laborious process of cross-checking that he and Karim had employed in the case of Mohamed Ghani.
It took him over an hour to go through them all. When he had finished he had a list of five names to go with that of Ghani. The single factor they had in common was that all their holdings were in bond issues that had been floated by the Handelsbank Bauer. The total value of the bonds was in the region of twenty-six million dollars.
Jack stood up and paced about the room, trying to assess the significance of what he had learned, feeling himself on the brink of a discovery that was both tantalizing and scary. It had occurred to him, riding back in the taxi, that he might be going off at a tangent with this business of the bonds, letting himself get distracted from his main purpose of tracing Jalloul. Now, he sensed, he had got an entirely new slant on the whole thing.
There was another small piece of research to be done. He went through to the drawing room, to a section of the bookshelves where he kept maps and guidebooks retained from holiday and business travels. Among them he found a Michelin road map of France, which he spread out on the coffee-table. The Franche-Comté region wasn’t marked as such on the map, but by scanning the eastern half of the country he quickly located the town called Belfort. It was the prefecture of a tiny department of the same name, tucked down in the south-eastern corner. The village of Vaux-sur-Autruche, which had been the home of Nadine Schuster, was not shown, suggesting it was not a place of much significance. One thing that did strike him about Belfort was its proximity to the Swiss border, which at its nearest point was only about twenty kilometres away. From Zurich it couldn’t be much more than a hundred and fifty. He could drive there and back in half a day.
Which reminded him that he’d better book a taxi to take him to the airport. On the hall table beside the telephone he saw for the first time a message that Alison had written on the memo pad.
It said: Dale Griggs. And gave a phone number.
Jack blinked disbelievingly at the name. The number began with 071, the prefix for central London. Couldn’t be. It must be part of an international code. But the code for Kuwait was 965, and phone numbers there had no prefix.
There was no indication of what time Dale had phoned. Through the hall window Jack glanced across at the Reynolds’ house, wondering if he should go over there and ask Alison to explain this bald message. But that might be awkward. No doubt she was busy consolidating her neighbours’ sympathy with horror stories about her marriage. Besides, he had never mentioned Dale’s existence to Alison and had no idea what they might have said to each other on the phone. What it came down to was that the sight of her name was enough to bring back an irrational sense of guilt: that bloody dream again.
He dialled the number. A man’s voice answered, without enthusiasm: ‘Henderson Hotel.’
‘Miss Dale Griggs, please.’
‘Hold on.’
Taped country-and-western music filled the earpiece for a time. When a woman’s voice came on he still wasn’t sure it was her.
‘Dale?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s Jack Rushton.’
‘Jack!’ She sounded delighted. ‘I’d about given you up.’
‘What are you doing here?’
‘I told you I was coming to Europe on vacation. Turned out to be sooner than I expected. I was expelled from Kuwait yesterday, and the first flight I could get out of Saudi was to London.’
‘Expelled?’
‘Yep. They refused to renew my residence permit, told me to leave right away. No more than I expected, but kind of sudden all the same. So here I am in the good old Henderson Hotel in Bloomsbury. Listen, is it embarrassing for you to talk?’
‘No. Why?’
‘Your wife didn’t sound exactly overjoyed to get my call,’ Dale said. ‘Surprised, then kind of peeved.’
‘Yes, I suppose she would be.’
‘Things still like that, huh? Well, I don’t want to be the cause of any extra grief. If you want to just forget that I called –’
‘No, of course not. What’s on your mind?’
‘This is going to be embarrassing, so bear with me. You remember me saying I was having problems getting my back pay out of the Ministry of Education? Well, they still haven’t forked out, and now that I’m not in the country to needle them, God knows how long it will take. I do have some money back in the States, but it’s tied up in stocks and it’ll take a couple of weeks to get over here. My credit cards are up to their limits and . . .’
‘And you’re short of cash. Before you ask, yes, I do remember offering to let you have some. The offer still stands.’
‘I hate having to ask, Jack, and I wouldn’t if there was any alternative. Right now I don’t even have the price of the air fare home. It would be a very short-term loan, I promise.’
‘How much do you need?’
‘Is five hundred pounds too much?’
‘No. The only problem is getting it to you. I’m flying to Zurich tomorrow morning.’
‘Could I come see you tonight, then? No, I guess that wouldn’t be a good idea. Is there someplace near your home that we could meet?’
‘I’m out in the suburbs. It would take you ages to get here.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Listen, I’ll bring it to you now. Where is your hotel, exactly?’
‘Russell Square. But really, Jack, I can’t expect –’
‘I’ll be there in an hour or less.’
He cut short her protests and put down the phone. The two teenagers were still in the sitting room and he asked them if they would mind staying on a bit longer. Whenever they wanted to go home, he suggested, they should ask Alison to come back.
He felt a tremor of illicit excitement as he closed the front door behind him and went to the garage. Starting Alison’s car and easing it down the drive, he saw a curtain twitch at a downstairs window of the Reynolds’ house. He guessed with malicious satisfaction that this would give them all something new to talk about.
18
It was an easy run into London but he had to circle Russell Square twice before he spotted the Henderson Hotel, sandwiched between a number of similar small establishments.
He parked the car and went inside. The lobby was furnished with nondescript easy chairs in which two or three guests sat watching a late programme on television. A night clerk, presumably the owner of the dispirited voice on the phone, sat behind the desk and gave Dale a covertly lascivious look as she rose from a seat nearby and walked past him to greet Jack.
Her blond hair was down and fluffed out around her face, with a stray ringlet falling against one cheek. She was wearing a chocolate-coloured woollen dress, dark brown tights and a leather belt that emphasized her narrow waist and bony hips. She was lightly made up and didn’t look tired after her journey; if anything she seemed fresher and more cheerful than she had been in Kuwait.
She smiled and kissed his cheek, then gestured apologetically around her. ‘It isn’t Claridge’s,’ she said, ‘but at least I knew it wasn’t going to break the bank. I’ve stayed here before. Refuge of penniless American assistant professors putting in research time at London U and the British Museum. It’s so good of you to do this, Jack. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it.’
‘It’s no more than I promised in Kuwait.’ He glanced round and lowered his voice. ‘It’s all in cash. I don’t think I should give it to you here.’
‘Come up to my room,’ she said. ‘I can offer you a drink, which is the least I should do.’
She led him, past the longing gaze of the clerk, to a tiny lift that churned its way up to the third floor. The Henderson had suffered the fate of other old London houses converted into hotels, of having its room space severely curtailed by the introduction of a lift shaft and bathrooms, so it was all odd corners and awkward turnings. Dale’s room was down a corridor to the rear of the building, a narrow cell into which a single bed, a combination fitted wardrobe and chest of drawers, a miniature desk and a chair had been ingeniously crammed. There were also a hand-basin and a shower cubicle. Velvet curtains concealed what Jack suspected was a view of an air shaft.
Dale hauled a shoulder bag from the wardrobe and took out a bottle of Remy Martin. ‘Thank God for duty-free,’ she said. ‘None of this stuff in Riyadh.’ She found two toothglasses, and while she opened the bottle and poured the brandy Jack took out his wallet. He removed the wad of twenty-pound notes that he had plundered, through a cash dispenser in Banstead, from his bank and credit card accounts, and placed it on the desk.
It caught her eye as she handed him his drink. She looked at him suspiciously. ‘How much is that?’
‘A thousand. I thought what you asked for was too modest.’
‘Jack, I can’t accept that!’
‘I think you ought to. Perhaps it’ll save you selling your stocks. Not a good idea with the markets as they are.’
‘But if I don’t get the money the Kuwaitis owe me I’ll have trouble repaying you.’
‘It isn’t a loan, Dale. And it’s not really a gift from me, if that makes you feel any better. I told you, it’s Hamadi’s money, and I think he owes it to you. Especially now, since he probably helped get you kicked out.’
‘If I’d known you were going to do this I would never have asked.’ She had flushed slightly, both embarrassed and pleased. Exaggerating her Southern accent, she said, ‘My Mama always told me to accept compliments and gifts with good grace, so I won’t go on quibbling about it. But I do intend to repay you.’
Jack shrugged. ‘I don’t want to argue either. Let’s just see how it works out. In the meantime I suggest you put that money in the hotel safe as soon as possible.’
‘Well, isn’t it time we sat down?’ she said rather feebly.
He took the chair while she perched on the edge of the bed, crossing her legs. The room had so little floor space that their knees were almost touching. It struck him that this was the first time she had been able to anticipate meeting him, and he wondered if she had made a positive effort to look her best.
‘Cheers.’ She raised her glass and took an appreciative swallow. ‘I really do hope I didn’t embarrass you by leaving that message.’
‘Don’t worry about it.’
‘I probably shouldn’t have called, remembering what you’d said about your marriage. I told your wife I was someone you’d met in Kuwait. Maybe she thinks I’m some tramp that you picked up there. I mean, you and I both know that she has no cause to be jealous, but when people are unhappy for other reasons jealousy often finds its way into the picture. I’ve been there myself, so I know. I don’t want to add to your problems.’
‘You couldn’t make them any worse, believe me. She finally made it clear last night that she wants a divorce. As for what she thinks about anything else, I just don’t know. We don’t talk. So whatever she imagines you are can’t make any difference.’
‘Good. But the rest of it is tough.’ She glanced at the cash that still lay on the desk. ‘I guess you didn’t tell her about that, huh?’
