Deaken's War Read online

  Because he was meeting a new client, the first for a month, Deaken wore the better of his two suits, the one with least shine at the seat and elbows. He returned to the kitchen from the bedroom for a cloth to give his shoes a final buff. When he straightened, Karen came forward and adjusted the knot of his tie. He reached out for her, feeling the stir of excitement at the touch of her body beneath the thin housecoat.

  “Maybe today will be the big one,” she said.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  “What for?”

  “Being kind.”

  She stretched up to kiss him. “Twelve thirty,” she said.

  “I’ll be waiting.”

  Outside the apartment Deaken hesitated, at once aware that it had grown hotter since he had been out for the breakfast bread. He set out towards the water, turning left almost immediately up the rue de Rhône and then right, along a cross-street to take him to the avenue Pictet de Rochemont. It was too expensive an office, even huddled as it was like some afterthought atop the grander suites of bankers and accountants, but Deaken had wanted an impressive address. A mistake, he thought—like so much else. He went in through the main entrance, with its smoked glass and potted plants and uniformed doormen, feeling like an interloper, and took the lift as far as it would go. He emerged on the eighth floor, where the offices were already diminishing in size, and walked up the stairway to the top floor, which had been added at some time like icing to a cake. Here the flooring was linoleum, not marble or cork or tile, and the windows fronting the corridor had the smeared look of glass cleaned once a week by a charwoman with little enthusiasm. Deaken’s office was the fourth along to the right but he stopped at the second because it was the one that Elian Fochet occupied. When he entered she was bent over a newspaper crossword.

  “Anything?” he said.

  “An offer for an out-of-hours answering service, without which no successful business is supposed to be able to operate, and a handout from American Express on the benefit of taking cards against the firm for employees’ use,” recited the woman. She hesitated and added, “Everyone got the same.”

  “Thanks,” said Deaken.

  “You’ve an appointment at eleven,” she said. Elian Fochet was mousy-haired, absolutely flat-chested, and wore butterfly spectacles that had gone out of fashion years before. Deaken thought she looked exactly what she was, the shared secretary/receptionist for a group of people hanging on by their fingertips to some pretension of business. He wondered if she was a virgin.

  “I know,” he said.

  “Do you want me to serve coffee?”

  “No, thank you,” said Deaken. Her coffee was appalling.

  “It won’t be any trouble.”

  “No, really.”

  She offered him the circulars but he shook his head. She threw them in the waste basket.

  He continued on to his own office, unlocked the door and stood at the entrance. The cheap carpet still looked presentable. So did the couch along one wall and the matching chair in front of the desk. He could have got away with the imitation black leather chair, high-backed and padded-armed, behind it, but the desk was ply and looked it, despite the attempt to disguise it with varnish. The inset, too, was clearly plastic and not leather. Nothing he could do about it now though. From a bottom drawer of the desk Deaken took a duster and wiped the desk top, then the sparsely filled filing cabinet and after that the windowsill. He slanted the Venetian blinds, lessening the light coming into the room, and then looked over his shoulder. Better, he decided. Not much better. He dusted the telephone which rarely rang, returned the cloth to its drawer, and from the one above took out his clean notepad; there were six pencils in a cup to the right, all needle sharp. That’s how he’d occupied the last hour of the previous day.

  It was ridiculous to continue like this. He had to do something. And do it soon. The erosion of self-confidence had been insidious. A run of bad trial results—not surprising considering the sort of trials they were—and he had suddenly decided to take a rest. Expand my experience in civil litigation, he’d told everyone. Except that he hadn’t been offered any civil litigation and doubts about his own ability had intensified, until now he wasn’t sure if he could handle a case even if it were offered. Help, he thought, that’s what he needed. Professional medical help. There would be no reason for Karen to know he was having treatment. Easy enough to arrange appointments and sessions during the day.

  What about the real cause of the rows and their increasingly strained relationship? He was frightened of parenthood, Deaken admitted to himself. Of seeing Karen balloon into awkward ugliness, nine months of worrying whether the child would be bom properly formed and not with some mental or physical disability. Was he unusual, thinking like that? Unnatural even? He knew Karen was determined to become pregnant; just as he was determined against it. Get the job settled first, he thought. The baby could come later. Richard Deaken, on the run again.

  Because of the glass fronting he was aware of the shadowed approach, even before the peremptory knock on the door. Deaken just managed to stand before the man got into the room. He was tall and broad-shouldered, with clipped fair hair and a sun-tanned, open face; the sort of man to play rugby or tennis, Deaken thought.

  One look encompassed the room and Deaken knew the shading from the Venetian blinds hadn’t worked. Shit, he thought.

  The man offered his hand. “Rupert Underberg,” he said.

  The contact was dry, businesslike; for the first time Deaken put the name in possible context. The accent was bland but there could have been the slightest trace of South Africa.

  When Underberg sat in the chair indicated, Deaken realized his face was almost completely shadowed in the effort to put the office in better light. Deaken glanced at his wristwatch. Underberg was ten minutes early. The man looked again around the office, more critically this time. Deaken had no doubt he could manage lunch with Karen. He would probably have time to plait several yards of paperclips. Except that he didn’t have sufficient for several yards. He normally collected these from incoming mail. It was thoughtless not to have accepted the brochures from the answering service and American Express this morning.

  “You didn’t make it clear in your telephone call what exactly it was that I could do for you, Mr Underberg,” said Deaken.

  “I didn’t know then,” said the man. “Now I do.”

  “What is it?”

  “Negotiate for me,” said Underberg. “Negotiate something very difficult. And special.”

  Deaken felt a spurt of interest. He took one of the painstakingly sharpened pencils from the coffee cup, wrote “Underberg” on the pad, underlined it twice and then looked up.

  “Why don’t we talk about it and I’ll see if 1 can help?” he said.

  “Oh, I think you’ll be able to help.”

  Deaken inscribed a third line beneath the man’s name. “How?” he said, mildly irritated by the man’s attitude.

  “Do you know Adnan Azziz?”

  Deaken frowned briefly, then he remembered. “The Saudi Arabian?”

  “Arms dealer,” continued Underberg. “The biggest.”

  “Yes,” said Deaken, “I know of him.”

  “He kills people,” said Underberg. “Not directly; he never does anything directly.”

  Deaken leaned forward over his desk, hand against his forehead to shield his face as much as possible from the other man. The words had an ominously familiar ring. He had appeared in civil-rights trials, either as the leading defence advocate or as the supporting advisory counsel to lawyers of the country, in Germany and America and Chile and Nicaragua and Turkey and Ireland and South Africa. And so often his involvement had begun with a meeting like this and with words like these. Not me, he thought. I can’t do it anymore. I’ve lost the enthusiasm, I’ve lost the anger. I just want to be left alone.

  “I don’t think this is for me,” he said.

  “Oh, yes, it is,” said Underberg.

  Deaken’s apprehe
nsion tightened.

  “I know all about you, Richard Deaken,” said Underberg. “I know that in South Africa your father is a leading member of the Nationalist government, a predicted cabinet minister, which he would have been much sooner if it wasn’t for the embarrassment of having a famous son. Up to a year ago there wasn’t a better-known civil-rights lawyer than you anywhere in the world; not many people simultaneously get the cover story in Time and Newsweek, you know. What’s happened in the last year? Lost your taste for fighting?’’

  “Who are you?” demanded Deaken.

  The man smiled, baring his teeth again, and stretched back in the chair.

  “The man you’re going to work for.”

  “Get out,” said Deaken.

  “You’re going to negotiate for me with Adnan Azziz,” said Underberg, his voice measured and confident.

  Deaken stood up. “Please get out of my office.”

  Underberg settled farther in his chair. “We have information that Adnan Azziz has completed an arms deal worth something like $50,000,000 with terrorists in Angola and Namibia. It goes beyond RPG rocket launchers, up to wire-controlled tank and antipersonnel carrier missiles, which we presume the Soviet advisers intend to operate, because the SWAPO guerrillas certainly haven’t got the ability. Thousands of AK-47 rifles and tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition. And not just communist weapons. We know there are crates of American Armalite rifles, again with tons of ammunition …”

  “I don’t want to know,” said Deaken. He was still standing and felt vaguely ridiculous.

  “It’s important that you know,” said Underberg, like a patient schoolmaster.

  “I’ve already told you I won’t take instructions,” said Deaken with growing exasperation. “For God’s sake, get out of my office.”

  “It’s for a massive assault in Namibia,” continued Underberg, as if the lawyer hadn’t interrupted. “We think it’s timed for mid-July. We’ve no definite date, but we know that’s the month. We’ll find out soon enough.”

  “For what?” Deaken’s question was automatic, without proper thought.

  Underberg’s teeth showed, in his piranha smile. “To stop it happening, of course,” he said. “It’s scheduled to be their big show, the one that will finally sway public opinion against South Africa in favour of the United Nations’ initiative. They’re even going to invite the world’s press, to report it. Only it won’t quite be the story they expect.”

  Deaken sat down. Underberg obviously had no intention of leaving, and there was no way he could make him.

  “We’ve infiltrated SWAPO up to here,” said Underberg, putting his hand beneath his chin. “We’re going to mount a counteroffensive they couldn’t imagine possible and annihilate the whole movement in one decisive battle.” He shifted, trying both for effect and a more comfortable position in the cramped chair. “Because we’re going to have helicopters and tanks and guns and rifles and missiles and they’re going to be grabbing for bows and arrows and spears.”

  “You said they’d purchased $50,000,000 worth of weaponry,” said Deaken.

  “Which they’re never going to see,” said Underberg. “You will get Azziz to deflect the shipment.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Everything’s been thought out very carefully, Mr Deaken. It’ll work, exactly as we intend it to.”

  Deaken shook his head. This wasn’t the sort of job he had hoped to impress Karen with at lunch.

  “Azziz has a son of eighteen,” said Underberg. “A very attractive, if indulged, child. This morning he was kidnapped on his way to join his father for his summer vacation.”

  “Jesus Christ!” erupted Deaken. “You know I can’t listen to any of this. You’re mad.”

  “No,” said Underberg. “Just determined.”

  “I could have you arrested the moment you leave here.”

  For the first time the man’s amusement seemed genuine. “It’ll take the police or any other force hours to get here, even if they believed you. By which time I could be halfway across Europe. I understand your attitude … 1 really do. I actually feel sorry for you.”

  “I told you once to get out,” said Deaken, burned by an awareness of utter impotence. “Now I’m telling you again. Get out of this office. I don’t believe a word you’ve said, but I still intend informing the police.” He snatched at the telephone, immediately aware that he didn’t know what number to ring; the instrument growled demandingly in his ear.

  “Put it down,” said Underberg. “No one can get through to you if the receiver is off the rest.”

  Deaken remained with the receiver held before him. Underberg reached over the desk and depressed the telephone rest. The growling stopped. “Put it down,” said the man again. “Please.”

  Slowly Deaken did what he was told.

  “Thank you,” said Underberg. He looked at his watch. “No harm will come to the boy,” he said, his voice even and conversational. “You’re to assure Azziz of that. If he does what we want, his son will be released unharmed and quite safe.”

  The telephone jarred into the room. Deaken jumped. It was too early for Karen, far too early.

  “Shouldn’t you answer it?” said Underberg.

  Deaken obeyed.

  “Richard,” said a voice he recognized at once as Karen’s. “I’m with two men. They came to the apartment just after you left and said you wanted to see me … so I went … they’ve told me to telephone you …”

  Deaken tried to swallow, against the sensation in his throat.

  “I’ve come a long way in a car … I’m frightened,” said his wife’s voice. “What’s happening, Richard?”

  They drove fast, anxious to cross the border, the speedometer needle registering the permitted maximum on every road, although they were cautious never to exceed it and risk interception by the police. The bodyguards had been under observation for two months, but their body weight was still only an estimate; the reduced Oblivon inoculation had been carefully measured against that body weight, but there was always the possibility they would recover earlier than the scheduled hour. And that they would ignore the instructions and raise an official alarm, sealing off the country.

  They chose Basel.

  As the Citroën joined the queue of vehicles edging into France, the curly-haired man arranged an anorak across his lap, covering the Magnum he wedged against Azziz’s knee

  “We’ll be watching you, not just from both sides but from the front as well,” warned the man. “The slightest mistake when we come to the check and I’ll blow your leg off.”

  It was the height of the holiday season and the busiest time of the day, when the customs officials were under the greatest pressure to keep the tourist flow moving in both directions. The passport checks were cursory.

  “Very good,” said the man, as the car picked up speed and began to descend into France. “I’m glad your people did what they were told.”

  “Take the gun away,” said Azziz. It was an order, not a request.

  The man did.

  “Where are we going?” asked the boy.

  “Not much farther.”

  “My father will pay, you know. Whatever you ask for, he’ll pay.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  The tension lifted from the men in the vehicle now that the border had been crossed. The driver still kept within the speed limit.

  They went through St Louis and then, almost at once, Huningue. Mulhouse was already being signposted but they turned off the main road to Rixheim.

  Three of the men, keeping Azziz between them, got out at the farmhouse. The driver kept the engine running, using the gate entrance to make his turn and go back towards the main road.

  It was a square, three-storey, yellow-brick building, with white shutters freshly painted and strapped back alongside each set of windows. It was no longer a farm. The surrounding fields were rented to a neighbouring farmer and the main house given over to holiday rentals; a boule
set was neatly arranged at one end of the gravel drive and the immaculately clipped lawns through which they walked were set with a garden table and chairs and a canopied swing seat. Everything was new and white-painted; the canopy and seats were striped bright green. The thick oak door led immediately into the main communal room. It occupied almost half the ground floor and was dominated by a huge open fireplace at one end; racks and spits of a curing system were still in place. There were vases of flowers on the central table and on the large open dresser and sideboard. As they entered, a man emerged from what was clearly the adjoining kitchen. He nodded towards them but said nothing.

  Azziz stood by the central table, looking around him curiously. He was a black-haired, deeply brown-eyed boy, tall and athletically slim; already his father’s London staff were inquiring about stabling facilities for his polo ponies in the Cambridge area. He held himself disdainfully erect.

  “What now?” he said.

  “We wait,” said the only man who ever spoke.

  “You talked in Arabic at the airport.”

  “Yes.”

  “But you’re not an Arab.”

  “No.”

  Momentarily Azziz’s demeanour faltered. “Israeli?”

  “Zionist.”

  Seeing the boy’s alarm, the man added, “You won’t be harmed, providing your father does as we ask.”

  “How are you called?”

  “Shimeon,” said the man. “Shimeon Levy.”

  “A good enough pseudonym,” said the boy.

  “It’s my given name,” said Levy. “I’m not afraid of people knowing it: they will soon enough.”

  Captain Erlander returned from the port office by eleven. Edmunson was aft, on the gangway deck, supervising the loading, and the captain turned away from the bridge approach, going towards the stern.

  “How is it?” he said.

  “Another six tons,” said the first officer.

  “An hour then?”

  “Give me two, just in case there’s a holdup.”

  “Three-o’clock castoff,” decided Erlander. “The forecast is good so we can clear the Strait by midnight.”