Читать книгу Borrowed Time - Alistair MacLean, Alistair MacLean, Hugh Miller - Страница 8

Next morning the plans for the Kashmir assignment were firmed up and finalized in the briefing suite. It was agreed that Mike would be flown directly to Delhi, then taken north by helicopter to the mountains north-west of the Vale of Kashmir. There he would receive an intensive introduction to the region from a Kashmiri Indian, Ram Jarwal, who was a UN Area Observer stationed near Srinagar, in the west of the Indian-administered territory of Kashmir.

Sabrina would spend a single day being briefed by a team of WHO specialists before she travelled to a US-operated commercial airfield at Dehra Dun, eighty kilometres north-west of Delhi. From there she would be spirited northward and would finally become fully visible driving a car into the town of Kulu, in the Pradesh region, 160 kilometres south of the Kashmir border.

‘As ever with agents collecting peripheral intelligence,’ Philpott said, ‘we want Sabrina to appear to have been around for a while, without anyone being able to pinpoint the place or time she arrived. The rule here is always worth remembering — a reassuring presence and a hazy history make for convincing cover.’

On her journey northward, Sabrina would carry the credentials of a WHO Ecology Monitor.

‘Since you will both arrive in the Vale of Kashmir by different means and at different rates of progress,’ Philpott continued, ‘it’s to be hoped you’ll pick up widely different intelligence in the early stages of your assignment. What we need to know, principally, is the severity of criminal activity — of recent origin, remember — in the target region. Long-standing problems are already accommodated by a number of means; we need to know what’s being added to make the pot boil over, as it were. The causes could be far more widespread than Reverend Young or our observers think. The short version is, we badly need hard intelligence.’

‘Nothing to be taken for granted,’ Sabrina murmured, scribbling.

‘Quite so,’ Philpott said. ‘We need to know the nature of the beast, where it’s from and how far it sprawls. In more realistic terms, we need to find out how best to counter and prevent a series of political reactions which could result in an Indo-Chinese bloodbath.’

Mike wanted to know if current intelligence still indicated that the main troubles were orchestrated by one or two terrorist groups.

‘That is still the view of our best-informed observers,’ Philpott said. ‘You may find differently once you get past the various façades, of course. If you do discover you’re up against something that calls for a small army rather than a couple of smart saboteurs, then don’t indulge in heroics. Evaluate the position, report to me, then clear out.’

Before dismissing them Philpott issued a caution. ‘At all times, remain aware that UNACO’s function is to combat and neutralize crime without impinging on local politics or customs. In this case it won’t be easy to avoid trespassing on sensitive ground, so damage-limitation must be a priority. Making matters worse will be a lot easier than making them better.’

In the corridor outside, Mike and Sabrina wished each other luck. Sabrina even put a peck on Mike’s cheek before they parted.

‘My, but that was cordial and civilized,’ Whitlock observed, stepping out of the recessed doorway of the briefing room. ‘Not like you two at all.’

‘Truces come and go,’ Mike said. ‘For a while now it’s been OK between us.’

‘Because you haven’t been working closely with one another.’

‘Precisely, C.W. The peace can’t hold. Sooner or later we’ll find ourselves sharing a predicament, and then she’ll try to assert what she feels is her natural authority —’

‘Over what you know to be yours.’ Whitlock held up his attaché case and tapped the side. ‘I’ve got something for you. Let’s go to Secure Comms.’

Mike had expected photographs, but what C.W. took out of the case was a mini CD.

‘This was the only way to do it.’ He powered up a graphics computer on a steel table in the middle of the floor. ‘Photographic prints at Aerial Defence are numbered and accounted for. They are also magnetically tagged through a ferrous component in the paper emulsion, so there was no way anybody was going to get one out of there. However, I have a resourceful friend on the strength, and he knows the code that unlocks the negative disks.’

‘Negative disks?’

‘The negatives aren’t on film. They’re electronic and they’re stored on hard disks. So my compadre unlocked the negs and transferred identical copies to this minidisk.’

Whitlock opened a zippered pouch and took out a Sony MZ-R3 minidisk recorder. He plugged one end of a transfer cord into the tiny silver machine and put the other end into a socket in the back of the computer. He put the CD into the Sony and a moment later a picture began to appear on the screen. It built slowly at first, then accelerated until the whole screen was filled with a sharp photographic image of eleven turbaned men on horses travelling through mountainous countryside. No faces were visible.

‘That’s no good,’ Mike said. ‘I was told they could be identified …’

‘There are over twenty still to go,’ Whitlock said. ‘Be patient, can’t you?’

He began tapping a button on top of the Sony. With each tap the picture on the screen changed.

‘Stop!’ Mike pointed as the eighth picture came up. ‘Stop right there!’

The image was a closer view and a different angle from the ones before. The faces of three men were visible. One was the leader, but he had moved his head at the moment of exposure and the features were blurred.

‘Damn!’ Mike growled.

Whitlock brought up the next shot. The same three faces were visible, but this time the leader gazed straight ahead, caught full face and pin sharp.

‘My God.’

Whitlock watched Mike. He had the look of a man who had been searching for something under a stone and had found it; fascinated repulsion was the description that came to mind.

‘That’s the man?’

‘That’s him.’

Mike took in the wide clear eyes, the firm arrogant set of the mouth; the nose, once straight, had gone through a few changes of shape since boyhood. It had even changed since Mike last saw it.

‘Ugly, isn’t he?’

Whitlock frowned at the picture. ‘He looks normal to me. Quite handsome, even.’

‘OK. I’m prejudiced.’

‘Tell me about him.’

Mike made a face.

‘You promised.’

Mike got two Styrofoam cups of coffee from the machine by the door and brought them to the table. They sat down in front of the big monitor.

‘Lenny Trent asked me if I had a private agenda where this man is concerned,’ Mike said. ‘You asked me if it was a vendetta. Well, yes to both questions. The agenda is bedded in a time long ago, when I was a kid. When I was, to be precise, a rookie quarterback for the New York Giants.’

‘If this is a football story I may fall asleep.’

‘Stay with me, you’ll be all right. During my second week with the team one of the star players, Lou Kelly, got his career ended abruptly in the parking lot behind the ball park. He was beaten half to death. At that time I had never seen anyone injured so badly. He lost an eye and had his left arm broken in so many places it had to be amputated below the elbow.’

‘How come?’

‘I didn’t get the full story until years later. A certain senator had offered Lou Kelly money to perform badly in a crucial game. He only had to play badly enough to give the other team the edge, that was all they needed. Lou Kelly refused and he was promptly offered twice as much money. He still refused. So a man was sent to punish him for being so intractable.’

‘A contract beating.’

‘Yeah. It turned out worse than a killing for Lou. I still remember seeing the man waiting for him outside the players’ exit and thinking, that guy is bad news. It was a long time ago and everybody was much younger then, but I’ve got no doubts. The man who destroyed Lou Kelly’s career that night was Paul Seaton.’

They were silent for a minute, drinking coffee, staring at the picture on the screen.

‘According to my contact at Aerial Defence,’ Whitlock said, ‘Seaton and his bandits are a bunch of crazies. They don’t limit their activities to running drugs. They’re into fundamentalist agitation, sabotage, even random murder. They could be a part of Reverend Young’s local problem.’

‘How much intelligence does Aerial Defence have on the bandits?’

‘I just gave you all of it. The one other thing they know for sure is that nobody offers the bandits any resistance. People are too scared. Look over your shoulder at these guys, you won’t survive past sunset.’

Mike leaned forward and touched the PRINT button on the computer keyboard. When the menu came up he clicked the High Resolution option. The printer started up.

‘I’ll take copies to Kashmir with me.’

‘Just don’t say where you got them,’ Whitlock said.

Mike crossed his heart and finished his coffee.

At one o’clock Whitlock took a cab to an address on West 3rd Street. He checked a name in his notebook, then descended carefully on narrow steps from street level to a shadowy basement door. A neon sign outside said TIME OFF in letters that alternated buzzily between green and red.

There was a weary woman at a desk by the door. ‘Five bucks,’ she announced.

Whitlock gave her a five. She dropped it in the drawer and stared glassily past him.

‘I’m looking for a man called Clancy Spencer,’ Whitlock said.

‘He’s working.’

On the platform at the far end of the club a grizzled black man was singing croakily into a microphone. He was accompanied on piano, sax and drums by men who looked nearly as old as he was. They were doing ‘Malted Milk’, after a fashion.

‘How do I get to speak to him when he’s done?’

The woman glanced at Whitlock for a split second. ‘Just let him see you got a drink for him, he’ll come soon enough.’

At the bar Whitlock got a Coke for himself and a large scotch for Spencer. He took the drinks to a table near the platform. As he sat down he held up the whisky in one hand and pointed to the singer with the other. Spencer caught on straight away and nodded, still croaking into the mike.

There were no more than twenty other customers in the place. Their applause when Spencer and the combo finished was a thin rattle around the smoky room, a sound like twigs snapping. A moment later Spencer sat down opposite Whitlock.

‘Nice meetin’ you.’ He reached across and shook Whitlock’s hand. ‘Call me Spence. What’s your handle?’

‘People call me C.W.’

Spence had the worst-fitting set of dentures Whitlock had ever seen. They were loose and they moved when he spoke, giving the impression that his mouth was out of sync with his speech.

‘Well then, C.W., this is mighty nice of you.’ Spence picked up the glass with finger and thumb, toasted Whitlock with a little swing of the glass, then swallowed half the whisky in one go.

‘How long have you been doing this, Spence?’

‘Singing in jazz dives? Since I was a kid.’

‘Never done anything else?’

‘I’d three years off to go to the war. Then I got married for a while and tried to make a go of a regular job. But it didn’t work out.’ He laughed throatily, making the dentures click. ‘Most of my life it’s been the way it is. Of course I ain’t what I was. Used to be a regular Eckstine. Now I’m just a broken singer of mostly broken songs.’

‘I thought that was Randy Newman.’

‘He stole the line off me.’ Spence laughed again. He finished the scotch and put down the glass, stared at it pointedly.

Whitlock got him another. ‘Do you mind if I ask you a couple of questions, Spence?’

‘You a cop?’

‘No. I’m not anyone who means you harm.’

‘Easy to say.’ Spence picked up the fresh glass and sipped this time. ‘What kind of questions?’

‘About your friend who passed away the other day.’

‘Arno?’ Spence put down the glass. ‘You sure you ain’t a cop?’

‘I’m just a man who needs to know more than I do. Did the law give Arno any kind of trouble?’

‘Couldn’t say.’ Spence made a vague shape in the air with his hands. ‘Him and me, we got along because we didn’t pry in each other’s back yards. We could sit and drink ourselves motionless without having to communicate. But I knew Arno steered clear of policemen. He used to call them Cossacks. That’s what he’d mutter when he’d see one — Cossacks!’

The private investigator, Grubb, had told Whitlock that Spence had wept when he went to the funeral home to view Arno Skuttnik’s remains. He also said Spence told the duty undertaker that he and Arno had been friends for thirty years.

‘So what was it that made you buddies?’ Whitlock said. ‘Was Arno a jazz fan?’

‘Not that you’d notice. I think what it was, we were both the kind of loners that like to have a friend, y’know? You maybe think it’s strange in a man that sings for his livin’, but I ain’t really an outgoin’ fellow. I never in my life had more than two, three real friends at any one time. Arno was the same, and they were like him, they kept themselves in the shade.’

‘Do you know who they were, the others?’

Spence took a long pull on the whisky, studying Whitlock over the rim of the glass. When he put it down he smacked his lips. Whitlock could see he was making up his mind.

‘I’m no good with names, and far as I recall, Arno never gave any, anyway. But there’s a picture …’ Spence fished a plastic wallet from his inside jacket pocket and opened it on the table. He pulled out a coloured snapshot and handed it to Whitlock.

‘That was taken in here on Arno’s last birthday, six or seven months ago. Harry the barman took it. Those two people had dropped by to pass on their good wishes and leave a bottle of gin for Arno. He loved gin.’

The picture showed Spence and Arno side by side on the padded bench along the wall beside the bar. A man was leaning down, saying something to Arno; he was in profile and he wore a hat, but Whitlock could see it was Adam Korwin. The other person in the picture was a woman. She was turned away from the camera, her shoulder hunched defensively.

‘The lady didn’t want her picture took,’ Spence said. ‘She looked kind of mad that Harry did it.’

Whitlock could make out her left eye, the shape of her nose, the general style of her short hair, and he could see the rings on her left hand. She also wore a distinctive checked coat.

‘May I borrow this?’

‘If you promise I’ll get it back.’

‘You will.’ Whitlock finished his Coke and pushed back his chair. He didn’t want to pressure the old man any more than he had to. As he stood up he pointed to Spence’s glass. ‘I’ll leave you one at the bar.’ He put the picture in his pocket and turned to leave. Then he remembered something. ‘Spence. Do you know if Arno kept a diary, a journal, any kind of record of events?’

Spence shook his head. ‘It don’t sound like him. Besides, if he kept a diary, we’d none of us be able to read it.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Arno never learned to write English.’

‘Not at all? How did he get by?’

‘People helped him out, I guess. Arno spoke English real well, but the writing was something he never got around to. He regretted that.’

Whitlock nodded and walked away. At the bar he paid for another large scotch and went outside. Upstairs, waiting for a cab to appear, he took out his notebook and scribbled a reminder to get the picture electronically copied and enhanced.

At the bottom of the page he put another entry in capitals: WHOSE WRITING ON THE PICTURE OF M. PHILPOTT?