The Passenger Page 9

  ‘At first I thought he was making a fuss. Some guests do. Then I learned he was very specific about everything and decided he wanted the table with the best view of the room, and being in the corner meant nobody could pass behind him.’

  But Angleton’s celebratory mood changed when three men arrived before Scobie and Furse. He became a different man.

  ‘Different how?’

  ‘Scared. Very old and beaten.’

  ‘Did they come to threaten him?’

  ‘No, but they were a rough crowd compared to Mr Scobie and Furse. Perfectly well behaved and polite but they looked like men used to dealing with trouble. One, a Mr Hoover, kept to the background. Mysterious man, accent I couldn’t place. He turned up first, after I had gone to bed, wanting a room. I wasn’t happy about letting him in. I’d already seen him a couple of times lurking in the valley when I was out riding. I told him he should have phoned but then Mr Angleton came down in his dressing gown and said Hoover was with him.

  ‘Events became very bizarre after that. One night there were gunshots in the valley and a flare went up. Another of the men, Mr Beech, blamed the SAS – they’re always prowling around the hills on exercise – but I was never altogether convinced. Mr Angleton was on the terrace that night, well after midnight, looking very blown about. He said he’d dropped his spectacles from the balcony. He was in the room you’re in.’

  ‘And who was Beech?’

  ‘He turned up the morning after Hoover, before breakfast. Not our usual kind of guest. He reminded me of the soldiers you come across exercising in the hills. In fact, I wondered at the time if he wasn’t SAS himself and had driven over from Hereford. Not a big man, very compact and watchful, plain and plain-spoken, fit and tough but not as fit as he once had been. He liked his beer and couldn’t say his rs.’

  She picked up the register, leaving Collard to puzzle.

  ‘What they were all running around doing I have no idea. I was surprised Beech and Angleton got on so well because they were so different. Despite being American, Mr Angleton was quite aristocratic, and Mr Beech was what Mrs Thatcher might call Essex Man. But he made Mr Angleton laugh where I suspect few did.

  ‘Oh, yes, they all ran up enormous phone bills – Mr Angleton alone spent hundreds of pounds on long-distance calls from his room, not including the ones made from the public call box down by the bridge. He used that so much it became a local talking point.’

  The evenings she was on reception, Valerie Traherne had operated the telephone switchboard and placed calls from Angleton’s room to Washington DC, Tel Aviv and Majorca.

  ‘It was all terribly glamorous. Usually if we get asked to ring through to Cheltenham it counts as an event. Our guests are not great telephone users.’

  ‘And the third man who came?’

  ‘Another American. At first I thought he had the same name as that American singer Chuck Berry but it turned out it was Chuck Barry.’

  Collard felt like he was standing on a high, precarious ledge looking down into the past in Frankfurt, watching the very tall man named by Sheehan as one of the three secret agents who died in the explosion.

  He saw Barry. He saw Nick off in the bookshop talking to Angleton. Angleton and Barry knew each other; the evidence was in front of his eyes, in the register. Yet Angleton had warned Nick not to get on the plane, and let Barry die.

  Valerie Traherne’s description matched the man he had seen.

  It’s My Party (and I’ll cry if I want to)

  Angleton usually got on with Brits. He enjoyed their prevarication, often mistaken for procrastination, and their self-deprecation, behind which bulged tumescent egos. But God, they could be bad dressers and most had dandruff and halitosis, with an absence of dentistry that made their teeth like something found at a road accident. His dreariest meetings reduced him to his silent mantra: Compared to you stuffed shirts, I’m as loose as a goose. (It was an Elvis thing.)

  In London he had drunk Bloody Marys, when? He supposed in ’85 or ’86. Two down, three to go would see him comfortable; downriver, Gravesend and the start of Heart of Darkness, waiting for the tide to turn, looking back at the Old City. He was with Beech, who couldn’t pwonounce his rs. When they got drunk together, whenever they met, he made Beech repeat, ‘I’m a wuff diamond,’ until they were incapable with laughter. He remembered it was to Beech he had said, ‘They’re setting up Nazir.’

  But Beech should not have been in Wales, or Hoover or Barry. Uninvited guests, all. Catastrophe was too mild a word: set up for the espionage equivalent of the come shot in a porno flick, he had been fucked by Slobbery Bill Casey. Worse he had been fucked by Bill Casey’s incompetence. Lesson number one: keep your back channels open. Lesson number two: make whatever sacrifices are necessary, within reason, to keep them open. He had patiently explained all this to the operationally green Casey in the privacy of his conservatory. Casey the flatterer: ‘They’ve given me CIA. I’m just a businessman. Give me the master class, Jim.’

  If anyone wanted to ruin his appetite in Wales, and give the sourest taste to the savour, they would have kidnapped Quinn. Which is exactly what happened. It was so perfect, so appropriate that Angleton sometimes wondered in his darkest nights if he wasn’t the operation’s secret author himself: under the list in his head titled ‘My Greatest Fears’ the idea of Quinn in enforced conversation with the wrong people was top or thereabouts, along with ‘My Role in the Assassination of JFK’. That was how high he rated Quinn. Quinn was wet work. Quinn knew where all the bodies were buried. What Quinn knew could get them all sent to jail for a long long time.

  Now Casey had sacrificed Quinn, because he didn’t know a castle from a pawn. Quinn in the hands of trained interrogators, Quinn a hostage, Quinn with electrodes attached to his nuts, Quinn spilling the beans: the thought could not even begin to be entertained. If Quinn sang, the whole fucking hymnbook would have to be rewritten. Wales was a bust. Hoover had called late – one of those once-in-a-blue-moon nights when Angleton was in the land of nod dreaming pleasant dreams – with the news that Quinn had been snatched from his Beirut apartment and was in the hands of the swarthy ones, who had extracted a 400-page confession from the last man they talked to. That time Casey had been on the telephone every day to Angleton in tears asking what he could do. Bill drooled so much – fact – that his phones had to be swabbed out several times a day, hence Slobbery.

  ‘Do exactly what I tell you,’ Angleton answered, holding the receiver from his ear to lessen the doggy noises emanating from Bill. And he did. It took everything both of them had to keep the confession off the table that time.

  And now Bill Casey was too embarrassed to take his calls, knowing Angleton would chew his balls off for letting them get Quinn.

  Angleton hadn’t even known Quinn was in Beirut.

  Hoover said he was calling from a phone box down the hill. It turned out Hoover had been watching him all along. The meter on Angleton’s paranoid graph went way off the scale.

  Down By the River

  Nick was in Collard’s room, relaxed and laughing. Collard noted how real everything looked as he dreamed. The girl was there too, a tantalizing presence, unseen or glimpsed on the balcony. Collard woke up standing in the middle of the bathroom calling Nick’s name.

  After breakfast he walked down to the river. The peace was shattered by the roar of a fighter jet flying so low it hugged the side of the valley. A split second later it was gone, leaving him shaken and foolish on the ground. He had thrown himself down, thinking he was hearing the first crack of the disintegrating airliner 35,000 feet above.

  Downstream he found the wooden hut Valerie Traherne mentioned. Apparently Angleton had called it his den. It stood above one of the fishing beats. Angleton had asked for an introduction to local anglers. As they were notoriously hard to impress, she was later surprised to learn they considered him a world-class fly fisherman whose observance and guile reading the river were second to none.

  The hut was a simple
affair with a tiny veranda and windows either side of the door, which was unlocked. The interior was about eight foot by eight, with an old wicker chair, a bench along the back wall and a shelf with a dozen paperbacks.

  Collard picked up a battered Graham Greene. The sun came out and warmed the hut. He dozed off in the wicker chair and jerked awake, filled with inexplicable dread. It turned out to be only Valerie Traherne’s dogs barking. He stepped out onto the veranda, thinking it would appear rude to be found lurking. It was the first time he had seen her that morning. Breakfast had been self-service, with coffee and tea in Thermos jugs and egg and bacon on a hotplate.

  She pointed to the dogs. ‘This one’s Lizzie and the other one’s Trumper. They’re Irish setters. What are you reading?’

  ‘Our Man in Havana. Spies. It seems appropriate.’

  ‘I think that was one of Mr Angleton’s.’

  He thought she was humouring him. Seeing his look, she explained guests were encouraged to donate books they were finished with to the hotel library.

  ‘The dull ones I take down to the charity shop. Mr Angleton donated a healthy stack. I was rather interested in what he had been reading. I thought it might help explain what he had been up to.’

  ‘Did it?’

  ‘Never had time to find out. I don’t know whether there are others of his still up at the house. If I find any I’ll put them aside.’

  That afternoon she came in with more books. Collard was in the drawing room. He was still the only guest.

  ‘These, from what I remember, were Mr Angleton’s donation. There’s an Eric Ambler and Josephine Tey. I know the Borges was his because he introduced me to him. Explained he was blind. A bit highbrow for the tastes of a simple hotelier – a lot of it didn’t seem to get anywhere. My first husband was Argentinian so I’m probably prejudiced.’

  Collard wondered if she’d had a crush on Angleton. It seemed improper to enquire after the whereabouts of the present Mr Traherne. He sensed her loneliness and regretted he had nothing he could offer her in such a romantic, isolated setting.

  She held up a copy of Reader’s Digest. ‘I haven’t the faintest idea what he was doing with this but it was definitely his because I remember thinking he was the last person you’d associate with Reader’s Digest. Quite amazing what doesn’t get thrown out. This ended up in one of the loos.’

  There was only one article in the Reader’s Digest of possible interest to Angleton – it was about Middle East drugs and arms deals. The eerie relevance gave Collard the same vertigo as the Barry connection. He had the strongest impression Angleton lay close to the centre of the mystery, a feeling triggered by the name that leapt out from the page: Nazir.

  He read the article twice. Nazir was cited as a new breed of businessman who operated with diplomatic protection and ran legitimate import–export companies in Vienna, Madrid, Beirut, Damascus and – Collard took note – Frankfurt. Through Syria he was able to trade with Eastern Bloc countries. There was also business with France, Spain, Portugal and England. Nazir was young, smart and personable and moved in international circles. But the companies were a front for smuggling drugs and arms whose profits financed terror.

  It left Nick looking a very tiny and vulnerable figure, with his direct link to Angleton, and indirect ones to Barry and perhaps, via Khaled, to Nazir. It left Angleton with a lot of questions to answer with his connections to all the emerging protagonists, living, dead and missing.

  Collard spent his last evening with the fishing diaries, which went back to 1933. It was therapeutic to read something so impersonal and unthreatening, except to the fish. Like Angleton’s entries, they contained descriptions of weather, conditions and flies used. Valerie Traherne joined him briefly to say it was a Sunday supper, cold meats and help yourself. It was her bridge evening.

  ‘I’m sorry I have to go out. I enjoyed our talk last night. Are you going in the morning?’

  ‘I have to get back. It would be nice to stay. It’s very peaceful here.’

  ‘You look a lot less tired than when you arrived. Are those the fishing diaries?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Angleton made his own flies. I watched him once, incredibly fiddly and meticulous, perfect occupation for him. He told me they called him Mother at the office, or the Gray Ghost, which was the name of one of his favourite flies.’

  Collard stayed up, hoping Valerie Traherne would come back before he went upstairs. He fell asleep in front of the fire and woke up to find it had gone out. Five minutes after he had gone to bed he heard her return. She paused in front of his door. He waited for the knock, waited for him to call out her name, listened to her departing footsteps.

  Snow fell in the night. It froze and Collard woke to find the valley blanketed and trees covered in ice.

  When he went to settle his bill Valerie Traherne warned him the way down to the main road hadn’t been gritted and suggested he stay until the snow melted. Thinking she wasn’t serious, he held out his credit card.

  ‘Mr Angleton paid in cash, I remember. A great wedge. Odd that.’

  An awkward silence fell as he watched her swipe his card through the machine and realized she meant him to stay.

  Collard was getting in the car when she ran out after him. She was flushed and embarrassed.

  ‘I forgot to give you this.’ It was an old hardback book with the jacket missing. ‘It wasn’t Mr Angleton’s. It was here already but I remember him reading it because of what it was about. More spies. Kim Philby.’

  Beatlemania

  Angleton remembered that trinity of events, his annus horribilis, 1963. Philby, the Great Traitor, gone in the New Year, disappeared from Beirut to surface in Moscow; John Fitzgerald Kennedy gone in November in Dallas, to be followed by the American invasion of those lovable mop tops, the Fab Four, the show-business equivalent of a nuclear strike. How do you find America? Turn left at Greenland.

  Millions of screaming girls stifled the noise of the shots that snuffed Kennedy (three, four, five? Quinn knew who), a lot less loud for the wall of sound that followed. Jack became myth (making the facts irrelevant).

  Dark days: Philby gone; Angleton smarting; Jack whacked. Jack an embarrassment in death as in life. The revelation came to him late one whisky-sodden night. He discussed it with Allen Dulles, still hurting from getting fired by Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs. ‘Jesus,’ said Dulles. ‘How did you come up with that?’ ‘It’s called lateral thinking.’ ‘Lateral collateral, I like it.’

  They were there within two months of Dallas. In less than a year Jack was history. He was a shrine. (Please God, don’t let Quinn blab about that particular skeleton in that particular cupboard.) Of course the joke was Angleton had been plotting the Irish upstart’s downfall – they all had – when he kissed the bullet (from the front). Jack had stated that he wanted the CIA smashed into a thousand pieces and was meant to go down in a sex scandal leaked to the French press via Mossad. The funniest story Angleton had heard was the Vatican had got wind and didn’t want the Jews smearing their Catholic President (Number Two RC in the world), realized the gig was up, given Jack’s questing prick, so had him taken care of (Mafia gunmen, easy). He hoped Quinn didn’t repeat the story and give them all red faces in the Vatican. Like any story, it wasn’t true but it could be made to look true, or maybe it was, could he be expected to remember? Fabrication was the cement of truth. When it came to deviance those Vatican boys could teach them all a lesson, knowing the devil as well as they did.

  Despite his conservative ways, Angleton had always enjoyed popular culture, Western double bills and bad late-night television, his companion after everyone had gone to bed. He liked Artie Shaw and cheap pop: Roger Miller’s ‘King of the Road’, two and a half minutes of pure nonsense; ‘England Swings’ was another matter, best forgotten.

  So when asked in Washington how to defuse the crisis of the Kennedy shooting in 1963, he said: First, do not publicly blame the Russians. Second, no mention of a coup d’état. Third, s
end me on a secret mission to Britain. Grave Brits in pinstriped shirts wanted to know what they could do to help. Gentlemen, why don’t you send us your Fab Four? Incomprehension. Your lovable mop tops. Incomprehension. She loves you, yeah yeah waaah! The penny drops. Send the Beatles on an American invasion!

  The Return

  Collard regularly checked the London answerphone; listening to his voice saying no one was there, please leave a message, followed by a series of clicks and whirrs, during which he held his breath, hoping to hear Nick. On the morning he left Wales, the machine failed to respond and the telephone just rang. He supposed the tape could have been full. He didn’t dare hope it might be Nick back home who had turned it off.

  Collard also placed a reluctant call to his bank on Haverstock Hill and arranged to see the manager that afternoon. He was hopeful he could persuade the man not to hide behind the usual restrictions of confidentiality and discuss Nick’s account on the grounds that he was still Collard’s parental responsibility.

  Collard drove towards the grey city, past Heathrow where he had last seen Nick. Jams at Earls Court and on the Westway added an hour to his journey. London was cold and meaningless, an ugly conglomeration that had outlived its use, defined only by what didn’t work, which was everything. The failing transport system was one reason Charlotte had been happy to leave.

  He paused outside the darkened house he refused to call home any more. His anger at Sheehan returned when he saw what they had done to his front door, smashed down with a sledgehammer and crudely bolted with a heavy padlock, leaving him with no way to get in.

  He drove the half-mile up the hill to the police station and was made to kick his heels for an hour before being told by a policewoman in plain clothes, ‘There was a warrant to search your house. Access was gained by force when no one answered. The door was repaired. I need proof you live there before I can hand over the key.’

  ‘Do I have grounds for complaint?’