‘Still angry?’ Peter asked, his hands folded across his belly.
I said, ‘I don’t think it matters much who’s coming down or what he’s saying. All I know is what I saw. Including Sanjay, dead because of you.’
Peter ignored that little shot and said, ‘I saw Miriam an hour or so ago. She was very pleased to hear that you’d been rescued. I imagine your reunion will be wonderful indeed.’
Before I could say something sharp in reply, there was a knock on the door, and a man dressed in military fatigues entered. He was tall, well built, and his white hair was cut short. He had the usual UNFORUS brassard and the blue beret through a shoulder loop, and his name tag said hale. But I also noticed his insignia of rank. The room suddenly seemed a lot colder, because I suddenly realized I had seen this older man somewhere before.
Peter stood up, shook the man’s hand, and turned to me. ‘Samuel? I’d like to introduce you to General Sir Lawrence Hale. He’s head of the British contingent for UNFORUS - but of course, since you claim to be a newspaperman, I’m sure you already know that. General, may I present Samuel Simpson, formerly of the Toronto Star, currently assigned to the field investigative unit that I’ve been working with.’
I stood up too, feeling now like I was living through that dream in which you’re in class and called upon by the teacher to stand up and speak and you know right away that you have no clothes on.
‘General,’ I said.
‘Simpson,’ he replied, grasping my hand for a moment and then ignoring me. He turned to Peter and said, ‘Captain? How can I help you? And can we make this quick?’
Captain… The man I’d thought was a former London cop had this gracious look on his face and said, ‘General, I just need you to verify something for my friend Samuel here.’
‘Is that all?’ Hale said with a touch of irritation.
‘I’m afraid it’s necessary. Samuel needs to know my background and what I’ve been doing here. It’s vital for the success of my mission.’
Now the general looked at me, his pale blue eyes frosty. ‘I’m concerned about security.’
‘You have my assurance that everything will be kept confidential,’ Peter said.
‘Very well,’ Hale said. ‘Simpson, Captain Peter Brown is here working in this country for our foreign intelligence service, MI6. He has been detached from his own regiment, the SAS.’
‘Special Air Service,’ I said, no doubt unnecessarily.
‘Indeed,’ Hale said. ‘Anything else?’
I couldn’t think of a thing to ask him. Peter smiled. ‘No, sir. Thank you very much.’
Hale just grunted and left the office. Peter closed the door. We both sat back down and I said, ‘What’s your mission been? Or is that part of the secret?’
‘Oh, it’s a secret, all right, but I’ve decided—entirely on my own—that you deserve to know.’
‘And why’s that?’
Peter said, ‘That’s a rather stupid question, don’t you think?’
‘Indulge me,’ I said.
‘Back at the campground Charlie told us later what had happened. You went out to make some hot water for morning tea and coffee. The rest of us were getting up when the gunfire started. Sanjay and Miriam, they wanted to go down the trail to see if they could find you. Jean-Paul and Charlie and myself—well, sorry, we thought it was too late. We managed to get the hell out of there but Sanjay thought he saw you, coming through the woods. He got out of one of the Land Cruisers and that was when he got hit. There was a lot more gunfire but we managed to get out of there, just barely. So you saved our lives, Samuel.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘A day later, Charlie and a couple of his Marine buddies came back to retrieve Sanjay. Charlie went down the trail, saw the stove, saw where a metal pan had been dumped, maybe halfway down the trail. Charlie figured that you surprised the militia column, maybe splashed the boiling water on a guy or two. True?’
‘True,’ I said.
‘Then they started shooting earlier than they wanted,’ Peter said. ‘Which gave us the time to bail out. So there you go.’
‘Sanjay,’ I said, feeling my hands get tingly in shame.
‘Yes?’
‘You said he left to find me?’
‘That’s right,’ Peter said. ‘He wanted to make sure we didn’t leave you behind.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘It’s just that, well, I didn’t know him that well and, um…’
Peter said, ‘I can’t say that I knew him that well, either. And he was cheating on his wife, and he was a shitty driver, and he complained about my cooking, but in the end he was a brave one. Maybe the bravest of us all, except for you. I mean, going after a militia column with just a pan of hot water…’
‘I wasn’t brave,’ I said. ‘I was scared out of my gourd.’
‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘But that’s why you deserve to know. Ask away, but ask away quickly. Your free access to my secrets is only good in this little room.’
I thought of a few things, and blurted out, ‘So, acting like an asshole. Was that you or part of the mission?’
‘A mixture of both, I suppose,’ Peter said, smiling. ‘I had a role as a cranky Metropolitan police officer to play. I didn’t want to get too friendly with the team. It wouldn’t have matched my cover.’
‘And what was your job?’
‘A number of different things.’
‘Tell me, then.’
A shrug. ‘First of all, to let my government know what was really going on in the field. The UN bureaucracy can be thick and slow, and my people wanted to know what was going on in real time, without having to wait for information to muddle its way to Geneva and then to London. That was job number one. Job number two was to gather intelligence about the militias on the ground, to find out if they are as loosely organized as they claim to be or if they are linked to certain factions in Washington. You see, it’s in our interest back home to have this country get back to its senses, the quicker the better. And knowing what influence the militias and their supporters might have in DC will make our job that much easier. And job number three… well, no offense to Charlie, but job number three was to keep me and everyone else alive. Too bad you seemed to have other ideas.’
‘The Australian television crew,’ I said.
‘How true. I knew that there was a militia unit working in the area, and that if we had just kept still after that news-hound got himself killed a UN convoy was going to make its way down the highway. But the stupid git managed to say something that both of us heard, about where his pals were located, and I didn’t want us to have to poke around and look for them. I mean, really, Charlie is a wonderful guy and a Marine and all that, but he could barely keep us together long enough to get the hell out when the shooting did finally start.’
‘But we found the bodies of the cameraman and producer,’ I said.
Peter shook his head. ‘So bloody what? Excuse me for being so blunt, but two more bodies in this place? I mean, really. Here we are, running around, trying to find Site A and keep those militia generals in custody at The Hague, and we’re going to waste our time on dead reporters who should have stayed home in the first place? Samuel, please, at least you can see the logic there.’
‘Maybe, but I don’t want to look that hard,’ I said. ‘So how did you end up at the militia camp?’
Peter actually laughed, ‘I was there to get you out, Samuel.’
‘How?’
‘How? By the tried and tested nature of paying a bribe,’ he said. ‘Look, we—and I don’t mean the UN—had received word of your capture. We were also told about a ransom to be paid, which included ammunition and drugs. So I was there to check on you, to make sure that you were alive and healthy, and to pay up and get out. And let me tell you, that so-called colonel—Saunders, I think his name was, what a perfect idiot—went apoplectic when he realized you had scarpered. I thought he was going to shoot the men who had been guarding you, and then me, for good measure. About the only way I got out of there fair and clear was to pay them off with about half the bribe.’