He seemed back to his old corny self, after a bout of weirdness that Clara believed had been brought on by misgivings over letting Crumwell bug an M.P.’s home phone. Clara didn’t know why she abided Charley. His looks, his boyish, clumsy innocence maybe. But he’d been too chummy with Crumwell, too easily taken in.
Commissioner Lessard showed up just then, and Clara took a few minutes to fill him in, then said, “Okay, let’s bat this around. They’re offering to bring our people home without risk.”
The woman colonel seemed ready to lead an armed revolt were Clara to abort the mission. A force field emanated from the other veteran warriors, all scrutinizing her for backbone, maybe seeing her doubts behind her facade of barely maintained cool. But she was determined not to be cowed by them. She must do the right thing.
“I want an honest appraisal of our chances, General. Unqualified, unambiguous. Don’t put a shine on it.” Looking right into Buchanan’s eyes, until he gave way, looked down at his hands.
“Nothing is guaranteed in the field of combat, Prime Minister. We may have losses. Light losses. Theirs will be twentyfold higher.”
“How would you feel if we postponed this for a week?”
“I would not say betrayed, ma’am, but pretty close to it.”
“That is much too harshly put.” E.K., fiercely. “We are dealing with human lives. A brief delay while we assess alternative possibilities may waste time but won’t cost lives.”
“A brief delay, sir, means we may be confronting four additional companies of enemy troops in Ozbeg.”
“Let’s go around the table.” Enervated by her dilemma, Clara fiddled with the gavel while people talked over each other, pros and cons, options, the best and worst scenarios. Denunciations of Anglo-Atlantic, doubts about their probity, about whether they could deliver. Dexter McPhee was in full-throated support of “our boys over there,” proclaiming himself ready, by God, to put on his uniform and join them.
Lessard sat intently but quietly through all this, impeccably attired in his civvies, a lean man with a high-domed forehead. Clara had seen his calm nod of satisfaction on observing that his rival, Crumwell, was no longer in the inner circle.
She had to swallow hard to admit it, but she wished Gerard Lafayette was here. His crafty mind, his eloquence, his occasional brilliance. She played with the thought of seeking his counsel, then almost gagged.
Opinion was divided equally, a failure of consensus. “At what point will it be too late to call back the Hercs, General?”
“Zulu minus seven.”
“Give that to me in English.”
“Almost exactly two days from now, five o’clock in the afternoon of Monday, January tenth, Ottawa time. Three a.m. the next day in Bhashyistan. Tuesday.”
E.K., one of his rare smiles. “I don’t believe they have a Tuesday. It’s called Timur. Monday is called Genghis.”
“We’ll make a final decision on Genghis afternoon,” Clara said.
Clara felt the coming of another migraine as she digested the proofs of CSIS incompetence served up by Luc Lessard, beside her in the limo. RCMP analysts had laughed off the tar sands plot; the spy agency had been buffaloed by eco-schemers.
Lessard had expressed these views to Crumwell only a few days before. “I assumed he would pass word to you through appropriate channels.” Meaning, obviously, Security Minister Thiessen, the broken link in the chain of command.
Percival was also in the limo, facing them, making notes, dead-pan. He’d urged her to back-bench Thiessen. She hadn’t listened.
She wiped the condensation from the window. Snowplows were hard at work on the Airport Parkway, but barely making headway against the thick spew from the cloud-black sky. Clara’s driver hewed to a narrow traffic lane, manoeuvring around stuck or abandoned vehicles.
Flights were still being cleared, and with God’s blessing she wouldn’t be late for her Vancouver event. Photo ops all next day, trawling among ethnic communities. On Sunday, a hopscotch tour of Vancouver Island, its scheduled low point a clasping of the muscle bound hand of the Viking, her throwaway candidate in Cow Islands.
“I regret to burden you further, Prime Minister,” Lessard said, “but one of our members has learned of an unusual visit last month by M. Thiessen to a suite in the Chateau Laurier.”
Clara tightened with dread as Lessard explained that a hotel security officer, despite orders by management to still his tongue, had spilled everything but the beer he was sharing with an RCMP pal. Sex scandal, that was Clara’s first thought.
The truth was more bizarre. For a quarter of an hour, Thiessen had crawled about that suite in apparent pursuit of a lost cufflink. The room appeared to have hosted a rowdy, lewd party, was littered with its detritus and reeked of marijuana. The minister of justice had been seen pawing at a hookah pipe.
Percival uttered a squeal of horror, his eyes wide with incredulity. Clara’s brain whirled as she assessed the awful implications. Disaster loomed if this blew up before January 24.
Lessard wasn’t through. “The registered guests of that suite have been determined to be two young gentlemen from British Columbia. They gave their address as Rural Route One, Garibaldi Island.”
Margaret Blake’s home base. What in bloody hell had Thiessen been up to? Clara shakily lit a cigarette, looked out again at the relentlessly falling snow. Maybe she would be lucky, spin off the road and die. Or go down in flames on Air Cleavage.
Using all the might she could muster, she affected an insouciance: did not a search for a cufflink seem innocent enough on the surface? Might Lessard agree that this silly-seeming business really didn’t warrant any further inquiries?
Lessard wasn’t buying that but offered a salve. “I assure you matters will remain confidential while we make such inquiries.”
“And you’ll have my government’s complete cooperation. A sensitive matter. I’d imagine your investigation will take a while.” Eighteen days, make it eighteen days.
“I can assure you, madam, that we have no wish to be accused of influencing the election’s outcome.”
She took relief from that offer of breathing room. A glance at Percival. His surreptitious nod. He will get on it, gag Charley, scrabble together an innocent-seeming scenario.
“Thank you for being so forthcoming, Commissioner.”
“It’s not the main reason I wished to see you, Prime Minister.”
Now what? Clara closed her eyes.
“Abzal Erzhan has surfaced.”
31
Arthur had pulled rank on Superintendent McIlhargey, co-opting the most sumptuous chair in this Ohrid chalet, a goatskin-draped La-Z-Boy. Feet up, thirty degrees from the horizontal, he was enjoying a feast of newsprint, a bundle of Globes and Citizens that McIlhargey had brought from Ottawa. Unusually thoughtful of the cranky bugger.
Arthur had rank on him because he’d won all but a handful of trials in which McIlhargey had been senior investigator, back in the days when Arthur was a lush, thirsting for gin and justice, and Hugh McIlhargey a toiling detective with Serious Crimes at E Division.
“This has made Luc’s day,” McIlhargey had confided on arrival in Ohrid. Commissioner Lessard, he meant, bitter at having been shunted to the sidelines by CSIS.
Arthur had never known McIlhargey to be a chess player — maybe he’d learned the skill after being seconded to Ottawa — but he was in the throes of a match with Djon Bajramovic. A break in the interrogation of Abzal Erzhan, now napping upstairs, after having kept Arthur awake all night in his hotel suite — fretting, pacing, flipping through TV channels, seeking updates on the unrest in his birth country. Finally, Arthur had retreated to his room, leaving Abzal to find what sleep he could on the sofa bed.
The day before, Abzal had been exhilarated, at breathing the free air, at the prospect of soon being with his family. But that had quickly dampened, and he’d refused Arthur entry to his private, haunted thoughts. He was entitled to his black mood — and to far more, to revengeful passion, hatred. The beast of Bhashyistan had ordered the execution of his parents, the arrest of his two brothers and his sister, all tortured, the girl defiled. Arthur had been unable to find words enough of consolation.