D r Richard Halliwell waited impatiently for the man from the City Pound. It was not yet 6.30 a.m. and apart from the occasional jogger, the park in downtown Atlanta was deserted, or at least Halliwell thought it was. This was a meeting that, if the worst happened, had to be deniable and could not be delegated. Halliwell smiled to himself. It appealed to his sense of justice that he might employ someone from the City Pound. They were, after all, no better than mangy dogs.
Halliwell thrust his gloved hands into the pockets of his expensive cashmere overcoat and tapped his Italian leather shoes in frustration. He was not a man who was accustomed to being kept waiting. His planning was, as usual, meticulous. The previous month he had tasked his long-time private investigator to report on several of the city’s employees. His private detective had understood the sensitivity of the task perfectly. As he always did, Halliwell had insisted on a verbal briefing and payment was in cash, which meant there was no paper trail. Halliwell had decided on a Mexican illegal immigrant. Married to a fiery wife, with two children, the man was a regular visitor to one of the city’s seedier bars where he was often seen in the company of equally dubious women. Why anyone would bother with him was beyond Dr Halliwell’s imagination as he watched the fat, dark-haired little Mexican make his way furtively across the park. Some women obviously had no taste, he thought, but in the end, the more disgusting his private life the better. Richard Halliwell liked to have control over people. When the man was 45 metres away, Halliwell slipped a thin balaclava over his face.
‘You took your time,’ Halliwell challenged.
The Mexican jumped, a startled look on his face.
‘In here,’ Halliwell commanded, appearing from behind the hedge that encircled a small private area of the park.
‘Why all the secrecy?’ the Mexican asked.
‘Because that’s the way I like it,’ Halliwell responded curtly. Leaving his fine leather gloves on, he withdrew a plain envelope from his cashmere coat. ‘Inside there is a thousand dollars cash. There will be a lot more where that came from, provided you cooperate.’
‘And if I don’t?’ The Mexican was now very wary of the tall, well-dressed man behind the mask, but he sensed he had the upper hand and his coal-like eyes gleamed with greed. Whatever he was about to be asked to do was important enough to be cloaked in extraordinary secrecy. His sense of the upper hand did not last long.
‘If you decide not to take the task on, this meeting never took place and you don’t get your thousand dollars. If you do take the task on, which is a relatively simple one, you will be very handsomely rewarded. Either way you keep your trap shut. There are some photographs in the envelope as well. Taken in the motel behind Hungry Jacks. They are copies. If you don’t remain silent the originals of the photographs will be delivered to your wife.’
The man’s dark face went pale. ‘Who the hell are you?’ he rasped.
‘That’s none of your concern. Do you want the money?’
‘Depends on what you want me to do,’ the man replied glancing around, like a large rat cornered at the end of a sewer and looking for a way out.
Richard Halliwell gave the man a quick outline of what was required.
The man paused, as if something was bothering him, as well it might. ‘$5000 a delivery?’ he asked.
‘Cash.’
Again he paused before answering. $5000 dollars would buy a lot of women and a lot of hooch, and it would keep that bitch he married in order too, he thought hungrily.
‘No skin off my nose,’ he said finally. ‘When do you want your first delivery?’
‘The barman will give you a message to contact your uncle. That will be the signal for you to come here. Your instructions will be in purple ink on a piece of paper at the bottom of that bin.’ Halliwell pointed to the refuse bin he had chosen as the dead-letter drop. ‘There is an entrance to the laboratory compound that is normally kept locked. You will be given the time for delivery and you are to stick to it exactly.’
Richard Halliwell waited until the man had driven away in his van before he removed the balaclava, then he walked out of the park in the opposite direction.
Unseen by either Halliwell or the Mexican, a shadowy figure on the far side of the hedge waited a full five minutes before he too walked out of the park.
CHAPTER 27
A s Professor Imran Sayed entered the new Commanding Colonel’s office, the pungent odour of fresh sandbags assailed his nostrils. Not only had the door been arched with the freshly filled sacks, but the front and sides of the desk looked like something out of ancient Giza with the green bags packed up to the top of the desk in a pyramid.
‘At ease!’ the Colonel snapped.
Professor Sayed had wandered in with one hand in his suit pocket, and he was somewhat taken aback by the Colonel’s order for him to relax. ‘Expecting an attack anytime soon, Colonel?’ he asked with a grin, unable to resist baiting the military commander.
‘I’ll remind you again, Professor, this country is at war. At war, d’yer hear, and we can never be too prepared. This is a top-secret base and another 9/11 might be just around the corner,’ Wassenberg fumed, momentarily distracted from the Professor’s opinion piece and the reason he had summoned the recalcitrant academic.
‘Perhaps that might be a good reason to sit down and talk with people like President Ahmadinejad and Bashar al Assad,’ Imran replied more seriously. ‘Instead of treating them and their people like pariahs and threatening to bomb them all out of existence. We might get better results if we sat across the table and got to know one another a little better. You never know, we might even find some common ground we can work from.’
‘Iran and Syria are part of the axis of evil, Professor. Haven’t you been listening to President Harrison?’
Not if I can help it, Sayed thought.
‘Chamberlain tried that with Hitler and look where that got us. We don’t negotiate with terrorists, Professor, and one day you and the rest of the academics on this base will learn to leave war fighting to the President and people like me who know something about it.’
Sayed was tempted to observe that neither Iran nor Syria had shown any sign of the territorial ambitions of either Hitler or the United States, nor did the President and his generals seem to know a great deal about the implications of starting a war in places like Iraq. He was beginning to think that the IQ of his Colonel and the sandbags had alarming similarities and he let the comments go through to the catcher.
‘Which brings me to your opinion piece in today’s New York Times. Who authorised that?’ Colonel Wassenberg demanded.
‘I wasn’t aware that an opinion piece, being one man’s opinion, required authorisation from anyone, Colonel,’ Sayed replied, his own anger starting to rise. ‘One of the cornerstones of this democracy, a democracy that we are very keen to impose on the Middle East,’ he added pointedly, ‘is supposed to be freedom of speech, but it seems to me that for conservative governments like this one, freedom of speech only applies if you happen to agree with their policies.’
Colonel Wassenberg was apoplectic. ‘You’re employed by the United States government to adhere to the policies laid down by the President, the Pentagon and myself, and that does not include writing to the papers with criticism that is way above your pay grade. In future you will clear all correspondence through me. Through me, d’yer hear? Dismissed.’
Sayed shrugged, turned and walked from Wassenberg’s office shaking his head. Not only did the Commanding Colonel have some interesting delusions of grandeur, but Professor Sayed judged that Wassenberg was a prime candidate for a stroke or a heart attack. He rolled his eyes and winked at a bemused Kate who was waiting to go in.