He turned away.
It was as if he backed off.
The street corner seemed an interface. When he retreated he was on the via Duomo, and the map said that the city’s principal cathedral was there, and the shops had lights in their windows. There, he felt fine. Down that street, he had felt a cloying nervousness. It would be different in the morning, of course, and he would be back in broad, warm, sunshine-laden daytime. He trudged back to his bed, and was troubled that he had suffered what was bloody nearly a panic attack. He had thought, till then, that luck rode with him.
He would be back in the morning to find her.
Eddie was serenaded to faltering sleep by sirens – so many of them and for so long – and the vehicles came, raucous, to a street near where he was. Only when the sirens had died did the restlessness and tension drain away. Then he could think of her again, as she was in the photograph on his wall.
‘Fancy bumping into you here. Just happened to be passing.’
Because of the work he did, Lukas had long ago shed a body clock. He could work in the night, sleep in the day, just as he could type on his laptop in the back of a bucking Land Rover or Humvee in half-darkness.
He typed his report on Colombia, what they had achieved and whom they had lost.
He was as happy working late into the night as in the morning, was not fresher at the start of a day than at the end.
No drama would creep into his report, no descriptive factors and no colour. He would list briefly what he had known, and the advice he had offered on the basis of facts available. Nowhere in the text would there be disguised praise for his own part or criticism of others.
Only a professional could make sense of it. Only those who employed him now, the chief executive officer at Ground Force Security and the director of operations, or those who had employed him in years past – the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Defense – could have made drama from the few pages on offer. The descriptions were clinical, and he used the short-hand jargon of his trade. Men across the globe who dealt with the high-risk stakes of hostage rescue and negotiation would read the pages and know that Lukas had written them, and they would pray to God that the next time he was needed they found him available to travel and not marooned in some other shit-heap place.
Home for him, where he typed, was an apartment under the eaves on the top floor of a street off the rue de Bellechasse. The mother of the CEO of Ground Force Security had lived and died there, and when Lukas had come on the firm’s books, it had been offered to him. The French capital suited him. He had no wish to live in the UK when he was employed by a British-based company, and less to be resident in the United States after twenty-two years with the Bureau, the last two on secondment to the Department of Defense. He craved to be distanced from his work, and the Paris apartment satisfied him. Little more than a shoebox, it comprised a cramped living room and a kitchenette behind a chipboard partition, a bedroom under a sloping ceiling but that had room for a big bed where a man with nightmares could toss in the darkness, a bathroom with a power shower that could wash off Iraq’s sand and Colombia’s mud, and a hall with a table and the telephone. It might not ring for a week or a month, but a red light would flash if he had missed a call. Lukas did not like being far from the telephone.
He was finishing off the report. Ground Force Security would be heaped with praise by the Agency because their man had survived and cover had been maintained – ‘goddam brilliant, a mother-fucker of a triumph,’ his CEO would be told by Langley. His own view: pretty much OK – not desperate and not wonderful. Some whom Lukas dealt with at field level regarded him as a lunatic. A few told him he was a lunatic. He didn’t take it personally, or when a Spanish diplomat had tried to punch him after calling him a lunatic. He had written it up in the usual laconic way afterwards.
Negotiations with a tribal leader had been ongoing for excess of three days. Much reliance placed on the talks; my view, too much reliance. Asset intelligence reported the hostage held in a six-storey block of twenty-four apartments plus basement. Exact location of hostage and hostage-takers in the building was not known but we had electronics in the stairwell. A male – not seen before at the building – approached and carried a plastic bag containing one large potato. I advised readying the storm squad for immediate intervention. Spanish diplomatic personnel in the command centre took a contrary position. The electronics in the stairwell indicated the unknown male to have gone to the second floor, right side of staircase. I urged an instant assault…
No mention of the attempt to punch him, the screamed accusation that he cared nothing for the life of a Spanish-born expert in antiquities on attachment to the National Museum. No mention of a diplomat having to be restrained while frothing with rage. No mention in the report of an expert’s experience. A big potato, weighing more than two kilos, had been the trigger for him. The diplomats believed negotiation would free their national, that a premature assault endangered the captive’s life. To be told that a man carrying a potato into the building was reason enough to abandon the talks that had been so difficult to initiate had caused an explosion of fury.
The assault was successful. Four Iraqis were killed by troops from the Polish special forces team and the hostage was freed. He would have been dead within the hour. Signed, F. Lukas.
NB A large potato was used as a pistol’s silencer in the assassination of a British national, the barrel tip being indented into the potato and the killing bullet passing through its bulk.
A British co-ordinator – one whom Lukas admired – had told him about big potatoes. It didn’t offend him to be accused of lunacy because he understood too well the stresses they all felt. The Brit had given him a cassette and Lukas had gone off to watch, alone, the video of a killing. The potato as the end of an automatic-pistol barrel, a Makharov, had dulled the noise on the soundtrack of the firing. He had seen the body collapse – not fall forward but go down like one of those big old cooling towers that were dynamited. The co-ordinator, tough, hard, had seemed badly cut by that loss. They were all in the same club, limited membership, and all felt badly when they lost out. He had failed to save the life of a European tourist who was a damn fool stupid guy to think he could walk those mountains without having looked through websites and Foreign office advisories – but it still hurt. It just seemed cheap to Lukas to show the world what hurt.
From his living room, he often looked out into the hall, but no red light winked and no bell rang.
Gerald Seymour
The Collaborator
7
There were kids at the top of the street. They wore a uniform of faded T-shirts and tracksuit bottoms or denims and scuffed trainers, had close-cropped hair that made them look as though they were recovering from a louse infestation. They had darting eyes that crossed over the pedestrians who came off the via Duomo, turned and headed on down the street. When the T-shirt of one was lifted in a sudden arm movement, Eddie Deacon saw the handle of a knife and the upper part of its sheath. The kids did not kick footballs. Behind them, astride a scooter, smoking, was an older boy, maybe fifteen or sixteen, and he kept the engine idling. Against the wall two more boys, maybe seventeen or eighteen, had mobile phones clamped to their faces.
Eddie Deacon was not an idiot – some said he was bone idle, that he lacked ‘drive’, that he was short on ambition – and nobody had ever called him ‘stupid’, but he had common sense, ‘nous’. He had realised that everyone who went down that street was visually checked over. There was a rhythm to it. A man or a car appeared and the kids seemed to rush in front of him, maybe to slow him. The scooter’s engine speed quickened and the mobile was spoken into. Once he had seen the scooter pull out and go down the street, and a signal must have been sent because, within seconds, another scooter had taken over sentry duty. He had walked past two other streets leading into the district and there had been kids, a scooter and mobile phones at the top of each. He could recognise it, could not deny it. Eddie had slept poorly because of the nerves. He was as intimidated by the street, hesitating and hovering at its mouth, as he had been in the darkness the night before. He felt his intelligence dulled. But it was what he had come for, to go down that street and find Immacolata Borelli.