The Marxist revolutionaries were a big disappointment to Smith, most of them having packed it in and got themselves mortgages and life insurance in the early eighties, although the Italian Red Brigades occasionally re-formed to sing some of the old songs. The Shining Path and its like in Central andSouth America were not Smith’s thing at all. They were as jazz to a Motown buff, and hardly worth mentioning. I dropped in what I thought were a couple of telling questions about the Provisional IRA, but Smith put on a Cheshire cat face and changed the subject.
Goldman came next, tall and thin and enjoying the fact that he didn’t enjoy his work. Goldman’s preoccupation seemed to be etiquette. He had a right way and a wrong way of doing everything, from hanging up a telephone receiver to licking a stamp, and he would brook no deviation. After a day of his tutoring I felt like Eliza Doolittle.
Goldman told me that henceforth I should answer to the name of Durrell. I asked him if I could pick my own name, and he said no, Durrell was already entered on the case file of Operation Dead Wood. I asked him if he’d heard of Tippex, and he said that was a silly name, and I’d better just get used to Durrell.
Travis was unarmed combat, and when they told him he only had an hour with me, he just sighed, said ‘eyes and genitals’, and left.
On the last day the planners arrived; two men and two women, dressed like bankers and carrying huge briefcases. I tried flirting with the women but they weren’t having any of it. The shorter of the two men might have been on, though. The tall one, Louis, was the friendliest of the four, and did most of the talking. He seemed to know his stuff, without ever really letting on what his stuff was, which sort of showed how well he knew it. He called me Tom.
One thing, and only one thing, was obvious from all of this. Dead Wood was not being improvised, and these people hadn’t just sat down the day before with the Ladybird book of international terrorism. This train had been running for many months before I was dragged aboard.
‘ Kintexmean anything to you, Tom?’ Louis crossed his legs and leaned towards me like some kind of David Frost. ‘Nothing, Louis,’ I said. ‘I am a blank canvas.’ I lit another cigarette just to annoy them all.
‘That’s just fine. First thing you should know, and I guess you know this already - there are no idealists left in the world.’
‘Except for you and me, Louis.’
One of the women looked at her watch.
‘Right, Tom,’ he said. ‘You and me. But freedom fighters, liberators, architects of the new dawn, all that stuff went the way of flared pants. Terrorists these days are businessmen.’ A female throat cleared, somewhere at the back of the room. ‘And businesswomen. And terror is a great-looking career for a modern kid. Really. Good prospects, lot of travel, expense account, early retirement. If I had a son, I’d say to him either law or terrorism. And let’s face it, maybe terrorists do less harm.’
This was a joke.
‘Maybe you wonder where the money comes from?’ He raised his eyebrows at me, and I nodded like a Playschool presenter. ‘Well there are the bad guys, the Syrians, the Libyans, the Cubans, who still look at terror as a state industry. They write big cheques now and then, and if an American Embassy gets a brick through the window as aresult, they’re happy. But in the last ten years, they’ve kind of taken a back seat. Nowadays, profit’s the thing, and when it comes to profit, all roads lead toBulgaria.’
He sat back in his seat, which was the cue for one of the women to step forward and read from a clipboard, although she obviously knew her speech by heart and just had the clipboard for comfort.
‘ Kintex,’ she began, ‘is ostensibly a state-run trading agency, based out ofSofia, where five hundred and twenty-nine personnel are employed on import-export activities. Covertly, Kintex handles upwards of eighty per cent of narcotics traffic from the Middle East into western Europe andNorth America, frequently in exchange for licit and illicit arms consignments resold to Middle Eastern insurgency groups. The heroin is similarly resold, to selected central and western European trafficking rings. Personnel involved in these operations are mostly non-Bulgarians, but are given storage and accommodation facilities inVarna and Burgas on theBlack Sea. Kintex, under a new operating name of Globus, also participates in the laundering of drug profits from all over Europe, exchanging cash for gold and precious stones and redistributing funds to their clients via a chain of business operations in Turkey and eastern Europe.’
She looked up at Louis, to see whether he wanted to hear more, but Louis looked at me, saw that I had started to glaze over, and gave a tiny shake of his head.
‘Nice guys, right?’ he said. ‘Also the folks who gave a gun to Mehmet Ali Agca.’ That didn’t mean a lot to me either. ‘Took a shot at Pope John Paul in ‘81. Made a few headlines.’
I went ah yes, and wagged my head to show how impressed I was.
‘ Kintex,’ he continued, ‘is a regular one-stop shop, Tom. You want to make some trouble in the world, wreck a few countries, blight a few million lives, then just grab your credit card and head down to Kintex. Nobody beats their prices.’
Louis was smiling, but I could tell he was blazing with righteous anger. So I looked round the room, and sure enough, the other three had the same kind of zealous fire hanging round their heads.
‘And ‘ Kintex,’ I said, desperately hoping that they would answer no, are the people Alexander Woolf was dealing with.’
‘Yes,’ said Louis.
Which is when and why I realised, in a very horrible moment indeed, that none of these people, not even Louis, had the faintest idea of what Graduate Studies was really about - or what Operation Dead Wood was really supposed to achieve. These people actually thought they were fighting a straightforward battle against narco -terrorism, or terronarcotics, or whatever the hell they called it, on behalf of a grateful Uncle Sam and Auntie Rest Of The World. This was run-of-the-mill CIA business, with not a kink to be seen. They were putting me into a second division terrorist group in the simple, uncomplicated hope that I’d nip down to a phone box on my evening off and fill them in with a lot of names and addresses.
I was being taught how to drive by blind instructors, and the realisation shook me a bit.
They laid out the plan for the infiltration and made me repeat every stage of it a million times. I think that, because I was English, they were worried I wouldn’t be able to hold more than one thought in my head at a time, and when they saw that I’d picked the whole thing up pretty easily, they slapped each other on the back and said ‘good job’ a lot.
After a revolting supper of meat balls and Lambrusco, served up by a harassed-looking Sam, Louis and his fellows packed up their briefcases, pumped my hand and nodded their heads meaningfully, before climbing into their cars and setting off back down the yellow brick road. I didn’t wave.
Instead, I told the Carls that I was going for a walk and went through to the garden at the back of the house, where a lawn ran down to the river and a view of the most beautiful reach in the whole length of theThames.
It was a warm night, and on the opposite bank young couples and elderly dog-walkers were still promenading. A few cabin-cruisers had moored nearby, water patting gently against their hulls, and the lights at their windows glowed a soft and welcoming yellow. People were laughing, and I could smell their tinned soup.