old, almost a museum piece in the development of mobile phones. All thumbs, his grandson answered it. ‘Yes?’
A pause.
‘Yes. He’s with me. Who’s calling, please?’
‘Thank you very much. It’s Harvey Gillot.’
He heard the young voice say that it was a man with the name of Harvey Gillot, and then he heard the older, familiar tone, a vile oath and a cough. It was good to have the number of a marginally senior officer in the Secret Intelligence Service… A hotel in Kyrenia, the north coast of Cyprus. Bits and pieces going from Armenia to the Kurds in northern Iraq, in the Saddam days, long before the old boy had dropped through the trap. Benjie Arbuthnot had taken a call on a phone in the hotel lobby and had given the caller his mobile number, which had gone straight on to the skin of Harvey’s hand. Then he’d headed for the toilets, written the number on his notepad and scrubbed his skin clean. Just a number that he might want one day. ‘Yes? Benjie here. Gillot? What the hell are you calling this number for?’
‘I have a problem.’
‘Don’t we all? Prostate, Inland Revenue? It’s almost a vintage phone and it’s been in a drawer for ten years. I gave it to my grandson last week and now you call it. Won’t ask where you snitched the number from, but be assured the card and the number will be at the bottom of a dustbin within an hour. So, what’s the problem?’
‘Rijeka, the docks, a shipment and…’
‘Breaking up, Harvey, and you’re leaving me far behind. What’s the problem? Make it snappy – and it’s damn decent of me not to have stamped this thing to extinction.’
Harvey took a deep breath. He was on the patio, hadn’t moved off it or eaten anything. The container that carried the Malyutka MANPADS had been shipped out of Gdansk, and the cargo in the container was on a manifest as ‘agricultural equipment’. It was on the final approach to the harbour at Rijeka, Customs were squared, there was a lorry on the quayside and men up the line to take the stuff into the cornfields and up to a rendezvous. In his room at the hotel there was a plastic bag of rubbish jewellery, the deeds of homes that were getting the shit shelled out of them and wristwatches a street trader wouldn’t take. He had been able to see the ship, in a close November fog, coming near to the quay, and the big man had drifted close and used his given name.
Harvey Gillot hadn’t seen Benjie Arbuthnot for seven years – hadn’t set eyes on him since Green’s Hotel in Peshawar and the sending on of the Blowpipes, bloody useless things. A murmur, very soft for a big man, in his ear about ‘sanctions busting’ and a little lecture on the maximum and minimum sentences available to a criminal-court judge when a punter was found guilty of ignoring the will of the United Nations Security Council. An aside, barely audible, indicated a good market, a fatter fee, if the container went on to Aqaba, and the start of a very healthy relationship with the Jordanians. A little smile on Benjie Arbuthnot’s face, and a slap of encouragement on Harvey’s back. He had known by then that the jewellery and house deeds were valueless, and the deal would cost him so… He had stood the agent down, paid off the lorry, watched timber unloaded from the freighter, then seen it sail. He had dumped the bag in a wastebin behind the hotel kitchens, then fled fast to the north and into Slovenia. Had supposed it was an act of policy for Her Majesty’s Government to see that the Jordanian military had good equipment, and Russian-made stuff was always useful in the maze puzzle of the Middle East. The Jordanians had paid well then and later. It had been Harvey’s first big deal since Solly Lieberman’s death, and he had been, at the age of twenty-eight, an international arms broker and had the protection of the intelligence community. He exhaled, and spat it out.
‘The deal you made me cancel in Croatia, at Rijeka, it’s come back at me and-’
‘Did you say made, Harvey? I seem to recall offering advice.’
‘It’s come back at me. There’s a contract out. The people who were buying the gear have raised the money. I’m walking dead and-’
He had said, on his patio, I’ve accumulated influential customers
… I have friends. Christ. Now it had a hollow ring.
‘I’m out now, just another Whitehall warrior on a pension. If I have anything sensible to say, I’ll call you. If not you won’t hear from me. Oh, and, Harvey, always remember it’s swings and roundabouts, a bit bleak today but you had some good times off my prompting. A blame game and spouting about responsibility aren’t applicable. Take care and good luck.’
The call was cut. He counted to ten, then dialled the number again. It was unobtainable. Take care and good luck. He sagged back into a chair.
9
It had been the white-puff smudges on the slopes across the bay, at Lulworth, that had kick-started Harvey Gillot’s brain: the firing grounds used by the army for training artillery gun crews and the tank people. There was a good chance they were using the phosphorous shells he had supplied. He did not supply the ammunition they were using in Afghanistan, but they needed cheap stuff for knocking holes out of the chalk hills leading to the cliffs at Lulworth. The ministry, of course, did not do deals with the new elite of Bucharest, Sofia or Bratislava, or even Moldova and the spivs in Chi in u. At that distance, he couldn’t hear the guns but the impact points were obvious. The ministry bought from anybody who had stockpiles of the correct calibre, and if artillery or armour officers bitched, they’d be told it was what they had and where they were. The good times were over. It had been a useful contract for Harvey Gillot.
He had moped through what remained of the morning, and into the afternoon. Two alternatives jostled for his attention: quit and run, or raise the drawbridge and make a fortress of his home. But the firing had put a third dimension on the table: go into denial – it would never happen – and get back to work.
He started by reactivating a deal that had seemed attractive last year, then withered. Baghdad – where else? It had been a brilliant marketplace in the couple of years after the invasion, then had dribbled fewer opportunities but had seemed, last year, to pick up. The United States flag was being hauled down: they were going. The government, the local people, seemed to want equipping but not just from an American warehouse. He had detail on the computer that he wouldn’t have minded sharing with investigators from an Alpha outfit at Revenue and Customs. The stuff had been joshing around for more than a couple of years, People’s Republic of China small arms and ammunition, and Harvey Gillot knew of three others who were deep into it. The stuff had come out of storage depots in Albania and hadn’t been kept well. It was good business to supply to Baghdad: officialdom tended to give it an automatic stamp and the bulk was signed off by officers and bureaucrats on the take in the Green Zone. It would be a long-dead trail by the time some poor bastard at a roadblock, wearing a police uniform that didn’t fit, found out he’d a jam in his AK or that the percussion cap wouldn’t ignite. Nothing wrong with Harvey Gillot getting a bit of the deal up-and-running again. The dog slept by his feet. He was on the phone.
A friend, reliable and trusted, worked out of Marbella. He was a bit Syrian, a bit Lebanese and a bit German, and he was talking with him. He wouldn’t, himself, go to Baghdad but the agent they all used – whose brother was in the inner clique and whose sister had married into influence – would travel, if the price was right, to Nicosia for contracts and payment details. The Albanians still had plenty, more than the Bulgarians, but Albanian stuff wouldn’t be good enough for a customer such as the Tbilisi government. He had thought – talking and punching keys on his calculator – that denial worked well A bloody door slammed. The main bedroom’s. The dog stirred, then slumped again.
He held his hand loosely over the receiver and shouted, ‘You don’t have to slam doors.’
His friend – in faraway Marbella – asked what the hell had happened and was he all right? He said he was fine, never better, but the energy was draining out of him. Then the front door slammed. This time he didn’t cover the receiver. ‘See if I bloody care!’ Harvey Gillot yelled. ‘I don’t give a-’
In his ear. ‘You sure you’re all right, Harvey?’
‘I’m sure.’
‘Maybe another time is better, Harvey. You stay well.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Harvey, I don’t pry into people’s lives. We go back a long way – anything I should know?’
‘Well, since you come to mention it, maybe there is something I can share with you… I’m on a death list. The
