Osnard took a pull of red and shook his head. 'Fight it, my advice. Form an internal Emba.s.sy working-party. You, Amba.s.s, Fran, me. Gully's Defence so he's not family, Pitt's on probation. Put together an indoctrination list, everyone signs off on it, meet out of hours.'

'Will your boss wear it, whoever he is?'

'You push, I'll pull. Name o' Luxmore, supposed to be a secret except everybody knows. Tell Amba.s.s to beat the table. "Ca.n.a.l's a time bomb. Instant local response essential." That c.r.a.p. He'll cave.'

'Amba.s.s doesn't beat tables,' Stormont said.

But Maltby must have beaten something because after a stream of obstructive telegrams from their respective services, usually to be hand-decoded at dead of night, Osnard and Stormont were grudgingly permitted to make common cause. An Emba.s.sy working-party was set up with the harmless-sounding t.i.tle of the Isthmus Study Group. A trio of morose technicians flew down from Washington and, after three days of listening to walls, p.r.o.nounced them deaf. And at seven o'clock one turbulent Friday evening the four conspirators duly a.s.sembled round the Emba.s.sy rainforest-teak conference table and under the low light of a Ministry of Works lamp acknowledged by signature that they were privy to special material BUCHAN, provided by source BUCHAN under an operation codenamed BUCHAN. The solemnity of the moment was offset by a burst of humour from Maltby, afterwards ascribed to the temporary absence of his wife in England: 'From now on BUCHAN's likely to be an on-going thing, sir,' Osnard declared airily as he collected the signed forms like a croupier raking in the chips. 'His stuff's coming in at quite a rate. Meeting once a week may not be enough.'

'A what thing, Andrew?' Maltby enquired, setting his pen down with a d.i.c.k.

'On-going.'

'On-going?'

'What I said, Amba.s.s. On-going.'

'Yes. Quite so. Thank you. Well, from now on, if you please, Andrew, the thing - to use your parlance - is on-gone. BUCHAN may prevail. He may endure. He may persist, or at a pinch continue or resume. But he will never, as long as I am Amba.s.sador, on-go, if you don't mind. It would be too distressing.'

After which, wonder of wonders, Maltby invited the whole team for bacon and eggs and swimming back at the Residence where, having raised a droll toast to 'the Buchaneers', he marched the guests into the garden to admire his toads, whose names he belted out above the din of pa.s.sing traffic: 'Come on, Hercules, hop, hop! -don't gawp at her like that, Galileo, haven't you seen a pretty gal before?' And when they swam, deliriously in the half darkness, Maltby astonished everyone yet again by letting out a great glad cry of 'Christ, she's beautiful!' in celebration of Fran. And finally, to round the night off, he insisted on playing dance music, and had his houseboys roll back the rugs, though Stormont couldn't help remarking that Fran danced with every man but Osnard, who ostentatiously preferred the Amba.s.sador's books, which he patrolled with his hands behind his back in the manner of an English princeling inspecting a guard of honour.

'You don't think Andy's a bit left-handed, do you?' he asked Paddy over a nightcap. 'You never hear of him going out with girls. And he treats Fran as if she had the plague.'

He thought she was going to cough again, but she was laughing.

'Darling,' Paddy murmured, lifting her eyes to Heaven. 'Andy Osnard?'

It was a view that Francesca Deane, had she heard it from her rec.u.mbent position in Osnard's bed in his apartment in Paitilla, would have happily endorsed.

How she had got there was a mystery to her, though it was a mystery now ten weeks old.

'Only two ways to play this situation, girl,' Osnard had explained to her with the a.s.surance he brought to everything, over lavish helpings of barbecued chicken and cold beer beside the pool of the El Panama. 'Method A. Sweat it out for six tense months then fall into each other's arms in a sticky coil. "Darling, why ever didn't we do this before, puff, puff ?" Method B, the preferred one, bang away now, observe total omerta all round, see how we like it. If we do, have a ball. If we don't, chuck it and no one's the wiser. "Been there, didn't care for it, glad o' the information. Life moves on. Basta."'

'There's also method C, thank you.'

'What's that?'

'Abstention, for one thing.'

'You mean me tie a knot in it and you take the veil?' He waved a well-cushioned hand at the poolside, where sumptuous girls of all sorts flirted with their swains to the music of a live band. 'Desert island out here, girl. Nearest white man thousands o' miles away. Just you and me and our duty to Mother England, till my wife comes out next month.'

Francesca was halfway to her feet. She actually yelled out, 'Your wife!'

'Haven't got one. Never did, never will,' Osnard said, rising with her. 'So now that obstacle to our happiness has been removed, h.e.l.l's to say no?'

They danced very well while she struggled for an answer. She had never supposed that someone so generously built could move so lightly. Or that such small eyes could be so compelling. She had never supposed, if she was honest, that she could be attracted to a man who, to say the least, was several points short of a Greek G.o.d.

'I don't suppose it's occurred to you I might hugely prefer someone else, has it?' she demanded.

'In Panama? No way, girl. Checked you out. Local lads call you the English iceberg.'

They were dancing very close. It seemed the obvious thing to do.'They call me nothing of the sort!'

'Want a bet?'

They were dancing even closer.

'What about at home?' she insisted. 'How do you know I haven't got a soulmate in Shropshire? Or London for that matter?'

He was kissing her temple but it could have been any part of her. His hand was perfectly still on her back and her back was bare.

'Not much good to you out here, girl. Don't get much satisfaction at five thousand miles, not in my book. Do you?'

It wasn't that Fran had been persuaded by Osnard's arguments, she told herself as she contemplated his replete and dozing figure beside her in the bed. Or that he was the best dancer in the world. Or that he made her laugh louder and longer than any man she had known. It was just that she couldn't imagine herself withstanding him for one more day, let alone three years.

She had arrived in Panama six months ago. In London she had spent her weekends with a frightfully handsome hunting stockbroker named Edgar. Their affair was mutually agreed to have run its course by the time she got her posting. With Edgar, everything was mutually agreed.

But who was Andy?

A believer in solidly-sourced material, Fran had never before slept with anyone she had not researched.

She knew he had been at Eton but only because Miles had told her. Osnard, who appeared to hate his old school, referred to it only as 'the nick' or 'Slough Grammar', and otherwise disdained all reference to his education. His intellect was widely based but arbitrary, as you would expect from someone whose school career had been abruptly curtailed. When he was drunk, he was fond of quoting Pasteur: 'chance favours only the prepared mind.'

He was rich or, if he wasn't, he was spendthrift or extremely generous. Almost every pocket of his expensive locally-made suits - trust Andy to find himself the best tailor in town as soon as he arrived - seemed to be stuffed with twenty- and fifty-dollar bills. But when she pointed this out to him, he shrugged and told her it came with the job. If he took her to dinner or they stole a secret weekend in the country, he spent money like water.

He had owned a greyhound and raced it at the White City until - in his words - a bunch o' the boys invited him to take his doggie somewhere else. An ambitious project to open a go-karting stadium in Oman had met with similar frustrations. He had run a silver stall in Shepherd Market. None of these interludes could have lasted long, for he was only twenty-seven.

Of his parentage he declined to say anything at all, maintaining that he owed his immense charm and fortune to a distant aunt. He never referred to his previous conquests, though she had excellent reason to believe they were many and varied. True to his promise of omerta he never made the smallest claim on her in public, a thing she found arousing: to be one minute at the highest pitch of ecstasy in his extremely capable arms, the next sitting primly opposite him at a Chancery meeting and behaving as if they barely recognised each other.

And he was a spy. And his job was running another spy called BUCHAN. Or spies, since BUCHAN product seemed more diverse and exciting than anything one person could encompa.s.s.

And BUCHAN had the ear of the President and of the US General in charge of Southern Command. BUCHAN knew crooks and wheeler-dealers: just as Andy must have known them when he had his greyhound, whose name she had recently learned was Retribution. She attached significance to this: Andy had an agenda.

And BUCHAN was in touch with a secret democratic opposition that was waiting for the old fascists in Panama to show their true colours. He talked to militants in the students' movement and fishermen and secret activists inside the unions. He plotted with them, waiting for the day. He referred to them - rather glamorously, she thought - as people from the other side of the bridge. BUCHAN was on terms with Ernie Delgado too, the grey eminence of the Ca.n.a.l. And with Rafi Domingo, who laundered money for the cartels. BUCHAN knew Legislative a.s.sembly members, lots of them. He knew lawyers and bankers. There seemed to be no one worth knowing in Panama that BUCHAN didn't know, and it was extraordinary to Fran, eerie in fact, that Andy in such a short time had succeeded in getting to the very heart of a Panama she never knew existed. But then he'd got to her heart pretty sharpish too.

And BUCHAN was sniffing a great plot, though n.o.body could quite work out what the plot consisted of: except that the French and possibly the j.a.panese and Chinese and the Tigers of South-East Asia were part of it or might be, and perhaps the drugs cartels of Central and South America. And the plot involved selling the Ca.n.a.l out of the back door, as Andy called it. But how? And how without the US knowing? After all, the Yankees had effectively been running the country for most of the century, and they had the most amazingly sophisticated listening and monitoring systems all over the isthmus and Central America.

Yet the Yankees mystifyingly knew nothing about it at all, which added hugely to the excitement. Or if they did, they weren't telling us. Or they knew but weren't telling one another, because these days when you talked about Washington foreign policy you had to ask which one, and which amba.s.sador: the one at the US Emba.s.sy or the one up on Ancon Hill, because the US military still hadn't got used to the idea that it couldn't bang heads in Panama any more.

And London was extremely excited, and was digging up collateral from all sorts of odd places, sometimes from years ago, and making amazing deductions to do with whose ambitions for world power would dominate everybody else's because, as BUCHAN put it, all the world's vultures were gathering over poor little Panama and the game was guessing who was going to get the prize. And London kept pressing for more, more, all the time, which made Andy furious because overworking a network was like overworking a greyhound, he said: in the end you both pay for it, the dog and you. But that was all he told her. Otherwise he was secrecy itself, which she admired.

And all this in ten short weeks from a standing start, just like their love affair. Andy was a magician, touching things that had been around for years and making them thrilling and alive. Touching Fran that way too. But who was BUCHAN? If Andy was defined by BUCHAN, who defined BUCHAN?

Why did BUCHAN's friends speak so frankly to him or her? Was BUCHAN a shrink, a doctor? Or a scheming b.i.t.c.h, worming secrets out of her lovers with lascivious skills? Who was it who telephoned Andy in fifteen second bursts, ringing off almost before he could say, 'I'll be there'? Was it BUCHAN himself, or an intermediary, a student, a fisherman, a cut-out, some special link-person in the network? Where did Andy go when, like a man commanded by a supernatural voice, he rose at dead of night, threw on his clothes, removed a wad of dollar bills from the wall-safe behind the bed and left her lying there without so much as a goodbye, to creep back again at dawn, chagrined or wildly elated, stinking of cigar smoke and women's perfume? And then to take her, still without a word, endlessly, wonderfully, tirelessly, hours, years on end, his thick body skimming weightlessly over her and round her, one peak after another, something that till now had only happened to Fran in her schoolgirl imagination?

And what great alchemy did Andy get up to when an ordinary-looking brown envelope was delivered to the door and he disappeared to the bathroom with it and locked himself in for half an hour, leaving a stink of camphor behind or was it formaldehyde? What did Andy see when he reappeared from the broom cupboard with a strip of wet film no wider than a tapeworm, then sat at his desk coaxing it through a miniature editor?

'Shouldn't you be doing that at the Emba.s.sy?' she asked him.

'No dark room, no you,' he replied in the brown, dismissive voice she found so irresistible. What a perfect slob he was after Edgar! - so shifty, so unfettered, so brave!

She would observe him at the BUCHAN meetings: our chief Buchaneer, lounging potently at the long table, a dreamy forelock drifting over his right eye as he pa.s.sed out his garishly-striped folders, then peered into the void while everybody except himself read them, BUCHAN's Panama, caught in flagrante: Antonio So-and-so of the Foreign Ministry recently declared himself so infatuated by his Cuban mistress that he intends to use his best offices to improve Panama-Cuban relations in defiance of US objections...

Declared himself to whom? To his Cuban mistress? And she dedared it to BUCHAN? Or declared it direct to Andy, perhaps - in bed? She remembered the perfume again and imagined it rubbed against him by bare bodies. Is Andy BUCHAN? Nothing was impossible.

So-and-so's other loyalty is to the Lebanese mafia in Colon, who are said to have paid twenty million dollars for 'favoured nation status' within Colon's criminal community...

And after Cuban mistresses and Lebanese crooks, BUCHAN takes a leap into the Ca.n.a.l: The chaos inside the newly const.i.tuted Authority of the Ca.n.a.l is increasing on a daily basis as old hands are replaced by unqualified staff appointed solely on nepotist lines, to the despair of Ernesto Delgado, the most blatant example being the appointment of Jose-Maria Fernandez as director of General Services after he acquired a thirty per cent holding in the Mainland Chinese fast-food chain Lee Lotus, Lee Lotus being forty per cent owned by companies belonging to the Rodriguez cocaine cartel of Brazil...

'Is that the Fernandez who made a pa.s.s at me at the National Day jamboree?' Fran asked Andy, deadpan, at a late evening session of the Buchaneers in Maltby's office.

She had lunched with him at his flat and made love to him all afternoon. Her question was inspired as much by afterglow as curiosity.

'Bandy-legged bald bloke,' Andy replied carelessly. 'Specs, spots, armpits and bad breath.'

'That's him. He wanted to fly me up to a festival in David.'

'When do you leave?'

'Andy, you're out of court,' said Nigel Stormont without looking up from his folder, and Fran had her work cut out not to burst out giggling.

And when the sessions ended, she would watch out of the corner of her eye as Andy piled together the folders and padded with them to his secret kingdom behind the new steel door in the east corridor, trailed by that creepy clerk of his who wore Fair Isle knitted waistcoats and slicked hair - Shepherd he called himself, always something in his hand like a spanner or a screwdriver or a bit of flex.

'What on earth does Shepherd do for you?'

'Cleans the windows.'

'He's not tall enough.'

'I lift him up.'

It was with a similarly low expectation that she now asked Osnard why he was once more getting dressed when everybody else was trying to sleep.

'See a chap about a dog,' he replied tersely. He had been on edge all evening.

'A greyhound?'

No answer.

'It's a very late dog,' she said, hoping to tease him from his introspection.

No answer.

'I suppose it's the same dog that featured so dramatically in the urgent decipher-yourself telegram you received this afternoon.'

In the act of pulling his shirt over his head, Osnard froze. 'h.e.l.l did you get that from?' he demanded, not at all pleasantly.

'I walked into Shepherd as I was getting in the lift to come home. He asked me whether you were still around so I naturally asked him why. He said he'd got a hot one for you but you were going to have to unb.u.t.ton it yourself. I blushed for you, then realised he was talking about an urgent signal. Aren't you packing your pearl-handled Beretta?'

No answer.

'Where are you meeting her?'

'In a wh.o.r.ehouse,' he snapped, heading for the door.

'Have I offended you somehow?'

'Not yet. But you're getting there.'

'Perhaps you've offended me. I may go back to my flat. I need some serious sleep.'

But she stayed, with the smell of his round clever body still on her and the print of him in the bedclothes at her side and the memory of his watcher's eyes smouldering down at her in the half light. Even his tantrums excited her. So did his black side, in the rare moments when he let it show: in their lovemaking, when they were playing games and she brought him to the brink of violence, and his wet head would lift as if to strike, before he just, but only just, pulled back. Or at BUCHAN meetings when Maltby with customary perversity decided to needle him about a report - 'Is your source illiterate as well as omniscient, Andrew, or do we have you to thank for his split infinitives?' - and little by little the lines of his fluid face hardened and the danger light kindled in the depths of his eyes and she understood why he had christened his greyhound Retribution.

I'm losing control, she thought. Not of him, I never had it. Of me. More alarming still to the daughter of a terminally pompous Law Lord and the former partner of the immaculate Edgar, she was discovering a distinct appet.i.te for the disreputable.

CHAPTER TWELVE.

Osnard parked his diplomatic car outside the shopping complex at the foot of the tall building, greeted the security guards on duty and rose to the fourth floor. Under sickly strip-lighting the lion and unicorn boxed eternally. He typed a combination, entered the Emba.s.sy's reception lobby, unlocked an armoured gla.s.s door, climbed a stair-case, entered a corridor, unlocked a grille and stepped into his own kingdom. A last door remained closed to him and it was made of steel. Selecting a long bra.s.s pipestem key from a bunch in his pocket, he inserted it the wrong way up, said f.u.c.k, removed it and inserted it the right way up. Alone, he moved a little differently to when he was observed. There was more rashness to him, something headlong. His jaw slumped, his shoulders hunched, his eyes looked out from under lowered brows, he seemed to be lunging at some unseen enemy.

The strongroom comprised the last two yards of corridor converted to a kind of larder. To Osnard's right lay pigeonholes. To his left, amid a variety of incongruous articles such as fly spray and toilet paper, a green wall-safe. Ahead of him, an oversized red telephone reposed on a stack of electrical boxes. It was known in the vernacular as his digital link with G.o.d. A sign on the base said, 'Speech on this instrument costs 50.00 per minute.' Osnard had written beneath it the word 'Enjoy'. It was in mis-spirit that he now lifted the receiver and, ignoring the automatic voice commanding him to press b.u.t.tons and observe procedures, dialled his London bookmaker, with whom he placed a couple of bets to the tune of five hundred pounds each on greyhounds whose names and appointments he seemed to know as well as he knew the bookmaker.

'No, you stupid tart, to win,' he said. When had Osnard ever backed a dog each way?

After this he resigned himself to the rigours of his trade. Extracting a plain folder from a pigeonhole marked top secret BUCHAN, he bore it to his office, switched on the lights, sat himself at his desk, belched and, head in hands, began to read again the four pages of instructions that he had received that afternoon from his Regional Director Luxmore in London and at considerable cost to his patience deciphered with his own hand. In a pa.s.sable imitation of Luxmore's Scottish brogue, Osnard mouthed the text aloud: 'You will commit the following orders to memory' - suck of the teeth - 'This signal is not repeat not for Station files and will be destroyed within seventy-two hours of receipt, young Mr Osnard... You will advise BUCHAN forthwith of the following' - suck of the teeth - 'you may give BUCHAN the following undertakings only... you will administer the following dire warning... oh yes!'

With a grunt of exasperation, he refolded the telegram, selected a plain white envelope from a drawer of his desk, put the telegram inside it and fed the envelope into the right-hand hip pocket of the Pendel & Braithwaite trousers that he had charged to London as a necessary operational expense. Returning to the strongroom he picked up a shabby leather briefcase that was by intent the very opposite of official, set it on the shelf and with yet another key from his ring opened the green wall-safe, which contained a stiff-backed ledger and thick bundles of fifty-dollar bills - hundreds being by his own edict to London too suspect to negotiate without making yourself conspicuous.

By the bulkhead light in the ceiling above him he turned up the current page of the ledger. It was divided into three columns of handwritten figures. The left-hand column was headed H for Harry, the right-hand column A for Andy. The centre column, which contained the largest sums, was headed Income. Neat bubbles and lines of the kind beloved of s.e.xologists directed its resources to left and right. Having studied all three columns in aggrieved silence, Osnard took a pencil from his pocket and reluctantly wrote a 7 in the centre column, drew a bubble round it and added a line to the left of its circ.u.mference, awarding it to column H for Harry. Then he wrote a 3 and, in happier vein, directed it to column A for Andy. Humming to himself, he counted seven thousand dollars from the safe into the floppy bag. After it he tossed in the fly spray and other bits and pieces from the shelf. Disdainfully. As if he despised them, which indeed he did. He closed the bag, locked the safe, then the strongroom and finally the front door.

A full moon smiled on him as he stepped into the street. A starry sky arched over the bay, and was mirrored by the lights of waiting ships strung across the black horizon. He hailed a clapped-out Pontiac cab, gave an address. Soon he was rattling along the airport road, watching anxiously for a mauve-neon Cupid firing its penile arrow towards the bungalows of love it advertised. His features, discovered by the beam of an opposing car, had hardened. His small dark eyes, as they maintained their wary watch on the driver's mirrors, caught fire with every pa.s.sing light. Chance favours only the prepared mind, he recited to himself. It was the favourite dictum of a science master at his prep school who, having flogged him black and blue, suggested they make up their differences by taking off their clothes.

Somewhere near Watford just north of London there is an Osnard Hall. To reach it you negotiate a hectic bypa.s.s, then swing sharply through a rundown housing estate called Elm Glade, because that was where the ancient elms once stood. The Hall has had more lives in its last fifty years than in its previous four centuries: now an old people's home, now an inst.i.tute for young offenders, now a stable for racing greyhounds and most recently, under the stewardship of Osnard's gloomy elder brother Lindsay, a sanctuary of meditation for followers of an Eastern sect.

For a while, through each of these transformations, Osnards as far away as India and Argentina divided up the rent, argued over the upkeep and whether a surviving nanny should receive her pension. But gradually, like the house that had sp.a.w.ned them, they fell into disrepair or simply gave up the struggle to survive. An Osnard uncle took his bit to Kenya and lost it. An Osnard cousin thought he could lord it over the Australians, bought an ostrich farm and paid the price. An Osnard lawyer raided the family trust, stole what he had not already dissipated through incompetent investment, then put a bullet through his head. Osnards who had not gone down with the t.i.tanic went down with Lloyd's. Gloomy Lindsay, never one for half-measures, put on the saffron robes of a Buddhist monk and hanged himself from the one sound cherry tree that remained in the walled garden.

Only Osnard's parents, self-impoverished, remained infuriatingly alive, his father on a mortgaged family estate in Spain, eking out the dregs of his fortune and sponging off his Spanish relatives; his mother in Brighton where she shared genteel squalor with a chihuahua and a bottle of gin.

Others, given such a cosmopolitan perspective upon life, might have headed for new pastures or at least the Spanish sun. But young Andrew had determined from an early age that he was for England and, more specifically, England was for him. A childhood of deprival and the odious boarding schools that had seared their imprint on him for all time had left him feeling at the age of twenty that he had paid more dues to England than any reasonable country was ent.i.tled to exact from him, and that from now on he would cease paying and collect.

The question was how. He had no craft or qualification, no proven skills outside the golf course and the bedroom. What he understood best was English rot, and what he needed was a decaying English inst.i.tution that would restore to him what other decaying inst.i.tutions had taken away. His first thought was Fleet Street. He was semi-literate and unfettered by principle. He had scores to settle. On the face of it he was perfectly cut out to join the new rich media cla.s.s. But after two promising years as a cub reporter with the Loughborough Evening Messenger his career ended with a snap when a steamy article ent.i.tled 's.e.x Antics of our City Elders' turned out to be based on the pillowtalk of the managing editor's wife.

A great animal charity had him and for a while he believed he had found his true vocation. In splendid premises handy for theatres and restaurants the needs of Britain's animals were thrashed out with pa.s.sionate commitment. No gala premiere, white-tie banquet or foreign journey to observe the animals of other nations was too onerous for the charity's highly paid officers to undertake. And everything might have come to fruition. The Instant Response Donkey Fund (Organiser: A. Osnard), the Veteran Greyhound Country Holiday Scheme (Finance Officer: A. Osnard) had been widely applauded when two of his superiors were invited to account for themselves to the Serious Fraud Office.