'Well, not quite, actually.'

'Don't spare me, Johnny.'

'She said that never in the whole history of human intelligence had so much been paid for so little. It was a joke.'

If Johnson had hoped to undermine Luxmore's confidence in Osnard and his works, he was disappointed. Luxmore's breast swelled and his voice recovered its didactic Scottish pulse.

'Johnny.' A suck of the front teeth. 'Has it ever occurred to you that a proven negative today is the equivalent of yesterday's proven positive?'

'No, it hasn't, actually.'

'Then reflect for a moment, I beseech you. It takes a crafty mind indeed, Johnny, to hide his tracks from the ears and eyes of modern technology, does it not? From credit cards to travel tickets, telephone calls, fax machines, banks, hotels, you name it. We cannot buy a bottle of whisky at the supermarket these days without advising the world that we have done so. "No trace" in such circ.u.mstances comes close to proof of guilt. These men of the world understand that. They know what it takes to be unseen, unheard, unknown.'

'I'm sure they do, sir,' Johnson said.

'Men of the world do not suffer from the professional deformities which beset the more inward-looking officers of this Service, Johnny. They are not bunker-minded, bogged down in detail and superfluous information. They see the forest, not the trees. And what they see here is an East-South cabal of perilous dimensions.'

'Sally doesn't,' Johnson objected doggedly, deciding that he might as well be hanged for a pound as a penny. 'Nor does Moo.'

'Who is Moo?'

'Her a.s.sistant.'

Luxmore's smile remained tolerant and kindly. He too, it said, saw forests and not trees.

'Turn your own question inside out, Johnny, and I think you will have your answer. Why is there an underground Panamanian opposition if there is nothing in Panama to oppose? Why do clandestine dissident groups - not riff-raff, Johnny, but drawn from the concerned and affluent cla.s.ses - wait in the wings, unless they know what there is to wait for? Why are the fishermen restive? - canny men, Johnny, never underrate your man of the sea. Why does the Panamanian President's man on the Ca.n.a.l Commission profess one policy in public while his private engagement book professes another? Why does he live one life on the surface and another below the waterline, hiding his tracks, conferring at unsociable hours with spurious j.a.panese harbourmasters? Why are the students restless? What is it they are sniffing in the air? Who has been whispering to them in their cafes and their discotheques? Why is the word sell-out pa.s.sed from mouth to mouth?'

'I didn't know it was,' said Johnson, who of late had become increasingly puzzled to observe how raw intelligence out of Panama enhanced itself in transit across his master's desk.

But then Johnson wasn't cleared for everything - and least of all for Luxmore's sources of inspiration. When Luxmore was preparing his famous one-page summaries for submission to his mysterious planners and appliers, he first ordered up a heap of files from the Most Restricted archive, then locked the door on himself until the doc.u.ment was done - although the files, when Johnson ingeniously contrived to take a look at them, related to past events such as the Suez conflict of 1956 rather than to anything that was supposed to be happening now or in the future.

Luxmore was using Johnson as a sounding board. Some men, Johnson was learning, cannot think without an audience.

'It's the hardest thing for a Service like ours to put its finger on, Johnny: the human groundswell before it has stirred, the vox populi before it has spoken. Look at Iran and the Ayatollah. Look at Egypt in the run-up to Suez. Look at the perestroika and the collapse of the evil empire. Look at Saddam, one of our best customers. Who saw them coming, Johnny? Who saw them forming like black clouds upon the horizon? Not us. Look at Galtieri and the conflagration in the Falklands, my G.o.d. Again and again, our vast intelligence hammer is able to crack every nut except the one that matters: the human enigma.' He was pacing at his old speed, matching his footsteps to his bombast. 'But that's what we're cracking now. This time we can pre-empt. We have the bazaars wired. We know the mood of the mob, its subconscious agenda, its hidden flashpoints. We can forestall. We can outwit history. Ambush her -'

He grabbed his telephone so fast it scarcely had time to ring. But it was only his wife, asking whether he had yet again put the keys to her car in his pocket before he left for work. Luxmore tersely acknowledged his crime, rang off, tugged at the skirts of his jacket and resumed his pacing.

They chose Geoff's place because Ben Hatry said use it, and after all Geoff Cavendish was Ben Hatry's creature, though both men felt it prudent to keep this quiet. And there was rightness in it being Geoff's place because in a way the idea had been Geoff's from the beginning, in the sense that it was Geoff Cavendish who had produced the first game plan, and Ben Hatry had said f.u.c.king do it, which was how Ben Hatry chose to speak: as a great British media baron.and employer of numberless terrified journalists he had a natural loathing for his mother tongue.

It was Cavendish who had fired Hatry's imagination, if that was what Ben Hatry possessed, Cavendish who had struck the deal with Luxmore, encouraged him, bolstered his budget and his ego, Cavendish who on Hatry's nod had given the first little lunches and informal briefings in expensive restaurants handy for the House, lobbied the right Members, though never in Hatry's name, unrolled the map, showed them where the d.a.m.n place was and where the Ca.n.a.l went, because half of them were hazy, Cavendish who had sounded discreet alarm bells in the City and the oil companies, cuddled up to the imbecile Conservative right, which was no work of art for him, wooed its Empire-dreamers, Euro-haters, n.i.g.g.e.r-haters, pan-xenophobes and lost, uneducated children.

It was Cavendish who had conjured visions of an eleventh-hour crusade before the election, a phoenix risen from the Tory ashes and turned war G.o.d, of a leader clad in the suit of shining armour that till now had always seemed too big for him, Cavendish who made the same pitch in different language to the Opposition - don't worry, boys and girls, you don't have to oppose anything or take a position, just keep your heads down and say this is no time to rock the Loyal British Boat even if it's sailing slap in the wrong direction, piloted by lunatics and leaking like a colander.

It was Cavendish yet again who got the multis suitably worried, who stirred up murmurings about the devastating effect on British industry, commerce and the pound, Cavendish who made us aware, as he called it: which is to say turned rumour into received certainty by the ingenious use of arm's length columnists operating outside the Hatry empire and therefore notionally untainted by its frightful reputation; Cavendish who planted follow-up articles in learned shoestring journals with promises to keep, such articles in turn being puffed out of all proportion by bigger journals, and so up the ladder or down it to the inside pages of the tabloids, to editorials in the degraded so-called qualities and late-night public debate on television, not only on the Hatry-owned channels but on rival channels too - since nothing is more predictable than the media's parroting of its own fictions and the terror of each compet.i.tor that it will be scooped by the others, whether or not the story is true because quite frankly, dears, in the news game these days, we don't have the staff, time, interest, energy, literacy or minimal sense of responsibility to check our facts by any means except calling up whatever has been written by other hacks on the same subject and repeating it as gospel.

And it was Cavendish, this hulking, tweedy outdoor English chap with the voice of an upper-cla.s.s cricket commentator on a sunny summer's afternoon, who had so convincingly propagated, always through well-dined intermediaries, Ben Hatty's treasured If Not Now When? doctrine that lay at the root of his trans-Atlantic arm-twisting and wire-pulling and intriguing, the thrust of which theory being that the United States cannot conceivably remain the world's one and only superpower for more than another decade at most, after which it was curtains, so if there was any heavy surgery that needed doing anywhere in the world, said the doctrine, however brutal and self-serving it might look from the outside or for that matter from the inside, then for our survival and our kids' survival and the survival of the Hatry empire and its evergrowing stranglehold on the hearts and minds of the Third and Fourth worlds: do it now while we have the clout, for f.u.c.k's sake! Stop p.u.s.s.yfooting around! Take what you want, smash what you don't! But whatever you do or don't do, stop mollycoddling and conceding and apologising and wimping out.

And if that put Ben Hatry into bed with the North American Loony Right, as well as their blood brothers on this side of the pond, and made him the darling of the arms industry to boot - well, f.u.c.k it, he would say in his sweet mother tongue, he wasn't a politico, he hated the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds, he was a realist, he didn't give a tinker's who he was allied to as long as they talked sense and didn't tiptoe around the international corridors saying to every j.a.p, n.i.g.g.e.r and dago: 'Pardon me for being a white middle-cla.s.s liberal American, sir, and excuse us for being so big and strong and powerful and rich, but we believe in the dignity and equality of all G.o.d's people, and would you be so kind as to allow me to get down on my hands and knees and kiss your a.r.s.e?'

Which was the image Ben Hatry painted tirelessly for the benefit of his lieutenants but always on the understanding that we keep it quiet among us boys and girls in the sacred interest of objective reporting of the news, which is what we are put on earth to do, or your f.u.c.king feet won't touch.

'Count me out,' Ben Hatry had told Cavendish the day before, in his toneless voice.

Sometimes he spoke without moving his lips at all. Sometimes he grew sick of his own machinations, sick of the whole human mediocrity.

'You two b.a.s.t.a.r.ds handle them on your own,' he added viciously.

'As you wish, Chief. Pity, but there we are,' said Cavendish.

But Ben Hatry had come, as Cavendish knew he would, by cab because he didn't trust his chauffeur, and even arrived ten minutes early to read a summary of the s.h.i.t that Cavendish had been sending to Van's people over the last few months - s.h.i.t being his preferred term for prose - ending with a one-page red-hot report from those w.a.n.kers across the river - unsigned, unsourced, unheaded - which Cavendish said was the clincher, the pure wine, the missing diamond, Chief, Van's people were going ballistic, hence today's get-together.

'Who's the b.a.s.t.a.r.d who wrote this?' Hatry enquired, ever anxious to give credit where it was due.

'Luxmore, Chief.'

'He the a.r.s.ehole who screwed up the Falklands operation for us single-handed?'

'The same.'

'Didn't go through Rewrite Department, that's for sure.'

Nevertheless Ben Hatry read the report twice, a thing unknown in him.

'Is it true?' he asked Cavendish.

'True enough, Chief,' said Cavendish with the judicious moderation that characterised his judgments. 'True in parts. Not sure about its shelf-life. Van's boys may have to be a bit quick on the draw.'

Hatry tossed the report back at him.

'Well at least they'll know the f.u.c.king way this time,' he said with a mirthless nod for Tug Kirby, the third murderer, as Cavendish wittily dubbed him, who had just stormed into the room without wiping his great feet and was glowering round him looking for an enemy.

'Those Yanks arrived yet?' he roared.

'Any minute now, Tug,' Cavendish a.s.sured him soothingly.

'b.u.g.g.e.rs'll be late for their own funerals,' said Kirby.

A particular advantage of Geoff's place was its ideal position in the heart of Mayfair, handy for the side entrance to Claridges, in a gated and guarded cul de sac with a lot of heavy hitters and diplomats and lobbyists living there, and the Italian Emba.s.sy one end. Yet there was a pleasing anonymity about it too. You could be a cleaner, caterer, courier, butler, bodyguard, catamite or grand master of the universal galaxy. No one cared. And Geoff was a door-opener. He knew how to get to the power people, bring them together. With Geoff you could lean back and let it happen, which was what they were doing now: three Brits and their two Yankee guests and everyone deniable as they tucked into a meal they agreed was not taking place, a help-yourself with no servants to witness it, consisting of salmon tiede flown down from the Cavendish estates in Scotland, quail's eggs, fruit and cheese, and all topped by a super bread-and-b.u.t.ter pudding made by Geoff's old nanny.

And to drink, iced tea and its stablemates, because in today's Born Again Washington, said Geoff Cavendish, alcohol at lunch was regarded as the Mark of the Beast.

And a round table so that n.o.body was dominant. Plenty of leg s.p.a.ce. Soft chairs. The phones unplugged. Cavendish was great on people's comfort level. Girls galore if you wanted them. Ask Tug.

'Flight bearable, Elliot?' asked Cavendish.

'Oh, I'm in travel heaven, Geoff. I just love those b.u.mpy little jets. Northolt was neat. I love Northolt. The chopper ride to Battersea, epic. Beautiful power station.'

With Elliot you never knew whether he was being sarcastic, or was he like this all the time? He was thirty-one years old, a Southerner from Alabama. He was a lawyer and a journalist, and floppy-droll except where he was on the attack. He had his own column in the Washington Times where he disputed ostentatiously with names that till recently had been bigger than his own. He was lank and cadaverous and dangerous and bespectacled. His face was all jaw and bone.

'Stopping over tonight or going home, Elliot?' Tug Kirby growled, implying that the second of these options was his preferred one.

'Tug, sadly we have to head right on back as soon as this party is over,' Elliot said.

'Not paying your respects to the Emba.s.sy?' said Tug with an oafish grin.

This was a joke. Tug didn't make a lot of them. The State Department were the last people on G.o.d's earth who should know of Elliot's visit or the Colonel's.

Seated at Elliof s side, the Colonel was chewing his salmon with the regulation number of bites.

'We don't have any friends over there, Tug,' he explained ingenuously. 'Just fairies.'

In Westminster Tug Kirby was known as the Minister with the Very Long Portfolio. Partly his s.e.xual adventures had earned him this t.i.tle, mostly it was his unrivalled collection of consultancies and directorships. There was not a defence company in the whole of the country or the Middle East, said the wits, that didn't own Tug Kirby, or Tug Kirby didn't own. Like his guests he was powerful and vaguely menacing. He had large fat shoulders and thick black eyebrows that looked stuck on. He had the mean, stupid eyes of a bull. Even while he was eating, his big curled fists stayed on the alert.

'Hey, Dirk - how's Van?' Hatry called gaily across the table.

Ben Hatry had switched on his legendary charm. No one could resist it. His smile was just so much fun after so long in the clouds. The Colonel brightened immediately. Cavendish too was delighted to find his Chief suddenly in good spirits.

'Sir,' the Colonel barked, as if he were addressing a court martial, 'General Van sends his compliments, wishes to express his thanks to you, Ben, and your helpers for the invaluable practical support and encouragement you have given him over the past months and right up to this present moment in time.'

Shoulders back, chin in. Sir.

'Well, you tell him we're all disappointed as f.u.c.k he's not running for President,' said Hatry, with the same radiant smile. 'It's a d.a.m.n shame the only good man in America hasn't got the b.a.l.l.s to stand.'

The Colonel remained unaffected by Hatry's playful provocations. He was accustomed to them from previous meetings.

'General Van has youth on his side, sir. General sees things long. General's of a very strategic disposition.' He was nodding to himself between hushed, worried sentences while his eyes remained wide and vulnerable. 'General reads a lot. He's deep. Knows how to wait. Other men would have fired off their ammunition by now. Not the General. No, sir. When the time comes to swing the President, the General will be right there swinging him. Only man in America knows how, my opinion. Yes, sir.'

I obey, said the Colonel's spaniel eyes, but his jaw said get out of my d.a.m.n way. His hair was cropped short. It was hard to remember as he sat to attention that he was not in uniform. It was hard not to wonder whether he was a little mad. Or whether they all were. The formalities were suddenly over. Elliot looked at his watch, raised his eyebrows rudely at Tug Kirby. The Colonel removed his napkin from his throat, primly dabbed his lips with it, then laid it on the table like an unwanted posy for Cavendish to clear away. Kirby was lighting a cigar.

'Do you mind putting that f.u.c.king thing out, please, Tug?' Hatry enquired politely.

Kirby stubbed it out. Sometimes he forgot that Hatry owned his secrets. Cavendish was asking who took sweetener in his coffee and would anyone care for creamer? Now at last it was a meeting, not a feast. It was five men who cordially detested each other, seated round a well-polished eighteenth-century table and united by a great ideal.

'You boys going in or not?' said Ben Hatry, who was not famous for preamble.

'We'd sure as h.e.l.l like to, Ben,' said Elliot, his face closed tight as a sea-door.

'So What's stopping you, for f.u.c.k's sake? You've got the evidence. You run the country. What are you waiting for?'

'Van would like to go in. So would Dirk here. Right, Dirk? All bands playing? Right, Dirk?'

'Sure would,' the Colonel breathed and shook his head at his linked hands.

'Then do it, for Christ's sake!' Tug Kirby cried.

Elliot affected not to hear this. 'The American people would like us to go in,' he said. 'They may not know it yet, but they soon will. The American people will want back what is rightfully theirs, and shouldn't have been given away in the first place. n.o.body is stopping us, Ben. We have the Pentagon, we have the will, the trained men, the technology. We have the Senate, we have Congress. We have the Republican party. We write foreign policy. We have a firm hold on the media in battle conditions. Last time round it was absolute, this time it will be more absolute than that. n.o.body is stopping us except ourselves, Ben. n.o.body, and that's a fact.'

A moment's common silence descended. Kirby was the first to break it.

'Always takes a bit of courage to jump,' he said gruffly. 'Thatcher never wavered. Other chaps waver all the time.'

The silence returned.

'Which is how ca.n.a.ls get lost, I suppose,' Cavendish suggested, but n.o.body laughed and the silence came back yet again.

'You know something Van said to me just the other day, Geoff?' said Elliot.

'What's that, old boy?' said Cavendish.

'Everybody who is not North American has a role for North America. Mostly they are people who have no role for themselves. Mostly they're jerking off.'

'General Van's deep,' said the Colonel.

'Get on with it,' said Hatry.

But Elliot took his time, resting his hands thoughtfully on his chest as if he were wearing a waistcoat and smoking a cheroot on his plantation.

'Ben, we have no d.a.m.n peg for this thing,' he confessed, as one journalist to another. 'No hook. We have a condition. We do not have a smoking gun. No raped US nuns. No dead US babies. We have rumours. We have maybes. We have your spook reports, unsubstantiated by our spook agencies at this time, because that's the way we say it has to be. This is not the moment to turn out the State Department's bleeding hearts, or put billboards screaming Hands Off Panama! at the White House railings. This is a moment for decisive action and having the national conscience adapt retrospectively. The national conscience will do that. We can help it. You can help it, Ben.'

'I said I would. I will.'

'But what you cannot give us is a peg,' Elliot said. 'You cannot rape nuns. You cannot ma.s.sacre babies for us.'

Kirby let out a misplaced guffaw of laughter. 'Don't you be so sure about that, Elliot,' he cried. 'You don't know our Ben the way we do. What? What?'

But all he got for applause was a pained frown from the Colonel.

'Of course you've got a f.u.c.king peg,' Ben Hatry retorted caustically.

'Name it,' Elliot said.

'The denials, for f.u.c.k's sake.'

'What denials?' said Elliot.

'Everyone's. The Panamanians will deny it, the Frogs will deny it, the j.a.ps will deny it. So they're liars, the same as Castro was a liar. Castro denies his Russian rockets, so you go in. The Ca.n.a.l conspirators deny their conspiracy, so in you go again.'

'Ben, those rockets were there,' said Elliot. 'We had pictures of those rockets. We had a smoking gun. We have no smoking gun for this scenario. The American people got to see justice done. Talk doesn't do it. Never did. We need a smoking gun. The President will need a smoking gun. If he doesn't get one, he won't swing.'

'We don't happen to have a few happy snaps of j.a.p engineers in false beards digging a second ca.n.a.l by flash-light, do we, Ben?' Cavendish asked facetiously.

'No, we f.u.c.king don't,' Hatry retorted, never raising his voice but never needing to. 'So what are you going to do, Elliot? Wait till the j.a.ps give you a photo call at lunchtime on the 31st of December in the year of Our Lord nineteen f.u.c.king ninety-nine?'

Elliot was unmoved. 'Ben, we don't have one emotive argument that will play on our television screens. Last time round we got lucky. Noriega's Dignity Battalions mishandled decent North American women in the streets of Panama City. Until then we were grounded. We had drugs. So we wrote drugs big. We had Noriega's att.i.tude problem. We wrote that big. We had his ugliness, and we wrote that big. Lot of people think ugly is immoral. We worked on that. We had his s.e.xuality and his voodoo. We played the Castro card. But it wasn't till decent North American women were hara.s.sed by disrespectful Hispanic soldiers in the name of dignity that the President felt obliged to send our boys in to teach them a little manners.'

'I heard you arranged that,' Hatry said.

'Wouldn't play twice, either way,' Elliot replied, brushing aside the suggestion as irrelevant.