Borrowed Time

Mike sat back. He pictured Paul Seaton somewhere near the centre of that avarice and graft and brutality. The picture was easy to conjure.

He took out the Zip disk and tapped a command key marked SECURE CONFERENCING. A box appeared onscreen and invited him to enter a telephone number; simultaneously a tiny red light mounted on the camera atop the screen lit up.

Mike entered the number of CIA Records at Langley, Virginia. After a moment a screen announcement told him he was connected; who did he wish to talk to? Mike entered the name Joshua Flynn. A pause, then a white square appeared onscreen, which turned quickly to a live colour picture of a thin-faced, exceptionally gloomy-looking man. The dolour vanished and he smiled widely as two-way visual contact was established.

‘Mike!’ The voice was alarmingly realistic over the computer’s sound system. ‘Where have you been? It’s so long since we spoke, I thought you must have defected.’

‘There’s no place left to run, Josh. How’re you doing?’

‘In spite of the wishes of my contemporaries, I must say I’ve thrived.’ Flynn waved an arm at the shelves and machinery ranged behind him. ‘I’m in charge these days. I’m one of only three men at Langley with all-level access to the files. If you forget how many lumps of sugar you take in your coffee, give me a call, we’ll have a record of it here somewhere.’

‘I’m chasing a favour, Josh.’

‘I can’t imagine any other reason why you’d call.’

‘A man by the name of Paul Seaton. He was —’

‘An employee of this agency,’ Josh cut in. ‘I knew him reasonably well, for a time. What do you need to know?’

‘Background stuff, leading up to the time he took off and became a bandit.’

‘You on to him for something?’

‘I could be, with luck. Just in case the luck holds, I’d like to know as much about him as I can.’

‘I could tell you most of it from memory,’ Flynn said, ‘but let’s be professional about this, right? I’ll call up the file. One second, Mike.’

It took four seconds. Flynn studied the printout, nodding.

‘OK. A summary of the known career of Paul Elliot Seaton, who will now be forty-three years old.’ Flynn put down the summary and looked directly out of the screen at Mike. ‘From the time Seaton left college he put himself at the disposal of people with power, the kind of power he knew he could never generate himself. He was open about his technique — he once told me his motto for getting on in life was “Find the engine you need and hitch a ride”. Anyway, Paul was preeminently physical, he wasn’t hampered by a conscience. He worked as errand-boy and muscle for several small and medium-sized politicians until an opportunity came along to join the CIA.’

‘Who gave him the opportunity?’

‘It was a recommendation from a grateful relative of our first director, Allen Welsh Dulles.’

‘He did somebody a big muscular favour.’

‘I’d guess so,’ Flynn said. ‘The job he got here carried no guarantee or likelihood of promotion, but Paul Seaton got to do harm, and he got to carry a prestigious ID that showed he was a legitimate employee of the Agency. For three years he was a happy young man. Then in 1977 Jimmy Carter arrived, and he directed a fresh administration to put tight controls on the clandestine activities of the CIA. A month later Paul Seaton was out of a job.’

‘How did he get involved with the mujahedin initiative in Afghanistan?’

‘Well, he wasn’t a lot more than a dogsbody around here,’ Flynn said, ‘but one or two people at the Pentagon kept records of those boys from Langley who’d distinguished themselves in situations calling for, quote, effective physical action, unquote. Seaton had drawn attention to himself for some of the things he got up to in Cuba and Chile, and so, within a month of getting his can kicked out of the CIA, the former gofer-bodyguard-enforcer-saboteur had himself a new job with the military.’

‘Did you see him at that time?’

‘Once. While he was doing his three-month training at a government facility in the Ozarks. I went there with a pair of our covert operations people for a briefing on Project Kandahar, as they called it. I spoke to Seaton for a couple of minutes. He was full of himself, full of the mission ahead. He was mustard-keen to get over there and start teaching bodily assault and slaughter.’

‘He was the man for the job,’ Mike said, then quickly added, ‘or so I gather.’

‘Yeah. When I asked the fellow in charge just what it was that Seaton and the others were training to do, he said, “They’re gonna teach one group of Neanderthals how to exterminate another group of Neanderthals, in the interest of maintaining a balance of power consonant with the needs and purposes of the United States.”’

‘But Seaton didn’t shape up the way they imagined he would, right?’

‘He’d been in Afghanistan only three or four months,’ Flynn said, ‘when he discovered an inborn leaning to fanaticism. He also found he had an aptitude for the life of a brigand. After the end of his tenth month in Kandahar, he severed all contact with the military.’

‘And what do you know about his present activities?’

‘Nothing. There have been rumours he’s into drug running, hill banditry, kidnapping, all the usual stuff villains get up to in the stretch of territory from Kabul to Chittagong. Nothing has ever been substantiated, and frankly he doesn’t fall within our sphere of interest.’

‘Well, you’ve been a help, Josh. I owe you one.’

‘Now I’m boss I can let you run it up to three you owe me. Then you have to pay it off in wine. Let me know if you get anything new on Seaton.’

Mike promised he would. He closed the conference connection. At the top of the notebook page he had filled while Flynn was talking he scribbled P. Seaton — background.

Soon, he thought, pocketing the notebook. Soon, you heap of garbage.

3

The following morning at 9:15 a message went out to all personnel of Task Force Three to attend a meeting in UNACO’s briefing room. Mike Graham was in a diner with coffee and the Washington Post when the pager vibrated against his chest. C.W. Whitlock got the message as he sat in his car in a street off Times Square, talking to a private detective he occasionally employed. Sabrina Carver heard the buzz of the pager where she had left it, resting on the ledge above her bathroom washbasin. She abruptly ended her telephone conversation with her mother, ran to the bathroom and read the terse message.

‘Bang goes the gym,’ she said, shutting off the last word, realizing she had started to talk to herself again. She had always believed the habit was harmless enough when she was at home, but lately she worried that it could spread to other places, or go really malignant and turn into a compulsion. She feared ending up like people she sometimes saw on the street and in stores, in deep conversation with themselves, detached and strange.

Bang went the gym, anyway. She had planned to go there at ten, do an hour, come back, shower, spend plenty of time getting dressed and made up, then have a long gossipy lunch with a school friend who was in town.

She could always go to the gym in the afternoon or the evening, so it was no disruption of the day, except that on a day when she was lunching out she liked to visit the gym in the morning, for then it felt like less of a misdemeanour to have dessert with her meal.

She got ready quickly and checked herself in the mirror. The dark gold Joseph Janard jersey suit was an extravagance she had been saving for the spring; it was still only February, a grey New York day, but she felt sunny enough to carry it. Her mother, born and raised in Paris, had told her never to forget that because she was blonde, relatively tall, and had a lot of French in her DNA, she could get away with clothes that would make most other New York women look downright silly.

A Cartier watch and a light brown Elégance wool coat across her shoulders completed the ensemble. She slipped her SIG P220 pistol into her purse and left for the UN.

As she came out of the elevator opposite the UNACO main entrance she saw Mike Graham ahead of her. She hurried and caught up.

‘What’s the meeting about?’

‘No idea,’ he told her. ‘But I hope it isn’t something that needs all of us.’

Sabrina waited for more, but that was all he said.

When they stepped into the briefing room Philpott and C.W. Whitlock were already there. Philpott was by the big ceiling-to-floor window that overlooked the East River. He was muttering testily to his mobile phone. Whitlock leaned patiently against the shiny panelled wall, arms folded.

“Morning, kids,’ he muttered.

Whitlock was the most versatile of all the UNACO agents, and the one most readily consulted by Philpott. He was a graduate of Oxford and a one-time officer in the Kenya Intelligence Corps. Philpott had personally recruited him into UNACO. They were often to be found together, although their closeness created no jealousy. Everybody knew Philpott was too much of a loner to have favourites.

‘You look stunning, Sabrina,’ Whitlock observed as she hung up her coat.

‘That’s what I was aiming for. I’m going straight to lunch after the meeting.’

‘You’re kind of overdressed for McDonald’s,’ Mike said. He sat down at the long central table and stared pointedly at Philpott, who was trying to terminate his call.

‘We’re going to the Arcadia,’ Sabrina said, sliding into the chair opposite Mike. ‘Special occasion. Me and Tania, an old friend from school. The last time we met she was very pretty, but I haven’t seen her in ten years so I have to assume the worst — she could be stunning. The haute couture is my best defence.’

Philpott ended the phone call and slammed the mobile down on the table. ‘That was the Secretary General’s office,’ he said. ‘UNACO is to be the subject of a techniques-and-procedures review. I resisted, but it would seem that somebody in Policy Control has a persuasive turn of argument — either that, or they’re blackmailing one of the under secretaries.’

‘They want to change the way we do things?’ Mike said.

‘At the administrative level,’ Philpott nodded. ‘It’s aimed at me. It’s personal. Just because I won’t play the good doggie every time Secretary Crane or one of his lesser vermin set foot in the place. However.’

Philpott sat down at the end of the table and opened his leather document case. ‘I want to brief you on the ground tactics and preliminary arrangements for an upcoming assignment.’

Mike raised his hand. ‘If I might say something, sir, before you start.’

Philpott sighed. ‘Hurry up, then.’

‘I want to take a couple of weeks of my outstanding leave to nose around the situation in the Vale of Kashmir. You know, the troubles the clergyman wrote to the Security Council about.’

‘Why would you want to do that?’

Mike adjusted his body language to look candid and open. ‘I thought that if a small fuse were stepped on now, it would prevent major explosions later.’

‘No,’ Philpott said. ‘I can’t agree. Out there, stepping on a small fuse could mean simultaneously putting your foot on a land mine. It’s not a place for one-man campaigns.’

Mike stared at Philpott for a long moment. ‘I’m disappointed you feel that way.’

‘No need to be,’ Philpott said. ‘There is time we can borrow.’

‘Huh?’

‘The ballistics-update course that you and the other members of Task Force Three should be attending from Tuesday next — it’s been put back two weeks.’

Mike looked at Whitlock, who was now sitting beside him. He looked back at Philpott. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘As I promised I would, I gave extended consideration to Reverend Young’s plea. I also spoke to Sufi Gopal in our Delhi office. He spoke without the clergyman’s passion, but his calm words were a good deal more chilling. I’ve decided there is enough criminal rumbling in Kashmir to justify organized UNACO intrusion.’

Mike stared. ‘Really?’

‘It’s what I called the three of you here to discuss. It’s a genuinely worrying picture. There is escalating terrorism, there is drug running, there is the calculated disruption of peaceful development, and there’s the possibility that even a small increase in friction could spark off fighting that would involve Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and China.’

Mike was still bewildered at the turn of events. He had been sure Philpott had thrown this one out. ‘You’re saying we can go in as a team?’

‘Indeed,’ Philpott said. ‘I believe a little collective defusing would be in order.’ He passed three clipped documents along the table. ‘These are preliminary strategic manoeuvres worked out between Sufi Gopal and myself. Let me have your comments and any suggested revisions of strategy by this time tomorrow.’

Sabrina frowned. ‘Is that it? Is the meeting over?’

Philpott nodded. They all stood.

‘That means I’ve got to hang about in these clothes for another two hours and still turn up at the Arcadia looking glitzy and fresh.’

‘Go home and take them off,’ Whitlock said.

‘I can’t do that. I can’t take clothes off, then put them on again in a couple of hours. I’d feel like I was wearing stuff that should be in the cleaner’s. And if I feel that way, I’ll look that way. In front of her.’

‘Go shopping,’ Mike said. ‘That’ll keep you on your feet for two hours without noticing it, and you won’t get your duds creased.’

Sabrina beamed at him. ‘Great idea,’ she said.

Whitlock stayed behind when Sabrina and Mike had gone. ‘I spoke to Carl Grubb earlier,’ he told Philpott.

‘The private investigator?’

‘I asked him to keep a watch on the funeral home where they’re holding Arno Skuttnik’s body. Quite a few people have shown up to pay their respects. Other staff from the hotel where he worked, his neighbours …’

Philpott was drumming the table softly. ‘C.W.,’ he said, ‘you wouldn’t have volunteered this information if it had been devoid of relevance, am I correct?’

‘I was working up to it, the relevant bit.’

‘Just skip the presentation. What’s the story?’

‘Adam Korwin showed up.’

‘What?’ Philpott’s eyes grew wide. ‘To look at the body?’

‘Grubb was watching from an adjoining room. He said the way Korwin looked at the corpse, he was there to satisfy himself it was who people said it was.’

Philpott shook his head slowly. ‘Can we be sure it was Korwin?’

‘I have the Polaroids. It was him, all right.’

‘I don’t know whether to feel good or bad about this.’

‘It’s intriguing,’ Whitlock said. ‘An old immigrant with no family, no skills, no interesting history, no status you could measure, dies suddenly, and who shows up to run an eye over the body?’

‘Adam Korwin,’ Philpott breathed. ‘Surprise, surprise …’

Korwin was the doyen of US East Coast spy-masters. During the cold war his name had been cited by three Kremlin defectors, and his status as a principal Russian spy-handler had been confirmed by highly-placed Eastern Bloc sources. But Korwin was so good at his job that he had worked for thirty years under the noses of the FBI and CIA without once doing anything even remotely suspicious. To all appearances he was a harmless self-employed upholsterer, and no one could muster enough on him to work up a believable extradition order.

‘What the hell was his connection with Skuttnik?’ Philpott said.

‘That’s my next avenue of enquiry. Assuming you want me to take this further.’

‘I’ll say I do.’

‘It’ll take time. What about Kashmir?’

‘With a touch of re-jigging and enough local help, that’s a job Mike and Sabrina can tackle. Don’t worry about it. Concentrate on the link between the late Arno Skuttnik and the boys from Red Square.’

Lenny Trent called that afternoon while Mike was in the TF3 suite, boning up on the geography of northern India and Kashmir. Maps and books were spread across two tables and a gazetteer lay open on the carpet. When the phone rang he had to dig it out from under the concertina folds of a Delhi street directory.

‘Mike. It’s Lenny. You still interested in pin-pointing the whereabouts of Paul Seaton?’

‘It’s only been one day, Lenny. Of course I’m still interested. I’m flying out to India before the end of the week, so you could say I’m really anxious to get a line on him.’

‘I may have something for you.’

‘So soon?’

‘Idle conversation can be a golden shovel, Mike. You never know what it’ll turn up.’

‘I’ll put that on the cork board.’

‘At lunch today I talked to my colleagues in general terms about what you and I discussed yesterday — the Afghanistan initiative, the way terrorist groups and drug routes have blossomed since the Russkies moved out — and I asked if anybody had ever had confirmation of the alleged drug convoys running from Kashmir down the western territories into the Punjab. Louise, who is in liaison with our north-west Indian contacts all year round, said she’d heard the convoys had stopped. Pakistani Army hotshots on the border had made it too dangerous.’

‘Oh, well…’

‘Hang on,’ Lenny said. ‘Louise then told me she’d heard from a good source that the American guy who led the big convoy was running another one now.’

‘Did she say where?’

‘From up near the Wular Lake region in northwest Kashmir, down the western territories to a destination unknown. It could be Batala or Kangra — they’re places where you’ll find run-on links for any kind of contraband.’

‘Fascinating, Lenny. But it still sounds like hearsay.’

‘You’re not letting me unfold this the way I want,’ Lenny complained. ‘Just listen. When Louise told us about the new convoy route, up pipes Jonathan, our satellite communications guy. He said he visited the Aerial Defence Department’s tracking and reconnaissance centre at Arlington six weeks ago, and they showed him some high-definition photographs, computer enhanced, taken from three miles up. He was impressed, especially by one that showed a suspected bandit convoy in the Pirpanjal Mountains in western Kashmir.’

‘That sounds more promising.’

‘Let me finish. The faces of several of the men in the horse convoy were clearly visible, so Jonathan says. I asked him if the leader’s face was showing but he wasn’t sure, he just recalled they were great pictures.’

‘Lenny, you just made my day. I’m really grateful.’

‘What are you gonna do? Get hold of the pictures?’

‘Not easy, but yes, that’s what I plan to do,’ Mike said.

‘Don’t mention me or my people, will you? Jonathan was shown the stuff as a favour, and because I suppose the Aerial Defence guys couldn’t help showing off. It was classified material and Jonathan was warned not to talk about any of it outside his professional circle.’

‘And he didn’t.’

‘But I did. So keep shtum, unless you want Customs at Delhi to find an embarrassment of heroin in your baggage.’

‘Noted. Thanks again, Lenny. You’re a sweetheart.’

It took twenty minutes to raise anyone at Aerial Defence in Arlington who would speak to Mike. When he finally located a USAF lieutenant attached to Satellite Reconnaissance, the man was not keen to route the call to anyone with more authority.

‘Lieutenant Ross, I need to discuss access to possibly classified aerial photographs,’ Mike said, setting out his case all over again. ‘I have Level One security clearance, you can make an integrity check with your own central computer right now. My security rating, plus my connection with the UN Security Council, permits me access to individuals and to data at the most sensitive levels.’

‘I daresay all that is correct, Mr Graham, but I have no authorization to connect you with any other person at this facility.’

‘Then who can patch me through to where I need to go?’

‘Certainly not me,’ Ross said coldly. ‘And even if I knew of such an individual, I haven’t the authorization to connect you with him in order that he might help you.’

‘This is crazy.’

‘You’re entitled to your interpretation, sir.’

Mike put down the phone to kill the connection, then picked it up again. He tapped in the number of C.W. Whitlock’s mobile. When Whitlock answered, Mike explained the Catch-22 conversation he’d had with the man at Aerial Defence.

‘You went by the wrong route,’ Whitlock said. ‘They don’t talk to anybody they don’t know. The officer who froze you out, he would have checked the list of known characters. The short of it is, unless you’ve first of all been on face-to-face terms with someone up there, they won’t give you the time of day by phone or fax.’

‘Do they know you?’

‘Of course they do,’ Whitlock said smoothly.

Mike explained what he was trying to get. He added that he would deem it a favour if Whitlock said nothing to Philpott about the matter.

‘What have you got going there?’ Whitlock demanded. ‘A vendetta?’

‘Something of the kind,’ Mike said; he knew an outright lie wouldn’t work. ‘It’s a long story.’ He paused. ‘Well, no, it isn’t really, but this is not the time …’

‘Tell you what,’ Whitlock said. ‘If I get hold of what you’re after, you’ll tell me what’s behind it. Deal?’

‘For Pete’s sake, C. W…’

‘Deal?’

Mike nodded at the receiver. ‘Deal.’

4

Next morning the plans for the Kashmir assignment were firmed up and finalized in the briefing suite. It was agreed that Mike would be flown directly to Delhi, then taken north by helicopter to the mountains north-west of the Vale of Kashmir. There he would receive an intensive introduction to the region from a Kashmiri Indian, Ram Jarwal, who was a UN Area Observer stationed near Srinagar, in the west of the Indian-administered territory of Kashmir.

Sabrina would spend a single day being briefed by a team of WHO specialists before she travelled to a US-operated commercial airfield at Dehra Dun, eighty kilometres north-west of Delhi. From there she would be spirited northward and would finally become fully visible driving a car into the town of Kulu, in the Pradesh region, 160 kilometres south of the Kashmir border.

‘As ever with agents collecting peripheral intelligence,’ Philpott said, ‘we want Sabrina to appear to have been around for a while, without anyone being able to pinpoint the place or time she arrived. The rule here is always worth remembering — a reassuring presence and a hazy history make for convincing cover.’

On her journey northward, Sabrina would carry the credentials of a WHO Ecology Monitor.

‘Since you will both arrive in the Vale of Kashmir by different means and at different rates of progress,’ Philpott continued, ‘it’s to be hoped you’ll pick up widely different intelligence in the early stages of your assignment. What we need to know, principally, is the severity of criminal activity — of recent origin, remember — in the target region. Long-standing problems are already accommodated by a number of means; we need to know what’s being added to make the pot boil over, as it were. The causes could be far more widespread than Reverend Young or our observers think. The short version is, we badly need hard intelligence.’

‘Nothing to be taken for granted,’ Sabrina murmured, scribbling.

‘Quite so,’ Philpott said. ‘We need to know the nature of the beast, where it’s from and how far it sprawls. In more realistic terms, we need to find out how best to counter and prevent a series of political reactions which could result in an Indo-Chinese bloodbath.’

Mike wanted to know if current intelligence still indicated that the main troubles were orchestrated by one or two terrorist groups.

‘That is still the view of our best-informed observers,’ Philpott said. ‘You may find differently once you get past the various façades, of course. If you do discover you’re up against something that calls for a small army rather than a couple of smart saboteurs, then don’t indulge in heroics. Evaluate the position, report to me, then clear out.’