Saul's Game Page 12

“What about Gerry?” Carrie asked.

  “Gerry’s PNG. Gerry’s bloody finished.”

  “PNG?”

  “Sorry, persona non grata. Our little world has its own language; sorry, sorry.”

  “What did he do to get PNG? Get thrown out of Syria? In America, some of us regard it as a badge of honor,” Carrie said.

  “Haven’t the foggiest. Everyone assumes he’s MI6, but of course, naughty to talk about that. It wasn’t Damascus, whatever happened there. No, dearest, Gerry’s train ran off the rails before that,” she mused. “Of course, Simon D-J absolutely loathes him. The only thing no one understands is why he hasn’t cashiered him already.” She looked sharply at Carrie. “Why the hell are you so bloody interested all of a sudden? He’s not rich, darling, and he’s not exactly dishy, our Gerry, is he?”

  “No biggie, really.” Carrie shrugged. “Apart from a couple of people at our consulate, you two are the only people I know in Istanbul. Why?”

  “Gerry’s a sod.” Sally made a face. “Bugger Gerry.”

  What happened there? Carrie wondered. They each took another hit on the hashish pipe and went back out to the entry hall. Gerry joined them at the guest-book table. He looked like a boy, ready to escape school any way he could. Carrie looked around. Eleven P.M.; early by Istanbul standards. The gathering was still going strong.

  “Have you been enjoying the soirée, mes amies?” a young dark-haired Frenchman behind the guest-book table asked.

  “Wonderful,” Carrie said. “Best party of the season,” she wrote in the guest book.

  “Formidable,” Gerry said, signing. “Incroyable.”

  “Simon of Duncan-Jones will be cheesed at you leaving so early,” Sally said.

  “Excellent,” Gerry said. “He can mime telling me off in the morning. He can practice with the bloody frogs.”

  “You’re such a prick, Gerry,” Sally said, turning and going back into the main room.

  Carrie hesitated for a moment, then followed Gerry outside. The two of them stood in the crowded street outside the embassy, light spilling from nearby shops. There were electric lights strung over the street and they had to get out of the way as a red-and-white tram came clanging by.

  “I believe our Sally’s going to try her luck with the Frenchman at the table,” he said.

  “Why is she so pissed at you? Did you kick her out of bed?” Carrie said.

  He didn’t answer, just began to walk. She stayed with him.

  “Jeez, that’s it, isn’t it? She wanted to screw you and you said no, you shit. Is that it?”

  He stopped and looked at her. People, mostly Turks, walked around them, ignoring them.

  “I like Sally. She’s at the curling-together-by-the-fire stage, so she won’t be that old woman in the tattered sweater who lives alone with thirty cats, but entre nous I don’t fancy her that way. Where to?” he said.

  “There are ways of doing it,” Carrie said. “There are ways.”

  “Well, why don’t you bloody well teach me? Because I’ve had plenty of women slam the door in my face and they didn’t seem to mind the least little bit.” He looked at her closely. “You seem lost. Where do you want to go?”

  “I’m not sure,” Carrie said. “I’m pretty high.”

  Almost unconsciously, they moved with the flow of the crowd toward Taksim Square.

  “Do you want to get a drink? There’s a semidecent Irish pub in Taksim Square.”

  “No thanks. I’ve had enough obnoxious Brits for one night,” Carrie said, swaying and walking unevenly. Then, aware of how that came out, “Sorry, I didn’t mean you.”

  “Of course you did,” he said. “It’s all right. We were obnoxious. We sit in our own grand consulate stew, poisoning each other with our own juices.”

  Carrie stopped walking.

  “No, I didn’t mean you,” looking at him, his unruly hair haloed by the haze of electric lights over the street. “I meant your asshole of a boss, Simon Dunkin’-Donuts or whatever the hell he calls himself.” She touched his arm. The whole purpose of her coming to Istanbul was to get him alone and talking. “I want to go to your place.”

  Something in his face changed. His eyes, the lines in his forehead; he looked younger, more attractive. She became conscious of all the people in the street. The city had an electricity about it, like New York or London, she thought. A street vendor selling simit, Turkish-style bagels, in the crowd was calling out, “Simit! En iyi!”

  “Does that mean you want to sleep with me?” he said.

  “I haven’t decided. Do you have something to drink? Something decent?”

  “Just a bottle of Yeni raki. Look, I haven’t done this . . . it’s been some time. If you’re not sure, there’s a rooftop bar not too far from here.”

  “My God, when it comes to sex, Englishmen are unbelievable. No wonder Sally’s ready to hump the furniture. If we have sex, we have sex. We have to talk,” she said.

  “Regarding . . . ?” He smiled.

  “Vauxhall Cross,” she said, referring to the location of MI6 headquarters in London, and his smile disappeared.

  He had a studio flat on the top floor of a building in the Eskişehir neighborhood in Beyoglu. From his window he showed her, over the roofs of buildings on down a hill, you could catch a fragmentary glimpse of the minarets of the Dolmabahçe mosque, lit up at night against the darkness of the Bosphorus.

  They sat on the bed against the wall, with glasses of raki, mixed with water and ice from the fridge. Carrie, her legs curled beneath her, was feeling, not better, but more normal now. Not so buzzy. The clozapine had kicked in, thank God.

  Between them on the bed were the photos and flash drive with the video she’d shown him on her laptop of the Russian, first with Abu Nazir, then with Abd al Ali Nasser.

  “His name’s Lebedenko. Syarhey Lebedenko,” he told her, pointing at the photo of the Russian.

  “You know him?” she asked.

  “Too bloody well. Biggest catch of my life—and he ruined it. My life. And it wasn’t even his fault.”

  “So why didn’t MI6 tell Langley who he was when we inquired?”

  “Oh, Carrie, darling, you are naive about us Brits. The one absolute rule that VC holds sacred above all others, that must never ever be broken, is ‘Never expose the holes in our undies to the Cousins.’”

  “Meaning us Americans?”

  “Indeed.”

  “And this was a hole?”

  “Like your Grand Canyon is a ditch,” he said, finishing his raki. He got up to refill their glasses.

  “How’d you meet?” she asked.

  He looked sharply at her. “None of this gets back to Vauxhall Cross?”

  “Not even Langley. Just you, me, and the only man in the whole damn Company I trust,” she said, crossing her heart like the little Catholic girl she once was.

  “We were running a honey trap,” Gerry said, nodding. “This was Skopje. Piss-all god-awful stinking Macedonia. Gorgeous country. Mountains, forests, but sweet mother of God, the bunghole of the universe. New Year’s Eve, 2003. You Americans, and we Brits right behind you, were banging the war drums to charge saber tips up into Iraq. All on bullshit intel, but that, as you’ll see, is part of our bedtime story. Because this, my darling Carrie”—she’d told him her real name; part of the deal, as Saul had indicated she might have to, for him telling her the gospel truth and nothing but—“is a love story.”

  “Who was the target? Of the honey trap?” she asked.

  “A UN pooh-bah, down from Pristina, Kosovo, for the sex. In those days, there were whole towns of Macedonia that were brothels pure and simple, a giant neon stop on the sex trade motorway. The op was equally slimy. VC, that is, Vauxhall Cross, was pushing us to ‘persuade’ UN types to support our upcoming attack on Iraq. All on bullshit intel from MI6 and the CIA.”

  “Not our finest hour,” Carrie said, half to herself.

  “Well, we weren’t exactly Churchillian either.” He nodded. “The girl
, Mariana, pretty little thing. Honey-blond hair. Like a little angel. She’d been trafficked from Moldova; sold for four hundred dollars American. We’d paid off her Albanian pimp, a miserable piece of human fecal waste named Agron, gave him an extra hundred euros to shut his blowhole, and told her if she played along with us, she’d be back in Chişinău—or the UK, if she wished—by the following night. Poor girl just wanted to go home.”

  “What happened?”

  “A rumpus. Banging, screaming. On the floor above us. Sounded like someone was being killed. Of course, we were in the next-door room, peeking at our dirty little video screen, me feeling like a perv, when little Mariana comes running in, clad in nothing but her undies, Pooh-bah with his pants down, the honey trap ruined, and she’s begging me to come help.

  “She’s sobbing, pulling at me desperately. Something about her best friend, Alina. So up we go, me with my Beretta, and my backup, a big off-duty Macedonian copper named Boban, who grabs—no joking—this big brass knuckle-duster with a knife, looked like something from World War One—and we run upstairs, expecting to save some sexy young thing, Alina. Sir Galahad to the rescue, eh?”

  “I actually like that.” Carrie smiled. “What happened?”

  “It was that scum, Agron. He had a bloody nose and banged-up eyelid, but he and one of his mates, who had a length of iron pipe, were pounding on a poor sod, who kept trying to punch Agron, screaming, ‘Where is she, you bastard? Where is she?’ Then the mate hit the aforementioned sod a wicked blow to the arm that broke it—you could hear it—then punched him in the side of the head, and he was down, stunned, helpless, but still demanding to know where she was.

  “Agron pulls out a switchblade, grabs the guy’s head, and is about to stab it in his eye when I put the Beretta to Agron’s head and suggested he reconsider. Boban is less gentle with the mate.”

  “And the poor sod?”

  “Lebedenko. I didn’t know it, but he was the biggest fish of my life. Not Russian, by the way. From Belarus. Minsk. More about that in a sec.”

  He poured refills for them both, added the water from a pitcher, then stirred the raki with his finger, drained it, and looked at her.

  “You really are the damnedest woman. Pretty too. Suppose I shouldn’t say that. Am I a total fool?”

  “Not total. Everyone’s lonely,” she said quietly.

  “The damnedest woman,” he muttered. “Where were we?”

  “The fight,” she said.

  “Right. Turns out Lebedenko had paid Agron four thousand euros to pay off this sex slave Alina’s quote-unquote ‘debt’ to him. But when he came to pick her up, she was gone. Agron had sold her to—we later found out—a Bosnian trafficker from Mostar, figuring to kill Lebedenko and so get paid twice for the girl.

  “We put Agron and his mate in the boot of Agron’s Volkswagen, took Lebedenko with us, and drove—it wasn’t far, the brothel was out past Mother Teresa—into the forest going toward Vodno. We stopped in the middle of the woods, took them out, tied them to a tree, persuaded them we were about to kill them, and basically got everything we could out of them. Which was, among other things, the name of the pimp they sold the girl to and where to get hold of him.

  “We patched up Lebedenko as best we could. He and I spent the rest of the night drinking Russian vodka in a bar right next to the brothel. Bar was a bog of a place, but it stayed open all night just for us. He showed me a photo of Alina. Carrie, even in a photo, she was a stunner. Long dark hair, unbelievable blue eyes. Sure she was less than half his age. Maybe more. He didn’t give a rat’s arse. Lebedenko was over the moon for her.

  “You know how it is, sometimes, those of us in this game. Even if we’re enemies, sometimes we just connect. I used MI6 resources to help track down Alina. Because Lebedenko was an incredible find. His firm, Belkommunex, was a front company. They weren’t subtle about it either. I mean, bloody hell, it was located in Minsk on Nezalezhnostsi Prospekt, right across the effin’ street from KGB headquarters.

  “It was Lebedenko’s company that sold Saddam Hussein the mustard and sarin gas he’d used on the Kurds. They were also involved with certain key instruments for Saddam’s Osirak nuclear reactor, the one that the Israelis destroyed. Lebedenko knew more about WMDs in Iraq than Saddam himself. That night, after we’d killed a couple of bottles of Russian Standard between us, both of us nine-tenths pissed, he told me Saddam was bluffing. There were no WMDs in Iraq.”

  “You knew? Before the war?”

  He nodded. “When I sent that report to VC, they buried it—and me. I had forgotten the most elementary rule of government service: ‘never tell your masters what they don’t want to hear,’” he said.

  “And the girl?”

  “Total cock-up.” He grimaced. “She got packaged and repackaged. Wound up getting sold to some Saudi princeling. One of the many, many offspring. Nasty rich and swinish as it gets. Private parties outside Riyadh. Apparently auctioned off her virginity a couple of dozen times. Men wanted to believe. She was that drop-dead gorgeous. After that, sometimes twenty, thirty men a night. By this time, the price for buying her out had gone up, way up. At one point, it was a hundred and thirty thousand pounds sterling. Poor Lebedenko couldn’t compete.

  “Eventually, she got AIDS. Her looks began to go. The princeling sold her to somebody else. But here’s the thing. Lebedenko still loved her.

  “No matter where she was—and I made sure to keep him posted—he would scratch up the money, get on a plane, put on a condom . . . see, it really is a kind of what? Compulsion? Love? You tell me,” he said.

  That word, she thought. Love, the undefined country.

  “What about her? Alina? How does she feel?”

  “Who the hell knows?” He shrugged. “After all that happened to her? Her family’s starving, like the rest of her whole bloody country, so according to Mariana, she applies for a job as a waitress in a restaurant in Italy. Next thing she knows she’s being gang-raped and sold as a sex slave in Macedonia. You know the rest. Lebedenko isn’t older than her. He’s decades, aeons older than her. How the devil can she feel? On the other hand, he’s the only person in the world who’s trying to help her. Six years he’s been trying to free her. You tell me how she feels?”

  “You’re right. Who knows?” Carrie said. “Where is she now?”

  “Bahrain. Manama. Private club.”

  “And Lebedenko?”

  “He needs forty thousand American dollars. He’s got eighteen. If someone were to stake him . . . ?”

  “You mean for twenty-two thousand we could—Lord!” She stared at him, sitting there, all angles on the bed, like an aging graduate student.

  She had to get this to Saul, she thought. This could be the ball game. Then something hit her. There was a catch. There’s always a catch, Carrie.

  “Wait!” she said. “You said he was a big fish. That he was connected. Sold sarin gas to Saddam. What else? Abd al Ali Nasser in Syria said you vouched for Lebedenko. What are we talking about? And if you were able to schmooze with al Ali Nasser, why’d they kick you out of Syria? What’s missing here?”

  “Clever girl, Carrie. Idiots like Simon, what-did-you-call-him, Dunkin’-Donuts, don’t see any of it, do they? Très good.” He smiled. “Because what al Ali Nasser may have forgotten to mention was that our little friend of the working girl, Syarhey Lebedenko, wasn’t out of the poison-sarin-gas business. He was selling tons of it to Syria through the Mukhabarat. Outing me, a British diplo-slash-MI6 agent so they could chuck me out made Lebedenko look aces to al Ali Nasser, made al Ali Nasser look even better to President Assad, and made me look like royal shit to VC, which is what they pretty much thought of me anyway,” he said.

  “So that’s why MI6 didn’t tell us about Lebedenko or you. It’s worse than holes in your undies,” Carrie said. “MI6 had intel there were no WMDs that might’ve stopped us from going into Iraq and never passed it along to us. No wonder you’re P—what’s the expression?”

  “PNG,
Carrie. Persona non grata. I’m the family embarrassment. They don’t want me around. They can’t get rid of me. They can’t let anyone know I exist. I’m the perfect metaphor for the modern Englishman, the Invisible Man.”

  “Ah, but we had other sources. Moscow Station should’ve known about Lebedenko. He was KGB. Right across the street from the KGB office in Minsk, you said. So why couldn’t they find him?”

  “You’re warm. You’re burning. I told you he was a jolly big catch, didn’t I? If he was being run—and let’s face it, Belarus is not an independent country no matter what they pretend; when Russia sneezes, they get pneumonia—then one must ask the question of the day: who the bloody hell was running him? Remember, our lover boy, Lebedenko, has been around awhile. So who ran him, eh? Back in the day? Before the SVR? Back in the bad old KGB Cold War days? Maybe someone who’s moved up in the world. Way up.”

  “Holy shit, Gerry. Are you talking about the president of Russia?” she said.

  Gerry smiled.

  “Of course,” she said. “He would have had all those KGB records about him destroyed. Anyone who would have said anything would have been either gotten rid of or . . . no wonder the CIA’s Moscow Station came up empty.”

  She finished her raki and put the empty glass, along with the photo and the flash drive, on the nightstand, then stood up and pulled off her top.

  “It’s getting late. Turn off the light,” she said.

  He did, then undressed. They fumbled on the bed, pulling off clothes, groping at each other, trying to find room on the bed and a comfortable way to fit together.

  “Is this really happening?” he said, cupping her breasts with his hands.

  “Wait. Back in Macedonia. What happened with the girl, Mariana?” she asked.

  “I sent her back to Chişinău. Gave her whatever cash I could spare. Not much. A hundred quid, but it was something. They have nothing there.”

  “And the Albanians?”

  “Put ’em back in the boot. Boban tossed ’em in the local lockup. A double win for old Boban. He got to keep the money they had on them plus credit for the arrest, plus he got to take over their share of the brothel and their girls in addition to his own. Told you he was bent. The entire country’s a bolluxed-up bunghole. Oh God, that feels good.”