Алистер Маклин: Borrowed Time

Malcolm Philpott’s attention was fixed on the television screen. He stared, unblinking, as the CNN camera panned across a pocket of hand-to-hand fighting and showed a mercenary sticking a knife in the chest of a Bosnian rebel. Over by the door behind Philpott, Secretary Crane gasped.

‘Brainless carnage,’ he hissed.

They were in the semi-dark of Philpott’s office, watching a video Philpott had switched on a moment before Crane entered. He had come in soundlessly, without knocking. He was known throughout the Secretariat building as Creeper Crane.

‘The footage is sixteen hours old,’ Philpott said. ‘An orchestrated local outburst we’d been expecting.’

‘Where?’

‘South of Banja Luka. The men in grey battle-dress are our people, Task Force Four.’

Desmond Crane stood with his back almost touching the door. His sallow skin looked tanned in the half-light from the shaded window. He winced as a TF4 man side-stepped a rifle-swipe and spun sharply, kicking his attacker in the ribs. Behind them another UNACO operative head-butted a mercenary who fell in the churned mud of the roadway.

‘Do you watch much of this stuff?’ Crane said, his words clipped, conveying censure.

‘Only what I have to. It pays to keep in touch. You weren’t suggesting,’ Philpott added coldly, ‘that I would watch combat footage for recreation?’

‘Heavens, no.’ Crane smiled, but his eyes stayed reproachful.

Philpott tapped his handset and the screen went blank. He pointed the remote at the window and touched another button. The vertical slats of the blind turned smoothly inward and the room brightened.

‘So.’ Philpott got behind his desk. ‘How can I help Policy Control?’

Crane laid a photograph face up on the desk in front of Philpott. It was a snapshot, black and white, and it showed Philpott himself, walking on a Manhattan street.

‘This must have been taken at least three years ago.’ Philpott picked it up and studied it. ‘That’s the amount of hair I still had in 1994, and the chalk-stripe suit went to the Salvation Army shop when I changed apartments a month before Christmas that year.’ He looked up at Crane. ‘What’s the significance?’

‘The picture was found by an NYPD detective among the possessions of a man called Arno Skuttnik who died last night.’

‘How did he die?’

‘Of a heart attack, in his one-room apartment at Waverly Place in Greenwich Village. You knew him, perhaps?’

‘The name isn’t familiar.’

‘Look at the writing on the back of the picture.’

Philpott turned it over. In smudged, pencilled longhand it said: Malcolm Philpott, Director of the United Nations Anti-Crime Organization (UNACO).

‘So he knew who I am.’

‘Indeed.’

‘Who was he?’

‘A seventy-year-old porter at the Washington Square Hotel. An immigrant who came to New York in 1964. Nothing exceptional is known about him – then again, nothing much at all is known about him.’

Philpott nodded patiently. ‘Do you think maybe he was engaged in espionage?’

‘Not at all. We’re pretty sure he never broke the law once in the thirty-three years he lived in New York.’

‘So what’s the problem?’

Crane stared. ‘I should have thought that was obvious.’

Philpott stared back. Crane was a man of middle years, roughly the same age as himself, but he possessed none of Philpott’s natural authority. Crane always had to reach for an effect. The reaching put him under strain, and it never failed to show.

‘Don’t you find it extraordinary, and a trifle alarming,’ he said, ‘that a porter in a Greenwich Village hotel had in his possession a photograph that identifies you as the Director of UNACO?’

‘Well, no …’

Crane’s mouth twisted. It was meant to be scornful, but again it was mainly strain that showed.

‘UNACO is not a secret organization,’ Philpott said. ‘True, we don’t advertise our existence. Our offices are unmarked, our phone numbers are not listed, and our agents and employees never acknowledge their affiliation. Our profile is minimal, but secret we are not.’

‘Yet this man, this porter, found out who you are.’

Philpott shrugged. ‘I have no theories about how he did that. But it wouldn’t have been too difficult, if he was determined.’

‘And why did he want to know about you?’

‘I have no theories about that, either.’

‘The department is very unhappy with this, Mr Philpott …’

‘The department?’

‘Policy Control. We can’t accept a situation where a senior officer of a sensitive department in the United Nations is so … so careless in his conduct of his affairs that any riffraff can find out what his job is and even take pictures of him on the street.’

Philpott stood up and came around the desk. He was smiling one-sidedly, a clear sign of displeasure.

‘I don’t really care how Policy Control feels about the way I run my life. To be frank, in my day-to-day awareness of this vast environment we share, your department seems scarcely to exist.’

Crane looked as if he had been punched. ‘I think it would be easy enough,’ he blustered, ‘to demonstrate Policy Control’s existence, and the way in which it enforces revisions of departmental procedure within the UN structure. That includes departments which grandly imagine themselves to be above any form of restraint or governance.’

‘Mr Crane, I am accountable only to two people. They are the Head of the Security Council, and the Secretary General of the United Nations. That’s it. I explain myself to no others. Now if you’ll excuse me …’ Philpott pointed to the door. ‘I’ve got real work to do.’

Crane stumped to the door and jerked it open. ‘I’ll tell my director what you said, and that you show no willingness to co-operate.’

Philpott nodded, going back behind the desk. ‘You can also tell your director that I made a suggestion.’

‘Which is?’ Crane demanded.

‘That you whistle Dixie through any orifice of your choice.’

Crane jumped aside as C.W. Whitlock strode into the office.

‘Morning, gentlemen,’ he said breezily.

Crane went out and slammed the door.

Whitlock put a folder on Philpott’s desk. ‘What’s wrong with The Creeper?’

‘There’s a leak in his self-importance. What have you got?’

‘A heartfelt letter from a missionary in the Vale of Kashmir.’ Whitlock flipped open the folder.

‘Not another one of your cries for help?’

‘Smart of you to guess, sir.’

Whitlock was an instantly likeable man, in nature and appearance. He was a native Kenyan whose white grandfather’s genes had bestowed a light umber skin, a strong jaw and a firm mouth, which Whitlock softened with a moustache.

‘The letter was sent to the Security Council, they passed it along to us. Do you want to read it?’

‘Later, perhaps,’ Philpott said. ‘Summarize for me.’

Whitlock leafed down through the documents to find the letter and his notes. Philpott couldn’t help watching him. He was incredibly fastidious in his movements, a man who had been described by a former Secretary General as fitting his role so well that it might have been moulded around him. He breathed aptitude.

‘Here it is.’ Whitlock put the letter on the desk with the notes alongside. ‘It’s from the Reverend Alex Young, a Church of England priest. He runs a medical and teaching mission at Shahdara, a village near the town of Tangmarg in the Vale of Kashmir.’