Brian Freemantle - The Run Around

‘Nothing,’ ordered Berenkov. ‘He is to be treated normally.’ What, he wondered, passed for normality in a place like this?

Vasili Zenin had decided to sleep at the apartment to examine it fully in the light of the following morning. And he did so very fully indeed, studying the maps and diagrams of the conference buildings and gardens that the woman had provided and calculating from them the sightlines available from the corner window overlooking the entire area. Definitely the sloped lawn designated for the commemorative photograph, the Russian determined. The trees he’d feared from ground level might interfere would be no problem and if there were any winter sunlight it would be sufficiently to one side not to impair his vision. He needed the accuracy of the rifle sight to assess the precise distance but he did not think the range to be any greater than four hundred metres, from which he had never missed.

Zenin turned away from the window and saw the disarranged bed through the open bedroom door. A very definite mistake to have brought her back here, he recognized again. But one that had been made and about which there was no benefit in continued recrimination: sexually she had been one of the most exciting women he’d known and supplied a need, like she would again.

Sulafeh Nabulsi was less than a mile away in the main conference building, taking the care she had shown from the day of her arrival to be recognized by the security guards. She, too, was thinking of what had happened in the apartment. She knew he would get her away after the killing, because he had promised he would. They could live together, she decided. It would be wonderful to be his woman.

Permanent State Department officials had, of course, organized the President’s European trip, advance groups liaising with the host countries in each capital months before, but the planning had personally been that of James Bell himself. It was the Secretary of State who had either approved or vetoed every one of Anderson’s public appearances and selected the people whom the man would meet, both publicly and privately. In addition he had insisted upon seeing the drafts and then the finally prepared speeches that Anderson would make at each event and function, determined nothing would be out of place for what he recognized to be the triumphant swan-song of his friend’s presidency. Berlin was as successful as Bell intended the entire trip to be. It began with an impressive arrival ceremony, where Anderson was greeted at Tegel airport by the West German president. Together they inspected a guard of honour to the accompaniment of a full band before the President gave the podium speech at which the theme was struck for every address the man was to make: Clayton Anderson, the man dedicated to peace. In the evening the Chancellor gave a glittering banquet to which Martha Bell wore a shimmering silk gown and once more outshone Janet Anderson, whose husband gave his second speech in which he spelled out more directly that the thrust of his two terms of office had been to mediate and solve intractible international problems and remove forever the threat of war which had divided his host country. In the morning — for internal US consumption — there was the required visit to an American army base to see and talk with troops forming part of the NATO commitment, which once more provided a forum for another speech, Anderson looking forward to the time when tensions between East and West had been swept away to make such a commitment and such an Allied force unnecessary. And an even more required visit to the Berlin Wall. It was the best television and photographic opportunity during this stage of the European trip and Bell had devoted great care to it, even arranging for an elevated platform to be constructed for the cameramen and photographers alongside the observation tower which Anderson mounted to stare grave-faced across the wire and the mines and the automatically triggered machine-guns into a gaunt East Berlin. Here — brilliantly — there was no speech. Anderson was pictured slowly and sadly shaking his head and he shook his head again to shouted questions from journalists demanding his impression, only allowing himself to be pressured at the moment of entering his car to say that the Wall was a testimony that required no words. There were provisions, of course, for private talks between Anderson and the Chancellor and the preceding briefing session was the first opportunity since the conversation aboard Air Force One for the President and the Secretary of State to talk privately and alone.

‘You know what I regret, Jim?’ mused Anderson.

‘What?’

‘That Kennedy got in first with his I am a Berliner speech: that would have gone down well today.’

‘Circumstances have changed, Mr President.’

‘Still a hell of a speech,’ insisted Anderson. ‘Anything new out of Geneva?’

‘Nothing.’

‘False alarm then?’

‘It’s looking more and more like it.’

‘You’ve got a lot of private reassuring to do in Geneva,’ reminded Anderson. ‘I had to lean on Jerusalem more than anyone else to get them to the same conference table as the Palestinians and I don’t want any backlash to pull the Jewish vote at home away from the party.’

‘I understand,’ said Bell.

‘I want you to fix up as many meetings as you can with the Israeli Foreign Minister and anyone else you consider necessary,’ said Anderson. ‘You tell Cohen and anyone else who needs to be told that however it might look publicly that privately we’re still in their corner: always have been and always will be.’

‘I’ll do that,’ promised Bell.

‘You think it would be risky to give an unattributable briefing about that to the important media people?’

‘Yes,’ said Bell, at once. ‘If it were datelined out of Geneva it would be instantly picked up by the Arabs. And I’m not thinking primarily of the Palestinians: I’m thinking of the Syrians and the Jordanians. Don’t forget their Foreign Ministers are going to be there, too.’

‘I’m not forgetting either that there are more Jews in New York State than in the State of Israel and that the Jewish vote — and the Jewish lobby — is goddamned important,’ said Anderson.

‘An accusation of secret deals and secret protocols could wreck the conference,’ said Bell, adamantly. ‘Cause a walk-out.’

The President retreated, at once. ‘OK. But you make sure the Israelis know the score. And make sure, too, if you can, that the right word gets relayed back home — America I mean, not Israel.’

‘There won’t be any misunderstandings or ill feeling,’ assured the Secretary of State.

‘Are there any outstanding requests from Jerusalem?’

‘There are some aid packages, in total something around half a billion,’ remembered Bell. ‘And there are the continuing arms supply agreements: a whole bunch of stuff, missiles, aircraft, things like that.’

‘Nothing is for nothing,’ said Anderson, decisively. ‘You let them know I am grateful for the concessions they’ve made and that they can have what they want; that they’ve my word on it.’

‘The arms supply might be awkward.’

‘How so?’

‘The keynote is peace, right?’ reminded Bell. ‘We’ve got Israeli and Arab at last around a conference table and we’re going to provide the Palestinians with a homeland. Doesn’t it look contradictory to take away the reason for fighting with one hand and maintain Israel’s war machine with the other?’

Anderson sat with his head reflectively forward on his chest, momentarily silent. Then he said: ‘One or two commentators could work up quite a head of steam with that scenario, couldn’t they?’

‘I think it’s a positive danger.’