Sam Bourne - The Chosen One

‘Uri, it’s me. Maggie.’

‘Maggie! I tried calling you. Over and over. What happened to you?’

‘Long story.’

‘You always say that.’

‘But it’s really true this time.’

‘You sound…different. Are you OK?’

‘I was in an accident, but-’

‘What! What happened? Are you-’ He sounded genuinely alarmed.

‘I’m fine, really.’ She strove to keep her voice steady. ‘I’m going to be OK. I just need your help.’

‘Do you need me to come there, because-’

‘No. I need to ask you about…intelligence.’

They had rarely spoken about it, and he had always refused to provide more than the sketchiest details, but they both knew that Uri Guttman had performed his military service in Israel in the intelligence corps and that he had risen to a pretty senior, if unspecified, rank.

So now, swiftly, she gave him a very thin outline of what had happened to her. She had been investigating an issue – she could not say what – which centred on a former agent of the CIA. She had traced him to Aberdeen, had spoken to his former high school principal, had helped a nice old lady with her car battery and then found her brakes were shot and had had to jump from a speeding car.

‘Jesus, Maggie. You never learn, do you?’

‘What does that mean?’

‘About staying out of trouble.’

‘I didn’t ask to-’

‘The whole point of the Baker job was that you were meant to quit being in shitholes dealing with shitty people who want to kill each other, and you were going to have a nice desk in Washington and-’

‘That was the plan, yes. But we didn’t bank on the President fighting for his political life after two months, did we?’

‘You and danger, Maggie. It’s like some chemical attraction or something.’

‘I thought you wanted to help me.’

‘OK. Another time. What do you want to know?’

‘At the funeral in New Orleans, the retired man from, er, the Company said a whole lot of stuff I didn’t understand.’

‘But you pretended you did.’

‘Right.’

‘Like?’

‘Like blankets.’

‘Say again?’

‘He said there would have been no point killing the man we’re talking about because, “He’d have prepared his blanket.”’

‘That’s what he said? “He’d have prepared his blanket.”’

‘Yes. Those words.’

‘Exactly?’

‘Yes. I wrote it down afterwards.’ Shit. That was also in the notebook.

‘OK, we have something different in Hebrew but it sounds like a similar idea.’

‘Similar idea to what?’

‘We call it karit raka . It means a soft pillow. Like it guarantees you a soft landing if you get in trouble.’

‘My brain’s not working at full strength, Uri.’

‘Well, normally you only use the karit in an emergency, like when you’ve sent out a distress signal. Inside your pillow, which might be back at base, will be a package of information that might help your organization find you and get you out of trouble.’

‘OK.’

‘But you could also use a karit another way. Your guy said “there would be no point” killing the man because of his blanket, right?’

‘Right.’

‘So that suggests he was using it as a different kind of insurance policy. I’ve heard of this too.’ He paused, as if thinking it through. ‘Let’s say I know something sensitive.’

‘OK.’

‘And I think there would be people willing to kill me to keep whatever I know secret. It might even be the organization I work for now, or worked for in the past. I may know things they don’t want to get out.’

‘Yes.’ Maggie was thinking of Forbes/Jackson and the CIA.

‘Then I might make up a karit – a pillow or blanket or whatever – that would sit somewhere, a bundle of information that would be released automatically the moment I died.’

‘And the potential killers would know you had done it, so that would deter them from killing you. Because once you’re dead, whatever they were trying to keep hidden would come out anyway.’

‘Precisely. That makes me feel good, Maggie. Maybe your head didn’t get so banged after all.’

‘A bundle of information, you say. Like where? In a vault or something?’

‘It used to be that way. Now most guys in this line of work do it virtually. Online or something. Or so I hear.’

‘So you hear , Uri?’ Maggie said with the same smile in her voice she always deployed when she tried to squeeze a past secret from him. She was trying to think through all the questions now rushing into her mind.

‘But it obviously didn’t work. The guy I’m talking about died. It didn’t stop his killers killing him.’

‘Either he hadn’t prepared his blanket, and the bad guys knew that. Or he had, but they felt sure they could get to it before it was made public or whatever. Or they knew what was in it and weren’t frightened. Or it’s still out there. And they’re desperate to find it.’

Desperate sounded about right: desperate enough to send a car with no brakes onto the highway, where it could have killed God knows how many innocent people.

She said nothing, working through the permutations. It was Uri who spoke next: ‘Sounds like they think you’re ahead of them, Maggie.’

‘Hmm.’

‘Maggie?’

‘Let me ask you something, Uri. If it were you. If you had a blanket, if you had a karot-’

‘A karit -

‘You know what I mean. Where would-’

‘I was never quite at the karit level. But my father was, in his day. And you know what he used to say? Not just about this, about all intel things. Again and again, the same quote. From some Brit. “If you want to keep a secret, announce it on the floor of the House of Commons.”’

‘I don’t follow.’

‘Hide it in plain sight. The one place no one thinks to look. If Churchill wanted to give the code for the D-Day landings, he’d do it in a speech to Parliament. What German would think to look there?’

‘You think Company men like Forb-, like the subject of my inquiry-’

‘Don’t worry, Maggie. I guessed already.’

‘Bastard.’

‘Don’t forget your question.’

‘I’m wondering whether someone who worked, you know, for the Company, would do the same thing: hiding in plain sight.’

‘The one thing I learned about intel was how similar these guys are. The spy books have that right: a spook from London and a spook from East Berlin have more in common with each other than either of them do with their own wives.’

‘Hide in plain sight. That’s good. Thanks, Uri. For everything.’

He was telling her she didn’t have to thank him, that her only job was to concentrate on getting well, but she wasn’t listening to his voice. She was listening intently instead to other sounds coming through the phone. She had heard a door closing, the bustle of another person in the room and then a change in the register of Uri’s voice. That confirmed it: a new girlfriend, turning her own key in the door to the apartment Maggie had once regarded as home.

Now, her own voice altered, she wound things up. ‘Listen, that’s great!’ she said, the tone false and perky, grating to her own ears. ‘I owe you one.’

‘Maggie, listen, if-’

‘Gotta go! We’ll talk soon.’ She decided to expel from her mind immediately the sound she had just heard, the sound of domesticity and intimacy between Uri and a woman who was not her.

Hide in plain sight . Concentrate on that.

She could see how that would work for Winston Churchill. He was famous, everything he did was in plain sight. But what did that mean for Vic Forbes/Robert Jackson? What counted as plain sight for a man who had spent most of his life hiding in the shadows?