Brian Freemantle - Dead End

Back in the apartment Parnell unpacked and opened one of the bottles of wine, slumping with the glass between his cupped hands, reviewing the day. He hadn’t done well – he had, in fact, been stupid, losing his temper. Too late now, for self-recrimination. He’d got it wrong, again, and deserved Jackson’s rebuke, and next time he’d try to remember and behave better. He had little doubt there would be a next time: maybe even a time after that. Bethesda had disorientated him, although not in the way Jackson suggested the FBI agents had expected him to be disorientated. He hadn’t suddenly collapsed, said anything or done anything, on being somewhere where he’d been with Rebecca, to indicate any guilt or awareness of something he hadn’t told the investigators. The disorientation had actually been far deeper than any of them had imagined. On the near-wordless return to Washington, Parnell had confronted a truth he hadn’t wanted to admit to himself, let alone to anyone else. He didn’t think he’d loved Rebecca. He had feelings, of course – maybe, in time, he would even have come to love her, although that was the most scourging of uncertainties. But not that Sunday when he’d unthinkingly talked of their living together. And not now, not ever. So, he had a lie to live, pitied by the few who knew him here, as someone who’d lost a woman whom he’d planned to marry. How difficult, he wondered, would that be to live with? Something else he didn’t know, like so much else.

He jumped, startled, at the telephone, recognizing his mother’s voice as soon as he’d answered. ‘What’s going on?’ she demanded at once.

‘You know. I told you. It’s all right.’

‘It’s not all right! I’ve been questioned. So have people at Cambridge.’

‘What!’ Some of Parnell’s wine spilled, with the urgency with which he came up out of his chair.

‘Two Americans. FBI, from the London embassy. They wanted to know if you were political. If you belonged to any organizations. That’s what they asked the people at Cambridge. I’ve had two calls, one from Alex Bell, your old tutor. Everyone here is worried about you.’

‘There’s nothing to worry about. It’s an unusual investigation.’

‘I want to come out.’

‘No,’ refused Parnell. ‘It’s not necessary and I don’t want you to.’ If he were a target, so would she be, he supposed.

‘Who’s looking after you?’

‘I’m looking after myself, very well.’

‘Why not come back? Quit and come back?’

‘That isn’t a question I thought I’d hear you ask. At this stage of the enquiry I doubt I’d be allowed to leave the country anyway. And I don’t want – or intend – to leave the country.’

‘There was an attempt to frame you once. How do you know it won’t happen again? Succeed this time?’

‘Because it won’t. I’ve got a good lawyer and I’m not going to be framed.’

‘I didn’t like being questioned as I was, as if you were still a suspect or in some way involved in terrorism.’

‘Is that what they talked about, terrorism?’

‘Of course it was! Asked about foreign countries you’d visited, how long you’d stayed there. That’s what they asked everyone else here, the same questions.’

‘I’m sorry. Call me back, with the names of everyone who was bothered. I’ll call them and apologize. And I’m sorry to you, too. I didn’t imagine it would come to that.’

‘They’re hysterical, about terrorism.’

‘Everybody is.’

‘Not everybody,’ she contradicted. ‘You want anything? Money?’

‘No, thank you.’

‘You’ll tell me if you do.’

‘Yes,’ lied Parnell.

‘Call me. I want you to call me every day.’

‘Not every day, Mother. Often.’

‘I want your lawyer’s name and contact numbers. Just in case.’

‘Just in case of what?’

‘Just in case.’

It was a welcome change for Dwight Newton to enter the Dubette corporate building on Wall Street at the same time as everyone else and take a public elevator to the executive floor. He’d been able to catch a later shuttle, too, but he’d still allowed himself time for waffles and maple syrup, unsure if the emergency meeting of the parent board and its subsidiaries would run over lunch time. He entered Edward C. Grant’s office through the secretarial cordon, to smiles and insistences it was good to see him again. The moment Newton was inside, without any greeting from behind his enormous desk, Grant demanded: ‘Bring me up to date. I need to know everything!’

The other man was frightened, Newton guessed, enjoying the thought. Prepared, having even made himself prompt notes to read on the plane from Washington, the research vice president recounted his encounter with the FBI agents, for once without any interruption from Grant.

‘The lawyers have to intervene to prevent any awkward questions?’

‘No,’ said Newton. He’d have to disclose the problem, but not this early.

‘That’s good. Right they should have been there but we don’t want to give the impression of having anything to hide.’

‘I thought we’d decided, you and I, that we didn’t have anything to hide?’ Newton actually felt superior to Grant and he enjoyed that, too.

‘What about that godamned flight number?’ Grant ignored him.

‘They didn’t ask.’

‘That’s good, as well,’ nodded Grant. ‘How did it go with the others?’

The upset wasn’t far away, accepted Newton. ‘We got a bit out of synch there.’

‘What do you mean, out of synch?’ The concern was immediate.

‘The way they set out their interview request was to see me first, then Russell Benn and after him Harry Johnson. That’s how I arranged it, to have the lawyers with me, waiting, before going on to Russell’s interview and after that to Harry’s. But they saw Harry first.’

‘Alone!’

‘Yes.’

‘Shit!’

‘I think it’s all right.’

‘It’d sure as hell better be! I want it – all of it – in every little detail!’

‘Harry’s a former Metro DC officer.’

‘I know that. Do they?’

‘They didn’t ask. He didn’t tell them.’

‘What did they ask?’

‘If AF209 ever carried anything addressed to Dubette. Which it didn’t, did it?’

Grant stared across his desk, momentarily unspeaking. Then: ‘Baldwin think that’s OK?’

‘I haven’t talked it through with him.’ Because I don’t want to be complicit, Newton thought.

‘No, perhaps not. What do you think?’

‘I’m a scientist, not a lawyer,’ refused Newton.

Grant stirred, irritably. ‘What’s Johnson say, from his police experience?’

‘That he answered all their questions completely honestly – that that’s how it could be argued in court, if it ever got to a court – that he was asked a specific question to which he provided a specific answer,’ said Newton.

Grant remained unmoving, his face fixed. With witch-doctor clairvoyance, he said: ‘What else?’

‘He didn’t tell them anything about the phone-tapping.’

‘Why not?’

‘They didn’t ask, so he didn’t offer. His interpretation of the law, you answer the questions you’re asked, not those that you’re not asked.’

‘He shouldn’t have been left by himself.’

‘It wasn’t intended he should be left by himself! I told you how it happened!’

‘He’s not to be alone if the FBI come back to him.’

‘I know that! He won’t be. If there’s another approach, he’s to tell me before it happens and we’ll get the attorneys back, with Baldwin.’

‘Did Johnson set the tap up by himself?’

‘He says so – says he learned to do it when he was with the police, and that he didn’t need help, from any electronics guys.’