Gerald Seymour - The Untouchable

'The only fox he'll ever have seen will have been on Wandsworth Common.'

'What you don't tell him is what I'm asking you to do. I want a total trawl to identify any call on a mobile this morning from the Pimlico district of London to Sarajevo. Shouldn't be that difficult, but I need the help of your old crowd, and GCHQ and the National Security Agency.'

'Are we moving from foxes to rotten apples?'

'Jarring them up, Mr Cork, creating mistakes.'

' I'll do that – and what do I tell, because I don't have time on my side, my esteemed minister?'

'Give him your word that there will be, in the future, total co-operation between the Sierra Quebec Golf team and the National Crime Squad.'

'Starting when? I have to tell him when.'

'Before Christmas.'

'Dammit, today's the nineteenth of March!'

He heard Dougie Gough's fulsome chuckle from the door, and then the chief investigation officer was alone in his room. For a full minute he paced the carpet. Images raced in his mind.

Dennis Cork had never been to the Ardnamurchan peninsula, but he knew Mull, Morvern and Moidart.

He saw dark hills set with granite escarpments and rough slopes. The guns waited. Old farmers and post-men, estate labourers, crab fishermen and Dougie Gough, with his pipe lit, made a picket line. They were out on the hillside to kill the vermin that took the lambs. Down the hill came the beaters with their dogs running free. With the beaters was the young man with the heavy-lensed spectacles, struggling to keep up… Cann. The big dog fox sprang from a peat ditch and tried to double back through the beaters, but the spaniels, Labradors and lurchers turned it. The mistake of the dog fox was to run towards the guns. It was a fine animal, strong and healthy, a lamb-taker. Now Cann was first among the beaters chasing it. The dog fox was a bright colour on the dark slope of crushed bracken. Dougie Gough had the shotgun up to his shoulder, aimed, fired, and Packer fell. The beaters and the guns did not bother to retrieve the carcass They left it as carrion for the crows.

The images were gone.

Dennis Cork dialled the number of room 709 at Vauxhall Bridge Cross. He played the old boys' network and asked for the trawl to be tasked through GCHQ and on through the Americans' National Security Agency listening post at Menwith Hill on the Yorkshire moors, where the great dishes sucked in the pulses of mobile-call transmissions. He pleaded priority for the precious resources of the computers.

He walked an uncertain line.

He was exposed. He made a second call, to the minister's principal private secretary. Powerful enemies faced him. He promised that full co-operation with the National Crime Squad would begin soon.

He relied for the survival of his career on the dour Gough and the young man, Cann, and events in a far-away place over which he had no control.

' Is it all right?' The Eagle sought reassurance.

' It's fine.'

' Is he all right?'

'He's grand.'

'Did you tell him that, Mister?'

' I told him.'

Not in these days, of course, but a long time ago, when the Eagle had been at boarding school and showing an interest in law, classics masters preached the value of the study of Latin and Greek, talked about 'expansion of the mind' and 'intellectual discipline'. The Eagle, then sixteen years old, had embarked on a two-year study of which, now, little was remembered. The fighting had been the most interesting part to a teenager, the description of warfare, and the generals who directed it. A Greek general and historian, writing four centuries before the birth of Christ, had identified the surest way to win loyalty.

Xenophon had written: 'The sweetest of all sounds is praise.' The old Greek warlord and writer had been ahead in man management, and Mister had learned the same art.

'… I told him he was indispensable. I gave him all the smarm he needed.'

'You should watch him, Mister.'

'He doesn't fart without me knowing it. Yes, I'm watching him.'

'He's not one of us.'

'Leave it, Eagle. I hear you. You're "one of us", aren't you?'

'You know I am. You… '

It was Mister's way, the Eagle recognized it, to win from the disciples, the acolytes, blustered, spluttered declarations of loyalty. It demeaned them, it gave him power over them. He looked into Mister's dull eyes as he made his protestation. His voice died. The Eagle had been left at the street corner above the house while Mister and Atkins had driven on up the hill to the open ground where they'd found the line of sight the day before. Now Mister had walked back, leaving Atkins, the Mitsubishi and the launcher there.

The dusk was settling on the city.

Mister said casually, 'His place was turned over this morning – Atkins's place was done by the Church.'

'He told you?'

'He doesn't know.'

' Is he going to know?'

'Not sure… '

'Who told you?'

'Crime Squad – there's white heat between Crime Squad and the Church. The Church isn't sharing.'

' I don't want to know about "friends" in Crime Squad, but when did they tell you?'

'A lot of questions, Eagle… I heard this morning.'

'Shouldn't you have told me? I am your legal adviser, Mister.'

'What you going to do about it? You're here, they're there. It'll keep.'

'Mister, I am telling you, as your trusted adviser, we have been away too long. Be careful.'

'You worry too much. I pay you to worry, but not to overdose on it.'

The lights sprinkled below them were cut by the dark line of the river, which in its turn was bisected by the shafts of headlights criss-crossing the bridges.

With the evening came the cold, but it was not the cold that made the Eagle shiver. The dark line was the abyss into which the Cruncher had fallen. Never could the Eagle have said or thought that he was fond of the Cruncher. Sometimes he'd said, to himself, that the Cruncher was a barrow-boy, sometimes a low-life little shit. The Cruncher had always competed with him, had intervened in matters that were not his. A contract was drawn up, but Cruncher wanted to check out each paragraph and each sub-section. Days of damn work and Mister would tear it up, because of the poison fed into his ear by the Cruncher. The Eagle had never had Mister's ear the way the Cruncher had. But that had not stopped the Cruncher from disappearing into the dark line that was the river cutting through the lights of the city below. He heard a distant squealing of wheels, the scrape of unoiled metal pieces. He shivered hard. He remembered the Cruncher the last time he'd seen him, in the Clerkenwell office over the launderette, and his feet as always on the Eagle's desk, his heels resting carelessly on files, his body tipped back in a chair, the monogrammed cigarette in his hand, and the scent, the conceit as he'd talked about his plan for Mister's future in Sarajevo, his vision: You're a businessman, Mister… any businessman who's top of the tree in the UK expands his interests, goes abroad, doesn't sit on his hands, goes looking for wider horizons. The Cruncher had been in the river for half a night and a day and another whole night, like a drowned mongrel, before he'd been pulled out. It had been a dog's death.

'When are you going to do it, Mister – do something about the Cruncher?'

'You think I'd forgotten about the Cruncher?'

' I didn't say you'd forgot-'

'You think I'm scared to do something about the Cruncher?'

' I didn't say you were scared.'

'You ever known me forget anything about disrespect? You ever seen fear in me?'

' I only asked when.'

' It'll happen, Eagle, when I'm ready. What I said, Eagle, you worry too much. A man with your brain, your brilliance, you don't have a call to worry.'

The wheels' squeal came closer, was beyond the pool of light thrown down by the only high lamp on the street. The sweetest of all sounds is praise. He was not a man of violence; his own weapon was in his supreme understanding of the law… And yet he had made the devil's bargain. He had never hit a man in his life; he had reduced a grown man, an experienced surveillance executive officer – through the ammu nition given to the QC – to a muttering shambling wreck, destroyed him more effectively than if he'd been hit with a pickaxe handle, broken him. With his forensic intellect, it was the Eagle who had sprung Mister from the trial. But… but… but, for all his scruples, the violence inherent in Mister was strangely mesmerizing to the Eagle. He had a place there, beside the bully. He was sheltered by the bully. And it fascinated him. When he thought of the violence, he sweated hot excitement. He wanted to see the launcher fired, because that was Mister's response to a judge who had dared to stand against them… and he had the brain, knew it because Mister had told him so, and the brilliance. They came up the hill, into the pool of light, and the city was below them. Mister had seen them.