Names, Rooke had said: names and numbers. Jonathan is providing them by the score. To the uninitiated his offerings might seem at first glance trivial: nicknames culled from place cards at the dinner table, fugitive conversations partly overheard, the glimpse of a letter lying on Roper's desk, Roper's jottings to himself about the who, the how much, the how and when. Taken singly, such snippets made poor fare beside Pat Flynn's clandestine photographs of Spetsnaz-turned-mercenaries arriving at Bogota airport; or Amato's hair-raising accounts of Corkoran's secret rampages in the Nassau fleshpots; or intercepted bank draughts from respectable financial houses, showing tens of millions of dollars homing on Roper-related offshore companies in Curaçao.
Yet properly assembled, Jonathan's reports provided revelations that were as sensational as any great dramatic coup. After a night of them, Burr declared that he felt seasick. After two, Goodhew remarked that he would not be surprised to read of his own high-street bank manager showing up in Crystal with a suitcase full of clients' cash.
It was not so much the tentacles of the octopus as its ability to enter the most hallowed shrines that left them aghast. It was the involvement of institutions that even Burr had till now presumed inviolate, of names above reproach.
For Goodhew, it was as if the very pageantry of England was dying before his eyes. Dragging himself homeward in the small hours, he would pause to stare feverishly at a parked police car and wonder whether the daily stories of police violence and corruption were true after all, not the invention of journalists and malcontents. Entering his club, he would spot eminent merchant bankers or stockbrokers of his acquaintance and ― instead of flapping a hand at them in cheery greeting, as he would have done three months ago ― would study them from under lowered brows across the dining room, asking them in his mind: Are you another of them? Are
"I shall make a démarche," he declared at one of their late-night threesomes. "I've decided. I'll convene Joint Steering. I'll mobilise the Foreign Office for a start; they're always good for a fight against the Darkists. Merridew will stand up and be counted, I'm sure he will."
"Why should he?" said Burr.
"Why shouldn't he?"
"Merridew's brother is top man in Jason Warhole, if I remember rightly. Jason's put in for five hundred bearer bonds in the Curaçao company at half a million a crack last week."
* * *
"Dreadfully sorry about this, old boy," Palfrey whispered, from the shadows that seemed always to surround him.
"About what, Harry?" said Goodhew kindly.
Palfrey's haunted eyes glanced past him at the doorway. He was sitting in a North London pub of his own choosing, not far from Goodhew's house in Kentish Town. "Panicking. Ringing your office. Distress rocket. How did you get here so fast?"
"Bike, of course. What's the matter, Harry? You look as though you've seen a ghost. They haven't been threatening
"Bike," Palfrey repeated, taking a pull of Scotch and immediately wiping his mouth with a handkerchief as if to remove the guilty traces. "About the best thing anyone can do, bike. Fellows on the pavement can't keep up. Fellows in cars have to keep going round the block. Mind if we go next door? Noisier."
They sat in the games room, where there was a jukebox to drown their conversation. Two muscular-looking boys with crew cuts were playing bar billiards. Palfrey and Goodhew sat side by side on a wooden settle.
Palfrey struck a match and had difficulty bringing the flame to his cigarette. "Things are hotting up," he murmured. "Burr's getting a bit warm. I warned them, but they wouldn't listen. Time to take the gloves off."
"You
"Got to play both sides of the net, old boy," said Palfrey, wrinkling his nose and casting another nervous glance around the bar. "Only way to survive. Got to keep up your credibility. Both ends." A frantic smile. "Tapping my phone," he explained, pointing at his ear.
"Who is?"
"Geoffrey. Geoffrey's people. Mariners. Flagship people."
"How do you know?"
"Oh, you don't. Can't tell. No one can. Not these days. Not unless it's sort of Third World. Or the police doing it with their feet. No way." He drank, shaking his head. "It's hitting the fan, Rex. Getting a bit big." He drank again, quick sips. He muttered "Cheers," forgetting he had said Cheers already. "They tip me the word. Secretaries. Old buddies from Legal Department. They don't say it, you see. Don't have to. Not, 'Excuse me, Harry, my boss is tapping your phone.' It's hints." Two men in motorcycle leathers had begun a game of shove-halfpenny. "I say, would you mind if we went somewhere else?"
