The Night Manager полностью

"The cartels pushing pacts with each other, Rex, making nice to each other, buying themselves big-time matériel, training their boys, getting their act together ― Rex, that's a different ballpark. There just aren't that number of people in South America who do that stuff. In South America, getting your act together is power. It's as simple as that. This isn't an assignment for Enforcement. This isn't cops and robbers and shooting yourself in the foot. This is geopolitics, Rex. And what we have to do here is, we have to be able to go to the Hill and say, 'Guys, we accept the imperatives in this. We have spoken with Enforcement, Enforcement have gracefully backed off, Enforcement will do their own thing in the fullness of time, which is their right and duty as cops. Meantime this is geopolitical, this is sophisticated, this has a lot of angles and is therefore an agreed Pure Intelligence responsibility, we have the way clear for sophisticated input, by tried and trusted professionals in Pure Intelligence, acting to a geopolitical brief.' "

She had evidently finished, for like an actress pleased with her performance, she turned full face to Marjoram as if to ask, How was I? But Marjoram affected a benevolent disdain for her fighting words.

"Well, I do think there's a lot of substance in what Barbara says," he remarked, with that decent, straightforward smile he had. "Obviously, we wouldn't stand in the way of a revision of responsibilities between the services. But then the decision is hardly up to us."

Goodhew's face was set in stone. His hands lay lifelessly before him, refusing to participate.

"No," he agreed. "It is not up to you at all. It's up to the Joint Steering Committee and no one else."

"Of which your master here is chairman and you, Rex, are secretary, founder and principal benefactor," Marjoram reminded him with another collegial smile. "And, if I may say so, moral arbiter."

But Goodhew would not be mollified, not even by someone as patently conciliatory as Neal Marjoram. "A revision of responsibilities, as you call it, is in no circumstances within the gift of rival agencies, Neal," he said sternly. "Even assuming that Enforcement were prepared voluntarily to quit the field, which I gravely doubt, the agencies are not empowered to carve up their responsibilities among themselves without reference to Steering. No side deals. That's one of the things Steering stands for. Ask its chairman ― "with a pointed nod at his master.

For a moment nobody asked anybody anything, until Goodhew's master emitted a kind of slurrying grunt which contrived to indicate doubt, irritation and a touch of indigestion at the same time.

"Well, obviously, Rex," he said, striking that nasal whinny peculiar to the Conservative front benches, "if the Cousins are going to take over the Limpet case on their side of the pond, willy-nilly, we here on this side are going to have to take a cool position about whether to follow suit. Aren't we? I say if, because these are informal discussions. Nothing's come through on the formal net so far. Has it?"

"If it has it hasn't reached me," Goodhew said icily.

"The pace these bloody committees work at, we wouldn't get an answer this side of Christmas, anyway. I mean, come on, Rex, we've got a quorum. You, me, Neal here? Thought we might swing it on our own."

"It's your call, Rex," Marjoram said amiably. "You're the lawgiver. If you can't turn it round, who can? It was you who drafted the like-to-like deal: enforcers play with enforcers, spies with spies, no cross-fertilization. The Lex Goodhew we called it, quite right too. You sold it to Washington, won the war of Cabinet, gunned it through. 'Covert Agencies in the New Era': wasn't that the title of your paper? We're only bowing to the inevitable. Rex. You heard Barbara. In a choice between a graceful shimmy and a head-on collision. I go for the shimmy every time. Don't want to see you hoisted on your own petard, or anything."

Goodhew was by now usefully angry. But he was too downy a bird to let his temper get the better of him. He spoke in a reasoned voice, down the table into Neal Marjoram's honest face. He said that the Joint Steering Committee's recommendations to its chairman ― another nod at his master ― were made in full session, not by an ad hoc quorum. He said it was the Steering Committee's recorded view that the River House was over-extended and should shed more of its responsibilities rather than attempt to win back old ones, and that hitherto the minister as chairman had concurred ― "unless you've changed your mind over lunch, of course," he suggested to his master. who scowled through his cigar smoke.