a Russian helicopter with a ground-to-air Stinger missile. If the pilot survived, you had to kill him with your bare hands.’
‘I heard about that. The Reagan administration sat on the details, but George Bush’s boys finally blew the whistle about what went on out there in the name of democracy.’
‘Seaton was unquestionably a talent,’ Mike said. ‘He had a genius for subversion, but he had never been stable. In 1986 he was known to be turning to Islam, and in 1987 he went native. He vanished into the hills with his own murderous little group of fundamentalists. At that time he declared he was a sworn enemy of the government of Afghanistan and the mujahedin movement. And that was the last official news of him.’
Mike paused to take a mouthful of coffee.
‘Two years ago, however, on a satellite picture taken on a routine pass over Amritsar in northern India, somebody looking a lot like Paul Seaton showed up at the head of a drug convoy travelling through the hills north of the city.’
‘Well, well.’ Lenny was suddenly more alert. He pushed his spectacles along his nose. ‘For a long time our people in India and Pakistan have been catching rumours about an American who runs drug convoys. His main route, allegedly, is along the border with Pakistan and Kashmir, then down the western territories of India as far as Firozpur in the Punjab. Until now, I was inclined to dismiss the stories as myth.’
‘Seaton’s real, no mistake. And I’ve studied the satellite picture enough times to be sure it’s him leading the horse convoy.’
‘So,’ Lenny said, ‘apart from a professional curiosity about criminal developments, what’s your special interest in Seaton?’
Mike made an effort to look blank. ‘It’s nothing I’d call special.’
‘Aw, come on …’ Lenny was openly sceptical. ‘I know you, remember? I know your different kinds of intensity. And I could do a monograph on your grades of determination. Tell me straight — are you harbouring one of those fashionable private agendas? Or a plain old personal grudge?’
‘I might be. Let’s just say Paul Seaton is owed a comeuppance. It’s been owed a long time, but certain recent events mean there’s an outside chance I can maybe do something about it.’
‘Even up the score?’
‘Something like that.’
‘What do you want me to do?’
‘Find out all you can about Seaton. If he’s in the drug trade, you’re the man to find out more.’
‘I’ll do what I can. Leave it with me.’ Lenny looked at his watch. ‘Let’s have some more coffee. Then we can swap gossip until it’s time for me to go back and terrorize another dope courier.’
UNACO occupied an entire floor of the Secretariat building on the UN’s East River site. Two hundred and sixty employees, eighty of them specialists, handled the daily administration of the world’s most efficient crime-fighting body. Thirty prime-rated field agents, recruited from international police and intelligence agencies, formed the core of the ten Strike Forces, and each Strike Force had its own suite of rooms within the network of UNACO departments. On his return from Seattle, Mike went directly to Strike Force Three’s ‘withdrawing rooms’, as Philpott called them.
To get there he had to pass through General Communications, a big, buzzing room filled with computers, telex machines, printers and satellite TV receivers. The department was staffed by twenty multilingual operators and twenty-three communications technologists, all of them women.
As Mike passed through, nodding and smiling from one desk to another, he saw what he was used to seeing: polite curiosity behind the warm smiles, a subtle prying as one individual after another looked for signs of pain still burning in him.
Behind the mahogany door with TF3 lettered on it, Mike sat down at one of the computers. He took a Zip disk from his shirt pocket and inserted it into the drive slot. A copy of Reverend Alex Young’s letter came up on the screen. Mike read it again, picturing the scenario, trying to view it from the standpoint of a priest dedicated to the nurture of a place and its people:
I risk repeating myself, Reverend Young wrote, when I say the Vale of Kashmir is an area of exceptional beauty, both physical and ethereal, a centre of harmony and growth, and it breaks my heart to foresee what the signs make plain — this wonderful place being sundered and ultimately destroyed by the incursions of greed, corruption, and brute violence.
Mike sat back. He pictured Paul Seaton somewhere near the centre of that avarice and graft and brutality. The picture was easy to conjure.
He took out the Zip disk and tapped a command key marked SECURE CONFERENCING. A box appeared onscreen and invited him to enter a telephone number; simultaneously a tiny red light mounted on the camera atop the screen lit up.
Mike entered the number of CIA Records at Langley, Virginia. After a moment a screen announcement told him he was connected; who did he wish to talk to? Mike entered the name Joshua Flynn. A pause, then a white square appeared onscreen, which turned quickly to a live colour picture of a thin-faced, exceptionally gloomy-looking man. The dolour vanished and he smiled widely as two-way visual contact was established.
‘Mike!’ The voice was alarmingly realistic over the computer’s sound system. ‘Where have you been? It’s so long since we spoke, I thought you must have defected.’
‘There’s no place left to run, Josh. How’re you doing?’
‘In spite of the wishes of my contemporaries, I must say I’ve thrived.’ Flynn waved an arm at the shelves and machinery ranged behind him. ‘I’m in charge these days. I’m one of only three men at Langley with all-level access to the files. If you forget how many lumps of sugar you take in your coffee, give me a call, we’ll have a record of it here somewhere.’
‘I’m chasing a favour, Josh.’
‘I can’t imagine any other reason why you’d call.’
‘A man by the name of Paul Seaton. He was —’
‘An employee of this agency,’ Josh cut in. ‘I knew him reasonably well, for a time. What do you need to know?’
‘Background stuff, leading up to the time he took off and became a bandit.’
‘You on to him for something?’
‘I could be, with luck. Just in case the luck holds, I’d like to know as much about him as I can.’
‘I could tell you most of it from memory,’ Flynn said, ‘but let’s be professional about this, right? I’ll call up the file. One second, Mike.’
It took four seconds. Flynn studied the printout, nodding.
‘OK. A summary of the known career of Paul Elliot Seaton, who will now be forty-three years old.’ Flynn put down the summary and looked directly out of the screen at Mike. ‘From the time Seaton left college he put himself at the disposal of people with power, the kind of power he knew he could never generate himself. He was open about his technique — he once told me his motto for getting on in life was “Find the engine you need and hitch a ride”. Anyway, Paul was preeminently physical, he wasn’t hampered by a conscience. He worked as errand-boy and muscle for several small and medium-sized politicians until an opportunity came along to join the CIA.’
‘Who gave him the opportunity?’
‘It was a recommendation from a grateful relative of our first director, Allen Welsh Dulles.’
‘He did somebody a big muscular favour.’
‘I’d guess so,’ Flynn said. ‘The job he got here carried no guarantee or likelihood of promotion, but Paul Seaton got to do harm, and he got to carry a prestigious ID that showed he was a legitimate employee of the Agency. For three