Part 17 (1/2)

Osnard took a pull of red and shook his head. 'Fight it, my advice. Form an internal Emba.s.sy working-party. You, Amba.s.s, Fran, me. Gully's Defence so he's not family, Pitt's on probation. Put together an indoctrination list, everyone signs off on it, meet out of hours.'

'Will your boss wear it, whoever he is?'

'You push, I'll pull. Name o' Luxmore, supposed to be a secret except everybody knows. Tell Amba.s.s to beat the table. ”Ca.n.a.l's a time bomb. Instant local response essential.” That c.r.a.p. He'll cave.'

'Amba.s.s doesn't beat tables,' Stormont said.

But Maltby must have beaten something because after a stream of obstructive telegrams from their respective services, usually to be hand-decoded at dead of night, Osnard and Stormont were grudgingly permitted to make common cause. An Emba.s.sy working-party was set up with the harmless-sounding t.i.tle of the Isthmus Study Group. A trio of morose technicians flew down from Was.h.i.+ngton and, after three days of listening to walls, p.r.o.nounced them deaf. And at seven o'clock one turbulent Friday evening the four conspirators duly a.s.sembled round the Emba.s.sy rainforest-teak conference table and under the low light of a Ministry of Works lamp acknowledged by signature that they were privy to special material BUCHAN, provided by source BUCHAN under an operation codenamed BUCHAN. The solemnity of the moment was offset by a burst of humour from Maltby, afterwards ascribed to the temporary absence of his wife in England: 'From now on BUCHAN's likely to be an on-going thing, sir,' Osnard declared airily as he collected the signed forms like a croupier raking in the chips. 'His stuff's coming in at quite a rate. Meeting once a week may not be enough.'

'A what thing, Andrew?' Maltby enquired, setting his pen down with a d.i.c.k.

'On-going.'

'On-going?'

'What I said, Amba.s.s. On-going.'

'Yes. Quite so. Thank you. Well, from now on, if you please, Andrew, the thing - to use your parlance - is on-gone. BUCHAN may prevail. He may endure. He may persist, or at a pinch continue or resume. But he will never, as long as I am Amba.s.sador, on-go, if you don't mind. It would be too distressing.'

After which, wonder of wonders, Maltby invited the whole team for bacon and eggs and swimming back at the Residence where, having raised a droll toast to 'the Buchaneers', he marched the guests into the garden to admire his toads, whose names he belted out above the din of pa.s.sing traffic: 'Come on, Hercules, hop, hop! -don't gawp at her like that, Galileo, haven't you seen a pretty gal before?' And when they swam, deliriously in the half darkness, Maltby astonished everyone yet again by letting out a great glad cry of 'Christ, she's beautiful!' in celebration of Fran. And finally, to round the night off, he insisted on playing dance music, and had his houseboys roll back the rugs, though Stormont couldn't help remarking that Fran danced with every man but Osnard, who ostentatiously preferred the Amba.s.sador's books, which he patrolled with his hands behind his back in the manner of an English princeling inspecting a guard of honour.

'You don't think Andy's a bit left-handed, do you?' he asked Paddy over a nightcap. 'You never hear of him going out with girls. And he treats Fran as if she had the plague.'

He thought she was going to cough again, but she was laughing.

'Darling,' Paddy murmured, lifting her eyes to Heaven. 'Andy Osnard?'

It was a view that Francesca Deane, had she heard it from her rec.u.mbent position in Osnard's bed in his apartment in Paitilla, would have happily endorsed.

How she had got there was a mystery to her, though it was a mystery now ten weeks old.

'Only two ways to play this situation, girl,' Osnard had explained to her with the a.s.surance he brought to everything, over lavish helpings of barbecued chicken and cold beer beside the pool of the El Panama. 'Method A. Sweat it out for six tense months then fall into each other's arms in a sticky coil. ”Darling, why ever didn't we do this before, puff, puff ?” Method B, the preferred one, bang away now, observe total omerta all round, see how we like it. If we do, have a ball. If we don't, chuck it and no one's the wiser. ”Been there, didn't care for it, glad o' the information. Life moves on. Basta.”'

'There's also method C, thank you.'

'What's that?'

'Abstention, for one thing.'

'You mean me tie a knot in it and you take the veil?' He waved a well-cus.h.i.+oned hand at the poolside, where sumptuous girls of all sorts flirted with their swains to the music of a live band. 'Desert island out here, girl. Nearest white man thousands o' miles away. Just you and me and our duty to Mother England, till my wife comes out next month.'

Francesca was halfway to her feet. She actually yelled out, 'Your wife!'

'Haven't got one. Never did, never will,' Osnard said, rising with her. 'So now that obstacle to our happiness has been removed, h.e.l.l's to say no?'

They danced very well while she struggled for an answer. She had never supposed that someone so generously built could move so lightly. Or that such small eyes could be so compelling. She had never supposed, if she was honest, that she could be attracted to a man who, to say the least, was several points short of a Greek G.o.d.

'I don't suppose it's occurred to you I might hugely prefer someone else, has it?' she demanded.

'In Panama? No way, girl. Checked you out. Local lads call you the English iceberg.'

They were dancing very close. It seemed the obvious thing to do.'They call me nothing of the sort!'

'Want a bet?'

They were dancing even closer.

'What about at home?' she insisted. 'How do you know I haven't got a soulmate in Shrops.h.i.+re? Or London for that matter?'

He was kissing her temple but it could have been any part of her. His hand was perfectly still on her back and her back was bare.

'Not much good to you out here, girl. Don't get much satisfaction at five thousand miles, not in my book. Do you?'

It wasn't that Fran had been persuaded by Osnard's arguments, she told herself as she contemplated his replete and dozing figure beside her in the bed. Or that he was the best dancer in the world. Or that he made her laugh louder and longer than any man she had known. It was just that she couldn't imagine herself withstanding him for one more day, let alone three years.

She had arrived in Panama six months ago. In London she had spent her weekends with a frightfully handsome hunting stockbroker named Edgar. Their affair was mutually agreed to have run its course by the time she got her posting. With Edgar, everything was mutually agreed.

But who was Andy?

A believer in solidly-sourced material, Fran had never before slept with anyone she had not researched.

She knew he had been at Eton but only because Miles had told her. Osnard, who appeared to hate his old school, referred to it only as 'the nick' or 'Slough Grammar', and otherwise disdained all reference to his education. His intellect was widely based but arbitrary, as you would expect from someone whose school career had been abruptly curtailed. When he was drunk, he was fond of quoting Pasteur: 'chance favours only the prepared mind.'

He was rich or, if he wasn't, he was spendthrift or extremely generous. Almost every pocket of his expensive locally-made suits - trust Andy to find himself the best tailor in town as soon as he arrived - seemed to be stuffed with twenty- and fifty-dollar bills. But when she pointed this out to him, he shrugged and told her it came with the job. If he took her to dinner or they stole a secret weekend in the country, he spent money like water.

He had owned a greyhound and raced it at the White City until - in his words - a bunch o' the boys invited him to take his doggie somewhere else. An ambitious project to open a go-karting stadium in Oman had met with similar frustrations. He had run a silver stall in Shepherd Market. None of these interludes could have lasted long, for he was only twenty-seven.

Of his parentage he declined to say anything at all, maintaining that he owed his immense charm and fortune to a distant aunt. He never referred to his previous conquests, though she had excellent reason to believe they were many and varied. True to his promise of omerta he never made the smallest claim on her in public, a thing she found arousing: to be one minute at the highest pitch of ecstasy in his extremely capable arms, the next sitting primly opposite him at a Chancery meeting and behaving as if they barely recognised each other.

And he was a spy. And his job was running another spy called BUCHAN. Or spies, since BUCHAN product seemed more diverse and exciting than anything one person could encompa.s.s.

And BUCHAN had the ear of the President and of the US General in charge of Southern Command. BUCHAN knew crooks and wheeler-dealers: just as Andy must have known them when he had his greyhound, whose name she had recently learned was Retribution. She attached significance to this: Andy had an agenda.

And BUCHAN was in touch with a secret democratic opposition that was waiting for the old fascists in Panama to show their true colours. He talked to militants in the students' movement and fishermen and secret activists inside the unions. He plotted with them, waiting for the day. He referred to them - rather glamorously, she thought - as people from the other side of the bridge. BUCHAN was on terms with Ernie Delgado too, the grey eminence of the Ca.n.a.l. And with Rafi Domingo, who laundered money for the cartels. BUCHAN knew Legislative a.s.sembly members, lots of them. He knew lawyers and bankers. There seemed to be no one worth knowing in Panama that BUCHAN didn't know, and it was extraordinary to Fran, eerie in fact, that Andy in such a short time had succeeded in getting to the very heart of a Panama she never knew existed. But then he'd got to her heart pretty sharpish too.

And BUCHAN was sniffing a great plot, though n.o.body could quite work out what the plot consisted of: except that the French and possibly the j.a.panese and Chinese and the Tigers of South-East Asia were part of it or might be, and perhaps the drugs cartels of Central and South America. And the plot involved selling the Ca.n.a.l out of the back door, as Andy called it. But how? And how without the US knowing? After all, the Yankees had effectively been running the country for most of the century, and they had the most amazingly sophisticated listening and monitoring systems all over the isthmus and Central America.

Yet the Yankees mystifyingly knew nothing about it at all, which added hugely to the excitement. Or if they did, they weren't telling us. Or they knew but weren't telling one another, because these days when you talked about Was.h.i.+ngton foreign policy you had to ask which one, and which amba.s.sador: the one at the US Emba.s.sy or the one up on Ancon Hill, because the US military still hadn't got used to the idea that it couldn't bang heads in Panama any more.

And London was extremely excited, and was digging up collateral from all sorts of odd places, sometimes from years ago, and making amazing deductions to do with whose ambitions for world power would dominate everybody else's because, as BUCHAN put it, all the world's vultures were gathering over poor little Panama and the game was guessing who was going to get the prize. And London kept pressing for more, more, all the time, which made Andy furious because overworking a network was like overworking a greyhound, he said: in the end you both pay for it, the dog and you. But that was all he told her. Otherwise he was secrecy itself, which she admired.

And all this in ten short weeks from a standing start, just like their love affair. Andy was a magician, touching things that had been around for years and making them thrilling and alive. Touching Fran that way too. But who was BUCHAN? If Andy was defined by BUCHAN, who defined BUCHAN?

Why did BUCHAN's friends speak so frankly to him or her? Was BUCHAN a shrink, a doctor? Or a scheming b.i.t.c.h, worming secrets out of her lovers with lascivious skills? Who was it who telephoned Andy in fifteen second bursts, ringing off almost before he could say, 'I'll be there'? Was it BUCHAN himself, or an intermediary, a student, a fisherman, a cut-out, some special link-person in the network? Where did Andy go when, like a man commanded by a supernatural voice, he rose at dead of night, threw on his clothes, removed a wad of dollar bills from the wall-safe behind the bed and left her lying there without so much as a goodbye, to creep back again at dawn, chagrined or wildly elated, stinking of cigar smoke and women's perfume? And then to take her, still without a word, endlessly, wonderfully, tirelessly, hours, years on end, his thick body skimming weightlessly over her and round her, one peak after another, something that till now had only happened to Fran in her schoolgirl imagination?

And what great alchemy did Andy get up to when an ordinary-looking brown envelope was delivered to the door and he disappeared to the bathroom with it and locked himself in for half an hour, leaving a stink of camphor behind or was it formaldehyde? What did Andy see when he reappeared from the broom cupboard with a strip of wet film no wider than a tapeworm, then sat at his desk coaxing it through a miniature editor?