JOHN GORDON DAVIS

UNOFFICIAL & DENIABLE

COPYRIGHT

HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2000

Copyright © John Gordon Davis 2000

Cover photograph © Shutterstock.com

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers

John Gordon Davis asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

Source ISBN: 9780007574407

Ebook Edition © DECEMBER 2014 ISBN: 9780008119348

Version: 2014-12-15

DEDICATION

To Tana and David Hilton-Barber

CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT

DEDICATION

PROLOGUE

PART I

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

PART II

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

PART III

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

PART IV

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

CHAPTER 31

CHAPTER 32

CHAPTER 33

CHAPTER 34

PART V

CHAPTER 35

CHAPTER 36

CHAPTER 37

CHAPTER 38

PART VI

CHAPTER 39

CHAPTER 40

CHAPTER 41

CHAPTER 42

CHAPTER 43

CHAPTER 44

CHAPTER 45

CHAPTER 46

CHAPTER 47

CHAPTER 48

CHAPTER 49

CHAPTER 50

CHAPTER 51

PART VII

CHAPTER 52

CHAPTER 53

CHAPTER 54

CHAPTER 55

CHAPTER 56

KEEP READING

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

PROLOGUE

Andy Meyer, the junior officer on watch in the US Coast Guard station, remembered the yacht dropping anchor in the open channel of St Thomas, American Virgin Islands, in the small hours of that September morning in 1996 because it was not flying a flag. Four hours later, just before dawn, he noticed the yacht steaming out of the channel towards the nearby British Virgin Islands. Meyer hoped the skipper knew what he was doing – there were rocky waters ahead, best navigated in daylight, and technically he should have registered his arrival in American waters before departing. Meyer decided to make an entry in the Log, just to show he had done some work.

The sun was up when the yacht, Rosemary, anchored in the big open bay of Road Town, Tortola, the sleepy little capital of the nearby British Virgin Islands, but it is established by Immigration Department records that it was not until three o’clock that afternoon that the skipper, Sinclair Jonathan Harker, reported his arrival. He appeared, according to Mrs Doris Johnston, the chief immigration officer, to have been drinking; he was nervous, unshaven, wild-looking. He gave his last port of call as Nassau, Bahamas, and produced a crew list certifying that only he and his wife Josephine were aboard. He presented Josephine’s passport, along with his own, but Mrs Johnston told him that Josephine had to report in person. Mrs Johnston then demanded his Nassau port clearance certificate: Harker said he had not known he needed such a document before leaving the Bahamas. Mrs Johnston told him in no uncertain terms that he would have to return to Nassau to get it.

Harker then left Mrs Johnston’s indignant presence, went to the American Express office and telephoned Josephine’s insurance company in New York advising them of her death and asking what procedures he had to follow. He then sent a fax to her attorney, asking the same question, then another to her father, Denys Valentine, in Boston, reporting his daughter’s death, saying he would telephone as soon as he had composed himself. Then, instead of heading to the police station to report her death, he returned to his boat and proceeded to drink a bottle of rum.

At noon the next day a police party went out to his boat, alerted by Mrs Doris Johnston who had complained to them that Josephine Harker still had not reported to Immigration Department. The Commissioner of Police, Joshua Humphrey, found Harker sitting in the saloon of his yacht, ashen, starting on a new bottle of rum. Harker looked up and said:

‘I want to report a person missing on the high seas …

Joshua Humphrey, portly, black, with forty years’ experience, suspected immediately that Sinclair Jonathan Harker was guilty as sin; ‘Sin-clear Harker the sinful sailor,’ he dubbed him. And when he went into Jack Harker’s history and learned that he had been a career officer in the Rhodesian army battling freedom-fighters until the bitter end of that long, nasty, bush war, he was sure. But when he learned that, at the end of that war, Harker had been snapped up by the South African Defence Force to fight in their bush war in Angola against the ANC guerrillas and the Cuban army, Commissioner Joshua Humphrey, a devout Africanist, was downright convinced of his guilt.

‘An’ what you bin doin’ since you stopped being a soldier for apartheid, Major Harker?’

‘A publisher. And I was never a soldier for apartheid – I was a soldier against communism.’

Joshua Humphrey found the distinction a metaphysical one but decided not to argue. ‘A publisher? How does a military man become a publisher, sir? Where?’

‘In New York. Commissioner, I’m very traumatized and I feel your attitude is persecutory.’

‘In New York, huh?’

The Commissioner was smart enough to know his lack of real experience. It was a relief to share responsibility and telephone the US Coast Guard in St Thomas and ask, as a favour, whether an officer experienced in investigations on the high seas would come over to take a look at this case.

The Virgin Islands, with balmy turquoise bays and white beaches, interlaced with exotic coral reefs, are very beautiful, possibly the best real estate in the world, but commercially they are good for little more than offshore banking and tourism. Named for their unspoilt beauty, they were colonized by Great Britain and Denmark as bases from which to battle the Spaniards and the pirates who plagued the merchantmen carrying the spoils of the New World back to Europe. Sugar plantations were developed, but the problem was labour: the tropical heat made the cane fields unworkable by white men; they simply did not have the sweat-glands for hard work in such a climate. The solution was black labour – for over two hundred years British and American slaving ships sailed to West Africa and brought back their cargoes of human beings to be sold as slaves to the plantation owners. The Virgins, like all the islands arcing across the Caribbean Sea, prospered, despite a series of rebellions by slaves which were ruthlessly suppressed. But then came the Abolition of Slavery Act in Great Britain which decreed that all slaves throughout the British Empire be freed at midnight on 31 December 1834.

Thus the basic economy of the Caribbean was dislocated: the plantation owners returned to Europe, the cane fields went to ruin, the erstwhile slaves scratched a subsistence living. Denmark sold her share of the Virgin Islands to the United States of America; the British hung on to their share of the islands until the Wind of Change swept Africa, whereupon she granted independence to all her colonies. But, unlike the newly independent African states, the Caribbean islanders spoke no African language, the only culture they knew was that of their colonial masters and they clung to that. Joshua Humphrey, Commissioner of Police, great grandson of slaves, was proud of his British heritage. He had something very important in common with Lieutenant-Commander Albert Smith of the US Coast Guard: both were proud to be black descendants of slaves, determined to show they could do their jobs as well as any white man, and both deeply resented South Africans because of their former politics. And now here sat a South African, a former senior officer in the South African army, with a story of his American wife’s mysterious disappearance.

‘Where exactly did this take place, Major?’ Smith asked, his pen poised.

Harker took a note from his pocket with trembly fingers. He handed it across the desk. ‘Those are the coordinates I got from my satellite-navigator when I woke up and found Josephine missing.’

Smith consulted a chart on the desk. He carefully marked in the coordinates with a parallel ruler.

‘But,’ he said, ‘that means she disappeared south east of Florida, in American waters.’

‘I thought they were international waters.’

Smith smiled. ‘Come on, Major, you’re a military man who can read maps, you know enough law to know where’s “high seas” and where’s territorial waters.’ He paused for a response, then continued: ‘But no matter what you thought, why didn’t you sail back to Florida, back to Miami or Key West to report to the police? They were less than two hundred miles away, and the winds would have been in your favour. Why did you go a thousand miles or more, against the wind, into the Atlantic, all the way to the Virgin Islands to report?’

Harker wiped a hand down his gaunt face. ‘I just didn’t think of it. I was distraught. Exhausted … We were heading for the Virgin Islands when this accident happened and I just carried on.’

Smith sat back. ‘So seven days later you arrived here. What time was that?’

‘About eight o’clock in the morning.’

‘And this was your first stop in the Virgins?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well,’ Smith said with satisfaction, ‘it was recorded by our Coast Guard station that you stopped in the American Virgins for several hours the night before last.’

‘Oh,’ Harker said, ‘that. But I only anchored, I didn’t go ashore.’

‘But you “stopped”,’ Humphrey insisted. ‘Why did you not go ashore, to the police, to report Josephine’s disappearance?’

Harker closed his eyes. ‘Because,’ he said tensely, ‘I needed to sleep.’

‘So why didn’t you go ashore to report after you slept?’

‘Because it was still dark. I thought it better to wait until daylight when senior police officers would be at work, not juniors on night duty.’

Humphrey smirked. Smith said: ‘Not because you thought the US Virgins police might be more efficient and therefore more dangerous to you? Seeing Josephine was American and she disappeared in American waters off an American boat.’

Harker’s nerves were ragged. ‘No. And I’ve told you I thought she’d been lost in international waters.’

Both officials smirked. ‘But you reached Tortola at about eight o’clock that morning,’ Smith said. ‘Yet you didn’t report to this police station at all – they came to your boat, the next day. Only then did you report anything.’ Smith looked at him. ‘How come, Major?’

‘Because I was exhausted after my ordeal – seven days at sea alone. I needed to sleep some more.’

‘But,’ Smith said, ‘Mr Humphrey says you had been drinking when he went out to your boat.’

‘When I woke up I had a few drinks. To pull myself together before reporting.’

‘But what did you do yesterday, when you arrived?’

Harker closed his eyes. ‘I sent a fax to Josephine’s father from the American Express office, informing him of her death.’

‘Why didn’t you telephone?’

‘Because,’ Harker said tensely, ‘of the emotion. I wanted him to be informed before I telephoned and we all burst into tears.’

‘I see …’ Smith nodded. ‘Not because you didn’t want to answer awkward questions? And then you returned to your boat to rest?’

Harker hesitated an instant. ‘Yes.’

Smith smiled. ‘Not so, Major. You made another phone call. American Express gave us the number. Who to?’

Harker closed his eyes again, sick in his guts. ‘I forgot. To Josephine’s insurance company.’

Humphrey’s face creased in theatrical wonder: ‘But how can you forget? And why, Major? What was the hurry? Why was that more important than reporting her death to me, the police?’

‘I was in the American Express offices, I had the facilities available, I simply took the opportunity to do the responsible thing.’

Humphrey snorted. ‘An’ what did you ask the insurance company?’

‘I simply reported Josephine’s death.’

‘You didn’t ask how to collect the insurance?’

Harker hesitated. ‘No. I mean I simply asked what formalities were required of me generally.’

‘Formalities? For what?’

Harker sighed.

‘Formalities to wind up her estate. Affidavits, death certificates, police reports and so on?’ Smith suggested.

Harker hesitated, then sighed. ‘Yes.’

‘In other words,’ Humphrey said, ‘how to satisfy the insurance company that they had to pay up.’

‘And how much insurance did you have on Josephine, Major?’ Smith asked.

‘None,’ Harker said shakily. ‘She insured her own life. She paid the premiums.’

‘And who was the beneficiary?’

‘Her estate.’

‘And who was the beneficiary of her estate under her will?’

Harker took a deep breath. ‘As far as I know, some of her relations, and her father. And me. Mostly me, but I don’t know the amounts.’

‘You don’t know?’

‘A will is a private matter, isn’t it?’ Harker rasped angrily.

Silence. Then: ‘And you? Who is the beneficiary under your will?’

‘Josephine. She gets everything.’

‘Did she know?’

Harker closed his eyes. ‘Yes. When we got married and decided to do this trip around the world we both made new wills in each other’s favour.’

‘And where is her will?’

‘With her attorney, in New York. As is mine.’

‘And did you advise her attorney of her death when you were at American Express?’

Harker sighed. ‘Yes.’

‘Why didn’t you tell us earlier?’

‘I forgot that detail.’

‘Oh, you forgot. Like you forgot to mention that you advised her insurance company?’ Smith smiled. ‘And how long have you and Josephine been together?’

‘Over seven years.’

‘And did she work?’

‘She was a writer. She published under her maiden name, Josephine Valentine.’

Smith looked at Humphrey. ‘You mean the Josephine Valentine? Who wrote that book about South Africa: Outrage?’

‘Right.’

Smith and Humphrey glared at each other. ‘So your wife was a wealthy woman?’ Smith asked.

Harker shifted. ‘Well off, yes.’

‘And you, Major?’

‘I published her books, or rather my company did, Harvest House. So I’m well off too.’ He added shakily: ‘So why the hell am I suspected of murdering her? Why would I kill the goose that lays the golden eggs?’

Smith smiled grimly. ‘Nobody’s accusing you yet, Major. And we will ask the questions, if you please. But tell me – was your relationship happy?’

‘Very.’

Smith frowned. ‘But how did she feel about your military history? Fighting fox apartheid, against the freedom forces of Nelson Mandela – she was very anti-South Africa in her books.’

‘She understood that I never regarded myself as fighting for apartheid. I was a professional soldier fighting against the Cuban army, Russia’s surrogates in Africa who were helping the illegal communist regime of Angola fight the Angola freedom forces. The South African army was supporting those freedom fighters, and so was America, because it was no secret that the Cubans also intended to overrun South Africa and turn it into another communist state. That’s what I was fighting against.’

‘But,’ Humphrey said, ‘that also meant you were fighting for apartheid. And against the ANC who had bases in Angola.’

Harker dragged his hand down his face. ‘I knew apartheid was going to collapse soon. The greater evil was if the Cubans and Russians overran South Africa, taking the Cape Sea Route. The communists could already control Suez any time they wanted. Next to go would have been the Panama Canal. Then the communists would have had the whole world sewn up. So the important thing was to defeat the Cuban army in Angola, drive them out of Africa.’

‘But you and your famous wife never quarrelled about this?’

‘No.’

‘So when did you settle in America?’

Harker said tensely: ‘In 1986 I was wounded, and invalided out of the army. First I went to England and became involved in publishing. I came to America in 1987 and took over Harvest House. In 1988 I met Josephine and later started publishing her books. And we’ve lived happily ever after. Okay?’ He closed his eyes. ‘And now I want to go back to my boat and sleep.’

Humphrey said, ‘No, we’ve impounded your boat, Major, while the forensic scientist examines it, takes photographs and so on. You’ll have to sleep in a hotel tonight. So please tell us again what happened that night Josephine disappeared.’

Harker opened his eyes. ‘Jesus. I’ve told you twice.’

‘Again, please.’

‘Look, evidently you suspect me. So I want a lawyer.’

Smith smiled. ‘Why do you want a lawyer if you’re innocent, Major? Why are you scared of just telling us again what happened, if you’re telling the truth?’

Harker took a deep, tense breath. ‘You can’t put me to the expense of a hotel when I have my own boat.’

‘Okay,’ Humphrey smiled, ‘so I offer you a bed in the cells instead. It’s up to you. But I would be grateful if you came back here at noon tomorrow to resume our discussion. And I would be grateful for your passport, please …’

Harker had left his boat at anchor in the bay: now, on emerging from the police station, he found it chained to the government jetty, under guard. Policemen were aboard. He collected some things and checked into the Ambrosia boarding house.

At ten o’clock the next morning Jack Harker was arrested at the aerodrome attempting to board a flight to the French island of Guadeloupe. In his baggage was a .25 Browning pistol. His South African passport had been surrendered to Humphrey: he was using an expired passport which the police had not known he possessed. On his return to the police station he was further interrogated; finally he was formally charged with the murder of Josephine Valentine Harker.

A week later he was extradited to Florida to face trial.

PART I

The Back-story

1

In those days of apartheid many accidental deaths occurred in police custody – black suspects fell down stairs and cracked their skulls, or slipped on soap in the showers, or sometimes even threw themselves out of upper windows in a reckless attempt to escape. There was always an official inquest, as the law required, but the magistrate very seldom found anything suspicious, anything indicating reprehensible interrogation techniques by the police. The inquest into the death of Steve Biko, for example, evoked no judicial censure even though Biko was driven naked through the night, a thousand miles, in the back of an open truck, to a police hospital after he had sustained a fractured skull when he fell against a wall whilst irrationally attacking his police interrogators. In those days these accidental deaths were attributed by most of the white public to a few ‘bad apples’ in the police, though the frequency suggested that there must be a lot of them, but not too many questions were asked and there were no hard facts to gainsay police explanations.

Then deaths began to befall the apartheid government’s enemies outside the country, which were clearly not accidental: Professor Ruth First, wife of the leader of the South African Communist Party, was killed by a parcel bomb in Mozambique; Jeanette Schoon, wife of an anti-apartheid activist, was blown to bits, together with her little daughter, by another parcel bomb in Angola; Dulcie September died in a hail of bullets in Paris as she opened the offices of the African National Congress; Dr Albie Sachs, anti-apartheid activist, had his arm blown off by a car-bomb in Mozambique; Advocate Anton Lubowski, another anti-apartheid politician, was gunned down outside his home in Namibia on the eve of his country’s independence from South Africa. The press, particularly the international press, argued that the pattern of these murders suggested they were the work of the South African government, but this was hotly denied. But then there were a number of explosions: at the London headquarters of the African National Congress, and at Cosatu House in Johannesburg, headquarters of the Congress of South African Trade Unions. Khotso House, also in Johannesburg, the headquarters of the South African Council of Churches, was bombed; Khanya House, headquarters of the South African Bishops’ Conference in Pretoria, was set on fire. Who were the people committing all these crimes? The government blamed it all on black political rivalry and ‘Godless communists’; others blamed it on those bad apples in the police; only a few believed it was government policy to murder and destroy its enemies and their property, and they largely kept their mouths shut because of the security police. For those were the days of the Brezhnev Doctrine, the Cold War in which Africa was the major battleground, most of Africa being communist-sponsored one-party dictatorships, the era of the Total Onslaught Total Strategy, the total strategy to combat the total onslaught of the ungodly communist forces of darkness bent on overthrowing Western democracy and the Godly principles of apartheid. The security police could detain anyone for 180 days without trial, and then another 180 days immediately afterwards, and then another, and so on until, in the words of the Minister of Justice, ‘the far side of eternity’. There was freedom of speech in parliament but precious little outside; radio and television were government-controlled, the press had to watch its step and foreign journalists who wrote unkindly about apartheid were unceremoniously deported.

And one of those deported was the beautiful Josephine Valentine.

Major Jack Harker had heard of her for years – the legendary heart-throb Josephine Valentine, the long-legged American blonde with the dazzling smile who collected wars and war heroes, the beautiful busty photo-journalist in sweat-stained khaki who always managed to wangle a helicopter ride into battle-zones denied to others by using charms pressmen don’t possess. She had a formidable and exotic reputation which lost nothing in the telling: while it was not true that she had been a high-priced hooker in New York, as alleged by certain members of the press, it was probably true that she always managed to be in the right place at the right time to get her spectacular pictures by screwing the right officer. It was said of her that she collected war heroes – but ‘warriors’ would have been a better word. She never had a lengthy relationship with her conquests: she used them, thanked them and left them with a broken heart.

Her war photographs made her famous: Harker had seen her name in many magazines over the years, read many a piece by her, seen many of her hair-raising pictures. Ms Valentine had shown up in Rhodesia during the long bush war, leaping out of helicopters with her cameras into operational zones, ‘screwing her way into the front lines’ to get her photographs; then she had been seen on the other side of the Zambezi amongst the black terrorists; and she was always popping up in the Middle East in the Arab–Israeli conflict. It seemed that wherever there was a war Josephine Valentine was there, charming her way into more stories; she was big buddies with the heavyweights of both sides. Military men all over the world knew about her, particularly in Africa; many had seen her, met her, entertained her, fantasized about her. Jack Harker was intrigued by what he knew of her and not a little frustrated that he seemed to be one of the few military men who had never set eyes on her. A dozen times she had left the bar, mess, bunker, trench, helicopter moments before he arrived.

And then, in 1986, when he finally encountered her in the Battle of Bassinga she was covered in blood, half naked, her teeth bared as she furiously tried to fire an AK47 automatic rifle at him.

The Battle of Bassinga in Angola was Jack Harker’s ‘century’, the hundredth battle of his military career, the hundredth time he had leapt into action, heart pounding, to do or die. It was also one of the worst battles: a parachute jump at a dangerously low level, at night, right over the target area, which was a camp holding thousands of terrorists and their Cuban advisors, all armed with billions of dollars worth of the latest Russian military hardware with which to liberate southern Africa from the capitalist yoke. The aircraft came in low in the hopes of avoiding the terrorists’ radar but the groundfire started up before they were over the drop-zone. Harker led from the front and he was first out of the aircraft, plummeting through thin air with his heart in his mouth, and he was the first casualty of the operation – a bullet got him through the shoulder as he pulled his parachute’s rip-cord: he was covered in blood by the time he crash-landed in a tree on the wrong side of the river. He extricated himself with great difficulty and strong language, stuffed a wad of emergency dressing deep into the wound and forded the river with more strong language.

All battles are bad but this seemed Jack Harker’s worst ever. He was awarded a medal for it, but he did not have coherent memories of it. He remembered the cacophony, the screams and the gunfire, the flames leaping, the shadows racing, remembered stumbling, lurching, the bullets whistling about him, blood flooding down his chest into his trousers no matter how deep into the wound he rammed the wad of cotton wool with his finger; he remembered storming the water tower, staggering up the ladder to destroy the machine-gun nest that was causing so much havoc, storming a Russian tank and throwing a hand-grenade down the hatch, he remembered the sun coming up on the cacophony of gunfire and smoke and flames and the stink of blood and cordite; he remembered being pinned down for a long time by a barrage of automatic fire coming from a concrete building on the edge of the parade ground, two of his men being mowed down as they tried to storm the building; he remembered scrambling up and running at the doorway.

The battle had been going on for an hour, the sun was up now, the camp strewn with bodies, the earth muddy with blood. Harker lurched across the parade ground, doubled up, rasping, trying to run flat out but finding he could only stagger, and he crashed against the wall beside the door. He leant there a moment, gasping, trying to get his breath, to clear his head, and he was about to burst through the doorway, gun blazing, when he heard a woman cry in English, ‘You bastards …’ Harker lurched into the room, his rifle at his hip – and stared.

Josephine Valentine was clad only in white panties; she had her back to him, her blonde hair in a ponytail, crouched at the window, wrestling with the jammed mechanism of an AK47, sobbing, ‘You bastards …’ On the floor behind her sprawled the half naked body of a Cuban officer, blood flooding from his back. Beside him crouched a black soldier, holding a rifle in one hand, shaking the body with the other; then he saw Harker, his eyes widened in terror, he raised his gun and Harker shot him. The soldier crashed against the wall, dead, and Josephine turned wildly and saw Harker. Her beautiful face was creased in anguish, her wild blue eyes widened in terror at seeing him; she flung the useless rifle aside, collapsed on to her knees beside the dead black soldier and screamed: ‘He’s only a boy!’ She snatched up his weapon, ‘Only a toy gun, he carved it!’ She flung it at Harker, then she scrambled frantically to the dead Cuban and grabbed at his pistol holster.

‘Leave that gun!’ Harker shouted.

‘You killed my man!’ she shrieked and swung the big pistol on Harker and pulled the trigger. There was a deafening bang and the force of the bullet knocked him backwards across the room, his thigh shattered. He crashed into the wall, shocked, and then saw her turn the pistol on herself. In a wild dramatic movement she thrust the muzzle against her naked left breast, her mouth contorted in anguish as she howled, ‘You killed him …’ She pulled the trigger and the blow of it knocked her off her knees, on to her back.

2

‘Publishing,’ said General Tanner, head of Military Intelligence, when he visited Harker in hospital on the South West African border, ‘is excellent cover for an espionage agent.’

Harker frowned. ‘Are you saying she was a spy?’

The general smiled. ‘I’ve changed the subject, I’m talking about you now. But yes, Josephine Valentine is a spy of a kind, fraternizing with the enemy. All photo-journalists are spies because they sneak up on you, take their forbidden pictures and flog them to the highest bidder.’

‘You’re talking about me? Sorry, General, you’ll have to explain – we were talking about Josephine Valentine. The bullet missed her heart, then?’

‘Made a bit of a mess of some ribs but the doc says it’ll hardly leave a scar. Pity, she’s been a pain in the arse for years. Like her to have a nice scar to remind her to stay out of our business, goddam drama queen. Pity we didn’t catch her boyfriend alive, he could have given us some useful information.’

‘She didn’t talk at all?’

‘Wouldn’t tell us a damn thing, just demanded to see the American consul. But we developed eighteen rolls of her film and we got some good intelligence on enemy hardware – and saw a few familiar faces. She’s threatened to sue us, of course.’ He smiled.

‘Where is she now?’

‘In Pretoria; we’re getting rid of her next week when she’s fit enough to travel. Daddy is coming out to take care of his darling wayward daughter. Anyway …’ the general plucked a grape off the bunch he had brought Harker, ‘… as I was saying: publishing is ideal cover for an espionage agent.’ He looked solemn.

Harker smiled. ‘As you were saying. But I’m afraid you’re going to have to explain that too.’

Tanner smiled. ‘Or there’s the import-export business – but it’s rather dull. Running a restaurant or a small hotel might be okay but it can be hard work – and putting you in charge of a bar would be like putting a rabbit in charge of a lettuce patch, aha-ha-ha!’ The general popped the grape into his mouth. ‘Whereas publishing,’ he chewed, ‘would be fun, particularly in an exciting place like New York. Respectability, lots of long lunches and cocktail parties, plenty of intellectual people to stimulate you.’ He shrugged. ‘However, if you don’t fancy that, I can offer you a whole range of jobs. Running a clothing store in Brussels, for example.’

Harker grinned. ‘I’m afraid you’ll still have to explain.’

The general picked another grape off the bunch. ‘You’re finished, Jack. You’ll never fight another battle. Half of one lung gone, one thigh-bone fucked. It’s HQ for you now, old man, fighting a desk. Or you can work for me in Military Intelligence. So I’m offering you a job as a publisher.’

‘You own a publishing house, General? In New York?’

The general smiled. ‘The only house I own is in Pretoria where my wife and children live. And that’s mortgaged.’ He looked at Harker. ‘But I control businesses all over the world, Jack.’ He smiled. ‘Ever heard of the CCB? The Civil Cooperation Bureau?’

Harker was mystified. ‘No.’

‘Good. And if you repeat this conversation to anybody you’ll be in breach of the Defence Act, the Official Secrets Act, and Christ knows what else. You’ll be court-martialled.’ He smiled again. ‘Got that, Jack?’

Jesus. ‘Yes.’

The general sat back. ‘Well, the CCB is the new covert arm of Military Intelligence. The new civilian espionage arm of our army. Very new. In short, the top brass has made a study of the CIA, the KGB, Mossad and MI6, and the Civil Cooperation Bureau is the result. Emphasis on the civil. Our civilian agents operate all over the world, in particular in those countries where South Africa is not allowed to have embassies or consulates or trade offices because of apartheid. As you know, every embassy of every country has an intelligence officer who works in the guise of “cultural attaché” or something like that. Well, because we have so few embassies, we have created the CCB instead. Our CCB agent is set up in a suitable business to make him look kosher. He recruits suitable local sub-agents, spies, to gather information about our enemies – just like every government does. Our agent sends the information back to me. I then do whatever is necessary to spike our enemies’ guns – just like I do when I get information from our attachés in our official embassies.’ He paused. ‘I must add that our CCB businesses are usually profitable. Our agents make good money.’ He smiled. ‘Much better than a major’s pay.’ He paused again. ‘I’m offering you a job in the CCB, Jack. I suggest publishing because of your English name, and accent – and you’re an intellectual sort of chap. You will draw a good salary – and, of course, you will be pensionable when you eventually retire. You’ll have a share of the publishing profits. We’ll provide you with an apartment in New York, as well as the actual offices – and a cost-of-living allowance, a car and an entertainment allowance. And we’ll pay your membership fees of all the necessary clubs – the yacht club; and so forth.’ General Tanner looked at him. ‘Sounds pretty good to me, Jack. Bit of a sinecure. Much better than selling life insurance, which is about all an ex-soldier can do.’

It sounded pretty good to Harker, too. ‘But what do I know about publishing?’

‘You’re smart. You’re one of the few intellectuals this army’s got – apart from me, of course.’ He grinned. ‘We’ve got another small publishing house in London. We’ll send you there for a few months for some high-density, high-tech literary training. But it really doesn’t matter because the editors you hire will know the ropes and you’ll learn on the job.’

‘But espionage? What do I know about that? And how do I recruit my agents?’

‘All will be explained. You’ll recruit men yourself when necessary, but your immediate boss, the guy you’ll report to, is stationed in Washington and he has already set up the network which you will inherit. He ran the whole show from Washington but it’s too much work now, so you’ll be responsible for New York and Florida via your publishing house.’

Harker was bemused. ‘It’s just information you want?’

General Tanner said: ‘New York is an important listening post. The United Nations is there – all those black communist countries shouting about us, plotting mayhem, harbouring ANC and SWAPO terrorists. And down in Florida there are all those Cuban exiles with all kinds of information about Castro’s army. You’ll be responsible for all that intelligence.’

Harker looked at the older man. He really liked him. That was mutual. ‘But I’m a soldier, not a spy.’

‘Military intelligence is a very important part of soldiering.’

‘Of course. But I mean I’m a soldier, not a hit-man. I don’t want to have to kill anybody.’

‘You won’t have to get your hands bloody, Jack.’ General Tanner smiled. ‘You’ll be told all you need to know when you have agreed and signed up. But let me say this much: any actions will be military ones – against the sort of people you’ve killed plenty of on the battlefield, and who’ve tried to kill you. That’s a soldier’s job, to kill as many of the enemy as possible, isn’t it? But the responsibility will be entirely mine as head of Military Intelligence.’ He ended: ‘We are fighting a total onslaught by the communist forces of darkness, Jack. That’s why America is helping us. Openly. And Britain, secretly. To fight this total onslaught we need a total strategy. And the CCB is an important part of that total strategy …’

3

Harvest House was a nice old brownstone overlooking Gramercy Park on New York’s East Side. Harker bought it for the CCB in his first month in town, having found out how expensive conventional office space is. It was easily big enough for the staff he hired: one editor, two personal assistants, a sales director who doubled as publicity director, and a general clerk. He found these people, all experienced in publishing, quickly because he advertised salaries above the average. The building was a big old nineteenth-century house: the numerous bedrooms became offices, the dining room became the conference room – there was space to spare. Harker, as managing director, had the best office: the large living room with its old marble fireplace and bay window overlooking the park.

When the building was remodelled, his staff in place, he hired a few of the catering trade’s leggiest waitresses and threw a large cocktail party for all the literary agents in New York to announce his start in business. ‘Why have we called ourselves Harvest?’ he said in his welcoming speech. ‘Because we want to gather up the bountiful talent that lies neglected by the other brainier-than-thou publishing houses …’ The literary agents responded: in the first year of business Harvest published eleven books, all by first-time authors, and made a respectable profit – partly because the production was done economically by another CCB enterprise, a printing works in Ottawa – enough to pay all salaries and overheads with some left over for reinvestment. Harker had a flair for publishing, a nose for a profitable book. And it was fun: there were boozy lunches with agents and authors, lots of interesting, intelligent people to meet. It seemed an easy living, the authors, agents and editors doing most of the work. It sure beat getting the shit shot out of you on the battlefields of Angola.

And his covert work for the Civil Cooperation Bureau was not difficult either.

‘The CCB divides the world into regions,’ General Tanner had explained. ‘America is Region One, England Region Two, and so on. America itself is divided: Head Office is in Washington, Region One A, where Felix Dupont is the overall Regional Director – he’s your boss. New York, where you’ll be, is Region One B – your title is Regional Manager. You will also be responsible for our CCB business in Miami, Region One C, where a guy called Ricardo Diego is the Regional Sub-manager – he’s a South African Spaniard. His front-business is a bar in the Cuban exile community, which is very valuable to us. He has agents planted in Cuba itself, who give us a lot of information on military matters. You’ll remember a number of occasions in Angola where we suddenly knew exactly about Cuban reinforcements?’

Harker nodded.

‘A lot of that was thanks to the CIA, of course, but also to Ricardo’s agents in Havana – who have agents in Luanda. Ricardo is very valuable. Trouble is, he’s not real management material. You’ll have to keep a close eye on him – Felix Dupont is too busy now, monitoring the Capitol scene and the rest of America. So Ricardo will report to you, and you report to Dupont. My orders will come to you through Dupont. As I said before, Dupont has a network of agents in place in New York, so you’ll inherit a going concern. Most of them don’t know each other, and only the “senior salesmen” will know you; you’ll probably never see the “juniors” – most of them don’t even know they’re working for us. Some think they’re working for the CIA, or for a European government, or for a firm of detectives. In fact, one of our senior salesmen is a private investigator, chap called Trengrove. We need all kinds of information about those United Nations nincompoops, not just hard military facts – who’s sleeping with who, who’s a homosexual, who’s got gambling debts, et cetera, so we can squeeze them. Another salesman has a very good whorehouse – one of the best in New York, I’m told. Anyway, as soon as you leave hospital you go to training school to learn all the general principles, then to London to get the hang of the publishing business, then you fly to Washington to stay with Felix Dupont for a few weeks, getting the nitty-gritty – he’s got a nice hotel. Did you ever meet Felix in the army?’

‘No.’

‘Remarkable man in martial arts. Took a bullet through the knee. However, after a few weeks with Felix you’ll spend a week in Miami with Ricardo, getting his picture. Nice bar he’s got – and lovely strippers, those Cuban girls sure are well-nourished. And Ricardo serves the best steaks in town.’

‘What about weapons?’ Harker said. ‘I presume I can’t take my own.’

‘Certainly not. No, Felix will supply all the hardware. You’ll have one or two licensed firearms, but most of the hardware will be unlicensed and untraceable. If you ever have to use a gun, dump it in the river straight afterwards. And if anybody ever shoots you, you tell the cops it was just another robbery. But you’ll learn all this at training school.’

‘Shoot me? I thought I was through with all that strong-arm stuff.’

‘You are, you’re a Regional Manager, not a salesman.’ The general hurried over that one. ‘Anyway, after a week with Ricardo you go to New York, move into the apartment Felix’s got for you, and set up Harvest House, get yourself a girlfriend, and settle into the role of the shit-hot, wing-ding new publisher in town.’ He smiled. ‘Easy. Wish I were you.’ He added: ‘I’ve never seen so many beautiful girls as in New York. And they outnumber the men six to one.’ He grinned. ‘You’re going to have a good time, Jack …’

Yes, the CCB work was easy enough. The reports trickled in from his senior salesmen, by telephone, encoded fax, scrambled e-mail, dead-letter box, undercover meetings: Harker digested it, collated it, gave any instructions, re-encoded it and sent it on to Felix Dupont in Washington. The information was a mish-mash of facts and conjecture, but Dupont made sense of it all in his jigsaw of espionage – and so too, after a while, did Harker: the pieces fell into place, the gaps becoming clear, the necessary instructions to the salesmen becoming self-evident. Once a month, sometimes twice, he went to Washington for a conference with Dupont. He usually combined these trips with an onward journey to Miami to check on Ricardo. This was always fun: whereas Dupont was a self-satisfied, detribalized Englishman with a painful body who thoroughly detested his enemies, Ricardo exuberantly enjoyed life and only really hated Fidel Castro. He loved South Africans and Americans who were giving the bastard a hard time in Angola. The clientele of his bar-ristorante felt the same way: anybody who took a swipe at Castro, the robber of their plantations and businesses, was okay with Ricardo and his customers at Bar Casa Blanca in Little Havana. None of Ricardo’s noisy patrons, nor his silent salesmen, knew who Harker was, but there was never a shortage of the senoritas in his hotel bedroom at the end of the day spent debriefing Ricardo, trying to make sure he had understood all his communications in Spanglish.

‘Ricardo, do us all a favour – buy a good Spanish-English dictionary, to check your spelling, we’ll pay for it. And take some English lessons, because when encoded your information can be misleading if you misspell or get the idiom wrong.’

‘So we confuse the enemy too, huh, compadre! But enough of work now –’ he waggled his dark eyebrows – ‘we go back to Casa Blanca to las senoritas? Or maybe I send one up here to you, jefe?’ He thumped his hand on his chest: ‘Clean! Garantizada …’

Yes, as General Tanner had promised, it was an easy job, and even satisfying once the jigsaw began to make sense. However, Harker’s jigsaw was usually incomplete because Dupont received information from the CIA direct and he only told Harker as much as he needed to know. Equally valuable was the detail coming out of the United Nations. Several of the delegations from African countries leaked information copiously to Harker’s salesmen, as a result of either blackmail or greed, but it was often only gossip about other delegates’ weaknesses or bad behaviour. Nonetheless, from time to time, important intelligence emerged about ANC bases in Angola, Uganda, Kenya, Zambia, about scandals and rivalries within the exiled hierarchy. Dupont and General Tanner – the ‘Chairman’ – prized these snippets highly. And it was Harker’s United Nations salesman who first learned about atrocities committed in the ANC’s military camps in Angola, torture of their own soldiers by Mbokodo, the ANC’s security police, apparently condoned by the top leadership, which resulted in two full-blown mutinies: Dupont and the Chairman were cock-a-hoop about that intelligence. When the story was broken in the international press it did the ANC considerable harm.

It was interesting, if often frustrating, and it certainly beat working in Military Intelligence headquarters in Pretoria. But Harker did not enjoy his work involving the anti-apartheid movement: keeping track of their plans, compiling dossiers on their activists, looking for ways to discredit them or minimize their impact. During the time Harker spent in Washington learning the ropes, Dupont ordered him to organize a burglary of the Anti-Apartheid League’s offices in New York, as a training exercise. The salesmen copied every computer disk, thus getting a mountain of information, then wiped the original disks clean, leaving the League’s administration and financial affairs in a shambles. Dupont and the Chairman were delighted with the information they got, but Harker studied it and couldn’t see what the excitement was about: sure, the burglary produced thousands of names of members, their addresses and telephone numbers, much correspondence between branches about fund-raising plans, proposed protest marches, lobbying of congressmen, reams of bank statements – but so what? There wasn’t mention of one spy, one arms cache, one target, one battle, let alone one revolution. Harker considered the Anti-Apartheid Leaguers a harmless bunch: they made a lot of noise but it was mostly a case of thundering to the converted. Indeed Harker sympathized with them – he didn’t approve of apartheid either. However, when he settled down in New York he studied the many dossiers on activists that Felix Dupont had compiled, updated them with new information received from his salesmen and passed it all back to Washington. He considered it a waste of effort, and found it distasteful to be prying into people’s private lives looking for peccadilloes with which to haunt them; but Dupont was very strict about keeping the files up to date. Dupont supported apartheid as vehemently as he hated communism and scorned blacks.

‘No, I don’t hate blacks,’ he once said, ‘I just have contempt for their politics and government. They cannot govern – look at the mess the rest of Africa is. Why? Three reasons. One, their culture – it’s totally different to ours, they see the civil service as an opportunity for power and enriching themselves – an opportunity for corruption. Two, Affirmative Action – they want to put black faces behind every desk to give jobs to their own race, so corporals become colonels overnight, constables become commissioners, clerks become magistrates. Stupid black pride makes them insist that black upstarts can do any job as well as any experienced white man. The result – shambles and corruption. And three: they then fuck up the entire economy by turning the country into a Marxist one-party dictatorship.’ Dupont snorted. ‘No black is ever going to rule me. And that’s what makes the anti-apartheid activists so important to us – they want the blacks to rule South Africa, which means that they are supporting the communists who want to ride to power on the backs of the blacks. Over my dead body! So keep those files strictly up to date, please.’

So Harker did. And it was through this diligence that he again encounered Josephine Valentine.

Security is always a problem for the spymaster: where does he keep the secret files so that nobody will find them or even suspect they exist? In his own country his office is in some government building, in foreign lands it is deep in the innards of his country’s embassy or consular office; but in the case of the Civil Cooperation Bureau no South African ambassador, consul or clerk even knew of its existence. So Harker’s spymaster office was off the basement boiler-room of Harvest House in Gramercy Park. On Dupont’s instructions Harker had installed a brand-new boiler that would not require attention for years and he hired a different company to install a steel door leading off it to a ‘storage room’. From that room another steel door, behind shelves of odds and ends, led to the Civil Cooperation Bureau’s New York espionage centre. Here Harker had a desk, a computer, filing cabinets, a telephone and fax line in the name of a fictitious insurance broker, and a shredding machine. There was no window: the walls were raw stone, the floor plain concrete. Standing orders required Harker to be in this neon-lit subterranean cell at seven o’clock every morning, before Harvest opened for business, to receive NTKs (Need-to-know Situation reports), to transmit SEEMs (Scrambled Encoded E-Mail reports), and to make any RTCs (Restricted Telephonic Communications) using codes or a litany of ENAVs (encoded nouns, adjectives and verbs) to report what the dark world of espionage had come up with in the last twenty-four hours.

Harker found this regime no hardship: his military training caused him to wake naturally at five a.m. no matter how late he went to bed; he pulled on a tracksuit and for the next hour he jogged through the dark concrete canyons of Manhattan, taking it gently so as not to strain his damaged leg; six o’clock saw him having breakfast at his favourite ‘all-nite dinette’ off Union Square, seven saw him showered and besuited at his desk in his bleak cell ready to put in a couple of hours’ work for the South African Defence Force, even if it only meant ploughing through reams of boring and insignificant detail about the private lives of members of the devilish Anti-Apartheid League.

But Harker did not find the fat dossier that Dupont had compiled over the years on Josephine Franklin Valentine boring. On the contrary, he found it fascinating, exotic. He felt as if he knew her personally. And hadn’t he saved her life? He had survived her furious attempted murder of him, had seen her thrust the pistol at her beautiful breast, seen the shocking splotch of blood, seen her blown backwards, arms outflung as if crucified. He had dragged himself over to her, blood pumping from his shoulder and thigh, put his ear to her bloody breast, heard her heart still beating; he had stuffed his field emergency dressing into her shocking wound, then plunged his mouth on to hers to force some air into her lungs – it was he who had yelled for the medics and ordered them to evacuate her on the first helicopter. Jack Harker felt he had saved her life even if in truth it was the medics who had done that. And what South African soldier would have let a white woman bleed to death on a black battlefield when medics were swarming around – particularly a beautiful half-naked, English-speaking woman who could obviously give her captors a lot of military intelligence about the Cuban enemy?

But Josephine Valentine had not told anybody anything. Harker had tried to question her while the medics were loading her on to the stretcher, tried to find out how many tanks and armoured cars the Cubans had down the road, to discover the name of the dead Cuban officer she was so upset about, and she had repeatedly told him to ‘fuck off’ – even when he asked her for the name of her next of kin in case she died. She had even refused to tell him her blood group. ‘I don’t want you to save my fucking life, asshole, haven’t you noticed?’

Nor did the Military Intelligence boys back at base camp in South West Africa have any success with her when she recovered consciousness after surgery, though her language improved. ‘Get lost,’ she said, ‘I demand to see the American Ambassador,’ and when the Intelligence boys had developed her numerous rolls of film and tried to question her about faces and equipment depicted therein she had demanded a lawyer, and told them she and her numerous high-powered publishers were going to sue the South African government to Kingdom Come. In short, Military Intelligence didn’t know how to squeeze information from a furious, beautiful American journalist with a wound in her breast – Military Intelligence was accustomed to black terrorist captives who quickly spilt the beans under a bit of robust interrogation and they didn’t have the nerve to third-degree information from a well-known American photo-journalist. General Tanner himself had flown out from Pretoria to try to deal with her; he had eventually called in the most senior CIA operative of the Angolan desk all the way from Lusaka, but even their formidable combined expertise failed to extract information and they had finally thankfully delivered her into the custody of the American Ambassador and her father, a big-wheel lawyer from Boston who arrived with a crack of thunder and placed her in a private clinic in Pretoria pending her deportation as an Undesirable Alien. She had refused even to divulge the identity of .her dead Cuban lover. Harker had felt almost proud of her when General Tanner had told him what a load of trouble she was. A very desirable Undesirable.

That was over two years ago, and now here she was back in his life as he sat in his dungeon in Harvest House reading her thick file. The beautiful Josephine Franklin Valentine smiled at him ravishingly from the pages of many magazine and newspaper cuttings containing her war photographs and stories – wars in Israel, the Middle East, Afghanistan, Mozambique, Rhodesia, Angola: wherever men made war Ms Josephine Valentine went in with her cameras blazing, her typewriter pounding out the staccato Hemingwayesque prose. Very good, lean, evocative writing – you could almost smell the blood and dust and cordite. She evidently loved the high drama of war, the strange business of going into battle, the extraordinary courage it required; she obviously deeply admired the men who did all this for a living when they could be making lots more money in a nice air-conditioned office. Yet she was very liberal, and a strict political analyst. She bitterly condemned the South African government but she was also condemnatory of the Russians for invading Afghanistan; she sympathized with the Israelis, admired their fighting men; she was dismissive of the Arabs as soldiers while very sympathetic to the Palestinians’ cause. She had a high opinion of the Egyptians for making peace with the Jews, and there was a splendid photograph of her sitting in Gaddafi’s ceremonial tent drinking camel’s milk, earnestly discussing his holy Jihad against the West, but in her story she blasted him as an enemy of mankind, particularly for the Lockerbie Disaster bomb. She had great admiration for the Rhodesians as soldiers, as Davids taking on the Goliaths of Russia and China, but she condemned most of their politicians as constituting a ‘cowboy government’. She applauded the Cuban army for fighting the South Africans in Angola – indeed it was she who had deeply embarrassed the President of the United States by revealing to the world that America was waging a secret war on the side of pariah South Africa against the communists, thus causing both countries to pull out of Angola for several years. But now the whole Western world was covertly on the side of the South Africans to drive the Cubans out of Africa, the war was at full blast again and Josephine Valentine was there, boots and all, sweat-stains on her khaki outfit, dust sticking to her face, blonde hair awry, stealing the show with her photographs and stories – until the Bassinga raid that Harker had led.

Josephine had written a dramatic piece about the battle. She admitted that the South Africans had saved her life, but there was no admission that she had attempted suicide – she attributed the self-inflicted wound to her engagement in the heroic battle in which her Cuban lover had been killed at her side. She did not divulge the dead man’s name but the South Africans had eventually identified him from photographs: Brigadier Paulo Rodriguez, forty-four years old, one of Fidel Castro’s top military strategists, the man expected to liberate South Africa from the apartheid yoke after his communist forces conquered Angola and Namibia. And for the first time she declared her political colours. She wrote:

‘I am not a communist, though I am very liberal – and indeed I am sure communism is going to mellow, as Mr Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika portend. But for the time being the Cubans are the only knights in shining armour around with the guts to take on the dragon of apartheid, and I’m rooting for them …’

There were many other cuttings and photographs from the society pages that Dupont had collected over the years: Josephine Valentine at country club balls, at yacht club regattas, at anti-apartheid functions. There were a dozen large colour photographs taken by Dupont’s salesmen with telephoto lenses: and, yes, she was certainly beautiful: that long blonde flowing hair, those big dark-blue eyes that looked both sparkling and short-sighted, a wide smile of full lips and perfect teeth, a slightly dimpled chin – and long legs and a bust to break any man’s heart. There were several clippings of her magazine articles condemning America’s policy of economic sanctions against Cuba – ‘Why beggar thy neighbour if you want him to like you?’ Harker read them carefully: she had great admiration for the machismo of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and the boys of the Sierra Maestro even if she wasn’t a Marxist. He turned to the Covering Report compiled by Dupont over the years.

Codename Bigmouth

Valentine, Josephine Franklin, female Caucasian, born 27 February 1962, in Boston, Massachusetts, US citizen. Parents Denys Adam Valentine, American, well-known lawyer in Boston, mother Elaine Franklin, née O’Reilly, Irish, allegedly aristocracy, naturalized American, now deceased …

Catholic College, Boston … Berkeley University … graduated in Political Philosophy and English Literature … post-graduate course in journalism, University of New York, before becoming a freelance journalist writing for various political magazines … political leanings strongly to left, possibly communist though no actual membership of any party known … tends to the Ban-the-Bomb, long-haired movements, often seen at protest rallies of various kinds … staunch supporter of Anti-Apartheid League, secretary of Chelsea Branch …

Financial situation: evidently wealthy, financed by Valentine Trust in her favour …

Sports interests include yacht racing, tennis, skiing, skating, cycling …

Cultural interests include opera, art, literature …

Lifestyle appears to fluctuate between the extravagant and the quiet … likes fast cars …

No criminal record …

Apparently good health … contact lenses … front teeth capped …

Sex Life …

At this point Harker got up, went to his little refrigerator, extracted ice and poured whisky into a glass.

Sex life? This detail he found really distasteful. It was offensive that ordinary people out there should be sleuthed by his salesmen trying to get smutty details of their sex lives. The hypocrisy of it! Sex, the great equalizer, the great common denominator, why the hell can’t we all just decriminalize sex? But no, almost the whole English-speaking world felt compelled to adhere to the hypocrisy, marriages were broken, careers ruined, ministers and governments fell. And what irritated Harker as he went back to his desk with his whisky was that he was, pruriently, looking forward to reading about the beautiful Josephine Valentine’s sex life … He took a sip of whisky and began to read on.

Scandal on campus when subject was having an affair with a married professor, Cedric Mansell, wife Elizabeth threatened to cite her as co-respondent … affair with Joshuah Danning, son of Senator Danning of Massachusetts … became engaged to football star Stephen Dickason who was subsequently jailed for drug-possession … affair with sportswriter Jim Nichols of New York Post … weekend in Poconos Mountains with Columnist Frederick Jackson of Washington Post …

Subject leaving US to take up residence in London. Case summary sent to Regional Director of Region Two, Chairman alerted in case she attempts to enter South Africa …

Conclusion: subject is dangerous because of her access to the media and because of her influential social connections, particularly in New York and Boston.

CAMs: Her sexual appetite generally can be portrayed as promiscuous – father is high-profile Catholic and subject could possibly be prevailed upon to spare him embarrassment. Best CAM is probably evoking scandal by planting evidence of criminal activity such as drug-dealing, paedophilia, pornography, shoplifting …

‘Jesus!’

Harker had tossed the report aside. Jesus – ‘CAMs’, Character Assassination Methods. Christ, did he really have to soil his hands with this sort of thing? Did South Africa’s military defence really require spending taxpayers’ money on an investigator to search back into the woman’s girlhood to find possible sexual peccadilloes? It would be laughable if it wasn’t so awful. And her sex life looked pretty average – could he really be expected to plant evidence of criminal activity on her? Ruin her life with a smear campaign because she organized protest rallies against apartheid? No way would he obey such an order.

And there was another reason for his truculence: although he didn’t admit it to himself, Harker felt possessive towards Josephine Valentine. Goddammit – he had saved her life!

Harker turned back to the large colour photographs of her taken with a telephoto lens when she was on the tennis court: and, Lord, she was beautiful. There were about a dozen shots of her in a variety of poses, bending, stretching, swiping, jumping, volleying, her blonde hair in a long pony-tail whipping dramatically around her face, her eyes flashing. Look at those long golden legs, look at that glorious ass, look at that bust …

He wondered where she was now. What wars were there, apart from the Angolan conflict? Plenty – Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan, Middle East, not to mention Northern Ireland, Cyprus, Tibet, Pakistan, Burma, Indonesia. He could easily find out her whereabouts by putting some of his salesmen on to making discreet enquiries. He could telephone her magazine publishers and ask. And she was a member of the New York Yacht Club – Harker had joined when he first arrived a year ago, maybe he would meet her there one day …

And then, that very week, Felix Dupont telephoned him on the scrambled line and said: ‘I see your girlfriend’s back in town soon.’

‘Which girlfriend?’ Harker really did not like his boss. ‘I have so many.’

‘The one you gave mouth-to-mouth to, old man. Just got a signal from our man in Angola, spotted her at Luanda airport, or what’s left of it, boarding a Russian transport flying to Cuba, onward destination New York via Mexico City. Our man in Havana will let us know her arrival details. I want you to have a salesman at the airport to tail her, then get on to her.’

This was interesting news. ‘Get on to her?’

‘Figuratively – but if you can do so literally so much the better, of course. Fuck the information out of the bitch.’

Oh, Harker really didn’t like his boss – and it sounded clear that the man was drinking, at seven o’clock in the morning. ‘What information in particular are you looking for?’

‘Any information, old man, you know that, don’t you remember anything they taught you at Intelligence School? Any fucking information is important in this dog-eat-dog world of espionage, these veritable valleys of dust and ashes in which there are so few oases of hope – any fucking information even if it’s what she has for breakfast or how she likes blow-jobs, because we never know when the info will become useful. But what we really want to know urgently is what Castro’s knuckle-dragging, tree-dwelling generals are planning in Angola, and we figure that your girlfriend may have some clues from all the pillow-talk she has out there.’

‘Is it known that she’s got a new lover in Angola?’

‘Of course she’s had another lover out there, how else does she get her free ride back to Havana? So get on to her and find out what she knows.’

‘Any specific orders about how I achieve that?’

‘The Three Bs – don’t they teach you anything at spy-school? Burglary, Bonking, Blackmail. Burgle her apartment, of course. Don’t do it yourself – send Clements in. She’s sure to come back with all kinds of film, notes, computer disks and so on – make microfilm and computer copies of everything. And you should also burgle her Anti-Apartheid League’s offices; it’s about time we dry-cleaned them to find out what they’re up to. You never know what snippets our lady may have sent back to them from sunny Angola.’ Harker heard Dupont take a swallow of something. ‘And then there’s bonking. Pillow-talk. Give her some of her medicine, old man. Swear undying love, tell her you want to publish her innermost memoirs, particularly what the generalissimos told her over the vino and cigars. That shouldn’t be too much of a hardship.’

Harker grinned to himself. Jesus, did Dupont really think that what this left-wing adventuress might know was worth all the effort?

‘And then,’ Dupont continued, ‘if all else fails, blackmail her. But that’s only as a last resort. And don’t you do it personally, get Clements on to it – but consult me first.’

Harker smiled. ‘Okay, send me her flight details.’

After Dupont hung up, Harker looked at Josephine Valentine’s file again. He turned up a colour photograph of her. Yes, she was beautiful … So, she was a member of the famous New York Yacht Club. He should try to meet her there before she started dating somebody seriously.

4

The following day Derek Clements checked out her apartment. The locks were standard; he picked them, made impressions, got keys cut. The next day he was at Kennedy Airport to tail her. That night he met Harker in a bar near Union Square.

‘How do you know it was her father who met her?’ Harker asked.

‘I heard her call him Dad.’ Clements was a tough, wiry little man with a ferrety face. He had been a US marine before showing up in the Rhodesian army as a mercenary.

‘What is the father like?’

‘About sixty. Stony-faced sort of guy. Grey hair. Good-looking. Nice suit, obviously lots of dough.’

‘How much baggage did Josephine have?’

‘One big holdall, one rucksack, sleeping bag. Camera box, video case, one camera around her neck.’

Harker was making notes. ‘And then?’

‘They took a taxi into Manhattan. I followed. They went straight to her apartment block on East Eightieth Street. It was now lunchtime, five-past-one. While she entered, the old man went to the delicatessen on the corner and came back with a package. He went inside. I went to the same deli, bought a coffee and sat and observed her apartment block. At two-thirty a taxi arrived, the old man emerged, got in and drove off. I waited another hour – had another coffee – waited to see if subject came out. She didn’t. I took a taxi home.’ He pulled out a wad of receipts. ‘Bureau owes me over a hundred and fifty bucks.’

‘Put it on the monthly sheet. Okay, you said you’d give me a plan of her apartment.’

Clements pulled an envelope from his pocket, took out a sheet of paper and unfolded it.

‘Small two-bedroom place but a nice view of Central Park. She uses the second bedroom as a study. Here.’ He pointed. ‘Computer, a rack of disks, lots of stationery. Piles of files with her stories and photos. Lots of framed photos on the wall, mostly military stuff. I microfilmed everything and copied all her disks.’ He indicated a small hand-grip on the end of the table.

‘When you go back in after she’s unpacked, will you be able to identify the new notes and disks?’

‘Yeah, all her disks are numbered, and all her notebooks, and all the entries are dated. When do you want me to go in again, sir?’

‘Give her a chance to settle down and establish a routine. Maybe she goes to the gym every day, or for a jog. You better set up an OP and find out her movements.’

‘Where, in a car?’

‘In a car. Read a paper, like they do in the movies. Move the car around, and change the model. Put Spicer on to the job as well, do a rota with him.’

‘Does Spicer know about this?’

‘No, and there’s no need for him to, just tell him I say so.’

‘He likes you, Spicer does, wants to know when you’re coming to his whorehouse again.’

Harker smiled. ‘And give me a call every morning before nine o’clock to report progress.’

A week later Harker had established a pattern of Josephine Valentine’s movements: Clements reported that her study light burned until about midnight every night, so she was writing hard. She slept until about mid-morning when she went to the corner delicatessen to buy newspapers, milk and fresh fruit. At one o’clock she emerged again wearing a leotard, wheeling a bicycle and wearing a pink crash helmet: on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays she rode across town, belting through the traffic, to attend an aerobics and dance class in a loft studio on the west side of Manhattan. On Tuesdays and Thursdays she rode to the rackets club where she played squash. In both cases she returned to her apartment block at three o’clock; her study light burned until midnight.

‘No evidence of a boyfriend yet?’

‘Not yet, sir,’ Clements said. ‘You want me to go in again one lunchtime? She’s settled down now, all her new gear must be on that desk.’

Harker sighed. He hated this – the risk, plus the dishonour of it, of unlawfully entering somebody’s home. But, war is war.

‘Not yet, helluva risk doing it in daylight. We’ve done well in a week. Let’s cool it, I’ll see if I can meet her at the yacht club or the rackets club before we do anything dangerous.’

It was much easier to meet her than anticipated. He had imagined that she would be surrounded by friends, that he would have to bide his time and ask somebody to introduce him, or contrive, with his usual uneasiness, to strike up a casual conversation. But she was alone when he first saw her, sitting at a table reading Time magazine: she was dressed to play squash, wearing a short white skirt, her racket on the table.

‘Miss Valentine?’

He had expected her to have a no-nonsense manner but she looked up with a ready smile. ‘Yes?’ And she was even more beautiful than her photograph suggested. And, for a flash, Harker glimpsed her again in that room in the heat of battle, naked but for her white panties, her breasts swinging as she turned on him.

‘I’m Jack Harker, I’m a member here. I saw your picture in the paper some time back and I’ve read a number of the war stories you’ve written. So I decided to be bold and introduce myself, because I admired them.’

‘Why, thank you!’ Josephine Valentine beamed. Praise is the quickest way to a writer’s heart but she surprised Harker by seeming flustered by it; he had expected a hard-nosed war journo who had seen and heard all the blandishments – instead she was blushing.

‘May I sit down a moment?’

‘Certainly, but I’m off to play squash in a few minutes.’ Harker sat, and she continued hastily, for something to say: ‘And what are you doing in New York, Mr Harker? You’re not American, with that accent.’

‘No, I’m a sort of British–South African mongrel.’

‘I see.’

He wondered whether she thought she saw a racist. ‘I run a publishing firm here, Harvest House. We’re fairly new in town but we’re keen. And that’s another reason I’ve introduced myself, apart from the pleasure of meeting you – I wondered whether you’ve considered writing a book?’

He felt he saw the light in her eyes.

‘As a matter of fact,’ she said, ‘I’m busy writing one right now. About South Africa, in fact.’

‘Well,’ Harker said, ‘would you consider having lunch with me one day to discuss it? Or dinner?’

‘That would be lovely.’

He felt a shit but he was a publisher. And war requires espionage. Personally, he felt as pleased as she was. As he watched her walk away to her squash date he thought: what a lovely girl, what lovely legs …

5

‘Never conceal,’ the Chairman had said, ‘that you were in the South African army. People like Clements and Spicer can do that but you’ll be too high-profile to get away with a lie like that – you may fool people for a while but sooner or later somebody who knows you will blow into town and people will wonder why you concealed the truth. So tell ’em upfront: you were a professional officer fighting an honourable war against communism. Rub in Sandhurst, the sword of honour, all that good stuff. But disown apartheid, make all the usual noises against it – these people love to hear others singing their song …’

But it wasn’t that easy when Harker met Josephine Valentine the next Saturday for lunch at the Tavern on the Green. She came striding into the restaurant, ravishingly beautiful, her long blonde hair flowing, wreathed in smiles for her potential publisher, the file containing her typescript under her arm. He had intended telling her that they had met at the Battle of Bassinga only if the conversation and atmosphere between them warranted it: within minutes of the small-talk beginning he saw a look enter her eyes, a glint of challenge when he mentioned his military background, and he decided against it. She listened with close attention as he sketched in his personal history, fiddling with the cutlery. Then she politely took up the cudgel.

An honourable war? Yes, she understood how a career officer had to do his duty to the state, even if he didn’t personally approve of all its policies. And she understood how most people might consider the communists to be dangerous people, she could understand that honourable soldiers would feel justified in fighting them to their last breath – one took up a military career to defend one’s country and that would necessarily involve killing as many of the perceived enemy as possible. But in the case of South Africa, the communist ‘enemy’ – she made quotation marks with her fingers – was also fighting for the liberation of South Africa from the apartheid yoke, helping the ANC in their armed struggle. This surely made the Cubans the honourable soldiers, because apartheid – ‘on your own admission, Mr Harker’ – is evil, and the intelligent, honourable South African army officer must surely have seen this paradox and been in a quandary, not so? He was indirectly – indeed directly, surely? – fighting for the evil of apartheid? So how this officer could have justified his actions, if only to himself, profoundly puzzled her. A moral dilemma, no?

‘Did you come up against this quandary in yourself, Mr Harker? Or in any of your brother officers?’

‘Please call me Jack.’ Harker could see his potential relationship with this lovely woman going out of the window. He didn’t give a damn about the CCB’s loss, it was his own. He said, truthfully, ‘Oh yes. We didn’t talk about it much in the officers’ mess but I and a good few others had considerable qualms. But I considered myself to be fighting the greater evil of communism only, the important thing was to defeat the enemy, drive him into the sea, and then let the politicians unscramble the mess of apartheid.’

She smiled sweetly. ‘And if the politicians had not unscrambled the mess of apartheid, what would you have done? Would you have quit the army?’

‘I quit anyway. The politicians still haven’t unscrambled apartheid, but here I am.’

‘But you were wounded.’

‘But not killed. I could have stayed in the army in a non-combatant role.’

She looked at him calculatingly, smiling. ‘Okay, but when you went into battle did you really feel that you were only fighting against communism?’

Harker smiled. ‘Yes.’ That was more or less true.

‘But in the heat of battle too?’

He didn’t think it would be helpful to explain that in the heat of the battle all you felt was terrified hatred for the bastards trying to kill you. Like the saying ‘There are no atheists in a fox-hole’, there are few starry-eyed liberals on an African battlefield. But he didn’t want an argument with this beautiful woman, he wanted to have a nice lunch while Clements burgled her apartment again and then, if at all possible, he wanted to get laid. If not today then some time. Soon. ‘Yes, in battle too. Shall we order?’

She gave him a dazzling smile. ‘A bit later perhaps; I’m enjoying this conversation, I’ll bring it into my book.’

Harker smiled. The Chairman would love that. ‘So tell me about your book. May I?’ He indicated the folder containing her typescript.

She placed her hand protectively on it. ‘Please, not yet.’ She gave him another dazzling smile. ‘I’ve only written about ten chapters so far, anyway. I thought I was ready to show them to you but now I know I’m not. You’ve given me some new ideas.’ She grinned, then hunched forward earnestly. ‘So tell me, what’s going to happen in South Africa?’

This was the opening he was waiting for, the reason why Clements was burgling her apartment at this moment. He turned the question around: ‘What do you think is going to happen?’ He particularized: ‘In Angola?’

‘I asked first.’

He decided to give his honest opinion rather than the propagandist one.

‘The war will go on for some time. But communism is on the ropes. Russia is in big economic trouble. Cuba is Russia’s cat’s-paw and Russia cannot afford to support them much longer. Angola is Russia’s Vietnam. However, nor can South Africa afford it much longer, though we’re in better shape than Russia and Cuba. So even if we don’t achieve a knockout blow now and drive the Cubans back home – which we could do militarily – Russia’s poverty will eventually do the job for us. So I think South Africa will finally win the war.’ He added, in the hopes of drawing her out, ‘I don’t think the South Africans will ever quit, no matter what economic hardships they encounter. And I think Castro realizes this and he’ll soon start looking for a face-saving way to make a peace deal.’ He added, ‘Don’t you?’

Josephine was not to be drawn. She had her hands clasped under her chin, her eyes attentive. ‘And what’s going to happen to apartheid?’

Harker took a sip of wine. ‘Meanwhile apartheid is on the ropes too. It is a proven failure. Cruel, and economically unjust – and economically wasteful. So there will be reform – already the state president has warned his Volk that they must “adapt or die”, and a lot of apartheid’s petty laws are not being enforced. So after the communist threat is removed, I expect apartheid will be eroded until there is none of it left. There’ll be resistance to the process, of course, diehards threatening civil war, but my guess is that by the turn of the century apartheid will be well and truly dead and we can get on with reforming ourselves our way.’

Josephine took an energetic sip of wine. ‘And what is “our” way? One man, one vote?’

‘Yes, but we must prepare for that over at least a decade. To instil a democratic culture into the blacks.’ He added, ‘One of the greatest sins of apartheid is that we wasted forty years during which we could have done that, brought them up gradually into political maturity. Instead, apartheid just translocated them back into their tribal homelands, threw independence at them and let them make a mess of it.’

Josephine sat back, on her hobby horse. ‘You don’t think that their “mess” is perhaps a teeny-weeny bit due to the rape of colonialism?’

Harker sat back also. He frowned reasonably. ‘Indeed, some of it. The Germans, for example, were bad colonialists, ruling by the whip. But they were kicked out of Africa during the First World War. The Portuguese were also bad – but at least the Latins didn’t practise segregation. King Leopold raped the Belgian Congo and brutalized the natives with forced labour, and the government did nothing to prepare the natives for the independence they threw at them at the first sign of rebellion, so of course the place erupted in chaos – particularly as the Russians and Chinese were fuelling the flames in their quest for worldwide communist revolution. Yes,’ he agreed sagely, ‘the communist powers were very bad neo-colonialists.’

Josephine sat back firmly in her chair, one hand clutching her wine glass to her breast.

‘And the Dutch were bad colonialists,’ Harker continued. ‘They subjugated the natives, very much like you Americans did with the Red Indians – you people were also bad colonialists.’ He smiled and took a sip of wine, then frowned. ‘But the British were pretty good colonialists, Josephine. They tried to teach the Africans democracy, tried to bring them into government gradually. But the Wind of Change forced them to go too fast, grant independence too soon and their colonies became corrupt dictatorships.’ He ended mildly: ‘Don’t you think?’

‘So,’ Josephine said, ‘you think that South Africa should spend the next ten years teaching them a democratic culture, before giving them the vote?’

‘It’s starting now. The government has created a separate parliament for Coloureds, by that I mean the half-castes, and another one for Indians. Apartheid is in retreat.’

Josephine leant forward. ‘Bullshit!’ She tapped her breast. ‘I’ve just come from that neck of the woods and I can tell you that apartheid is monstrously alive and hideously well! South Africa is not ruled by parliament any more, it’s ruled by the goddam security forces! By so-called securocrats. By the so-called State Security Council which is nothing more than a committee of police and army generals which bypass the whole goddam parliament!’ She looked at him. ‘Your parliament is irrelevant now, the country is run by the goddam generals, like the Argentine was. Like Chile.’ She glared at him. Before Harker could respond she went on, ‘And what about the NSMS – the National Security Management System that this State Security Council has set up – hundreds of secret intelligence committees across the country with tentacles into every facet of life, spying on absolutely everybody, committing murders and mayhem. Absolutely above the law.’ She glared. ‘What your parliament says is irrelevant in these days of the Total Onslaught, Total Strategy.’

Harker was impressed with her general knowledge. He said: ‘But that sort of thing happens all over the world when a state of emergency is declared. However, I doubt that parliament is irrelevant. I agree that in matters of security the State Security Council bypasses parliament, but I don’t believe that they are above the law.’

Josephine said: ‘You don’t think that the South African police has a hit-squad of two? Boys in dark sunglasses who knock off the odd enemy of the apartheid state?’

Harker shook his head. ‘No.’

‘Nor the army? The army hasn’t got Special Forces capable of hit-and-run skulduggery?’

Harker dearly wished to change the subject. ‘Of course, all armies have. Like the British SAS, the American Green Berets. But hit-squads? No.’

Josephine had her hands clasped beneath her chin, eyes bright. Then: ‘Not even with the policy of Total Onslaught, Total Strategy inaugurated by your President P.W. Botha ten years ago – in 1978 to be exact. The ends justify the means – any means?’

Harker shook his head, and took a sip of wine. ‘Not “any means”.’

Josephine looked at him, very polite. ‘But what about the bomb that exploded at the ANC headquarters in London in 1982? Who did that? And who blew up Cosatu House last year in downtown Johannesburg – the headquarters of the Congress of South African Trade Unions? The Boy Scouts? And who blew up Khotso House only last year, the headquarters of the South Africa Council of Churches – also alleged to be the underground headquarters of the ANC?’ She smiled at him. ‘President Botha blamed it on “the Godless communists”.’ She snorted. ‘What crap. As if the communists would blow up the ANC’s headquarters – their ally. And what about Khanya House, the united church’s building in Pretoria, a couple of months later? And what about Dulcie September? And what about the beautiful Jeanette Schoon, who worked for the British Volunteer Service in Angola, got blown to bits with her little daughter by a parcel bomb. You remember that case, only last year?’

Harker remembered reading about it. He had attributed it to rogue cops. ‘Yes.’

‘Who do you think sent the Schoons that nice parcel bomb? Father Christmas? And what about Albie Sachs, the ANC lawyer in Mozambique, somebody rigged a bomb to his car last year which blew his arm off when he opened the door. Who did that, d’you think?’ She frowned. ‘Albie Sachs was the sixth senior ANC official to be targeted in foreign countries.’ She looked at him. ‘Doesn’t that suggest to you that there is a department in the South African government that specializes in that sort of thing?’

Harker badly wanted to get off this subject. ‘That could all be the work of individual rogue cops acting on their own initiatives.’

Josephine smiled and sat back. ‘Come on. Taking all the evidence together, the irresistible conclusion seems to be that the Total Strategy means the police and army can do what they goddam like to combat the perceived enemy.’ Josephine took a sip of wine. ‘Anyway, what’s your opinion of the anti-apartheid movement?’

Harker was relieved to change the focus of the subject. ‘They do important work, raising public awareness.’

Josephine looked surprised. ‘Really? Would you be prepared to join us? Work with us?’

Harker could almost hear Dupont and the Chairman whooping in glee. He said, ‘Sure, though I don’t know how much practical work I could do.’

Her demeanour had changed. ‘Oh, your name as a publisher would help us a lot. We’ve got some famous companies and organizations supporting us. And seen being associated with a good organization like ours would surely do Harvest House some good.’

Harker inwardly sighed. ‘Quite possibly.’

She hesitated, then said, ‘And if a good anti-apartheid book were written, you would consider publishing it?’

Christ, what would the Chairman think about that? ‘If I considered it a commercially profitable book, yes. Indeed that –’ be indicated the folder containing her typescript – ‘is what I hoped this meeting today was about.’

Josephine evidently had decided suddenly that this South African was okay. ‘Oh yes, but I wasn’t sure it would be your kind of book, you being a heavy-duty battle-scarred war veteran and all that jazz.’ She grinned. ‘Thought maybe I was barking up the wrong tree.’ She leant forward earnestly. ‘I hope I didn’t offend you?’

‘Not at all.’ Harker smiled. Very relieved to be off the subject of South African hit-squads. He added, to ease his conscience about raising false hopes, ‘However, a bigger publisher may do better for you than Harvest House. But your literary agent will advise you on all that, of course.’

She said earnestly, ‘But I’d really like to give you first go at it, I mean, being a South African you know what I’m talking about, you’d be very helpful editorially.’

I’m a bastard, getting this woman’s hopes up, Harker thought. But he would be able to pass the buck to his editor. ‘Well, let’s drink to that prospect.’ He raised his glass.

‘Right!’ Josephine picked up hers and they clinked across the table. ‘Oh,’ she beamed, ‘this is exciting. I’m going to go home and work like hell on my revisions. Can we meet again next week, so I can show the first few chapters to you without dying of embarrassment?’

Harker grinned. ‘Same time, same place?’

‘Perfect. And I’ll be paying!’

‘You will not.’ The South African taxpayer was paying. Harker was very pleased she had relaxed. She’s a volatile one, he thought. He was pleased not because he was fulfilling Dupont’s orders so unexpectedly easily, but because he really wanted to meet her again next week. Even if, regrettably, he might never get laid now that their relationship had unfortunately degenerated into a potential one of publisher and author – Ms Josephine Franklin Valentine looked too smart to make the mistake of sleeping with her mentor. Authors like to keep their publishers on pedestals. But had she not screwed plenty of army officers for helicopter rides into battle-zones? He said: ‘So, shall we order?’

‘I feel like getting drunk first!’

Harker laughed. ‘So do I.’ He beckoned to their waiter and pointed at the wine bottle for a replacement. He turned to Josephine. ‘So,’ he said, not for duty’s sake, ‘tell me why you got deported from South Africa.’

‘The cops raided my hotel room, confiscated my writing and escorted me on to an aircraft to London.’

‘But what had you done to make them raid your hotel room?’

Josephine smiled. God, she was beautiful.

‘When the Soweto riots broke out in South Africa – turmoil. I flew down to Johannesburg to get some action. I had to tag along behind the press corps – not being a full-blooded journalist accredited to any newspaper I was vulnerable. Anyway, there I was, a hanger-on, and the police commander called a press conference to explain to the world why so many blacks had been killed in Soweto that day. And I had the audacity to say: “But Brigadier Swanepoel, couldn’t you have used rubber bullets instead of real ones?” And Brigadier Swanepoel looked at me with his Afrikaner beetle-brow’ – Josephine furrowed her forehead in imitation – ‘and responded: “Rrubber bullets? Madam, I will starrt using rrubber bullets when those kaffirrs starrt thrrowing rrubber rrocks!”’

Harker threw back his head and laughed.

Of course she’d done a hell of a lot more than criticize Brigadier Swanepoel to antagonize the authorities into deporting her: Dupont had said in his covering report that she shouldn’t have been let into the country in the first place. She was obviously a communist, the South African Embassy in America should never have granted her a visa, somebody had slipped up as fucking usual. But Josephine didn’t want to talk any more about it. ‘It’ll all be in my book, I don’t want to steal my own thunder by telling you twice, so let’s just have a jolly lunch …’

And it was jolly. The initial suspicions and fencing behind them, the conversation flowed like the wine, copiously. She hardly mentioned her experiences as a photo-journalist again: instead she regaled him with anecdotes about her other adventures around the world, her work for the anti-apartheid movement in London, her investigation into the politics of Hong Kong, into the plight of the Aborigines in Australia, of the Palestinians in Israel, the plight of the whale, the coral reefs – ‘The whole goddam environment’s in a mess!’

‘Did you write about all those subjects?’ He had not seen any cuttings about the environment in her CCB file.

‘You bet. I’ll show you my file of cuttings one day.’

She wanted to set the world on fire. ‘But I’m not a communist, Jack. I’m all for enterprise, it’s the unacceptable face of capitalism I’m against. The monopolies, the exploitation, the sweated labour.’ She waved a hand. ‘Of course, when I was a starry-eyed freshman at university I went through the usual phase of communist idealism, but I grew out of that. And I think the world had to go through this period of communist revolution to sweep aside the feudal injustices of centuries, to redress the obscene imbalance of wealth and power that existed at the time. I admire the communists’ achievements.’

Like what? Harker was about to say, but changed it in his mouth: ‘Which ones?’

‘It’s undeniable,’ she said earnestly, ‘that the average Russian and Chinese peasant – the vast majority of those two massive countries – it’s undeniable that they’re much better off now than before their revolutions.’

Harker didn’t want to argue but he had to say, ‘But it’s 1998 now, and though the average Russian and Chinese probably is better off than his grandparents, he’s still very poor compared to his modern Western counterpart.’

‘Yeah? What about the poor of South America? The masses of India? They’re supposedly “Western” too in the sense that they’re in the West’s sphere, of influence.’

‘But the moral wrongs in those countries don’t make the economic and moral wrongs in Russia and China right, do they?’

‘True.’ She grinned. ‘So we’re coming up with profound truths. And I’m feeling more profound every minute.’ She pointed her finger at his nose. ‘But only a revolution will sweep aside the wrongs of most Third World countries, and the only power capable of making such a revolution is communism. All the other kinds are pussy-footing and piss-weak. So I applaud those underground communists who’re plotting to overthrow the repressive governments of Argentina and Chile and the like. I applaud the likes of Fidel Castro – I support the Cubans in Africa because even if they are driven back into the sea as you want, I betcha –’ she jabbed a finger – ‘that win or lose the Cubans will have been a big factor in the eventual collapse of apartheid.’

She looked at him an earnest moment, then thrust her warm smooth hand on his. ‘But even though you don’t like that, Major Jack Harker, sir –’ she gave a little salute – ‘will you please please please still consider publishing my shit-hot humdinger of a book?’

Harker threw back his head and laughed. It all seemed terribly funny.

‘Oh …’ she laughed, ‘I’m having a lovely day …’

Yes, it was a lovely day. On their second Irish coffee he just wanted to take her hand and walk with this lovely young woman through this lovely park with its trees in full summer bloom, its lovers and roller-skaters and musicians and horse-drawn carriages – just walk hand in hand, being frightfully learned and amusing, telling each other more about each other, going through that delightfully earnest process of impressing: that’s what Jack Harker wanted to do, then hail a taxi to take them back to his nice old apartment off Gramercy Park, then fold her in his arms. But there was going to be none of that delightful business: it was a non-starter because Josephine wanted to rush home to work.

‘While my writing blood is up! I’m not going to waste all this booze, I’m going to go’n pound out the prose so I bowl you over next Saturday, Jack Harker of Harvest House fame …’ She blew him a dazzling kiss as her taxi pulled away from the Tavern on the Green.

Harker watched her go with regret. As her cab disappeared she twiddled her fingers over her shoulder at him. He grinned and waved. Then he pulled out his cellphone and dialled Clements.

‘The eagle is on her way back,’ he said.

‘I’m clear,’ Clements replied.

‘Anything new?’

‘Some.’

‘So, drop everything around to me tonight.’

It was a wistful Harker who walked through Central Park, sat in the Sherry-Netherland’s bar and drank a row of whiskies. He had spent a lovely day with a lovely young woman and he wanted to savour it – and he was going to report none of it to Felix Dupont.

But when he got back to his apartment there was a coded message from Dupont on his answering machine, ordering him to proceed to Washington the next day for a conference. The following Saturday Harker could not meet Josephine Valentine as arranged because he was preparing to commit murder.

6

Colonel Felix Dupont, Director of Region One of the Civil Cooperation Bureau, ran a good, small hotel called the Royalton in a side street not far from Pennsylvania Avenue. It had only fifty rooms and the place was rather British: the interior was half-panelled in dark mahogany, the reception area had potted palms. Hunting trophies adorned the walls, antique chandeliers hung from the ornate ceiling. It had a handsome horseshoe bar called Churchill’s, also fitted out in mahogany with dark booths. All the bar staff were busty ladies – Felix Dupont didn’t hire any other kind. Churchill’s did good trade. The Royalton had no restaurant so it was inexpensive by Washington standards and therefore popular with travelling salesmen and husbands cheating on their wives. It was a profitable little hotel because of the low overheads, and its administration was undemanding, which left Dupont plenty of time for his covert Civil Cooperation Bureau duties.

Felix Dupont was a man of about fifty with dark bushy eyebrows over a round, bearded face. He had piercing blue eyes that could be jolly. He was a devout Afrikaner, but an Anglicized one from Cape Town. He had gone to the best private school of British persuasion and had even considered going to Oxford University before he opted for a career in the South African army. He had a very good military reputation. Harker respected his abilities but didn’t like him. The man was an unmitigated racist. The antagonism was mutual: Dupont respected Harker’s record as a soldier but he resented his Sandhurst background, his British culture and manners. Ninety years ago Dupont’s father and grandfather had fought the likes of Harker’s in the long and bitter Boer War, his grandmother and most of her children had perished of disease and malnutrition in the British concentration camps along with twenty-six thousand other Boers. If Dupont had had his way Harker would have been transferred to Region Two, London, where he could ‘ponce about with those English sonsabitches’. Now Dupont had a nasty job for Harker, codenamed Operation Marigold, and he relished the man’s reaction.

‘Jesus.’ It was the first time in his CCB career that Harker had been ordered to kill anybody.

Dupont waited, amused, his blue eyes hooded.

‘How?’ Harker demanded.

‘Softly-softly. We want to know what exactly these guys are planning before we bump them off – who their accomplices are, where they are, et cetera. And we want all the documents they may have in their possession. So before you hit them you record their party talk with a long-range listening device which the CIA will provide.’ He smiled wolfishly. ‘Then, when the dear boys are sleepy and go to bed, you burst in there and shoot the shit out of them. You then collect up every document you can find, every scrap of evidence in their wallets and briefcases, then you plant explosive charges and you blow them all to Kingdom Come.’ He added, ‘In fact you not only blow up the house, you also strap explosives to the bodies and blow them to smithereens too, so there’s no possibility of identification afterwards.’

Jesus. ‘And supposing I don’t hear anything incriminating on the listening device? Supposing they’re not planning sabotage?’

Dupont said, ‘You just listen until they’re getting ready for bed, then you attack. First you lob a few stun grenades through the windows, then burst in the back and front door simultaneously.’

Harker shook his head grimly. ‘But how do we know this tip-off is reliable? The identity of the targets, for starters. Who exactly in the CIA gave you the information? They’ve been known to be wrong in the past.’

‘You have no need to know who. Just take my word for it – and my orders.’

‘But how do we know they’re plotting sabotage inside South Africa?’

‘I repeat, you have no need to know. Suffice it to say the CIA have informers amongst the Cuban military. The ANC guys have just completed a course in urban terrorism in Havana. Brigadier Moreno is the Cuban army’s top intelligence officer in Angola.’

‘But,’ Harker said, ‘why the hell are these guys meeting in America? This is very hostile territory for them.’

‘Yours not to reason why, Major. Just accept the CIA’s information gratefully. Suffice it to say they’re here under false identities and they’re here for good reason.’

‘But does the Chairman know about this?’

‘You take your orders from me, Major!’ Dupont said sharply. ‘But, yes, he knows. And approves.’

Harker did not like this. He had killed plenty of men on the battlefield without compunction but he had never killed in cold blood.

‘It’s a golden opportunity,’ Dupont said.

Harker could see the military desirability of the action: an opportunity to kill two top Cuban officers meeting three senior ANC officials trained in urban terrorism to discuss sabotage strategies within South Africa was not to be missed. He just wished it wasn’t he who had to do it, particularly on American soil. ‘And where is this ANC safe-house where they’re meeting?’

‘It’s a Russian safe-house. It’s a farmhouse, in a lonely part of Long Island, New York. No other houses nearby. The CIA have given us a plan of the place.’ He tapped a roll of architectural drawings. ‘And skeleton keys.’

‘Why the hell don’t the CIA do the damn job themselves if they’re so keen to be helpful?’

Dupont was enjoying Harker’s anxiety. ‘Because they want to keep their noses clean. They want us to do their dirty work for them.’ He added: ‘They’ll blame the job on the anti-Castro exile community in Miami.’

‘But why me? I’m not an assassin. You’ve got plenty of other operatives who could do the job, why me?’

‘You received training in termination techniques, didn’t you? You signed the fucking oath of faithful service?’

‘But the Chairman told me I wouldn’t have to get my hands bloody!’

‘Well the Chairman was wrong, wasn’t he? Things have got a bit tougher since he recruited you.’ He glared. ‘And if there’s any insubordination you’ll be posted back home. And court-martialled! And you can kiss your high-brow Harvest House goodbye. Do you hear me?’

Court-martialled? Harker clenched his teeth: it wasn’t an offence under the Defence Force Act to refuse to commit murder on foreign soil. But losing Harvest House? He glanced back at Dupont, then muttered: ‘I hear you.’

Dupont sat back. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he glowered, ‘here we have the opportunity to get rid of two top Cuban officers, Sanchez and Moreno, the two top bastards who’re killing our boys in the bush, and they’re meeting three ANC swines to plot murder of innocent civilians with their bombs and sabotage – and you’re squeamish!’

Harker glared at him. ‘I fully recognize them as legitimate military targets – I also went to war-school. I would bump them off joyfully if I could get near enough to them in the war zone. But you’re damn right if you mean I’m scared of doing it in the civilian environs of America – sir. If anything goes wrong I’ll be tried for murder. Sir.’

Dupont smiled carnivorously. ‘When you say “sir” you’d better sound as if you mean it, old boy.’

Harker sighed angrily. Dupont looked at him icily, but decided to let it go. ‘Major, if you land in trouble the CIA will see that you get out of it. They’re as keen on this job as we are. And they assure me that when you’ve reconnoitred the killing ground you’ll see it’s a cinch.’

Harker snorted. Dupont glanced at his wristwatch and said, ‘Okay, tell me about Bigmouth.’

Harker groaned angrily. He said, ‘I’ve reviewed everything Clements got from her apartment yesterday, her notebooks, her disks. Here’s my report.’ He put his hand in his pocket, withdrew an envelope and tossed it in front of his boss.

‘And?’

‘And,’ Harker said, ‘she’s harmless. There is nothing of significance that we don’t know already. Apart from her war photography she’s no different from all the other bleeding hearts in the anti-apartheid movement.’

Dupont pushed the report aside and said grimly, ‘She’s not fucking harmless, she’s a troublemaker. All those demonstrations and fund-raising, all the crap she writes. It’s not just a movement, it’s an industry – all these “Free Mandela” T-shirts and crap. Did she tell you about this book she’s supposed to be writing?’

‘No,’ Harker said.

‘When are you seeing her again?’

‘I can meet her again through the yacht club.’

Dupont jabbed his finger. ‘Well, get on to it. And find out about this book – tell her you want to read it, you’re a fancy publisher. And if it looks like getting published you publish it. And kill it. Tell her you’re printing thousands of copies but print a few hundred and bury the fucking thing …’

7

It was touch-and-go whether Harker refused to obey orders concerning the assassination, resigned his commission in the army, kissed goodbye to Harvest House and tried to make a new career for himself at the age of thirty-eight. He had no moral compunction about killing General Sanchez and Brigadier Moreno of the Cuban army – he had been killing their soldiers for years on the battlefield, as they had been trying to kill him. He wasn’t even much concerned about his own skin: the CIA with their wheels within wheels would cover his tracks if he left any and if he still got in the shit they would pull the right strings to fish him out – unless it suited them to let him take the rap, but he didn’t seriously think they would do that. Nor was it fear of danger; he had penetrated behind enemy lines to reconnoitre targets over terrain much more dangerous than an empty farmhouse in the tranquil American countryside. Nor was it fear of the poverty that might ensue if he resigned in protest: true, he would lose Harvest House, the job of publisher he really enjoyed, but he had a good reputation in New York and he could surely get another position in publishing. Nor was it fear of his own army that worried him: sure, if he resigned in protest they would watch him like hawks, he would be a dead man if he dared spill the beans – but Harker would not spill any beans. No, it was murdering those three ANC officials that worried him.

They were civilians, not soldiers. Okay, they were going to be plotting sabotage within South Africa, and that made them murderers – five years ago ANC agents had planted a car-bomb outside the South African air force headquarters in Pretoria and killed and injured many people, most of them civilian passers-by. That was despicable, but on the other hand wasn’t the air force headquarters a legitimate military target for the ANC, hadn’t the bomb blown out all the windows and a fucking great hole in the wall? Sure it was despicable to blow up civilians, but hadn’t the explosion impressed the shit out of South Africans, delivered the message that apartheid was a dangerous, bloody business? And then had come the murder of Dulcie September; the whole world had had no doubt that South Africa had done the job, and Harker now had no doubt that the CCB was responsible. The thought had sickened him. Christ – soldiers were legitimate targets, but unarmed civilians who had committed no wrong other than espouse a political cause opposed to your political masters’ credo stuck in his craw. Jesus, he’d hoped such action would never be required of him.

‘They’re plotting murder,’ Dupont had said.

Yes, most probably, Harker admitted to the passing twinkling lights beyond the Amtrak dining saloon carrying him back to New York with the suitcase of explosives the CIA had provided; yes, most probably they would be plotting murder, but how do we know for sure? We have only the CIA’s word for it. Perhaps they’re discussing something like children’s nutritional aid, or the ANC’s next tactic around the corridors of the United Nations which Harker would hear all about from his salesmen anyway …

‘Of course they’re saboteurs,’ Dupont had shouted. ‘Why else are they meeting Sanchez and Moreno?’

Yes, they must be, but he wished he knew their names so he could try to verify the fact, and he wished he had more than the CIA’s word for the purpose of the meeting.

It took him a long time to go to sleep that Monday night, staring out of the train window, watching the night lights of America slip by.

The reconnaissance was easy.

Harker did not do it himself because his CCB cover as a publisher would have been blown if he had been caught. He sent one of his senior salesmen, Derek Clements, the very tough American who had been a US Marine and a mercenary in the Rhodesian army. He was one of the best soldiers Harker had known, the right sort to have on your side in a tight corner: amongst other military accomplish-ments he was a tracking and survival expert, an instructor in hand-to-hand combat, an expert in demolition work. Clements had been in the CCB longer than Harker, who had inherited him from Dupont. His front-business in America was a car-hire firm much patronized by United Nations officials: his rank and pay scale in Military Intelligence was that of lieutenant. But he was really staff-sergeant material, one of the breed of men who kick ass and make an army function.

Harker drove Clements to Long Island that Tuesday afternoon in a Hertz car rented in a false name. They located the area of the farm, then went to eat at a roadhouse. When darkness fell they synchronized watches and drove back to the area. Clements was dropped off at the roadside. He disappeared into the dark, and Harker drove on.

The farmhouse was surrounded by woods and, as Dupont had promised, it was deserted. There wasn’t another dwelling for over a mile. Clements approached carefully. There was no light. He observed the old clapboard house for half an hour, looking for signs of life, then he crept to the back door and let himself in with the keys Dupont had given to Harker.

And, yes, though the place was empty, it was in use: the kitchen was clean, there was water in the taps. Clements went through it slowly, shining a shaded torch. There were a few cans of food in the small pantry and some Cuban rum. The living room was the only suitable place for a meeting: there was a dining table surrounded by eight chairs. The bookshelves were empty, there was no paper anywhere. Upstairs there were three bedrooms holding ten narrow beds, made up with blankets but no sheets. All the cupboards and drawers were bare. There was one used bar of soap in the small bathroom but nothing else. All the floors were made of wood, covered with a scattering of worn mats.

Clements went back downstairs. He began to go through the house again systematically, carefully noting every detail, the position of the furniture, of the mats. Then he let himself out by the kitchen door, and crept back through the woods. At ten o’clock exactly Harker’s headlights appeared down the road. Clements emerged from the darkness, and Harker picked him up.

‘Well?’

‘It’ll be a cinch,’ Clements said. ‘We hit all three entrances as shown on the architect’s drawing. And the place is a tinder-box, everything is wood. A couple of bombs will blow the lot sky-high. It’s obviously just a safe-house for transients. No armour, no communications, not even a phone. So who are these guys we’re hitting?’

‘Sorry, you have no need to know. Is there a good place for the listening device?’

‘Perfect. One just under the floorboards as a back-up, the main just inside the surrounding forest – plenty of undergrowth, but a clean field of fire if the action starts at the wrong time.’

‘Okay, so plant the gear on Thursday night. Rent a car, park it at the hamburger joint and walk to the scene. Rig your listening device in the right place and then make yourself scarce. Take Spicer to cover you. Then we rendezvous on Saturday, with our hardware – the CIA are supplying us with the Russian machine pistols that the Cubans use, and the grenades. The CIA are tailing the targets all day to see what else they get up to. When they arrive here the CIA will radio me. We move into the forest and listen. At the right time we hit ’em, front door, kitchen door and french window. Then we get their documents and blow the place up.’

‘How many of us?’

‘Four. You, me, Spicer and Trengrove.’

Clements said, ‘Wish we could hit them as they arrive, as they’re getting out of the car.’

‘Wish we could too. But the boss wants to hear what they’re talking about.’

‘Well,’ Clements said with a smile, ‘sounds like fun, sir. About time we did something exciting.’

Exciting? Harker felt ill in his guts. He was sick of war. He sighed grimly. ‘Okay, we’ll go back to Harvest and I’ll give you the listening gear Dupont gave me.’

8

Yes, Harker was sick of war, sick of soldiering: he didn’t feel like a soldier any more, he felt like a publisher. He didn’t even feel much like an African: he felt more of an Anglo-American now. But a professional soldier he was. He owed his position as a publisher to his military superiors, and he was at war. And the purpose of warfare, every military scientist agrees, is to kill as many of the enemy as possible as fast as possible in the pursuit of victory: you only stop killing the enemy when he is defeated or makes peace. It is the characteristic of the professional military man that once he has made up his mind on a course of action he carries it out: he only departs from his objective if he has to make a tactical retreat.

Harker’s character and talents fitted him perfectly for a successful military career. Yes, he was sick of war but he regarded it as a just battle against the communist forces of darkness. By the time the train had carried him back to New York from Washington he had made up his mind that the persons meeting at the safe-house in Long Island were legitimate military targets: the CIA said so, the Chairman said so, Dupont said so. The qualms he had about the ANC officials being civilians were groundless – they were plotting sabotage within South Africa which would surely involve innocent civilian casualties. Harker wished he knew more but he had no need to know before accepting his superiors’ word for this. True, his action would be highly illegal under the laws of America, first degree murder, but that did not diminish the moral legitimacy of it under the laws of war.

Nonetheless Harker felt sick in his guts. He did not waver, but the fact that those ANC officials were civilians kept nagging at him. He grimly told himself that his qualms were illogical, attributable to his war-weariness, to being softened. He pushed the point out of his mind but it kept stalking him. It was a very tense week. He did not sleep well.

Before midnight on Thursday Clements telephoned him at home. ‘All systems go,’ he said. ‘The story is written exactly as outlined. It’ll be publishable on schedule.’

‘Good.’

Harker poured himself another drink. Yes it was good, for Christ’s sake, good that five bastards plotting murder were going to be taken out, that innocent civilian lives in South Africa were going to be spared … But he had been secretly hoping that Clements might report that the mission had proved impossible – then the CIA would have had to do their own dirty work.

That wouldn’t bother you one bit, so why the hell are you bothered now? The result would be the same!

The next morning he was about to call Josephine Valentine to postpone their Saturday lunch date when she telephoned him.

‘Well, Major,’ she said cheerfully, ‘it’s all systems go. I’ve polished up those first ten chapters and they’re fit to be read. This is to confirm tomorrow’s date.’

Harker closed his eyes. All systems go. That she had used the same words as Clements made him flinch. ‘I’m terribly sorry, Josie, but I was about to phone you to ask if we can postpone, something very important has come up.’

‘Oh.’ She sounded very disappointed. ‘Of course. Till when?’

He wanted to give himself a week to lie low, to settle down, to get the debriefing over, reports sent, to get over the whole incident. He could almost feel her disappointment – authors want their praise immediately. ‘How about the following Saturday?’

‘Fine!’ Her relief that the postponement was not longer was palpable. ‘I know – let me take you to lunch at the yacht club. It’s my favourite day there – a superb buffet.’

‘Yacht club it is,’ Harker said. ‘We’ll fight about the bill.’

‘I’m paying,’ she said. ‘You’re giving up part of your weekend for me!’

Saturday was tense. Harvest House was deserted, echoing. His instructions were to stay in his command post in the basement to be in secure contact with both the faceless CIA and the ugly face of Dupont in Washington until H-hour, the time for action. It was a long day. He tried to do some publishing work but could not concentrate. He turned to some CCB preparation, reviewing his salesmen’s latest information in readiness for his routine monthly report to Dupont, but he could not settle to it. He tried to catch up on the wads of South African newspapers that arrived twice a week, a task he usually enjoyed, but he could not even keep his mind on the reports about the Angolan war. Most of the news was bullshit anyway – the journalists usually only knew what the army chose to tell them to boost morale, to keep the public supportive. In reality the war was going to be South Africa’s Vietnam if a deal wasn’t made soon – he just wished to God the politicians could learn from America’s mistakes, pull out all the stops, hit the Cubans with everything the army had, drive them into the sea once and for all, get the war over, then settle South Africa’s internal problems – dismantle goddam apartheid and bring moderate blacks into government. But South Africa dared not do that because there would be an international outcry – the West also wanted Russia and Cuba out of the continent but South Africa, which was capable of achieving that, was its own worst enemy with its goddam apartheid, a pariah. So the battles raged on, people dying, taxpayers’ money haemorrhaging into the hot sands of Angola along with the blood.

Harker shoved the newspapers aside in frustration. He held his face. And what he was doing today was part of that process. Another nail in the coffin of communism.

He had to get up and start pacing up and down the basement to ease his nerves.

It was always like this before an action, he reminded himself. Once you knew you were going in at H-hour you were a bundle of tension. You try to rest, to eat, to read, to pray, you know you can’t change anything, the plan is laid, the orders given so all you can do is hope – hope that you come out alive. That’s for an overt action, where it’s more or less each man for himself when the bullets start flying – it was much worse for a covert action where you were sent behind enemy lines and the main hope you had was that they didn’t capture you alive and torture you to death. So what’s new about this fucking tension?

What’s new is that you’ve gone soft in two years in New York – your heart’s not in soldiering any more …

God, he wanted a drink. To ease his nerves, to help his hangover – that was certainly part of his problem, he’d been drinking too much. But he dared not.

To kill the time he pulled out Josephine’s file, and he sat down behind his desk and tried to read again the stories she had written. But he could not concentrate on that either; he flipped through the file, looking for photographs of her.

Oh, she was beautiful. Just then the telephone rang. He snatched up the receiver. ‘Hullo?’

‘Is that Buttons and Bows Night Club?’ Dupont said.

Harker closed his eyes, his heart knocking. ‘Sorry, wrong number.’ He hung up.

Harker slumped, then picked up his cellphone, his hand shaking. He dialled.

‘Buttons and Bows,’ Clements said.

‘I want to speak to Mr Buttons, please.’

‘He’ll call you back in about twenty minutes, sir.’

It was a long twenty minutes waiting for Clements’ next call. ‘Awaiting your pleasure, sir,’ he said.

Harker picked up his holdall and clambered up the narrow staircase into his upper office. He opened the big front door of Harvest House and stepped out into the spring night. The car was parked fifty yards down the road: the driver flashed his headlights once. Harker climbed into the front passenger seat. A man called Parker, one of Clements’ salesmen, was at the wheel. ‘Good evening, sir,’ they all said.

‘Good evening,’ Harker said tensely. ‘Let’s go.’

At nine o’clock that Saturday night they were creeping through the forest, approaching the farmhouse. Now they were all in black tracksuits, wearing balaclavas, carrying the machine-pistols Harker had distributed.

The clapboard house was about fifty years old, the paint peeling off the wood, the yard around it sprinkled with weeds and shrubs. The house was in darkness. The listening gear was in position. Harker gave his instructions and Clements moved to take cover facing the front door, Spicer went off to cover the kitchen door, Trengrove disappeared around the other side of the house to the living room window. Harker remained with the listening device, covering the dining-room French window. They settled down to wait.

It was a very long hour before the headlights came flicking through the forest. The car came up the winding track into the yard, its headlights now blinding. Harker lay beside the listening gear, his heart pounding; the vehicle’s doors opened and one by one five dark figures clambered out. They were hardly talking, only a mutter here and there as they stretched and reached for luggage. Then, while the headlights illuminated the kitchen door, they trooped towards it, carrying their briefcases and baggage. For the first time Harker could distinguish the blacks from the Cubans, but he could not identify anybody. They clustered around while one of the Cubans selected and inserted a key.

Harker snorted to himself. It would have been an ideal moment to hit the whole damn lot of them: no fuss, no risk. But no – goddam Dupont wanted to record what they talked about first. The Cuban unlocked the door and they filed inside. Lights went on. Harker glimpsed them filing through the kitchen into the dining room. They clustered around the table, and one of the Cubans produced a bottle from his briefcase.

Harker put on the headphones of the listening device. He could hear mumbled speech. He turned the tuning knob and the volume. Suddenly he heard a Cuban say, ‘Close the curtains. Sit down, please …’ He heard the scraping of chair legs on the floor. More mumbles. The tinkle of liquor being poured. Then the meeting began.

Harker listened intently, his tape-recorder turning; then he closed his eyes in relief. Thank God … Thank God this murder was not unjust. The bastards were certainly plotting murder. Mass murder. Planning to detonate three car-bombs at twenty-four-hour intervals: the first at the Voortrekker Monument on a Sunday, the second at the Houses of Parliament on Monday, Johannesburg’s international airport on Tuesday. Harker smiled despite himself – the chain of events would be effective: the Voortrekker Monument job would infuriate, the Houses of Parliament job would vastly impress, the Johannesburg airport job would downright terrify. The psychological impact upon the South African public, coming one after the other, boom boom boom, would be enormous. In fact, listening to the muffled indistinct speech, Harker was surprised they settled for only three bombs – why not half a dozen, throw in the Union Buildings in Pretoria where all the top government departments hang out, the Reserve Bank down the road and, say, the City Hall. Harker had always wondered why the ANC hadn’t done all that years ago – they really were, militarily speaking, a milk-and-water bunch. MK, the Spear of the Nation, the ANC’s army, had never waged a battle. The only thing that gave them clout was the moral turpitude of apartheid.

For an hour Harker tried to listen to the plotting going on in the house, over the coughs and mumbles and mutters and occasional laughter, the glug of liquor and the click of cigarette lighters; he could only make out snatches of detail and he hoped the tape-recorder was picking up more. Then suddenly the meeting sounded as if it was over: he heard a burst of song in Spanish, followed by guffaws.

Harker took a deep breath – it was time to hit. He took off his headphones and whispered into his radio transmitter.

‘H-hour coming up. Do you read me? Come in one at a time.’

‘One, copy,’ Clements said.

‘Two, copy,’ Ferdi Spicer said.

‘Three, copy,’ Trengrove said.

‘Okay,’ Harker said, ‘we hit on zero … Five … Four … Three … Two … One … Zero!’

Out of the forest sprang the four dark forms. They ran through the darkness at the house. Harker raced up to the curtained dining-room French window, a stun grenade in his hand: he yanked out the pin with his teeth and hurled it through the window. There was a shattering of glass, then a detonation that seemed to shake the earth. Then there was a crack as Spicer kicked the kitchen door in, another as Clements did the same to the front door. Harker burst through the window and opened fire. And there was nothing in the world but the popping of his machine pistol, then the noise of Spicer’s and Clements’ as they covered the two principal escape routes.

In the cacophony Harker did not hear the shattering of the living room window as a black South African called Looksmart Kumalo dived through it, through Trengrove’s hail of bullets, scrambled up and fled off into the black forest. Trengrove went bounding frantically after him, gun blazing, but in an instant the darkness had swallowed him up. Trengrove went crashing through the black undergrowth, wildly looking for the runaway man, but Looksmart Kumalo, badly wounded, was hiding under some bushes. Trengrove crashed about for several hundred yards, then he turned and went racing back to the farmhouse.

Harker was frantically collecting up all the documents, baggage and briefcases while Clements and Spicer were fixing explosives to the dead bodies. ‘Where’s the other body?’ Clements demanded.

‘Sir!’ Trengrove shouted. ‘He escaped into the forest!’

‘Christ!’ Harker stared. ‘Christ, Christ, Christ!’

‘Go after him, sir?’ Clements rasped.

‘Yes!’ Harker shouted. ‘Spicer stays and finishes the explosives! Rest of you go. Go!’

For twenty minutes Harker, Clements and Trengrove thrashed through the black undergrowth of the forest, trying to flush out the runaway, hoping to stumble across the dead body. It was hopeless – nobody can track in the dark. After twenty minutes Harker barked a halt. If the bastard survived he was unlikely to tell the American police that he was attacked during a murderous conspiracy meeting in an illegal Cuban safe-house.

‘Back!’ Harker rasped. ‘Get the hell out of here!’

Spicer was desperately waiting for them, the explosives emplaced, the listening gear and the seized documents ready to go. Harker spoke into his radio to the getaway car: ‘Venus is rising!’

The men went racing up the dark track towards the tarred road. They were several miles away, speeding towards Manhattan, when the house disintegrated in a massive explosion, the bodies blown to tiny pieces.

9

It was always the same after an action. Before going into battle he was very tense but afterwards, when the dust had settled and the bodies had been counted, he slept as if he had been pole-axed even if he knew the action was to resume at dawn – he felt no remorse about the enemy, only grim satisfaction and relief to have survived. It was only the conscripts, the civilians in uniform, who sometimes felt remorse, but usually that didn’t last long either because few experiences are more antagonizing than having, some bastard trying to shoot the living shit out of you.

Harker woke up that Sunday afternoon rested for the first time in a week, permitting himself no feeling of guilt. The die was cast, nothing could change it. It had been a legitimate military operation and had saved civilian lives. It was front-page news in most of the papers: there were photographs of the area where the safe-house had stood, the earth and shrubbery blackened and blasted. There was one survivor in critical condition: an ‘adult male of African origin now in hospital, with multiple injuries, including loss of one eye and an arm so badly mutilated by gunfire that it had to be amputated below the elbow’. The FBI were investigating: they had no comment yet but the local sheriff, who was first on the scene, was moved to hint that this was ‘probably a gangland slaying, probably to do with drugs’. Investigations were continuing.

Harker felt a stab of guilt through a chink in his armour when he read about the mutilated survivor, as yet unidentified, but he thrust it aside – he had seen plenty of his soldiers mutilated over the years: if you play with fire you must expect to get your fingers burnt – the bastard had been plotting far worse, he was lucky to be alive and if he’d been caught in South Africa he would have been hanged after the police had wrung the truth out of him. Harker had no fear that the man could be dangerous: no ANC official would be so dumb as to tell the FBI he was meeting with Fidel Castro’s henchmen on holy American soil. Without much difficulty Harker parried the thrust of guilt as he encoded his report to Dupont that Sunday afternoon, and when his computer began to print out the information from Washington that the survivor was now positively identified by the CIA as Alexander Looksmart Kumalo, his remorse evaporated further. Looksmart Kumalo was well known to Military Intelligence as one of the ANC’s sabotage strategists.

That afternoon Harker took the shuttle flight to Washington to deliver to Dupont all the documents seized at the farmhouse. He had not read them; he had tried, he could read Spanish with difficulty but he could not concentrate; indeed he did not want to know any more than he had to about the misery of war and murderous skulduggeries in its name, and he wanted to forget his work of last night. But when he walked into the soundproof office behind the reception desk of the Royalton Hotel a happily drunk Dupont not only thrust a large whisky at him after pumping his hand in congratulation – ‘Jolly good show, fucking good show! Sanchez and Moreno!’ – but also insisted Harker give him a blow by blow account. And sitting in the corner was the CIA man whom Harker knew only by the codename ‘Fred’, the guy who was Dupont’s handler or contact with the United States’ ‘Dirty Tricks Bureau’ as he called it, and Fred wanted every detail on tape.

‘Fucking good show …’ Dupont interjected frequently.

Neither Dupont nor Fred was unduly concerned about the survivor, Looksmart Kumalo. It was a pity, of course, that he had not perished with the rest of the blackguards but there was no danger of the bastard spilling the beans: he would be debriefed by the CIA and advised, ‘in the nicest possible way’, that not only was his liberty at stake because of the cocaine the FBI had planted on him, but his health was also because – if he didn’t have a mysterious fatal heart attack in hospital – he would be deported to South Africa where he belonged and where he would receive a warm welcome from the authorities if he opened his big mouth. And if he broke the bargain he was being so generously offered, the British MI5, France’s Sûreté and most of the civilized world’s secret services would have him prominently on their shit-list.

‘He won’t talk publicly,’ Froggy Fred croaked, ‘and if he does they’ll be the last words he utters.’

‘You planted cocaine on him?’ Harker frowned. ‘I thought the FBI were going to blame the whole thing on the Cuban exile community in Miami. Now you’re going to claim it was a drug-war assassination?’

‘Both,’ Fred rumbled. ‘We blame it on both, as alternative possibilities, to raise confusion.’

Dupont leered happily, stroking the pile of documents. ‘He’ll keep his mouth shut, don’t worry …’

It was after midnight when the debriefing was declared over and a taxi was summoned to take Harker back to the airport. Dupont offered him a room in the hotel –‘The presidential suite indeed’ – and Fred volunteered to throw in a good hooker ‘on Uncle Sam’ – ‘Or two!’ Dupont cried – but Harker just wanted to get the hell, away from yesterday, from these awful guys, from this hotel where they festered.

As he climbed into the taxi, Dupont breathed alcoholically through the window. ‘Fucking good show! Now you relax, disappear to the beach for a few days, then get on to the Bigmouth case …’

He did disappear to the coast, but not to enjoy himself – it was to brood. Ah yes, his soldier’s conscience was clear, more or less, but even soldiers sometimes want to be alone after they have done battle, spilt voluminous blood, mourn not for the enemy but the whole dreadful business of taking so much life. And he did not want to ‘get on to the Bigmouth case’ – he felt a fraud. He was a fraud. Jack Harker dearly wished he was not bound to take the beautiful Josephine Valentine to lunch next Saturday, he wanted to be alone, he dearly wished he did not have to pose fraudulently as her potential publisher in order to further the ends of apartheid. Josephine Valentine’s book was hardly a legitimate military target.

And he would not do so.

No, he would not do so. Jack Harker refused to defraud Josephine Valentine any further by pretending that he was interested in publishing her book. He would have to pay her the courtesy of reading her ten chapters, and he would give her his honest opinion, but he would tell her immediately thereafter that Harvest would not publish it. He was not going to give her false hope, and he certainly was not going to obey orders and bury her book, kill it by publishing it badly. Fuck you, Felix Dupont.

Having made that decision he felt better. On Saturday, when he drove back to Manhattan, he was again looking forward to having lunch with one of the best-looking women in New York.

When Josephine Valentine came sweeping into the yacht club dining room, clutching her file, beaming, hand extended, she was even lovelier than he remembered.

‘Hi!’ She pumped his hand energetically: hers was warm and both soft and strong. She was a little breathless, as if she had been hurrying. ‘Am I late?’

‘Indeed you’re two minutes early,’ Harker smiled. ‘You look beautiful.’

‘Thank you. Well …’ She plonked the file down on the table. ‘Here it is.’ But she put her hand on it. ‘Please, don’t look at it now. I want you to give it your undivided attention at home. And,’ she grinned, ‘I’m nervous as hell.’ She sat.

Oh dear. ‘Don’t be, I know you write well.’ Harker sat down. And he decided that right now was the moment to start extricating himself. ‘And I’m not the only publisher in town. Indeed you’ll probably do better with a bigger house.’

Consternation crossed her lovely face. ‘But you will consider it? Are you saying you’re not interested any more?’

Oh Christ. ‘I’m just being realistic, for your sake.’ He smiled. ‘On the contrary, I’m the one who should be nervous that you’ll take it to somebody else.’

Josephine sat back and blew out her cheeks. ‘For a moment I thought you were trying to tell me something.’ Then she said anxiously, ‘You will be brutally honest with me, won’t you?’

‘Of course.’

‘Okay.’ She sat back, with a brilliant smile. ‘And now let’s stop talking about it – I’ve been burning the midnight oil all week.’

‘So what’ll you have to drink?’

‘A double martini for starters. Followed by a bucket of wine. And remember I’m paying.’

‘You are not.’ The fucking CCB was paying.

They had a good time again that day. They laughed a great deal, drank a lot, became very witty and wise. Harker got into a mood to celebrate too, but he was not sure what: he still felt a fraud. And, God, he just wanted to get this masquerade of being her potential publisher over so he could do what publishers should not do – make a pass at an author. Oh, to take her hand across the table, look into her blue eyes, tell her how beautiful she was, to feel her body against his, to go through the delightful process of courtship: but as long as he was defrauding her his conscience would not permit it, his head had to rule his loins. So the sooner he went through the motions of reading her typescript, grasped the nettle and told her that Harvest could not publish it, the better.

‘So tell me, Major Jack Harker,’ she said over the rim of her first glass of Irish coffee, ‘whatever happened to Mrs Harker?’

‘There hasn’t been one. There very nearly was, but she changed her mind. One of the casualties of war. She’s now Mrs Somebody Else.’

‘Oh. Well, all I can say is that she was either very, very stupid or Mr Somebody Else must be very, very nice. So tell me …’ she raised her glass to her wide full lips and looked at him, ‘is some lucky American gal filling her stilettos?’

‘Nobody special.’ He felt himself blushing. ‘And how about you?’

She grinned. ‘Nobody special. I’ve only just hit town after a long time away.’

Oh, Harker badly wanted to know about her past, how many of the legends about her were true. In particular he wanted to know about that dead Cuban lying on the floor of the building at Bassinga when she had tried to kill herself – but the time was not right for a confession that he had killed her lover, and doubtless never would be.

‘I’m sure you’ve been close to marrying?’ he said.

‘Several times. But, at the last minute, there was always something amiss.’ She flashed him a smile from underneath her dark eyebrows. ‘Like, not enough soulmateship.’ She added: ‘I’ve got the feeling you know what I’m talking about.’

‘Soulmates? Sure. Lovers who think and feel alike. Share the same interests.’

‘And passions. Interests and passions. Like…Justice. And Democracy. Freedom. A fair wage for a fair day’s labour. And poetry, and music. And … God.’ She looked at him seriously, then flashed him a smile. ‘All that good stuff.’

‘And have you ever found it?’

Josephine nodded sagely at her glass. ‘I thought so, several times. But each time it turned out to be a false alarm. Or something like that. Until the last time, I think. Maybe. But he was killed.’

Oh Christ. Harker waited, then said, ‘How?’

She said to her glass, ‘He was a soldier, like you.’ She smirked. ‘And he lost his life fighting you guys.’ She looked up. ‘The Battle of Bassinga? Mean anything to you?’

Harker feigned a sigh. What do you say? ‘It was a big do, I believe. I was in hospital at the time, wounded in an earlier action, the one that pensioned me out.’ He glanced at her. ‘So, what happened exactly?’

Josephine took a sip of Irish coffee. ‘I’d been living with him in his base camp for about a month. First met him up north in Luanda, then flew down with him to cover the southern front. We were asleep in his quarters when your guys struck, just before dawn. Helluva mess. Anyway, Paulo got shot at the beginning. So did I, but that was later on.’

So she wasn’t admitting attempted suicide. ‘You were shot in the cross-fire?’

‘When Paulo was shot I went berserk, I grabbed his AK47 and started firing out the window. There was a box of loaded magazines and I just kept firing, slapping in one magazine after another. Stupid, because journos aren’t supposed to become combatants if they don’t want to be treated as an enemy, but I was frantic about Paulo. Anyway, finally a bullet got me. Here.’ She tapped her left breast. ‘Missed my heart, fortunately. Next thing I knew I was being loaded into one of your helicopters and flown off to one of your bases, where they patched me up – which was nice of them, seeing as I’d been trying to shoot the hell out of them an hour earlier. Then they deported me.’

‘Oh, yes, I heard about this. So you’re the blonde bombshell who threatened to sue us. Wasn’t there a row about your photographs?’

She smiled. ‘Your guys developed my film to see what they could find out about the enemy’s hardware. I kicked up a fuss and they gave me my negatives back.’

‘Did they interrogate you?’

‘Sure, but I told them to go to hell.’ She added, ‘I must admit, grudgingly, that they were perfectly gentlemanly about it.’

Harker wondered what she would feel and say if he told her he knew the truth. ‘And this man Paulo – you were in love with him?’

She nodded. ‘Wildly. Or I thought so. I’d only known him for a little more than a month. Now with the wisdom of hindsight I realize that I was only infatuated, and confused by my admiration for him. He was a very admirable man. And swashbuckling.’ She smiled.

‘And handsome, no doubt.’

‘But that doesn’t cut much ice with me. It is what’s in here that counts.’ She tapped her heart. ‘And here.’ She tapped her head. ‘He was an entirely honest, dedicated social scientist, if that’s the word, dedicated to the well-being and betterment of his people – a true Christian, but for the fact that he was an atheist, of course, being a communist. Dedicated. His men loved him. Several medals for bravery. And ‘a great sense of humour. And a great reader, a very good conversationalist in both Spanish and English.’

Harker couldn’t stand the man. No doubt a fantastic Latin lover too. ‘Sounds good. But?’

‘But,’ Josie smiled, ‘I now realize it wouldn’t have worked. For one thing I’m not a communist. For another I espouse God. English is my mother tongue, and freedom of speech and of the press is my credo. And I’m a fully liberated Americano who regards herself as every inch her man’s equal, not as a Latino wife. Oh, he was macho, Paulo. Machissimo.’ She smiled wanly. ‘And there was something else wrong. I knew it at the time but wouldn’t admit it to myself – there was lots of lust, and lots of fun, but I knew deep down that it was just a rip-roaring affair, not love with a capital L.’

Harker was pleased to hear that: Señor Paulo sounded quite a tough act to follow. Before he could muster something appropriate Josephine asked with a smile, ‘And what about that extremely silly lady who nearly became Mrs Harker, then lost her marbles?’

Harker smiled. ‘Well …’ He was tempted to exaggerate, to match her description of Paulo, then he decided to do it straight. ‘Well, rather like your Paulo, who had something missing, my Pauline – and that was truly her name, would you believe the coincidence? Pauline was also dedicated to liberal politics, uplifting the Africans. Trade unionism, defeating apartheid, et cetera. She was a teacher, and she was going to set the world on fire. Anyway, I was off in the bush most of the time, dealing with her pals the enemy, and she met this crash-hot stockbroker who took her away from it all.’

‘And the first you knew about it was when you came back from the bush?’ She shook her head. ‘Well, he must have been one hell of a sexy stockbroker.’ She smiled at him.

The compliment made Harker’s heart turn over. And he longed to reach out across the table for her hand.

Then she confused him by changing the subject abruptly. ‘And tell me, do you believe in God?’

For the next half hour, through another round of Irish coffees, religion was the animated if solemn topic. Yes, Harker did believe in a Creator but he had arrived at this conclusion by logic rather than by what had been instilled into him at Sunday School: the upshot was an inability, on the evidence, to conclude whether He was the Christian, Islamic, Buddhist, African or some other kind of god. Josephine on the other hand described herself as ‘eighteen-carat Catholic’: ‘Alas, I believe in Heaven and Hell, the whole nine yards.’

‘But why the “alas”?’

Josephine tossed back her head and grinned at the ceiling: ‘“Oh Lord, make me good, but not yet”.’

Harker smiled. ‘Saint Augustine.’

Josephine pointed a red fingernail at his nose. ‘So you’re not such an infidel after all. Inside that rugged exterior there’s a Christian trying to get out …’

And then she said, halfway through the third Irish coffee, ‘And they tell me, Major, you’re a shit-hot sailor.’

Harker was surprised. ‘Who told you that?’

‘I’ve made a few enquiries around this club, and the feedback is you’re probably a gentleman, maybe even a scholar, but certainly a very good sailor. But you don’t come here often enough, they say.’

Harker was pleased with his credentials. And more pleased that she had enquired. ‘Unfortunately I can’t afford the time to come here often. But, yes, I’ve put my name down as crew for a few regattas and some kind skippers have taken me on. I’ve had a lot of fun.’

She leant forward: ‘Oh, isn’t sailing fun?’ Her eyes sparkled. ‘The wind, harnessing it, squeezing the most out of the sails? Even the skipper bawling you out. And getting drenched, and all the bullshit back in the clubhouse, the hot toddies and the post-mortems – I love it!’ She looked at him happily. ‘I’m a very competitive soul, Jack Harker. And I think you are too, huh?’

Harker ached to take her hand. Yes, of course he was fucking competitive, you have to be in the military. But a lot of the steam, the fight, seemed to have gone out of him since he had become a .civilian in New York. ‘Not as much as I used to be. Something to do with age.’

‘Bullshit. You’re not even forty. And you emerge from God-knows-how-many years of mortal combat and decide to become a publisher! That’s a very competitive business. Oh, he felt a fraud. She continued. ‘It takes balls. In New York, of all places. Why did you choose America?’

‘The American dream?’ He smiled.

‘See? Anyway, before I tell you my American dream, have you ever sailed across an ocean?’

‘I’ve been crew in the Cape Town to Rio de Janeiro yacht race several times.’

‘Oh, I’d love to do that! Was it scary? Those huge waves?’

‘Well, you knew you had a good strong boat and a good strong crew.’

‘Love to do it. And one day I will.’ She hunched forward. ‘Okay, my American dream: I’m going to make a pile of money out of writing, then buy a good strong boat and sail around the world.’ She grinned. ‘What do you think of that?’

Oh yes, Harker would love to do that. ‘Marvellous.’

She said with a twinkle in her eyes, ‘Okay, so what else are we compatible about, Major? We’ve canvassed books, booze and boating very successfully.’

‘How about ballooning?’

‘It’s wonderful!’ Josephine cried. ‘Did it in Kenya, over the Serengeti game reserve. Oh, what a sensation! Tell you what, a friend of mine has started a ballooning business upstate, we’ll do it one weekend!’

‘Sounds good.’

She took a gulp of her Irish coffee. ‘And, of course, you must be a parachutist?’

‘Had to be.’

‘And I’m a parachutist. Though only one jump, in England. But I’ve got my certificate. And boy – what a thrill. I’m dying to do it again.’

Harker was impressed. ‘Weren’t you scared?’

‘Terrified shitless! Standing at that door? But, boy, when that ’chute bursts open you feel king of the world. And what a ride! I’ve got to do it again. Were you scared, the first time you jumped?’

‘Hell, yes.’

‘But then you liked it?’

‘No. I wasn’t worried about the jump any more, it was who was waiting for me on the ground that bothered me.’

‘Hell, yes …’ She looked at him solemnly. Then she sat up straight. ‘What else are we both mad about? I suppose it’s too much to expect, coining from darkest Africa, that you ski as well?’

‘As a matter of fact,’ Harker smiled, ‘I’m a very good skier. I learned here in America. Almost every weekend during the winter I go upstate.’

Josephine slumped back and smiled at him broadly. ‘You know, Major Harker, sir, if I weren’t looking at you through rose-coloured spectacles as my future publisher I think I could develop a terrible case of the hots for you!’

Harker laughed. And his heart seemed to turn over. She burst into laughter with him, her eyes shining. It all seemed terribly funny. Oh, she would be very easy to fall in love with. ‘You keep wearing your rose-coloured spectacles and I’ll keep wearing mine.’

Her laughter subsided. She lowered her head slightly and peered at him from under her extravagant eyelashes. ‘Does that mean you are actually, seriously looking at me as your potential author?’

Oh dear. He heard himself say, ‘That’s how we’ve come to be meeting today, isn’t it?’

She looked at him. ‘Wouldn’t it be taboo?’

All Harker’s good intentions had gone out the window. But he didn’t care any more. He said, ‘Out there in the market-place all kinds of doctors, lawyers, accountants are getting involved with their clients, their patients.’

Josephine looked at him solemnly. ‘And do I understand correctly that despite that jazz about rose-coloured spectacles you find me attractive?’

Harker wanted to burst into laughter, but he put on a serious face.

‘Very attractive.’

She said earnestly, with a touch of impatience: ‘I mean as a person.’

Harker suppressed his grin into a smile. ‘Your body is superlatively attractive. But, yes, I mean as a person. An intellect. A soul.’ He meant every word.

‘Not as a one-night stand?’

Harker had to restrain himself from laughing. He said solemnly, ‘Correct.’

She regarded him closely. ‘Because if it is just a one-night stand, fine. Provided that in the morning we look each other in the eye and say to each other, honestly, “Thanks, pal, that was fun.” Hopefully, we’ll be able to say that much at least – “that was fun but let’s forget it happened”.’ She looked at him. ‘Promise me you’ll be honest?’

Harker couldn’t conceal his wide smile. ‘I promise.’

The corners of her lovely mouth twitched. ‘And whatever happens in the morning, it won’t affect your decision as to whether you publish my book or not?’

The remnants of Harker’s conscience spluttered out. ‘Absolutely not.’

‘It’s a deal?’

‘It’s a deal.’

She regarded him for a long moment; then her mouth went into a wide grin. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘So. As they say in the classics, my place or yours?’

The CCB paid for the lunch, despite her protests. ‘I’d like to feel I’m retaining some measure of control over my virtue, Major – if I kick you out in the morning at least I won’t feel in your debt!’ It all seemed terribly funny – and very erotic: here was an unconditional agreement about carnal experimentation between two adults with no illusions, no promises, no complaints entertained afterwards. ‘No prisoners taken, Major?’ They were both smiling broadly as they walked down the steps of the New York Yacht Club and hailed a cab. And when the driver said ‘Where to?’ Josephine spluttered, ‘What the hell, let’s go to your place, driver!’ It seemed uproariously funny.

But when they reached Harker’s apartment block down on East 22nd Street, and opened the ornate wrought-iron gate into the archway, then crossed the courtyard towards the rear block, a solemnity seemed to descend on her. They walked in silence down the corridor to his door. While he unlocked his apartment, she stared at the floor. He opened the door and let her enter first. She took a few paces inside, then turned, and leant back against the wall.

She looked at him. ‘Sure this is wise? Mixing business with pleasure?’

With the last vestige of his conscience Harker replied, ‘I never said it was wise. I just said it wasn’t unusual.’ He added, ‘And we’re not in business yet.’

‘But I’m hoping we will be,’ Josephine said softly. She looked at him a long moment, then said solemnly: ‘You won’t feel compromised?’

Oh Jesus. ‘Not if you won’t.’

‘How can I be compromised? You’re the one who has to decide about my book.’ She looked at him. ‘If you want to pull out of our little deal, fine.’ She was clutching her folder to her breasts.

This was his out. He could kiss her on the cheek and offer to call her a taxi with a clear conscience. But he didn’t want to do that, he didn’t care about his conscience. He asked, ‘Do you want to pull out?’

She stood at the wall, looking at him from under her dark eyebrows. She shook her head slightly. ‘Uh-uh.’

Harker grinned. Then Josephine smiled widely, and he took her in his arms.

He crushed her against him, her folder between them. Then her arm went around his neck, and she kissed him ravenously. Their teeth clashed and her tongue flashed into his mouth and she moaned. His hand slid down her back over her buttocks and thighs. Oh, the wonderful soft smooth feel of her. She thrust her pelvis against his loins and kissed him hard: then she broke the kiss, and leant back in his arms, eyes smouldering.

‘Just please don’t bullshit me about my book,’ she breathed.

‘It’s a deal.’

Harker turned, took her hand, and led her down the short corridor, into his bedroom.

It was tidy, the double bed made because he had been away for most of the week. Josephine solemnly put her folder on to a table. Harker put his arms around her and kissed her again. Then he clutched her breast, and the full firm soft beauty of it made him groan. He plucked at the buttons of her blouse, and she peeled his jacket off his shoulders. Then her fingers went to his tie. They feverishly fumbled and pulled the garments off each other, their mouths crushed together, their hands groping and sliding. Then she turned out of his clasp, her hair awry. She opened the door to his bathroom.

She slid back the glass door of the shower and turned on the tap. Hot water began to gush. Steam billowed. She held out her hand to him. Harker struggled out of his trousers. Then he stepped under the teeming water and took her nakedness in his arms. And, oh, the glorious naked feel of her, her back and hips and belly and breasts and thighs against him as they kissed feverishly.

10

Harker woke up about midnight. Josephine was sprawled on the bed beside him, one long leg bent, her blonde tresses spreadeagled across the pillow. The bedside lamp was on, the night lights of Manhattan glowed in the big window.

He looked at her lying there: he could see the small scar on her left breast where she had shot herself, the exit scar near her armpit. Oh, she was beautiful, the swell of her hip, the line of her legs seemed the loveliest he had ever seen. And their lovemaking had been the most glorious he had ever known. The evening seemed a dream, a haze of breathtaking sensuality. And, oh, it felt like love.

What was he going to do about this?

He lay on his back, staring at the ceiling.

He had lived long enough to know it couldn’t be love yet, of course. But it was certainly the start of that delicious phenomenon, and what was absolutely certain was that he did not want to let this woman go – he simply had to pursue it. But what was equally clear was that no way could he betray her.

So there was only one honourable thing to do: get this publisher-author masquerade right out of the way, tell her that Harvest House could not publish her book, tell Felix Dupont that Josephine did not want him to do so because she had a better publisher in mind – and tell Dupont that he would learn absolutely nothing new about her anti-apartheid activities because she wasn’t interested in seeing him again.

Harker sighed grimly at the ceiling.

Yes, but when Dupont found out that he was still seeing her – as he would, sooner rather than later – the bastard would rub his hands in glee and put the screws on him to deliver information about her. He could not be party to a deception like that, so he would either have to deceive Dupont, or deliver insignificant information the bastard knew already.

Or refuse.

Yes, and if he refused he would be fired. Being fired from the CCB didn’t worry him – but fired from Harvest House? His American work-permit revoked? Sent back to Pretoria?

Harker sighed again. The only alternative was to take up her offer of walking out: drop her right now. Tell her that last night was all a big mistake. And that Harvest House didn’t think it wise to publish a political book …

Harker lay there beside her on the double bed in the glow of Manhattan’s lights. Yes, undoubtedly, that is what he should do. Get out of this potential briar patch of multiple deceit while he could still do so with reasonable grace and a reasonably clear conscience. It would wound her feelings, but only her pride and that would be good, she’d keep well away from him, from the clutches of the CC fucking B. In fact he would be the only one to be hurt.

He lay there, thinking it through. At least he had to go through the motions of reading her book and rejecting it.

He hated this. With all his lustful heart he just wanted to roll over and take her beautiful body in his arms again. But he had best get up and start reading that book so he could tell her when she woke up that Harvest would not publish it.

He got up off the bed carefully so as not to waken her, and pulled on trousers. He picked up her folder and walked barefoot across the room. He stopped at the door and looked back at her. What a crying-out pity …

It was one o’clock on a Sunday morning in June. He was wide-awake now. He went into his kitchen, opened the refrigerator and got a beer. He snapped the cap off and upended it to his mouth. He sighed grimly and returned to the living room, picked up the folder, and sat down on the sofa.

And within ten minutes he knew that his decision, this whole thing, was an even bigger crying tragedy. Because this book was going to be brilliant.

Harker went to the kitchen and got himself another beer. Christ, it was good. He had only speed-read thirty pages in ten minutes but if the next two hundred were as good it was going to be a bestseller. Oh, it needed editing, she was a slash-and-burn writer who wrote wrote wrote, letting it all hang out, repeating herself shamelessly, flying off on descriptive tangents that left the reader both breathless and impatient. But it was brilliant. Harker returned to the sofa with his bottle of beer. He stared out of the bay window at the pretty little courtyard.

What was he going to say to her about this? How could he tell her that her book didn’t have promise?

He took a tasteless swig of his beer.

You tell her it’s got loads of promise but you don’t consider it’s suitable for Harvest House because Harvest doesn’t publish political works, you solemnly advise her to take her brilliant book to Random House when it’s finished, or Doubleday or one of the other big guns who throw money around like confetti hyping up books.

He sighed. Just the book Harvest needed to really put itself fair and square at the upper part of the publishing totem pole. But worse than that, much, much worse, was that not only did he have to tell her it wasn’t worth Harvest’s while publishing, he also had to watch this beautiful, talented woman walk off into the morning, freeze her out, tell his secretary to make excuses that he wasn’t in, not return her calls. Whereas all he wanted to do was walk back into that bedroom and take her glorious body in his arms.

Harker took a deep breath, and reverted to her typescript.

It was called Outrage. It showed an astonishing grasp of the causes of the great South African historical drama: in the first forty pages Josephine Valentine transported the reader through the Frontier Wars of the eastern Cape, through the Great Trek that followed, the turbulent opening up of the Cape Colony’s northern frontier by the Dutch wagoneers rebelliously moving away from the recent British occupation of the Cape of Good Hope and their Abolition of Slavery Act. Then came the horrors of the Mfecane, Shaka’s crushing, the battles with Mzilikazi’s Matabeles and Dingaan’s Zulus, the establishment of the independent Voortrekker republics, the discovery of gold and the bitter Boer War that brought them back into the British Empire, through the horrors of two World Wars where the defeated Boers fought for their British victors against their German soulmates. It was a gripping piece of storytelling. Somehow, through these opening rampant pages, Josephine Valentine had managed to weave in her principal characters, American clipper-ship captains who traded, lived and loved amongst these rough tough Boers until the reader leapt a hundred years to 1948 when the Boers triumphed in the elections, won their beloved South Africa back from the British and immediately instituted their policy of apartheid to contain the Black Peril.

Harker stared through the window at the dark courtyard. The book showed a professorial understanding of the background to the modern curse of apartheid, its roots in the battles of not so long ago. All this Josephine had squeezed digestibly into forty bounding pages, making it high adventure: it showed remarkable narrative talent. How could he tell the author differently? Harvest House should jump for joy and shout Hallelujah for stumbling upon this book which should make any publisher a lot of money.

He gave a sigh, took a swig of his beer and read on.

The next thirty pages encapsulated the oppressive doctrine of apartheid in a speech in parliament by the descendant of the American traders which tore the doomed policy to tatters, heaping shame upon its creators, proving its folly, its cruelty, its repressiveness, evoking pity for its black victims. It was a brilliant speech made poignant by the vivid character who articulated it – everything anybody would want to allege against apartheid, logical argument unfolding irresistibly, yet all in narrative form.

Christ, this woman can write.

Harker got up off the sofa and walked back to the kitchen. He reached for a bottle of whisky and poured a big dash. He stood at the sink, staring out of the back window.

It squeezed his heart to turn down a book like this. And it broke his heart to walk away from this woman.

But he had to do both. If he did not, Dupont would get his hooks into her, Harker would either have to betray her or lie to Dupont – either way led to a treacherous, duplicitous life. No – he had to be cruel to be honourable, cruellest of all to himself – because all he wanted to do right now was walk back into that bedroom and enfold that beautiful, talented, captivating woman, and then wake up beside her at midday and take her to brunch and drink wine while he looked into her big earnest eyes and told her how great she was, how Harvest House was behind her all the way, what a talented person she was, how captivating, how she was stealing his heart … He walked back towards the living room and abruptly halted in the doorway.

The most beautiful, most talented, most captivating woman in the world stood before him, fully dressed, her book clasped to her breast, her hair awry.

‘I’m going home now,’ she announced. ‘I’m afraid this has all been a mistake. Forgive me.’ She stared at him from under her eyebrows.

Harker was astonished. ‘What’s a mistake?’

She waved a hand. ‘Mixing business and pleasure. You’re supposed to be my goddam publisher – I mean, that’s what I hoped you are. And here I am falling into bed with you like a goddam Hollywood starlet flinging herself on the casting couch.’

Harker closed his eyes. Oh, this was being made easy for him. He heard himself say, ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘I’ve already been ridiculous!’ she hissed softly. ‘Not you – no man’s got any sense when it comes to willing womanflesh!’ She glared at him from under her dark eyebrows, then said, ‘Believe me, Jack, that as a totally liberated woman I consider myself fully entitled to as much sexual freedom as you guys. And I’ve been around, in plenty of tighter corners than this. But this book –’ she thumped it against her bosom – ‘is the most important thing in my life right now and I was a fool to give you – my potential publisher – the impression that I’ll whore for it, that I’m a brainless fuck-the-boss bimbo. So I’m going home, to spare you the embarrassment of dropping a panting wannabe author and to spare me the embarrassment of being dropped.’ She pointed at him across the sofa: ‘But I want you to know, Jack Harker, that I did not jump into bed with you in the hopes that thereby you would be persuaded to publish my pathetic book – I did so because, in my inflamed, intoxicated state I wanted to do so. And before I disappear out that door, never to darken it again, I want you to know that I do not, repeat not, expect you to publish my book. Goodnight and sorry I was such a pest.’ She flashed him a brittle smile and turned for the door.

‘Josie? It’s not a pathetic book. It’s brilliant.’

She stopped. She turned slowly and looked back at him. ‘You’re just saying that to protect my feelings.’ She turned for the door again.

‘Josie,’ he said, ‘it’s brilliant. If the rest is as good as the pages I’ve read it deserves to be a bestseller.’

She had stopped again, her hand on the doorknob. He thought, Why am I saying this? He continued, to assuage his guilt, ‘And please don’t feel bad about last night. These things happen.’

‘You mean your female authors are always hopping into bed with you?’

‘I mean,’ Harker said with a bleak smile, ‘that I don’t misinterpret your motive. Indeed,’ he added, trying to make a joke of it, ‘I rather hoped it was because of my big blue eyes.’

She looked at him, unamused. ‘So, I should come back to bed now, huh?’

Oh, he would love her to come back to bed now. ‘No. And no hard feelings, that’s the deal we made yesterday.’

She looked at him, then demanded, ‘Do you want me to stay?’

Oh Christ. ‘Only if you don’t want to go.’

She snorted sulkily. Then: ‘It’s just that I feel such an ass. Christ, I’m twenty-six years old, I’ve been in half the battles of the world, and here I am giving a vivid impersonation of a silly little tart.’

Harker snorted. ‘Please don’t feel that, it’s not true.’

Her hand was still on the doorknob. ‘Do you really like my book so far?’

Harker had to dash back to his guns. ‘Yes, it’s good –’

‘You said “brilliant” before!’

Harker had to steel himself. ‘Yes, when it’s edited.’

Josephine groaned. ‘But I spent the whole of last fucking week re-editing for you!’

‘Well, authors don’t always make the best editors of their own work.’ Stick to your guns. ‘Josephine, it’s good but I don’t think Harvest House should publish it. I think that you’ll do much better with a bigger house, like Random or Doubleday.’ He added for good measure: ‘I’m afraid it’s too political for Harvest.’

He could see the cloud cross her soul. She stared at him a moment; then said, ‘Of course. Thank you for the advice.’

‘Josephine, your agent will advise you – you must get an agent – but I’m sure he’ll tell you the same. Harvest is too small.’

She smiled thinly, still holding the door-handle. ‘Thank you for that selfless advice.’

‘Josephine, believe me –’

‘The trouble is I don’t believe you, Jack. If another publishing house can make it a bestseller I don’t understand why Harvest is passing up the opportunity to do the same and make money!’

‘Josie, we simply haven’t got the budget to do all the publicity razzmatazz your book will need – will deserve.’

‘Of course,’ she said quietly. ‘I understand. Perfectly. And, as you say, it’s rather too political.’ She forced a bright smile. ‘And there’s one thing I want you to understand perfectly, Jack: I went to bed with you only because I was inflamed by strong drink and lust – not because I hoped thereby to persuade you to publish my pathetic book!’ She flipped the lock and opened the door.

Oh Jesus. ‘Josephine – let me call you a taxi.’

‘I’ve already called one, from your bedroom telephone. Bye-eee …’ She flashed him a dazzling smile from the corridor.

‘I’ll come outside and wait with you till it comes.’

‘Bye-ee.’ She twiddled her fingers at him and closed the door.

Harker strode back to the bedroom. He cast about for his shirt, snatched it up off the floor, pulled it on as he hurried back to the front door. He dashed barefoot across the courtyard into the archway of the front block. He burst out on to East 22nd Street.

It was deserted. Josephine’s taxi was disappearing round the corner. Harker retraced his steps grimly. He locked the door behind him and walked back to the bedroom. And there, on his bedside table, were her earrings. He looked at them regretfully. Then he collapsed on to the bed and stared up at the ceiling.

Oh, what a crying pity. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply, heart-sore.

Well, he had done the right thing, if that was any consolation. He had saved her from Dupont’s clutches, sent her packing on her way to the success she deserved. At least he didn’t have it on his conscience that he was deceiving her. But, God, what a crying-out-loud shame that Harvest House wasn’t going to zoom to the top of the bestseller list for the first time in its life and make a fortune.

And even more sad was the fact that he was not going to possess that glorious body again. Not going to fall in love with her after all, the most captivating woman he had ever met – oh, those long legs, those perfect breasts – and her ravishing smile as she tumbled joyfully into bed and took him in her arms, her pelvis thrusting to meet him. He would love to be meeting her for lunch again today, love to go walking through the park with her, hand in hand, finding out about her, going through that delightful insanity of falling in love, feeling on top of the world, laughing and being frightfully witty and wise. Oh yes, he was infatuated, and it was a tragedy that it wasn’t going to happen.

He swung up off the bed and looked at her earrings lying on the bedside table. A sad memento of a lovely day. He would take them to the office and post them to her. He walked to the kitchen and poured more whisky into his glass.

But it was for the best. She was a very sensitive person – you’d have to be on guard all the time lest you upset her. Volatile. Doubtless moody – most creative people are. A delicate bloom, yet with robust convictions. She would have been a difficult soul to be in love with, it would have been no bed of roses with her – perhaps indeed a bed of neuroses. Goddam writers are a load of trouble, all steamed up then flat as a pancake, locked in a love-hate relationship with their work.

Yes, it was all for the best. But, oh, what a crying-out pity.

11

He was woken late Sunday morning, with a hangover, by the buzzing of his entry-phone. He draped a towel round his waist and went to his front door. ‘Yes?’ he said into the apparatus.

‘Sorry, did I wake you?’

Harker’s heart seemed to miss a beat. ‘I was just getting up.’

‘I’ve got a letter for you,’ Josephine said. ‘I was just going to slip it into your mailbox, then I remembered my earrings.’

‘A letter?’

‘Of apology, for flouncing out like that last night. I was very boring and girlie and rude and unfair and I apologize, you’d done nothing to deserve that. Okay?’

‘Okay,’ Harker smiled. ‘And you weren’t any of those things.’

‘May I come in, just to get my earrings?’

‘Of course.’ Harker pressed the button and hurried back to his bedroom. He pulled on a bathrobe and ran his fingers through his hair. He dashed into his bathroom and took a swig of mouthwash. As he re-entered the living room Josephine was crossing the courtyard. He opened his front door wide. ‘Good morning.’

‘Hi.’ Josephine entered, her brow a little lowered, half-smiling. She seemed even more beautiful. ‘Sorry again.’

‘Nonsense. Sit down, I’ll fetch your earrings.’

‘I won’t stay. Here’s your letter.’ She held out an envelope. ‘Please don’t read it until I’ve gone in case the earth really does swallow me up.’

Harker smiled and put the letter on the dining table. Oh, he didn’t want her to stay, he didn’t want to destabilize his resolution, but he had to be polite. ‘Would you like some coffee?’

She hesitated. ‘If you’re having some.’

‘Actually I’m going to have a beer. I was up until dawn.’

‘So was I, must have drunk a gallon of wine. Re-editing my bloody book, I feel like death. It’s far too intense and flowery. But …’ She looked at him almost pleadingly. ‘It’s not a heap of crap, is it?’

Here we go again. Harker wanted to take her in his arms and tell her Harvest would be the luckiest house in town if it could publish it – but he had to stick to his guns. He turned for the kitchen. ‘No.’ He opened the refrigerator, took out two bottles of beer and reached for glasses. ‘And don’t, repeat don’t,’ he said as he re-entered the living room, ‘edit out the flamboyance and the floweriness.’ He handed her a bottle and glass. ‘Leave those decisions to your editor. Just cut out some of the repetition.’

She was looking at him from under her eyebrows, hanging on his words. It was hard to imagine this was the hard-bitten photo-journo who screwed her way to the front lines. In fact he didn’t believe that that was how she got there. ‘You really think so?’ She put the glass on the table, upended the bottle to her mouth and glugged down three big swallows, looking at him round the neck. She lowered it and breathed deeply. ‘Thank God … I believe you now, you weren’t bullshitting me last night. I know because that’s exactly the decision I reached at dawn – “Leave it to the editor”.’ She flashed him a grateful smile and stretched up her arms. ‘I’m so happy!’

Harker wanted to get off this painful subject. ‘Won’t you sit down?’

‘No.’ She held up her hand. ‘I must fly.’ She turned and began to pace across the room, head down, holding her beer bottle. She waved a hand. ‘Neat,’ she said.

Harker stood by the sofa. He did not sit down because then she probably would do the same. ‘What is?’

She waved her beer bottle and paced back towards him. ‘Your apartment. Tidy. Suppose that’s because you were a soldier, soldiers have to be tidy, right?’

‘The army drums that into you, yes.’

Josephine paced back towards the window. ‘Like your mind,’ she mused. ‘You see things clearly. Put your finger on the essence straight away.’ She smirked. ‘You should see my apartment. Untidy as hell. Like my mind. A psychiatrist would make heavy weather of that, I guess.’

He would love to see her apartment. And into her untidy mind. She turned at the window, and pointed absently at the door behind him. ‘What’s through there?’

‘Madam Velvet’s.’

Josephine stopped. ‘Did you say “Madam”?’

Harker smiled. ‘Velvet. That door leads down to the basement. This apartment used to be Madam Velvet’s upmarket whorehouse. Speciality, domination and sado-masochism. One of my authors, Clive Jones, he works part-time for Screw magazine. Know it?’

‘Every New Yorker knows Screw magazine. Though nice folk like me don’t read it.’

Harker smiled. ‘Well, the first night Clive came around here he immediately identified this place as formerly Madam Velvet’s den for the kinky – he had come here some years earlier to write it up for Screw. There’re still some of her fixtures down there – the cage, a few ringbolts on the walls, the Roman bath. But she took the rack and whips and chains with her when she left. I just use it as my gym.’

‘How exotic. Can we go down and have a look?’

‘Sure.’ He turned for the door.

A staircase led down into darkness. He switched on a light and led the way. They descended a dozen stone steps, into a stone-lined basement the size of the apartment above. A neon light illuminated the scene.

A bare cement floor had a few scattered rugs on it: there was a cycling machine. In one corner was a tiled whirlpool bath, empty. In another was a pinewood cubicle, a sauna. Between them stood Harker’s washing machine. In the third corner was a brick-built bar with a curved wooden counter, a few wooden shelves behind it: the other wall was lined by a row of rusty iron bars, a prison-cage, the door open.

‘Wow,’ Josephine said.

‘And note the ringbolts on the walls, where the silver-haired sado-masochists liked to be chained up while Madam Velvet and her girls did their thing.’

‘What an extraordinary place … Do the whirlpool and the sauna work?’

‘Sure.’

‘You should replace that neon light with flickering candles. And have a water-bed on the floor. Wow …’ She turned and paced off across the dungeon, head down. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘I fully understand that Harvest doesn’t want to take the risk of publishing a political book like mine – and I’m not asking you to change your mind. But …’ She turned and faced him across the dungeon. ‘But I would be terribly grateful if you read the rest of my book and gave me your opinion on it. Your advice.’ She explained wanly: It’s all in my humble letter. I mean I’m terribly fortunate to have you here in New York, not only a literary man with artistic judgement but somebody who knows Africa well and can correct me on historical detail.’ She appealed: ‘Is that a terrible cheek, after the way I flounced out last night?’

Harker smiled. He knew he should make an excuse and get rid of this problem once and for all – but he did not have the heart. Nor did he want to. He heard himself say, ‘Certainly, Josie.’ He added, to salve his conscience. ‘But you shouldn’t rely on my judgement alone – you must get a good agent, and take his advice above mine.’

‘Oh, great!’ Josephine strode across the dungeon, wreathed in smiles, and planted a kiss on his cheek. She laced her hands behind his neck and leant back. ‘Oh, I’m so lucky to have my own African guru!’ Then she stepped backwards and waved a finger: ‘But there’ll be no more girlish nonsense like last night – our friendship is going to be purely platonic. That’s the only thing I was right about yesterday, that’s why I was so angry with myself.’ Then she smacked her forehead: ‘Oh, I am an ass! I don’t mean I find you unattractive. On the contrary I find you very attractive. I simply mean –’ she waved a hand – ‘that it won’t be a problem again.’

Harker grinned. ‘A problem?’

‘You know, getting all uptight about a simple thing like an injudicious one-night stand.’ She looked at him. ‘And,’ she said, ‘I insist on paying you a fee.’

‘A fee?’

Josephine slapped her forehead again. ‘Oh God, that sounds terrible.’ She laughed. ‘No, not a stud-fee – an editorial fee! Your face! No – you’re going to be devoting many precious hours to my book and I insist I pay for your time. And thereby keep our relationship on a businesslike, platonic keel.’

Yes, he could be smitten by this woman. And, yes, as he wasn’t going to publish her book, couldn’t he pull this trick off, have his cake and eat it? He heard himself say, ‘And what if I don’t want your fee? What if it isn’t a businesslike, platonic relationship?’

She looked at him from under her eyebrows. ‘You mean if we become lovers?’

Harker grinned. ‘Well, you haven’t exactly got to commit yourself for life. It wouldn’t be hard to just sort of carry on from where we left off last night.’ Christ, what was he saying this for?

She looked at him solemnly. ‘You mean we should go back to bed now?’ Before he could deny it she made up her mind. ‘No.’ She held up a hand, ‘No, just friends. So I insist on paying you a fee. You’re going to help edit my book, I’m extremely grateful, I’m not going to endanger all that with emotional, messy, untidy sex stuff.’

Fine, so that was understood again, his conscience was clear – more or less.

‘I’ll help you with your book on two conditions,’ he said. ‘One, no fee. Two, you must tell absolutely nobody that I’m helping you. Not your friends, not your agent, not your publisher when you’ve got one – not even your father.’ Harker did not want Dupont learning that he had any access to her book or her.

Josephine said earnestly: ‘Do you mind telling me why not?’

‘Personal reasons – and professional. And there’s another thing I feel I must tell you.’

Then he changed his mind. As he was sticking to his decision about theirs being a platonic relationship he had been moved to confess to her that he had been less than honest about the Battle of Bassinga, that it was probably he who had shot her lover, that it was he who shot the fourteen-year-old boy with the wooden gun, that it was he, Harker, whom she had tried to kill and wounded so badly that he had been disabled out of the military, that he knew she had tried to commit suicide, that it was he who had plugged her wounds. But he stopped himself – why embarrass her by refuting the romantic version which she had given him, why mortify the woman by confronting her with her attempted suicide?

‘What?’ Josephine asked. ‘What’s the other thing?’

‘Nothing,’ Harker smiled.

‘What?’

‘No, it’s unimportant.’

‘Please.’

‘It doesn’t matter. Well, as that’s decided why don’t we go upstairs and have a decent bottle of champagne to kill the germs in that beer?’

Josephine took both his hands and squeezed. ‘Thank you for helping me!’ she said. ‘I’m so excited. But I think I’d better fly now, I’ve got so much work to do if I’m going to take full advantage of your help, you’ve got me all fired up. And I can tell by the twinkle in your eye that if I stay for a bottle of celebratory champagne we’ll end up in bed.’ She pointed her finger to his nose: ‘Platonic friendship only!’

He grinned. ‘Absolutely. So let us seal the deal with that bottle of champagne.’

PART II

12

They had a lovely time that long hot summer of 1988.

Mostly she slept at his place. Before dawn she crept out of bed so as not to wake him, pulled on her tracksuit, shouldered her small backpack, donned her crash-helmet, tiptoed out, unlocked her bicycle and set off up the quiet canyons of Manhattan. She rode the sixty blocks to her apartment as fast as she could to get the maximum benefit from the exercise while the air was comparatively unpolluted. Soon after sunrise she was at her desk, chomping through an apple and two bananas as she peered anxiously at her computer screen, marshalling her thoughts, picking up the threads from last night. By lunchtime she had done about a thousand words: she changed into a leotard, pulled a tracksuit over it, stuffed some fresh underwear into her backpack and rode her bike flat out across town to her dance class at the Studio: for the next forty minutes she pranced around with thirty other women of various shapes and sizes in a mirrored loft, working up a sweat under the tutelage of Fellini, a muscle-bound bald gay who volubly despaired of ever making a dancer out of any of them. For the next half hour she had her first conversation of the day while she showered before adjourning to the health bar for a salad and colourful dialogue about boyfriends, husbands, bosses, work, fashions, waistlines. By two-thirty she was cycling back across town to knock out another five hundred words. At four-thirty she permitted herself the first beer of the day to try to squeeze out another two hundred words. At about five-thirty she hit the buttons to print and telephoned Harker at his office. ‘The workers are knocking off, how about the fat-cats?’

‘Okay, want me to pick up something?’

‘I’ll pick up a couple of steaks.’

‘I’ll get ’em, just you ride carefully, please.’

By six-thirty she was pedalling downtown to Gramercy Park, zipping in and out of traffic. She let herself into the apartment complex, locked up her bicycle in the archway and strode across the courtyard to the rear building. She let herself into his ground-floor apartment. ‘I’m home …’

It worried Harker, her riding that bicycle in rush-hour traffic: he didn’t mind her cycling in the early morning, but New York traffic in the evening gave him the willies – and she rode so fast. Once she did have an accident, skidded into the back of a braking car, took a bad fall, sprained her wrist and was nearly run over, but she was only concerned about her goddam bike. He offered to fetch her every evening in his car, he even offered to have a cycle-rack fitted so she could take the machine with her and cycle back to her apartment in the morning – but no, she insisted she needed the exercise both ways, ‘after all we drink.’

‘You’re in magnificent condition; go to a gym if you need more exercise.’

‘Gyms are so boring. Aerobic classes are boring. But riding a bike is a little adventure each time, you see people and things. That’s why I like dancing, expressing yourself in motion, letting it all hang out …’

She was in very good condition but, yes, they did drink a good deal. Like most soldiers, Harker was accustomed to heavy drinking to unwind, and now that there was no combat he could unwind as much as he liked. Similarly, like most writers, Josephine drank to unwind.

‘I spend my entire working day alone, without colleagues, without anybody to talk to except myself, nobody to seek advice from, and by the end of the day I’m pretty damn sick of myself and I want a bit of fun.’

Josephine redecorated Madam Velvet’s dungeon, installed subdued lighting, put plants around the Roman-style whirlpool bath, scattered imitation bearskin rugs on the cement floor, stocked the ornate bar, filled the prisoners’ cage with colourful imitation flowers; she even hung some kinky whips, chains and leather boots from the ringbolts in the wall. She brought in two armchairs, a television set with a video-player – and, in the corner, some more up-to-date gymnasium equipment. In one piece of daunting machinery the manufacturers had managed to squeeze every artefact for the torturous development of the muscular system.

‘Everything you can get in a well-run gym, but in the privacy of your own home, to quote the advertisement.’

Harker looked at the gleaming contraption. ‘Is it safe?’

‘Don’t you like it?’

‘Shouldn’t it be fenced off to protect visitors? Shouldn’t we be wearing hard hats like those politicians on television? What’s this costing me?’

‘It’s your birthday present!’

Every day he worked out before going to Harvest House; and he found it a turn-on to watch her sweating on the machine. He bought himself a mountain bike like Josephine’s and on weekends they rode in Central Park and around Manhattan Island, sometimes across the Hudson River into New Jersey. In the fall they took a week off work and rode into upstate New York to see the riotously beautiful autumn colours. They rode almost five hundred miles in seven days and when they returned to Manhattan they were so glowing with health they did not want to stop.

‘Then let’s not. Let’s say to hell with work and just keep going all the way to Florida …’

That night, lying in the hot whirlpool bath in Madam Velvet’s dungeon, sipping cold wine, she said, ‘Know what I want to do one day? Have a farm. Maybe only twenty acres, but in beautiful country like where we’ve just been, with a tumbling stream and some forest and pastures for grazing a few horses and a cow or two, and a big pond for ducks and geese who’ll all have names, and a few chickens to give us eggs. And the horses will be mares so we can breed good foals, and we’ll have a tractor so we can grow alfalfa for them. And we’ll exhibit our animals at the livestock fairs and win prizes.’ She smiled. ‘I love New York, it’s so stimulating, but really I’m a country girl.’ She added, ‘Our house won’t be very big, more like a cottage really, because I don’t like housekeeping, but it’ll be very pretty. And my study will be upstairs, so I have a view of the pastures and the pond while I write.’

It was a pretty thought. ‘Well,’ Harker said, ‘we can achieve all that, but what about my work?’

‘Well,’ Josephine said reasonably, ‘you’ll be able to do a great deal of your publishing work at home, of course, but our country place will be close enough to Manhattan for you to be able to drive down once or twice a week so you can keep your finger on Harvest’s pulse – that’ll be no sweat, particularly if you have a chauffeur. Daddy’s got two, neither of them have enough to do and he’s promised me the use of one of them if I move closer to him upstate.’

In the late autumn Josephine decided it was time to take Harker up to Massachusetts to meet her father. The country was beautiful. The gates to the Valentine property loomed up majestically against green pastures, a winding avenue of old oaks led up to an imposing mansion, the walls covered in ivy. Harker switched off the engine outside the ornate front door.

Josephine said, ‘Just be your ever-charming self. You’ve been in tighter corners than this.’

Harker expected the big front door to burst open, the old man to come beaming out. But no: the door was locked. It was a butler who opened it.

The library was the size of a badminton court, the walls lined with laden bookshelves, the big room divided by more bookcases; a mezzanine floor was above, equally lined and laden. Denys Valentine, about sixty years old, tallish, thick-set, grey-haired, handsome, stood in front of his big marble fireplace, before the crescent of leather armchairs, whisky glass in hand, and said with a self-conscious smile, ‘Josephine’s told me a bit about you, of course, on the telephone. It’s a pleasure to meet you.’ He gave a thin smile. ‘A great pleasure.’

Harker had been invited to sit down but he preferred to remain standing because his host was doing that. He knew he was being assessed and he felt on his mettle. ‘Equally, Denys,’ he said with a smile, and waited.

Denys Valentine cleared his throat, then said resolutely, ‘Josephine has indicated to me that you and she are … more or less living together.’ He cleared his throat again.

Harker resented this: he and Josie were mature people, for Chrissakes.

‘That’s true. But she continues to maintain her own apartment, where she works every day. We only see each other in the evenings.’

Denys Valentine said, with another thin smile, ‘And in the mornings.’

Harker looked at him, also with a thin smile. ‘That’s true, yes.’ He added: ‘And I’m confident I speak for Josephine when I say we are very happy.’

Valentine turned a steely eye on Harker. ‘But I am not happy. If you’ll forgive me for saying so.’ He paused. Then: ‘I don’t think any father likes his daughter living in sin.’

Harker had to conceal his smile. ‘Sin?’ He shook his head politely. ‘I don’t believe that’s how it is, Denys. To be happy, to be in love, can hardly be a sin.’

Denys Valentine looked at him. ‘Out of wedlock it is a mortal sin, I’m afraid, the scriptures are clear. “Cursed are the fornicators.” Quote, unquote.’

Harker had to stop himself smiling. What do you say to that? So he nodded politely.

‘Well, Jack?’

‘Well what, Denys?’

‘What are you going to do about it?’ Valentine paused, then went on, ‘To me it is clear. You must either desist or you must marry. Immediately.’

Harker looked at him with a twinkle in his eye. ‘And which of those two options would you prefer to see happen?’

Valentine shifted, then turned to the liquor cabinet. ‘How’s your glass?’

‘Fine at the moment.’

‘Please help yourself when you’re ready.’ He poured whisky for himself and said: ‘I want what’s best for Josephine. Clearly it is not good for her – for her immortal soul – to be living in sin. But alas that doesn’t mean that getting married is necessarily good for her either.’ He turned back to Harker. ‘I must be frank and tell you that I have great difficulty in reconciling myself to your previous career, Jack.’

Harker frowned. ‘You mean you don’t like the fact that I was in the South African military?’

‘But more that that,’ Valentine said, ‘I am a pacifist. When I was drafted into the army during the Korean War I was a conscientious objector at heart. I don’t believe in taking human life – that’s my Catholic belief, my family’s belief. The only reason I didn’t appeal against being drafted was because my law degree and a few of my father’s friends in politics guaranteed me a non-combatant role in the Judge Advocate’s department, doing court-martials.’

Harker smiled politely. ‘Josephine has never indicated that she’s a pacifist.’

Valentine said resolutely, ‘The only circumstance that justifies the taking of human life is to protect the lives of those whom one has a legal and moral duty to defend – like your children. However …’ He smiled thinly. ‘You’re completely finished with the army now, thank the Lord – Josie tells me you don’t miss it at all. However,’ Valentine said, ‘there remains the matter of whose army you were in – namely the South African.’ He glanced at Harker. ‘I have great difficulty with this. Josephine has tried to explain that you were fighting communism, and evidently she has accepted your … she has adjusted to the anomalous situation. But so far I regret I am unable to do so.’ He cleared his throat. ‘All my family are dedicated to democracy. To me it is incomprehensible that an honourable soldier can fight on the side of South Africa’s apartheid regime.’ He looked at Harker and spread his hands. ‘I’m sorry if I offend.’

Harker said quietly: ‘Would you rather your honourable soldier fought on the side of Godless communism which does not permit any form of democracy?’

Denys Valentine gave him a wisp of a smile. ‘Two tyrants fighting each other makes neither right. But since you ask, I am sure that the life of the average worker, the man-on-the-street in Russia, is more just and congenial by far than that of the average black man in South Africa.’

Harker said grimly, ‘I do not defend South Africa’s apartheid, Denys. However, I assure you that it is much better by far than the destructive, chaotic poverty and bloody tyranny that communism and the Gold War have forced on the rest of Africa. And I assure you that the only political power capable – or willing – to take on communism in Africa these days is South Africa, I assure you that it is highly advisable to allow South Africa to defeat the communist tyrant before apartheid itself is defeated – as it will be soon, by its own people. Because without South Africa communism will overrun what’s left of Africa and the poor bloody continent will never recover.’ He raised his finger. ‘In other words, the only hope for Africa is South Africa – the only hope is that it will defeat the communist onslaught, and thereafter become the economic engine that will slowly revive the rest of Africa.’ He ended, ‘Without South Africa’s survival, the rest of Africa is a basket case, for ever.’

Denys Valentine looked at him. ‘You think that South Africa is going to rejoin the human race soon? When will this miracle come to pass?’

Harker resented the tone, not the disbelief. ‘When the war in Angola ends – and that’s going to happen soon. There are overtures by Cuba already. Russia cannot afford the Angolan war much longer – it’s an economic basket case and this new president – Gorbachev – is pulling Russia’s horns in. Soon he’ll sue for peace. South Africa will readily accept because the Angolan war is our Vietnam too and these international sanctions are starting to bite hard.’ He took a sip of whisky. ‘When the communist threat is removed, the new South Africa will start.’

Valentine looked dubious. ‘And then what? How do you feel about being governed by blacks?’

Harker was tired of being subjected to tests. He said, ‘I’m cautiously optimistic.’

Valentine frowned. ‘Why “cautiously”?’

Harker sighed. ‘Well,’ Harker said, ‘the rest of Africa has been chaotically misgoverned. But there’s a chance it will be different in our case because the failures of Africa are in part attributable to Africa being a Cold War battle-ground – both Russia and China threw money at the black tyrants to get them on side and so the West did the same, so misgovernment was allowed to flourish. Tyranny, corruption, genocide, inefficiency were rewarded with more and more money which the tyrants put into their Swiss bank accounts while poverty and disease descended on their unfortunate people. So a culture of shameless corruption developed which was tolerated by the rest of the world. But when the Cold War ends, that tolerance will change – if black politicians do not behave they’ll have their aid cut off. So I think South Africa’s black leaders will not have the freedom to abuse the country as happened in the rest of Africa. They’ll have to behave themselves.’

Valentine’s judicial countenance turned irritated. ‘Behave themselves? Isn’t that rather arrogant? Have you shared your views with Josephine?’

Harker was irritated too: he resisted the temptation to say, They’re hardly views, they’re fucking facts. ‘Of course I have. And she agrees with some of it. On other points we agree to differ.’

‘And what do you think of this book she’s writing?’

Harker hoped he was changing the focus. ‘Well, I don’t know much about it,’ he said.

‘But she says you’re her guru.’

Harker was annoyed that Josephine had told him. ‘She discusses parts of it with me sometimes, but she only allows me to read small bits now and again. But what I’ve read is very good.’ He added, ‘I’m not acting as her editor.’

‘Nor, I believe, do you intend to publish it?’ Valentine added, ‘I must say I agree, never mix business with pleasure.’

‘It’s more a matter of finance, Denys. Harvest is a small house. We published twelve books last year – two of them lost money, the other ten made a respectable profit, but not enough to enable us to put the effort into Josie’s book that it will deserve – advertising, publicity tours, et cetera.’ He looked at the older man.

‘And what do you think of her agent, Priscilla Fischer.’

‘She’s a tough cookie, Priscilla. She’ll make sure Josie gets the best deal in town.’

Denys Valentine took a sip of whisky, then said: ‘Reverting to the matter of you two living together. Have you any plans about marriage?’

Harker smiled uncomfortably. ‘It’s a bit early to say – we’ve only known each other a few months. But we have talked about it. I think Josie feels she’d like to retain her freedom for a while yet, to experience more of the world. That’s not unusual in writers.’ He looked at the older man, and waited.

‘And how do you feel about that?’

‘If and when we get married I want her to feel she’s seen life and has plenty to write about.’

‘“If and when”? I’m pleased to hear that you’re so realistic about this.’ He took a self-conscious sip of whisky. ‘Because I also don’t think Josie’s ready for marriage yet. She’s an exceedingly intelligent and talented person and she shouldn’t be burdened with the responsibilities of marriage for a long time yet – children and so forth.’

Harker understood loud and clear that he was being warned off. ‘Well, Josephine will know her own mind in the fullness of time.’

‘But will she?’ Valentine said. ‘Artistic people often don’t know their own minds about anything although they think they do. Heads in the clouds most of the time.’

Harker resented the innuendo. ‘She’s always seemed pretty sensible to me, Denys.’

‘Oh, extremely intelligent – all her life she’s been an A-grade student capable of figuring things out for herself. But, for all that, she is a dreamer who is really motivated by … unrealistic, unwise impulses.’

Unwise impulses like me? ‘Well, Denys, you seem to be in a most unsatisfactory situation. You don’t want Josephine to live in sin with me, and yet you don’t want her to marry me.’ He restrained himself from saying, ‘So what the hell are you going to do about it?’

Valentine cleared his throat, fiddled with his glass, then said, ‘I’d like to ask you for your cooperation – yours and Josephine’s.’ He paused. ‘Don’t see each other for six months.’

Harker was taken aback. ‘And after six months?’

‘If after six months you still want to be together, so be it. I’ll accept it, but you’ll only have my blessing if you marry.’

Jesus. Harker wanted to smile. It was the sort of thing a father might say to the suitor of his teenage daughter. Before he could muster a response, Valentine continued.

‘I’m prepared to make it as easy as possible for the pair of you to cooperate – I’ll pay for Josie to go abroad for those six months. Anywhere she likes.’

Jesus. You are prepared … The arrogance of it. ‘And if we do not cooperate with you?’

‘I regret having to say this, but if you do not, I will not give either of you the time of day ever again.’

Harker looked at the man. Jesus. And Jesus again! He could not conceal his smile. ‘Have you discussed this with Josephine?’

‘Not yet. But she has an inkling of my disquiet.’

Your disquiet? Harker took a breath. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I cannot speak for Josephine, of course, but I can assure you right now that you will not