Maestro by John Gardner
She stayed close to the wall, and caught sight of the man she was following as he walked into the light from a lamp held in a bracket in front of the stage door. She did not hear the second figure behind her, but her intuition made her turn just as Sean O’Donnel leaped towards her.
Back inside, Gus had a member of the audience up onstage. No coaxing had been necessary, and he was going through a series of quite impossible vanishes and reproductions with the egg and a small black bag—allowing the lady assisting him to put the egg into the bag, from whence it disappeared, returned, vanished again, became two eggs, then three, each of which was placed singly into the bag and disappeared. Finally, when the bag was shown to be utterly empty, Gus produced yet another egg, which multiplied to two, between the fingers of his right hand, then three and four. He held up the right hand with the four eggs between the fingers, reached up behind the hand with his left hand, producing yet another egg, which, in turn, changed to two, then three, then four, between the fingers of his left hand.
Finally, he asked the spectator to hold the little black silk bag for him as he slowly deposited all eight eggs into it. Almost immediately he reached in, pulled out one of the eggs, then crushed the bag in his right hand and used his fingers to turn it inside out, proving it was empty. Where there had been eight eggs, there was now only one, which he rubbed between his hands; then he opened them, to show that the egg had gone. In its place was a small yellow parakeet, which, as he tossed it into the air, vanished, its place taken by a yellow silk.
“Don’t worry, he’ll be back.” Gus gave them the old charm and asked the lady helping him if he could borrow a ring. There was some byplay as she worked at getting the ring from her finger, and Gus went into the audience to borrow two more rings. Finally, he dropped all three rings into one hand, lifting it slowly to show that the borrowed rings had linked together. He unlinked them, handing one back to its owner in the audience, but inviting the other owner onstage with the first assistant from the audience.
Gus then produced a sheet of newspaper from which he tore a rough quarter of the page, crumpling the remainder and giving this ball of newspaper to the second assistant. He placed the rings onto the quarter sheet, crumpled it into a ball into which he thrust a stick of sealing wax.
On drawing the stick out, he showed that the end had melted; and on opening the paper, looked amazed, for the crumpled paper had been changed into a nest of three envelopes, each one sealed. In the inner envelope, he found, not a ring, but a key.
Gus pulled out his own key case and there was one of the rings inside. This was handed back.
“The key goes into this box,” Gus explained, pointing to a beautifully crafted mahogany box on the table. When this was unlocked, another box was pulled out, then a third. Gus opened the final box and the parakeet bobbed out onto his hand. Around its neck was a thin ribbon, attached to which was the other ring. As this last happened, Herbie quietly moved, fading through the door into the foyer.
In the alley Bex had feinted to her right as Sean came hurtling towards her, his right arm swinging a leather briefcase. Then she side-stepped so that his body cannoned against the wall. She vaguely heard the man up near the stage door shout. She thought he was shouting, “Come on, man. Time’s running out.” So, as Sean fell against the wall, all arms and legs, she reached beneath her jacket again and slid out the regulation Metropolitan Police handcuffs she always carried.
Sean looked as though he was recovering, so she brought up her knee, hard, between his legs. He gave a yelp of pain and doubled over. She moved in, slipped one cuff around Sean’s wrist and the other through the handle of the briefcase. It was all complete intuition and she only knew she had done the right thing when she saw Sean’s terrified eyes. “For God’s sake,” he breathed out, winded. “Sweet Jesus, in the name of God, undo the bloody cuffs. This thing’s going to explode any minute. Please.” He was thrashing about, trying to hit her, but the pain and the new fear led him into complete panic. He ran back and forth, then towards the other man, standing near the stage door.
“Get in there, Sean. Don’t waste everything. Go.” The shadowy figure was near to screaming, but Sean, now in terror, just kept running, as though looking for somewhere to hide. Like a child, he put one hand up over his eyes, as though by not seeing anything he would blot out the truth. Through it all he shook his arm violently, as if he could, with some mighty effort, rid himself of the briefcase.
As he came outside, Big Herbie saw Declan Norton pounding across the street from the black car, his face twisted in anger. He reached the alley, with Herbie just behind him.
Declan seemed not to have even noticed Bex, and showed no sign that he knew Herbie was behind him. He simply stood there and yelled, “Get him inside. Die like a man, Sean, but make sure the bastard Keene goes with you!”
The figure by the stage door tried to block Sean and, like a sheep dog, guide him inside. He was shouting, “The bomb’s for Keene, Sean! Get in there! In—”
Sean swerved to the right, avoided the man at the stage door and ran hard towards the end of the alley.
Herbie stood still, right behind Declan, as the case exploded. For a second, as though in a freeze frame, he saw Sean engulfed in flame, then, in what seemed like another still picture, he watched as the man disintegrated in the blast that swept down the alleyway.
The figure by the stage door flattened himself against the wall, then turned as Declan yelled, “Tony! Get in there! Do it yourself! Just finish him off! Get in, man, get in!”
The shadow by the stage door turned and disappeared inside, just as Herb chopped the Beretta behind Declan’s right ear. Norton made a little grunt and went down, like a beast in an abattoir.
“Watch him, Bex,” Herbie shouted, and began to run towards the stage door.
Inside, it was dark, then he caught sight of the stage. In the wings people seemed to have shrunk back in fear. The familiar figure stood alone in the wings, feet planted apart, hands coming up, with a pistol in the double grip.
Gus was completing his act—making thought-of cards rise from a deck placed in a goblet. The final card rose high above the goblet and was caught in Gus’s hands.
Herb shouted, “Stop! Police!” bringing up the Beretta as the figure in front of him brought his pistol to bear on Gus.
Kruger was about to fire when someone detached herself from the crowd cowering back in the wings.
The audience was stamping and applauding as Gus spread his arms in acknowledgment. Nobody out there heard the shot. The slim girlish figure simply put the pistol to the would-be assassin’s head and pulled the trigger. There was a gout of blood from the back of the man’s skull as it blew apart and he fell sideways.
“Oh, shit!” Herbie mouthed. “The fool. He should have known he couldn’t get away with it forever—whatever it is he’s trying to get away with.” He began to walk forward as Bex came in through the stage door.
Slowly, with Bex just behind him, he walked towards the crumpled body. “Tony,” Herbie choked. “Tony Worboys, you bloody idiot.” Young Worboys’s blood kept pumping.
Carole stepped from the knot of people who seemed to be rooted, unmoving. She looked towards Bex then saw Kruger’s almost wilting smile. He put an arm around her, gave her a squeeze and moved back to stand with Bex as they watched Gus take his final calls.
“I don’t understand.” Bex looked at him and then at the body.
“Gus’ll have some of the answers. He’d better have some answers.”
The applause washed up, joined by the stamping of feet, as Claudius Damautus took ovation after ovation. At last the curtain came down and Carole ran out to embrace her husband.
Herbie and Bex followed her. “You’d better have a damned good story, my old friend,” Herb said, then looked to see that another figure had joined them out of the darkness. Herbie recognized the girl as Khami Qasim and saw that her right hand now hung by her side, the pistol pointing at the ground. “And this, I suppose, i
Gus nodded and pulled Khami into an embrace. “I think she’s saved a lot of lives.”
“And taken some,” Herbie said quietly.
“She finally took out the man Walid. I think the one here—Hisham—is down to Declan Norton. Where is he, by the way?”
“They just took him downtown,” Bex told them. “He’ll have a nasty headache when he wakes up.”
“Gus, Young Worboys is dead.” Herbie’s face crumpled as he said it.
“I’m sorry.” Gus shook his head. “I’m sorry, but perhaps it’s for the best. I doubt if he could’ve coped with the rest of his life in jail.”
“As bad as that?”
“Worse.” Gus put an arm around his old friend. “He was my reason for dying. It’s a shock to you, Herb, but he had got himself badly mixed up with the FFIRA, and others. I suspect that bastard Declan Norton had a contract out on him in any case. Tony Worboys just knew too damned much. That’s why I had to disappear by dying. It’s a long story, Herb. Can I tell it tomorrow?”
“Sure, why not?” Herbie put his arm out to bring Bex into the conversation. “Gus, a funny thing happened to me on my way to the theater tonight. It was this nice Detective Chief Inspector from the anti-terrorist squad.”
Gus extended his hand to Bex and told her that when eating with Herbie Kruger you really had to sup with a long spoon.
“I know,” she said. “I know just how long Herb’s spoon is.”
30
“YOU’LL HAVE SEEN NOTHING about it in the files,” Gus began. “But I was assigned to interrogate Tony Worboys about eighteen months before I retired. It began as just a routine matter, nothing solid, straws in the wind.”
They sat together in Herbie’s suite at the Grand Hyatt. The FBI, CIA and police heads from Conductor had agreed to let Kruger and Bex talk to Gus Keene before they carried out their own debriefing. Khami had been taken away to what the FBI termed a place of safety, and Washington breathed a collective sigh of relief when the President made a statement to the effect that the entire team of terrorists connected to the appalling incidents of the past few days was now accounted for. “This does not mean we can relax our vigilance,” he said in a televised statement from the Oval Office. “Our beloved country has experienced the cowardly and deadly actions of international terrorism on a scale never before seen here. More could follow.”
“Straws in the wind?” Herb asked. “What kind of straws?”
“There was a lot on.” Gus gave a weary sigh. “We had you and that old orchestral conductor filling up the guest facilities. You’ll remember that I was hearing everyone’s confession at the time—including your former German girlfriend’s, Herb. Sorry, but I had to mention that. Anyway, out of the blue, the Office called me to London. We were still at Century House then.” Century House had been the Office headquarters for a long time. “They told me that nobody had done a positive on Deputy CSIS Worboys for years.”
By a “positive” Gus meant a Positive Vetting. These were routine examinations of members of the Office or the Security Service. Checkups to make certain that members of the Office remained clean. The CIA did it with a lie detector and called it “fluttering.” The Brits preferred to work on people’s backgrounds on a face-to-face basis.
“So you gave him a going-over?” Herbie leaned back in his chair. He had been upset, even desolate, since the previous night. After all, he had virtually trained Tony Worboys. The man had been his closest associate during the worst times of the Cold War.
“Yes, I gave him a going-over. He was tremendous when the Soviets were the main target, but once the Evil Empire seemed to fall apart, Tony Worboys went through a kind of change. A lot of people did, and you can’t blame them. Everyone thought their jobs were on the line. They weren’t, of course, because our old profession never dies, and when the Soviets crumbled, things became even worse. The world was more dangerous than it had been for almost fifty years.
“As you know, Herb, only a hundred and twenty people were let go from the Office, and most of them were on the brink of retirement anyway.”
“Sure, I was one myself.”
“That was years ago, Herb. Anyway, they were always hauling on your string to get you back.”
“Worboys was going through a kind of change, Gus?” Herbie pushed on.
“Yes. I had him out at Warminster a couple of times. Talked to him in London, detected something was not right. He’d become more arrogant, but they all do when they climb the ladder and end up close to the Chief’s door.” He sipped from the coffee they had brought up for him. “But Tony’s lifestyle seemed to have changed. He’d bought that big place out at Harrow Weald. His kids were at expensive schools. His wife spent money like it grew on trees. He appeared to be living beyond his means—none of us can make a fortune in the espionage business. He told me several stories. His wife had money of her own. He’d had a legacy from some long-forgotten uncle.”
“Long-forgotten uncles can be useful.” Herbie nodded.
“I checked it out, and on the surface it seemed true. His wife did have money, and he did come into a legacy. There was something more, though. I worked away at it and he became more belligerent. So, I finally got the okay to use the magic machines on his bank accounts—and his wife’s, of course. A lot of money had come his way, but not quite the right amount. In fact, a good deal more than he’d admit to. Wife was the same.” He gave a deep sigh. “So, as often happens, I gave him an okay on the vetting, then did something illegal.”
“You, Gus?” It was mock surprise because Herbie knew Gus well enough to be ninety-nine percent sure that the foxy Confessor had often got hold of evidence by illegal wiretaps, unauthorized surveillance and quite irregular computer hacking into financial houses. Often senior officers turned a blind eye or backdated forms of consent. “What wicked ways did you go?”
“Put a team on Worboys. Good lads. My people from Warminster up for refresher courses, boys and girls like that. We also tapped his telephone. In the office and at home. I also had some of the computer whiz kids take a little walk through overseas bank accounts.”
“What do you mean by overseas? Switzerland?”
“Switzerland, Liechtenstein and the like.”
“You can get into the databases of those places nowadays?”
“It’s an art, Herb. I had guys that could have found out every investment made by the royal family, with nobody ever the wiser. We came up with some rich results regarding Tony. A numbered account in Switzerland, which was topped up at regular intervals. Once we had that, all we had to do was trace back. Find out where the top-ups were coming from.”
“So you did that?”
“Not at first. We got him during the surveillance. It’s odd how experienced intelligence officers sometimes make tiny errors when they go off the rails. They usually cover themselves well enough—as he did—but by then I was searching for a chink in his armor.”
“So which rails did he go off?”
“First of all, the ones that led to Belfast or Armagh. I couldn’t prove it, but I knew. If he’d been faced with it, I’m certain that he would have had his own version—written backwards, if you follow me.”
Herbie nodded.
“I logged every meeting he ever had with people acting for terrorist groups, of all shades and conditions, in Ireland. I logged every telephone call—even stuff we got with directional mikes aimed at public telephones. Yet I’m certain that if I had laid it all out, Tony would’ve laid out his cards next to each piece I’d collected. He would have been able to show a good intelligence take; claim that he was working informers. The old trick, Herb. You know how it works. The informer becomes the informed. I knew he had answers to each and every piece of evidence. For each meeting he would have chicken feed claimed to have been passed to him. But I knew he was really doing the passing. Then he widened his field of operations.”
“He mov
“Middle East; the old Soviet satellites; name it and he had his fingers in the pie. Tony Worboys was passing a great deal of high-octane material to practically everyone.”
Herb nodded again. “And that led to the usual problems?”
“He should’ve known better. I don’t have to tell you the pattern that develops in cases like this. He got in so deep that people demanded more of him. They demanded more personally.
“They wanted a favor performed here, and another one done there. By the time I decided to retire, Worboys was in hock really badly. Two or three years ago he would never have been led by the nose by the likes of Declan Norton, who’s just a hired gun when all’s said and done.”
“But people like Declan had him bang to rights. You scratch our backs if we scratch yours.”
“That’s it, Herbie. I know of several groups who had him by the short-and-curlies. Seriously. He’d have committed murder for them …Well, he nearly did last night.”
“So, what you do with all this information, Gus?”
“Kept it. Just before I retired, I was very foolish. Had Tony down to dinner, then laid the news on him. I told him the lot. Said I had tapes and video and Lord knows what else.”
“Reaction?”
“He just laughed at me. Said he would have no difficulty in disputing anything I handed over—I said I’d hand it over unless he promised to come clean, give it all up and take an early retirement.”
“And he just laughed? Well, he would really, Gus. Why the hell you tell him?”
“Because I’d got myself mightily pissed off at everything. Worboys just walked away and told me I should watch my back. I retired and started the book. You know, Herb, I was going to include everything—Cataract; the way the Security Service used me to run that idiot asset, Ishmael—Hisham; my own folly in running Jasmine for my own ends. I was going to air every piece of dirty laundry we had—including friend Worboys. In fact, I had all the Worboys material put into a safe lockbox at my bank. It’s still there, so I guess we’ll have to haul it out again.”