Borrowed Time. Hugh Miller

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      Mike sat back. He pictured Paul Seaton somewhere near the centre of that avarice and graft and brutality. The picture was easy to conjure.

      He took out the Zip disk and tapped a command key marked SECURE CONFERENCING. A box appeared onscreen and invited him to enter a telephone number; simultaneously a tiny red light mounted on the camera atop the screen lit up.

      Mike entered the number of CIA Records at Langley, Virginia. After a moment a screen announcement told him he was connected; who did he wish to talk to? Mike entered the name Joshua Flynn. A pause, then a white square appeared onscreen, which turned quickly to a live colour picture of a thin-faced, exceptionally gloomy-looking man. The dolour vanished and he smiled widely as two-way visual contact was established.

      ‘Mike!’ The voice was alarmingly realistic over the computer’s sound system. ‘Where have you been? It’s so long since we spoke, I thought you must have defected.’

      ‘There’s no place left to run, Josh. How’re you doing?’

      ‘In spite of the wishes of my contemporaries, I must say I’ve thrived.’ Flynn waved an arm at the shelves and machinery ranged behind him. ‘I’m in charge these days. I’m one of only three men at Langley with all-level access to the files. If you forget how many lumps of sugar you take in your coffee, give me a call, we’ll have a record of it here somewhere.’

      ‘I’m chasing a favour, Josh.’

      ‘I can’t imagine any other reason why you’d call.’

      ‘A man by the name of Paul Seaton. He was —’

      ‘An employee of this agency,’ Josh cut in. ‘I knew him reasonably well, for a time. What do you need to know?’

      ‘Background stuff, leading up to the time he took off and became a bandit.’

      ‘You on to him for something?’

      ‘I could be, with luck. Just in case the luck holds, I’d like to know as much about him as I can.’

      ‘I could tell you most of it from memory,’ Flynn said, ‘but let’s be professional about this, right? I’ll call up the file. One second, Mike.’

      It took four seconds. Flynn studied the printout, nodding.

      ‘OK. A summary of the known career of Paul Elliot Seaton, who will now be forty-three years old.’ Flynn put down the summary and looked directly out of the screen at Mike. ‘From the time Seaton left college he put himself at the disposal of people with power, the kind of power he knew he could never generate himself. He was open about his technique — he once told me his motto for getting on in life was “Find the engine you need and hitch a ride”. Anyway, Paul was preeminently physical, he wasn’t hampered by a conscience. He worked as errand-boy and muscle for several small and medium-sized politicians until an opportunity came along to join the CIA.’

      ‘Who gave him the opportunity?’

      ‘It was a recommendation from a grateful relative of our first director, Allen Welsh Dulles.’

      ‘He did somebody a big muscular favour.’

      ‘I’d guess so,’ Flynn said. ‘The job he got here carried no guarantee or likelihood of promotion, but Paul Seaton got to do harm, and he got to carry a prestigious ID that showed he was a legitimate employee of the Agency. For three years he was a happy young man. Then in 1977 Jimmy Carter arrived, and he directed a fresh administration to put tight controls on the clandestine activities of the CIA. A month later Paul Seaton was out of a job.’

      ‘How did he get involved with the mujahedin initiative in Afghanistan?’

      ‘Well, he wasn’t a lot more than a dogsbody around here,’ Flynn said, ‘but one or two people at the Pentagon kept records of those boys from Langley who’d distinguished themselves in situations calling for, quote, effective physical action, unquote. Seaton had drawn attention to himself for some of the things he got up to in Cuba and Chile, and so, within a month of getting his can kicked out of the CIA, the former gofer-bodyguard-enforcer-saboteur had himself a new job with the military.’

      ‘Did you see him at that time?’

      ‘Once. While he was doing his three-month training at a government facility in the Ozarks. I went there with a pair of our covert operations people for a briefing on Project Kandahar, as they called it. I spoke to Seaton for a couple of minutes. He was full of himself, full of the mission ahead. He was mustard-keen to get over there and start teaching bodily assault and slaughter.’

      ‘He was the man for the job,’ Mike said, then quickly added, ‘or so I gather.’

      ‘Yeah. When I asked the fellow in charge just what it was that Seaton and the others were training to do, he said, “They’re gonna teach one group of Neanderthals how to exterminate another group of Neanderthals, in the interest of maintaining a balance of power consonant with the needs and purposes of the United States.”’

      ‘But Seaton didn’t shape up the way they imagined he would, right?’

      ‘He’d been in Afghanistan only three or four months,’ Flynn said, ‘when he discovered an inborn leaning to fanaticism. He also found he had an aptitude for the life of a brigand. After the end of his tenth month in Kandahar, he severed all contact with the military.’

      ‘And what do you know about his present activities?’

      ‘Nothing. There have been rumours he’s into drug running, hill banditry, kidnapping, all the usual stuff villains get up to in the stretch of territory from Kabul to Chittagong. Nothing has ever been substantiated, and frankly he doesn’t fall within our sphere of interest.’

      ‘Well, you’ve been a help, Josh. I owe you one.’

      ‘Now I’m boss I can let you run it up to three you owe me. Then you have to pay it off in wine. Let me know if you get anything new on Seaton.’

      Mike promised he would. He closed the conference connection. At the top of the notebook page he had filled while Flynn was talking he scribbled P. Seaton — background.

      Soon, he thought, pocketing the notebook. Soon, you heap of garbage.

       3

      The following morning at 9:15 a message went out to all personnel of Task Force Three to attend a meeting in UNACO’s briefing room. Mike Graham was in a diner with coffee and the Washington Post when the pager vibrated against his chest. C.W. Whitlock got the message as he sat in his car in a street off Times Square, talking to a private detective he occasionally employed. Sabrina Carver heard the buzz of the pager where she had left it, resting on the ledge above her bathroom washbasin. She abruptly ended her telephone conversation with her mother, ran to the bathroom and read the terse message.

      ‘Bang goes the gym,’ she said, shutting off the last word, realizing she had started to talk to herself again. She had always believed the habit was harmless enough when she was at home, but lately she worried that it could spread to СКАЧАТЬ