Unofficial and Deniable. John Davis Gordon

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ