The Devil's Breath Read Free Page A

sunshine, watching the swans paddling by. His plate empty, Billy had drifted across to a play area where a couple of older kids were kicking listlessly at a plastic football, and the two men had sat at the table, McVeigh talking about Billy’s new school. Listening, Yakov had nodded, watching the boy make a goal with two careful piles of T-shirts. After a while, he’d looked at McVeigh.
    ‘You miss being married?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘You regret being married?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘You ever see your wife?’
    ‘Not properly. Not to talk to. Just …’
    McVeigh had shrugged, looking at Billy again, installed between the goal-posts. It was the first time the two men had ventured on to this kind of territory. After dozens of conversations about kids and football and the smallprint of living in London, it had seemed abruptly intimate. Yakov had smiled, saying nothing, and McVeigh had reached for his glass, swallowing the last of the beer.
    ‘Find the right woman,’ he’d said, ‘and you’re a lucky man.’
    ‘I know.’
    McVeigh had looked at him, puzzled by a new note in his voice, something unmistakably wistful, something close to regret.
    ‘I thought—’ he’d frowned ‘—you and Cela?’
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘I thought—’ he’d shrugged, embarrassed ‘—it was all great.’
    ‘It is. That’s the problem.’
    ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘It
is
great. Very great.’
    ‘Is … that a problem?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Why?’
    McVeigh had looked at him, waiting for an answer, some kind of explanation, but Yakov had simply shaken his head,that same quiet smile, an expression of impenetrable sadness, and then he’d stood up, calling to Billy, taking the spin off the boy’s pass with a deft flick of his foot, redirecting it to one of the older youths.
    A week later, McVeigh was still brooding on the conversation, certain that Yakov had wanted to tell him something, half-convinced that he should phone up, suggest a quiet pint, just the two of them, no Billy, but in the end he’d done nothing about it, telling himself that he’d got it wrong, that the man had simply been lost for words, one too many shandies, that the moment had come and gone and meant very little.
    Until three days ago, when every newspaper in the country carried pictures of a body sprawled in a Kensington street. One leg was in the gutter, and the head was at an odd angle, but the half-smile on the man’s face gave the lie to the Israeli Embassy’s careful evasions. Yakov Arendt. The wizard in the Nike track-suit. The Sunday drinker with something on his mind.
    McVeigh shuddered and turned over, shutting his eyes again. He had yet to break the news to Billy. And still, even now, he hadn’t got a clue how to do it.
    *
    The incident at the Manhattan Plaza Hotel was still in the hands of the New York Police Department when the American Embassy in Amman, Jordan, received a small brown envelope from a youth on a motor-cycle. The youth left no name and offered no further point of contact. The envelope was addressed, in typescript, to the President of the United States.
    It was opened by one of the Embassy’s senior attachés. He read the two typed paragraphs twice and then reached for the phone. Halfway through dialling he put the phone down and ran upstairs to the Ambassador’s office. The Ambassador, he knew, had a crisis meeting scheduled for noon. The meeting was to include top members of the Jordanian administration and a cousin of the King. Since the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, two weeks back, there’d been lots of crisis meetings. It was 11.45.
    The Ambassador read the note, shook his head, read it again. An active service unit had entered the United States. They werepresently established somewhere on the East Coast. Soon they would be moving to New York. They were under Headquarters Command. They had been training for their mission for many months. Their mission would answer American aggression in the Gulf. It would remind US citizens that war, if it