The Hidden Man - Charles Cumming [85]
‘Oh, I won’t bore you with that now. Suffice to say the Yanks have had it up to here with his conspiracies.’ He chopped a hand against his forehead and took a swig of his double Scotch. ‘I had a nasty feeling he’d do something like this.’
‘So it’s true.’
Ben laughed nervously as he asked the question.
‘Oh God, no. Well, not all of it, in any event. All this stuff about Bob being Station Chief in Berlin is complete balls, for a start. I don’t know what he’s talking about. Bone was a Cousin, certainly, but very low on the food chain.’
‘A Cousin?’ Ben asked.
‘CIA.’ McCreery assumed a quieter voice. ‘He did end up in Afghanistan, but Christopher would hardly have regarded him as a friend. Far as I’m aware, they only met half a dozen times. Bob was a bit fuck struck by the Brits, to be honest, a complete Anglophile. Boodles and the Queen, all that empire jazz, made him drool like a puppy. So an old-school operator like your father would have been right up his street. Old Bobby Bone loved a bit of posh.’
McCreery appeared to look back at the letter and emitted a gusty laugh on page four.
‘And this bit’s absolute cock,’ he said, waving the paper noisily in his hand. Ben couldn’t tell whether McCreery was genuinely irritated or just being loyal to the firm. ‘Neither was your father continually based in Kabul, nor was he undeclared. He simply made visits to the Afghan capital from time to time. Until later on, Bone was mostly working for an aid organization, and then only as a conduit for American funding. The Yanks were chucking so much money at the Soviet problem they didn’t know if it was arseholes or breakfast time.’
‘So why would Bone just make all this stuff up?’
With a theatrical lurch of his eyebrows, McCreery intimated that the American was simply demented.
‘God knows,’ he said. ‘Perhaps some of it’s true. I ran agents for years that Christopher knew nothing about. That’s the business we were in. And Bob’s analysis of the Soviet army is pretty accurate. The drugs, the bullying, the corruption. But the idea that a foreign diplomat - particularly a tall, white, elegantly attired Brit like Christopher Keen - could just walk around the bazaars of Kabul calmly recruiting disgruntled Russian soldiers is frankly lunatic. One might as well try hitchhiking in Piccadilly. Your father was a pedigree intelligence officer, my God, but even that would have been beyond his considerable talents. Besides, one didn’t have authorization to go after members of the occupying forces. That wasn’t our brief. We were anxious to get our hands on Soviet military technology, certainly, but their officers were exceptionally well disciplined and very unlikely to turn. As for their subordinates, the Office already had highly placed sources in Moscow who completely negated the need to pitch lower echelons.’
‘Echelons’, like ‘Cousins’, was another euphemism with which Ben was unfamiliar, but he felt too embarrassed to ask for a translation. Instead, he said, ‘What about what Bone says about the SAS? About you training the mujahaddin?’
McCreery hesitated.
‘Quasi-accurate, at best. We certainly sponsored de-badged British soldiers to report on the muj, and SAS did take a contingent to Scotland for training. But not to the Highlands, as our friend attests. The exercises took place in the Hebrides.’
‘And you were there?’
McCreery rolled his neck and implied with a glance that Ben should ask a different question.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to pry.’
‘Oh heavens, don’t worry. I’m just not at liberty to discuss specific operations in which I may or may not have been involved. Bit old-fashioned like that. Take my responsibilities rather seriously.’
‘Of course.’
‘Unlike dear Mr Bone, it seems, who has committed a flagrant breach of security. Still, that’s the American way. Shoot first, ask questions later.’
‘Friendly fire,’ Ben said, without really meaning to, and Jocksmiled. ‘So what was my father doing in Afghanistan? Can you at least tell me that? Can you tell me if there’s any link between him and this guy Kostov?’