Kennedy’s Ghost. Gordon Stevens

of minor things,’ Myerscough told him. ‘Sorted out within hours.’

      ‘What about Nebulus?’

      One of the switch accounts in London.

      ‘Nebulus is fine.’

      ‘Anything else?’

      Myerscough shook his head.

      Brettlaw concluded the briefing, took his sixth coffee of the morning, lit another Gauloise, and began to prepare for his appearance before die House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence that afternoon. Two, sometimes three days of every month were taken up with such appointments. For the DCI it was one day a week. When Brettlaw was a politics major at Harvard he would have called it democracy.

      It was twelve-thirty; he took a light lunch in the executive dining-room and was driven to the Hill. The committee began at two, jugs of iced water on the tables and die members in a semicircle facing him.

      ‘The payment of $50,000 to a Bolivian government minister was in line with Congressional Order 1765 …’

      ‘At present the Agency is running two operations in Angola …’

      Even though the session was closed there were always too many members wanting to score political points, too many wanting to make names for themselves.

      ‘With respect, Congressman, I have already explained that to the Senate sub-committee on terrorism …’

      You ever been a bag man in Moscow, he had wanted to ask one of them once. Your balls frozen and the KGB hoods sitting on you. Yet still you had to make the contact, still you had to bring it home.

      The hearing closed at four-thirty; he made a point of shaking hands with each of its members and was driven back to Langley. At six-thirty he held his penultimate meeting of the day, an hour later he arrived at his last.

      The Lincoln town car was parked opposite the University Club and the Secret Service car was half a block down, though he assumed there was another in the alleyway behind. It had been more fun in the old days, before the end of the Cold War, when the building next door had been the Soviet embassy. Now it housed merely the Russian Federation, so that even though the game was still running and the place was still staked out, the edge of driving up 16th had gone for ever.

      He walked through the reception area, went to the fitness area in the basement, collected a towel, locked his clothes in a locker, took an ice-cold ten seconds in the plunge bath, and went into the sauna. The wall of heat almost stopped him. He took the towel from his waist, laid it on the wood seat, and sat down.

      ‘How’s Mary and the family?’ Donaghue asked.

      ‘Fine. Cath and the girls?’

      ‘Doing well.’

      It was twenty-five years since they had been room mates together at Harvard, since they had studied together and worked their butts off to make the football squad together. A quarter of a century, give or take, since the long grim afternoon, still remembered, at the Yale Bowl. The annual game between the universities of Harvard and Yale, the Crimsons and the Elis. The last play of the last quarter. Yale leading, Brettlaw quarterback and Donaghue wide receiver, the ball in the air and the world holding its breath.

      A little over twenty years since their numbers had come up and they had gone to Vietnam, Brettlaw into Intelligence and Donaghue into the Navy. Fourteen months less than that since Brettlaw had heard about Donaghue and kicked ass – filing clerk up to four-star general – to get him out and on the first flight home, to get him the best doctor in the best hospital in town.

      A little less than twenty years since they had been best man at each other’s weddings, and, a couple of years after that, godfather to one another’s firstborn.

      ‘We ought to get together sometime. Have a barbecue.’

      ‘Let’s do it.’

      The sweat was forming in beads on their foreheads.

      ‘Good session with the committee this afternoon?’

      ‘No problems.’

      ‘But?’

      ‘The enemy’s still there, Jack. Others might forget it but we mustn’t.’

      The sweat was pouring in tiny rivulets down their bodies.

      ‘Hope you’re keeping your nose clean, Tom.’

      Because if I run for the nomination I’ll need all the help I can get. And if I make the White House and if there’s nothing you’re trying to hide from me, then you’re head of it all, you’re Top Gun, you’re my Director of Central Intelligence.

      ‘You know me, Jack.’

      The Potomac was silver in the evening sun. The six of them sat on the upper deck of the houseboat, sipping Rolling Rock and munching through the steaks, plus the crabs and lobsters Mitchell had bought from the fish market at the top end of the marina.

      None of the others present that evening were connected with the security industry: two were actors, one was a lawyer and one a landscape architect, though all lived on the boats. Each of them knew of Mitchell’s Marine background, of course, each had laughed at the upturned helmet now used as a flower pot and the Marine Corps badge next to the family photographs, but few had noticed the scuba mask and parachute wings above the main emblem, and none had asked. Haslam had, of course, but Haslam knew anyway, because after Vietnam some of the boys from Force Recon had served with the Rhodesian SAS and Haslam had met a couple when, years later, they’d passed through London.

      The evening was quiet and relaxing, the others at the front end of the sun deck and Haslam and Mitchell by the barbecue at the rear.

      ‘Make the Hill this afternoon?’ Mitchell checked a steak.

      ‘Yeah.’ Haslam was tired but relaxed.

      ‘Meet Donaghue?’

      ‘Briefly.’

      ‘What you think of him?’

      ‘Impressive, though all he had time for was a handshake. Quince was suggesting he might run for president.’

      ‘So I hear.’

      Mitchell flipped the steak on to a plate and called for someone to collect it.

      ‘How’d you know Donaghue?’ Haslam poured them each another beer.

      ‘How do I know Jack Donaghue?’ Mitchell threw two more steaks on the grill. ‘Long story, Dave, long time ago.’ He hesitated, then continued. ‘You know what Force Recon was about, behind the lines most of the time, never off the edge. I was lucky, came back in one piece. Thought I’d come home the hero.’ He laughed. ‘Like the old newsreels of the guys coming back from World War Two, girls and cheer leaders and ticker-tape welcomes. Instead they treated us like shit.’

      Criticize the war, Haslam remembered Mitchell had once said, but don’t criticize the kids who left home to fight in it.

      ‘No job, no past that anybody wanted to know, so no future.’ Mitchell was no longer tending the barbecue, instead he was staring across the river, eyes and face fixed. ‘Ended up doing the wilderness thing in upper New York state, a lotta guys up there, then joined the Forestry Service.’ He laughed again. ‘Finally I ended up on the coast, Martha’s Vineyard, picking up any jobs I could. One day I bumped into Jack Donaghue.’ When Donaghue and Cath and their first daughter – there was only the one then – were on holiday and he himself was serving take-outs at Pete’s Pizzas in Oak Bluffs. ‘Jack told me about GI loans.’ The following morning, drinking beer in the rocking chairs on the veranda of the wood shingle house on Narangassett Avenue which the Donaghues had rented, the smell of summer round them and the ease of the Vineyard relaxing them. ‘He and Cath talked me into taking one, hassled me in to going to law school.’ He laughed a third time, but a different, more relaxed laugh this time. ‘Didn’t even ask for my vote.’

      When Haslam left