Kennedy’s Ghost. Gordon Stevens
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cab in to DC.
Coming back from a job had always been strange.
The adrenalin that still consumed you mixing with the relief that you were normally in one piece. Depending on the sort of job, of course. Sometimes there were just a couple of you, sometimes a patrol. Sometimes, as in a terrorist scare, there were so many of you trying to get a piece of the action that you wondered if there was anyone else anywhere else. Sometimes you came back fit, other times slightly battered, occasionally torn to hell. It had happened to him twice, the medics waiting but one of his own always there first, staying with him and slipping him a cigarette or a beer when the doctors were looking the other way. A couple of times he himself had waited for an incoming flight, most recently in the Gulf. Inconspicuous, of course, lost in the crowd just as the lads would wait till everyone else had cleared the plane, which was part of what it was all about. Then the telephone call to the family, but that again was different.
Except that was when you were regiment, and now he was by himself.
Because gradually the years sneaked up on you, so that although you did your ten miles a day and worked out whenever you could, you knew the time was coming when you would no longer be running up mountains, when instead of being out there you were the one doing the briefings and sending other guys out. Which was when you sat down with your wife, knowing that when she was alone she would cry with relief. Which was when you emptied your locker, had your last party in the mess, then went off to look for the rest of your life.
Sometimes you did private work, bodyguard stuff, except who in their right minds wanted to stop a bullet or a bomb meant for someone else? Sometimes, and especially if you had Haslam’s record and reputation, you joined one of the select companies run by ex-regiment people, even tried to set up your own.
The travel helped, of course; occasionally you were still in the thick of it, even though your presence there was coincidental, like the guys doing the jobs in the former Soviet Union. Sometimes you struck lucky, like the bastard whose people were doing some protection work in a certain African state at the time of an attempted coup, the British ambassador caught in the middle and Whitehall sending in the regiment to get him out. Except they needed someone who knew the ground, so while his wife thought he was supervising a job in Scotland he was really running out the back of a Herc into five thousand feet of velvet African night.
Because none of you could ever quite shake it off, none of you wanted to come off the edge, none of you could resist still looking for that last mountain. Even now he could see the words from James Elroy Flecker’s ‘Golden Journey to Samarkand’ on the clock at Hereford:
We are the pilgrims, Master, we shall go
Always a little further; it may be
Beyond that last blue mountain barred with snow …
Which was probably slightly literary, and the only words of Flecker’s which he hadn’t found boring, but it was also probably true. Which was why he’d gone his own way. Why he’d come to DC. Why he’d singled out people like Jordan and Mitchell. Why, in his way, he was still on the edge. Why he had still not given up on his own last mountain.
The condominium was on the eighth floor of one of the modern blocks near George Washington University, looking south-west towards the Potomac River. Most of the other people were university or government, there was a security system on the main entrance, a porter on duty twenty-four hours a day, and laundry facilities plus lockups in the basement. The furniture he had installed was comfortable rather than expensive, there was a Persian carpet on the floor, and the desk in the corner of the sitting-room was antique. On the walls were the reminders of his past: a Shepherd print of the battle of Mirbat and a Peter Archer of The Convoy in the sitting-room, plus a cut-glass decanter with the regimental badge – what others called incorrectly a winged dagger – the same as on the gold ring which had warned Ortega in Lima. Two photographs of D Squadron next to the basin in the bathroom and the letter from the White House on the back of the door.
It was almost midnight.
He let himself in, skimmed through the mail he had collected from the box in the foyer, laughing at the joint letter the boys had written him and enjoying his wife’s, then put the rest aside till morning and went to bed, deliberately not setting the alarm. When he woke it was almost ten, the morning warmth already penetrating the flat. He showered, made breakfast, and began the telephone calls.
The first was to the company for whom he had done the Lima job, the next four were to companies for whom he worked in Washington, informing them that he was in town again, and the sixth was to the office in Bethesda. The call was answered by a receptionist. He introduced himself and asked for Jordan.
‘I’m afraid Mr Jordan is at a meeting downtown.’
One of the government bodies for whom the company worked, Haslam supposed.
‘Can you tell him I called and ask him to phone back when convenient.’
Jordan telephoned twelve minutes later, told Haslam he had to get back into his meeting, and suggested lunch. When the calls were finished Haslam booked a table at the Market Inn, unpacked his travel bag, and left the flat. The restaurant was fifteen minutes away by metro rail and a little over an hour if he walked. He ignored the station and turned toward the Mall.
The grass was green and freshly cut, and the late morning was hot. The Vietnam Memorial was sunk into the ground to his left and the Potomac was to his right, the Memorial Bridge spanning it and Arlington cemetery rising on the hill on the far side, the Custis-Lee Mansion in the trees at the top, and the memorial to John Kennedy just below it. Even now he remembered the first time he had come to Washington; the night, pitch black and biting cold, when he had stood alone at the Lincoln Memorial and stared across the river at the tiny flicker of light in the blackness. The eternal flame to the assassinated president.
The following morning he had taken the metro rail to Arlington and walked up the slope of the hill round which the cemetery was formed. The ground had been white with frost, and it had been too early at that time of year for the tourist buses, so he had made his solitary way across the polished granite semicircle of terraces, then up the steps and on to the white marble surrounding the flame itself. And after he had stood staring at the flame he had walked back down the steps and stood – again alone – at the sweep of wall which marked the lower limit of the memorial and read the quotations from Kennedy’s inauguration speech. Seven quotations in total, three either side and the one he remembered in the middle:
In the long history of the world
few generations have been granted
the role of defending freedom
in its hour of maximum danger.
I do not shirk from this responsibility
I welcome it.
He lay on the grass and imagined Kennedy speaking, the voice fading as the sun relaxed him. Two months on any kidnap took their toll, two months on a kidnap in South America took more than they were entitled to. No more jobs for a while, he thought; he would go home, spend some time with Megan and the boys.
He picked up his jacket and walked on.
The morning was hotter, DC shimmering in the heat and the humidity already building. The White House was three hundred yards to his left, the needle of the Washington Memorial to his right, and the brilliant gleaming white stonework and exquisite outline of Capitol Hill half a mile in front of him. There were other parts of DC, there were urban ghettoes and unemployment and homelessness, often violence and murder. But today DC looked good.
By the time he reached the Market Inn it was one o’clock and the restaurant was already filling. The manager escorted him to a table in the room to the left and a waitress poured him iced water.
Most of those present wore suits and almost all were on what Haslam thought of as the computer break. He’d forgotten how many times he’d sat in offices and seen it done: the telephone call, incoming or outgoing, then the swivel of the body to the computer and the telephone hooked on the shoulder, Yeah, let’s do lunch … The diary