The Night Manager

The news Burr had been praying for came exactly a week later. They had stayed in to wait for it. Goodhew had told them to.

"Leonard?"

"Yes, Rex."

"May we agree that this conversation is not taking place? Or not until after Monday's meeting of the Joint Steering Committee?"

"If you like."

"Here's the bottom line. We've had to toss them a few trinkets, or they'd have sulked. You know how the Treasury is." Burr didn't. "Number one. It's an Enforcement case, one hundred percent. Planning and execution to be yours exclusively, the River House to provide support in aid, theirs not to reason why. Do I hear shouts of hooray? I don't think I do."

"How exclusive is exclusively?" said Burr the wary Yorkshireman.

"Where you have to use outside resources, you obviously take potluck. One can't, for instance, expect the River boys to run a telephone check for one and not take a peek at the product before they lick the envelope. Can one?"

"I'll say one can't. What about our gallant American Cousins?"

"Langley, Virginia, like their counterparts across the Thames, will remain outside the charmed circle. It's like to like. The Lex Goodhew. If Pure Intelligence is to be held at bay in London, then it stands to reason that their opposite numbers in Langley must also be held at bay. Thus have I argued, and thus has my master heard me. Leonard...? Leonard, are you sleeping there below?"

"Goodhew, you're a bloody genius."

"Number three ― or is it D? My master in his capacity as minister responsible will nominally hold your tiny hand, but only with the thickest possible gloves, because his latest phobia is scandal." The flightiness disappeared from Goodhew's voice, and the proconsul came through. "So nothing direct from you to him at all, thank you, Leonard. There's one route only to my master, and that's me. If I'm putting my reputation at risk, I don't want you muddling. Agreed?"

"How about my financial estimates?"

"What do you mean, how about them?"

"Have they been approved?"

The English damn fool returned: "Oh my goodness no, you silly boy! They have not been approved. They have been endured through gritted teeth. I've had to carve them up between three ministries and cadge some extra from my aunt. And since I personally shall be cooking the books, will you please account to me for your money as well as for your sins?"

Burr was too excited to bother with any more fine print. "So it's the green light," he said, as much for Rooke as for himself.

"With more than a dash of amber, thank you," Goodhew retorted.

"No more snide digs at the Darker Procurement octopus, or silly talk about secret servants feathering their own nests. You're to be all honey with your American Enforcement buddies, but you will be, anyway, and you're not to lose my master his safe seat or his shiny car. How would you like to report? Hourly? Three times a day before meals? Just remember we didn't have this conversation until after Monday's agonised deliberations, which on this occasion are a formality."

* * *

Yet it was not till the U. S. Enforcement team actually set foot in London that Burr allowed himself to believe he had won the day. The American policemen brought a whiff of action with them that washed away the taste of interdepartmental haggling. Burr liked them at first sight, and they liked him, better than they liked the less winnable Rooke, whose army back stiffened as soon as he sat down with them. They warmed to Burr's blunt language and his short way with bureaucracy. They liked him better still when it became clear that he had forsaken the unsavoury preserves of Pure Intelligence for the hard tack of defeating the enemy. Pure Intelligence for them meant all things bad, whether it resided in Langley or the River House. It meant turning a blind eye to some of the biggest crooks in the hemisphere for the sake of nebulous advantages elsewhere. It meant operations inexplicably abandoned in midstream and orders countermanded from on high. It meant callow Yale fantasists in button-down shirts who believed they could outwit the worst cutthroats in Latin America and always had six unbeatable arguments for doing the wrong thing.

First of the enforcers to arrive was the celebrated Joseph Strelski from Miami, a tight-jawed American-born Slav in training shoes and a leather jacket. When Burr had first heard his name five years before, Strelski had been leading Washington's uncertain campaign against the illegal arms traffickers who were Burr's declared foe. In his fight against them, he had crashed head-on with the very people who should have been his allies. Hastily transferred to other duties, Strelski had enlisted himself in the war against the South American cocaine cartels and their appendages in the States: the crooked percentage lawyers and silk-shirt wholesalers, the arm's-length transportation syndicates and money launderers, and what he called the no-see-'em politicians and administrators who cleared the path and took their cut.