The Eleventh Commandment (1998) Read online

  Connor began to think about spending the next two weeks basking in the sun. As they passed a news-stand, a small headline in a right-hand column of the Sydney Morning Herald caught his eye.

  American Vice-President to Attend Funeral in Colombia

  Maggie let go of her husband’s arm as they walked out of the Arrivals hall into the warm summer air and headed for the parking lot.

  ‘Where were you when the bomb went off in Cape Town?’ Tara asked.

  Koeter hadn’t mentioned anything about a bomb in Cape Town. Would he ever be able to relax?

  6

  HE INSTRUCTED HIS DRIVER to take him to the National Gallery.

  As the car pulled away from the White House staff entrance, a Secret Service Uniformed Division officer in the guard booth opened the reinforced metal gate and raised a hand to acknowledge him. The driver turned onto State Place, drove between the South Grounds and the Ellipse, and past the Department of Commerce.

  Four minutes later, the car drew up outside the gallery’s east entrance. The passenger walked quickly across the cobbled driveway and up the stone steps. When he reached the top step, he glanced back over his shoulder to admire the vast Henry Moore sculpture that dominated the other side of the square, and checked to see if anyone was following him. He couldn’t be sure, but then he wasn’t a professional.

  He walked into the building and turned left up the great marble staircase that led to the second-floor galleries where he had spent so many hours in his youth. The large rooms were crowded with schoolchildren, which was not unusual on a weekday morning. As he walked into Gallery 71, he looked around at the familiar Homers, Bellows and Hoppers, and began to feel at home - a sensation he never experienced in the White House. He moved on to Gallery 66, to admire once again August Saint-Gaudens’ Memorial to Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts Regiment. The first time he’d seen the massive life-size frieze he had stood in front of it, mesmerised, for over an hour. Today he could only spare a few moments.

  Because he couldn’t stop stopping, it took him another quarter of an hour to reach the rotunda at the centre of the building. He walked quickly past the statue of Mercury and down the stairs, doubled back through the bookstore, ran down another flight of stairs and along the underground concourse before finally emerging in the East Wing. Taking one flight of steps up, he passed below the large Calder mobile hanging from the ceiling, then pushed his way through the revolving doors out of the building onto the cobbled driveway. By now he was confident no one was following him. He jumped into the back of the first taxi in the queue. Glancing out of the window, he saw his car and driver on the far side of the square.

  ‘A.V.’s, on New York Avenue.’

  The taxi turned left on Pennsylvania, then headed north up Sixth Street. He tried to marshal his thoughts into some sort of coherent order, grateful that the driver didn’t want to spend the journey offering him his opinions on the Administration or, particularly, on the President.

  They swung left onto New York Avenue and the taxi immediately began to slow down. He passed a ten-dollar bill to the driver even before they had come to a halt, then stepped out onto the street and shut the back door of the cab without waiting for the change.

  He passed under a red, white and green awning which left no doubt of the proprietor’s origins, and pushed open the door. It took a few moments for his eyes to grow accustomed to the light, or lack of it. When they did, he was relieved to find that the place was empty except for a solitary figure seated at a small table at the far end of the room, toying with a half-empty glass of tomato juice. His smart, well-cut suit gave no indication that he was unemployed. Although the man still had the build of an athlete, his prematurely balding dome made him look older than the age given in his file. Their eyes met, and the man nodded. He walked over and took the seat opposite him.

  ‘My name is Andy …’ he began.

  ‘The mystery, Mr Lloyd, is not who you are, but why the President’s Chief of Staff should want to see me in the first place,’ said Chris Jackson.

  ‘And what is your specialist field?’ Stuart McKenzie asked.

  Maggie glanced at her husband, knowing he wouldn’t welcome such an intrusion into his professional life.

  Connor realised that Tara couldn’t have warned the latest young man to fall under her spell not to discuss her father’s work.

  Until that moment, he couldn’t remember enjoying a lunch more. Fish that must have been caught only hours before they had sat down at the corner table in the little beach cafe at Cronulla. Fruit that had never seen preservatives or a tin, and a beer he hoped they exported to Washington. Connor took a gulp of coffee before leaning back in his chair and watching the surfers only a hundred yards away - a sport he wished he’d discovered twenty years before. Stuart had been surprised by how fit Tara’s father was when he tried out the surfboard for the first time. Connor bluffed by telling him that he still worked out two or three times a week. Two or three times a day would have been nearer the truth.

  Although he would never consider anyone good enough for his daughter, Connor had to admit that over the past few days he had come to enjoy the young lawyer’s company.

  ‘I’m in the insurance business,’ he replied, aware that his daughter would have told Stuart that much.

  ‘Yes, Tara said you were a senior executive, but she didn’t go into any details.’

  Connor smiled. ‘That’s because I specialise in kidnap and ransom, and have the same attitude to client confidentiality that you take for granted in your profession.’ He wondered if that would stop the young Australian pursuing the subject. It didn’t.

  ‘Sounds a lot more interesting than most of the run-of-the-mill cases I’m expected to advise on,’ said Stuart, trying to draw him out.

  ‘Ninety per cent of what I do is fairly routine and boring,’ Connor said. ‘In fact, I suspect I have even more paperwork to deal with than you do.’

  ‘But I don’t get trips to South Africa.’

  Tara glanced anxiously in her father’s direction, knowing that he wouldn’t be pleased that this information had been passed on to a relative stranger. But Connor showed no sign of being annoyed.

  ‘Yes, I have to admit my job has one or two compensations.’

  ‘Would it be breaking client confidentiality to take me through a typical case?’

  Maggie was about to intervene with a line she had used many times in the past, when Connor volunteered, ‘The company I work for represents several corporate clients who have large overseas interests.’

  ‘Why don’t those clients use companies from the country involved? Surely they’d have a better feel for the local scene.’

  ‘Con,’ interrupted Maggie, ‘I think you’re burning. Perhaps we ought to get back to the hotel before you begin to look like a lobster.’

  Connor was amused by his wife’s unconvincing intervention, especially as she had made him wear a hat for the past hour.

  ‘It’s never quite that easy,’ he said to the young lawyer. ‘Take a company like Coca-Cola, for example - whom, I should point out, we don’t represent. They have offices all over the world, employing tens of thousands of staff. In each country they have senior executives, most of whom have families.’

  Maggie couldn’t believe that Connor had allowed the conversation to go this far. They were fast approaching the question that always stopped any further enquiry dead in its tracks.

  ‘But we have people well qualified to carry out such work in Sydney,’ said Stuart, leaning forward to pour Connor some more coffee. ‘After all, kidnap and ransom isn’t unknown even in Australia.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Connor. He took another gulp while he considered this statement. Stuart’s scrutiny didn’t falter - like a good prosecuting counsel, he waited patiently in the hope that the witness would at some stage offer an unguarded response.

  ‘The truth is that I’m never called in unless there are complications.’

  ‘Complications?’