Read Online Dead End by Brian Freemantle - Free Book Online Page B

announced the Dubette president.
    â€˜I understand.’ Newton thought the football-pitch size of Grant’s desk accentuated the man’s bantam-cock shortness.
    â€˜It was a good idea to have security check everything out as thoroughly as they did.’ It was a safeguard to let the other man imagine he’d initiated the precaution, which he hadn’t. After what Grant regarded as the one and only mistake of his life – relegating that in his mind to a lapse more than a mistake – he now took no risks.
    That amounted to praise, Newton decided. ‘I thought so.’
    â€˜I had the same done in Paris. That was useful, too.’
    â€˜You’ve seen everything I sent up, about the website proposal?’
    Grant nodded, tapping a folder on the left of his desk. ‘You did good there, too, Dwight. I wish others had.’
    Newton was quite relaxed, which he rarely was in Grant’s presence, certainly on a one-to-one basis. But he’d calculated the situation from every which way and concluded that he was probably the only person who couldn’t be accused of mistake or misjudgement. It certainly seemed that way from the conversation so far. Guessing the other man’s reference, he said: ‘What’s the take from Paris?’
    â€˜Buck-passing,’ replied Grant, at once. ‘I hauled Saby back, for a personal explanation. And Mendaille, obviously.’
    Newton was surprised, properly realizing how seriously the president was treating the misdirected communication. Henri Saby was the chief executive of the French subsidiary. Georges Mendaille was head of research in Paris and the man personally responsible for the mistake. ‘What do they say?’
    â€˜Saby entirely blames Mendaille. Mendaille says it was a simple but understandable mistake, that out of habit he mishit the automatically logged email address, sending it to Washington in the normal way instead of personally to you, which was the specific instruction.’
    â€˜If it was the specific instruction, Mendaille shouldn’t have been hitting keys from habit,’ said Newton. ‘He should have been concentrating.’
    â€˜Exactly!’
    Toadying bastard, thought Grant. But hadn’t he made everyone with whom he had to deal a toadying bastard?
    â€˜You firing him?’
    Grant shook his head. ‘Dismissed, he’d be resentful, wanting to hit back, a potential whistle-blower. I want him where I can see him, know what he’s doing all the time …’ The man paused. ‘Mendaille’s our hostage, we’re not ever going to be his. That’s the way it always works.’ There was another pause. ‘Which brings us back to your problems.’
    Newton shifted uncomfortably at it being described as his problem, recognizing that no blame or culpability for anything would ever be traceable to Edward C. Grant. There’d be no record, not even a diary entry, of this meeting. Newton accepted, too, that despite everything being already set out in the file upon Grant’s desk, it all had to be talked through.
    â€˜Rebecca Lang’s in a relationship with Parnell,’ he began. ‘Sometimes she stays at his place, sometimes – usually weekends – he stays over with her in Bethesda …’
    â€˜We got photographs?’ cut in Grant, who already knew the answer from his direct contact with Harry Johnson, the head of Dubette security. The question was to bind Newton into any future action that might be necessary.
    â€˜Coming and going from both places,’ confirmed Newton. That wasn’t in the file, so perhaps there was after all a purpose in talking it through. ‘She asked Showcross outright what was going on. He told her it was beyond her clearance and nothing to do with her …’
    â€˜But then she rang Paris?’ cut in Grant, again.
    â€˜On a cockamamie excuse about a transmission screw-up that could have been sorted