by Ian Rankin
MURDERING BASTARDS, the headline had screamed.
Well, of course they were. To pick such an open place, such a public spot. But such a sweet target: how could they have refused the opportunity? There had been security, of course, there always was, but how secure could one be? It was a fact of life that politicians were targets. It was part of the hard-won image. As soon as one gained one’s seat, there were policemen on one’s doorstep, opening car doors, one step ahead and one step behind during every trip. It gave one a sense of power, and Sizewell had always enjoyed it. It was a mark of attention, a badge of his importance in the state.
All the same, intelligence should have caught wind of this one. He knew that he would have to have a few words with his old friend Partridge. But first there was another statement to compose. I would like to be seen as a symbol perhaps of this country’s determination never to give in to…
He thought again of the phone calls and the threats, of the snooping newspaperman. This would settle his hash. Let him try and dig up dirt on me now, thought Sizewell, no one would dare publish it. He lay back contentedly, fingering his singed eyebrows delicately. Partridge would know what to do, he was sure of that.
Partridge was on the hunt, hunting out his superior who had gone underground. Partridge knew that when the old boy needed to think, or to escape, the railway stations were often not enough for him, and he would find a half-decent platform on the underground and sit there, watching the ebb and flow of the day’s travelers, until he had made peace with himself. On a day such as this, though, he might just be of a mind to push his way right to the front of the platform, waiting until the scream of lights from the tunnel gave him the momentary courage to leap onto the rushing tracks.
Bond Street, Oxford Circus, Tottenham Court Road, Holborn, Russell Square, King’s Cross, Euston, Warren Street, and Goodge Street took him the best part of the morning, and by the end of it he had only a sense of utter hopelessness and a raging headache to show for his odyssey. The old boy could be anywhere. What was the use? He came up into blinding light, the Ascension-clear light of early winter. The air was as brittle as glass, and the paving stones were like permafrost beneath his feet. He bought the noon edition of the Standard and read of Harry Sizewell’s continuing recovery. Well, that was something anyway. God, what a mess this whole thing had been. What an utter shambles.
He knew of a small sandwich bar near the museum where he might have lunch before heading back (in a taxi perhaps: he could not face the underground). There were reports to be drafted, questions to be avoided (not evaded: he knew the difference), files to be unfiled and refiled, and the Harvest team to be summoned from their individual locations. All except Miles Flint. Where on God’s earth was he? Partridge had read the cryptic note from the mobile support unit: the arrest had been going to plan, but then there had been a skirmish, shots had been fired, and one of the suspects had escaped, taking agent Scott with him. What the hell did it all mean? Had Flint been kidnapped? Partridge had spent a great deal of the taxpayers’ money on telephone calls while he tried to find out. He had been bounced like a rubber ball from one extension to another, from one barracks to another, and always the person to whom he most wanted to speak was not available, was “still in the field,” could not be contacted. What did they mean, “still in the field”? The operation should have ended days ago. It looked as though Circe had blown up in his face. And, as ever, Miles Flint was the fuse.
The receiver burning in his hand, Partridge had finally given up. For some reason a poem by Yeats came to him. He had never been one for poetry, but a few lines, rote-learned for school examinations, stayed with him: “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.” Well, he was damned if he was going to fall apart, though everyone and everything around him might. No, he would be the center, he would hold, he must.
He found the old boy in the sandwich bar, examining his shoes and his reputation, perhaps thinking both to be in need of repair. Partridge sat down at the scarred Formica-topped table.
“Sir?”
“Partridge, what are you doing here?” The voice was tired out, like froth in the bottom of a cup. “Harvest went all wrong, didn’t it? We pulled them out too early.”
“That happens, sir.”
“It shouldn’t. We should have hung on. London in the middle of a bombing campaign, and we pull out of a terrorist surveillance.”
“We may have a larger problem than that, sir.”
“No sign of Flint yet?”
“None, sir.”
“What do you think?”
“It could be anything, but the probability is that he’s been taken by the IRA, maybe even turned by them.”
“He knows too much, you know. We can’t let them get anything out of him.”
“I’m aware of that, sir. There are men in the field just now. They’ll find him.”
“Then give them the order. Nobody must come out alive.”
“That’s a bit—”
“Nobody!” The director seemed close to tears, but they were tears of anger. Things were moving away from him too fast, and he felt a sudden impotence.
“Yes, sir,” said Partridge, realizing for the first time just how close he was to the top job. The old boy would be lucky to last another week. Seven days only, at most. He had been summoned to Downing Street three times in the last five days. He was running out of answers.
“Bloody Miles Flint,” he said now, “where is he? What’s his game, eh? Just what’s his game?”
TWENTY-FOUR
THERE WERE SPLENDOR BEETLES EVERYWHERE, which made for a fairly depressing homecoming. Look at them all, besuited and betied, the suits French, the ties silky soft but unobtrusive. Obtrusively unobtrusive. City shoes of polished leather clacking the length of the expensive streets, the streets of gold. There was nothing splendid in this show. Latin, splendere, to shine. But the splendor beetles buffed up to the nines, Buprestidae, their larvae fed on decomposing matter. There was always this furtive decay beneath the casual and splendent display. What secrets did they hide from the world, these busy businessmen, their shoes sounding like the rubbing together of insect legs? Everyone had their secrets, their little cupboards of treasure, private diaries locked away in bureaus, the pile of salacious magazines in the bottom of the wardrobe, the unquenchable taste for the illicit.
Miles heard the sounds of guilt as he walked with Collins, and he thought, is this what I’ve been paid all these years to protect? He had been put in charge of everything, from the whitest lie to the guiltiest of traitors, all in the cause of the sanctity of secrecy itself. Was that it, then? Yes, that was it. That was all. He had been a schoolboy, collecting things for the teacher, no reasons needed, no excuses. He flagged down a taxi and motioned for the sullen Collins to get in. He was fairly certain that Collins wouldn’t attempt to escape, not now that he was in the enemy heartland. Miles had noted the newspaper headlines. The hunt was on for the Kew bombers. Besides, Miles had offered him a very generous incentive to stick around.
The new Miles had not been surprised when their return to England had turned out to be so uncomplicated. He felt that he could accomplish anything. The spider’s bite still tingled in his blood. He ducked into the taxi after Collins, and felt warm and safe and snug.
Snug as a bug in a rug.
“St. John’s Wood,” he said to the driver, then sat back to watch, as Collins was doing, the parade of all those who had been fitted out for the annual ugly bugs’ ball.
He couldn’t be sure which, to the taxi driver, would seem the more suspicious—perfect silence during the drive, or Collins’s accentuated brogue. He decided finally to play it as it came. The driver, in any case, seemed preoccupied. He was in the midst of an argument with the world at large and other drivers in particular, and he carried on the argument vociferously from his cab window.
“Why St. John’s Wood?” asked Collins, trying, Miles noted, not to make his voice sound too Irish.
“That’s where
I live,” said Miles, quite loudly.
The driver looked in his mirror, interested for a split second, then turned back to harangue a pedestrian who had dared to step onto a crosswalk.
“But won’t they be watching your house?”
Miles shrugged and smiled.
The traffic was crawling like flies through a pot of glue. Time was of the essence now that Miles had sneaked back. He had to finish this off while the element of surprise was his.
“Do you know London at all?” he asked Collins, whose eyes were transfixed by the passing parade.
“Never been here in my life.”
“It’s hell,” said Miles.
“Yes, I can believe that,” murmured Collins, his hands planted firmly on his knees.
St. John’s Wood, however, was reassuringly the same, though the renovating and building work continued all around. Miles held the last of his money in his hand, ready to pay the driver, his wallet empty now, no credit cards, no checkbook, nothing. His identity lay somewhere inside the house in Marlborough Place, but he could no longer be sure that he wanted it.
He realized that it was, in its way, a blessing that he had been ordered to leave his identity behind him, for the firm had given him plenty of cash to make up for the lack of plastic money. The owner of the fishing boat had taken a fair whack, but that had been worth every penny. Then the rail fares had been expensive, but he had never enjoyed traveling by bus. In their carriage, he had read in the newspapers of the aftermath of the Kew bombing. It seemed that two people were still in hospital. Collins read, too, and his eyes registered a mixture of disgust and accusation that Miles found reassuring. He had changed sides once before; perhaps he would do so again. He knew what Collins wanted. He wanted what everyone, be they terrorist or spy, wanted eventually—he wanted out, plain and simple. But it was never plain and simple. It was not like quitting at roulette when you had won or lost. There were forces in this game, the old invisible rules that chained you to the table. No croupier ever said rien ne va plus, no wheel was ever still. But Miles was about to try to beat the table. He was going to break the whole system. And Collins, soulful, questioning eyes or not, was going to help him.
As the taxi turned out of Wellington Road and into Marlborough Place, Miles saw the figure. A woman, standing opposite his house, and quite obviously watching it.
“Just keep driving,” he said. The driver nodded. Passing her, Miles risked a glance. She was a brazen one, though, wasn’t she? They didn’t train them well enough these days. Well, let her wait there. He wasn’t going to announce his arrival.
“I thought this was where you lived,” whispered Collins.
“It is,” said Miles. “But I thought you might like to see where the Beatles made Abbey Road. It’s just up here. It would be a shame for you to come to London and not see that famous zebra crossing after all, wouldn’t it?”
Collins shook his head slowly. He had left a nightmare and entered a farce.
He hit him again, and this time the fanged alien stayed down, but as he walked toward the exit, another one came at him, hitting him hard in the back, and just as he crossed the threshold out of the room, his energy pack registered zero and he crumpled to the floor. A small angelic figure left his prone body and, to the music of the Funeral March, ascended to the top of the screen.
“Damn!”
He had scored twenty-seven thousand, not even enough to put him on the top ten high scores. Jim Stevens turned from the machine and looked around the noisy arcade, seeking out another game to play. Nobody seemed at all curious about a middle-aged man in an amusement arcade full of children, which was just as well, since he was in no mood for looks and stares.
The Sizewell investigation had turned sour on him, and he had a raging toothache at the front of his mouth. He was also a little hung over from the previous night, a night spent wining and dining Janine. She had not fallen for his charm, but he had fallen to her gracefully executed karate chop to the neck. He had forgotten two important points: one, that she was a feminist, and two, that she attended self-defense classes in what free time she had. There was certainly nothing repressed or downtrodden about the blow she had given him. It still hurt when he turned his head to right or left. So, with everything conspiring against him, he had come down to the arcade to blitz a few aliens and shoot hell out of King Kong, Commando, the Frog, and Dizzy Miss Lizzie. All to the accompaniment of bleeps and squeals and the tight, businesslike sound of heavy rock music from the arcade’s sound system.
“Give me another quid’s worth of change,” he said to the beautiful, bored girl in the booth, whose languid features had first attracted him to this place. Forget it, he had enough woman trouble as it was. When the bars opened again, he would sink himself in whiskey and beer and damn the consequences. Everything was going wrong. Business as usual. Sizewell would be impenetrable now that he had the media behind him. He almost had a halo over his cursed head. In addition to which, the spy, Flint, had never come home, which left Jim Stevens with nothing but a pocketful of change and a screaming desire to blast hell out of the Zorgon Battle Fleet once and for all.
Sheila parked the Volkswagen with her usual care, reminding herself that the passenger-side taillight needed a new bulb. Taillight, taillight, taillight. She picked up her briefcase and a large hardback book from the backseat. The book was about literary Paris in the 1920s. What she remembered about Paris personally were the appalling toilets in some of the buildings and the outrageously priced café au lait of Montparnasse. She had not caught even a whisper of existentialism there, though she had found plenty of evidence of a dog-eat-dog philosophy.
Taillight, taillight.
The door opened fluidly and closed behind her with a slight echo, as if she needed reminding that she was alone in the house. The silence embraced her like a frozen coat, a chill smother of mothballs. She would cook up some mushrooms in wine and tomatoes, and eat them hot with rice or pasta. Rice probably. There was no pasta in the house.
In the kitchen, she noticed that one of the chairs had been pulled from the small table. It hadn’t been that way this morning. She always pushed it in after she finished breakfast. Always. She felt her stomach constrict and her face begin to tingle. Oh God, she thought, oh God. There were sharp knives hanging on hooks above the stove. She lifted one down and clutched it to her breast, looking around her for other signs of ingress. Hearing a cough from the living room, she took a deep breath and started out of the kitchen.
When the living-room door flew open, the man started up from his seat, ready to do battle with almost anything except the wild-eyed harridan who, teeth bared, held a glittering carving knife before her in striking position.
“Jesus, missus, there’s no…I can explain…”
She was only a yard away from him, and she looked huge, fear pumping her up to twice her normal size.
“No need to explain,” she hissed.
“No, I can explain, really I can. Your husband…”
She was moving toward him, needing only the excuse of a wrong movement to send the knife plunging down. Two feet from him, then a foot, her breath as loud as any wild animal’s…
“Sheila?”
Miles came clattering down the stairs.
“Sheila?”
He was dressed in the blue terry cloth robe she had bought last Christmas. His hair was wet and stringy, his eyes trying to pierce the blurred air. His glasses had been left behind in the bathroom.
“Oh, Miles.”
They embraced, pulling each other inward hard.
“Oh, Miles, where have you been? I’ve been so worried.”
“No need,” he whispered, stroking her soft hair, feeling her weight against him, and then, in embarrassment, remembering the presence of Collins, he pulled away from her, but slowly, tenderly.
“How did you get in?” she asked. “You left your keys behind.”
“Through the back garden. My friend here is a dab hand with a locked door. This is Mr.
Collins, by the way. Will, this is my wife, Sheila.” Miles examined the knife, which was still trapped in Sheila’s fist, as incongruous now as some cheap joke-shop toy. “It looks,” he said, “as though you’ve already been introduced.”
Sheila smiled toward Collins, her face as red as a funeral wreath. Collins shrugged and smiled back, a little humiliated at his own show of cowardice. It surprised him that he could feel humiliation without any concomitant anger. Something was changing inside him, but what?
They ate the mushrooms, which Sheila had cooked from her special recipe. During the meal, Miles and Collins glanced at each other, smiling conspiratorially. Both were thinking how strange this food seemed after the huge Irish breakfasts, the solid and comforting amounts of fatty meat, the potatoes and veg. While they ate, Sheila asked her questions, and Miles tried to parry them, feigning tiredness and artlessness. He had introduced Will Collins as a friend of long standing, but Collins was no actor and Sheila, sensing that here was the weak point in her husband’s armor, had begun, gently but skillfully, to interrogate Collins. At last, some scraps of rice still untouched on her plate, Sheila put down her fork.
“You’re lying through your teeth, both of you. It’s quite transparent. Miles, I thought we had some kind of an agreement. Truth in marriage and all that. Is our agreement at an end?”
Miles chose to stare at Collins. “Not here, Sheila, not now. Later.”
“Why don’t you trust me, for Christ’s sake? Why does there always have to be this screen between us?”
“Of course I trust you, Sheila. Don’t make a scene.”
“Am I making a scene, Mr. Collins?”
“No, Mrs. Flint, you are not.” Miles looked at Collins in silent horror, while Sheila turned to her husband in victory. “Your husband,” Collins continued, “likes to think that he’s armor-plated. That much I do know. But”—he paused to sip some wine—“I never set eyes on him until last week. I don’t know why he’s lying to you, frankly I don’t care, but I don’t see what point there is to it. He…we need all the friends we can get. You’ve got to see that, Flint. Else we could both be corpses by the morning.”
