The Abrupt Physics of Dying

by Paul E. Hardisty

  Finally he emerged, soaked to the skin and breathing hard, onto a narrow single-lane road that contoured the mountainside. He followed the road for about a kilometre through steeply pitched fields and dense stands of pine. Ahead, a chalet emerged from the hillside. Such was the gradient here that its cedar shake roof was set into the slope, while the front peak towered three storeys above the ground, overlooking the valley below. Split wood was stacked ground to eaves along the side wall. A thin line of smoke wisped from the chimney.

  Clay continued past the chalet, checked the number on the post box at the top of the drive as he passed. Number 12. The number the woman had written down for him, the address. Clay passed by, kept to the road. It continued for another half-kilometre, entered a tall stand of densely planted pine. Within, it was dark and cool. He came to a switchback in the road, followed it up and around. As soon as he’d cleared the switchback, he left the road and clambered down into the forest, moved downslope until he had a perfect view back along the road to the chalet. Hidden behind a fallen trunk, he settled in to watch.

  A few cars trundled past. A tractor. After a long while a farmer, on foot, driving three dairy cows down the road, gallon-jug bells clanging at their necks. No one entered or left the chalet.

  Clay waited a full two hours before leaving the woods, satisfied he wasn’t being followed. He covered the ground quickly, peg-legged down the gravel drive, calves and quads aching, stiff. A woman’s black bicycle leant against the wall, the tyres flat, the chain rusted, a frayed wicker pannier hanging from the handlebars. Weeds ran rampant over what once was a vegetable garden. A lone sunflower, stunted, malnourished, poked its face through the tangle. The building itself, close up, was old, with heavy wooden beams, big stable doors on the ground level, and above, a balcony, shuttered windows, boxes of long-dead geraniums, stems withered and brown. The view across the valley was spectacular, a Technicolor backdrop. He breathed deep, climbed the stairway to the balcony, and knocked on the oak-plank door, his left arm thrust deep into his jacket pocket.

  The truth. That’s what he was here for. Something to fight the growing void within him, the gaping incompleteness that swallowed every beam of light, every warmth. He waited but no one came. He knocked again, looked out across the valley, at the glaciers shining in the sunlight, at all that hateful beauty. A couple walked by on the road above, hand-in-hand, their laughter dancing on the breeze. After a while he turned away, started down the stairs.

  He was halfway down when he heard the door open. He turned and stepped back up to the balcony. A woman stood in the doorway, still in shadow, hand above her eyes to shield the sun. She was young, thin, her hair short with a blunt fringe, jet-black. She wore a long black skirt and a grey woollen sweater with the sleeves pushed up to the elbows.

  ‘Bonjour, monsieur?’

  She stepped forward into the light. Her incredible eyes shone out at him without recognition. He stumbled backwards, hung on to the railing, blinked hard, questioning what he saw.

  Her eyes narrowed. She stepped out onto the balcony, reached up and touched his beard. ‘Clay?’

  Everything That Had Led Him Here

  He held tight to the rail. ‘Rania?’

  She threw her arms around his neck and kissed him hard, almost knocking him off his feet. ‘Mon dieu, c’est toi,’ she gasped between kisses. ‘C’est vraiment toi.’ She pulled him inside and closed the door, engulfing him with a flood of kisses.

  ‘You …’ he took a deep breath, looked into her eyes. ‘Thank God.’

  She touched her shoulder. ‘Al hamdillulah.’ The skin of her forearms had come up in gooseflesh.

  He held her for a long time, there inside the doorway, the late-afternoon sun streaming particle-lit through the open windows, the blond pinewood floors and walls glowing, her face buried in his chest, just feeling her, convincing himself, not wanting to let go.

  After a while she whispered: ‘They said you were dead.’ Her voice was thin, breathless, rougher than he remembered. ‘There was a story in the newspaper with your photo. It said you died trying to escape from Yemen. It said you killed seven oil workers.’

  Shame burned through him. He looked away.

  She led him through to the chalet’s main room, a big window looking out across the valley, heavy pine beams overhead, a wood-burning stove, old lived-in furniture, a writing desk. She put her hand to her mouth and coughed. The sound came from deep within her lungs, rasping phlegm. ‘When I heard you were here, in Switzerland, I did not believe it.’

  He was quiet for a long time, looking out at the mountains as if they, too, had just somehow rematerialised. A solitary cloud scuttled past the highest glacier.

  ‘The woman I met? Was she one of your people? DGSE?’

  She shook her head, looked down at her hands. ‘They are not my people any longer, Clay.’

  Clay turned and faced her. A frisson ran up the back of his spine. ‘What happened that night, Rania? At the village.’ He had been waiting a long time to ask that question.

  A spasm of coughing shuddered through her body. She looked up at him, her face pale, pained. ‘I had only been in the service two years. All I did was pass along information to my contact.’ She hung her head. ‘It was the first time I had been asked to do anything, how do I say, direct. I was instructed to find Al Shams. We knew that he wanted desperately to tell his story. But he needed you to be able to tell it.’ She stopped, looked down at the floor. ‘Before the interview I activated a short-range directional transmitter and hid it on the roof of his building. I had already called in the operation the night before. But then after you …’ she paused, putting her hands to her cheeks. ‘After we were together, it was all so clear. I knew he was not what they thought he was. I could never have lived with it. I had to warn him.’

  He understood. We have a choice. All of us.

  He put his hand on her shoulder, turned her so she was facing him, held her close. She felt frail, bone thin.

  Rania looked up at him. ‘It was supposed to be retribution, Clay. For the murder of Thierry Champard. Justice. And a warning. We had intelligence that Al Qaeda was planning to hit a target in France. We had to act. It was not until yesterday that I read the story about Parnell in the newspaper.’

  ‘Parnell?’

  ‘He was picked up by Interpol on his way through Amsterdam and taken into custody two days ago. The French government is pressing charges of conspiracy to commit murder. Petro-Tex has denounced him. They said they had unearthed evidence that proved that Parnell had hired an assassin to kill Champard. Apparently, Parnell and Champard had been working together to embezzle large sums of money from Petro-Tex. When Champard got cold feet and threatened to confess, Parnell had him killed. Not a difficult thing to arrange, in Yemen.’

  ‘Don’t I know it.’

  ‘Rex Medved himself has been on the news today saying that Parnell acted on his own, without the knowledge of senior management, and against company policy. Petro-Tex is cooperating fully with the investigation.’

  Clay tried to breathe, felt the air rasping through his constricting windpipe. ‘It wasn’t Parnell, Rania. It was Medved.’

  Rania gasped. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Medved had Champard killed because he threatened to reveal what was going on up at the CPF. I have proof. Or will have soon. That’s why they’ve blamed Parnell. They’re worried the truth will get out. So they decided to pre-empt whatever might be revealed, set a smokescreen.’

  Rania face hardened.

  ‘Medved tried to have me killed, a few weeks ago in Oman.’

  Rania gasped.

  ‘He’s looking for you, too, Rania. They’re trying to wrap this whole thing up. They want anyone who knew what really happened to disappear.’

  She stood for a moment looking past him, out across the valley or out into the future, perhaps, saying nothing. Then she took his hand and led him to the kitchen. A wood fire flickered in a big steel stove. She moved a cast-iron kettle a few
inches onto the hotter part of the stovetop. In a moment it was wisping steam. He watched her reach two earthenware mugs from a wooden cupboard and pour tea leaves from a jar into a strainer.

  ‘I convinced Hurricane to pull out of the Petro-Tex joint venture,’ he said.

  ‘That is good.’

  ‘It’s as far as I’ve got.’

  She took the kettle from the fire and poured two cups of tea, handed him one. ‘And Hussein?’

  ‘Murdered. The day you left.’

  She frowned. ‘I am sorry.’

  Clay looked into her eyes, surprised.

  ‘If he had wanted to kill me, he would have,’ she whispered. ‘He contacted DGSE – arranged for my evacuation. Hussein would have to have gone through PSO channels to do it. That was probably what cost him his life. In saving me, he ruined his cover inside PSO.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘And Abdulkader, your friend?’

  Clay swallowed. ‘He was killed. Saving me.’

  Rania’s face contorted. Tears flooded her eyes, sharpening the fiery corona.

  ‘Hurricane pulling out will have been a big blow, Rania. But Petro-Tex is hanging on. They’re looking for new money. Without it, they can’t expand, and if they don’t expand, the existing wells will water out and the whole operation dies.’ He put his mug on the table, stepped towards her, reached into his pocket, pulled out the crumpled handwritten pages of her story, put them on the table. ‘We can finish this,’ he said.

  He searched her face. ‘I can get everything we need, Rania: eyewitness statements, photographs, reports, sample data, field measurements. We can blow this thing to pieces, Rania. If this gets out, Medved is destroyed, politically and financially. We can crush the bastard, Rania.’

  She looked down at the pages. ‘Ten thousand Ogoni were massacred by government troops in Nigeria just a few weeks ago, Clay, and it barely made the news. People are fatigued. There is too much injustice, a deluge. It’s not news anymore.’ Tears pooled in her eyes, overflowed.

  ‘This matters, Rania. You know it does.’

  ‘It is not a question of whether something matters, Clay. Lots of things matter. It’s whether you can actually do anything about it. It is like building a sandcastle on the beach when I was a little girl. I would work all day and make something beautiful. Then the tide washed it all away.’

  It sounded too familiar. It sounded like him. He swallowed hard, could see the hardened disillusionment in her. ‘That is exactly what they want you to think, Rania.’

  ‘They?’ she said.

  ‘All of them. Petro-Tex, Medved, the morons that sent us to Angola, your lot. The people who control the system. The people who have been using us our whole lives, making us do their dirty work.’ He checked himself a moment, paused. ‘You have to finish that story.’

  ‘Do you not understand, Clay? I wanted to. Believe me. I have spent hours and days drafting and redrafting it until my head split.’ She slumped down onto one of the kitchen chairs. ‘But you were dead.’ She wiped the tears from her face with her hands, left then right, blinked away the beads from her eyelashes. She buried her face in her arms, breath rasping through her lungs.

  Clay felt his chest tighten. He sat beside her and put his arm around her and held her for a long time, feeling the tremors running through her body.

  She gripped his arm and looked up at him. Her eyes were like prisms, tears refracting the alpine light. ‘That person you saw with the gun, it was not me, Clay. It never was.’ She grabbed a newspaper from the stack next to the fireplace and put it on the table, an old copy of the IHT. ‘This is me, Clay. This.’

  He looked down at the paper, another of her by-lines.

  ‘I had convinced myself that I was doing something noble, something righteous, but it was all a lie.’

  ‘Your father.’

  She nodded. ‘And then losing you …’ she bent double, her lungs rebelling, her body shuddering in a series of wrenching coughs. When it was over, she looked up, tears in her eyes, pushed the fringe from her eyes. He could see the price she had paid in every part of her face. She looked into his eyes. ‘Mon dieu, Clay. It was like dying.’ She wrapped her arms around him and pushed her face into his chest.

  That’s exactly what it was like.

  And then, without warning, Abdulkader was there, real, close, his shattered body pumping blood out onto the hot dry sand, his eyes looking out across the shimmering plain towards that place the living will never know. A shiver ran through him. He closed his eyes, tried to blink Abdulkader away. ‘I’m here, Rania.’ His voice sounded far away, as if he was listening to himself in another room.

  She wiped the back of her hand across her eyes. ‘Allah akhbar.’

  Clay swallowed hard. ‘Maybe He is.’ He kissed her. The smell and the feel of her calmed him. He reached up and touched her cheek, a phantom. By the time he realised what he had done it was too late.

  She gasped. ‘Mon dieu, Clay. Your … your hand.’

  He stopped and pulled away, and held it up for her to see.

  She stared at it for a moment and then took what was left of his forearm in her hands and kissed every part of the stump. ‘I am so sorry,’ she said.

  But he did not want her pity, or her remorse, for now he could see the abrupt physics of it all, of everything that had led him here.

  Entropy

  Clay woke with a start. Moonlight reflected from the glaciers and threw long shadows across the bed and lit the walls of the bedroom. He pulled up the duvet against the cold, breathed the mountain air flowing in from the open window. It was getting warmer now, summer’s zenith in the air, the smells of ripening fruit, cedar, rain on the way. She murmured something and snuggled close, snaked her arm across his chest, the warmth of her plastered against his side, the smell of him all over her, of her on him. He could see the scar clearly now, an angry welt arcing down from just below her collarbone towards her side, the larger one on her back where the shoulder blade had been reconstructed.

  Hussein’s aim had been good. Two inches lower and he would have ripped out her heart. As it was, she had almost died of secondary lung infection. He pulled her close, kissed the scar. She looked so vulnerable, lying there naked beside him. Desire coursed through him, a deep chemical swoon. He was morning hard, aching for her. But he breathed deep, found control. He didn’t want to wake her.

  Clay slipped from under the covers. In the semi-dark he pulled on trousers, a shirt and a fleece-lined jacket, and crept to the kitchen. He got the stove fire going and soon had a pile of glowing coals. He filled the kettle, poured out tea leaves and made a quick breakfast.

  It had been six days now since he’d found her. Still weak, Rania slept long daylight hours. When she could, she worked on the story, threading in the technical detail Clay provided. While she slept, Clay walked alone in the mountains, high up to the alpine slopes, returning to the chalet after dark, always watching, alert for any sign of danger. He was healing. He watched Rania grow stronger. Soon she was able to accompany him, short distances at first, longer each day. They spoke of the future, the imminent and yet seemingly distant danger they faced, Medved’s people out there looking for them both, hunting them. And yet up here in the mountains they seemed immune, insulated somehow from all of it. On the radio he heard of the changes in South Africa, of reprisals and reconciliation. Petro-Tex’s growing success in Yemen was in the news, too. Despite the war and the controversy swirling around its operations, production was set to increase. If the reports could be believed, the new oil discoveries were world-class. Rex Medved announced the launch of a major new charity helping underprivileged children in the developing world. Yemen would be the operation’s flagship.

  Clay was about to open the front door when he heard footsteps behind him. She was standing in her nightgown, arms wrapped around herself.

  ‘Where are you going, Claymore?’

  ‘I didn’t want to wake you.’

  She stood looking at him.


  ‘I need to make some calls, get some cash.’

  She frowned, that little negative smile he found so enchanting. ‘Someone might recognise you, Clay.’

  He stroked his beard. ‘Looking like this? My own mother wouldn’t recognise me, Allah keep her soul.’

  She bit her lip. ‘I am sorry,’ she said. ‘I did not know.’

  Entropy. It was all about the inevitable disaggregation of things, of people. You couldn’t escape it. Clay grabbed the door handle.

  ‘Please do not leave, Clay. It is safe here.’

  He turned, looked at her. ‘We can’t hide forever, Rania. Al Shams is still out there, still fighting. We have to help him.’ He reached up, stroked her cheek with his fingers. ‘Don’t worry. I won’t be long. Back tonight.’

  Soon he was descending the ridge trail, the lights of the town flickering below in the valley, the first grey light touching the ice on the peaks, his breath clouding in the air.

  Three hours later he was in Geneva. He went straight to the Standard Bank building on Rue des Alpes. Two weeks ago he’d set up an account there, arranged a sizeable transfer from the Cayman Islands branch. Now he walked through the dark granite foyer, aware of the closed circuit cameras following him. He filled out a withdrawal slip at the counter, presented it to a teller behind an old-style wood and glass wicket. The man looked down at the slip, over his spectacles at Clay, and then picked up the phone. He spoke into the handset, listened. After a moment he replaced the handset.

  ‘Un moment, s’il vous plaît,’ he said, and disappeared into a back room.

  Clay kept his eyes lowered, away from the cameras, nerves jangling. A minute passed, two.

  Finally, the clerk reappeared. He counted out Clay’s cash, and then slid a sealed envelope under the glass, along with a yellow chit. ‘Signature,’ said the clerk.