Borrowed Time u-11

by Hugh Miller

  They set off walking south-east. They crossed sloping farmland and dusty roads, cutting across the natural lines and divisions of the land, taking shortcuts through woods and across gullies to a stretch of natural road. It was solid rock, the blunt edge of a ridge from which they could see terraced rice fields laid out like patchwork, every shade of green and yellow. A looming backdrop of dark hills to the north and east intensified the colours and provided a windbreak for hundreds of acres of cultivated land.

  ‘The pictorial view of Kashmir,’ Ram said. ‘From a distance everything is so orderly.’

  After an hour the mist cleared, and even though they were high in the hills Mike and Ram began to sweat. They stopped to take water.

  ‘It’s a beautiful place,’ Mike said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘I didn’t imagine it was anything like this.’ He pointed ahead of them, to a cluster of houses with a larger building at their centre. ‘Have we come to a community?’

  ‘Bahadur. The white cube bigger than the others is Reverend Young’s medical centre. The school is inside his mission, which is farther down the slope.’

  ‘This is where I do my UN fact-finder bit, is it?’

  ‘With a minimum of acting required,’ Ram said. ‘This morning we simply introduce you. Discussions can come later. Reverend Young is expecting us, so there should be something cool waiting — he makes an admirable lemonade.’

  They walked down the slope to Bahadur. Ram led the way through narrow twisting streets to the mission. As they approached he looked puzzled.

  ‘I’ve never seen the door shut before.’

  He went up the two little steps and knocked on the door, waited, then pushed it. It opened. He went in, took three steps across the tiny entry hall and turned.

  ‘Come in, quick,’ he told Mike. ‘Close the door.’

  Mike pushed the door shut and caught the smell at once, heavy on the warm air. It was unmistakable, the odour of decomposing human flesh.

  Ram went into the room beyond. Mike heard him groan.

  ‘What is it?’

  Mike went through. It was a bare white room with two small windows high on opposite walls. On a wheeled examination table in the centre of the room lay the body of a priest, stretched out, the arms tied together under the table. The black vestments were covered with blood. The face had been beaten to a pulp. Shards of white skull bone stuck up from the scarlet mass, catching the light.

  ‘Is it Reverend Young?’

  ‘I assume it is,’ Ram said. ‘I recognize the ring on his hand.’ He touched the mangled head with a fingertip and drew it back. ‘Not more than a couple of hours dead. Another hour and the stench will be unbearable.’

  They went outside. Ram fished out his mobile phone. ‘I’ll get the police down here. Nobody will have seen a thing, of course. There are never ever any witnesses. Not even if it was done in broad daylight in the middle of the street.’

  Ram spoke for a minute to the phone, then switched it off and dropped it back in his rucksack. ‘The police will take care of everything,’ he said. ‘We can go. And it’s best we do, before the locals take it into their heads that you brought bad luck with you.’

  As they walked back up the slope Mike felt they were being watched, but he saw no one. ‘Have you any idea who could have done it?’ he said.

  ‘Plenty of cut-throats to choose from,’ Ram said. ‘But I couldn’t narrow it down to one or even a dozen. As I said, I don’t know anybody who didn’t like Reverend Young.’

  6

  Sabrina arrived at Kulu on time, and the first stage of her planned transformation to a WHO official went to schedule. Wearing a shalwar kameez- traditional tunic and trousers — and a scarf over her head, she went directly to a lockup garage in an underpopulated suburb north of the town and let herself in with a key she had been given at Dehra Dun.

  The car waiting for her was a ten-year-old two-door Peugeot 205, metallic blue with dabs of rust on the roof and the lower edges of the doors. The engine had been reconditioned and made reliable, there were new tyres and secure locks. A creative after-touch was the attachment of a loose aluminium plate to the underside of the engine mounting, which rattled and vibrated and made the car sound frail and barely roadworthy.

  Sabrina’s change of clothes was in a holdall in the boot of the car. Staying low-key was always difficult, given her height, her figure and her looks, but UNACO Kitting and Outfitting had made the best selection they could: billowy blouses, long flowing skirts and baggy trousers in brown and ochre shades, stout boots and a couple of shapeless canvas jackets.

  She took only a minute to change. Looking every inch the overseas social worker in her flapping shirt and sturdy footwear, her long hair done up in a bun and tucked into the brim of a floppy sun hat, she opened the garage door, got behind the wheel of the Peugeot and drove out into the sunlight of Kulu.

  What happened next, she later decided, was an unprofessional lapse of a kind she could never let happen again. She stopped the car a few metres along the dusty road from the garage, went back and locked the garage door. She came back to find that her shoulder bag had gone from the front passenger seat.

  She stood for a moment and stared at the empty seat, forcing herself to be calm, trying to raise a clear memory of how things had looked before she turned away from the car and went back the few steps to lock the garage door.

  Anger and anxiety obscured her memory. She was mad at herself for being so careless, and she was seriously worried because her documentation, her gun and her folding money were all in the vanished bag — to say nothing of her Swiss Army knife. She forced her mind away from consequences and told herself firmly to think only along positive lines. Even so, she couldn’t help visualizing Philpott, seeing him turn puce as he learned that one of his so-called prime agents had behaved like the worst kind of amateur.

  She leaned both hands on the bonnet of the car and closed her eyes. She could see herself driving out into the light, feeling sudden warmth through the windscreen. She had braked, put the engine in neutral and got out, leaving the door open. She had no recollection of anyone else being near.

  She opened her eyes, starting to feel desperate. She recalled something Philpott had told her, something she had subsequently written down. It was one of the chunks of advice he only ever imparted when he had taken a drink:

  If ever you find yourself in a position where it seems possible you will damage UNACO, remember that it is worth any amount of effort, any measure of pain, and all the resourcefulness you can marshal to make sure that you deflect the harm away from UNACO, or undo the source of harm entirely.

  Black marks against an agent were seldom erased. Sabrina had so far collected none. She had no intention of starting.

  She shut her eyes tightly and tried again. She thought back further, saw the approach to the garage, the key in her hand extending to open the padlock.

  She experienced a jolt now, realizing there had been something peripheral, something at the edge of her vision that should now register. She tried to freeze the image of her hand going forward to the lock and saw it slow down. Simultaneously she was aware of movement in herself, in her neck, the beginning of a reflex action.

  Of course!

  She had looked over her shoulder. She shut her eyes tighter and concentrated, inching through the recollection, aware that she had missed something, or at least she had taken no account of it. She saw again the shrubs and stunted trees at the side of the garage, with the yellow clay of the road dusted halfway up their trunks and stems.

  A woman!

  She had seen a woman on the other side of the trees, looking through a gap, her face impassive. She had simply been watching, doing nothing to raise the kind of curiosity that would get her remembered.

  ‘Yes, yes, yesss!’

  Now that the image of the woman had been raised Sabrina could hold it and stare at it. In her early training with the FBI, she had learned that even if she did not consciously see somethi
ng that appeared in her line of vision, it would be printed on her memory. Raising such memories was now something she could do five times out of ten. She put the image to the centre of her mind and worked at enhancing it.

  The woman was young, perhaps twenty, with typically dark eyes and black hair; she wore a silver chain around her neck and she …

  The recollection stalled there. Something needed to be noticed.

  ‘Come on, come on!’

  There was an irregularity about the neck. A scar! There was a vertical scar, running down the midline of the larynx. It was an operation scar, perhaps an old tracheotomy, the thickened tissue raised and almost white against the surrounding brown skin.

  The effort of finding a telltale sign had been so extreme that Sabrina heard herself pant. She kept her eyes shut and pictured the face again, imprinting it, making it a clear feature of fresh memory: small chin, wide upper lip, prominent cheekbones, rounded and deep-set dark amber eyes, hair combed back behind the ears.

  Sabrina opened her eyes. She felt as if she had done a day’s work. She looked at the empty seat again. The thought of her bag being somewhere else right now, in other hands that might do unthinkable mischief, was like a goad behind her, prodding, shoving.

  She jumped in behind the wheel, banged the door shut and threw the engine into gear. As she tore away along the road she had no idea where she was going, beyond knowing she had to start her search in the town.

  * * *

  People were staring. Women had their hands over their mouths, others drew their veils protectively across their eyes. The whole market had stopped to watch the commotion at the vegetable stall.

  ‘I do not speak English!’ the stallholder howled. He was an old man, and Sabrina had him by the front of his shirt. She held on with both hands and looked determined enough to pick him up and throw him across the market. ‘No English! I speak no English!’

  ‘You just spoke it!’ Sabrina rasped; falling into the character imposed by her unflattering clothes. ‘Now you’re going to rack your brains and answer my question or I’m going to drag your spindly old carcass down to the local clink!’

  She had started out her enquiry much more gently, stopping by the old man’s stall, asking him if he knew of a young woman with a scar at her throat, a good-looking young woman that Sabrina was anxious to find. Then she noticed that the old trader had his hand in her jacket pocket. She caught him by the wrist, twisted his arm up his back and pushed his face into a pile of green chillies. She let him stay that way, howling, his mouth half stoppered with his produce, while she did a good enough impression of a crazy woman to keep the other traders at a respectful distance. When she finally released the man and grabbed him by the collar, she guessed he was scared enough to rat on his mother.

  ‘Are you going to tell me?’ she demanded. ‘Huh? Or do I beat you up and haul you off to the police?’

  ‘Please, no, do not hurt me, I beg you …’

  ‘Talk, then.’

  ‘You are looking for a woman called Phoolan Sena …’

  ‘Where do I find her?’

  ‘She lives with her son over there.’ He pointed to a clutch of small houses beyond the perimeter of the market. ‘Her house has a blue door.’

  ‘And you’ll have a black eye if I go over there and find out you’re lying to me.’

  Sabrina let the man go and marched away. She pushed her way through the narrow lanes between the rickety barrows, past staring stallholders and their cringing customers.

  Out on the bare ground at the rear of the market she paused and looked back, just able to see her car at the top of the narrow street where she had parked it. If the locks were as good as she had been told, it should be all right, although the way today had gone, she could not invest much faith in anything.

  She found the house with the blue door and rapped on it, seeing paint fly off in little flakes under the impact of her knuckles. Feet shuffled beyond the door, then it swung open. For a split second the woman with the scar on her neck just stared. Then her memory kicked in and she jumped back, half turning as she leapt, getting ready to run for the back door.

  ‘Hold it!’

  Sabrina caught her by the hair and tugged. The woman yelled. Pulled hair, like a kicked shin, can immobilize a person long enough for an attacker to get the upper hand. Sabrina swept her leg behind the woman’s knees and put her flat on her back.

  ‘You’re Phoolan, right?’ Sabrina knelt beside her. ‘Where is my bag, Phoolan?’

  The woman looked hurt and frightened and surprised all at once.

  ‘I have a memory for faces,’ Sabrina told her, ‘even ones I haven’t really seen. So don’t give me any stories about you being the wrong woman. You do speak English, by the way?’

  The woman’s stare was too mystified, too blank. She didn’t know what Sabrina was saying. She knew who she was, though. Sabrina stood up and pointed a warning finger. ‘Stay.’

  The room was sparsely furnished; Sabrina could see at a glance that her bag wasn’t there. She went into the other room, much smaller, and found a little boy sitting on the side of a truckle bed. He was five or six years old and incredibly thin, with eyes that looked too big for his head. Sabrina’s bag lay behind him on the bed.

  ‘Hi, there,’ Sabrina said, making her voice soft. ‘How you doing?’

  The boy looked wary but he stayed where he was. Sabrina ruffled his hair. She reached past him and picked up the bag. She pulled open the drawstring at the top and checked the wallet first. The cards were there, her WHO ID and papers of accreditation were there, but the money, five hundred dollars, was gone.

  She looked at the thin little kid again and decided she wouldn’t make a noise about the cash. She pulled back the tab on the false bottom and there was the pistol. All in all, she could say she was in luck.

  ‘I hope your mom uses the cash to do you both some good.’

  Sabrina turned away, running her fingers through the stuff in the bag, aware that something else was missing.

  Then a terrible pain hit her. She dropped to her knees and rolled on her side, gasping. The boy was standing, one empty hand outstretched, staring down at her. As he turned and ran, Sabrina reached behind her, clenched her teeth and pulled the Swiss Army knife from the back of her thigh.

  ‘Aah! God! Aaow!’

  She pushed herself up and turned at a commotion in the other room. She saw the feet scamper out the front door, the boy and his mother. They were off like the wind, with enough money to stay away for a while, or to just go and live somewhere else for good.

  Sabrina stood up, grunting, feeling the stiffness in her leg. She got a field dressing and an ampoule of wound wash from the zippered pocket in the bag.

  ‘I used to call it my lucky Swiss Army knife,’ she grunted.

  The kid had used the longest, sharpest blade. Judging by the margin of blood on the polished steel, it had gone in three full centimetres. It felt like he had used a bayonet, but on the plus side there wasn’t much bleeding. Sabrina pulled up her skirt and squirted the antibacterial on to the wound.

  ‘Oh hell, hell, hell!’ A fresh agony hit her. ‘Son of a bitch!’

  It burned like a blowtorch. She distracted herself by tearing open the dressing wrapper with her teeth, and as the pain diffused away and left behind only the nagging throb of punctured muscle, she tried once again to tell herself that, on balance, she had been pretty lucky.

  * * *

  Philpott picked up the red phone on the second ring and waited for the scrambler noise to subside.

  ‘Sabrina? Where in God’s name have you been?’

  ‘There was a hitch, sir. I’m truly sorry, I would have been in touch sooner if it had been possible.’

  ‘Something wrong with the phone, is there? We can always get a replacement to you if you think you need one.’

  ‘The phone’s fine, sir. I just encountered a little setback, and what with one thing and another, my call-in got delayed. I’ve already smacked my wr
ist on your behalf.’

  ‘Quite right. Are your problems sorted out now? Can I rely on you sticking to our agreed schedule from here on?’

  ‘Yes, sir, you can.’

  ‘Fine. Be careful.’

  He put down the phone and immediately the black one beside it warbled. He picked it up, glancing at the clock. He had planned to leave half an hour ago.

  ‘Philpott.’

  ‘Thomas Lubbock.’

  Philpott’s eyes narrowed. A call direct from the Director of Policy Control could only mean the pressure was being turned up.

  ‘What can I do for you?’

  ‘Pencil a date in your diary.’ Lubbock’s voice was cold and offhand, a model of rehearsed detachment. ‘Wednesday, March twelfth. Techniques-and-procedures review.’

  ‘I don’t think I can manage that date,’ Philpott said.

  ‘I wasn’t offering you an option.’

  ‘Of course you weren’t,’ Philpott said smoothly. ‘You haven’t the authority to do anything like that.’

  ‘I …’ Philpott listened, relishing the break in Lubbock’s flow, the crack in his composure. ‘I would point out that the Secretary General has agreed the date —’

  ‘You’ve spoken to him?’ Philpott injected a note of surprise.

  ‘I have spoken with one of his staff …’

  ‘Ah.’ Philpott let that hang in the air. ‘Look here, this is what we’ll do. I’ll speak to the SG in person and let him know that I’d favour another date. He can then convey the message to his staff, one of whom will no doubt get back to you. If your revised date doesn’t suit me either, maybe I should suggest to the SG that I decide on a date and time myself.’

  Lubbock was silent for five seconds. When he finally spoke it was clear he had trouble controlling his voice. ‘I’m sure you enjoy this, Philpott,’ he said. ‘I can tell you’re the type that likes games. But I would suggest — and you’d do well to note — that you’re about to discover that a frivolous administration cannot survive in this organization.’