by James Meek
‘It’s no big deal,’ said Kellas. ‘People do it all the time. Books. Movies. Politicians.’
‘What I’m saying, you can imagine your future, go ahead, but you ain’t got no business imagining ours.’
‘Here,’ said Kellas, reaching into the envelope and taking out the manuscript. ‘Take it. It’s not going to be published anyway. You might as well have it. Read it, see what you think.’
‘No,’ said Lloyd. The gesture appeased him and he smiled. ‘You’re OK.’ He leaned back and closed his eyes.
Kellas switched on the light above his seat and began to read his book. The bus stopped at Salisbury. The snow had been replaced by heavy rain, driven by a strong, gusting wind. Waves of air and water wriggled across the empty white rectangles marked on the tarmac of the parking lot. The boarding passengers smelled of wet wool as they processed up the aisle. They had the expression of survivors just winched off the roofs of a flooded village. Lloyd opened his eyes. Once the bus was back on the highway, he asked Kellas if he was reading his own book; then, if he ever read his books out loud.
‘I’ll read you some now, if you like,’ said Kellas.
‘Yeah, go ahead.’
‘From the beginning?’
‘Read me what you got right there,’ said Lloyd. Kellas began to read aloud. He’d reached the part where Tom de Peyer of Special Branch was about to set out for a decisive secret meeting with his European counterparts, concealing his trip from American intelligence by travelling in the middle of the night, inside a shipping container, aboard a cross-Channel freight train. His mysterious boarding of the train was observed by two young Londoners, Waz and Franky, spraying tags on a bridge.
‘You nearly done?’ said Waz.
‘Done the white, got to put the red in.’
‘Get a fuckin’ move on, man. Those geezers look well dodgy.’
‘You’re paranoid, bruv. It’s the mersh. That was bad shit, bruv.’
‘What’s ‘mersh’?’ said Lloyd.
‘London slang for cannabis.’
‘And what’s with the accent?’
‘It’s a London accent.’
Lloyd smiled with half his mouth. ‘I mean how come you do the accent for one of them, and not the other?’
‘They’re different.’
Lloyd laughed. ‘Is Franky by any chance a young man of colour?’
‘Is it a problem?’
Lloyd laughed. ‘Doing the accents.’
‘Shall I go on?’
‘Sure. Hope you’re going to give me some action soon.’
Kellas read on through the part where he described, in great detail, the route the train took through Europe on its way to a secret cavern hidden off the Sophiaspoor Tunnel in the Netherlands. The passage took several minutes to read and he was aware of a restlessness in the seat next to him.
‘You said it was a thriller,’ said Lloyd. ‘I hate to say it, but all this shit about trains, it’s boring.’
‘It’s the slow build-up.’
‘You got the slow part.’
‘It’s a trick. You think one thing is the main thing and the other is the background, but it’s actually the other way round.’
‘OK, professor, read on.’
Tom de Peyer, deputy head of Special Branch’s Manchester section,
‘That your hero?’
‘Yeah. This a new section starting now. There’s a space.’
‘OK.’
Tom de Peyer, deputy head of Special Branch’s Manchester section, felt the shipping container sway as the crane lifted it off its bogey. After a few moments, there was a gentle thud as the steel box was deposited on the ground. He released the safety harness holding him into the aircraft seat that had been quickly and crudely welded to the floor of the container, went to the door, opened it and stepped out. His feet crunched on stone chips and he held up his hand to shield his eyes from a harsh white light.
‘No baggage, as ever,’ said a familiar voice. ‘Sorry it wasn’t exactly club class.’
‘Casp!’ said de Peyer, stepping forward to shake the hand of Casp Haverkort, the lean, tanned, Dutch intelligence officer he’d worked with a decade earlier to smash a Croatian armssmuggling ring.
‘What is this place?’ asked de Peyer, looking round at the cavernous space off the tunnel’s main railway tracks, lit by arc lights mounted on masts. Shipping containers with open doors lay scattered around the chamber like discarded cardboard boxes outside a grocer’s. Small huddles of men and women, some in uniform, stood talking and smoking.
Haverkort grinned and his piercing blue eyes twinkled.
Kellas glanced at Lloyd, but there was no reaction.
‘We underspent our budget one year,’ he said. ‘Somebody thought it might be useful to have a piece of underground real estate nobody else knew about. Not even our friends across the Atlantic. It’s pretty much snoop-proof. You heard the Pentagon moved another satellite to watch western Europe.’
‘Just a minute,’ said Lloyd. ‘Who are the good guys here?’
‘You have to read on to find out.’
‘But the Pentagon is the bad guys.’
‘In this book, definitely.’
‘Everybody in the Pentagon?’
‘The whole institution.’
‘What, like America got taken over by some kind of evil dictator?’
‘No, they just had a normal election.’
Lloyd exhaled. ‘This is such bullshit. OK, go on.’
De Peyer nodded. ‘I take it this meeting isn’t happening.’
‘We’re absolutely not here, my friend. No records, no minutes. You must rely on your excellent memory.’
‘Who turned up?’
‘Everybody. Except the Canadians. They sent the most encrypted good luck message in history. The French are trying to take charge, of course. The Germans were terrified that one of the Americans at Ramstein might be Jewish. But they have a convicted hacker working out of his prison cell who managed to get into the Pentagon’s personnel files. No Jews in that unit. The Spanish are surprisingly gung-ho.’
‘Wait, the Germans are Nazis again?’
‘No, they don’t want to be Nazis, that’s why the thing about the Jews.’
‘This is very confusing. Go on.’
‘What about your people?’
‘Us? We’re ready to draw a line. I was at Srebrenica.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Srebrenica. A town in Bosnia where a bunch of Muslims got massacred after a Dutch UN battalion let the Serbs in.’
‘OK. That actually happened? OK.’
‘I know. You also picked up that American accent when you studied in California.’
‘The thing is, Tom—’ Haverkort leaned forward and lowered his voice ‘—nobody trusts anybody. Most of all, they don’t trust you.’
‘Do you trust me, Casp?’
Haverkort hesitated. ‘We’re all in unknown territory here. We’re defying habits we learned in the cradle. It’s huge. But we know that however big it is for us, it’s bigger for your country, Tom. Britain and America, you’re family.’
‘I don’t know that the Americans think so.’
‘They sent us a cop. Downing Street doesn’t trust the military on this.’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘Give it to me straight, Tom. What did he tell you, the prime minister?’
‘He said that the law is the law, and America is not above it. We are not attacking America, but we cannot allow these soldiers to avoid international justice.’
‘And if America attacks us? Will you fight?’
De Peyer grinned. ‘If standing in the way is fighting,’ he said, ‘I’ll stand in the way.’
‘You’ve got some nerve, peddling that stuff over here,’ said Lloyd.
‘You peddle your stuff over there.’
‘I ain’t peddling no stuff.’
‘Not you personally.’
‘Your book stinks.’
&nb
sp; ‘That’s what they told me in New York.’
The bus driver announced that they were arriving at T’s Corner grocery store, Oak Hall.
‘My stop,’ said Kellas.
‘Listen, I got something to say to you,’ said Lloyd. ‘America is the greatest country in the world, that’s ever been, and we don’t need some British guy coming here with his bullshit novels, trying to teach us about justice. I mean, sweet Jesus, it’s like the whole world is on our case right now, attacking us, and dissing us, and making us out like we’re baby-killers. Well, I’ve got a message for the world: butt out, and watch out, ’cause we’re coming back. We done Afghanistan, and now we’re going to do Iraq, and we’ll do whatever else it takes to stop all the terrorists and the motherfucking outlaws, alone if necessary. We’re coming back.’
A cheer, a whoop and an ‘Amen’ came from other seats in the bus.
‘It’s only a novel,’ said Kellas. ‘A made-up story.’
‘Why would you make up a story like that unless you thought it was true?’
The bus stopped and the doors opened. Kellas stood and Lloyd got up to let him out. ‘To make money,’ said Kellas.
‘That’s weak, brother. You got no right. You don’t know us. You don’t know this country and you ought to leave what you don’t know and you don’t understand well alone.’
‘Isn’t it the American way?’
‘Bullshit! You can’t be anti-American in the American way.’
Kellas nodded slowly and said goodbye.
‘Yeah, take care, man. Take it easy. Someone picking you up?’
Kellas walked down the aisle of the bus, thanked the driver and walked down the steps into the storm. He reached the partial shelter of the roof over a set of petrol pumps when he heard a shout behind him. He looked round. Lloyd was standing in the doorway of the bus, waving the envelope containing his manuscript. He lifted it at Kellas and shook it, then threw it towards him. It fell short and landed on the wet asphalt. A sheaf of pages slipped out. Wind and water fought for control. After a few flips airward, the rain brought the paper down and the envelope and pages lay there, soaking. The bus doors closed and the bus drove off. Kellas picked up the envelope and the stray pages and pushed them into the slot of a trash can by the pumps. For a moment, anger hammered against the bounds of his body, and he struck the lid of the trash can with both fists. Then he walked into the grocery store, bright and deserted, apart from a single server on duty. It was five-thirty a.m. His wrist ached. He went up to the counter.
‘Hi,’ said the server. ‘How are you today?’ She was a young girl, small and slight, with large eyes and her hair in widely spaced cornrows. She looked barely sixteen.
‘Regular coffee,’ said Kellas.
‘Small, medium or—’
‘Small.’
The girl fetched him a paper cup and a lid. Her movements were precise and slow. ‘You just come in on the bus from Salisbury? Was it snowing up there?’
‘Further north it was.’ Kellas’s hand closed over the top of the cup.
‘You must’ve outrun the cold front, then, ’cause they say it’s heading on down our way, going to be here any time. They said on Weather Channel first the wind’d get up, then the rain’d come in, and once the storm was all wild and busy, the rain’d turn to snow, and we’d have a good inch by time the sun comes up. Only I’m not so sure, ’cause—’
‘Jesus, can you stop prattling on about the fucking weather?’ said Kellas. He opened his mouth to continue, then stopped. The girl’s eyes had widened. Kellas looked down. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
‘You don’t have no cause to be shouting at me like that.’
‘You’re right, I’m sorry. Really.’
‘I was only making conversation.’
‘I know. I don’t know what came over me. That is, I do know what came over me, but anyway, I apologise.’
‘I’ve got a panic button right under the counter, and I can have the cops on your ass in sixty seconds. You want me to do that?’
‘No. I’m – how much for the coffee?’
‘Dollar ten.’
Kellas found two dollars in his pocket and gave it to her and told her to keep the change. She thanked him.
‘What’s your name?’ said Kellas.
‘Renee.’
‘My name’s Adam. I want you to believe that when I say I’m sorry, I mean it, it’s not just…’
‘It’s OK.’
‘How old are you, if you don’t mind me asking?’
‘Eighteen.’ She was wary now.
‘Am I keeping you from your work?’
‘You’re the only customer.’
‘I should be getting on,’ said Kellas, half-turning round. Instead he moved closer to Renee. ‘Last time I lost my temper with someone your age was about a year ago. I yelled at him and I shoved him, with my hand, like that, pretty hard.’
‘Maybe you should think about getting some of that anger management therapy.’
‘Maybe. He did something that pissed me off but we didn’t speak each other’s language, not a single word.’
Renee had stretched her arms out on the counter in front of her and was leaning on them, arching her back. ‘How come he didn’t speak English?’ she said.
‘He spoke another language, probably two.’
Renee yawned and kicked one of her heels back. Kellas knew he should stop. ‘I would never have shoved him if he hadn’t had a gun. That made it OK. I could tell myself I was doing something dangerous.’
‘What kind of a gun did he have?’
‘An AK.’
‘Pretty heavy.’
‘You know what that is?’
‘Oh, sure I know.’
Kellas went to fill the cup with coffee from the filter jug, emptied four sachets of sugar into it and went back to the counter. He stood with his back to it, leaning against it, drinking the coffee and watching the windows, which trembled in the wind. Every few moments a sound came from the glass as if someone had thrown a handful of gravel on it. Renee was working over some surfaces with a cloth.
‘Where was that place you were at?’ said Renee.
‘Afghanistan.’
Renee stuck out her lower lip and nodded, moving her cloth from side to side over a clean shelf. ‘That’s a long way from here.’
‘You could get there in a day.’
‘D’you see any of those Taliban?’
‘Only dead ones.’
‘You a soldier?’
‘No.’
‘Some kind of bounty hunter?’
‘No!’ Kellas laughed.
Renee smiled. ‘Why not? There’s guys over there worth millions just for their heads. Dead or alive, it says on the poster. My boyfriend was like “I ain’t joining the army” but somebody was to pay his fare out there and give him an Uzi and a pick-up, he’d go after them by himself.’
‘I was a reporter.’
‘OK. So no killing for you. You’re a peaceful individual. A noncombatant.’
Kellas frowned. The counter was crowded with motoring atlases, cigarette lighters, drums labelled Sea Salt Peanuts, five-cent candies and stickers reading ‘Virginia is for lovers’. The strong light in the store was taken up by thousands of yellow and red labels printed on plastic packaging.
‘I used to think that. Now I’m not sure,’ he said. ‘If you stand by while somebody else kills some strangers in the distance, are you in on the killing yourself? What’s the charge, aiding and abetting? I don’t know where the law of Virginia or Afghanistan stands on that. I thought we were only talking about killing, and then one of us went and did it.’ Kellas paused and looked at Renee. She was standing with her hands behind her back, leaning against a wall behind the counter, staring at nothing with her head slightly bowed.
‘So maybe I helped out,’ he said. ‘Killing a couple of Taliban.’
‘You should get in touch with the FBI,’ said Renee. ‘You might be in for a bounty for that.’
‘Do you think?’
‘I guess they’d need to see some sort of proof. Like an ear, maybe, or one each of their fingers.’
They stopped talking. Kellas became aware that if it wasn’t for the faint sound of Bing Crosby singing Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer on the PA, the store would be in complete silence.
He put the half-finished cup of coffee down and asked the way to Chincoteague. ‘That’s Chincoteague Road right there outside, between us and Pizza Hut,’ said Renee. She nodded. ‘Just follow it all the way, across the causeway, and that’s Main Street, Chincoteague.’
Kellas thanked her and walked out of the store into the storm. After a few paces he stopped and considered going back to tell Renee that it had started to snow, but even the short distance he had travelled was hard-won ground, and he went on.
10
The wind was as strong as before, but the temperature had gone down steeply, and lush, sticky flakes of snow were hurtling darkly across the lamplight. Pale half-moons of a feathery texture at the edge of the road suggested it would settle. Looking further ahead, Kellas could see a strip of snow consolidating down the centre of the highway.
His left hand gripped the two halves of his jacket together at his throat. The bandage provided a little extra warmth but this was cancelled out by the chilling effect of snow melting on the skin of the hand and his face. The pain in his wrist was fading, numbed by the cold, perhaps. That was a good thing. Of most concern was the speed with which his jacket and trousers were absorbing moisture. Once all his clothes were saturated, which would be soon, he would begin to lose body heat rapidly. It could not be a good sign that the snow was falling thickly enough for the lower layer to melt and continue soaking his jacket, while a middle layer formed a transition, and an outer layer began to stick and accumulate on the jacket breast.
Ahead the snow was unbalding the asphalt swiftly. There were houses. Shelter to seek if it got rough, which, most likely now, it would. A phrase appeared in his head: once you experience unambiguous symptoms of hypothermia, it is already too late. Yet had he heard it, or read it, or made it up in that moment? It wouldn’t do to ramble. No meandering, mental or pedestrian. Concentrate.
