Heat

by Campbell Armstrong

  Stratton was twelve miles from the hotel and the road was narrow, curved. Pagan drove quickly, without care. He swung into the bends, meadows passed in a green visual haze.

  She calls unexpectedly. She calls out of nowhere. What was he supposed to do? Ignore her? He’d lived so many months with her in his mind she had the status of a constant imaginary companion – except she wasn’t a figment, she was real, cruelly so; and, yes, beautifully so.

  He reached Stratton, which resembled a postcard of the kind tourists buy as souvenirs of Merry Olde England. A few thatched cottages, a small central square, a modest pencil of a monument to the men who’d fallen in two world wars.

  The Swan was located on one side of the square. Pagan parked, went inside the pub. There was no sign of her – but he hadn’t expected any. She wasn’t going to be sitting on a stool at the bar with a gin and tonic in her hand, just waiting for his arrival. She’d be in the vicinity, of course, making sure he’d come on his own. She wouldn’t take chances. When she was certain he was unaccompanied, she’d telephone the bar and arrange another meeting place. She was happy with labyrinths. She lived her life inside them. Intricacies appealed to her, elaborations were amusing.

  I want to see you, she’d said. And he’d jumped, as she’d known he would. He’d lunged, as he always did when it came to her.

  He walked to the bar, ordered a Scotch, waited.

  I want to see you. Why? he wondered.

  For the first time since she’d phoned he had the uneasy sensation that perhaps this was a ruse, a ploy of sorts. She wanted him to come to The Swan in Stratton because – because she didn’t want him to stay at the hotel. Why?

  Sixty-three counter-terrorist specialists. That was quite a number assembled under one roof. And each one of them was her enemy, or at least a potential enemy. He ran his fingertips round the rim of his drink, listened to the whisper of flesh on glass. He didn’t like the drift of his thoughts, but then he brought to mind the presence and experience of the security force and it eased his concerns a moment.

  I want to see you.

  Seven months on from their last encounter, she turns up out of some mystifying heaven with a command. He sipped his drink, but he wasn’t in the mood for alcohol. He watched the door, glanced at the other few occupants of the room – a couple of German tourists, two Americans in tartan caps they must have purchased during the ten-minute Scottish leg of their thirty-six hour whirlwind experience of that quaint museum known as the UK. Nobody else.

  He set down his glass. Waited. He wasn’t good at waiting. He found himself staring at the telephone at the end of the bar. He imagined her somewhere nearby, watching him. He’d come to imbue her with extraordinary powers – the ability to be present without being detectable, the capacity for disappearances that amounted to sorcery. He thought of the London underground train, the bomb she’d placed in a carriage last February, and for a second he was haunted by the post-explosion smells of the dark tunnel – charred plastic, cindered clothing, human flesh. These came to him even now in bad dreams from which he woke sweating.

  The telephone rang. Pagan didn’t even wait for the barman to pick up. He did it himself, hastily grabbing the receiver.

  She said, ‘I’ve changed my mind.’

  ‘What do you mean you’ve changed your mind?’

  ‘I don’t need to see you.’

  ‘I’ve been waiting here—’

  ‘Alone with your thoughts,’ she said.

  ‘You said you wanted to see me.’

  ‘You’re so very obedient, Frank. I like that.’

  Obedient. He wondered about the ramifications of that word and decided he didn’t like them.

  She said, ‘You’d jump through hoops of fire for me, wouldn’t you?’

  He made no reply.

  ‘Go back to the hotel, where you’re really needed. I’ll be in touch.’ She hung up.

  Pagan replaced the receiver and went outside quickly. Where you’re really needed. What was that supposed to mean? He didn’t want to think, didn’t want to analyse the statement. He drove numbly and at speed. When he reached the resort he skidded past the gatehouse and headed up the gravel driveway toward the hotel. The building, a neo-Gothic stately home converted to a luxury resort a few years ago by a Japanese consortium, came in view. He parked his car and hurried up the steps and moved in the direction of the dining-room.

  He shoved the doors open. He wasn’t prepared for what confronted him.

  2

  LONDON

  The first day of September was hot. Richard Pasco arrived at Heathrow airport where he was met by a young man called Ralph Donovan. He judged Donovan, blond and blue-eyed and glossy with good health, to be a junior spook, a messenger boy from Langley.

  Donovan was cheerful and attentive, helping him through immigration. Pasco had trouble with the leg; he’d never become accustomed to the crude steel prosthetic that had been fashioned for him in Russia. It rubbed against the stump of flesh above the knee where surgery had been performed. The loss of the lower leg to gangrene was only a minor entry in his ledger of grudges and resentments. Greater damages had been inflicted in places nobody could ever see.

  Donovan assisted him into a black BMW outside the terminal.

  ‘Good to be out, I guess,’ said Donovan as he turned the key in the ignition.

  Pasco had resolved to play along with any charade going. ‘Terrific,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll bet,’ Donovan remarked. He had a razor nick just under his jaw, a pinhead of hardened blood. ‘You think you feel good now. But when we fly you back to the States …’ With a suntanned hand he made an expansive gesture that suggested beaches, easy living.

  Pasco stared from the window of the car. In the glass he observed a reflection of himself, his ruined face, eyes so sunken they might have belonged to a tubercular case. Back to the States, he thought. He was suddenly impatient, a feeling alien to him; the condition of his last ten years had been one of slow stubborn survival. He’d created a million pictures in his mind, of course. He’d imagined redressing the balance of things, sure. He’d fed upon the toxic nutrition of hatred, but even that had been a measured daily dose, like liquid dripped into his system intravenously.

  He turned away from his reflection. The suit of rough blue serge they’d given him in Moscow was uncomfortable. The black shoe on his right foot pinched him.

  ‘This is how it works,’ said Donovan, whose voice was flat like that of a prairie preacher. ‘You’re booked into a downtown hotel for tonight. A five-star affair. You can relax. Watch a little TV. Order up some room service. Champagne, if it takes your fancy. Have a good long bath.’

  ‘Sounds fine,’ said Pasco. A bath, he thought. The simple luxury of a bath.

  ‘Then tomorrow morning I’ll call for you and we’ll fly back to Washington. To the land of the living.’

  Land of the Living, Pasco thought. And the Dead, blue eyes.

  ‘You’ve had it pretty rough, I guess,’ Donovan said.

  Pasco said, ‘I survived.’ Fucking dumb kid. You don’t know shit.

  ‘I doubt I’d have your kind of fortitude,’ Donovan said.

  ‘Yeah, I got lucky,’ Pasco said, and looked from the window again.

  The BMW was heading through Hammersmith toward central London. Pasco thought it strange how freedom, for which he’d hungered so long, distilled itself in commonplace things – a flower vendor on a sunny pavement, a long-legged girl in a mini-skirt no larger than a handkerchief stepping out of a taxicab. Freedom was a series of quick sketches, cameos. But he knew there was a sense in which liberty was a trick of the mind. He shut his eyes, drifted a few seconds into a shallow sleep. When he resurfaced the BMW was parked outside a hotel.

  ‘This is it, Mr Pasco.’

  Donovan came around and opened the passenger door. Pasco had an urge to brush the kid’s hand aside and walk into the hotel unaided, but then he thought: Let him help. Take advantage of all the help you can get. His stum
p ached, and his body felt like a construction of ill-fitted parts that might have been held together by rusted pins and rough-edged bolts.

  Inside the foyer, a ludicrously sumptuous place with an infinity of chandeliers, Donovan said, ‘I’ll take you up to your room. Then I’ll leave you in peace until the morning.’

  Pasco expressed his gratitude. It was important to look pleased and perhaps even a little awed. God bless Freedom. God bless America.

  The room was large and comfortable. A big rectangular tinted window overlooked Hyde Park. The afternoon sky was unbroken blue. Pasco stood at the window for a long time before he sat on the edge of the bed. He used the remote control to switch on the TV, stared at a tennis match, changed channels, changed them again and again, flicking from commercials to news items to a quiz show and back again to tennis, as if he were in a hurry to assimilate the state of the world. Dizzied by the random assault of images, he clicked the off-button. He unlocked the mini-bar and surveyed the rack of miniature bottles. The variety unsettled him: he’d forgotten the simple concept of choice. He resisted the urge to drink. He wanted a clear head.

  Donovan had told him that a complete change of wardrobe could be found inside the closet – a new suit, shoes, shirt, underwear, even a tie that matched the shirt. Pasco opened the closet, took out the jacket, tried it on. Ten years ago it might have fitted him perfectly. Now it hung loose on his body and the cuffs came to his fingertips. Whoever had purchased the wardrobe hadn’t taken into account his years of deprivation. They hadn’t thought about the fact he would have lost weight, they hadn’t considered starvation diets and hard labour. They expected Richard Pasco to look as he had years before: but he’d been gone, and forgotten, and all the clocks of the life he’d lived in America had simply stopped.

  He tossed the jacket aside, then lay down on the bed and shut his eyes.

  Faces came before him. Landscapes flitted across his mind. He saw mountainous snowdrifts, barbed wire, makeshift huts with tar-paper windows behind which, on long black Siberian nights, kerosene lamps flickered. He heard the yapping of hounds, the distant howl of wolves. He saw a figure in a watch-tower. He felt the shaft of a hammer in his calloused hand, the motion of muscles as he raised the hammer above his head and then brought it down, minute after minute, hour after hour, on and on, an eternity of useless movement.

  The world was either rocks to be smashed with hammers, or snow cleared with shovels. The seasons dictated the form of labour, all of it meaningless: futility was the true punishment. Not the grindingly long hours, the thin soup and scraps of floating gristle, but the pointlessness of what you did every day, month in, month out. Without purpose you lost your way, you broke down and floated into the lower depths of yourself, dark abysses, places of hatred and rage so intense they caused you to lose whatever tiny foothold you still maintained on sanity. Hatred and rage, he’d come to realize, weren’t abstract qualities. You could taste them. You could suck on them like cigarettes. They tainted your blood.

  He stared at the ceiling. He raised his hands up. They were rough, hideous, inscribed by old scars that hadn’t properly healed. He lowered them to his sides. Although sun shone through the window, he shivered. The cold had seeped into his bones so thoroughly he doubted he’d ever be warm again.

  He shut his eyes and slept, dreaming of snow and dogs and the clank of chains and the motionless figure in the watch-tower. When he woke the sun had thinned in the room and his throat was dry and he knew that for the rest of his life the watch-tower would play a role in all his dreams.

  Later, when the sky was dark, a visitor came, a tall man in an elegant double-breasted grey suit. His hair was neat and silvery. On the little finger of his left hand he wore a large black ring embossed with a gold eagle; it was the only hint of ostentation about the man. Pasco wondered if it were some kind of fraternity ring.

  The man introduced himself as James. Was that his first name or last? He didn’t say. He shook Pasco’s hand briefly, pretended not to notice the scars. He smiled and flashed some expensive bridgework. He drew the curtains and sat down in an armchair at the window, crossing his legs.

  ‘You’ve had a difficult time,’ he said to Pasco.

  Pasco wondered about the man’s affiliation. Was he Langley? Did he work out of some anonymous branch of the Federal Government? Was he something else altogether? Pasco had been expecting a courtesy visit from somebody in an official capacity, maybe even the offer of a job back in Virginia. Something behind a desk, a few sedentary years paper-shuffling, followed by a pension. And then good night, chump, and thanks a lot. A consolation prize in return for his hardships.

  ‘Injustice is always a hard pill to swallow. You chew on bitterness long enough, it leaves a lot of poison in your system,’ James said.

  Pasco nodded, said nothing. He was curious about this James, this talk of injustice and bitterness and poison. This wasn’t quite what he’d anticipated. He’d fully expected the three-course American speech, you did your patriotic duty, self-sacrifice, we’re all choked up with gratitude, we’re thinking of naming a street in Le Mars, Iowa, in your honour, et cetera et cetera. This character James was heading off on quite another tack altogether and Pasco wasn’t sure where he was going.

  ‘The camp was unpleasant, of course,’ said James, and touched his big pinky-ring.

  ‘It was no Club Med,’ Pasco said.

  James smiled thinly. ‘You have a lot of time to think in places like that. Think and remember.’

  ‘Yeah, there’s plenty time for that all right,’ Pasco said.

  ‘You think of the people that let you down. People that disappointed you. Then, maybe, you go beyond the people and start thinking about the country itself. It wasn’t just so-and-so that left you stranded, it was the system, the company, America, the things you believed in. You think – the whole system is flawed. It’s all a con. You were misled. You were bamboozled and brainwashed. All the colours have been bleached out of Old Glory.’

  Pasco nodded. Where the fuck was this going? James was quiet a moment. Pasco studied him. He had a sudden flash that James wasn’t Langley at all, he was coming from some other place. The question was where.

  James got up, crossed the room, opened the mini-bar and took out a can of ginger ale, which he popped. Froth fizzed and surged across the back of his hand. This small spillage troubled him because he fussed with a paper napkin, dabbing the soda from his skin as though the liquid were caustic. He crumpled the napkin, discarded it carefully in the waste-basket. A fastidious guy, Pasco thought.

  James said, ‘You lost a leg. What for? The greater good of your country? Some patriotic reason you’ve never been able to understand?’

  Pasco said, ‘Tell me one thing. Who are you?’

  James answered the question with several of his own. ‘Do you intend to return to the fold, Richard? Is that how you see your future? They’ll find you a meaningless little notch in a cubicle and you’ll be thankful to them?’

  ‘Maybe,’ Pasco said.

  ‘I don’t think so, Richard,’ James said. ‘I don’t think that’s even remotely on your mind.’

  ‘What are you? Clairvoyant? Suppose you tell me what’s on my mind?’

  ‘I think it’s simple, Richard.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Desperately simple. Revenge.’

  Pasco had a paranoid moment. Had this character been sent to test his loyalty, assess his state of mind? Langley was capable of shit like that, all kinds of underhand schemes. Everything was mirrors and distorted reflections and treachery.

  ‘Revenge?’ Pasco asked. He wasn’t about to admit that. Not yet.

  ‘Correct me if I’m wrong.’

  Pasco coughed. His health was uncertain. The camp had caused severe deterioration in him. Shortness of breath, chronic chest pains, the pinched nerve in his shoulder, the ulcerated mouth. Revenge, he thought. It didn’t give you back your health, and it didn’t restore sanity. But it had other benefits. A great glow of satis
faction, for starters. The kind of jubilation that came from righting wrongs – as destructively as possible.

  ‘Before we take this another step, I need to know who you are,’ he said.

  ‘Is that important?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Why? You imagine I’m here to make out a report for some Langley shrink and have you certified as a basket-case and therefore utterly useless as a candidate for even the most menial janitorial position?’

  ‘Yeah, I’ve considered it,’ Pasco said. Guy was a goddam mindreader.

  ‘You’re wrong, Richard. I’m not here in that capacity. Nothing like that.’

  ‘OK. So spell it out.’

  ‘Some things you just can’t spell out,’ James said.

  ‘Yeah? What are we talking about here? I’m to take you on trust?’

  ‘Trust. Why not?’

  ‘It’s not my favourite word, friend.’

  ‘I sympathize,’ James said. He looked at Pasco in a pensive manner for a time. ‘OK. I’ll meet you halfway along the road, Richard. It’s the best I can do. You have certain grudges. Understandable ones. You want to take action. You haven’t quite thought it through yet. But there’s a germ in your head and it’s been festering there for ten long years. You’ve developed very deep resentments against certain people inside a certain institution. In a sense, you’re still a prisoner. Not in some Russian gulag this time – no, you’re a prisoner of your own hatreds and frustrations. Again, this is understandable …’

  Pasco made as if to interrupt, but James stalled him with a motion of his hand. ‘Please. Let me finish, Richard. I represent certain parties who bear resentments very much like your own. They have different reasons, but I’m not here to split hairs. Their goals are the same as yours.’

  ‘My goals? What would you know about my goals?’ Pasco asked.

  ‘I didn’t come here blind, Richard. I didn’t come here on anything as slender as hope. I don’t rely on fragile things. I have reports about you from the camp. I have records of statements you made to your fellow inmates about what you’d do to the people who betrayed you if you ever got the chance. And some of them make very dramatic reading.’