Heat

by Campbell Armstrong

  Seated in front of this very mirror, Pagan thought, she must have studied her own reflection hundreds of times from hundreds of angles, applying a touch of make-up here, there, experimenting with lipsticks, changing the colour of her eyes, brushing her hair in different styles, trying on wigs. Her life was a kind of spillage in which identities ran one into another.

  Inside the wardrobe was an array of clothing, most of it unappealing, mass-produced beige slacks, pleated skirts in autumnal colours with chain-store labels, matching blouses, cardigans, sandals, unfashionable shoes. Kristen Hawkins had been carefully thought out, an innocuous woman you wouldn’t look at twice. A little shy, lacking self-confidence, tiptoeing through life as if she expected at any moment to be startled by a sudden movement: he could imagine Kristen Hawkins.

  At the back of the wardrobe, half-hidden, hung the sharply-tailored black business suit she’d worn when she’d killed Martin Burr; Pagan reached in, touching the material of the garment as if he were somehow compelled to do so. Alongside the black suit were several cocktail dresses with designer labels. One was bright and spangled and glistened faintly; another was red and bold with a low-cut neckline. Underwear was scattered on the floor of the wardrobe – flimsy silken things crumpled together, some transparent, some exotic. An entanglement of erotic garments. Pagan looked, felt the rush of an intimacy he didn’t want, then closed the door.

  Foxie said, ‘The lady in the magician’s cabinet. Now you see her, now you don’t.’

  Pagan wandered out of the bedroom and along the landing, and Foxie followed. A flight of steps led up to an attic room. He climbed, thinking how the atmosphere of this house settled on him like a weight. He paused outside a door, pushed it open, entered a bedroom with a skylight. Foxie came just behind him.

  ‘Christ,’ Foxie said.

  The man who lay on the bed had been shot directly through the mouth. His face was gone. Pagan noticed the bloodstains on the pillows and the wall. He stared at the dead man’s hands, which were covered with ugly scar tissue. Several fingernails were missing. Death, of which he’d seen so much, still sickened Pagan. He’d never developed an immunity toward it. He forced himself to look at the bloodstains. They hadn’t had time to darken.

  ‘He hasn’t been dead long,’ he said. ‘An hour, maybe two.’ He turned and walked away from the bed and stood at the other side of the small room, where there was a fireplace in which something had recently been burned. He poked among the ashes, retrieving a couple of scorched documents, both of which he held rather delicately between thumb and forefinger, as if they might disintegrate under his touch. He gazed at a smoke-stained photograph stuck to a page whose edges had been blackened by flame.

  ‘What is it?’ Foxie asked.

  ‘An American passport made out in the name of Richard Pasco.’ Pagan studied the photograph a moment, trying to make connections. Then he looked at the remains of the other document; a bank-book, issued by Barclays, Pasco’s name on the first page. The other pages, which recorded deposits and withdrawals, were illegible. ‘Pasco comes here – why? Does he need Carlotta?’

  ‘She only provides one kind of service, Frank,’ Foxworth said. ‘Destruction.’

  ‘And Pasco needed her for that – why? what kind of destruction? Just to kill Burr? What for? Where does Martin come into the picture?’

  Foxie shrugged. He glanced at the dead man, then looked back at Pagan. ‘Until we know a little more about Pasco, all we can do is make wild surmises.’

  Pagan was still examining the passport as if it might contain further information. It had been issued in Washington DC, but the date of issue was scorched. He moved back toward the bed and looked down at Pasco and drew a sheet across the man’s shattered face.

  Foxie said, ‘She didn’t do a very thorough job of burning the passport, did she?’

  ‘No, she didn’t.’ Deliberately so, Pagan thought. A sign. Something she’d left behind for him. An arrow he was intended to follow. ‘Let’s get out of this room.’

  They went out together to the landing. Foxie shut the door behind him. They descended, entered the sitting-room.

  Pagan stood at the table where the brush and paintbox lay. Suddenly it seemed to him that the house was filled with echoes of her movements, her hands working the brush in whispered strokes, the slither of clothing sliding from her flesh as she undressed, the creak of the mattress as she climbed into bed: she was everywhere and nowhere, indistinct, lingering in impenetrable shadows. The house, a place of death, unsettled him.

  Pagan sat down at the table and idly picked up the paintbrush and was overcome by an unnerving feeling. He didn’t believe in psychic vibrations, but he experienced something inexplicable for a fraction of time – the sense that Carlotta’s hand was covering his own as he held the brush, a ghostly touch. Puzzled, troubled, he dropped the brush on the table and the feeling dissolved as quickly as it had arrived. A little shaken, he stood up. Call it an off-centre moment, he thought. Call it the imagination working on overload, circuits temporarily rearranged, sleight of mind. However you named it, it spooked him.

  He rose, wandered the sitting-room, tried to slow the rhythms of his thoughts. On the far side of the room a curtain had been drawn across a closet, and he drew it aside out of curiosity. A computer and a modem sat on a small desk that occupied the tiny cubicle. It was from here that she’d hacked her way inside the Yard computer system. He imagined her punching keys, plundering data: anything stored in the system would be available to her with a few keystrokes, as long as she had the passwords. How had she discovered the entry codes? he wondered – but the question wasn’t one that occupied him for long. She can do almost anything, he thought. Obstructions were meaningless to her. Obstacles didn’t exist, or if they did she found some way around them.

  His attention was drawn to a slip of paper stuck to the keyboard. He removed it, stared at the message. He handed the paper to Foxie. It read: TURN ON, SEE PAGAN.

  Foxie switched the machine on, typed the letters of Frank’s last name. The screen was immediately filled with a grainy photograph of Pagan’s flat – the bedroom, the unmade bed, the indented pillows; and Carlotta, legs spread apart, sat on the edge of the mattress. Her blouse was undone, her breasts visible. Her hands were cupped just under her breasts, elevating them slightly. On the bottom of the screen was the caption: SELF-PORTRAIT, PAGAN’S BEDROOM. Pagan stared at this a moment, drawn into the provocative pose, which seemed to him to have been staged in a deliberately tacky manner, like a cheap porn-shot in a low-budget skin magazine. Her face was tilted backward so that she looked toward the camera lens at an angle. She was smiling; a glossy-lipped come-on. How many hours had she spent in my flat? he wondered. How many times had she intruded?

  Pagan switched off the machine and said, ‘Let’s get out of here,’ and he put the passport and the bank-book in the pocket of his jacket. He moved into the hallway and Foxie, pondering the personal significance of the computer image he’d just seen, came after him.

  21

  VIRGINIA

  James Mallory hated guns, the feel of them, the noises they made, the savage uses to which they were put throughout the nation. Skidelsky, on the other hand, was something of a gun-freak and liked target-shooting. Presently, on a hot floodlit field some miles from Fairfax, Max was testing a modified Ram-Line Ram-Tech Auto Pistol, holding it in the standard two-handed manner and blasting away at pumpkins that had been arranged on a fence. He missed a couple of times, exchanged the Ram-Tech for a Sig P-225DA, and fired off a couple of shots. Mallory, who wore soundproof ear-muffs, observed one of the pumpkins explode under the bright arc-lights, and inevitably thought of a human head blitzed. Skidelsky fired again, struck another of the gourds, and it blew apart.

  ‘Like it,’ Max said. ‘I prefer the walnut stock to the rubber, I have to say.’ He turned to Larry Quinn, who was standing alongside a Cherokee, the interior of which contained a variety of handguns. ‘What else have we got there, Larry?’


  Quinn ran off a bunch of names. ‘A Hammerli 212. A Glock 21. An H & K P7M8.’

  ‘That the one with the squeeze-cocker?’ Max asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Quinn.

  ‘What else is there?’

  ‘Let’s see, let’s see.’ Quinn rummaged inside the Cherokee. ‘A Desert Eagle Magnum. A Colt Combat. There’s a Bryco 59 auto. Also a Calico M-950 with the retarded blowback action.’

  ‘Toss me that one,’ Max said.

  ‘You got it.’

  Skidelsky took the Calico – which Mallory thought an odd shape, like something out of an old sci-fi movie – and took aim. More pumpkins were blown up under the glare of the lights. The air was splattered with flesh-coloured pulp and broken fibre. Mallory noticed how fond Max Skidelsky was of this destruction, the concentration in his face, the mouth tensed. Quinn, hovering in the background, looked on approvingly. Larry was another gun-buff. Max and Larry spoke with great enthusiasm about things Mallory didn’t even try to understand – flash suppressors, combat-type trigger guards, ambidextrous cocking knobs. There was a whole weird terminology about weapons, a terse technical language constructed around guns, as if it were designed by PR agents to disguise the fact that basically guns were for one thing only: killing people.

  Killing people. Mallory edged some yards away from Skidelsky, who’d traded the Calico for an AMT Hardballer Long Slide, which had to be about nine inches in length. Max said something unintelligible about the bevelled magazine well – whatever that was – and then fired the gun at the collection of gourds, missing with two of his four efforts. Gunshots echoed all around the big field, like nearby thunder.

  All the barren heat of the day was trapped in darkness; nightfall hadn’t alleviated it. Mallory’s cotton shirt stuck to his flesh. His armpits were soaked. The lights hurt his eyes, so he turned away and looked in the other direction, back across the field where the electricity didn’t penetrate. These Wednesday night gun-shows were a regular fixture in the calendar of the Club. The usual attendance was six or seven, and sometimes as many as a dozen, but sometimes other members were overseas, or doing business, like Ralph Donovan, in other cities, and so tonight there was only himself and Larry and Max. It occurred to Mallory that he didn’t know the exact membership. Max never talked numbers. There might have been twelve. There might have been fifty. Mallory had never asked.

  Skidelsky said, ‘Your turn, Jimmy.’

  Mallory always dreaded this bit.

  ‘What takes your fancy?’ Max asked.

  ‘Any old thing, doesn’t matter.’

  Skidelsky slung an arm around Mallory’s shoulder and squeezed tightly. ‘Give us more enthusiasm, Jimmy. Let me hear desire.’

  Mallory laughed uneasily. ‘I’ll try the Glock.’

  ‘Give the man the Glock, Larry.’

  A gun was pressed into Mallory’s hand. Its weight was oppressive. How could twenty-five ounces of steel feel so heavy?

  ‘Concentrate, Jimmy. Believe in yourself. Believe you can’t miss,’ Max was saying.

  James Mallory raised the Glock, took aim, fired. His shot went winging off harmlessly into the night.

  ‘Again,’ Skidelsky said. ‘Make believe the pumpkin is the head of somebody you don’t like or somebody who’s a threat to you. Barclay Reeves, for instance. Or old Christopher Poole.’

  Barclay Reeves, former Director of the FBI. Mallory tried to imagine the pallid, pinchpenny face of the man who was rumoured to be in the running for The Big Job, if such a thing ever came to pass. Mallory, who always thought Barclay Reeves resembled an ascetic monseigneur, narrowed his eyes, fired, missed.

  ‘Again,’ said Max.

  Again. This time Mallory’s shot grazed the edge of a pumpkin, shifting the gourd just a little.

  ‘Mmm, not bad, Jimmy.’ Skidelsky took the Glock out of Mallory’s hand. ‘You just need more practice. More faith.’ He gripped Mallory’s arm and grinned. ‘What the hell. You’ve got talents more important to us than hitting pumpkins.’

  Mallory wondered about his talents. He was good when it came to arranging matters, overseeing details that might have escaped others, such as Skidelsky, whose vision was generally directed at the totality of things. Mallory was wonderful with the cogs and tiny wheels and making them fit so that the machinery ran smoothly. He supposed it was for this reason that Skidelsky – who held, at a relatively early age, the important position of Assistant to the Executive Director, Christopher Poole, who in turn was just below the Deputy Director – had first approached him some six months ago and befriended him. Max had that way of making you feel special, you weren’t just some nobody in Research at Langley, just some guy whose function it was to evaluate the voluminous material that came out of the espionage archives of the former Soviet Union, usually offered for sale by pale Slavic men in ill-fitting suits, men you met in cheap hotels in shabby Balkan countries, men you interviewed in isolated pavement cafes and small bars in sidestreets in Rome or Athens or Marseilles. Max drew him out of this drudgery with flattery, generosity, the bright smile of friendship – and before he’d realized it he was sucked in, brought under Skidelsky’s starry wing, he was part of the clique, the group, he belonged, and by Christ, didn’t that make him feel privileged? Hanging out with the smart kids on the block, the movers and shakers in their fancy suits and expensive restaurants and the good-looking bimbos that drifted in and out of their orbit.

  The point was: you belonged. You were a member of a new élite. And this élite sometimes drank late into the night and talked about the state of the nation and what was wrong and how it could be put right – and even if Mallory felt uneasy at times, a conspirator against the organization that employed him, he realized he sympathized with much that Skidelsky and his friends had to say. The cops were thugs with holstered guns, the Feds were top-heavy and incompetent, the politicians were bullshit artists looking after numero uno, the Agency was menaced by a skinflint Administration, the system was going to hell in a handbasket – we’re on a sleigh-ride down the glacier of mediocrity and the huskies are gathering speed and we don’t have any fucking seat-belts, as Max had phrased it – and it was high time to change things before the bell of doomsday was the only sound you could hear.

  Heady stuff. Exciting. Mallory liked the buzz of being around Max. He liked doing things for him. He liked being entrusted with tasks, some of them no more than tiny chores – copying certain documents that crossed Mallory’s desk, sometimes providing him with data from files. And the recent task, the trip to London, the meeting with Pasco, the arrangement with Galkin, all that – well, that had been the single most important function he’d had to perform. And Max had persuaded him he could do it. You have a certain gravitas, Jimmy. You’ll have Pasco eating out of the palm of your hand. You wear the right clothes, you got that slightly Ivy League look about you, you’re the right age. You think Pasco’s going to listen to some kid?

  And Mallory had pulled it off. So why didn’t he truly feel a great sense of achievement? Why did something niggle and wriggle on a hook at the back of his head all the time? He remembered the conversation he’d had with Max about ethics: that was where the problem lay. If he was entirely honest with himself, he liked the entirety of the scheme more than he liked the parts. There was no point in saying so to Max, because he had that way of convincing you your thinking was wrong; you were still a prisoner of old loyalties that had disintegrated long ago; all the past bargains were off; fresh approaches were needed to the Problem of America. And then there would be a bout of hand-bonding. Trust me, Jimmy. Trust me. Trust is the basic article of The Artichoke Club. What we’re doing, we’re doing for the common good.

  But people will die, Max.

  Yes, and that’s unfortunate, and I feel for them, but you can’t build up the new unless you do away with the old. Law of nature, Jimmy. Like gravity.

  Larry Quinn was opening a styrofoam cooler packed with bottles of Czech beer. He passed one to Skidelsky, another to Mallory, who wanted to
think of this gathering in the field as something innocent, a boy’s night out, shoot off a few rounds, slug a few brewskies.

  ‘Cheers,’ said Quinn.

  The three men stood at the back of the Cherokee and drank for a time in silence.

  Max Skidelsky said, ‘Something I want you to hear,’ and he fished around inside the vehicle until he found what he was looking for. A small cassette-player. He stuck a tape inside it, pressed the play button. There was a second of hissing before the recorded voice of Christopher Poole could be heard saying, One, the woman is unlikely to return to this country. Two, I can’t imagine her singling out Agency personnel as targets. If she has destructive grudges, they’re directed at the Bureau.’

  Max clicked the recorder off. ‘From the horse’s mouth,’ he said, and laughed, shaking his head as he did so.

  Quinn laughed too. Mallory managed a small smile. The heat in the field was devouring him. Mosquitoes and assorted night pests fluttered around his face and he flapped them aside. Max, who did a devastating impersonation of old Poole, stiffened his lips and said, ‘One, the woman is unlikely to return to this country … What planet does Poole live on? Is he actually alive at all? I hear him breath, and words come out of his mouth, but I can’t find the point where anything about him interfaces with reality as we know it.’

  Quinn slugged his beer and laughed again. ‘You think Poole’s the only one that’s funny, Max? Yesterday I’m talking with Naderson and he suddenly segues into some tired adventure yarn about what the Agency did down in South America in the Fifties, when America really stood for something, and the peasants were glad to see people in their jungle fatigues bring democracy all de way down to Bananapulca, or wherever. It isn’t only Poole that’s out of it.’