Heat

by Campbell Armstrong

  As Naderson scanned the group he was struck by the rather bleak fact that the ageing process had touched everyone maliciously – the proliferation of white hair, baldness, paunches and, in the case of Ted Hollander, a walking-stick. It was depressing. He realized he was looking forward to retirement, two months away. He had a general sense of having outlived his usefulness. His world was long gone. He’d retire quietly, and raise his organic vegetables, and every now and then perhaps he’d think of the life he’d left, and maybe he’d remember the price that had been paid for his liberty.

  Marge Habbs emerged from the crowd and linked an arm through his. ‘With all of us down here, what I want to know is – who’s minding the god-damn store?’

  Naderson said, ‘It makes you wonder.’

  Marge Habbs pinched Naderson’s arm. ‘And how are you anyway, Bobby?’

  ‘Struggling along,’ he said.

  Marge Habbs wore very heavy make-up. She drew Bob Naderson toward her and lowered her voice confidentially. ‘Tell me, Bob. You’ve got Chris Poole’s ear. Is this ship being scuttled? Or are we to run on a skeleton crew?’

  ‘It’s too soon to tell,’ Naderson said.

  ‘This man in the White House,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t respect the Agency. Nor the Agency’s traditions.’

  ‘Amen to that,’ Naderson said.

  ‘Fuck democracy, I say. If the people vote that kind of man into office.’

  ‘If you run across a better system, let me know, Marge.’

  ‘You’re far too serious,’ and she poked him in fun with a fingertip.

  He looked at her a moment. ‘What’s the security like here?’

  ‘Security? You worried about something, Bobby?’

  ‘Just curious.’

  ‘This is The Lodge, for God’s sake. If you’re not safe here, you’re not safe anywhere.’

  Naderson reflected on this. There would be guards all around the place. There would be an electronic detection system. He sighed, tried to relax.

  In the background Joan Dunne was making a speech. She was standing up on a chair but she still looked diminutive. ‘I want to welcome you all officially to The Lodge. Some of you have never been here before. Most of you, I’d say, came to the Company long before The Lodge was functioning.’

  There was a general little round of self-deprecatory laughter. Naderson thought he detected uneasiness in it.

  ‘Anyway,’ Joan Dunne was saying. ‘Business begins tomorrow at ten a.m. Breakfast will be served between eight and nine thirty in the dining-room. You’ve all been allocated rooms in The Lodge. Due to lack of space, some of you will have to double up. But not, ha ha, on a mixed basis. We don’t have any trainees in residence this week – so their rooms are available to us. Christopher Poole, where are you? Do you want to say a few words before we retire for the evening?’

  Poole, who liked the spotlight every so often, spoke in a firm voice. ‘I seriously hope something beneficial will come out of these seminars. I don’t have to tell you all that we’re going through some troubled times. But we’ve had troubled times before, and we’ve survived them, and we’ll do so again. To our health. To the Agency. Long may we flourish.’

  He sipped from his cup, then raised it aloft, and everyone in the lounge did likewise. There was, Naderson thought, an air of forced cheer about all this, like that of people celebrating Christmas Eve in a bomb shelter during an air-raid.

  The rain didn’t matter to her. She was caught up in its majestic power. She drove without caution. She overtook slow-moving trucks and cars that crawled carefully. When lightning lit the sky in the distance she found the sight uplifting. The night pulsated. There was urgency in the storm, and urgency in herself.

  46

  VIRGINIA

  Pagan sat in a truck-stop eight miles from Roanoke and quickly drank black coffee. With a paper napkin he made an opening in the steamed-up window and gazed out at the parking-lot. The rain kept hammering, and visibility was bad and oily puddles trapped the blue neon sign of the truck-stop in a sequence of disturbed reflections.

  His head ached; driving in this kind of weather required hard concentration and wakefulness. He drained the coffee, then spread before him on the table the rough little sketch Mallory had made for him. Ten miles before Roanoke he was to follow a sign for a place by the name of Trout. It’s a few cabins and a bait shop, Mallory had said. You don’t want to blink. A mile beyond Trout he’d come to another sign pointing to a community called Goode. Before he reached Goode he’d see a signpost for Camp Ladyfair, his ultimate destination. Two miles along a bad road and there you are. There won’t be any security. At least not going in. Camp Ladyfair, he thought. An innocuous name. It might have been a summer camp for kids.

  He rose and walked to the cashier and paid his bill. He purchased a bottle of aspirin and swallowed two with a glass of water. Then he turned up the collar of his jacket and stood in the doorway, gazing in the direction of his parked car some twenty or thirty yards away. He made a dash for it through the blitz.

  Max Skidelsky answered the mobile phone in his car.

  Jacob Turk said, ‘I’ve lost him, Max.’

  ‘Fuck,’ Max said.

  ‘I don’t know how it happened. I can’t see shit most of the time. It’s a nightmare. He must have come off the freeway somewhere.’

  ‘Where are you exactly?’

  ‘About twenty miles out of Roanoke on 81. Where are you?’

  ‘Not far behind. Near Lexington.’

  ‘What do you want me to do?’

  ‘Just keep going, Jake. If you see him, get back to me. If you don’t, you know where you’re going anyway.’

  ‘Gotcha,’ said Jacob Turk.

  Skidelsky replaced the mobile phone unit. He looked at the clock on his dashboard. 04:53. He drove with his shoulders hunched forward. The sparse traffic heading slowly in the opposite direction glared against his glasses. He thought of the ancient ones gathered at The Lodge, living in the past, reminiscing even as they were allegedly trying to look into the future. A waste of time and breath.

  He picked up the phone and punched in a number and said, ‘Time to move,’ and he hung up again, thinking of the thirty or so people who waited in different hotels in Roanoke, imagining them stirring out of their beds, drinking quick cups of coffee, snatching a doughnut maybe, then making their way separately and quietly to the community of Trout, where they’d assemble and wait for action.

  He turned on the radio as he drove. There was country music for a while, and then news of an explosion the night before in Delaware, and although the details were scant the announcer said that the place was believed to have been ‘a military installation’, a vague term that suggested to Skidelsky government censorship, prompted, of course, by the connivers inside the FBI, who still wanted to play down the terrorist element, even though the whole of America knew Carlotta was at liberty in their midst.

  All right! Max slapped the dash open-handed. She’d done the business in Delaware. And that left the camp. He worried a moment about her unpredictability, but if she’d been to the satellite installation then the camp would be next on her agenda, and she’d want to do it fast, on the back of her work in Delaware, because he understood the way she worked, how she liked the cumulative effect of her actions, one devastation following another – as if she were a magician trying to top one trick immediately with another even more mystifying.

  The bug was Pagan. Pagan, who was somewhere in this dreary wet landscape, somewhere close. Pagan, who could only be in this general vicinity because he too was headed for The Lodge, which was a nuisance – but not one Skidelsky was going to fret over too much.

  He wondered how Pagan had found out about the camp. It didn’t matter now. He wondered about Larry Quinn, and why Larry hadn’t reported back. But these considerations were intrusions, and he couldn’t give them headroom, because in the long run they weren’t hugely important. He was focused and on the move, he was all compressed energy, he w
as a young man whose numbers were about to come up on the lottery. And like all people who know they are winners, he didn’t entertain the possibility of defeat.

  He took a cassette from the glove compartment and stuck it in the player. Christopher Poole’s voice issued through the speakers. 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 had quite a collection of Poole’s little speeches on tape, and later, when the smoke had cleared, he intended to use them to edify influential parties in Congress who might be horrified to learn that the Executive Director, God rest his soul, had been so dreadfully out of touch with the realities of the world. They’d understand then why the Agency had drifted into impotence, and why it required an instant transfusion of new blood. There would be a sizeable number of vacancies to be filled soon enough.

  She parked her car off the road in a concealed place between pine trees and, canvas bag in hand, she got out. She was dressed in black leather jacket and jeans and her hair was slicked back. She was Carly Phoenix again, and she was comfortable with the identity. She walked under the trees. The whole landscape was dense and secretive, scented with wet pine needles. Rain fell still, but it was slowing. She listened to the rush of small streams.

  She opened the canvas bag and took out her one remaining cylinder and put it in the pocket of her jacket. She had Quinn’s gun in her hand. She abandoned the canvas bag under a clump of ferns and moved between the trees and the ground underfoot became muddy in places and sucked at her leather boots. Now and again she paused and listened for sounds not associated with the rain. But she detected nothing.

  She felt a remarkable calm descend on her; it was that lull before action, that quiet chamber inside which she withdrew. The place where she collected herself. She moved slowly and easily down the slope, sometimes pausing to push aside an overhanging branch, sometimes stopping to attune her ear because she was still listening for foreign sounds.

  Darkness was beginning to splinter, a crack here, an opening there. Dawn would come in flat grey brush strokes. There would be no sunlight. Rain-clouds were low in the sky. She remembered Pasco’s description – one central building known as The Lodge, and a couple of outbuildings, one a shooting-range, the other a lecture hall and library. Beyond these were two tennis courts, a softball pitch, and a swimming-pool. But The Lodge was the heart of Camp Ladyfair. It lay in a hollow and could be seen from above as soon as you were clear of the trees.

  She kept moving through the pines. An owl floated past her. Bats, their radar short-circuited by rain, made mazy patterns overhead. The trees began to thin. She found herself on a low ridge half a mile above a huge wooden house. The Lodge. No windows were lit.

  She could make out the two surrounding buildings and the edge of a tennis court. The place was silent and seemingly deserted and for a time she was reluctant to begin the descent down the gentle slope, because it was too silent. There was no visible security, no dogs, no wire fences, just the exposed house. Why were there no guards? No sentries? No patrol vehicles? The place had the feel of a vacation home left empty, a weekend retreat with nobody in it.

  She stood under a tree and watched, waiting for something, a movement, a sign of life. She could go down the slope undetected, she was sure of that – if she kept low; if she hunched her way through the wild shrubbery that grew there, it wouldn’t be difficult in this dark grey light to reach The Lodge. But she didn’t move. She turned her face and looked the length of the ridge. Silent. Nothing. Just trees, just the slow ineluctable progress of light. No sense of anyone hidden in the pines.

  She gazed down once again at The Lodge.

  A porch-light went on and a man appeared, his white hair startling. He stretched his arms and appeared to yawn, but he was too far away for her to tell. He walked to the edge of the porch and put one hand out as if to test the temperature of the rain, then he pulled the hand back to his side. He wore striped pyjamas and a robe. He scratched his head and went back indoors.

  She continued to watch. She thought of Pagan, wondered where he was. If he was close by. If he was only a mile or so away, zoning in on her. She considered the situation. She weighed the notion of making her way down the slope. Her damp clothes adhered to her flesh, and her jeans stuck to her thighs and a solitary drop of drizzle slid between her breasts. She smiled. There were no uncertainties in Carly Phoenix’s world. No doubts and misgivings. She was the kind of woman who’d always go all the way, and even a little further.

  She edged forward and began, in a zigzagging manner, to go down the slope. The rain was recharging itself, and by the time she was halfway down the slope it was blowing hard against her face and black mud slushed round the soles of her boots.

  The rustic sign simply said: Camp Ladyfair. Nothing else. There was no gate, no barrier poles. Pagan turned his car into the narrow driveway, which ran between tall pine trees. A few yards further and he encountered another sign. Lodge. Half a mile.

  His windshield wipers creaked back and forth, clawing away rain and pine needles that had been washed out of the trees. He understood that if he drove the car too close to The Lodge he’d alert somebody, bring attention to himself, so he parked the Buick on the grass verge at the side of the road and he got out, and instead of following the road he went into the trees, which creaked in the downpour like the masts of sailing-ships.

  He was wet through within moments, but he didn’t feel it, because he was concentrating on the woman and nothing else, and the possibility that she was here to do what Mallory had called the demolition work. And if she was here, the only thing that mattered to him was getting to her before anyone else.

  A compulsion in the rain, and he knew it – but sometimes compulsions overwhelmed judgements, and it didn’t matter if you understood that they were indicators of weaknesses in yourself. You could only follow their dictates. And that, that was what he was doing as he slid under the high trees and moved beneath branches and dawn finally broke through, a frayed dawn the colour of old iron, and uncompromisingly drab.

  The woman had been watching the landscape through binoculars for hours. She rarely altered her position. If her muscles were stiff, it didn’t matter so long as she didn’t take her eyes off the ridge and the surrounding area. She hadn’t slept. Sometimes she poured coffee from a vacuum flask to keep herself alert. But she was a tough old bird, and she always had been. The cardigan and sensible tweed skirt might have fooled some people into thinking otherwise. But she knew.

  She listened to the silences of the big house, which were sometimes punctuated by the creak of a floorboard or wind in the eaves. It was too bad about The Lodge, because she’d become attached to it over the years, but change was change, and sometimes it was painful, and you had to go through it anyway. Like labour. Her wrists ached and her eyes hurt, but she had deep reservoirs of resolve and stubbornness and self-control.

  She shifted her position just slightly, elbows propped on the window-ledge.

  There, she thought. On the ridge. And moving. Moving down into the shrubbery, wild berry bushes, stunted crab-apples, the thickets and thorns. The camouflage was good – but not good enough for somebody with her keen eyesight. She punched a number on her phone and said, ‘She’s coming. Get your people in place.’

  On the other end of the line, Max Skidelsky said, ‘Bless you. You’re terrific.’

  ‘Just remember me at the appropriate time and I’ll be happy,’ she said.

  ‘You better get out of there fast.’

  ‘I’m out the door,’ she said.

  ‘Later.’ Max Skidelsky cut the connection.

  Joan Dunne, who hadn’t undressed for bed, left her room. She made her way toward the back staircase, and descended through the house. She passed the closed doorways of rooms where people snored, dreaming their fossilized dreams. She thought the place had the feel of a large museum containing relics of an extinct species. She put
on her raincoat and left The Lodge by the back door and walked quickly in the direction of the tennis courts and from there headed toward the wet open fields beyond.

  Later, she could tell people she’d taken an early morning stroll, and so she’d survived by a stroke of good fortune. But, hell, she was a survivor from way back. She always had been. It was a question of knowing which way the wind was blowing, that was all. And Max Skidelsky, who was blowing a whole new gale of his own through the structure of things, had made a promise to return her to a suitably senior position at Langley. She was weary, finally, of being stuck in this backwater, and of generations of trainees who only reminded you of your own passing years.

  She walked and walked in her wellington boots. She wanted to be very far away when it happened. For a tough old bird, she still had a residue of sensitivity left.

  In front of The Lodge was an open area, a lawn studded with a bright array of flowers. It was too exposed. She decided she’d approach the building at an angle and so she moved toward the indoor shooting-range, which was located about fifty yards from the main house. She went quickly, because the light was growing stronger despite the clouds and the rain, and she didn’t want to increase the risk of being observed. From the shooting-range, she could reach The Lodge sideways, and thus avoid the porch and the entrance.