The Passenger

by Chris Petit

  He was wrong.

  Round fell to his knees, turning the barrel, jamming it hard in his mouth, swallowing a last breath that turned into a shrill keening as he fired both barrels.

  In the moment of explosion, Collard saw his friend’s eye stare through him into the black infinity of beyond, then the eye and the whole head vaporized, transformed into blood, shattered bone and brain matter that splattered over Round’s expensively rag-rolled kitchen ceiling.

  The torso toppled forward onto Collard. His ears rang as he contemplated the unrecognizable remains of what little was left of Round’s head.

  Payoff

  Round’s body lay on the floor in a pool of congealing blood. Pages of scrawled notes that made it clear he had meant to shoot himself lay on the kitchen table. They gave the reason and, when he read them, Collard, who believed he had grown inured, found he was still affected by the breathtaking callousness of it all.

  No one would have heard the shot. The nearest house was miles away. Tranter would tidy up when he found out what happened and by then Collard would be gone. There was nothing left to stay for.

  He abandoned his car and took Round’s Jaguar. There was no traffic so early on a Sunday morning. Numbness and exhaustion were in danger of sending him to sleep so he stopped in a quiet road and climbed in the back which was so spacious it was nearly possible to lie down. He fell into a deep and dreamless sleep, from which he woke hours later, still exhausted, and continued his journey, concentrating on nothing but driving, stopping only to post the letters in the Euston Road.

  The Hampstead Heath extension was busy on a Sunday afternoon. Games of football were being played, watched by well-dressed families bundled up in colourful anoraks and winter coats. It was a bright, still afternoon with a clear blue sky. Collard had used a call box to telephone Churton, who was waiting at home as arranged, to say he was ten minutes away. He spotted him in his flat cap and Barbour, watching one of the games, attaché case in hand and dog sitting by his side.

  Churton betrayed no emotion, apart from a working jaw muscle. Seeing him, Collard knew how hollow his small triumph was. Churton was not the sort to admit defeat.

  They stood in silence watching the football.

  Collard said, ‘TDG was Iraq’s Technology and Development Group, with representatives in London, and close links to Saddam Hussein’s brother-in-law, who was chief of Iraq’s secret service. Joost Tranter was an invisible assistor in establishing TDG then helped the Iraqis buy machine-tool companies to develop an indigenous arms industry. In 1987, TDG purchased one such company from the TI Group. You were group deputy chairman and arranged the sale.’

  Churton stared into the distance. Collard saw where he had cut himself shaving that morning.

  ‘Tranter was active in setting up a missile factory near Baghdad and helped Iraq pursue the development of nuclear capability.’

  Collard was met with an arrogant silence, interspersed with the occasional look of contempt that said that Churton was driven by patriotic duty and a stoicism Collard could not begin to understand. Thanks to Round, Collard knew it was an act, a gutter toughness dressed up as something else.

  Churton looked at his watch and said, ‘You haven’t got long.’

  ‘Who paid for all of it, in the end? All the reneged deals and credit guarantees?’

  ‘You weren’t born yesterday.’

  ‘The taxpayer.’

  The shortfall had to come from somewhere, diverted from existing funds. The clue was in Evelyn’s final comment: ‘Ask where NSO money goes: ECGD. Abracadabra!’

  The Export Credit Guarantee Department had underwritten all those dubious arms deals, paying out government money to cover any withheld payment. The answer lay in Britain’s recent oil bonanza, whose profits had been raided by the ECGD for compensation. Round had told Collard that NSO in Evelyn’s equation stood for North Sea oil.

  ‘Pretty dry old stuff, this political dynamite,’ Churton said.

  ‘I know about the share trading in the week before Flight 103.’

  It was Round’s last confession.

  Churton turned slowly and asked, ‘What are you talking about?’

  The real crime behind Flight 103, as Round saw it, was that those, like him, who had known something was going to happen – if not the day – had done nothing and instead speculated on the stock market.

  ‘In the week before the attack there was an unusually high volume of trading in sectors such as air transport and insurance. Shares in British Airways changed hands at about three times the normal level. There was also exceptional and unexpected speculation in the futures market.’

  Churton’s watery blue eyes were hostile. ‘Are you accusing me?’

  ‘I’m telling you what I know. Anything happens to me then the mechanics are in place for a lot more people to know.’

  Churton sneered. ‘That old ploy.’

  ‘You had better tell Tranter that Round’s dead. He used a shotgun on himself.’

  Even that news failed to surprise Churton, who shrugged as if to say Round had confirmed his low opinion.

  Churton handed Collard the attaché case.

  ‘Cheap at the price. Now fuck off.’

  He called his dog after him and walked away.

  Collard went home for the last time. Tranter had assured Round that the police search had been called off. Collard wasn’t so sure but he was past caring.

  The door was padlocked again, meaning Sheehan hadn’t done a Round and blasted his brains out. Collard presumed the shot Sheehan had fired was aimed at him. He thought it was the final proof of the man’s insanity that he’d bothered to lock the door on the way out.

  There were no new messages on the answerphone. Collard went through each room and said goodbye. He was not a sentimental man but Nick had lived most of his life there and was associated in Collard’s mind with every room: where his toy boxes had been kept; the old location of his high chair; stair gates and all the other impedimenta of childhood. The memory of Nick as a small child was clearest in Collard’s mind. He gave less thought to Charlotte, knowing he still had to confront the pain of that separation.

  He paused outside Nick’s door. The room was empty. Nick’s possessions still lay on the floor. Sheehan had shot the mirror over the basin. There was a neat hole in the middle of the glass. The starring broke up Collard’s reflection, making him look like the one who had been shattered.

  He went to the room at the front of the house and looked out at the Sunday-quiet street. He remembered the last time he was there – the noise of police sirens he thought were coming for him, and a flash of light from the window opposite.

  He took only two souvenirs to remember his time there. He picked out a tiny piece of broken mirror from Nick’s room. As he removed it the rest of the glass fell into the basin. The second was Nick’s guidebook. Collard thought he might need it.

  He walked out and didn’t look back.

  Lazarus

  Collard drove, aware only of the bare bones: streets, rooms, weather and all the other distractions receded. He thought of old man Angleton, still lurking behind the mystery, and knew how Angleton must have felt stuck living in his head. He knew there was more, that it wasn’t over yet.

  If anyone could reveal all the facets behind the mystery, rather than partial edited highlights, Collard knew it would be the departed spymaster. Perhaps that was the same as saying death was the only solution.

  He stopped at a twenty-four-hour garage, an oasis of neon and bright green, to refuel. He paid cash at the night-security grille. The lonely attendant reminded him of Khaled’s family, with their university qualifications, running gas stations outside Detroit. He could hear Sheehan’s rumbling laugh as he declared, ‘At least they’re in the oil business.’

  Tomorrow he would be stateless too. He remembered Neuss and the cell’s safe house in Frankfurt, and Schäfer’s unit logging suspects’ endless drives through Europe, from Sweden and Czechoslovakia, gathering a su
itcase or meeting a contact in an anonymous pizzeria or bar. Collard’s life was theirs now.

  Caught between bone-weariness and epiphany, Collard stared out into the night at his voyage into metaphysical abstraction, into Angleton space. He understood the zealousness of fanatics, the irrelevance of the flesh, admitting for the first time that he had buried his denial of Nick’s death alongside his other great fear – that they had both got on the plane at Heathrow after all. There had been no Angleton at Frankfurt, no warning, and everything since was the wild imagining of a desperate mind in the time it took to crash.

  Collard asked the expensive dashboard clock if everything that had occurred since could be compressed into under a minute. Yes, the clock said: time was irrelevant in the face of eternity and 46.5 seconds a lifetime.

  He saw police everywhere, to his nervous eye evidence of Tranter’s treachery. He was just another car driving through the night but he knew Churton and Tranter would not be beaten lightly.

  At Alconbury, two police cars watched him and one followed long enough to see him turn off the main road into the flat reaches of the Fens, where the road’s course followed long, straight drainage ditches.

  Another car joined him. Collard couldn’t work out if it was following until it dropped back.

  He turned onto the road where the airfield was, ten miles further down. The flat countryside increased his unease. His lights could be seen for miles. There were few turn-offs, no trees and no hiding place. Daylight would reveal a landscape as unadorned as a child’s drawing, straight horizon bisected by sky and a few scattered buildings visible from far off. He gripped the wheel too hard. His neck and shoulders hurt from driving.

  The road ran straight on and on. The waters of the canal gleamed like oil. Off in the distance he saw the lights of another vehicle. Collard’s attention wandered. He knew he was falling asleep but he dared not stop. The Jaguar seemed to drive itself. There was only him now. Round’s head exploded in his mind’s eye. Everything was converging, too fast and too slow at the same time, on the brink of hallucination.

  Black and white chevrons raced at him. He stamped hard on the brake and slewed the car round the unexpected bend and shot across a narrow bridge, with an impression of a stationary truck blocking the road, waiting for him to smash into it and kill himself, as they intended. He braked and turned the wheel hard. The car failed to respond, steering straight ahead. Collard shut his eyes and waited for the impact. None of it mattered. He had nothing left. Escape was only another postponement of the inevitable. The car skidded and Collard heard tearing metal. His head slammed against the door pillar and as he lost consciousness he was vaguely aware of the car suspended in the air, about to be sucked down into the black water.

  He came to in the dark, the unseen pressure all around, closing in. The hot engine protested noisily at its dousing, steaming in pockets the water hadn’t reached. He could see nothing. The lights had fused. Cold water filled his shoes. He groped for the door handle and shoved. Nothing gave. An air pocket released a stream of bubbles. Soon the car would be a flooded coffin. He tried not to think what would happen when the air went, tried to welcome the catharsis that would take him away but saw only mindless, animal terror followed by the triumph of nothingness, the moment when time and memory impacted.

  Freezing water clutched at his heart. He struggled to lower his window. The handle turned uselessly. His mind was starting to separate. The car filled too fast.

  The handle of the passenger window was jammed too. He used up valuable air climbing in the back. The window handle behind the front passenger seat resisted, beyond the point of despair, then turned. Water poured through the open window. He gasped. The cold alone would kill him.

  The door refused to budge. He tried to haul himself out of the window. It took too long. He was forced back inside for more air but found only water. He turned and blindly wrestled his way back through the opening, giving in to panic. Counting. Each number exploded in his head. His lungs burned. He stopped counting.

  Collard woke and thought he was dead. Naked, in blackness, unable to see, on a concrete floor, overwhelmed by all his childhood fears – darkness as isolation, darkness as cruelty, darkness as unknown – combined with the frightening adult knowledge that he had been saved only to be cast into perpetual darkness. The profound silence asked him what if no one came, a prospect more terrifying than his ordeal by water.

  He felt his way round the room. There was a door with no handle, a light switch that didn’t work. Under a narrow metal-framed bed was a tin chamber pot. There was no basin or tap. The window had been boarded over; through the tiniest crack came an impression of light.

  He lay down on his front with his head in his arms, hoping to find he had been dreaming.

  Harsh light dragged him back. It came from a bulkhead light in the ceiling, protected by a wire cage. The light went on and off, sometimes for minutes or hours until Collard could no longer tell. He knew he was being subjected to sensory deprivation and that his captors understood the damage done by waiting.

  The sliver in the boarded window told him nothing except whether it was light outside. He punched the board until his knuckle split. He tasted salty blood that increased his thirst. In the next spell of darkness he worked at the crack with a loosened bedspring. He dug away until a pinhole of grey appeared less dark than the surround.

  He jammed his eye to the hole and saw a moonlit terrain and several strange, squat buildings, bulky and industrial. The streetlamps were broken. His impression was of nothing beyond, only empty landscape.

  He had seen enough pictures to know he was in East Europe. He was behind the Iron Curtain.

  He had no idea how he had got there. He had been hijacked from death. He was still without any memory of the circumstances of his rescue – other than freezing cold and the surprise of lights – or the identity of his rescuers, unless Churton and Tranter’s vindictiveness extended to pretending to kill him, then passing him on to Nazir’s people with the information he was Nazir’s assassin.

  Once, his chamber pot was emptied while he lay passed out. Sometimes he was woken by the sound of his own howling.

  Two men came for him in the dark. He smelt garlic and cigarettes and panicked at the prospect of sexual humiliation. They manhandled him to his feet, forced a hood over his head and spread him against the wall, with his toes and fingertips taking his weight. At first the position seemed supportable but he soon shook and cramped so much he fell on the floor and thrashed in agony. The men didn’t hit him. They didn’t need to. Collard’s body did their work for them.

  They spoke accented English. When the cramp passed they repositioned him and went on questioning: always the same, asking who he worked for and if he was a spy. He clung to the insistence he was nobody’s spy. Each time he fell was like losing a layer. Soon he would be nothing.

  Then it stopped. He was given a bowl of soggy rice, brought by one man who put the plate on the floor while the second guarded the door. They wore fatigues. They weren’t masked and were Middle Eastern. Collard thought he recognized one. He went through everything since the crash, looking for a connection and found none until the man’s prominent Adam’s apple reminded him of the decorator in the Frankfurt house where he and Stack were to have met Nazir. Collard supposed it didn’t matter if they showed their faces because they would shoot him soon, or worse.

  His suspicions weren’t allayed when his clothes and watch were returned and he was allowed to use a proper toilet and basin. They would build his hope only to dash it.

  From the growth of beard on the deranged man staring out of the mirror, he judged he had been held three or four days, and tested beyond endurance.

  He was given what tasted like regular supermarket bread and cheap soap that he recognized as Camay. His confusion increased when he read the name of the basin and toilet manufacturer: Armitage Shanks.

  He was still in England.

  The Old Fundamentalists

  ‘I
am, believe it or not, an ally. You would be well within your rights to say I have a strange way of showing it.’

  The man sitting in front of Collard was American, but not quite. There were the remains of a foreign accent. He was elderly but still carried traces of the hard man he once must have been. He reminded Collard of a retired steel worker or a rigger. Delicate half-moon reading glasses sat oddly on a rough face that belonged outdoors. Weariness of expression suggested it had witnessed more than most, little of it good. He had the tough, punished look of a heavy drinker though only a bottle of mineral water stood on the old desk between them. The upholstered chair with wooden arms he sat on looked like it had been found on a skip. A transistor on the table was tuned to a Brahms violin concerto.

  ‘Where am I?’

  ‘Near the Thames. In East Tilbury.’

  ‘I thought I was in East Europe.’

  ‘You are, in a way. The place was built by a Czech shoe entrepreneur nostalgic for the old country. It was meant as workers’ utopia in the days of benevolent capitalism.’

  He held up a Thermos. Collard nodded.

  ‘I’m going to put plenty of milk in.’

  Collard warmed his hands on the mug.

  ‘Kim Philby came in this way by Russian cargo boat in March 1986. I was the only witness to the man’s first steps on English soil in more than twenty years.’

  Collard remembered Valerie Traherne’s description of the man opposite him: someone who had lived many years in the United States but came from Belgium and never quite lost his accent: Angleton’s mysterious visitor arriving late at night, demanding a room, last heard of in Frankfurt removing the security tapes from the hotel.

  ‘I recognized him from the stammer. The clothes were cheap and Russian and so were his cigarettes but the voice was very British – the thick glasses and beard did little to disguise him once I knew who I was looking at. He looked brand new in the English clothes I had brought him. “Dear old Marks and Sparks,” he said.