For the Good of the State

by Anthony Price

  ‘What?’ Partly it was because the wind made the old man almost inaudible. But also Tom couldn’t resist taking another look at the Mad Englishwoman and her family. (And she was trying to button up the protective hood of the baby’s push-chair now, while the Awful Child was wrestling with his kite.)

  ‘What I’m depending on—’ Audley almost shouted the words ‘—is that Panin will know that Jack Butler will hold him responsible if anything unpleasant happens to me, no matter how it seems. Just as—’ The wind gusted strongly, carrying away the rest of his words.

  And if anything unpleasant happens to us? Tom wondered momentarily, although he already knew the answer to his own fate: the doom of bodyguards down the ages, long before King Harold’s household thegns had died to a man round his body, was part of the contract of service. Even if Willy Groot shed a tear for him she would still reckon he’d only got what he asked for in his line of work.

  Somehow Audley had got ahead of him again. ‘What—?’

  The old man stopped, and stared around for a second, and then turned. ‘I said “Just as Jack will hold me responsible for whatever happens otherwise”, Tom.’ He gave Tom a hard look. ‘And Henry Jaggard will hold you responsible also, eh?’

  The wind dropped, suddenly and freakishly, so that Audley’s final shout came out unnaturally loudly, us though to emphasize what had been in the back of Tom’s mind ever since he had come to his decision. Then, even more suddenly, its full force hit him again at the corner of the path where it reached the coast at last, almost stopping him in his tracks.

  ‘Yes—’ Not so much the wind as the whole glorious panorama of the North Devon coastline took his breath away, with headland after headland plunging uncompromisingly into the sea, with the promise of deepwater directly beneath them: an indomitable coast against which the wind and the waves beat endlessly but in vain.

  But Audley was still staring at him, partly blocking his view of the path along this coast and finally concentrating his mind at the same time. ‘I shall resign, of course,’ he said.

  ‘Yes?’ Disappointingly, the big man accepted this shock-horror revelation with only mild interest. ‘Why?’

  It was on the tip of Tom’s tongue to tell the truth, that he was fed up with the accumulated risk of being an accidental and secondary target while trying unsuccessfully to make obstinate old buggers like Audley himself take the most basic precautions. But then he saw that it wasn’t quite the real truth.

  ‘I can’t work for a man I’ve betrayed.’ He liked the harshness in his own voice. ‘I should have quit an hour ago, and left you to get on with your damn “Nikolai” by yourself. But I promised your daughter, in a moment of weakness, that I’d watch over you, David.’ Looking at Audley now was like looking at a coin with hate on one side, and love on the other, when the coin was balanced so that he could see neither side. ‘I’m keeping faith with her now—against my better judgement.’

  ‘Ah!’ Still only mild interest. ‘The old thankless task! Believe me, boy—I do understand. Because I’ve been there too, myself.’ The old Beast-smile returned, moistened now by the fine mist of rain which was stinging Tom’s own cheek, hard-driven by the wind. ‘So just answer me this one question, then: who would you betray—your country or your friend?’

  As well as irritation bordering on anger, Tom felt the rain driving cold into his exposed eye. ‘That’s a ridiculous question, David. It’s bad enough to have to risk my neck for you. But I don’t have to put up with humbug as well.’

  ‘No.’ The smile twisted downwards. ‘But just this once—just this last time … can’t you humour your dear mother’s old friend?’ The smile vanished. ‘And then no more questions.’

  That Mamusia’s old flame played dirty right to the last question was absurdly comforting, somehow: it made the outcome of that old, long-resolved contest between Audley and Father, in which Father would always have played a straight bat (just like William Marshall in Ranulf of Chester’s day) quite astonishing. But it also confirmed every loving thing he had ever thought about Father in that same instant.

  ‘All right.’ He wished Audley would get out of the way, so that he could see the path ahead; but this answer must clear that obstacle too, anyway. ‘Since this is my country it’s no question. But if it was Poland … that might be more difficult. But in this country … if my so called “friend” was British, then he would have already betrayed me, and all my other friends, so he’d be a traitor, and “betrayal” doesn’t describe my reaction to that, when I blow the whistle on him. Or, if he’s a foreigner … then he’s a false friend and an enemy—I might still honour him then, but “betrayal” still doesn ’t apply, just the same, when I get him in my sights—‘ In spite of all the wind (or perhaps because of it), a sudden tingle in his nose made him sneeze. ’Is that what you want? “My country”—right … before my “friend”—wrong?‘

  Audley shook his head. ‘It was just a question.’ He stepped aside, leaning into the wind, which flapped his bullet-ridden raincoat around his knees, to reveal the path behind him as well as the bullet-holes. ‘I already had my money on the answer. And there’s a place for you in R & D when you want it, is my answer to that, Tom.’

  The cleared path had a foreground, and a middleground, and a background, snaking round the next headland. But there was only the middleground, really. Because there, where the path cut into a cascade of dead bracken and heather and gorse which fell from the skyline above down into the invisible sea far below, three men were waiting for them.

  Three—?

  Instantly, he sorted them out: saw, but didn’t count, Nikolai Andrievich Panin, muffled against the wind and dark-overcoated still; saw, but dismissed, his little Major, who was better-protected in a short rainproof jacket like the Barbour which Willy had been wearing, wherever Willy might be, but somewhere mercifully safe now; and saw, and only saw, the third and last and first figure most of all, raincoated like Audley.

  ‘You watch Sadowski, Tom.’ Audley shouted his whisper at close quarters. ‘I don’t trust Panin … But Sadowski is a bloody hit-man! Remember?’ He touched Tom’s arm, propelling him forward. ‘Remember?’

  ‘Yes.’ Tom let himself be propelled on to the foreground of the path, where a trickle of water from the hillside above had reduced the path to a morass churned up by footprints and hoofprints; although all he could really concentrate on as he squelched forward was that first figure.

  The mud gave way and slid treacherously underfoot, but he could still only see Major-General Gennadiy Zarubin standing four-square on the path, in what might have been his father’s country, and his grandfather’s, before the two world wars had demoted and promoted his line: another tall, raincoated figure, almost as broad-shouldered as Audley himself, waiting now to make them that offer which Audley had chosen not to refuse, with the headlands behind him already fading into the rain-squall which was sweeping into them, and over them, out of the infinite greyness of sea-and-sky which filled half their world.

  He lifted his hand, to keep the driving rain off his cheek and out of his ear, and also so that he might hear what Audley might say, as the gap between them decreased step by step; and, at the same time, reached across his chest and felt the weight and shape of the Smith and Wesson; and finally glanced up to scan the gorse-broken skyline above them.

  Odd that there was still a scatter of yellow flowers on this sea-blown wuzzy, when there hadn’t been a single flower on the gorse at Mountsorrel: and some of these were winter-browned at the edges (he saw each complex flower with a photographic clarity which surprised him); but others were blooming freshly, defying wind, and winter equally, against all the odds, while all the lower ground-hugging heather flowers were long-dead and colourless—

  ‘He’s a big bugger, isn’t he!’ Audley’s words, when they came, were utterly inconsequential. ‘I wouldn’t like to meet him in a dark alley in Berlin—either side of the Wall!’

  Almost as big as you are—or maybe even bigger! The th
ought twisted through Tom’s brain, challenging him to wonder what Audley himself had been like in his own dark alleys, years ago, in the dark ages.

  ‘He doesn’t even look like a Russian.’ Audley hissed his final useless judgement into Tom’s protected landward ear in the instant that he quickened and lengthened his stride across the last few yards, to the man himself, thrusting out his hand in a classic gesture of false friendship. ‘General Zarubin! Good morning to you.’

  A shaft of light—it wasn’t true sunlight, but it was something more than the murk which had shrouded them so far—lightened the two big men as they met, as Zarubin matched Audley with his own hand: it was a strange unnatural light, like the light of Limbo, between Heaven and Hell—

  ‘Dr Audley—’

  Time accelerated and slowed down, spiked on now and on for ever afterwards simultaneously, as the two meat-plate hands reached out towards each other, with an empty yard separating them which would never be bridged as the Major-General seemed to throw himself forward, on to hands and knees, to stare through Audley with blank astonishment in the same now-and-never instant that the bright red blossomed from his white shirt on each side of his tartan tie, and the blood gushed out of his mouth like vomit—

  Tom hit Audley with his shoulder, every ounce of his weight spinning the big man sideways against the overhang of the hillside, above the path, even before General Zarubin’s dead body finally subsided into the mud.

  ‘Oooff!’ The sound of Audley’s breath and his own mingled as they both fell, binding them together into oak-tree-and-ivy flailing together in their fall, with no thought for afterwards. But then Tom’s training (never before exercised like that), and Audley’s lack-of-training (still uninformed from yesterday’s bullet, and still unbelieving), turned them both into a confusion of threshing legs and arms, all trying to re-establish their independence.

  ‘For Christ’s sake—!’ Audley mouthed the words into his ear.

  ‘Shut up!’ Tom pushed him down as he tried to sit up, pressing his face into the stony bank below the yellow-flowered gorse. ‘God—!’

  God was not an appeal: God was the sight of Nikolai Panin still standing up in the open, above the still-twitching body of Major-General Gennadiy Zarubin, as though the rest of his life had minutes to spare, not seconds. ‘Get down, man! For God’s sake—!’

  Panin threw away another precious second in shifting his surprised look from the hillside above to Tom. Then he hunched himself ludicrously, as though to make a smaller target, and sank to his knees beside Zarubin.

  To hell with him! thought Tom, as Audley pushed and heaved beneath him. He could take his bloody chances!

  ‘Damn you, Tom! Let me up, damn you!’ Audley swore at him.

  ‘You stay right where you are.’ Tom kept his elbow on Audley’s neck as he watched Panin raise his comrade’s body slightly, and simultaneously tried to remember the instant of the bullet’s impact. Because there was a dark mark no bigger than a shilling high up on the broad expanse of Zarubin’s back, just above the shoulder-blade: so the high-velocity bullet had come downwards steeply, shattering flesh and bone, to blossom that huge exit-wound where the shirt had reddened—had come downwards from not far away, and not more laterally from some distance greater ahead of them—

  He couldn’t hold the big man down much longer—

  That was right! Because the three men had been hugging this same overhang above the path, where the wind hadn’t been so fierce, when he had first glimpsed them.

  So the killer hadn’t killed before because he hadn’t had a clear shot until Zarubin stepped out to greet Audley—

  Christ! The next thought rolled Audley away from him, even as he cleared the Smith and Wesson from its holster. ‘Get down, David!’

  ‘What the devil—?’ Even in the instant of his release Audley picked up his panic signal, and shrank into the overhang obediently.

  ‘Where’s Sadowski?’ Tom snarled at Panin.

  ‘Sadowski?’ The Russian let go of Zarubin’s shoulder, and the body dropped back into the mud as though gravity finally had a stronger claim on death than on life. ‘Major Sadowski is doing his duty, Sir Thomas.’ He looked down at the blood on his hand with evident distaste. But then calmly wiped it off on the dead man’s raincoat before looking up again at Tom. ‘Just as you are doing now.’

  The freak wind suddenly howled around them, swirling the sharp raindrops into Tom’s face from a new direction, half-blinding him.

  Tom—‘ Audley’s voice came from behind and below him ’—go!‘

  ‘No!’ Panin straightened up, still on his knees but fumbling into his raincoat. ‘Your duty is to protect us, Sir Thomas. Let Sadowski—’

  ‘Shut up!’ Audley’s voice was level with Tom now, and it was deep-frozen with pure hate. ‘And if you find what you’ve got inside there, I’ll shoot you in the guts, I swear to God—as God is my witness!’ The old man’s voice modulated, as though he was surprised by his own passion. ‘I’ll shoot you in the guts, Nikolai … because after all these years the only thing I can remember is to shoot low—so I may actually shoot your balls off instead—go, Tom!’

  Panin froze. Then swayed, as another gust shook him; but swayed like a frozen dummy nevertheless, unmoving even though moving.

  ‘That’s right.’ Thick velvet suddenly coveted the steel. ‘Now the hand comes out—slowly … ever-so slowly … that’s right!’ Audley drew a deep breath. ‘God! You were bloody close then, I tell you! Because it’s been forty years … well, maybe thirty years, give or take … But I never was very good with small guns. Okay with 75-millimetres, but no good with 9-millimetres … Go, Tom—for God’s sake, while this old devil and I frighten each other equally—go on, Tom! Go!’

  Standing up on the path, even for an instant, also frightened Tom. But then the beginning of returning logic steeled him to take a full look at the skyline above him, with the loss of precious time already also spurring calculation as he did so: Sadowski had gone straight up into the wuzzy, somewhere behind them — but why?

  ‘Go on, Tom—go find out what he’s up to, there’s a good chap.’ Audley had his voice almost back to the conversational level. Yet somehow that sounded louder than a shout inside Tom’s head as he moved obediently to the order.

  Sadowski wasn’t protecting Panin, as he ought to be doing—

  The overhang, where the cliff-path had been cut from the living rock of the hillside, soon petered out. But then the gorse-wuzzy was still old and impenetrable as he searched for an opening further along as he followed the path round the headland, its sharp spikes and brown-frosted yellow flowers mocking him—

  Like Sadowski, he wasn’t protecting his man now, so what the hell was he doing?

  There was a gap just ahead, at last—

  There was something very wrong here: he had promised Henry Jaggard implicitly, and Cathy Audley explicitly, not to do what he was doing; and he was risking his own life in breaking those promises. But, in the midst of what was now a huge disaster, David Audley had given an order, because his instinct was to fight disaster, to the last gasp and the last bullet—and—and by sweet Jesus Christ!—that was his own Polish instinct, too!

  Now there was the gap in the wuzzy—a gap where a summer-fire had burnt it back long ago, to let the heather and the bracken get a stronger foothold for a time until it could re-establish itself—so that was the way he would go—

  The dead wuzzy and heath and bracken gave place suddenly to a crumbling stone wall, reinforced by a sheep-proof wire fence.

  Over the wall and the fence: there was smooth hillside grass now, liberally sprinkled with sharp-focused sheep-dung and smaller rabbit-droppings, with the curve of the headland above him and the full fury of the wind at his back, driving him upwards towards the crest; indeed, even as he let the wind drive him, he saw real sheep away to his left, huddled against the inland line of the wall, and also the white danger-signal tail of a rabbit bobbing off to his left, into a square wall of windswept go
rse—

  But there was no other living thing, either ahead or left-and-right, as he came towards the high point, with the whole coastline behind him fully revealed and stretching into far rain-mist: this, almost to the very yard, where that dimpled trench-line marked the edge of the gorse square, must have been where the old Romans had built their signal-station, with this superb view of any Irish raiders sailing up the Bristol Channel—although in this bone-cutting wind it must have been more a punishment-posting than a mere watch-keeping duty—

  Another ten yards, and he would be at the high-point of the ditch, where the ancient palisaded-and-revetted gateway must have been, with a high watchtower somewhere inside that wuzzy, all built with timber brought up from distant inland wooded valleys with great labour and organization far surpassing anything Ranulf of Caen and Gilbert of Mountsorrel could have managed more than a thousand years later, in a less efficient age of the world—

  And then he saw them: and saw them both together, on the corner of another sheep-wall-and-fence inwards from the Roman signal station, but not in those other ages of Romans and Normans safely dead, but in his own now, with his own death shouting —

  Which way?

  They saw him almost in the same instant, perhaps by chance, or perhaps because they were being properly careful: it didn’t matter, because in his own age, if he gave that damned Green Machine rifle a clear sight, he was dead now—and the odds against him clogged his throat with fear even as he tried to make a decision—

  Which way? Because if he went back the way he had come, the curve of the hillside would still give them a clear view as he reached the stone wall again, which was higher on this side, so that he would have to climb up it—

  The thought became its own decision: there was a narrow band of grass between the gorse-wuzzy of the Roman fort and the steep bracken-and-heather below him, and his legs were already anticipating his brain’s instructions, already running him where he needed to go, automatically twisting and jinking him like that frightened rabbit which had itself showed him how to take cover in the wuzzy.