The Striker Portfolio q-3

by Adam Hall

  I was ready for it but the grass was soft and I was late getting away because of the wheelspin and the glancing blow slung the N.S.U. full circle and for a while I was just sitting there looking along the headlight beams watching them start an initial slide along the centre strip that carried them sideways for fifty metres with turf ploughing up in a wave over the roof before the momentum died and their wheels began spinning again for grip.

  I was back on the concrete before they were but the gap was only medium and they were closing as hard as they could and I knew that somewhere inside the correct black overcoats and stiff white collars the semblance of an emotion had been provoked. Anger. From my limited information I assumed that their controllers had given orders that I should be killed and that my death should appear accidental, but they were finding it more difficult than it had seemed and now they were angry because their pride I I was hurt. They were no longer implementing an arrangement: they were conducting a duel.

  They wanted to kill me now. It hadn't mattered to them before.

  This could make a difference. Emotion at very high speed could lead to misjudgement. But it was my sole consolation. The light was already a glare inside the car before the last of the mud was centrifuged from the tyres and we settled down on the top-limit mark with the windrush blotting out most of the engine sound.

  Then they cut their lamps so that I couldn't see which side they were going for. The mirror was only a frame for vague movement now, dark and shifting and inconsistent.

  A bump came and I corrected the line but it wasn't too bad because they'd hit too close to the centre. Then they had another go and the impact was well to one side and very heavy and I did what I could but this time the strain dragged a tyre off and I watched the headlamp beam go spilling across the edge of the road and flooding down into woodland. The N.S.U. was airborne for a few seconds, floating strangely among light and shadows, then it struck rubble and began pitching and I saw the trees coming and turned the engine off before the night went wild.

  Chapter Ten — FUGUE

  The moon gleamed, set in shadows.

  Shapes, but not of trees or smashed metal: I expected shapes of trees. The moon was glass-bright, translucid, shimmering, sometimes going dark and emerging again among the shadows.

  'Wait a minute.'

  The whole of the organism was prepared to arrange its survival if it could: run, fight, beat out flames, bind blood in with a tourniquet, free itself from wreckage. The components were immediately available: nerve, sinew, gas-interchange process, adrenalin supply. Intelligence alone was absent. The organism had to be told what to do, and nothing knew.

  The moon, alive with light, held a globe of colour in its centre: blue. And in the centre of blue was another globe, totally black.

  The shapes were fainter, touches of light on cloud, the cloud silver, curling, hanging near the moon, a line dividing its softness. A feather lying curved above the moon.

  'Who are you?'

  The moon darkened again and shone again and watched me. It was an eye watching me.

  'Bitter There was pain in the organism but not enough to limit movement. I was on one elbow looking across at her face, recognizing it but not recalling it, knowing I had seen it before but not knowing where or when.

  Information came flooding in so fast that the receptor areas couldn't cope with it but I saw now that there was light coming from behind her, from the street, and that something reflected it so that her eye shone. Then there was an implosion of random images and within a millisecond the whole scene was formed and took on significance: she was sitting hunched in a chair near the bed where I lay and tears had dried on her face.

  'Who are you?' I said it in German this time.

  She told me her name but paramnesia is odd: recognition is present but recall can't just be switched on like that. The name meant nothing when she said it.

  A young face with amethyst eyes swollen from crying, a bewildered mouth. All her attention was on me. There were no trees or shattered glass, no flames to beat out. Sweat began trickling from my temples and I stopped making an effort, suddenly aware that the effort I had been making was enormous and very desperate because I was scared sick of seeing the lot go, the whole lot.

  The only hope was in taking the pressure off, letting the neural traces show up under the hypo in their own good time. I didn't use English any more: the one word she had spoken had been in German.

  'Is there any kind of head injury?'

  My hands were moving about, the fingers hunting for blood. Quite a lot of the organism was coping well enough, doing its best to look after itself.

  She said something but I wasn't interested: there was so much data coming in that I wanted to sort it out before anything new was presented. A window and the unlit lamp and of course her face and various colours and the tear stains.

  'Oh yes,' I said and sat still for a bit. Traces were showing up: I had seen tears on her face before when she'd said she hated me and that I was impotent. 'So that's who you are.'

  Memory, returning, can't present every detail because there are too many. Putting your clothes on you don't observe the pattern of the tweed or the style of the shoes: you simply know that these are your clothes. It's not a matter of Striker, shepherdess, Wagner, cheese-wire, Benedikt, ignition switch plus several million other images and their significance. It's a matter of finding yourself back in a. place composed of all the things you have ever known. Identity.

  'Wait a minute.' I was sitting on the edge of her bed, head in my hands. It would need a minute to settle in. If you don't take it easy the whole thing can go blank again.

  'Nitri,' she said again, frightened.

  'Yes I know. Yes.'

  Her scent. It had been inside the car. The N.S.U.

  There was still an area of darkness and I was aware of it but it would have to be left alone. Some kind of inhibitory block, repression of unpleasant events.

  'What time is it, Nitri?'

  'Four.'

  'Night?'

  'Yes. But you — '

  'When did I get here?'

  'In the night.'

  'Hours ago — this night? Come on — some hours ago?'

  'You said you were coming.'

  Blank. It didn't fit anywhere. She had sounded frightened. Perhaps I'd spoken too loudly. That was because I was frustrated: there might be a need for hurry and I couldn't 'Don't worry,' I told her.

  I sat blanking my mind for as long as a minute and it worked and I got a completely lucid sequence: the telephone cold in my hand, the sweep of light as a car went by, the smell of the exhaust-gas. I'm coming to see you. Pain across the shoulders and chest What happened? A loose feeling in one shoe. I'll be there in an hour. A car slowing or seemingly slowing so that I dropped back into the shelter of the woodland.

  'I was phoning from the autobahn. I just wanted to know if you'd be alone.'

  'I'm always alone.'

  She meant always without Franz.

  Her body was milky under the nightgown and the light from the street shadowed her eyes. She asked me why I had come.

  I couldn't tell her. They might already have found him on the floor and the number of the N.S.U. was in the reception-book and there was an N.S.U. with that number lying smashed in the trees near the autobahn. So I couldn't have gone back to the motel or checked in at any hotel in Linsdorf or Hanover or anywhere at all, looking like this. There was no safe-house because I was working with prescribed cover: Walter Martin attached to Accidents Investigation Branch temporary overseas location Weserbergland Federal Republic Germany. The A.I.B. was an official organization in the pursuit of lawful business in cooperation with a foreign government and if anything irregular happened to Walter Martin the A.I.B. must be protected from any consequences. The Bureau would want to take care of this situation before it could get out of hand so I had to tell Ferris as soon as I could. The trouble was that I'd blown my own cover and couldn't go near the Linsdorf base or the A.I.B. unit
or Ferris himself. I'd had to find a bolt-hole and go to ground and this was the only place but I couldn't tell her that.

  'I needed you,' I said.

  'People don't need me.'

  She meant Franz didn't 'I had an accident.'

  She let herself laugh suddenly. 'Did you?'

  The Special Uses sheepskin coat was ripped and one shoe was loose, split right across. I didn't know what my face looked like but the wound in my hand had been opened up and they were both caked with earth.

  Another clear sequence began and I sat with it as if I watched a film: the trees coming up in a wave at great speed as the car lurched into a slow roll, still airborne and then hit rubble and plunged with the headlights turning the scene into an abstract kaleidoscope pattern of black and white, the trees winter-bare and resembling a gigantic stack of driftwood bursting and hurled against the windscreen, the percussion of wood on metal and glass and the white hail as the screen went, the scene revolving slowly at first until it was upside down and then jerking as the saplings bent under the onslaught and sent the car sideways and straight and sideways again-and pitching lower into the undergrowth while the momentum was broken against stripped white bark and I kept my knees jack-knifed and my feet on the crash-cushion, the reek of fuel from a torn pipe and sometimes the glow of the moon spinning through black branches and always the bite of the straps holding my body back while my head's own weight dragged at the neck and tried to break it. Everything suddenly still.

  'Don't worry,' I said again.

  'I was scared.'

  'I know.'

  'You didn't recognize me, I mean.'

  'I do now.'

  She slid off the chair and knelt in front of me and I made to touch her face to reassure her but my hand was scabbed with dried blood and she was clean and young and fragile in the aureole of the street's light and I took my hand away.

  'Do you need a doctor?'

  'No. Why were you crying?'

  'I was thinking about Paul and I suppose I went to sleep. It was late when you phoned. Paul Dissen. You know it was his plane today? He — '

  'Yes.'

  'He got mixed up in my dream, half himself and half Franz, it was grotesque. Dead, of course,' She got up and looked helpless for a moment, floating in the light from the window, aimless. 'He's always dead when I dream about him. I'll fetch some water.'

  I decided to recognize the fact that retrograde amnesia was blocking off part of the past. I didn't want to telephone Ferris until I could give him the whole thing. I remembered most of the post-crash sequence, leaving the N.S.U. and finding an emergency phone and later going down through the trees again and reaching the secondary road and stopping a truck, waving a handful of deutschmarks in the glare of his lights. But I didn't know why I had crashed the N.S.U. because the retrograde kick covers a period of anything up to fifteen minutes prior to concussion and the last thing I could remember was a man at an Esso station saying if it rained later tonight the roads would freeze. I said I didn't think it would rain because the moon was too clear.

  It happens with a lot of people — drivers, airline pilots — and there's nothing they can do about it when there's an enquiry: they just 'don't remember what happened'. It is why Stirling Moss couldn't explain what made him crash. The memory traces need time to consolidate and store experience and if the head gets a blow it's like tapping a bowl of sand just after someone has drawn figures on it with a stick: it smooths over.

  She was bathing my hands. I could have done it for myself in the bathroom but she'd got it all set up with towels on the carpet and hot water in the bowl and I didn't stop her because playing dolls would help her to deal with the fright and bewilderment: she'd been dreaming about Paul-Franz being dead and then I'd come through the doorway and fallen flat on my face with delayed shock and it must have been hard for her to take.

  'I never see him in a plane or in a wreck or anything. You'd think I would.'

  'Yes.'

  She had a whole plastic bag of cotton wool and tore bits off it the wrong way, tugging at it and not getting anywhere. 'I see the funeral, men in black with pale faces I can't recognize. It's always a civilian funeral, I suppose because that's the only kind I've ever seen, my mother's, with big black cars and flowers. And all the time I'm thinking about the plane — it's made another widow and this time it's me.'

  There had been a boy washing the windscreen of the N.S.U. He'd asked about the engine, if it ran well. The edge of the blank area was somewhere there: at the Esso station.

  'You'll mess yourself up, Nitri.'

  The water was red-brown in the bowl. She nodded and went to change it. I got up and followed her because this needed an entire bathroom and anyway I wanted to see if anything had happened to my face. But there must have been some kind of memory trace in the subconscious: the moment the N.S.U. had come to rest with the front lodged at an angle between two trees I'd snatched at the buckle and thrown the straps clear, kicking at the driver's door and finding it was jammed solid, dragging myself through the white fragmented windscreen and slitting a shoe on the frame. There was a branch in the way and my coat was catching but I forced myself through the gap with my scalp shrinking and goose-flesh everywhere: there was some kind of fear driving me on, pushing me through a gap that would have been impossibly small if the fear hadn't given me the strength. Not quite fear: a kind of dread.

  'I'll make you a tourniquet from something.' The water span red in the basin.

  Full consciousness hadn't come back until I'd felt the telephone cold in my hand. The concussion would have left me trapped inside the wreck: i t was the dread that had taken over. I had known that unless I could get away from the wreck, something would come for me there. Even when I'd finished talking to her on the emergency phone there was no let-up: a car was slowing along the autobahn and I dropped down the earth bank and clawed my way through bramble and gone on across a knoll of trees. At one time headlights had swung through the higher branches as if a car were being turned, and the frost glittered on the dead leaves underfoot. Then there was the truck, much later, on the minor road, and my hand full of deutschmarks, waving.

  The data was limited enough but it would have to do.

  She was watching me in the mirror. My face wasn't too bad now that I'd rinsed off the earth. I'd obviously fallen somewhere or gone down the bank from the autobahn face first.

  There's a doctor in this block.' She was impatient, annoyed at r her own sense of helplessness. 'There's nothing I can do for you.' I said: 'I need a phone.'

  Code-intro for the mission was sapphire needle and we cleared on it and didn't bother with anything else because it was fool-proof: if one of us were under duress we'd slip in the alarm-phrase and take it from there. The only danger was from bugging but he was very good on security and no one could have known I'd show up here.

  'I've blown my cover.'

  'All right.' There was sleep still in his voice but he'd said it straight away and I knew there'd been no need for any kind of code-intro because only Ferris would say 'all right' without hesitation when you phoned him three hours before dawn to tell him a thing like that. It wasn't the work involved that would upset him — all I wanted were some new papers and something to drive in — but the background inference: you don't blow your own cover unless you've got into a very dodgy position. 'How soon can you fix me up?'

  'It depends where you're going.'

  'Nowhere special.'

  She had gone into the bedroom and shut the door but she could listen through it if she wanted to and I thought she probably would because the normal thing to do when you've had an accident is to call round at the nearest hospital for bandages and I'd shown up here and fallen all over the floor.

  'What happened,' he asked. The sleep had gone from his voice. I didn't answer right away and he said: 'We're all clear.'

  The throbbing across the shoulders and chest had set in again because I was standing up. The international-standard belt is designed to take 3
0g's and the one in the N.S.U. must have absorbed nearly that amount of load and it was a wonder the slack hadn't whiplashed the buckle free. The only thing it hadn't done was to keep my head off the body-shell above the windscreen and the only reason there wasn't any blood was because the visor was padded.

  'They got at the contact'

  'I see.'

  I felt vaguely sorry for him. He'd told me that London wanted to know fully urgent who made contact with Lovett. For a moment I expected him to order a rendezvous. He'd have to do an awful lot of chasing about in the next few hours trying to help London deal with the blown cover thing and he'd probably go down to Linsdorf himself to stop any flap inside the A.I.B., but when half a mission hangs on a stable cover and the other half on getting a contact across and the cover's blown and the contact's dead it's reasonable for the director to ask for a meeting person-to-person if only so that he can tread on his agent's face.

  I waited till he said something else. Five minutes ago he'd been asleep and now he was having to do a lot of thinking. And there was the third thing I had to tell him and I didn't want to do it until he'd had a chance to stop reeling.

  'Where are you?'

  'Where I was last night.'

  On the other hand there is always a risk in meetings. The agent is usually infectious: there are tags at his back or trying to trace him or set up a trap and if he's seen making a contact it exposes the director. They are not two members of a team: they are strictly departmentalized. The agent is a bit of clockwork on the floor and when it hits something or turns over the director's hand comes down and sets it going again on a straight course unless it's broken in which case he throws it away and sends for another one. An agent can go through a mission and be set running again through another one and if he's lucky they can use him half a dozen times before they have to plug him with platinum tubing and bone-rivets or reach for the next-of-kin form. Bu t the director is a career man, a white-collar manipulator who keeps his nails clean, stacking up mission after mission till they pension him off to prune roses.