by Jo Bannister
“No,” muttered Grant, but he could not make it sound convincing.
Vanderbilt grinned at him and released his hand. “Pretoria may have had trouble getting the truth out of you, but I bet they always knew when you were lying.”
The undisguised amusement in the big man’s tone stung Joel Grant to anger. With a certain terse dignity that would have surprised his friends, he said, “It’ll be time enough for you to mock me when somebody’s done to you what Pretoria did to me and you’ve come through it better—boy.”
The parting shot was an obvious and deliberate insult, intended and taken as such. Vanderbilt swung instinctively; instinctively Grant flinched away from the broad hand; but at the last possible moment the Boer amended the blow from a punitive slash across the face to an almost friendly swipe across the top of the head, the sort of tap you might give a presumptuous child. Grant was left cringing for nothing: as the anticipation of assault ebbed he felt a tide of humiliation rising through his hollow cheeks.
Vanderbilt watched his discomfiture with half a smile, like a man enjoying a sly joke. But behind the smile, in the place where he did his thinking, he was troubled. If Grant had begged him not to use the drug he would have gone ahead with a clear conscience, confident that the only thing Grant was allergic to was the thought of having to pay for his treachery. He knew that once that needle slid into his vein any hope he might have had of contriving an escape was gone. He did not know his captor, could not know that anyway there would be no chances because Vanderbilt never took any. He must consider that his liberty, and ultimately his survival for he clearly believed that going home would cost him his life—and for all Vanderbilt knew to the contrary he could be right—depended on staying awake now.
But he had not pleaded for his awareness. He had almost said nothing; so nearly nothing that the significance of the swallowed comment could easily have been missed or misunderstood. Vanderbilt was not blind to the possibility that Grant was double-bluffing him—that it was a lie which Grant wanted him to believe, so that having sown the suspicion a feigned attempt to cover it was the best way of ensuring its germination—but there were two objections. The first was that Grant hardly seemed up to that degree of subtlety, and the second that the ground bait was insufficient to guarantee a bite. He was inclined to believe that Grant both thought and hoped the drug would kill him.
There remained the strong possibility that Grant himself was mistaken—perhaps not about his medical condition but about the effect this particular drug would have on it. Pretoria had had him for weeks: plenty long enough for any problem which threatened his successful interrogation to emerge. They would have used drugs; they would know about any hypersensitivity. If Pretoria had given him this compound it was because it was safe. De Witte did not make that kind of mistake.
But maybe Botha did. Vanderbilt did not know. He decided to back his instincts, his skill and his luck, and hold off drugging Grant until he was left with no option. He did not expect it to come to that. He was confident of his ability to manage his prisoner with one hand tied behind his back, whereas in fact the reverse would be the case. There was some risk involved, but there was risk anyway and he had come too far and gone to too much trouble to go home with a corpse.
The decision made, he delayed no longer. He repacked the bag, though he left out the loaded syringe which he put, its needle carefully capped, into a deep pocket of his coat. He unlocked the end of the handcuffs he had fastened to the bedstead, and in a rough parody of dressing a child he pushed Grant’s arms into the sleeves of his raincoat. Grant tried to pull away from him but Vanderbilt tugged him back, without difficulty or rancour, and joined his hands behind him. Then he turned him round and buttoned him up with a grin. “What is it they say here?—That should stop you catching your death.”
With his bag in one hand and the short chain linking Grant’s wrists in the other, towing him backwards through the still house, he made a last tour of the upstairs windows, checking all the angles before he made his move. There was nothing to see: even the distant sheep had wandered to another part of the fell. Except as prompted by the wind, nothing stirred in the overhung lane at the front.
He found himself listening to the house. Its age disconcerted him. He supposed it was a few hundred years old, and unless someone took a bulldozer to it to make room for a motorway it would probably last another few hundred. His country was not as old as this little ordinary stone house; and unless he made a serious on-the-job blunder one day he rather expected to live long enough to witness its demise. The thought caused him sorrow but not despair: he was a practical man, he knew nothing was forever. Not Rome, not Camelot, not South Africa.
But in the meantime he had his work to do, from which not even the gentle remonstrance of the silent house could deflect him. When the time came for Vanderbilt to quit he would do it properly, honourably, face to face over a superior’s desk. He would not cut and run in the middle of a job, however distasteful, however convenient … With a snort of internal laughter Danny Vanderbilt pushed his prisoner towards the stairs, aware that he was paying too much heed to the sententious ramblings of a silent old house.
Joel Grant was also contemplating the age of the house. It had been built at a time when the needs and wishes of the owner rather than the contents of the Town and Country Planning Act dictated the design, and from the way the roof timbers swept down low over the top of the stairs, the first owner was clearly a short man. Vanderbilt, on the other hand, was a tall man. He would of course stoop under the low beam; unless something distracted his attention at the critical moment. Grant, amazed to feel the old dynamic stirring in his veins at the prospect of action, tugged petulantly at his bonds until the Boer tightened his grip on them. Then he launched himself into space.
Afterwards Vanderbilt could hardly believe how completely he was taken aback by the manoeuvre. He was watching for trouble outside, had largely written Grant off as a source of anything more than irritation; even so he could have dealt with the unexpected or explosion of effort if he had not misinterpreted its meaning at the very start. Because of what had gone before, his initial thought—the only one he had time for—was that Grant was still intent on suicide. Rather than let him plummet to his death of a broken neck at the foot of the stairs he hung grimly onto the chain linking Grant’s wrists and let the inertia of his big body act as an anchor.
Before the anchor could bite and hold, however, Vanderbilt had been jerked forward the half metre that was enough to bring his head into sharp contact with the beam. Sick pain burgeoned behind his eyes and he felt his knees go weak; in a jumble that was mostly legs the two men piled down the narrow staircase with Vanderbilt on top. Grant collected more bruises, and for a wrenching moment as he brought the Boer’s weight down on him he thought his shoulders had dislocated, but foreknowledge enabled him to protect his head and when they hit the floor he recovered faster. He kicked and squirmed his way out from under and rolled over one raging shoulder to his feet. Vanderbilt was groping for his senses: Grant kicked him twice in the face to make the search harder—barefoot he made less impression than he might have hoped but the second kick rocketed Vanderbilt’s skull against the thick panel of a sturdy hall cupboard with a satisfying dull report.
Grant waited no longer but took to his heels. The bolt on the back door delayed him only a moment and then he was out into the freedom of an English afternoon. Adrenalin surged in his blood like champagne, but in the bubbles was a renaissance of the fear which had by and large abandoned him when his cause seemed beyond saving. Now he had regained some measure of control over his fate he was terrified of losing it again. He bolted, like a hare, for high ground, past the car and up the green lane that led to the road. Oblivious of the gouging stones under his feet, he did not know he was leaving a blood spore.
At the top of the lane he paused briefly, bent over his heaving chest, then turned left. He did not know where the cottage lay or where he might find help. He knew he needed pe
ople: not one or two, that a man like Vanderbilt would kill cheerfully to cover his tracks, but dozens—a village, a pub, a full bus. He chose left because that way the road fell, whereas to the right it went on climbing—a distinction that mattered not at all to a man in a car but meant everything to one on foot.
Remembering the car warned him of the certainty of pursuit. He did not believe he had put Vanderbilt out of commission for more than a scant few minutes: long before any prospect of help drove up this lonely upland road, Vanderbilt would. Even if he turned the wrong way—if he was dazed enough not to guess that a tired man would want to run downhill—he would come back after a mile. If he stayed on the road Grant was as good as caught; and caught, as good as dead.
The roadside was lined on both sides with stone walling, most of it topped with barbed wire. When he came, still running, bent almost double with a pain like fire in the muscles of his arms, to a place where the rusty wire had broken and coiled back on itself, he rolled over the wall and dropped into its shadow, pressing his back against the stones and his cheek into the wiry wind-flattened turf.
Almost at once he heard the car.
Vanderbilt was pinching his bleeding nose with one hand, steering with the other. He was not driving fast and his big face, though bloody, was calm. He was not so much angry, even with himself, as absolutely intent on rectifying the situation before it could slide beyond salvage.
He came up the green lane without pausing, because there was no other way for Grant to have gone, and at the top he turned down the hill because he knew the running man would be feeling the cramps of exertion by then. From there on, however, he drove slowly and kept a careful watch. He could not guess if Grant would run until his lungs burst, gambling on finding some help or sanctuary in the few minutes his gambit had bought him, or whether he would go to ground. There was plenty of cover, if a man knew how to use it. Grant would: now he would, now that he had started thinking like a soldier again.
Vanderbilt was aware that he had underestimated Grant. Frightened, hysterical, arguably psychotic, he was still the product of a rigorous military training which owed as little to the Marquis of Queensberry as it did to the Geneva Convention. The fact that he had left all that did not mean that it had left him: in his mind he might have retired to a staid and timid civilian existence, but given the right circumstances his body would always react as a soldier’s. Now that Grant knew that too he would be harder to handle. He would also be harder to find.
Vanderbilt drove beyond the furthest point he thought Grant could have reached—he had been badly dazed by the unexpected attack but he had not entirely lost consciousness or an awareness of the passage of time—then turned the car. Then he crept back, studying the fields on both sides, scrutinizing the walls for signs of disturbance and the middle distance for movement. He saw none. On one side there were sheep grazing, their scattered pattern and steady cudding a guarantee that no one had gone that way. On the other side of the road the land fell steeply towards a swift little river swirling brown from recent heavy rain up on the moor.
At intervals of fifty metres Vanderbilt got out of the car and leaned over both walls to check their shadows.
He was almost back at the lane which led to the cottage when, returning to the car from such a sortie, he saw the blood. It was not copious, only a smear he could never have seen from a moving car, but he recognized it at once and knew what it meant. He silenced the car’s engine so that he could listen and turned once more down the hill, on foot, scanning the tarmac surface minutely until he found the spoor again.
He followed the faint trail for perhaps sixty metres and then it ended. On one side were the sheep; on the other the stone wall had lost its crown of barbed wire. With a quiet surge of confidence Vanderbilt vaulted over.
He landed knee-deep in old bracken. Brakes of the wet brown stuff spread dense fingers across the slope. If Grant had burrowed deeply into that lot it could take hours to find him, and Vanderbilt did not have hours to spare. He had a rendezvous with a helicopter less than an hour from now, and first he had to find a suitable landing spot. If he did not recapture Grant in the next thirty minutes he would have to spend a second night in this country, with the police using every extra hour to intensify their search, tighten their grip on the airports and call in the expert assistance of men who had met the De Witte machine before. Vanderbilt had counted on getting his captive out before that degree of mobilization could be organized. Tomorrow would be twice as hard as today, and the day after might be impossible. If they got close enough that he felt breath on his neck he would kill his man and get out like a criminal, in his own time and by a devious route; but if he did that he doubted if he would work again. At least not for De Witte; maybe as a freelance assassin.
He looked down the sodden patchwork field towards the rushing little river and contemplated failure. He could not afford to spend time beating the bracken for a skulking boy he should have had the sense to dope before detaching him from the bedstead. At least if he had died it would have been Pretoria’s mistake, not his.
While he thus ruminated on his predicament another portion of his brain, that area where he was a professional first, last and always, was conceiving of a solution. When he had it a small light kindled in his eye, a small cool smile touched his lip and he climbed back onto the road and fetched the car.
He considered shouting a warning but decided it would be ignored. He drove the car into the stone wall, accelerating all the way.
The impact broke the wall into a hundred tumbling rocks that hit the ground, bounced once or twice and hurtled off down the slope, gaining momentum as they went, crashing a broad swathe through the stands of bracken. Vanderbilt hurdled the rubble and set off in pursuit.
The small avalanche was half-way down the slope and beginning to run out of steam, and Vanderbilt was beginning to worry that his tactic had achieved nothing more than a bit of vandalism—or at the other extreme a silent crush of blood and bones in the flattened bracken. Then, with the noise of the stones like hollow thunder about his ears, Grant’s nerve broke and he struggled up out of the tangle and jerked round to face the danger.
It was a mistake, but by the time he saw that the nearest of the bounding stones would skip by him harmless metres away Vanderbilt had him marked. The big man slowed almost to a saunter behind the dying avalanche. He knew that, chained, Grant could not run anywhere that he could not be overhauled in a few strides. Grant knew it too. Vanderbilt thought the panic was over. He smiled from under his nosebleed. “There you are.”
Joel Grant felt a scream building up inside him. It was like in Pretoria, listening to the footsteps stop outside his door; or maybe worse because of the sanity, the normality, the safety all around. Things like this did not happen in England.
But it was not altogether like Pretoria. In the corridors of small rooms under De Witte’s office there was no freedom, not of body, mind or soul; none of the freedoms that separate life from existence, not even the freedom to die. On this wet northern hillside, though his snatched liberty was restricted in both space and time by the big man bearing down on him, a kind of hope remained. The mounting scream erupted not as sound but as sudden, galvanic movement as he broke for the river.
Vanderbilt raised his voice in complaint. “Grant, for pity’s sake! I can catch you as easily that side of the river as this, only then we’ll both be wet.” Reluctantly he changed up a gear, jog-trotting after the running man.
There was a shallows where the brown water raced spumy over a spit of rock. Grant ran past it, leaping recklessly downstream along the rugged, uneven bank where the river turned dark and fast, hurrying unbroken over the deep smooth bed.
Vanderbilt frowned, wondering why. Then he knew why and he was running too, harder than Grant, the big muscles driving his thick legs like pistons, his broad hands seeming to grapple the air out of his path. There was nothing graceful or fluent about the way he ran; sheer strength gave him speed. He was a scant dozen yards
behind when Grant threw a last, fast glance over his shoulder—in a split second Vanderbilt recognized hatred, fear, resolve and a terrible grim triumph: a compound nothing short of madness—and then he was gone. The river received him with hardly a splash.
For a brief moment trapped air ballooned the fabric of his coat towards the surface. Then it escaped in a silent silver explosion and the dark thing that was the man was rolled down into the turbid race.
Grant made no attempt to find his feet. He had no interest in the far shore. The surging little river, which was even in the deeper reaches just shallow enough to wade breast-high, was plenty deep enough for his purposes. With enough determination a man can drown in a gutter. As he felt the cold current take him he emptied his lungs of the buoyant air and filled his mouth with water. He could taste the acid peat. But for the most fiercely ingrained of human taboos with which the body frustrates the will, he would have breathed it deeply into him, such was his haste to die. His tumbling body collided softly with the muddy bed of the stream and he was rolled along it with relentless energy by the hurrying flood. If he had wanted to he could not have saved himself then.
Vanderbilt, who had no desire to die, paused on the bank just long enough to rid himself of his heavy outer clothing and his shoes. He waded into the icy brown flood some way downstream from where Grant had disappeared. The cold gnawing at his groin made him hiss; under his breath, while he groped through the water, he whispered with vicious monotony, cursing Grant in three languages.
The stretched seconds passed. Only a very few of them now marched between Vanderbilt and failure. Twice he dived, his spread fingers sweeping the silted bed, but he could not see through the brown fog and the strong current tugged him away from his station. Each time he recovered his feet with difficulty, setting his big body against the river, trawling it with wide arms, wholly aware that his best efforts could not stop tons of the opaque brown stuff passing him by with every second, enigmatic, any burden it carried hidden from his gaze. With mounting desperation he wondered if he should submit himself to the current, let it bear him away with its other trophies, in the hope that chance might bring him the prize endeavour denied him.
