A momentary pause. The door closed, the chain was slipped and it opened again, wider. Harry stepped cautiously out into the corridor. The waiter caught sight of him and frowned. Then Harry lunged into the doorway in front of him, flinging the door wide and swinging round to meet
“You.” The door rebounded from its stop and jogged his shoulder as he stared in astonishment.
“Well? Who did you expect?”
“But they said… Bill Cornford had…”
“The champagne was a really nice idea, Norman.” Donna gave him an exasperated smile. “Why don’t you come in and help me drink it?”
THIRTY-SIX
“What the hell did you expect me to do?” demanded Donna as she paced the plush-carpeted length of the room in voluminous to welling bathrobe and matching mules, hair still damp and face flushed from the shower she had been taking when the champagne arrived. “You and Woodrow had both vanished. Anything could have happened. I couldn’t just sit in Baltimore and wait for you to call.”
“I might have aged less rapidly if you had.”
“Bad luck. If you’d called me, you’d have got the message I left for you. Then Wilhelmina Cornford wouldn’t have come as such a big surprise.”
“I didn’t want to worry you.”
“Silence was worrying.”
“Sorry. I just needed time to work out what to do.”
“Pity you didn’t put it to better use. Woodrow’s right. We have to postpone.”
“How can we?”
“We don’t have a choice. We get one shot at this. Just one. Sending you in single-handed isn’t the way to do it.”
“Nor is giving Lazenby an opportunity to smell a rat.”
“He won’t. Not in a week. And that’s all Woodrow needs, doesn’t he?”
“So he reckons. But he’ll be in plaster. On crutches. Maybe in a wheelchair. What happens if something goes wrong and we need to make a run for it?”
“Jesus, I don’t know. Why did he have to fall down the stairs in the first place?” She made a despairing gesture with her hands and turned towards the curtained window. “It’s all going wrong. All falling apart. That’s the truth.”
Harry had thought the same. But this was not the time to say so. If Donna suspected that going back into hiding was now the only sensible thing to do, it was not a suspicion he could afford to echo. For David’s sake and his they had to go on. Without delay. “Have some champagne,” he said, filling her glass. “You may as well.”
Donna sighed. “Champagne,” she murmured. “You crazy fool, Harry.” She walked over, took the glass and sat down on the sofa beside him. “You really would go through with this, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“But you’re not going to.”
“Aren’t I?”
“Phone Globescope in the morning and call it off.”
“Are you sure you want me to?”
She half-smiled. “I’m sure I don’t want you to. The thought of ending all this running and hiding. The thought of it being over by this time tomorrow. Can you imagine how attractive that is? But I can’t let you do it. I can’t let you take the risk.”
“Why not?”
“Because the odds have changed. And you don’t owe us enough to gamble on them. In fact, you don’t owe us anything at all.”
“David does.”
“And you reckon you owe him, do you?”
“I reckon I must. Fathers don’t come much more neglectful than me.”
“But you didn’t know you were a father.”
“That’s no excuse.”
Donna sipped her champagne and gazed at him thoughtfully. “Do you have any other children?”
He grinned self-consciously. “Not that I know of.”
“Ever been married?”
“I am married. Technically. But it’s not what you’d call a love match.”
“Has there ever been a love match?”
Forced to survey the emotional desert of his middle years, Harry shrugged. “No. There hasn’t.”
That’s what you’re looking for, isn’t it? All this about debts,
duties and paternal obligations is just… camouflage. It’s love you’re after. Human warmth. An end to loneliness.”
“I’m not lonely.” Even as he spoke the words, he was aware of their hollowness. Donna was closer to the mark than he would have thought their brief acquaintance had made possible.
“Yes you are. I know the signs.”
“From personal experience?”
“Maybe. But let’s not talk about me.”
“Why not? You’re more interesting than I am.”
“Not seen from over here. I’m just a straightforward neurotic-obsessive scientist. Childless feminist and lapsed Lutheran. It’s a well-worn groove. Whereas you’re… unclassifiable. A genuine puzzle. Just too sensitive, too intelligent, too stubborn to be the ambition less nonentity you claim to be. A few years ago, you were a drunken pot man in a Greek taverna. So how come you’re capable of even trying to play the white knight with a rusty sword? What have you done with your life in the meantime?”
“It’s thrown me a few challenges.”
“And you measured up to them?”
“Most people wouldn’t think so.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m curious. Because you want to know about me and David and I’m willing to trade. Because whatever we decide to do it can’t be done till morning and I don’t want to spend the whole night arguing about it.”
“Then don’t argue. I’ll go back to my room. We could both use some sleep, I expect.”
“Is that what you want to do?”
“No.” The one word admitted a shared wish: a relief from solitude; a lowering of the de fences “I don’t want to leave. You know that.”
“Do I? I’m not sure what I know any more. All these months… Running and hiding… Christ, so long I’ve almost…” She was convulsed by a sudden wrenching sob. Instinctively, Harry reached out to comfort her and she fell against him, her shoulders heaving.
“It’s OK,” he said, sliding his arm around her. “It really is OK.”
“I’m sorry.” She pulled back, dabbing at her damp cheeks with the cuff of her robe. “This is so … so very stupid.”
“No. Just human.”
“I’ve had to judge every move. Measure every risk. Pretend for
Makepeace’s sake even Rawnsley’s, I suppose that I really am in control.” The tears were flowing freely now. And she was making no attempt to staunch or conceal them. “But I’m not. Am I?”
“You’re as much in control as anyone else.”
“And how much is that?”
Harry risked a smile. “Hardly at all.”
She laughed through her tears. “You’re such a fool, Harry. Such a dear sweet fool. If only David could have known.”
“Maybe he still can.”
“Maybe.” She wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand and smiled back at him. “Here, now, with you, at this moment … I almost believe he will.”
THIRTY-SEVEN
For a second, when Harry woke and glimpsed the first grey fingers of dawn pr ising between the curtains, he was uncertain where he was. Kensal Green? Copenhagen? Dallas? No. Suddenly, as he turned slightly on the pillow and saw Donna asleep beside him, realization and recollection collided. He closed his eyes and sighed. It had seemed such a natural progression at the time, from giving comfort to sharing pleasure. But what had seemed then simply too good to be true seemed now altogether too complicated for comfort. An accusatory voice of middle-aged responsibility whispered in his ear: “You’re old enough to be her father, Harry. What would your son say if he knew? How would you explain it to him? How would you justify it?”
It was clear to him now. She had been, in some curious way, entrusted to him. And he had abused that trust. She had endured more than two months of a fugitive existence, guarding her tongue, stifl
ing her anxieties, bottling up her emotions. It was understandable that the dam should eventually burst. He had merely been there when it had. And he had been lonely and fearful in his own right. But he should still have had the sense the maturity to foresee and avert the consequences of surrendering to his instincts and allowing Donna to surrender to hers. They were obvious now. As obvious as they were disturbing.
It had been a night of mental as well as physical intimacy. A meeting of minds as well as a joining of bodies. Harry had told Donna more of the truth about himself than he had divulged to any other living soul. And Donna had been similarly revealing about herself.
Born in Seattle thirty years ago, the youngest of three daughters of an aeronautical engineer, Donna, like so many of Globescope’s victims, had been an academic prodigy, absorbed into the hothouse world of scientific research just as computers were making that world their own. From the Neurosciences Institute in New York, where she had cut her teeth on the quest to create artificial intelligence, she had gone on to teach at Berkeley. There, during a conference about the definition of consciousness, in the fall of 1990, she had met David Yenning. Their immediate and mutual attraction had foundered on Donna’s fallacious assumption that David loved his wife. When they had met again, at Globescope two years later, David and Hope were in the throes of a divorce. It soon became apparent that he had recommended Donna to Lazenby as a suitable recruit partly in order to renew their acquaintance, which had swiftly ripened into love. They had set up house together. They had planned to marry. They had talked about children. They had been happy. And then, just when David’s divorce made it possible for them to implement their plans, something had gone wrong. A rift over scientific theory had articulated for Donna her suspicion that David thought his intellectual potential necessarily greater than hers, that motherhood and domesticity would win for him the arguments he might otherwise lose. Complicated by the brewing confrontation with Lazenby, their relationship had fallen apart. She had moved into an apartment of her own. They had ceased to understand each other, even though a form of armed truce had enabled them to continue working together.
Then the crisis at Globescope had broken and made their differences irretrievable. David must have seen his secret deal with Lazenby as a way of proving his point once and for all: proving himself cleverer and subtler than Donna while saving her from herself. The collapse of their relationship and the reasons for it seeped into his fateful decision to betray her along with the others.
And there, for Harry, was the harshest rub of all. He was supposed to be helping his son, not seducing the woman his son had loved. This was worse than desertion. This was dereliction. How, if David recovered, would Harry explain it to him? How would he make it sound other than shameful?
It was his fault and nobody else’s. Donna would say otherwise,
of course. She would say that what had happened between two frightened lonely people required no explanation and conferred no blame on either party. She would be as gently realistic as Harry suspected she always was. But she would be wrong. Because realism had been overtaken by the tangled reproaches of Harry’s past. From a house in Swindon to a hotel room in Washington, across thirty-four years during which he should so often have known better, the thread stretched taut. But it did not break.
Decisiveness came to him then, undisguised as certainty. When Donna woke, she would try to talk him into calling off his appointment with Lazenby. And she was so tenderly reasonable that she might well succeed. Even if she failed, Harry would be left playing the part of her heroic protector, which was the worst possible way of ensuring that what had begun last night did not continue. The answer was clear. He must not be there when she woke. He must not be near her till his business with Lazenby was settled.
Slowly, he slid out of his side of the bed, uttering a silent prayer of thanks for the high quality springing of the Hay-Adams’s mattresses. Donna stirred faintly, but did not wake. Looking down at her, sleeping the sleep of peaceful exhaustion, one arm and a smooth-skinned flank exposed by the flung-back sheet, he shook his head in regret.
He dressed swiftly and cautiously, watching her all the time. But her eyelids did not so much as flicker. She slept on, unaware. When he was ready to go, he felt a sudden impulse to kiss her forehead, clear and cool and unfurrowed as it was beneath the ruffled fringe of her hair. But he resisted. This leave-taking was between him and his conscience only.
He moved to the door, eased it open, stepped out into the corridor and closed the door softly behind him. He paused in case there should be a tell-tale noise from within, a puzzled murmur of “Harry, where are you?” But there was nothing. With a nod of satisfaction, he walked along to his own room and made as surreptitious an entrance as he had just made an exit.
He stripped, showered and shaved hurriedly, then put on the clothes he had kept back for the challenge this day held. Within twenty minutes, he was on his way, as slickly senatorial in appearance as he was queasily apprehensive in mood. All was still quiet in the corridor. Silently, he wished Donna a late untroubled waking. Then he headed for the lift.
Downstairs, businessmen’s breakfasts were being wordlessly consumed in the restaurant overlooking the park. But hungry as he was, and badly in need of coffee, Harry did not linger any longer than it took to extract directions from the concierge to Globescope’s offices at 25 Dupont Circle. “Time spent in reconnaissance,” Right Sergeant Hughes had never tired of telling him during his R.A.F career, ‘is seldom wasted.” And Harry had plenty of time to put to use.
He headed north along 16th Street, west along K, then northwest up Connecticut Avenue, straight as an arrow towards Dupont Circle, past shops and offices not yet open for business, knots of commuters stamping their feet at bus stops, hooded joggers flexing their muscles against fire hydrants, ragged down-and-outs emerging from their cardboard nightclothes. The city stretched and yawned around him, sniffing dubiously at the dan kish day. It paid him no heed. And he returned the compliment.
Dupont Circle lay at the junction of Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Hampshire Avenues. The traffic generated by these three roads surged round a bedraggled cluster of trees and benches, overlooked by an assortment of stylish old Beaux-Arts mansions and sleek new office blocks. The Globescope Building contrived to keep a foot in both camps. Its seven storeys of glass and concrete were clearly modern, but its mansard roof, intricate pedimenting and mock balconies paid architectural homage to the past. For the headquarters of an organization that concerned itself with the future, it seemed curiously ambivalent about which direction it was looking in.
Harry surveyed it from the crowded refuge of Starbucks Coffee Shop, sipping at a cup of scalding espresso and chain-smoking Marlboro cigarettes, which as far as he was concerned the cowboys could keep, while pretending to read a copy of the Washington Post somebody had left on his stool. It was a window-seat, giving him an uninterrupted view across a corner of the park of the Globescope Building’s main door and the shuttered entrance to its underground car park. Two or three cars had descended into it since he had taken up this position, their drivers waiting on the threshold for the shutter to be raised, and twenty or so workers of indeterminate status had arrived on foot, using security cards of some kind to open the door. Passers-by were clearly not encouraged to wander in off the street. And the office windows were tinted reflectively to prevent idle glimpses of what went on behind them. The building, at first glance stolidly anonymous, revealed under prolonged scrutiny an air of well-mannered secrecy.
It was not what Harry had expected. And this made his visit to Lazenby’s office that afternoon seem a more uncertain prospect than ever. How was he going to pull it off? Exactly how? With Woodrow riding shotgun, the plan would have been clear. Now there was no plan at all. Just a hopeful bet on Harry’s powers of improvisation.
His gloomy train of thought was suddenly derailed by a snatch of conversation between the man and woman who had occupied the pair of stools beside him. They wer
e dressed in off-the-peg executive garb and were sharing a pre-nine-to-five dose of cappuccino and office gossip. Gossip in this case about a colleague who had died recently in mysterious circumstances, supposedly of a brain haemorrhage.
“Do you really buy that?” the woman asked in a guarded undertone.
“Could be true,” the man muttered back, breaking off to bite open his sugar sachet. “Can’t be healthy to be as cerebrally charged up as he always seemed to be.”
“But it makes four out of seven. I trained as an actuary, Rogerand I have to tell you that’s way off any mortality scale I ever saw.”
“Seven’s an unrepresentative sample. You oughta know that. Anyhow, there are only three actual deaths, so we’re still below fifty per cent’
“Three deaths and one deep coma, if we’re going to be picky. It still stinks.”
“But of what?”
She shrugged. “How should I know?”
“Do you think he could enlighten us?” Roger gestured through the window with his cup as a pale-blue Rolls Royce purred into the circle and tracked slowly round towards Globescope. Reclining in the back seat, with a telephone to his ear, was a broadly built, spiky-haired figure whose eyes virtually matched the paintwork of the car. Recognition hit Harry almost as a physical blow, shocking him into a throat-singeing gulp of coffee. It was the man he had encountered leaving David’s hospital room, the man he had mistaken for a doctor till corrected on the point by a nurse. A colleague of David’s, she had said. Well, maybe that was what he had said. Because colleague was so much simpler than former employer. Simpler and less suspicious.
“How does he stay so cool?” the woman pondered.
“Dunno. Wish I had his secret, though.”
“But which secret? There are so many to choose from.”
The Rolls pulled up in front of the Globescope Building. The chauffeur jumped out and opened the rear door for Byron Lazenby to make his presidential exit. He emerged, faintly smiling, onto the pavement, his telephone call neatly concluded, his suit crease-less and expertly cut to flatter his bulky frame, a slim leather briefcase held lightly in one hand. As the chauffeur drove on to the car park, Lazenby took a deep breath of the damp Washington air, then strode into the building, its door yielding before him, either by magic or the agency of some attentive lackey within.
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