by Henry Porter
Eva made room for herself and sat by his bed, one hand touching his head, the other holding his hand. The nurses kept throwing glances in Eva’s direction, trying to gauge her reaction. The respirator groaned and clicked with its usual rhythm, but from Tomas there came a new noise, a rattle, almost a bubbling sound, from his chest, which the doctor said had been drained but was already refilling with liquid. Harland looked down at his son’s wasted limbs and then at the little knot of concentration in his forehead.
‘He’s exhausted,’ said the doctor. ‘His reserves are very low indeed.’ This was aimed at Eva – a warning that she should expect the worst. ‘The infection took hold late last night. We gave him some powerful antibiotics. But he was obviously in great pain and we have relieved that with diamorphine. The problem is that his defences are down, plus his stomach is reacting badly to the antibiotics.’
Eva took no notice. Her eyes were fastened on the clear plastic mask over his mouth and nose. Harland touched her on the shoulder and said he was going out. He went to find The Bird, who had made himself comfortable by a coffee machine and was absorbed in a nursing journal. He looked up and smiled sympathetically.
‘It’s not good news, is it?’
‘No,’ said Harland leadenly, ‘I’m afraid it isn’t.’
‘Terrible for you, old chap. I’m dreadfully sorry for you both.’
‘Thank you,’ said Harland, for no reason thinking back to the Embankment and the sudden shocking grief he’d experienced while waiting for the ambulances to arrive.
‘Well, at least you won’t be able to hare off to the bloody Balkans,’ he said. ‘No good can come of that.’
‘Yes, but it means that the evidence that Griswald and Tomas wanted to make public will be destroyed. Their work – their sacrifice – will be wasted. That does matter, Cuth.’
The Bird considered this. ‘Look at it this way. They both did a lot to expose the links between Kochalyin and our former colleagues. There’s going to be a dreadful stink when this gets into the system.’
‘Yes, I suppose so, but it doesn’t do anything to get Kochalyin.’
‘But what on earth can you do? Running off to some godforsaken mountainside in Bosnia with your Sureshot camera is not going to help.’
Harland didn’t argue.
Half an hour later, Dr Smith-Canon appeared and said he wanted to speak to Harland and Eva. It wouldn’t take long, but it was important.
They went into his office.
‘I’m not going to beat around the bush with you both,’ he said. ‘The situation is very serious. We might just be able to save him but it’s going to take everything we’ve got and even then we won’t know how long he’ll last.’
Eva nodded dully.
He waited. ‘You do understand what I’m saying?’
She nodded again.
‘We have your son’s wishes on record. You believe those are still his wishes?’
Without speaking she turned to the door. Smith-Canon searched Harland’s face for clarification. He nodded and followed Eva back to Tomas’s room. She settled by Tomas’s side again, and Harland stood behind her, holding her shoulder.
Tomas could feel very little. There was some small part of him that was making decisions and taking things in and communicating these things to the centre of his being. It was like a voice on a bad telephone line, becoming fainter. He knew that he was fading with it. What more was there to say? He was going and soon he would not be having these conversations with himself.
It wasn’t like this the first time. He had no sense of the definite surroundings of the coma. There was no stairway, no damp walls, and no warm place at the bottom where he could rest. But his mind was full of something – tiny firings of light and flickers of memory. They didn’t added up to much and he was tired of them.
One more time. He would open his eyes one more time and see who was there. It was difficult but he managed it, and when he focused he saw that his mother was very close to him. She looked so distraught that he almost didn’t recognise her. He saw Harland too, leaning forward into his field of vision. They were standing together – mother and father. That was good.
She spoke in Czech, which was a relief: he couldn’t handle anything else. She was saying how much she loved him and she wanted him to fight and struggle and beat the illness so they could go home together. She said she knew he could do it. He smiled to himself. She used to say that when he was small – she knew he could do it. But this time he couldn’t. He’d done his best and he was going to have a sleep.
He closed his eyes. Then there was noise in the room. Raised, angry voices. He felt the bed move. What was going on? He couldn’t be bothered to find out. No, he was tired and he was going to have a sleep.
The commotion started in the corridor. Harland heard Smith-Canon and The Bird’s voice rebuking someone. There were other voices. He didn’t turn towards the door because he knew the moment was near. Tomas had opened his eyes and gazed at Eva with pinprick pupils, then shut them with a flutter. The monitor on the other side of the bed had been showing an increasingly irregular heart beat.
A few seconds later the noise spilled into the room. Harland whipped round to see Vigo still in his overcoat march towards the computer stand which had been pushed against the wall. Smith-Canon came in followed by two other men who he realised must be Special Branch officers.
‘Do you hear me?’ hissed Smith-Canon, snatching at Vigo’s sleeve. ‘My patient is dying! You have no right to be here. You must leave now.’
Vigo’s face was set with purpose.
‘This won’t take long. We just need the machine. That’s all.’
Harland leapt up, pushing the bed away from him, and placed himself between Vigo and the computer.
‘Get the hell out of my son’s room, Walter.’
The other men forced their way past him and began unplugging the computer and detaching the electrodes which still dangled from the stand. Harland swung round to them.
‘Have you no sense of what you’re doing?’ he demanded.
Harland glanced at the monitor beside Tomas, then at Smith-Canon who had moved forward and stood shaking his head by the bedside. Eva lifted Tomas’s hand to her cheek, closed her eyes and silently fell forward on to his chest.
In that moment it occurred to Harland that Tomas had not left him, but had simply withdrawn to a distant level of existence. It seemed possible that a body which had been all but lifeless for the past few weeks might still harbour a trace of him and that he’d make himself known as miraculously as he had done before. As if he had read these thoughts, Smith-Canon leaned over and turned the respirator off. The noise of the machine subsided and the gentle rise of Tomas’s rib cage stopped. Harland moved to Eva’s side and touched her lightly on her back, then felt Tomas’s arm. It was already cold. He had gone.
Vigo hesitated a few seconds longer, then nodded to the men who had picked up the computer and its leads.
‘I take it you have some kind of authority to do that,’ said The Bird with deceptive mildness from the door.
‘The Official Secrets Act,’ replied Vigo, and left.
30
FLIGHT
An hour passed during which a startlingly bright day broke outside and the sounds of the city going to work reached their ears.
The room itself was silent and heavy with Eva’s grief. Harland stayed with her for about half an hour but guessed she’d want to be alone with Tomas. He slipped out to find Smith-Canon and thank him for all he had done. On the way back to the room, he was approached from behind by one of the two Special Branch officers who had been waiting a little way down the corridor. The officer, a young man with sunken cheeks and a blond moustache, informed him that he and Eva should consider themselves under arrest.
Harland looked at him with disbelief.
‘If I were you,’ he said, ‘I’d make sure that I had that instruction from the very highest level, because one word from me, and the whole of this
business goes to the press. Now fuck off.’
‘We have our orders, sir.’
‘Nevertheless,’ said Harland fiercely, ‘you tell them that any discussions we have will be on our own terms. And during that meeting Mrs Rath will be treated with the respect due someone who has just lost their only child.’
With that he turned and went back into the room. Eva looked up. Evidently she’d heard something of the exchange.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘They’re not going to bother you.’
‘What now?’ she asked at length.
‘We must make arrangements,’ he said quietly, looking down at Tomas. ‘I guess we take his body back to your country.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but what are you going to do?’
‘I’m going to Bosnia to get pictures of the site. It’s now or never. Everything will be gone by tomorrow.’ He stopped. ‘I feel I ought to stay with you but …’
She shook her head. ‘No, Bobby, you should go.’
‘I’ll only be away a couple of days.’ He looked into her face. Her eyes were bewildered and shocked.
Half an hour later they left the hospital with the Special Branch officers. Notions of arrest had apparently been suspended – at least temporarily. They were led through a maze of passages near Admiralty Arch at the top of The Mall and into a large room, surrounded with a dado of Victorian ceramic tiles and hung with paintings of naval battles. A band of sunlight fell from the window across the centre of the room and heated the floor polish, giving the air a faint odour of resin and leather and a sense that the room was left over from an era of gaslights and plumed helmets. An odd place for Vigo to choose, thought Harland.
He sat with three other men in a crescent beside a conference table covered with a blanket of green felt to protect its surface. Harland guessed that two of them were from MI5 and he assumed the third was either from the Foreign Office or was a colleague of Vigo’s from MI6.
Vigo motioned them to two chairs and then pulled his own slightly nearer the table.
‘We all know what we are here for,’ he said, without looking up. ‘We’re here to establish exactly what other allegations are going to be made in these transmissions.’
Harland coughed. ‘But surely you have everything you need in the computer that you seized in the hospital.’
‘The computer had a number of concealed files that destroyed themselves when they were opened.’ His eyes had risen from a blank notepad and were levelled at Eva. ‘Tomas had learned something since we last took his computer away from him. Or perhaps that was your work, Irina? He plainly could not have done all this without your help. We also fully understand that the additional information which has been released in the last nine hours must have come from you. So, it is our urgent purpose to learn what else is going to come out. The Government needs to respond to this mess.’
Eva shook her head. ‘It was my son’s work,’ she said simply.
‘You must have helped him in the hospital?’
‘Why are you so hot under the collar, Walter?’ said Harland, seeking to draw the fire. ‘All the material has been used before.’
Vigo leaned forward so that his shoulders and chest merged into one uniformly grey bulk. ‘I don’t think either of you quite understands the gravity of your position.’
‘Nor you yours,’ Harland shot back.
One of the two men that Harland had pegged as MI5 sighed. He had been studying Harland closely, as if watching for adverse character traits in a psychometric test.
‘I mean it,’ Harland insisted. ‘For once your systematic hypocrisy has been exposed – spying on allies, using a war criminal to transport arms while paying lip service to his arrest and prosecution. It’s going to come out.’
‘We understand you were threatening to give this to the press,’ said the Foreign Office type.
‘Yes, when one of your police officers said he was there to arrest us. But as you know, I have had no access to the transmissions. I still have only a vague idea of their exact nature. So I’m hardly in a position to publicise it, am I?’
‘However, Irina, you are,’ said Vigo. ‘Did you make copies of what Tomas has been putting out?’
She shook her head.
Vigo looked sceptical and returned to Harland.
‘But the fact that you were prepared to make the threat underlines our fears. Only yesterday we had your word that your report would be taken no further and that its circulation would be limited to those who already have it. You appear to have abandoned that undertaking.’
This was all said with moderation, but Harland had no illusions about Vigo’s intention. He was making the case for his colleagues, pointing up Harland’s unreliability, his hot-headedness.
‘You forget,’ he said in an equally measured tone, ‘that I am a servant of the United Nations. I work for the Secretary-General. I cannot therefore be subject to the interest of one state above all others. Of course this affair is embarrassing for you, but the fact remains that a man who had been indicted by the War Crimes Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia was working for you and the Americans. As a permanent member of the Security Council, Britain signed the resolution to establish the tribunal and is legally obliged to support its work. The same goes for the US. But both countries have done the opposite. Whoever set up Kochalyin’s assassination in Bosnia is no longer of any real interest. What is relevant, however, is that Kochalyin relied on you from the winter of ’96, ’97 onwards. I accept that you were not responsible for this, Walter, but that’s too bad. You’re carrying the can for the flexible morals of your friends.’
‘You have no proof that he has been used by either us or the Americans,’ Vigo stated.
‘Perhaps no direct proof, but if the facts were laid out about the crash and the faked assassination, together with all the other material – the pictures and so forth – then I’m sure people would draw the right conclusions.’
Harland had realised a while back that what they were worried about was the potential alchemy between his report and Tomas’s transmissions. If the coded material ever reached the public domain, it would be denied by all concerned as a work of fantasy. But a UN report, commissioned by Jaidi, which supported some of the allegations, would lend credibility to the rest.
Vigo’s attention flicked back to Eva.
‘Of course, this is not quite the issue of high principle that you claim it to be – is it?’
She didn’t respond.
‘Irina, we know your son was involved in the murder of those Muslims – he admits it in the coded material of last night and he has apparently given the same statement to Harland.’
‘How do you know that?’ asked Harland, alert to the possibility that his e-mails had been read.
‘Because he included it at the end of the last transmission and said as much. Was this his last word?’
‘Yes,’ Eva said. ‘He was taking responsibility for his actions before he died. But it was not his fault. They forced him to kill that man.’
‘As indeed he makes plain in his little account of the incident,’ said Vigo with indifference. ‘Was it his way of signing off? I mean, was this how he planned to finish the entire transmission?’
She looked up and nodded slowly. ‘Yes, there’s nothing more.’
‘Good,’ said Vigo. ‘Then we know what we’re dealing with and can plan our response. As to the report, I take it that your assurance of yesterday still stands?’
Harland didn’t answer because he was puzzled by the sudden fading of Vigo’s concern.
‘Let me remind you,’ Vigo continued, ‘that you agreed not to distribute it further and that you would not add to it. I hope you’re clear that you will both feel the full force of the state if you go against your word. So do I have your assurance?’
Harland shrugged. ‘If that means you will leave Eva and me alone, then yes.’
‘Our business here this morning is therefore concluded,’ said Vigo. ‘You may now leave. We don’t
expect to be in touch again, unless we learn that you’ve broken your agreement.’
Harland knew perfectly well that their business was nowhere near concluded. For Vigo, closure would only be achieved when he and his report had been neutralised.
They left the room and after retracing their route back through the dismal corridors, they broke into the sunlight of The Mall. He put his arm round her shoulder.
‘I think we should go and sort things out at the hospital.’
‘Yes, then you will go to Bosnia. I’ll come with you.’
‘You want to?’
‘Yes,’ she said. She had understood what the meeting had been about all right.
Later, at Century House, they were met by The Bird who had piled some anoraks and boots by the entrance to the lift. He greeted them with a cavalier look dancing his eyes.
‘You’ve missed the flight to Vienna which connects to Sarajevo this afternoon,’ he said. ‘There’s no point going to Zagreb because there isn’t a connection to Sarajevo until tomorrow. So I’ve made other arrangements. A charter firm we use is sending a plane to Athens tomorrow to pick up a party of shippers. They’re happy to send the plane to Sarajevo en route. But there are three conditions: you pay for the landing charges and a tank of fuel, you give the driver a steaming great tip, and you take me along for the ride.’ He searched their faces for a reaction. ‘I know some people in Sarajevo.’
‘When did you ever go to Sarajevo?’
‘Never, but one meets people hither and thither. I gather it’s crawling with chaps pretending to their wives they’re reconstructing Bosnia when all they’re doing is banging Balkan beauties.’
‘I know the type.’
‘You are the type,’ said The Bird, looking down at the mound of clothes and boots. ‘Okay? Right, let’s shift this kit down to the car. We’ve got to be at Blackbush airport in under an hour. Oh, by the way, I’ve got a good digital camera so you don’t have to bother with that.’
