THE NIGHT WATCH
Julian Dinsell
© Julian Dinsell 2016
Julian Dinsell has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published 2016 by Endeavour Press Ltd.
“When men shall say peace and safety, then
comes sudden destruction.”
Paul’s Letter to the Thessalonians
“Where does the dark go when the light comes on?”
Kloptik
“I prefer the kind of bullshit you can smell.”
Murphy
Table of Contents
Chapter 1 - Before the Beginning
Chapter 2 - Kloptik
Chapter 3 - Murphy
Chapter 4 - Thornhill
Chapter 5 - Westminster
Chapter 6 - Bach
Chapter 7 - Bermuda
Chapter 8 - Warsaw
Chapter 9 - Jakob
Chapter 10 - Cortexean
Chapter 11 - The Bialystok Road
Chapter 12 - Hamburg
Chapter 13 - The Experiment
Chapter 14 - The Judgement
Chapter 15 - November
Chapter 16 - Galesburg Illinois
Chapter 17 - 44th Street
Chapter 18 - The United States of Paradox
Chapter 19 - Madison Square Garden
Chapter 20 - Noplace, Nevada
Chapter 21 - A Journey East
Chapter 22 - The Cabinet Office, London
Chapter 23 - Washington, DC
Chapter 24 - The Refuge
Chapter 25 - Tribeca, New York
Chapter 26 - Chelsea, London
Chapter 27 - The Hog’s Back
Chapter 28 - Upper East Side, Manhattan
Chapter 29 - Geneva, Switzerland
Chapter 30 - Morristown, New Jersey
Chapter 31 - Golkov
Chapter 32 - The Flight
Chapter 33 - From the Rockies to the Himalayas
Chapter 34 - Helios
Chapter 35 - The Summit
Chapter 36 - The End of the Beginning
Chapter 1 - Before the Beginning
Kloptik was afraid. It was a primitive, animal fear of the kind that sharpens the senses to the limit of endurance. He caught the bitter odour of adrenaline on the palms of his hands as he pulled up the collar of his old overcoat and lowered his head into the freezing wind.
So close to the end of his journey, he had expected that fear would have been left behind. But the terror that had driven him from Central Europe and out across the dark Atlantic pursued him still; down this long, dark, empty American street. His slight body struggled to keep an even pace in the face of ferocious blasts of air. Like a threatening crowd, gusts of frozen air jostled him across the sidewalk and he lurched forward with uneven steps. Litter washed in and out of darkened doorways. Like wet seaweed on a receding wave, an old newspaper wrapped itself around his leg. He tried to shake it free but it clung tenaciously to him and he had to turn his back to the wind to rid himself of it.
His first hour and a half in America had been a shock. He was in one of those parts of the inner city that had been surrendered to the vandals. The fight was over; everywhere graffiti proclaimed the triumph of the new rulers. He did not understand much of what he read but as a scientist his instinct was to analyse and to classify.
It seemed to his central European academic mind that the slogans were in celebration of a culture whose supreme achievement was dereliction. Places that had once been redoubts of family pride – Fink’s Auto Store, The Haven Deli and Mario’s Dry Cleanery – had long since been abandoned. Empty windows framed burnt-out roofs against the night sky. He wondered if anyone would ever live here again. On the crumpled map in Warsaw, he had memorised the walk from the docks to the rendezvous. It looked so simple, so easy to remember. Unlike the tangled city centres of Europe, here the streets were numbered and laid out in a grid pattern. But neither the map nor anything else had prepared him for what looked like a war zone.
As a distraction from the cold, he let the strangeness of such self-inflicted wounds engage his imagination. Was this another ancient Rome? A civilisation that imploded like a supernova and sucked barbarians into its empty core? He sensed that this was different. No foreign enemy had done this. No Mongol horde, no band of Visigoths, not even a Communist conspiracy had destroyed the neighbourhood and driven out the population. There were no answers, only more questions.
Struggling on against the angry cold, he wiped his streaming eyes on the rough sleeve of his coat. Perhaps only a nation of plenty and power could indulge in such destruction? He struggled on, his shallow breath condensing into ice crystals that froze on his moustache. He admitted defeat.
The answer to this bizarre landscape lay buried deep in a way of life foreign to his understanding. Yet the madness of it all was strangely reassuring. It made the warning he carried seem somehow more normal, more believable.
Less than a kilometre. His memory of the map had become distant and anxiety rose as the distance shortened. It was not a simple fear of death; that was a mere detail. It was a fear of losing control, of collapsing under the weight of it all. That was the greatest terror.
Yet somehow part of him retained a strange detachment; a second personality that was a passionless observer of the frightened creature he had become. Over and over, his mind forced his memory to replay the Warsaw experiments. In the terrified faces of the laboratory animals, eyes and ears searching an environment they did not understand, he saw a mirror of himself.
It was then that the numbing wind became a comfort. He let the icy air flow through his mind and it froze his remembrance of what had followed into suspended animation. But the price of an anaesthetised memory was a cold that ate into the soul. His core body temperature was falling rapidly and he knew that he could not go much further.
*
Five blocks away, Murphy was waiting and he was furious. His broad build, heavy features and red hair made his anger seem all the more formidable. A fool’s errand on this night of all nights, he thought. The call from London, two hours earlier, had dragged him away from his son Tad’s graduation party; a heart-warming expression of solidarity in what was often a dysfunctional family.
Murphy bitterly resented the intrusion. There were guests from all over the country: San Diego, Fort Worth and Chicago, even cousin Largo from Virginia. His announcement that he had to leave had left them stunned. None of them understood and some were openly hostile. His wife Mary went into one of her silent stoic moods. It was her way of trying to cope.
She wanted to understand, but a world of urgent secrecy and occasional danger was so far from her own experience of life, that she remained a permanent outsider. They barely spoke as he left the crowded room. In the hallway, Murphy managed a few words with Tad. Short sighted, tall and narrow faced, Tad looked entirely unlike his father. Their physical difference also seemed to describe the emotional distance between them. Even as he spoke, Murphy knew what he said sounded like a platitude, but could think of no better way of putting it.
“Son, you know there’s no place in the world I’d rather be than here tonight.”
Without aggression, Tad asked the obvious question. “Then why are you leaving?”
After their many screaming rows of recent years, Tad’s gentleness was unsettling and it provoked Murphy to have an unusual moment of frankness.
“If I really knew the answer to that, I’d have explained it to your mother twenty-five years ago.”
Now was not the moment for a deep discussion. A Grade Nine call was only one level below a warning of imminent armed attack. He took the car keys from his pocket and moved towards the
door.
“I just have to go, that’s all. If I was any good at self-justification, I’d have been a politician.”
Tad made no reply until Murphy was halfway to the door. Then the dam burst. “I did it for you.” The point did not get home. “The study, the degree and all, I did it for you.”
The rebuke hit Murphy like a freight train. It was the first time he realised how little he understood. Forty years of rigid self-control began to implode and he swallowed hard against the threat of tears.
“Son, we have to talk and I have to go.”
Mary, tall and slender like her son, came into the hallway. Silently she put her arm around Tad’s shoulder and guided him back into the crowded room where he merged into a morass of bright chatter about his future. Largo appeared at Mary’s elbow and asked to use the secure phone in the spare room.
*
Five miles away, on the other side of the river, Kloptik steadied himself against an unlit street lamp. With great effort, he resisted collapsing under the folly of it all. Why was he on his way to meet a man he did not know on a derelict street corner in the hope that it would lead him to the only person in the world he believed he could trust? With one final effort, he pushed himself into the wind and lurched on.
*
Belfast, Berlin, Baghdad, Prague, Potsdam, Riyadh, Hong Kong. Across the world, for a working lifetime, Murphy had waited for frightened fugitives in shadowy places. On this bitter night, he had been in street-craft mode for more than an hour. He stood in a children’s playground, on a vacant lot between two empty apartment buildings.
The meeting point was at an intersection, which formed a jagged frontier between the district that was still inhabited and the wasteland that stretched away to the docks.
In daylight, the bright playtime colours of the playground were the highlight of the block; the flagship of RAD – Residents Against Dereliction – as the action group called itself. In the dark space beyond the children’s swings, Murphy was sufficiently out of the way to avoid casual observation, but had the necessary line of sight to identify the contact. It was something he had done so often that he’d taken up the position almost without thinking. He stood motionless; his only concession to the cold was to move his toes in an attempt to prevent what felt like frostbite. Time, like the air, seemed frozen. Across the river stood the crystal-sharp lights of Manhattan and he felt a distant sense of outrage at how quickly the skyline without the twin towers had again become familiar. But it was impossible to stay angry in this much cold. Bitterness at having to leave home at so important a moment slowly deflated into sullen boredom.
He heard a car several blocks away. It was a battered Cadillac and as it cruised slowly by, he saw that it contained four heavily built black men. Murphy heard the muffled thump of Heavy Metal from inside the car. He stiffened; they seemed to be looking for somebody. He knew Mantoni, in the first-line backup vehicle, would have seen them and he was concerned that he might overreact.
The Cadillac stopped; the occupants seemed to be having an argument. Then, with squealing tyres, it suddenly shot away. Murphy watched the tail lights fade and eventually disappear as the car sped down the hill towards the river. A false alarm; the moment of tension passed, boredom returned and he began to get toothache.
Murphy was not a deep thinker, more of a cheerful cynic; he was everybody’s idea of New York–Irish. From a distance, people often said that he looked and moved like Gene Hackman. Minutes before the call came he was having a loud, good-natured political argument with Largo. “When politicians make public declarations of high ideals they always involve private dealings on some dark street corner. Believe me, I’ve been there.” But there was something more than usually curious about this particular street corner. Who in their right mind would choose this piece of urban desolation, with the unnecessary complication of muggers or even a snatch squad from the Drug Enforcement Agency?
Either it was the work of a complete amateur, or someone was playing a very deep game indeed. He was not to know that he was right on both counts.
Kloptik could no longer feel either his feet or his hands. Two blocks, just two blocks to go. Murphy stood stony-still in half-concealment. The cold was getting dangerous rather than just painful. The hastily snatched Donegal tweed overcoat was a grave underestimate of the temperature. It felt like 20 below and he knew that he would soon have to move.
Then he saw him, a small figure with a jerky stride; even in the poor light it had to be him. As Kloptik slowly came closer, the anxious face, the grey hair and the gaunt eyes were unmistakable. Murphy stepped out of the shadows.
“Welcome to the United States of America,” he said.
The old man was startled and then he felt a surge of relief. He took a step closer and delivered the code word with dignity.
“Kloptik.”
“Great, let’s call a cab.”
Murphy pressed the bleeper in his jacket pocket and the dusty brown Chevy with the hot engine rumbled round the corner of the block. Kloptik was stiff with cold. Like a corpse, Murphy thought as he eased him into the back of the car.
He spoke to the driver. “Tell them they can split, five-minute intervals. Mantoni knows what to do, he’ll tail us, but nobody else through the tunnel, that’s ours.”
It was two thirty a.m. as the three other nondescript vehicles made their devious ways home. Half a block behind, the shadow car kept pace with them.
Murphy felt the pain of frozen limbs coming back to life. He could only guess what the old man was feeling. But Kloptik said nothing and Murphy did not break the silence. It was not until their approach to the tunnel that Kloptik spoke.
“You must appreciate, I am most unsuited to this work. You will listen, I will explain. The old weapons, nuclear, germs, chemicals … all they can do is kill–”
Murphy interrupted sharply. “I don’t collect information, buddy. Just people.”
“But at least I must introduce myself. I am Professor Josef Wolski–”
Murphy cut him short. “I’m only the doorman. It’s my job to take you to the management.”
Kloptik lapsed into frustrated silence as the car sped through the almost empty tunnel beneath the river, a giant catacomb of dirty white tiles; the car’s headlights, bouncing off the fractured reflective surface, strobed across his face.
Murphy thought of fairground ghost-trains when he was a kid and tried to lighten the mood. “Looks like the longest public John in the universe,” he said.
Kloptik said nothing, but he knew he had reached the end of the beginning.
Chapter 2 - Kloptik
The cold wouldn’t go away. Kloptik closed his eyes and waited for the welcome pain of returning circulation, but felt nothing. Not knowing what was ahead, he tried to make sense of what lay behind. At university and in academic life, he excelled. In a kinder age, or if he had been more politically orthodox, he might have been recognised as one of Poland’s most notable contributors to science. He had even become well known in academic circles in the West, and late in the Cold War, during one of the recurring periods of ‘détente’ with America, he had appeared on the cover of Newsweek. The magazine said he was: In the tradition of Marie Curie, who discovered a new element and named it Polonium – for her native land. The parallel was disturbing. Discovery and death were woven together from the very beginning of her work. While the world marvelled at X-ray images of bone beneath flesh, nobody understood that the power that produced them was lethal. Concerning himself, he understood the truth. He had grown used to veneration by his academic peers and, from time to time, the ominous word ‘genius’ had appeared in print. But he knew better. What they saw as an outstanding talent, he knew to be merely uneven development, like that of a physical giant with a mental handicap. Though he possessed a remarkable intellect, he often experienced the emotions of a timid child. To each of his small circle of friends he was a different person. Some knew him as a colleague with a reputation they could never hope to equal,
others perceived him as shy and lonely and found his vulnerability reassuring. None of them saw the whole man. As for the scientific and political establishments, he allowed them to think of him as an austere academic, a public image that produced an aura of moral and scientific authority.
Since everyone seemed to take these characteristics at face value, in rare moments of relaxation he jokingly referred to maintaining this persona as his ‘Newsweek strategy’. The scientist in him thought how predictable it was that under stress, his mind should retreat over seven decades in search of some perfect moment when he had been completely happy.
It was always a fruitless endeavour. Childhood held few warm memories. Aunt Lisa had dutifully tried to be father and mother to him. But duty was no substitute for love.
He filled the void with reading. Books were the garden where he played childish games, the gymnasium for the growing mind and later a defensive perimeter against a world full of ever-threatening emotions.
The car emerged from the tunnel into the sparkling Manhattan night. Nothing had prepared him for this.
Chapter 3 - Murphy
For an apparently uncomplicated man, Murphy had a very tangled history. Most people who knew him thought of him as a bluff New York Dubliner and most people were wrong. Murphy’s father, ‘The Old Man’ as the family called him, had been a mail-plane pilot in his youth. Flying was a passion that overrode every other part of his life. When war broke out in Europe, he borrowed money from an uncle and took a ship from Boston to Liverpool. For six weeks in 1940 he had tried to join the Royal Air Force. It was a lonely experience. As an American citizen, he was breaking US law by trying to join the armed forces of a foreign country. Back home, the America First Movement drew hundreds of thousands to rallies in support of keeping the country out of the war. Their star turn was Charles Lindbergh, the All-American Boy who made the first solo flight across the Atlantic and who later became infatuated with the Nazis and their formidable new air force. Such was the mood of the time, that when President Roosevelt promised America that, ‘Our boys will not fight in foreign wars,’ he was a hero to all but a few. Nor were the British welcoming. The political complication of having neutral nationals fighting on the front line was something that nobody in the British establishment seemed willing to contemplate. ‘Dead Americans in British uniforms would be a positive embarrassment, old boy,’ was how one civil servant had put it. It was a time that became known as The Phoney War. There was little fighting. The Germans called it Sitzkreig, the Sitting War.
The Night Watch Page 1
