Braithwaite’s mocking tone was unremitting. “Do you mean another terrorist attack – Islamists?”
“No, I’m certain of that.”
“Then who, and above all why?” Braithwaite said with rising exasperation. “The Russians, the Ukrainians, the Poles, one way or another, by force or complicity, they’re all attempting to move into the land of capitalist plenty. The Americans, after the mauling they’ve just had, want out from the responsibility of world policemen. The Germans want to be left alone to get on with taking over Europe … and the Japs are looking over their shoulders at the Chinese. Everyone has something to gain from a treaty.” The Minister was not a man of ethnic subtleties.
“I suspect not quite everyone,” said Thornhill.
“And how is this attempt on the peace of the world to take place? Political treachery, physical attack…?”
“Perhaps neither,” Thornhill replied.
“Perhaps neither,” the Minister mimicked Thornhill’s evasiveness. “Don’t talk in riddles, man, I haven’t the time for your kind of subtlety.”
Thornhill paused for a moment, wondering how he could convincingly explain the radical idea he had only that day begun to formulate. “Minister, with respect, thinking in national terms may now be out of date. There are powerful interests which transcend national and political boundaries.”
Braithwaite’s pride in speaking bluntly continued to exert itself. “Don’t try and give me a geo-political history lecture. I know as well as you do where the threat comes from. Islamic fanatics. We’ve had enough lessons; even the liberals understand that now.”
“This is not about Islam. At least not directly.” Thornhill knew it was going badly.
“Well is it or isn’t it? What do you mean, man?” Braithwaite looked at the large wall clock with Roman numerals. “I’ve got less than fifteen minutes before Cabinet. Explain yourself, if you can.”
“By not directly, I mean not instigated by them but made possible by their impact on public opinion.” Thornhill felt the conversation slipping from his grasp. He’d almost lost Braithwaite.
“So are you talking about some other sort of cross-border conspiracy?” It was an accusation rather than a question.
Though conscious of the ticking clock, Thornhill took the luxury of a moment of silence, then tried to present a world view in a few sentences.
“Look at the facts. Since time immemorial, every state has viewed potential or actual threats to its safety as coming from three sources: other nations, terrorism or subversion from within. But consider the world that is now emerging. Superpower confrontation may be on hold, but what of the huge void that the collapse of the Eastern Bloc military and economic power has created? Vast amounts of money and very powerful technologies have no home. What we can be certain of is that this black hole will suck in all manner of things. The witch’s brew that it may produce will be perilous in the extreme.”
“That’s your problem, isn’t it? A witch’s brew; you’ve no real idea what’s in it,” Braithwaite said.
“Minister, I fear that it is not just my problem but our problem. The whole world is terrorised by terrorism, and is ready for anything that appears to offer an answer.“
Braithwaite had little regard for theory. He wanted to take control of the conversation. “Interesting notions, but no more than that. You can prove no linkage between them.”
“There doesn’t need to be a linkage, just a coincidence of timing. Just look at what happened with Al Qaeda and Iraq,” Thornhill said.
The Minister, ever anxious to get to the point, was in danger of missing it. “So what are we talking about? Eastern Europe being taken over by American drug barons while we’re all hunting Islamic terrorists?”
“Of course not,” Thornhill said, annoyed at a second interruption. “The analogy is imperfect. All the drug cartels in South and Central America have produced is money and a ruthlessly protected distribution network. The possibility I’m talking about is something quite different, something much larger and more dangerous. I believe we may have had our first warning, perhaps our only warning. Frankly we need your help.”
Braithwaite was alert to the hint of some political advantage.
“How so?”
Thornhill continued. “It’s a matter of recognising the importance of the opportunity. Let me present you with another analogy. Just before the Second World War, two Poles smuggled a machine to London. It became known as Enigma. It was a device of the type used to encode all German military signals: Wehrmacht, Luftwaffe and Kriegesmarine. As you know, for most of the war, from the Blitz, through the Battle of the Atlantic, to the D-Day landings, we knew almost everything of importance that the German High Command sent to their forces in the field and could act accordingly. Understanding the importance of what those two Poles brought with them almost certainly saved the Western world from defeat.”
Braithwaite looked pointedly at the clock and Thornhill knew he’d used too many words. “And the relevance of those events to this situation?”
“I believe we may be in the process of being offered something of similar magnitude.”
“A machine?” Braithwaite was far from simple minded, but he did have a tendency to be over-literal.
Thornhill controlled his exasperation. “No, Minister, not a machine, not another Enigma, but something with the ability to put at risk the new accord. ‘From the Rockies to the Urals.’ I believe that was the phrase you used in the House this week?”
Braithwaite did not appreciate having his own words quoted back to him and stood up as if to emphasise his authority.
“You will be aware, Sir Jack, that I have little affection for your trade, and it will be no secret to you that I have frequently opposed your department in committee in the House of Commons.”
He got up, walked to the window and looked out across Whitehall.
He spoke without turning to Thornhill. His political instincts led him to the heart of the matter. “What you are telling me is either the delusion of a few cold warriors who face being pensioned off, or it really is important. How am I to know which?”
He reached out to wipe away the dust from one of the windowpanes, but the grime was on the outside.
*
“What’s the difference between a hedgehog and head office?” The owner of the champagne-modulated voice was too intoxicated by the brilliance of his own wit to wait for answers. “A hedgehog has the pricks on the outside!” he shouted in triumph and then collapsed in a fit of girlish giggles.
Thornhill sat in silent anger amid the mindless chatter of a group of photocopier salesmen. Incentive travel, he had been told, a long weekend in Bermuda for the sales region’s superstars and their wives or girlfriends. The business section of the 747 was simply another stage on which to perform.
“Performance is what this business is all about, darlin’ … know what I mean?”
One of them leered at the stewardess as she served yet more champagne. Thornhill concentrated on the Atlantic sky and tried to isolate his mind from the noise around him. The curvature of the earth stood out sharp against the light, just like the end of the world in which the ancients believed ‘go too far and you fall off the edge’. The thought set Thornhill to wondering, was he approaching the end of his own world? Were suspicion, imagination and anticipation any longer enough?
The salesmen ranted on. Thornhill put on a sleep mask and went over the ground again. The encounter in London with the woman called Anya; a pseudonym, he supposed. Then the near disaster with the second message.
It came on the back of a postcard mailed to the Fulham safe house whose address he had given her. It was brief – a street number and the avenue with which it intersected in a rundown area across the river from Manhattan.
The coordinates were followed by a date and a time. A five-day postal strike in South London had delayed the arrival of the message. Mrs Matthews, the Fulham housekeeper, rang Lloyd-Emlyn in Thornhill’s office to warn of its ar
rival, but out of long years of habit, she did not read it. A courier was immediately organised and the card arrived thirty-five minutes later. Lloyd-Emlyn signed for the package and left it on his desk while he continued a difficult phone conversation with Sally, his almost ex-girlfriend. It was a relationship with an uncertain future; Sally talked a lot and Lloyd-Emlyn became restless.
While half listening, he broke open the seals on the envelope, slid out the card and froze. In one movement he slammed down the phone, launched himself towards Thornhill’s office door and burst in.
Thornhill was in a long and difficult meeting with a senior official from the Treasury to negotiate the coming year’s budget. Lloyd-Emlyn saw Thornhill’s anger at the interruption and spoke first, cutting the Treasury man off in mid-sentence.
“Sir Jack, we have an emergency.” The Treasury official swept his papers off the desk, stuffed them untidily into his briefcase and left the room without another word.
“Bad timing–” Thornhill began.
Lloyd-Emlyn interrupted again. “It’s Kloptik; there’s a meeting in under two and a half hours – on a street corner in New Jersey.”
Thornhill took the card and read it twice.
“Call Murphy, grade nine alert. Then organise whatever back-up you can; he may need protection.”
Lloyd-Emlyn was thinking ahead. “What about the Americans? Surely we must operate within the inter-services agreement; it’s on their turf after all. And we’ll need to use the satellite if we want to know what’s going on.”
“No.” Thornhill spoke sharply. “That way we’ll lose him.”
“But the Foreign Secretary signed the agreement personally,” Lloyd-Emlyn insisted.
“Get on the phone, man, you’re wasting time.” Thornhill knew exactly the professional risk he was taking. If things went wrong, they would be after his head for giving the Americans a justification to operate an open-season hunting licence in London; something that the Foreign Office had been trying to limit for years.
*
The aircraft droned on and Thornhill sank deeper into thought. He could find no way to understand Kloptik’s unnecessarily mysterious journey across the Atlantic.
Looking back on the first meeting in Hamburg, he felt like a character trapped in a script somebody else had written. The difficulty was that he didn’t know who the other characters were. Intellect told him that to stake so much on such slender evidence was irrational, but instinct told him otherwise. He understood himself well enough to know that his reputation among colleagues for ‘a sure touch’ rested on an ability to make precise judgements between the competing values of acute analysis and instinctive insight. Now everything rested on his judgement of Kloptik. He tried to sleep but couldn’t, wondering how many times the future of nations had turned on the look in a man’s eyes.
The sleep mask was no protection against intrusion.
“Do you know…?” The voice of Thornhill’s neighbour shouting into his ear was heavily inebriated; it stumbled and began again. “Do you know that we’re travelling a mile every time you breathe in and out?” The voice waited for acknowledgement, and receiving none, moved on to the next wonder-fact. “As fast as a Colt .45 bullet, that’s how fast we’re going.”
“Then let’s hope you don’t get ahead of yourself,” Thornhill replied irritably.
The salesman tried to grapple with the thought but lost interest and sank into semi-consciousness. Thornhill closed his eyes and, without success, tried to close his ears.
*
The sun shone blood-red through Kloptik’s eyelids as he lay listening to the surf. He felt cheated that in all his life he had never experienced anything like this before. This was no East European sun that skimmed across a cold landscape like a pebble on a lake, a sun that never touched the soul of the nation. On this fragment of limestone seven hundred miles from the American coast, the sun was not a fleeting visitor but master of everything it fell upon.
The sea was warm, the sand hot and, after sunset, the rocks radiated back the heat they had soaked up during the day. Warmth suspended animation and he lay torpid, like a lizard, on the sand. A shadow passed across the light. It was Darcy.
“The plane’s landed. He’ll be here in half an hour.”
Guiltily leaving his reverie behind, Kloptik rose uncertainly. He felt self-conscious wearing nothing but unfamiliar bathing shorts, and the sand made him feel unsteady on his feet. He attempted to regain his dignity before he spoke.
“Very well, I shall go and change,” he said as he began to tread cautiously across the hot sand. “I shall meet him in the hotel.”
*
Thornhill had decided to deal with the first encounter alone. When he arrived, Darcy left the room. Bullivant sat in the suite across the hall with the door open. Morag had set up her computer, the modems and the miniature satellite dish on the balcony of her room next door. Murphy operated the recorder. Latchford went to the bar to watch for new arrivals.
The meeting was an emotional moment. Thornhill found himself in an extravagant Slavic embrace.
Despite years of European socialising, he remained embarrassed by displays of physical affection between men and took half a step back to avoid the full force of the gesture.
Kloptik spoke first. “I knew you would come,” he said with the charm and self-assurance that Thornhill remembered from their first encounter in Hamburg. But he was in no mood for charm.
“You knew damn well I’d come, you’ve been trying to manipulate me since we first met. So let’s get to the point; why all the melodrama?”
Kloptik smiled, but it was a theatrical gesture, without humour. “Ah, so you are angry. I thought you must be angry to have brought me here instead of London.”
“I brought you here so I could find out how much of a fool I’m making of myself before unleashing you upon my masters.”
“Or to ensure that you remain in control once you have heard what I have to say?”
Thornhill spoke sharply. “I had a message from you concerning a threat to the summit. That’s all I know. That’s why you’re here, that’s why I’m here. So let’s get on with it.”
“Almost correct, but not quite.” Kloptik made the point as if identifying an error in a student’s thesis.
“You know about me, you know about the Night Watch and, most importantly, you know that I understand you well enough to have been able, as you put it, to ‘manipulate you’. An ugly term, but it is your own. Now, I suspect that such ‘manipulation’ is something unusual and perhaps unique in your experience?” Kloptik paused for a moment. “That is why you are here, and that is why I am here, rather than in London.” Thornhill drew breath to reply, but the Pole broke into a smile, stretched out both his arms and said, “But I am not here to listen to your confession, but you to mine. It’s a long story.”
“Then begin at the beginning, go on to the end and then stop,” Thornhill said irritably.
“Alice in Wonderland … The Duchess?” Kloptik said with obvious pride at catching Thornhill unconsciously using a quotation. He expected some recognition, but received none.
“Get on with it.” Thornhill immediately knew that he had reacted too sharply. He was tired and jet lag was beginning to show.
Kloptik didn’t seem to notice. He moved away and lowered himself into one of the big armchairs.
Thornhill thought how incongruous he looked; a small, intense man in borrowed clothes, sunk into a morass of garish Hawaiian fabric. He took the matching chair opposite and waited.
“First, my name. I am Wolski, Professor Josef Wolski.”
Next door, Morag keyed the name into the terminal that was linked, via the dish on the balcony, to the London computer database. The response was instantaneous but brief: a list of the scientific papers that Wolski had presented to academic conferences over the previous decade, the article in Newsweek, but nothing more.
Wolski’s professorial manner, married to an orator’s turn of phrase, made Thornhil
l wonder whether he had remembered the man as completely as he had imagined.
“You recall the Night Watch, our small effort at recording the events of our long national night?”
“Yes, I remember.”
“I told you we never intervened, rather we vowed to record, so that one day the truth would be remembered; a limited objective, but perhaps a noble one. ‘A Testament for Humanity’ someone called it, I don’t remember who it was; delusions of grandeur no doubt. But you must understand that those dark days were also days of innocence. We thought that being witnesses for the prosecution would be sufficient, that somehow this would separate us from the wrongdoers.” He faltered and Thornhill saw that whatever was to come next was going to be difficult to say.
There was a long pause.
Wolski was close to tears and spoke haltingly. “In my case at least, that was wrong. I am no longer just a witness, I stand among the ranks of the guilty.”
“What happened?” Thornhill asked quietly.
“What happened?” Wolski repeated with rising volume. “What happened? The Night Watch could not secure the Mindgate. You have understood nothing,” he added accusingly.
Wolski was right, Thornhill did not understand. The Mindgate? It was the first time he had seen Wolski angry, or was he just raving? What was it that he was expected to understand? Perhaps the truth was that there was nothing to understand, except that Wolski was insane.
Wolski’s mood changed; he seemed detached, looking around the room as if waking from a dream and seeing it for the first time – the carpet with hair long as rye grass, the expensive split bamboo wall coverings, the pinks and lime greens of the furnishings. It was an alien environment. His eyes locked on Thornhill and with difficulty he pulled himself out of the large, soft armchair and moved to the writing desk. For an instant Wolski saw himself in the mirror over the desk and Thornhill noticed how sharply he turned away to avoid eye contact with his own reflection. He took the hard upright chair from the desk and carefully placed it at the centre of the balcony window that gave a view of the sea.
He sat for some time with his back to Thornhill, his silhouette set against the bright sky outside. The rising wind was blowing towering heaps of white cloud across the sky. It was past high water and the ebbing tide was throwing up sharp, steep waves as it collided with the onshore wind.
The Night Watch Page 5
