by Alan Judd
‘Which was?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I do.’ It was a lie. He spoke without knowing what to follow it with but it achieved its end. Peter was engaged, his attention now on what was being said. ‘But that wasn’t really the point, was it, Peter? It wasn’t our betrayal, as you call it, that got to you.’
A pheasant called and faintly, distantly came the throbbing of a helicopter. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said Peter.
‘I’m talking about Igor. It was Igor who betrayed you. That’s what you can’t accept, that’s why you’re so bitter with us.’
‘Bollocks.’
‘Think about it, Peter.’ Charles continued to speak gently. ‘What you couldn’t bear was the idea that Igor targeted and recruited you, that it was all a ploy, that he was an SVR officer all along and that they sent him after you, trading on his homosexuality which would otherwise have got him sacked. And did when the case collapsed. You fell for him, as they hoped you would. But you couldn’t bear the thought that he never really loved you, that he was using you, doing what we were all trained to do.’
Peter shook his head. ‘I told you, you don’t know what you’re talking about. There’s no point trying to make out it wasn’t your fault. I trusted you and you let me down. That’s what happened.’
‘We weren’t to know the Americans would leak it.’
‘But you told them.’
‘They’d have worked it out anyway. And we owed them.’
‘What’s happened to Igor, then?’
‘He was allowed to leave the SVR and was given a job with a bank, a Russian bank.’
In Charles’s perception the movement of Peter’s arm and the sound of the shot were simultaneous, as were Sarah’s gasp and the convulsion in his breast as the sound passed through him. But nothing else did, the bullet thudding into the earth by Sarah’s knee. Peter was grinning, his gun still pointed almost at her but his eyes on Charles. ‘You’re lying. Igor’s dead. They kicked him out and abandoned him and he took to drink. That’s why death is the only answer now. For all of us. Death the great equaliser. You don’t seem to get it, Charles. This is not a negotiation. There’s no solution to be had, only an end.’ He looked at Sarah. ‘But not for you, if you do what you’re told and don’t make a fuss. Stand up.’ She got awkwardly to her feet, facing him. ‘Turn to your right and start walking. Keep going and you’ll come to the lane eventually. There are some cottages down there. You’ll find someone to help you.’ She didn’t move. After a few seconds he added, in a kindlier tone, ‘Don’t be silly, Sarah. Off you go.’
Still she didn’t move. ‘You don’t need to do this, Peter. There’s no point. Walk away. Go and live in Russia. Do something for Igor’s family.’
Charles couldn’t see her face but her voice was controlled. Peter shook his head. ‘After having two people murdered and then kidnapping you? They’re never going to let me go to Russia, Sarah, but thanks for the thought. Now, you can walk away or stay here and watch. It’s up to you.’
Charles edged his feet forward until he was nudging the Winchester. He knew where it was without having to look down. He had cocked it after leaving the car a mile or so away and making his way across country, keeping to hedgerows and woods. There was a round in the breech, the hammer was back, he had only to pick it up and point it, pushing the safety catch with his thumb and squeezing the under-lever, the secondary safety catch, as he fired. Between two and three seconds, he reckoned. But that was long enough for Peter to get the same number of aimed shots off. They had to keep talking.
‘It’s better you go, Sarah,’ he said.
She turned her head. ‘I’m not going, I’m not going anywhere. I think this is completely ridiculous and unnecessary.’ She looked back at Peter. ‘You’ll have to shoot me too, I’m afraid.’
Charles was exasperated, fearful and grateful. Anything to keep the conversation going. ‘Sarah, please go. The only reason I’m here is so that you can go.’
‘I know and I’m not going.’
She looked from one to the other. Perhaps she realised it too – anything, including a marital tiff, to keep Peter from his purpose.
It didn’t work. Peter Tew pointed the gun at Charles, straightened his arm and fired.
‘All right, stand up. Hands on your heads.’
Michael Swavesy’s voice was flat, as if weary of repetition. He was still at the table, shotgun on his lap, mobile at his elbow, cigarette in his left hand. He watched them get up, raise their hands, hesitate as to which way to face, then turn towards him. ‘Cigarette?’ he asked.
Jeremy shook his head but Louise nodded. It was a sinister offer – the last smoke before execution, perhaps – but it was engagement of a sort and it might delay things. Swavesy pocketed his mobile, threw away his half-smoked cigarette, shook another from the packet, put it in his lips and lit it. His right hand still rested on his gun. Then he put away the packet and walked over to her. At arm’s length, holding the gun at waist height and pointing at her belly, he took the cigarette from his own lips and put it between hers, grinning. His brown eyes were friendly, almost caressing. ‘You can use one hand to smoke it. Keep the other on your head. Turn round, both of you. We’re going round the back of the barn.’
‘Where are you taking us? What are you doing?’ Jeremy’s voice was hoarse.
‘I’m going to tie you up, leave you where you can be found. Nothing to worry about.’
Being told there was nothing to worry about made it worse, Louise thought. That was just what you would say. They followed the track around the barn. There was his motorbike, a patch of rough grass, a wooden shed and beyond it a fence and stile. Beyond that was a clump of bushes, then the field above. There was no sign of rope to tie them with.
‘Okay, that’s far enough.’
‘May I finish my fag first?’ she asked.
‘Course you can. All the time in the world.’
That convinced her. She listened for the click of the safety catch. It might be off anyway. She took a pull on her cigarette and looked at Jeremy. He was staring down the field towards the beehives and the old brick privy. He seemed self-absorbed, or perhaps catatonic with fear, certainly not heeding her. ‘When I chuck my fag away, run for it,’ she murmured. He gave no sign of having heard.
She was going to do it, but stopped. She couldn’t bring herself. The small of her back felt horribly vulnerable, the muscles quivering. ‘One other thing—’ she called. Then she did it, tossing the cigarette straight up and breaking to her right.
There was a loud bang and a shout but it wasn’t her. She was on the stile and then off it, out of control, tripping on brambles and falling in the bushes. There was another bang. She got up and ran stumbling to her right, the bushes tearing at her feet and arms. Then she was in the field out of sight of the barn, running uphill by the hedge as fast as she could.
It was Michael Swavesy’s uncharacteristic hesitation that saved them. He was creeping closer, so as to get a more concentrated blast in the back of each head, when she said something and tossed the cigarette in the air. His eyes followed that, only momentarily but enough for her to have started her break to his right. His gun was still at his waist and if he had swivelled after her immediately he’d have cut her in half. But the man started running too, straight ahead and downhill. He was heading for the beehives, might very soon be behind the privy and then out of stopping range, whereas the girl was closer and had nowhere to go, just the fence and the stile. He could take her second. He stopped his swing towards her, pulled back round to his front and let the man have it. The man went down with a cry, knocking one of the hives over.
When he turned back to the girl he couldn’t see her. Then he saw the bushes move and fired into them. They quivered and were still. It looked as if he’d got her. As he broke open the gun to reload and follow up on her the man got up and started running again, but limping and slow. Michael Swavesy left the girl for the second time and
ran after him, holding the gun in his left hand and fumbling in his pocket for cartridges. He had one cartridge in and was reaching for the other when he realised the man had stopped running and was waving his arms around. He closed on him, slowing to a walk, thinking it might be delayed death spasms. He slotted the second cartridge in, checked it, snapped the gun shut and looked up to see the man’s blotched and bloated face looming towards him. He had no time even to bring the gun up before the man fell on him, gasping and shouting incoherently. Swavesy went over backwards, with the great sprawling weight on top of him and a bit of masonry digging painfully into his kidneys. The gun was knocked out of his hands, falling between his legs. There was sudden stinging on his face and neck and the backs of his hands. For a moment he couldn’t struggle free and then the man was off him and running away again.
Swavesy got to his feet amidst a swarm of bees. There were dozens of them, inside his shirt collar, in his hair, up his sleeves, in his ears, stinging, stinging, stinging. He heard himself shouting, ran a few yards towards the barn, then back to pick up his gun, then down into the field away from the barn, trying to leap the broken stone wall but tripping on a strand of barbed wire and falling, winding himself, then up, gasping and flailing, still holding his gun, running haphazardly down the field.
He could not have failed to hear the helicopter but he failed to heed it. Louise, from the top of the field, panting and exhausted within the safety of the wood, heard it only seconds before it arrived. It came in very low and fast, a violent, overwhelming intrusion, buffeting the tree-tops and blasting warm air on her upturned face. Seconds later it landed in the field below the barn and three or four helmeted armed figures leapt out as the wheels touched. Swavesy, she could see, was running haphazardly across the field as if dodging invisible obstacles. The figures from the helicopter ran after him, then stopped, kneeling, as the rotors wound down. There was shouting followed by a clattering of sharp cracks. They didn’t sound much – less than Swavesy’s shotgun or the other shots she had heard from across the valley as she fled – but they were sufficient. He crumpled like a puppet whose strings were cut and lay still, a small dark lump in the middle of the field. On the far side of the barn another figure stopped its slow stumbling run and turned to watch. When the shooting was over it began to limp back towards the helicopter.
Seeing the spurt of flame from the small black hole and hearing the shot told Charles that he must be all right, that Peter had missed. Pretty inexcusable from ten yards, he thought afterwards, though with a pistol anything was possible. But the noise and shock of being shot at at close range paralysed him for a second. That was the time for Peter to get another shot off, the one that shouldn’t have missed. Instead, he was distracted by two shots from the direction of the barn, as if in answer to his own. He looked round.
It was enough. Charles had the Winchester cocked and in his shoulder in one movement. He had forgotten how loud that .30 round was, how solid the kick. You knew you’d fired a grown-up gun. It took Peter in the middle of his chest, flinging him onto his back in the ferns. His pistol flew sideways and fell across Sarah’s foot.
Charles was on his feet without thinking, the gun recocked and pointed at Peter. Sarah had not moved. She stared at the body. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked.
She turned towards him almost reluctantly. ‘Yes. Are you?’ Her voice sounded remote.
He stepped through the ferns towards her. He knew he should be overwhelmed with relief but couldn’t yet feel it. He wanted to say so much more than ask if she was all right but the words wouldn’t come, for either of them.
She turned back towards the body. ‘Hadn’t we better see if we can do anything? He might be still alive.’
‘He’s dead.’ Something about the newly dead told you they were dead, an absence, something not there, even while the body was warm. He had witnessed it first with his father in the hospital. It had been impossible to mourn just then because it was no longer his father, just a body. Whatever had been, wasn’t.
‘You can’t be sure. He might be alive.’
‘He is dead.’ He eased the hammer forward, laid the gun in the ferns and knelt at Peter’s side. There was a small hole in the chest, slightly to the left, where the heart would be, and virtually no trace of blood. There would be a bigger and messier hole in the back. Peter’s eyes and mouth were open to the sky, as if in surprise. He might just have had time to see, as he turned back from the distraction, that Charles had a gun; it would have been the last thing he saw. Charles started going through his pockets.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Looking for the keys for your handcuffs.’
She made a sound that was half laugh, half gasp. ‘How can you be so – so practical? No, that’s not what I mean, that’s not the word.’
It was, and it was because there was nothing else to be. Consciously irrevocable actions were rare and the full sense of what he had done he would feel only later. Something of himself had died with Peter, albeit something that had died in Peter long before. But to act was necessarily to disregard.
The clattering roar of the helicopter made them look up. They saw it land, a handful of figures disembark and run down across the field and out of sight, shielded by trees. Then they heard the shooting.
‘That’ll be his number two, his wing man,’ said Charles. ‘The one who was probably supposed to shoot me. And maybe you if necessary.’ He found the keys and went over to her.
She held out her hands. ‘Would he have shot me, d’you think – Peter?’
‘I doubt he intended to unless’ – the handcuffs fell to the ground and she stood rubbing her wrists while he put his hands on her shoulders – ‘it seemed practical.’
20
George Greene’s parliamentary office was one of the larger panelled ones at the back of the Commons chamber, behind the Speaker’s chair. It was near, not too near, the Prime Minister’s office. There was room for his desk, a small round conference table and another desk in the corner for his parliamentary secretary. George, Angela and Charles sat at the conference table with coffee cups, scraps of paper, glasses and two-thirds of a bottle of Laphroaig.
The debate on what had become known as the Barngate affair had just ended. To viewers it had been acrimonious and noisy, with George and the shadow foreign secretary at each other like a pair of Jack Russells. The Prime Minister had been solid, if not overly demonstrative, in his support of George; the leader of the opposition almost incoherent with righteous indignation. It had ended, as everyone expected, with a comfortable majority for the government and, away from public gaze, equable private exchanges between opponents.
George Greene was pleased. ‘Stupid of the opposition to take the shameful-treatment-of-gays angle. We’re fireproof on that – all in the past, changing social attitudes, couldn’t happen now and whatever. Whereas we are actually vulnerable on the competence angle – porous computer systems, lack of controls, inexcusable post-Snowden – even though none of us was in charge when it all started. Lucky they swallowed the idea of Charles as computer-savvy new broom, incredible as that may seem.’
Angela’s smile was wintry. ‘Your media reputation as action man hero and husband of beautiful, brilliant and brave lawyer has made you invulnerable to criticism. For the time being.’
Charles shook his head at George’s proffered whisky but George poured anyway. The weeks since the shooting had been a whirlwind: the police investigation, the referral to the Crown Prosecution Service, public speculation about his future, media stories about an action-filled past that was unrecognisable to him, press harassment of Sarah for an interview, the suggestion – hastily withdrawn – that he might have murdered his predecessor, accounts of his and Sarah’s Oxford love affair with ancient photographs of them at a ball, his appearance before the ISC, Jeremy Wheeler’s elevation to national hero for having tackled the professional hitman, saved Louise’s life and endured hundreds of bee-stings and a leg wound, the request – easily re
fused – that he cooperate with a film based on Peter Tew’s life, the safe return of Beowulf with the news that she had suffered a communications failure but could receive signals all along, and eventually confirmation from the CPS that he was not to be prosecuted for killing Peter. The police hadn’t returned his guns, though, and there was a struggle to get the Home Secretary to prevent Louise’s superintendent censuring her for departing from normal police procedures.
‘That and the fact that the lights are back on,’ said Charles. ‘Not that that was really my doing.’
Angela nodded. ‘We know that, of course, but the focus on you helpfully distracts people from asking how we could have been so vulnerable in the first place. For once it’s useful to have a high-profile C.’
‘So long as you don’t blather all over Facebook about it and keep your tweets under control. Assuming you’d know a tweet if it sat up and bit you.’ George topped up his own whisky again after Angela put her hand over hers. ‘Useful, too, that that prat Jeremy Wheeler is hogging so much of the limelight. We’re going to have to do something for him, I’m afraid. Something harmless, anything to keep him out of the Cabinet. I’ll leave Angela to fill you in. Main thing is this competence issue. They’re bound to return to it once the personality hysteria subsides and it’s vital we maintain public confidence in our ability to protect ourselves from cyber attack. At the moment, people – our enemies and the public – thinking we can is in fact our best protection. But it’s not enough.’ He looked at them both. ‘Now, this request from BBC Panorama for MI6 cooperation with a programme on the subject – quite right you turned it down flat, both of you – but it could actually be very useful if it helps us perpetuate the myth of invincibility a little longer while we do all this clever stuff to make sure we are indeed less vincible. If you could bear to do it, Charles. You’ll hate it, of course.’
