Stone crumpled to the ground, clutching his leg, a cry of pain and surprise bursting from his throat while Williams, no longer limping and his seemingly injured arm now holding the gun that had fired the shot, stood over him, a look of regret on his face.
“You won’t believe me,” he said softly, “and nor will you even care, but I wanted you to know I’m sorry, this was never my intention.”
“You traitorous bastard!”
“No,” Williams shook his head, “not traitorous. I’m doing this for Britain, for the World…”
“What?”
“You have to die so everyone else can live.”
“Don’t talk bullshit, what the fuck is going on?!”
Williams took a deep breath and bowed his head a little, as though he were preparing himself for the confessional, but his eyes remained unmovably on Stone’s.
“I knew,” he said, simply and quietly.
“Knew what?”
“Everything. I knew that Myska was working with the Russians on the bombings and I knew there was a pretty good chance they’d be trying to topple Svobodova and lay the groundwork for an invasion. And I knew that The Institute wanted Czechoslovakia kicked out of the international clubs and that there must be a reason for that. And then I found out that an invasion by the President who’d already taken out the Ukraine would provide just the opportunity for The Institute to replace him with someone more sympathetic to their goals. But it was just me and Greyson, so after that we had no choice but to let the whole thing pan out and see what little changes we could make here and there.”
The pain in Stone’s leg was becoming unbearable but the angered resentment burning in his chest hurt him more.
“You knew?” he hissed. “All this fucking time?”
“Where do you think Greyson’s been all this time?” Williams shook his head sadly. “He hasn’t been ‘keeping his head down in Prague’, he’s been busy scuppering the deal and making one of his own.”
“What...?”
“Bok was an Institute man,” Williams said, exasperatedly, the next ‘Iron Man of the East’ who’d keep Czechoslovakia part of a new Eastern Empire. But aside from a bit of sabre rattling now and then would keep out of The Institute’s way in Europe and let them screw the rest of us as hard as they like!”
He shouted the words, all pretence of hiding gone and speaking loudly as though trying to justify his actions more to himself than to Stone.
“And so Greyson got in touch with his old mate from this neck of the woods, Konstantin, and in return for a passage to the Premiership, generously provided by some of the recordings I’ve made in recent weeks, Konstantin would be waiting to seize power when the President went down, get Bok into custody and withdraw from Czechoslovakia. In return, when Greyson takes over as Prime Minister he’ll withdraw British troops from Syria.”
Though the intensity of the pain continued to throb, Stone sneered a cynical laugh at Williams’ revelation.
“Prime Minister?” he laughed, “Prime fucking Minister? This, all this has been about Greyson’s fucking job title?!”
“No,” Williams snapped, “it hasn’t! Greyson doesn’t want the fucking job but that makes him the only one fit to have it! And after the current PM, along with all the other political leaders in Europe who voted in favour of Czechoslovakia’s suspension, have some difficult questions to answer, and Konstantin publically praises Greyson as the instigator of the Syrian peace talks, he’ll be drafted to fill the vacancy before you can say ‘stitch up’. But for the deal to work, the President’s killer has to be punished.”
“Just like that,” Stone shook his head in despair at the ease with which the wool was pulled over his eyes.
“Just like that,” Williams repeated. “I’m sorry Captain, but after Brexit, Britain needs friends, wherever it can find them; and what better way to do it than by ending yet another pointless fucking war and saving hundreds of thousands of lives? And at the same time ending an occupation and preventing God knows how many years of oppression? And instead of hordes of young soldiers being sent in to die at the hands of distant politicians, the whole conflict can be solved with minimal casualties: the Aggressor, the Victim and the Man in the Middle; You. You’re the Flower on the Shrine, Captain, you’re the sacrifice for the sake of lasting peace.”
The inequity burned within Stone as fiercely as the wound in his leg, filling him with an insatiable rage. He tried pushing himself to his feet, only for the still bleeding wound to pull him unceremoniously back down.
“Fix this.” Stone hissed the words through gritted teeth.
“It is fixed.”
“Fix it again!”
“I can’t!” It was Williams’ turn to lose his cool, his voice at once bellowing out to the world and pointing straight at Stone.
“Is that what you think I am? Do you think I’m Spy Jesus?! I’m not Spy Jesus! I’m not Espionage Moses! This situation is as ‘fixed’ as it’s ever going to be, you just ended up with the shit end of the stick when the music stopped playing; someone had to, and believe me, I know that one day it’ll be my turn; but here and now it’s yours.”
“Why are you doing this?”
“Because there has to be a reason!” Williams bellowed the words, his arms outstretched and passion etched onto his features. “There has to be a fucking point to all this; all the things I’ve done! It’s not enough anymore to just pick the least shitty option and hope for the fucking best, there has to be some greater good, or else why go on? I’ve been beating on the chest of Britain’s decaying corpse for years, trying to spark some kind of life back into it, and all I hear is its final breath wheezing faintly out of it, for years! Nothing! No sign of life! All the false dawns, all the Chosen Men and Anointed Women and not a spark amongst them! Just Hard Right lunatics and Ultra Left morons, all of them using me to do the fucking dirty work for them in the name of some greater good that that even they don’t really believe in! All of them failed, just leaving an ethically dying people who weren’t even worth saving anymore. But then, Greyson came along, someone who knew how to play the game but who had his own idea of the prize. And I heard a heart start beating again. All of a sudden, there was a reason again; someone who understood that the dawn might be the most beautiful part of the day but it isn’t the end of it, you have to keep going, keep pushing. Greyson will do that, and as long as he does then it’s all worthwhile again.”
The aged spy’s soul searching offered no comfort to the distressed Captain, whose mind turned, as ever, to thoughts of his boy and his own reason for carrying on.
“It shouldn’t end like this, I need to speak to my boy, my son…”
“Your son?”
“Let me talk to him on the phone, now, I have to make him understand, I have to…”
“Lincoln…”
Whether it was that Williams had used his first name, or the almost delicate manner in which he did so, Stone stopped and looked up at his scruffy, traitorous comrade.
“Lincoln, your son’s dead.”
He spoke the words quietly, delicately even, but they burned through Stone more ferociously than any wound in his career, even the throbbing caused by the bullet in his leg a mild irritant by comparison and he shook his head violently at them, clenching his eyes closed hard and hissing back through gritted, grinding teeth.
“No. No, you shut your fucking mouth you traitorous Scot’s bastard! Shut your fucking mouth!”
“He’s dead, Lincoln,” the uncharacteristic gentleness in Williams’ voice continued to tear viciously into the stricken Captain. “He died in your arms, months ago, in the London attack with the others. That’s when you had your breakdown…”
“No,” Stone was sobbing, staring at the blood on his hands ass though he were back there on the pavement cradling his broken boy and howling with all his ferocious might.
“That’s why you were the perfect choice,” Williams continued sadly, “the disgraced soldier, supposedly responsible
for the flight of the very terrorists who would go on to kill his son, and who, unable to handle the guilt, would uncover evidence of Russian and far right complicity in the attacks, until one day going rogue and taking the President down with a rifle.”
Williams held up the phone he had shown off in Myska’s office; now playing a video clip of the Captain, stretched over the grassy ridge and firing a shot, zooming closer seconds later to the falling body of the President.
“If it’s any consolation,” Williams said, “a lot of people are going to remember you as a hero for this.”
The anger was still inside him but directed now at himself instead of Williams, his mind clearing just sufficiently to take in the Scotsman’s words.
“Not the right people though,” he exhaled, fighting to control his tears, “not the right person. I spent so many years, his whole life, trying to make him proud of me, trying to prove myself worthy of being his dad. Trying to be his hero…”
Williams own head shook in sad response.
“You still don’t fucking realise do you?”
Stone opened his wet eyes to see William’s own betraying a telltale glisten as the aging, aching man spoke.
“You always were his hero, Lincoln, you were his father.”
A sound in the distance behind them stirred the pair, both men realising that their Russian pursuers were close at hand. Williams reached into an inner pocket and held out his hand to Stone; a small white pill.
“I have to go,” he whispered almost apologetically. “Here, there’s no point you suffering needlessly; take this and you won’t feel a thing.”
Stone, his eyes puffy with emotion but his crying contained, looked at the pill and shook his head.
“I was always ready to die for my country,” Stone smiled, “I just always thought it would be on the battlefield, as a soldier.”
“This is a battlefield,” Williams answered, his own voice cracking, “just a different type. And you’ll always be a soldier. Goodbye Captain Stone.”
Williams turned and ran, reaching the fence and easing himself through the cut-in hole, before melting into the densely wooded trees on the Czechoslovakian side and turning back to watch.
The pain in Stone’s leg engulfing him with every fresh movement, he willed himself through the discomfort and strained to stand on his good leg while the wounded one hung limply beneath him. The rumbling and shout of military voices was almost upon him and he knew there would be no warning shot. Through the dense trees, on the other side of the border stood Williams, his one time Guardian Angel turned Harbinger of Death, ghoulishly waiting for Stone’s end to come. The scrawny, wrinkled figure stood erect and Stone saw him move his arm in a swift movement, bringing his hand against his head, the tips of his long fingers brushing his temple in respectful salute.
Stone smiled at the gesture. He felt no rage towards Williams, no malice. All that was gone, replaced only with the eager desperation to hurry on his way and hold his boy again; he was waiting for him, Stone knew that. Rasti’s words the previous night had proven that to him, and neither the pain from his wound nor any number of bullets could ever numb the elation building in him at his impending reunion. The noise was voluminous and accompanied now by the loud shouts of voices, screaming unfamiliar Russian accented words at him. Turning round to face his end, Stone neither acknowledged, nor cared about the rifles facing him, neither did he flinch when they loudly signalled their readiness; instead he could see only his boy, stood smiling brightly at him, his arms stretched out wide to accept his father’s embrace.
“Hello son,” Stone said, tears of joy running down his scarred, weathered face, “Daddy’s home.”
THIRTY
A FRESH PAIN ACCOMPANIED EACH STEP the aged body made, as though time and the earth itself had conspired to punish him by making his final journey longer. Finally, he wheezed to a standstill before the frozen metallic ranks of children before him, his frail hand reaching out to rest on the shoulder of the tallest, while his fading eyes moved to take in all of the faces gazing silently at him.
“You’ve been ages Marek,” he heard one of the children’s voices say in his mind. “What took you so long?” asked another, younger voice, filled with the innocent grumpiness of infancy.
“I’m sorry,” he said to them aloud, his voice breaking with emotion, “I had work to do.”
“What work?”
“Important work,” he replied softly, “to make sure what happened to us couldn’t happen again. I had to make sure we were safe, that Europe was safe.”
“You were gone a long time,” replied the grumpy voice.
“We missed you,” whispered another, still younger.
“It was a long job,” he answered, “but one that’s for others to take up now. I missed you too, all of you.”
“Did you really miss us Marek?”
“Every day,” he answered, “but now I’m back, at last.”
The voices were quiet for a moment, as if mulling over his words.
“Can you play with us now?” the young voice finally asked him.
“Yes please,” he smiled, “if you’ll let me?”
“Of course we’ll let you,” said an older boy, “how long can you stay?”
“Forever,” he said.
The voices cheered and spoke at once, urging him to hurry up and join them and he laughed tearfully as he consented to their joyful requests. Finally, he dropped to his aching knees at the feet of the statue, though the pain no longer registered; and with his hand holding tightly the crucifix around his neck, the Last Child of Lidice went to join his friends.
“Are you proud?”
Greyson had not been fool enough to expect a warm reception but neither was he prepared for the question as he approached Svobodova at her favourite cemetery; the politician stood with her back to him, staring down at some ancient, illegible lines on a crumbling stone grave. The early morning was unseasonably cold, with due clinging to the grass and a slight breeze adding to the chill with which Greyson had awoken that day.
“We came out of it as well as could be expected,” he said from his position behind her, “the Russians have withdrawn, Konstantin is in charge and your opponents are discredited forever. You even managed to get Czechoslovakia reinstated in the EU and NATO; it’s as much as we could have hoped to achieve.”
“And yet the victory brings with it no joy. You lied to me Jonathan.”
“There was no way I could prevent the occupation,” he said defensively, “all we had was a bit of intelligence, Williams and me; we had to let it play out and crisis manage it as we went along. And while we’re on the subject you weren’t exactly open about Salam were you? What’s going to happen to him?”
“He’ll be tried and serve his sentence under an assumed identity,” Svobodova said dispassionately. “If only you’d trusted me I could have resolved the whole situation without bloodshed; instead Karol, poor Captain Stone, even your own wife, all dead…”
“We couldn’t just relay on Salam,” Greyson shook his head, “there were too many variables. Look, I know you’re angry, but we could have been standing here now waist deep in deaths in the midst of a new oppression, but instead we’re not. You can’t change the world, Mirushka,” Greyson sighed, “not all at once. It doesn’t want to be changed. All you, I or anyone can do is try to do the best we can in our piece of it.”
“You didn’t trust me enough even to let me try. It was my country at risk, not yours, you had no right to intervene, to go behind my back…” She hissed the words bitterly, the pain in her voice only too evident.
“There was more than just Czechoslovakia at risk,” Greyson shook his head sadly, “the whole of Europe could have fallen back forty years. I had to act. And now, instead of a war and countless lives lost, Europe’s peace is secure and you have an ally on your border.”
“While an innocent man lies dead in a Ukrainian ditch, put there by the very people he fought for.”
“Bette
r one man than a hundred, or a thousand.”
“One is too many. You should have trusted me.”
Greyson, fighting hard to blink back the dampness in his own eyes, took a step closer to Mirushka and placed a hand softly on her shoulder.
“You brought a second flower today?”
“It seemed only right,” she said. “Captain Stone has no grave to mourn beside, and while half the world hail him a hero and half castigate him as a murderer, it is appropriate that I acknowledge privately the man he really was.”
“You know,” he began, looking down at the flowers she had laid, “when I was learning to drive, my old instructor told me that I could be the best, the safest and most skilful driver in the world, but I’d still never be able to guarantee I’d be safe on the road, because I’d have no control over how everyone else drove their cars.”
He turned her into him, his voice sad, his words sincere.
“Just because you and I want to drive a straight, honest path, it doesn’t mean everyone else on the road wants to do the same. Sometimes, we’re forced to drive more defensively than we’d like, forced to take a detour or two, to make sure we reach the destination intact.”
“And abandon our passengers on route?”
He dropped his eyes for a moment and she followed them earnestly, as though desperately searching for a spark of the man she knew.
“I didn’t want him to die,” Greyson’s voice began to crack and he struggled to contain it.
“But he did.”
He dropped his arms from her shoulders and continued to stare at the ground.
“Two years,” he muttered.
“What?”
“I’m heading back to Britain to accept the Premiership, but we’ve a General Election in two years; either I’ll be voted out or if we win I’ll resign.”
“Why resign?”
“Because I want you to believe that I didn’t do this for power. I did it because I believed it was the only way.”
“Oh, Jonathan…” She shook her head sadly.
Greyson looked over to where his official car waited and he leant forward to kiss the top of her head, softly and sincerely.
The Prague Ultimatum Page 28
