Ika answered, trying to let neither Susan nor the man confronting her see how unnerved she was. There was much gesturing toward Susan as they talked. After several exchanges the man turned more fully to Susan and barked something at her.
“He wants to see your papers—passport and visa,” Ika translated.
Saying nothing, Susan produced them from her purse and handed them over. The man examined them sullenly, then reached abruptly for Susan’s purse. Susan held on to it angrily.
“Stop it!” she said. “Ika, tell him to stop this. He has no right.”
Ika didn’t say anything, just watched anxiously as the man finally wrenched the purse from Susan’s hands, then glared at her as though by resisting she had committed a serious offense against his authority.
“Tell him to go to hell, Ika! Who does he think he is?”
“Better stay calm, Dr. Flemying. Just let him show his masters that he’s doing his job, then we go on our way.” It was an attempt at reassurance, but her voice sounded less confident than she would have liked it to.
Susan continued to glare angrily at the man as he rifled through her belongings. Nothing much seemed to interest him until he found the Polaroid of John with Dan Samples. He took it out and looked at it for a few moments, frowning. Then he turned and said something over his shoulder to his partner.
“What’s he saying?” Susan asked.
“He’s telling the other one to call the office,” Ika replied.
The man by the jeep had pulled up a dash mike and was speaking into it. As he did so, he glanced beyond the fence to the distant buildings.
“I think there is someone watching us,” Ika said, pointing, “from behind the window over there.”
The man in front of her said something sharply. She replied with equal sharpness. His mouth tightened, and for a moment Susan thought he was going to hit Ika. But he was distracted by the crackle of a voice from the jeep radio. The man standing by it spoke briefly into the mike again, then hung up and turned to say something to his partner.
“They want you to go with them,” Ika said, her own fear vanishing in the face of her concern for Susan. She addressed several animated sentences to the two men in Russian, but her arguments were dismissed by a curt headshake and a few words.
“What did you say to them?” Susan asked.
“I say you are American citizen, they have no right to do this. Your ambassador and government will make big scandal, these men lose their jobs.”
The failure of this threat to make any impact on the men in question was underlined by the none-too-gentle pressure Susan felt on her arm, urging her to move to their jeep and get into the backseat. Once again Ika launched a torrent of protest in Russian, her voice rising half an octave in anger. This time the man who was pushing Susan into the jeep swung around and aimed a menacing forefinger at a point between Ika’s eyes. Susan didn’t need a translation to tell her that the few words he snapped out were a final warning to Ika to back off if she didn’t want to suffer the same fate herself.
“Ika, it’s all right,” she said, shouting to make herself heard over the general scuffle and cross talk. “I’ll go with them, I’m not worried.”
“I call someone for you—the embassy.”
“It’s all right….”
Ika said something else in Russian, then added for Susan’s benefit. “I tell them take me with you—you need translator.”
Susan didn’t have time to respond before the other guard, the one who’d spoken on the radio, pinned Ika’s arms from behind and pushed her roughly toward her own vehicle, where he wrenched open the door and threw her in. Then he climbed behind the wheel of his own jeep, reversed into the road, and drove them at speed back toward the gates.
That was the last, Ika would tell people later, that she ever saw of Susan Flemyng. She continued to watch through the fence as the jeep headed for what looked like the main block among the scattered buildings, then swung left and headed between two of them. Seconds later, it and its occupants had disappeared from view.
Chapter 16
THE ROOM INTO which Susan was shown had no furniture except for a bench attached to one wall. It was clearly a security holding area because there was no handle on the inside of the door, and the single window was barred and fitted with opaque glass. The plastered walls were painted in a faded green and were absolutely bare. She glanced at her watch and saw she had been sitting there for a little over ten minutes when she heard a key turn in the lock and the door opened. The guard who gestured for her to follow him was one she hadn’t seen before.
She was shown into an office that was a little more welcoming than the room she had just left, though not by much. A coal fire burned dimly in a grate, there were a few prints and what looked like diplomas on the walls, and two windows (without bars) that looked out onto a kind of inner courtyard formed by the central cluster of buildings. Behind a desk sat a man in a threadbare suit with a few pitiful strands of hair carefully fixed in place across his bald head. He looked like the eternal and universal petty bureaucrat, and he did not get to his feet when she entered. In fact he didn’t even look up from the document he was studying, occasionally tapping a line with his ballpoint pen as he mulled over its significance.
The guard who had brought Susan in had withdrawn respectfully and shut the door after him. She stood waiting for several moments before breaking the silence.
“I hope you speak English,” she said, not disguising the resentment she felt at this high-handed treatment. “Because you seem like an offensive little man, and I’d hate to waste my breath telling you so if you can’t understand what I’m saying.”
He gave no sign of being aware that she had spoken, just went on tapping his pen down the page he was reading, then turned it over and continued on the other side.
“I would like some kind of explanation,” she continued. “I don’t know where you’ve spent your career until now, but you obviously have no idea of the kind of trouble that taking an American citizen prisoner in this way is going to cause.”
The man drew a long, slow breath, then sat back and looked at her. A faintly supercilious smile played over his bland features, as though he wanted her to see that her attempts at sarcasm had merely amused him.
“Please explain your interest in what we’re doing here, Dr. Flemyng,” he said, in perfect, near-accentless English.
“I trust you won’t mind if I sit down,” she said, “because I’m going to anyway—as you haven’t the manners to ask me.”
He tipped his head slightly and made an openhanded gesture, inviting her to be his guest, but still didn’t move. She pulled over a chair from the wall and sat facing him across his desk. Even though their eyes were now level, he maintained the illusion of superior height by tipping his head farther back and peering at her down his nose.
“I am still waiting for an answer to my question, Dr. Flemyng.”
“The answer is that I know what you’re doing here. And very soon the rest of the world will know. So I think that’s all we have to say to each other, Mr.…whoever you are. Perhaps I’ll wait to find that out from the newspapers.”
The man sighed in a way designed to emphasize yet again how empty her threats were. “There will be nothing in the newspapers, Dr. Flemyng. Or on television. Or, for that matter, anywhere else.”
“I wonder what makes you so sure of that.”
In reply, he looked past her. She sensed that someone had entered the room without her hearing. She turned.
A man stood there, astrakhan coat hanging open over an expensive suit, a pair of soft black leather gloves clasped almost foppishly in one hand.
It was Latimer West.
The room they had adjourned to was again more comfortable than the previous one. With its armchairs and drinks cabinet, it struck Susan as a kind of visiting VIP lounge, although there was no doubt in her mind that the VIP was West and not herself.
“We’re going to have a civilized conversatio
n, Susan,” he said, after offering her a drink, which she had refused. “I know what you think and how you feel. Nonetheless, I’m sure I can persuade you to see things differently.”
“You murdered my husband. Is that what you call civilized? Do you think you can persuade me to see that differently?”
There was a hangdog sadness in the way he looked at her. She wondered for a moment if it came from regret over his crime or simply from her bad taste in bringing it up.
“I am not the principal in these matters, Susan. I do not make final decisions. I am what I have always been—an administrator.”
“And you think that puts you above the law? Or any consideration of right and wrong?”
He sighed and nodded thoughtfully, as though he understood and sympathized with all she said. “You know that your work has been, as you would claim, ‘misused.’ But you also know now that you are not alone in this. Indeed, you would be disingenuous to pretend that the possibility of such ‘misuse’ had never occurred to you.”
“I thought there were safeguards. No, let me correct that. I knew there were safeguards. I thought they worked.”
West gazed down ruefully at his hands, which lay loosely clasped over his stomach.
“Of course they work.” His voice took on a note of weariness, as though restating the obvious was beginning to test his patience. “Otherwise quite the wrong sort of people might have got their hands on this project by now.”
She wanted to laugh at the sheer arrogance of the remark, but somehow couldn’t bring herself to do it.
“How strange,” she said, “that the depth of your cynicism fails to surprise me, Dr. West. I barely knew you at the foundation, but I always sensed it.”
He looked at her and raised an eyebrow. It was an ironic gesture, mocking almost.
“Your problem, Susan, is that you forgot the most fundamental law of science—which is that there is no such thing as a free lunch. That is something every scientist has known since Archimedes lowered himself into his bath and shouted ‘Eureka!’ So we must begin to wonder why scientists such as yourself turn your backs on that eternal truth. Perhaps because, like all hypocrites, you know perfectly well what’s going on, you just don’t want to see it. You tacitly approve, but you don’t want to say so openly.”
“That is absurd!”
“All science is a two-edged sword. It is pure only in the mind, at conception, as an idea, an equation, or just some new way of looking at things. But once it’s out there in the world, it becomes whatever the world wants it to be. Germ warfare, nuclear holocaust, or a cure for cancer.”
“There’s no comparison—”
“You want the right to do your work on your own terms and the wherewithal to do it.” He was on his feet now, his impatience with her growing into open irritation. “You want the luxury of thinking your own thoughts in your ivory tower. All right, you can have it—but read the terms in your contract that pays for it.”
“You don’t have the right to use any of my work without my agreement.”
He tossed his head with scorn and gave a murmur of bitter amusement.
“In a court of law no doubt your view would prevail. But the world is not a court of law. It is a court of common sense, of which the law is only one part.”
“A very small part in your world.”
He stopped the pacing he had begun and looked at her sharply out of the corners of his eyes.
“My world is your world, Susan. Ordered the way you like it, for your comfort and pleasure and security, where you are able to get on with your work and avoid confronting the necessary unpleasantnesses of life—”
It was as far as he got, because Susan had sprung from her chair and attacked him with a ferocity she didn’t know she possessed. She knew that the voice she could hear screaming obscenities was hers, but she felt strangely detached from it. As indeed she did from any sense of physical contact with him. Her rage was so deep and inexpressible that violence could not assuage it. She knew only that she was pounding and kicking and tearing at him, but it was doing no good. And yet she couldn’t stop, until she became aware that she was being stopped by force. Two guards had entered the room and were dragging her away from him, pinning her arms behind her back. Only now did she see that his collar was torn, his hair disordered, and his face streaming with blood from a long scratch under his eye.
“All right… all right… give her a moment to calm down.”
West was breathing hard as he spoke, dabbing his wound with a handkerchief. His words were translated into Russian by the little bureaucrat, who had also entered the room. Slowly the guards released their grip on her, as though wanting to be sure that she wasn’t about to launch herself at him again.
But the worst of her rage had gone. She allowed herself to be led back to the chair she had been occupying and didn’t resist the pressure on her shoulder to be seated. She wanted to sob helplessly, but knew this was something she would never permit herself to do. Instead she sat like a sullen child, staring at the floor, her hair a tumbled mass covering half her face.
The guards stepped back, but remained by the door. West remained standing, breathing slightly easier, still dabbing at his wound and brushing back his hair. He became crisp and businesslike.
“Now, Susan, I’m going to put some questions to you, and I want answers. How did you find out?”
She looked up at him through her hair, not bothering to brush it from her eyes. Somehow she felt such a gesture would have shown a kind of respect for him, and she didn’t want to risk that.
“I got a copy of the file that Dan Samples had given to my husband. How else?”
“Where did you get it?”
“At the hotel in Ostyakhon.”
West froze and looked at her in disbelief.
“The hotel?”
“You mean you didn’t think of searching there? You’re not as efficient as you like to appear, are you?”
“We checked. Your husband had left nothing at the hotel.”
“But Samples did.”
West looked doubly surprised. She didn’t try to hold back a faint smile she felt playing around her mouth.
“This is all most encouraging, Dr. West. I was afraid you people might be infallible. I see you’re not.”
He ignored the jibe and snapped, “Where is that file now?”
“I won’t tell you, and even if you torture it out of me, it won’t do you any good.”
“You know we can make you tell us without torturing you.”
“True. But the file is already beyond your grasp. It’s too late.”
She felt a kind of elation now. Suddenly she was winning this confrontation. She hadn’t anticipated trouble when she came to photograph the camp. All the same, she had been ready for it. She had made sure that Samples’s file was in safe hands. That was her only protection. She was terrified, but she could see from the look on West’s face that it was a protection that might work.
West contemplated her awhile. She could almost see the wheels turning behind his forehead as he weighed the implications of her words.
“Of course you realize, Susan, that the information in that file is effectively useless unless you are there to back it up and explain what it all means. It amounts only to accusations, which are always deniable.”
She tipped her head, acknowledging he had a point. “All the same, the media will have quite a time with those ‘accusations.’”
West continued to dab at his scratch, then contemplated his bloodstained handkerchief for a while as though he could find some guidance in the spreading red Rorschach.
“You have a point,” he said eventually. “It is something we would prefer to avoid. Fortunately, it is a contingency, one of many, against which we are already prepared.”
Something in the way he spoke checked the feeling of relief that Susan had started to enjoy. There was an enduring confidence in him that she didn’t like. Without thinking, she brushed back her hair to get a c
learer view of him.
He noticed the gesture and knew that she was worried. The balance between them had swung back in his favor. She sensed his satisfaction as he turned to the little bureaucrat, who had remained in the room.
“You might care to put that call through now,” he said.
Susan watched as the shabby little man dialed a long-distance number. It was answered promptly. “One moment please, Mr. Hyde,” said the little man, “I have your daughter here. She would like to speak with you.”
Susan watched, too shocked to react, as West took the phone from the little bureaucrat and handed it to her. Automatically she said, “Hello, Daddy?”
“Hello, darling,” he said.
She could tell at once that something was wrong. The vibrancy had gone out of his voice. He sounded older.
“It’s Christopher,” he said, and went on quickly before she could react. “He’s not hurt or anything like that. But I’m afraid he’s disappeared.”
“How do you mean ‘disappeared?” She could feel her heart beating, and felt strangely suspended between fear and relief that the news wasn’t worse. “You mean somebody’s taken him?”
“I’m afraid that’s the way it seems. There’s someone here now, insisting I make this call.”
“Daddy, are you hurt?”
“No—don’t worry about me. We must think of Christopher. I’ve been told to tell you that you must do as they say.”
“Daddy, do you know who ‘they’ are? It’s the Pilgrim—”
At a signal from West the little bureaucrat had broken the connection. Susan looked up at him.
“I swear, West, if anything happens to my son…”
“Nothing will, Dr. Flemyng—provided you take your father’s advice and do as you are told.”
Chapter 17
THEY TOOK THE helicopter that she’d seen arrive earlier. It flew for about twenty minutes, then landed at a small military air base. At least it seemed military from the way it was guarded, but most of the planes she could see were private jets. They boarded a 737. The interior was done up like a luxury hotel. At least they gave her a private cabin. She had a bathroom, a fridge—everything she needed. Nobody interrupted her during the flight. She was sure there was a fiberoptic lens watching her but she didn’t try anything to test her theory.
The Discrete Charm of Charlie Monk Page 8