She touched the hem of his blanket. He thought that if she did something with herself, changed her hairstyle, wore more attractive clothes, deep-sixed the terrible glasses – she might not be so bad to look at. But in her present garb she seemed to suck all light out of the room.
He gazed at her face. Where did she fit? he wondered. Where did she belong in this world James had created for him? Probably she was just some kind of bridge, a go-between, the person who’d shuffle him along the line of command.
He leaned on his elbow. ‘So. What happens next?’
‘It depends.’
‘Depends on what?’
The woman said nothing for a time. That unnerving stare of hers. Chilly. ‘On what you tell me.’
Pasco said, ‘We already covered everything yesterday.’
‘Let’s cover it again, Richard,’ she said.
‘Is it really necessary?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘Where do you want me to start?’
She thought a moment. ‘The man who recruited you. Start with him.’
Pasco relaxed a little. He was on familiar territory. ‘I attended Johns Hopkins. I intended going on to graduate school. Electronics. One day this guy Binns, an Eng Lit professor, stops me on campus. Says he wouldn’t mind talking with me for a time.’
‘And so you talked.’
‘Yeah. We had three, four meetings.’
‘And he persuaded you where your future lay?’
‘Listen, I was gung-ho in those days,’ Pasco said, and smiled at a lost memory of himself. ‘It didn’t take a whole lot of persuasion, you understand. My God, I was an impressionable kid. The Agency wanted me. They wanted me.’
‘What happened next?’
‘I spent three months at this training-camp place,’ he said. Training-camp, he thought. Indoctrination house was more like it. You had it drummed into you again and again what the Agency stood for, how it protected a way of life that was the envy of the whole god-damn world, how proud you ought to be that you’d been singled out and blessed. Blessed, my ass. You were cursed.
‘Where was the camp?’
‘Near Roanoke. Ten miles, about.’
‘Who was in charge?’
‘Guy called Laird. But we didn’t see much of him. He was a God, you know. Whenever he appeared, it was like he descended in a golden chariot from the clouds. He gave a couple of pep talks and off he went back to heaven.’
‘So who were your regular instructors?’
Pasco thought a moment. He said, ‘They kept changing. There was a guy named Backus. Electronic communications were his thing. Littlejohn was another. His function was to tell us the glorious history of the Agency. I guess he was there to beef up morale. There was a woman called Joan Dunne. Her field of expertise was how to conduct ourselves in overseas postings, if we happened to land one. How to deal with the natives, that kind of guff. How to stay out of romantic entanglements. Be careful of homosexual entrapment. But there were other instructors – I guess maybe eight, nine in all.’
‘You remember the location of the camp?’
‘How could I forget it?’
‘Describe it for me,’ she said.
As Pasco answered, he wondered why she wanted to hear all this again. Was she looking for inconsistencies in his history? He was on secure ground, though. His time with the Agency had been branded into his brain. And any little thing he might have forgotten, he’d remembered during his ten years in the penal colony, because there hadn’t been much else to occupy his time other than to reconstruct the past.
‘After this training, you went on to Langley.’
‘Right. I was instrumental in planning the location of spy satellites. Don’t misunderstand me – I was only part of a team. I didn’t call the shots.’
‘Who did?’
James had said You must mention Naderson. ‘Guy by the name of Bob Naderson. Last I heard, he’d become Assistant Deputy Director for Science and Technology. Which means he had responsibility for a whole bunch of operations. National Photographic Interpretation Center. Office of Research and Development. Technical Services.’
‘An important man,’ she said.
‘Yeah, well, he was one step below the Director for S&T.’
‘And his name?’
James had told him: Poole, you must include Poole. ‘Christopher Poole.’
‘You met Poole?’
Pasco shook his head. ‘He was high on the totem pole. I was only a regular Indian. I saw him maybe twice in my life.’
‘Did you work for anyone else at Langley?’
‘Kevin Grimes. He was my immediate superior for a couple of years. He was site director in charge of electronic radar stations.’ Grimes. The seersucker suit. Grimes with his distended mouth. Grimes, thoughtful, watchful, treacherous.
‘Where?’
‘He moved around. He was based in Delaware,’ he said. ‘Near Dover.’
Stroking her greying hair with one hand, she said, ‘Some of these people are presumably retired. Maybe even dead by this time. Have you thought about that?’
‘Yeah. But some of them are still running things.’
‘You know in particular who set you up?’ she asked.
‘Does that matter?’
‘It helps to focus, that’s all.’
‘Grimes, for starters.’ Pasco shrugged. In the gulag, he’d never dwelt on particulars. His animosity and hostility had been fuelled by anything and everything connected to the Agency. He hadn’t thought about focus. He hadn’t wanted to narrow things down and restrict the boundaries of hatred. ‘You could include Eddie Binns, Laird, or any of the instructors who trained me. Include Bob Naderson, Christopher Poole. But I don’t think you’re quite getting the picture. This doesn’t have anything to do with particular people. This goes beyond individuals. Way beyond.’
She studied his face. Assessed him. He felt as if a flashlight had been turned on him. ‘So you don’t give a damn who actually put the drugs in your suitcase?’
‘No, I don’t. As far as I’m concerned, they were all responsible.’ He remembered what James had told him. He recalled James, in that insidious voice of his, telling him what to say. Impress on her the fact you want to hit the training-camp. That’s important, don’t forget that. You can forget other stuff, but you don’t forget that. Make sure she understands that. That’s your primary target. Pasco pondered this instruction and wondered, as he’d done before, about James’s personal agenda. What the hell difference did it make? His locomotive and James’s were running on parallel tracks, that was the only thing he needed to know.
He cleared his throat and said, ‘If you asked me to single any one thing out, I’d have to say the camp near Roanoke would be my number one priority. That’s the one I’d really like to get. Even if I couldn’t lay a finger on anything else, I’d want that place destroyed.’
‘Why?’
‘Because that’s where I first tasted the bullshit,’ he said. ‘That’s where I swallowed the whole thing. I didn’t stop to chew. I didn’t stop to ask myself if I really liked the taste of what they were feeding me at that joint. I just gulped it down like a good little boy and they patted me on the head and told me I was doing terrific. I’d like to see that place demolished. I’d like to see it just blown sky fucking high.’
She was quiet a second. ‘Tell me about your flight,’ she said.
‘Flight? What the hell has that got to do with anything?’
‘Was it Washington direct to Moscow?’
‘I changed at Heathrow.’
‘So you carried the drugs through Heathrow.’
Pasco nodded. He wasn’t sure where the woman was headed except into irrelevancies. ‘What difference does it make? I wasn’t stopped at Heathrow. My luggage wasn’t examined. I sailed through smoothly. Why?’
‘Curiosity,’ she said.
‘About what?’
‘Maybe there was a deal,’ she said. ‘Maybe the Brits at cus
toms had been tipped to let you pass through. Doing a small favour, say.’
‘Does it matter?’
She rose from the edge of the bed. ‘This business is the most important thing in the world for you, isn’t it?’
‘You got it,’ Pasco said.
She looked at him thoughtfully. ‘I’ll be back soon. We’ll talk some more.’
‘What more is there to talk about?’ he asked.
‘You’ve been gone ten years, Pasco. You should have learned something about patience in all that time.’
The woman stepped out of the room. A trace of her scent hung in the air. It reminded him of something growing, something suggestive of Fall and pale sunlight on fading landscapes, but he couldn’t place it.
The woman left the house, locked it. She drove an old CV6 through a sequence of uninteresting suburban streets. Certain houses had striped canvas awnings that imparted the effect of a low-budget carnival. A man wearing rubber gloves clipped a bush in the shape of a stork. A woman in a wide-brimmed straw hat hosed her front lawn. The hot air was ripe with the smell of cut grass.
Traffic was dense. Stuck at traffic-lights, she found herself thinking about Pasco’s hands, though she wasn’t sure why. They looked unreal, theatrical, as if someone had applied stage scars to them. She wondered what it would be like to touch those hands, to place her fingertips upon the wrinkled discoloured tissue.
She thought he had a haunted look. He was running on loathing, which was a fuel that never took you as far as you wanted to believe it could. You needed additives for extra mileage – a sense of your own capabilities, an awareness of what made you vulnerable, a firm understanding that life was a transient business. She wondered if she entirely trusted him and his story. It was something she’d check.
At an intersection she encountered a police roadblock, four uniformed constables checking drivers. Four intense young men sweated in their pale blue shirts. She waited in line, edging forward slowly, and when one of the policemen tapped on her window she asked, ‘Something wrong, Officer?’
The constable was very young, but trying to look hardened and embittered by a savage world. ‘Routine check,’ he said.
He hunched down, gazed at her face, then asked to see her licence, which she took from the glove compartment. The licence was made out in the name of Kristen Hawkins. The cop studied it for a moment, then returned it to her. Routine check, she thought. She knew better than that.
‘Drive carefully,’ the constable said.
‘I always do.’ She slipped the car past the knot of policemen and when she reached the next corner she made a right turn. She was conscious of more cops. They strolled around in pairs, muttered into their little hand-held communication devices on street corners. She was also aware of something else, dark tendrils of smoke that drifted over rooftops a few streets away and the smell, wondrously pungent, of charred wood.
She found a parking-space in a side-street. She picked up an overnight bag from the passenger seat, got out, locked the car, and began to walk. When she came to a pub she went inside and headed for the toilet.
11
LONDON
Pagan took a taxi back to his apartment in Holland Park. He didn’t enter the place at once. He stared up at the windows of his living-room. He had no desire to go inside. The windows unnerved him. The rooms beyond were unwelcoming.
He looked in the direction of the small park. Twilight, and the place was virtually empty save for a few kids smoking reefer, passing a joint openly from hand to hand. Pagan sometimes had an urge to confront them, flash the ID – but he’d never considered marijuana anything other than a harmless indulgence. Let them smoke, he thought. Let them soar. God knows, there had to be escape routes from reality.
He looked along the street. The unmarked police car was a black Rover parked five or six houses away. He walked toward it. The cop behind the wheel was Detective-Sergeant Bennie Banforth, who rolled his window down. A pale cloud of stale tobacco smoke drifted out of the car. Banforth had the dull orange fingers of a chain-smoker.
‘Nothing, Frank,’ he said. ‘No sign of her.’
‘You been here long?’
‘Just after you called me this morning. The only kind of activity I’ve seen is over there,’ and he nodded in the direction of the square. ‘At least half a dozen dope transactions in the past hour. Quite a little marketplace, Frank.’
‘And that’s it?’
‘That’s it,’ Banforth said. ‘You look like you’ve been in the wars, old son.’
‘You could say that.’
‘You were at that explosion over in Kilburn, I hear.’
Pagan, conscious of the condition of his clothing and the smoke stains on his face, nodded.
Banforth said, ‘The word is the woman planted the bomb.’
‘The word is right,’ Pagan said.
Banforth lit a cigarette. He wheezed a little as he inhaled. ‘Good old George had a chat with you, did he?’
‘I just spent two hours with him.’
‘On his high horse, I expect,’ said Banforth.
‘He’s not a happy man, Bennie.’
‘He was born miserable, Frank.’
Pagan thought a moment about the uncomfortable scene in Nimmo’s office. Nimmo’s apoplexy was an odd thing to watch – the reddening of the plump cheeks, the agitated working of his eyebrows, how a jet of spit accompanied his every word like a form of damp punctuation. Pagan had been obliged to explain his reason for being in the neighbourhood of the bombing, which involved telling him about the business of the stolen photograph. Nimmo’s anger had diffused itself in clumsy sarcasm. Oh, she has a key to your flat, does she? Comes and goes as she likes, does she? Running an open house, are you, Frank? Tea and biscuits next, I expect. Why don’t you hang up a bloody B & B sign?
Pagan always countered Nimmo’s sarcasm with anger. You don’t know what it’s like out there, George. You haven’t got a clue about police work. You’re just too fucking busy sitting in this bloody office building your empire and giving meaningless statements to the press and yakking on TV. Pagan understood he’d gone too far, but he didn’t regret that because it was like opening a clogged valve inside himself and releasing steam. This locking of horns had an element of satisfaction in the sense that it offended Nimmo, but George had at least one stinging comeback, which he was only too happy to fire. Tell me one thing, Pagan. Tell me what you’ve achieved in the last seven months. Go on, I’m waiting. While she’s busy murdering people in hotels with bloody lethal food and bombing bloody supermarkets, what have you actually accomplished apart from acting the bloody hero by pulling a few people out of a burning supermarket?
It was a cutting question intended to wound Pagan, and one he had no answer for. It was pointless to tell George Nimmo about the difficulties of the search, the grinding hours spent assessing a relentless stream of misleading information, the accumulation of computer data, the assimilation of material from banks, motels, estate agents, government offices – in the hope you might come across one telling little item of information, that she’d opened a bank account, she’d rented an apartment, she’d stayed in a hotel, she’d applied for a credit card or had a telephone installed. It was useless to burden Nimmo with the menagerie of aliases Pagan had explored – the Lambs, the Starlings, the Foxes, the Birds, all the rest of it. Nimmo didn’t want to hear any of this. He simply wanted a result. The rest was dross. And besides, if she’d given up using the names of creatures as pseudonyms, as she’d done when she’d found work as Carmen Profumo, then Pagan was chasing up and down blind alleys in pursuit of a phantom.
Bennie Banforth said, ‘I heard there were no fatalities in the supermarket job.’
‘A small mercy,’ said Pagan.
‘Something to be thankful for, old son.’
Pagan shrugged, then moved back in the direction of the house. He took his key out and opened the front door, stepped inside the hallway, looked toward the unlit stairs. He stopped outside
Miss Gabler’s door, knocked quietly. He heard her voice from inside. ‘Who is it?’
‘Your upstairs neighbour,’ Pagan said.
He listened to the sound of a chain being slid back, a key turned. Miss Gabler lived in a state of apprehension. The neighbourhood had gone downhill and her world was one of potential robberies and rapes. Her face, weathered and creased, peered round the door at him.
‘Mr Pagan,’ she said. ‘The hour is late. Is this a social call?’
‘I was checking, that’s all,’ he said. The air from her apartment smelled of cumin.
‘Checking on what?’ she asked.
‘Your well-being.’
‘Why?’
‘Common courtesy,’ he remarked.
Miss Gabler, who complained habitually about the ‘negro’ music Pagan played, said, ‘I’ve never associated you with courtesy in the past, Mr Pagan. However, it is quite refreshing to find this unexpected kindness, I must say.’ She scrutinized his appearance. ‘Have you been in an accident?’
‘You might say.’
‘Are you hurt?’
‘No, I’m fine.’ Pagan glanced in the direction of the stairs. ‘I don’t mean to alarm you, Miss Gabler. But I’m curious to know if you’ve seen any …’ How to phrase this without causing the old dear dread? ‘… any strangers lingering lately?’
‘Lingering where?’
‘Around the house …’
She shook her head. ‘Only the usual louts who congregate at the entrance to our little park.’
Pagan hesitated a second. ‘Have you heard anyone upstairs in my flat when I was out?’ It was the wrong question. He saw at once he’d succeeded in upsetting her.
‘Why? Have you been robbed? Have you been burglarized?’
He smiled and patted the back of her hand. ‘No, nothing like that,’ and he invented some yarn about a key he’d loaned to a fictitious friend, as if this fable might defuse Miss Gabler’s state of alarm.
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