by Oliver Tidy
As he worked his way through the fullest English start to the day that he could find, he caught her looking at him over her single slice of brown toast.
‘What?’ he said, through a mouthful of beans, sausage and egg.
‘You’re different,’ she said.
He smiled. ‘Are you surprised? I feel like a new man. It’s a cliché but it’s like a huge burden that I’ve been carrying around with me for the best part of eighteen months has just been lifted off my back. You can’t understand, Susan. I’m not trying to patronise you. I’ve been playing with death and against the odds for weeks. I shouldn’t be here. But I am. I’m alive, I’m free and I’ve got somewhere to go.’
She felt genuinely happy for him but perhaps because she didn’t get what she wanted out of it, or out of him, her happiness was tinged with a jealousy that she was ashamed of herself for feeling. She wanted to feel that happy, that alive, that enlivened.
They walked back to her apartment through the park and she had to suffer his silly boyish grin as he looked up at the trees and the sky beyond, breathing in the air theatrically and kicking playfully at the leaves. In the end she had to say something.
‘Your sickeningly positive outlook is starting to make me feel a bit queasy. You said you’ve got plans for today. I suggest you get on with them and let me get on with some work.’
Sansom just grinned back like a simpleton.
*
At her flat he used the mobile he had appropriated to call the number on Crouch’s card. He was told that if he would care to give the address a car would collect him in thirty minutes. Susan wrote it down and he read it out. He told her he was going to try to leave a message for Eda. Not wanting to be privy to how she would expect that to play out, for personal reasons as well as good manners, she retired to the bathroom and another shower. Although she didn’t say so, she intended to make it as cold as she could bear. She shut the door behind her.
The phone in Istanbul rang twice and Sansom imagined how wonderful it would be to hear Eda’s voice. Perhaps she had seen the news, understood that he was in the clear and that he would be on his way back to her. She might have headed back to her office knowing that he would call and that with him being free she too was free to come out of hiding.
‘Merhaba.’ The familiar Turkish greeting just lifted his spirits further.
‘Hello. I’m calling to leave a message for Eda. It’s Daniel Fallon’
‘One moment, please.’
She was there. He knew she was there.
‘Hello.’ A heavily-accented Turkish male’s voice filled the line.
Sansom was disappointed. It had been too much to hope.
‘I’d like to leave a message for Eda, please. Can you tell her that I’m fine? Tell her to watch the news. Tell her I’m coming back to her as soon as I can.’
‘I’m sorry. I have terrible news for you, for all of us. Eda is dead.’
He thought he misheard him. ‘Pardon?’
‘I’m truly very sorry.’
‘She can’t be dead,’ Sansom heard himself saying. ‘Eda Ulusoy? I’m calling to leave a message for Eda Ulusoy.’
‘I know. There is only one Eda who we know here.’
Sansom felt the contents of his stomach start to push their awkward way back up his throat. He swallowed hard and forced them back down.
‘How? When?’
‘A motor car accident. Yesterday morning. She went off the road into a ravine. She died at the scene.’
Yesterday morning he was still being hunted. She wouldn’t have known that he had made it.
Sansom gently replaced the receiver and instantly felt angry with himself for not thanking the man at the other end. That was rude of him. His eyes prickled and he felt that the room had become incredibly hot and stuffy. The nausea returned and he knew he was going to vomit. He staggered to the open window and puked his guts up down the side of the building and on to the empty pavement below. He hung across the sill, sucking in air. He was aware of the shower going in Susan’s bathroom. He got to the kitchen sink and splashed his face with cold water. He needed fresh air. More than anything, he needed to be outside.
He stumbled out of the front door and down the stairs. Across the road from Susan’s was a small green space with a couple of trees and a bench. He made it there. He realised that he was shivering. He sat with his head in his hands for some minutes, struggling with the paralysing numbness of the news. The blaring of a car horn got his attention and he saw Crouch’s car from the night before at the kerbside. Automatically, he stood and went to it. Crouch was not in it but he got in anyway.
Real time was interrupted for the soldier. They drove for perhaps twenty minutes before coming to a stop outside a bland modern apartment building. The driver turned to face him. ‘Identify yourself at the door and follow instructions. Are you all right? You look like shit.’
‘A good night, that’s all,’ said Sansom. The driver wouldn’t want to know. He wouldn’t understand and he wouldn’t care.
‘Well, I’m sure you had good reason to celebrate.’
The drive had given Sansom time to regain some control of himself. He went through the motions of stepping out on to the flagstones and approaching the building on legs that barely supported him. He identified himself as instructed and was led to rooms on the third floor. Crouch was waiting for him alone. He didn’t get up.
‘Welcome, Acer. How does it feel, then?’
‘What?’
‘Being a free man again, of course.’
‘Yes. Good,’ said Sansom sounding and looking anything but that.
‘Overdid your celebrations a little last night, did you? I don’t blame you. Hair of the dog?’
Sansom nodded and sank into a chair. Perhaps a shot would do him good. Crouch handed him a heavy glass tumbler with a couple of fingers of amber liquid in it. Sansom gulped half of it and felt the gradual revitalisation and warming of his extremities and his core.
‘Better?’
‘Thanks. Yes.’
Crouch eyed him seriously. ‘Look, you’re sure that you’re in a fit state for this? We can postpone.’ It was clear that he didn’t want to and Sansom needed the distraction that it would give him from his misery.
‘I’m fine.’ He etched an idea of a tired smile. ‘Feeling better every minute.’ He didn’t want to talk about Eda with Crouch. Eda was his and his alone.
‘So,’ began Crouch, ‘first let me tell you that the Home Office has released a statement to the media clearing you of any involvement in recent events – I think they went for mistaken identity. Secondly, you’ll no longer see a For Sale board outside your father-in-law’s home. Our lawyers are working on the conveyance of the title into your name. Thirdly, the wheels are in motion for your military discharge papers and your recompense. We will need a bank account number. We will also need to know from your journalist friend what would make her happy – within reason, of course.’
‘That’s all good. Thank you. You’re keeping your promises. How is Bishop?’ Sansom needed to talk, needed to listen, needed to engage in conversation that would stop him thinking about Eda being dead.
‘Not good. He’s likely to sustain a certain amount of brain damage but probably not die.’
‘And Smith?’
‘Disappeared. It’s as though he never was. But we’ll find him, eventually. And we will deal with him in our own way. You can rest assured of that.’
‘You want me to tell you about Iran?’
Crouch eased himself back in his chair. ‘Very much.’
‘If you’re going to understand it completely, I’ll need to give you some background.’ Crouch nodded encouragement. Eda was dead. A motor car accident the voice had said. Where? Was she driving? Was anyone else involved? Was anyone else killed? ‘Stop me if you’ve heard it before.’ He took a deep breath. ‘I was on a sailing holiday in the Pacific with my wife and child a little over a year ago. It was an old clipper, three masts – The Re
ndezvous. There were other passengers and crew, of course. Bishop’s son was one of the crew.
‘Bishop and Botha, a South African arms dealer operating out of Istanbul, had certain arrangements as I understand it now, not all of them above board. But Bishop defaulted on something, let Botha down and Botha was applying pressure. Bishop said he had to give them something or the South African was going to ruin him. I don’t know how Bishop knew, perhaps his son told him – as a crew member he might have been privy to the passenger list – but on board was another family: the Hammonds. The Hammonds, husband and wife, were both nuclear physicists. They had their two children with them. A girl and a boy, as I remember. Both young. Botha sent men to intercept The Rendezvous in the remoteness of the Pacific where they could take their time doing exactly what they liked without witnesses. And what they liked was slaughtering everyone – passengers and crew.
‘They caught up with us at Jackson Island. It’s hundreds of miles away from any other populated landmass. I was on the island exploring when they arrived. My wife and baby daughter were still on board. They didn’t want to leave any survivors to tell about the real purpose of their intervention.
‘When Bishop recruited me at Headley Court he told me that he wanted Botha killed because Botha had killed his son. Bishop said that had been his punishment for letting Botha down. Maybe it was. I don’t know what to believe any more. Because of what I had lost and what he was offering me, I made an easy recruit to do his dirty work. In my father-in-law’s home yesterday, he told me that the real reason that no one was to be left alive to tell tales was because not everyone on board was killed. The reason Botha’s men showed up in the Pacific was for abduction. They took the Hammonds and probably their children and Botha sold them, traded them as you would trade a commodity. Bishop said he sold them to Iran. I believed him then.’
Crouch stared at him, speechless.
Sansom’s present, something that he had been able to banish temporarily from his mind by reliving his past, rushed back in like an emotional tidal wave. Eda was his future. He couldn’t remember if he’d told her that he loved her. He had. It had been a guilty love – one that he had not felt it proper to feel. How could she have died? And then he was forced to confront the horrible thought that he had shied away from since learning of her death: had it been an accident? Had she been a loose end that Smith had been unable to tolerate?
He was aware of Crouch speaking: ‘The bastard.’ He was out of his chair and pacing. ‘The complete and utter, senseless, cowardly bastard.’ He turned to face Sansom and the soldier got a glimpse of the hardness that lay beneath the thin veneer of Crouch as a slightly eccentric avuncular figure. ‘You understand, Acer, that by doing that they have probably handed the Iranians the opportunity to advance their uranium enrichment programme and in turn satisfy that anti-everything-western regime’s hunger for the development of their nuclear weapons programme. Jesus Christ. I knew of the Hammonds. Their loss was felt. They were important people. She, especially, was top of her field and he was in the top drawer. When – not if – when the Iranians finally prove successful in manufacturing a nuclear weapon they will use it. And with what will follow – the inevitable tit-for-tat launching of further weapons of mass destruction – the world as we know it will not be worth living in. How could Bishop have been so... so treacherous, so reckless, so spineless?’
‘Botha was not a man to let down.’ Sansom had finished his drink and not even realised it. ‘You can call the Iranians to account on it, can’t you? I mean, international law will be on your side. The international community wouldn’t hesitate to support you.’
‘If we could prove it. Up until five minutes ago, I believed they’d perished in the Pacific along with those other poor souls.’ He stopped and stared in Sansom’s direction. ‘I didn’t know about your personal loss, by the way. Words fail me, Acer. What you have been through is unimaginable.’
And I’m still going through it, thought Sansom. Just when it looked like I might have something worth living for again, it’s been snatched away from me. He felt another wave of nausea wash the colour out of him as he remembered his own dreadful news.
‘No intelligence has come out of Iran suggesting what you’ve told me,’ continued Crouch. ‘We can’t just go making wild unsubstantiated accusations that they will obviously deny. This is Iran. They’d bury them deeper – metaphorically or literally. They certainly wouldn’t own up to being party to mass slaughter in international waters followed by international kidnapping.’ Crouch ploughed on, oblivious to Sansom’s inner turmoil. ‘If it’s true and they still have them, we’ll need proof.’ He slumped back in his chair and Sansom was almost sorry that he had been the messenger. His mind was suddenly filled with images of Eda: a smiling, laughing Eda; Eda with a cigarette and a glass of wine by candlelight; a tanned, fit Eda emerging dripping salt water from the Bodrum sea; Eda lying naked across the bed after their love-making – and then his imagination conjured up an image of an indistinct vehicle rolling over and over as it ploughed a gash in the vegetation of some steep wall of a Turkish hillside to explode in a ball of flame in the ravine below.
‘It seems that we owe you something more, Acer. Did you think any more about my offer?’
‘Your offer?’ Sansom could feel the dryness in his throat.
‘Employment?’
He hadn’t, of course, not seriously. He’d wanted no part of that. He had wanted his quiet life with Eda, to live in the sun and the sea and to take life as it came for as long as it suited him.
‘Yes.’ He heard himself say. ‘I have. How would it work?’
‘You’re interested? Really?’ Crouch was surprised. ‘You didn’t give me that impression yesterday, I must say.’
‘I didn’t like the picture of life that you painted for me.’
‘Well, at last: some good news. I need reliable, resourceful, people. Above all I need lucky people – and you, Acer, are lucky people.’
‘I believe you make your own luck.’
‘Exactly. So do I, Acer. I also believe that the harder one works the luckier one gets. I imagine that by now you’ve worked out that I work for MI6. I’ll be honest with you, Acer. I’m not offering you a position within that arm of intelligence, but now and again there are jobs that need to be done that can’t be seen to be associated with us, or any branch of British intelligence. Your personal history would make you an ideal candidate for such tasks. I might be able to offer you some freelance work from time to time. You would take your instructions from, report to, and be responsible to me. The work is always international. It’s well paid and varied. But the risks can be high. It’s irregular and can be dangerous. It’s not work for the faint-hearted. It’s not the kind of work that one can do well with a significant other or a family.’ Crouch glanced up quickly, ready to apologise for his crass remark, for forgetting Sansom’s personal history so quickly, but the soldier didn’t show that he had been offended by the insensitivity. ‘It is a fact of international diplomacy that there are sometimes sensitive jobs that need doing for the greater good; jobs that can’t wait for the slow grinding of the diplomatic machine to churn out its approval, or more often than not its disapproval. Sometimes there is an element of urgency for action where delay could be catastrophic and costly. I guarantee my operatives every support that I can give except one: official recognition. If you were to get caught in an awkward situation by the opposition, whoever they may happen to be on that day, you are to all outward appearances deniable and on your own. Behind the scenes every avenue, diplomatic or otherwise, would be explored to get you back, to help you, to extricate you from whatever mess you were in, but officially deniability is, unfortunately, a necessary part of some of our work.’
‘I understand,’ he said. But he no longer wanted to be there. It was like listening to Bishop and Smith all over again: this belief that there was no other way than violence and whatever else it took to further the interests of the state’s foreign policy.
‘Do you? Do you believe you are ready for something like that? Suitable for it? Go away and think about it, Acer. Keep my number. Come and see me at the end of the week. We have existing business to conclude anyway. Let me know your decision then and if you decide against the idea then I trust that this conversation will remain between us. But, Acer, you are the kind of man I need. You are the kind of man your country needs.’ Again the similarity between Crouch and Bishop was uncanny. A memory of Bishop’s visit to Headley Court was stirred – the forced sincerity, the flattery.
Sansom nodded and rose. He found his hand being gripped and pumped then Crouch showed him out. His escort from the front desk was waiting outside the door. He led him down and out on to the street. He declined the offer of a lift back to Susan’s and set off along the footpath.
*
Nothing had changed, everything had changed. The ordinary surroundings that he was able to derive so much pleasure from just hours before now did nothing to stir his senses. He felt deadened. He no longer caught the scents of autumn in the air; he didn’t notice the leaves shifting in the light breeze; he no longer wished to run his hand over the trunks of the trees that staggered the pavement as he had done on his way back from breakfast; he was deaf to the urban birdsong and beneath the thin coating of whiskey he could taste his own vomit.
He wound up overlooking the Thames. He leant on a wall and for some minutes studied the eddies of swirling brackish water. He wondered how people managed to throw themselves in and not then fight with everything they had to reverse their decision and thrash their way to a bank. What must people feel to be moved to such action? And why was he not, after all he had suffered and been made to experience, feeling like those lost souls? Again, he had no one and now nothing to live for. All he had to look forward to was day after day of misery, memories, regret and loneliness. He wouldn’t have cared less if he had died in some manner out of his control – a lightning bolt or a falling branch – but he would never have the courage, or the cowardice, to take his own life, or even try.