On another occasion, well before we had real-time surveillance capability and, in this case, even mobile phone coverage because of the location, she had actually been convinced she was about to be shot. She was travelling with an army patrol, a trip she had negotiated locally with the commander, so no authorities or higher command even knew she was there. The point of the report was to catalogue the activities of that particular individual, the commander himself, since he had been identified by others as something of a maverick. The commander, with his detachment of soldiers, none of whom wore uniform or insignia, by the way, despite being a unit of the regular army, set off in their truck to patrol an area that had seen extra-judicial killings, as they tend to be described. Well, they were ambushed by guerrillas. These extra-judicial killings were attributed to this particular military group by certain local opinion, and the men with the machine guns were out for vengeance.
Christine explained later how she expected a hail of fire to start, there and then. She was already covering her face with her arms, an action as futile as it was unavoidable, when nothing happened. The men around her seemed not to react. She described how they neither surrendered nor capitulated, panicked or resisted. What they did, surprisingly, was negotiate. It took a couple of hours. Some money changed hands, also. Christine got no clear view of what happened on that score, unlike her take on the eventual bullet through the head of the commander, which she was requested to witness, but not film. His men had decided that he was expendable and had handed him over to secure passage for the rest of the party. The shot was delivered from close range and blew the man’s head off. She was asked to photograph the result and publish it, as evidence of yet another extra-judicial killing. The T-shirt and shorts that had formed his non-uniform were clearly visible, but the bandana he had tied across his forehead was not. The soldiers, of course, blamed the guerrillas, and so Christine could never have argued a different story, since it would have been one voice against many.
On another occasion, we lost contact with Chris for a full week as she trekked through mountains with freedom fighters in Central Asia, but beforehand she had warned us that this might happen. When it did, however, the absence proved prolonged, two days longer than the outside estimate she had placed on the trip. But when I took advice on the proposed route, even though it was only a roughest of guesses as to where they might have headed, the report indicated that it would take considerably longer than Chris had estimated. Thus I did not panic and did not request any special monitoring. And she turned up, of course, late, but intact.
None of these incidents, nor any other situation that had arisen during any of her assignments, had ever prompted my intervention, and certainly none had even suggested an emergency call. But on this occasion, six days into the One-On-One assignment to Cartwright’s island, I felt I had to act. There was no indication whatsoever of her whereabouts. Other crises had her leaving an area of general and operational surveillance to enter somewhere with only restricted or even zero cover. One-On-One was almost an inverse, in that all the coverage we had was on Cartwright’s island, a place with physical and communication limits, boundaries that separated it from the rest of the planet where normal surveillance pertained. This was the contradiction. Anything that Christine might take with her, anything she might use anywhere, except on that tiny island, would fix her position and tell us what she was doing. But anything that might assist us she had left behind, and it is simply not possible she did that deliberately.
As far as we were concerned, the assignment was to arrive at Cartwright’s island, do the interviews and get out. He had offered a number of locations, but we had been unanimous in our opinion that the island would offer the best backdrop, since it would further enable us to emphasise the line we wanted, which was to stress Cartwright’s isolation and thus willingness to act either alone, or with scant regard for what he knew others were doing in his name. There always was to be wriggle-room, of course, because we had no idea whether he would cooperate or obstruct. And the longer it took, the more we expected Christine to exercise discretion on all aspects of her brief. She was on the spot and it was her job to secure what we wanted to achieve. The final say, thus, was always with her.
But on this occasion, Christine had full coverage, complete protection. She had full audio and visual, plus permanent internet contact if needed. She was on-line when mobile, courtesy of the micro-systems in her sunglasses and she carried a very smart phone the size of a biscuit. For her to have gone missing at all, she must have made a deliberate decision to do so, which was behaviour so out of character I had to reject it as a possibility. The only other possible explanation involved coercion by Cartwright, probably involving a direct physical threat. This also meant that Cartwright must have been fully aware from the start of all the systems we had in place, which indicates either the extent of the power of those behind him, or possibly of collusion from within our own services. My only option, clearly, was to signal an emergency. If nothing else, it would force several agencies to report, and then, I suggest, we ought to be able, by noticing activity or more especially inactivity, to identify the location and identity of Cartwright’s support.
And then the hours passed. They became a day and another night, and then another day. And what was even more galling was that my emergency flag was flying throughout, but thus far it had apparently not been noticed. Christine had crossed no border, certainly no border with an immigration check. She had booked no transport ticket, nor paid for anything that cost more than the ten dollars in cash that she had left after paying for her taxi to the hotel on day one. She had made no phone calls, nor had she accessed the internet, for if she had she would surely have immediately visited a trusted site to post an innocuous but coded message to reassure us. Her email accounts remained unaccessed. In our world, it is really quite difficult for an individual, going about normal daily business, to achieve anonymity. To be realised, invisibility has to be pursued actively and, as far as we were concerned, Christine Gardiner had simply disappeared, and had stayed that way for over two days.
But Cartwright had done the same. None of his cars had been on the road, of that we were certain. I placed a specific note alongside my emergency request to trigger searches on plate recognition for traffic cameras worldwide. We knew he owned vehicles in six countries, but none of them moved. In the event, since no border crossing or travel data was generated, the only ones he might have used would have been those he kept over on the mainland. But nothing moved, including those resources most easily available to him. And, as in Christine’s case, nothing whatsoever linked to his identity registered: there were no financial transactions, no communications and no travel.
***
I have spent another day staring at the unchanging scene. An empty house is still empty. The weather has changed again, and we are back to the heavy, bulbous white clouds floating like foam on sky-water. The scene, and along with it my mood, hardly changes. I continue to fear the worst and have communicated my belief that One-On-One is probably finished, a failure, aborted, undermined. My only concern, of course, is where Chris might be, and what might have happened to her. I cannot imagine that Cartwright would harm her, because he has nothing to gain and everything to lose. And it remains essential I stay on task, because what I want can only be found by understanding and then predicting Cartwright’s moves.
I continue to scan the horizon, at least that part of it that crosses over to the mainland, but nothing significant passes by. There are the usual water taxis bouncing over the swell, and an occasional rusted fishing boat, hung about with nets, cranes, ropes and jibs on its way to wherever a living might be made. The aircraft-like ferries speed their crossings to and fro, their timetables already etched in my expectations. By now, I can even identify the likely route from the company livery. They are all, no doubt, full of travellers, all of whom have checked out of their origin port legally. They will have booked their tickets, and so will appear o
n the trip’s manifest, and they will have paid using plastic, and thus created transaction records on financial systems. In several ways, therefore, they will all have been scanned by the procedures my emergency request has instigated, and none of them is Christine. I know that already, for if any of them had been, the details would already have appeared on the screen to my right, which records any status change on targeted data. There remains nothing, nothing to report, merely people going about their lives which, it seems, is the very stuff of our business, the stuff of our files.
It is inevitable, I suppose, that in this half-awareness of total concentration, my mind should drift again to that night in an Oxford college, a night that had been all but erased from my memory until brought disturbingly back to the fore by the injection of Cartwright’s comments. Christine can only remember it vaguely, which is hardly surprising, since she was smashed out of her mind at the time, though happy, before she slept. I recall that just a few weeks earlier, when we had first met at the freshers’ party (we used to use such words in those days!), I had nodded towards the glass she had just drained of its brown stuff and offered to refill it with what I presumed was Bacardi and Coke. It was a drink we thought was cool at the time, obviously well before it became a staple of the disco. I remember being taken aback, quite literally stopped in my tracks, when she called after me with, “Pepsi, just Pepsi.” She didn’t even drink.
It was a couple of weeks later that I had first suggested she add a little something else to her usual tipple. As far as I saw things, the sooner she fell in with general practice, the sooner she could put behind her all the fears her amputation had brought, fears that were still so close to the surface that they were obvious from the moment we met. If only she could begin to behave like it had never happened - at least mentally - then surely she would overcome it. I had not expected her to take to the new regime with quite the gusto she displayed, however.
On that Saturday in November, the knock on the door, and the panicking porter who had made it, could have done much damage to all of us. Yes, we were being irresponsible. Yes, we had been stupid. Yes, we were in breach of college rules. Yes, we had broken the law. If the book that would be thrown at us might open at any page, it seemed, the answer to the question, “Can we do them?” would have been “Yes.” But that evening, all I know was that after a couple in a local pub, we had come back to Christine’s rooms and had stayed there. What we had been doing inside, behind closed doors and literally shuttered windows was our business and ours alone. Whatever fracas outside in the street had brought the police to the compound’s perimeter had absolutely nothing to do with us. It might have happened in the street just in front of Christine’s rooms, but there was a garden in between, and her windows were a good twenty yards from the railings. Whatever was happening out there, an attempted break-in, a drunk trying to fight, it was quite immaterial as far as we were concerned, even though the man might have indicated, or so the porter claimed, that he was heading for Christine’s rooms. The problem was on the street, and I was determined it was to stay there. And in any case, as I have already indicated, Christine and I were not around that weekend, having gone off on our first trip away together to somewhere unspecified in the New Forest, under the cover of a visit to my mother in the ancestral home. At least that’s what I asked her to tell whoever rang, and her words were merely confirmed by the entry in the porter’s ledger.
My quick thinking did change our lives. It protected our status at Oxford, and thus allowed us to continue as before. We stayed clean. And that was four decades ago, four decades that the ensuing unbreakable partnership between Anthony Green, PhD and Christine Gardiner, MA had survived. But now that partnership, both professional and personal, was probably broken and certainly in crisis.
***
“It looked like a compost heap and smelled like shit.”
They were back, emergency cancelled, hell to pay, no doubt...
They had been away for more than four days when, late that afternoon, Cartwright’s water taxi took the swell as it progressed slowly and unwaveringly towards his rocky home. It was arriving from the island port, where they had probably stopped off to buy more supplies. Three hours earlier I thought I had seen the characteristic stripes of his boat passing across my vision from right to left, indicating they had come from the joined estuaries of the two great rivers whose confluence was hidden from my view, behind several mangrove-knitted islands, between which boats sped through the avenues of nipa fronds. I had no idea where they might have been and wondered if anyone else, apart from themselves, did.
“It’s the biggest flower on the planet. It’s unique.” He was checking the boat’s securing ropes on the balcony when he stopped and thought. “Okay, let’s correct that before you quote me. It’s the world’s biggest single bloom.”
“It’s like being taken to see someone’s domestic waste.” Christine seemed less than impressed, but clearly they were both in a good mood.
“And it only flowers once a blue moon.”
“Can I quote you on that one?”
Cartwright smiled with mock-impatience.
“In that case, I won’t be hanging around for the next blue moon.”
There was a short pause. They had not stopped talking since their arrival, the above representing mere paraphrase of their platitudes. This time Christine had clambered up the ladder from the boat, and she had done it with surprising confidence, once Cartwright’s support from below had been assured. It appeared that she had ceased to fear such tasks and was willing to take whatever time it took to achieve the end she desired. She had arrived wearing her false leg, which in one respect made things more difficult, since it presented merely a weight to be lifted. But wearing it, she was able to plant it, with its joints fixed, on a ladder rung and then almost lean against its support for the instant it took to lift and bend her right leg onto the next rung. Though Cartwright steadied her tread, I could see her behaviour adapting to accommodate activities that were gradually transforming into the commonplace. Cartwright took the precaution of giving her a rope as well, but, had she slipped, it would probably have broken her back, since she tied it around her waist. They had arrived with another treasure trove of black and blue plastic bags, which Cartwright began to unload as soon as Christine was safely on the balcony. They chatted at a near shout as he attached a rope to each bag and asked her to pull it up. He did test the weight of each one before asking her to lift and she had pulled up three before she pointed out that she was doing all the work. He laughed. Then, job completed, he rejoined her on the veranda, where they sat for a few minutes to drink water.
“Will you want to eat again?”
“Tonight? No. That was enough to keep me going for a week. The steamed fish was superb.”
“Steamed grouper with ginger... always a favourite.”
“It smelled a good deal better than your flower...”
Cartwright laughed again and there followed a long pause, while between them they drank the better part of a two litre bottle of water that had arrived in one of the bags. It was mineral water, and shop-purchased, since I had heard Cartwright break a seal. This was clearly a concession to Christine’s tastes. After draining his glass and setting it down on the table between the chairs where they sat, he stretched out and gave a giant yawn. Christine giggled and leaned across to slap him playfully on the arm. Only she knows why she did it. “There is quite a boundary in sensory perception...”
Silence followed. Christine was still holding her glass, but not drinking, merely cradling it to her midriff in private comfort. “Now I wish I had said that,” she said, disinterestedly.
Cartwright continued in his over-stated, overtly relaxed pose. He had closed his eyes. His upper half was in the veranda’s shade, while his stretched out leg caught the afternoon sun. “Jasmine,” he mumbled, sounding half asleep, the incongruity obviously deliberate.
“I meant the flower, you idiot.”
“How was I to know? And I’m not an idiot. Arsehole.”
Cartwright laughed. “I was talking about sensory perception.”
“And Jasmine didn’t set your senses alight?”
Cartwright sat up a little and shook his head. “Communication is always most acute when its absence is obvious.”
“Now there’s a line.”
“I meant the flower, jasmine. It smells.”
“The world has noted this.”
“Hardly, it seems, if you are a representative of that world.”
“I think I have noticed the smell of jasmine.”
“Describe it.”
Christine really did have to think for a moment. “It’s perfumed, sweet.”
“To describe a smell as perfumed is an obvious tautology.”
“Sorry... an obvious sin...”
“Perfumed just means it has a smell. The question really asks you to relate what you think it smells like. What does the smell of jasmine remind you of? Imagine you are one of those pretentious wine connoisseurs who sniffs a glass and then never says it smells of grapes.”
“I told you, it smells sweet.”
“Like sugar?”
“If you like.”
“But sugar is a non-volatile solute. It doesn’t have a smell.”
“It smells sweet.”
“Christine, it doesn’t smell!” He half turned towards her and a pause added emphasis. “Is that all you can say on behalf of jasmine?” He paused and became suddenly animated, sitting up in his chair a little and taking hold of Christine’s left arm across the gap above the table that separated them. He pulled a little, and their two stumps formed a natural pivot which, without legs in between to stabilise them, caused them both to overbalance. Their shoulders met in a gentle collision and, on perfect cue, Cartwright’s arm lifted over her head to stretch around her back and take hold under her right arm, just touching the breast. “Imagine,” he continued, more quickly, “that the two of us are on holiday - somewhere exotic, Majorca, for instance - and we are out walking at sunset.” She had already wriggled almost free of his arm. “It’s pleasantly warm and we have just had steamed grouper for dinner.”
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