by Craig Thomas
Miandad inhaled sharply. Hyde's shoulders hunched with tension, and his neck ached. The eyepieces of the night-glasses hurt him as he pressed them to his face. Men ran, closer now, almost…
A glowing spark seemed to drift down from the command helicopter, which immediately lifted to a greater height and banked fiercely away. The spark fell like a luminous insect, even a cigarette-end dropped from the helicopter.
The mist burst into flame. A tunnel of fire existed in an instant, a coffin of flame which contained every one of the moving men. Hyde could see them still moving, then standing, then twitching, then staggering, then falling. He could hear the roar of the ignited napalm or whatever it was. It was louder than the faint screams.
Then it began to die like the glow of a flashbulb; remaining on the retinae of the watchers still as a bright light, but dying into paleness, then shadow then darkness. Hyde had dropped the night-glasses. Heat beat against his face for a moment, then was gone and he felt chilled to the bone. A few ragged shots from the antique rifles in the rocks near him rang feebly out after the command helicopter. Hyde raised the glasses once more. He felt nauseous. Petrunin's helicopter was retreating backwards down the valley, its pilot and observation windscreens facing back towards the carnage, its air intakes above the windscreens like huge, flaring nostrils. It looked like something gloating over its success.
"I think there were more than fifty of them," Miandad murmured. "Including the wounded." Hyde turned to him, open-mouthed. "Including two of his sons." He nodded his head at the man beyond Hyde.
"I–I—" Hyde began, but he could say nothing more. His mouth remained open, as if expecting comment. What was it? What lurked at the back of his mind like a shadow? Some book, was it? Conrad — Kurtz? Heart of Darkness, that was it…
Petrunin had become — a savage. A murdering savage. 'The horror… the horror', Kurtz had said of his own decline into savagery; or the world's decline. Petrunin was Kurtz now. Once urbane, clever, far-seeing, professional; now a butcher, and one who gloated. The camp guard with the lampshades of Jewish skin…
Hyde retched, but nothing came.
There was a smell of burnt flesh, burnt people, reaching them from the floor of the valley, together with the faint aroma of chemicals. The black eggs he had seen must have burst open on impact, spreading the gas that he had been able to see as a mist. The spark dropped by Petrunin's helicopter had ignited the mist that by then clung to everything — especially to fleeing human skin and clothing. A twelve-foot high box of fire, a prison of flame.
Mohammed Jan was standing over himself and Miandad. He spoke to Miandad in Pushtu; perhaps two brief sentences. Hyde looked up into the chieftain's face, above the cradled Lee Enfield. The whites of his eyes gleamed, but Hyde could distinguish no expression on his face. Then he turned and was gone.
"Come," Miandad said. "He wishes to speak with us. Of the Russian."
Miandad got up and brushed off his trousers. Hyde rose weakly. Turning slowly, he could see Mohammed Jan descending to the floor of the valley, moving towards the charred remains of his two sons and fifty of his Pathan subjects. Hyde dragged the cold air into his lungs. There was a black, charred swathe through the valley; through the clean snow that blanketed the high pass. Hyde found himself shivering. He had always feared Petrunin. Now, he was terrified. He was in dark, turbulent water, entirely out of his depth.
* * *
Paul Massinger carefully stamped the snow from his shoes at the top of the steps leading to the low wooden cabin. After the cries of an unseen bird, more like a cough than a song, had faded, the taxi's idling engine behind him made the only sound. The forest of dark-boled, snow-laden pines seemed to crowd upon the cabin, threatening its temporary occupation of the small clearing. There, no more than twenty miles north of Helsinki, Massinger felt totally isolated, utterly without resources.
He tugged at the bellrope. The noise of the bell suspended near his head reminded him of his own schooldays; his turn to be the bell monitor. When the heavy sound died, he could hear no noise or movement inside the house. His breath smoked, the air was chilly against his face. The clearing was almost colourless; only black and white, trees and snow. He shivered.
He rang the bell again, then shrugged at the taxi driver, who seemed uninterested; or interested only in his meter. Phillipson had answered the telephone, had agreed to talk to him, albeit with some reluctance. They had agreed the time, but now -
Footsteps?
"Who is it?" a voice asked. Its evident anxiety, even through the wooden door, chilled Massinger more deeply than the temperature.
"Massinger — Paul Massinger… we talked on the telephone—"
"I've nothing to say to you, Mr Massinger."
Massinger heard his own surprised, quickened breathing in the silence that followed as if it were the noise of Phillipson's fear. The man was evidently afraid — had been frightened…
Massinger ignored the idea. "Mr Phillipson — it could be important," he said as levelly as he could, leaning confidentially towards the rough, unpainted surface of the door. A strong lock, he noticed. "It really could prove very important." He glanced behind him. No, the driver wouldn't hear, not with the engine running. "It has to do with the arrest of Kenneth Aubrey. I couldn't explain to you over the telephone line, but…" He breathed deeply. He could hear, above the engine of the taxi, the heavy, persistent silence of the small clearing and the forest around it. It intimidated. He continued in what seemed a small inadequate voice: "I'd like to explain it to you in detail — in private, Mr Phillipson." He felt like an unsuccessful salesman.
"I have nothing to say to you — please go away."
"Mr Phillipson — what's the matter? Can I help? You can certainly help me."
"Please go away!" The voice was high enough to be described as a shriek of protest. It was the voice of a child or a very old man. Someone bullied—?
"Mr Phillipson—"
"No!"
"Please—!"
"Go away!"
Massinger knew that the taxi driver was watching him, that he had heard Phillipson's desperation and terror. Yes, it was terror.
Phillipson had spoken to someone — someone in Helsinki, London, anywhere, it didn't matter — and that person had frightened him into complete silence. That someone might—
Might be behind the door, standing next to the frightened Phillipson, hand firmly upon his arm.
Massinger shivered. "Then be damned to you, Phillipson!" he called defiantly through the door before turning on his heel. The taxi driver's head flicked round and the man stared through his windscreen. Massinger stamped down the wooden steps, using his stick to make as much noise as possible. The fading afternoon light between the massed pines was like darkening smoke. The clearing seemed tiny, imprisoned. Massinger wanted to hurry, to urge the driver to accelerate, but he merely gestured wearily and said, "I'm afraid I'll have to change my plans. Let's go back to Helsinki."
The driver nodded and let off the brake. The car's rear wheels slipped slightly, then gripped with their studded tyres. Massinger did not turn his head to look back at the lonely cabin as they bounced down the rutted, snow-covered track towards the main road. No other tracks, he told himself. You fool. There was no one else there.
He wouldn't have talked. He was afraid for his life.
He folded his arms tightly across his chest and tried to relax into his seat. The taxi turned onto the main road. There was a hurry of traffic heading in the opposite direction, away from Helsinki. The afternoon darkened into evening, a red sun little more than a thumbnail on the horizon. The short winter day was already over. They passed through Haarajoki, then joined the moottoritie into Helsinki. The traffic thickened and headlights rushed at them out of the darkness.
Massinger gratefully allowed himself to doze, refusing to acknowledge that somehow he had run out of will, energy, even purpose. He hardly realised that the taxi left the motorway in the outer suburbs of Helsinki, diverted because of
an accident and the subsequent traffic jam. Dimly, he glimpsed the grubby edges of the city; light industry's chimneys, low factory blocks on snowbound plots that still appeared scrubby, wire fences. Bungalows, tower blocks, two-storey houses invested the spaces between the chimneys and the factories. His eyes were open as they passed the circle of a concrete stadium, preyed upon by its floodlights.
He dozed again, to be woken by the coughing of the taxi's engine. It faded, caught again, then died and the taxi began to slow down. The driver steered it to the kerb, then turned to Massinger apologetically, shrugging his meaning rather than speaking. Massinger pursed his features and nodded impatiently. The driver got out and went to the taxi's boot. Massinger saw him waving a petrol can at the window, nodded again, and then watched him in the mirror as he began to trudge back the way they had come. Massinger had no idea when they had last passed a garage.
Massinger sighed. He had no desire to be left to his own devices in the back of a taxi in the suburbs of Helsinki. He was suddenly hungry, and he needed the satisfying narcotic of alcohol — half a bottle of good wine, if his hotel stocked any. He wanted something to stifle the procession of speculations regarding Phillipson that had paraded through his fitful dreams.
The driver had left his radio on after reporting his whereabouts and his delayed return. Its splutter of incomprehensible Finnish grated on his nerves at first, but he found a superficial reassurance in it after a while. It was normal; utterly normal. He settled further in his seat, pulling his overcoat closer around him. The car was growing cold without the heater.
There were houses and bungalows set back from the quiet road; mere slabs of darkness without feature, pricked or squared by lights. Occasionally, a car passed him. His body continued to register the rapid drop in temperature inside the car. The windscreen and the windows began to steam over. He almost dozed again.
A bleep from the radio and another burst of Finnish woke him. He stretched his eyes, and saw the car, parked without lights across the quiet road from him. A pale Mercedes. He could see nothing behind the dark windscreen, but he sensed people inside. It was parked on the main road, not in the service road, and he knew it belonged to neither resident nor visitor.
Then the voice on the radio began speaking in heavily-accented English. It did not seem addressed to him — he knew it was but the voice never made that clear— but it referred to him by name. It referred to the taxi, to the taxi's delay, to the American passenger of the taxi. It was the despatcher at the company office informing someone of the temporary fate of the taxi Massinger had hired. Nothing more or less than that. But the voice spoke in English which he knew he was meant to understand and fear. Involuntarily, he glanced across the road at the parked car. No lights, but then the flare of a lighter or match. Then nothing again.
There was another scratch of static from the radio, followed by mumbled messages, replies from the despatcher, all once more in Finnish; incomprehensible. He fumbled with the handle, opened the door and climbed out of the taxi. The air chilled him. He stood with his hand still gripping the handle; whether for security or support he was uncertain. The darkened Mercedes remained still and lifeless, gathering menace. Two cars passed in quick succession, and then the road was silent and empty once more. Massinger was aware of the tiny distance that separated him from the Mercedes.
He stood there for minutes which had no precise shape or division. Then the headlights of the Mercedes flicked on and off three times, and the engine fired. The car pulled out and away, heading north. Massinger was gripped by a fear that it meant to make a U-turn and come back for him, but its tail-lights eventually disappeared over a slight rise in the straight road.
Massinger realised he was shivering uncontrollably, with relief and with the lingering sense of menace. Someone was trying very seriously to frighten him — had frightened him. He opened the door of the taxi and slumped like a boneless old man into the back seat. His heart was racing. He felt nauseous, weak and unwell, and pressed his hand against his thumping chest as if to quiet it. He felt perspiration growing chill on his forehead and around the collar of his shirt. He no longer wanted to go on with it or have anything at all to do with the fate of Kenneth Aubrey.
CHAPTER SEVEN:
The Zone of Occupation
If she kept her eyes closed, tightly closed for just one more moment, her father would walk out of that bright, wet haze where her tears refracted the sunlight through the branches of the old tree. It wouldn't just be Simmonds in the Bentley, or even Mummy sitting in the deep rear seat — it would be her father, smiling…
Margaret Massinger snapped upright in her chair, lifting her head, shaking it to remove the insidious past. Present, she reminded herself. Her attitude was still childlike, unevolved since the age of six, since times like the one she had just remembered, the end of the 1947 summer term at school. Even many months later, she still believed he would come. Mummy had made certain of that.
The body in the ruins that had been identified as that of Robert Castleford, in 1951, had been as much of a shock as if he had been murdered that day or the previous one. She had never been allowed to imagine that her father was dead or would not return — not for a single moment in five years. And he had indeed come back — as a hideous skeleton whose grinning, broken skull she had seen in grainy monochrome in a newspaper photograph. The placards had borne his name for days, the teachers and some of the older girls at school had reminded her by their looks and words for many weeks. Mummy had never coped with it. She had shut it out. To her, he would always, one philandering or amnesiac day, return to her; as he always had done.
After the sanatorium, the hospital, the mortuary, and finally the cemetery, her mother was buried next to the grinning skull of her husband. Margaret went to live with her paternal grandmother, where her relatives had, by degrees, explained her father to her. A warm man. Unfaithful, often. Everyone had assumed, without voicing the thought, that it had been a woman in Berlin who had been instrumental in his disappearance. Even after 1951, that assumption had continued. He had been killed by a jealous husband, another lover, by an enraged or abandoned woman.
It was her mother's image of him, however, that indelibly remained; the fictitious, idealised portrait of husband and father that so suited her years and her sense of loss. And it still continued plaguing and paining her.
Throughout her adult life, she had been able to comprehend her attitude to her father, explain it rationally to herself. Like stunted growth. Yet, like dwarfism, it was impossible to grow out of or beyond. She had only her child's veneration, nurtured in the hothouse atmosphere of her mother's quiet madness. Mummy had never admitted him to be less than a saint, a minor god. Never permitted any other view of Robert Castleford as her reason slipped beneath dark water.
And, after Mummy's death, grandmother had taken Robert Castleford up like a beacon with which to lead her granddaughter. Her memories of her father formed an enchanted circle from which she could not escape. Had never wanted to.
Handel was being played on the radio. There were crumbs of toast on the front page of The Sunday Times and on the lap of her dressing-gown. And the remains of a Valium sleep in her head, squeezing like a closing vice. She had never needed Valium since her marriage to Paul, and had only taken to it originally in the aftermath of a previous affair, when the pain and blackness of the first weeks had seemed like an echo of her mother's quiet madness. It was late. Almost midday.
The Insight article, a Sunday Times exclusive, became smudgy print once more. There was a damp spot where a tear had fallen. She still felt the first moment of shock at her father's picture, at Aubrey's picture, at an unidentified silhouette between the two snapshots, and at the headline, Menage a trois? Beneath that, even more pompously, The meaning of treason?
A warm man. Her grandmother had ignored her questions. Her beloved and only son's sexual peccadilloes were of no significance, and obviously allowable in such an able, brilliant, ambitious man. But, like dark jewe
ls, sly and covert pieces of gossip had decorated her adolescence. His name had been associated with an abortion, an almost-expulsion from one school, desperate, ineffectual blackmail by one married woman, affairs…
Robert Castleford had attracted sexual indiscretion, and had always charmed it into harmlessness.
There was something else on the front page, too — something concerning 1974 and Germany, under the headline, Who else has been betrayed? She had begun to read it as a distraction — World Cup, Olympic massacre, advisory role for Aubrey, investigation, Gunther Guillaume… she could make little sense of it, and it possessed no interest for her. Her eyes and her mind and her memory continually returned to the Insight article. She could not bear to turn to page eighteen for a fuller account. There was sufficient on the front page — her father and Aubrey involved in some sordid sexual triangle in Berlin with the wife of a sought-after Nazi war criminal…?
Lurid, melodramatic — attested to by a former intelligence agent in Berlin, someone who knew the protagonists well. Now living in retirement on Guernsey, so the article claimed. Sexual jealousy, rage, quarrels, despair, hatred, violence.
She understood the emotions. Her own sexual experience confirmed that it was possible; emotions in riot and disorder, passion amounting almost to madness. Her father could have died in such circumstances. Aubrey could have had killed him over a woman. It was so much more convincing, so much more real than the world of callous treasons and betrayals, of politics and intelligence work and the Cold War. And it made more sense than person or persons unknown. The latter seemed like a senseless and more contemporary piece of violence such as the two and a half lines in the extreme left-hand column of the front page, accorded to an old woman's death at the hands of muggers.
Margaret's loss had begun in 1951, and she knew she had never recovered from it. It was as if she had contracted some childhood disease as an adult when the consequences were much more serious, even fatal. Her mother had deluded her for five years, and when the truth dawned and could no longer be avoided, her mother went slowly and utterly mad and killed herself. Margaret had found herself abandoned in a way she could not have imagined possible. Since that moment of the skull grinning from the newspaper, held in some German workman's hands, she had been completely and utterly alone. Rich eventually, by report beautiful, intelligent, possessed of energy and a capacity for work and enjoyment — but solitary, isolated, bereaved; alone.