A Different War

by Craig Thomas

  There were paw prints in the dusty earth. Behind her, Banks puffed and wriggled his way in pursuit. Millions, she kept reminding herself, millions of pounds. To have kept everything on schedule would have cost millions more than was evidently being spent. And Phases One, Two and Three were, she remembered from the PM's un ringing words at the opening ceremony, and from the architects' glossy handouts, intended to progress at the same pace. Now, large parts of those phases had seriously lagged, others had not even seen a sod turned in earnest.

  Of course there were, dotted around the development, completed projects, new roads or stretches of road, whole new estates of houses, one of the shopping centres. She herself had been to concerts in the new symphony hall, addressed a gathering at the conference centre next door to it. But, like a city at night, seen from the air, the glaring blotches of light were balanced by areas of darkness.

  There were great pieces of the entire jigsaw missing.

  And no one had noticed.

  "You'll need this," Banks announced smugly, holding up a heavy-duty lamp.

  "Us women so impractical," she murmured.

  "And you should have brought a camera."

  "Why, Ray? You imagine I could force people to tell me the truth by showing them a few snaps of building sites?" She immediately sensed the intemperateness of her response.

  "Sorry," she apologised.

  "Right, let's have a look, shall we—?"

  She hurried down the steps out of the sunlight, into a warm gloom then a subtle change of temperature. The lamp's beam became stronger, more necessary for a moment or two, then the light, dusty as it was and somehow unused, increased as they reached the ticket barriers and a glimpse of the platform. There was a huge, greenhouse-like glass roof over the station's two platforms. The barriers were open, and she walked into disappointment. The station, beneath its light coating of dust, boasted tiled walls, mosaiced platforms, large steel notices. It was complete, awaiting its first train.

  "I–I thought they hadn't got on this quick," Banks faltered. Marian glared at him, as if he had been a subtle enemy, persuading her of David's guilt.

  Marian's disappointment was vivid and ridiculous, even embarrassing. It reminded her of the mockery of some of her most complacent colleagues in the House who referred to her as Rent-a-Moral, because they easily tired of her obsessive, always challenged sense of justice. She had sometimes made herself ridiculous, her perennial outrage manipulated on sundry occasions by people who had no real claim upon it. As now, apparently.

  The finished metro station, entire even to the awaiting, empty advertising hoardings. The succession of building sites through which she had travelled, and on which she had erected a castle of venality and fraud, had ended here, in these pristine, functional, completed surroundings.

  "I—" She cleared her throat.

  "I'm just going to have a look down the tunnel," she announced. I'll borrow your lamp, Ray, if I may."

  "But it's all finished," he grumbled.

  "Nevertheless…"

  "Oh, I'll come with you."

  "Good."

  She strode off along the platform. The hard hat was making her forehead damp; a headache encroached, but its cause was sheer bloody frustration, she decided. Her shoes clicked along the platform. She almost expected a sleek, blazoned train to sweep from the tunnel. She hesitated, staring into its darkness. The dry breeze of every underground station. The scent of concrete and dust, as the rails ran into the darkness.

  "It's not live, is it?"

  Banks chuckled, his masculine superiority comfortably worn once more.

  "I shouldn't think so. Come on, then, let's get it over with."

  A sparrow fluttered against the glass roof, as if intent upon damaging itself rather than on freedom. The sight pained her.

  "Right. Shine that lamp—" A noise startled her, filtering down the steps and along the platform, echoing in the empty station. A car engine approaching, then the silence as it was switched off then the slamming of a door… He and Burton seemed the only heated and animate things in the aseptic hospital corridor off which were the doors to the intensive care unit. Windows looked out over Helsinki, now bathed in early-afternoon sunshine, appearing like a pallid ghost of Venice, with white buildings and open stretches of green and the grey sea beyond.

  "If your theory's correct," Burton was arguing once more, 'then you're making suppositions about motive and instigation that don't hold up and I should know!

  These people ruin, they don't needlessly kill they work by means of the rumour, the dawn raid… it's the letter that killeth." He surprised Gant with a boyish smile.

  Gant merely shook his head, holding his hands together in front of his knees as if to still them. He felt himself becoming more impatient; a truant listening to a homily while his adventure waited outside for him. Vance had suffered a second, and more massive heart attack in the air ambulance. Barbara's reaction had been a pallidity, an ashen ness that suggested she had suffered the coronary. Vance had been unconscious for the remainder of the short flight. Mocking first sunlight had glared on his white face through the helicopter window.

  They had rushed him to intensive care… an hour ago. Gant believed that Vance must be dead. Twice in the helicopter they'd tried to jump-start his heart, as if he was a car with a drained battery. The body had shown the feeblest response, to which Barbara had clung as to the spars of a life raft Her grief washed her sunken cheeks and dead eyes with tears.

  "It isn't like that not anymore," he said softly. They do what they have to… and the kind of people I know, who I've worked for in the past, they're looking for work now." He looked up bleakly.

  "You just don't get it, do you? You think yours is the world of grown-ups and you know the rules. It's the world I come from which has the adults in it people who think nothing of walking through other people to be where they want to be. Not just walking over."

  "You're suggesting that intelligence people are involved herein my business?"

  "Why not?" Gant shrugged.

  "Your membership rules say they can't join the country club?"

  Burton glowered and was about to reply when his mobile phone trilled, as it had done a half-dozen times during the hour they had been seated in that corridor. He snatched it from his pocket. Gant stared down the narrowing perspective of the corridor, its walls and floor gleaming from the sun coming in through the glass.

  "Yes?" Burton snapped wearily.

  It was Stuart, his MD. He turned away from Gant towards the windows and the view of the city, which rendered the hospital corridor the comfortable anonymity of a hotel room. Gant's slumped, still form on the hard chair was too suggestive of defeat, of impotence.

  Tim when are you flying back?" he heard.

  "I think the sky's fallen in on us, sorry to have to—"

  "What's wrong now?"

  "We're being deserted in droves by passengers. Booking cancellations are into thousands for the Atlantic flights. Doesn't seem to matter which aircraft type it's just having Artemis painted on the tailplane.

  And the big European carriers and the Yanks are making the most of it fly safely, was one slogan in today's papers. I've managed to get that retracted by threats of legal action… Sorry to sound such a Job's comforter, but—"

  "It's all right, Stuart," Burton answered mechanically. Even to himself, his voice sounded remote, belonging to someone in the hunched, defeated-looking posture of Gant.

  "We can't give tickets away, right?"

  "Not without a lot of effort."

  "OK, I'm coming back as soon as I can get a flight." He sensed Gant look up at him, but ignored the tightness between his shoulder blades.

  "Sure. Yes no, I don't know what we can salvage… No, nothing here that helps us." He paused, then added: "It's gone to hell in a handcart, Stuart. But don't quote me."

  There was no rally in his voice.

  "See you—" He switched off the phone and turned back to Gant, as if expecting his d
ecision to be challenged.

  There's nothing you can do," Gant said.

  "Can you do anything?"

  "Not fast enough to make a difference."

  Think I'm finished correct?"

  "So is he in there maybe permanently." Gant's eyes were bleak, his cheekbones prominent, as if he was facing a hard, chill wind. Burton recognised an empathy with Vance, a remote kind of pity, emotions written in a tiny, minimalist handwriting on his features. There's nothing you can do. I'll tell her you had to leave."

  Thanks—" Burton hesitated.

  "I if there's anything you can do… I mean, I'm employing you, in a way. I'll go on doing that, if you'll pursue—" Gant smiled wintrily.

  I'll pursue. Someone did this to his airplane just for money. The guy who planted the device got paid, and the guy paying him expects to turn a profit. That's all it is… I'll pursue."

  Burton nodded.

  "Good. Let me know what you decide to do, what you need—"

  "Sure."

  "Goodbye, Major." Gant smiled.

  "I must hurry—" Gant watched him stride down the corridor, his steps threatening to become a fleeing run at any moment. When he had disappeared, Gant settled back on the hard moulded plastic of the chair and stared out towards the city. There were golden roofs down there, and neat parks, afternoon traffic, all of which remained ordinary.

  It was almost two when Barbara emerged from the intensive care unit, the door swishing behind her, then sucking shut. When she told him that Vance had not regained consciousness and that they could not restart his heart and that she had given the instruction to switch off the life support, he did not look at her, but held her hand loosely, since she seemed to wish him to do so.

  After an unmeasured time of sobbing and racked breathing as Barbara stared out of the windows down at the city, she quietly subsided into the chair beside him.

  Tentatively, he put his arm around her shoulder and she slid like a child against him, her head pressed into his chest. He felt her grief beat in her cheek and forehead like his own pulse.

  As he held her, he stared at a perspective beyond the crashes of the

  494, beyond the ruins of Vance Aircraft, and the sabotage that had murdered Hollis and Alan.

  The former had tried to be his friend and the latter his enemy, and both of them had failed. Just as neither of them had deserved to die so someone could turn an extra buck.

  Out there, somewhere, was a man who doctored microprocessors so that they caused airplanes to crash. And beyond him, there was someone very, very remote, who had ordered it done. Someone with planes to sell, someone with planes to fill and fly… Someone he wanted very badly to find.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Economic Recovery There were footsteps and voices from the platform which sidled into the hot darkness of the tunnel. They were out of sight of the platform because of a slow bend in the tunnel to the point where the construction work had ceased. The track, the tiling of the walls, the lighting all petered out only hundreds of yards from the dusty newness of the metro station. Before Ray had extinguished the lamp, they had seen the roughly excavated workings, as incomplete and inhospitable as a coal mine

  To Marian it seemed too sudden, too decided. Petered out was the wrong expression. Work had been suddenly, quickly suspended… three months before by the date on the tattered, dusty copy of The Sun she had found. The newspaper had flapped against her feet as if alive, startling her until the light of the lamp had revealed a bare-breasted female and two lurid headlines expressing moral outrage at pornography on television and violence in films. Twelve weeks ago, work had stopped completely on this stretch of the metro line and probably on the entire system.

  "What do we do?" Banks asked breathily, his lips close to her ear.

  "Who do you think it is security?"

  "Probably. Not day-trippers, anyway."

  Weak torchlight fell on the floor and walls of the tunnel. The footsteps were louder, the voices like murmured threats.

  "What are we supposed to be doing down here?" Banks asked more urgently. They were standing in darkness, close together. She smelt the tense increase in the overpowering scent of his expensive aftershave, heard his breathing.

  "Come on out of there," she heard.

  "Come on we know someone's in there." A looming shadow was washed along the tunnel towards them, as if it were pouncing. The voice was suspicious, but hesitant, too. The parked cars would not suggest local yobs, but would mystify.

  "Come on-!" more impatiently, confidently.

  "What are we going to—? What are you doing?" Banks was startled by the noise of the zipper of her jeans, the rustle of the blouse as she tugged it free, unbuttoned it.

  "Just follow my lead!" she hissed, grabbing hold of him. Turn on the lamp!"

  She pulled Banks against her, feeling the pressure of his stomach.

  Their coupled shadows sprang out on the wall. The beast with two backs… Oh, dear, the things I do for England. She felt, with a curious repellence, his arousal. Hurry up, she thought, disliking the aftershave, the good-living rounded ness of his jowl pressed against her cheek.

  "Sorry—" he began to apologise.

  "What the bloody hell are you—?" she heard as her cue and pushed Banks away.

  His foot moved the lamp and their parting shadows danced on the walls.

  At once she began pulling up her jeans.

  "Jesus Christ-!"

  "I told you I didn't want to!" she snapped loudly at Banks in a passably local accent, her tone harsh with experience.

  "Not bloody down here!" She buttoned her shirt as Banks ostentatiously re zipped his flies. Torchlight washed their faces, dazzled them.

  "Christ, Ray-! I didn't expect an audience! You and your bloody sex-drive!"

  Banks' features were stunned, half-amused, perspiring.

  "Who the hell are you, mate?" one of the two figures asked.

  They were no more than a few yards away. In the glow of the torch, she could make out the uniforms of security guards. Complete Security?

  "You like watching, do you?" she challenged brazenly, tossing her hair away from her face.

  "You're trespassing—"

  "Ray hasn't got enough puff to do any damage!"

  she retorted, making as if to brush past the security men. Complete Security again, she realised. One of them grabbed her arm, restraining her. She smelt onions on his breath, and beer. She shrugged his grip away.

  "Come on, fair's fair," Banks began, dropping his voice, so that she only caught snatches of the male-camaraderie bawdiness of his explanation. She turned her back contemptuously on them.

  "My secretary… down here just wondering about one of the flats, you know hot day… just seemed, took my fancy…" She wondered, so convincing was the performance as it reached her, whether Banks had experience in such matters. The wife was, at best, dowdy… Cat, she told herself.

  "I mean, it's not a crime, is it?"

  Banks had already begun moving them all towards the end of the tunnel and the platform. She snorted and tossed her head, more like a colt than a woman, and lit a cigarette; surprised at the ease with which she could adopt brassiness, the accent, the exaggerated walk as she went ahead of them.

  "See what you mean but you're still trespassing."

  "Look, I don't want any trouble, mate—" His accent, too, was thickly local now.

  "I mean, you wouldn't be insulted if I offered—" She glanced at the two men only once, to confirm their uniforms. Complete Security. Then kept ahead of them, her face averted. Stan at the building site of Banks Construction had recognised her, after all. These two one in his thirties, the other middle-aged didn't seem to know Banks, but just in case… And wiggle your hips, she cajoled herself. Her shoes clicked along the platform. Banks' tone was almost that of repartee now. She felt herself beginning to shiver with relief and stilled her body by an effort of will, wearing her new, brazen, adulterous self like a straitjacket.

  The sun
was hotter, it seemed. She ducked through the fence where it was damaged and hurried to her car. Hot leather seats, the hot paintwork. She dragged her sunglasses out of the glove compartment and put them on to mask her features. Then she sat on the uncomfortable heated leather, turning her face away from the two security men, who watched her for a moment, as if in recognition as much as desire, and one of them announced to Banks:

  "You're getting too old to do it in railway tunnels, mate! I should put your name down for one of these flats, if I were you!"

  "Ask him when they'll be finished!" she whispered urgently, as they walked off, laughing.

  "When when are they going to start selling them, then?" Banks called out.

  The older of the two men, the one who had joked about the flats, turned back. His features were cloudy with a sense of having made some slip.

  "It'll be in the papers, mate!" he snapped and the two seemed suddenly more reluctant to leave.

  That's it," Banks admitted, his hand resting on the door of the Escort, the other waving acknowledgement to the two security guards. Time to bugger off!"

  "Agreed… I'll see you then, Ray at the office!" she called out, and started the engine.

  Banks seemed nonplussed.

  "Have you, er—?"

  "Seen enough? Yes, thanks I'll call you. Don't hang around." His sudden grin was lascivious, filled with memory.

  "And that's the end of that, too!" she laughed.

  "Well done the character-acting, I mean!"

  She waved her hand and accelerated away from Banks, hearing one of the security men call out something in a voice brimming with lewdness. The marina retreated in the driving mirrors, Banks becoming a stranded, tiny figure, the two security men ambling away, satisfied. She was sweating profusely, not merely because of the heat of the upholstery, not merely because they had been surprised. She felt dizzied with the success of her gambit, her personation of Banks' fictitious secretary.

  Tanya, she thought, would have been her name. She was hotter than the car, the day. The station was there but there was no metro system.