by Craig Thomas
He heard the first of them collide gently with the wall beneath the bedroom window, then a further, softer detonation of flesh and clothing against the house.
They would know about the booby-trap, they'd come in via the window he had prised open. He wiped angrily at his forehead. He touched at the revolver Aubrey had supplied. Sweat under his arms, hands clammy. The stigmata of the old game, he realised, his lips parting across his teeth in a feral, threatening expression.
Three, four how many? He withdrew the revolver and checked the chamber, listening beyond the glass to the noises of birds, the rustle of a slight breeze, the sound of footsteps maybe along the wall of the farmhouse. He replaced the Smith & Wesson in his waistband, this time nestling it against his stomach. Its stubby barrel and no-snag front sight were unfamiliar only for a moment. Wood creaked in the afternoon silence.
There was no one between himself and the barn. If he dropped from the window and ran, he would be exposed for no more than thirty yards, a matter of a few seconds… while he ran headlong, enlarging all the while in a telescopic sight, falling away as if kicked by a horse when the first bullet struck. There was no one between him and the barn because they wanted him to go that way, if he had seen them at all.
Gant, still crouching, edged his way across the polished floor, sensing rather than hearing the tiny scuffs and irritations of his rubber-soled shoes against the wood.
Then he straightened on the landing and tiptoed towards the head of the stairs, aware of the dry, crumbling texture of the plaster as his left hand stretched out to steady his unnaturally slow movements. The rucksack was slung across his shoulders. On a table at the head of the stairs was an old oil lamp. Gant could smell the fuel, the burnt wick.
It rested on a clean, neat cloth of lacework, the kind his mother might have made. Strickland's mother, too… shadow across the room, short and stubby with the early-afternoon sun, pausing after having climbed through the window. He listened and could hear the unseen man breathing, and perhaps another's breaths beyond that. One still outside the window. He waited, reluctant to draw the gun, to fire it.
The shadow moved, precisely, carefully. It possessed a bunched hand from which a tiny, sticklike accompanying shadow protruded. They would even expect this one to get blown away, but it would serve to locate him exactly, narrow the field of fire… He was sweating profusely.
The revolver remained in his waistband, his hand instead touching against the polished brass of the old oil lamp, a pattern of leaves etched on its clouded glass bowl.
Three or four more steps and the shadow would be at the foot of the stairs, they would be visible to one another… His grandmother had worked by the light of lamps like this one, his mother had kept one as a memento… He had picked it up as the memory drifted through his awareness, had replaced it like a reluctant purchaser, had opened the box of matches that lay beside it on the lace, had watched the shadow take one step, then another… Had held his breath as he eased off the clouded glass and crooked it against his stomach with a bent arm, had turned up the wick, had struck the match, a loud, slowed-down sound, watched the wick flare up, before-foot of the stairs, the first man, his hand on the banister. Gant threw the flaring oil lamp towards the stocky, square-faced man, who ducked aside. The lamp broke, spilt its oil. The flame ran after it hungrily.
Even as the fire began behind him and the curtains burned as quickly as rags, his gun was aimed at Gant. He drew the Smith & Wesson and fired twice, ducking back against the plaster that splintered from his attacker's shots, stippling his cheek with fragments like small stones.
The man lay sprawled back across a flaming rug, his clothes already smouldering. The crackle of an RT stronger than the crackling of wood catching fire. The second man was still outside the window. Gant launched himself down the short flight of stairs, not pausing to glance at the window, turning instead towards the kitchen, running-colliding.
His breath deserted him, his body was shocked into vulnerability as he lurched back against the heavy table, seeing the man he had collided with arched against the sink, as if they were two fighters resting.
Through the window, a fuzzy image of men running. He thought he recognised the figure and stride of one of the team from Oslo. The man against the sink was coughing air back into his lungs. Gant struck him across the temple with the stubby barrel of the revolver, the foresight cutting the skin open. Even as the man fell aside, Gant was opening the door and running towards the barn.
His ears pounded. It was difficult to snatch air into his lungs, the knowledge that he was running towards a marksman compressing his chest.
Someone shouted as the first shot whined away near his shoulder. A window shattered behind him. He plunged through an open gate in a low stone wall into the dappled shadows of trees. A small orchard. Old nuts, empty shells, cracked beneath his feet. A tree was white-scarred by other shots as he surged through the orchard bent almost double. Sunlight, shadow, sunlight The land dropped sharp as a grassy cliff away from the orchard towards a grove of dark trees, towards fields dotted with animals and fringed with lines of holm-oak.
Beyond the nearest field, gleaming through the trees, the glint of water. He saw the immediate landscape like an aerial map, from the vantage of the Cessna.
He glanced back. Flame licked from a window, pale in the afternoon light. Puffs of smoke. Three men running after him into the orchard, the one he thought he had recognised from the hangar in Oslo waving his arms, directing the others into flanking movements.
He skittered down the steep slope, the long, lush meadow grass brushing against his knees. He stumbled, falling. Two shots whined over his head, the flat cracks of the rifle startling a grazing cow, which lumbered away from him. He scrabbled to his knees, looking back. They were already coming quickly down the slope. The trees and the water were still a hundred yards or more away.
Gant ran, weaving like some manic foot baller evading invisible tackles. There were two more shots. He swerved left, right, right again, left-crashed into a thin branch, then through tough, restraining bushes. Lost balance, stumbled forward, then rolled. Water drenched him. The banks of the stream were high and close, the water no more than a couple of feet deep. He was holding the revolver above his head as if frozen in a desperate waving action. Trees leaned heavily over the slow water. For moments only, he was hidden from them.
David Winterborne's office looked down on Poultry's narrow street, and across towards the Bank of England and the Mansion House. He could also see the Royal Exchange and St. Mary Woolnoth, the oblong Hawksmoor tower which struggled to symbolise faith, surrounded as it was by the high rises of banks. David had selected the location for his corporate headquarters years before, when the view from the windows had seemed more necessary; an attempt to suggest that Winterborne Holdings truly belonged in the City.
He looked now at the church, imagining its ornate, baroque interior, its columns and baldachino reredos. It was Marian who had first taken him inside, made him look properly, lectured him. Marian, naturally
… Irritated by the recollection, or even the pigeons on the windowsill, Winterborne turned to face his desk. The screen of his PC held the e-mail letter he had drafted to Strickland.
It could be sent anonymously, without trace. It contained a proposal for a commission. A target for one of Strickland's bombs. The letter purported to come from a third-party fixer on behalf of some shadowy, extremist Middle East group.
The target was not specific, but Strickland would be able to deduce that it was Arafat… The traitor to the dispossessed people and to God, the puppet of the Zionists Winter borne had enjoyed creating that description. Hamas and Hizbollah, or Islamic Jihad, were never subtle in their condemnations.
The proposed fee was half a million US dollars. Strickland would be tempted not by the money, but by the fact that he had once, years before, failed to kill Arafat.
He had probably been employed by the Israelis on that occasion. The Chairman of the PLO had
left the bathroom in which the device had been placed ten seconds before it was remotely detonated. Strickland's failure had humiliated him. He would be unable to resist another chance. His pride in his infallibility was the glue that held him together.
Strickland would respond to the e-mail via his own PC. He would have no idea to whom his reply was being addressed. Even if he had a suspicion that it was a trick to draw him out into the open, he would still come. The prize was too tempting to resist, Winterborne was certain of that. Strickland would offer a meeting on neutral ground.
However careful he proved to be, he would come and then he would be eliminated.
Winterborne would transmit the enticement in another moment or two.
Meanwhile, there was the Bach on the CD player. The B minor Prelude and Fugue filled the office. The music seemed appropriate to Hawksmoor's church, to the elegant cornicing and ceiling rose of the room and the heavy bookshelves, and to his mood. Reflective intimacy in the prelude, the profound yet strict order of the fugue which followed. He listened for a few moments, remembering that it had been Marian who had given him his appreciation of music. Effortlessly clever Marian… He shook his head and scrabbled the remote control from his desk, switching off the music almost savagely.
He studied his desk, supporting his weight on his knuckles. His application for US citizenship moved smoothly, oiled by lobbyists and tame Congressmen… The leasing deals for Skyliner lay like raked leaves… Other businesses prospered. His staff, in other offices, busied themselves with sublime confidence, skating on newly thickened ice that bore no resemblance to the thin, dangerous crust on which he had been moving with so much caution only weeks ago.
Now, he was poised. Once the citizenship was settled, he could move on the microprocessor firms, the construction and other companies he needed to weld together to form the hull of what would become Winterborne Holdings in the US.
He would be raiding, soon. The US banks were now eager to lend and CEOs of companies were keen to sell out to him, for the appropriate golden balm.
It still unnerved, like a recollected nightmare, the thought that it might all have fallen into ruin because Aero UK could not sell Skyliner and Euro-funds had had to be diverted to prop the company up. The discovery of the fraud would have ended — everything.
What was necessary had been done. It was over.
He thought of Marian again and of a withering description she had offered of him after an early piece of stock manipulation had outraged her. You're a mixture of Buddhist fatalism and European imperialism, David, a contradiction. Because of the one you believe it doesn't matter what actions you take, and because of the other your actions are those of a bandit… Why?
He had answered her mockingly, quoting from one of the Chinese poems she had introduced him to when she was still a teenager. Li-Tai-Po, the drunk, the revelling hedonist… Dark is life, so is death. She had hated that because it had been true. Nothing really mattered.
Contempt for life made you a Buddhist or a bandit, OK, Marian?
That, perhaps, had been the day when they had finally seen the gulf between them, each on opposite sides of a deep canyon.
He smiled, re-reading the e-mail, then turned back to the window. A pigeon continued to strut aimlessly along the windowsill above the traffic, occasionally thrusting out its wings as if uncertain of its ability to fly or woo. He returned to his desk and abruptly pressed the transmit key, sending the e-mail to Strickland's PC, wherever it was on the planet. Days, perhaps a week, and Strickland would come out, blinking like a mole in the sunlight to be beaten on the head with a spade.
The still-green buds of rhododendrons were like spear points at the edge of his vision as he sat hunched in the concealment of the thick bushes that leaned out over the stream. He had moved upstream for perhaps half a mile. The bushes were dusty and old. Insects buzzed outside, suggesting that the rhododendrons were impenetrable, that he was safe. Sunlight dazzled beyond the outermost bushes, through the gold, red and pink of opened flowers.
He studied the map, checking the location of the Cessna. They would have found it, he insisted to himself. There'd be someone waiting for him… or, just to make certain, they would have emptied the fuel tank or damaged the controls. His finger traced the stream towards the nearest village. Maybe there—?
He recollected the tiny village from the air as the Cessna banked over it, a curl of water around it, the old lauze — roofed houses crouching beneath the abbey church, fortified and threateningly large in its surroundings. The slopes of the land, the narrow valley emptying into the Vezere, parked cars, hot sunlight and dark shadows in the cramped streets. Should he make for the village? Beyond the rhododendrons was a small copse of trees, then open fields dropping away towards the village. The Cessna sat in a field he would be able to see from the edge of the copse.
The dust from the bushes, the heat of the afternoon, irritated his throat. One man had passed noisily along the bank of the stream above him ten minutes before. The crackle of his RT and unheard instructions interrupting birdsong. Gant was becoming stiff in his hunched position, he needed to move. He listened beyond the hum of insects and the birds to the heavy afternoon silence. The distant noise of a cow, of a vehicle on some hidden road.
He turned on his stomach and began wriggling through the undergrowth, catching at his breath with each movement as a cough threatened. He emerged into the copse of holm-oak and poplar and rose to his knees, listening again as his heartbeat died back to quiet. Then, standing, he slung the rucksack across his shoulders and began moving through the shadows, avoiding the splashes of sunlight as if they were irradiated.
Crackle of an RT, an answering, harsh whisper. Off to his left, perhaps fifteen yards. He moved behind the hole of a tree. There was more sunlight, the ground was beginning to drop away. He moved his feet gently, gliding from the cover of one tree to another.
He raised the f ieldglasses to his eyes. The lenses misted, then cleared. He scanned the fields to the west of the village, where the Cessna's livery was suddenly bright and incongruous amid grass, near the shade of trees. He could see no one, not even the farmer to whom he had explained his engine fault, his need to seek parts, his return in no more than three hours… Around the Cessna, like an exaggeration of the afternoon heat, a haze he at once realised was evaporating fuel.
They'd drained the tank rather than more obviously damaging the airplane. To the left of the Cessna, no more than a hundred yards away from it, a momentary gleam of sunlight on metal.
Disappointment wrenched at his stomach. He leaned back against the rough bark of the tree, staring up at the canopy of leaves, letting his breath exhale in an expression of defeat. Sweat ran into his eyes…
Minutes whole minutes had been wasted. He felt drained, raising the glasses once more with weak arms. The Cessna, but only for an instant, then cows and sheep sweeping through the lenses, trees, and lines of willow and poplar that marked streams, ditches. To Gant the landscape became more covert, military; a map of trench works from a long-forgotten war, each hedge or screen of willow and poplar marking water or a ditch where he could move unobserved. He traced the lines carefully, fixing each stretch of cover, each exposed area.
A hundred yards to the first parade of poplars… another seventy yards before he had to break cover again… fifty yards to a belt of oak, then another long field, then more trees that had advanced like a besieging force up to the fortified walls of the abbey church. Two cars and a pickup moved like bright, carapaced insects along the winding, shadowy street of the village, sunlight flashed from windscreens on a minor road. He listened behind him. Someone was blundering with slow, elephantine caution away from him.
He tensed, then began hurtling down the slope towards the first line of poplars, which waited like a still troop of men for his assault. He heard shouting, and his blood racing. The grass was noisy with his passage, a cow veered away from him.
He ran brokenly at first, then in a straight line, despite
the first shots away to his left. Sheep that had discovered the shade of the poplars moved away in truculent panic as he blundered into shadow, and reached the rivulet the trees had marked.
He jolted himself to a halt against the bank. The ditch was no more than four or five feet deep, the water just inches. He splashed along its slippery, stony bed, his breath roaring. He remained crouched as he scuttled rather than ran, hearing shouts of pursuit.
He collided with something, was struck. Then something grabbed him, even as it shouted for support. He smelt food on the man's breath, arms pushed him off balance his feet slipped, hands closed on his throat. A face, as distorted as if it were garbed in a stocking mask, pressed against his eyes. Gant struggled, shaking his head to rid his throat of the man's grip. His vehement denial seemed impossible to transmit to the rest of his body. The man pressed him back against the bank, his hands still tightening around Gant's throat. He tried to snatch at air, his mouth twisted wide, but he was unable to swallow.
Breathing became almost impossible Black lights flickered before his eyes, blocking out the sunlight streaming through the tracery of poplar branches. The man's stub bled rounded face was contorted with effort.
His hands were tight on Gant's throat, whose back was arched against the bank, his hands scrabbling with dirt and grass and roots as if he were frantic to escape underground. The RT was somewhere close, dropped into the water or in a pocket, and it was urgent with exhortations to hold him and with promises of immediate help.
He couldn't reach the revolver, didn't know where it was, dropped or still thrust into his belt… His hands still clawed the dirt of the bank, panicking at the encroaching loss of consciousness, his feet shuffling in the water. Scrabbling… as if he was being pulled into a narrow space… black lights, flecks big as fragments scrabbling… the man's face filled with effortful blood and triumph… His arms came up together, threading through the man's arms then flinging them wide, breaking the grip around his throat-breath… coughing breath