The Truth

by Peter James

  He wanted badly to speak to Van Rhoe, but he couldn’t do that from here, not if he was being watched and listened to. And what if Van Rhoe was also under observation?

  Sitting down at his desk again, he gave a reassuring smile to Susan and John that made him feel uncomfortably guilty. Then he told them there was nothing to worry about, it was just a tiny cyst, exactly as Miles Van Rhoe had diagnosed. It was best just to live with it, keep taking the painkillers when it got really bad, be a brave girl.

  Watching them leave, he hated himself. But it would be all right: as soon as he had the opportunity he’d tell them the truth. He would go straight home from the office, scoop up Caroline and the children and drive them all to the nearest police station and get this whole thing into the hands of the authorities.

  He sped through the rest of his appointments, and then, at ten past six, grabbed his coat – his secretary had already left – and hurried outside.

  The Porsche, black as the night in the rain-lashed car park, beeped at him and winked its lights when he hit the button on the key fob. Then he opened the driver’s door and the dome light came on. That was when he saw the figure sitting patiently in the passenger seat.

  He jumped.

  ‘Good evening, Mr Addison,’ Kündz said. ‘Did you have a nice day?’

  Harvey Addison stood rigid, frightened. His instincts told him to run, but that wasn’t going to do him any good; this man Kündz knew where he lived. Running wasn’t going to get him anywhere, talking was his best option.

  He climbed into the Porsche and closed the door. Suddenly it felt very quiet in here. He was wondering, how the hell did this man get in here? The alarm was still set. He had been sitting in the car with the alarm set, and the sensors in the car detected even the tiniest movement.

  Christ, what kind of a freak is this man?

  Kündz said, ‘You did well, Mr Addison, I am pleased with you, and when I report this to Mr Sarotzini he will be pleased with you also. Just one thing bothers me, and I will explain this to you as you drive – please drive now.’

  The obstetrician weighed up his options. He was trying to think clearly, but fear was causing a blizzard of confused thoughts inside his head. ‘W-where?’

  ‘I will direct. Navigation is a skill Mr Sarotzini has taught me.’

  ‘Mr Sarotzini? Who’s he?’

  ‘Turn left. This is a good car. I also have a German car, a Mercedes, I like it very much. It’s the sports one, you know, but I think I have a more complicated sound system than you. Your speakers in here are very small. I can recommend some to you that will give you much better quality. I see your radio was set to classical music stations. The speakers you have here are really more suited to rock music.’

  ‘I really need to get home, Mr Kündz. I have a patient in labour due to give birth in a few hours, and I must have some supper and then get over to her.’

  ‘She is a fortunate lady to have such a diligent obstetrician, Mr Addison. Now – straight on over the lights – Mr Addison, in your lunch hour today you did not go out. You were looking around your room. You were trying to find a microphone? A camera? What would you have done if you had found these things?’

  There was an air of quiet menace in the man’s voice that riddled Harvey Addison with fear. ‘I was curious how you knew so much about me, how you got the pictures.’

  ‘Curiosity is an impure thought. This is one of the Truths, Mr Addison.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Turn right at these next lights, please. These actions, this looking for a camera, a microphone, I find these cause concern. Trust must be absolute, Mr Addison.’

  A wild thought was going through Harvey Addison’s head. He wondered if he could accelerate hard, put the car into a slide and slam the passenger side of the Porsche into a lamp-post.

  ‘Do you understand the need for purification, Mr Addison?’

  ‘In my work I understand the need for sterility, for cleanliness.’

  ‘Don’t let any thoughts of killing me take root in your mind, Mr Addison. If you crash this car you will arrive home to find that your wife, Julia, and your three children, Adam, Jessica and Lucy, have suffered in the manner I have already explained to you. You go straight over the next lights. From purification can come absolute trust.’

  Increasingly frightened with every mile that passed, Harvey Addison could get nothing further from the man. They were driving north on the Ml now in silence. Then, several miles inside Bedfordshire, Kündz calmly instructed him to turn off the motorway.

  They headed into the darkness of the countryside, passing a sign to a place called Brogborough, Addison’s fear deepening as they left the lights and the comfort of other cars behind them. And then it deepened even further still, when Kündz directed him onto a dirt road which, after a few hundred yards, ended in a vast, deserted quarry. The headlights picked up a stationary car, a Ford.

  ‘That’s my car,’ Kündz said. ‘I appreciate the lift. Please pull up beside it and then switch off the engine, we should not cause unnecessary pollution. We must all be concerned about the environment, the ozone layer. Are you concerned about the ozone layer, Mr Addison?’

  The obstetrician switched off the engine and, in a quavering voice, assured Kündz he was concerned about the ozone layer. Then he added, ‘I – I thought you had a Mercedes?’

  He was shaking with terror.

  Kündz smiled at him. ‘Yes, but she is in Switzerland, in Geneva. I think it is as well because she would have got dirty on this road. Please switch on the interior light.’

  Harvey Addison did as he was told. With the wipers stopped and the rain quickly frosting the screen, he felt even more enclosed and trapped. Kündz removed a pouch from his shoulder bag and unzipped it. Inside was a piece of cardboard, the barrel of a ball-point pen, and a cellophane packet containing a fine white powder.

  Unhurriedly and carefully he made a slight convex curve in the cardboard. Then he poured white powder on to it. ‘This is cocaine, Mr Addison. You like cocaine very much, don’t you?’

  Surprised that Kündz knew about this as well, and determined to keep all his wits about him, he said, ‘I don’t want any right now, thank you.’

  Kündz sounded genuinely hurt. ‘Mr Addison, this is a reward for doing so well today. Please, enjoy, we have plenty of time, there is so much night in front of us. I have brought you this for your purification.’

  The darkness, the remoteness, the silence. Christ, how the hell could he have let himself into this situation? In London he could have done something – he could have run, shouted. Surely he could have done something? How the hell could he have been so bloody stupid as to have ended up here?

  He felt close to tears. His children, Caroline, what did this madman want from them all? What did he want from him, now, here?

  ‘Please, Mr Addison, enjoy yourself. The quality is quite outstanding, I am sure you will agree.’

  Harvey Addison’s hands were trembling so much he could hardly grip the barrel of the pen. Hesitantly, he took a very small sniff – and then, within seconds, everything seemed much better. There was a surge inside him. He felt a power gripping him, this was great, this power, his whole stomach constricted, and a wave that started deep in his belly, rippled, spreading outwards through his whole body. It was pure, incredible pleasure, so strong it evacuated his lungs. This was sex, this was pure orgasm, but this was orgasm that went on building, spreading outwards through him, just on and on, wave after wave, each becoming stronger, more intense.

  ‘This is incredible!’ he gasped. ‘My God, this is incredible!’

  Kündz nodded, he was glad, he was happy. He urged Addison to take another snort.

  The obstetrician shook his head.

  ‘Please,’ Kündz said. ‘Do this for me. It will be even better.’

  And Harvey Addison did not really want to stop now. This stuff was so good – he’d never had anything this good. He held the barrel of the pen to his left nostril, closed
the right, and snorted hard. And instantly, this was just so incredible!

  And for Kündz the only disappointment was the smell, the beautiful, harsh smell of this man’s fear had faded. But that was a small price to pay for this man’s purification. Because Harvey Addison needed this purification to achieve his absolute trust.

  And to achieve this trust, Harvey Addison must experience the Fifth Truth, which stated, ‘The only purification is eradication.’

  This was something he would explain to the obstetrician in a moment.

  Chapter Forty-two

  Susan sat at her desk, staring out of the window, running through the things she needed to do. Wallpaper, she thought suddenly, and wrote it down on her pad. Pram, Mothercare, she wrote down. The cursor of her computer blinked steadily and she could hear the whir of the machine’s fan. Ante-natal exercises, she added.

  The rain was still tipping down – it had not stopped all night. The garden looked sad, waterlogged, the beech hedge and many of the trees stripped of their leaves, fallen twigs and branches strewn on the lawn, bits of rubbish that had blown in, or been thrown in, flapping or rolling around.

  On her way back from shopping at lunch-time, she’d seen the old boy next door being taken away in an ambulance, but she didn’t know why, and his wife, Mrs Walpole, didn’t answer the door when she’d popped round later to see if there was anything she could do for her.

  It was Friday, and she was relieved it was the weekend tomorrow and that John would be home. She was glad too that she still had Fergus Donleavy’s manuscript to work on – she hadn’t realised quite how much she would miss the intellectual stimulation of work, or how much she would miss the human contact of going into the office.

  Although she had a few girlfriends with whom she could organise lunches and coffee mornings and teas, plus a ton of books she wanted to read, and she could break up the days with the Today programme and Woman’s Hour and The Archers on Radio Four, concerts on Radio Three and Classic FM, plus various other radio and television treats she’d discovered – as well as housework and cooking – she had still not got used to her own company.

  As if sensing her mood, Bump was restless today, shifting around, kicking, punching, having a good old rough-and-tumble. Vivaldi was playing on the CD, the Four Seasons. Bump still preferred Mozart but was getting to think Vivaldi was pretty OK.

  ‘You think Vivaldi’s cool, don’t you, Bump?’ she asked softly.

  But there was no response. ‘You asleep, Bump?’

  Still no reaction.

  ‘That’s OK, you sleep. Wish I could sleep as much as you do. Wish I could go to sleep and wake up on April the twenty-sixth …’

  Her voice dried because she wasn’t sure about that any more. A lot of thoughts were going through her mind, and some seemed to be driving her, thoughts that she couldn’t help but were just there, as if someone was putting them there.

  And the biggest one, which was there all the time and would never completely go away, was what kind of father Mr Sarotzini was going to make for Bump.

  There was another problem: she was sleeping badly in spite of feeling tired all the time. She’d been having a lot of weird dreams recently, and last night’s had stayed with her – it was still spooking her.

  In the dream she was in a vast house, every room of which was painted black. She couldn’t find her baby and was running, panic-stricken, from room to room, but they were all empty. Then, finally, she had found Mr Sarotzini, and he’d smiled at her and told her not to worry, the baby was fine, but she didn’t trust him.

  She’d tried looking up the dream in a couple of books on dream analysis, but they said different things, which made her even more confused. And anyhow she didn’t need to analyse this dream to figure it out: she knew, in her heart, exactly what it meant. She had been just clutching at a straw that maybe it meant something else.

  She clicked on her mouse and Netscape came up on her screen. Clicking the mouse again, she opened the search engine Yahoo, and typed in the word SURROGATE, then clicked again. A whole list of headings appeared:

  center for surrogate parents and egg donation.

  woman to woman fertility center.

  surrogate mothers’ network.

  She worked her way through the first ten, then the next ten, but didn’t find what she was looking for. She finally exited from Netscape, called up the Usenet Newsgroups and again entered the search command SURROGATE. This time, after half an hour of going up blind alleys, she hit paydirt.

  surrogate, legal.

  There were forty different topics under this heading, but two immediately caught her eye and she checked out the first of these. It gave the references for the court transcripts of all cases in the British and US courts where the surrogacy had been challenged.

  Then she checked out the second newsgroup topic, which turned out to be an information helpline, and felt a beat of excitement. It was exactly what she needed.

  She composed an e-mail in her head, then typed it out, read it through carefully, and clicked on the command to send it. Then, in case John came home unexpectedly, she cleared it from the screen.

  At that moment the phone rang. It was John. ‘Harvey Addison,’ he said. ‘I’ve just had a call from Caroline.’

  Sitting in his flat in Earl’s Court Kündz was watching Susan typing on her keyboard, and he was appreciating the Vivaldi she was playing. This was a good thing, playing music for the baby, he approved of that. But there was too much glare coming off her computer screen and the lens of his camera couldn’t pick up the detail of what she was typing. She was surfing the Net, but he didn’t know why. He didn’t know what she was looking at and she was not giving him any clues.

  Only her face gave him clues. This expression she had. He didn’t like this expression, he was not comfortable with it, he was worried by it.

  ‘Susan,’ he chided. ‘I hope you’re being a good girl, Susan.’

  He could hear the putter of the keys: she typed fast, using all her fingers. Kündz liked it when she did that – she looked so confident, so in control of her machine and this, he remembered from Mr Sarotzini’s teachings, was a very Zen thing. It was good to be in control of your machine, to know your machine, to love your machine, because all things respond to love.

  You must love even the things you hate, even the people you hate, and Kündz did love the people he hated, and he remembered the words of the poet, Byron, who had said, ‘Now hatred is by far the longest pleasure. Men love in haste, but they detest at leisure.’

  Kündz was in awe of this wisdom. He watched Susan; she’d had no pains today, and that was good, he did not like to hear her cry. And he hoped so much, so very much, that Susan was not going to give him a reason to hate her, because he would find that hard – maybe too hard.

  He watched her face, breathed in her remembered smells, and breathed them in again, more deeply, the pangs of longing worsening. He looked at the concentration on her face, the soft pale skin of her neck, and he wanted to kiss it, to hold her, to feel the warmth of her breath against his own flesh. Why had he ever thought that it might start to get easier?

  He watched her fingers on the keyboard and he wondered if she was in search of wisdom. And as he listened to the sound of her typing, his computer was listening also. But it was not the clicking that it heard, it was the electrical pulses inside Susan’s computer – these pulses that were inaudible to the naked ear – and it was translating these pulses, almost as fast as she could type, back into words that appeared on Kündz’s screen.

  And now he read:

  hello, i need help, please, on my legal position: i am a surrogate mother, almost six months’ pregnant. my husband and i have accepted payment for this. i would now like to know, if i decided to challenge the legitimacy of this arrangement, and offered to repay the money we have been given, what my position would be. is there a lawyer you could put me in touch with who specialises in this area?

  And Kündz said quietly, to himse
lf, ‘Oh, Susan, my darling, meine liebe, my cherished one, what are you doing, my darling? What are you doing?’

  He shook his head.

  He would have to report this to Mr Sarotzini, and this made him frightened for Susan. Mr Sarotzini would be angry, and Kündz did not want this, he really didn’t, he did not want Mr Sarotzini to be angry with Susan, but he must report this. What alternative did he have? And he knew that the answer was none, there was no alternative.

  Susan gripped the receiver tightly to her ear. She had heard John clearly, yet she still said, ‘What?’

  ‘Harvey’s dead.’

  She could picture the obstetrician vividly in her mind, standing over her yesterday, tall, slim, his normally arrogant expression softened into a warm smile, holding the ultrasound to her tummy. ‘I – I don’t – I can’t believe it. What happened?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ he said. ‘Caroline just rang me in a terrible state. He was found dead in his car.’

  ‘But we – we saw him yesterday. He was fine. Did he have an accident?’

  ‘No I – I –’ He was silent for a moment. ‘I don’t think an accident. I don’t know, she wasn’t clear – more like a heart attack or a stroke, an aneurysm or something.’

  ‘Shall I call her?’

  ‘I – yes – you want to do that?’

  ‘Yes. God, I invited her over for a coffee morning next week. I rang her yesterday.’

  ‘I have to go to a meeting at Microsoft, then I’ll come home.’

  ‘This is awful,’ she said. ‘I can’t believe it.’

  ‘I can’t either,’ he said.

  She hung up, the full shock of it hitting her now. The image again of him yesterday afternoon, holding the ultrasound scanner on her tummy. Now he was dead.

  With trembling hands, feeling as if the whole world around her had destabilised, she looked up the Addisons’ number in the book and dialled.