by Tim Lees
“Aye, well,” said Carl. “You can put your office where you want, these days.”
“Oh, indeed. Play both sides off against each other. Either way, you win.”
“What?” I said.
Nouri pushed his glasses up his nose, looked at me. “Does your Registry not have an Eastern branch? For Russia, China, India—wherever?”
“We’ve made some inroads, yeah, but—”
“But underfunded. Like he said. Now they want their slice of the pie. The Registry, my friend, is like an octopus: its tentacles are in so many places it no longer knows where it is or what it does. Perhaps no one knows. Hm?”
“That’s—that’s the weirdest conspiracy theory I’ve ever come across.”
“Oh aye,” said Carl. “It’s modern business, that. All multinationals nowadays.”
“I think,” said Nouri, “we have just met your poor relations. Don’t you?”
“Bollocks,” I said.
I shook my head. I said, “That’s ridiculous. Even if it was true, it couldn’t possibly—”
“Ah.” Nouri wagged his head.
“They’re pirates,” I said, “That’s all. Out for what they can get.”
“Oh yes. And every emperor, every dictator, every CEO—all of them were pirates once. In-fucking-deed.”
“And there you have it,” said Carl. “Pearls of Eastern wisdom. Eh, Nour? Still. I’ll tell you what they bloody weren’t. Barring your boss man there, your big chief feller. They weren’t fucking soldiers, I say.”
“And praise God for that,” said Nouri.
“Wee boys. You dress ’em up in khaki, order ’em around, they think they’re—God knows . . .”
“Royal Marines?” I said.
“Now that, pal, they will never be. Ye ken?”
It had been Carl, on watch, who’d heard the Colonel’s vehicle approach. He’d woken Nouri. Then he’d gone to take a look, unaware the newcomers were homing right in on our truck. Nouri, meanwhile, seeing the armored car, had assumed it was to beef up our defenses on the journey home, when we’d have company assets to protect. He’d soon found out how wrong he was. And Carl had kept his head down, waiting for his chance.
“I thought I’d try and scare ’em with a couple o’ warning shots,” he said. “They were quicker off the mark than I expected over that. But you,” he turned to me, “now that was fucking nice, that was. A wee bit distraction there. My head still fucking aches from it, but . . .”
Carl and Nouri took turns driving. There were checkpoints, the usual tension. Between those and the rough roads, I didn’t get a lot of sleep. And all I thought was that I wanted to be home.
It struck me I’d grown less at ease with the world these last few years. There was still the pleasure of a job well done, the thrill of taking on something I knew only a handful of people in the world could really manage; yesterday, indeed, I’d done something that might have been unique. I’d seen field ops play for effects before—Martin Klein was a notorious showman, one of the few who actually enjoyed an audience—but even they never pushed it so far; never had to. But I’d pushed it, pushed it, then pulled it back again, a perfect retrieval.
Maybe I’d been lucky. It could have easily—too easily—gone wrong.
It isn’t what happened that bothers you. It’s what could have happened. What could happen next.
I had a few days’ leave due. Maybe it was time to take them.
Chapter 13
Special Projects
“See? It went well, didn’t it?”
“Actually, no.”
“But you got it?”
He was just a bit too quick on that for my taste. Not, “What happened?” “Are you OK?” or, “Anybody hurt?” Not even, “Take a seat.” I dropped the backpack on his office floor, in the middle of a red-and-yellow oriental rug. His gaze went with it. His hands made little in-out moves, like silent applause.
“Yeah,” I said. “I got it.”
He called for tea, then made a show of breaking out his best scotch from the secret drawer and pouring me a glass. He had one too, “to keep me company,” he said. I outlined what had happened. For the man who’d assured me we’d be under the radar, I have to say his little pantomime of shock wasn’t especially convincing. He asked me how I was. He put his head on one side, then the other. He said, “My God,” “No,” and “Jesus Christ.” Then he said, “Come on. Let’s grab some lunch.”
I bent to pick up the pack.
“We’ll put that where it’s safe,” he said.
“London’s pretty safe,” I said.
“Well, we’ve no flights right this second, Chris. But there’s a secure room here. It’s not the first of these we’ve had to deal with, I can tell you. The Registry branch out here might not be very active, but it’s not . . . inactive.”
I was reluctant to let the thing out of my sight, in light of all the trouble it had cost me, but I did see Dayling’s point. The secure room, as it turned out, was a cupboard armored like a bank vault. Steel door, steel walls, combination lock. Very nice.
I was tired, I was irritable. But I was also hungry. And you do get a taste for bamia, if it’s done right.
We went to the same restaurant as before. The same waiter chewed what may have been the same toothpick—there were shortages, after all, there was a war on—and Dayling ordered for us with a genteel magnanimity, as if he knew my own tastes better than I did myself.
“Most of these places,” he told me, “they’ve got about a hundred items on the menu, but in the kitchen, only one.” He paused, like a conjuror before the climax of the trick. “Fried chicken.”
“I like fried chicken.”
“You’d do well here, then.”
“You’ve done pretty well.”
He shrugged, mock-modestly.
“Though I’ll admit,” I said, “I’m sort of baffled by it all. I mean, you left Field Ops for a place like this? Is that wise?”
“Or safe?” he countered. “I know, I know.” He started fussing with the dishes on the table, lifting each lid, checking what was where. I noticed that he wore long sleeves again, buttoned at the cuffs.
I said, “Doesn’t it get to you? The bombs, the shootings? You said it yourself: easy to kill someone here. Right?”
“Oh—” He flapped a hand. “I’m not exactly front line. We’re well protected, and the money’s good. I get regular vacations. Here—try some of this. You’ll like this.”
He ladled some sort of sausage onto my plate. It floated in a pool of grease and veg. Little of it was immediately identifiable.
He looked at me, pulled a serious face. “Chris. I feel so bad about what happened. I feel like it’s my fault. If I’d have known the risk—”
“Yeah. Well. I’m on the first flight back to Brize, and I’m not coming back.” I let this rest awhile. Then I said, “You still haven’t answered me. Leaving Field Ops, coming here.”
“Well, that’s a hard one, Chris.”
“You mean it wasn’t just my shining example put you off your game, then?”
“It’s hard to explain.”
“Try.”
“It’s like this. Here, there’s a risk. We all hope it won’t happen, we know it probably won’t happen. In Field Ops—in Field Ops, I bloody knew that I was going to come a cropper. Just a matter of time, you know? Just a matter of time.”
There was something just a little off about him, something raw and jittery. I cut a piece of sausage. I could smell the herbs in it, rich, exotic. Then I said, “Funny, though. I got the feeling you’d have liked this last one. Thought you’d want a crack at it yourself, yeah?”
“I’m not Field Ops.”
“Still. You could have come along, just for the ride?”
“I told you. I�
��m not built for it.”
He started on his own plate. He put his head down and I watched him eating.
Then he said, “I’ve visited Assur.”
“Really?”
“Long time back. I was still in Ops. We were taking readings, . . . Country was a bit rough, even then. No retrievals. Not allowed. But I got the chance to . . . sit there.”
“Commune with it,” I quoted.
“I could . . . feel it, Chris. I could feel its moods. Feel it talk to me. I’d never known that. I was—this will make you laugh, but I was quite religious in my teens. Life was . . . very difficult for me. I’d go to church when no one else was there, and pray and pray and pray. I’d bunk off school and go to church. I practically wore the knees out in my trousers. And I never got a sense of God. I wanted so much just to feel that there was someone there, you know? That there was something more than just the—the shit that I was going through. I wanted Him to say, ‘It’s all right, Andrew.’ Only He never did. But in Assur . . .”
“It spoke to you?”
“No. He didn’t speak. But he was there. I don’t think that I even prayed—well, not exactly, but for the first time I was aware that, if I did . . . someone would hear. It was—I still get flashbacks, sometimes. Very rarely, but I do. It was extraordinary.”
“You were Field Ops for a long time. You must have experienced—”
“Not like this.”
His body language had changed. No longer suave, laid-back, now he angled forwards, his gestures nervous and incisive.
“You know that being close to them, it does things to your head. Your thoughts—”
He slapped his fork down, a little too loudly.
“I know all about that. All about it. Don’t try to make excuses or explain it away. This was different.”
“It’s the oldest known,” I said, hoping to deflect him.
“More than that. It’s the primary. This is where it all began. I swear.”
“Well, it’s a theory . . .”
“The gods aren’t local. They’re not from our space-time. That’s why everything gets . . . twisted up around them. It’s my belief that the Assur entity was first, and then it . . . let’s say it budded, like a plant. And all the others grew from that. But it was always first.”
“That’s interesting,” I said.
“Oh, it’s more than interesting. It could change our whole perspective on them. I don’t know . . .” He sighed. “I would have gone. I really would. Except they wanted you.”
Something in his tone just pricked my interest then.
“ ‘They,’ ” I said.
He waved a hand dismissively, and reached out for the water jug.
“This came from Seddon, right?” I said. “In London? That’s where I get my orders. That’s where I got this one.”
He drank, said nothing.
“ ‘They,’ ” I said again.
“Well.” He pursed his lips, wiped his mouth on a napkin. “I don’t suppose it matters now. It was the US office, Special Projects. They wanted you, mentioned you by name. I wasn’t meant to tell you.” He looked sheepish. “But it can’t do any harm now, can it? And we’re old friends.”
“Special . . . Projects?”
“That’s right. Why?”
So I said a name.
I said, “Shailer.”
Dayling said, “I didn’t like the secrecy, I must admit. When it’s a question of security, that’s fine. But not between ourselves, eh?”
“Did you deal with him directly? Shailer?”
“Only once. He said he knew you, but they wanted me to deal with it. I realized then that’s the only reason they’d called me. Because I knew you. They thought it would help.” He looked down at his plate. “I wasn’t important at all, you see? Except for that.”
The rest of the meal was long and awkward. I kept trying to question him and wound up pretty much convinced he was as ignorant as he claimed. What bothered me the most, though, was that I’d got the job the usual way, through Seddon’s office, without even a hint of subterfuge or outside involvement of any kind. I asked repeatedly, “Was Seddon in on this?” But all he’d say was, “Seddon wasn’t mentioned.” We finished with two tiny cups of thick black coffee, which pretty much disposed of any hopes I’d had for decent sleep. I tossed and turned in my hotel bed, and in the morning, checked my flight time, swallowed a quick breakfast, then went to Dayling’s office to collect the flask. He wasn’t at work. He wasn’t answering his phone, or, so I was told, his door.
It took a while to find someone who knew the combination for the safe room, but presently a plump young man appeared, fussing with a bunch of keys. He wore jeans and carpet slippers. He dialed the combination lock, then tried a variety of keys upon the other two until he got it open. He was very apologetic about the delays, though nobody was listening by then in any case.
The flask, of course, was gone.
And so was Dayling.
Chapter 14
Flight and Pursuit
I’ve seen the Registry try to cover up its messes and mistakes at several junctures in my life. There’s usually a lot of running about and some frantic phone calling and e-mails and invariably some major official whose authorization is required and who fails to respond in time. Everybody squawks and frets like turkeys before Christmas, not sure what to do.
This time, at least, we found out what had happened very early on. There was hardly any mystery at all—except for why.
It seems Dayling had risen early, as was his habit, and attended to some morning chores, all as normal. He’d even booked a lunch appointment at his usual restaurant. Then, he’d visited the safe room, removed the flask, taken a Registry car to the airport, and booked himself a Turkish Airlines flight to Paris, France, leaving within thirty minutes. The flask went with him—he had a Registry pass, top level, and used it to dodge his way round customs, but apart from that, there had been no attempt to hide his tracks. He didn’t even seem to have been in any hurry about it.
Seddon, my boss, is a tall, gangly man with eyebrows of a startling whiteness, and sees himself as very pro-active, very hands-on. Unfortunately, in a case like this, the hands in question aren’t likely to be his own. I spoke to him from Dayling’s office, as it happened. The phone line was as sharp and clear as if he sat across the desk from me. Astonishing technology. So far away, yet I could hear each indrawn breath, each tut and dear and vexed oh heavens as I carefully explained the situation. After that, he was quiet for a moment, and when he spoke again, his crisp consonants and plummy vowels allowed no willful misinterpretation of the job ahead. Would that they had.
“I want you to go after him,” he said. “You’re his friend, aren’t you? You can talk to him. Persuade him to see sense. I want to play it carefully on this one.”
“This whole job—” I started, but he spoke across me.
“I don’t know Dayling. Any vices, bad habits? Debts? Unsavory associations? Any kind of context we can put him in?”
“I hadn’t seen the guy in ten years. I didn’t expect to see him at all, quite frankly.”
Seddon clicked his tongue. “This is all very annoying,” he said, as if I were some hawker who’d just got him out of the bath. “I’ll talk to our Paris office. Ask them to keep the local authorities out of it, if they can. . . . I do so hate working with people I don’t know. You can’t depend on them. That’s why I need you there, Chris. Packed, already? Yes? I want you on the next plane.”
“There’s more to this,” I said. I knew he’d given his command, and in his view he was done. But I pressed on. “There was an attempt to seize it in the field. Russian mafia or something, I dunno. Eastern Europe, anyway. Then Dayling runs off with it. Does that make any sense to you?”
“I’m sure it doesn’t, Chris. Are you suggesting I
might . . . know something about this?”
“I’m not suggesting anything,” I said. “You think he’s trying to sell the thing?”
“Oh, I’d think so. Wouldn’t you?”
“They couldn’t get it off me in the field, so now they’re going to buy it. Him, too, I imagine. He was Field Ops once. They wanted me, you know. Very . . . lucrative deal.”
“Really. You must tell me all about it. Meanwhile—all haste, eh? Let’s hope we have a quick end to this. God knows . . .”
I don’t like airports. I’m sick of them, really. Most airports rank about an inch higher than bus stations for comfort, convenience, and general human warmth. You’re not there to enjoy yourself. You’re there to go somewhere else.
They say that there are spirits in these great travel termini, still untapped, fed by the hopes and anxieties of millions of travelers. If so, the spirit at Charles de Gaulle is a particularly tetchy one.
The place was packed with people. I took a detour round a family of six seemingly camped out in the middle of the hallway, their suitcases piled up like a barricade. As I hit immigration, Seddon rang, and I had to cut him off to deal with the official sniffing at my passport. It was a flight from Baghdad, of course, an ordinary, commercial flight; and while my queue was long, the queue for anyone of darker skin and non-EU origin was longer still and a lot slower moving. By the time I’d gone through the formalities and called Seddon back, he was engaged. A woman’s voice asked me to please hold and a scratchy version of one of the Brandenburgs began. I rang off, went outside, caught a whiff of the night air, and hailed a taxi. From the back seat, I called London again.
Seddon said, “You’d have been quicker on the train to Gare du Nord. Cheaper, too.”
I grunted at this.
“Anyway,” he said. “We now have an address.”
“It’s a false trail.”