The silence that flooded the dark was immense, oceanic. Marcus stepped out of the bedroom, glanced at the dead boy, then at the white face of the old man. The girl was making an odd little whimpering noise, her sleeve drawn up to her face like a mask. Below, at the foot of the stairs, lay two KGB men, one atop the other as if in death a strange intimacy had been imposed. Marcus went down the stairs, stepped into the courtyard, walked to where the third KGB man lay. The side of his skull was gone and his face, beneath the glare of Marcus’s flashlight, had about it an unreality, like something left only half-created. He killed the flashlight, listening to the dark, concentrating. There was still only silence. He went out of the courtyard and walked until he came to the rutted track, and there he paused. A car was parked to the side of the track. He approached it cautiously. There was nobody in it, and no sign of any other vehicles. He sat down on the ground, his back to the front tyre of the car. He was shaking. He stuffed his hands in his pockets but the trembling went on, even after he’d risen and walked back to the house and climbed the stairs to look at Anarhist, who lay slumped against the wall.
Marcus reached down to close the boy’s eyelids, conscious of the girl watching him, and of the old man standing nearby, clearing his throat in the manner of somebody about to make a speech. But Bruno thankfully said nothing.
“I don’t know if they came here purely by chance or if somebody tipped them off, but we leave here now,” Marcus said. “We’ll go elsewhere until it’s time.”
Nobody disagreed.
Fredericksburg, Virginia
Galbraith had been furious – and his unleashed fury was like a mad panther loose in a room of fine china – when he learned of the risk Andres Kiss had taken by going to Carl Sundbach’s apartment and unexpectedly killing the old man. The carnival in the street, the water display and the battered cop car, hadn’t exactly delighted him either. It often seemed to him that the Clowns took their in-house name too seriously, and had some adolescent need to perform acrobatics and gravity-defying stunts in cars and the like, which Galbraith found distasteful altogether. True, they’d managed to divert Pagan from Andres Kiss, creating a triumph out of the almost disastrous coincidence of Kiss and Pagan being in the same area at the same time, but still … The whole situation need not have happened. And it had arisen because Gary Iverson had failed to fathom young Kiss’s killing potential. He’d failed to read the man with any accuracy, and Galbraith was annoyed by the fact that his own trusted servant, the loyal Iverson, his right fucking hand, had proved less than perspicacious in an important matter.
Dressed in his robe, Galbraith was lounging in his basement, gazing at his consoles, tapping into the vast data banks of the planet. The grimness of his mood was caused as much by Andres Kiss’s unnecessary risk as by his own apprehension, his tangible sense of anticipation. The clock was running down, and Frank Pagan was out there – and he still had the potential to do damage.
Galbraith studied the consoles, albeit in an absent way, because he was thinking of Epishev. Listening to Gary’s conversation with the Russian in New York a couple of hours ago, Galbraith had been struck by a chill note in Epishev’s voice, and a curious reticence on the man’s part – as if he suspected some kind of trap. Perhaps his long association with Greshko had made Epishev just as paranoid as his superior. It was only because of Greshko’s suspicions that Epishev had become involved in the first place – and since Galbraith hated waste, it occurred to him that Epishev’s talents should be put to the best possible use. It was one of Galbraith’s most important gifts. He knew how to use the talents of other people to perform tasks he’d never undertake himself.
He looked at the consoles. There was a message from the US Embassy in Moscow, destined for the State Department, but picked up by Galbraith’s technology just as it plucked everything out of the sky.
The General Secretary will address the thirty-eight member Presidium of the Supreme Soviet at approximately 1600 hours Moscow time. He is expected to push through a progressive programme on both social and economic matters although there is likely to be strong criticism from certain elements in the Party, who consider his innovations too drastic. It is thought that he has sufficient support, although the outcome will be dose. End end end.
End end end – but of what? The world as he knew it? Galbraith wondered. He checked his wristwatch. It was almost seven. In three hours time Andres Kiss would be catching his plane to Norway. Three hours. Galbraith picked up one of his telephones, the white slimline one which looked incongruous amid the other five receivers, all of them standard US government issue. He punched in eleven digits, and almost immediately heard Gary Iverson’s voice.
“Where are we, Gary?” Galbraith asked.
“On the Long Island Expressway,” Iverson replied. His tone was muted, a little remorseful. He clearly felt he’d failed Galbraith, and Iverson was a man who rarely failed at anything. Except, Galbraith thought, simple human understanding.
“And where’s Pagan?”
“Pagan and Max Klein are about four cars ahead on the outside lane, sir. The girl is not travelling with them.”
“Their destination is Glen Cove?”
“Apparently,” Iverson said across a connection that was remarkably clear. “I imagine Max Klein’s researches at the Corporation Commission provided him with Mikhail Kiss’s name. I guess they tracked down the number of Andres’s Jag, and that got Klein rolling.” A pause. “I’m sorry about that one, sir. I had no idea Andres would do what he did. If I’d known …”
Sorry, Galbraith thought. Being sorry wasn’t going to cut it. Being sorry was a dead-end street. This was where the miscalculations had led. This was what Iverson’s illiteracy in reading the human heart came down to. This panic, this last-minute crap, this needless pursuit and the inevitable slaughter. “Call the Kisses. Tell them to leave for the airport.”
“My information is they’ve already gone, sir.”
“Fine. Where’s Epishev?”
“He’s directly behind me in a van.”
“And the MO?”
“It’s his own idea and I think effective. It dispenses with both men at once.”
Galbraith said, “I don’t want you anywhere near it, Gary. Is that understood?”
“Understood. What about the girl?”
“I’m not interested in her in the meantime. When Pagan’s no longer … well, around, we’ll keep her under surveillance for a while to see what she does. Not that it’s going to matter, because it’s after the fact by then, Gary. Keep me posted. And no fuck-ups. No near misses. No collisions. No calamities. Are you receiving me?”
Galbraith hung up. He chewed on a fingernail. There was at least no caloric intake in this kind of oral activity. He was still nervous, and there were phonecalls to return from Senators Holly and Crowe, that fretful Tweedledum and Tweedledee. He lay down on the sofa, thinking how unfortunate it was that a man like Frank Pagan, whose file he’d pulled from the Scotland Yard interface, whose attributes he admired, was doomed to die because he’d been in the wrong goddam place at the wrong goddam time.
The fat man shut his eyes. He contemplated the design of White Light, the mosaic which, despite the unwillingness of certain pieces to fit, was nevertheless a fairly attractive thing to behold. He was pleased in general with the pattern, and the fact that neither he nor his department was even remotely involved in events which by tomorrow night would have echoed around the world. He even liked the sound of the very name White Light – which had about it a certain shimmering intensity, a mysterious quality, something that raised it above the mundane manner in which clandestine projects were normally christened. He thought of Operation Mongoose, and Operation Overlord, and Project Bluebird, and he decided that White Light was superior to all of them.
He opened his eyes when he heard the sound of somebody knocking on the basement door. He called out Entrez and saw the ugly little woman known rather cruelly around the building as Madame Avoidable.
&nb
sp; “The papers you asked for,” she said. She wore a green wool cardigan and matching skirt and her glasses kept slipping to the end of her nose, causing her to make constant adjustments.
Galbraith took the documents and thanked her.
She said, “These are in the system.”
“And the genuine ones?”
“Expunged as per your request.”
“Mmm mmm mmm, a million kisses of gratitude,” Galbraith said. He flipped through the pages, about six or seven in all. He watched Madame Avoidable leave, then he spread the sheets on his table and gazed at them. They were very good, very convincing. It was Andres Kiss’s military record, and it read like a case-study in schizophrenia. He absorbed such phrases as ‘delusions of grandeur’, ‘failure to accept any authority other than his own’, ‘a sense of a personal mission against the Soviet Union’, and ‘unwillingness to comply with Air Force regulations’. At the bottom of the page was the signature of a military psychiatrist (since deceased) and the stamped legend DISHONORABLY DISCHARGED. It was a nice little piece of fabrication and it would go down well with the gentlemen of the press, when the time came.
Long Island
Max Klein had replaced the battered Dodge with another Department car, a tan Ford of unsurpassed anonymity, the kind of vehicle used by narcotics officers making undercover buys. Pagan noticed scratchmarks across the back seat where handcuffed suspects had presumably scuffled around vigorously. Klein, who hadn’t said much all the way from Manhattan, was curious about the woman in Pagan’s room, but reluctant to ask questions. He had the feeling the Englishman wasn’t exactly a man who opened up for you. Likeable, tough, the kind of guy to have with you in a crisis, Pagan gave the impression of a closed person, difficult to know, hard to reach.
As the Ford passed an exit for Flushing, Klein decided to take a chance. He said, “I thought you came to New York on your own, Frank.”
“I did.”
“Don’t think I’m prying. The woman, I mean.”
“I don’t.” Pagan enjoyed the friendliness he found in Americans, the quick camaraderie, the casual way first-name relationships were formed, all of which made a bright contrast to the taciturn English, whose hearts you had to drill open as if they were safes containing something too precious to touch. The down side of this easy manner was the way certain Americans thought they had the freedom to go rummaging around in your life, which was what Klein was edging towards now. But Pagan was going to be firmly polite.
“I don’t want to go into it, Max. I don’t want to complicate your life.”
“Complicate my life?” Max Klein laughed. “My life’s already complicated. I’m thirty-seven years old and instead of hanging in the Museum of Modern Art I’m driving a goddam cop car on the Long Island Expressway. You think that’s a simple transition?”
Withered ambitions, Pagan thought. He stared at the highway before him and the way the sinking sun glinted from passing cars. Did he want to hear about Klein’s life? Apparently he had no choice because Klein was talking about his paintings, his days in art school, the months he spent dragging a portfolio of his stuff around midtown galleries, only to encounter the severity of rejection. At least it steered the subject away from Kristina, Pagan thought, half-listening to Klein’s good-natured banter about the rebuffs he’d received at the hands of gallery owners and art critics. Max had developed a shell of self-mockery, referring to his paintings as the work of a quick-sketch artist with delusions of mediocrity. Pagan, smiling, looked in the mirror on the passenger side, seeing the flow of traffic behind.
“I used to be in demand with my sketches,” Klein said as he deftly changed lanes. “Give me a witness, a half-assed description, and I’d whip out a picture of a suspect in no time flat. Nowadays, they can use computers or a pre-made ID kit. They don’t need my particular skills. So they push me here and there, one department to another. Fraud last month. Juvenile the month before. Before that it was missing persons. You want an insight into sheer misery, Frank, missing persons is the cream.”
Pagan made a noise of sympathy. He saw the exit for Great Neck. “How much further?” he asked.
“A few miles,” Klein replied.
Pagan glanced once more in the side mirror. A large cement-mixer rattled behind, and then tucked at an angle in the rear of this monster was a dark blue van whose windshield glowed golden in the sun. He looked at the greenery along the edge of the expressway, imagining simple pleasures, walking with Kristina Vaska through a meadow or along a sandy shore or lazing by the bank of some stream. Sweet Jesus, Frank – had it come to this so soon, these little halcyon pictures, these banal images of romance? He was almost embarrassed by the direction of his own mind. You’ve been too lonely too long.
Klein swung the car off the expressway now. Pagan saw the exit sign for Glen Cove and then the greenery that had bordered the expressway became suddenly more dense and leafy, and white houses appeared to float half-hidden in the trees. Klein slid from his pocket the piece of paper with Mikhail Kiss’s address on it, and looked at it as he braked the Ford at a red light. Since he didn’t know where Brentwood Drive was located, he said he’d have to stop at a gas-station and ask.
Pagan turned his head, seeing the same cumbersome cement-mixer and the dark blue van behind him, and suddenly, without quite knowing why, he was uneasy, perhaps because he remembered the van outside Sundbach’s building, which had been the same make as the one behind him now, perhaps it was because the van hadn’t attempted to overtake the slow-moving cement-mixer for the last twenty miles. It’s in the air, Frank, he thought, this general wariness, this low-level fear that you’ll go a step too far and upset somebody to the point of madness – something you might have done already.
He tried to relax, rolling his window down and smelling the perfume of new-mown grass float across the evening. He had a sudden glimpse of water, a narrow inlet that penetrated the land from Long Island Sound, and then the water vanished behind trees. Klein pulled the Ford into a gas-station and Pagan saw both the cement-mixer and the dark blue van go past, and he felt a quick surge of relief because he’d already begun to construct unpleasant possibilities in his mind.
Pagan took the slip of paper from Max Klein. “I’ll get directions,” he said, and he stepped out of the car, glad to stretch his legs. He walked toward the glass booth where the cashier sat. He pushed the paper towards the woman, who was middle-aged and wore her hair in a slick black bun. She had the slightly flamboyant look of a retired flamenco dancer. She started to give directions, then interrupted herself to answer the telephone.
Pagan, staring across the forecourt, past the pumps, past Max Klein in the tan Ford, folded his arms. He could hear the distant drone of a lawn-mower, a summery sound, lulling and comforting, as if the very essence of the suburb was encapsulated in that single familiar noise. There was nothing alien here, nothing extraordinary, just this unchanging placidity.
He shut his eyes a moment, caught unaware by a sudden tiredness, then he shook himself, opened his eyes, saw the dark blue van come back along the road, moving slowly, the windshield still burnished by sunlight. It came to a halt on the side of the street opposite the station. Pagan felt curiously tense as he watched the vehicle.
The van moved again, but slowly still, making an arc in the direction of the gas-station. Pagan put his hand behind him, reaching for his gun in the holster, but not yet withdrawing the weapon because this might be nothing, an absolutely innocent situation, a van driver deciding he needed gasoline and turning back to get it, nothing more than that. Frank Pagan fingered the butt of the Bernardelli, watched the van cruise toward the pumps, and he realised how jumpy he’d become. He saw Klein behind the wheel of the Ford, his head tilted against the back of his seat in a weary manner.
The van kept rolling forward. It was about twenty feet from the station now. It stopped again, hidden somewhat from Pagan’s view by the thicket of gas-pumps. The cashier hung up the telephone and said, “Now where was I? Oh, yeah
, you take a left at the second light,” but Pagan wasn’t really listening. He saw a hand emerge from the blue van and something dark flew through the air, crossing the bright disc of the evening sun a moment, flying, spinning, falling, and it was a second before Pagan realised what it was, a second before he opened his mouth and shouted Max!
He saw Klein’s face turn towards him even as the van hurried away and the driver was briefly visible. Then the Ford exploded and a streak of flame burst upwards, blue and yellow and red fusing into one indescribable tint, and he heard the sound of glass shattering into something less than fragments, something as fine as powder, then a second explosion which caused Klein’s burning car to rock to one side. For a moment all light seemed to have been sucked out of the sky, as if the sun had dimmed. Pagan wasn’t sure, but he thought he heard Max Klein scream from behind the flames that seared through the car, the burning upholstery, the black smoke that billowed from under the wrecked hood. He rushed forward, thinking he might have a chance to haul Max out, but the intensity of heat and the choking smoke drove him back, scorching his face and hair, blackening his lips. He saw Klein through flame, burning like a straw man, one fiery hand feebly uplifted, as if he might still find his way out of this furnace – and then the flames engulfed him. Pagan, drawing a hand over his face, was forced to step back. The air was unbreathable and the smoke that rose furiously out of the car stung his eyes and blinded him. A mechanic rushed out with an extinguisher but he couldn’t get close to the car because of the heat. Besides, it was far too late to help Max Klein. Inside the glass booth the cashier was calling the fire department, also far too late for Max Klein.
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