Thornhill listened carefully; he wanted Wolski to keep talking, to keep thinking outside the box. The old man turned slowly from the lake and stood staring at the grand building behind them. Thornhill said nothing.
“It’s not only second marriages that are a triumph of hope over experience.”
Thornhill didn’t understand and waited for an explanation. With a sweeping gesture, Wolski took in the whole elaborate facade.
“Look at it, the architecture of failure.” Thornhill did not to interrupt. “At the very first world peace conference, much more than a century ago, the Russian delegate proposed the total abolition of all the world’s armies and navies. Not a popular idea. Then, after the First World War – ‘The War To End All Wars’ – the League of Nations was born in there and, collapsing under the weight of its own indecisions, it died in there.” Wolski sounded mildly drunk, but Thornhill realised that he was intoxicated by bitterness, not alcohol.
They walked close to the edge of the lake where the ice was frozen into a sea of aspirant icebergs. The cold began to gnaw through Wolski’s thin shoes and his feet felt numb. He stopped suddenly.
“Ice,” Wolski said thoughtfully.
Thornhill knew him well enough to understand that this was more than a statement of the obvious and waited for him to continue, but he said nothing more and started walking again.
*
“Hicks, you were in Geneva ahead of us; what’s your impression?”
The team were sitting at a conference table and Thornhill was starting his circle of questions.
“Can’t fault it. Like I said in London, they’ve got it as watertight as a duck’s arse,” Hicks said reluctantly.
“Darcy?”
“I agree; they’re doing all we would do, and more.”
“Morag?”
“I’ve nothing to add.” It was the first time in Thornhill’s memory that she had not offered an assessment of her own and he wondered why.
The questions continued without getting any useful answers.
“Professor?”
Wolski, who had been listening intently, said, “I’m sure that all that’s being done is necessary, but I’m equally convinced it’s useless. November knows all these measures as well as we do; it’s exactly what he would expect.”
Nobody had anything to add and Thornhill spoke again. “Well observed, Professor. That leads us to try and identify what we know that he’s not aware of.”
Morag picked up the idea and Thornhill noticed that she seemed glad to be back in the conversation.
“We must suppose that everything up to the Professor’s arrival in New York is known to them, otherwise they wouldn’t have taken such aggressive action in Bermuda. The main new factor since then is Darcy’s visit to Warsaw.”
Darcy took up the idea. “There was nothing there; it was only what the crazy old woman and the druggie said that stopped me from writing the whole thing off as a fantasy.”
“Let’s go over the ground again,” Thornhill said. “What exactly did they say?”
“It’s in my report.”
“I’d rather have it from you than off paper.”
“Okay,” Darcy said, getting up and pacing to the window. The mist over the lake was thicker. “The place had been taken over by squatters; it looked like a hippie commune. In retrospect, that could be seen as camouflage. They asked me, was I a swineherd? Was I the Iceman? Was I going to shoot the pigs? It was all crazy, in the most literal sense. I remember thinking that if I could find a cab, I could just about catch the afternoon plane home. Then this filthy old mad woman grabbed my leg and wouldn’t let go. She ranted on about them being ‘all gone, the fascists, the Americans and the pigs’. She just wouldn’t let go.”
“Why was I told none of this before?” Wolski angrily sprang to his feet.
“It was secret,” Darcy said.
“Secret!” Wolski shouted explosively. “Secret from whom?” His face was red and he was trembling with anger that he made no attempt to control. “They know about it because they set it up. You all know about it and you’ve kept it secret from the only person who may be able to tell you what it means. What kind of incompetents are you?”
Darcy snapped back. “Everybody thought you’d checked out after Bermuda.”
“That’s enough,” Thornhill said quietly, and Darcy turned back to the view of the lake. Thornhill spoke to Wolski. “Be fair; remember our conversation in Surrey, you were less than enthusiastic.”
Wolski nodded in acknowledgement and sank back into his chair.
“Ice,” he said. “This confirmed the suspicion I began to have when we were walking by the lake.” Wolski hesitated.
“Take your time,” Thornhill said.
Wolski swallowed hard. “As the disaster with the basketball team showed, the dose at which this substance is administered is critical. Ice could be a medium of storing exactly measured quantities. That is what I had begun to believe by the lake; what you’ve just told me reinforces my suspicion.” He looked around the room, nodding in confirmation. “There is a strong indication that ice, as well as being a storage medium, could also be the delivery system, some sort of projectile. ‘Iceman, swineherds, shooting the pigs’, they could be experiments to test such a technology.”
“Ice pellets?” Hicks asked.
“Perhaps.”
“That would need some kind of explosive charge as a propellant,” Morag said.
“Not possible,” Hicks said. “I’m not a ballistics expert, but I’m sure that an explosive charge of the kind you get with a bullet would shatter ice.”
The conversation came to a halt. Everybody wanted the idea to be practicable. It was the only possibility around which they could mobilise. Yet nobody could think how it could be made to work amid the most secure environment in the history of international events.
Eventually, Hicks continued. “In any case, an explosive charge would be picked up by the sensors.”
It was Thornhill’s turn to pace the room. The city across the lake had now faded into the mist rising from the water. The problem he was trying to understand seemed no less ethereal, yet he knew that twenty-four hours from now the last act would begin.
The team sat isolated from each other by their own individual sense of despair. They were among the best in the business, but could see nothing but defeat. Then Thornhill had an idea.
“Darcy, please ask Sergeant Hampton to join us.”
Hampton scanned the group. He knew the faces and the reputations but had no way of matching one with the other. He seemed nervous and welcomed Thornhill’s gesture to sit down.
“Hampton, I believe you were in the Marines before you joined us?”
“The Royal Marines, yes, sir; twenty-two years.”
Thornhill noticed the correction. Marines are American, Royal Marines are not. It told him a lot about the man. He was willing to offend his boss in defence of his own identity – a plus mark in Thornhill’s book.
“You were squadron armourer, I believe.”
“Yes, sir, for my last three years with 42 Commando.”
“I’m going to ask Mr Hicks to explain a scenario to you and ask you for your suggestions.”
Hicks quickly outlined the parameters of what they suspected.
Hampton answered without hesitation. “Compressed air, sir, that’s the most likely answer. Water doesn’t compress, that’s why landing in the sea from a great height is like hitting concrete. And it’s why the sea smashes ships on the rocks. Ice, being frozen water, is the same. Air, on the other hand, does compress and if there is a controlled release it’s much more like a spring than an explosion.”
“Remarkable,” Wolski said. “Why wasn’t he asked to join us from the beginning?”
Thornhill didn’t begin to explain the issues of rank, status and security, which were so often the enemy of effectiveness. “I believe we are beginning to understand,” he said.
Morag spoke. “The most vulnerable moment
will be the signing of the Grand Declaration at the very start. That’s when all the heads of state or of government appear together to sign the formal document of intent. The Grand Declaration is a bland form of words, but it will be the media event of the decade. Think about it; what more visible demonstration of the collapse of existing world authority systems could there be than to have its leaders quite literally tearing each other to pieces at the moment they are supposed to be signing up to peace and international brotherhood?”
The thought of such a bizarre possibility silenced everyone.
“There is something else you should know,” Thornhill said as he stopped pacing and sat down. “I have information that there are major changes taking place within the Celastacom organisation. These suggest that November anticipates a future very different from the present.”
“If this goes wrong there will be a huge number of innocent victims,” Morag said.
“We should be more concerned about innocent perpetrators,” Wolski said.
Everyone turned towards him, waiting for an explanation.
Chapter 30 - Morristown, New Jersey
“What do I say to anybody who asks about this?” Tad said, while he and Murphy waited for the Avis car rental office in Brooklyn to open.
They had taken the subway across the East River; Brooklyn was an elementary subterfuge, a less obvious place to start than Manhattan. He needed to buy time, and the more confusion he could leave in his wake the better.
“You won’t know who it is that’s asking the questions, so tell them the truth; as little of it as you can get away with.”
“And Mom, what do I tell Mom?”
“I’ll speak to Mom.”
The office doors opened and they went inside.
“I need to see photo ID,” the clerk said mechanically.
Murphy handed over the driver’s licence and credit card from the cellar.
“Do you accept or decline the additional insurances?” the clerk enquired, while looking at the computer screen. Irritated by the lack of a response, she asked again. “Collision damage waiver and life cover. Eighteen dollars a day, package deal price. Do you accept or decline?”
“You should accept, Dad.”
Murphy still seemed muddled. “Life cover for eighteen dollars, how could I refuse? Accept.”
The clerk pushed the form across the counter. “Sign here, and initial here and here.”
They drove together to the subway, one stop from the connection for Kennedy Airport. Tad took the train to the United Airlines terminal and then caught the shuttle back into Manhattan. Another cut-out in the trail.
Murphy drove the rented Ford to the Shore Parkway beside Jamaica Bay and turned north. The final dregs of madness in his head had begun to drain away and islands of sanity started to merge into a recognisable landscape. The road changed to Leif Erickson Drive. Murphy’s memory grappled with the name. Was he the first European to cross the Atlantic, five hundred years before Columbus? Or was Erickson not the first, but merely a successor to unnamed Irish monks who made the voyage in leather boats?
To part of him it seemed strange that he should be engaged by such trivia, yet in another corridor of his mind it seemed urgent to consider all questions, even irrelevant ones, in careful detail. The black skeletal shapes of Coney Island appeared against the lightening Atlantic sky. Images of sweaty youthful summers amid vast crowds of tenement escapees rubbing sand-covered shoulders on the world’s most famous beach played through his mind. The car tyres thumped a regular pattern over the steel plates of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. Fifteen miles away, across New York harbour, the lights of Manhattan looked like a distant fairground. He felt a stab of illogical resentment at such unknowing, uncaring normality.
The moment passed and he was soon in New Jersey, where the commuter traffic was beginning the daily process of clogging the highway into the city. He pulled onto the New Jersey Turnpike; then close to the lights of Newark Airport he turned off the highway to make a chain of purchases from small shops in small towns. He considered the mall at Paramus. It would have been quicker, but malls have security cameras. He bought duct tape at a garage, weed killer at a garden depot and a ski-suit and goggles in an outdoor store.
The successive stops added more than an hour and a half to the journey to Morristown Airport but it was worth it. An ITT company jet passed over the runway threshold as he drove through the main gate. Morristown had once been a rural airfield, but now it was busy with corporate aviation.
The flying club, housed in one of the original buildings, was small and unobtrusive and Murphy found this strangely comforting.
Arriving unannounced was a gamble. The security advantages were obvious but there was the risk that the aircraft would be rented out. He parked out of sight of the club office and walked across to the hangar. The old Cessna 180 stood in the open. He remembered the spare key taped inside a tail inspection panel – a precaution against the kind of embarrassing incident following a midnight swimming party in Key West a couple of summers ago. A key had been lost and a spare had to be couriered down from New York. For a wild moment, he thought of simply taking the aircraft, getting as far as he could on the gas in the tank and putting down for a refill before the news got out. Along with the idea came a parallel consciousness of the foolishness of such thinking. Once it might have worked; nowadays, a stolen aircraft would attract fighter jets.
*
Tad was in class when Mantoni arrived at Hunter. He had waited beside a vending machine that hid him from the doorway of the lecture room. When the students streamed into the corridor he stepped out in front of Tad. The class surged past in search of their next lecture.
“I’m a friend of your dad’s.”
“How do I know that?”
“You don’t.”
Tad began to follow his fellow students; he felt less vulnerable on the move.
“What you do know is that he’s sick and he needs help,” Mantoni said.
“He works in a sick business.”
They were overtaken by another wave of students and loud conversations about relationships and rivalries.
Mantoni was momentarily jostled aside. “It’s a sick business that keeps all of you guys healthy,” he said, with a gesture towards the crowded corridor.
Tad kept moving and became alarmed at the realisation they were running out of corridor.
Mantoni tried again. “What did he tell you to say?”
“He said to tell you the truth.”
They had reached the end of the corridor. Tad knew he couldn’t walk back in the opposite direction, nor could he face the open campus beyond the double doors.
“Is that what you’re going to do? Are you going to tell me the truth?”
“No,” Tad said.
*
“Is Glen around?” Murphy asked the earnest-looking young man behind the clubhouse operations desk.
“No, he’s skiing in Aspen. I’m Jason.” He stretched out his hand and Murphy shook it.
It was a relief – Glen always wanted to talk. They had known each other for years and last summer they had flown to the North Woods in Maine for a week’s fishing. The last thing Murphy wanted was attention, even from a friend.
“Too bad; maybe we’ll catch up when I get back.”
“Sure; I’ll tell him you came by.”
“Is my aircraft available?”
Jason consulted the bookings log. “It’s booked out to the Stephensons on Sunday.”
“So it’s free until then?”
“Yes, but don’t be late back, the Stephensons have been good money earners for you. They fly down to their daughter in Savannah a couple of times a month. It’s the only way the old man can get the old lady to fly. Are you sure you’ll be back before the weekend?”
“Sure. I’ve just got to get some hours in to keep my licence.”
“Where you headed?”
“What’s with the weather?”
“Looks like we
could be skiing here by tomorrow afternoon.” Glen pushed the weather map across the desk. “There’s this big storm system coming down from Canada.”
“Guess I’ll head south, get out of here ahead of it.”
“Anywhere in mind?”
“Las Vegas maybe, work up a tan in the morning, Lady Luck in the afternoon and another kind of lady for the evenings.”
“Skin cancer, bankruptcy and STDs. You sure you’re coming back? Sounds like a Kamikaze trip to me,” Jason said with a leer.
“Is she gassed up?” Murphy asked as he filled out the flight plan.
Jason resented Murphy for not responding to the joke. “Sure, just like always,” he said.
Murphy parked the car on the far side of the Cessna and began to transfer the bags to the aircraft.
“Some vintage set of clubs; my granddaddy had a set like that.” Jason had appeared unexpectedly and was much too close for comfort. “Can I give you a hand?”
Murphy spoke instinctively. “Sure. Will you put the car in the parking lot and put the key in my pigeonhole?”
“Sure thing,” Jason said, and was gone.
Murphy slid the last of the bags into the passenger compartment, retrieved the hidden key and climbed into the pilot’s seat behind the left-hand set of controls. The magic of the well-worn aircraft came flooding back. The tacky plastic upholstery, paint abraded through to the metal, the old-fashioned analogue instruments, the worn handgrips of the control column and that mystic smell of raw metal and aviation fuel that recalled memories of long flights accomplished long ago. He turned the key and the instrument panel came to life. The engine responded to the starter with a cough, then began to fire. Murphy rattled through the pre-flight checks and got taxi clearance from the tower. In his peripheral vision he saw Jason put down the phone in the clubhouse. He waved his arms and started to run towards the aircraft. Ignoring him, Murphy opened the throttle and the Cessna moved forward with increasing speed. Now the clock was ticking.
The Night Watch Page 28