The Night Watch

by Julian Dinsell

  Chapter 31 - Golkov

  The sleek hotel room was a prison to Wolski. Its digitally controlled double-security locked door, spotlights, polished surfaces and shiny leather offered all the comfort of a condemned cell. But he had nowhere else to go. Security demanded he remain locked away. He had no more insights to barter for conversation, no more suggestions to win him engagement with others. His sense of emptiness was acute; the need for human company was too great to resist, and he took a decision to rebel. In the high-speed lift, after a couple of false starts, he punched in the security code and seconds later was descending to the lobby. The hotel conference centre, with its set of interconnecting halls, was full of teams erecting exhibition stands. Wolski wandered aimlessly among the feverish activity. Having been so long a focus of attention he enjoyed the anonymity. To be among people whose priorities demanded nothing of him was liberating and he luxuriated in it. Then, like lightning before thunder came the shock. The force of it hit him before his brain could fully grasp what he was looking at. The largest of the cavernous exhibition spaces was devoted to the Domes: Dynamos and Helios. He had heard them endlessly discussed but this was the first time he had actually seen what they looked like. He stood frozen to the spot, taking it all in: powerful simplicity, pure technology, ambitions without horizons; it all seemed so completely achievable.

  He wandered among the technicians who were showing the combined stress of jet lag, last-minute technical failures and an unmissable deadline.

  “Let’s go for a laser and audio test,” an impatient amplified voice said.

  The doors closed, the lights went down and Wolski was suddenly in a sea of holographic images and multi-track omni-polar sound. Ideas and images exploded around him. He was distantly conscious of yelled obscenities as he collided with hardware and tripped over cables. In a state of rising panic, he eventually found an exit. The crush bar yielded and like a drowning man coming up for air, he staggered into the hallway. Taking huge gulping breaths, he steadied himself against the wall.

  “A glass of champagne, Professor?” It was Golkov. Wolski was transfixed, and Golkov took him by the arm. “I heard you were here and hoped to renew our acquaintance. The past is the past, come and celebrate.”

  Wolski seemed devoid of any power to resist as Golkov steered him to the hospitality suite, where hotel staff were setting out trestles and loading them with bottles and glasses. Golkov guided him to a small round table covered by a crisp linen cloth. Wolski stared at the virgin-white weave and longed for innocence. A champagne bottle and two flutes appeared. He was faintly aware of a cork being drawn and the rising level inside the glasses.

  He heard Golkov say, as if reading his mind, “You did what you did, you made your contribution. Things that are invented cannot be uninvented. You’re a scientist, you know that.” Golkov was enjoying himself and raised his glass in a parody of a toast.

  The gesture touched a nerve and Wolski felt an infusion of anger, like the welcome pain of circulation returning to frozen limbs. With great deliberation, he raised his head and looked Golkov directly in the eye.

  He urgently wanted something memorable to say, some declaration of defiance, some expression of hope, but all he could manage was, “You will not succeed, you shall not succeed.”

  Golkov expelled air in something between a snort and a laugh. “Which is it, Professor, prediction or declaration?”

  “Both,” Wolski said, without letting go of the lock he held on Golkov’s eyes.

  When Golkov looked away, he realised he had won the tiniest of victories.

  Something in Wolski’s unflinching manner seemed to annoy Golkov. “You are wondering why I’m not alarmed.” It was a statement, not a question.

  Wolski remained defiant; holding on to the faint hope that Golkov could be provoked into an indiscretion, a weakness that could be exploited, but there were no obvious gaps in Golkov’s armour of urbane superiority. He was enjoying Wolski’s helplessness.

  “When I was told you were here, I was delighted. I knew that your very presence demonstrated that you had failed. If you weren’t so blinded by romantic notions of the human condition, you’d know how obvious your failure is.”

  Wolski felt his defiance deserting him, like a spent wave that rolled back to the open sea. He looked around for a way of escape. The room was slowly filling up with impromptu gatherings of officials discussing plans for the following day. Uniformed security guards patrolled the corridor.

  Once more Golkov seemed to read his mind. “Test my hypothesis: call security. Who would believe you? Don’t be too hard on yourself, the failure is not entirely your own. The people who believed you have failed you.” Golkov poured himself another glass of champagne. “Use your scientific judgement, Professor. If you go public, the best you can hope for is to be treated as an elderly psychotic with embarrassing delusions, and be quietly deported. Of course, it might turn out to be very much less comfortable than that.”

  Wolski felt another welcome wave of anger. It was unanticipated and he was gladdened by its arrival; it allowed him to see a weakness – Golkov’s need to strut and crow.

  He struck back. “Do not preen yourself too publicly. Were you to succeed in this vileness, your usefulness would be ended and your existence terminated.”

  “How little you realise what the future looks like,” Golkov said dismissively.

  “How little you have learned from the past,” Wolski snapped back. “Revolutions devour their children. You are a Russian, of all people you should know that.”

  At last Wolski had got under Golkov’s guard, but nothing had prepared him for the reply that Golkov spat across the table. “You judge everything by your tedious bourgeois sense of right and wrong. We are the new barbarians; we shall return the world to an earlier, purer time. We shall rule the strong and be ruthless with the weak – those like you who cling to the exhausted remnants of a collapsing world.”

  “You’re mad.” Wolski tried to find relief in the obvious insanity of it all.

  “And if I were, would that be important?” Golkov said. “It is power that matters. Not merely the power of life and death but power for its own sake.”

  Golkov poured himself a further glass of champagne. Was it the fourth or the fifth? Wolski tried to remember.

  “You know what I say is true because you yourself are living evidence of it.”

  It seemed important to Golkov that his victim should agree with him. But Wolski had nothing to say.

  “Don’t you understand?” Golkov continued. “You’re a hostage of your own weakness. You hate killing but would dearly love to kill me right now, wouldn’t you?”

  Wolski remained stubbornly silent.

  “You had the opportunity to kill me, but you didn’t have a plan, and because of that you don’t have the means. But most important of all, you don’t have the resolve. Oh, and let’s not forget, should you decide to act on impulse, you don’t have the physical strength.” Perhaps it was the champagne, but Golkov seemed to be behaving like an advocate before a jury. “So, I rest my case; in every sense you are a prisoner of your own inadequacy.”

  At last Wolski understood why he was being subjected to Golkov’s analysis. There was no other audience. A hermetically sealed existence in Warsaw had created a world where spoken thoughts were not permitted. Golkov was simply taking advantage of a newfound freedom.

  “So Calvin November is to be King of this new world order?” Wolski asked.

  He was astonished that Golkov seemed to agree with what he had intended to be a pejorative remark. “We are led by a higher mind. He will be King in all but name and I shall be High Priest; the Director of Helios, source of our knowledge and our new power.”

  “If your Mr November is to be King, you realise he’ll have to depose Elvis?” It was the first thing Wolski had been proud of saying for a long time.

  Golkov slammed his fist onto the table and champagne slopped over the top of the glasses.

  “I con
trolled you in Warsaw and I control you still. You made it so easy, you and your fellow carpet-slipper warriors: resistance until it becomes uncomfortable, then it’s pass the vodka and black-market caviar. It was very convenient of you to keep all your vulnerabilities in such an accessible place.” He paused and then rushed on in case Wolski might find some comfort in the possibility of his friend’s survival. “Don’t think you saved them, you merely made them irrelevant. And you, look what happened to you – once a scientific genius and now a moral bankrupt.”

  How strange it was, Wolski thought, that Golkov continued to need this kind of justification.

  All the words Wolski had been trying to find came out in a rush. “Morality!” he shouted.

  A few heads turned at the edges of the small groups absorbed in business and cocktails. They turned back, probably assuming a quarrel involving a female.

  “You dare speak of morality. You killed a team of young athletes just because you were impatient.”

  “A result of the inadequacy of your work,” Golkov said dismissively.

  “Morgenstern was shot in the head.”

  “A tiresome little Jew. Not a racist’s remark, you understand,” Golkov added quickly, “merely a factual observation of ethnicity, personality and stature.”

  “You killed Jakob.”

  “A racketeer posing as a philosopher.”

  “You tortured him.”

  “The decision was his.”

  “He was my friend!”

  “He made an unfortunate choice. The reality is that information can be expensive. The important thing is to make someone else pay.” Golkov looked at his ugly gold Rolex. “As enjoyable as it is to exchange reminiscences with an old friend, I have work to do. I will, however, leave you with one further thought. When this is all over you will be astonished at how simply it was done. Your self-contempt at not having seen it will be terminal. Goodbye, Professor.”

  It took all Wolski’s strength to get back to his room. He sat on the large, soft bed and longed for the comfort of tears, but none came.

  Chapter 32 - The Flight

  At an airfield near the Utah–Nevada state line Murphy took a calculated risk; at least he wanted to think of it as such. In reality, he had no option. He had flown for sixteen hours, with refuelling stops at places like Covington Kentucky and Neosho Missouri, which he reckoned to be out of the way, yet with sufficient traffic for a casual arrival to be unremarkable. The journey had, quite literally, been a nightmare. His rising fatigue allowed the residue of the drugs back into his mind. It was like flying through a vortex of distorted memories and fearful futures. Now he could go no further. He had to sleep. After signing the papers for the fuel he kicked off his shoes and sank into the seductive softness of the lumpy broken-springed sofa in the locker room behind the flight office. Nobody seemed to notice. Just an hour, he promised himself.

  In normal times his mental alarm clock was accurate to the minute. Now things were different. It was the radio that roused him; he heard the words ‘Cessna 180’ and ‘November Echo’, his call sign, being read back by the operator in the flight office. It could only mean one thing. He grabbed his shoes and jacket and ran for the back door. The aircraft was less than a hundred yards away. He opened the door and pressed the starter button in a single continuous movement. On the perimeter road he saw the red flashing light of a Utah State Police cruiser. The Cessna would not be hurried; it went through its normal routine on coughing indecisively before agreeing to fire on all cylinders.

  The flashing light was getting a lot closer. Murphy opened the throttle and roared down the perimeter track. On the radio there were urgent instructions to stop.

  He swung the aircraft onto the runway and took off down wind, a dangerous procedure with a heavily laden aircraft, but he knew that the police would have time to block the runway if he taxied to the up-wind end for a conventional take-off. He cleared the hangar by no more than six feet. The shallow climb suited his purpose; he had to stay under the radar and that meant an altitude of a hundred feet or less. For the first ten minutes he flew a zigzag course in an attempt to confuse observers on the ground. His pulse returned to normal and he began to enjoy the thrill of flying under power lines and following the contours of the landscape. He calculated that he had about an hour and a half of flying time to go. He could outrun a Highway Patrol helicopter but not any other type of aircraft. The night before, he had noticed on the flight office map that there was an Air National Guard base some two hundred miles away, so a fighter intercept was a serious threat. But it would have to be a visual search. He was now flying just fifty feet above the desert. He guessed it would take a half-hour or so for the State Police to contact the Air Guard and for aircraft to be scrambled. There was twenty minutes of flying time to reach the area, which meant they would have three-quarters of an hour to find him. Everything rested on what happened in those forty-five minutes.

  The reduction of the problem to a single number was reassuring. He checked the compass heading and relaxed. It was then he realised that, for the first time in his life, he was flying in bare feet.

  *

  If a fleet of Martian spaceships landed at Noplace Nevada, Joe would have displayed neither surprise nor excitement. So Murphy’s unannounced appearance raised no spoken questions. He ambled slowly over to the aircraft as it taxied up to the barn.

  “Thought I’d drop by for old time’s sake,” Murphy said as he shut the engine down.

  “Oh yeah,” Joe said noncommittally.

  “Golf,” Murphy said, indicating the old Slazenger bag on the back seat. “Doing a tour of desert golf courses and had some engine trouble.” He reached inside the bag and pulled out a pair of two-tone golf shoes.

  “Oh yeah.” Joe used the phrase to express a variety of meanings. This time there was a distinct flavour of disbelief.

  “Could I use the barn? Don’t want to get sand in the works.”

  “Yeah,” Joe said, and swung the doors open.

  Together they pushed the aircraft inside. It was a tremendous relief; he was now out of sight. They each took one of the doors and swung it closed.

  “Guess I’ll get started.” As Murphy spoke, there was a sudden roar as a pair of F15s flew over at rooftop height.

  They both stepped outside to see the aircraft disappearing in a mirage of jet exhaust and heat haze.

  “What do I tell them?” Joe asked.

  “Who?”

  “Any of your golfing buddies who happen by?”

  “Tell ’em I stopped by, had a cheeseburger with fries and a chocolate malt. Then I flew on around sunset.”

  “I’ll go fix the burger,” Joe said, ambling towards the Diner.

  “In a while,” Murphy shouted. “I’ve got work to do first.”

  The barn had no air-conditioning. He dared not open the doors and the temperature rose rapidly as the sun got higher.

  He carefully spread out Tad’s pages of calculations on the bench and began work on the aircraft. He stuck measured lengths of duct tape on the windshield, as indicated on Tad’s plan. Similarly, he measured out the fishing line, double-checking the length against Tad’s calibration. He carefully opened the Rox metal case and removed the hand grenade. Then he tipped the clubs out of the golf bag and zipped the grenade into one of the outer pockets. With a rusty hammer from the workbench, he tapped out the hinge pins from the co-pilot’s side of the aircraft and lifted the door off. He stood the golf bag in front of the co-pilot’s seat and filled it with weed killer. Then he tied the end of the fishing line to the pull-ring on the grenade fuse. Carefully he wound the line back on the reel and lashed the mechanism to the seat frame. It was a brutally simple idea.

  Flying at a known height and speed, when the target filled the gap between the tape marks on the screen, he would push the bag out of the aircraft, the carefully measured fishing line would pull the grenade pin and the bag would explode in an airburst immediately above the dome. He calculated that the flammability
of the dome’s construction materials and the hydrogen in the recycling plant below should do the rest. Neither he nor Tad had been able to calculate whether the blast would tear the aircraft apart.

  *

  “Make that a double with cheese,” Murphy said as he swung open the squeaking swing doors of the Diner.

  He wasn’t sure why he was surprised that the place was exactly as he remembered it. A fine layer of desert dust lay over the red cracked plastic seats that had started life in the 1950s. Perhaps it was because everything else in his life had changed so much that it seemed odd that anything from the past should remain unaltered. Joe tossed aside an ancient copy of Sports Illustrated left by some long-forgotten customer.

  “You got it,” he said as he began to rummage in the deep freeze.

  The work in the barn had taken longer than Murphy had imagined and the sun was nearing the skyline of the desert hills.

  “You got a payphone here?”

  “Over by the restrooms.”

  Murphy pulled out a handful of change and fed the coins into the phone, dialled and waited. He had almost given up when Mary answered.

  “Hi, babe,” Murphy said quietly.

  “Oh God.” She began to cry; it was thirty years since Murphy had heard her do that. “Where have you been?”

  “I’m travelling,” he said, avoiding the question.

  “Mantoni has been here; he said you were sick, that you need help real bad.”

  “I guess I do, sweetheart, we all do.”

  “He said you’d call me; he wants you to tell me where you are.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “But they’ll trace this call.”

  In the glass of the restroom door, the reflected sun was sinking below the horizon.

  “I know,” he said.

  Mary became even more alarmed. “That means you don’t care.” Her voice rose in panic. “That means whatever you’re doing has no future to it.”

  “It’s going to be okay, babe.”