The Night Watch

by Julian Dinsell

  There was quietness, and then she spoke with deliberate calm. “Don’t do it; whatever it is you’ve got planned, don’t do it. Come home, for God’s sake, if you love me come home.”

  The glass panel of the phone door erupted into reflected light as the huge laser of Helios bore into the darkening sky. Instinctively Murphy turned away from it. The last person had left Helios. It was time to go.

  “Honey, I can’t tell you where I am, but I can tell you where we’re going. We’re on our way to Oregon. We’ll start again there, just like you always wanted.”

  He heard a deep anguished scream and hung up the phone to shut the sound out of his head.

  Chapter 33 - From the Rockies to the Himalayas

  Network correspondents, journalists and anchors checked their hairstyles and, in a dozen languages, polished their phrases for the camera. Such a huge investment by the world’s networks and newspapers meant that large amounts of coverage were essential to justify the expense. Every reporter wanted the line that history would remember, one with the staying power of ‘Iron Curtain’ or ‘Cold War’. The current holder of the title, an anchor from NBC, who first coined ‘From the Rockies to the Urals’ to describe the scale of the conference, was now trying out ‘From the Rockies to the Himalayas’.

  A woman reporter from the BBC was rehearsing. “The largest peace conference since Versailles 1919, which created new states from the Pacific to Czechoslovakia, from Africa to Iraq…”

  Fox News took an upbeat line. “This is an event of Olympic proportions and the difference between this and the other Olympics is that here everyone can be a winner; there are enough prizes for everybody…”

  ZDF from Germany were being cautious. “The lesson of Versailles must not be forgotten. Back then, the President of the United States stayed in Paris for three months to ensure America got what it wanted, but even so great an effort was not enough to get Congress to ratify the treaty…”

  Everywhere there were officials, tireless as an army of worker ants. Technicians checked the lighting grid, the air-conditioning plant and the alarm systems. They calculated the humidification and temperature settings that would be required as thousands of bodies made their own individual contribution to the climate. The sanitary staff were confident in the ability of the system to liquefy any quantity of waste, except the indestructible enemies of any sewage system – condoms and tomato pips. Like sheepdogs, multilingual chaperones herded the children’s choirs from rehearsal to commissary.

  Security teams ran their own checks for contamination of air, water and the voids under floors and above ceilings. Everyone was subjected to metal detectors and skin swabs for traces of explosives or toxic chemicals. Outside, as discreetly hidden as the shrubbery would allow, there were laser-guided missiles to enforce the air exclusion zone. The outer limits of the site were lined with a double rank of concrete blocks. Motorised access was limited to vehicles that had previously been checked and kept in guarded compounds when not in use.

  The instruments for the orchestra were shipped in overnight and security cleared before the players arrived.

  *

  How? Simple practicality had consolidated itself into the only question that mattered. It would not, could not, be allowed to go away. It was absolutely unyielding – the intellectual equivalent of concrete. Thornhill felt an overwhelming need to speak to Jane.

  At the Tabac in the lobby he bought a phone card and a few minutes later was walking through the wealthy lakeside suburb that lined the busy road to Lausanne. He found a small, noisy bar with a card phone and called the secure line in the flat. Jane answered immediately.

  “Sounds as if you’re enjoying yourself,” she said, hearing the conversation and laughter.

  “I’m missing you.” It was not the kind of thing that Thornhill had said in recent years. Over time, their closeness had become unspoken and the remark was out of character. Jane immediately sensed danger.

  “Is it very bad?” she asked gently.

  “Yes.”

  “Can I help?” There was a silence, and Jane sensed Thornhill was making a decision.

  “There is one thing you could do.” Jane said nothing, leaving Thornhill to make his own pace. “If you don’t hear from me by one a.m. on Sunday there’s an email on my laptop in the safe. Send it first and read it afterwards. It will tell you everything. Will you do it?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “I can’t tell you any more.”

  “I know.”

  To Thornhill, a loving absence of words meant more than poetry. “I’ll be home for Sunday tea.”

  The ironic thought of a comfortable domestic ritual made them both laugh.

  “I love you,” Jane said.

  Thornhill swung round, turning his back on the crowd to prevent others intruding on their moment of intimacy. The automatic in his pocket collided with the bar.

  ‘Two to the heart and one to the head.’

  *

  Thornhill, conscious that the team needed thinking time, released everyone for an hour.

  Wolski could not stay still; movement provided the illusion of coping with the stress. From past experience, he knew that he needed to let his mind wander. Occasionally inspiration had come that way. The increasingly urgent activity in the Great Hall of Nations took him back to Warsaw. A long time ago, ahead of the arrival of the Bolshoi Ballet from Moscow, he had been invited to the great Teatr Wielki. Ignace had a friend in stage management who let them in. It had one of the largest stages in Europe. How similar it all looked. This too was a performance of global scale with world players and an international audience, but a performance nevertheless.

  Morag allowed herself a moment’s amusement as she listened to photographers arguing in half a dozen languages about the placement of tripods and ladders. Everyone ignored the carefully drawn plans that were the Swiss officials’ attempts to provide everybody with a clear line of sight.

  Darcy watched intently for errors and omissions as the multi-layered security technology was put through a final succession of checks.

  Video recognition equipment was in place to scan the faces of all arrivals and check them in milliseconds against a vast database of images of known terrorist suspects, and others in whom the security services had an interest. Next came chemical detection swabs across the palms of both hands and a retina scan to ensure that the person matched the pass they carried. Remote radioactive chemicals and explosives sensors operated in overlapping zones around the perimeter. Thornhill was one of a handful of senior officials who had an executive security pass. It was this single flaw in the system that enabled him to get the automatic into the building. Everyone else had to go through metal detection, followed by an examination with the new generation of low-emission X-ray equipment that could see through clothing, shoes, briefcases and anything else capable of concealing a weapon.

  For weeks there had been a bitter political row about the one-thousand-voice World Children’s Choir. There had been endless arguments about the mix of languages and choice of songs. Decisions based on population favoured China, India and South East Asia. Selections based on geography shifted the balance towards English, Spanish and French. Eventually, Mandarin, English, Hindi, Russian and Spanish had been agreed upon. Then there was a lottery for songs from smaller language groups. The winners were Serbian, Navaho and Welsh.

  Thornhill knew that there had been an almost identical process of bickering about the order of precedence for the entry procession for the signing of the Grand Declaration, and places on the tiered seating to witness it. Arguments had been advanced on the basis of landmass, population and alphabet. After fierce wrangling, high-pressure lobbying, offers of aid and threats of withholding it, an order of precedence based on Gross National Product had been reluctantly agreed.

  Thornhill called the team together for a final briefing.

  “Everyone knows that the period of maximum vulnerability is when the key players are in the open and the Swiss a
re well prepared for that. Our experience suggests that the threat is on the inside. Any questions?”

  Everyone wished they had some new possibility to discuss, but no one had anything to ask.

  “Then everyone to their places,” Thornhill said.

  *

  The procession began on wheels, with the longest line of limousines that anyone, even veteran journalists and diplomats, could ever remember. The whole thing had been timed with Swiss exactitude. The set-down points had been laid out to allow six limousines to disembark their passengers simultaneously.

  Three lines of procession were marked out on the wide slowly rising steps leading to the huge glass-panelled doors at the entrance of the foyer. Inside, the Diplomatic Corps were allocated places on either side of the broad ceremonial staircase that wound its self-conscious way upwards to the Grand Hall. The diplomats had to be in place an hour and a half before the first delegates arrived. Thornhill chose a place on the outer curve at the mezzanine level. The position would give a clear line of sight as the great and good, presidents and prime ministers, captains of industry, Mafiosi, bankers, movers, shakers, stars of screen and science streamed upwards to the tiered seating reserved for those with the ultimate honour of being witnesses to the signing.

  At the apex of the curve, Thornhill calculated, there would be a moment when he faced November directly. He stood very still amid the diplomatic chatter that ebbed and flowed around him.

  ‘Two to the heart, one to the head,’ he kept telling himself. It had become a mantra in what had become a supreme crisis of conscience. Was he another Stauffenberg seeking to strike down a new Hitler or simply a failed warlord with nobody left to do his dirty work? With long-practised discipline, he forced himself to keep a mental grip on the sharp-edged resolution he had made, and it felt as if his mind bled.

  Looking at Thornhill, Morag and Darcy knew that his cold isolation from those around him was no more than heavily disguised desperation.

  Wolski approached and stood quietly beside them. They turned simultaneously towards him, shocked at his appearance.

  “You look terrible,” Darcy said. “You need a drink, a large whisky.”

  “I’ve already been offered champagne,” Wolski said. The trauma in his voice snapped Thornhill out of his introspection.

  “Who by?”

  “Golkov.”

  “Golkov, here?” Morag asked quietly.

  “Yes.”

  “What did he say?”

  “I’ve been told a terrible truth or a great lie.”

  “What did he say?” Morag persisted.

  Wolski had difficulty speaking. “He said the simplicity of it all would drive us into ‘terminal self-contempt’. He said, ‘there are none so blind as those that won’t see’.”

  “Arrogant bastard,” Darcy said.

  Wolski was fighting tears as he looked towards Thornhill. “We have failed, don’t you understand? We are no more than witnesses at the state funeral of civilisation.”

  Chapter 34 - Helios

  ‘Laser, laser burning bright in the forest of the night…’ A distorted Oxford memory of Blake’s mystic poem The Tyger forced itself to the front of his mind. He was flying less than fifty feet above the ground, but the roaring air-stream from the open doorway isolated him from the shadowy moonlit hazards of the landscape below. Fatigue flushed incoherent horrors from the corners of his mind. ‘…what dreadful hand or eye formed thy fearful symmetry?’ With all the concentration he could muster, he hung onto the droning of the little Cessna’s engine. ‘It would be almost impossible to survive,’ Tad had said. ‘The size of an explosion big enough to ignite the canopy and set off the hydrogen would tear the aircraft apart – how fast will the aircraft be flying?’

  Everything now depended on these last few minutes. Random thoughts collided like dodgems at a fairground. ‘Half a league, half a league onward…’ The Domes came into clear sight. ‘Sweet revenge and bitter regret…’ He pulled on the stick and the aircraft climbed steeply and levelled out. ‘…The time has come to talk of many things, of ships and shoes and sealing wax of cabbages and kings…’ He lined up the tape marks with the curvature of the dome and the vertical column of the laser. ‘…Government of the people by the people for the people…’ As the shape filled the space between the edge markers, he kicked the golf bag into space. ‘…shall not vanish from the earth.’

  The fishing line ran out and he could hear the cinematograph-like clatter of the winding gear above the roar of the wind. With the sound came agonising images of fishing with Tad in an Adirondack summer of long ago.

  Then came the flash, vast piercing white, driven into his skull by Mary’s scream.

  Chapter 35 - The Summit

  It was impossible not to be astonished at the sheer scale of the event as the world’s most powerful leaders and richest players in the multi-national game made their fanfared entrance. For the sake of decency, aid workers, folk musicians, union leaders, artists and actors were woven into the procession. But it was the superstars with whom the distinguished crowd of watchers jostled to establish eye contact. In his place on the curve of the stairway, Thornhill was as unmoving as a statue. As the head of the procession crossed the wide hallway, the World’s Children’s Choir began their medley of world music.

  On the balcony opposite, Morag, Darcy and Wolski stood among the sea of junior officials. Not far away, Golkov smiled at them like a contented snake.

  Looking down on Thornhill, Darcy said, “He looks in a bad way. If I didn’t know him better, I’d say he was in a catatonic trance.”

  “He is watching sheep going to the slaughter,” Wolski whispered.

  “Shut up,” Morag said sharply.

  Amid the crowd she saw only Thornhill and, like a mother unable to rescue a child from danger, felt only helpless desperation.

  By contrast, Thornhill’s mind was strangely calm. As the procession began to make its way up the grand staircase, he knew he’d seen this picture somewhere before, but like a name on the tip of the tongue, he couldn’t place it. Then suddenly, he had it. What he saw unfolding before him was a near replica of the earliest news-film ever shot; a procession of Kings, Emperors, Rajahs and Grand Panjandrums attending the coronation of the last Czar of Russia, the last glittering assembly of the old order.

  He felt the warm shape of the hidden weapon. Everything seemed so beautifully simple. In fifteen paces the world would change, and he with it.

  Morag was nauseous with tension. Shoot the pigs … the iceman… She swallowed hard against rising vomit. Her memory was in overdrive. She swung round into Wolski and nearly knocked him over.

  “Innocent perpetrators. What did you mean by innocent perpetrators?” she demanded ferociously.

  Ten paces. Thornhill counted each step. ‘Two to the heart, one to the head.’ He had no thought beyond the now inevitable event.

  Wolski was at a loss to know how to answer Morag. All he could think of was Golkov’s taunt: ‘When this is all over you will be astonished at how simply it was done.’

  At five paces, Thornhill’s right hand was aligned with the pocket where the weapon was hidden.

  “Think, for God’s sake think,” Morag shouted at Wolski. She was oblivious to the angry looks she was attracting from the star-struck crowd.

  The security men closest to her discreetly closed in.

  “Think!” she screamed incoherently. “‘Water doesn’t compress…’, ‘Shoot the pigs…’; you nearly had something.” She sounded totally deranged.

  Wolski looked around him with absolute desperation. For some reason he did not fully comprehend his blank gaze engaged with the crowded press enclosure.

  The procession moved inexorably on. Calvin November was now three steps away from Thornhill, whose hand slid into the pocket and closed round the automatic. He slid the safety catch off.

  *

  Over the next two steps and five seconds the world changed, but not as Thornhill had anticipated.

/>   He heard Wolski’s thin voice shout, “The photographers, the flashguns.”

  Wolski’s voice was drowned out by Darcy yelling, “Eiger, Eiger Eiger!” as he shouldered his way through a crowd of alarmed heads of state.

  The emergency code word had temporarily immobilised the security team at the head of the stairs.

  “Get everybody out of here!” Darcy screamed.

  The procession stalled and there was pandemonium. The entire grand staircase was a mass of outraged egos.

  Then Thornhill’s mobile phone rang. Nobody who knew the number would call at a moment like this. It had to be Murphy.

  “I’ve cut the bastard’s balls off,” the voice said. “The sun is down, Helios is out.”

  Those around him were incredulous at Thornhill taking a phone call. He felt a surge of energy; the icy calm was suddenly gone.

  “Where are you?” he asked, trying to control the urgency of the question.

  “Travelling.”

  “Where to?”

  “You’ll work it out. All you need to know is that Helios is out.”

  “Permanently?”

  “Permanently, totally, globally.”

  “I’ll pass your message on in person.”

  “In person?” There was stark astonishment in Murphy’s voice.

  “Yes, in person,” Thornhill said as he ended the call.

  “I know you.” The contemptuous voice was that of Calvin November. Hemmed in by the crowd, he wanted someone to vent his anger upon.

  Thornhill made firm eye contact and replied with measured aggression. “And I know you, Mr November, I know you very well. I know about Warsaw, I know about Cortexean and I know about Washington.”

  If November grasped the magnitude of what was happening, he didn’t show it.

  “And I’ve been asked to give you a message,” Thornhill continued. “Helios is out, your sun is set – permanently.”

  Golkov had heard the conversation from a distance and was struggling through the crowd with a mobile phone to his ear. November saw him waiting for a reply. Golkov shook his head. Darcy was speaking urgently to the Swiss security team.