So what did it mean? He knew even before receiving the signal that the computer had been at work. All of Kleist’s patients were being subjected to scrutiny as Albert left London with Hayes. The search had apparently thrown up a “Sig Con,” or significant connection, between his German quarry (Kleist) and another case where action had been required (A/R). A cabinet office secretary had been treated, was that right—“Caboffsec treated”? Albert frowned at the deliberate obscurantism, which, he realized, had been designed to confuse “trusted allies” like Hayes and Vassili. Anyway, since he could not even confirm safe receipt of Shorrocks’ cable (“Nilconf”), Gandergoose was up to him.
He folded the sheet of paper and stuffed it into his pocket. “How much longer?” he asked Vassili.
“That will depend on whether the commander here obtains clearance from Athens.”
“Can’t we cut the red tape?”
“I’m sorry. Somewhere close to where we are now there may be a Soviet sub, probably containing a highly trained Special Operations unit. If it comes to a fire-fight, our commander cannot just hope for the best.”
“Is that why we’re cruising so slowly?”
“Yes.” Vassili went across to the chart table. “Let me show you what we think we are up against.”
Albert looked around for Bill Hayes, who a few moments ago had been standing beside him, ostentatiously trying to read London’s signal, but the American was nowhere to be seen.
“Here …” Vassili ran a finger north-south “… is the Vespuga Deep. A trench, wide and very deep, as you guess from the name. If they are anywhere, that’s the place. Put yourself in the Soviets’ position. What would you do?”
“Stay down until D minus five, then surface for long enough to ship the boat that’d be waiting for me up top.”
“I don’t think so. The sea around here is treacherous, especially at night to those who don’t know it. Kleist and the woman would be mad to take such a risk, floating around in a rising swell, with winds and tides against them.”
“What, then?”
“We believe the submarine captain will send a boat to make landfall. Whichever option they choose, there has to be a boat, on the surface, at some point and for some time. There’s a good chance we’ll pick her up. But …”
“But what?”
Vassili unwound hands, arms, and shoulders in the finest production Albert had seen yet. “You won’t let us help you. Surprise, you tell us. No helicopters, one ship only. It may be possible, easy it isn’t.”
Albert moved to the nearest porthole and stared out into the darkness. “Kleist and the woman will have gone ahead,” he said to the glass. “I can’t think of any other reason why Lescombe should be so desperate to get to the small island.”
“Unless that was a blind. You have told me already, he’s good.”
“Not this time. He’s getting close to home now. Starting to panic.” Albert paused. “I want us to go there too. But quietly. Undetected. Does the captain know where they would have landed?”
Vassili called across to the commander. The man squinted at the ceiling and spoke a few words.
“He says along the eastern side of the island there are many fine beaches. A man could land there if he didn’t mind getting his feet wet.”
What if the enemy’s already in place? Albert thought grimly. Suppose the submarine had surfaced, sent a task force. A German-occupied Greek island, how history does repeat itself …. He became aware of another voice speaking. The signals officer was at work in his cubbyhole behind the bridge. Vassili glanced in that direction, then back at Albert.
“Orders,” he said softly.
Albert nodded. “Where did you stow my bags?”
“Aft. There’s a rope locker—”
Shit! Albert thought. Outside, on deck. “I know it. Excuse me.”
The breeze had stiffened while they were talking. Albert made his way toward the stern, keeping his gaze firmly on the deck in front of him. One step, two steps, there, you can do it…. He opened the lid of the locker and took out a long rectangular case, the sort of thing professional snooker players use to carry their dismantled cues. Then a voice behind him said, “Hold it right there.”
Albert obeyed.
“Turn around.”
Albert did so. “The thing that’s been puzzling me,” he said conversationally, “is why you waited so long, Bill.”
David was lying on sand; and even then he nearly drowned.
A wave, the same one that had filled his gasping, wide-open mouth, met an opponent coming from the other direction. The incoming water proved stronger; it swept him almost as far as the beach. He felt something hard beneath his feet, only to lose it again. His heart seemed to explode and he knew nothing more until he came to, spreadeagled face down on relatively solid ground. Every third wave or so sluiced over his shoulders; if he had taken mere seconds longer to recover, he would have died.
He crawled up the slope inch by painful inch, until water no longer deluged his body. When he finally managed to push himself onto all fours he could see great gouges in the sand. He had clung to the beach as if it were a life raft, trying to become one with the earth, so that he, like it, might become indestructible.
The moon shone brightly, but it provided an ominous, ghostly illumination, which gave more intensity to the shadows than sunlight ever could. He looked out to sea, still in the throes of upheaval, its white horses prancing wildly. Apart from flecks of foam, nothing showed. The boat had gone. So had the boatman.
David sat down heavily. If it weren’t for him, another man would even now be alive. No! You can’t be sure he’s dead yet, suppose another freak wave washed him ashore, further up the coast….
To hell with it. Tomorrow. He could adjust then, fiddling the books of conscience until they came out right. Status check. Nothing broken. No bleeding. A head that ached where he had bumped it against the side of the boat, bruises left, right, and center, stomach, nauseated. But alive, thank God.
He had lost a shoe. Better take off the other one, you’re on sand, it won’t hurt your feet….
The beach was narrow, perhaps a hundred feet long, bounded by rocks at either end. He could not see a light anywhere. Nor could he hear anything above the wind and the pounding of the sea. Which direction ….
He had come down from the north and something told him that Anna was ahead of him. Go south.
He kept away from the shoreline, wanting to see if there were any paths leading inland. He knew there were several people involved, because he’d concealed himself to watch while they loaded Anna into the car and drove off. Even allowing for the fact that not all of them might have come as far as this, the group would be bound to have left traces. But he discovered only a few false trails, little more than trampled undergrowth leading back to piles of picnickers’ rubbish or heaps of ashes.
When he came to the furthest limit of this particular beach he began to climb over the rocks. He was at the summit of the outcrop when something made him raise his eyes. And he saw her.
Anna was standing at the end of the next cove with her back to him, head bowed. She was alone.
David’s heart gave a delirious thump of exaltation, but he somehow resisted the impulse to shout. God knew who else might be within earshot. He slid off the rocks, seeking the shadow of the vines, which here came down almost to the sand. He moved slowly, anxious to avoid making the slightest noise. Sixty feet away. Fifty. Forty.
Anna did not move. She seemed to be asleep, suspended upright by invisible puppet strings.
Closer. Thirty feet. Twenty.
As David opened his mouth to speak, something hard thrust itself into the small of his back. “Don’t move,” said a voice he had never heard before. Anna started to turn; he caught a glimpse of her ghostly face, stagnant, like that of a long-drowned corpse, with two black wounds where the eyes should be. Then his mind filled with darkness and the bitter knowledge that the road he’d followed so tenaciously had at las
t run out.
CHAPTER
45
Why did I wait so long?” The question seemed to intrigue Hayes. He tilted his head to one side, but the black object in his right hand did not waver.
Albert found it impossible to gauge the gun’s stopping power by moonlight. “I’ve been slow,” he said. “I admit that.”
The shadows did not permit him to see if Hayes smiled, or what expression his face wore. Somewhere just outside Albert’s concentration, terror hovered. The pitching of the deck, salt air on his face, the feeling that any second now he might lose his balance and drop over the side were enough to bring on a feeling of nausea that could cripple him. If he once so much as acknowledged its presence, he’d be reduced to gibbering impotence. So he did what he always did when faced with water in vast hateful quantities, and kept his entire attention focused on a nearby object: in this case, Hayes’ weapon.
Don’t let him see you weaken, don’t panic, say something! “The real question, I suppose,” Albert drawled, “is what shall we do about it all?”
“Do? Tell me, Lieutenant Colonel Albert of the SAS regiment, ‘Who Dares Wins’ and suchlike crap, what do you believe is going on here?”
“Me? Nothing. I’m only a simple soldier.”
Hayes shook his head. “No. You’re not. You’re a highly complex individual. I’ve read your Northern Ireland stat sheet. ‘Cold personality masked by scrupulous politeness, coupled with significant absence of morality,’ isn’t that how it goes?”
“I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.” How insouciant, Albert thought. Wonderful. “You can always rely on Army Intelligence to get it wrong.”
“No commitment to any one government agency, but held ready at all times for secondment. ‘Special operations,’ that is to say, state executioner. Freelance.”
Albert made a deprecating moue. “There’s no money in it.”
“That’s a lie. But anyway, so what? You don’t need money, because you have no life outside your work. Not even a sex life. Relaxations: hunting, painting, long solitary walks, stroking your cat. But oh boy, can you cook! And you’re a trained psychologist. Now that really interested us. Why in heck should MI6 need a psychologist?”
“Thinking man’s thug, you know the sort of thing.”
“No, I don’t. I don’t understand any of it. I’m just here to do one job.”
“Make sure I don’t do mine.” Albert was struggling with the illusion that someone had flooded the deck with oil, that he would slip and slither and slide…. “Yes,” he said, his voice almost a shout. “Oh, quite.”
“What exactly is your job, colonel?”
“I’d have thought that was fairly obvious.”
“Pretend I’m stupid.”
“My orders are to ensure that the Krysalis file doesn’t fall into enemy hands.”
“You’re to kill the woman, in other words?”
Albert’s smile did not falter. Hayes was silent for a long time. No matter how the deck swayed beneath their feet, his stance never changed. That part of Albert’s brain not fighting queasiness was busy with spans, ranges, angles, light. Nothing balanced; the lines steadfastly refused to meet. “I’d have thought you’d be rather pleased to let me get on with it,” he said. “Why are you so determined to stop me?”
“You know why, Colonel Thinking-man’s-thug.”
“There’s a price on her head.”
“On David Lescombe’s, too. And whereas you come expensive, me, I’m cheap.”
Ah, Albert thought savagely, so Redman did hedge his bets. “How much are you in for?” he inquired, not without genuine interest.
“That’d be telling, wouldn’t it?”
Albert sighed. “I suppose this explains why you took a free lunch off Vassili, out of my earshot, when you ought to have been staking out the airport with me, if your cover story was true. You wanted to make sure he didn’t become too efficient at helping me.”
“That’s right. His orders were to give you everything you asked for. I didn’t like that, because I’m going to kill the Lescombes, not you. So I let him think the United States wouldn’t be too pleased with his government if your mission succeeded. Unfortunately, I got to Vassili a little late. Like you, I’ve been slow.”
“Oh, I don’t know. Unless that submarine actually comes up top, ready to ferry the Lescombes home to Moscow, we’re both going to be rather short of excuses for what we’ve come to do, aren’t we? Seems to me Vassili did his stuff: one dead German radio operator meant that nobody could milk him of his codes, send a decoy message, abort the Russian operation.”
“Vassili’s one of the good guys, yes. Deep down he’s anti-British and he’s got a lot more power than you think. A pity I didn’t get to him earlier; perhaps he’d have persuaded his government to withhold cooperation from you altogether.”
“But apart from that, all’s well that ends well.”
“Certainly. You can relax now, colonel.”
“One problem.”
“Namely?”
“I’m still holding this case.”
There was a moment of silence, of immobility. Then Hayes retreated a step, bringing his back against the rail, which was exactly where Albert wanted him. He heard a heavy click and knew that what Hayes held was a revolver, now cocked, not good, don’t look at the sea, you fool, not good news at all….
“Put down the case, colonel.”
“Going to have to make me, old boy.”
Albert’s brain was subconsciously counting seconds. The radio officer had been receiving when he left the bridge. So much time to decode. So much time to formulate tactics. So much time to brief. So much time to execute. Now it was D minus nothing. And if the orders said “No,” if the game had gone against him …
With a sudden surge of power the ship leapt forward, going from five to fifteen knots in exactly the flash of time it took Albeit to swing his case up and knock the gun from Hayes’ hands. Then the case became a battering ram. It thudded into Hayes’ left side, below his breastbone, crushing the pancreas and rupturing his spleen, but before agony could transmit itself through the American’s brain, hands grasped his ankles and somersaulted him backward over the rail. Hayes was bleeding to death, internally. By the time he hit the water he had been immobilized beyond any possibility of salvation. He died slowly, in pain, at a great depth.
As Albert thrust his way onto the bridge Vassili turned to him and said, “A boat has already landed on the beach. We are late. What have you—”
“Power, please, make what speed you may. And no light until the end. Have you got that?”
“Yes.”
“No light at all! I’ll be up top.”
Only then did Vassili notice what he was holding.
“Don’t move,” said a voice in David’s ear. He knew intuitively the voice belonged to Kleist and he raised his hands. “Anna?” he breathed.
She stared straight ahead. He could not tell if she recognized him. “Are you all right?” he asked, and on hearing that, she lifted her chin, but still she did not speak.
“Anna, it’s me. David.”
For a moment longer she continued to gaze at him in silence, then—“Go away,” she burst out. “Please go away. They’ll Kill you. There’s nothing you can do.”
David felt the hard object disappear from the small of his back and seconds later a man he’d never seen before walked into his field of vision. So this was Kleist, how strange; he’d imagined someone taller….
Now the three people on the beach stood at the points of an invisible, equilateral triangle, facing inward. David longed to go to Anna, but he felt sure Kleist had a gun. So he was destined to die here without ever holding his wife in his arms again, or telling her how much he loved her.
Anna raised her hands and David saw that they were bound with rope. So she had not gone willingly, then. Despite the peril, his spirits soared. The rope vindicated him. It meant that he’d been right to trust her in spite of everything. She was
n’t a traitor.
“Barzel will be back any minute,” Anna said. “He’s climbed up to the lighthouse, his radio works better there … Gerhard, can’t you help him hide?”
But then a new voice spoke from the edge of the moonlight, where sand met trees. “I don’t think so,” it said. “Your husband and I must have a talk, Anna.”
Barzel stepped forward far enough to let David see the weapon he was holding in his right hand. With the left he supported the strap of a cabin bag slung over his shoulder.
“Something’s wrong,” he muttered to Kleist. “Stange’s not answering.”
“Why?”
“How in hell would I know?” Barzel turned back to David. “We’ll go up the beach,” he murmured. “Talk in private.”
When David stayed where he was, terrified by foreknowledge of what was going to happen, Barzel gestured with his Luger. “Please,” he said softly. “Not here.”
“Gerhard!” Anna’s shriek made David start, but its effect on Kleist was remarkable: a shudder seemed to pass the whole length of his frame. “He’s going to kill David,” Anna cried. “Gerhard, stop him!”
At first no one moved or said anything. David tried to swallow, but his throat was dry. Then Kleist put his hands in his pockets and stepped to one side, as if conceding a point. Barzel gripped David’s shoulder. “Walk,” he muttered.
“Jürgen.”
But Barzel paid no heed to Gerhard. He continued to march David back along the beach, toward the rocks.
“Jürgen, stay away from him. It’s not necessary. We’ll be gone in half an hour.”
When Barzel did not so much as break stride, Gerhard took his right hand from his pocket. He was holding a pistol. “Barzel!”
At that the other man faltered and began to turn, releasing his grip on his prisoner. David’s knees gave way and he fell over. Barzel was nearly facing Gerhard, not quite, when suddenly he clasped his hands, bringing the Luger up to horizontal. A shot exploded through the darkness in a spiral of flame, missing its target; then, almost simultaneously, Gerhard returned fire.
Krysalis: Krysalis Page 40