by Robin Duval
‘So the British are going to destroy it? Come off it, Marcus, you must think I’m stupid.’
Marcus was silent for so long that Bryn began to wonder if, for once, he’d actually managed to undermine that normally impenetrable self-confidence.
Agnete had returned to sit beside them.
‘Bryn,’ he said at last. ‘No one is more loyal to Her Majesty’s person than me. But, the fact is, there are a few of us who recognise that in the most extreme circumstances there may be a greater duty. So: no, my people are not proposing to risk passing the smithium on to the politicians. We, not them, will destroy it.’
‘And your career, Marcus?’
He seemed so earnest and genuine that Bryn was quite moved. Phoney sentiment and sententiousness had never been part of Marcus’s character. His story had the ring of truth. Bryn felt privileged to be a witness to the moment: out of such things was history made.
His cousin pulled a wry face and grinned across at him.
‘Well of course,’ he said, ‘if all this gets out, I’m stuffed. But it will have been worth it. Don’t you think?’
‘I think you’re doing the right thing.’
He nodded.
‘I hope so.’
The light was beginning to fade. The sun was settling in the west through a bank of gathering clouds.
‘Bryn,’ said Marcus after a while. ‘Bear with me one more time.’
The Laing passed to and fro.
‘You see,’ he continued, ‘all the spies are now watching each other. We need someone else to get the smithium out of America. Someone below the radar to whom we’d supply a new identity and passport. Resourceful. I would never want to flatter a cousin, but you are the ideal candidate. And I trust you. A rare commodity in my trade.’
Bryn let him continue.
‘The plan is for you to hand it over to me at a safe rendezvous in England. I’ll arrange for a trusted scientist to destroy it. A layman might kill himself.’
Bryn pondered this a moment.
‘Have I got this right? It’s too dangerous to destroy but not to carry it?’
‘That’s right. Like HEU.’
‘Like what?’
‘Highly enriched uranium. It’s perfectly safe to carry around so long as it’s not exposed to air. The smithium flask will be shrouded in lead casing to prevent breakage – but mainly so it doesn’t set off radiation detectors. If you check it through an airport it’ll emit less radiation than a bunch of bananas.’
‘Really?’
‘Horse’s mouth. Believe me.’
‘Stratton’s colleague?’
Marcus nodded.
‘How about Strange though? How would he be intending to get it out?’
‘Difficult to be certain. Probably the cocaine route. It’s a connection he has used in the past when he has needed to move military matériel quickly.’
‘He works with Colombian drugs smugglers?’
‘Oh, Bryn. The cocaine trade and Americans like Strange have a lot in common. They both hate socialist regimes, for a start.’
‘But how does the route work?’
Marcus frowned and sighed again.
‘Usually up the Pacific Coast, through Canada or Alaska and Greenland, and ultimately to the west coast of Ireland or Scotland. But we need to intervene before that can happen. We really haven’t much time.’
He stared at Bryn as if waiting for an answer.
He needed an iron-clad, preferably honourable, reason not to get involved.
‘Marcus,’ he said, and he could hear the quaver again in his voice. ‘There is a flaw in all this. I am not the “clean” operator you imagine me to be. You surely can’t have overlooked my acquaintance with Strange. And I know Wilson is onto me. He’s been tracking me since Lassen. You should know that he, or some accomplice, tried to kill me in San Francisco. I’m damaged goods, Marcus. And that’s why I’m getting out.’
The clouds were building up more heavily in the west and the sun had faded entirely from sight. Agnete was on her feet and collecting up their picnic. Bryn wondered how she could see through the silky waterfall of her hair.
‘Are you referring to the motel room blast?’ asked Marcus.
‘You know about that?’
‘Well I would do. That was actually us.’
It took Bryn a while to absorb this. He felt as if he had tuned into a radio programme whose beginning he’d missed and whose ending he would never know.
‘We’ve kept an eye on you since Germany,’ said Marcus. ‘After the unfortunate Lassen business and your subsequent involvement with the San Francisco police, we decided you needed a new identity.’
‘You what?’
This was beyond credulity.
‘It’s only temporary, Bryn. You wanted a different room so we… discreetly… accommodated you. As I said before, you have to take advantage of opportunities in our business.’
‘Serendipity,’ he said. He was exhausted.
‘Yup. My men found a dead drug addict – a sad and common feature of the streets of these fine California cities – and moved him into your old room, the room in which you were still registered. The fellow was of a similar shape and age to yourself and the explosion would have made him unrecognisable anyway. Gas build up from a faulty boiler. The police will have assumed that the corpse was you. More importantly, we’ve made sure Wilson and Strange believe it.’
Marcus put his cold hand confidingly on Bryn’s knee.
‘I’m sorry we missed you. We intended to intercept you at the motel and have this conversation with you then. But you had already disappeared. Fortunately, we had taken the precaution of secreting a tracking transceiver in your hire car. Otherwise we would never have found you.’
He burrowed into his rucksack and produced a passport, slightly foxed as if already well used. It was in the name of someone called Hathrill but the photograph was of Bryn. Taken, as he vividly remembered, about two years previously by Marcus himself, when he had run into him unexpectedly (again) in the Roman amphitheatre in Arles.
‘You’d shaved off your beard that summer, Bryn – too hot for you in Provence, I suppose. And you had that ridiculous short en brosse haircut. Made you practically unrecognisable.’
How long had Marcus been saving this up…
‘And you’re hoping I’ll do the same now?’
‘Here,’ he continued, producing another document from the bag. ‘This is a British driving licence in the same name. You’ll have cards and access to a bank account with ten thousand sterling in it. Should be enough to get you by. You can do what you like with the residue. Oh… once you’re safely back in the UK, we’ll arrange for you to revert to your true identity, proper passport and so on. All your problems solved.’
‘Except for one thing.’
‘Really?’
‘I’m not going to do it, Marcus.’
Marcus’s jaw tensed and his eyes filled with something almost like fury. And as instantly he relaxed and put on a hurt little boy face, and sighed again. He began to return the documents to the rucksack.
‘We’ve invested a quantity of work in this, Bryn.’
‘And made a hell of a lot of unwarranted assumptions.’
‘Trying to make it easier for you.’
‘I have not changed my mind, Marcus.’
He chewed his lip; and began to hoist his backpack over his shoulders. Bryn scented success: finally Marcus’s penny seemed to have dropped.
‘Would it make any difference… ’ he said.
He had reverted to his quiet, accommodating tone.
‘Would it make any difference if I told you that Strange’s coterie of war-mongering activists call themselves The Friends of the Right?’
‘So?’
‘And that one of their founding members is your Mormon pal, Dan? A long-term close buddy and ally of Strange and planning to benefit greatly when the President has been destroyed.’
‘No, it wouldn’t make any di
fference,’ Bryn said.
But Marcus’s little rapier thrust had found its target. Touché. No wonder Strange had been so interested that evening in Bryn’s marriage. And, with hindsight now, so very well informed.
Marcus took out a small black mobile telephone.
‘You don’t have to say anything,’ he said. ‘I’m not asking for a commitment. Nothing at all. But if you ever need to get in touch with me, use this. It’s a sixty second “burner”. That means it’s a basic cell phone with no screen or display and one number in its memory. If you call me, you must never use my name or make any reference at all to our conversation. The phone has one minute of call time. After that it’s useless and you throw it away. All you need to do is give the codeword for the isotope flask.’
‘Which would be?’
‘“Stella Polaris”.’ He grinned. ‘Can you remember that?’
‘I should think so.’
‘And if you do this job for us, the other thing I need to say – again – is that you will be safe. You know we will be tracking you. We would be watching – and from near enough to make sure we can intervene if anything threatens to go wrong.’
‘You realise that what you say is completely academic.’
His cousin nodded.
‘Well, well, we’ll see. Agnete and I will be leaving you now. We must not be seen together. We’ll meet again in London, I’m sure.’
He slipped the cellphone into Bryn’s top pocket.
And with that, Marcus and Agnete set off again, like any other pair of well-kitted Pacific Crest hikers, down the single track southwards towards the Paradise Inn. Bryn stood on his rock watching them until they rounded the last granite outcrop and disappeared from sight.
But just before they did, and when they may have thought they had already passed from view, he saw Agnete throw her arm around Marcus’s neck; and watched them lean into each other in a brief, and unmistakeable, gesture of mutual affection.
Chapter 11
It is possible that Marcus knew him better than he knew himself. He should have continued on his way up to the Canadian border, through the token border control, to the consulate in Vancouver, and home. That would have been the sensible thing to have done.
Instead, he put his plans on hold. He abandoned the booking at the Paradise Inn, drove the three hundred miles back to Medford and booked into the same motel he’d occupied a week previously. Again he paid cash for the room in advance. And booked a session for an hour later on the motel computer.
It was already approaching midnight but the meeting with Marcus and Agnete had driven all desire for sleep from his mind. He crossed the road to the small municipal park opposite and sat on a bench to gather his thoughts.
There were problems with the original scheme. Though he had taken a car into Canada without challenge a couple of times in the past, it was possible he had merely been the lucky beneficiary of a random stop and check policy. He could not be certain the Canadians would always be so relaxed; indeed there might have been some tightening up in response to the recent international tensions and American pressure.
Nor was an application at the consulate for a replacement passport without its hazards. How likely was it that the police would already have reported his death to the UK Consulate-General in San Francisco, and that this information had been fed into Vancouver’s database? How might that be explained? And how concerned should he be that news of his continuing existence – and current whereabouts – might leak out to his enemies?
He was classically between a rock and a hard place.
He was flattered that Marcus thought him resourceful and courageous enough to handle his alarming assignment. Extremely flattered. But he surely knew himself better. Unlike his cousin, his world was lived in the mind, not on the battlefield – at least not while the battle was still in progress.
And yet. How far might he be relying on a lazy assumption gathered from books and films and television and newspapers: that espionage is invariably fraught with excitement, danger, sudden violence and death? Judging by Marcus’s lifestyle, it had rather more to do with hotels, meetings, long lunches and a great deal of spare time. Probably for most of his fellow spies it was a nine-to-five world of offices, computers and canteen gossip, like any other. With perhaps a very modest portion of mayhem on the margin. And was the task Marcus had in mind for him likely to be so much more hazardous than, say, delivering the post?
He was no nearer a decision.
And there were a couple of jobs he needed to do first.
He returned to where he had parked his car outside the motel room, and opened up the boot and the bonnet. It took a fair amount of burrowing and stretching but eventually he found it: a tiny radio transceiver tucked away behind the engine block. He ripped it out and dropped it in a public trash bin.
He went online. It had been a long while since his last fix of British news, so he typed in the BBC website.
Marcus was not alone in talking about imminent war in the Middle East. The intentions of the young Gulf Sheikh who had overthrown his nonagenarian father were becoming clearer by the day. Emissaries from al-Shabaab, an Islamist movement based in Somalia, had been seen returning from a meeting in his palace; there were well-sourced rumours of a mutual arms pact. Protests were pouring in from the pro-Western Emirates. The Israeli Knesset was in closed session. A quick check with www.foxnews.com and www.cbsnews.com revealed that even the USA-centric commentators were concerned.
His full email tray presented a conundrum. If he opened one, and particularly if he responded to it, he might immediately give his existence away. He scanned down past the academic bulletins and the unfiltered spam for any item of outstanding interest. One unusual email caught his eye. After a moment’s hesitation, he opened it anyway.
It was from ‘The Law Office of Harlan J Hackett’ in Salt Lake City and it informed him that Mrs Marion Judith Williams had initiated proceedings for a no fault divorce, citing as grounds ‘irreconcilable differences between the parties’. Mr Hackett asked to be put in touch with Bryn’s lawyers.
He turned the computer off.
His well overdue night’s sleep was the most troubled he’d had in years. Several times he awoke from half-dreamt tableaux of a motel in uproar, Agnete and Marcus silhouetted on a faraway ridge, dark-suited men knocking at his door.
But most frequently, images of Marion.
Marion, not as he had known her more recently, but as a younger woman. With a loud, vulgar laugh; unaffected gaze; brisk marching gait, always ahead and faster than he wanted to be; warm, vibrant and physical. A stream of images bubbling up uninvited through his dreams. And – increasingly – till it settled and would not be budged, an email from a lawyer’s office.
He snapped the light back on.
The only available sedative was a dose of night-time television. A monochrome episode of I Love Lucy finally hit the spot.
When he awoke it was late morning.
As so often, a night’s sleep delivered the missing clarity. He did not wait for breakfast. He pulled Marcus’s cell phone from his pocket and activated the number in its memory.
‘Ja.’
It was Agnete.
‘“Stella Polaris”,’ he said.
It was an easy one to remember: the title of a radio adventure story from his childhood, and Marcus’s.
‘I have spoken to my office manager,’ she replied.
She spoke rapidly and without a break, as if she was reading from a script.
‘He is away on business but has told me to say that we are sorry you are not happy with your new phone. Please remove the SIM card and make a note of the number on it. My boss says you should flush it down the John. I am sorry the company cannot help you further. Goodbye.’
And with that the line went dead.
He opened the phone up and flipped out the SIM card.
On the blank part of the card, above the gold contact sphere, were two rows of neatly hand-written numbers: 41586 3
8332. He wrote them on the palm of his hand, wrapped the SIM card in a couple of sheets of toilet paper and flushed it away. For good measure, he stamped on the redundant mobile until it was a mess of shattered plastic, and managed to flush that away too. Then went for his free coffee and pastries.
His fellow breakfasters were all younger than him. Most of them were listening to rap music through ear phones or, between mouthfuls, tapping out text messages. He sat next to the smallest, a boy barely thirteen years of age who was fiddling with an iPhone more state of the art and loaded with apps than any he’d seen before.
‘Do you ever use that to speak to anyone?’ he asked him.
The boy glanced at him with that habitual teenage mixture of incomprehension and utter contempt.
There was no sign of a parent. There was probably a mutual agreement that he took breakfast on his own.
‘Let me show you how to do it,’ said Bryn, and deftly lifted the device from the boy’s grasp and dialled in the numbers he’d inscribed on his palm. The adolescent watched open-mouthed. Bryn handed him a pink iced doughnut.
He knew enough about California to recognise that the first three of the SIM card figures matched the telephone prefix for San Francisco. A voice answered immediately.
‘American Mocha Coffee House,’ it said.
‘What?’
‘American Mocha Coffee House.’
‘What’s your address?’
The voice was unfazed.
‘1290 Market Street. Anything else to help, sir?’
‘No thanks.’
He returned the iPhone to the boy – ‘It works fine, you can carry on with your game now’ – picked up a cinnamon roll and left.
The journey down Route 5 was straight and fast and he was back in San Francisco by early afternoon.
The first stop was a downtown barber shop, where he asked for a crew cut. It was not evidently a term much in currency still in the twenty-first century.
‘Waddya mean, Mister? Buzz cut? Ivy League?’ responded the barber, an elderly Vietnamese.
The Ivy League turned out to be the less extreme alternative, so he settled for that. And, for the first time in his life – from a professional, that is – he ordered a close shave.