Below the Thunder

by Robin Duval

  He knew Market Street from his last visit. It was down the road from the Opera House: a wide, busy thoroughfare striking diagonally across the San Francisco grid system. The American Mocha Coffee House was packed full of the lunchtime crowds, and not a free seat was visible.

  But he spotted Agnete on a small banquette at the far end of the room, reading a copy of The San Francisco Chronicle. As he approached, she removed a small reticule from the seat alongside her – without looking up from her paper – and he sat down in its place.

  She gave absolutely no indication that she knew him. For a while he sat in silence, taking an occasional sidelong glance at her face. She remained frowningly engrossed in some article about Californian property values, even making the odd note in the margin. Bryn began to wonder if his shiny new appearance might have rendered him unrecognisable.

  She lifted her pen and slowly and deliberately drew an arrow across the top of the page. It seemed intrusive to peer. The page, however, remained resolutely unturned. So he popped on his reading spectacles and discreetly leaned over. Above a headline predicting a collapse in real estate sales, she had written in capital letters the words: OPERA BOX OFFICE.

  She got up, folded the paper into her bag and disappeared in the direction of the rest rooms.

  It took him longer than it should to realise that Agnete was not coming back. Or that she might be expecting him to follow her. But when he got to the unisex facilities, they were vacant. At the end of the corridor an emergency fire exit stood half open. He went through and made his way circuitously to the War Memorial Opera House.

  There was still one performance of the Ring Cycle to go and he was as anxious not to be seen by fellow audience members – including his British friends – as he was to avoid detection by whoever might be following him or Agnete. Apart from a few straggling tourists, though, the box office antechamber was empty.

  He did not have to wait long. A door opened from the grand inner lobby and, White Rabbit-like, Agnete emerged and as instantly popped back in again. He hurried after her, through to the auditorium, down a side aisle to another door and along a corridor and finally into what he took to be the dressing room of the King of the Gods, furnished with a brocaded settee and armchairs, a television, ceiling-high refrigerator, fitted cupboards; and wall-width mirror and make-up shelf, wig stand, over-sized vase of fresh flowers. He wished he’d had a camera.

  Agnete sat down and came briskly to the point.

  ‘We are very close to knowing where the isotope is,’ she said. ‘It has definitely been hidden here in San Francisco, in an apartment or maybe someone’s house. Not anywhere traceable to Mr Strange, naturally. Our information is that it will be moved very soon, probably to complete a deal.’

  It was still pretty vague.

  ‘Also we can confirm that the isotope has been sealed in a lead flask and stowed away in a safe – we think wall-mounted or under floorboards. If the safe cannot be opened, it may be possible to remove it wholesale. Tools will be needed, and a sack truck to carry it away.

  ‘It won’t be till they make their final arrangements that we will know the precise location and – providing our informant gets his intelligence out quickly enough – that’s when we should have our chance to intervene. But the window of opportunity is likely to be very short indeed.’

  ‘Or non-existent.’

  ‘And it could be dangerous.’

  She paused for a moment.

  ‘You understand we are asking you to go in alone and find the safe and the isotope and bring it out?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And that we cannot guarantee what you will find there?’

  She looked at him intently.

  ‘Are you quite sure this is what you want to do?’

  Was she concerned? He tried to penetrate her ice blue gaze but she was as unreadable as before. Only the question itself, and maybe some hesitancy in her manner, gave him encouragement. It would have to do for the time being.

  ‘The Service will be watching you,’ she said. ‘From a distance.’

  Then, as if she had thought better of herself: ‘But you will be fine. I am quite sure.’

  She was beautiful.

  He knew why he had come here. Mostly a reaction to Marion: driven along by the hubris that is the flip side of disaster. But now. Now, he had a chance to please the Dane and play the hero. Why should he not?

  ‘Where is your car? I need your keys.’

  He handed them over meekly and explained where he had left the vehicle.

  ‘It is too dangerous for you to use it,’ she said. ‘If the police should stop you, it would be a disaster. I will make sure the hire company find it. It will look to them as though it had been stolen, probably from the motel where you were – as it were – killed. You will need a new car.’

  And she passed him the business card of a local car hire company. Mighty Motors.

  ‘It’s already paid for in the name of Hathrill,’ she said. ‘They won’t ask for ID, but here are your papers anyway.’

  She opened the reticule, and took out a passport, driving licence and a couple of plastic cards. As she handed them over, one of the cards fell from her fingers and onto the floor.

  For a second or two she appeared disconcerted. Bryn moved to help but she quickly gathered the card up and placed it firmly in his palm.

  ‘These cards are active now,’ she said, rising to her feet. ‘Do not leave the Opera House through the front. Get a taxi out of town, book into a motel in the new name and have a good night’s sleep. Pick up the car in the morning. Your bags and everything you need will be in it.’

  He put a hand on her sleeve and drew her back down to her seat.

  ‘And what happens next?’

  ‘You have to wait,’ she replied.

  ‘How will I know what to do? How will you make contact?’

  ‘We will. You do not have to worry about that.’

  ‘And what if I don’t hear from you?’

  She thought for a moment.

  ‘I think… should we not be in contact within a few days, it will all be over. You fly home to London.’

  ‘Five days? A week?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘A week maximum,’ she said at last. ‘You can fly home.’

  She looked up and smiled at him. The first smile he had ever seen from her. He started to respond but she rose pre-emptively to her feet. His fingers slithered away down her departing sleeve and caught her trailing hand.

  ‘When shall I see you?’

  She did not free herself immediately. Her head stayed bowed over her captured arm with the falling curtain of hair an excluding veil between them.

  ‘I cannot say,’ she said. ‘I cannot tell you.’

  She slipped her hand away and gathered up her bag, flicked her yellow-white tresses across her shoulder, and left the room.

  She would of course be reporting their meeting to Marcus.

  How did his cousin fit in? What should he assume about Marcus’s relationship with Agnete? It would be a curious arrangement at best, with Marcus both her senior professionally and old enough (unlike himself) to be her father.

  He could see where this was going. It would take him no time at all to justify a romantic pursuit of this ice maiden. And somewhere inside him he detected an unaccustomed boldness. He liked the feel of it. Though the final decision, after all, would not be his. Nor Marcus’s either.

  He followed Agnete’s instructions to the syllable.

  His departure through the Opera House stage door was conveniently masked by a noisy influx of students. He quickly found a taxi and directed it across the Oakland Bay Bridge and southwards to a Holiday Inn remembered from a family vacation a decade before. The motel overlooked a small marina with boutique shops and restaurants; far enough off the beaten track to avoid recognition.

  After checking in, he settled outside a waterfront brew pub, with a glass of the house IPA on the table beside him, and gave some
more thought to his situation.

  It was a strange thing, love. Loving; and being in love. Bryn imagined he understood the former. He believed – for example – that he still loved Marion. Being in love though: he’d never had any trouble recognising it when he was young, but it all seemed so much a part of that foreign world of the past. So where was he now with Agnete? Not, he thought, merely charmed or bewitched – he still knew what that was like. But in love? How would he recognise that? Some conscious loss of the self, he imagined, like being overrun and occupied. An unbidden image floating in the ocean in front of him. A small troubled smile like a melting iceberg. There even if you looked away up at the sky. A gaze as commanding and as unblinking as a small child. Heroes had fought dragons for less. He would know it if he felt it.

  The marina reminded him of Darling Harbour in Sydney in miniature. Bustling with young people full of money and irresponsibility. Parties rather than couples. Soft top BMWs, customised roadsters, ‘all-wheel-drive’ monsters. One was parked on the cobble walkway directly in front of him, oblivious of pedestrian inconvenience. The biggest and blackest Porsche he had ever seen.

  He’d noticed an ocean-going yacht called The North Star, with two sails lowered but not yet tidied away, chugging into the harbour. The crew were short and heavily tanned, possibly from a South American country. A blonde man leaned out of the Porsche and waved to them. The yacht was too long to moor up beside the walkway; so it dropped anchor in mid-water and lowered a small dinghy. Some crewmen clambered down and gunned the dinghy’s outboard motor towards a slipway and out of sight beyond the behemoth in front of Bryn.

  He turned his attention to the contents of his glass. This Californian micro-beer was the most delicious he had drunk in America and, with its rich, dark colour and ten degrees of alcohol, unlike any IPA ever brewed in Burton upon Trent. He imagined introducing Agnete to the quotidian pleasures of his own former life: beer (and, as a Dane, she should be receptive), a favourite local restaurant in London, walks through autumn beech woods in the Chiltern Hills.

  The South Americans by now were piling into the Porsche. The blonde man was leaning against it, his back to Bryn, talking to a taller South American who might have been the yacht’s captain. Both climbed inside and the Porsche pulled away, leaving Bryn finally to an uninterrupted vista of the sun setting over the poorest suburbs of San Francisco.

  He pondered Marcus and his world view. He was right of course to treat the Lassen isotope as such a serious threat. But it reminded Bryn a little of a scaremongering story from the newspapers, with screaming headlines attached; the kind of overcooked account that modulated with time into something rather less alarming, until finally it was no more than a footnote in some politician’s memoirs. Perhaps you really had to be on the inside of events to know their true significance.

  The sunlight flared on the edge of his beer glass. He put out his hand to drain the last couple of inches, and a tiny concentric ripple spread outwards from the centre.

  And disappeared as if it had never been.

  Chapter 12

  There was a slight hiccup when he came to pay his bill in the morning. Neither Bryn nor the previous evening’s receptionist – when she’d taken the usual precautionary imprint – had noticed that his credit card was missing a signature. The morning shift was an obese young man the size of a schooner. He was more alert.

  ‘No signature, buddy boy,’ he said, tapping the back of the card in case Bryn didn’t understand American English.

  ‘Stupid,’ he confessed, and reached for the motel ballpoint.

  ‘Need to see your ID,’ said the young man, folding the card back officiously into his capacious palm.

  ‘I’ll pay in cash.’

  ‘You’re darn right you will. If’n you can’t pay on your card.’

  ‘Can I have it back, please.’

  ‘Nope. Not without ID. City law.’

  He considered for a moment surrendering the card, but decided that was too perilous an option. If the motel passed it on to the police, his false Hathrill identity could be rapidly exposed. Then it occurred to him that his new driving licence and passport must already bear some kind of signature. The trouble was that he did not know what it looked like. And he’d never practised it.

  There was no choice but to busk it.

  ‘Here you go,’ he said, fishing out the new passport. ‘And it’s got a fine picture of me.’

  He thumbed the page open helpfully, long enough to get a quick look at the signature, and passed it over. Small, rather scribbly writing, with the single initial ‘G’.

  The large young man looked at him narrowly, checked the photograph, looked at him again, looked at the photo again, and finally ran the card through his reader.

  ‘Sign it now, buddy,’ he said, as he returned it with the credit slip.

  ‘I will,’ said Bryn. ‘I will. Thank you so much.’

  He did it rapidly and confidently with a flourish, replicating the loose character of the original. The receptionist had already moved on to the next client.

  He found a taxi rank on the marina and gave the Mexican driver Mighty Motors’ address. The driver had never heard of the company, and was so unfamiliar with the locale that Bryn had to read out the zip code so he could tap it into his GPS system.

  He sat back and studied the new documents more carefully. It was apparent now that, even had he been obliged to forge the Hathrill signature sight unseen, he would still have passed the test with flying colours. It was, chillingly, in his own handwriting. How this could have been achieved, he could not imagine.

  Or maybe he could.

  Some years previously, he recalled that he’d tutored a young man of that name – one of the new history intake at UCL. At the start of each first term, it had been his custom to scribble out on a sheet of paper the names of all the freshers, to help him memorise them: always the single initial and the surname. Someone, presumably Marcus, must have come across this and copied it. How long had he been planning to make use of it? Serendipity again? He did not think so.

  The taxi had crossed the Oakland Bay Bridge back into San Francisco City and turned south. It followed the line of the waterfront, down a long, straight, traffic-busy thoroughfare overhung by tall buildings, with few pedestrians. The driver turned off towards the Bay and the buildings shrank back to two storey height. The road system was rigidly grid patterned; tiny balconied houses shortly gave way to rows of decayed repositories, each with a bolted roll-up door and a four-digit number painted alongside it. There were more people now on the sidewalks, but they were all men and all African-American.

  They drew up in the last street before the sea.

  ‘Hunters Point,’ said the driver, looking closely at the GPS display. ‘Sure is a dump, mister.’

  He did not hang around.

  Bryn was on a square peninsula jutting out into the Bay. Container vessels stood at anchor in the quiet waters beyond. There were signs of an initiative to upgrade the area – a couple of wall posters proclaiming future plans and an estate of bright new apartment buildings a quarter of a mile further down the coastline. But where he stood, all was windswept, rubble-strewn and derelict. Low-hanging power lines, which invariably announced the underclass districts of the city, criss-crossed the crumbling, pot-holed street.

  There was a small car lot nearby, with a solitary dirty Chevrolet sedan parked up against the wall. A wooden fire escape led up the side of a building to an open office door. Beside the door was a signboard: Mighty Motors.

  No one was inside. On a shelf by the entrance lay a set of Chevrolet car keys, attached to a piece of torn envelope with the word Hathrul (sic) scrawled upon it. Bryn waited.

  Ten minutes passed and no one came. He remembered Agnete’s easy-going instructions: ‘They won’t ask for ID’. It was too hot to wait any longer. He scooped up the keys.

  As he descended to the sidewalk, a fat man emerged from a mobile toilet further up the road, tucking his sweat shirt into
his jeans. If he showed any interest, Bryn did not detect it.

  He sat in the driver’s seat, trying to figure out how to drive the vehicle. It was a disappointingly bottom of the range, GPSfree model, gear stick already worn down to the white plastic, with no air-conditioning and smelling of sweat and floral cleaning fluid. For the first time in his American driving career, it came with manual instead of automatic transmission. He could start the engine easily enough, but he needed the reverse gear to allow him to leave the parking space and he could not work out how to engage it.

  Deep in the recesses of the glove box, past the discarded candy wrappers, was an instruction manual. A previous owner had wrapped it in a protective black plastic that had decomposed in the California heat to a nasty stickiness. He tracked down the advice about shifting into reverse but, when he attempted to return the book to the compartment, he had to detach each of his fingers, one by one, from the wrapper. As he did so, a plastic slip containing a CD fell away with them.

  It was an album of, of all things, recorder music.

  He turned it over. The bewigged portrait of an obscure baroque composer called Pezel adorned the paper cover. He vaguely remembered the name from when he used to play tenor recorder with a group of friends, back in the days before the move to America. He chuckled. It was the last thing you’d expect in the derelict back end of San Francisco.

  He was on the point of tossing the CD into the door bin when a peculiar dawning surmise held back his hand – as if his brain had just caught up with a processing overload. He took a closer look at the disc cover. As he suspected, Johann Christoph Pezel was not at all what he seemed.

  Someone had, really quite subtly and professionally, photoshopped a more recent image into the space between the wings of the composer’s full-bottomed wig. A photograph he’d seen before, though not perhaps for twenty years. He sat back and laughed. It was the face of his dearly beloved Shropshire aunt, whom he had last visited that summer, before Bayreuth. And – of course – not only his aunt but Marcus’s also. Clever bastard.

  He switched on the car’s audio system and dropped the CD into the tray. What a surprise: no sweet sound of recorders; not a trace of Herr Doktor Pezel. Instead, the voice of Agnete, quiet and close to her microphone. He was conscious for the first time of her Scandinavian accent, albeit the faintest, most teasing trace of one. He adjusted the sound to the minimum level necessary to hear, and composed himself in concentration.