Below the Thunder

by Robin Duval

  He ran his fingers lightly down her spine. Wishing he could tap into whatever she was having.

  ‘That’s nice,’ she said.

  The fingers jumped away.

  ‘Don’t stop.’

  He started to speak but she placed a hand fleetingly on his lips and rolled away on her back. They lay side by side, like alabaster statues on a tomb, until he thought she must have drifted back to sleep; and raised himself to look at her.

  The sapphire eyes were wide open and fixed on the ceiling.

  ‘It’ll spoil everything if you ask me.’

  ‘I won’t ask you then.’

  She turned her head and stared at him.

  ‘I came here because I wanted to say I was sorry.’

  ‘Why should you need to?’

  ‘And to make it up to you.’

  In the next room, the music – with a mechanical click – came to an end. Bryn eased off the bed and went through to switch the sound system off.

  When he came back, her mood had darkened.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Bryn. I am so bad at this. I want you to know you won’t be involved again. The wretched stof is on its way to Europe.’

  ‘The stof?’

  ‘The isotope thing. They’re smuggling it in.’

  ‘The cocaine route.’

  ‘How do you – ’

  ‘Marcus told me.’

  ‘You’re really not supposed to know about the cocaine route.’

  ‘Well I do. I expect Marcus is hoping to intercept it. Would that be Ireland? Or Iceland perhaps?’

  She turned away from him and pulled a coverlet up over her shoulders.

  ‘Is that why you are here in London, Agnete – waiting for his instructions?’

  ‘Please don’t ask me any more questions, Bryn.’

  It was a long night.

  He considered moving to another room, where he might be less troubled by her proximity. When he did doze off alongside her, it was for no more than an hour or so. She stayed in the same foetal position, deep in a silent slumber. He could feel the satin smoothness of her skin. She had a natural, unperfumed smell now – that made him think of open country and cornfields. He could bear it no longer.

  He pulled a spare blanket from a drawer and carried it through to the sitting room. The floor was littered with the crumpled evidence of their love-making. He picked up Agnete’s dress and hung it across a chair. Her tote-bag was open beside it: it was one of those carryalls likely to be popular with pickpockets, loose and bulky with only a flap to protect their contents. Two or three papers had fallen half out of the bag and he began to push them back in. One was an envelope. Scrawled on the outside in a familiar, confident, broad-nibbed hand were the words Darling and Agnete.

  He stood for some time with the envelope between his fingers. It had clearly been opened and read and he could feel the folded letter inside. In the next room all was silence. It was one of those moments upon which life hinges. Minutes passed. He made the decision to pull the document out.

  It needed only a glance.

  Marcus was – with palpable warmth – thanking her for the weeks they’d spent together – their wonderful summer – how he’d been rejuvenated, counting the days to the next time. Bryn refolded it and returned it to the envelope, leaving the rest of the letter – for a second time – unread.

  He was surprised that Marcus – in his position – could be so careless with an affair. Agnete evidently meant a great deal to him. He remembered Fiona’s bitter comment about ‘state secrets with long legs.’ Perhaps sexual indiscretion in these enlightened times no longer rang official alarm bells. He was still a bastard though.

  Amongst the other papers was a train ticket – for the next evening’s 21:15 sleeper from Euston to Inverness – and a couple of other letters. Bryn didn’t look any further. He already felt ashamed of his intrusion: and he’d got his just deserts.

  He found it very difficult to settle down on the couch.

  The revelation – or, to be honest, confirmation – that Marcus had a prior claim had left him again bemused. He must have mistaken the signals she had given him through the course of the evening. He had not thought there was a serious gap in years, but now it seemed a gulf. Was this ‘modern’ woman, unreservedly playing both ends against the middle? Or was it a Scandinavian thing? He reflected on the propensity of Danes to treat divorce and remarriage as the social norm; with family holidays of step-children, ex-husbands, ex-wives, ex-lovers, all contentedly vacationing together. Maybe his main deficiency was in being British.

  But what was it she said?

  ‘I came here because I wanted to say I was sorry.’

  ‘Why should you need to?’

  ‘And to make it up to you.’

  Quite simple really. Last night must have been his pay-off.

  He went back to the bedroom and watched her sleeping. The coverlet had fallen to her waist – or she had unconsciously pushed it away in the heat of the summer night. The moonlight made her more like an alabaster statue than ever. Venus de Milo with arms. He wished she had a less dangerous profession. He doubted her other SIS contacts would be as reliably harmless as him. Did Marcus worry about this at all? Probably not.

  He returned to their bed and – worn out, perhaps, by too much thinking – slept till morning.

  Agnete was already sitting up against the pillows.

  ‘Did you set the clocks?’

  It took him a moment to realise she was referring to Dieter’s Pacific Standard Time bedside alarms.

  ‘They were like that when I moved in. I’ve never bothered to reset them.’

  ‘Have you noticed anything else peculiar?’

  ‘No, no. This is Dieter’s house, Agnete. It’s all peculiar.’

  Later they made love again. The focus and simplicity of the previous evening was absent. There was a more conspicuous passion, as though they were both trying to make up for something that was absent. At the end, she held him in silence, enfolded in her arms, until he fell asleep again.

  When he awoke, she had already showered and dressed. He could hear her moving quietly through the other rooms of the house. By the time he had thrown on a dressing gown and emerged from the bedroom, she was in the hallway. He was just in time to see the front door closing behind her.

  Chapter 20

  Hardly any trace had been left behind. Even the remnants of their meal had been tidied out of sight into bins and cupboards. Only her natural fragrance – the barest hint of it – still hung in the bedroom and the living room. In the garden, though, abandoned in the long grass like a difficult memory, he found the iPhone with which she had photographed them together.

  He sat outside in the cool morning air, with a mug of coffee, and examined it. It seemed unimpaired by its night under the stars. He wiped off the dew and checked the last picture she had taken. Two glasses on the table, a hand – his own – putting a plateful of prosciutto beside them, her shadow unprofessionally in frame. He put the phone away in a jacket pocket. He would find her and return it to her.

  He still had Marcus’s card with its mobile number. He called it again, and again got no reply. He considered visiting Fiona, but concluded it would be a wasted journey. There was one other way of tracing Agnete. Marcus would not be grateful for it, but needs must…

  For a Secret Service, the huge MI6 Headquarters on the Albert Embankment was remarkably anxious to draw attention to itself. From across the River Thames it made a startling if confusing show: a lego pyramid, a tower of babel, an ocean liner, a Babylonian ziggurat. If however, like Bryn, you approached from Vauxhall Underground station on the southern side, it was an altogether more modest affair. With its squared off ranks of blank windows, it was much more like the anonymous office block one might reasonably have expected.

  A trickle of men and women who looked exactly like office workers were passing through an open gate, some – not all – showing an identity card to the uniformed security officer standing beside it.
Bryn fell in with them.

  The officer stepped forward with a raised hand.

  ‘Yes, sir? Can I help you?’

  Bryn gave him Marcus’s name and handed him, for good measure, Marcus’s card. The man spoke into a wireless telephone and motioned him to stand aside.

  There was a very long wait. Twice, the security officer took calls on his phone. Twice, Bryn had to repeat his name and business (‘I’m delivering a report. He’ll be expecting to see me personally’). Finally, a second officer appeared and took him to a waiting room outside the wall of the main building – a kind of quarantined halfway house with a woman sitting inside behind a glass screen. Bryn smiled at her. She ignored him.

  A well-used copy of the Daily Mail lay on a low table by Bryn’s armchair and he flicked through it. Time passed. The woman behind the screen lifted a telephone and spoke inaudibly into it. Without any warning, a tall young man strode into the room and extended his hand.

  ‘Professor Williams,’ he said. ‘Please come with me.’

  He grasped Bryn lightly by the bicep, and ushered him out again into the sunlight and through to the reception area of the main building.

  ‘I’m Marcus’s cousin,’ Bryn confided, as they negotiated an airlock-like security barrier.

  ‘I know who you are, sir, thank you.’

  A public schoolboy, perhaps fresh out of Oxford. A future Marcus. He wondered how much the Service had changed since those famous, fictionalised Cold War years.

  The young man guided him through to the lift lobby, up several floors, through a set of keypad controlled double doors, and down a final, carpeted corridor. He stopped at the entrance to the last office.

  ‘Do come in, Bryn,’ called a voice.

  Not Marcus’s.

  A man had stood up behind a desk at the far end of the room. Bryn did not recognise him at first. He appeared taller than when he’d last seen him and he was now wearing a sleek three-piece suit – in considerable contrast to the baggy well-used DJ affected on that previous occasion. His hair – collar-length before – had been trimmed back and his manner was less gently clerical and more briskly business-like.

  ‘I was hoping you would call me,’ said David Burton.

  ‘Ziggurat Exports.’

  ‘Indeed. Most people find it rather obvious. But if you had rung the number you’d have come straight through, without all this palaver.’

  ‘I was hoping to talk to Marcus.’

  ‘You can talk to me instead.’

  Bryn waited for the explanation that was bound to follow; but Burton merely smiled. Something was amiss. Marcus had hinted on the mountainside at opposing factions within the intelligence service. ‘If all this gets out, I’m stuffed.’ On whose side was Bryn’s now not-so-fortuitous San Francisco acquaintance?

  Burton walked round from behind his desk.

  ‘I see you’re wearing the same jacket as last time I saw you,’ he said.

  He leaned into Bryn and deftly plucked something from his lapel. He held it for a moment frowningly between his fingers: it was a pin with a small round head.

  ‘Very unreliable,’ he said. ‘Czech manufacture.’

  He tossed it disdainfully into an open drawer.

  He sat down in one of two well-worn leather chesterfields and invited Bryn to do likewise. He laid a pen and a small notepad on the arm of his chair.

  ‘When we last met in San Francisco,’ he continued, ‘I was merely keeping an eye on you. Killing two birds with one stone.’

  ‘Marcus didn’t tell me. Never mentioned you.’

  ‘We are a discreet organisation.’

  ‘Really.’

  Bryn looked around at Burton’s office. More austerely furnished than he suspected Marcus’s might be. No sign of a drinks cabinet.

  ‘So how can I help you?’

  ‘I need to speak to Marcus.’

  ‘Ah. There, I fear, we have a problem. Marcus is on leave and I am looking after his desk. But there’s nothing you could tell him that you can’t also tell me.’

  ‘No secrets within the service.’

  ‘Quite so. And what’s been happening to you, old boy? Who have you been seeing? Who are you in contact with?’

  ‘Surely you must know all that already, David.’

  Burton made a brief note on his pad.

  ‘I thought maybe you had some shipping news for us. No?’

  ‘No.’

  He made another note.

  ‘So why did you come here, Bryn?’

  ‘To talk with Marcus, David. Only Marcus.’

  He was surprised at his own loyalty. The other’s opacity was beginning to irritate him. He sensed the feeling was mutual.

  ‘I think I should tell you something about your cousin,’ said Burton, with the deliberate enunciation of one who expected to be paid close attention. He leaned across to his desk and pressed a button. The tall young man returned and took a seat to the side of the room.

  ‘Your arrival here today,’ he continued, ‘suggests my colleague Marcus may not have been entirely honest with you. You should know that your cousin has not been employed by the Service for some little while now.’

  He waited before moving on, but Bryn resisted any impulse to respond.

  ‘Opportunities do arise in our profession to make something on the side – even minor secrets have a monetary value, you understand – and Marcus had rather an expensive lifestyle. He has been on gardening leave for six months now. During that time, regrettably, he has contrived to drop below our radar and for several weeks we’ve been trying to re-establish contact with him. All this against a background of some very worrying reports.

  ‘We’ve known of course about you and Udell Strange. And about Marcus’s own interest. The reason I was in San Francisco was because we hoped you might lead us to your cousin. Well, that and the heaven-sent opportunity to hear Nina Stemme as Brünnhilde. Unfortunately, Marcus has managed to avoid meeting you anywhere we could have intervened. So what we would like now is for you to help us to find him.’

  Bryn felt his stomach turn. What Burton was saying sounded credible enough. But why, in this world of mirrors, should he trust this man rather than Marcus? At least one thing was now clear: the two of them were on quite different sides. With which of them, however, should he align himself?

  ‘If I knew where my cousin was,’ he said heavily, ‘I wouldn’t be here.’

  ‘He may contact you,’ said Burton. ‘More likely you than us. Call me on this line if he does.’

  He wrote a number on the pad, tore it off and passed it over.

  ‘This one will find me wherever I am. You’ll be performing a national service if you contact us the instant you hear from him. Now is there anything else you want to tell me?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you quite sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Just remember to keep in touch.’

  He rose from his armchair with his hand extended and his gaze locked on Bryn’s – as if he intended to leave a permanent imprint of his final few words. Bryn returned with the young man to street level. As he left the building a light flashed from the window of a passing car. It was probably nothing more threatening than a tourist memento of the Spy Palace.

  He travelled the Underground back to Ealing Broadway. He now took it as axiomatic that his movements were being monitored. When a man in a suit followed him out of the station, he turned into a Tesco Express and made a great show of buying a pork chop, a small bag of potatoes and a bottle of cheap wine. There was no obvious sign of a tail during the twenty-minute walk home. But a small saloon was parked opposite the house, and a man in the driving seat was talking on a mobile telephone.

  Everything seemed precisely as he had left it. He checked the telephone, the toilet, the kitchen and the bedroom. If there were any microphones, he suspected they’d have been there for some time. He found none – though he knew that was hardly conclusive. He remembered Agnete’s quiet tour of the rooms early that
morning and wondered whether she too had been searching for bugs; or had been removing them.

  A trawl of the rest of the house was no more successful. He was reluctant to prise away skirting boards or pull out light fittings for fear of interfering with Dieter’s lovingly realised décor. But when he peered behind a framed Burne-Jones print hanging on the sitting room wall, a dusty card tumbled to the floor. At first he ignored it. It was only later, when he picked it up to tidy away, that he noticed that a phone number had been scrawled on it. Marcus’s mobile number. In Dieter’s characteristically German handwriting.

  It took him a few seconds at most to work it out. Bayreuth tickets that were not so serendipitous after all. The all-round convenience of Dieter’s house to everyone concerned, state of the art bugged and ready prepared for him. An address (‘Where are you, Bryn?’) with which Agnete would already have been familiar. A web of deceit that he could barely begin to unravel. He was even more determined to find her.

  There was still time to pack a bag and catch the 21:15 from Euston to Inverness. He was half-way through dialling National Rail for a ticket when the full absurdity of the situation overtook him. Not only were MI6 undoubtedly tapping the line – but also conceivably MI5, the Israelis, Marcus’s people, even the BND. All of them united by the imaginative assumption that he might actually know something. He put the phone back in its cradle.

  There was no point in using the front door. He decided to slip out through the French windows and try the service alley at the bottom of Dieter’s garden. It ran about fifty yards to the end of the block. From there he was able to work his way circuitously back to the Broadway and load up at a cash point, using his Hathrill card. Marcus, interestingly, had not cleared the account. Doubtless he was monitoring to detect any withdrawal; but he had to assume that no one else would know about it.

  He returned to the house by the same route. He packed a few things in a rucksack and borrowed a velvet slouch hat and an anorak from Dieter’s wardrobe, as well as his birding binoculars. For the fun of it, he went into the front upstairs bathroom, put on a pyjama top and stood by the open window for a few minutes brushing his teeth, yawned ostentatiously, drew the curtain across and switched off the light.