Below the Thunder

by Robin Duval

  After breakfast they took a walk together. They’d told George and Caroline they wanted to look for red squirrels and received directions so eager and detailed that they felt they had no choice but to follow them to the letter. Before very long they came across a twig-built drey high in the elm trees beyond the house. A squirrel sat on a branch watching them.

  It was, quite contrary to what Bryn had expected (and what the books advised), bigger and fatter than the normal American grey squirrel. There were the familiar tufted storybook ears and round monkey face and vast eyes. Backlit by the morning sun, the broad fluffed-out tail had become a translucent chestnut-coloured feather, with a thread of bone running opaquely up its centre.

  ‘We should talk about Scotland now.’

  ‘And Ealing,’ Bryn said.

  ‘That too.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  She took his hand.

  ‘Scotland was your fault, Bryn. Marcus thought he could persuade you to be his courier again. When you wouldn’t play, he needed me. I should never have been there.’

  ‘Nor me neither. I saw your rail ticket.’

  ‘I know. You’re really not a good spy. You have to learn to put things back into people’s bags exactly as you find them.’

  A couple of smaller squirrels came down from the drey and ran across the ground to a feeding table set among the trees. A nuthatch hung on an elm trunk until Agnete’s voice startled it and it flitted away into the wood.

  ‘Marcus knew the Israelis had been following you. That trick of changing the clocks – it’s their way of undermining you, like raiding your fridge or using your loo and not flushing – letting you know they’re onto you. The Russians used to do it too.’

  ‘It sounds very childish.’

  ‘A lot of the game is very childish, Bryn.’

  She came to a halt.

  ‘Tell me more, Agnete.’

  ‘For a while,’ she continued, more slowly, ‘they assumed – correctly – you were under Marcus’s protection. But that changed when you refused to help him. The Israelis were desperate for information. Marcus knew you didn’t have any, or at least none that bothered him. So he let them know there was no objection to them taking you in.’

  ‘Which would be my punishment. What a bastard.’

  ‘And I know he regretted it. Almost immediately. I heard him call them off.’

  ‘Later.’

  ‘Yes. Later.’

  So she’d already known about the beating and water-boarding when she rang him that day. Those long silences as she’d listened to him, the total absence of surprise…

  ‘Did you know Marcus was intending to hang me out to dry?’

  ‘I didn’t know what to do.’

  ‘Why did you stay with him?’

  ‘Oh Bryn. Please don’t ask me that.’

  She walked on down the path. He followed her until they reached the edge of the woods where a lane ran away down the hill past the pig farm. It was a sadly run-down relic of what it once had been. Rotting wood sheds, rusting machinery, a tyreless Morris Minor buried to its broken windows in rye grass and thistles. The stench of porkers fattening in their own waste.

  She had turned to face him.

  ‘Let me tell you the rest of the story. ’

  Let me tell you a story.

  And where had he heard that before?

  ‘Strange decided to use the cocaine boat. Marcus was to receive the package personally and deliver it to the Arab contact in London. But Marcus’s plan was for you to intercept it before it even reached him. The Israelis would be accused of the theft, Marcus would have an unbreakable alibi, and another person would be blamed for losing the isotope.’

  ‘Wilson, for example. ’

  She nodded.

  ‘And no one would connect you – or him – with the theft. That was the plan anyway. Marcus would get the package back from you when it was safe, and do his deal. Probably with the Israelis. A serious quantity of money, a completely new identity, the Bahamas.’

  ‘I can see why he was so cross.’

  ‘That’s why I had to help him. I may be the only person in the world he still trusts.’

  They walked on from the pig farm and its sweet odours. An incinerator was standing in the middle of a field with a thin cord of black smoke winding up towards the sky.

  ‘The cocaine ship arrived off the Scottish coast a day early. Marcus got a radio message that they’d been seen by a coastguard and needed to unload and move out at once. Wilson was on the boat looking after the package but he had to come ashore to make sure the coast was – literally – clear. Marcus made me hide in the kitchen so he wouldn’t see me.

  ‘The original arrangement was for Marcus to meet with Wilson and the captain of the yacht together and receive the package in a sort of formal handing-over. But the captain panicked and brought it ashore early. You were there and of course he thought you were Marcus. I heard Wilson take a call from him afterwards. He gave a very basic description – height, hair, the clothes you were wearing. It didn’t mean anything to Wilson. I don’t think it meant anything to Marcus either. But I knew it was you. I knew you must have followed me.

  ‘Then Wilson rushed off. Obviously to find you and kill you. Marcus shot away to Lochinver to get a message to Strange and call in the cocaine transport. And I went after Wilson.’

  ‘Thank God for that.’

  She was shivering again, just as she had at the broch. He held her until she relaxed.

  ‘I have never,’ she whispered, ‘never done anything like that in my life before.’

  ‘And never will again.’

  She looked away towards the smoking incinerator.

  ‘You see that,’ she said. ‘There were flames ten feet high yesterday. Someone must have poured petrol into it.’

  ‘Is that where you took the rucksack?’

  She laughed.

  ‘I’m afraid we’ll have to buy some more clothes, Bryn.’

  Over the next two days they became quite familiar with the Cumbrian hills and woods and red squirrels. Bryn learned about Danish customs – the lit candle for a guest, the role of coffee and cake, the songs at Christmas. Even a little about the cocaine trade – its reliance on well-rewarded local fishermen, the regular white van delivery runs to and from London.

  They talked very little about Marcus. It was evident to Bryn that Agnete’s feelings were still in conflict, and not for discussion. She was opposed to almost everything Marcus did or said, but unchangingly reluctant to condemn him. He wondered how deeply the relationship had run – and how difficult it would be for her to move on.

  Their most serious discussions were about the isotope: what should be done with it. Agnete was adamant that Marcus’s original argument, however counterfeit, remained the right and true one. The isotope had to be destroyed. Bryn would have been content to bury it in the woods. But he sensed that, for Agnete, its final destruction had now become a necessary expiation for the traumatic events on that Scottish cliffside.

  Chapter 23

  The idyll had to come to an end. It was the news from Carlisle that triggered the decision. Apparently, some young men – George’s cousin wondered if they might be plainclothes police – had been asking questions about visiting strangers and tourists who had not booked ahead. Within two hours, Agnete and Bryn were on their way.

  They had resolved their differences about the isotope. Bryn had persuaded her to speak to an old UCL colleague of his – now a retired emeritus professor of physics living in north-west London – who could advise on a safe means of disposal. The problem would have to be a ‘hypothetical’ of course. Agnete could present as a naïve research assistant.

  There was a wobbly period also when Agnete had been inclined to surrender herself to the local police. But she accepted in the end that there would be little chance of destroying the isotope if she wound up in custody. Perhaps, when their task was accomplished, she might turn herself in. But Bryn argued that the police in an
y case – left to their own uninterrupted devices – were most likely to conclude that Wilson’s death was a gangland killing. A cocaine smugglers’ argument. There were no witnesses – apart from Marcus, and he would hardly wish to involve the police in his affairs. The only persisting difficulty was Agnete’s restless conscience.

  They travelled to London down minor roads, as far away as possible from monitoring cameras and highway patrols. It was not safe to return to Dieter’s house or Agnete’s London pad. Instead they found a small boutique establishment off the Tottenham Court Road which Bryn, in years past, had used to recommend to visiting academics with a taste for English history.

  It was a listed eighteenth century building with small oak panelled rooms, period furnishings and dark varnished paintings of Georgian worthies on the walls. The floors were uneven and the bathroom fittings unreliable. The little hotel was as obscure and unlikely a hiding place as they might hope for.

  There was business to be done. After a telephone call in the morning, and fifteen minutes on the Jubilee Line, they found themselves in a leafy suburban street north of Swiss Cottage. A few doors past Sigmund Freud’s blue-plaqued house, behind a tsunami of shrubbery, was the mansion where the old emeritus professor lived alone. Their gift-wrapped package – a permanent companion now – was in the rucksack on Bryn’s back.

  Professor Kelp was pleased to see them. He was a little confused – even after the phone call – about who they were. But he received them cordially enough in a downstairs sitting room, between a grand piano and a rosewood dinner table, their surfaces both awash with piles of manuscript and newspapers. A garden of rampant blackberry bushes and nettles could be seen through the open windows. Earl Grey tea was served in china cups and saucers, from an antique silver tea-pot.

  Bryn’s ‘hypothetical’ did not bother him at all. Maybe he had already decided they were a couple of mature students with a difficult paper to write and in need of technical assistance. He was happy to oblige.

  ‘Isotopes of the kind you describe have certain common characteristics,’ he said. ‘If exposed to the air there will first be a blinding blue flash of light, followed by an overwhelming wave of heat. Put bleakly, everyone in the vicinity will be irradiated and is likely to die within twenty-four hours. The Earl Grey’s not too weak is it?’

  Bryn wondered how the professor would have reacted if he’d known a jar of the terrifying substance was resting at that moment upon his threadbare Persian carpet. With undeterred enthusiasm, he suspected.

  ‘This is what we call a criticality accident. The blue colour is due to the emission of ionised atoms, or the excited molecules of air falling back to unexcited states, producing an abundance of light. I’m sure you know that’s also the reason why ordinary electric sparks in the air, including lightning, appear… well of course… electric blue. Sugar either of you? No I’m sure you don’t.’

  Agnete was gazing out through the open French doors. A fat tabby cat wandered in and started drinking milk from a saucer under the piano.

  Professor Kelp was now in full spate.

  ‘Everyone in the vicinity would receive a dose of up to thirty Grays.’

  ‘Thirty what?’

  He looked at Agnete sharply.

  ‘Oh dear. Well for your benefit, young lady – not I dare say for your colleague’s – that is the modern measurement of absorbed radiation. A dose of thirty Grays would produce immediate nausea and vomiting, seizures, tremor and ataxia and lead rapidly to death.’

  Bryn had been making a show of noting down the professor’s comments on a sheet of paper.

  ‘So,’ he said, tapping the paper earnestly, ‘I understand the dangers of such an isotope. But what if – hypothetically of course – I should want to destroy it, how would I do that?’

  ‘I have described its destruction,’ said the professor crossly.

  ‘What if I wanted to destroy it safely?’

  ‘Why should you want to do that?’

  ‘Hypothetically.’

  ‘Ridiculous. And terribly hazardous.’

  Professor Kelp could see no point at all in Bryn’s question. To him it was the very opposite of scientific enquiry. Students these days. He sighed.

  ‘If you insist. There’s one solution to that. Get a quantity of sand – several tons should do it – and find a way of burying your isotope deep inside so it can drain out very slowly. Not easy to achieve. The essential thing is that the isotope be deprived of any contact with oxygen and at the same time be allowed to disperse in an inert medium. After a few days it should be safe enough. I hope that satisfies you, young man.’

  They thanked him for his tea and advice.

  Such an early departure seemed to disappoint him. He had been expecting a longer tutorial.

  ‘Where did you say you were studying?’ he asked at the door.

  ‘UCL.’

  ‘Which Professor?’

  But they were already, smiling and nodding, halfway down the street. He was still standing on the pavement peering after them when they turned the corner into the Finchley Road.

  The interview had left them with as many questions as answers. Even if they found a sufficiently vast quantity of sand, they could see no way to release the contents of a sealed glass jar buried deep within it. No way, that is, that would avoid the outcome Professor Kelp had described with such vivid relish. This was at least a two-pipe problem.

  At Bryn’s suggestion, they took the old Metropolitan Line west from Finchley Road Station. He hoped they might kill a few birds with a single stone.

  Within half an hour they were in the Chiltern Hills, West London’s greatest secret. Beech woods and rolling farmland, tiny ancient villages, hidden pathways as old as the earliest inhabitants, the finest and most unspoiled pubs in England. Locally brewed beer to die for.

  They disembarked at the little country station of Chorleywood and set off for the Chess Valley.

  For a while they could think of nothing more practical than lowering the isotope, in its packaging, to the bottom of some disused coal shaft; and filling up with truckloads of sand. It was Agnete who suggested they might instead look for radioactive waste disposal sites – and she Googled them on her iPhone. There turned out to be more than a hundred in the United States alone – thousands of acres of them. But only one English repository, and that way up back near the Scottish border.

  She was more struck by the possibilities offered by the Schacht Asse pit – a salt mine near the Germany-Denmark border used as a geological repository for nuclear waste, scheduled soon for closure – whose location was familiar to her. How difficult – or expensive – would it be to persuade an employee to lose the isotope in one of the mine’s deepest chambers, before it was sealed up for ever?

  The bleak topic of their debate contrasted starkly with its surroundings. The Chess Valley was the quintessence of the Chilterns. Tranquil, private, folded around a river as lucent as glass; with watermeadows of marigolds and ragged robin, working watercress beds, hedgerows of blackberries and sloes, and small unexpected herds of grazing alpacas.

  They had been walking and arguing for two hours and the burden on Bryn’s back was becoming vexatious. An opportunity, he thought, to introduce Agnete to Vales Bitter, Lion Pride – and Wadworths (nothing succeeds like) 6X.

  The Red Lion, like so many of England’s most cherished public houses, had been an old coaching inn. Mr Pickwick would have recognised and adored it. There was one busy bar surrounded by three or four small drinking rooms. No musak, fruit machines or television screens. Pretty barmaids. A grumpy landlord. All precisely as the genre required.

  In a snug at the rear, Bryn found a rack of newspaper sticks including an untouched copy of the Guardian. It was nearly a week since his last news fix and he fell upon it like manna.

  A spectacular photograph of a dust cloud dominated the front page. American news as usual. The Governor of California had declared a state of emergency after serious earth tremors in the north. Tourists
had been banned from the National Parks and residents were being evacuated. The cloud was growing and spreading across the Cascade Mountains and interfering with international air traffic out of Seattle and San Francisco.

  It had not prevented one particular traveller, however. In a bylined comment column, the paper reported on the arrival in London – on unexplained business – of ‘one of the most secretive men in American politics’. The visitor it was so intent on flushing out was none other than Udell Strange. And a little less secretive than before.

  Bryn showed the article to Agnete. And promptly wished he hadn’t. She had begun to enjoy the hushed, gentle atmosphere of the pub and the strange new ales. And for a brief moment – perhaps – pushed her cares aside. Now her good humour seemed abruptly to drain away.

  ‘I think we should move on,’ she said.

  She remained monosyllabically reticent throughout the journey back to London, staring into space or flicking through an abandoned freesheet. Then she stood up and spent some time at a train window contemplating the passing countryside. Once, when she caught Bryn watching her, she managed a rueful smile. She returned to her seat and placed the freesheet wordlessly in his lap.

  It was the Evening Standard – the West End Final Edition – with a breaking news story on the front page. So fresh a story that, apart from a photograph, there was precious little detail. A ‘worldfamous nuclear scientist’ had been shot dead in a north London suburb. His name had been withheld by the police; a couple of men had been detained; that was it. Just a picture of the scene of the crime. The house that they’d visited that morning.

  The train was two stops short of the Finchley Road.

  ‘I’m going to check it out.’

  ‘No, Bryn. It’s too dangerous.’

  ‘I promise to be careful.’

  ‘Be very careful then. I’ll see you at the hotel in an hour. No more.’

  She carried on alone to central London with the rucksack. She insisted on taking it with her and he was glad to be relieved of it.

  The pavement and road in front of Professor Kelp’s house had been cordoned off with blue and white police tape. The kerbs had been cleared of parked vehicles – apart from a white van and two police cars – and a single policeman was on duty. A small crowd had gathered and Bryn joined it.