by Peter Tonkin
He did not see it like that, of course. He saw it as a failure on his part. He thought he was letting them down just at the moment when they most relied upon him. Suddenly the impact of the realisation was like a breaking heart. He swayed there, apoplectic with rage, unable to form the words he needed to rebut the outrageous threat. Maggie DaSilva rose at his side. He saw her in the periphery of his vision, as though she was moving in slow motion.
He realised everyone in the studio was looking at him and distantly he wondered why. His gaze swept over the faces of his enemies: the smooth American, the smirking Italian, the smug newspaperman, the sleek presenter, the merciless camera. He was looking straight into the camera when the agony of his breaking heart clutched the left side of his chest again. He tried to grip his ribs to ease the pain behind them but somehow he couldn’t move his left arm. A numbness swept down his whole side and the last thing he felt was his left leg collapsing.
In full view of the camera, before the sleepy editor could cut away, the fine, distinguished, widely beloved old man collapsed under the weight of a massive heart attack.
He would have died there and then if anyone other than Maggie DaSilva had been beside him. She was in action at once, rolling him over and loosening his tie. He was wearing a starched collar and she wrestled with the gold-coloured stud, swearing quietly under her breath. Fortunately, he was a slim man and she was able to get her fingers between the cotton collar and the loose skin of his neck. A wild wrench tore the whole lot wide as far as the crisp white curls on his chest. Her eyes had been as busy as her hands. He was utterly white. His closed eyes were almost blue behind their lids. She pulled his jaw down and moved his tongue. ‘Send for an ambulance at once,’ she snapped at the stricken group around her. Then, still on camera, she leaned forward to begin mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
Harriet Lang, shaken but still professional, closed down the show. She kept her comments to a minimum, but there was nothing she could do to minimise the impact of what she realised with sickening clarity would be very damaging indeed. When she and John Stonor had been setting the programme up it had seemed like brilliant television: the fearless exposure of the uncaring side of big business. It was all too obvious now that what they had actually broadcast was the calculated, merciless hounding of a defenceless old man to the edge of death on air. The whole country would be all too well aware that, as she wound things up in close-up, a grim battle to keep her victim alive was going on behind the camera. The effect was finally underlined by the arrival of the company first aid crew in the last second of the broadcast. Behind her closing platitudes, their urgent directions went out to the watching nation.
‘ ... and next week, the problem of pollution in our lakes and rivers ...’
‘... Leave him to us now, miss. Get the oxygen in here quickly, Brian ...’
‘We’ll have Perigrine Prior, Environmental Editor of the Guardian and representatives from Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth. Facing them will be ...’
‘... Full pressure now, John. Yes, he’s breathing. Got a pulse? Got the stretcher? Good ...’
‘... So we’ll see you then, when we’ll all Face the Press together. Good night.’
‘... Lift! That’s good. Let’s get moving while he’s still got a chance ...’
*
Maggie ran down the corridor beside the stretcher. She had kicked off her high heels and was running in her stockinged feet but even so she was having difficulty in keeping up. Sir William’s face still looked terrifyingly pale, but perhaps it was just in contrast with the black triangular mouthpiece attached to the oxygen cylinder lying beside him. Her mind was racing, trying to work out all the best courses of action and decide which one she should take first. She was not in shock yet but she knew it would only be a question of time before she was. The taste of his mouthwash filled her mouth and the intimacy of the taste was dangerously poignant.
They stood in silence while the lift whispered downwards. The only sound in the little car was the mechanical hiss of Sir William’s laboured breathing. They came out into the lobby at a rush, but there the forward impulse of events came to an abrupt halt. There was no ambulance.
While they waited in the quiet lobby, the first aid team kept Sir William going, but their body language and the sounds they made warned Maggie that they were not happy about the delay. The slim barrister started to shake, just as she had feared she would, and soon she had to go and find a chair. All she could think of was the look on Robin’s face when the news got through to Atropos. And on Helen Dufour’s face when she landed at St Petersburg to find the news waiting for her there. Helen and Sir William were supposed to be thinking of marriage. The French senior executive would be lucky not to be going to a funeral instead.
The lift doors opened and a group of people got out. Maggie glanced up and down again, her dark cheeks burning with rage. It was the group of men and women who had done this. John Stonor and Harriet Lang, quietly, side by side, their faces slightly stunned. Signor Verdi had picked up his sidekick from the trial, the tall lugubrious Signor Nero of Disposoco. The American lawyer Gordino walked between them, in intense conversation with them. She knew what he would be saying well enough: It’s bad luck the old guy fell ill but remember, your suit is with his company. Don’t weaken; let’s go for it.
She looked away from them through the glass doors. Out in the dark street, a bright ambulance pulled up. Its rear section swung wide and two white-coated men hurried towards the building. The doors opened and the falling whine of its siren followed the paramedics into reception like the cry of a dying wolf. Maggie was swept up into the bustle of things again as they relieved the first aid men and began rattling off questions to her. Questions she could not answer for the most part, about medical history and allergies. Doggedly determined he would not go to the emergency unit alone, she followed out into the street.
A small crowd had gathered, even at this time on a Sunday night. Maggie hardly noticed them as she rushed forward with Sir William, but something about the way they stirred made her stop and look back. The crowd had reacted to the fact that John Stonor and Harriet Lang had come out. They were obviously famous enough to make the little crowd react in a way that the sight of a dying man on a stretcher had not. Maggie felt like screaming at them. Didn’t they care about anything important? She was dangerously close to tears. A motorcycle pulled up behind the line of people. Its pillion passenger swung off and began to walk forward. The driver sat hunched forward with both feet firmly on the ground, helmet and filter mask in profile against the slick brightness of the wet street.
Out through the door behind the television personalities came the other three. The pillion passenger began to push through the little crowd. Maggie’s attention switched back to Sir William as the ambulancemen slid his stretcher up into the back of their vehicle.
Everything seemed to Maggie to be happening very slowly now — she was deeply in the grip of shock. The extra time everything was taking gave the images a better opportunity to burn themselves into her memory, but she hardly felt a part of the scene at all.
The pillion passenger walked deliberately across the pavement. There was nothing about the figure to attract her attention except for the sinister anonymity of the black leather and the visored helmet, but something made her look for just that little bit longer. So she, perhaps she alone, saw the right arm come up until the machine-pistol was at shoulder height. John Stonor and Harriet Lang had vanished as soon as they saw the waiting crowd. The three men behind them were hurrying down the steps and were so close to the black-clad figure they could almost have touched the weapon.
Had Maggie been less deep in shock already, she would have acted far more quickly — and would probably have got herself killed in the process. As it was, her first action was to push Sir William’s stretcher further into the ambulance as though, having got him this far, he was now her responsibility. Then she opened her mouth and sucked in breath to yell a warning. But her cry o
f ‘Look out!’ was lost in the stutter of the gun and the throaty roar of the revving motorcycle.
The three men danced backwards and their attacker stepped forward after them, still firing. Then the man turned, the smoking gun down at arm’s length by his side, and began to walk back. The little crowd beside the ambulance scattered in all directions. A pair of hands grasped Maggie and jerked her up into the ambulance. The doors slammed shut. There was utter silence except for Sir William’s wheezing breath and the roar of the motorcycle which rose and began to fade.
‘Get us out of here!’ yelled someone in the front of the ambulance.
‘No! Wait,’ yelled the man holding Maggie. ‘There’s work to do out there!’
He hit the door and dropped to the pavement. Maggie went with him. The motorcycle had gone as though it had never existed, and three almost child-sized figures lay hunched on the steps in the light from the lobby just behind them.
It was as though the blood had always been there and the sad little bodies had simply fallen into it. The ambulanceman reached Verdi first, turning the man over gently, as though he was actually a child. The blue eyes were protuberant and fiercely fixed. The moustache bristled with indignation. There was nothing left of the face below it.
‘Aiuto!’ whispered a voice, and Maggie was on her knees at once, paddling through the blood, trying to work out which of the other two victims might have spoken. It was Signor Nero. She cradled his head in her lap, utterly indifferent to the blood which marked the front of her midnight-blue suit like tar. It was hot against her shock-chilled skin. His soft, sad brown eyes looked up at her out of bruise-dark rings. His lips writhed as he tried to form words. She leaned down to hear. Far, far away, the ambulanceman said to someone, ‘No, the other guy’s dead as well.’
Nero’s breath smelt of garlic and wine and something else she couldn’t quite put her finger on. The Italian coughed convulsively and the strange smell got stronger. Of course, it was the smell of blood.
‘They kill even the lawyer?’ he asked, his voice light as down on the wind.
She nodded, not trusting herself to speak. How recently and how bitterly she had hated this poor man. She felt more soiled by the memory than by his lifeblood.
‘The lawyer too.’ His voice was infinitely sad.
She looked up. The ambulancemen were standing, watching her. They all knew the wounds were fatal.
‘They say,’ continued the Disposoco man, his face working to form the words, as though they were the most important thing in the world, and Maggie suddenly, sickeningly knew that ‘they’ were the murderers on the motorbike. ‘They say the case is closed. In’s’allah. You understand. It is message for us all from the PLO. It is their promise from so long ago. In’s’allah. The case is closed.’
33 - Day Thirteen
Monday, 31 May 10:00
The three figures came over the low ridge and paused, looking down at the scene of bustling activity below. They all wore thick cold-weather gear of Eskimo manufacture and except for their size they seemed almost identical. The right-hand figure was the tallest, very nearly a giant, in whose mittened hands the ski poles looked like toothpicks. The harness round the immense barrel of his chest reached back to a fully packed sled which, seemingly, he would have had little trouble carrying under one arm. Inuit are a small-framed folk; the clothes he wore would have dressed two of them. Or both of the slighter figures beside him. The left-hand figure stood reed-straight, up past his shoulder, and the central figure, every bit as tall in fact, seemed shorter because it drooped with fatigue. Even so, it was the central figure which moved first, pulling down the covering over the lower part of its face to say, ‘Here we are. Atropos. Home sweet home.’ The noise coming up the wide ice valley towards them was loud enough to require quite a shout, but even so there was no mistaking the voice of Ann Cable.
‘I would never have dreamed this could be possible, would you, Colin?’ called the second, slighter figure.
The giant simply shook his head, looking down at the hive of activity around the beached ship. Their current position effectively put them at the highest point of the slope of ice which, further down, became Robin’s slipway. The height was just enough to give them a panoramic view reaching even over the high bridgehouse with its tall thrust of funnel to reveal the bustle on the forward deck. Here there seemed to be a gaping hole as though a military shell had landed between and immediately forward of the split windlass to leave a rough-edged, round, dark crater. More lengthy inspection, however, revealed that what seemed to be a hole was in fact a dark section of decking, from which a circular object had recently been lifted. No, not circular; bladed. But its fixings had been circular. And the object itself was being raised now, like some massive brass-coloured three-leafed clover. It was being pulled erect by the power of a box-shaped gantry sitting far forward on the deck, seeming to squat like a weightlifter above it.
Clustered in another circle round it stood a group of people whose minuscule size seemed to emphasise the scale of the propeller above them. Five of them standing in a column on each other’s shoulders might have reached towards the top of it. Five like the giant looking down on the scene — six or seven of the people actually involved in it. No sooner was the propeller upright than the gantry began to grind back along the deck. Its movement was so slow at first that only the echoing sound of it gave notice that it was moving.
Five hundred feet nearer, the activity was less easy to characterise. A large group of people, arranged on several levels up a series of makeshift scaffolds, seemed to be freeing the distorted brother of the propeller on the forward deck. There was no gantry here to squat like a titan and raise or lower the massive weight. Instead, a strong hawser, attached at both ends to the capstans on the poop deck and looped round the hollow-centred propeller, was lowering it carefully to the ice. The noise was deafening — the roar of fire from oxyacetylene torches, the bellows roar of turning capstans, the twang of overstrained ropes. The insistent, overpowering tintinnabulation of metal against metal. It sounded like some monstrous blacksmith’s forge.
Even Ann, who knew what Robin’s plans of action had been, was astounded by the scale of what was going on. She could hardly guess what its effect upon Colin and Kate Ross was, especially as her rescuers had been alone on their drift ice station on the western coast of this iceberg for the better part of six months; ever since the massive craft of ice had been swept out of the Arctic Ocean and into the Davis Strait, in fact. She had no desire to linger here, however. She was burning to find out what had happened to Henri. The unexpected intimacy of their experience had disturbed her in many ways and the thought that he might not have made it back alive was incredibly painful to her. Colin and Kate would have been much happier simply to have radioed news of her rescue and given her a couple of days’ rest to recover, but something had made her beg them to bring her back as quickly as humanly possible. They had not been loath to fall in with her plans; the thought of doing some socialising was very welcome to them, even under these rather extreme circumstances.
The three of them rocked forward over the crest of the slope together and began to slide easily down towards the nearest group of crew members. It was Chief Lethbridge who saw them first. Ann, wearing a pair of Kate’s Polaroid sun goggles, saw him much more clearly than he could see her and she was able to discern the fleeting shadows of surprise, shock and suspicion with which he viewed three apparent strangers. She saw him glance up, see them outlined against the bright sky and frown. She saw him check around his men and make sure none of them had strayed up here. She saw him look back up and realise that they were wearing outfits unlike anything Atropos could supply. She saw him speak rapidly to a man beside him and then jerk his walkie-talkie up to his lips. As he talked urgently into it, the blacksmith’s chorus of sound died down around him so that only the slow grinding from the forward deck remained on the air. It was at this point that she regretted her insistence upon silence; upon this highly dramatic
entrance which was already designed in her own mind to form the climax of her next book.
‘Suspicious bunch,’ growled Colin Ross. Ann still could not get used to the gravelly depth of his speaking voice. He slurred his ‘S’s slightly, his accent whispering distantly of Scottish ancestry in a way that Richard Mariner’s did not.
‘Do you think something might have happened?’ No more could Ann get used to Kate’s calm English tones, more suited to an Oxford professor’s garden party than a wilderness of ice.
‘They’ve lost two crew members so far,’ said Ann. ‘For all I know, they think they’ve lost two more within the last two days. On top of that, there’s someone somewhere aboard who may be trying to kill them all.’ Her voice sounded suddenly worried and uncertain even in her own ears. ‘That might well make them jumpy.’ As she said it, the spectre of Henri’s possible death reared up before her again. Is he dead? she asked herself once more. And, if so, what blame do I bear for it?
Two familiar figures loomed atop the rapidly nearing poop and suddenly Ann found herself tearing back the hood and pulling down the goggles so that they could see her face. ‘Henri!’ she called exultantly. ‘Robin! It’s me. I’m all right!’
The silence disappeared at once and the three of them found themselves skiing down into an overwhelming thunder of cheering. A thunder which abruptly came from the ice as well as the assembled throats. The cliff slopes on either hand vibrated and the slope heaved beneath them. Ann went sprawling and the others, more sure-footed than she, had difficulty staying erect. The real thunder silenced the welcome, for it was unexpected and utterly unnerving, like a minor earthquake. Everyone looked up in sudden fear at the glistening upper slopes, but apart from some clouds of crystals which rapidly formed a rainbow above them, nothing else happened. Robin and Henri had disappeared — onto the main deck, no doubt, to see whether the tremor had affected the mobile gantry or its load.