by John Sweeney
The day that happened he phoned his daughter Iryna, and she told him what she always told him: ‘Write a book about your war, Dad. Write a book about what you did, what you went through.’
And the funny thing was, he’d just finished it. One hundred and five thousand words: We Were the Zinky Boys. The title? Three decades on and he still hated that they had flown his boys home in the cheapest possible coffins. The wrongness of this was grinding into his soul when he realised his mobile phone – cheap and old, like him, but it worked, it didn’t tell you your sodding star sign – was ringing.
‘General? General Dozhd? Gennady Semionovich Dozhd?’ A robot’s voice, metallic.
‘Yes – speaking.’
‘General, I have bad news.’
‘Who is this?’
‘No matter. General, I am so sorry to tell you . . . bad news about your daughter. They will tell you a car crash. But that would be a lie.’ And then Machine-Throat cut the call.
Gennady rang Iryna’s mobile. No answer. Her flat. No answer. Her office. No answer. He called her mobile one more time, listened to her voice message – soft, breezy, full of fun – then left a message: ‘I finished the book you ordered me to write. Call your old man. Call the author.’
No one called back. Outside, the sun began to fall out of the sky. He went to his freezer and found what he was looking for: a full litre bottle of vodka. Soon, everything would be black.
LONDON
Hiding behind a wide tree trunk, its bark flaking and strangely disfigured, Joe realised they hadn’t spotted him. This time, he had the advantage. Reilly was darting between the trees, endlessly chasing squirrels, endlessly frustrated that he had no vertical take-off facility, as Wolf Eyes walked slowly west, parallel to Constitution Hill, the two shadows following on behind.
Just by Joe’s feet were the remains of a bright red balloon that had gone pop, attached to a long piece of nylon string. He ripped off the fading red plastic of the punctured balloon and stuffed the string into the pocket of his duffle coat.
Reilly was a good two hundred yards from him, maybe more. If he made his move now, he would have a start on the two men. They looked as if they could move fast if they needed to, as well as steal a man’s dog. Still, better now than never. He put his fingers to his lips and blew, one long whistle and one short.
Reilly knew that tune. He stopped, cocked his ears and then began to run, his legs see-sawing, the fastest little dog in the whole of London. Joe could not help but smile as the black splodge of fur rocketed towards him.
The woman and her shadows stood rooted, puzzled but not yet alarmed by what the dog was up to. Reilly came to him and reared up, pressing his forelegs against Joe and licking his hands, his tail wagging like a windscreen wiper at double speed. They’d cut his fur in a silly style that made him look a little bit different, but the way Reilly licked Joe’s hands he was still the same fool of a dog.
Joe slipped the string around the fancy new red collar. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the two men start to run towards him, moving fast.
His mobile rang. Instinctively, he answered it.
‘Joe? It’s Terri. Are you sure it’s the fact-finder? Joe?’
You fool, Joe, you fool. Not the time to answer the phone.
‘You see, I’m sure . . .’ Terri continued. ‘Well, I’m not one hundred per cent, but I had it down as the preliminary.’
They were one hundred and fifty yards away now, maybe closer.
‘Terri, gotta go—’
‘. . . but as your union official—’
‘Bye.’
He started to run, running faster than he’d ever run in his whole life. Man and dog ran to the edge of The Mall, but the great avenue to the Palace was clogged up by a phalanx of red-coated guardsmen clumping towards Horse Guards Parade. One look behind him told him all he needed to know. If he hung around and waited for the guardsmen to pass, the twins would be on him in half a minute, if not less.
He raced forwards, Reilly matching him in speed, darting through the ranks of soldiers. But the physics of forward motion by the mass of guardsmen and sideways intrusion by a man and a dog wasn’t going to end well.
Joe and Reilly got halfway across when one guardsman stopped dead lest he tread on the animal. The soldier immediately behind cannoned into him, and within a few seconds The Mall had become a diagram of the Large Hadron Collider, Reilly ricocheting off the tumbling redcoats yet remaining uncaptured, the ever-elusive dog particle. The swearing was out of the standard model.
Man and dog vaulted over the cursing guardsmen, got to the far pavement, and ran down the stone steps into St James’s Park and up along the edge of the lake. But as fast as Joe and Reilly were, the twins seemed to be faster, gaining on them, ruthless at pushing strangers out of their way. The string attaching dog to man meant they had to dodge around bunches of tourists, while the twins could move faster, unencumbered.
A straggle of schoolchildren from Salamanca blocked the path at a chokepoint by the bridge across the lake. Joe and Reilly wheeled wide around the kids, only to be confronted by a Latvian TV crew interviewing a puce-faced British tabloid royal reporter with the Palace in the background, the cable linking the camera to the sound man blocking their path. Man and dog crashed through the shot, skipping over the cable.
Two lovers from Paraguay were taking selfies in the middle of the bridge – a man in a wheelchair and his wife from Seoul waiting patiently for them to finish – when Joe and Reilly careered into and out of their framings.
As they ran from the bridge towards Birdcage Walk, Joe dared to look behind him; the twins had just knocked over the TV crew as if they were so many skittles. He was going to lose Reilly for ever if he didn’t think of something fast.
Edwin R. Downs had spent forty years tending to the feet of the people of Des Moines. Chiropody had been his Calvary. Now retired, he was free to take the holiday of a lifetime and indulge in his passion for cycling. Bewitched by the view of St James’s Park, he had parked his Boris bike on its stand and was framing a shot of the lake with Buckingham Palace in the background. His finger clicked, the shutter closed, he lifted the camera away from his eyes and sensed a blur of movement behind him.
‘Hey! That’s my bike . . . Stop, hey! You with the dog!’
But the thickset man was standing on the pedals, and the Boris bike was accelerating off with the little black dog running alongside. Taxis screeched to a halt as the bike, man and dog shot across Birdcage Walk and down the alley.
On Queen Anne’s Gate, Joe flicked his eyes over his shoulder. No sign of the twins. He steered left, still pounding on the pedals, a plan forming in his mind as bike and dog headed towards Westminster.
Reilly panting by his side, he dumped the bike by St Stephen’s Tavern and darted down the steps of the tube station, but turned immediately right along the subterranean tunnel to the ferry dock. As he came out into the light, the brightness of the sky dazzled him. The fast boat to Greenwich was leaving, a ferryman loosening the last hawser from the dock. Man and dog skipped over a chain. The space between boat and dock was growing: two feet, three, four. Joe and Reilly leapt the gap and landed.
‘Easy does it,’ said a ferryman in a high-vis jacket the colour of an exploding volcano. ‘Someone after you, innit?’
Joe, breathless but triumphant, simply nodded his head and ducked down into the main cabin, to lose himself among the mass of unknowing tourists. The river was low, on an ebb-tide, and the ancient city revealed itself through the tinted showroom windows of the boat at sewage-pipe level: a London not so pretty, pumping out muck and filth and grime for two millennia.
Ignoring the medley of outflow pipes, he hunched forwards and patted the dog on his flank. Reilly angled his neck and studied him with two black, melancholy eyes, as if to say: Where you been, mate?
Opposite them sat a mother, with a little girl in a party dress, her ginger hair in ringlets. She stared at Reilly and moved to stroke him. The mother fro
wned momentarily, but Joe smiled and the toddler approached the dog, who lifted his paw in a gesture of royal grandeur. With great solemnity, the girl shook the dog’s paw and said, ‘Good morning, nice dog, and how are you today?’
Despite all that had happened that morning, Joe could not but smile. He would be horribly late for the rest of the tribunal. Better give them a ring. No, when he was off the boat he’d call Terri and tell her to give them a ring. He was loath to re-enter the Land of Disciplinary Mumbo-Jumbo until he absolutely had to.
As the boat docked at zero longitude, Joe and Reilly joined the throng of tourists clogging the steps of the cabin, waiting to disembark. They walked coolly across the wide metal gangplank, through an ugly grey pipe and concrete construction, shaded from the light.
The moment Joe’s feet hit land, he and Reilly jogged towards a small dome, not far from the Cutty Sark, and the two of them hit the iron stairwell down to the old foot tunnel beneath the Thames. The echoes from his footsteps and Reilly’s light patter were amplified by the tunnel’s walls, lined with white ceramic tiles, glistening wet, rheumy with age. The sound waves bounced ahead of them and came back, echo on echo. Halfway through the foot tunnel, the downwards slope flattened for a short distance and then tilted up. He angled his neck behind him and saw, chasing after him, implacably but a very long way off, one of the black-clad twins.
He hurried on, faster, Reilly skipping along beside him, enjoying the game. How on earth had the man followed them down here? Towards the northern end of the tunnel, the walls crowded in, constricting the pathway, the result of old maintenance work shoring up its sides, which had been weakened by a stick of Luftwaffe bombs in the war. He had only twenty yards to go before the end of the tunnel and the bottom of the corkscrew stairwell leading up to the not-so-fresh air of the Isle of Dogs, and all manner of places to seek refuge from his solitary shadow. He chanced a look behind. The shadow was at the midway point now, so he and Reilly had an excellent chance of escape.
Flicking his head round to face front, he ran onwards. Ahead of him, behind a central pillar by the bottom of the stairwell, stood the other twin. The shadow unbuttoned his coat, put on two plastic gloves and withdrew a square patch from an inside pocket. He unpeeled a layer of protective film from the patch and waited in the gloom for the man with the dog on a string.
A short while later, the mother and the little girl with ringlets came across a body out cold at the foot of the stairs.
‘Mummy,’ said the little girl. ‘There’s the man, but where’s the nice dog?’
BEAR LAKE, UTAH
The transmission tunnel of the black Lincoln town car gave out a low boom as it clunked against the surface of the road again. The limo was entirely the wrong auto to take up to the mountain country of northern Utah, but mission security meant that whoever had booked it wasn’t allowed to tell the hire people the destination, didn’t even know it themselves. The limo didn’t have four-wheel drive and it was too low-slung for the roads twisted out of shape by the relentless left hook, right hook of winter freeze and summer heat. It was somebody else’s mistake but, still, it gave the mission a sour start, which was not what Dave Weaver had wanted. Weaver was famous in the Agency for two things: his pigeon-step gait and his bland expression, a smoothness that gave nothing away. But inside the limo, you could feel the tension build through the silence.
The driver and shotgun were standard-issue CIA toughs – burly, uncommunicative, professionally featureless – but the woman sitting next to Weaver was striking. He studied her through the sides of his eyes: black glasses framing an oval face, long dark hair gracing the lapels of her thick black coat, the finely sculpted body he knew all too well. She was reading a printed file in a brown manila folder. After the hacking incidents, when faced with ‘issues of difficulty’ the Agency had gone old-tech. And Ezekiel Chandler was an issue of difficulty.
‘You’re fully prepared?’
The woman nodded.
‘If so, why are you rereading the file?’
‘Just reflecting on some points.’
‘This is important. We can’t afford another screw-up.’
She closed the file and examined Weaver.
‘That is to say, you can’t afford another screw-up.’
Someone snickered, an affront Weaver elected to ignore, for the moment.
‘Be wary with Chandler,’ Weaver told the woman. ‘He looks, sometimes talks, like the dumbest hillbilly you ever did see. Inside, his mind burns like a furnace. He’s exploited the chasm between the surface impression and his intellect his entire life. So don’t underestimate him.’
‘I don’t intend to,’ she said, and returned to examining the folder.
The limo fishtailed up a steep hill and came to rest in front of a long log cabin next to a battered old Ford pickup, a Stars and Stripes flapping in the breeze, a pile of wood under a lean-to. They got out, and gasped at the coldness of the thin mountain air and the raw beauty of the wilderness below. Snow blanketed the visible world. The front door of the cabin swung open and Zeke stood in the doorframe, dumb puzzlement written on his open face.
‘Mr Chandler, good to see you.’ Weaver smiled but his eyes showed no amusement. To Weaver, Zeke seemed older and more gormless than ever, but he knew better than to go by his appearance.
‘Mr Weaver, pleasure’s all mine. You should have tipped me off. Wasn’t expecting visitors. Still, you’re all welcome. Fancy limousine you’ve got there.’ Zeke drawled out the ‘o’ sound in ‘limousine’ so that it rhymed with the ‘o’ in Ebola.
People who could read the CIA’s deputy director of counterintelligence well – and Zeke was the pre-eminent master of studying the man who had succeeded him in the post – could gather that the mention of the limo put him out.
‘This limousine of yours rides well on our hillbilly roads?’ asked Zeke.
‘That’s not what we’re here to discuss.’ Already Weaver could feel his authority begin to seep away from him, exactly what he had feared most about meeting his old adversary again.
A trail of black spots had fallen on the snow in the limo’s tracks.
‘Looks like it’s leaking oil. I’d better take a look.’
Zeke disappeared into the cabin, only to re-emerge in an ancient quilted jacket with a torch in his hand. He walked down the steps towards the limo and nodded at Weaver, the two security men, and the woman with them.
‘There’s some coffee on the stove. Go in and warm yourselves up,’ said Zeke.
With a litheness that belied his age, he dropped down to the snowy ground and with his one strong hand gripped the bumper of the limo and pushed himself underneath the chassis, making himself invisible.
‘Oh dear, the sump’s been pretty mashed up . . .’ said a disembodied voice.
‘Leave it, Chandler, leave it.’ Something too sharp about Weaver’s tone made the two security men turn to each other and trade flickers of disquiet. Zeke’s head reappeared from underneath the chassis.
‘Have you a problem with me looking at your limousine’s sump?’
‘We’re here to talk to you about Archibald Sayce.’
‘Archibald Sayce?’ puzzled Zeke, deadpan.
‘These two gentlemen are from the inspector general’s office. And this is Dr Jean Wilkinson.’
‘How do you do?’ said Zeke. ‘I can kind of guess what you two do, but a doctor? I wasn’t aware I was poorly.’
‘She’s a psychiatrist,’ said Weaver.
Zeke’s geniality vanished. His face recomposed itself from suggesting a country bumpkin to a Cooper’s hawk: seeing all, fearing nothing, scouring the earth for the next kill.
‘A shrink? You bring a limousine up here with two goons and a shrink and you’re saying I’m mad? What’s going on here, Mr Weaver? Crone’s in charge of internal affairs last time I heard, not you. What’s your game?’
‘It’s not a game, Zeke.’
‘Mr Weaver – call me Mr Chandler. I find the formality easier to
handle.’
‘Well then, Mr Chandler, the Agency cannot blithely do nothing when we discover that an eminent retired deputy director has gone haywire, throwing away his religious beliefs, his marriage and developing an alcohol problem into the bargain. You’re a potential security leak.’
‘Fiddlesticks.’ Zeke spat the word out with such contempt that it had the force of a swear word.
‘Dr Wilkinson has full security clearance from the Agency. She is here to evaluate your psychological state.’
Zeke studied her with his raptor’s eyes. ‘My psychological state is just fine and dandy. But listen, you go ahead. I’m all yours.’
The psychiatrist lifted her left hand. ‘I need to consult with Mr Chandler privately.’
‘Why can’t we talk about my Oedipus complex and all and I fix the sump at the same go? Save you folks time?’
Dr Wilkinson repeated herself.
‘Get out from under the limousine, Mr Chandler,’ said Weaver.
Zeke shook his head. ‘Light goes at three. Sump first, shrink later.’
Weaver nodded bleakly, and drew the lapels of his thick woollen overcoat together to shield his throat from the cold.
‘Go in, make yourself at home.’
It was another hour before Zeke walked through the door, wiping his oily hands on a rag. He went through to the kitchen, washed his hands thoroughly, and then disappeared out to the backyard to find some logs to stoke the fire. Only when he had finished that errand did he sit down with the four visitors. As an exercise in issue deferment, Zeke’s performance as an auto mechanic had been exemplary. He smiled his wide-open smile at the visitors, none of whom returned the favour.
‘That fancy limousine of yours should be OK. Best get my welding job checked by a professional when you get back down the mountain. I can drive my pickup down with you some ways, so if you’re in trouble . . . well, you won’t be. So, Dr Wilkinson, do you want me to lie on the couch?’