When the refuelling was complete the Mebsher resumed its journey, but was now moving noticeably more slowly than before. Two more hours passed before another halt. Tarent again scrambled down the steps at the rear of the compartment and took some more food and a cup of coffee. None of the other passengers responded when he offered to bring them drinks, so he silently resumed his seat.
His fellow passengers were quietly aggravating him. They ignored him all the time, although Tarent had to admit they barely spoke amongst themselves. It was still impossible to work out if they were travelling together, although they were apparently of the same background of officialdom, or at least in roughly equivalent positions within those circles. The man who sat alone in the front row either concentrated hard on the screen of his laptop, or dozed for brief periods. Sometimes he spoke on his mobile phone – an indication of his high status since nearly all digital access was forbidden while inside a Mebsher, because of the sophisticated electronic equipment on which it depended for defence. In any event, the thick armour plating normally prevented any signal getting through, but the man had connected his cellphone through a cable of some kind, presumably gaining access to the network. When they had boarded that morning in Bedford, Tarent had glimpsed the flash of a CIA identification chip and briefly heard a New England accent. The man was tall, his close-cut grey hair grew thickly and his face was one of the most humourless Tarent could remember seeing. The man’s self-absorption was like a black hole, neutralizing any attempt at contact.
The other two passengers still appeared to Tarent to be together, although today they were sitting slightly more apart. It seemed not to be a personal relationship. The man was older than the woman. All he could see for most of the day was the backs of their heads: the man’s dark, almost black hair was thinning over his crown, the woman’s brown hair mostly covered by the scarf. There was a gap above her collar, by her left ear, where part of the scarf had lifted away. As the Mebsher lurched along the uneven road surface, their heads shook and moved together. Sometimes she raised a hand and tweaked her fingers through the strands of hair falling behind her ear.
Tarent took a few surreptitious shots of the others. One picture caught the profile of the woman in what he recognized as a typical gesture: her head was tipped forward, her eyes were closed, a finger lifted the side of the scarf to touch her hair.
She still reminded him of Melanie, and he wished she did not. Maybe it was guilt. The sense of the years wasted and his failure to do anything about that. Melanie was thirty-eight now, or had been thirty-eight until the week before last. Memories of her kept returning, maddeningly. Tarent sometimes imagined he could hear her voice, trying to break in over the racket of the Mebsher’s engine. Her scent was still on his skin, or so he thought.
The night before she was killed they made love, something they sometimes did after a row. It was unsatisfactory for them both. The bunk they were in was too narrow and the walls of the safehouse were treacherously thin. It was hot. Humidity and heat, endlessly, invariably. They made the effort, an unspoken attempt to try to tell each other they were still together, but they both knew they were not. After those fevered minutes of physical and sexual exertion, the habitual distance spread out again between them, not a real barrier but a painful and familiar reminder of how fragile their marriage had become.
Lying in the dark they riffed a fantasy they both knew well, the one about returning to Britain, taking a vacation, going to a good hotel in London or one of the other cities and spending the back-pay on a few nights of selfish luxury. But it would never happen, they both knew, and even then they had no idea how disastrous the next day was going to be.
She resented him, he resented her. But how can you resent a nurse? Tarent had found several ways, a defence mechanism. His own practical qualification, a degree in environmental sciences, was where there were jobs for the taking. Allegedly. After university, Tarent had found there was no apparent need for an inexperienced pyrologist. After a year’s visit to the USA he returned to Britain while the political and social upheaval that accompanied the foundation of the IRGB was still in progress. No jobs were going at all at that time, so he drifted into photography, working first with a friend from uni, later striking out on his own as a freelance. That was what he was doing when he met Melanie.
She once described photography as a passive activity, receptive, non-interventionist. It recorded events but never influenced them. She believed that nothing was worthwhile that was not practical, hands-on, proactive. That was her function, but not his. He defended himself in what he saw as a candid way, but which Melanie described as ineffectual. Photography was a form of art, he said ineffectually. Art had no practical function. It only was. It informed or it showed or it simply existed. But it could move the world. Melanie derided him for that, pulling open the loose neck of her shirt and pulling it down, exposing yet again her shoulder and upper arm. That was where a deranged patient had scraped a soiled needle against her, trying to infect her with whatever it was he had. That was her trophy, the personal reward for proactivity.
‘So photograph it, why don’t you?’ she yelled at him once, during the second week of their transit across Turkey, somewhere in the high arid deserts beyond the coastal strip. That day their Mebsher convoy had run short of water, and they were waiting to be resupplied. Tarent could still remember the grim surroundings of stone and desiccated vegetation, the abandoned town of Hadimá down the hill, the mountains of yellow rock, the distant glimpse of the sea, the blasting hot wind and the cloudless sky.
The resentment hurt, but he still loved her. He remembered what she seemed to have forgotten, their early days, their intensive letters and long phone calls, the excitement of all that, the immense emotional challenge. Love was stronger than resentment.
But now he was to go back to his damned passive photography.
6
He closed his eyes, dozed for a while. Suddenly, a voice came through the intercom, the Glasgwegian accent.
‘This is Ibrahim, your second driver. Peace be unto you. There’s some kind of fault with our power cells and unfortunately many of the usual recharging points are unavailable. We need to make our overnight stop earlier than planned, so we’re going to divert and make an overnight at a place called Long Sutton. They can take us for one night. It means another delay, but that’s probably better than running out of energy. We can have replacement cells fitted there, and we’ll make up time tomorrow. The weather forecast is good.’
There was a pause. The microphone stayed on. Behind the hiss of the communicator they could hear the two men in the cockpit speaking to each other. The woman in front of Tarent had reacted visibly to the announcement, looking up in surprise. Now she turned her head and spoke quietly to the man beside her. He shook his head, listened to more. Then he silently agreed with her, nodding, eyebrows briefly raised, looked away.
Tarent leaned against the wall of the compartment, peering again through the narrow window. As he did so, two things happened simultaneously. Something was thrust insistently, firmly, inexplicably, into his hand, and he folded his fingers reflexively around it. And a second voice, the other sergeant in the cab, took over the announcement.
‘This is Hamid, senior driver.’ Tarent recognized Hamid as the young sergeant who had helped him on board, out of the floodwaters of north London, when he joined the Mebsher. ‘Peace be unto you. This is to let you know that we have been ordered to port your security clearances ahead, because of where we’ll be stopping. The Long Sutton base is normally off-limits, as you no doubt know. No cause for alarm – just routine. Everyone on board today is cleared to the required MoD level. Just thought we should mention it in case anyone has concerns. You will have to check in with your chips and ID tags, but they’ll be handed straight back to you.’
Tarent had distant memories, from years back, of a number of protest demonstrations when the Long Sutton base was opened. In those days it had been operated by the US Air Force as an advan
ce early-warning listening site, but presumably these days, long after the dissolution of NATO, it was being run by the Ministry of Defence. But early warnings? About whom?
He still had trouble recognizing himself in the role of high-ranking official of some kind, one with a security clearance. His past contacts with government departments had usually been intermittent, mostly when he was assigned to some event that needed permission from the Home Office or Emirate Liaison. Even then he was acting only as a freelance photographer, commissioned by a web magazine or a TV channel, needing accreditation.
As the lumbering vehicle continued on along the road, Tarent was working his fingertips around the slip of paper that had been pushed so forcefully into his hand. He twisted it, making it into a tight cone, sharp at one end, for the moment not thinking about how it had come into his possession. Finally he opened it, smoothing it across his thigh.
Written in erratic handwriting, apparently scribbled in haste, were the words: I am travelling to Hull DSG. Come with me? The Warne’s Farm appointment can be skipped.
It could only have been the woman in front of him. Tarent screwed up the paper and looked again at the back of her covered head, where her hand rested against her neck. While watching her earlier, bored with everything, he had thought those restlessly moving fingers were a mannerism, an uneasy habit, but now he wondered if she might have been sending some kind of unrecognized signal to him.
He remembered the early impression he had had of her, a sense that she was somehow alert to him. There was nothing but coldness in her overt manner towards him, but now this note. His look turned into a stare he found difficult to unlock. Apart from the fretting of her fingers she was making no movement at all, apparently unaware of him.
If he raised his hand he could touch those fingers, feel her neck and hair.
Nothing happened, nothing changed. Soon he was dozing, a dreamless state of near-sleep, half-aware of the reality around him: the movements of the vehicle, the vibration and noise of the engine, the jerking forward or back if there was a gear change. He thought vaguely about the woman, so close to him, so remote. Come with me? To what? The question mark made it into an offer, not a command. An offer of Hull? In other circumstances he might see the note as a proposition, but it was the same woman who had brusquely checked his photographer’s licence. And the only certainty in his life at that moment was the fact he had been given strict instructions to attend a debriefing at an OOR establishment somewhere in the Lincolnshire Wolds, called Warne’s Farm. The woman’s note said he could skip it. He did not see how.
He returned to full awareness when the vehicle slowed suddenly and came to a halt, the whine of its engine running down to silence. Through half-open eyes, yawning, Tarent glimpsed a military presence: two young marines stood on guard, clad in low-vis camo fatigues, Kevlar vests and pads, masked into anonymity with automatic rifles at the ready.
He was aware of his fellow passengers shifting in their seats, as keen as he was to be out of the Mebsher at last. Now that the vehicle was silent and stationary, Tarent felt trapped. The air-con was off, the fans were no longer blowing. It looked cold outside.
At the window again, Tarent saw Hamid outside, signing a number of documents. There were arguments going on, but not ill-natured. Something about the vehicle they were in, to judge by the gestures.
After several more minutes two civilian officials wearing protective clothing and breathing apparatus squeezed their way through the entry hatch into the cramped compartment. Sitting close to the narrow hatch, Tarent felt a welcome draught of fresh air. One of the officials was a man, the other was a woman. The woman was wearing hijab, so with the oxygen mask and protective glasses nothing at all could be seen of her face. The man was wearing a dark work-jacket, with ‘Ministry of Defence’ stencilled on the flap of a breast pocket. Both of them were carrying large pressurized cans – the man squirted a fine aerosol into all corners of the compartment itself, while the woman sprayed all four of the passengers with the stuff. Tarent held his breath as soon as he realized what was about to happen, but his immediate concern was to protect his cameras. Inevitably, he soon had to breathe in. The aerosol was powder-dry, tasted vaguely acrid and where it landed on the skin it stung. As he and the others choked and coughed, the woman directed more spray at them.
They were left to recover on their own. Over the intercom, Hamid and Ibrahim could be heard in the control cab, also coughing. Ibrahim pleaded loudly for forgiveness, but for his own angry thoughts, not for the actions of the officials.
They were allowed to disembark. Although he was closest to the hatch, Tarent held back to allow the others out of the vehicle first. The woman stepped past him, without a glance or a word.
7
The Mebsher had halted next to a long building, brick-built with a flat roof. There were trees everywhere, around the buildings and alongside the two or three tracks that could be seen leading to other parts of the compound. A breeze was moving through the trees. Tarent gulped in the fresh air, trying to calm his breathing. His lungs still felt aggravated by the chemical spray. He could smell the stuff on his clothes, in his hair, on his face and lips. It renewed the feeling he had had ever since arriving back in Britain, that other people were taking over his life, determining his actions. Yet he was also convinced that none of the people he had encountered in the last few days had any conception at all of what he had been doing abroad, what the chaos of events there was like, the morbid sights he had witnessed and the terrifying events he had experienced, the parlous state into which so many parts of the world had fallen. Half of Europe was now virtually uninhabitable. Most people who were able to live here in the temperate world, the ever more narrow and meandering strips of livable land in the northern and southern hemispheres, were having to draw back from the rest, hold on to the remains of what they knew. Curiosity about the uninhabitable parts of the world had mostly died, shrouded by the need for self-preservation.
A white geodesic dome, and two vast satellite dishes, could be seen rising up beyond the trees.
The other three people from the Mebsher were walking ahead of him. He followed them in through a door guarded by a police officer, then along a corridor. The woman was lagging behind the others, and she glanced back at him. Her expression was openly enquiring.
Tarent shook his head, then tried to make a noncommittal gesture.
She turned away from him immediately, straightened the pack on her shoulder, and walked more quickly. She pushed past her male companion, leading the way into one of the rooms ahead.
A lengthy induction process followed. Apart from having to produce ID, they were made to sign disclaimers under freedom of movement and freedom of information legislation. The American man objected with formal words, citing a US Supreme Court judgement, but then cooperated without further demur. They were each given a tag to hang around their necks, to be worn at all times, even in bed. Tarent was relieved and surprised when they did not examine or take away his photographic equipment.
It was still the afternoon. The rest of the day loomed ahead with nothing much to do. Tarent knew nobody there, and Long Sutton’s own rules about banned activities and closed zones were posted on every door and most of the walls. He was allocated a room in one of the dormitory buildings – it was as sparsely furnished as the underground room in Bedford, but somewhat smaller.
He stripped off his clothes and lay naked on the bed for a while, then took a shower. Afterwards, still naked but for the obligatory identity tag, he lay on the bed with his head tipped back so that he could look up at the trees overhead. It began to feel warm in the room, but there was no way of adjusting the temperature and the windows were sealed.
He watched TV for a few minutes, flicking through the channels to find a news service or current affairs programme. As so often before, channel browsing for more than five minutes in some hotel room or rented accommodation made him feel moronic and annoyed. When he found a news broadcast the main story was again
the meeting in Toronto, so Tarent turned the television off.
Looking out of the window he noticed that the sun was lowering, so he dressed again and walked slowly around the immediate area of the dormitory block. No one else was about. He carried his camera on his belt as usual but this time he kept it half-concealed beneath a woollen pullover. In truth he was not particularly interested in the place, but he was relishing the chance to walk around under trees. When the extremes of climate change struck it was the trees which usually disappeared first: by forest fires, by storm damage, by desperate scavenging for fuel. So many landscapes had been denuded. The trees at Long Sutton provided him with a rare, harmless pleasure. With the Canon set for the lighting conditions, Tarent took several shots of the canopy above, nothing special or picturesque, but a record of the leafy ambience.
He kept walking, heading away from the main group of buildings. He conscientiously stayed away from any area marked as a secure zone. He took several more photos of trees, lining up the shots so that some of the buildings were visible in the distance. In several places it was possible to take advantage of the compound’s floodlights, which were neither bright nor numerous. The environment was not pictorially stimulating but Tarent enjoyed the feeling of old instincts returning, to shoot foreground and background, frame the pictures, use exposure imaginatively. Now he was out of the Mebsher he had managed to get a digital link to his remote electronic lab, which graded each of the pictures according to his own default settings. He then downloaded back several of the shots and was satisfied by the deep shades of grey and black, the striking greens. There was electronic noise visible in several of the deeper shades, even after the images had been regenerated by the lab. The sun was now close to setting, and finding the right exposure was difficult in the varying light under the trees.
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