Sepulchre

by James Herbert

  Cora regarded Mather curiously.

  "They were both standing in the middle of a shallow stream, father and son, no doubt enjoying each other's company after so many months apart, when the gunmen struck Liam saw his father shot dead before him. He told the Garda later that his father had struggled to the bank and had tried to crawl from the water. The boy was frozen with fear and could only watch when one of the masked gunmen kicked his father down into the stream again, then stood with one foot on Undying man's back holding him beneath the water. The boy said the stream had already turned crimson with blood when the man pointed his revolver into the water and shot Captain Hal loran in the back of the head."

  Cora closed her eyes, but the ghastly image became sharper in her mind. She quickly opened them again.

  "Siobhan knew her cousins had been involved, otherwise Liam would have been murdered, too, as a witness. That's why the assassins had taken the trouble to wear masks, so the boy wouldn't recognize any of them. But there was nothing she could do. If she were to voice her suspicions, not only would she be at risk, but so too would her son, and possibly the grandfather. It's my opinion that her silence partly contributed to her eventual breakdown. Grief did the rest."

  The girl was staring at him. "How . . . how do you know all this? Did Liam tell you?"

  "Pieces," he replied. "Even as a youth, Liam was never one to reveal his inner feelings. I made inquiries, I talked to his grandfather. You see, I was Captain Halloran's commanding officer in Aden. He was an excellent soldier, one I had a high regard for, and his death was a great loss for my unit so early in the campaign. I took a personal interest in the family he'd left behind, and that's how I learned of the boy."

  Mather finished the tea and again placed the cup on the floor. When he straightened, his hand began to soothe the ache in his knee. Talk of the war in Aden somehow always revived that pain.

  "As Liam grew older, it seemed he was always in some kind of trouble, as though a wildness in him had been unleashed. Perhaps that was his way of smothering the sorrow, disguising it with anger. I've no idea, to be honest. The wildness grew out of hand when his mother, unhappy and unstable for all those years, finally committed suicide. I'd kept track of them both since the death of Captain Halloran, made sure the widow received full financial compensation from the British Army, but lost touch for some time when I had difficulties of my own." He tapped his aching knee to indicate the precise nature of those "difficulties." "Thought I was going to lose it, but managed to convince the medics the leg would come good again after a little tinkering with their scalpels. Nowadays, I wonder if I did the right thing," he added as if to himself. "Anyway, I received a letter from the grandfather informing me of Siobhan's death, and when I was well enough, I traveled to Ireland myself to see what could be done for the boy." He smiled wryly. "I believe I arrived just in time."

  It was difficult for Cora to picture Liam as a boy, angry, probably frightened, grief-stricken again with the loss of his mother, her death a direct consequence of his father's murder. How could she equate that image with the man who had come to her room the night before, had taken her against her will, that very act of ravishment stirring the familiar pleasure such defilement had for her, so that she could not help responding? But then the quieter passion afterward, the lovemaking that was gentle, so tender, arousing purer emotions that eclipsed mere desire. It had left her stunned, unsure, as though he had deliberately enacted both sides of passion with her, the cold harshness lacking any caring, and then the simple joy that came without abuse or pain, a fulfillment she'd almost forgotten. But then Cora had to wonder if Halloran was someone on whose actions others put their own interpretations. Was she presuming too much of him? Was he really only a man of violence?

  Mather's voice broke into her thoughts. "Liam had been getting into scrapes. No, more than that—his mischievous-ness went beyond the bounds of natural boyhood hooliganism.

  From what I heard on my arrival, he was in serious danger of being taken into youth custody. Several incidents around the small town where he lived with his grandfather had been attributed to him, although on the worst occasions no damning evidence of his involvement could be laid absolutely on his doorstep. There were particular problems with the local priest. Whether or not it was because the Church represented the nearest authority against which he could rebel, I've no way of knowing. One particular incident. . .but no, as I say, there was no definite proof, it would be wrong for me to speculate."

  The Shield Planner interlocked his fingers, his elbows resting on the arms of the chair. He pressed his forefingers against his lip, momentarily lost in thought. "I felt it was time to take Liam away from that environment; Ireland held too many tragic memories for him. So I arranged for him to board at a school in England, the least I could do in honor of his late father. The school had close connections with the army, turned out many fine cadets. I'm afraid I was rather preoccupied with my own career, which was starting afresh after my leg injury, but I tried to keep an eye on things as much as I could. The boy appeared to settle down—perhaps a strict regime was what he needed all along. I suppose because of what his father had been, the type of school that had educated him, and the fact that his grandfather had passed away and that there really was no other place to go, Liam eventually decided that soldiering was the profession for him."

  Mather's face wrinkled with pleasure. "Damn good at it, too, by all accounts. Oh, he was still somewhat reckless, never quite losing that touch of Irish wildness; but the army has ways of channeling that kind of spirit. Liam took to that way of life as if ordained for it, and was good enough to make the SAS.

  "Unfortunately, he was involved in an incident in 1972 that I believe was the root cause of Liam's later cynicism. Still not into his twenties, he was stationed with a small British Army training team at Mirbat in Oman—about ten of 'em in all. A civil war was going on between the monarchy of Oman and its left-wing opponents, and the SAS unit had spent three months in that dreary little town of Mirbat attempting to drill some kind of order into the loyalists. They held two forts, thirty Askaris in one, around twenty-five Dhofar Gendarmerie in the other, with an unruly bunch of counterguerrilla irregulars billeted in the town itself. The only artillery of any real weight they had was a Second World War twenty-five-pounder, a .50-inch Browning, and an eighty-one-millimeter mortar.

  "One morning, just after dawn, they were attacked by nearly three hundred rebels armed with machine guns, mortars, antitank rifles, and a Russian rocket launcher. It should have been an outright massacre, but the SAS commanding officer, an absolutely fearless individual, and only a few years older than Liam himself, organized his own men and their Arab allies into a fighting force to be reckoned with.

  "I won't bore you with all the battle details, m'dear, but the officer, a captain, was here, there, and everywhere, screaming orders, directing what meager artillery they had, shaping his defense so that the attackers couldn't take a hold. Under enemy fire, he crossed four hundred yards of open ground with a medical orderly to reach the fort where the Gendarmerie was holed up. He'd already radioed his HQ for a helicopter to evacuate casualties, but enemy firepower was so fierce the damn thing couldn't even land. The captain took over the second fort's gun position, the guerrillas no more than thirty yards away, and nearly had his head chopped off by machine-gun fire. Men were being cut down around him, but not for one moment did the captain consider giving the order for surrender. No, no chance of that. From his position, he was able to site targets for two Strikemaster jets that had arrived to lend support, but still the battle raged.

  "At last, a relief squadron flew in from Salalah to assist, and the rebels, already stopped in their tracks and their numbers considerably depleted, gave up the ghost and fled. A quite remarkable resistance by the commanding officer and his men, and the rebel forces never really recovered from the defeat, although it took another four years for the war to end.

  "I believe that battle affected Liam in two ways, th
e first being that he was involved in a carnage of mindless ferocity, and he himself had dealt out much of it; and the second was that he was shown an example of outstanding courage by his commanding officer—a captain, don't forget—which I'm sure he imagined his own father had been capable of. Yet the battle was never officially recognized by his own government, even though he was awarded a Military Medal for his actions, and the captain a Distinguished Service Order. That and the fact that he was unclear in his own mind as to whether he was on the side of the goodies or the baddies made him rather cynical about war itself. Worse was to follow.

  "Seven years later, that same captain, a man he had come to admire and respect, by then promoted to major, died from exposure during an SAS exercise on the Brecon Beacons. A totally wasteful death which so filled Liam with disgust that he resigned from the army shortly after.

  "He became a mercenary, using conflict for his own ends, which were purely financial, rather than allowing it to use him. I observed from a great distance, learning of his activities through contacts I had in various countries and, it must be confessed, I was saddened, appalled even, by what I heard. Although it was never said that he killed indiscriminately, or ever used violence when it could be avoided, he had a reputation for being utterly ruthless as far as his enemies were concerned—and enemies were defined as those being on the side of those not paying his wages."

  Mather noticed that Cora did not appear shocked, nor even surprised; it was as though he had merely confirmed her own suspicions about Halloran.

  "A few years ago I began recruiting for Achilles' Shield," he went on. "Ex-SAS officers make extremely good operatives, so they were my prime targets. I'd lost all contact with Liam by then—it may be that I was afraid of what he'd become—but something inside urged me to seek him out, a niggling guilt perhaps, a feeling that it was / who had let him down. It may possibly have been nothing more than a nagging curiosity.

  "I eventually located him in Moshupa, a small township in Botswana, very close to the border of South Africa. He was training ANC guerrillas for incursions into their homeland, where they would wreak as much destruction as possible before stealing back across the border to the neighboring state. But Liam was a far different person from the young man I had come to know. He seemed . . . empty. As though what he was doing, the killers and saboteurs he was training, the awful conditions he was living in, meant nothing at all to him. He didn't even register surprise when I turned up, only a chilly kind of amusement. When I spoke with Liam it was like talking to someone drained of emotion; but gradually I began to realize he possessed an inner seething that frightened me more than anything else about him. God knows what he'd been involved in after resigning from the British Army, but its mark had been left. No, he hadn't been brutalized; it was as though he'd become immunized against outrage, wickedness, against caring. As I said, that was on the surface: inside, emotions were being stifled, held so firmly in check that I suspect even he was unaware they were there. Or perhaps he glimpsed them now and again, yet refused to let them rise, refused to be influenced by them. I was sure I'd come at exactly the right time, couldn't help but feel I'd been nudged by some inner instinct of my own, because I could tell that Liam had had enough, he was ready to break. Those suppressed emotions— his own self-hatred—were about to erupt.

  "He wouldn't admit it, not even to himself, but I think he saw me as some kind of lifeline, a means of dragging himself from that moral squalor he'd sunk into. As for me, I was only too happy to throw down the rope.

  "Liam told me he had discovered there were no absolutes. No absolute right or wrong, no absolute good or evil. There were degrees of everything. Once you accepted that—truly accepted it, he insisted—you were able to set your own balance, you understood the bounds within which you could function without guilt clawing at you, tainting your thoughts and so hindering your actions. And he said that virtue, righteousness, whatever you like to call it, often held little sway over evil, because its own rules inhibited. Sometimes only evil could defeat another evil. Degrees, he kept repeating, the lesser against the greater.

  "None of it made much sense to me, but it indicated the slough of despair he was wallowing in. No, perhaps despair suggests self-pity, and the man I spoke to was too hardened for that. Pessimism might be a more appropriate word, cynicism even better. Anyway, he agreed to return to England with me and work for Achilles' Shield, protecting lives instead of the opposite. In my opinion, that change was vital for Liam, because it pulled him back from the brink."

  Cora, who had been listening quietly throughout, finally spoke. "He was that close . . . ?"

  "In my opinion," Mather reasserted. "It may be an old-fashioned notion on my part, but when all probity is lost, total degradation is swift to follow. It seemed to me at the time that Liam had almost lost all reasonable values."

  The girl looked down at her hands, and Mather wondered if he had embarrassed her. Were his ideas too rigid, or too "quaint" for these racy times? Probably, but no less valid for that, he reassured himself.

  "And has he changed?" Cora asked softly.

  "Well, he's been with Shield for over six years now, and in many ways he's the best operative we have. Yes, he has changed." Mather smiled. "But just how much, I really can't say."

  29

  RECONNOITER

  They drove past the gates, all three occupants of the car peering around, looking along the uneven drive to see where it led. Unfortunately it curved into woodland that obscured any further view.

  With a nod of his head, the front passenger indicated the old lodge house set to one side of the big iron gates. The car did not slow down.

  They studied the high wall as the car picked up a steady speed once more, and then the dense trees and undergrowth when the weathered brickwork ran out. They traveled a long way before a narrow lane came up on the left. The driver steered into it, the other two occupants continuing to study the hedges that bordered the left-hand side of the lane. Presently they were able to catch brief glimpses of downward slopes, woodland, a lake. The man in the backseat told the driver to stop the car.

  Although their view was restricted by the trees closest to the lane, they could just make out what appeared to be a red-stoned building on the far shore of the lake, nestled beneath low hills. Reluctant to linger too long, the back passenger instructed the driver to move on.

  The lane joined a wider road and again the car turned left, maintaining a casual speed, neither fast nor slow. There were bends and dips along the route, but the observers' attention rarely wavered from the heavily wooded countryside on their left. Through his rearview mirror, the driver noticed another vehicle approaching from behind. It was a Granada, and he mentioned the fact to his companions. It slowed down, keeping a distance of forty or fifty yards away, following without pressuring the lead car into hurrying.

  The driver of the first vehicle watched for a road to come up on his right. One did, and he drove on by. Soon another appeared, again to his right, and this one he took.

  In his mirror he saw the Granada pass along the road they had left, its two occupants staring after them. It quickly vanished from view, but the driver of the first car kept on going, picking up speed.

  Only when they had traveled a mile or so further did he pull in by the side of the road and turn to look at his companions.

  The passenger in the back nodded. From what they'd seen so far, the scar-faced man (when they had finally broken him) had been quite correct: the estate was large, very large indeed.

  30

  RETRIBUTION IN DARKNESS

  Quinn-Reece was alone in his office on the eighteenth floor of the Magma Corporation.

  The tiniest smile of satisfaction twitched his lips as he completed the last paragraph of the report concerning the Papua New Guinea copper situation—a report that Felix Kline had requested he provide before leaving the building so that the chairman could call a forward planning meeting after he had broken the news to the board of directors
on Monday morning.

  Did they really hope to retrieve the situation? Exploration rights for that particular area of land had already been granted to Consolidated Ores, and not even if Magma's bribe to the government officials involved outmatched their rival company's could the agreement be rescinded.

  He gathered the papers together on his desk. They would be ready for his secretary to type first thing in the morning. Rarely a happy man, Quinn-Reece allowed his smile to broaden. He was pleased with the wording, for it emphasized, in all due modesty, of course, his strenuous efforts to secure those rights before anyone else got wind of the find, continuously trying to contact their agent on the island by telephone, telex, and even personal messenger to his hotel. Unfortunately, the man could not be located (or so Quinn-Reece indicated in his report) and in the meanwhile, Magma's biggest rival had learned of the "find."

  He allowed himself to chuckle.

  Time to go home, he decided. Enough is enough. The report could indeed be more full, but why the hell should he put in any more hours on a Sunday? It was late afternoon and the skies were already darkened by clouds and drizzle. Before he went, though, a stiff gin and tonic to celebrate yet another successful deception.

  He left his desk and went to a wall cabinet, opening it to reveal his private liquor stock, there for entertaining business associates or, more often than not, for the frequent "nips" that got him through the day. The small ice bucket was empty, but who needed ice? He poured a good measure of gin into a glass tumbler and added an equal amount of tonic. He raised the glass to his lips when the noise outside his office door stopped him.

  He shrugged. Security on their rounds, checking all offices. Your excellent health! he silently toasted himself, and took a large swallow of the drink. The mixture warmed him, lightening his mood even further. Just a few more months' subservience to that obnoxious, stunted oaf, then set up for life, working for a company who would appreciate his business acumen and who would be extremely grateful for past services. The risk had been worth it. And what could the corporation do anyway, even if they had discovered he was the source of the leaks? Take him to court? Oh no, he knew too much for that. The shareholders would be unhappy if they were to learn of Kline's true position at Magma, and the financial press would have a ball. Even Consolidated was unaware of the psychic's presence within Magma—they merely assumed that the corporation's field agents were more astute than their own. No, the worst that Magma could do would be to dismiss him. And pay him off for keeping his mouth shut, of course. Instead they were firing the girl, Cora.