She looked at me, uncomprehending. “That’s it?”
“Yeah. That’s it. They’re going to put you through to a very grumpy Glaswegian.”
“Of course they are. And what do I say to this charming Scotsman?”
“Describe what you can see. Describe me. Describe what’s happened, where I am. Tell him anything you like. If he wants you to positively identify me, tell him I won’t give you my name.” I thought for a moment. “But, uh, tell him about the scars. Tell him about the scar on my calf, and say I told you it was from Colombia and that I never got any thanks for it. Then just take his lead. And if you still don’t believe me, well . . .” Well, then my luck would have run out, like I always knew it would someday.
“Why don’t you do it?” Her voice was rising. “Why don’t you make the call on the speaker? I have to leave in thirty minutes.” She offered me the phone. She was rattled now and obviously so. “Look, to be honest, it’s more fun talking shit with you than playing mum to the junkies downstairs in ED, but why don’t you just do it, eh? You’ve convinced me you need to make a call. So make it.” Fear crept into her speech, edging into the gaps between the syllables. Fear that she had made, was making, the wrong decision; but fear, too, that it was already too late to row back. She breathed out through her nose, and looked first at her shoes and then at me, making her decision anew, qualifying it as she went. “I don’t want to speak to anyone.” She held the phone out farther toward me. “You make the call. You speak and I’ll listen.”
I’ve watched people play at roulette like that, their hand hovering over their stack on red or black, odd or even, twitching to get it back until the wheel stops spinning.
“I can’t make the call, Rose. I wish I could, but I can’t. They have the most sophisticated voice recognition software this side of Langley on that line. I say one word and all hell will break loose. They’ll tear the fucking roof off this building to get me, kill anyone who gets in their way. Trust me. I know.” I held up my wrists. “You think I did this to myself?” Then I pointed to my ankles. “And that? You think I shot myself in the shoulder and then strung myself up? As everyone keeps reminding me, I’m not fucking Houdini.”
She let the hand holding the phone fall to her side. She looked scared now—but in dread of the situation, not of me. That fear was good: it meant she believed me. As long as her fear didn’t turn into panic, I could control her.
“Who are ‘they’?” she asked. Scared, but not stupid. She was taking nothing for granted.
“I don’t know, Rose.” She raised her eyebrows. “Honestly. I don’t know. That’s why I’m in here, why I’m asking you for help.” And that, finally, was the truth. If my comms with Frank, or his with Vauxhall, had been compromised, then no call I made was safe—and anyone or everyone could have been hunting me.
She braced herself and held her phone at the ready. Her voice steadied.
“What else will Grumpy Jock ask me?”
“Very little,” I replied. “Except, perhaps, whether I’m still playing chess.”
“What should I tell him?” she asked.
I wrinkled my nose and sniffed the air, and decided—against a lifetime of experience—to stick to the truth.
“Tell him,” I said, “that I resigned.”
9
Passport, please.”
I handed the Eurostar security guard the junior doctor’s brand-new maroon passport. I yawned and looked down, covering my mouth as I did so. “Sorry,” I apologized from behind my palm. “Late night.”
David Peter Mann was sixteen years younger than me, black eyed and brown haired, with a jaw square enough to play liar’s dice with. A gray beanie covered my head. A disposable razor had smoothed my chin. I pinched the sleep out of my blue eyes, feigning a hangover headache. While he scanned the photo page, I busied myself with the contents of my coat pocket.
Rose had played her part well. An hour earlier I’d stalked across the freezing parking lot at Ashford International in a shirt, shoes and coat she’d filched from a cupboard downstairs in the Emergency Department. In the back pocket of my jeans, the passport and driver’s license she’d lifted—albeit reluctantly—from the bag she allowed the eager junior doctor who’d done my initial assessment to keep in her office. I had no phone, and didn’t want one. As for money, I had a hundred-dollar bill—and five hundred pounds in cash, courtesy of Rose’s bank card. She had a promise of repayment from a terse Glaswegian.
And Grumpy Jock—Regimental Sergeant Major Jack Nazzar—was as terse and as tough as they came. Legendary Special Forces old-timer, he was the founding father of the Wing—or the SAS’s Revolutionary Warfare Wing—a Dirty Dozen of Hereford’s most experienced operators. MI6 called them the Increment. I called them when I was in trouble. I’d relied on them for overwatch on dozens of UKN operations, and spent more weeks in the field with Nazzar than I could remember. I wasn’t sure if I was still operational or not. And with Frank out of the picture, there was no one to report to, or receive orders from. I couldn’t call Whitehall even if I wanted to. As far as the Establishment was concerned, I didn’t exist: Director Special Forces didn’t take phone calls from a ghost. Frank was my only link to the offices of state and back channels of diplomacy that ultimately determined every operator’s fate; Jack Nazzar was my only remaining connection to the off-the-books world of warcraft that supported them. I’d counted on him being a friend. He hadn’t let me down.
And neither had Dr. Mann.
“Thank you, sir. Have a nice trip.”
I took back the passport and stood in line for the X-ray at security, wondering how outlandish my appearance would have to be before someone questioned my identity. I filtered my way through French customs—who barely looked at the photograph—picked up a cup of coffee and a croissant and crossed over the steel and glass footbridge that dropped me down onto the platform. I’d booked myself on the 0655 to Paris, Gare du Nord. A small clutch of other passengers braved the icy morning as if by their perseverance they might conjure the train from St. Pancras a few minutes early. A stiff breeze picked up from the southeast. Anyone with any sense clung to the warmth of the waiting room upstairs for as long as possible. It was an hour before sunrise. My wounds ached, and I remembered that I wanted to smoke. I tried not to think about either and watched the clock instead. My breath steamed in the frigid air.
Ten minutes to departure.
The call to Nazzar had achieved its single objective: to persuade Rose to assist me by proving I was on the side that deserved her help. She’d stayed at the hospital overnight, eventually distracting the policeman and the nurses on my ward with a dropped cup of coffee just long enough for me to bolt. The wires weren’t, it turned out, linked to a central bank; the room monitor bleeped feebly as Rose said it would when I peeled the pads off, and then stopped abruptly as the unit’s machine brain realized it was no longer hooked up to a human.
As I stood on the platform, the ward sister would have been cursing my accomplice for having ordered my transfer to another ward without filling out the proper paperwork. She could fret about finding me as the irate policeman jabbered into his radio. Or, more likely, she would throw her hands up and tell him she had better things to do than unpick a consultant’s cock-up. But whatever she chose to do next, I would be lost in the system for a precious hour: a man who didn’t exist, nowhere to be found, in a bed that hadn’t been assigned.
When the police finally discovered that I’d flown the coop, they would issue a missing persons report. But with no photo and limited manpower for migrant hunting, the chances of them sweeping the station before departure were minimal. By the time they’d pulled my image from the hospital’s CCTV—if they even bothered to do that—I’d be in Paris.
What Nazzar chose to do next was anyone’s guess. The call would have been logged and recorded but not monitored—so there was no reason why any wires would have been
tripped at his end unless he chose to raise the alarm himself. It could take days—weeks, even—for the call to be reviewed. Nazzar had taken chances on me before. Whether I made it onto the train or not would tell me whether he had again. I guessed he’d hold off until I fired a flare. As much as he was an ally forged in the furnace of old time’s sake, he was a friend out of necessity, too. His necessity. If there was a problem with UKN, there was a problem for the Wing. And Jack Nazzar didn’t like problems. I knew he’d always vote for the most effective solution to deal with them—sanctioned or otherwise. He didn’t like politicians, either.
Rose would be safe. I’d take the rap for the stolen passport; if asked, she’d say I forced her to make the call. But her guilt by association in the eyes of whoever was hunting me was not so easily solved, not even by Nazzar. I knew he’d send an operator to keep tabs on her and her wife—and in all likelihood take them into unofficial military protective custody. That was as much an insurance policy for him as it was for them. If—when—that happened, it would feel like they’d been kidnapped at first, and I was sorry for it. Depending on how things worked out, a new identity, home, job, life were all potentially coming down the line at them. I’d told Rose to take her wife on a surprise holiday, immediately, though I doubted Nazzar would let them leave the country. The brutal fact of the matter was that, irrespective of what ultimately transpired, both of their lives would be changed irrevocably by Rose’s chance meeting with me. She would be protected by the Wing—but at a cost she’d not calculated.
Five minutes to departure.
I revisited the plans I’d made from the hospital bed. In Paris I’d catch a connection to Toulouse. From there I’d hitchhike and walk into the Pyrenees. The winter would be tough, but there would be isolated chalets and retreats abandoned till spring. Breaking into second homes owned by foreigners was a national pastime in France, so much so that the thinly stretched rural gendarmerie were mostly unconcerned as long as no violence was employed. I tried to shake off the cold of the platform and imagined the warm spring sun that would follow the vernal equinox. In my mind’s eye I saw the mountains’ snowcaps melting into the streams and lakes where I’d drop a hook at dawn. There was no question that I could sustain myself. Special Forces selection, followed by years of training in a succession of increasingly harsh environments, would see to that. In comparison with Nunavut’s Arctic tundra, surviving the Pyrenees would be a cinch. What would happen when—if—I reemerged was a question I would have plenty of time to consider.
Three minutes.
The train pulled into the station. Metal ground against metal. Hydraulics wheezed. Doors opened. A guard wrapped up in a blue-black fleece stalked along the platform. I stepped over the yellow line, jostled by the backs and bags of a disorganized family eager to be in the warmth of the carriage.
Of course I could survive. But to what end?
I’d persisted in the pursuit of death because I had been persuaded by my soldier-scientist father that it mattered who pulled the trigger. And so it also mattered to me—if not to Frank—that even if what I’d become was a killer, at least I wasn’t a murderer. But the reality was that Doc was dead because—and only because—I’d gone to him; and gone to him in the full knowledge it might kill him. I may as well have pulled the trigger myself. If that wasn’t murder, what was?
Worse still, the consequence of his death could be another fatality as unconscionable as it seemed inescapable: if Doc had been killed somehow because of his connection to me, then there was every possibility that Rachel Levy could follow her father to the grave. No loose ends. God knew I’d tied off enough myself. Arkhangel didn’t just read like a message: it felt like a death warrant.
If she died, I would lose the last person who knew me when I was Mac Ghill’ean, and not McLean. I thought of Frank and of the tide of blood we had loosed upon our enemies. His enemies. And suddenly, for the first time in a long time, it felt like who I’d been mattered more than what I’d become. Doc had said Rachel was in London. Stop running and start thinking.
Stay.
Find her.
Save her.
I checked myself. I could dress it up all I liked, but a killer wasn’t what I had become; it was what I had chosen to be. I screwed up my eyes. The fact was, I hadn’t pulled the trigger on Doc. Someone else had. I was sorry, but there it was: a single tragedy written in the unending roll call of the dead. Rachel, a woman whose face I tried not to remember and could hardly recall when I did, a woman whose name I struggled to speak out loud. Aged forty-two, and I was still acting like a cunt-struck teenager.
No.
Fuck her.
And fuck Frank and his circular firing squad.
I stepped up toward the open carriage door and stopped there, one foot on the platform and the other foot on the train.
And yet Frank might still keep faith. Maybe he had never lost it.
You made a choice, I told myself. You’re still a soldier. So wait for orders. And then follow them.
Still I hesitated. Move forward or step back. The past was a foreign country, too, and one I had much less idea how to navigate than France. I thought of my father, who for stretches of my childhood I very rarely saw, and I thought of Doc, who perhaps saw more of my mother than either my father or I had wanted to admit. If love for her had bewildered him until he died, then he would have died for me, too. Maybe my mother murmured his name with mine as she swept her tired child’s limbs into bed.
I’d never thought too much about love. Every man I’d killed had been some mother’s son. To dwell on that could make a strong man lose his mind. Or his soul. Even now—especially now—thinking about my mother and father, about Doc and Rachel, was like standing too close to a wall. All I could see were bricks and mortar, not what they encompassed. But there were no walls I had not scaled in the past. I would survive. And yet what was the point of survival if there was no one, least of all myself, left to love?
Get a grip on yourself, Max. You’re a fighter. So fight.
One minute.
I stepped down off the running board and put both feet on the ground. I paused and turned around, smacking into the frantic father of the family that had boarded before me, busy with a folded stroller. As his hand went out to steady himself, a rolled-up copy of the Times unfurled itself from under his arm and tumbled to the platform. I stared down at the wrinkled pages curling in the brittle air, straight into my own eyes.
The portrait was reproduced twice its original size, captioned with my name. I looked passively at the camera. No smile. Short haircut. Shave. The tip of my left ear missing. A bright, perfect print against a white background. It was my passport photograph, and it had been taken three weeks before at Raven Hill barracks. The headline above it: “lone wolf” sought over terror attack. Below the fold, in lurid color, was a photograph of Chappie Connor’s burned-out cottage. Thatch gone, glass gone, door gone, it sat, still smoking, like a charred skull sinking into the sodden headland.
Fifteen seconds.
I stooped to pick the paper up, and the man said “Thank you.” But grappling with the baby carriage, he had no hands to take it. I stood and watched as he clambered on, received through the open door by his panicked wife. The last whistle blew. The platform had emptied of everyone except the guard and me. In a moment the doors would lock. I looked at the paper up close. There was only one person who could have released that photograph. Commander Frank Knight had vaporized my most valuable asset in the creases of tomorrow’s fish-and-chip wrapping. My face would be everywhere. My name, too. Movement would become impossible. Helping me would be suicide. I was beyond the pale.
Time was up.
If I stayed, it would get bloody, quickly. If I left, it might be impossible to return.
All bets were off.
I stepped onto the train.
10
Monsieur?”
“S’il vous plaît, un café et un verre d’eau.” My eyes scanned the menu chalked up on a thin blackboard hung near the door. “Et un croque-madame.” I smiled. “J’ai faim.” The waiter nodded and cleared the cups and plates left by the couple whose table I’d taken. The bistro was set to the side of a small square dominated by a large church, a short walk from the Gare du Nord. In the summer tables and chairs must have spilled out of the concertinaed wood-and-glass doors onto the flagstones outside. But on that cold morning the panes had fogged over, creating a damp, gray curtain that cut off the city beyond. It was good to be inside.
* * *
—
WHEN I’D ARRIVED, I’d exchanged the sterling left over from getting to Paris and then used some of those euros to buy a train ticket to Berlin, via Düsseldorf. I’d walked the cavernous concourse cautiously but casually. In Ashford there’d been no point in hiding my face from the station’s security cameras; Mann’s passport would have given my route away immediately. But in Paris I was careful not to show my face to the lenses that pivoted on gantries above me. This was where I needed my trail to go cold—or at least cool.
The station seethed with passengers and tourists, watched by patrols of maroon-bereted paratroopers from the 3rd Marine Infantry Regiment. The troops moved slowly, purposefully, FAMAS assault rifles cradled across their chests, eyes looking for a fight—and, if and when they got word, for me.
The Thalys fast train to Düsseldorf departed in less than two hours from the platform adjacent to the Eurostar arrivals. I’d double-checked the departures board and cooled my heels for a minute. When the video of the station CCTV was played and replayed, I’d be spotted, eventually, exactly where I wanted them to find me: scoping out another international train, but one I had no intention of boarding. If whoever was looking for me concluded Germany was my next stop, it would buy me time. And time, as always, was golden. Head down, I’d scuttled off and buried myself in a crowd of Dutch students making for the Métro. I’d descended with them. At the bottom of the stairs I’d peeled off and ducked into a photo booth. After putting five euros in the slot, I’d sat there impassively, waiting, counting my breaths, listening to the weekend bustle beyond the curtain.
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