All Fall Down

by James Brabazon

  He refilled my glass and stared at me, tilting his head to appraise me as one might an animal before slaughter. Where to put the knife? How deep to thrust it? I’d been back in London for twelve hours. My wounds were as raw as the day they’d been cut.

  “I’m glad we have this, ah, opportunity, to clear up any outstanding personal matters. Tell me, McLean. Is there anything in particular I can help you with?”

  He was good. I gave him that much. I thought about all the questions that still remained, but decided instead to ask him the one I knew he’d answer, the one that would determine all that followed.

  “How did you know, sir?” I said, nursing the wine. He kept still, close, watching me. “How did Frank—Commander Knight, I mean—how did he know to send me to the cottage in Donegal in the first place?”

  “The devil,” he said, sitting back in the dining chair, “is always in the detail. But if it’s all the same with you, I’ll let Commander Knight delve into the specifics.” He reached for his wine, crossing his legs under the table as he did so. He paused, calculating, I supposed, the cost of continuing. “What I will say, though, is that it’s a bloody good job Dr. Levy didn’t have a telephone. Never mind a computer.” And then a broad grin spread across his face. “Apparently Commander Knight had been watching him for years. And then his daughter wrote him a letter. A bloody letter. Can you imagine?” He turned the glass in his hand, examining first the wine, and then my reaction. “She was unstable by all accounts. Tried to kill herself once before. Looks like this time she followed through. Shame she didn’t survive, though. She’d have made a good gift for the Americans. God knows we could do with some credit at the White House— What?” He sipped the wine. There was a knock on the dining room door as it began to open. “And talking of the devil, that will be him now.”

  King’s batman put his head into the room and cleared his throat.

  “Commander Knight, sir. Shall I . . . ?”

  “Yes, do.” The door opened wider. “Ah, Frank. Come in. We were just finishing up, weren’t we, McLean?” We both stood. I rolled my shoulders and braced myself, though for what, exactly, I wasn’t sure. Frank Knight stepped into the room. “I’ll leave you two Irishmen to it,” he continued. “But before I do, and seeing as we’re all here together, there was just one thing I wanted to double-check.” He looked at Frank and then at me, working out, perhaps, which one of us would lie least effectively. I was both flattered and appalled that he settled on me. “This Punjabi chap, the one who turned up in Tel Aviv.”

  “Baaz,” I said. “Bhavneet Singh. What about him?”

  “Are you sure”—he turned his attention to Frank—“are you both sure that was his name?”

  “Yes,” I said, also turning to Frank. “I’ve already been through this with Jack Nazzar on the evac from Tallinn.”

  “I see,” said King, shooting his cuffs and adjusting his tie. “Or, rather, I don’t see. See him, that is.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Neither does anyone else, McLean. The address in Paris you gave for him? On Rue du Texel.” I nodded. “It’s leased in the name of one ‘Pierre Shor.’” I went to speak but he cut me off with a raised hand. “And there is no one—of either name—enrolled in Saclay University.”

  “I . . .”

  “And the Indian Ministry of Home Affairs,” he continued forcefully, “could neither locate anyone in jail in Chandigarh who might be his father nor find any academic who might plausibly have been his professor.”

  My mind raced. Sweat broke across my back. The center of my chest throbbed with pain as my heart rate climbed.

  “An auntie. He said he had an auntie in London. I told Nazzar about her, too.”

  “I’m sure you will forgive our colleagues in the Security Service if it takes them a little longer than twenty-four hours to pinpoint that particular Mrs. Kaur.”

  In my mind’s eye I saw Baaz walking away from me in Tel Aviv, and the scales fell from my eyes. Frank shook his head at me like a dissatisfied schoolmaster.

  “Fortunately, if somewhat embarrassingly,” King continued, “the Israelis have found him for us.”

  From a pocket inside his uniform jacket he produced a folded piece of paper. He smoothed it out and handed it to Frank, who passed it to me. He wasn’t wearing a turban, but it was Baaz all right, caught in three-quarter profile from above by a security camera—rucksack over his right shoulder, ball cap and upturned collar hiding his hair.

  “Haifa?” Frank asked.

  “No. Ashdod,” Knight replied. “Your man here is queuing to board a cruise ship bound for Piraeus. His ticket was booked last Wednesday.” The date stamp on the video grab read 07:00:06 19-01-2018. Friday morning. “According to the ship’s manifest he was due to disembark at Alexandria on Saturday morning.”

  “And then what?” I asked.

  “And then he vanished, McLean. No one has seen or heard anything of Bhavneet Singh since.”

  That beautiful, brilliant boy had stepped out of the shit storm, pocketing the one thing we’d all wanted. Whatever his motivations, it was a stunning achievement. That much I had to admit. It would have been a coup as magnificent as it was monstrous, were it not for one defining fact: he’d jumped ship too soon. Unless his mind proved equal to Rachel’s, without her final calculations all he’d escaped with was precisely one hundred United States dollars. King took the printout from me and walked toward the door.

  “He’s all yours, Frank. The best of bloody luck to both of you.”

  General King stalked out of the dining room, swatting away the attentions of the lance corporal whose undesirable job it was to wait on him. Frank and I stood staring at the floor, waiting for their footsteps to recede. When the only sound left was the distant hum of traffic creeping along Whitehall, Frank looked up at me.

  “Well done. Not often you see the old bugger lost for words.”

  “Well done?”

  “The cottage was burned out and all the evidence destroyed. All anyone on the circuit abroad knows is that Her Majesty’s Government wanted you to kill a dead man—and I don’t need to tell you, of all people, how easy it is to lead the press. As usual, the great British public will believe exactly what we want them to: Seventy-seventh Brigade has been on it for days. All things considered, I think it went rather well.”

  “But the banknote. The—”

  “What banknote?” Frank interrupted me. “There is no banknote. It washed out to sea. Remember?” I opened my mouth to contradict him, but thought better of it.

  “There was a shooter, Frank. There was a gunman waiting in the bloody cottage.”

  “If you say so, Max. Though, as things stand, you might want to think twice before putting that to King. But I did take the precaution of doing as you suggested and checking the sat feed. You were right. We’d have seen a runner clear as day.” He helped himself to a glass of King’s wine. “There wasn’t one. Goldilocks must have fried.”

  “Show me, Frank. Show me the satellite images.”

  “As you well know,” he said, “those images are classified. So I’ll say it again, Max. All the evidence has been destroyed. You vaporized it.” He turned to face me squarely. “I expect exactly what happened in Donegal will remain permanently, uh, how shall we put it? Unknown.”

  “And Avilov, Dr. Leonid Avilov? His GRU goons picked me up in-country, in Mayo.”

  “Ah yes. The good doctor. He didn’t survive, either. A traffic accident, it seems. The Kremlin has issued a statement. Thrown from a bridge in Moscow during a collision. He was court-martialed a month ago, apparently. They’re denying all official knowledge of his excursions to the Holy Land and our Emerald Isle.” I flexed the fingers of my right hand. “So, uh, all’s quiet on the Eastern Front.”

  But there was one thing he hadn’t considered.

  “The computer, Frank. The Russians
have built a computer.”

  “Yes.” He nodded slowly. “As far as we can tell—and it’s hard to be certain—that does indeed seem to be the case.” He took a long draft of the wine, and put the empty glass back on the silver tray, next to the decanter. “But then again”—he smiled—“so have we.”

  “Does it work?”

  “No, it doesn’t. Not now, anyway. And you know,” he said, taking a step closer to me, “perhaps that’s for the best. After all, if it did, you and I would be out of a job, wouldn’t we?” He put his hands in his pockets and went to leave. “The general’s batman will show you out.”

  We both knew that I could kill him right then and there. The fact that I wouldn’t was perhaps the last guarantee of survival I had. Standing on the train platform in Ashford, I’d thought all bets were off. They weren’t. Frank had never even dealt me in. He’d manipulated me so perfectly that I’d believed all along that I’d been the one in charge.

  “You played me, Frank.”

  He hesitated in the doorway, his back still turned to me.

  “No, Max. You played yourself.”

  EPILOGUE

  APPOINTMENT IN ARKLOW

  SATURDAY, JANUARY 27, 2018

  I pressed my face to the railings. The old regency pile sat at the far end of the drive, gray beneath a damp Wicklow sky, windows full of clouds. It had rained earlier and the ground was wet, just as it had been twenty-seven years ago. On her eighteenth birthday Rachel had already been teetering on the edge of madness, greatness. All I’d had were stories.

  And of all the stories I’d told, the most enduring had been the one I told myself: that the gates to our family house had guarded a prison I’d been lucky to escape. But I’d known, sitting at Polina Yurievna’s table—my mother’s table—that I’d ended up on the wrong side of them.

  Hand over hand I hauled myself up over the old ironwork, fingers still smarting, chest and shoulder burning, and dropped down onto home ground.

  I walked to the front door and tried the handle, but it was locked. Then I skirted around the house, past the library, and under the shadow of the clock tower. The formal gardens fell away and there, landscaped into the edge of the woodland that rolled on for miles toward Croghan Mountain, was the lake that had taken my mother’s life.

  I sat down on the bench my father had carved for her before his last trip to Africa, and unfolded the old photograph Polina had given to me.

  Rock-a-bye baby, don’t lie on the edge, or the little gray wolf will bite your side. . . .

  I couldn’t say she hadn’t warned me.

  Frank would never admit it, because he didn’t need to: there was only one person who could have released my passport photograph, and only one person who could have called me at Doc’s—the same person who tipped off the Gardaí: him. Almost the only thing I’d gotten right was that we’d been equally suspicious of each other. The moment I’d hung on to the hundred-dollar bill had been the moment he’d cut me loose—not to discard me, but to force me toward the conclusion he’d gambled I’d reach, propelling me onward at every turn. He didn’t trust me. But he’d needed me to help him unravel a mission that he didn’t fully understand himself. He knew the only way I would do the job—the only way I could do it—was if I didn’t think I was doing it at all. I would have chased anyone on earth to their death for him.

  But not her.

  I suspected it as I’d watched her pyre burn, but hadn’t wanted to face it. The lean, wiry man running away from Doc’s; the BMW motorbike rider in Paris; the athletic Mercedes driver escaping the crash in Moscow; maybe even the figure in Aleksandr Denisovich’s front yard: all five-eleven, all the same build. Whoever he was, it was possible he’d dogged me all the way to Arkhangel. And if I was right, he’d saved me in Moscow, too. My father didn’t believe in coincidences. And neither did I. Frank’s operators were as unknown to me as they were to one another. Maybe I’d imagined it, or maybe I’d had a guardian angel after all—or a guardian knight. And maybe, just maybe, his name was Bhavneet Singh.

  One way or another, I was sure I’d be seeing him in the future. To survive in the tunnels like that takes more than intuition; it takes training. And to vanish into thin air like that takes more than courage; it takes connections. Perhaps I’d imagined it. Perhaps I was looking for patterns that weren’t there. But whoever or whatever Baaz was, a child prodigy from the Punjab simply didn’t cover it. Being photographed on the quayside wasn’t proof he’d boarded his ship. And Frank and I had both fiddled enough passenger manifests to know they weren’t worth the paper they were written on. The drive from Ashdod to Ben Gurion Airport takes less than an hour; perhaps it wasn’t the line at the port the Israelis should have been looking at, but the queue of people checking into my flight to Moscow—assuming, of course, that Talia even wanted to find him.

  The only real mystery left was why in the end I’d been spared at all. But as Frank had said himself: neither of us was out of a job yet.

  I’d started the drive that last night in Russia with the road lit by firelight, turning my back on the forests that would have swallowed Rachel and me. I’d thought I was coming back home, but bricks and water were nothing to come back for. She’d known all along that there was nowhere left for her to go. Not so me. I’d had a choice. And despite everything, I’d chosen to come in from the cold. Frank had sent a ghost to kill a devil. I watched the world, compelled toward my own completion, looking out over the still water, unable to let go.

  Rachel had set honor in one eye and death in the other. It had blinded her until she’d died. In the gathering gloom I asked myself what I might possibly be owed as the cost of all that bloodletting. Out of the flames I tried to conjure her face. But all that remained was the memory of those eyes flashing in the inferno, and the reality of me, alone, holding on to nothing but a name. I thought I had known my own mind. But I no longer even knew for sure which one of us had gone insane.

  Then from inside my jacket I removed the stricken cell phone, wrapped tight in waterproof bindings, and hurled it into the lake. It had saved my life once. The image in its circuits might one day do so again.

  When the ripples reached the shore, I heard footsteps, and then a man wearing a black uniform appeared beside me. A security guard, watching for trespassers, face hidden by the peak of his cap. He cleared his throat.

  “You shouldn’t be here, you know,” he said.

  “Yes,” I replied. “I know.”

  I put away the photograph of my mother and stood up. Turning my back on the lake, I let the lights of the town guide me to the sea. I had survived for a reason.

  Everyone always does.

  About the Author

  James Brabazon is an author, journalist, and documentary filmmaker. Based in the UK, he has traveled to more than seventy countries, investigating, filming, and directing in the world's most hostile environments. He is the author of All Fall Down, The Break Line, and the international bestseller My Friend the Mercenary, a memoir recounting his experiences of the Liberian civil war and the Equatorial Guinea coup plot. He divides his time between homes in London and on the south coast of England.

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