Arkhangel : A Novel (2020)
Page 34
‘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 27 January 2018
I pressed my face to the railings. The old Regency pile sat at the far end of the drive, grey 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 on to 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 towards 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 that Polina had given to me.
Rock-a-bye baby, don’t lie on the edge, or the little grey 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 got 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 towards the conclusion he’d gambled I’d reach, propelling me onwards 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 each other. 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 towards my own completion – looking out over the still water, unable to let go.
Rachel had set honour 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 from 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.
THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING
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First published in the UK by Michael Joseph, 2020
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ISBN: 978-1-405-93704-7
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Table of Contents
Title Page
About the Author
By the Same Author
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue: Appointment in Arkhangel
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Epilogue: Appointment in Arklow
Copyright