(1995) By Any Name (28 page)

‘I don’t think West would have taken the equipment if he hadn’t intended to hide out in the hills,’ Chaloner persisted.

‘Equipment which you handed to him.’ Simmonds felt obliged to contribute something to the conversation.

‘Do I have your permission to go out on patrol, sir?’ Chaloner pressed.

Heddingham was already phrasing his excuses to London, excuses that laid the blame squarely on the Special Forces officers who had flagrantly and blatantly ignored his orders.

‘Sir?’ Chaloner prompted.

‘Go to the devil if you so choose, Chaloner, as long as you’re back here by six tomorrow morning for a briefing.’

‘Sir.’ Chaloner wondered why the briefing had been called so far in advance, but concerned only with going after the man who had humiliated him, he didn’t ask.

Whether it was because their lovemaking had broken down some of the barriers between them, instilling trust as well as lust, and Elizabeth hoped – a little affection, or whether it was because West was more relaxed and secure in the haven he had found, Elizabeth didn’t know, but it proved easier for her to hypnotize him a second time.

She worked at a slower pace; asking questions about the door he was visualizing. The dark wooden door with brass furniture and stained glass panels he described wasn’t the door to the flat in Brecon.

Resisting the temptation to ask him to open it, she took him slowly and methodically back through the drifting clouds to the first moment of his life he could actually remember – running down the motorway.

‘I know you’re running, but we want to go back further. Just a little further. Where are you?’

‘Running, down a road. It’s dark… ’

‘What can you see at the side of the road?’

‘Houses.’

‘What kind?’

‘Semis, curtains closed, lights shining… it’s dark, and raining. I’m wet.’ He tossed fitfully on the mattress. ‘Cold and wet.’

‘Go back… Float upwards… upwards in the clouds… and back. Half an hour, no further… You’ve floated back. What are you doing?’

‘Walking down the stairs.’

‘Where are the stairs?’

‘In the house,’ he answered impatiently. ‘I’m cold.

I’ve just left the shower. My hair is wet.’

‘Is there someone downstairs?’

‘Visitors. They want to see me.’

‘Who are they?’

‘Oh Jesus Christ!’ His voice pitched high, ending in a chilling scream. ‘Oh no… ’ He flung himself face down on the mattress and covered his head with his hands.

‘Are they shooting at you?’

‘They’re dead,’ he mumbled thickly.

“They’re dead.” There was raw agony in the pronouncement that induced a tide of self-loathing.

No one had the right to inflict the kind of pain she was subjecting John to. Dave had once told her that if a patient had blotted out something, they had done so for good reason. And, he’d believed that some experiences were better left buried, for all the modern confrontation theories and group therapy treatments.

‘They didn’t have to kill them. Not when they wanted me.’ The intense anger in his voice was tempered with an almost unbearable grief. ‘Come and get me you bastards!’ he taunted. ‘I’ll make you pay for this… ’ He rose and ran to the window.

‘John!’ she realized he was about to hurl himself through the glass. ‘It’s over. You’re not there any more.’ She blocked his path with her body. He bulldozed her to the floor. She gripped his ankles with both hands, straining to hold him. ‘You’re back in the house in Libanus. It’s over. John it’s over… ’ She looked up. His eyes were open. He was staring down at her. ‘John?’

‘There was a gun pointing at me. I ran through a window, it shattered… ’ he screamed again, a scream so piercing she was afraid it would be heard from one end of the village to the other.

‘It’s all right.’ Rising to her feet she wrapped her arms around him and held him close. It didn’t matter that the blankets were slipping away from both of them. Only that he was frightened and in pain, and needed what little comfort she was able to offer him.

‘I saw that hand again. The one with the scar and the gun. There was blood… lots of blood… ’ He looked down at his own hands as though he were checking them for the scar.

‘You didn’t have a gun.’

‘I wasn’t firing one.’

‘Did you see the face of the man who held the gun?’

‘He was middle-aged, fair skinned.’

‘Do you remember your name?’

‘No.’

‘You were in a house. Walking down the stairs in a house. Can you remember where it was?’

He closed his eyes and covered his face with his hands.

‘We have time… ’

‘No we don’t,’ he broke in bitterly. ‘That is the one thing we don’t have.’ He dropped the blanket, rose to his feet and walked naked to the bed where he’d left his clothes and the camouflage suit. She watched him dress. Strange, she’d never thought of a man’s body as beautiful before. Not even Joseph’s. The desire to go to him was overwhelming, but he didn’t need her.

She’d done all she could, and it wasn’t enough.

‘You’re leaving?’

‘I was far gone, but I know I screamed loud enough to be heard in Brecon, let alone Libanus.’

‘I’m coming with you.’

‘No. Stay here, wait a couple of hours then go a house and telephone the police.’

‘They know I stayed with you because I wanted to.

No one made me jump after you from that ambulance.’

‘I won’t expose you to any more danger.’

‘Will it be as dangerous where you’re going, as it will be for me if I stay here?’ She raised her eyes to his. ‘Dave, the paramedic… ’

‘Put these on.’ He handed her the small camouflage suit he’d scavenged from the Land Rover.

Dropping her blanket she started to dress.

‘I still think you should stay here. If you can’t trust the police, call a newspaper, they’ll give you protection.’

‘And what story do you suggest I tell them?’

‘The truth.’

‘Do you know what that is?’ she asked flatly.

‘Because, I don’t. Not any more.’

‘Donovan O’Gallivan.’ Captain Cartwright passed a photograph pinned to a file down the conference table in the Command Cell that had been set up in Stirling Lines. ‘IRA terrorist, who offered his services to a Middle Eastern based group after the ceasefire. This is the only known photograph of him. The minister thought I should brief you with what we know about him.’

‘We’re expected to recognize him from this?’

Major Simmonds held up the blurred photograph of a man wearing dark glasses and a beret, a black scarf tied, bandit fashion, over the lower part of his face.

‘It was taken at an IRA funeral. His description is in the file. Six foot four inches, well built, black hair, blue eyes, no distinguishing features apart from various scars and healed bullet wounds, gifted linguist who has been known to successfully adopt various accents.’

‘It has to be our man,’ Heddingham affirmed. The operation was wearing him down. All he could think of after a day spent in fruitless conference, staring out of the windows at a bleak, white frosted landscape, was a month’s leave. Preferably in Barbados with a woman prettier and more amenable than his wife had been of late.

‘The description fits many men,’ Captain Cartwright advised prudently.

‘But it also happens to fit our man,’ Heddingham commented. ‘The photograph resembles him, and you chaps must have been fairly certain it was him before you went to the minister with this?’ He tapped the file.

‘He is a known Islamic fundamentalist operative whose movements cannot be accounted for at present.

Our intelligence services believe he is on assignment in Europe.’

‘Well, there you have it then, Cartwright. And the minister is satisfied with the identification?’

‘Neither the minister, nor the cabinet will be satisfied until this man is caught,’ the thin, runny nosed brigadier, Cullen-Heames, who had flown down to Stirling Lines with Cartwright, ventured.

Heddingham looked to Simmonds. ‘I’m in charge of this operation, and I say it’s time to stop pussyfooting around. West has killed four times already. Shoot on sight. You’ll relay the order, Major?’

‘Sir.’ Simmonds left the room.

‘Shoot on sight, sir?’ the radio operative asked Simmonds as he approached.

‘How did you guess?’

‘With the disarmament conference starting tomorrow there’s no way they can afford to take any chances.’

West left the guesthouse the moment it was dark.

With the memory of his screams still echoing in his mind, he packed the rucksack with food and the sleeping bags, checked and primed the guns, slung one over his shoulder and thrust the other into a holster. He tied red bands cut from the blankets to both his and Elizabeth’s upper right arms. He had covered everything he could think of, but decided he could forget the password. After last night they would have undoubtedly changed it.

Elizabeth switched off the fire. They hadn’t even spent twenty four hours in the dilapidated room. It was little more than a squat, but she had lived more vividly within its walls than she had done at any time since Joseph’s death. She had even experienced a fleeting, momentary happiness. Whatever the future brought, that at least would stay with her.

‘Ready?’

She looked at John, already he seemed harder, more remote than the man she had made love to, and it wasn’t simply the clothes and weapons.

‘Yes.’ She pulled the ski mask over her head.

He unzipped her suit and thrust the spare Browning into the inside of her waistband.

‘I don’t want it,’ she protested.

‘I know.’ He led the way out of the room, switching off the immersion heater as he went. ‘But I might.’

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

‘You can oversee the search from here, sir,’ Sergeant Price suggested as Chaloner pored over a map of the Beacon area in the room they’d requisitioned in the Storey Arms.

‘I’m going out with one of the patrols, Sergeant,’

Chaloner informed him abruptly without looking up from the map.

‘You didn’t get any sleep last night, and not much in the two nights before that,’ the sergeant dropped tact in favour of common sense. ‘The men are fresh…’

‘I’ll keep up, Sergeant.’ Chaloner rammed his finger on the map. ‘He’s around here somewhere,’ he declared decisively.

The sergeant looked down. ‘You think he’s in Libanus, sir?’

‘Somewhere close by.’

‘But the police conducted house to house searches the night he jumped from that ambulance and again the following morning. They found nothing in the village, or the surrounding farms. And neither did the dogs that picked up his scent from the clothes in the St Michael Street flat.’

‘Let’s look at what we do know, not at what we don’t.’ Chaloner took a pink marker pen and drew a triangle half way along the curving road between Libanus and the Storey Arms. ‘He jumped here. We had two hundred men out looking for him within the hour, and they came up with absolutely nothing. That tells us he did one of two things… ’

‘You think he had someone waiting for him?’

Sergeant Price interrupted.

‘If there had been, they would have had to be in a helicopter. Within an hour of him jumping the police had road blocks set up in every direction for fifty miles. And if he had flown off, he hardly would have returned to ambush me.’

‘So, he knows the terrain, and used the cover of the snow storm to dig himself in on the mountain.’

‘Precisely. For my money he went to ground. And that’s why he took brandy and hypothermia blankets from the ambulance. Men have dug themselves into a hide with less and survived.’

‘And Dr Santer? You think she’s still with him?’

‘If she’s alive. The driver told us that West didn’t want her to stay with him. Yesterday, we mounted an intensive search of this entire area,’ Chaloner drew a circle on the map that encompassed the three peaks of the Beacons, the Storey Arms, the areas both sides of the Libanus Road and the Mountain Centre, ‘and we come up with precisely nothing. Then in the early hours of the morning our man turns up here.’ He brought the pen down on the back road that led from Libanus to the Mountain Centre. ‘He ambushes me, steals water and wind proof clothing, survival equipment, skis and food, all of which will enable him to continue living in a hide. A hide he could have left Dr Santer in, a hide which must be less than an hour’s walk from the point at which he jumped. Any further and one of the patrols would have seen him going in.’

‘And you think he’s still there?’

‘Wouldn’t you be, if you were him? He’s evaded us so far. Therefore it’s logical to assume he knows our methods and thought patterns. And he’s probably assumed, quite rightly so, that the brass will want the search moved on soon. All he has to do is sit tight for a few more days before making his next move.’

‘So what do the patrols cover tonight, sir?’

‘We have a dozen?’

‘Forty men, eight NCO’s, including me, and four officers including you, sir.’

‘Form thirteen patrols. We concentrate on a five mile area from the point at which he jumped, and,’

Chaloner smiled frostily, ‘let’s hope we find him before morning. If we don’t, I have a feeling the CO

isn’t going to be slow in laying the blame for his escape at our door.’

‘We’ll need luck, sir,’ the sergeant rolled up the map. ‘And a bucket of morale. The lads are getting a little tired of all this arctic weather training.’

Elizabeth followed John to the window that overlooked the flat roofed extension. He checked all three guns for the last time. While Elizabeth had dressed he’d cleaned every last smear of grease from their mechanisms, lest they freeze and jam when they were taken into the cold. He pulled his white ski mask over his face before opening the casement. He studied the buildings and backyards that gleamed white in the twilight. Encouraged by the silence, he stepped into the thick snow on the roof. Putting his hand on his gun, he glanced back, watching Elizabeth climb out alongside him.

Despite the layers of clothing and the boots, she shivered as soon as her lungs drew in the freezing air.

He moved his head, signalling for her to go down first. She sank to her knees on the edge of the roof. He gripped her wrists and lowered her down. Closing the window, he pushed in the splintered wood and smeared snow over the broken area around the catch.