A Gathering of Spies (24 page)

Her eyes also were open, staring bleakly.

Not yet eighteen
, Katarina thought again.

She reached out and closed the girl's eyes.

After another few minutes, she gained her feet. She felt suddenly old. Her back hurt. She looked down again at the corpse, then bent over—her spine popped loudly—and picked up the knife.

After straightening again, she hesitated. The kitchen windows were open; she could hear the pleasant buzzing of insects in the garden.

The garden earth would be soft, easy to dig.

She set the bloody knife down on the counter, got her hands under Gladys's arms, and began to drag her.

When Sir John Frederick Bailey arrived home that evening, he found Katarina Heinrich standing in his kitchen, alone in the semidarkness, holding a bottle of wine.

At the sound of his footsteps, she turned. She swayed, regarding him. Her clothes were muddy; her face was slack.

Sir John Frederick Bailey looked her up and down.

“Where did that bottle come from?” he asked sternly.

Katarina didn't answer. She raised the bottle and drank from it.

“Where's Gladys?” Bailey said. He took a step forward, into the kitchen. “Where did that bottle come from? Answer me, Agnes. From the cellar?”

Katarina nodded.

“Did Gladys tell you that you could—”

“John,” she said. “Come here.”

He stood there, staring at her.

“Come on,” she said, and smiled. “I've got a secret.”

Bailey snorted. “You're drunk,” he said.

He reached for her, meaning to take the arm that held the bottle. But somehow the bottle ended up on the floor, and her hand ended up closing around his wrist. She turned him around forcefully; a bone in his arm splintered with a loud, dry crack. He opened his mouth to cry out, and her other hand came up, the fingers sliding between his lips, choking him.

Then her first hand moved and did something soft in his side, near his kidney, spreading warmth up into his ribs. He felt a delicious agony that shaded, very quickly, into wet, and dark, and quiet.

“
Verzeihen Sie mir
,” Katarina murmured, lowering him to the floor.

She waited for full night to fall, just in case the neighbors happened not to mind their own business. Then she dragged Bailey to the garden, slit his throat, laid him upside-down over a sharp rock, and watched him bleed into the freshly turned earth.

After watching him drain for a few moments, she went inside again and collected her baggage. She piled it into the Aston Martin parked in the driveway: a four-seater with two doors, built in 1938 but still in near-perfect condition. A nice step up from the lorry, she thought. And all she'd had to do to get it was—

She cut the thought off.

She entered the house again and conducted a final quick search to make sure she'd missed nothing of value. She was rewarded by the discovery of several dozen small white tablets in a vial in Bailey's desk drawer. They were amphetamines, produced by the American army to keep its soldiers alert and awake. Bailey, it seemed, had his vices.

Katarina took a handful and pocketed them. Then, with sudden inspiration, she took another handful and, using the flat blade of a letter opener, ground them to dust on the desktop. She tore a piece of paper from a notepad, folded it into a packet to hold the powder, and tucked it into her shoe. If she needed a sudden burst of strength, she would forsake the pills and simply snort the powder. It would travel directly to her bloodstream, providing intense energy and increased alertness—for a few minutes. Then, of course, she would crash.

For emergency only
, she thought.

She went around to the backyard again, checked on Bailey, and saw that he had another few minutes of draining left in him.

She stood in the garden and waited, carefully thinking nothing at all.

She struck off an hour past dark.

She drove north. She would avoid turning east, toward the coast, until it was absolutely necessary. The ten-mile strip bordering the water was a restricted area; it would be heavily patrolled.

She felt nervous.

After driving for perhaps twenty minutes she noticed that the road seemed to end very abruptly two hundred yards ahead. As she drew closer, she realized that she had reached her first roadblock: two sedans, parked in a V. She slowed, thinned her lips, then came to a full stop.

Two young men appeared from the brush at the side of the road. One came to shine his torch in her face, while the other went around to the passenger seat to take a look at Bailey. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw light glancing off the ascot wrapped around Bailey's throat, off the brim of the hat pulled low over his face—

“Get that light out of his eyes,” she snapped. “Can't you see he's sleeping?”

The lads, neither of them older than nineteen, hastily obeyed.

“Sorry to trouble you, miss. But may we see your papers, please?”

She passed the papers over, then sat drumming her fingers impatiently on the wheel.

The man by her door looked at the first identity card. He flipped to the second. He flipped back to the first.

He handed the cards back through the window, and waved her on.

She passed Spalding, then Newark-on-Trent, then grazed the eastern border of Mansfield, then entered a stretch of country leading toward Doncaster. She drove for another hour without encountering a second roadblock.

Her nervousness increased.

What did they know that she didn't?

Finally, in the small hours of the morning, she decided not to push her luck. If she came upon a roadblock now, she would be the only car to have passed within recent memory. They would pay far too much attention.

She began to look for a place to wait out the rest of the night. After twenty minutes, she reached a small road running roughly northeast, into thick woods. The way was marked by a signpost featuring a wood carving of a pheasant.
Private property
, she thought. With any luck, they owned a lot of land and would leave her alone until morning.

She doused her headlamps and took the turn.

Once surrounded by trees, she drove for another thirty feet, then pulled the Aston Martin as far off the road as possible. She killed the engine, got out, and spent ten minutes arranging loose brush to screen the car.

She climbed back behind the wheel and tried to settle down for the night.

Sir John Frederick Bailey, even bled, was beginning to smell. She turned away from him, putting her face near the open window. But she couldn't escape it: a ripe, sour odor, already rich with decay. She tried to close off her senses. Discipline. She had hoped to keep Bailey dirough the second night of driving, until she had reached York, in case she encountered more roadblocks. He shouldn't have started to putrefy for another day at least.

But the stench proved too great to bear. There was something about Bailey, it seemed, that lent itself to rapid decomposition. After a half hour she admitted to herself that his use to her was finished.

She got up, dragged the rigor mortis-stiffened corpse out of the car—upsetting much of her screen in the process—pulled him two dozen feet away, and left him lying facedown in a streambed. She had to bury him, of course. But she suddenly felt too exhausted even to move.

She went back to the car and slipped behind the wheel again. In just a moment, she would get up and dig a shallow grave. She wondered if the ground of the streambed would be easy to dig. Or would the forest floor be better?

God, but she was tired.

The interior of the car still smelled like a corpse. When had she become so soft? she wondered. When had she turned so weak that something as trivial as a bad smell could upset her?

She had rested long enough. It was time to get up, leave the car, and bury the corpse.

She would take an amphetamine. Get herself going again. That was what she would do.

In just a moment, she thought.

In just a moment.

In just one more moment.

She woke to the sound of a truncheon rapping on the windshield.

A man was standing beside the Aston Martin, waving her out of the car.

She bought herself a second by rubbing at her eyes. Then she obeyed slowly, leaving the suitcase in the back untouched—he was watching her too closely.

The man was tall, on the far side of sixty, smelling powerfully of hair tonic, wearing a faded waistcoat. It was a cane in his hand, she realized, not a truncheon. In his other hand was a leash. A mottled gray-black terrier strained at the end of the line—not in her direction but toward the dry streambed.

Toward the corpse.

“Morning,” the man said.

“Good morning,” Katarina said.

“You won't mind if I ask what you're doing here, sleeping in a car on my brother's property, now would you?”

Katarina looked around for a moment before answering. If there was a brother in the vicinity, he was keeping to himself. Nor could she see a house or a farm; only the woods, the deep, wet shadows, and the bright morning sun.

She looked back at the man, judging distances.

“I ran low on petrol,” Katarina said. “I pulled off the road. A girl can't be too careful these days.”

The terrier turned its head and looked up at its master. It barked twice, pipingly, then strained again toward the streambed.

“I suppose not,” the man said. “Where are you headed, all by yourself?”

Katarina heard twigs snapping. She turned her head and saw another man coming from the direction of the streambed. He was perhaps a decade younger than the first, wearing a dark roll-neck sweater, holding a shotgun.

“Body in the stream,” he said.

“Bloody hell!” the man with the dog said.

“Raise your hands,” the man with the shotgun said, and put the gun on Katarina.

She hesitated, then put her hands above her head.

“You know what we've got here, George? One of those Fifth Columnists, I'll wager.”

“You've gone daft. This bird?”

“
You
explain why she's out here, then, with a body in the stream not two dozen feet away. The car's stolen, I'll wager, and what's more she's got no papers.”

“What about it?” George asked Katarina.

“On the dash.”

George moved to the car, opened the front door, and leaned in. After a moment he stepped out again, holding the papers. He carried them to the man with the roll-neck sweater, riffling through them as he walked.

“Gladys?” he said.

Katarina nodded.

“Don't take this the wrong way, love, but you look a shade over seventeen.”

She said nothing.

“And who's this? Fellow in the stream?”

“Aye.”

They both looked at Katarina.

“Turn around, lass,” George said. He came forward, unlooping his belt from his trousers. “Put your hands behind your back.”

Katarina turned, lowered her hands, and put them into the small of her back.

She watched the man's shadow on the forest floor.

As he reached for her wrists, she pivoted on the balls of both feet, dropping, sending a mirror block to his right hand, striking the ulnar nerve on the inside of the wrist, deadening that arm. Then, rising again, she delivered a left hooking arc with the heel of her palm, hitting the small bony ridge just under his right ear, dislocating his jaw.

She seized him by his shoulders, spun him around to face his brother, threw him forward, and took cover behind the car.

Roll-neck sweater held his fire—God damn it.

Katarina crouched behind the Aston Martin, peering beneath the undercarriage. She could see George sprawled on his side, on the ground, looking at his dead arm with wonder.

She opened the back door of the car and started to climb in.

The shotgun thundered. The windows on one side of the car blew out, spraying glass.

A shard grazed her temple. She ignored it. Her fingers snagged the suitcase and she quickly slithered back out of the car. She hit the latch, found the haft of the knife. Except for the shallow wound on her forehead she was unhurt. One barrel left in the gun. But where was he? She peered beneath the undercarriage again. She could see George, still down—and the dog, still with its master—but where was the second man?

A soft crunch.

To her left. Coming around the Aston Martin.

She rolled under the car, rolled over crackling pieces of glass, and came up lightly onto her feet.

Roll-neck was in the process of sneaking around the front. She turned the knife over in her hand as she stood, taking aim.

“'Ware!” George cried, his voice cracking.

Roll-neck spun, bringing the gun up. At the same instant, the knife flew from Katarina's hand. She immediately dropped onto the forest floor again. She did not see the knife find its target; but there was a choking sound, a drizzle of blood in the air, a belated explosion from the gun, then a sudden hissing, squealing, steam-venting from the front of the car.

The dog was coming for her.

She reached for its throat, but it gave her teeth, trying to bite her hand. She managed to spin the thing over in the air and drive it into the earth head-first. The terrier let out a yelp. Katarina picked it up again. She drove it into the ground again, and its neck snapped.

She turned her attention back to George. His eyes were huge. He began to try to drag himself away across the ground, his dead arm flapping uselessly.

She finished him.

Then she considered her next course of action. The Aston Martin was ruined; steam was pouring from it. How long would it take for these men to be missed? She looked for wedding bands, saw none. Which didn't mean a thing. If the alarm was going to be raised immediately, then she would not travel on foot; she would risk hitchhiking. But if the alarm would not be raised for half a day, she would rather gain some distance from this place before showing her face to anybody.

She decided to proceed on foot—at least for a time. She ate a quick breakfast, not looking around herself, chewing thoroughly, so the food would stay down. She went through her baggage and chose only the most necessary items—the knife, water, the torch. She splashed water on her wounds, changed the bandages again, and left the medical supplies behind with the suitcase.