A Spy's Life (35 page)

The doctor was back again and the Dumpling was scurrying about trying to impress him with her efficiency, making nauseating purrs and coos as she went.

‘Hello Tomas,’ he said. ‘Treating you well, are they? Good. I have someone here who wants to see you.’ He stopped and told the Dumpling that she should take her break now. When she had gone he said, ‘Her name is Harriet and she is your father’s sister. I have mentioned before that your father has taken me into his confidence, but I wasn’t sure whether you had understood me. However, Nurse Roberts tells me that you are fully aware of everything that is being said to you and that you understand English.’ Some secret, thought Tomas. ‘That’s very good news. Anyway, I believe your father is at this moment in Prague, getting in touch with your mother. His sister thought she would pop in and see you while he was away. I think you’ll find her very refreshing company.’

Tomas was not at all happy at the idea of meeting someone who didn’t know him. It was stupid to feel so self-conscious, but it
was
different seeing a person from the outside world. He prayed that his body would behave for the next few minutes and he cautioned himself not to let anything stressful float into his mind because those were the thoughts which seemed to set off his spasms.

The woman came in and showed her face at the end of the bed. It was a pleasant, animated face.

‘Hi,’ she said. ‘I’m Bobby’s sister. My name is Harriet. I saw you fleetingly a week or so ago, but I’m sure you don’t remember me.’

He did remember her, but couldn’t think where he’d seen her. His first thought was that she did not look at all like her brother.

He waited. He was the victim of conversation now. People came in and they talked at him and he had to listen. Sometimes he wished he couldn’t understand. But his English had come back and, in fact, he was thinking in English most of the time. He believed his dreams were still in Czech, though.

She began to speak quietly and not in a rush, which most people did to fill the silence and cover their embarrassment. She looked at him directly in the eye also, which was a good sign. Only Nurse Roberts did that properly.

‘I know Bobby will have told you nothing about himself so I thought you might like to hear a bit about him.’ She paused. ‘He’s always been like that – not saying much about himself, but he’s got a lot worse in middle age. He spends too much time by himself. He travels an awful lot and I suppose he’s got out of the habit of talking to people properly. He’s good at what he does and he’s very persuasive and charming when he wants something. But it’s such a pity that he doesn’t let people see more of himself in other ways. You know, he can be really funny. Hardly anyone ever sees that side.’

This is exactly what he wanted – a story, the story of his father’s life. Harriet moved to the chair that the Dumpling had just left and sat down. She leaned over to touch his hand and then decided to perch on the side of the bed.

‘I hope you don’t mind,’ she said with a laugh. ‘It’s just a lot easier to see you.’ Harriet was fearless, but she was not overpowering. She continued speaking, stopping to allow the ventilation that occurs naturally in a conversation. That was considerate because his brain didn’t move as fast as it used to and sometimes he needed a moment or two to catch up. She was smart too: she anticipated what he wanted to ask her. Just as he was thinking that he would like to know something about Harland’s background, she began to tell him.

‘There’s eight years’ difference between us, so for a lot of my childhood Bobby was away. You see, our mother died quite early so having him home was just perfect. My father, whose name was Douglas, was a scholar – he lectured and wrote about theology. He used to go off to Cambridge University to do a spell of lecturing and he’d bring Bobby back with him for the weekend or, better still, the long vacation. Then things brightened up. My father started smiling again and we were a family. You see, we all missed my mother dreadfully.’ She paused. ‘She died in a road accident a few miles from our house. I don’t remember much, except a terribly sombre atmosphere settling over our lives. And there wasn’t any escape because we lived in a desolate and flat part of England, called the Fens. Things stay put in the Fens. Nothing shifts or moves on its own and that was the case with our grief. It stayed. My father never really got over my mother’s death and died at quite an early age himself. I was twenty then and Bobby was twenty-eight. I suppose it brought us together. We’ve been pretty close for most of the time since then.’

She looked away. Tomas felt this was because of her own sadness and regrets and that it had nothing to do with him. She was behaving naturally and he felt complimented.

She continued in this vein for some while, telling him how her brother had given up the idea of doing physics and changed to an engineering course, a sign of his practicality as well as his basic modesty. He was much brighter than he ever believed, she said. Perhaps that’s why he had gone into intelligence work. It had seemed to their father a waste of his talent and decency.

Harriet talked to him about meeting Eva.

‘Was her name Eva? He thinks she has another name.’ She looked into his eyes. ‘I wish you could talk to me, Tomas. I really do. We shall have to work out a way of you communicating with me. The nurse says that you sometimes use your eyelid. Is that right?’

Tomas blinked once.

‘That means yes?’

Tomas blinked again.

‘And twice for no?’

Another blink.

‘Now that I know, I promise I won’t plague you with questions – not everything has a yes or a no answer. But can I ask if she’s called Eva?’

Tomas blinked once and then blinked twice more rapidly.

‘A yes and a no. Perhaps Eva is part of her name?’

Tomas blinked once.

‘I see – she used her second name. Your mother was a big thing in his life. I don’t imagine he has told you how important she was. I’m only just beginning to understand that when he stopped seeing her, a part of him closed down. I don’t know the details. Maybe you do, but it obviously had something to do with your arrival.’ She looked hard into his eyes. It was not a gaze you flinched from. ‘How strange life is. Having a son is the one thing that might make Bobby connect with the world. Your coming to him has affected him deeply but I’m not sure he appreciates this yet. Was he very suspicious when you first met?’ She smiled and waited.

A blink.

‘I thought so.’ She smiled again. ‘That’s typical. But you must forgive him. He’s been through a lot. Do you want to hear more?’

A blink.

‘Not tired?’

He lied with two blinks.

‘Good. I’m going to tell you a little about him which will make you understand him a lot better.’

Tomas listened as she began to speak about his father’s trip to Prague in 1989. She said he was badly treated – badly hurt. Tomas wondered what that meant exactly. Then he had become seriously ill. He had sorted this out, but she was sure that the effects of the beating had stayed with him.

Tomas was aware that he was suddenly having difficulty breathing. The machine pumped air into his body, but his body didn’t seem to want it. And in some remote part of him – his legs? – there was a new tingling which was something between the sensation of a skin warming up after being exposed to extreme cold and a nettle rash. He made a conscious effort to divert his thoughts to the boy of fourteen that he had been during the Velvet Revolution.

He pulled the images from his memory and forced himself to concentrate on all their details. He saw the train ride to Prague. ‘It was the first week. They had heard about the police attacking students in the city because way up in the mountains where they spent most of their time they could receive German TV. It was odd: his mother was usually so cautious and wary of the authorities. But a few days after that news she took him out of school and bought two train tickets to Prague. The day after they arrived – a Thursday – they went to Wenceslas Square to join the crowds. It was bitterly cold – the first day of winter. They waited from the middle of the morning to late evening. His mother was flushed and kept on plucking his arm and hugging him, which was a little embarrassing.

‘Remember this, Tomas,’ she had said, holding his face between her gloved hands, ‘you’re watching history being made. Promise me that you will never forget this.’

And he had remembered that day, mostly because of the aura that surrounded her. She had never been so alive, so passionate, so moved. It was as if she’d been pretending to be another person all those years.

In the following days the gatherings in Wenceslas Square had swelled. They went without fail each morning and stayed until the evening, buying food from the street vendors who materialised along the fringes of the crowds. At times he found it boring, listening to speeches over a poor public-address system. But eventually he understood that the crowds were holding vigil until the moment when freedom had been irrevocably seized. He was fascinated by his mother during those days. Strangers in the crowd would latch on to her, drawn by her infectious optimism. Everything she was thinking was expressed in her face and that gave it a new beauty. He would never forget those days in Wenceslas Square.

He was better now. The distraction had done the trick. He returned to Harriet.

‘Can I ask you a question?’ she asked.

He felt tired but he blinked once.

‘Well – I think you have just given me your answer. So, I’m going to go now. I’ll be back tomorrow, if you like.’ She paused and examined his face. Then she touched his cheek just above the stubble line. ‘I have left some music which I know you like. I got the police to tell me what was in your bag. They wouldn’t give me the original CDs, so my husband’s secretary spent the morning getting duplicates.’

He said thank you, which he hoped she would realise was three blinks.

‘There is one other thing,’ she said, getting up from the bed. ‘I have done some research about your condition on the Web. There are quite a few devices which will enable you to communicate more easily. Most will allow you to send e-mail. I’m going to talk to the doctor and see which he thinks will be the best for you. It’s really important that you’re able to say what you want.’

He blinked once and closed his eyes.

After dropping Harland off at a small hotel by the Old Customs Yard in the centre of the city, Zikmund did not return for a full twenty-four hours. He phoned mid-morning to say that it would take him all day to do some essential research. He would tell him about it that evening or the next day.

The city was choked with fog and few people were about. Harland spent a listless time walking around and reading in coffee shops. In the early afternoon he returned to his functional suite of rooms with a paperback of Dickens’s
The Old Curiosity Shop
, which he’d bought at an English bookshop near the hotel. He read for a little while, opened some wine and looked out at the day congealing to dusk.

With a leaden certainty, he knew that nearly everything had fallen into place. Kochalyin was Lipnik. Kochalyin had also been Eva’s husband. This explained how Tomas had come to be in Bosnia and why he’d been traced to London and shot. Kochalyin had ordered the death of his stepson and the torture and death of a young girl of whom he knew nothing. As for the plane crash, that too must have been Kochalyin’s work, although the precise mechanism that caused the plane to swerve into the lighting towers as it came into land was only known to the FBI. He had pretty much everything he needed to make the full report to Jaidi.

At ten that evening he answered the phone to The Bird.

‘Friend Zikmund gave me your number. Are you finding him helpful?’

‘Yes, very,’ said Harland. ‘Why’re you calling me?’

‘Because there’ve been a lot of developments which are going to take the heat off you.’

‘How?’

‘It seems our country and western disc jockey got back to work yesterday to find a great fuss.’ Harland remembered the old crack about GCHQ – it’s in the country and west of London. ‘Every spare man, woman and child with a gift for cryptography and other dark arts was deployed on tracing the source of these coded signals. Since Christmas there has been a burst of the stuff and the first few days of this week there was an awful lot of activity. The Americans and our lot at GCHQ were fairly hopping and decided they had to close this thing down once and for all. Macy heard from another source that they had wired up several of the radio stations used by these jokers in the past and started to trace all the incoming calls.’

‘That’s a big operation.’

‘Yes. But it wasn’t as though they hadn’t thought of it before. Apparently these characters had some kind of routing system in Stockholm. Stockholm’s full of Internet wizards, it seems. They bust a place last year and then just last month they pinned down the routing system and worked out who the sources were. A troublemaker named Mortz met a sticky end, I gather. God knows who killed him, but he was dead and things went quiet which is all anyone cared about. Then all hell blew up when the radio stations started pumping out more of this stuff during Christmas week. Again, they thought they had solved the problem – I don’t know how they thought this, but they did. However, the coded signals kept coming. And guess what?’

‘Just tell me, Cuth.’

‘They traced this last batch of calls to London – to about a dozen numbers being used in rotation in the Bayswater area. With their usual towering incompetence, our former colleagues set about watching every house where one of these calls had come from. They assumed there was some kind of cell operating in the area – people running from house to house with a laptop. But this particular spot in London happens to be an area of high Arab ownership and Arabs do not spend the winter in damp old London. Most of the houses were empty and there was no sign of any activity. Then some bright spark realised that the telephone exchange must have been interfered with. They found two computers at different points in local junction boxes. Crisis over. Everybody goes home for tea and crumpets and hearty congratulations from the secret brotherhood flood in. Only problem is that they never find the bloke or blokes who were responsible. Still, the disc jockey tells me that there hasn’t been a bleep out of any of the radio stations for thirty-six hours or more.’