For the Good of the State (40 page)

Somehow Audley had got ahead of him again. ‘What—?’

The old man stopped, and stared around for a second, and then turned. ‘I said “Just as Jack will hold
me
responsible for whatever happens otherwise”, Tom.’ He gave Tom a hard look. ‘And Henry Jaggard will hold
you
responsible also, eh?’

The wind dropped, suddenly and freakishly, so that Audley’s final shout came out unnaturally loudly, us though to emphasize what had been in the back of Tom’s mind ever since he had come to his decision. Then, even more suddenly, its full force hit him again at the corner of the path where it reached the coast at last, almost stopping him in his tracks.

‘Yes—’ Not so much the wind as the whole glorious panorama of the North Devon coastline took his breath away, with headland after headland plunging uncompromisingly into the sea, with the promise of deepwater directly beneath them: an indomitable coast against which the wind and the waves beat endlessly but in vain.

But Audley was still staring at him, partly blocking his view of the path along this coast and finally concentrating his mind at the same time. ‘I shall resign, of course,’ he said.

‘Yes?’ Disappointingly, the big man accepted this shock-horror revelation with only mild interest. ‘Why?’

It was on the tip of Tom’s tongue to tell the truth, that he was fed up with the accumulated risk of being an accidental and secondary target while trying unsuccessfully to make obstinate old buggers like Audley himself take the most basic precautions. But then he saw that it wasn’t quite the real truth.

‘I can’t work for a man I’ve betrayed.’ He liked the harshness in his own voice. ‘I should have quit an hour ago, and left you to get on with your damn “Nikolai” by yourself. But I promised your daughter, in a moment of weakness, that I’d watch over you, David.’ Looking at Audley now was like looking at a coin with hate on one side, and love on the other, when the coin was balanced so that he could see neither side. ‘I’m keeping faith with her now—against my better judgement.’

‘Ah!’ Still only mild interest. ‘The old thankless task! Believe me, boy—I
do
understand. Because I’ve been there too, myself.’ The old Beast-smile returned, moistened now by the fine mist of rain which was stinging Tom’s own cheek, hard-driven by the wind. ‘So just answer me this one question, then:
who would you betray—your country or your friend
?’

As well as irritation bordering on anger, Tom felt the rain driving cold into his exposed eye. ‘That’s a ridiculous question, David. It’s bad enough to have to risk my neck for you. But I don’t have to put up with humbug as well.’

‘No.’ The smile twisted downwards. ‘But just this once—just this
last
time … can’t you humour your dear mother’s old friend?’ The smile vanished. ‘And then no more questions.’

That Mamusia’s old flame played dirty right to the last question was absurdly comforting, somehow: it made the outcome of that old, long-resolved contest between Audley and Father, in which Father would always have played a straight bat (just like William Marshall in Ranulf of Chester’s day) quite astonishing. But it also confirmed every loving thing he had ever thought about Father in that same instant.

‘All right.’ He wished Audley would get out of the way, so that he could see the path ahead; but this answer must clear that obstacle too, anyway. ‘Since this is my country it’s no question. But if it was Poland … that might be more difficult. But in
this
country … if my so called “friend” was British, then he would have already betrayed me, and all my other friends, so he’d be a traitor, and “betrayal” doesn’t describe my
reaction
to that, when I blow the whistle on him. Or, if he’s a foreigner … then he’s a false friend and an enemy—I might still honour him then, but “betrayal” still doesn ’t apply, just the same, when I get him in my sights—‘ In spite of all the wind (or perhaps because of it), a sudden tingle in his nose made him sneeze. ’Is that what you want? “My country”—
right
…
before my “friend”—
wrong?
‘

Audley shook his head. ‘It was just a question.’ He stepped aside, leaning into the wind, which flapped his bullet-ridden raincoat around his knees, to reveal the path behind him as well as the bullet-holes. ‘I already had my money on the answer. And there’s a place for you in R & D when you want it, is my answer to that, Tom.’

The cleared path had a foreground, and a middleground, and a background, snaking round the next headland. But there was only the middleground, really. Because there, where the path cut into a cascade of dead bracken and heather and gorse which fell from the skyline above down into the invisible sea far below, three men were waiting for them.

Three—
?

Instantly, he sorted them out: saw, but didn’t count,
Nikolai Andrievich Panin
, muffled against the wind and dark-overcoated still; saw, but dismissed, his little Major, who was better-protected in a short rainproof jacket like the Barbour which Willy had been wearing, wherever Willy might be, but somewhere mercifully safe now; and saw, and only saw, the third and last and first figure most of all, raincoated like Audley.

‘You watch Sadowski, Tom.’ Audley shouted his whisper at close quarters. ‘I don’t trust Panin … But Sadowski is a bloody hit-man! Remember?’ He touched Tom’s arm, propelling him forward. ‘Remember?’

‘Yes.’ Tom let himself be propelled on to the foreground of the path, where a trickle of water from the hillside above had reduced the path to a morass churned up by footprints and hoofprints; although all he could really concentrate on as he squelched forward was that first figure.

The mud gave way and slid treacherously underfoot, but he could still only see Major-General Gennadiy Zarubin standing four-square on the path, in what might have been his father’s country, and his grandfather’s, before the two world wars had demoted and promoted his line: another tall, raincoated figure, almost as broad-shouldered as Audley himself, waiting now to make them that offer which Audley had chosen not to refuse, with the headlands behind him already fading into the rain-squall which was sweeping into them, and over them, out of the infinite greyness of sea-and-sky which filled half their world.

He lifted his hand, to keep the driving rain off his cheek and out of his ear, and also so that he might hear what Audley might say, as the gap between them decreased step by step; and, at the same time, reached across his chest and felt the weight and shape of the Smith and Wesson; and finally glanced up to scan the gorse-broken skyline above them.

Odd that there was still a scatter of yellow flowers on this sea-blown wuzzy, when there hadn’t been a single flower on the gorse at Mountsorrel: and some of these were winter-browned at the edges
(he saw each complex flower with a photographic clarity which surprised him);
but others were blooming freshly, defying wind, and winter equally, against all the odds, while all the lower ground-hugging heather flowers were long-dead and colourless—

‘He’s a big bugger, isn’t he!’ Audley’s words, when they came, were utterly inconsequential. ‘I wouldn’t like to meet him in a dark alley in Berlin—either side of the Wall!’

Almost as big as you are—or maybe even bigger
! The thought twisted through Tom’s brain, challenging him to wonder what Audley himself had been like in his own dark alleys, years ago, in the dark ages.

‘He doesn’t even look like a Russian.’ Audley hissed his final useless judgement into Tom’s protected landward ear in the instant that he quickened and lengthened his stride across the last few yards, to the man himself, thrusting out his hand in a classic gesture of false friendship. ‘
General Zarubin! Good morning to you.
’

A shaft of light—it wasn’t true sunlight, but it was something more than the murk which had shrouded them so far—lightened the two big men as they met, as Zarubin matched Audley with his own hand: it was a strange unnatural light, like the light of Limbo, between Heaven and Hell—

‘Dr Audley—’

Time accelerated and slowed down, spiked on
now
and on
for ever afterwards
simultaneously, as the two meat-plate hands reached out towards each other, with an empty yard separating them which would never be bridged as the Major-General seemed to throw himself forward, on to hands and knees, to stare through Audley with blank astonishment in the same
now-and-never
instant that the bright red blossomed from his white shirt on each side of his tartan tie, and the blood gushed out of his mouth like vomit—

Tom hit Audley with his shoulder, every ounce of his weight spinning the big man sideways against the overhang of the hillside, above the path, even before General Zarubin’s dead body finally subsided into the mud.

‘
Oooff!
’ The sound of Audley’s breath and his own mingled as they both fell, binding them together into oak-tree-and-ivy flailing together in their fall, with no thought for afterwards. But then Tom’s training (never before exercised like that), and Audley’s lack-of-training (still uninformed from yesterday’s bullet, and still unbelieving), turned them both into a confusion of threshing legs and arms, all trying to re-establish their independence.

‘For Christ’s sake—!’ Audley mouthed the words into his ear.

‘Shut up!’ Tom pushed him down as he tried to sit up, pressing his face into the stony bank below the yellow-flowered gorse. ‘God—!’

God
was not an appeal:
God
was the sight of Nikolai Panin still standing up in the open, above the still-twitching body of Major-General Gennadiy Zarubin, as though the rest of his life had minutes to spare, not seconds. ‘Get down, man! For God’s sake—!’

Panin threw away another precious second in shifting his surprised look from the hillside above to Tom. Then he hunched himself ludicrously, as though to make a smaller target, and sank to his knees beside Zarubin.

To hell with him
! thought Tom, as Audley pushed and heaved beneath him.
He could take his bloody chances
!

‘Damn you, Tom! Let me up, damn you!’ Audley swore at him.

‘You stay right where you are.’ Tom kept his elbow on Audley’s neck as he watched Panin raise his comrade’s body slightly, and simultaneously tried to remember the instant of the bullet’s impact. Because there was a dark mark no bigger than a shilling high up on the broad expanse of Zarubin’s back, just above the shoulder-blade: so the high-velocity bullet had come downwards steeply, shattering flesh and bone, to blossom that huge exit-wound where the shirt had reddened—had come
downwards
from not far away, and not more laterally from some distance greater
ahead
of them—

He couldn’t hold the big man down much longer—

That was right
! Because the three men had been hugging this same overhang above the path, where the wind hadn’t been so fierce, when he had first glimpsed them.

So the killer hadn’t killed before because he hadn’t had a clear shot until Zarubin stepped out to greet Audley—

Christ
! The next thought rolled Audley away from him, even as he cleared the Smith and Wesson from its holster. ‘Get down, David!’

‘What the devil—?’ Even in the instant of his release Audley picked up his panic signal, and shrank into the overhang obediently.

‘Where’s Sadowski?’ Tom snarled at Panin.

‘Sadowski?’ The Russian let go of Zarubin’s shoulder, and the body dropped back into the mud as though gravity finally had a stronger claim on death than on life. ‘Major Sadowski is doing his duty, Sir Thomas.’ He looked down at the blood on his hand with evident distaste. But then calmly wiped it off on the dead man’s raincoat before looking up again at Tom. ‘Just as you are doing now.’

The freak wind suddenly howled around them, swirling the sharp raindrops into Tom’s face from a new direction, half-blinding him.

Tom—‘ Audley’s voice came from behind and below him ’—
go
!‘

‘No!’ Panin straightened up, still on his knees but fumbling into his raincoat. ‘Your duty is to protect
us
, Sir Thomas. Let Sadowski—’

‘Shut up!’ Audley’s voice was level with Tom now, and it was deep-frozen with pure hate. ‘And if you find what you’ve got inside there, I’ll shoot you in the guts, I swear to God—as God is my witness!’ The old man’s voice modulated, as though he was surprised by his own passion. ‘I’ll shoot you in the guts, Nikolai … because after all these years the only thing I can remember is to shoot
low
—so I may actually shoot your balls off instead—
go, Tom!
’

Panin froze. Then swayed, as another gust shook him; but swayed like a frozen dummy nevertheless, unmoving even though moving.

‘That’s right.’ Thick velvet suddenly coveted the steel. ‘Now the hand comes out—
slowly
…
ever-so slowly …
that’s right!
’ Audley drew a deep breath. ‘God! You were bloody close then, I tell you! Because it’s been forty years … well, maybe thirty years, give or take … But I never was very good with small guns. Okay with 75-millimetres, but no good with 9-millimetres …
Go, Tom—for God’s sake, while this old devil and I frighten each other equally—go on, Tom
! Go!’

Standing up on the path, even for an instant, also frightened Tom. But then the beginning of returning logic steeled him to take a full look at the skyline above him, with the loss of precious time already also spurring calculation as he did so:
Sadowski had gone straight up into the wuzzy, somewhere behind them — but why
?

‘Go on, Tom—go find out what he’s up to, there’s a good chap.’ Audley had his voice almost back to the conversational level. Yet somehow that sounded louder than a shout inside Tom’s head as he moved obediently to the order.

Sadowski wasn’t protecting Panin, as he ought to be doing—

The overhang, where the cliff-path had been cut from the living rock of the hillside, soon petered out. But then the gorse-wuzzy was still old and impenetrable as he searched for an opening further along as he followed the path round the headland, its sharp spikes and brown-frosted yellow flowers mocking him—