Reconstruction (27 page)

‘Jaime?’

The boy looked up.

He didn’t want to say it out loud. Just nodded his head in the direction of the phone, and wiggled his hand.

Even the little boys were quiet. Perhaps they’d stopped breathing.

Jaime put the phone on the floor, and took two steps back. The gun in his hand was still pointing at Ben.

It wasn’t far to where the phone lay. And it wasn’t as if having his back to the wall made Ben safer: he could be shot just as dead standing there as anywhere else. He forced himself to keep his eyes on Jaime as he collected the phone and straightened up: this, his body language said, was the essence of honesty.
We
. You just said
We
. This is what
We
do next.

He put a finger to his lips.

The phone was just a phone: how many times had he held a mobile phone? There was a great long chunk of his life during which he never had, him or anyone else; then bang – it happened every day. How many things could you say that of? It probably wasn’t the moment to make a list. This one was no different to any of the others: what-ever the makers wanted you to think, every mobile was basically the same lump of plastic. This one, though . . . This one felt heavier than it should. And while Ben knew that was his mind playing tricks – taking the knowledge that this phone was bugged, and transmitting that knowledge to the palm of his hand – that feeling wouldn’t leave him as he carried the phone through the door to the toilets, and dumped it down the pan in the first cubicle.

‘What was that?’

Faulks ignored Fredericks for a moment. Lowered his face to his hands instead, and rubbed it, as if he were washing himself.

‘Did he just . . .’

‘He just dumped it down the toilet. Yes.’

‘Jesus fucking Christ.’

The van was growing smaller – all those banks of listening equipment seemed to swell in direct proportion to their new-found uselessness.

Fredericks said, ‘I should never have let him in there.’

‘I don’t remember you having much choice.’

‘He’s endangering every hostage. What are we sup-posed to do now?’

Faulks said, ‘He’s a spook, Malc. He’s got his own agenda. But I doubt that includes getting innocents killed. He’s in the firing line too, don’t forget.’

‘But whatever he’s up to, we’re not allowed to hear it.’

‘We’ve got directional mikes. They’ll pick up something.’

‘Everything?’

‘Depends how loud they are.’

Fredericks shook his head. ‘He’s cutting us out of the loop.’

‘Or somebody.’

‘What?’

‘Us or somebody.’ Faulks reached for a set of head-phones. ‘It might not be us he’s keeping secrets from.’

He was back from his mission. He’d drowned the phone. Everything was exactly as it had been, except that the dig-ital spy had been removed from the scenario.

There were other ways of eavesdropping, of course – directional microphones; possibly other bugs clamped to the outside walls during that aborted incursion. If Bad Sam Chapman was outside, he’d be glued to the speakers now; wondering why the hell the main attraction had just dissolved into watery silence. And possibly switching to one of those back-up devices: bug on the wall, directional mike.

On a table beneath one of the shuttered windows sat a tape recorder; a children’s model in big chunky plastic, with primary-coloured buttons. A slew of pre-recorded tapes surrounded it, and Ben chose one at random; slotted it in. It burst into life at a frightening volume:

EELS ON THE BUS GO ROUND AND ROU

He fumbled with the dial.

nd round and round round and round
Better.

The others were staring as if he’d gone mad. Even the little boys – nursery music? They raised their heads from their father’s thighs, and gazed like woodland creatures who’ve just heard a piper in the trees.

He said, ‘Okay. Now we can talk.’

Words just loud enough to be heard above the music.

‘You’re at Marble Arch,’ he said. ‘Waiting for me. And two men arrive in a car looking for you.’

‘Yes.’

‘The same men who tried to pick you up this morning.’ ‘Yes. That is right.’

‘But you must have got away from them last night. What did you do?’

‘I run down into underground.’ Jaime’s whisper was hoarse: this wasn’t easy for him. Whispering in a foreign language – two things to concentrate on at once. ‘But I don’t get on train. I come up other side. Other side of road.’

‘Got you.’

Jaime looked puzzled.

‘I understand. Never mind. Carry on.’

‘They follow me, but I think I lose them. I am good at disappearing in crowd. They think they trap me, but I lose them.’

‘What time was this?’

Jaime said, ‘It is late. Many people, though. There are many people coming from pubs and shows. Enough to disappear in.’

‘And you’re sure they followed you down?’

‘Tall man did. I not see other one.’

From what Ben had heard, it was when you couldn’t see Bad Sam that you had to worry.

‘I hide behind ticket machine. The tall man –’

‘His name was Ashton.’

‘Ashton, he go through barrier, and stand at top of moving escalator. There are lot of people going down, young people, all with rucksacks and making noise. He think I am one of them.’

‘But you were hiding by the ticket machine.’

There was a rhythm to this. The occasional prod was all it took. Jaime’s story was up and running.

‘Yes. And while his back is to me, I go out other entrance. I come out other side of road.’

Ben flashed on Marble Arch. That side of the road was where the bus stops were – the intercity buses, on their way out of London from Victoria.

‘And you got on a bus.’

the wheels on the bus go –

‘I did not plan to. I plan to run, to keep running. I do not plan to leave London.’

‘So why did you?’

‘Because there is bus there, as I reach the bus stop. It say Oxford on the front. And I remember something Miro tell me.’

From below, DS Bain must have resembled a gargoyle on a college battlement, but nobody was looking up right now. After a while, you don’t see the gargoyles; they’re just another kind of brickwork.

Though the occasional crackle in an earpiece confirmed a connection to the earthly scene.

Target acquired.

Steady . . .

But no: that was last time.

This time, things were quiet below – quiet, anyway, inside the crucial circle. This was the area mapped out by the rifle’s crosshairs; a tiny, intimate region only Bain currently understood. To step inside that area was to surrender to the possibility of death.

The man in the dirty vest appears once more, and the thing
in his hand acquires definition as he turns to the window, looks
directly through it, and brings the object level with his chest,
pointing it outwards, into the night . . .

Who could have known that his gun wasn’t loaded?

The wind gusted without warning, and made its usual rearrangements: rustled grass; plucked at sleeve and hair; attempted to dislodge a weapons specialist. But Bain wasn’t moving. Movement was the marksman’s enemy; every limb adjustment demanding a recalibration of the required shot . . . Bullets couldn’t be recalled once the trig-ger had been squeezed. Nobody needed to tell Bain that.

But the inquiry had determined that the shot had been justified – the man had been holding a gun, after all. An unloaded antique, but still a gun. A hurled bedside lamp – a bang and a flash – had completed the picture.

shots fired shots fired

‘And you’re comfortable with returning to duty?’

‘Of course, sir.’

‘In your firearms role, I mean.’

‘Of course, sir.’

That conversation also figured in dreams; an endless recurring dream, it felt like, and thus an accurate reflection of an endless recurring reality. Loaded conversations in airless offices. Conversations that always had the same subtext:

You killed a man.

I know. I was there.

Could you do it again?

The role was not about shooting people, so the wisdom went. The role was about Containment.

Containment, though, covered a broad spectrum, and occasionally involved shooting people.

Below, the crowd milled about with the apparently pointless but somehow graceful motion of dust motes in sunlight. Everything moved. The wind tickled the trees and bushes lining the rec ground; a train within hailing distance buffeted its way along the tracks. A car Bain couldn’t see roared into life. The only motionless object was the door framed by the crosshairs of the rifle’s scope.

Target acquired. . .

Steady.

‘Anyone could turn up at the door, say they were with Special Branch, or whatever you said.’

‘You’d do well to bear that in mind. Tell me about Judy’s husband. Did she talk about his business interests at all?’

‘I’d like you to go now.’

‘And I’d like you to answer my questions. Did she talk about his business interests at all?’

‘She – he – she only talked about him once. Really talked. Other than that it was Derek used to this or used to that. Like he was still alive, except they were divorced.’ She was forgetting to smoke; forgetting to drink. Sam Chapman was no longer partner in scandal. He was more like the big bad wolf this foolish piggy had invited in.

On the TV screen, the nursery view had again given way to the larger picture: a pixellated version of join-the-dots – Dunblane/Hungerford/Columbine. A little lacking in narrative cohesion, but the names pushed buttons that would guarantee viewing figures. On another channel, they’d be flogging the numbers game: 9/11; 7/7. A sequence of diminishing returns – so far – whose consequences rattled round the world.

She was flapping, but he’d stick around a while longer. To find out how much she knew, in case this turned out to be another loose end in need of tying off.

‘Your glass is empty,’ he said.

‘I – I don’t want another.’

‘Of course you do. One last one. I’ll fetch it.’

Stepping into the kitchen, he looked back, but she hadn’t turned. In the mirror, he watched her fiddling with the top button of her blouse; twisting it nervously, as if it were constricting her breath. And then she shook another cigar-ette from her pack, and lit it with a trembling hand.

When she leaned forward to meet the flame, the back of her neck exposed itself whitely, as if it were laid on a block.

The wheels on the bus, having gone round and round, were fading into silence.

It was 12.22, and Eliot’s legs had turned to stone. His children’s grip had murdered his circulation, and if he ever walked out of this building again, he doubted he’d man-age it on his own two feet – which would be all he needed: footage of him being stretchered out of the annexe. Undying proof of his utter wimpishness.

Jesus, Eliot. Is that the worst that could happen?

The music, having stopped, began again.
The farmer’s in
his den
. . .

At least this one, he hadn’t been listening to while lying in bed this morning, five and a half hours and one hundred years ago.

Gordy looked up at him. ‘Why is the music playing?’ he asked.

He was trying so hard to whisper, it almost came out as a shout.

‘Yes, daddy. Why is the music playing?’

You never heard from one twin without hearing from the other. They lived in stereo.

Gently prising them from his thighs, he sank to a level where he could put an arm round each.

Eee eye addyoh, the farmer’s in his den
‘They don’t want anyone to hear what they’re saying.’

He surprised himself with this.
Hush
was what he’d been intending; truth just slipped out, the way truth some-times does.

‘Why?’

‘Why, daddy?’

‘I don’t know.’

This truth business could be addictive.

‘Gordy doesn’t know either, daddy?’

‘And Timmy doesn’t know either.’

Well, at least they were all on level pegging. As he looked across at Louise, he could tell something furious was raging inside her; a storm about to break. And with that a stray thought sank a hook into half a memory, dragging it up to the light, and he remembered words exchanged on a sofa while champagne worked its mischief.

I used to work in a bank.

I’m glad you brought that up. I ordered a new chequebook
weeks ago.

She had laughed, but with a slight edge to it.

Not high-street banking. This was more your good old,
leather-bound merchant variety.

Gordy’s lips were working again, but only the faintest sound was coming out. ‘What’s the matter? Are you okay, Gordy?’

‘Eee eye addy-oh,’ his youngest son whispered.

‘The farmer’s in his den,’ Timmy finished.

He held them tighter, tears pricking his eyes; tears he didn’t want them to see. How was that for wimpishness – he’d stared down a gun this morning, but his sons’ attempts to sing through this unmanned him entirely.

And still a memory continued unreeling; of voices – one of them his – thickened by alcohol, and rehearsing the small talk that was prelude to the main event. Something to get them through this interlude where their glasses remained full.

This was more your good old, leather-bound merchant variety.

(Which wasn’t, Louise reflected even as the words left her lips, quite right. There was precious little leather-bondage round DFM, where the prevailing culture was hi-tech, stainless, broadband – cutting-edge acronym, not polished courtesy; cocaine jag, not brandy snifter. But she wasn’t so drunk she needed to clarify every detail. Which meant she had a better head than Eliot, who was already saying things twice, to be sure she’d got it.)

‘Shuffling currencies in the big money markets.’

‘That sort of thing.’

‘Trading the yen against the dollar.’

Yada yada yada.

She liked him, though. He wasn’t without charm, and outside the nursery whirl – freed from the twin restraints of children and the encroaching working day – seemed younger, happier, and enthusiastic about her company, which was nice. Plus, something devilish had taken hold of her; something partly sex, and partly an urge to kick over the traces; to remind herself that life hadn’t always revolved around the needs of infants. And hadn’t always been lived with a mother on the premises.