The Dying Light
Table of Contents
Praise for Henry Porter’s novels
‘A first-rate thriller . . . Porter sustains an elaborate plot skilfully and portrays memorable, multi-faceted characters. Brandenburg . . . exhilaratingly testifies to the thriller genre’s ability to transcend its primary role as entertainment.’
SUNDAY TIMES
‘Another elegant spy thriller . . . not merely a tale of intrigue and deception, betrayal and retribution, but also an examination of the people who live through these experiences.’
GUARDIAN
‘A real page-turner . . . a thriller of high ambition.’
DAILY MAIL
‘A powerful, propulsive piece of thriller writing . . . Porter has consolidated his reputation for writing some of the best espionage thrillers around.’
OBSERVER
‘Brandenburg . . . doesn’t pester you with its research, nor offer you indigestible chunks of political history. Instead it provides something to bite on and plenty of space to chew it. Porter enjoys himself enough to carry the reader with him. On the way, he continues to breathe new life into spy fiction.’
INDEPENDENT
‘A tour-de-force, which is stunning in its execution and masterful in its attention to detail . . . The future of the spy novel is in safe hands. The man writes like a dream. Challenging, ambitious, thoughtful, authoritative, he’s a le Carré for this century.’
GLASGOW HERALD
Also by Henry Porter
Remembrance Day
A Spy’s Life
Empire State
Brandenburg
A Spy’s Life
Empire State
Brandenburg
The Dying Light
HENRY PORTER
Orion
An Orion ebook
First published in Great Britain in 2009 by Orion Books,
an imprint of The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House, 5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK company
1357910864 2
Copyright © Henry Porter 2009
The moral right of Henry Porter to be identified as the author
of this work has been asserted in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the
prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above
publisher of this book.
All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
eISBN : 978 1 4091 0698 2
This ebook produced by Jouve, France
In memory of Jack Garfitt, who saved my grandfather, Capt Beauchamp Seymour from certain death on the Western Front in October 1914, and for his daughter, Olive Garfitt.
‘Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing awe and admiration, the oftener and more steadily we reflect on them - the starry heavens above and the moral laws within.’
Immanuel Kant
‘Common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.’
Vladimir Nabokov
‘A regime always ultimately seeks to restrict freedom, no matter what reasons it gives for doing so. The total state wants to guide society and educate its citizens. New rules and regulations are constantly being imposed on everyday life . . . The politics of prohibition has long since invaded areas in which the potential damage is either a private matter or at most a matter of opinion.’
Wolfgang Sofksy, Privacy, A Manifesto, 2008
1
A Death Explained
First was the fall, then came the death, and the death erased all memory of the fall, which was in any case handled in a very British way. The story of how David Eyam was cast from the highest circles of government was no more than a footnote at the inquest, which followed hearings into a teenage road fatality and the electrocution of a tractor driver whose grab snagged overhead power lines.
Yet if there had been a programme that March morning for High Castle’s newly refurbished coroner’s court, David Eyam’s name would have been at the top, as much due to his former positions as acting head of the Joint Intelligence Committee and a succession of unspecified roles in the prime minister’s inner circle, as to the tourist’s film from Cartagena in Colombia, which contained the record of his very last moments on earth.
The recording was played on three television screens and the sounds of the Colombian evening filled the provincial calm of the court with the heat and exuberance and doom of Central America. The camera jerked from a bell tower, around which white doves circled, to a line of balconies bedecked with flowers, typical of Cartagena’s colonial district, then to a street vendor carrying baskets of fruit from a yoke that seemed to be made from part of a bicycle frame. It moved with such speed that the people sitting nearest the screens recoiled as though this would steady the shot for them. Kate Lockhart, seated in the second row, remained still, her eyes watching the clock on the top right-hand corner of the screen - the last minutes and seconds of her friend’s life being counted off.
The camera came to rest briefly on the name ‘Bolivar Crêperie’, written across the length of a red awning under which there was some kind of juice bar with perspex cylinders of fruit and a cashier’s desk. Then it swerved to two women and a man - all in shorts - sitting at one of several tables in front of the restaurant. Here, after a wobble, it settled. The party of three produced long-suffering smiles; sunglasses were raised and tall glasses of beer hoisted to the lens. The image froze and the coroner leaned forward and nodded to the clerk.
‘This is the important part,’ said the coroner’s clerk, pointing at the screen in the centre of the court with a remote control. ‘Pay attention to the top left-hand corner, where you will see the deceased in a navy-blue shirt and cream jacket, and then to what happens in the background on the far side of the street - over here.’ He tapped the screen with the remote.
But Kate could see David Eyam nowhere. She searched the screen frantically again. The pale jacket at the top - no, that wasn’t Eyam. Not that jacket, not that lank hair, not that beard, not that emaciated angularity. The man was far too thin. Christ! They’d made a mistake. The fools had got the wrong man. Eyam must be alive. Ever since she’d received the email from the firm of lawyers handling his estate a couple of weeks back, she had felt a kind of incredulity at the idea of Eyam’s death. The extinction of one of the foremost intellects of his generation by a blast in some seedy quarter of a tropical port, without the world knowing for an entire month, as if Eyam was some useless hippy or boat bum, was unfeasible . . . unsustainable . . . incredible.
The film was started again: the new shot was in a wider frame. The camera had evidently been placed on a tripod because a second man appeared in front of the lens and adjusted something, during which process his face loomed in grotesque close-up, then sat down with the other three and swivelled his cap so the peak was at the front. Kate’s eyes darted to the top of the screen. The man in the pale jacket had not moved. No, that wasn’t Eyam: far too untidy. But then he turned to talk to a dark, thickset indvidual with wraparound shades and a black polo shirt on his right, and his face became animated. At a pinch it could be him. The parting was the same, although the hair was a lot longer than she had ever seen it, and the cast of his eyes, his brow and the shape of the nose all did a fair impression of Eyam. Then he handed a book to his neighbour with the sunglasses and he seemed to start talking about it: the court could hear nothing of what was said. The mannerisms of her friend in full flow were unmistakable. He sat back in the chair, caught hold of his right elbow and seemed to draw down the points he was making by opening and bunching his pianist’s fingers. When the other man, who was now examining the back cover of the book with his sunglasses propped on his forehead, replied she saw his head go back with his mouth slightly open in anticipation. Even at that distance she could see the eagerness and fun in his expression. This was David Eyam. It couldn’t be anyone else.
The cameraman had now taken the role of reporter and, using a small microphone held under his chin, addressed the lens - in what the clerk explained was Swedish. But the noise of the street drowned what he was saying and once or twice he looked round with dismay as a motorbike or truck passed.
The clerk cleared his throat and pointed to Eyam. ‘The deceased is talking to a Detective Luis Bautista,’ he said glancing at a pad. ‘He is an officer with the Cartagena Police. He was meeting his girlfriend at the cafe and was off duty at the time.’
‘We shall be hearing from him later,’ said the coroner, looking round the courtroom over his glasses with his eyebrows rising and falling independently of any expression. ‘Detective Bautista is with the local anti-terrorist force and is coincidentally a specialist in the sort of attack we are about to witness.’ His eyes went to the clerk. ‘Mr Swift, you may proceed.’
Kate’s mind protested. No, she would not sit calmly like the others, now peering at the film with an indecent anticipation, to watch Eyam being atomised. She drew the small shoulder bag towards her and looked for the easiest way out of the crowded courtroom, but then found herself drawn to the sight of her friend helplessly sitting there and she remembered the first time she had set eyes on him in a student common room in Oxford twenty years before: the dark, oblique presence, the swarming intelligence in his eyes, his habit of moving a hand through his hair when asked a question and then leaning forward with his fingers momentarily pressed to his mouth and blocking the inquiry with some diversionary enthusiasm that was so interesting you overlooked the failure to disclose. Two decades ago, Eyam was simply luminous - the smile of reason almost never left his face. She saw him now through the eyes of the people in court: a tourist, good-looking in a dishevelled way, yes, but also a man who seemed washed up and might easily be suffering from some form of mid-life crisis, or addiction.
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