This Other Eden (36 page)

His
fantasies of domination were brought to something of an abrupt conclusion,
however, when he found himself facing the barrel of a gun.

‘You
disgust me,’ said Scout, her lips trembling with emotion.

‘Excuse
me, baby?’ Jurgen inquired, genuinely shocked.

‘Don’t
“baby” me, you limp-willied hypocrite!’ Scout shouted. ‘I was listening at the
door to everything you said when you were downstairs.’

‘You
listened?’ Jurgen Thor was a little concerned by this.

‘Of
course I did! Coo, you don’t get many chances to hear Jurgen Thor talking with
huge movie stars. I thought it would be exciting, a bit more exciting at least
than things have been with you so far, anyway. I thought it would be inspiring,
that Max Maximus must be a secret activist and that I’d hear wonderful things
about the fight against Claustrosphere. What do I hear? The most disgusting
compromise there could ever be. I still can’t believe it. You, me, all this,
paid for by Plastic Tolstoy! It makes me bloody sick. I’ve wasted two whole
years of my life training to be a hypocrite and I think it’s absolutely off.’

‘Give
me the gun, Scout,’ Jurgen said.

‘Like
hell, I will. Crikey, you’ve got some nerve, still thinking you can hand out
orders to me.’

‘So
what is it you want, then?’

‘I’ll
tell you what I want, chum. I want a full confession from you on video tape.
This bloody charade has gone on long enough.’

Scout
was just too young and idealistic to swallow the kind of pragmatism with which
Jurgen had persuaded Rosalie to maintain her silence. She had not gone through
the five years of pointless struggle that Rosalie had gone through, had not
watched everything she tried to defend die. She was still a young girl who
believed the world could be saved by people acting decently. She also believed
fervently in that old Mother Earth dictum that Claustrosphere was planetary
treason
—
in fact, she had a poster of Jurgen Thor on her bedroom wall
which said exactly that. How often had she lain on her bed, staring into those
gorgeous eyes, dreaming of how one day she would follow the Green God into
battle against Claustrosphere. Now it turned out that those eyes had lied, that
Jurgen Thor and Plastic Tolstoy were just two sides of the same coin. Scout was
too young to accept that nothing was sacred and that even idealists must make
compromises. She was discovering all at once just how wicked the world was and
what a terrible thing it was to be human. She could not take it.

‘I
don’t care what it does to Mother Earth, I’m going to make this nightmare
public,’ she said. ‘In the long run you can’t build anything lasting and decent
on lies.’

‘That
is not so, my love. Lies are as important as truth, for without lies, the truth
is worthless,’ said Jurgen.

‘Now
that’s just bloody twaddle and you know it. You don’t like being called a
hypocrite, that’s all. But that’s what you are and I’m going to tell, so just
get downstairs, you must have a video recorder in your study.’

And so
Jurgen Thor returned to the study where he had been so recently conversing with
Rosalie and Max, only this time he was not the masterful one, secure and in
control. This time he was the prisoner of someone he considered scarcely more
than a child. That was what Scout thought, anyway. As it happened, Jurgen was
about to regain control in spectacularly brutal fashion. He did not want to
kill her, so he made one last attempt to reason with her.

‘Scout,
you’re making a big mistake here. No good can come of this, for you or the
Earth. Are you catching what I’m saying here, babe?’

‘Listen,
Mr Thor, either you’re going to tape a confession about Claustrosphere and
Mother Earth or I’m going to shoot you and hang the consequences. I feel sick
of everything and I don’t care anymore.’

‘So be
it,’ said Jurgen Thor sadly.

It was
a simple matter for Jurgen to manoeuvre Scout into the position he wanted. She
was maintaining the maximum distance she could from him, so in order to get her
to stand against the wall he required, he merely had to stand against the
opposite wall himself. Of course he could have disarmed her. Jurgen was as sure
as anything that Scout would not shoot if he called her bluff. But what then?
He could scarcely let her go. This was one girl that he could not guarantee
would keep her mouth shut. She would blab and blab and blab and even though no
one would believe her, hers was a story that Jurgen simply did not want told.

The
house was built on the actual peak of the mountain. The top floor, which made
up the bedroom, was parallel with the mountain-top, and the lower floors were
built out from the steep rock that fell away from the summit. This meant that
underneath the bottom floor, which was Jurgen’s study, there was nothing but
the supporting poles which jutted out of the rockface. In order that these
support poles might be periodically maintained, there was a trapdoor in the
study floor. It was over this trapdoor that Scout now stood.

Jurgen
Thor had always loved that trapdoor. He sometimes opened it at night and sat at
the edge, dropping lighted coals into the dark chasm beneath, watching as the
bright embers disappeared into a grim crack in the rock hundreds of metres
below. He had even had a trapeze fitted. His friends could scarcely credit it,
but Jurgen Thor sometimes
swung
from beneath the trapdoor. With no
safety harness or line of any sort, he would hurl himself through the air, back
and forth, back and forth, nothing but rushing air between him and the chasm
below.

‘Scout,’
he said, ‘you are about to experience something truly strange and unique.
Something I have always wondered about. Try to stay conscious and aware as it
happens, for it will be a fine and a triumphant end for a brave but stupid
girl.’

Even as
a moment of nervous doubt and concern flitted across Scout’s face, Jurgen
crossed to his desk in a single stride and pushed a button. The trapdoor fell
away beneath her feet and with no more than a gasp of surprise, she disappeared
into the cold darkness.

Jurgen
went to the edge of the deadly hole and peered out. There was nothing to be
seen, Scout was long gone and the velvet night had enveloped her. She could
still be heard, though. The scream, which had found its voice moments after
Scout’s deathly descent began, rang around those dark and terrible rocks,
invisible in the blackness, but awesomely present all the same.

Scout
screamed for a moment or two, even after she died. The drop was a long one and
the speed of sound is no respecter of the dead. As the last echoes of her short
life faded into the stillness, Jurgen Thor closed the trapdoor. To his
surprise, he found that he was crying, as much for himself as for Scout. He was
truly sorry that he had had to kill her. Repentance would do him no good,
though, he knew that. If there was a God, then Jurgen Thor was damned and a few
idle tears would not wash away his sins.

Chapter
Twenty-One

Betrayal and disaster

Traitor
in the midst.

The police could only
stand back and watch as the first of the mighty tankers pulled on to the grand
mosaic-covered piazza at the front of the European parliament.

In a
Land-Rover leading the lethal procession, squashed in between Rosalie and
Saunders, sat Judy, his mood swinging from misery to elation with every bump in
the road. He was miserable because he was cold and wet and his backside was
sore. Judy had loathed camping and adventure holidays as a child, and the
intervening years had not changed his attitude at all. The lifestyle which
Mother Earth had chosen for themselves was one which, as far as Judy was
concerned, they could keep.

Despite
the cold and the damp, however, he was also feeling pretty pleased with
himself. Here he was, at the very heart of a major Mother Earth action. He had
infiltrated further into the organisation than he could have dreamt possible,
further indeed than any of his more favoured colleagues had managed in a very
long time. True, he was acting entirely on his own initiative, and had deserted
whilst in the line of duty in order to do it, but Judy hoped that if he
achieved the result he was looking for, then all would be forgiven.

He
shifted uncomfortably in his seat.

‘Keep
still, will you!’ barked Saunders, the man with no face.

‘Sorry.
I was just thinking that I may have developed piles.’

‘Ha! You
hear that, Rosalie?’ Saunders sneered. ‘A noble wound, eh? Give the man a
Purple Heart, he’s got a sore arse. Some of us have got
real
battle-scars.’

One of
Saunders’s hands left the steering-wheel and began to tug at the buckles that
secured his head-bag at the neck.

‘Leave
it alone, Saunders, and drive the bloody car!’ snapped Rosalie.

She too
had a lot on her mind. Despite the fact that the raid had so far been a
colossal success, Rosalie could take no pleasure in it, knowing as she did that
the whole thing had been financed by Tolstoy … who was, to all intents and
purposes, the anti-Christ. She was certainly in no mood to deal with Saunders’s
bombast.

‘Don’t
even think about taking off your bag, Saunders,’ she went on. ‘I’m in no kind
of mood for it. Just leave Schwartz alone to worry about his bum.’

It was
not, in actual fact, haemorrhoids that had made Judy shift uncomfortably in his
seat. His reflections on how successful he had been so far had reminded him of
the unpleasant fact that his success had been obtained at the expense of
deceiving Rosalie. Judy was not at all happy about this. He admired Rosalie,
and knew that it was only because of her recommendation that the Mother Earth
leadership had agreed that he remain with the unit at all. Let alone be allowed
to take part in a mission.

‘He
saved me from a life sentence,’ Rosalie had said whilst pleading Judy’s case.
‘That means prison for him if we throw him out. I think we owe him the benefit
of the doubt. Besides, if he is what he says he is, then he could be very
useful indeed. Let me keep an eye on him, I’ll answer for it.’

Judy
was keenly aware that Rosalie had chosen to trust him and that he intended to
repay that trust by betraying her. This did not make him feel good about
himself. However, it was Judy’s opinion that Rosalie was about to commit a
ruthless and wicked crime which he had to stop. He did not doubt that she would
be acting in accordance with her own sense of what was right and just, but then
every murderous zealot in history had claimed to have God on their side.

Celeb
status.

Rosalie had also sought to
get Max on to the team, but at this, a line had been drawn. It was felt that
famous media stars could prove something of a liability whilst trying to hijack
toxic waste shipments. Autograph hunters would only get in the way.

‘If he
wants to join Mother Earth,’ the leadership had said, ‘he can start at the
bottom, just like anybody else.’

Rosalie
could see their point. Terrorist raids were not social events, lovers and
boyfriends could not be included. Max was less understanding. In fact he was
mystified.

‘But
I’m a
major celebrity,
man!’ he had exclaimed. ‘Most people kill to have
my puss in their hood.’

‘Max,
Mother Earth is a guerrilla army, not an LA nightclub or a video launch. We
don’t get better results because we have famous people along.’

Max
said that he understood, but he didn’t really believe it. He had lived for too
long in a world in which fame was the ultimate credential. A world where there
was literally no activity, neither business nor pleasure, which was not deemed
the better for having a celebrity attached to it.

‘OK,
OK,’ he said, trying not to sound offended. ‘I’ll just sit on my butt in Paris
and get wasted. You know, really get in touch with my excessive side. That’s
what I like to do anyway. Party, right? Your mission is to save stuff, mine is
to party. I was only trying to be cool.’ There was a pause, then Max gave
himself away by adding, ‘You’re
sure
you told them it was me?’

‘Yes, I
did, Max, I’m sorry, but I think that made it worse.’ Now Max knew there had
been a mistake. He attempted to absorb what Rosalie was suggesting but he
simply could not, it was too alien a concept. His name had made things
worse?
Impossible.

‘Listen,’
he said, ‘it’s kinda clear there’s been a balls-up at their end, but don’t you
worry about it, OK? Just let it go.
Walk away.
I’ll have my office check
it out with these droogs and we’ll have the cruddy little no-names crawling to
us on their knees in a day or two.’

Rosalie
took Max’s advice and let it go. Reminding herself always to remember that even
though hers and Max’s worlds may have collided, they were still worlds apart.