For the Good of the State (39 page)

Tom’s mouth opened, but then closed again as he concentrated on negotiating the track’s final constriction—a little bridge so narrow and scarred by previous too-close encounters with vehicles that he feared for the Cortina’s rusty wings—so that for that moment the idea of Zarubin in his wider setting, as the KGB’s religious expert, slipped away from him.

‘Phew! What a place!’ said Audley in an oddly stilted voice. ‘“The Pleasant Isle of Aves”, no less!’

‘What?’ Once over the bridge they were on a wider road, although the remains of its ancient metalling was hardly visible among its pot-holes as it led them towards a scatter of vehicles parked beside a huddle of cottages at the far end of the meadow.

‘Kipling, dear boy.’ Audley craned his neck to take in the scene. “This isn’t quite Stalky country—
Dunsterville
country, I should say … But it’s tucked away well enough to qualify, eh?‘ He twisted in order to examine their line of approach. ’No coaches, and precious few tourists … But, if old Nikolai isn’t romancing us, this is where Major-General Zarubin’s paternal ancestors scratched a risky and uncertain living, fishing for the fickle shoals of herring in olden times.‘ He came back to Tom. ’Herring, wouldn’t it have been? Didn’t they catch herring hereabouts, off Lynmouth, before they caught tourists in season?‘

‘Did they?’ Tom noted the cars (an elderly Land Rover, scarred from the bridge; a decrepit Austin 1100, resting on its collapsed springs; a vintage Volkswagen Beetle, waiting for a collector to find it; and the same spanking-new Montego he had noted outside the
Green Man
last night, in which Professor Panin and his hit-man had kept their last rendezvous); while, at the same time, he expanded Zarubin’s role: not so much an expert, rather a
removal man—
a remover of turbulent and inconvenient priests from the scenes of KGB action?

‘Of course they did!’ Audley sniffed, but in derision and not because of his cold. ‘Herring was
the
fish, in the old days: it fed the poor and it manned the Royal Navy—they ploughed it into the fields, even … But I don’t expect you’ve ever eaten a herring, eh? No “herrings-in-tomato-sauce” for you, even! Fish fingers, more like—eh?’ But now he had also taken in the cars, as he freed himself from his safety-belt, as Tom parked on the end of them, beside the Montego. ‘But at least we’re in the right place, anyway.’

Tom released his own belt. ‘But where’s Zarubin, then?’

‘Huh! He’ll be walking his father’s old path, along the cliffs—like old Nikolai said he would.’ Audley gave him an old-fashioned grin, and shook his head in agreement. ‘I know, I know! The idea of Major-General Gennadiy Zarubin cherishing a sentimental conceit for any-bloody-thing … let alone for his ancestral past … that’s not
likely
, I do agree, Tom. But, then, most of the things people do, when they can indulge the luxury of doing those things for their own gratification … ’ He shook his head again ‘ … The truth is that Panin’s got us by the short hairs, and he knows it. Because even producing Zarubin for our inspection—producing him privately, face-to-face like this, away from the official embassy circuit … I could never resist the opportunity, just in case it offered us a dividend.’ He pushed open the door, and swung one leg out of it. ‘But offering us a
name
, into the bargain—you tell me, Tom: what would you do?’ He fixed Tom irrevocably. ‘After what’s already happened back there, in that damned abattoir of his?’

Tom saw the ultimate conflict of interests clearly, between himself and Audley—between the minder and the minded, whose interests were more often than not fatally opposed when it came to risk-taking. But to that he also had a standard answer. ‘If I were you, David—that is, if I were as pig-headed as you, but perhaps a bit more sensible … if I were you, I’d send someone else instead of me—’ He raised his hand quickly ‘—because it might be safer for all concerned, is why: not cowardice, but plain common sense.’ He shook his head. ‘I’m not a target. At least, not on my own I’m not. But if you are … then we both are at risk. So let me go instead of you.’

‘Mmm … ’ Audley looked down the mouth of the combe, towards its U-shaped opening to the sea. Then he smiled at Tom across the bonnet of the car. ‘I must admit that I did toy with that convenient get-out myself, not so very long ago. And … not so much because I really believe in its logic, as because I have an absurd hankering to see my unborn grandchildren one day.’ Only then he shook his head back at Tom. ‘But it won’t do, I’m afraid … and I’m afraid that “afraid” is right. But for two reasons, I’m
afraid
, anyway.’ He stopped abruptly, and pointed down the combe again. ‘Do you see where the path goes up the hillside, beyond the cottages—on the right there? That’ll be what they call the “Somerset and North Devon Coast Path” on the map, I shouldn’t wonder—eh?’

Tom had already noted the map and observed the zigzag line. ‘What two reasons?’ It was useless to argue, but he must make the attempt.

‘The odds are that he won’t talk to you—Zarubin won’t.‘ Audley started to climb into his raincoat. ’I brought an umbrella, didn’t I? I put it in the back somewhere—?‘

‘Then he can talk to you some other time. On our terms.’ There was a huge ugly burn-mark on the big man’s sleeve—on both sides of the sleeve, in fact; with a puncture mark in its centre—and there must be several other such marks elsewhere on the coat, for a guess. ‘On our terms, when you’re good and ready, David.’

Audley reappeared triumphantly from the car, brandishing the umbrella. ‘I knew it was there … But I am ready, dear boy. And never more so than now.’ He stepped away from the car. ‘Come on, then.’

Tom watched him sniff the wind, and despaired. “That’s only one reason.‘

‘No, it isn’t.’ As it wasn’t actually raining the old man busied himself with furling the umbrella neatly, as though for a stroll up Whitehall. That is the other reason, exactly: if I let the bastards frighten me now, I’ll never walk free again—don’t you see?‘ He stabbed the umbrella decisively into the mud at his feet, looking at Tom with a quite uncharacteristically pleading look. ’Don’t you see?‘

Tom saw—and saw suddenly to the uttermost part, which he had never glimpsed so clearly before. But he couldn’t think of anything to say.

‘If they want me dead, then I am dead,’ said Audley disarmingly. ‘But if they don’t … and I
don’t
go and find out what they
do
want now … then I shall have to move house, and take all sorts of quite demoralizing precautions—at least, until Jack Butler can read the riot act to them … And I’m damned if I’m going to put Jack to that sort of trouble.’ Another grin. ‘And I’m also damned if I’m going to let them make me a coward-dying-many-times-before-his-death, too! I’m
damned
if I’m going to let Panin do that to me, in fact.’ The grin vanished utterly. ‘So let’s go and find out what the old devil’s really got up to then, Tom—right?’

So they walked.

Their walking was unreal, but on one level of experience its unreality was no new experience for Tom: the routine precautions he had superintended in the past, even in nominally peaceful parts of the Middle East, had always been fraught with similar tension; and in the Lebanon, where each side was against itself, as well as the middle and the mirror-image extremes, unreality was the only reality within the killing-zone.

But what was different here, and more unnerving, was the far greater unreality of a landscape in which only nature and the elements were violent, with no eyeless ruins and twisted wreckage, but only a coastline beaten by the fierce winter gales and the unconquerable sea itself the same natural path along which Major-General Gennadiy Zarubin’s father just might have walked, from Brentiscombe Point to Lynmouth long ago, before he had walked all the way from the Caspian Sea to Moscow
long ago, long ago, long ago
!

‘It’s amazing how the wind hits you, and then misses you, isn’t it!’ Audley puffed slightly, from the steepness of the path, as they completed the first zig-zag up the hillside. ‘I wonder whether he really did.’

‘Who—’ Puffed or not, the old man was always difficult to keep up with ‘ — who did? And did what?’

‘But it’s quite blown my cold away.’ Audley stopped for a moment, and drew the salt-sea wind into his lungs.

‘The wind?’ And, as always, Audley was hard to keep up with on another level. ‘Who did what?’

‘Zarubin
pere
.’ Audley nodded at the wrinkled, white-waved water, which was already far below them. ‘God help sailors on a day like this! Whether he was a simple sailor-lad, o’ertaken by great events—a great war and a great revolution, to name but two—and cast ashore in a far foreign land … And you can’t get much further or more foreign than the Caspian, at the mouth of the Volga.’ He cocked an eye at Tom. ‘What a story—if it’s true!’

‘Yes.’ This time he managed to start walking alongside the old man, trying to match stride for stride. ‘I was thinking the same thing. If it’s true.’

‘Uh-huh. It would be nice to think it was, somehow.’ Audley nodded as he walked. ‘Pity that we’ll never know now.’

‘We’ll never know?’ Tom cocked his own eye at the skyline above them. The steep hillside wore a combat jacket of browns and greens, the russet of last year’s bracken mixed with the winter-worn dark gorse and lighter grass and broken by rocky outcrops. ‘Won’t we?’

‘Panin’s a careful man. If it wasn’t true he’d make it so, for our benefit, just in case. He’s a man who likes to mix certainty with risk, I think—or the other way round.’

‘But why?’ Far down below, on the green floor of the combe, he could see two tiny figures in red anoraks—children at this height, but they might easily be adults—circling two toy black-and-white cows in the meadow; while above him the skyline and the whole landscape was empty. But in this well-camouflaged country the only certainty was
risk
, was all he knew. ‘Why, David?’

Audley said nothing for a dozen yards or more, as they followed the path across the hillside, over a stone culvert through which a stream splashed, noisy but invisible under the bracken. ‘Who knows? If this is really Zarubin’s country, then Panin must have thanked his lucky stars, because he’d know I couldn’t resist such a tale, never mind the bait. And if it isn’t … well, the same pretty much applies, whichever way the game’s played: I did the dirty on him, once upon a time. So it’s only history repeating itself, with a few cosmetic variations.
He
knows — and he also knows that
I
know. And so on,
ad infinitum—
it’s no use trying to make sense of it: it’s only like peeling a large Spanish onion, which makes me weep, but never makes me sad.’ He half-turned towards Tom in mid-stride, and patted himself vaguely in the midriff. ‘All we can do is keep our powder dry, like Jack Butler always says … and hope for the best, eh?’

Tom remembered two uncomfortable things almost simultaneously, and was further reminded of both of them by the additional burn-marks which Audley’s flapping raincoat revealed during the half-turn: the dead Pole’s little pistol, which Audley had palmed as ‘evidence’, would be about as much use in these conditions as a peashooter (even supposing the old man could still point it in the right direction, and not shoot himself in the foot); and, in these same conditions, his own Police Smith and Wesson, in his own hand and with five rounds remaining, provided only marginally more protection, if that.

‘Yes.’ He grinned foolishly at Audley. There was no point in voicing his professional doubts now. All he could do was hope for that best of Audley’s, while the stretch of path ahead of them was still empty. (Only Mad Dogs and Englishmen, and Visiting KGB Generals, went out in such wind-and-rain.) And the gorse-broken skyline was still equally empty above them. ‘You’re right, David.’

All the same, he scanned their surroundings even more carefully—only to discover instantly that the zag of the
zig-zag
behind them was no longer empty, however innocent: there was a head-scarfed woman there, with a child hidden in a push-chair, accompanied by a youth encased in a green anorak carrying an enormous red-and-yellow kite—clutching it with evident care, and obvious difficulty, since it was doing its best to hang-glide him into space already from the less-windy stretch of the path below.

‘What’s the matter, Tom?’ inquired Audley.

‘Nothing.’ If the bloody child soared into the skyline under his bloody kite, then that would have to be a problem for his idiot mother. All Sir Thomas Arkenshaw and Dr David Audley needed to do was to get round this last bit of pathway, in order not to be able to witness the tragedy, with the wind taking care of the mother’s anguished cries.

‘What?’ Audley was oblivious of women and children and kites.

‘Nothing.’ Tom erased them too. ‘I was going to say … you don’t really think Panin’s up to more violence, surely?’

‘Hah!’ Audley breathed in gratefully. ‘No, I don’t, Tom.’ He supported this pronouncement with another huge breath, cold-free, taken into the teeth of the wind. ‘Instinct tells me not. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here, to be honest.’ Another huge breath. ‘Because age has made a coward of me.’

‘What?’ Partly it was because the wind made the old man almost inaudible. But also Tom couldn’t resist taking another look at the Mad Englishwoman and her family. (And she was trying to button up the protective hood of the baby’s push-chair now, while the Awful Child was wrestling with his kite.)

‘What I’m depending on—’ Audley almost shouted the words ‘—is that Panin will know that Jack Butler will hold
him
responsible if anything unpleasant happens to me, no matter how it seems. Just as—’ The wind gusted strongly, carrying away the rest of his words.

And if anything unpleasant happens to us
? Tom wondered momentarily, although he already knew the answer to his own fate: the doom of bodyguards down the ages, long before King Harold’s household thegns had died to a man round his body, was part of the contract of service. Even if Willy Groot shed a tear for him she would still reckon he’d only got what he asked for in his line of work.