Rain on the Dead (31 page)

“Why the pistol, Max?” Dillon asked. “I thought we were friends.”

“I don’t have any of those anymore, and that includes you, Sara. The Glock is to show whoever is watching us through binoculars that I mean business. These things pump out seventeen rounds, as both of you know.” He raised his glass of wine. “I’m happy with this, but if you’ll sit down at the table I’ve laid for you, there’s a thermos of tea, another of coffee, and an open bottle of Irish whiskey, knowing you both have a taste for it.”

There was a garden table laid out just beside the open door to the porch, two chairs beside it, rain drifting in, as Sara poured coffee and spoke for the first time.

“I thought I knew you, Max, and I find I didn’t.” She wrapped her hands around the mug. “It’s not quite the worst thing to happen in my life, but it comes close. The first was hearing that my parents on holiday in Jerusalem had been killed by a Hamas bus bomb.”

“God help me, but I’m sorry for your hurt, girl,” he said. “It was not intended.”

“You could have fooled me,” Dillon said. “There are two men
and a woman up there at Rosedene now with your bullets in them. Was that not intended? What about Lily Shah, a kind and decent woman hard-used by life, conned into believing your lies?”

Sara broke in, her voice urgent and angry. “Just tell us, Max, what was so important that it justified the terrible things you’ve done.”

“Well, we could start with the stupid politicians who bungled operations over a twelve-year period in Afghanistan. Who took no notice of the fact that the Russian campaign there was a total disaster, with thousands dead. Even Alexander the Great couldn’t get out of the country fast enough. I wanted revenge for the obscenity of my butchered son’s body parts hanging from a thorn tree outside some wretched village in Helmand, and for my wife, reduced by all this to a walking corpse, reduced to cramming pills down her throat to end her torment. Does any of this mean a thing to you?”

“Dreadful, all of it.” Sara shook her head. “But revenge is not going to get us anywhere.”

“Oh, yes it is. As we leave Helmand Province, the Taliban are moving back in, so can Washington or London tell us what it was all about? As for my link with al-Qaeda, they knew how it was with me. That I didn’t give a stuff about Osama bin Laden, but I’ve been beyond price to them. An insider in the Security Service who isn’t even a Muslim. A bit like Philby during the Cold War, working for the Security Service on one hand and the KGB on the other.”

“There can only be one end to this. You realize that, don’t you?”

“Oh, the executioners will be out,” Max Shelby said. “They’ll all prefer me dead. I’ve only one thing to say, and that’s catch me if you can. It would be much better if you go now.”

Sara said, “When I was a very young officer in Bosnia, shocked by all those bodies, you told me that honor was everything to a soldier, because without it you were just a butcher.”

“As the times change, all men change with them. That was then, this is now.”

“I wish I’d cheated on the terms of this meeting, because I honored it and didn’t put a pistol in my pocket. If I had, I’d have shot you dead by now.”

“If you could,” he said calmly.

Dillon said, “I shouldn’t have listened to her when she persuaded me to leave my pistol at home.”

Sara had reached the road, and the Daimler moved in to get her. Max said, “Well, what’s to stop me from emptying this Glock into you right now?”

“Your plan, Max. You were always the clever bastard, so there’s method to your madness, and to shoot me dead right now would ruin it, whatever it is.”

Max had stopped smiling. “Shut your mouth and get out of here, otherwise I might change my mind and pull the trigger.”

“On a quiet street in Mayfair? That would be a stupid thing to do, and you were never that. On the other hand, it would indicate to most people that you really have gone mad.”

Max stood there rigid, the Glock raised in his right hand, a fixed look on his face, and then he smiled. “Why, Dillon, you almost had me,” and his smile had a certain triumph in it. “Go on, clear off.” He turned away, slamming the door on the other side of the bars, and Dillon moved back, scanning the façade of Kabul Place, then swung to meet the Daimler, which pulled in to pick him up.

Sara said, “What was that all about?”

“Oh, I didn’t like how he’d been with you, so I was bracing him.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she said.

Cazalet smiled. “Means trying to pick a fight.”

“It almost worked,” Dillon said. “I invited him to shoot me, trashed him, and for an instant there, I thought he might pull the trigger, but that would have ruined his plan.”

“Just get your breath for a minute,” Sara said. “What plan?”

“I haven’t the slightest idea, but I’m certain he’s got one. Sorry, Sara, you’d have to have been there to realize it.”

“I get the impression you really think he’s crazy,” Cazalet said.

“All the wicked and evil things he’s experienced are true enough,” Dillon said. “The barbarity of what happened to his son, the mental destruction of his wife, are true enough, but they’re turning him inward, and it’s been very destructive to his personality. He’s not the old Max anymore, but he still has some control. He demonstrated that by not shooting me when I taunted him.”

Ferguson said, “I won’t have this. The MI5 agents about Kabul Place are to invade the house when it gets dark. A power failure will then shut off any fancy security systems, so access should be no problem.”

“What if he puts up armed resistance?” Dillon asked.

“I’d rather have him in one piece,” Ferguson said. “But if it has to be that way, so be it.”

“So much tidier,” Sara said as the Daimler swept in to the front entrance of the Dorchester.

“Don’t be bitter, Captain Gideon,” said Ferguson as Parker braked to a halt. “I’m hoping this is going to work.”

—

Of course Max Shelby had a plan, a product of the boyish games of childhood. The general opinion of Kabul Place was that it was Victorian but refurbished in Edwardian times. Living at home and attending St. Paul’s School as a day boy, Kabul Place had been better than a storybook. His father away in the army, his mother indulgent, he roamed at will in the darkness below, a halogen lamp held high, prizing open closed-up entrances and frequently following the sound of water to strange places.

Few people realized that the London underground was riddled with tunnels that ran for miles all over the City—Norman and Tudor sewers, a network of smaller rivers leading to the Thames that the Georgians and, later, the Victorians, in their wisdom, covered over. It had remained his hobby, places where you only needed a sledgehammer to smash through crumbling Victorian bricks to create a point of entry that could be easily camouflaged.

So, in his present situation, he’d expected the kind of attack that Ferguson had described, not just because it was obvious, but because it was the only way that would make sense to his enemy, but he’d no intention of waiting for them.

He had made preparations for this situation a long time before and went up in the lift to the penthouse, where he had left a yellow waterproof overall of the type used by sewage workers, changed into it quickly, plus rubber boots and a safety helmet with a strong spotlight fixed to it to guide the way.

He had informed al-Qaeda’s Grand Council of the situation, the green light on his transceiver pinged softly, he pressed the button,
and the voice said, “Situation understood, your action approved now and in the future. Any help needed will be available.”

He closed the transceiver’s neat case and put it into a large military duffel bag. Just as he’d thought. They’d hang on to him while there was still a game to be played, which meant he was still in business. From his desk drawer he took a silenced Glock and slipped it into his right pocket, then took out a Walther PPK and put it in his left.

There were two pineapple grenades at the back of the drawer. He examined them in turn, frowning, then remembered taking them from the body of an Afridi he’d killed. He shrugged, dropped them into the duffel, then reached for a smaller bag that he’d packed quickly. Lightweight black suit, shirt, shoes, a toilet bag, his credit card, a thousand in cash, passport, and army identity papers. He closed it, dropped it into the larger duffel, which he zipped. He looked out to the streets below, found them dark enough to send him hurrying to the lift with the duffel, descending all the way to the cellars, where he turned on the lights, hurried through three corridors, one of which ended with a large wooden chair against the wall, an old-fashioned halogen light hanging from a hook. He switched on his helmet light, and as he did the same with the halogen, the power cut off.

There were already sounds of movement upstairs, so he swung back the chair, threw the duffel inside, and followed it, taking the halogen light with him and pulling the chair back into place. There were shouts in the distance, boots pounding, but they were already fading as Max Shelby hurried from one tunnel to another, the duffel hanging from its strap on his left shoulder.

The combination of his helmet light and the halogen of the other illuminated the tunnels as never before, and on occasion, he was ankle-deep, and at one point to his knees. The constant rain of the last few days, of course, but it didn’t matter because he had no intention of following the maze of tunnels to the Thames itself, a mile or more away. He had another destination in mind, and then everything changed as he stepped out of a side tunnel and found a mirror image of himself standing foot-deep in water, staring at him, a net in one hand and a rake in the other.

“Who the hell are you?” the man demanded belligerently.

“Never mind who I am,” Max said. “What are you up to? Scavenging? Or are you looking for bodies?”

“You can talk. I’d like to see what you’ve got in that duffel.”

“Feel free.” Max reached in, took out a pineapple grenade, removed the pin with his teeth, lobbed it at him, and ducked back into the side tunnel. The roar echoed, drowning whatever cries there were.

As things calmed, he stepped out to examine the carnage. The other man had obviously been killed instantly, his own action had been on impulse, so that he was not even sure what it was supposed to have achieved. Perhaps he
was
mad now, and this would be the final proof to Ferguson and the rest.

The face he looked down on was unrecognizable, the yellow uniform exactly like his own but ripped to bloodstained tatters. He felt inside the torn jacket, found a cheap wallet containing a name, a hostel address, and thirty pounds in cash.

A life to no purpose, or perhaps some purpose? There was a question here. Say a truly desperate man who had suffered more
than most in his private life, a man once highly respected but now harried by authority, faced only public shame of the worst sort and decided to stop running and end it all?

It could work if he was careful. He could keep the Glock, which was an illegal weapon. The Walther had been issued and was traceable, so it went into a pocket of the dead man’s uniform, together with Max’s passport, army identity papers, all soaked in bloodstained water, as were the items in the small bag.

He’d been running through those tunnels, dogs on his heels in a way, and the point had come where he’d had enough. Why he’d chosen such a dreadful way to do it could only be explained by a soldier who would have known it would bring death on the instant. The other grenade discovered in the duffel would be recognized as Russian, a relic of the Soviet war in Afghanistan. With luck it would all make sense, for a while at least, together with the halogen light that he bounced off the wall, smashing it.

Which left him the transceiver in its leather case, shockproof, impervious. He started to run now, holding it in his left hand, aware of sounds in the distance, finally passing across a concrete slope that resembled a waterfall because of recent rain. The tunnel there was smaller, rougher, an area discovered in his youth. He finally reached the crude steps, a grilled gate where he had to crouch and apply force to open it, and emerged into the darkness of an overgrown garden in one of the lanes at the back of Shepherd Market.

Another relic from boyhood, one of his favorites, the modest building had once been the stable for the cobbled street, converted into a garage with a flat above it. A dead end, a tiny garden, nobody to wonder who he was, so he had been able to come and go for
years, no obvious connection with Kabul Place, even during army time and MI5. After all, if there was one thing the Security Services had taught him, it was how simply one could change. Dye job for the hair, and there was plenty of that in the bathroom, false mustache, tinted glasses, and a tweed cap. He certainly had no intention of sitting around, and, after all, cabdrivers came in all shapes and sizes, and it was an old London black cab he’d kept in the garage for years, so useful for parking and the police just waved you on most of the time.

The kitchen needed tidying, but there was plenty of canned food in the cupboards and the freezer full of useful items. He went up to the modest bedroom, reported to the transceiver that he was still alive, and went into the bathroom for a shower, whistling. Tomorrow was another day.

—

“They say it’s pretty foul, Charles,” Sir Howard Glynn told Ferguson. “You and your people have a right to see him, I suppose. And I have to because I was his boss. Professor George Langley, whom you know well enough, is doing the autopsy at Church Street Mortuary, which is where the body is now. I’m going straight there—if you and those involved want to see him, you can join me.”

“I’ll certainly be there. Don’t know about the others. May I bring Cazalet?”

“Why not? I’ll see you then.”

Ferguson sat there thinking about it, then called Roper and filled him in. “I feel I have to go, but I’ll leave it to you to speak to the others, if you don’t mind. Would you consider going?”

“Absolutely not,” Roper told him. “I’m old-fashioned, and I’ve seen too many good men dead in my time to have any kind of sympathy with a traitor, whatever his excuses.”