The man was Odell.
He told the officers that he had seen nothing of the accident, which was essentially true, and made his escape from the scene before events in the adjacent alley were discovered.
It seemed every corner turned on his route back to his rooms brought a fresh question. Chief amongst them: why he had been lied to about Odell's death? And what psychosis had seized the man that made him capable of the slaughter Ballard had witnessed? He would not get the answers to these questions from his sometime colleagues, that he knew. The only man whom he might have beguiled an answer from was Cripps. He remembered the debate they'd had about Mironenko, and Cripps' talk of 'reasons for caution' when dealing with the Russian. The Glass Eye had known then that there was something in the wind, though surely even he had not envisaged the scale of the present disaster. Two highly valued agents murdered; Mironenko missing, presumed dead; he himself - if Suckling was to be believed - at death's door. And all this begun with Sergei Zakharovich Mironenko, the lost man of Berlin. It seemed his tragedy was infectious.
Tomorrow, Ballard decided, he would find Suckling and squeeze some answers from him. In the meantime, his head and his hands ached, and he wanted sleep. Fatigue compromised sound judgement, and if ever he needed that faculty it was now. But despite his exhaustion sleep eluded him for an hour or more, and when it came it was no comfort. He dreamt whispers; and hard upon them, rising as if to drown them out, the roar of the helicopters. Twice he surfaced from sleep with his head pounding; twice a hunger to understand what the whispers were telling him drove him to the pillow again. When he woke for the third time, the noise between his temples had become crippling; a thought-cancelling assault which made him fear for his sanity. Barely able to see the room through the pain, he crawled from his bed.
'Please ...'he murmured, as if there were somebody to help him from his misery.
A cool voice answered him out of the darkness:
'What do you want?'
He didn't question the questioner; merely said:
'Take the pain away.'
'You can do that for yourself ,' the voice told him.
He leaned against the wall, nursing his splitting head, tears of agony coming and coming. 'I don't know how,' he said.
'Your dreams give you pain,' the voice replied, 'so you must forget them. Do you understand? Forget them, and the pain will go.'
He understood the instruction, but not how to realise it. He had no powers of government in sleep. He was the object of these whispers; not they his. But the voice insisted.
'The dream means you harm, Bollard. You must bury it. Bury it deep.'
'Bury it?'
'Make an image of it, Ballard. Picture it in detail.'
He did as he was told. He imagined a burial party, and a box; and in the box, this dream. He made them dig deep, as the voice instructed him, so that he would never be able to disinter this hurtful thing again. But even as he imagined the box lowered into the pit he heard its boards creak. The dream would not lie down. It beat against confinement. The boards began to break.
'QuicklyV the voice said.
The din of the rotors had risen to a terrifying pitch. Blood had begun to pour from his nostrils; he tasted salt at the back of his throat.
'Finish if!' the voice yelled above the tumult. 'Cover it upl'
Ballard looked into the grave. The box was thrashing from side to side.
'Cover it, damn you!'
He tried to make the burial party obey; tried to will them to pick up their shovels and bury the offending thing alive, but they would not. Instead they gazed into the grave as he did and watched as the contents of the box fought for light.
'No!' the voice demanded, its fury mounting. 'You
must not look!'
The box danced in the hole. The lid splintered. Briefly, Ballard glimpsed something shining up between the boards.
'It will killyou!' the voice said, and as if to prove its point the volume of the sound rose beyond the point of endurance, washing out burial party, box and all in a blaze of pain. Suddenly it seemed that what the voice said was true; that he was near to death. But it wasn't the dream that was conspiring to kill him, but the sentinel they had posted between him and it: this skull-splintering cacophony.
Only now did he realise that he'd fallen on the floor, prostrate beneath this assault. Reaching out blindly he found the wall, and hauled himself towards it, the machines still thundering behind his eyes, the blood hot on his face.
He stood up as best he could and began to move towards the bathroom. Behind him the voice, its tantrum controlled, began its exhortation afresh. It sounded so intimate that he looked round, fully expecting to see the speaker, and he was not disappointed. For a few flickering moments he seemed to be standing in a small, windowless room, its walls painted a uniform white. The light here was bright and dead, and in the centre of the room stood the face behind the voice, smiling.
'Your dreams give you pain,' he said. This was the first commandment again. 'Bury them Ballard, and the pain will pass.'
Ballard wept like a child; this scrutiny shamed him. He looked away from his tutor to bury his tears.
'Trust us,' another voice said, close by. 'We're your friends.'
He didn't trust their fine words. The very pain they claimed to want to save him from was of their making; it was a stick to beat him with if the dreams came calling.
'We want to help you,' one or other of them said.
'No ...'he murmured. 'No damn you ... I don't ... I don't believe ...'
The room flickered out, and he was in the bedroom again, clinging to the wall like a climber to a cliff-face. Before they could come for him with more words, more pain, he edged his way to the bathroom door, and stumbled blindly towards the shower. There was a moment of panic while he located the taps; and then the water came on at a rush. It was bitterly cold, but he put his head beneath it, while the onslaught of rotor-blades tried to shake the plates of his skull apart. Icy water trekked down his back, but he let the rain come down on him in a torrent, and by degrees, the helicopters took their leave. He didn't move, though his body juddered with cold, until the last of them had gone; then he sat on the edge of the bath, mopping water from his neck and face and body, and eventually, when his legs felt courageous enough, made his way back into the bedroom.
He lay down on the same crumpled sheets in much the same position as he'd lain in before; yet nothing was the same. He didn't know what had changed in him, or how. But he lay there without sleep disturbing his serenity through the remaining hours of the night, trying to puzzle it out, and a little before dawn he remembered the words he had muttered in the face of the delusion. Simple words; but oh, their power.
'I don't believe ...'he said; and the commandments trembled. It was half an hour before noon when he arrived at the small book exporting firm which served Suckling for cover. He felt quick-witted, despite the disturbance of the night, and rapidly charmed his way past the receptionist and entered Suckling's office unannounced. When Suckling's eyes settled on his visitor he started from his desk as if fired upon.
'Good morning,' said Ballard. 'I thought it was time we talked.'
Suckling's eyes fled to the office-door, which Ballard had left ajar.
'Sorry; is there a draught?' Ballard closed the door gently. 'I want to see Cripps,' he said.
Suckling waded through the sea of books and manu- scripts that threatened to engulf his desk. 'Are you out of your mind, coming back here?'