Responsibility, she thought, and bit her tongue until it bled. I have responsibility. I have to pull myself together. Fear is an old friend. I am used to fear. I have gone as far as a person can go and I’ve often been afraid. I have never shown it to anyone, but my enemies have frightened me. Enemies who have threatened me and everything I stand for. I have never let myself be broken. Fear only sharpened my senses. Fear made me clear-sighted and wise.
The blood tasted sweet, like warm iron.
Helen Bentley had plenty of practice in managing fear.
But not panic.
It floored her. Not even the familiar iron claw, which was now clamped round the back of her head, could jolt her from the confused state of paralysed fear that had gripped her since she was taken from the hotel suite. The adrenalin had not made her sharp and clear-sighted, as it normally did in conflict situations or important TV programmes. Quite the opposite. When the man by the side of her bed had whispered his short message, the world stood still and the pain was so overwhelming that he had to help her to her feet.
She had only once before experienced anything like it.
And that was a long time ago, and should have been forgotten.
It should have been forgotten. I should have forgotten it by now.
She was crying now, sobbing silently. Her tears were salty and mixed with the blood from her bitten tongue. The light by the door seemed to be getting brighter and there were threatening shadows everywhere. Even when she squeezed her eyes shut, she felt the red, dangerous dark closing in on her.
I must think. I have to think clearly.
Had she fallen asleep?
The experience of losing count of time confused her more than she might have imagined. For a moment she felt like she had been away for days, but then she reined in her rambling thoughts and made another attempt to reason.
Listen. Listen for sounds.
She opened her ears and senses. Nothing. It was silent.
At the late supper last night, the Norwegian prime minister had told her that the national-day celebrations would be loud. That the whole city would be out.
‘This is the children’s day,’ he had told her.
Trying to reconstruct an actual event was something solid. Something to focus her thoughts on, so that they didn’t detach and swirl around like leaves in the wind. She wanted to remember. She opened her eyes and stared straight at the red lamp.
The Prime Minister had stammered, and used bullet points.
‘We don’t parade our military forces,’ he said with a thick accent, ‘as other nations do. We show the world our children.’
She hadn’t heard any happy children’s shouts since she came to this empty bunker with the horrible red light. No brass bands. Nothing other than complete silence.
She couldn’t get rid of her headache. The way she was sitting, with her hands tied in front of her with thin strips of plastic that bit into the skin on her wrists, prevented her from performing her normal ritual. In desperation, she realised that the only thing she could do was to let go of the pain and to hope for salvation.
Warren, she thought, apathetically.
Then she fell asleep, in the middle of the worst attack she had ever experienced.
XVI
Tom Patrick O’Reilly stood on the corner of Madison Avenue and East 67th Street and longed to be home. It had been a tiring flight, as he hadn’t been able to sleep. He had sat on his own from Riyadh to Rome. It felt like being transported by a robot. Only when they landed in Rome did the pilot come out of the cockpit and greet him with a nod, before opening the doors. He had exactly twenty minutes until his next departure on a scheduled flight to Newark. Tom O’Reilly was sure that he wouldn’t manage it. But a woman in uniform had suddenly appeared – he had no idea where from – and miraculously rushed him through all the security checks.
The trip from Riyadh to New York had taken exactly fourteen hours, and the time difference made him feel confused and unwell. He never got used to it. His body felt heavier than normal and he couldn’t remember the last time his knee hurt so much. He had tried, without success, to cancel a couple of meetings that were scheduled in New York that afternoon.
He just wanted to go home.
The last meal with Abdallah had been eaten in silence. The food was delicious, as always. Abdallah had smiled his inscrutable smile as he ate slowly and systematically from one side of his plate to the other. His family were, as usual, not present. It was just them, Abdallah and Tom, and a silence that seemed to dominate. The servants disappeared too, once the fruit had been served. The candles had burnt down and the only light came from the big terracotta lamps on the walls. Abdallah had eventually got up and left him with nothing more than a quiet good night. In the morning, Tom had been woken by a servant and collected by a limousine. When he got into the car, the palace seemed to be totally deserted.
He had not looked back, and now Tom O’Reilly was standing on a corner on Upper East Side, clutching an envelope in his hand. The unfamiliar uncertainty made him anxious, almost frightened. The terrifying eagle on the postbox looked as if it was about to attack. He put down his small suitcase.
He could, of course, open the letter.
He tried to look around without drawing attention. The pavement was teeming with people. Car horns hooted in irritation. An old woman with a lapdog on her arm bumped into him as she passed. She was wearing sunglasses, despite the grey skies and the drizzle in the air. On the other side of the street, he noticed three youths talking animatedly. Tom thought they looked at him. Their lips were moving, but it wasn’t possible to hear what they were saying above the noise of the city. A girl smiled at him when he met her eyes; she was pushing a pram and was lightly dressed for the cool weather. A man stopped just beside him. He looked at his watch and opened his newspaper.
Don’t be paranoid, Tom reassured himself, and stroked his chin. They’re just normal people. They’re not watching you. They’re Americans. Just ordinary Americans and I am in my own country. This is my country and I’m safe here. Don’t be paranoid.
He could open the envelope.
He could throw it away.
Maybe he should go to the police.
With what? If the letter was illegal, he would be investigated and confronted with the fact that he had actually brought it into the country. If it was OK and Abdallah had been telling the truth, he would have betrayed the man who had looked after him for so many years.
He slowly opened the outer envelope. He pulled out the one inside, with the back facing up. The letter was not sealed, only glued down in the usual way. There was no sender’s address. He froze as he was about the turn the envelope over to see who the addressee was.
What he didn’t know wouldn’t harm him.
He could still throw the envelope away. There was a rubbish bin only a few metres along the street. He could throw the letter away, go to his meetings and forget the whole thing.
But he would never be able to forget it, because he knew that Abdallah would never forget him.
He resolutely dropped the letter into the blue postbox, then he picked up his suitcase and started to walk. As he passed the rubbish bin, he scrunched up the outer envelope with no name on it and dropped it into the bin.
There was nothing wrong with posting a letter.
It was not a crime to do a friend a favour. Tom straightened his shoulders and took a deep breath. He would try to wrap up the meetings as quickly as possible and catch the early-evening flight to Chicago. He wanted to get home to Judith and the kids. He had done absolutely nothing wrong.
He was just terribly tired.
He stopped at the pedestrian crossing and waited for the green man.
Three taxis were hooting furiously, quarrelling about the inside lane on Madison Avenue. A dog barked loudly and wheels screeched on the asphalt. A little girl howled in protest when her mother pulled her by the arm to stand beside Tom. She gave him an apologetic smile. He smiled back, full of understanding, and took a couple of steps out into the road.