Ba-boom baboom. Ba-boombaboom. Baboombaboombaboom…
And now she can see the geegaw waiting, and she is getting warmer. If she can just reach it and turn around, it will all be well. She stops swimming, stops falling, and it rises towards her. She breathes out and calms. The sea swallows her, and then something enormous swallows her again, and gravity and ice grip her and she screams.
Choking on the floor of the submarine, Edie Banister swears and shudders and says she will never, never, never again, until Donny Caspian’s hands wrap a warm towel around her and he tells her it will all be okay.
“I died, Donny,” she says, “I fucking did.”
“I hear that happens, Edie,” Donny says. “But I don’t recommend it so early in the day.”
For no good reason, this makes her laugh.
Reading the Barikad file, Tom Rice was conscious of two concurrent and conflicting responses. On the one hand, he felt he was being admitted to the room behind the curtain, to the secret councils of Europe in years gone by—and by extension, being tested and prepared for the moment, perhaps sooner than he thought, when he might be given similar access to contemporary things. Possibly his misgivings in London had been first-night nerves. Perhaps he really had just lucked into something which would take him to the heights. Promotion. Power. A knighthood, and in due course directorships, or the top job in an Oxbridge College for his retirement.
On the other, he found himself rejecting the histories in the file. It wasn’t that they were ridiculous. They were almost certainly all true—odd and alien in this new century, but true. The numbers of the dead might seem too immense, but Stalin’s time had been a horror. Russia was enormous, and she could die like almost no other country on Earth. Uncle Joe had spent her people freely, used them up to drag the nation into something like industrialism, if you didn’t look too closely. Millions had died, and tens of millions. So that was all plausible.
The notion that in modern times a government might expend serious money on something so outré as psychical research, and that somehow it might be relevant here, might seem wretchedly deluded: a tabloid story in the making. Again, though, it had happened. The Americans had verifiably had programmes which pursued these same goals. They had done stranger things, actually: experiments on wounded soldiers and radioactive material that read like the first pages of a comic book. And the Star Wars project which had ended the Cold War had been much the same idea: a gigantic boondoggle the Russians just had to chase, and could not afford. No, that part was possible too.
The idea that a British intelligence agency might indulge in a stunt as reckless as the one described in the final pages of the file he found bizarre, and if it had been today he would have assumed it was disinformation to conceal something more mundane and drab, like a blackmail plot or a well-placed bug. He knew, though, that the Special Operations Executive had done things of equal madness in its day, which was why SOE had numbered a huge proportion of dead heroes among its ranks, why the organisation had been considered wayward and annoying by serious agencies such as MI6, and why it was now defunct. All true.
But, but. The fashion in which a file is arranged, the context, structure, and manner of its presentation: Rice knew well that these things were as important in a way as the information it contained. He had himself produced reports which endorsed in every particular a given policy, while at the same time so setting them out that no elected leader would ever consider the policy’s implementation. It was one of the key skills of the British civil service, because politicians had to be forced to think of things which would happen after they were voted out, and didn’t want to.
So if he was flattered by this information, that was because he was supposed to be flattered—or so his more cautious mind declared. And if the end of the story suggested that there was more to come, that was not accidental, was not merely because life continued. It was because the narrative had been constructed to invite ideas of continuance. Frankly, on a professional level, he thought the document a little overdone. It could have been a great deal subtler. It was garish, almost prurient. It invited speculation of the wilder sort, lent itself—spuriously, so far as he knew—to connections to the present day which could not be sustained. It reminded him, in its apparently unmerited confidence, of the now-notorious dossiers which had preceded the invasion of a certain Middle-Eastern nation. There just was no clear reason why anyone involved in the Barikad project would come for Donny Caspian out of the past. Caspian’s dusty secrets were insignificant now. He could have given an interview to The Times, and it would have been cleared quite happily and read by almost no one. He had never been near a nuclear missile, hadn’t known dirty truths about the Casanova sons of foreign dignitaries now themselves ascended to the heights. That wasn’t him. Donny Caspian—odd as it might seem—had been a gunslinger and a daredevil, and for all that that was very laudable, it didn’t make you a target sixty years down the line. The file was hogwash. Throw in a bit of sex, and it would do very nicely as the worser sort of airport novel.
Tom Rice was new to the secret world, but he was not new to dirty tricks. He had been for several years charged with monitoring the trade in guano on one of Britain’s residual overseas territories, and while this was not overly glamorous, it had been massively educative. Guano might be the slimy product of the digestive systems of birds and mammals, but it was expensive and desirable, which meant people lied, cheated, and occasionally killed for it. Guano was sold in bulk at the international level, often traded on paper several times before it was ever actually shipped. And where there was paper, there was fraud. Warehouses were filled with ordinary mud and topped off with a layer of the good stuff; inspectors were bribed not to use a dipstick, and the presence of the fantasy guano was used to depress the market price so that someone could buy low, then sell high when the fraudulent guano disappeared. Sometimes you turned up to collect your product and found someone else had bribed it out from under you: the forms insisted you had taken delivery, and you’d be out your stake and your sale. And all that was before you even touched the arcane business of gaming the subsidies, which was where it got really bad and the guano trade started to dovetail with drugs and sex slaves. Tom Rice had been provided with a bodyguard of three when he was working the guano desk, and been trained in surviving a kidnapping. He’d had a hot button on a lanyard around his neck at all times, even in the bath.
All of which had made him just a little more open to ideas of foul play. Perhaps that was why he was here, now. If all this was on the level, that experience was worthwhile in this situation. But sitting in the Copper Kettle, with that infuriating old dear behind him exchanging increasingly barbed apologies with the manageress, he could feel the dead spot between his shoulderblades lighting up, and knew that something, somewhere, was very much awry. But for the life of him, he couldn’t see what it was.
“Really, Mrs Mandel,” said the old dear, “you shouldn’t use such language, and in front of the young gentleman. He’s terribly shocked.”
“ ‘Buck up’,” the manageress said icily. “I said ‘buck up’. Not anything else, I’m sure.”
“Well, no doubt you did. You really won’t let me pay?”
“I wouldn’t dream of it, Miss Banister,” Mrs Mandel replied.
“The Linzertorte was excellent,” the woman said, and Mrs Mandel huffed loudly, and marched back to her perch by the till.
Rice had ducked into what passed for an alley in Shrewton: a grim little sidestreet between a church and a post-office sorting office, lined with dustbins. He called Gravesend. “Hullo, Lizard here again.”