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, Price, Anthony - For the Good of the State 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 Price, Anthony - For the Good of the State 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 Price, Anthony - For the Good of the State 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, Price, Anthony - For the Good of the State 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.
Price, Anthony - For the Good of the State 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.
Somehow Audley had got ahead of him again. ‘What—?’