I'd picked up a Lincoln an hour ago from Avis, nothing very fast, because we weren't going anywhere, just a car he could recognise easily, if he came, if Proctor came. I sat waiting.
I had telephoned him from Parks' flat, suggesting a rendezvous. He hadn't asked questions; he was a professional and he knew three things. One, that I wasn't trying to bring him off the Contessa into a trap, because I couldn't hope to do that, with the massive armed support he would ask Toufexis to put into the field. Two, I wouldn't suggest a rendezvous unless I'd got something to tell him that would interest him, and interest him to the point where he'd consider sparing my life. Three, that I was ready to trust him with that same life, or I wouldn't be here at all.
It was six minutes before the appointed time. In six minutes I would know what he'd decided to do, and there were only two possibilities. He was either sitting there in the Cadillac and would walk up the street to meet me, or he had let me believe he'd be here and simply told Toufexis that I was set up for the kill at this time and in this place.
If, in six minutes from now, I tried to drive away I would receive a fusillade before I'd gone fifty feet. The same thing would happen if I walked up the street and Proctor wasn't here.
The Cadillac had arrived with an escort of five vehicles, two of them armoured, with door pillars thicker than standard and smoked windows and massive front bumpers and heavy-duty tyres.
Five minutes.
Even if he were here, and we met, and talked, he might not be interested in what I'd got to say. He might disbelieve it, counter it or ignore it. And when he left here he would give the signal for the kilclass="underline" he wouldn't let a chance like this go begging.
Four minutes.
There was another risk. Even if what I told him made sense, and would normally have interested him to the point where he would decide to spare my life for his own sake, he might be so far gone by now, so subliminally indoctrinated or so high on cocaine, that he would behave irrationally, as they'd already noticed him doing on board the Contessa, according to the tapes.
I don't think there were any other risks. There may have been, and I could be missing them. I was very tired now, dangerously tired, pushing my luck.
And you can't get clear now, even if you wanted to.
I know that. Shuddup.
You're locked in.
It was the only way. Leave me alone.
The minute you get out of this car -
God's sake leave me alone.
That familiar feeling.
Three minutes, two, one.
Familiar feeling, ice along the spine, the hairs lifting at the nape of the neck, the breath quicker and the pulse accelerating, felt it so many times before, never got used to it, always as bad, the mouth dry and the eyes ready to flinch at the crack of a twig or the creak of a door or the click of a rifle bolt, thirty seconds and time slowing, slowing.
Nine o'clock on the facia, nine o'clock and no movement anywhere, no one getting out of the black Cadillac, we'll say nine, he'd said and I had agreed, and now it was nine, the appointed hour, and it would be up to me how long I waited before I realised he hadn't come, before I decided to get it over with and started the engine and pulled away from the kerb and drove into a burst of deadly hail, finito, you were a fool after all, you could have gone home, they had a plane for you, the hail shattering the windscreen and ripping into the bodywork and into my head, my face, my lungs, fool after all, there's one born every Door of the Cadillac opening.
Didn't have, it didn't have to be Proctor, just one of Toufexis's -
One man, only one man, getting out and slamming the door and looking in this direction and starting to walk, Proctor, his hands hanging loosely by his sides. I couldn't see his face but I know people by their walk and this was George Proctor and I got out of the car and shut the door and started along the sidewalk, picking my feet, having to pick my feet up and put them down again, felt like a marionette, did it show, felt like a marionette under slack strings, step at a time, one step at a time, you'll get there, a leaf, a leaf here and there underfoot, the trees breaking in high green wave against the city-bright sky, the shadows deep enough here to conceal -
'It'll have to be good,' he said, Proctor, halting in front of me.
'What? I told you to come alone. You don't listen.'
He studied me, dark eyes shimmering between narrowed lids, the heavy mouth pursed in a false smile. 'You look a bit under the weather.'
'It's just indigestion.'
He didn't laugh. 'I haven't got long.'
I went and leaned my back against the railings of the garden, hibiscus in bloom, red in the lamplight, brought one foot up to rest on the low stone wall, where to start, where are we going to start? 'You know I didn't get you here to waste your time, Proctor, or mine, so you'd better listen, because it's true.' I turned my head and saw men standing beside their cars, turned and looked the other way, same thing, a small army, I just wanted to know I'd been right: he'd asked Toufexis to bring a small army here… Turning to look at Proctor, 'You were very good, once, first class, we did two big ones together, didn't we, and then you had a bit of bad luck with that bullet and it brought you out of the action and you've been getting so bloody frustrated that you finally hit the drugs and let the Soviets turn you and now you're deep in all that shit they're peddling on the Contessa, and that is absolutely true. Were you listening?'
'For what it was worth.' The eyes very bright, not with anger or anything but worse, with amusement.
'I came here to take you home,' I said.
His eyes changed very slightly, and he was lifting his head back a degree, sighting me, and I realised something I hadn't ever thought of. He was thinking that I had lost my reason.
Perhaps I had.
'Home,' he said, 'I see.' Watching me carefully, 'You missed out, you know. You should have joined forces with me. It's an incredible thing they've come up with, a real master plan, a -'
'Call it world dictatorship.'
He shrugged. 'If you like. But a benign dictatorship. A new order, with -'
"The Thousand Year Reich,' I said, 'lasted twelve years.'
'This is so very different. This isn't socialism.' His hands began gesturing and his eyes brightened again. 'This is one world in the making, and we're -'
'Happy for you,' I said. 'Another thing you should listen to, Proctor, is this. You've been influenced by subliminal suggestion, ever since those people picked on you to work the Soviet connection. They've turned you into a robot.'
Stood waiting, letting it sink in. It had got home, I'd seen that. He knew all about subliminal suggestion: he'd had those commercial tapes doctored for the Trust.
In a moment he asked me, 'How much do you know?'
'About what?'
'About the Trust.'
The whole thing.'
He took a long time now. He didn't think I was mad any more. 'If you know everything, why do you want me to go home?'
'That's the mission. Always has been. You're the objective. You're out of your depth here.'
He asked suddenly – 'What makes you say they've had me under subliminal suggestion?'
The focus was here, then.
'We found a transmitter in your flat.'
'A bug?'
'No. A transmitter, putting out information. It was very powerful – I picked up some of the stuff when I was there that night, political stuff, and instructions. They were for you, of course, not me.'
His face was dead-pan, a trained face, conditioned to express nothing; but his eyes were changing all the time now, glittering, excited, then deadening, darkening. Perhaps it was the cocaine, but I didn't think so. I'd started some kind of struggle inside him.