“I’m glad you’ve woken at last,” Pakeshi said in a weary voice. What I could see of his face looked as baggy and lined as an unironed shirt. Parts of it were red from continual nervous plucking.
“No helicopter?” I asked. I listened and heard nothing. Had we somehow managed to outrun them?
“No helicopter since the dawn,” he said. He sniffed and took a swig from a half bottle of gin he’d somehow acquired. “But do take a look behind you,” he added with an effort to sound brighter than he appeared. I glanced through the back window of the car. The same van I’d seen the day before in Crystal Palace was following us at a longish distance. “It’s been following us at least since the helicopter vanished,” he explained. “I think the strategy is to follow us until we run out of petrol.” He pointed at one of the dials set into the gleaming wood of the dash board. “This is something that we shall face within the hour. I was hoping you’d wake soon, as I supposed I should consult you on our next move. We could stop outside a police station and throw ourselves on the mercy of the authorities. Otherwise, unless we can shut down the Markham Broadcasting Corporation, I fear we must make a stand or to give in to whatever is intended for us.”
“Where are we?” I asked. I thought quickly of the police station idea. Almost certainly, that would send the van packing. On the other hand, I was a wanted man, and how would the average provincial plod take the claim that I was also being hunted by a Foreign Secretary engaged in some treasonous conspiracy with the leader of the Communist Party?
“Welcome to Basingstoke,” Pakeshi said once he was finished with one of those hard to reach bristles that poked from a roll of fat beneath his chin. “I practised here for a few months after my arrival in the Imperial motherland. If you’re as reluctant to face the police as you look, its industrial area provides us with a chance that, if it were not our only one, would seem absurdly slender.”
We drove on for another five minutes. I’d never seen Basingstoke. But the place was crowded with factories. Most of these were the small, modern buildings of yellow brick you see everywhere. They might have been turning out computers or other electrical products. Bearing in mind the slow, electric lorries that cracked and sputtered about with the names of shipping companies on their sides, the factories were closely tied to the export market, and might have been producing machine tools. It was hard to say. But they all looked rather busy, and were mostly surrounded with wire mesh fences. What chance Pakeshi thought they might provide was beyond my guess.
Any tendency to a fit of nerves was held at bay by the rising urgency of my bladder. Whatever our need for petrol, we really would need to stop soon. Or might there be a handy container somewhere in the car? As I was thinking of the right suggestion, Pakeshi turned a corner with a sudden and most painful swerve. He accelerated along the now empty road. After a few hundred yards, he did what amounted to an emergency stop that nearly pitched me over the front seats and through the windscreen. Looking closely at the crumbling and mostly abandoned factory buildings of the much older district we’d now entered, he turned again, and then again. For the moment at least, the black van was vanished from behind us.
“Haven’t we been down this road before?” I gasped. Pakeshi nodded, and, without warning, pushed his foot down even harder on the accelerator. I fell backwards onto the seat. When I managed to get myself upright, I turned and looked through the back window. There was still nothing behind us—though I’d seen the day before in South London how little chance there was of true escape. With another apparently impulsive turn of the wheel, Pakeshi turned sharp left through some gates that had been removed or had rusted open. He turned again and, out of sight from the road, parked in the loading yard of what might once have been a flour mill.
“Time to get out, Dr Markham,” he said. Before I could make any reply, he was out of the car and pulling at the back door on his own side. I fell out into his arms and prepared to stagger over into a corner of the yard. “Not so fast, Anthony,” he called. He reached back into the car for his big leather bag. He looked at it for a moment and put it into the boot, and then locked all the doors. “Come on,” he urged. “If we have more than a few minutes for this, we’ll be lucky.” He dragged me towards the gate and into the road. As we crossed to the other side, and went through another, smaller, gate, I looked about. There wasn’t another human being in sight. A thin drizzle had started again, and a solitary cat had taken shelter beneath some crumpled metal sheeting. It paused from licking itself dry and gave us an unpleasant look. We hurried past towards the main building.
Pakeshi almost danced with his own fit of the nerves as we pushed an old crate against the wall, and I then climbed slowly through a broken window into the large, empty space within. I felt what I’d thought were solid boards crumble beneath my feet. One of them smashed as Pakeshi’s much heavier bulk landed beside me. In the dim light that reached through the dirty or boarded up other windows, I could see that we were in a very large space indeed. This might once have been filled with steam-powered machinery, and hundreds or even thousands of workers would have teemed about. But the tide of prosperity that must have carried this place into the 1920s had first ebbed, and then, on its mighty return, had flowed in new channels. Now, its roof covered eight or nine floors of mournful dereliction, each one half the size of a football pitch.
Pakeshi looked sharply about the abandoned factory building. He pointed at a staircase in the middle of the floor that led down. He pulled me across the rot-spoiled floor. At the head of the staircase, he stopped and looked up for a brief and alien prayer to whatever deity he thought it worth hoping to exist. I looked back to the window and nearly lost control of my bladder. I could hear the distant throbbing of the van as it drove along those deserted streets. If it chose to park outside the gates of this factory, we’d never get back to Macmillan’s car. And I could see two damp sets of footprints in the dust that covered the floor between the window and where we now stood.
Pakeshi led me hurriedly down the stairs into a basement. We raced along a darkened corridor towards the light of another staircase. There was an old lift shaft beside. Pakeshi looked into this and then up. He muttered another prayer and now dashed up the stairs. We hurried upwards, our shoes rasping loud on the cluttered iron and concrete of the stairs. On every floor Pakeshi looked at the closed doors of the lift. I think it was on the third floor that he stopped. Through one of the broken window panes that threw light onto the stairs, I could hear the sound of shouted orders in the yard outside.
There was a loud swish and Pakeshi pulled open the lift doors. I looked into the bleak iron mesh of a goods lift. He pushed me in and forced the door shut behind us.
“What are you doing?” I cried. I looked with horror at the sweaty brown face. Did he suppose there’d be any electricity in this building after so long? Even if there was, where did he think the lift would take us?
“Shut up and get your clothes off,” he snarled. I put a hand automatically on the top button of my overcoat, then let it fall again. I tried to begin an argument.
“Shut the fuck up!” he hissed through gritted teeth. “Have you never heard of a Faraday Cage?” I thought back fifteen years to Science lessons with Mr Davis. If I remembered correctly, it was all about blocking the progress of electromagnetic radiation. There was a formula that related the distance between the wires of the mesh and the wavelength of the radiation that needed to be blocked. You could have searched me for the formula. All I wanted was a good long pee through the rusty mesh that surrounded the lift. “We’ve got ten minutes at the most,” Pakeshi cried, pulling his hat off and twisting it desperately in his hands. “Make that five. Get those clothes off and spread your legs.”