The little man on the wall, dressed in Wellingtons and sou-wester, was holding an umbrella and taking a tentative step out of a door. Next to him a clock showed twenty minutes to two. There was a trace of woodsmoke in the air.
Still floppy from the accumulation of a week’s stress and the morning’s interrogation, Petrie rolled off the bed and put his head in his hands. He went over it again.
1. We’re fugitives without money, false documentation or the means to obtain it.
2. We’re in a strange land, without friends or contacts.
3. Two governments, British and Russian, are determined to obliterate us.
4. That being so, is there anywhere reachable on Earth where we’d be safe?
5. America, possibly. The Americans will go for it, or they won’t. Lacking information on this, there’s an even chance.
6. If the Americans go for it, and the signal goes out, and the celestial coordinates of the signallers become public knowledge, Freya and I will be safe.
7. If the Americans don’t go for it, we’re finished.
8. An even chance of survival is better than a negligible one.
All this had gone through his head while talking to Freya in Roland’s Café but he had kept his thoughts to himself, ruthlessly stuck with the decision that Freya and he should split, to double the chance of the signal getting out.
The logic might have been icy, but the prospect of being dead in a few hours was flooding his mind and threatening to paralyse him. He tried to relax his muscles, but with no success. His throat felt constricted. He knew, without looking in a mirror, that his face was white. At the same time he had the weird feeling of being disembodied, as if he was a separate person looking down on his anguish.
He wondered about Freya. What was her plan? How could she survive on air? Where was she heading? Would she be safe in Norway, or would she be arrested at some border control and then disappear?
Back to the Americans. If they went for it, they would somehow have to get him out of the country. Somehow they would have to get him through a hostile passport control at some airport, on to a transatlantic Jumbo.
They must have done stuff like that hundreds of times.
Or they might buy into the same logic which had made the heads of two countries, one of them his own, decide to kill the knowledge, and its carriers.
He wondered if it had occurred to Callaghan and Alice that, since they were privy to the dangerous story, they might themselves now be targets. He had a surge of guilt at having exposed them to risk; at the same time he knew that anyone exposed to the knowledge would be at risk.
The mobile was under his pillow, apparently unmoved, and it had a message.
You wouldn’t believe what I’ve been through. Lift to Bulgaria took me to Varna, on the Black Sea. Now in Albena, a seaside resort to the north. Less than 300 km from Russian border. Will try to reach Odessa overnight and tomorrow fly from there to St Petersburg if Unur can get money to me. After that it gets hard but I have an idea. Reply through Unur if you are reading this.
Freya.
Freya, still alive. He heard her soft sing-song voice, smelled her perfume, watched the flow of her long skirt …
Cut that out. Concentrate on surviving.
Petrie walked on to the verandah. Clouds were straddling the peaks but the sun was riding above them. A car was descending the hairpin road, visible now and then through gaps in the conifer forest below. It was three miles away and Petrie couldn’t be sure if it was Callaghan’s. He breathed in a big lungful of fresh air before turning back into the room.
He stepped down the wooden stairs, meeting warm air coming up from the big living room. The fire was glowing red, and was too hot to stand close to. Petrie threw on some logs.
The kitchen looked new. Dishes piled neatly in the sink told Petrie that Alice and Joe had had breakfast. More exploration revealed a large cupboard which served as a study; it was cramped — ‘bijou’ in estate agent speak. The chalet was empty.
Petrie then explored outside. The house was built on a mountainside, in an acre of ground which had been sculpted from the rock. The property was enclosed by high fencing. He wondered about its purpose; he thought it was maybe to keep out chamonix or bears, but it seemed unnecessarily high.
Back in his room, he pulled out Wildlife of the High Tatras. The disk was still there, still between the marmot and the owl. In the bijou study, he fired up Callaghan’s computer, and found that it was connected to the outside world. He typed in the address of Freya’s Icelandic friend.
Urgent for Freya.
Overjoyed that you’re still at large but don’t send me any more details of your movements. Unless you’re pgp-encrypted your messages can be, and probably are, being read.
Tom.
Callaghan’s e-mail system, so far as Petrie could see, had no inbuilt encryption, nor did he have time to download a system. His message had avoided the key words which would draw the attention of Echelon, but he thought GCHQ had probably extended the repertoire of trigger words. His finger hovered over the return button which would fire the message over a telephone line, into some paraboloid somewhere and then up into an aether buzzing with curious satellites. He thought the message would probably go down into one of the big ears listening on the Yorkshire moors, and from there to GCHQ and MI6. He wondered if its route could be traced back to this isolated chalet in the back of beyond.
He thought maybe yes, maybe no. If yes, the cost of warning Freya could be a visit from British or Russian specialists, and this remote, isolated safe house would become his execution chamber, and Freya might still be caught anyway.
The balance of the logic was clear: don’t send the message.
He pressed the button.
Damn woman.
47
The Judgement
Half-past three in the morning. A stillness in the glacial air blanketing Camp David, its paths now under two feet of snow. Here and there, little oases of light in the dark, illuminating the falling snow. One oasis around Chestnut, where the duty officer sat at a quiet switchboard; another surrounding Elm, little more than a hut, which a Secret Service man was using to escape the Siberian cold. And lights were burning in the lounge of Aspen, where the President, Hazel, the CIA Chief and Harris were spread around armchairs.
‘Executive Order 12333 of 1981. Part two, section eleven. “No person employed in or acting on behalf of the US Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.”’ Hazel waved the document she had taken from the library in Hickory, then dropped it on the floor. She was on her fourth coffee of the night; hours of cigar smoke were drying up her throat.
Bull said, ‘Hazel, that’s a presidential ban, not a law. I can overrule it.’
‘But article two, para four of the UN Charter confers peacetime immunity of all people from acts of violence by the citizens, agents or military forces of another nation.’ She paused. ‘We can’t seriously conspire to assassinate innocent people.’
The DCI was starting on his fourth cigar. ‘What do you mean by assassinate?’
‘Come on, Al, you’re not going to give me some legal fudge?’
‘Hazel, the line between legality and illegality can be very thin. But these days we stay rigidly on the right side of it. That’s why precise definitions are fundamental. The NSC, the Department of Justice and the army’s International Law Division have all carried out legal analyses of domestic and international laws on assassination.’