INCARNATION (34 page)

‘If you want to know the truth,’ she’d said, her voice held calm and reasonable to fool the voice-analysis machines, ‘we’ve got a traitor in-house.’

There’d been a frozen silence, and for a moment she’d felt naked, inadvertently exposed.

Polly Potter, Polly Potter

Red worms eat ‘er and maggots rot ‘er.

‘Could you be more specific, Miss Potter?’

There’d never been a Mr Potter, as it were. Plenty of men, several of whom had offered to change her name to Pride or Orpington or suchlike. Such nice men, but quite useless to her, every one.

‘Please, Miss Potter. We need your help.’

‘Well, as a matter of fact, I’d … rather not be. Specific. Not till I’m in a safe house. Or somewhere more secure than that.’

Another silence, as though Central Operations was slipping away from her down some sort of slippery grey tunnel. She knew them, they could wipe you out with a word or its omission.

‘This isn’t very helpful of you. If you don’t tell us ...’

‘As a matter of bloody fact, I’ve told you all I actually know. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I receive information about a traitor, and next thing a big man with a gun starts smashing my flat to pieces. I want you to take me out of here and put me somewhere he can’t get at me. I also need a communications link to China so I can pass on a warning to one of our agents. Then I want you to send someone to Carstairs PDQ. There’s a boy in there who may be at risk.’

‘We know about the boy.’

‘What do you mean, you know about him?’

‘We know who goes in and out of Carstairs, Miss Potter. Wouldn’t be right, our not knowing.’

‘Then you’ll get him out?’

‘If he’s there.’

She didn’t like that "if". It clung to her afterwards like a rebuke. They took down some details, but even as she spoke, she overheard a man’s voice in the background, murmuring words she could not make out. Had he been there in the room with them all along, or was this just a phantom voice on the line, a listener-in, an appraiser, a reckoner? It had been an insecure line anyway - where was she going to find a secure one at two in the morning?

They’d told her where they wanted her to go: a warehouse in Ponders End, down near the ballast works. It was a place where the service stored boxes of shredded paper before incinerating it. Or so they said. ‘How long will it take you to get there from where you are now?’ they’d asked. ‘At least an hour,’ she’d said. Taxis were too clumsy and unreliable, so she stole a bicycle and left a wad of banknotes to mark its disappearance.

She’d turned up well ahead of them and found a vantage point from which to watch. She’d not lost her field skills, what few she’d ever learned, watching, listening, observing (which was quite different to watching), waiting, anticipating. She’d added a few of her own, not that anyone had ever paid much heed: intuiting, blending, ignoring appearances.

They came in four cars, and she didn’t like the look of any of it. Least of all did she like the heavies they’d wheeled in. She knew their names, Stuart and Stevie. The Bouncers were big lads from the North-east, very sweet-natured, but remarkably strong and welded to duty like ice to skin. They had not been brought out to Ponders End to comfort or reassure her. She was a loose cannon, and in the handbook loose cannons needed more than a little ballast.

She’d slipped away on her bicycle, back down the Hertford Road, and slowly into town. A cheap hotel had loomed into sight just as she was on the verge of collapse and wondering how much further she could go. She’d booked a room and slept well into the afternoon. The hotel was near Hackney Downs, about as near the bottom of the star-rating system as it was possible to get without falling into a black hole and staying there. Most of her fellow-guests were professional women turning tricks. She’d been awakened about two in the afternoon by a couple in the next room engaging in vigorous and noisy physical exercise.

Now it was nearly eleven at night. She’d spent much of the day in cheap cafes and pizza parlours, drinking oily coffee and thinking it all through. The file on David Laing which she had stolen was now destroyed. Even so, she desperately wanted to get in touch with David, but she couldn’t think how. It only occurred to her as she’d been about to finish her last drink and shuffle back to the hotel.

She’d found the cafe on her first foray: it was a few doors away from the hotel. There’d been a telephone behind the counter, so she’d made her mind up there and then and rung Chris Donaldson from Section Six. He knew David, he knew Tursun, he would understand the problem.

He told her he’d be there in an hour or two.

‘Don’t tell anyone else,’ she said.

‘I won’t.’

‘Not even in the service.’

‘Especially not in the service.’ He’d laughed gently and replaced the receiver.

So she ordered a coffee and a KitKat, and sat down at an empty table in the corner. Apart from herself and a balding man behind the counter, the place was deserted. She’d asked the man earlier when he closed, and he’d answered that it was an all-night cafe, that there’d be customers in and out till morning: taxi drivers, nurses from the maternity hospital at the end of Jew’s Cemetery, prostitutes from Dorking Road, firemen, spongers, creeps.

‘No druggies, though. I can’t stand that. Got no time for that, I haven’t. Drugs.’ And he’d spat on the floor as if to say that hygiene was king.

It had suited her down to the ground. A Camp coffee and a KitKat and a long wait, it was what she wanted.

He turned up fifty minutes later, dressed in pitch black, as though he’d come for a funeral. A cigarette hung on his lower lip, his eyes looked tired. The cafe had filled a little. Cigarette smoke hung on the air, blue and drifting, the drug of choice in here. There was a night watchman from a nearby building site, a few loaders from the freightliner terminal, a couple of the girls from the far end of Dorking Road. They looked up hopefully as he came in, then dropped their eyes again, seeing him focused on her table.

‘I see the cavalry has finally arrived,’ she said as he sat down next to her, scraping his chair over the torn linoleum.

He lifted an imaginary trumpet to his lips and tooted.

‘I see you’ve found the most salubrious place in London to hide out in,’ he said, glancing round. The coffee machine coughed and spluttered. One of the girls laughed, and briefly the place seemed charmed.

‘I didn’t know places like this still existed,’ she said. ‘There’s something timeless about it. They know one another, the regulars that is, and there’s a sort of camaraderie. But it’s all surface. They don’t really know one another at all. They’re just passing in time. The night goes by, and they drift in and out, and nothing changes.’

‘You sound depressed.’

‘Wouldn’t you be?’

‘I’ll take you out of it,’ he said. ‘Not just the cafe, the whole thing. But first I need to talk. I need to know exactly what’s going on.’

He stood up and walked to a jukebox on the wall opposite. The man behind the counter watched him go. He made a selection of five records, then turned back to the table, pausing to buy a coffee on the way. The first record came on, Tom Waits singing "Downtown Train" in a dirge-like voice that seemed somehow appropriate.

‘Go through it from the beginning,’ he said, settling back into his seat. Steam rose from his coffee cup, making a faint veil between them. ‘Don’t leave anything out.’

She was tired, but she knew she’d not get any sleep until she told him what little she knew. She told him, and he listened, frowning.

‘That’s all?’

She nodded.

‘You don’t actually know who this traitor is?’

‘Tursun didn’t name him. Not in my presence, anyway.’

‘But you must have your thoughts. Your suspicions. Ideas spun at home.’

‘I have ideas, yes. But nothing certain.’

‘Have you told anyone else?’

‘You. Security, of course. That’s it.’

‘Why didn’t you just turn yourself in to Security? They’d have looked after you, it’s what they’re good at.’

She glanced round the cafe in its trembling fluorescent light. Its all-pervading desolation caused her real discomfort. She’d been here so long, she felt part of it already.

‘Someone sent the Bouncers,’ she said, hugging the words to herself. 'I didn’t like the look of them. There’s no need for that.’

‘So you ended up here?’

‘As you can see.’

‘Did you telephone anyone else from here?’

Her head moved from side to side. She wanted to sleep, to sleep for a long time.

‘I’ve no one left to phone,’ she said.

‘No friends?’

‘What would be the point? It would only land them in trouble.’

‘You’ve had discreet liaisons from time to time. Would one of them ...?’

‘Take my word for it.’

‘Very well, I do.’

She looked up then, as though his questions had alerted her. The cafe had emptied. Even the man behind the counter had made himself scarce. The coffee machine gurgled unattended, throwing out clouds of steam in all directions.

The door opened and Anthony Farrar came in, dressed in a light coat. He looked tired, thought Pauline, and his cheeks and eyelids were pale. He did not smile when he caught sight of her. She did not smile back.

‘I’m sorry ...’ said Donaldson, the only apology she’d ever get.

They’d always mocked her. What happened now would be no exception. As she got to her feet she felt Farrar take her elbow.

Polly Potter, Polly Potter,

First they got ‘er, then they shot ‘er …

M
a Jenwen instructed Yusup and Zunun, the two undertakers who lived in the next alley but one, to deal with his father’s rapidly decaying remains. They demanded payment well above the standard rate, and Jenwen handed over every penny without quibble. The body was embalmed - quite against usual practice - and wrapped tightly in the best bandages. Downstairs, they placed the old man in the light wood coffin that had been prepared for him ten years earlier, and filled the spaces with camphor before nailing down the lid.

The old man’s Muslim name was Shams al-Din, and his Chinese name was Ma Deming. He had been ninety-seven years old, he had married seven wives, divorcing four and outliving three, and he had had a single child, who had spent his entire life dying. Ma Jenwen had never thought to outlive his father, in spite of the old man’s great age. His own life had been such a helter-skelter race towards death, and his father’s such a sedate journey.

Just on the edge of the old town, between a bakery and a shop selling translations of Arabic texts on law, there stood a small neighbourhood mosque.

‘Take the coffin to the Molena Ashidin Mosque,’ Ma Jenwen said. ‘Leave it there till morning. I still have to notify some of the family.’

‘We can’t bury him in the cemetery outside the city. You understand that, don’t you?’

‘I’m speaking to the family of Sheikh Azad. They have space.’

David and Nabila had been given strict instructions to return when it was dark. The Chinese curfew had been lifted, because no one remained to enforce it. But Osman had imposed one of his own, and his men were scattered across the city to see no one used the crisis to rob and steal.

David spent the evening at Momin’s, sorting out what he needed to take with him and what he could leave behind. Of prime importance was his Magellan GPS, a small hand-held device weighing just over one and a half pounds, that would allow him to navigate using the twenty-one Global Positioning System satellites. In theory, GPS in hand, he’d be able to navigate his way through pea soup, thick-cut marmalade, and molasses.

He also packed his pistol, a submachine-gun, and several boxes of ammunition for both. The gun was an Uzi. He’d been forced to choose between it, with a 10-inch barrel, and a Sterling Mark 7 in its 4-inch version; the Uzi had won because it was so reliable in desert conditions.

He pulled the last strap tight and looked at his watch. There were still a few hours to go, and suddenly he felt desperately tired. He’d barely slept the night before. And he’d be lucky to find much time to sleep for a long time to come.

He said goodnight to Momin and went to bed, setting his alarm for two o’clock Peking time. Within minutes of his head touching the bolster, sleep was sucking him down into a deep pit that seemed to have neither bottom nor top. He felt himself spinning helplessly within it, then he and the pit had become one thing, and there was nothing but spinning, and nothing but darkness.

And then there was no darkness, and everything grew still. He was in a great forest, and above him the trunks of giant trees seemed to go up for ever. He walked and walked, trying to find a way out, but the further he went, the more all-encompassing the maze of trees became. It was as though the whole world had grown green. What sunlight came through the tangle of branches above had lost its original colour and acquired an emerald tinge.

He sat down on a tree-stump, tired and lost, and suddenly he caught sight of a doorway, and a staircase going up behind it, and proper light coming down from somewhere out of sight.

He passed through the doorway and started climbing the stairs. It seemed to take days to climb to their very top. The last step took him on to a short landing of polished ebony, where he came at last upon a fanciful door, embossed with dragons and wonderful trees and birds, and painted in red and gold. A huge lock of polished brass took up a great chunk of one side, and silken tassels as big as giant artichokes hung on the other.

David opened the door silently and stepped into a vast room scented with lilies and ambergris. Everywhere heavy curtains hung, embroidered with silk and gold thread. Beneath their feet, thick carpets had been laid, Chinese and Indian and Central Asian, all mixed together lavishly, their colours and their patterns clashing and harmonizing without rhyme or reason. From the ceiling hung thousands upon thousands of paper lanterns, each lit from deep within by a single candle, each with its own colour - now amaranth, now sapphire, now celadon, now carmine, now magenta and heliotrope and amethyst, now azure and indigo and ultramarine, now citron and fallow and jonquil and nankeen. Hundreds of colours, no two ever quite alike. And from each lantern hung ribbons and tassels that moved in the gentlest of breezes.