INCARNATION (4 page)

‘Are you allowed to say who?’

There was a slight pause. Dryden was a rule-book on two legs. He’d weigh up everything he said seven times before saying it.

‘Matthew Hyde,’ he said.

‘S
am, this isn’t easy to explain.’

‘You can’t take me to the Dungeon.’

‘Not today, no. Oh, Sam, I’m really sorry.’

‘That’s all right.’

But he knew it wasn’t all right. At nine, promises mean a lot. In Sam’s condition, they meant more than usual.

‘Look, I’ll make it up to you. It’s just…’

Sam didn’t really know what his father did for a living. As with their friends, David’s job description was necessarily vague. He was ‘something in the civil service’, ‘a Whitehall dogsbody’, ‘a glorified typist’. Now, he thought, Sam had to know a little more.

‘Sam, will it help if I tell you something very secret? Something nobody, absolutely nobody else is to know.’

‘Stuart Badger’s dad had a secret like that. Stuart said he was a sex pervert. Are you one as well?’

‘Do you know what a sex pervert is?’

‘Stuart said he wore women’s clothes. Is that what you do?’

‘I’m sorry to disappoint you, Sam, but women’s clothes don’t look good on me. Let’s leave sex out of this for the moment. But I want you to remember that this is very seriously secret. I mean that. You’re to tell absolutely nobody, however much you may want to. People’s lives could depend on it.’

‘Not even Maddie?’

‘Maddie knows already. But it’s best you don’t talk about it with her. She worries about what I do.’

‘What do you do?’

‘I work in something called the Secret Service. Do you know what that is?’

Sam shook his head, but it was obvious his curiosity had been aroused.

‘It’s an organization that puts together information about other countries. And sometimes we send people in to find out more, or to take defensive action against things like terrorist attacks. My job is to get information about China.’

‘Like James Bond?’

‘Not quite.’

‘Do you have a gun?’

‘Most of the time, no. Even when you’re in the field, it isn’t always safe to carry a weapon.’

‘Do you … ?’

He held his finger out and put it over his son’s lips. They were warm to the touch. He wanted to take the boy and hug him hard, but something held him back.

‘Look, Sam, I don’t have time to go into all this now. But I will, I promise. All I want to say is that the reason I can’t take you out today is that I just had news about a man I knew, an old friend. He was … I sent him on a mission and he didn’t come back. I thought he was dead, and maybe he is. But it’s just possible he’s alive, and that he needs my help. I’ve got to go into the country to find out. Do you understand?’

Sam looked at him gravely.

‘You’re not making all this up?’ he asked. His eyes were wide, like a startled fawn’s. David shook his head.

‘Scout’s honour?’

‘Scout’s honour.’

‘I’ll spend the day with Billy Hancock. His mum’s taking him to Hyde Park. They’re taking a boat out.’

‘Terrific. I’ll give you money for lunch.’

Sam scampered off to get ready, then scampered back again.

‘Dad? Did you ever kill anyone? Like in the films?’

‘Enough speculation, Samuel Laing. I need to be on my way.’

Sam turned and hurried upstairs to his bedroom. Watching him leave, David felt his heart could so easily break.

C
arstairs was Arwel Hughes’s safe house down in the Cotswolds, in a five-acre wood near Temple Guiting. They’d kept everyone there at one time or another: Blake, Blunt, Gordievsky, and dozens more the public had never heard of and never would. Carstairs was stone-roofed, mullioned, and fair, but it was no holiday cottage.

He joined the M4 at Hammersmith, and headed west. There was a tailback on the other carriageway, a mile and more of lonely faces staring through sun-bedazzled windscreens. Some beat with their fingers to the rhythm of Radio One or a cassette, some combed their sleep-tangled hair, some yawned. It was the middle of another week, the end of another month. Life did not change.

David put his foot down, moving past slower traffic with practised ease. The Volvo took the strain gently, and he set the cruise control at 90, settling back to watch the city slip away from him. He held the wheel lightly and did what little steering was needed without thinking.

His thoughts were in turmoil. One moment Sam was there, his face bright and eager, then Maddie rushed to the front, clamouring for attention, then Elizabeth sauntered up, smiling her amused smile, then Matthew Hyde appeared out of dark shadows, tired and hesitant.

Dryden had pleaded ignorance. ‘It’s something to do with Matthew Hyde,’ he’d said. That’s why they want you there.’

‘Is Matthew alive? Has he made contact?’

‘I’ve told you all I know. Farrar said I was to tell you that. But that’s all.’

‘Will Farrar be there?’

There’d been a sigh at the other end. Dryden wasn’t a close friend, but he knew. David realized that a lot of people had known about Elizabeth’s affair a long time before she’d spilled the beans to him.

‘David, you’ve got to face him some time. Either that or resign the service.’

‘Will he be there?’

‘I don’t think so. It’s being handled by another desk. You have to be there because of Hyde.’

David had sent Hyde on his last mission three years earlier, to investigate a report that Iraqi scientists had been sighted in Sinkiang, not far from the nuclear testing sites at Lop Nor. Hyde had gone in, made two telephone calls to a Uighur agent in Urumchi, and then gone completely silent. He had not been heard from since. He and David had been old friends, and David hoped what he had not dared hope in years, that Matthew had somehow managed to escape.

He bypassed Windsor and Eton, through countryside fringed by Maidenhead and Slough. The constancy of the road appealed to him. If life was like a motorway, he thought, you’d know what to do, and when: come off here, go back on there, switch lanes, speed up, slow down.

Maddie had never understood the rules of the road. Her life was guided by instinct and impulse, she would quicken or slacken her pace according to the dictates of hormones and mysterious brain chemicals whose promptings were outside her conscious control. She’d had one breakdown after coming home from China six years earlier. His bright-faced little girl had become someone unrecognizable and unapproachable. She’d spent a long time in Dr Rose’s clinic in Esher, and when she’d come out they’d thought her cured.

What would Matthew be like? he wondered. Changed? Or the same old blight on the species? Hyde had been a wonder, a pain in everyone’s arse, cleverer than a dozen monkeys in a bag of treacle. He had read the ‘Analects’ more than one hundred times - or so he claimed - and he spoke Chinese like a hsiao flute, his pitch perfect, his accent flawless. What would he be now? David asked himself. A broken man? A reed? Or something quite different from anything he could imagine?

The car followed the road like a leaf racing downstream. Sunshine flowed across the countryside. Birds circled in an empty sky. He’d sent Matthew Hyde to the most dangerous place in the world, without back-up. He’d been sent to a desert without a heart or soul, and now he’d come home. Or something had come home.

Srinagar

23. June

‘M
r Dubey, sir, would you step this way, please?’

The voice came from a little alley on his left. Someone speaking Hindi, with a light Kashmiri accent. He turned to see who it was. Fierce sunlight struck his eyes, making him squint. He’d left his dark glasses behind in his office. The other man was visible only as a shadow.

Sunil Dubey had been the Indian Intelligence Service’s eyes and ears in Srinagar since as far back as made no difference. Most of the Service’s work was done up here, where every inch of ground was a matter of dispute between India and Pakistan, and Dubey had made a name for himself spotting and betraying agents who worked for the other side. His reports to Delhi were a matter of pride, commented on by Mr Ranjit Bhose, no less, the director of Jammu and Kashmir Regional Unit. He had never met Mr Bhose, but he dreamed of the day when his contribution to national security and public safety would be rewarded with a letter of commendation and a medal. Genuine silver, hallmarked, made in Britain.

He’d spent all day writing his latest, a super-confidential account of proceedings at 10 Pampore Alley, attesting to all that had been heard and witnessed by himself during the interview with the boy from Ladakh. It was with him now, in the canvas bag he carried, nestling next to the nan he’d just bought at Jamshid Khosraupur’s shop. He’d have liked to have access to the tape the man Ross had made. That would have made it perfect, and impressed Mr Bhose no end; but he knew there’d be no chance of that, not unless someone in Delhi put some pressure where it hurt, some even bigger cheese than Mr Ranjit Bhose. He sang under his breath, Nahi buleghi voh barsat ki rat, a song he’d heard Mohammad Rafi sing in an old film they’d shown on television last night.

It worried him a little that they’d spirited the boy away like that - parents, clothes, bags and baggage. The little rooms in Gujwara Alley had been stripped of their possessions: it was as if no one had ever lived there, or ever would again. Someone in Delhi - Mr Ranjit Bhose or maybe someone even more pukka - would be sure to ask him why he’d done nothing to prevent them, and he didn’t know what to answer. They should have been there, seen the man called Dennison, tried to face up to him themselves. Well, he’d telephoned Delhi, and it wasn’t his fault that the person on the other end was no one of any importance, that his message had been ‘logged and noted’, and almost certainly not passed on with any alacrity. All the same, they were sure to fix the blame on him if they could. Hence the importance of the report, hence the care he’d taken over it.

The boy worried him a lot. He’d met more than one incarnation in his time, pretty boys and pouting girls who said, ‘I’ve been here before’ or ‘My mother and father were so-and-so, and I’ve come back to be with them a second time.’ It reduced people to tears, tore families apart, created legal problems that went on for years, like that trial in Mr Dickens’s great novel. Most of them were fakes. Ninety-nine per cent kutcha, even if you closed your eyes and thought of all the gods in all the heavens. This one was different. This one had scared the Englishmen.

He took a step out of the sunlight, grateful for the shadow play of the alley. The man who had called to him was standing casually near an open doorway. The alley was full of food stalls. A smell of cooked mutton rose from the pots of a rista merchant, rich and warm.

With a sense of relief, Dubey recognized the man. His name was Mohammad Faiz, a Muslim saffron-seller who worked off and on for the British. Faiz had even passed occasional snippets of information to Dubey himself from time to time - nothing remarkable, but always worth paying a few rupees for. If his tips were shown up as false - which they often were - he’d simply shrug and say, ‘Mongra is mongra, lochha is lochha,’ in reference to the two kinds of saffron he sold: the first prohibitively expensive but genuine, the second cheap and just as yellow, but perfectly worthless.

Faiz also liked to put it about that he had close links to the Hizbul Mujahidin, the main Muslim separatist movement, and that he was even in the confidence of its leaders. To which Dubey would shrug and say, ‘Mongra is mongra, lochha is lochha.’ Still, round here, it never paid to be too careful. Never trust anyone, never distrust anyone. ‘Al-salam alaykum, Mohammad. Kya hal hai? It’s good to see you. Have you got something for me?’

Mohammad Faiz smiled. He was a thin man with loose, saffron-powdered skin that clung to what there was of his flesh like seaweed clinging to a rock. Yellow teeth gleamed in a soft red mouth.

‘Mr Dennison sahib says I must speak with you.’ 

‘Dennison? The Englishman? Where is he?’

‘Not here. Dennison has gone. He says I must find you and speak with you directly.’

Dubey looked up the narrow alley ahead of him. Shadow and sunlight, sunlight and shadow. A dog ran gamely between the legs of passers-by. A group of soldiers walked past, their weapons held in nervous hands, fearful of a sudden ambush or a bullet in the back. Hostile eyes followed them to the corner and out of sight.

‘Well, what is it he wants you to talk with me about?’

‘Not here, Mr Dubey, sir. He is very insistent. He says I must speak with you, sir, in private. Please, we can talk in here.’

He gestured to the open doorway: an odd gesture, one that a pimp or a strip-show tout might employ, luring the unwary into vice or self-degradation. A strange, vapid light came from inside. Dubey caught sight of a large fan turning somnolently in the thick air.

‘What is this place?’ he asked amiably.

‘It is my brother’s karkhana. His boys weave carpets. The very best Mughal designs. Perhaps you would like to buy one? A present for your dear wife.’

‘I can’t afford carpets. Your brother should have sold one to Mr Dennison.’

Mohammad moved his head in an apologetic manner.

‘Nabil will make a very special price for you when I tell him what an important man you are. You have most significant connections. Nabil always needs contacts to the right people. And he is very generous to those who help him. Come inside, let me introduce you.’

Dubey hesitated for several moments. He did not feel altogether safe in this part of town. But Mohammad had spoken with Dennison.

‘You are sure Dennison sahib asked you to speak with me?’

Mohammad looked at him impatiently and slipped one hand into his shirt pocket. He drew it out holding a slightly crumpled sheet of paper and handed it to Dubey. Dubey unfolded it. It bore a letterhead consisting only of Dennison’s name, beneath which someone had scribbled in English the words ‘Thanks for your help’ and the initials PJD, barely legible. Wordlessly, Dubey handed the paper back to Mohammad and followed him into the workshop.

There was a public area at the front, where carpets had been laid out for sale, some on a long bench, others hanging from the wall. Dubey could tell right away that they were not the very best work, but adequate. He admired one with dark red and gold tones, styled after a Persian model. He fingered it as he passed and admired its delicacy, wondering if he could afford it, even with a discount.