The Envoy (35 page)

Kit scanned the sea horizon with his binoculars until he found a black lump coming in close to shore. The approaching ship flashed a brief signal and then her engines slowed. She was now so close that Kit no longer needed the binoculars to make out her shape and type. She was a large landing vessel: the type that the British had used to land tanks on the Normandy beaches. Kit watched as she manoeuvred astern of the Russian ship, slowed now to less than walking pace. The landing ship then spun around with a groaning of engines so that she lay abeam of the cargo
vessel.
Then there was a dull thud of steel on steel as the new arrival moored alongside.

The rest happened so quickly that it seemed practised and carefully choreographed. The crane motor whirred to a high pitch and the bomb rose out of the hold like an evil genie. It was lashed to a long pallet and was the size of a hearse. Kit felt his skin tingle. Mass death hung in solemn silhouette against the northern sky. Was this why we rose from the primal slime? Kit lay his face on his arm; he didn’t want to see any more. He
listened
to the sounds as the landing ship headed into the beach and crunched on to the shingle. He heard the rattle of chains as the landing ramp thumped on to the stones. Then the sound of a tracked vehicle leaving the ship and climbing the steep bank of shingle. Britain now had its own hydrogen bomb. Kit lay still for five more minutes tasting the salt of his tears. He wanted out; he didn’t care how. He just wanted out.

Kit crawled back the way he had come. When he was out of sight of the watchtowers, he got up and ran in short bursts crouching low. He was much more careful now than he had been coming. After each sprint he lay flat and listened to the night. He didn’t want to get caught. Not now, now that he had something to live for. He had uncovered a conspiracy and he would soon have the names to go with it. Kit didn’t care who used his secret once he had sold it. The secret was precious currency: the only
currency
powerful enough to buy him a life with Jennifer. Nothing else mattered.

Kit was less than two hundred yards from the point on the
riverbank
where Driscoll was supposed to pick him up. He halted and froze as soon as he heard the voices. One sounded London English, the other white South African – or maybe Rhodesian. The colonial voice spoke loudest. ‘You’re not fucking alone so don’t tell me that. You’re just a fucking colobus monkey. Where’s your bwana and who is he?’

The next thing Kit heard wasn’t Driscoll’s voice, but Driscoll’s scream. ‘Not there, don’t cut me there.’ The scream was really bloodcurdling this time. ‘Don’t cut me any more, not there. Please, please, I’ll talk.’

It was the London voice now. ‘You’d better talk and you’d
better
not lie.’ The two guards were now laughing. ‘We’ll know if you’re lying, mate. And if you are, Johnnie’s going to finish
cutting
your cock off and use it for fish bait – just like he used to do with those Mau Mau bastards in Kenya.’

Driscoll spoke next. Kit couldn’t hear all the words, but he heard enough to know that Driscoll was spilling all the beans he had. And who, thought Kit, could blame him? That stuff about captured agents not talking was patriotic bullshit.

It was only afterwards that Kit thought that he should have tried to rescue Driscoll. He did have a gun and might have
surprised
them, but at the time he only wanted to save himself. While Driscoll was talking, Kit low-crawled to the river and slid down the bank and into the water as quietly as a snake. The tide was now flooding hard back to Orford. Kit kicked off his boots and let his bag sink to the bottom of the river. The incoming tide was so strong that Kit hardly needed to swim. As he drifted past the place where the guards were holding Driscoll, Kit couldn’t see a thing, but he did hear them cutting off his head and Driscoll trying to scream through his gagged mouth. The decapitation wasn’t a sawing sound, it was a hacking sound. They must have been using some sort of machete, thought Kit. He could hear the blade crunching through the cartilage and bone and then
cracking
on to the shingle below the severed neck. Kit bore the guards no malice. They were just players – as he had once been – and these were the rules of the game. It reminded him of a Stanley Spencer painting of Jesus being nailed to the cross. The village carpenter with a mouthful of nails and a hammer in his hand is just a tradesman doing his job. Crucifixions, kitchen shelves – all the same.

The Director of the CIA, Allen Dulles, had flown to London for the first stop of his world tour. He had taken over an Air Force DC-6 and turned it into a flying penthouse complete with a
personal
physician to look after his gout. The world tour was
supposed
to be secret, but Dulles expected welcoming parties to greet him on the airport tarmac. He was behaving more like a head of state than the head of a clandestine security service.

Dark clouds from the south-west scudded across the Heathrow sky as Dulles bounded down the boarding ladder – the gout seemed in remission. The first to greet the Director was Ambassador Aldrich who got a big bear hug. Kit was fourth in the protocol pecking order and had to be content with a wink rather than a hug. Allen Dulles still used his trademark wink as a
seduction
tool with devastating effect. The wink said, ‘Those hugs and hearty laughs I give the bigwigs are just for show, the real
business
is between you and me.’ Kit was ashamed that he still fell for it, for he had long known that ‘wink’ to be a whore. Nonetheless, Kit knew that a private meeting between himself and Director Dulles was one of the principal reasons for the London visit – and Kit had prepared his lies with care. And when that meeting finally took place, two days later, Kit had even more lies to tell.

When Kit got back to his flat that evening, he picked up his post from the couple downstairs. There was a quarterly account statement from Medler and Gower about the family trust fund. It was more than he expected. Once again, Kit felt a wave of guilt and self-loathing. His wealth came from ancestors who had
stolen
land from one people and then enriched it by the slave labour of another. The money was cursed. Once again, Kit vowed that he would give it away. There was a letter from his sister, Caddie, with a New York postmark – and one from his mother postmarked from France. There were two postcards. One was from
diplomatic
friends on a mountain climbing holiday in Austria. They had addressed the card, presumably as a joke, to ‘His Excellency Kitson Fournier, Envoy Plenipotentiary’. The other postcard was from Jennifer. It was a sepia view of Orford Castle. The message was deceptively bland:
Brian and I hope to see you before the end of the month – as you promised! Louise sends her love and is
looking
forward to seeing you again. All our love too. Jennifer and Brian, xxx
. Kit felt his heart begin to pound and his skin tingle. It was going to be a long night.

Kit arrived in Orford just after midnight and parked the car on a dark lane near the churchyard. He felt nervous: it was not an inconspicuous time to prowl among gravestones in a churchyard. He felt the shade of his ancestor, Tombstone Frank, sitting beside him with his grave-robbing spade. Kit had no idea what he would say if the vicar found him there. If anyone questioned him, he would hint at an adulterous rendezvous. In a way, it was
true – and
lies shaped from truth are always the best lies.

Kit sat in the car and watched moon shadows caress the ruins of the older larger church. It was often like that in Suffolk. When one church collapsed, they built a smaller church within the
roofless
remains of its predecessor. It was as if the churches were shrinking in response to ebbing faith. Soon, thought Kit, the church would be the size of a doll’s house with matchbox pews and thimbles for chalices. Kit rolled down a window and listened to the night. The wind was still blowing a force five; in the distance was the sound of a bell buoy. Kit wondered what it would be like to be out there – with ‘those in peril on the sea’. He remembered the day that Jennifer had taken him to Orford Church to hear the rehearsal of
Noye’s Fludde
.

Was that, he thought, the moment that he had fallen in love with this island – not its government and its policies – but its
people
and land? Kit left the car and walked to the churchyard gate past gardens heavy with runner beans and late summer roses. All around him were sleeping houses. ‘I must,’ he swore, ‘never do anything that might bring them harm.’

It was easy to find Louise’s grave. He flicked on his pocket torch and quickly played it over the grass. Jennifer had planted the dead drop spike at the foot of the grave as agreed. Kit quickly retrieved it and went back to the car. It was best not to hang around. He didn’t bother to check what she had secreted in the spike until he got back to London – but he already had a good idea of what Jennifer had done.

It was after three in the morning when Kit got back to his flat. The first thing he did was take a double dose of amphetamines. This wasn’t going to be a night for sleep. When he picked up the dead drop spike, his hand was shaking. Part of him hoped he wasn’t going to find anything significant. He didn’t want to be trapped in another dilemma – and he was afraid for Jennifer too. He took a breath, unscrewed the top of the spike and emptied the contents on to the kitchen table. There wasn’t just one, there were two rolls of undeveloped film. What, thought Kit, has she done?

When the films were developed and fixed, Kit took them out of the tank and hung them above his bathtub. While he was waiting for them to dry, he opened the letter from Caddie.

Kit folded the letter and put it back in its envelope. He loved Caddie – he loved them all. But he knew that it was unlikely that he would ever see his family again. He went back into the
bathroom
to check the films. They were still wet. He went back to the sitting room and opened the letter from his mother.

Kit put the letter down and stared blankly into nothingness. Nothing any longer connected with anything. His deracination was as total as a summer rose hurled into the vacuum of outer space. Kit went back into the bathroom. The negatives were dry. He then took them into the kitchen where he laid them across a white lit base normally used for making contact prints, and studied them with a high-resolution magnifying class. At first, he was amazed that Brian had left so much sensitive stuff in his briefcase, but then he realised that it was probably more secure to keep such documents close at hand rather then to leave them on Orford Ness.

The first roll of film had been used to copy technical and
engineering
reports. There were numerous sketches labelled with both English and Cyrillic script. The second roll of film
contained
densely copied tables, formulae and statistics – but also, and more importantly, names. Much of the information copied was in Russian. This, Kit knew instinctively, was a Holy Grail moment: the type of intelligence scoop that spies would, literally, die for. The film almost certainly contained the identities of the entire network of spies, agents, double agents and scientists that had conspired to steal and sell a hydrogen bomb to the British intelligence services – and Kit fervently wished that he didn’t have it. Kit closed his eyes and prayed that he wouldn’t have to use it. Jennifer had, with each click of the spy camera’s shutter, lined up more than a hundred death sentences. The most
important
thing now was to arrange a rendezvous with Vasili – and let the bluffing and horse-trading commence. But time was running out – and, once he had had his meeting with Allen Dulles, Kit knew that the few hours remaining were going to be sprinting for the finish line.