Cold (2 page)

And then it came to him. He
had
seen her, only an hour before. That very morning he’d left Reilly at the vet’s for his annual check-up, gone for a bite of breakfast, run some errands and returned later than he’d planned to pick him up. He’d paid the vet and then bumped into her, also on her way out, with a dog the spitting image of Reilly, a small, light-boned running dog with black curly hair. The only difference was that her dog had a little white moustache or goatee on his face.

The two dogs had taken a liking to each other, their leads had got entangled in the doorway and Joe had had to stoop to separate them out. He’d stood up and said sorry, she’d mouthed ‘No problem’, but it was her eyes that had gripped his attention. They were wolf-blue, intense, wild, extraordinarily beautiful. He remembered, too, the sweet melancholy of her face, the sallow skin and dark hair. She’d worn a pendant around her neck on a rough leather cord, a crescent moon with some Arabic script on it.

And now – what? Was she stalking him?

One hundred yards behind Wolf Eyes, two men trudged through the snow, moving at the exact same pace as her. Bald, chunky, in long black overcoats, they had the same frame and way of walking: twins from a funeral home, out for a stroll. They moved closer to each other and exchanged a few words.

Joe climbed a low, uneven hillock and turned to gaze back. Wolf Eyes stood, thirty yards behind him; the two men, one hundred yards behind her. Joe stayed where he was, impervious to the cold scouring his throat. A crow flapped away to another piece of sky.

Fifteen, twenty paces more, along the edge of the rise, he stopped. So did they. He faced front, walked three steps, twirled to face them and all three stopped dead. A sinister gavotte: Joe turned, they stopped; he moved, they moved. They were tracking him but afraid, or not empowered, to make contact. If the two men were following Wolf Eyes, then why was she following him?

He reached for his phone to take a photograph of his shadows, but the battery was dead. For the devilry of it, he picked up a ball of snow, packed it, and lobbed it as hard as he could towards the woman. It fell well short but she stood monolith-still, as if nothing had happened. He stooped to pick up some fresh ammunition, packed it hard and threw a second snowball. Wolf Eyes and her shadows remained motionless, frozen in space and time.

‘What do you want? Cat got your tongue?’ he yelled at them.

They made no noise, no movement.

He made a third snowball and was about to hurl it, then thought better of it. He opened his fist and the unthrown snowball fell to the ground with the softest of
phut
s.

To the west, a bank of cloud piled up, the colour of wet cement. He bent down and put the dog on his lead and set off, gazing back every now and then, anxiety coursing through him. The three of them stayed stock-still where they were, diminishing black dots. As he stumbled into an ancient oak wood, treed with history, he looked back one last time.

They had gone.

UTAH

A
Cooper’s hawk gyred in the thermals in the thin mountain air, Bear Lake below and the Rockies above, the bird of prey’s universe half lit by a low wintry sun. In the valleys, mist still swirled and coiled, shrouding detail, the earth grey and numinous. Ice-grime dusted the buckled land but the deep snow of winter had yet to come.

A figure came out from a long, low log cabin and slammed the door shut. A tiny bee of a woman in blue jeans and boots, a black puffer jacket against the cold, a mass of silver hair coiled tightly in a bun. She walked down to an ancient Ford pickup parked in front of the cabin, carrying a small wicker picnic basket over one arm and cradling a shotgun in the other. She opened the passenger door and placed the shotgun and basket within, got in, and slammed the pickup’s door shut with the same vehemence as she’d slammed the cabin door.

Grandma was angry.

Sat behind the steering wheel was a slight, wiry man in his sixty-fourth year, his white hair closely cropped and his beard neatly trimmed with no moustache, in the style fashionable in Abraham Lincoln’s day. He was dressed in a dark coat, worn with age, a dark charcoal suit, white shirt, burgundy tie and black brogues. Nothing fancy, nothing new. A wide gap showed in his front teeth, which might have suggested to a casual observer that he was a country boy out of his depth, even a bit simple. But if you studied the old man closely he had a stillness about him that urged caution.

At the sight of the shotgun, he slowly shook his head. They had been playing this game for half a century or more. They didn’t talk much; they didn’t need to. It was she who broke the rules, who brought their unarticulated sorrow to the surface.

‘Man’s leaving his woman, she gotta protect herself.’

‘Grandma, I—’

‘Don’t you call me Grandma, you damn so-and-so Ezekiel Chandler.’

‘Mary-Lou, I just worried that you might get excited. You’ll blow your foot off with that there elephant gun. And your feet being so dainty and all.’

Vanity about her tiny feet, about her love for dancing, was one of Mary-Lou’s very few weak points and, despite her deep and raging anger at his foolishness, she had to suppress a smile of pleasure at the compliment.

‘Hold your tongue, Zeke.’

‘I ain’t leaving you.’

‘Get going, you old fool.’

He turned the key in the ignition, and the engine bit and they lurched off, heading south-west towards Salt Lake City. Three hours on the road before they rounded a bend and the great rift lay spread out in front of them.

The early-morning mist had long gone. A gleam of light from the centre of the city below glinted in the sun. It was, it must be, the utmost tip of the golden horn of the Angel Moroni, a burning symbol of the alien god that Zeke no longer believed in. The Ford left the asphalt and wallowed to a halt, so that they could both cherish the view, on this, their last day of togetherness.

‘Zeke.’

They hadn’t spoken a word the whole time it had taken them to drive from the shack close to the Idaho line to this, the first prospect of Salt Lake.

‘Mary-Lou?’

She had been by a country mile the most beautiful woman in the valley. Raven-black hair, red lips, a body to die for, tiny feet. And he had feared her wrath for every second he’d known her.

‘I’ve loved every inch of you since you came down from Mr Plackett’s farm with your hand falling off at the wrist begging for help. I sewed that hand back on and I was only a baby.’

‘You were sweet sixteen.’ His left hand gripped the wheel with the strength of a monument; his right hand’s grasp was as limp as an aunt’s peck on the cheek.

‘Shut yer mouth.’

Ordinarily, he would not have allowed such language from her. But today Zeke could not find his voice.

‘And then I gave you seven children.’

‘I know what you did, Mary-Lou.’

‘And you worked for that
thing
’ – she said ‘thing’ like it was a curse – ‘in Washington, DC. And I nursed my babies and I prayed for you night and day. Congo, Afghanistan, Moscow . . . You gave me a whole heap of nightmares.’

‘Mary-Lou, I—’

‘Shush yourself, Zeke. I prayed for you wherever you were, and the Angel Moroni delivered you back every time.’

‘Mary-Lou, I—’

‘Shush yourself,’ she said. ‘And I do declare that you were the handsomest, bravest, most God-fearing Mormon in the whole valley and I felt so honoured to be your woman.’

She had never spoken to him like this, not in the half-century he had known and loved her.

‘Grandma, please.’

‘Shush. And you retire from that thing and finally I’ve got you where I want you. And what do you do? You repay me for my whole life of loving you and stitching up your hand, best as I could do.’

‘You did it amazing, Mary-Lou.’

‘Shut your mouth, Ezekiel Chandler. And you repay me by going rogue, by turning your back on our Church and becoming an apostate. And I do declare that much as I love every fibre of your being, if you go ahead with this silly nonsense that seems to be in your head today, I and my children and their grandchildren will have nothing to do with you from this day forth to the end of the world.’

‘I – I . . .’

‘Tell them you’ve changed your mind. Tell them you’ve had second thoughts.’

‘I can’t, Mary-Lou.’

‘Then we’d better get going.’

He turned the key in the ignition and the pickup lurched back onto the road and headed down the mountain towards the city. He couldn’t think about the desolation that would follow the meeting. He might never see his children and grandchildren again. Instead, he quoted his favourite passage from Lermontov, which earned a rebuke from Mary-Lou.

‘Hush your mumbling, Grandpa.’

He rolled the phrase over in his mind, first in Russian, then in English:

Restless, he begs for storms,

As though in storms there is rest.

It summed up his decades of service with the CIA. His mind wound back to the late 1970s and his very first mission, in Katanga Province in Congo. He’d been as green as a lime, only just arrived in Lubumbashi in the heart of the copper belt, a centre of resistance to President Mobutu, whom Uncle Sam had backed for reasons Zeke never understood then nor got to understand since. He was in the consulate, still acclimatising to the easy-goingness of the locals and the prickliness of the heat, when he got a flash message to go to the main police station. They’d caught a Soviet agent and they needed a Russian speaker, pretty damn fast.

To say Zeke had a gift for languages was like suggesting that Isaac Newton was not bad at maths. A Mormon from the hicks, he could speak gulag slang as if he’d got out of Kolyma the day before yesterday. That was because of a deep friendship he’d struck up with an old Russian fisherman who’d spent two decades as a prisoner – a
zek
– in Stalin’s prison camps. Zeke had met the fisherman while serving his two years as a Mormon missionary with the Ainu people in the Kuril Islands, where Japan peters out and the Soviet Union began. The fisherman had said precious little about his past life to Zeke for a whole year – listening, but saying nothing.

One Orthodox Christmas, when the memory of the home he could never return to seized him, he opened up. Arrested for nothing, sentenced to twenty years because his father, long dead, had been an Orthodox priest, the old fisherman told of how the criminals in the gulag used to slit the throats of the newly arrived politicals for their fur-lined boots; how the zeks had to wait until the spring thaw in April before they could dig mass graves to bury the dead, who’d been stacked together outside like so much dead wood; how he and a friend had trekked out of Siberia and eventually, after crossing the Sea of Okhotsk in a rusty tub they’d stolen, made landfall on a Japanese-held island. When they came across an apple orchard on the island, they’d eaten so many apples they fell ill. His friend’s stomach burst wide open and he died; the fisherman had only just survived.

‘I think of Josef Stalin and all those lives, blunted, snuffed out for no good reason,’ said the fisherman into his vodka. ‘People cried when the old bastard died. Well, not me, not me.’ Zeke had never forgotten it.

Thanks to his Mormon posting, Zeke had been the only recruit in the CIA who, on joining the Agency, already spoke Japanese with a Russian accent and Russian with a zek accent, and Ainu, which hardly anyone spoke at all.

In Congo, the consular car left Zeke at the front door of the police station and it took a while before he was pointed down some steps to a dank basement. The smell of shit and blood was all but unbearable. From somewhere he couldn’t quite make out came the sound of clocks chiming, so loud it dinned into his ears. The basement was dark, apart from a bulb illuminating a naked man lying belly up on a table, his arms and legs pinioned by straps, his head clamped in a vice. A soiled white towel was stuffed in his mouth.

Jed Crone, the Kinshasa station chief, a Harvard man but a Mississippi boy, shifted his heft and picked up a length of hose. A stocky man, he had a thick head of brown hair and was wearing a once-white suit that had gone the colour of cat’s teeth. Crone signalled to an African policeman, who turned a tap. Water surged from the hose as he placed it on the towel, directly over the mouth of the naked man. He squirmed, legs and arms twisting and flexing against the straps, his head fixed, immobilised, by the vice. Muffled by the towel, he was making a curious gargling noise, like that of a man quietly drowning, a sound rendered almost inaudible by the cacophony of clocks.

On the periphery of the light stood a record player, next to which was an album sleeve, black, with a black triangle, from which flowed a narrow rainbow of light. Zeke lifted the needle, the clocks stopped, and Crone and the African stared at him. With the record player silent, every sound in the room seemed amplified. Water and snot bubbled in the naked man’s larynx, a hideous gargling.

‘You need a Russian speaker, sir?’

‘We do,’ said Crone, his southern drawl still pronounced.

‘I suggest we stop this, sir. Let me talk to him.’ To his ears, Zeke’s voice sounded very loud and very young.

‘Fuck you, you Mormon sissy.’

‘Stop this, sir. And don’t cuss in front of your betters.’

‘Fuck you, and what are you going to do about it?’

Crone was a head and shoulders taller than Zeke, and the African at the tap was even more massive.

‘Because I’m wearing a secret camera and I’ve been filming what you’re doing and I have a moral objection,’ Zeke said. ‘And unless you stop it, that film will be with Senator Frank Church’s committee on the Hill in two days’ time.’

Crone turned his whole body towards Zeke, the hose in his hand watering the concrete floor. ‘You wouldn’t have the balls.’

Zeke moved his chin, almost imperceptibly, up and down; he would so.

‘You’re bluffing.’

‘Are you calling me a gambler, Mr Crone? Because Mormons don’t drink alcohol, don’t drink coffee and we don’t gamble. So stop what you’re doing to the poor brother yon. Or . . .’