Cold (33 page)

He bowed low and said a silent thank you to the
SleepEasy
for getting them safely to Ireland, then hopped onto the quay, knelt down, kissed the stone, crossed himself and closed his eyes in prayer.

When he opened them, he realised Katya was standing very close, her face a study of perplexed amusement.

‘I didn’t know you were religious,’ she said.

‘I’m not.’

‘Then I must be seeing things.’

‘When the boat keeled over ninety degrees, I said to myself, if we get through this alive, I’ll say a prayer. So I did.’

‘Simple on the outside, Mr Tiplady, but on the inside you are full of secrets.’

He stood hurriedly, picked up the bags and walked off. Katya ran after him, caught his arm, pulled him round and said, ‘I know nothing of the sea but I think I and your stupid dog owe our lives to you.’ And she reached out her hands and brought down his head and kissed him passionately on the lips. Reilly got bored with the dead seagull and lolloped over and jumped up, one paw on him and one paw on her, and Joe said, ‘You stupid dog!’ and they laughed until it hurt.

‘I will never go in a stupid boat again. So long as I shall live,’ Katya said.

‘Me neither,’ said Joe.

‘Before . . .’ she struggled to find the correct words to express the power of the emotion running through her. ‘Before, I thought I wanted to kill myself. On this boat, in the storm, I discovered something. I don’t want to die at all. I want to live.’

‘Me too,’ said Joe.

The quay was not much more than a stone extension of a natural rock outcrop protecting half a dozen fishing boats from the fierceness of the Atlantic rollers. Above it stretched a line of cottages painted daffodil, peach, bright green, and scarlet. The vividness of the colours made up for the bleakness of the day, foul-tempered rain squalling in from the west. The rigging on the fishing boats howled and whistled; waves slapped noisily inside the harbour. It was late afternoon, but the sky was already dark and getting darker by the minute. A hefty man in tweeds and a peaked cap left the scarlet house and approached them.

‘You sailed through that? You’re a braver man than I.’

Joe nodded and started speaking in a language that, to Katya’s ear, was gibberish – soft and sweet to the ear, with a real lilt to it, but gibberish nevertheless. The two men chatted until, conversation over, they shook hands and Joe led the way up the hill.

‘Was that Gaelic?’ Joe nodded. ‘What did you tell him?’

‘I told him he could sell what works on the boat and then he should take it out to sea and sink it. In return, he didn’t see us, we weren’t here. Not me, not you, not the dog.’

The man in the cap watched the big blond man, the woman and the dog walk off to the south, then stepped gingerly on board the
SleepEasy.
The first thing he did was inspect the locator beacon. After a quick fiddle, he reconnected the battery and a red light started to blink.

At least
, he thought,
I can make a wee bit of money out of that
.

LANGLEY

C
rocuses were beginning to punch through the soil and wood ducks fussed about the Potomac’s snowy banks, but there was no sign of the coming of spring inside the executive boardroom of the Central Intelligence Agency. Only the Stars and Stripes and the shield of the Agency provided colour against the greyness of the walls; apart from human voices, the only sound was the soft hiss of air conditioning.

The possible location of the head of ISIS, al-Baghdadi, the latest intercepts from Pyongyang, and a paper on how to combat the Chinese cyberthreat were all thrashed around, then put to bed. A thickset man with grey bristling hair and a deep voice, seeped in authority, called the meeting to a close but concluded: ‘Deputies Crone and Weaver, could you stay behind a moment, please?’

‘Certainly, Director Rinder,’ said Crone, always the more forceful of the two men in public – and in private. Weaver smiled thinly. The three men waited until the rest of the meeting attendees had left the room and the door had sealed behind them.

‘What’s on your mind, Mike?’ said Crone.

‘How is getting our technician back from Moscow going, Jed?’

‘We’re experiencing some difficulty.’ Crone nodded twice, agreeing with his own assessment. ‘We thought we had a trade with the Russians. They’re interested in two nobodies. The idea was they would get them, and in return we would have our technician.’

‘What went wrong?’

‘It’s hard to say. We think the British helped the nobodies disappear. They’ve vanished off-grid, and that couldn’t happen unless they had expert help. We’ve offered the Russians a series of other trades, but they’re interested only in these two.’

‘The two the Russians want, they are what?’ asked Rinder.

‘One Irish, male. One Chechen, female. Nobodies.’

‘And they’ve gone off-grid?’

‘Yes sir.’

‘How much money have we spent on the grid? Billions of dollars, the most sophisticated hunting dogs in the history of humanity, and we’re nowhere. Jed, tell me, how could that happen?’

‘I don’t know, Mike. I don’t know.’

‘This thing in Manaus – a cardinal dead. Has that got anything to do with our operation to find these two?’

Crone looked at Weaver, who offered the open palms of his hands, signalling that he had nothing to offer.

‘No,’ said Crone. ‘Not as far as we know.’

‘OK, good. Keep on it. We want our technician back in our custody. He has betrayed us and we wish to send a signal that if you are one of us, you wrong the Agency at your peril. That is understood – Jed? Dave?’

‘Absolutely, Mike,’ said Crone.

‘Yes sir,’ said Weaver.

‘Good, we’re done.’ Rinder stood up and walked towards his own executive door, which led to his office. He opened the door, was halfway through, when he turned his head and said, ‘Oh, one more thing. I reckon that this will be fine and pan out well in the next few weeks. If it doesn’t, I think we should bring in a consultant – one of us, obviously – to kick the tyres, just to check that you haven’t missed anything. He’ll have to have full run of all the files, all your email traffic and telephone calls, naturally.’

‘Naturally,’ agreed Crone. Weaver nodded.

‘Good, that’s settled then.’

‘The consultant,’ said Crone. ‘Who do have you in mind?’

‘Ezekiel Chandler,’ said Rinder, and disappeared behind his door.

‘We need that pansy Mormon like a hole in the head,’ said Crone softly. Weaver said nothing but twitched once, then twice again.

COUNTY DONEGAL

T
he Atlantic smashed against the rocks of Donegal, the spray phosphorescent, soaring into the sky until it melted into the darkness. They stood in a bus shelter, one hundred yards from Maguire’s Bar, waiting for the last customers to leave, Joe holding Reilly by his string, the spray and the rain pattering down, relentless, swishing down the drainpipes, puddling the road. Then the fiddler ran out of tunes and hurried out into the rain, followed by two barmaids, who called out goodnight, turning up their coat collars against the weather. A few minutes later the very last drinker staggered out of the pub. Joe and Katya waited another few minutes before walking slowly towards the bar. It was past four o’clock in the morning.

The pub was quite dark, but they were haloed by a light on the lintel.

‘You can dye your hair blond but you’ve got a damned cheek coming here, Joe Tiplady,’ said a voice, the same accent as Joe’s, but harder, sourer in tone. A wheelchair slid into the light, bearing a man – as big as Joe, but older, bearded – in his hands a sawn-off shotgun.

‘Be less trouble to get one of the boys to do it for me. No one would know, no one would tell. But’ – he waved the shotgun – ‘all things considered, I’d rather do it meself.’

‘Seamus . . .’ said Joe and got no further.

‘He’s trying to help me,’ said Katya, running to the man in the wheelchair, ignoring the shotgun and kneeling down beside him. Shaking from the wet and the cold, from what they’d been through together, from what might be to come, her voice trembled with every word she uttered. ‘Your brother . . . I don’t know what happened between you, but he saved my life, once, twice, three times. If you kill him, you’ve got to kill me, too, because without him I am dead. But kill me first.’

From the deadness in her voice, Seamus knew that this was not some artful trick, that she meant every word.

Outside, they could hear the dripping of the gutters and the patter of the rain falling on the porch roof; farther off, the Atlantic surf battering against the rocks below. Seamus kept the gun trained on Joe, but his eyes were held by Katya, kneeling at his side. Eventually, he lowered the gun.

‘You can’t stay here,’ Seamus said.

‘Thank you,’ sobbed Katya. Joe said nothing but he felt a great weight being lifted from him. His brother may not have forgiven him, but he was not going to kill him.

‘You need to find some other place to hide. Ireland’s too small to hide the likes of Joe Tiplady. People have been looking for yous.’

Katya said, ‘Who?’

‘Two men – one bald, kind of an albino, the other darker, handsome, a bit of madness in his eyes. They were first seen in West Belfast, then Cork, now here. Asking, asking, asking after him and a Russian woman and a little black dog. They are very particular about the dog.’

Reilly shook his fur; Katya emitted a low moaning sound.

‘They’re camped out in a posh hotel twenty miles from this very spot,’ said Seamus. ‘They come every morning, leave around midnight. They don’t drink, they don’t seem to eat. They just sit in their big black car and wait. It’s creeping the bejaysus out of the whole village.

‘When they first came here, I sought them out and asked what was their business. They were trying to find you, the brother who brought shame on his family and got his older brother shot in the back. They left with the very clear understanding that I would shoot the traitor Joe Tiplady on sight.

‘Now the British, they would get that, and leave. But these boys, they listened to me, they lapped it all up, and then they went and sat in their big car until midnight. And then they were back just after dawn the next day. The same thing every day for a week. It’s as if they’re working for a madman, someone who just won’t take no for an answer.’

‘They are,’ said Katya. ‘We want to go to . . . to America.’ She held back ‘Utah’ for some reason. ‘We can’t fly. They can trace our passports. What shall we do?’

Seamus thought for a moment. ‘I’ll try and work something out. In the meantime, I’ll take you to a place where you can wait, undisturbed.’

He disappeared off to the kitchen and returned with a black bag sitting on his lap, then motioned for them to follow him. Starlight guided them down the road until they came to the tiny harbour, where waves lapped against three small crabbing boats. Seamus parked his wheelchair by a rubber dinghy, lifted himself out of the chair and slid into the dinghy in one smooth, practised movement.

Beyond the harbour’s breakwater, the ocean still wrestled with the memory of the storm. Katya was barely able to pick out the deeper black of the seething sea against the black sky, but behind them, to the east, the darkness was thinning. Telephone wires sang, seagulls shivered in the lee of lobster pots. She shook her head.

‘I promised myself I would never go in a stupid boat again, and this one is tiny!’ she yelled into Joe’s ear. Joe nodded but remained silent. He’d said barely a word since they’d met his brother. Katya, Joe and Reilly got in, facing backwards. Seamus pulled on a cord and the dinghy’s outboard barked into life.

Once clear of the breakwater, the sea seemed no less wild than at the height of the storm, the dinghy sliding up peaks and smashing into troughs, the little two-stroke engine fizzing with anger when its propeller bit on air.

Wet through, so soaked to the skin she could feel her flesh pucker, her back to the direction in which they were heading, Katya was astonished her misery had ended so quickly.

Seamus judged the moment just right, edging the dinghy on the crest of a wave through two fingers of rock, and the suddenness of calm was shocking. From where they had come, the darkness was suffused with a red blur, and her eyes were adjusting to the gloom enough for her to make out, directly ahead, some rough steps, carved out of rock, and beyond that a small stone chapel, topped with a cross. Only later would she realise that it was entirely hidden from view from the mainland, and from the sea, by two great slabs of rock: there was no hiding place more perfect.

‘They built this place for a hermit monk long ago,’ said Seamus. There was no need to raise his voice. Here, on the island, sheltered from the wind, it was as if the storm did not exist. ‘Word was, the monk went quite mad. People say it’s haunted.’

Katya could believe it.

‘In the old days, fishermen would come to keep out of a storm,’ Seamus continued, ‘but the world’s forgotten it now. It came in useful in the civil war, in the early 1920s, and then again in the Troubles. You’ll be safe here. You’ve got enough food for a while and there’s a fishing line in the bag, too. I’ll come for you in a week’s time.’

He passed the black bag to Joe, judged the momentum of the dinghy just so – so that it bumped gently against the smooth rock at the base of the chapel. Joe, Reilly and Katya leapt out and the dinghy was reversing out, fast, and then it had gone.

Hard to imagine that in the twenty-first century they could be so utterly alone, so remote from modernity. Katya pressed on the latch to open the wooden door of the chapel. It wouldn’t budge. Joe took over, and the grime and rust gave way under his strength. Inside were two rooms: an anteroom, with a wooden bed and an ancient, musty mattress that Reilly made his own – he went fast to sleep, instantly – and to the side, a fireplace; beyond that was a tiny door you had to crouch to enter, and through that was a pew for two people, if that, and a stone altar, on it a single stone cross.

Windows looked west and east, where the light was fattening by the moment. Katya watched the Atlantic rollers smash into the island, jetting plumes of sea spray as tall as a house to be set on fire by the rising sun. Dark, dark crimson gave way to a fiery red. It was unutterably beautiful.