Devil’s Harvest (11 page)

‘From a missile?’ She couldn’t keep the surprise out of her voice.

Richards nodded, his eyes all charm.

‘What kind of delivery system?’

‘Predator Reaper using AGM-114 NT Hellfire missile.’

‘NT?’ Ms Easter looked puzzled. ‘I’m not sure I’m familiar with that, sir.’

‘Non-Traceable. Self-destructing.’ Richards said it almost as a growl.

‘Are we talking about an actual … event? Just how theoretical is this?’ Again the quiver, naivety, disbelief perhaps. Or excitement.

Bartholomew cleared his throat to answer, but Richards beat him to it. ‘You can assume that it is an actual event. Given the obvious international sensitivity that attaches to such a
test
event, your information will be limited to the absolutely necessary. And your clearance level will have to be redetermined, of course.’ Again the flash of a smile. Charming bloody devil, Bartholomew thought, regarding Frank Richards in a new light.

‘I thought the self-destruct delivery system was still in the notional phase. Experimental only.’

‘It is, Ms Easter.’ This time, Bartholomew asserted himself, his stern gaze levelled at his enamoured junior officer. ‘As we’ve just found out to our eternal damnation, it is.’

Chapter 7

EN ROUTE TO NAIROBI

Gabriel and Jane left the staff meal soon after Professor Ismail had taken his leave. Jane had remained distracted by her phone call, while Gabriel had not recovered from the Sudanese man’s recriminations, and the evening stalled and coasted, spluttering to an early standstill. They walked to their car in silence, parked near the entrance to the Bristol Grammar School, its pinkish stonework hidden in the dark, their footsteps accentuated by the cold night. Gabriel always felt a burgeoning pressure in these tense moments, pushed either to declare open hostilities or to paper over the rifts with polite platitudes. But Jane did not appear to be angry with him so much as disconnected, caught up in her own unfathomable thoughts. Even his brave and searching ‘Is there anything wrong, dear?’ was met with flighty dismissal.

They drove towards the promenade to buy milk at the all-night convenience store near Broad Quay. The small fountains and shallow pools were lit up by green and red lights, the colours reflecting off the crisp packets and other city detritus collected in the water. Jane remained in the car while Gabriel went inside the small shop run by a skinny Pakistani who still hadn’t mastered even the most basic English, nor the quantification of the correct change. Jane was texting on her phone again when he returned. She had sent off her message as he pulled away in the direction of the Marriott Royal Hotel and the College Green. As they headed up the hill they passed, on the right, one of Banksy’s more famous pieces of graffiti. The owner of the tenement building the risqué artist had chosen as his canvas had decided to illuminate the work for night-time viewers. A naked man hung by one hand from an open window, while above him his half-dressed paramour and her angry husband looked out across Park Street in vain. Someone had thrown blue paint from the walkway, most of the splatters spraying out below the painting, and one partially obliterating the corner of the window pane.

Gabriel was not sufficiently offended by the graffiti to actually throw paint at it, but he did feel a prudish twinge of distaste for the public display of sexual jocularity. He didn’t find the ignorance of the cuckold particularly humorous. The man looked out from the window, oblivious to his rival just a foot below him, his cheating spouse wrapped in nought but a sheet. It was ribald and unsophisticated. Somehow demeaning of the city.

And then the slow, creeping, hot-and-cold tickling of an idea. A thought disassociated from anything before it, a notion that popped into his head, from nowhere, but immediately established itself as an obvious truth. Of course, he thought, before verbalising the obvious.

‘Jane, are you having an affair?’

His wife’s face instantly tautened into a shrew-like pose. The fact that she hesitated was sufficient. Despite the cold, the car felt stuffy.

‘An
affair
, Gabriel? That makes it sound so … I don’t know … deliberate. So clandestine. But, yes, I’ve been seeing someone, if you must know. Jason. It’s nothing serious.’

And there it was, a few breaths, a mouth, a tongue and lips formed into words, and the normal course of a life was sheared across its fault line, plunging both of them on an utterly new course. The words hung like smoke in the space between them, defying understanding. And what a strange formulation, Gabriel thought in the brief silence that followed: ‘seeing someone’, ‘nothing serious’. These were phrases from an obscure world.

‘Who the hell is Jason?’ He kept driving, his subconscious controlling the vehicle as they passed St George’s. It was a familiar landmark, and yet it seemed as if he’d never seen it before. How could it stand there, so impassive, ugly and prepossessing, when reality was warping around it?

‘A horticulturalist.’

Gabriel pulled up, steering the car off the road into a lay-by. Why not just block the road, scream outrage, jump out of the car and rent one’s clothes asunder? He pulled up the handbrake with unnecessary force.

‘You’re joking! You’re fucking a gardener?’ But you hate gardening, he almost added, biting it back as he realised the obtuseness of such a complaint.

‘There’s no need to be crass, Gabriel,’ Jane responded, a quiver in her voice for the first time. ‘He actually has a postgraduate degree from Birmingham.’

‘Birmingham!’ Gabriel spluttered. That second-rate university.

‘Oh, don’t be such an insufferable snob. Anyway, he had some kind of breakdown a while ago and is now following his passion.’ There was a pause in the car as they both considered the unfortunate choice of phrase.

The ‘affair’ had already run its smutty course, she insisted, and had now fizzled out, the gardener slinking back into the tool shed from whence he had emerged. Now that the truth was out, or at least partially exposed, it was impossible to retract it or look past it, or to comprehend how he had ever missed it. It was almost a relief, an explanation for Jane’s increasingly puzzling behaviour. But, having failed to see the obvious, Gabriel felt the humiliation even more keenly.

For weeks afterwards he walked around in stunned silence, unable to communicate save at the simplest level with those around him. He couldn’t escape his imaginings of Jane with another man – some sun-kissed, golden-fleeced Jason. He was like a dim-witted laboratory animal obsessed with a searing rod that burnt it every time it touched it. Unable to stay away, he kept putting out his destroyed appendage to grasp the metal once more.

He still felt that need now, to revisit his wounds and poke about in morbid fascination. He sensed that his shame was visible to everyone, that he carried Jane’s infidelity as a physical aberration on his body.

In spite of his obsession, he did not ask questions, he did not fancy he wanted the details, and Jane wasn’t forthcoming. How she had managed it remained, at a practical level, a mystery to him. They continued living in the house, moving about in a bizarrely polite dance. Somehow – Gabriel wasn’t clear how it had come about – he found himself sleeping on the couch, while Jane still sprawled out on the double bed. The cuckold loses more than just his dignity and his spouse, he realised – he loses his power and freedom as well. Having been outsmarted, deceived at the most basic level, he is no longer worthy of any status at all, apart from some enfeebled masculinity.

This state of abeyance continued, grey and dreadful, Gabriel immobilised by unidentifiable emotions, Jane reserved and watchful, waiting to see which way her fortunes would be cast. Gabriel felt her eyes upon him, but they weren’t softened by any regret; rather she seemed hardened by his indecision. There was no escape for either of them, circling the dying ashes of their marriage like tired dancers.

Then one day, several weeks into their purgatory, he came home, looked at his waiting couch, the blankets not folded or tidied since he had risen that morning, and took a decision. It wasn’t the outcome of careful deliberation, but a vengeful statement of intent. He had to do something, to extract his existence from the fog of Jane’s indiscretion.

‘I’m going to Sudan to finish my research,’ he announced to Jane when she returned from work, or wherever she had been.

He said it without actually articulating the thought in his own mind first, and once it was expressed it started to take shape as a motivated position. The content of the statement didn’t really matter. It was the announcement itself that was important, a statement of purpose. He might have said ‘Fuck you, you bitch, you’ve destroyed my life’, but it wasn’t in his nature.

‘That damn professor from Khartoum was right,’ he added. ‘The research cannot be completed – ethically and with truth – until I’ve been there. And I can’t bear that bloody couch any longer.’

Jane looked at him with more interest than he had seen in years. But her response was characteristically acerbic: ‘You pretend it’s about truth and science. But you’re as ambitious as anyone else. This research is your ticket to status, Gabriel. But going to Sudan is madness. You know nothing about the place. It’s just one barbaric tribe trying to kill another over a missing goat. They’re still on the US terrorist list. You’ll be buried in a shallow grave long before you find that ridiculous herb.’

The comment enraged him. It wasn’t the deceit, or the inherent xenophobia in her statement. It wasn’t the lack of apology or humility. It was that little barb – the reference to
Arabidopsis
as a herb – that finally caused his anger to erupt. It was an unforgivable transgression and Jane had known it the moment she saw his face colour in response.

‘You horrible little whore,’ he said, slamming the door as he left.

* * *

Before he could give the matter any further thought, Gabriel found himself being herded through the abominable conflation of humanity that was Heathrow Terminal 5. Out-sized women with clipped voices barked instructions at him, directing him from the bowels of the terminal building to the bright check-in booths. His water bottle had been confiscated without further explanation by an officious teenager with yellow teeth and a name tag identifying him as a ‘security assistant’ called Clint. A pair of nail clippers was whisked out of his overnight toiletry bag and tossed into a plastic bucket, clattering against a variety of similarly confiscated shiny implements. Then he was scrutinised at customs clearance as if he were trying to come
into
the country, on a passport from some unknown dictatorship in West Africa.

‘Sudan, sir?’ A long, unblinking look from a frog-mouthed person of indeterminate gender and intelligence. ‘Purpose of travel?’

‘Scientific research’ was met with a blank gaze. ‘Tourism, then,’ Gabriel offered, wondering if it sounded suspicious to change the reason for travel so quickly. But the answer placated his interrogator. Some tapping of computer keys proceeded, and then the dull gaze was back on him.

‘You aware there’s a travel warning?’

‘Yes, yes. That’s the North, I’m going to Juba. To South Sudan. They’re two different countries now.’ Gabriel sighed and tried to keep his patience. The official was still glaring at him when Gabriel realised that his passport was lying on the narrow counter in front of him, waiting for him to pick it up. ‘Thank you,’ he said, snatching at it. A nod of the amphibious head and an eyebrow raised for the next person to approach. This then was the brave new world of counter-terrorism: into battle
sans
water bottles or nail clippers.

The post-security boarding area was similarly frenetic and he was grateful when he finally found refuge in his window seat near the rear of the enormous Boeing, collapsing into his designated spot, sweaty and out of breath.

His comfort was short lived though. No sooner had he extricated his seatbelt from under his buttock than a strange-smelling young woman plonked herself next to him. Her unwashed hair had clumped into matted bundles, some sprouting upwards and outwards, others longer and hanging like courgettes from her scalp. A particularly dense dreadlock knocked against his shoulder as the distinctly un-Jamaican woman threw herself about. Gabriel had half a mind to ask the neat airhostess for a paper wipe to make sure that there was no resultant oil on his shirt. Her odour was both herbaceous and earthy, like hessian sacks or fresh hay, with a hint of cowpat. Her top was flouncy and more revealing than was respectable, the smooth curve of breast abundantly visible. She didn’t appear to be wearing any form of brassiere, the shadow of nipple beneath the Indian cotton more generous than Gabriel preferred.

The aisle seat was still empty when the pilot announced their imminent departure and Gabriel was annoyed to note that his new companion didn’t take the opportunity to move and put some personal space between them. He was on the point of suggesting it when she turned her attention to him.

‘Hey man,’ she announced, pointing out her chest intimidatingly. Gabriel hoped she did not notice him cower. ‘I’m Carrie. Cool that we’ll be partners on this journey.’

So cool, thought Gabriel sourly, although the breast situation had now captured his attention. Carrie turned out to be a twenty-two-yearold Canadian with a diploma in sustainable agriculture – whatever that meant – who had volunteered to plant veggie gardens in north Kenya using human excrement as compost. Gabriel tried to hide his copy of the
Annals of Botany
in the seat pocket in front of him but the hawk-eye soon spotted it. With oohs and aahs she learnt that her companion was in fact a real botanist, and her effusion quadrupled.

‘Oh my word, have you seen the latest results on human waste as a growth stimulant for veggies? It’s just amazing that we pour this nutritional gold into the sea to kill whatever we haven’t already plundered.’

Gabriel flinched at the image of his daily stool as ‘nutritional gold’ but said nothing, hunkering down for what was obviously going to be a long and tiring flight.

‘Of course, it’s optimal to use … waste from vegetarians, well vegans actually, because the heavy metals and hormone additives are absent and generally it’s far more beneficial. But do you think we can get people to understand that, well …’