Fractions (65 page)

Was I all right. I felt as if it was I who had come back from the dead.

‘Of course, oh my God, are you?'

‘I'm fine, I saw some terrible things but I'm okay. So's Colin. We're at the airport.' She laughed. ‘Like you said. Sorry I'm a bit late. My flight boards in ten minutes, due in at 1545.'

It was 2.15. I said I'd be there to meet her. After she rang off I immediately called Annette with the news.

‘Is it safe for you to come out?' Annette asked after we'd finished telling each other several times over of our joy and relief and assurance that we'd neither of us ever given up hope.

I shrugged. ‘I'm not on any “wanted” lists. The mobs have been brought to heel. Looks safe enough to me.'

‘From where you are, I'm sure it does,' Annette said wryly. ‘Some of the movement people –'

‘Yeah, I know,' I said. They'd got involved in resistance. Some had got themselves interned, or shot. Others – such defence companies and militias as I could influence – had tried to avoid engagement, but found themselves fighting the Yanks whether they liked it or not. I was uncomfortable talking about it even on a secure line. ‘Still,' I went on, ‘I've got a list as long as my arm of messages and articles urging them not to do it, so…'

‘Anyway,' Annette said, in sudden decisiveness, ‘you can't stay down there forever. OK, I'll pick you up in fifteen minutes. Broadway at the lights. Usual.'

She was in Acton, not at home but not in hiding either.

‘Right, see you there love.'

I gathered my gear, swept up any traces of my presence, and when the basement looked again like nothing but a computer hobbyist's cubby-hole, climbed the swing-down aluminium ladder and stepped out from a cupboard under the stairs into my host's hallway. It had that dead aroma of a house where nothing had moved all day but the letter-box flap, the thermostat and the cleaning-machines. I left an envelope containing a few gold coins on the umbrella-stand and let myself out.

The house was on a street behind Ealing Broadway. The chestnuts lay like green sea-mines on Haven Green. A light drizzle was falling. I remembered a spray-bombed slogan from the Chernobyl year:
it isn't rain, it's fallout.
I turned up my collar and hurried. There were cops outside the Tube station – Republican Guards, to my surprise. I didn't give them a closer look.

I crossed the Broadway and walked away from, and then towards, the traffic lights. The Odeon across the way was showing
The Blue Beret
, advertised by a huge back-lit poster of some grizzled veteran played by Reeves or Depp (I forget) holding a bayonet's edge to a Peruvian peasant's throat.

I turned back, spotted Annette's black Volvo a hundred metres away in the sparse traffic and turned again and sauntered to match velocities as she slowed to a stop. I leaned over, opened the door and got in. There was always that moment of checking that you hadn't given someone the shock of their life.

We laughed, and she accelerated away from the lights.

‘Everybody all right?' I asked.

‘Everybody we know,' she said, her voice taut.

‘Tell me later about the comrades,' I said. ‘We'll do what we can.'

She nodded, concentrating on the road and the traffic-screen updates. Our route was charted along the Uxbridge Road until just past Southall, then sharp left along the Parkway to Heathrow.

‘What's wrong with the Great West Road?'

She grunted. ‘Troop transport.'

Hanwell, a middle-class residential suburb, was quiet. Southall, an Asian immigrant area, solid Republican, had dozens of gutted shopfronts.

‘What happened here?'

‘A mob from Hayes,' Annette said. We went up and across the bridge over the Grand Union Canal. The factories of Hayes, to our right, had been precision-bombed to charred splinters by the Yanks. I admit to feeling a certain grim satisfaction: the area had been a racist, imperialist bastion for years. Even the Trotskyists had given up selling their Red weeklies to its White trash.

‘What goes around comes around.'

‘Rather a hard lesson,' Annette said.

Every park we passed had its encampment of black plastic domes, lurking cowled aircraft, black helicopters. As we neared the airport the numbers of black-uniformed US/UN troops increased. No need for roadblocks – a wave of an identity-reader did a neater job. The lasers made you blink, always too late: the retinal scan was in.

Heathrow was like a scene from the twentieth century. Nobody was flying but those who had to: refugees from the war zones, wounded soldiers and civilians, desperate emigrants. It had a Third World of people waiting for flights, waiting to get through the re-imposed immigration barriers, waiting to die; and a Second World of officials and officers ordering them about. In this bedlam the First World consisted of volunteers trying to help and entrepreneurs trying to help themselves. Each passenger lounge had its field hospitals and hawkers; each gate its unpaid advisers and legal sharks and medical aid team.

We arrived at the international terminal, but the flight had been switched to the domestic. The rolling walkways were over-loaded with disembarking troops and their kit. Walking between terminals was a Brownian motion through a Hobbesian crowd. Time dragged, stopped, passed without being noticed. Annette and I clung together and struggled forward.

Hours later, when Eleanor and Colin at last appeared in the stream of arrivals, we were as haggard and ragged as they. After hugging and crying and talking, we turned around and fought our way out again. We got to the car, paid the parking surcharge, paid a hawker another outrageous sum for warm coffee, and set off for home. It was about 10.00 p.m.

I drove: Annette was exhausted, I was manic with relief.

As I edged the car around the junction for the M4 a laser's ruby flicker hurt my eyes. Blinking away the after-image, I was blinded again by a torch, waving us in to the side of the road. On the pavement was a unit of five soldiers with black uniforms and M-16s. I thumbed the car-phone switch and pulled in, turned with a hopefully reassuring smile to the others and stepped out. Other cars inched past me. Everyone in them took great care not to look. I kept my hands on top of the car and moved crabwise around to the near side.

Hands groped around my collar, my torso, down my legs and between them. Then my shoulder was grabbed and I was spun around and thrown back against the car. I froze in the light and kept my hands up. Behind me, through an open inch of window, I thought I heard Annette's quiet, urgent voice.

The soldier covering me lowered his beam, raised his rifle and loomed close. His visor was up, revealing an impassive, Andean face: I was reminded of the peasant in the poster. What goes around comes around…

‘Jonathan Wilde,' he said. It wasn't a question. I didn't answer. My mouth was dry.

‘Come with us,' he said.

I felt the window at my back roll down.

‘No!' Annette shouted.

‘Yes,' I said. ‘Go. Go now.'

‘Yes,' said the soldier. ‘Go.'

He motioned me away from the car. I took two slow steps forward. ‘There are no weapons in the car,' I said.

‘We know.' He swung his rifle away from me, towards the car. For the first time his face showed an emotion, something so primal it was hard to tell whether it was fear or rage.

‘Go!' he screamed.

I could hear Annette's dry sobs, Eleanor crying, Colin arguing. I dared not turn around, or even make a gesture.

The engine started, and slowly the car pulled away.

Streetlights and fog. Aircraft landing-lights and fog. Night and fog. They had never looked so beautiful. I raised my eyes for a look at the stars I thought I'd never reach, not now. I couldn't see them. Ah well.

They walked me a few hundred metres to a patch of waste ground. I was actually relieved to see a black helicopter, its matt angular surfaces gleaming with condensation in the shadows. They bundled me aboard and sat me down facing the open doorway as the craft took off. It made surprisingly little noise. The soldiers watched me with silent malice and dirty-secret smiles.

I wondered why I'd kept walking, when I could have run. It looked like I was for one of the classic US-client execution styles, the Saigon sky-dive. I should have run, I thought, and not given them this satisfaction. There's an Arab proverb, something along the lines that
hope is the enemy of freedom
, or
despair is the liberator of the slave.
It explains a lot, including why I climbed into that helicopter.

I hope it doesn't explain what I did after I got out.

 

‘Come in, Mr Wilde.'

The polite invitation, from one of a dozen men in suits around a table, was accompanied by a shove in the back from the UN trooper that sent me stumbling into the room and left no-one in any doubt who was really in charge here. The door behind me was too heavy to slam, but it closed with a muffled thud, as if the soldier had at least made the attempt.

I straightened, mustering my dignity, and glanced around the room. Somewhere in Westminster – the helicopter had landed in St James's Park, and I'd been bundled into the back of an APC and driven a short distance – but it was impossible to tell if it was a private or a public building. Big mahogany table with lights above it, oak-panelled walls, portraits of distinguished ancestors or predecessors in the gloom. The men who looked up at me from the table had something of that same air of inherited or acquired assurance, despite being more dishevelled than I was: their jackets crumpled or hung over tall chair-backs, ties loosened, eyes red and cheeks unshaven.

The table was spread with laminated maps, on which lines had been drawn and wiped and redrawn in fluorescent inks from the marker-pens that lay scattered among coffee-cups and overflowing cut-glass ashtrays the size of dinner-plates. Rising smoke curled up through the cones of light to be sucked away by powerful air-conditioning that gave the atmosphere a stale chill.

The man who'd spoken stood and motioned me towards a vacant seat at the nearest corner of the table. A freshly filled cup of coffee steamed in front of it.

‘Good evening, Mr Wilde,' he said. ‘I must apologise for the rather brusque manner in which you've been brought here.' He gave a self-deprecating smile, a slight shrug as if to disavow responsibility. He was old, older than I – though he'd had better treatment – and his wavy yellow-grey hair, shoulder-length, made him look like a judge or one of those eighteenth-century dignitaries in the portraits. ‘I trust you have not been otherwise ill-treated?'

I stood where I was and said, ‘I call kidnapping ill-treatment, sir. I demand an explanation, and an immediate contact with my family and my lawyer.'

Another man spoke up, leaning forward on his elbows into the light. ‘None of that applies. This country's under martial law, and anyway, you're not under arrest.'

‘Fine,' I said. ‘Then I'll go now.'

I turned away and made for the door.

‘Stop!' The first man's voice sounded more like an urgent warning than a command. ‘A moment, please.'

This was more like it. I turned back.

‘Of course you're free to leave,' the man continued, ‘but if you do, only we can guarantee your safety. All we ask is that you hear us out.'

I doubted this, but decided it would be foolhardy to try anything else. Besides, I needed that coffee.

 

They were a committee of what was already being called the Restoration Government. Members of Parliament, civil servants…they didn't give their names, and I never subsequently tried to find out. They told me they were trying to restore order and a civilian administration.

‘The Republic is dead, Mr Wilde. Our only choices are a prolonged and futile resistance, with a prolonged and painful occupation – or an an attempt at a workable settlement.'

‘I don't see the US keeping up a prolonged occupation,' I said. ‘Given their notorious sensitivity to body-bags.'

‘How many US troops have you seen?' snapped the second man. ‘They're all in bunkers operating telepresence rigs. Believe me, America's Third World clients have troops and to spare for the UN. Internal security is what they're raised for and paid for. They'll laugh off the pathetic efforts of our home-grown Guevaras. Make no mistake – the United States – the United
Nations
– means it this time. No nation will ever again be allowed to start a war. Nuclear disarmament
will be enforced.
'

Saliva droplets from his speech were spotting the maps. I was half-expecting his right arm to twitch up. I must have recoiled slightly. The long-haired man raised a hand, soft cop to the hard cop.

‘We know as well as you do that a power such as the US must become cannot possibly administer the world. Police it, at a very high level, yes. But as some powers move up from the nation, others devolve to the local community. We have the opportunity to encourage autonomy and diversity. Let us take it, and spare our country years of agony.'

‘“Us”?' I looked around. ‘I have nothing in common with you. What do you want from me?'

‘The possibility of a deal, Mr Wilde. A settlement. We're pulling in all the regional and factional and community leaders we can reach. You happen to be the first.'

‘And what d'you intend to offer them?'

‘Accept the Kingdom – in practice – as the national authority, and you can have autonomy in the areas your supporters control.'

‘I have no authority to negotiate –'

‘Oh, but you have. You have influence. We know that without it some younger and hotter heads would be calling the shots. And we know you're up to more than your public statements indicate –'

‘What makes you say that?'

He smiled. ‘The volume of encrypted traffic from your safe houses.'