Intrusion (38 page)

Hugh recoiled, splashing some of the cola, tipping the desk
almost over. The man picked up his own seat, set it down and sat in it again, leaning forward, knees apart, arms on the desk.

‘I really do want to know, you know,’ he said. ‘Quite apart from the benefits to yourself of telling me, it really is driving me up the wall.’ He took another sip, and smiled thoughtfully. ‘You trained as an engineer, I understand. I have a smattering of physics myself. The military chaps, of course, all have a very solid scientific education. You see, don’t you, how deeply frustrating it is to be told something that violates the law of conservation of mass-energy?’

Hugh tried to speak, but his mouth was too dry. He took a gulp of Coke. His arms felt like they’d been knotted from toy balloons, weak and swollen. They ached like he’d just done a thousand press-ups. His ears rang so much that he strained to hear the man speak. The urge to sleep was almost overpowering.

‘Did I say that?’ he said. ‘I don’t remember.’

‘Ah,’ said the man. ‘You were interviewed after your arrest.’ He waved a hand, and the screen lit up. Hugh saw an image of himself shouting, in a desperate tone: ‘I told you! I told you before! I threw them away in the tunnel!’ There was a blur of motion across the screen, and then it went blank again. Hugh felt his hand lift slowly to his face, to meet a bruise over the cheekbone.

‘I remember now,’ he said.

He had the impression that it had gone on like that for hours, before he’d been made to stand against the wall. That would account for some of the other aches and pains.

‘A tad unprofessional,’ the man said. ‘They’re not supposed to leave visible marks, you know. Not when a court appearance is on the cards. But then … as I said, the frustration. It can get the better of the best of us.’

He brushed his palms against each other, briskly, twice. ‘But luckily for you, I didn’t have to listen through all that. I’ve come to this fresh, so to speak. Think of me as … well, supposing you were in a foreign country, and you’d got into trouble with the local police. Beaten up in the back room of the nick, slung into some stinking oubliette, bewildering charges laid against you. Think how pleased you’d be if the British consul turned up! There you are, over a cup of tea, together in private, knowing nothing you say goes beyond these walls. Think how you’d react – you’d tell him, or her, everything.’

He leaned back, opening his arms. ‘I’m that British consul, Hugh. I’m here to get you out. Or if that’s not possible, to save you from going back to the interrogation cells, and from there to worse places. Far worse. No matter what you’ve done, you have absolutely nothing to lose by telling me everything.’

‘I thought I
had
told them everything,’ Hugh said. He raised a hand, painfully. ‘Wait, don’t … don’t fly off the handle again. Please … bear with me, OK? I want to tell you everything. I’m honestly not sure what I said. I don’t even know what I’m accused of. Apart from having an air pistol, which it seems I’ve already admitted to. OK, I admit it again. I put my hands up to it.’ He tried the gesture, and failed. ‘Metaphorically, all right?’

The man nodded, looking sympathetic. ‘Yes, of course. Go on.’

‘I don’t know what I’m accused of, or what I’m charged with.’

‘Ah!’ The man grinned, raising a didactic finger. ‘Accused of, charged with. A valid distinction, and an interesting one. What you’re charged with are various offences under firearms, child protection, terrorism and so forth, all centred around keeping, carrying and then concealing an illegally held firearm. The terrorism bit comes in because you’ve stashed it in an area of ongoing military operations, which I take it refers to the aircraft taking off around here to stop the Russians from poking their nose-cones farther into Allied airspace. We’re on a Warm War front line, after all. All very much letter-of-the-law stuff, and they’ve thrown the book at you. If you get sent down for that, you’ll be in the regular prison system for decades and your wife gets done as an accomplice, seeing as she didn’t shop you when she had the chance, comprendez?’

‘Yes,’ Hugh croaked.

‘Now, I know what you’re going to say. This is a heck of a lot to throw at a chap because of an air pistol. Between ourselves, I quite agree. But like it or not, the law is clear on the point: Magnum, Glock, air pistol, replica, or even remotely realistic toy, all equally illegal. Because, you see, it’s not what it
can
do, it’s what someone might have a reasonable apprehension that it
could
do that turns it into a weapon. An instrument of intimidation, and therefore, potentially, of terrorism. Wave a spud gun around with a political motive, and – bang! You’re a terrorist!’

‘I understand that, but—’

‘Very good. Accused of, let’s say suspected of – different
bucket of grief altogether. You’ve been in touch with two people who’ve previously confessed to offences under the Acts, you know. Still running around, free as birds. Why, you ask? Well! We’re all grown-ups here, nobody’s listening, and we’re not in the Labour Party. So we don’t have to pretend we don’t know what these confessions are worth. Not what I’d consider actionable intelligence, let’s say, but that’s what kicked this whole thing off. That, and the singularly unfortunate fact that the intelligence community has picked up some chatter recently from the Naxals, relating to Stornoway.’

‘Naxals in
Stornoway
?’ Hugh’s voice rose, an intonation he’d meant to sound like scorn and disbelief, but which came out dismayingly like surprise and delight.

The man waved a hand. ‘Naxals can pop up anywhere,’ he said. ‘Just your hard luck that the latest flap happens to be here. Or perhaps not entirely – your trip to Southall to book a flight to Prague didn’t help you at all. Throw in the visit and phone call from that woman Geena Fernandez, her friend Joseph Goonwardeene – you know how it is with the security boys. Paranoia is their profession.’ He smiled complicitly. ‘It isn’t mine.’

‘What is yours, then?’

The man put his elbows on the desk and wiped his fingers across his closed eyelids, brushing his eyebrows, then slid his hands to his temples and peered across at Hugh. He looked tired, suddenly, as if he’d been awake too long and the night had caught up with him.

‘Curiosity,’ he said. ‘No, seriously, Hugh. My job is getting
people like you out of places like this. Do you have any idea of how much false positives cost the taxpayer in accommodation alone? How much of the time of skilled interrogators is wasted in extracting confessions from people who have nothing to confess? The sheer economic loss of taking innocent people out of the workforce? It would make your hair stand on end. And that’s leaving aside the cost of what happens when the subjects are cleared, if they ever are. Rehab where possible, compensation, legal costs … Honestly, in ten years of this I’ve saved HMG the cost of my entire projected lifetime employment plus pension a dozen times over. As for the political fallout – don’t get me started.’ He shook his head, and sighed. ‘Just don’t get me started.’

The man stood up and again began pacing around. Hugh eyed him warily, and tensed in his seat.

‘Speaking of not getting me started,’ the man said, ‘you don’t need to keep up the evasions. Your wife has given the police a full statement. The suicide box, the tearful conversation, the second sight, the land under the hill, what she saw and what you and the kiddie claimed to see in the tunnel, the lot. And her own troubles with the law and the health system. There’s nothing to hide any more, Hugh.’

He stood to the side of the screen, like a lecturer, and waited.

Hugh eased the heels of his hands from the inside edge of the desktop. He laid his arms lightly across it and let his legs stretch a little.

‘I didn’t mention any of that?’ he asked, impressed.

‘No,’ said the man. ‘Despite its being the sort of rigmarole
that could have given the chaps pause. Are we, they might have asked themselves, trying to beat the truth out of a lunatic? Well, perhaps they wouldn’t have, but the ploy would have been worth a try, one would have thought. Been done, you know, been done. Extraordinary what some people can get up to. Heard of an Indian intelligence bod once, trained by yogis or some such, kept up the most … ’ He snapped his fingers. ‘One for the memoirs. So, Hugh, no, you didn’t mention any of that.’

He tapped the screen, and an image came up, of jagged but approximately rectangular false-colour contours, like a mathematical diagram of some complex equation.

‘Let me tell you about the tunnel,’ he said. ‘Searched from end to end. Scanned with sub-millimetre radar. Police rescue probe plunged into the water at the bottom. Three metres deep, it goes, about two or three steps from where you turned back. No cracks in the concrete wider than a pinkie, through which the water seeps into the peat. Ten centimetres of accumulated detritus at the bottom, then solid rock. Search-and-rescue boys actually found three airgun pellets in the mud, quite easily, that’s how thorough the check was.’

He flicked with his middle finger, and another image came up. A big square, with the ghostly shape of a pistol wedged diagonally across it.

‘Drone shot of your jacket pocket,’ the man said. ‘Taken moments before you dropped into the gully. You can practically read the serial number. No question of it having been chucked before you entered the tunnel. No question at all of some piece
of misdirection, like, say, one of the coppers picking it up on the way out. Every detail of every one of their movements was logged in real time on their lapel cameras.’ He snapped his fingers, and the screen went white. ‘Gone. Just like that. So where is it?’

Misdirection, Hugh thought. Like a magic trick. Maybe there was something there he could work with, but first …

‘Look,’ he said, ‘I don’t want to provoke you or anything, but why does it matter so much? We’re talking about a thing that can kill a rabbit, or put an eye out if you’re careless. From the way the other guys were shouting, it was like they thought I’d set up some kind of, uh, dead drop, isn’t that what you call it? For some terrorist or spy to pick up later. Well, I can see that could be worth doing with explosives or actual guns, but – an air pistol?’

The man clicked his tongue. ‘You’d be surprised what can be done with an air pistol. Take what you’ve just said. Shoot a soldier’s eye out from ten paces, get your timing right, and you can relieve him of whatever weapon he has. And you’re off. People have built armies that way. And you’d be surprised how important it might be, in some circumstances, to shoot a rabbit. No smoke. No explosive traces to worry about. Very little sound. Stuff like that. Just a thought. But that isn’t what’s worrying the chaps, and what’s worrying me. Proof of concept, that’s the worry. If you’ve found, or been shown, a way to disappear a chunk of metal in full view of half a dozen people, what else is possible?’

Hugh took a deep breath. ‘I can see that,’ he said. ‘I didn’t
understand that before. Maybe if they’d explained … but anyway. Can I tell you how it seemed to me, in the culvert?’

‘Oh, please do. And do stop cringing. I promise not to hit you, or even yell at you.’

‘All right. I didn’t see a pool of water. It was like the tunnel ended with an opening on a steep hillside. I saw a landscape, like the real one but at a different time, maybe in an ice age. Or maybe just after one, you know? In the sunshine beyond winter.’

‘In the sunshine beyond winter?’ The man seemed a little surprised, and to be turning the phrase over in his mind.

‘Yes. And when the police came, I threw the air pistol and the box of pellets out of the opening and … into that landscape. I threw them hard, but it wasn’t like … a good strong fling.’

‘Indeed not,’ said the man. ‘You threw like a girl.’

‘I couldn’t get my arm back,’ Hugh said, defensively. ‘I heard them fall, like on scree, not far down the hill. And I’m sure if you have such good images as you say you have of what happened, they’ll show how my arm moved, the speed of it, the force. They might even show the trajectory of the gun and the box leaving my hand.’

‘As it happens,’ said the man, ‘they don’t. They show the throw. They also show the steep, sloping roof of the culvert right in front of you. They don’t actually show the objects bouncing off, but your hand is in the way and the imaging is far from perfect.’

‘Do you have these images?’ Hugh asked. ‘Can you show me them?’

‘Of course.’ The man snapped with several fingers in succession. The screen lit up with a view, jumpy but clearer than Hugh had expected, of him and Nick and Hope, crowded together and bending over in the low, narrow space, seen from behind. It perturbed Hugh to see the light reflected off the water in front of his feet, and the sloping ceiling a metre and a half or so in front of his face. He saw his struggle to get something out of his pocket, Hope’s grab, his throw. No glimpse of what he’d thrown. Then the figures turned around, Hugh first, getting between Nick and the end of the tunnel, Hope momentarily obscuring the view of both of them. They began to move forward. The viewpoint backed off. They remained in view all the way up the tunnel. Then the light, and blurred images as Hope was grabbed.

‘That was from one camera?’

‘Yes.’

‘Show me the others.’

The man did. They were much the same; different angles, different obscurities, each sequence ending with a blur of motion as Nick and then Hugh were grabbed.

‘Well, there you are,’ Hugh said.

‘What?’ The man looked at the final still, bright and blurry.