Orders from Berlin (29 page)

It was the simplicity of the idea that delighted Seaforth the most. He would receive credit for trying to prevent an assassination that he had in fact committed, and with any luck he would end up taking over Thorn’s job as deputy director as a reward for having shot the poor bastard in the head. Seaforth smiled at the thought of Thorn, patriotic to his backbone, immortalized in death as the ultimate traitor to his country. Commemorated in wax, he could have a special place alongside Guy Fawkes and John Wilkes Booth in the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussauds.

Seaforth wondered why he hated Thorn so much. His own pursuit of Ava had been necessary to cover up her father’s murder, but Thorn’s obvious jealousy, first apparent at the funeral, had added spice, and Seaforth had taken a sadistic delight in observing Thorn’s impotent rage when they passed each other in the corridors at HQ and, best of all, when Thorn found him hiding in Ava’s bedroom. He looked forward with relish to the prospect of putting a bullet in Thorn’s head. Why? Partly, of course, it was because Thorn hated him. But it was more than that. Thorn had come to stand in Seaforth’s mind for that whole class of self-assured, born-to-rule, upper-class Englishmen that this war was on the way to wiping out once and for all.

Seaforth shuddered as he recalled his Scottish border childhood and his father touching his cap as the old squire rode past on his big black hunter; the same toffee-nosed English landowner who made his father pay an exorbitant rent that he could not afford for a tumbledown shack not fit for human habitation. His family had had so little money during the last war that his mother had been forced to work in the scullery up at the big house, washing their expensive porcelain plates and crystal glasses to make ends meet, while her husband and her eldest son fought and died in the Flanders mud to preserve the very system that was grinding them and their kind into the ground.

Seaforth remembered how she’d dressed up in her Sunday best and gone down on her hands and knees to the squire to get her surviving son an exemption when the government lowered the conscription age to seventeen in the last year of the war. And then she’d told Seaforth to be grateful when the tribunal gave him a six-month postponement on his call-up. Grateful! Seaforth would have liked to pull the old man out of bed by his wiry white whiskers and kick him down the stairs of his Queen Anne manor house. But for now he’d have to be content with killing Thorn.

And Churchill too. With Winston out of the way, England would make peace. As far as Seaforth was concerned, this was the only downside of his plan. The Blitz was levelling London and levelling society too; with peace, that process might be delayed. But not for long. Seaforth agreed wh
oleheartedly with Karl Marx that Thorn an
d his class could not last. The tide of history was against them. Seafo
rth was without political ideals. Neither F
ascism nor Communism had any great appeal for him, and his tie to Nazi Germ
any was a marriage not of love
but of
convenience
. His in
terest was in destructio
n, not creation. What came after didn’t much matter.

He was a confirmed atheist, had been for as long as he could remember. How could he be anything else after what he’d been through? But in recent days he had felt a growing sense that some invisible force was guiding him, leading him by the hand until the moment his fingers would squeeze the trigger of the Colt semi-automatic pistol registered to Alec Thorn that was currently locked in the bottom drawer of his desk on the other side of the room, and he would dispatch to kingdom come the two people he disliked most in all the world.

As far as Seaforth could see, the only complicating factor now was Ava. He was due to meet her in Sloane Square in an hour, and he was looking forward to the prospect. It was true that he didn’t need her any more now that her husband had been charged with Albert’s murder, but he didn’t think he could simply stop seeing her. That would make her suspicious, and the last thing he needed was for her to show up at HQ and start asking questions. So he’d waited a day to let the dust settle after Bertram’s arrest and had then called her as agreed. She’d picked up straight away. It was almost as if she’d been waiting by the phone, and she’d sounded much more enthusiastic about seeing him than she had before. Perhaps tonight he would be able to take their relationship to a different level.

Seaforth prided himself on his ability to live without women. They weren’t worth the risk. From time to time he paid money to a high-class agency that guaranteed discretion for ‘professional visits’. But in recent months he’d preferred abstinence, and the arduous process of conquering Ava’s reservations had proved far more fulfilling than anything the agency could provide. It was early days yet and she was still suspicious of him – but slowly, inch by inch, he could feel her giving way. And as she yielded, she also emerged from her shell. Underneath her head scarf and mackintosh, away from the shadow of her awful husband, she was a different person. She was like a chrysalis metamorphosing into a brightly coloured butterfly. There was a fire in her green eyes and a hunger for life that he found attractive. Yet she was fragile too, thin and delicate; he knew he could break her with a twist of his wrists.

Why should he deny himself the pleasure of pursuing her to a final seduction when seeing her was the more sensible course? He was enjoying himself, and she was a useful distraction from the restlessness he’d been suffering ever since his visit to Churchill’s bunker two weeks earlier.

He’d always been a good sleeper, but now he woke up every night in the small hours, struggling in a cold sweat out of horrible nightmares in which his brother and father returned as living dead, covered with the mud of Flanders, reproaching him with white, wide-open, empty eyes for leaving them so long unavenged. The noise of the Blitz didn’t help, of course, but he was sure it wasn’t fear that was causing his insomnia. It had never occurred to Seaforth to take shelter even when the bombs had started falling close by to Cadogan Square. Perhaps it was his newfound sense of personal destiny, but he was irrationally certain that no bomb had his name on it. If he was going to die, it would be in a more significant way than being blown to bits in a public shelter.

The nightmares were in fact just a symptom of a growing overall agitation that he was finding harder and harder to control. For years he had been patient, biding his time as he burrowed steadily into the heart of MI6, and now suddenly he couldn’t stand to be idle and became irrationally angry at even the slightest irritation.

He thought constantly of his brother, gazing for minutes at a time at Alistair’s silver-framed photograph that held pride of place on the rosewood chest of drawers opposite his bed, positioned so that it would be the first thing he saw in the morning when he woke up and the last at night before he went to sleep. The picture had been taken on the day before Alistair’s embarkation for France in the late summer of 1915. He’d been home on leave after the end of basic training, and it had been the last time Seaforth had ever seen his brother smiling, resplendent in his new khaki uniform.

Seaforth closed his eyes, remembering the red flush of the young blood in his handsome brother’s cheeks; the devil-may-care laughter in Alistair’s bright hazel-coloured eyes; the way he would burst out singing for no discernible reason when they were out walking together in the Eskdale hills with the wind blowing up their coat-tails in the years before the war. And he remembered too how all that had gone, disappeared forever, when Alistair came back shell-shocked from the Loos battle three months later and wouldn’t speak or look anyone in the eye, just shook down his whole right side with a tremor that he couldn’t seem to control. The white-coated doctors stopped it at the hospital, gave Alistair electric shocks until they said he was well enough to go back, this time to Belgium. And that was the end – he never returned from there. But his diary did, in a brown War Office envelope that also contained his identity disc, a tattered picture of his mother, and a St Christopher’s medal that she’d given him for luck when he first went away. He’d written it at Loos the previous year. As far as Seaforth knew, his brother never wrote another word after he went back to the front in January 1916. It was as if he were already dead when he got on the train at Carlisle.

Seaforth went and fetched the battered book from the drawer of the night table by his bed. He always kept it close by. He knew many of the entries by heart, but he preferred to read them in his brother’s bold, slanting handwriting, which had already begun to deteriorate by the end of his first month in France, until at the end it was no more than a scrawl. The murdering English had made a mistake returning the diary. They should have destroyed the book just as they destroyed its writer, but they were careless about small things, and Seaforth had long ago sworn to make them pay for their negligence.

He opened the book, quickly turning the pages until he came to his brother’s description of the first day of the battle.

September 24th, 1915

They took away the cookers and we all fell in. An English general with a white moustache and a swagger stick came and gave us a speech. It was about blood and sacrifice, but the guns were firing up ahead and we couldn’t hear very well. When he was finished he got back in his staff car and drove away.

On the march up to the line we sang Bonnie Scotland, but the song stopped in our throats when we came to the trenches they were digging for the dead. Stepping over our graves in the twilight we were, while a redhat ticked off our names, and up ahead the green and white flares of the Very lights and the flickering flashes from the exploding shells lit up the slag heaps and the big redoubt that’s the object of the attack in our sector. Hohenzollern, they call it – like the old kings of Prussia. It sticks out its nose into no-man’s-land like it’s some kind of earth monster; crawling with Boche; waiting for us to come over.

The bombardment goes on all night, crashing in our ears like an endless thunder. There’s no point in talking – we can’t hear ourselves speak, and so I write, leaning on the firestep, crouching over the flickering butt of a candle, thinking of home. Our brigade is in reserve and we can see the gun crews stripped to the waist for work – they bring up water in buckets and throw it down on the smoking barrels. The guns are lined up wheel to wheel. They never stop firing, but there’s a rumour going down the line that a German plane scored a direct hit on our ammunition dump two days back and that we haven’t got enough of the heavy stuff to smash their wire. Who knows if it’s true? But I’m glad it’s the Boche, not us getting shelled.

A grey watery dawn breaks over the redoubt and the drumfire reaches a crescendo. There are sappers with red and green armbands coming through our trenches carrying cylinders made of iron. We know what they are but we say nothing. Chlorine gas is no way to fight a war. Don’t they know that?

Seaforth’s hand shook as he turned the page to read the next entry.

The 26th and 28th Brigades went over at half past six. We heard the whistles and the shouts and the German machine guns starting up. With a trench periscope you can see. I looked and there was the gas cloud – yellowish green and drifting eastwards, thank God. Will the wind blow it back towards us? No one knows what is happening up ahead. We put on our masks, tuck them into our tunics and wait.

Later in the morning we went up into the front line, awaiting the order to go over. The trench was full of our dead and wounded – those who fell back from off the parapet at zero hour and those that have crawled back in from no-man’s-land. There was a man out in front of us a little way, crying and screaming with pain. But he was brave – between his cries he shouted at us not to come out for him – fifteen yards away and it would be certain death to bring him in. Poor devil! He stopped his wail around noon.

At half past three our sergeant gave us rum, walking down the trench with a canteen and a table spoon, like he was a mother giving her children medicine at home. But this is not to make us better; it’s to make it easier to die.

And then it’s strange how everything is frozen in the last moment before we go, like in a photograph – scaling ladders against the sandbagged walls; bayonets fixed; officers looking at their watches, whistles in their mouths; the rain beginning to fall; and someone somewhere plaintively playing a mouth organ – a dirge for the dead, because that is what we are – if not today, then tomorrow or next week. There is no escape.

And suddenly it was a frenzy of activity – we were climbing and rushing and falling, and the machine gun bullets were hitting the ground like hailstones, ripping through the grass like wind. Impossible to go forward and impossible to go back. The battlefield was no more than a series of shell holes in which men crouched, waiting for the end. Beside me in mine was a Highlander I didn’t know. I gave him water. ‘Straighten my legs,’ he asked me in a whisper. ‘They’re all crooked.’ But he had no legs to straighten – they’d been blown clean away, and so I touched the bones of his thighs and he had to be satisfied with that.

Seaforth shut the book hard and closed his eyes. Twenty-five years separated him from this place that he had never seen and that no longer existed, yet the Loos trenches were more real to him than the room in which he was sitting. Abruptly he got up from his chair and went and fixed himself a drink. He felt sick. He wanted to put the diary away, but it was like a drug addict’s needle. Sooner or later he always went back to it.

He turned the pages forward into the month of October.

The rats in our trenches grow bigger by the day. They live in the corpses. If we kill them they putrefy and then it is worse than if we left them alive. I feel them when I sleep, running.

My right arm has started to shake. I can hardly fire my rifle. It’s getting worse every day. The medic says I must grin and bear it.