Out of the Sun (14 page)

"A recording you've never listened to? Hidden in an armchairl Lazenby may have found it and destroyed it by now. It may not have been working properly, for God's sake."

"It's not likely to have been found," said Hammelgaard calmly. "And I made sure it was working before we went. It's a recording of everything said, up to the moment of disconnection, by David, Lazenby and me in Lazenby's office at Globescope on the afternoon of August twenty-ninth. Project Sybil. HYDRA. The whole deal. Everything. We spoke candidly, I can assure you. Very candidly. The recording won't leave any room for doubt. It'll destroy Lazenby."

"It's still there, If it can be retrieved."

"It's if against when, Harry. If you can pull this off. Against when they track us down. Take your pick."

"But I already have, haven't I? I've already agreed to go."

"I can't force you to honour that agreement. Walking away from this may still be an option. For you, anyway."

"But not for you and the others. And not for David."

"No. Not for us."

"Then I seem to have no choice."

"You'll be here tomorrow night?"

"Yes. I'll be here."

Hammelgaard stared at him for a moment, his expression indecipherable in the darkness. Then he said: "Thank you, Harry. This means a lot. And not just to me."

"That's what worries me."

"Good. Worried men make good messengers."

"How do I deliver the message?"

"I'll explain tomorrow. I have a lot of arranging to do."

"If you say so."

"I do. And one more thing. About David's notebooks. I assume they were taken in case they contain references to Project Sybil. It's not likely they do. They're actually a record of his hyper-dimensional work. Of no possible interest to Globescope. A precaution on their part, we must suppose. But it's puzzling. Why go to such lengths to fake the circumstances of an accidental or suicidal overdose, then spoil it all with a pointless theft?"

"It doesn't seem to have aroused much suspicion."

"No. Except mine. Nothing was taken from Gerard or Marvin, but they would have had papers about them as well. Gerard carried a lap-top with him wherever he went. It was found intact on the Metro platform after he fell under the train. Why not take that too as a precaution?"

"Because there were witnesses?"

"Maybe. Maybe that's it."

"Iris thought David might have left the notebooks in Washington, but Dr. Tilson '

"Confirmed they were with him. I know. That's what .. ." Hammelgaard lowered his voice still further. "Listen to me, Harry. This has no bearing on anything else. We'll keep it personal between us, OK? Iris gave me the keys to David's house in Washington. In case I wanted to check for the notebooks. I didn't, of course. It would have been too risky. Anyway, Dr. Tilson had already told me I wouldn't find them there. But there might be other papers other records of his most recent work. He was close to a breakthrough. Anything that can be salvaged could be ... hugely significant. When this is all over, I want you to go there and remove all the disks and documents you can find. Everything. Then take it to Dr. Tilson. She might appreciate its importance. I'm not sure anyone else will. Here are the keys." He grasped Harry's hand and pressed three keys held on a ring into his palm. "Don't lose them."

"Why not search the house yourself? Like you say when this is all over." But Harry knew the reason. He knew it as surely as Hammelgaard.

"Just do it, Harry. As soon as it's safe. The tape will destroy David's reputation along with Lazenby's. Don't let everything he achieved be destroyed as well. He was close. He was nearly there. He was on the brink of history."

"He might still be able to carry on the work, you know. In person."

"A fine hope, Harry. A father's hope." Hammelgaard stood upright and glanced around. Time to go. No more to be said. Here. Twenty-four hours from now. You will come, won't you?"

"Yes."

Till then, lie low."

"I will."

"Goodnight, Harry." Hammelgaard shook his hand firmly. "Held og lykke." Then, catching his frown, he added: "I'm wishing us both luck." With that, he turned and walked swiftly away across the bridge, without once looking back. Harry watched him go, then lit a cigarette and smoked it through, standing on the bridge above the dark plashing water, letting nicotine and solitude slow the turmoil of his thoughts. Till he too was ready to walk away, weary and confused, sure of nothing except his promise to return.

EIGHTEEN

Friday was cold and grey in Copenhagen. Harry wandered its wintry streets, trying not to think about the foolhardy mission he had agreed to undertake. Which proved possible, but only at the expense of surrendering to the tug of a comfortless memory.

Lindos, August 1988. The beach as crowded as the town. A burning sun striking the white roofs like a hammer. Every bar packed, every craft shop crammed. Noise and heat and too much jostling humanity. At the Taverna Silenou, Harry was more than a little drunk. Wisely, Kostas had told him to go home and sleep it off: absent waiters were better than inebriated ones. Taking his resentful leave, Harry had fallen into flirtatious conversation with a Danish girl. What about he could not remember. Nor could he remember the exact sequence of subsequent events. He thought he might have tripped on a chair-leg, but it could as easily have been a deliberately extended human foot. Either way, his hand, flailing for support, had ended up grabbing the front of the girl's loosely buttoned blouse, ripping it open as he toppled to one side. He had already noticed she was not wearing a bra. Now everybody else noticed as well. The resulting scene blouse buttons flying, breasts bouncing, Danish voice shrieking, faces staring, arms restraining was a merciful haze. It was only the following day that Kostas had told him how seriously the girl had threatened to report him to the police for indecent assault; her companions had evidently dissuaded her.

Ah yes, her companions. There had been two men sitting at her table. That much Harry could recall. But his memory could dredge up no details of their appearance. They seemed now in his mind's eye to be obscured by the sort of shimmering blur deployed in television interviews for the benefit of spies and super grasses He knew who they were, of course. He had met them both since. But still he would have liked to be able to form a distinct picture of them that day. Of one of them, anyway. The one he could only otherwise envisage as a motionless figure in a hospital bed. The son he had met and probably spoken to without realizing it; who had seen him, red-faced and barely coherent, clinging to the trunk of a fig tree as he offered a fuddled apology along with an unconvincing denial; who had studied him and judged him and gone on his way unannounced.

Three months later, shadowed by a far more serious allegation, his pleas of innocence once again disbelieved, Harry had left Rhodes, never to return. But the circularities of life wound him in as they had before. It was only in the physical sense that he had not returned. In the same sense, he had not visited the Yenning house in Swindon since the summer of 1960. But memory was a traveller who acknowledged no barriers. And whose journeyings could not be avoided. So to the Taverna Silenou and Iris Venning's bed his thoughts slipped back with disconcerting ease as the Copenhagen day wore on. Somebody should have told him they really should how complicated life becomes the more there is of it to look back on. How complicated and how intractable. By mid-afternoon he had consumed enough Julebryg to guarantee a few hours' sleep before a long and unpredictable night began. He went back to the Kong Knud actively looking forward to the escape from remembrance slumber would provide.

It was a twin-bedded room, an arrangement he distrusted on account of some superstitious saying of his mother that to sleep in a room with another made-up bed in it was unlucky. He had actually gone to the lengths of stripping the other bed his first night there, only for the slatternly chambermaid to make such a fuss that he had decided to ignore his mother's advice. Not for the first time, he came to regret it.

It seemed to him that he woke at dusk and, rolling over to look towards the window, saw the shape of a human figure beneath the other bedspread, lying supine and inert, like a corpse beneath its shroud. It seemed to him that, gripped by horror, he rose, crossed the room, reached out and grasped the edge of the bedspread, then pulled it back to expose .. .

Nothing. He was awake, staring down at an un dented pillow and undisturbed sheets, his heart pounding, his face bathed in sweat. He stumbled to the window and threw it open, leaning out to breathe the cold unhaunted air. NON-STOP SEX, the neon sign blinked at him from the other side of the street. STRIP AROUND THE CLOCK. Night had fallen in the real world. Darkness had welcomed him back. Death was only a dream.

A capacity audience comprising several hundred Danish teenagers plus Harry watched the late-night showing of Natural Born Killers at the Palads Cinema. Harry felt perversely grateful for being sickened by such a wallow in pointless violence. It at least distracted him from anxious anticipation of his 1 a.m. appointment on Knippelsbro.

He wandered along Stroget, forced down some coffee in a bar, then made his way to the harbour. It was still some minutes short of one o'clock when he reached the foot of the steps leading up onto the bridge. But it was better to be early than late. Glancing up at the parapet, he thought he saw a figure leaning on the railings, looking down at him. It was too dark to tell if it was Hammelgaard. He raised his hand cautiously and the figure moved instantly back out of sight. Suddenly anxious for no definable reason, Harry ran up the steps two at a time. At the top, he had to stop to recover his breath. But he had got there fast enough to be sure of seeing the figure, whoever it was and whichever direction it had been heading in. Yet there was nobody on the bridge. Nobody approaching him or retreating. Nobody at all.

He was trembling as he fumbled for a cigarette. Cursing his nerves, he wedged a Karelia Sertika between his lips and struck a match. Only to be seized by a conviction very close to a visual certainty that somebody was standing beside him. He whirled round to confront nothing but thick cold air. The match blew out. And the box slipped from his grasp. He made a grab for it as it struck the railings, but succeeded only in stubbing his thumb against a bar. The box bounced through and vanished. Then, a few seconds later, came a dismal plop as it hit the water. Thanks a lot," he muttered. That's all I need." In an irritated spasm, he snatched the cigarette from his mouth and flung it in after the matches, then instantly regretted doing so. Hammelgaard would probably have a light.

But where was Hammelgaard? It was surely one o'clock by now. As if on cue, some distant church clock struck the hour. Harry shivered and decided to walk to the middle of the bridge in the hope of seeing Hammelgaard approaching from the other side. The still night magnified his footfalls as he moved. The steam of his breath made him think longingly of cigarette smoke. His thumb began to throb.

Then he saw a huddled shape on the pavement ahead of him, at the Christianshavn end of the bridge. He broke into a run. It was a man, dressed in black, lying face down close to the railings. His cap had slipped off, revealing the pale crown of a bald head, but the collar of his coat was turned up, obscuring his features. There was still just a chance, as Harry stooped over him, that he might be a stranger. A slim fading ghost of a chance. Harry reached out and grasped the edge of the collar, then pulled it back to expose ... Torben Hammelgaard. Eyes staring. Mouth sagging. And no breath frosting on the air. There was no pool of blood, no sign of violence. But the unblinking eyes and crumpled limbs told their story. Before Harry could feel at his wrist for a pulse or turn him over and listen for a heartbeat, he knew what he would find. Torben Hammelgaard was dead.

NINETEEN

Fear is a winged chariot. Harry ran farther and faster than he ever had in his life before from that unmarked corpse on Knippelsbro. He ran until his chest was a tightening hoop of pain and he could run no more. Until he staggered into some dark doorway in Christianshavn and sank down on his haunches among the dog-ends and burger cartons, wondering if at any moment the shadow of his pursuers would fall across him.

Pursuers there surely had to be. They had killed again, in their unique undetectable way. They had killed the man Harry had led them to. And now it must be his turn. At any moment, from any direction, they were bound to come for him.

But they did not come. As the minutes passed and Harry slowly recovered, the hope formed in his mind that somehow he had evaded them. He struggled to his feet and peered out from the doorway. Nothing was moving anywhere. Nothing was waiting for him to emerge.

He set off again, this time at no more than a fast walk, glancing around and behind him as he went, clinging to the shadows, heading wherever the next turning took him. He badly wanted a drink and a cigarette. He was not absolutely sure which he wanted more. But it hardly mattered, since his chances of getting either seemed for the present remote.

What to do. Where to go. How to deal with what had happened. The need to be decisive wrestled in his mind with the impossibility of deciding. Hammelgaard was dead. Harry had a message to carry for him, but no way of delivering it. And he was in peril of his life. Or was he? Perhaps they had been following Hammelgaard for some time. Perhaps it was just a coincidence they had chosen to strike when he was on his way to meet Harry. If so

But he could not take the chance. He could not afford to assume anything. He should leave Copenhagen as soon as possible. But leave it to go where? And leave it how? The airport and the railway station could easily be watched. And his passport was still in his room at the Kong Knud. That too could be watched.

Yet flight was his only sane choice. Hammelgaard's body would be found by morning. If he had any identification on him, the police would soon trace his sister. And she would tell them about Harry. Harry could end up wanted for murder, with no alibi and a lot of suspicious behaviour to explain. That made one decision at least easier to take. He could not go to the police.