The Amber Knight (12 page)

‘I suppose you were given the same treatment?’ Magdalena asked Adam.

‘Men weren’t given any extra privileges, if that’s what you’re thinking,’ he replied.

‘Did you ask what they were vaccinating you against?’

‘Yes. They insisted we’d been exposed to a life-threatening disease but they wouldn’t say what.’

Elizbieta started screeching again. ‘They could have injected us with anything…’

Adam was tired of her complaining. ‘If they’d wanted to kill us, they could have done it with a lot less fuss in the forest.’

He examined their surroundings. The best that could be said was the hall they were in was clean and well-lit. Too well-lit for eye comfort. To their right an area had been divided into half a dozen open-fronted cubicles, walled on both sides by panels pushed tight to a glass wall threaded with steel mesh. As if the meshed glass wasn’t enough, beyond it, floor to ceiling steel bars the thickness of his arm lent a zoo-like atmosphere. Behind the bars lay a corridor tiled with the same clinically white ceramic floor and wall tiles as the hall and cubicles.

Each cubicle housed a narrow steel bed, plastic chair and table. Nothing else. The end cell, which offered no more privacy from the corridor or the hall they were in than the others, was furnished as a bathroom with a shower head set on the wall above a drain, a stainless steel WC, sink, liquid soap dispenser and paper towel holder. There were no windows, but Adam looked for, and found, the probing eyes of camera lenses set alongside the light bulbs recessed in the ceiling, and he had no doubt they carried microphones.

‘Let’s hope our keepers remember to feed us.’ He turned to the nearest cubicle and sat on the bed.

‘We could have been exposed to radiation or Aids…’ Elizbieta’s high-pitched voice reverberated hollowly around the hall.

‘If we have, it’s the first I’ve heard of a vaccine being developed against either condition.’ He pressed down on the bed with his fingertips.

‘…they could be using us as guinea pigs. We could die here, no one would know, and it would be your fault. “Come to Kaliningrad,” you said. “Nice little trip, visit Krefta,” you said. And now look at us…’

‘You ever heard of anything like this happening to anyone else?’ Adam interrupted, looking to Magdalena.

‘Not recently.’

‘Pity. I hoped it was some quaint Polish custom so you could tell me what to expect next.’

‘…they’ve taken everything.’ Elizbieta’s ranting continued to intrude on Adam’s attempts to make sense out of the events of the past few hours. ‘My one good suit, underclothes, money, cosmetics, perfume, papers – even my best tweezers…’

Adam pulled the pockets in his overalls inside-out to prove he had fared no better.

‘Perhaps they’re checking our ID,’ Magdalena suggested in an attempt to alleviate Elizbieta’s panic.

‘This bed is solid,’ Adam declared, lifting the single paper sheet that covered it. There was no mattress, blanket or pillow, but lying down proved less tiring than standing. A masked and suited figure appeared before the bars with a tray of coffee and sandwiches.

‘You recognise the insignia on the shoulder?’ Adam turned to Magdalena.

‘Only from my nightmares.’

After pulling his gun and training it on them, the guard unlocked a grill set in the bars and pushed the tray towards the glass wall.

‘There’s a glass door at the opposite end. I’ll unlock it electronically after I leave.’

‘How long do you intend to keep us here?’ Adam asked.

The guard re-locked the grill and holstered his gun.

‘Why are you holding us?’ Adam persevered. ‘I get claustrophobic in rooms without windows. If you leave me here for any length of time I’ll turn into a gibbering idiot,’ he shouted after the retreating man.

They heard a click. By dint of pushing with her fingertips Magdalena found the door in the glass wall. She picked up the tray and carried it to the table in the cell Adam had commandeered.

‘And I thought I’d mastered the Polish language,’ Adam complained.

‘That depends on how you like your Polish.’ Drawn by the sandwiches, Elizbieta condescended to join them.

‘When you can’t influence the situation there’s only one thing to do.’ Crossing his arms behind his head, Adam lay back.

‘You’re not going to sleep?’ Elizbieta demanded.

‘I intend to try.’

‘Want some coffee or a sandwich?’ Magdalena held up two pieces of dark bread wrapped around a bright pink filling.

‘Can you guarantee that serum we were given will protect me against the bacteria in that salami?’

‘You want guarantees in this situation?’

‘I’ll pass. Wake me if something happens.’

If Adam had been given access to a pencil and paper he might have been tempted to work out a new theory on the nature and substance of time. Existing in a world devoid of colour and clocks under the glare of constantly burning lamps made the artificial divisions of hours and minutes irrelevant and, after listening to Elizbieta’s tirades for what felt like eternity, he was prepared to discount the evidence of his beard and believe anyone who told him weeks had passed since they’d been picked up in the forest.

Pillows and blankets appeared alongside the third monotonous meal of coffee and sandwiches. Magdalena and Elizbieta used the blankets to rig up a curtain around the shower, although he made a point of lying on his bed whenever either of them moved into the bathroom area.

Nothing intruded into their closed, sterile world except the masked guard who brought them food. Clean overalls appeared with the fourth tray. Even allowing for the amount of time he spent sleeping, or, more frequently, pretending to, Adam became closer acquainted with Elizbieta than he’d ever had the desire to, while Magdalena remained as enigmatic, cool and aloof as ever.

He never saw her with her hair or her guard down. Like him, she spent most of the time lying on her bed, apart from an hour between every meal during which she exercised as vigorously as the confines of space would allow. Just watching her go through a punishing routine of power walking, press- and push-ups made him tired. By tacit agreement they limited their conversations to the absolute essential and, from the number of times Magdalena glanced up the ceiling, Adam assumed that she, too, had noticed the cameras.

In contrast to Magdalena, when awake, Elizbieta rarely remained still or quiet. Vitriolic ravings about his shortcomings and cowardice alternated with tearful outbursts for the men she had loved and believed she would never see again. She never mentioned Feliks. After their fifth meal of coffee and sandwiches she began entertaining him and Magdalena with doom-laden predictions of their imminent, extremely painful, slow and lingering deaths.

Just when Adam was beginning to wonder if he’d died and been consigned to a hell, custom-tailored by a vindictive deity as retribution for his particular sins, he was beckoned to the glass door at gunpoint by the guard, who’d abandoned his mask for the first time since they had been seized in the forest. He opened the door in the glass wall and stepped tentatively towards the bars. As the guard unlocked the grid, he glanced back to see Magdalena standing next to her bed watching him, but it was left to Elizbieta to exploit the full drama of the moment.

‘Adam, don’t go! You can’t leave us.’ She flung herself theatrically through the door, only to retreat when the guard waved his gun towards her.

‘They probably want to give me a shave.’ He rubbed the stubble on his chin, debating whether it was two or three day’s growth.

The guard motioned him to walk ahead. The corridor stretched, ominous and silent, before him. The guard’s boots stamped behind him as he shuffled around corner after corner in his paper slippers and still the corridor yawned ahead of him. White, empty and threatening. All the stories he had heard about the Communist years came to mind, especially the ones about the final walks of hapless prisoners down corridors, walks that ended with a bullet in the back of the skull.

Then he heard a cacophony of voices, one loud, indignant and so blessedly familiar he almost whooped with joy. He ran down the tunnel the guard motioned him into. Through ragged joins in hooped, Perspex sheets he caught tantalizing glimpses of a garden – trees – leaves – grass – red and golden flowers – and finally, standing in a reception area at the end of the passage, the stocky figure of Josef Dalecka.

‘You just can’t stay out of trouble, can you, Adam?’

‘I try to live a quiet life.’ Adam held out his hand. It seemed an odd gesture to make to a man he felt had just saved his life.

‘Not hard enough. I’ve had it with nurse-maiding you. Next time get yourself out of your own scrapes.’

‘We’re free?’

‘It took a great deal of time and effort, my time and effort,’ Josef emphasised harshly, ‘but yes, they’re going to let you go.’

‘That’s generous of them considering we did absolutely nothing.’

‘I don’t know about America, but in Poland we stick to the roads. It’s an offence to drive across the forest. Apart from the inconvenience caused to walkers, deer and wild boars, think of the ecological damage.’

‘What about the damage done to us? They didn’t decontaminate us to test their equipment. What exactly did we drive into?’

‘Classified,’ Josef muttered, deferring to the uniformed figures ranged behind him.

‘Did we stray into a biological warfare site?’ Adam addressed the official sporting the most elaborate insignia.

‘A virulent form of foot and mouth disease, sir,’ came the bland reply.

‘I thought you needed cloven hooves to catch that.’

‘An anatomical advantage you Americans have over us Poles.’ Josef flashed Adam a warning look.

‘You’re free to go, Mr Salen, just as soon as you sign this document.’

Adam took the sheet of paper the man handed him and began to read it.

‘It’s the usual indemnity form used by the authorities, certifying that you suffered no injury while in our care.’

‘I’m not sure about the after-effects of those sandwiches…’

‘Sign it,’ Josef barked.

Adam picked up a pen from the desk and scribbled his name at the foot of the page.

‘Oh my God!’ Elizbieta appeared at the head of the tunnel and stared aghast at a table behind Adam. On it stood three sorry piles of rags, but Elizbieta had recognised one as what was left of the clothes she had been wearing when they had been detained. The crimson designer suit she had been so proud of had been shrunk to child-size, its colour bled to the palest pink. Beneath it, her white silk cami-knickers had been transformed to a hideous grey. ‘Those clothes cost me three month’s wages, they were dry-clean only. What have you done to them? I’ll sue you, you bastards…’

‘Elizbieta,’ Josef broke in. ‘Sign the form, there’s a good girl. I have a car waiting.’

Adam and Magdalena’s outfits had fared no better than Elizbieta’s so they travelled back to Gdansk in boiler suits and paper slippers. Rather than fill Josef’s car with the stench of disinfectant, they left their clothes behind, but it took the promise of a substantial cheque from Adam before Elizbieta could be persuaded to abandon her beloved suit. Even the girls’ handbags, their shoes and Adam’s leather wallet had been ruined. The only recognisable items in the neat piles that had been made of their possessions were their identity cards, passports, private papers, and a lump of dried soap that had been scraped away from a bullet, in Adam’s pile.

‘I’d be careful with that if I were you, Mr Salen,’ one of the officers warned as he abandoned the soap and picked up the bullet. ‘The edges are sharp.’

‘It’s a lucky charm.’ Adam pocketed it and followed Josef to his car.

When they reached the main road to Gdansk, much to Elizbieta’s annoyance, Adam closed the glass partition that separated the front from the back of the police vehicle and looked at Josef, who was concentrating on driving.

‘What’s the real story?

‘As far as I can make out you drove into an area contaminated with anthrax. They’ve found a couple of corpses.’

‘Animal?’

‘Presumably deer or cattle. I couldn’t get past the rumours. Not my department.’

‘You mean there isn’t anyone in the know you can put the frighteners on,’ Adam guessed.

‘Special forces always have been a law unto themselves. You really are a bloody fool for tangling with them. I had a hell of time tracking you down. No one would admit to seeing you after you crossed the border back into Poland. Feliks, Magdalena’s brothers and Edmund have haunted my office for three days…’

‘We’ve been missing for three days?’ Without access to clocks, watches or windows Adam couldn’t have hazarded a guess as to how long they had been kept prisoner.

‘They all know you’re safe. As soon as I got word where you were being held last night, I sent messages.’

‘Last night! Why didn’t you come for us then?’

‘Because they wouldn’t release you. I spoke to a doctor who insisted you had to remain in quarantine for a minimum of seventy-two hours.’

‘Lest we spread foot and mouth amongst the cloven-hoofed population of Gdansk?’ Adam raised a sceptical eyebrow.

‘What were you doing driving around the forest? They told me some cock and bull story about guns and a black car chasing yours. Couldn’t you invent something better? A child of three would have a hard time believing that one.’

‘We went to Krefta’s place in Kaliningrad, drew a blank and headed back. When we left a rest area outside Frombork a black Mercedes with Russian plates followed us. A couple of miles up the road it forced us to stop and two men got out. I took one look at the gun snout nosing from beneath one of their coats and headed into the forest. It seemed the safest place at the time.’ Adam turned his head. Magdalena and Elizbieta were curled up on opposite ends of the back seat, their eyes closed. ‘The plates were definitely Russian.’

‘You get a number?’

‘I was too busy trying to avoid trees to make a note of it.’

‘Brunon Kaszuba still hasn’t surfaced. It takes a special bastard to leave even an ex-wife to the mercies of the Russian Mafia.’

‘You think the Mafia could have been following us?’