The Dark Chronicles (31 page)

‘No, Paul. Please let go of that idea. I told you: Anna died a long time ago.’

I could sense a false note somewhere. The eyes. His eyes didn’t move – they were fixed on me. Because he was fighting the urge to look elsewhere. The window? Was it my imagination or was there some noise coming from that direction? What was it – cheering?

I glanced down at my watch. I managed to register that it was twenty-five past before I picked up the movement in my peripheral vision and looked back up to see Pritchard leaping towards me, his hands outstretched like claws. I pulled the trigger without even willing it to happen, and watched as the bullet ripped through his jacket and forced him back onto the floor.

‘Where is she?’ I screamed. ‘Which corner?’

He whispered a word, and then was silent. His voice had been hoarse, and the word hadn’t come out clearly, but I knew what it was instantly: ‘Pockets,’ he had said.

I searched them, and then headed downstairs and into the courtyard. A long black car was slowly approaching the gates, and somewhere above me was Anna with one eye glued to her sniper sight, waiting for it.

The courtyard was packed and noisy, with the crowd jostling against the ropes to catch a glimpse of the car that was now edging through the gates one yard at a time, presumably so the PM could wave at everyone. One of the Redcaps saw me and started racing over, so I dropped back to a brisk walk and made as though I were calling out to someone on the other side of the ropes. Manning had also spotted me and was heading in my direction, but I was just a few yards away from the next corner, and yes, there was the staircase. I took the steps three at a time, my ears hot and pulsing and my chest constricting. Then I was on the landing.

I took out the Tokarev and uncocked the safety. As there had been with the other staircases, two large open wards faced each other. All the patients who could move had thronged into the one facing the courtyard and were gathered around the windows peering down. All but one, a young boy with an artificial leg, who was leaning against the wall, watching me with large eyes. I had a sudden memory of a German boy of about the same age who had once looked at me like that, a lifetime ago.

At the far end of the landing was a door. If this staircase followed the pattern of the others, which it seemed to, it should lead me to a storage-room-cum-office. This was the door I’d travelled thousands of miles to open: behind it, almost certainly, lay the answers I was looking for. I grabbed the handle.

Locked.

I smashed my foot into the lower half of the door. A couple of splinters flew up, and after a couple more kicks the whole thing fell in.

The gun was the first thing I saw, a dark snake pointing out at me, the barrel gleaming. Then the figure in white behind it.

‘Drop your weapon!’ she hissed, and there was such danger in her voice that I immediately leaned down and placed my pistol on the floor, then kicked it towards her.

She picked it up and pocketed it, then backed away from me to the window. Thin bars of sunlight glowed through the shutters but much of the room was in darkness and it took my eyes a moment to decipher some of the objects. A mop and bucket leaned against one corner, a duffel bag on the floor nearby. On the windowsill, a tripod had been mounted. It wasn’t until she started placing the rifle onto this that I got a good look at her.

She had changed. There was still the dark soulfulness in her eyes, the wide jaw, the wave of hair swept back. But the mouth that had been full and sensual was now thin and hard, and her skin was also somehow different: still bronzed, but now a little leathery. Perhaps Pritchard hadn’t been lying about her having lived in Tunisia. She turned to look at me then, and it was almost as if her skin tautened under my gaze, until, like the surface of a painting being scratched away, the ghost portrait that had been hiding beneath was revealed.

It was her. Nearly twenty-five years after I had last seen her, here she was again, still in a nurse’s uniform, and this time she was clutching a sniper rifle. I looked back at the duffel bag and saw the small white cap with a red cross on it peeking out of the top. It was just like the one I’d seen at the Afrospot. Or close enough: I noticed that the thread was slightly the wrong shade, and guessed she had taken the outfit from one of the Nigerian clinics and adapted it.

‘Hello, Paul,’ she said, and then she turned from me and lowered
herself into position, crouching down on one knee and screwing her eye into the rifle sight.

*

I closed my eyes and swallowed the vomit that had risen in the back of my throat.

‘I thought you were dead,’ I said.

‘You were wrong.’

I laughed involuntarily, though it came out more as a whimper. ‘I was… Is that…’ My breathing failed again and my legs nearly gave out from under me. Come on, get the words out! ‘Is that the best you can come up with?’ I said. ‘
I was wrong?
’

‘We can discuss this later. Did you see Henry?’

I didn’t say anything, mainly because my right thigh was jerking and I was trying to keep it under control with my arms, but she misinterpreted the silence.

‘Did you see him, Paul?’

Her voice had a coldness that cut right through me. Even with everything that was happening, something told me not to let her know he was dead, and I shook my head, then answered, ‘No’ aloud when I realized that she still wasn’t looking at me, but remained fixed in her position at the window.
With them that walk against me, is my sun.
Only she wasn’t walking: she was staying put, waiting for the PM.

‘Don’t tell me you still intend to go through with this,’ I said. She didn’t reply, just kept on looking through the sight. I wanted to lunge across the room and rip her away from it, force her to stand and face me and answer me. But I was too weak, so instead I just stood there, clutching my leg uselessly. More seconds passed. What was going on down there? Had the car stopped?

There was too much flooding through me, and I couldn’t slow it down or order it.

‘How did you do it?’ I asked, finally. ‘Make-up and something to
stop your pulse?’ I had no idea what part of my mind had come up with the question, but another part approved. Keep her talking, get some answers, distract her. Distract yourself.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Something like that. I was one of the first – they have done it many times since.’

‘
Why
, Anna?’ Here was the question. Here, finally, was the question I had wanted her to answer.

She didn’t say anything for a while, and I wondered if she had heard me. Then she answered. ‘Love,’ she said simply. ‘Love of my cause.’ She lifted her head a fraction and glanced across at me, and the Anna I had known all those years ago receded once again. I searched her face desperately for the glimpse I’d had just moments before, but it was no use. ‘I am sorry I hurt you,’ she said, still talking in the same calm, slow way. ‘I didn’t want to. But I knew you were one of us the first time I saw you. I could sense that you wanted to do good, that you would be a strong soldier for us. Are you still a strong soldier for us, Paul? Can you keep fighting a little longer for me?’

The anger welled in my stomach.
Did she think I was a bloody child?
My legs started to spasm, and I fought back the dizziness. Please don’t let me lose my hearing now! I closed my eyes for a moment and tried to find some stillness and regulate my breathing, but all I could see were dozens of tiny bursts of light, darting here and there, trying to make connections with one another. I placed a hand behind me and let myself slump slowly to the floor, leaning my head against the jamb. It was more comfortable here and, after all, it was where I belonged. How did the next line run?
The wheel is turned
, that was it: ‘
The wheel is turn’d; I hold the lowest place
’.

‘I have paid a price, too,’ Anna was saying, and I woke from my dreams of poetry in a distant classroom and strained my ears to make sure I heard her right. I wanted to catch every word of this extraordinary confession, wanted very much to know how she had paid a price for betraying me. ‘I have sacrificed my career and a good part of my life to protect you,’ she said. ‘Because if anyone ever found out I was alive, that might have exposed you.’

Ah, well: that wasn’t bad. One had to admit that that wasn’t bad. So that was why she hadn’t shot me yet – because of my value as an agent?

‘But Slavin found out,’ I said.

‘Yes, that was unfortunate. Vladimir Mikhailovich had been out here too long – he was lonely. He became obsessed with me. I told him there was someone else. That was a mistake. I have spent much of my time away from Lagos in recent weeks, and on one occasion he must have broken into my quarters and found some letters I had never sent Henry. I had kept them – a weakness. I suppose he sent photographs of them to Moscow and someone in the KGB realized who I was. But he’s gone now.’ She smiled tersely. ‘Nobody knows.’

‘You’re still a believer, then?’ I said. A phrase she had often used in Germany came back to me. ‘In the brotherhood of man?’

Her mouth tightened. ‘Of course. Why not?’

I clawed my way up to a sitting position, but she heard me and lifted the rifle an inch so I stopped and she replaced it again.

‘I don’t know,’ I said, as though nothing had happened. ‘The gulags, the mock trials, the tanks in the streets? The use of assassination to sustain a civil war in Africa until you can install a puppet leader to further your own aims?’

The car must have stopped because she moved her eye away from the sight and turned to look at me. ‘Henry warned me you might have lost your nerve,’ she said. ‘I didn’t believe him. You’ve worked for us for over twenty years, Paul.’

‘Based on what, though?’ I said.

She went back to her previous position.

‘I never lied to you about the big things. And you’re hardly in a position to lecture me about sustaining a civil war. Your government—’

‘My government. Not me.’

‘So whose side are you on then?’ she said, and the false politeness vanished for a moment.

‘My own,’ I said.

‘I see. Just a neutral bystander, condemning everyone else from your position of complete superiority… and inactivity?’

‘You’re all as bad as each other,’ I said. ‘I refuse to take sides any longer.’

‘But you must, Paul! Don’t you see? You must! There’s no room for sitting on the fence in this world. One side will win, and it will change how millions of people live. You have to take sides, and act on your beliefs. And I believe we will help this country.’

There was a mad glare in her eyes. I didn’t want to hear how killing the PM was going to help – no doubt she had her answers. She’d always been good with the abstracts. ‘So that’s it?’ I said. ‘The cause above all, and screw anyone who gets in the way?’ I forced myself onto my feet and began trudging across the room towards her. She didn’t even flinch.

‘What’s to stop me from killing you?’ I asked.

She looked up, surprised, then calmly put her eye back to the sight as though I were a child.

‘Because you loved me,’ she said. ‘Perhaps you still do, in some way. I am what
you
have believed in for most of your life, and you can’t destroy me. You will watch me finish this and then you will leave here, and we will never speak again. You will continue your work in London with Sasha.’

‘No!’ I said. ‘I won’t be—’

There was a sudden lift in the noise of the crowd outside.

‘Here’s the test, Paul,’ she said. ‘Here it is now. Which side will you take?’

I lunged forward, hitting her in the back. My pistol clattered onto the floor, out of reach, and Anna turned and lashed out at me, scratching at my face, but I managed to hook my arm around her right shoulder and brought her weight back and slipped the other arm around her neck and squeezed as hard as I could, trying to block out the pain, the sounds, everything. My hands were tingling and I looked down and saw that blood was flowing from
the palms and I saw her face, her eyes fixed open, no drugs now, no clever injections, and I kept squeezing her even though I knew it was too late, because I could still hear the echo of the shot, and then I thought a flock of seagulls swept over the courtyard, but it wasn’t seagulls, of course, it was humans, screaming. What a strange sound, I thought.

I looked down. I could see everything perfectly – the black car surrounded by a swarm of people, their shadows making everything seem to lean to one side: the black man in the peaked cap kneeling beside the body of the white man in the summer suit whose head didn’t seem to be there any more. I let go of Anna, and she slumped to the floor. Releasing her seemed to do something to my breathing, because I started heaving uncontrollably.

There was a scraping noise and I looked up to see a small crowd of people tumbling into the room. I registered Smale first, then David the doctor behind him, and finally Manning, lobster-red in his tropical suit, his handkerchief the size of a windsail fluttering above the scene. Smale slapped me and screamed something I couldn’t understand, and when I didn’t answer he started shaking me. I wanted to tell him it was useless, he was wasting his time, I didn’t have long to go. ‘
Murder!
’ he was shouting, and I realized it was directed at me. ‘
I am arresting you for murder!
’ It seemed like the wrong thing to say and I started counting aloud, for some reason. There was a lot of movement, a lot of panic, but I was perfectly conscious of it all, right until the last moment, the last breath. I was watching it all, right up until I died.

Nobody tells you you’re dead – you have to figure it out yourself. It took me rather a long time. In fact, it was the presence of time that held me back. At the start, the idea didn’t even occur to me. I seemed to be surrounded by an endless grey landscape, but that didn’t mean death, surely: I was simply unconscious.

Only I wasn’t. I could vividly remember everything, right up until when Smale had shaken me and I had stopped breathing. But still, the fact that I was thinking meant I was alive: probably in a hospital somewhere, recovering.