The Dark Chronicles (64 page)

‘After copies have been made, of course.’

‘Of course.’

‘And how am I alive? The document says there’s no antidote.’

‘No known one. Our scientists have been working on adapting this type of virus for several years, just as the Americans and British have been, and we have developed a range of antidotes. As you were already infected with the disease, it seems they only gave you a tiny dose of the new strain. We think they wanted to see what the effect would be in a controlled environment: to observe how transmissible their new strain might be to other humans before they tried it out on a larger scale at a later date…’

My mind jolted back to Sardinia, and my skin crept. They had put me in the same cell as Sarah because they had wanted to see how quickly she would catch the new strain from me. The plan had never been to attack Rome or Turin, but somewhere else entirely. Severn had scribbled ‘4 May’ on the strategy document, but it must have been just a possibility, rather than anything they had yet planned. Once Urquhart was fully satisfied that the new strain could act as effectively as it needed to, they would have injected me anew, then found a football match in Naples or an opera in Venice or whatever suited them, planted me in it and stood back and waited for the crowd to become infected. No doubt they would also have prepared suitable evidence to leak to the press that the carrier of the deadly new plague had been a Soviet agent.

Now I saw why Severn had been so anxious about whether Sarah had slept with me: he had still loved her, and if she had only been near me for a few hours she would have been unlikely to have caught the disease already – the idea was that it took several hours to come into effect. But if we had
slept together
, the chances would have been far greater that she already had it. It was a monstrously warped kind of love, of course – he had still put her in a cell with me to test how fast the disease could spread without us sleeping together.

Only we had escaped before they had had the chance to find out.

The knife Barnes had pulled on the rooftop in the Vatican hadn’t
been a stiletto blade, but a needle. He had been trying to inject me with the vaccine, because my twenty-four hours were nearly up and I had been about to reach my optimum period of transmissibility, or whatever the scientific term for it was. And that explained Severn’s valediction. When he had arrived at the embassy and we were there, he had realized that both the dossier and Barnes’ paperback were missing from his safe, and had presumed that Sarah and I had taken both and so discovered the plan to use me as a weapon. But then I had confused him. Instead of trying to leave the country, either to defect to Moscow or head for London, I had inexplicably raced to the Vatican, and then to Turin. At some stage, he had guessed that I was running too fast to have discovered or read the documents in the back of Barnes’ book, and was still acting on the basis of the strategy dossier and the various Stay Behind documents.

But those documents were still enough to damn them with – if we had reached Haggard or anyone else who hadn’t been involved, the whole thing would have backfired. So they had run after us with needles, in the hope of stopping us before we reached optimal transmission and caused an attack they weren’t able to manage, and to retrieve the documents and kill us before we told anyone about their conspiracy. Severn had told me that I didn’t know what was happening, not out of any sense of remorse, but because he had realized he had failed to stop me and wanted to taunt me with his knowledge of what lay in store.
‘Enjoy her while she lasts. It won’t be long.’

I turned back to Sasha. ‘I take it you have known about this for some time,’ I said. ‘Like the tunnel.’

‘The revival of Stay Behind? Since last year. A British agent in Stockholm revealed it inadvertently to one of our assets.’

That drunkard Collins. The Service should have sacked him years ago.

‘And you’re willing to stand by and let innocent people be killed – and to be blamed for their deaths – just to protect the fact that you know it’s going on?’ As well as being terrible operational
logic, I wondered if it wasn’t worse than committing the atrocities in the first place.

‘But it is not
we
who will be blamed,’ he said. ‘Not exactly. It is British anarchists, the Italian Communist party, and similar groups throughout Western Europe. We support these people sometimes, but they are not our real friends. They are like the information we let through the tunnel – not the most important. We do not want to expose NATO’s actions at this particular moment. If they kill a great many civilians and blame it on others, then we may do so. In the meantime, the more evidence we have pointing to their involvement, the better.’

They ‘may do so’ – he didn’t seem too bothered.

‘How many people count as “a great many”?’ I asked.

He gave me another of his patronizing smiles – he seemed to have an endless supply of them. ‘I think you have misunderstood the strategy of their operation,’ he said. ‘In Italy it is called Gladio, and that is an apt codename, I think. It is named after the
gladius
, one of the weapons used by the gladiators: a stabbing sword.’ He thrust his fist towards me. ‘The wounds it inflicted often looked horrific, but were not that deep – it was an ineffective weapon if you wanted a quick kill, in fact. But, of course, that was not what the organizers of the fights wanted: they wanted slow kills. Do you know why?’

‘Yes. Because the longer it took for someone to die, the more entertainment there was for the crowd.’

‘Precisely – nobody likes going to a boxing match to see one fighter knocked out in the first ten seconds. And so, too, with Gladio. They are not interested in killing many innocent people – but they want to
terrify
many people, with a superficial but spectacularly bloody wound.’

‘That’s a pretty poor salve for anyone’s conscience,’ I said. ‘Would you say the same to the families of those who are killed? Or is that why you rescued us? A sudden attack of scruples because the virus would mean more deaths than you could justify?’

‘I am sorry to disappoint you once more, but no. We were worried that you would reach London with the documents. That would have been… unfortunate. Osborne and the others will, of course, wonder how much you discovered, and what you will tell us. But once we have returned all the documents to the safe, there will be no reason to suppose that you discovered anything at all, and we are confident that the strategy will continue.’

He was actually boasting about prolonging the operation. It appeared that, from Moscow’s point of view, the more people who were killed and blamed on proxy groups the better – it would be all the more effective when they held their press conference to reveal that NATO had been behind it. Unlike the Berlin Tunnel, this time they didn’t appear keen to call things off and ‘accidentally’ discover the plot when given the chance.

When Barchetti had told me Arte come Terrore knew about the attack in the dome, he had meant the events in London after all – the ‘in’ had simply been a slip of the tongue, or because he hadn’t known precisely what had happened there. What he had discovered, and what he had been desperate to tell Severn, was that the cell knew that they were going to be blamed for that attack. That meant that they knew about Stay Behind – and so did Moscow. So the whole thing was blown, and Barchetti had needed to warn the Service. When I’d turned up instead of Severn and asked if he thought Arte come Terrore were involved in killing Farraday, he had realized I didn’t know about Stay Behind at all, and that something was therefore desperately wrong with my having been sent to meet him. So he’d fled… And that was why Pyotr had ordered me to kill him: Moscow not only didn’t want the Service to know that they were aware of Stay Behind, but were prepared to kill for it.

A strange sensation ran through me. There hadn’t been any attacks planned for Rome or Turin, but there would still be plans for attacks in Italy and elsewhere. And by killing Barchetti before he got his message to the Service, I had allowed the whole bloody thing to continue, just as London, and Moscow, had wanted.

Unless, of course, I could get out of here.

But how? Something told me they wouldn’t take off until Sasha was seated and belted in and had given the go-ahead, so I tried to stall him some more.

‘Why didn’t you answer my call in London?’ I asked.

He smiled tolerantly. ‘Has that been bothering you? Let me put your mind at rest there, then. I had no idea about the attack in St Paul’s, none at all. My radio man simply had a feeling that the safe house was compromised, and he and his team shut down and moved immediately as a precaution. As soon as I felt we were secure again, I sent Grigori to let you know… But you didn’t seem especially open to hearing the message.’

So my paranoia had got the better of me. It hadn’t been the first time they had moved safe houses – it was good practice to do so every once in a while, in fact. As there had been the risk that they would do so at the same time as I needed to contact them urgently, we had arranged that in such events Sasha would send someone to alert me within twelve hours. And he had done so. But he and his team had happened to move just as someone had taken a pot shot at me, and I had forgotten all about that arrangement and jumped to entirely the wrong conclusion. Perhaps if I had stopped for a moment in that call box in Smithfield and considered that, I might have heeded Toadski’s message in Heathrow, and not taken the flight to Rome, and… but that way madness lay. Whatever I had done, that bastard Osborne would have tried to kill me. It was a miracle he hadn’t succeeded – but at what cost?

I couldn’t look Sasha in the face now, but I had one last question to ask him. ‘This new strain…’ I said. ‘Is it more effective than the ones developed by your scientists?’

He nodded. There was a moment of silence, and then he understood what I was really asking. ‘Yes. The doctors isolated it from you a couple of hours ago.’

I leaned forward to try to hit him, but the strap around my chest held me back.

He stood, and smiled down at me. ‘I wish I could make you see how much I admire you, Paul. I’ve always felt you were a man of high ideals – perhaps too high. Sometimes they must be sacrificed for a greater cause.’

I didn’t have any ideals to speak of, but in the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king – if he’s not hanged by the mob.

‘What greater cause?’ I asked. ‘Communism – or the Motherland?’

‘Both, of course. The second is meaningless without the first. It is true that in this case the interests of the state have perhaps over-ruled strict ideology, because more important things are at stake. But you surprise me – did you really think you and your girlfriend were going to stop this war alone?’

‘She’s not my—’ I stopped myself. It was futile. There was nothing more important at stake than a perpetual cycle of point-scoring, but he would never be able to understand that.

He gave me a thin smile. ‘I think you should sleep now,’ he said. ‘We’ll be leaving soon.’

*

He had left me here, alone with Sarah. Well, why not? We were strapped to our beds in the hold of a plane, about to take off.

But we hadn’t taken off
yet
.

I started tearing at the strap, but it was no use: it was fixed tight. Panicking, I began clawing away at it in the hope my nails might break the surface. But I knew that wouldn’t help. My eyes raced around the small space desperately looking for something that might help, and trying not to think of how little time I might have. I had to get moving before…

That was it. Movement. The stretcher was on caster wheels, albeit with brakes on each one. But if I could create enough energy to lift them… At the foot of the bed I could see the glass Sasha had handed me earlier resting on the trolley. But how to move myself towards it?

I placed a hand out of the stretcher and tried to reach down to the floor.
I was several inches short. That wouldn’t work. So I strained my chest against the belt again, but this time tried to jerk my entire body upwards as I did so. For a moment, the stretcher leapt a fraction of an inch in the air, and as it did I tried to use the momentum by pushing upwards again, and again, until it bounced. Praying that the noise wouldn’t bring anyone running, I started jerking from side to side as well as upwards, and gradually the stretcher began to turn. It was infuriatingly difficult to control, but after a couple of minutes I had managed to move myself so that I was almost horizontal to the trolley, and less than a yard away.

I didn’t think I was going to manage to get within arm’s reach any time soon, so I reached down and removed the catheter from my wrist. Then I reached for the pole containing the intravenous drip bag and tilted it towards me. I quickly unhooked the bag, and then dipped the pole down and took a swipe at the trolley, missing by several inches.

I made it on the fourth attempt, snagging the pole perfectly around one of the trolley’s legs. I pulled it towards me carefully and reached out for the glass. Shielding my face with my arm, I cracked the glass firmly against the side of the trolley, sending shards scurrying across the floor. But several shards had remained in the trolley. I picked out the largest and sawed away furiously with it at the base of the strap. Finally it started to fray, and then it broke away.

Gulping for air and soaking in sweat, I stumbled over to Sarah’s stretcher and performed the same exercise. She woke while I was freeing her and looked up at me in a daze. I gestured for her to follow me, and she nodded. I knew it could be just moments before they started taxiing across the tarmac, after which we would have no chance. Coming out of the hold I saw that one of the doors was just a few feet away. I ran towards it and pushed the button. It shunted open, and a blast of air entered the plane.

I beckoned Sarah on and she reached the door, and then we started racing down the metal stairs until we were on the tarmac.
Wind whipped across my face, sending a dull ache through my jaw, and the sweat on my back suddenly felt chilled. We must still be in Turin, or nearby. That was good. France and Switzerland were close. I hoped we were nearer Switzerland: we had to get over the border, find a proper doctor…