The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (21 page)

“Dozens of lives, centuries of my life, from the first stirring of consciousness in my father’s arms to the day I die, this, Harry,
this
is my purpose.” Now he turned and fixed me with a stare from which I refused to flinch. “You won’t stop me, will you, Harry?”

A plea and a threat?

Perhaps.

Something tightened inside.

“I will always be your friend, Vincent,” I replied. “Nothing less.”

Did that part of my soul which curled up in knowledge of the lie curl up inside him too? Did we both recognise our own
deceptions in that deep part of our beings that had no need for rational thought?

If he did, he moved straight through the second, waving it by like a casual acquaintance seen on the other side of a busy street. He slipped back into his chair, picked up the empty whisky glass, scowled to see it drained, laid it down again. “Can I ask you to take some time to think?” he said at last. “A week, maybe? If at the end of it you still feel the same…”

“Of course.”

“… we’ll work something out. I would be heartbroken if you went, Harry, truly I would, but I understand if… conscience… stands between us.”

“Let’s see how it is in a week,” I replied with a shrug. “After all this, it would be hypocritical to rush into things.”

Half an hour later I was back in my room, and not ten seconds after the door snapped shut was reaching for my travel bag and warmest clothes, and wondering about the best way to escape.

Did I ever tell you about the time I was kidnapped by Argentinian bandits? I was a businessman, which was to say I was taking the profits from a company while other people did the legwork and feeding most of my resources into the Cronus Club, as befitted the basic tenets of the institution. I was living in Argentina and, rather naïvely, had assumed that I was keeping my head down and causing very little trouble.

I was kidnapped while driving to market. They were rather unprofessional about it, taking my car out with a sideswipe that overturned it and could well have killed me then and there. As it was, I dislocated my shoulder and cracked a couple of ribs, and considered myself lucky to have done no worse.

As I crawled from the wreckage of my car, two men in ski masks came barrelling out of the pickup which had swiped me on the potholed road, grabbed me by an arm each and, screaming, “Shut up, shut up!” in heavily accented English, dragged me into the rear of their vehicle. The whole escapade can’t have taken more than twenty-five seconds.

I was too groggy and confused to do anything other than obey, and lay face down with my hands above my head for the duration
of the journey, where under more prepared or kinder circumstances I might well have made a better strategic assessment of my kidnappers. I was aware by the increasingly poor roads and rapidly rising humidity that we were heading into forest and felt no particular surprise when we finally came to a stop in a small round clearing of no discernible merit and I was pushed to a mud floor shimmering with larvae. They bound my hands with rope and covered my head with a cloth that stank heavily of roasted coffee, and dragged me through the forest. As will happen when you have a bewildered, injured, blindfolded prisoner on rough paths, I only made it a few miles before I tripped and sprained my ankle. A row ensued as to what to do with me next, and eventually a rough stretcher was cobbled together from crooked branches that stuck into my spine as they pulled me to their camp. There, to my great disappointment, the ski masks came off, and I was crudely shackled with a rusted chain to a post set in the ground. A newspaper carrying the day’s date was laid at my feet, a photo taken and, eavesdropping on to the gabble of my hosts, I discovered that a ransom for some $300,000 was to be demanded.

My company could have paid the fee ten times over, but, listening to my captors, who still hadn’t realised that I spoke a word of Spanish, I concluded that it was unlikely I would live to enjoy the cost-benefit analysis. As they clearly considered me a weak foreign businessman, I played the part, groaning as my shoulder and ankle began to swell against my clothes. It took very little play-acting, for they’d shackled my sprained ankle to the post and very quickly the flesh was pressing against the metal in hot, throbbing agony. Eventually, realising that a dead hostage was a useless hostage, they unshackled me and gave me a crutch to walk on, and a boy, barely fifteen years old, took me down to the nearby stream to wash my face and neck. He had a Kalashnikov, the universal weapon of all budget warriors, but he could barely hold it and I doubted if he knew how to fire the thing properly. I collapsed into the stream and, when he came to check on me, hit him round the side of the head with my crutch, beat him into submission and drowned him beneath the thin, shallow water, sitting on his spine
and pressing my elbow into the back of his skull with all the weight and strength I had.

Examining my surroundings and my damaged leg, it seemed unlikely that escape would happen, and I resolved that, since I would almost certainly die in this place, I may as well die by the means of my choosing. So I limped back to the camp, preparing to go out in a blaze of glory. Somewhat embarrassingly, the first guard I came upon was having a piss by some trees and, while my sense of professionalism suggested merely snapping his neck and being done with it, I was, I concluded, not exactly SAS competent. Instead, I shot him in the buttocks, and as he screamed and the others came running, I got down on my belly and shot out the kneecaps of the first man to come into view.

To my surprise, no one else came.

Then a voice called out in broken English, “We do not want fight you!”

I replied in Spanish. “You don’t appear to have a choice.”

A pause while this information settled in. Then, “We’ll leave the map and water–clean water! And food. We’ll leave you the map, water, food. We’ll wait twenty-four hours. That will give you time to get to the truck. We’ll not follow! You take the map!”

I called back, “That’s very kind of you, but really, if you don’t mind, I think I’d rather just slog it out here and now, thank you very much.”

“No, no, no need!” he called back, and really, I was beginning to doubt the commitment of these bandits to their task. “We’ll wait twenty-four hours and go. Won’t bother you again. Good luck!”

I heard the sound of movement between the leaves, of metal things being overturned, footsteps heading away.

I must have lain there for an hour, an hour and a half, waiting for the end. The forest stirred. Ants crawled into my shirt and considered eating me, but I clearly wasn’t their choice of meal, and they crawled on. A snake slithered through the undergrowth nearby but was more afraid of me than I was of it. Dusk began to settle, and there was silence in the camp. Even the man whose
kneecaps I had removed was silent. Perhaps I’d hit the femoral artery. Perhaps the pain had become too great to bear. At last, boredom more than anything else and a recollection that death was not my primary concern here pushed me to my feet, and, rifle in one hand and crutch in the other, I limped into the camp.

It was indeed deserted.

A map, water canteen and tin of cooked beans had been carefully laid out on the central table, along with a handwritten note.

The note said, in English,

“
Many, many apologies.
”

That was all.

I put the canteen over my shoulder, the map in my pocket and began the slow limp back to civilisation.

Whoever the bandit was, he had told the truth. I was never to see him again.

Regrettably, my escape from the Argentinian forests was not, I suspected, going to be in quite the same league as leaving Pietrok-112. Certainly, the actual leaving of the facility should present no problem, for there was no reason for the guards to suspect my purpose and there is nothing as reassuring as a friendly face, a polite wave and a man heading about his–presumably vital–business. It would be once outside, in the big beyond, that movement would become difficult. Acquiring an easy means of suicide would be vital, I decided, should it seem that capture was likely. The decision which remained was this–did I risk an overland route, striking out through the vast emptiness of northern Russia, using size and space to deceive my inevitable pursuers, or did I follow transport lines and try to lose myself in the Russian transit networks, creeping my way through cities and towns towards the western borders? I was more comfortable with the latter option, but rejected it. There were too few transport networks out of Pietrok-112, too many bottlenecks which could be sealed with a simple phone call, and even were I to somehow make it to a populated area and lose myself in the crowd, I doubted if national borders or state treaties would hold back the search. I knew too
much, and was both too valuable and too much of a risk to the secrecy of Vincent’s project.

Overground it would be, surviving to the best of my ability in the tundra. I had experience of living off the land, of both reading the simplest path and hiding my own trail. However, these were not the fertile lands of northern England where I had been raised, but a thousand-mile hostile nothingness. Suicide was still a firm option on the table, but death by starvation was unacceptable.

Did I have time to plan?

Time to prepare a stash, gather together the necessary tools?

I doubted it. There had been a look in Vincent’s eye. He knew, as I knew too, that I was no longer his man. I did not doubt that the man who had torched the Leningrad Cronus Club would soon strike against any threat to his security. I had to get out before he could take action against me, and time would be short.

I threw together only what I’d need to survive. Money was irrelevant, as was a change of clothes beyond a pair of socks to keep dry. Paper for kindling, matches for fire, electric torch and spare batteries, a penknife for cutting wood, a metal cup from beside my bed, the plastic sheeting from my rubbish bin, needle and thread. I packed fast but carefully, slung my bag over my back and headed to the lab to pick up a small lump of black magnet and a length of copper wire, waving cheerfully at the lab assistant as I did so, for I was often to be seen grabbing random bits. I broke the lock into the canteen stores and grabbed as many tins of salty food as I could find, burying them in my bag, but was interrupted by a sound in the dining room outside, forcing me to scurry for cover. The noise went by and I marched upwards, heading back through the cold corridors of Pietrok-112 towards the armoury. I would need a weapon, light and reasonably adaptable. No Kalashnikov this time; a revolver would do. The armoury was guarded, but the sergeant on the door knew me and smiled as I came up to him, right up to the moment where my arm went across his throat and a tin of sardines crashed down against the side of his skull, plunging him into darkness. I fumbled for the keys on his belt, and found none. Cursing, I turned to the armoury door. Unconsciousness in
humans is usually of two sorts–brief or terminal–and I doubted if my sardine-led assault on the sergeant was going to buy more than a few minutes. Was there time to pick the lock? I tried, using the copper wire from the lab and my penknife, cursing at the crudity of my implements, biting my lip every time a tumbler slid into place. A click, a turn, the darkness of the armoury beyond. I stepped inside, turned on the light and…

“Hello, Harry.”

Vincent stood right there, calm as anything, leaning against a box of grenades. For a moment I was frozen in his stare, a thief caught red-handed: no denial, no chance to beg or run. I said, “In the time it takes me to load and fire one of these guns…”

“No,” he agreed. “You won’t make it.”

He didn’t move, didn’t try to stop me. I sighed. At the end of the day, having nothing better to do, I had to try. I grabbed the nearest pistol, had the safety off and the empty magazine out in a click, reached down for the live ammunition on the shelf below, grabbed a fresh magazine, pushed it into the butt, felt it lock, raised it to fire–not at Vincent, but at me–when several thousand volts administered from behind sent my body first into paralysis, then convulsions, then nothing at all.

A padded suit in a padded chair in a padded cell.

How had I worked in this place for so long and not found this room?

Bright light and an IV drip. The drip fed into a vein in my hand. My hand was strapped to the chair at the wrist. I wondered if anything would be achieved by trying to wrench the drip out of my skin. In the long run, probably not. There were straps along the length of my arm, stopping at the bend in my elbow. More straps across my legs, around my ankles, across my chest and even, to my annoyance, my forehead. It was designed to make death by anything other than an act of God impossible. I reflected that it was probably also the best my posture had been for a very long time and was thus innately uncomfortable.

Vincent sat in front of me and said nothing.

A phrase written on his face.

Not angry–just sad.

I wondered if, in another life, Vincent had been a primary school teacher. He would have excelled at the task.

Finally I said, “Assuming I refuse to eat or drink, how long do you think you can keep me alive with nutrients and force alone?”

He almost flinched, pained by the vulgarity of the task in hand. “In a few years’ time the IRA hunger strikers will live for over sixty days before death. I’m hoping, however, that we can find some better way of sustaining you than by putting a tube down your throat.”

My turn to flinch. Sixty days is a long time to be a prisoner with no thought of escape but a prolonged, painful death. Did I have the will to refuse food when dying of starvation? I didn’t know. I had never put it to the test. Could my mind reject life even when my body screamed for it. It depended, I concluded, on what that life was for, and worth.

Silence.

I couldn’t remember there ever being silence between us before this day, or at least a silence which was not one of shared excitement and contemplation. There seemed no need for communication, no need to spell out all the obvious things which polite society required were said. Indeed, it seemed to me that in that silence we said it all anyway, and almost at the exact instant I had run out of things I wished to say to Vincent in the imaginary conversation in my mind and begun back again on a loop of it, he raised his head and declared,

“I need to know your point of origin.”

The question stunned me, though it shouldn’t have.

“Why?” I asked, mouth suddenly dry.

“Not to kill you,” he blurted hastily, “Dear God, I would never do that, Harry, never, I swear. But I need you to know that I know it. I need you to realise that you could be aborted in the womb, not-born. I need you to know that, so that you will keep my secrets. I know you will never again be my friend, but the rest… is more important.”

I considered the implications, not for my own life–the threat against that was suddenly very clear–but for Vincent. He was younger than me, born later in the century, and therefore the idea that he could somehow be a threat to me, prevent me even being born, was impossible, unless he had assistance. Someone of an older generation, someone who would be alive in 1919, ready to
poison my mother before I could be created. An ally in the Cronus Club? A collaborator in his dream, as I could no longer be?

He watched me, no doubt following the direction of my thoughts, then added, “I would rather not take the information by force, Harry. But if I must, I must.”

A snap back to the present, focus on reality. “You’ll torture me?” I asked. No point dancing around the words, and I was mildly pleased to see him flinch at the idea. Less pleased to see how readily he accepted it.

“Yes, if I must. Please don’t make me.”

“I’m not making you, Vincent; the decision is entirely yours. I’d like just to clear myself of any moral responsibility for that particular act before you do it.”

“You know everyone breaks, Harry. Everyone.”

A memory. Franklin Phearson, sobbing at his feet. Everyone breaks, and that was the truth of it. I would break as well. I would give up my point of origin.

Or I would lie and die.

“What will it be?” I asked airily and was surprised by the giddy lightness of my words. Recollections of Phearson tumbled beneath my thoughts like a quiet sea pulling back for the tsunami, and I rolled along with the waters, no longer in charge. “Are you thinking chemical? I should warn you, they tried antipsychotics on me before and it produces some unlikely effects. Psychological? No, probably not psychological. If I have only sixty or so days before my body is too weak to survive, and while I hate to overestimate my own mental fortitude, time is your enemy. Electrical would be best, but runs a risk to the heart–you do know about my heart, don’t you? Extreme cold, perhaps. Or extreme heat? Or a mixture of both. Sleep deprivation as standard but then again—”

“Stop it, Harry.”

“I’m just going through the process for you.”

He managed to meet my eyes, and I found it easy to meet his. I’d never seen him beg before.

(I’m a fucking good guy, Harry! I’m a fucking defender of democracy!)

“Just tell me, Harry. Tell me when you’re born and this won’t have to get any worse.”

(Christ, I’m not that guy, I’m just not, but you gotta understand, this is bigger than you or me.)

“I hope you don’t mind if I again query your use of the phrase ‘have to’.” I didn’t know who spoke but it sounded like me, albeit a little drunk. “You are under no compulsion to do any of this to me. It’s an entirely voluntary action on your part.”

“Everybody breaks, Harry.”

“I know. But you can’t afford to see how long it takes me, can you? So come on, Vincent,” I relished his English name, rolled it round my tongue. “You’d better get started.”

He hesitated, just a moment, then the begging was gone.

His eyes tightened.

(Make a difference, damn it! Make a difference!)

Franklin Phearson’s voice in my ear. Once upon a time he’d made the pain go away and stroked my hair, and I’d loved him for it like a child loves a long-lost mother, and I’d been broken and he’d been right. In his own inestimable, pointless way, he’d been right, and I’d died and that world, to me, might never have been if memory didn’t make it so.

With a half-shake of his head, Vincent stood to go.

“Not going to do it yourself?” I called after him. “Whatever happened to moral responsibility?”

“Think about it for a day,” he replied. “Just a day.”

And he left.