Touch (29 page)

I had counted eleven men who went to Saint-Guillaume to kill a cripple by the name of Janus.

Only three were waiting by the truck, parked on the roadside above a stream, its headlights burning white. Two of them had even begun to relax, their balaclavas off to reveal one man, one woman, cigarettes glowing between their bare fingers. Hard to strike a light when your fingers are muffled by wool and silk; harder still to enjoy a gasp when your face is hidden from view.

Perhaps they didn’t know the events by the river.

Perhaps they were to have been told that Coyle’s death was accident, not execution.

Perhaps they were only following orders.

My hands were in my pockets, and my face was covered by wool, and I was a familiar shape on a darkened night, and I was alone.

The man by the van turned as I approached, called out, “Herodotus?”

“Aurelius,” I replied, brisk and businesslike, then, “I think we’re going to need a hammer.”

Curiosity flickered on the face of the woman, but my words had been enough to carry me from the lip of the road to the back door of the van, an arm’s reach from the nearest man, and so, without further ado, I pulled my hands from my pockets, and before he could even register my bare flesh, pressed them against his exposed face and jumped.

An aluminium coffee mug fell to the ground, bouncing along the road and into the overflowing gutter; Samir Chayet staggered and blinked, hands rising to the unfamiliar balaclava against his skin, and I drew the gun off my hip and put one bullet in the thigh of the woman and another into the belly of the man who stood beside her. As they fell, I stepped forward, pulled their guns from their respective holsters and, having nothing better to do with them, tossed them down the ravine, listening to them clatter away in the dark. My weapon still raised, I shuffled round to the driver’s side of the van, and seeing no one inside, turned again to find Samir frozen in place, the balaclava limp in his hands.

“Hi,” I said. “You’re a nurse, yes? There’s a man down by the stream in a Lycra suit. I’d like you to get him for me. He’s been shot. These two have also been shot, though only time will tell if fatally. I’ll kill you, them and anyone else who passes by if you don’t do as I say, understand?”

He understood perfectly.

“Terrific,” I exclaimed with forced brightness. “I think I saw a torch in the driver’s compartment. I’ll watch for your light.”

Time moves more slowly in the dark.

A cheap plastic watch on my wrist glowed green, declaring the hour unsanitary for any reasonable thing. The sky’s enthusiasm for the night’s rain was fading to a thick sleepy mist that obscured the line where black cliff met starlight. I stood away from the headlights of the van, gun in pocket, torch in hand, and watched the tiny bubble of Samir’s light moving by the stream far below.

Of the two individuals I’d shot, the man with the belly wound had lost consciousness, a mercy, I felt, for all concerned. The woman was awake, her hands pressed over her thigh, her breath fast and ragged, eyes full of pain. The blood through her fingers and the blood on the tarmac was bright and thin where torchlight touched it, black and endless when the light turned away. I’d missed her femoral artery, as her continued ability to breathe demonstrated, though she seemed unwilling to thank me for this.

I leaned against the side of the van and finished their coffee.

No one felt the urge to communicate.

Samir’s light began to ascend. I waited, torch turned towards the top of the path, for the two muddy figures to emerge. Coyle had one arm across Samir’s back, the other curled into his own shoulder where the blood still burned between his fingers. He looked, in the unforgiving beam of my torch, pale and grey, a blueish tinge to his lips. Samir’s face was bursting red, teeth locked together with effort, lips peeled back like a horse ready to bolt.

“Put him inside,” I said, gesturing to the back of the truck.

“What did you do?” Coyle breathed, his gaze skimming over the two fallen figures.

“Their boss shot you. I wasn’t about to to ask for company policy.”

Coyle didn’t cry out as Samir eased him on to the vehicle floor, which I took for a bad sign. “You’re a nurse – do something.”

“Are you going to kill me?”

When I’d asked the same question, I’d done so in shaking Arabic, but now I heard Samir speak, his voice was clear confident French with a thick southern accent. In a way I felt the performance of Samir I’d given suited his features more than the reality he now presented. “I give you my word that if you patch this man up I will let you live. And if you run I’ll kill you and everyone here. Do you understand?”

“I don’t know you.” I felt a flicker of admiration. Shaking, frozen Samir Chayet, who’d woken in the dark with his hands tied, was standing his ground in the middle of the night.

“Nor do you understand what happened, how you came to be here. Yet the simple fact is you can take a risk and run, or you can take a risk and stay, and with only the bare minimum of information available you must decide which is the greater.”

He weighed up his options and chose the wiser.

Five minutes later, he said, “This man needs blood.”

“Know your type?” I asked Coyle.

“Sure,” he growled from the floor of the van. “You know yours?”

“My friend is such a wag,” I confided to Samir. “He tries to cultivate this dry manly wit.”

“Nonetheless,” said the nurse, “he needs blood, or I can’t promise what will happen.”

“I’ll get right on that. Keep the first-aid kit; the two folk bleeding outside the van are probably going to want it. One of them might have a mobile phone. I suggest you call the police – only the police – just as soon as we’re gone.”

Samir Chayet was a black silhouette in the rear-view mirror as I drove away. For less than eight hours I’d worn him, and his life would never be the same.

Coyle lay on the floor of the van behind me, one hand pressed to the dressing against his shoulder, his breath ragged, his skin grey. I’d put his jacket back around his shoulders, a blanket round his legs, and still he shivered, teeth clattering as he said, “What now?”

“Ditch the van. Get you to a doctor.”

“Am I your hostage?”

“That sounds like more trouble than it’s worth.”

“Why would you help me?”

“Help myself. Always. You going to stay awake?”

“You going to sedate me?”

“No.”

“Then I’m staying awake.”

I drove north, following the largest signs to the biggest roads. Judging from the water-carved crevices and black pines of the hills, I guessed I was heading deeper into the Massif Central, hunting out the lone motorway that had been forged across dry plateaux and sodden valleys of volcanic black. A phone rang on the passenger seat beside me; I ignored it. A few minutes later it rang again.

“You going to answer that?”

Coyle’s voice, a bare shimmer from the back.

“Nope.”

Sodium lighting announced the advent of the motorway. The signage promised turnings to ancient castles and towns of skilled artisans. The towns of skilled artisans offered medieval walls, Cathar monuments, Templar secrets, Hospitaller coats of arms, tourist shops in whose darkened windows hung swords, shields and ancient sigils, and perhaps drugs.

The phone rang again.

I ignored it.

Rang again.

Ignored it.

On the edge of a town I pulled into an empty supermarket car park.

The phone rang, a fourth time, bouncing insistent on the seat beside me.

I put it on speaker and answered.

A sharp intake of breath at the end of the line.

Then silence.

I sat back, eyes half-closed against the orange light of the car park, and waited.

Somewhere, someone else quite possibly did the same.

And silence.

The great roaring silence of the open line. If I strained I thought I could hear the gentle in and out of expectant breathing, steady and deliberate.

Behind me Coyle stirred, waiting for the conversation to begin.

I said not a word.

Breath on the line, and it seemed to me that, as our silence stretched – thirty seconds, forty, a minute – the breathing grew faster, brighter, and the word that came to mind was excited.

A child, gasping with delight, playing hide and seek somewhere in the dark.

I waited.

I was fine with waiting.

No code words were called, no response requested.

And there it was – the rising breath broke, burst out into a single bubble of sound.

A giggle.

“Hello,” I said.

The sound stopped as suddenly as it had begun.

“I see you,” I murmured. “I see
you
. You’ve come too late – step back, stretch out, try again. But I’ll always see you, whoever you are.”

Silence on the line.

“You shouldn’t have ordered them to kill my host. I know why, I understand. But when the moment comes, that’s the thing I want you to remember.”

I hung up.

Pulled the battery out of the phone, tossed it under the seat.

Turned the engine back on, pulled out of the car park.

The wet
swoosh
of wheels over tarmac.

The
slap-slap-slap
of the windscreen wipers.

Then Coyle said, though perhaps he already knew, “Who was that?”

“I think you know.”

“Why didn’t he speak?” Coyle was levering himself up on his good arm, straining to see me in the driver’s mirror.

“Nothing to say.”

“Tell me who.”

“Who do you think?”

“I want you to say.”

I shrugged. “Galileo Galilei was a brilliant man. I find it offensive you’d use his name for that creature.”

“All that we have ever done is try to stop it.”

I tried to smile, though he couldn’t see the expression; tried to shape my voice into something halfway reassuring. “Tell me – do you feel like you’re losing time?”

He didn’t answer.

“Sure you do,” I sighed. “Everyone does. At two o’clock you sit down to read a book and then, what do you know, it’s five in the afternoon and you’re only two pages further in. Perhaps, as you walk home through familiar streets, you grow distracted, and when next you wrench your concentration back to where you’re going you find you’re already there but the hour is late – so much later than you think. A call logged on your phone you don’t remember making; perhaps your pocket dialled it as you leaned against the table. A waiting room where the magazines are three years old and you can’t be bothered but, oh my! The time has flown and you don’t quite know why. All we need are a few seconds. To give my wallet to a woman I do not know. To kiss a stranger, make a telephone call, spit in the face of the man I love, punch a policeman, push a traveller in front of a train. To give an order in a voice known for its authority – Nathan Coyle must die. I can change your life in less than ten seconds. And when it’s done, all you will be able to say as you stand before a jury of your peers is… you don’t know what came over you. So tell me, Mr Nathan Coyle. Have you been losing time?”

Silence on the phone, silence in the van.

“Thought as much.”

In the town of Cavaliere (
LIVE
THE
PAST
– tourist office open 10 a.m.–3 p.m. Monday–Thursday excluding siesta) a map pinned up by the beige-bricked church pointed to a small clinic, a door like any other tucked into a street of tight apartments whose only claim to fame was a tiny plastic sign stuck by the bell asking any would-be visitors to kindly refrain from smoking on the stairs.

I parked squarely in the middle of the street, left the engine running and crawled over the seat into the back. Coyle was still awake, still breathing, his eyes red and his fingers curled into claws. “Hanging on in there?” I asked.

“What do you think?”

“I wasn’t really asking. Remember that it wasn’t me who shot you. Remember that your own people ordered you dead.”

“Why?”

“Why remember, or why did they give the order?”

“Both.”

“I think you can guess,” I replied, shifting my weight forward, hands folded comfortably between my knees. “Leaving aside the fact that you’ve been compromised by the entity known as Kepler, you’re just a bit of a pain. You’re obsessed with Galileo; you failed in your mission, and now you’ve read files that you probably shouldn’t have. I imagine, despite my excellent advice, that you asked some questions. Questions like ‘Why did Josephine have to die?’ or ‘Has Galileo ever been to Frankfurt?’ or ‘When you say vaccination programme, what precisely are your parameters?’ or… whatever. Am I wrong?”

He didn’t answer, and I was not wrong.

“As for why your friends decided to kill you – that’s easier still. An order was given. A telephone rang or an email was sent, and whoever spoke knew the code words and had power and authority, and an order was given. And of course you have protocols, fail-safes against just this sort of situation, but then again a fail-safe is only as good as the person who created it. And who’s to say who really gives the orders now?”

“You think… it’s in Aquarius?”

“Yes.”

“At the top?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“It’s had time.”

“Why?” Trying to fight more than pain now, trying to swallow more than morphine could numb. “Why?”

“Because you’re useful. Because if I wanted to study ghosts – really study them – if I wanted to learn what makes us tick, I’d probably create an organisation like Aquarius too. Keep your enemies close, as the old words say.”

He didn’t answer, couldn’t meet my eyes. His breathing was fast, struggling, skin shining with sweat.

“You’re losing blood.”

No answer.

“I can help you, but you’ll need to do something for me.”

“Do what?”

“I need you to tie me to the passenger seat and point a gun at me.” His mouth widened first in question, then wider in comprehension. “You still want to kill me?”

Without hesitation, his mouth twisting in a smile that wasn’t a smile: “Yes.”

“You think it’s a good idea?”

“Yes.”

“You want to live?”

He didn’t seem to have an answer to that one. I nodded at nothing in particular, held out my bare cold hands for his attention. He didn’t move, one hand still cradling the bloody mess of his arm, head turned to one side. “Galileo ordered you dead,” I murmured, “and Aquarius did it. Now I’m about as excited by this as you are, but unless you want to bleed out right here, right now, this is what it’s going to have to be.”

He levered himself up on one elbow. “Cable ties,” he said, and “Give me your gun.”

I hesitated.

Gave him my gun.

His finger tapped against the trigger, light as a conductor testing his baton, feeling the weight of it, considering his options. He sighted down it, then let it drop to his side. I strapped my hands to the hook that hung above the passenger’s seat, tightening the cable ties with my teeth until they bit deep, and then a little bit more, for spite. The height of the van was awkward – I could neither stand straight nor sit down, but balanced, knees bent, arms raised, suspended like an old coat.

“OK,” I said as Coyle watched me from the floor. “If you wouldn’t mind?”

He crawled on to his knees, cradling the gun to his chest. Made it on to one foot, and for a moment I thought he’d fall, but then the other foot came in and with a half-step, half-stagger, he came towards me, eyes locked on mine.

A moment.

Just a moment, and I didn’t know.

A mistake, perhaps?

His finger
tap-tap-tapped
against the trigger of the gun.

Too little time to plan, too little time to come up with anything better.

A mistake ever to let this man live?

Perhaps.

Perhaps this will be a very short learning curve.

Then he reached down and picked something black and grubby from the floor. A balaclava, long since discarded. A twist at the end of his lips that might have been a smile, he staggered towards me, waved it before my face, a command in gesture, not words. Open wide.

I licked my lips. “You in much pain, Nathan Coyle?” I asked.

“Find out,” he replied. I tried not to gag as he pushed the damp black fabric into my mouth. It tickled the back of my throat, made me want to vomit. I swallowed and tasted wool, mud, cigarette smoke.
Tap-tap
went Coyle’s trigger finger against the gun. The barrel brushed against my chest as he inspected his handiwork.

A moment.

He thought about it as the blood seeped through the whiteness of the bandage, dried brown on his fingers, around his throat.

He looked at me, and I looked at him.

His hand shook as he reached out for me, hovered an inch away from my hands, the whole arm rocking with more than just cold. I don’t know if he intended the movement, or if the weight of his own fingertips became too much to bear. Skin brushed my skin,

and I jumped, giddy with the relief of it, and as the bleary-eyed would-be killer flopped against the ties that bound him to the roof of the van, I staggered back, clutching my arm, the pain now not so much a universal shrieking as a specific throbbing, the hot fire of it pulsing in time to the rhythm of my heart. I gasped, swayed against the side of the van, felt thin blood bubble through my skull, blinked tears from my eyes. My captive flopped against his bonds, then kicked out, tried to stagger upright and flopped again, shouting unheard words through the balaclava in his mouth. I waggled the gun at him and hissed, “Try me.”

He fell silent, grew still.

I smiled my giddiest smile and slid, one shaking foot at a time, out of the van.

The night nurse took a long time to answer the door.

When she did, she saw first my face, grey and smeared with blood, and her features opened in shock and sympathy. Then she saw the bandages around my shoulder and chest, and I think understood what it was, what it might be, but by then I’d caught her by the index finger and,

as Coyle fell, I grabbed him round the middle and held him up. “OK,” I whispered in my new, gentler voice. “You’re OK.”

I eased him down on to the steps, and as his eyes regained their focus he looked up into mine. “Kepler?”

“I’m going to get you blood,” I replied. “And painkillers. What’s your type?”

“You’re really doing this?”

“Blood type. Now would be a good time to declare allergies too.”

“A positive. I’m A positive.”

“OK. Stay there. If your friend in the truck starts shouting, shoot him.”

“Kepler?” he called as I skipped back up the stairs, light-limbed in my nurse’s shoes. “He
is
my friend, you know that?”

“Sure. I guess how you handle that one is up to you.”

The clinic was fluorescent white. I wore a uniform of unwashed blue, sensible shoes, too much lipstick, not enough coffee. I’d been watching the TV until the knock at my door. The screen showed poker, a camera pointing straight down at a green table, hands moving in and out as cards were flipped, chances lost. I let it play. A small reception area stood empty. The light of a vending machine glowed in a shadowed corner; the shutter was down across the desk. Little rooms led off either side of a corridor, within them plastic beds draped with white. I checked doors until I found the most secure, patted down my pockets, found a bunch of keys. Lady Luck smiled on me that day – the door was all bolts and levers, not a combination to be found. Three of my eleven keys fitted the locks; the door opened.

The room beyond was a paradise of nasty drugs for nasty diseases. French pharmacies; nowhere in the world can you find as many potentially toxic formulas so readily available. The painkillers weren’t hard to find – the most secure box in the room once again yielded to a heavy-duty key. The clinic’s blood supplies were a bare minimum; the packs already had their intended destinations written on, for this old gentleman who can’t make it to the hospital for his transfusion; for that young lady whose DNA turned against her before she was born. I stole a couple of pints, stuffed a plastic bag with saline, needles, sterile wipes, fresh bandages, sedatives and the long-hooked edge of a suture needle.