“Sons of bitches,” Reeve whispered. He moved past the burning wreckage and saw that the front car had gone, along with whatever vehicle had turned up towards the end. He kept hearing that whistled command. It sounded like the opening of a tune he recognized… a tune he didn’t want to recognize. Five beats. Dahh, dahh, dahh, da-da. It was the opening to “Row, row, row your boat.” No, he was imagining it; it could have been another song, could have been random.
He wondered about checking the woods for Marie Villambard’s body. Maybe she was alive, maybe they’d taken her with them. Or she was lying somewhere in the woods, and very dead. Either way, he couldn’t hope to help. So he set off the other way until he recovered his bag. He had a landmark this time though. The corpse with the cut throat was still lying slumped on the ground.
Row, row, row your boat. He detested that song, with good reason.
Then he froze, remembering the scene outside the crematorium in San Diego: the cars turning up for the next service, and a face turning away from him, a face he’d thought was a ghost’s.
Jay.
It couldn’t be Jay. It couldn’t be. Jay was dead. Jay wasn’t alive and breathing anywhere on this planet…
It was Jay. That was the only thing, crazy as it seemed, that made sense.
It was Jay.
Reeve was shaking again as he headed back to the cottage. There was a body cooling on the ground next to the window, but no sign of Foucault. Reeve looked into Marie Villambard’s Xantia and saw that the keys were in the ignition. Car theft probably hadn’t been a problem around here. Nor had warfare and murder, until tonight. He got in and shut the door. He was turning the key when a vast bloodied figure pounced onto the hood, its face framed by pink froth, growling and snarling.
“Got a taste for it, huh?” Reeve said, starting the engine, ignoring the dog. He revved up hard and started off, throwing Foucault to the ground. He watched in the rearview, but the dog didn’t follow. It just shook itself off and headed back towards the cottage and what was left of its supper.
Reeve edged the Citroën past the two wrecked, smoldering cars. There was black smoke in the night sky. Surely somebody would see that. He scraped the Xantia against tree bark and blistered metal, but managed to squeeze past and back onto the road. He allowed himself a cold glint of a smile. His SAS training told him never to leave traces. When you were on a deep infiltration mission, you’d even shit into plastic bags and carry them with you. You left nothing behind. Well, he was leaving plenty this mission: at least two corpses, and a burned-out Land Rover with British plates. He was going to be leaving a stolen car somewhere, too, with blood on its steering wheel. And these, it seemed to him, were the very least of his problems.
The very, very least.
He drove north, heading away from a horror he knew would surely follow.
His arms and shoulders began to ache, and he realized how tense he was, leaning into the steering wheel as if the devil himself were behind him. He stopped only for gas and to buy cans of caffeinated soft drinks, using them to wash down more caffeine tablets. He tried to act normally. In no way could he be said to resemble a tourist, so he decided he was a businessman, fatigued and stressed-out after a long sales trip, going home thankfully. He even got a tie out of his bag, letting it hang loosely knotted around his throat. He examined himself in the mirror. It would have to do. Of course, the driver of a French car should be French, too, so he tried not to say anything to anyone. At the gas stations he kept to bonsoir and merci; ditto at the various péage booths.
Heading for Paris, he caught sight of signs for Orly. He knew either airport, Orly or Charles de Gaulle, would do. He was going to ditch the car. He figured the ports might be on the lookout for a stolen Xantia. And if the authorities weren’t checking the ports, he reckoned his attackers almost certainly were. In which case they’d be checking the airports, too. But he had a better chance of going undetected on foot.
He drove into an all-night parking garage at Orly. It was a multistory, and he took the Xantia to the top deck. There were only two other cars up here, both looking like long-stayers or cars which had been ditched. The Xantia would be company for them. But first of all he knew he needed sleep-his brain and body needed rest. He could sleep in the terminal maybe, but would be easy meat there. He reckoned there’d be no planes out till morning, and it wasn’t nearly light yet. He wound the car windows open a couple of inches to help him hear approaching vehicles or footsteps. Then he laid his head back and closed his eyes…
He had a dream he’d had before. Argentina. Grassland and mountain slopes. Insects and a constant sea breeze. Two canoes paddling for shore. In the dream, they paddled in daylight, but really they’d come ashore in the middle of the night, faces painted. Supposedly in silence, until Jay had started singing…
The same song he’d sung when they landed on the Falklands only a week before, taken ashore by boat on that occasion. Splash-ing onto the beach, meeting no resistance. And Jay humming the tune he’d been ordered to stop singing.
Row, row, row your boat
Gently down the stream.
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,
Life is but a dream.
A dream? More like a nightmare when Jay was around. He was supposed to be a good soldier, but he was a firing pin short of a grenade, and just as temperamental.
Just as lethal.
They’d sent for them after that firefight in the Falklands. They wanted to mount a two-man mission, deep surveillance. They were briefed onboard HMS Hermes. Their mission would be to keep watch on Argentinian aircraft flying out of Rio Grande. (Reeve was told only afterwards that another two-man unit was given the same brief with a different location: Rio Gallegos.) Nobody mentioned the words suicide mission, but the odds on coming back alive weren’t great. For a start, the Argentinians on the Falklands had been equipped with direction-finding equipment and thermal imagers; there was little to show that the same equipment wouldn’t be available on the mainland.
Therefore, their radio signals out would be monitored and traced. Meaning they would have to stay mobile. But mobility itself was hazardous, and the possibility of thermal imagers meant they wouldn’t even be able to rest at night. Getting in would be easy, getting out a nightmare.
Jay only demurred when his request for a few Stinger shoulder-launched antiaircraft missiles was rejected out of hand.
“You’re going in there to watch, not to fight. Leave the fighting to others.”
Which was just what Jay didn’t want to hear.
Row, row, row your boat…
And in the dream that’s what they did, with a line of men waiting for them on the beach. For some reason, the men couldn’t locate them, though Reeve could see them clearly enough. But Jay’s singing got louder and louder, and it was only a matter of time before the firing squad by the water’s edge let loose at them.
Row, row, row your boat…
Reeve woke up in a sweat. Christ… And the true horror was that the reality had been so much worse than the dream, so awful that when he’d finally made it back to Hermes they’d refused to believe his version. They’d told him he must be hallucinating. Doctors told him shock could do that. And the more they denied the truth, the angrier he got, until that pink haze descended for the first time in his life and then lifted again, and a doctor and two orderlies were lying unconscious on the floor in front of him.