“Where now?” he asked, breathing hard.
“The main complex’s two miles that way.” River couldn’t tell which direction Griff was pointing. “We pass some abandoned buildings first, half a mile or so. Ruined. Leave buildings untended, that’s gunna happen.”
“How often do you come here?”
“When I feel like it. It’s a good place for rabbiting.”
“How many other ways in are there?”
“That one’s easiest. Used to be another towards Upshott, where you could lift a post clean out of the ground and just walk in over the fence. But it was cemented back in place.”
They began to walk. The ground was slick, and inclined downwards; he slipped and would have hit the ground if Griff hadn’t steadied him. “Careful.” Then the clouds thinned, and a sliver of light gleamed from behind a gauzy curtain. River saw Griff’s face clearly for the first time since leaving the pub. He was grinning, showing teeth as grey as his pitted skin, his mottled scalp. He seemed to be reflecting that scrap of moon.
Darker shadows waited at the foot of the incline. River couldn’t make out whether they were trees or buildings, then understood they were both. There were four buildings, mostly roofless, and jutting out from their broken walls were long spectral branches, which caught a shiver of wind as he watched, and beckoned him onwards. Then the heavens shifted again, and the moonlight faded.
“So,” River said. “If someone just turned up looking for a way in, he’d not be likely to find it?”
Griff said, “Might, if he was smart or lucky. Or both.”
“You ever run across anyone in here?”
Griff made a snickering noise. “Scared?”
“I’m wondering how secure it is.”
“There’s patrols, and some places are wired. You want to avoid them.”
“Wired?”
“Tripwires. Lights and sirens. Mostly near the base, though.”
“Any round here?”
“You’ll know soon enough, won’t you? If you tread on one.”
That would be a laugh, thought River.
Holding an arm out for balance, he followed Griff towards the smashed-up buildings.
Pashkin said, “I ought to ask, you’re not married?”
“Only to the job.”
“And these, ah, messages you’re getting. They’re not from an irate lover?”
Louisa said, “I have no lover. Irate or otherwise.”
She’d received three further texts, but hadn’t read them.
They had eaten their starters, and their main courses; had drunk the first bottle, and most of the second. It was the first proper meal she’d eaten since Min’s death. Pricey, too. Not a detail that would bother Arkady Pashkin, who owned an oil company. Louisa wondered if condemned men reviewed their final meals; sent compliments to the chef en route to the scaffold. Probably not. Though they had the excuse of knowing they were condemned.
She would blind him with the pepper spray. Plasti-cuff him hand and foot. Then all she’d need was a towel and a shower hose. In the Service they trained you in interrogation resistance, which was a covert way of teaching you interrogation methods. Pashkin was a big man, seemed in good health, but she imagined he’d last five minutes. Once she’d learned how Min had met his death, and which of Pashkin’s goons had killed him, she’d put him out of his misery. There’d be something around she could use: a letter opener. Picture wire. They taught you to be resourceful, in the Service.
“So,” he said. “You don’t want to know the same of me?”
“Arkady Pashkin,” she quoted, “is twice-married, twice-divorced, and never in want of attractive female company.”
He threw back his head and roared. All around the restaurant, heads turned, and Louisa noticed that while the men scowled, the women looked amused, and some of their gazes lingered.
When he’d finished, he dabbed his lips with his napkin and said, “It seems I’ve been Googled.”
“The penalties of fame.”
He said, “And it doesn’t, ah, put you off? This so-called playboy image?”
“Attractive female company,” she said. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“So you should. And as for ‘never in want,’ journalists exaggerate. For headline value.”
A waiter arrived, and asked if madame, sir, would like to view the dessert menu? He went off to fetch it, and Pashkin said, “Or we could walk back across the park now.”
She said, “I think so, yes. But would you excuse me?”
The cloakroom was down a flight of stairs. When they called them cloakrooms, you’d moved up a notch on the restaurant scale. This one had old-fashioned pewter sinks in a wooden unit, lighting dim enough to flatter, and proper cotton towels, not air-blowers. She was alone. From elsewhere came the muffled percussion of cutlery; the conspiratorial hum of conversation; the throaty drone of an air purifier. She locked herself in a cubicle, peed, then checked her bag. The plasti-cuffs seemed weedy and impractical until you tugged them, whereupon their tensile strength became apparent. Once you’d wrapped them round someone, they had to be cut free. As for the spray, the label warned of serious damage if applied directly to eyes. A nod was as good as a wink.
She left the cubicle. Washed her hands. Dried them on a proper cotton towel. Then stepped out of the door and into the lobby where she was seized and pulled through another door into a small dark space. An arm was round her throat; her mouth clamped shut. A voice whispered into her ear: “Let’s have the bag.”
Where the slope bottomed out the ground was stony, and clumped with grass. River heard trickling water. His night vision was picking up, or maybe there was more to see. The first house was right in front of them, broken like a tooth, one side collapsed to reveal the cavity within. Wooden beams straddled its upper half, supporting an upper storey that was no longer there, and the floor was a litter of brick, tile, glass and broken stonework. The other buildings, the furthest no more than a hundred yards away, seemed in similar fettle. From inside the next River heard a rustling as its tree stirred, and branches scraped against what remained of its walls.
“Was this a farm?” he asked.
Griff didn’t answer. He glanced at his wrist, then moved off towards the further building.
Instead of following, River walked round the first house. The tree inside was big enough that its upper branches poked above the highest remaining wall. He wondered how long a tree took to grow so big, and figured the house had been a ruin for decades. He saw no sign that anyone had been here recently. He was standing in cold ashes, the remains of a fire. But that was long dead.
If Mr. B’s purpose had involved the MoD base, he might have met his contact here, in this hollow; among these victorious trees and smashed houses. River wondered whether this area was patrolled, or if it was only the perimeter the guards took notice of. Griff would know. Where was Griff?
He walked back round the front. He couldn’t see more than a dozen yards ahead, and didn’t want to shout. Plucking a chunk of rock, he hurled it at the house. It hit with a thock loud enough to alert Griff, but no figure appeared. He waited a minute, then did it again. Then checked his watch. It was seconds off midnight.
The dark dispersed, as if a switch had been thrown. A shining ball burst into being overhead with a noise like tearing paper. It hovered in the sky, casting unearthly light, and instantly made the landscape strange—the battered houses with their intruder trees, the pocked and hillocked ground; all became alien, another planet. The light was orange, edged with green. The noise faded. What the hell? River spun round as another noise ripped the world apart, a banshee scream so loud he had to slap hands to his ears. It ended in a crash he couldn’t tell how far away, and before its echoes died another erupted into the night, and this time he saw in its wake a red-hot scar that burnt its shape into his eyes. And then another. And another. The first explosion shook the ground, and warm wind blasted past him; the second, third, fourth turned him on his heels. The blasted ruins were no shelter, but they were all there was.