He pointed the gun uselessly at the ground. He swayed, felt he couldn't stand long enough for them to reach him. He kept turning his head as they closed on him. Kept turning it until they stood around him in a wary ring. Someone took away the rifle, examining it.
He kept looking not at their faces, but at the red stars on the fur caps they wore beneath their camouflage hoods.
Four: Beach Head
Kenneth de Vere Aubrey settled into the somnolent, contemplative mood that he usually enjoyed in the Public Gallery of the House of Commons. And he grew older, he was aware that the sounds that rose from the floor of the House, especially those made, as now, by a poorly attended Question Time, threw his awareness back upon himself. He had almost entirely lost an earlier, youthful sense of the business of the world being done there. The Chamber had become a club.
He had reported to the Foreign Secretary, after lunch, on the security procedures to be put into effect, by the SIS in cooperation with the CIA and the Finnish Intelligence Bureau, for the culminatory stages of the Helsinki Conference on Mutual Balanced Arms Reductions, one week hence. The Foreign Secretary himself would head the team of British observers at the treaty signing; the United States' partners in NATO would be signatories only to the second, and supplementary stage, of the conference, to be held in Belgrade in the autumn.
An Opposition speaker was on his feet, requiring a junior minister at the Foreign Office to explain what assurance the government, and the President of the United States, had been given as to the sincerity of the Soviet Union with regard to arms reductions — a late, and rather naive, attempt to stir doubt; or perhaps to draw attention to the speaker. There were a few half-hearted murmurs of derision from the government back benches. The Front Benches on both sides of the House were conspicuously bare.
Aubrey came to the House more often in these last days of his employment with the SIS than he had done in earlier years. It irked him that he could not precisely explain his motives; but it was tolerably warm. An obscure sense of desire for legitimacy nagged him, as it often did. Perhaps he was disillusioned after sitting below the salt for so long — enter Third Murderer, he thought. Here, at least, it was tolerably above board — at least, it gave that illusion. Perhaps that was also the reason he spent less and less time with the operational side of the service, and preferred administration and oversight of intelligence gathering.
Perhaps he was growing senile, and ought to begin attending the Upper House. He shifted in his seat, and cursed the ailing circulation that so swiftly made him cold and cramped when still. And, aware of the physical, he thought of other men of stronger sensual passions than himself; their horror at the growing inoperancy of limbs, their sense of desire unabated, but more futile and humiliating with the onset of age.
They had spoken no word of retirement to him as yet; for which he was grateful. If anything clouded his general self-possession, his satisfaction with his lot, it was the idea that one day the neat, uncluttered flat in Sussex Gardens would become a bare, unfurnished cupboard to be inhabited, with growing dissatisfaction, for the long hours of endless, successive days.
He wondered how cold it was in Finland, and whether to delegate the organisation to one of his senior assistants — perhaps even to Davenhill, whose standing with the Minister, though not immutable, was at that moment satisfactory. And it would do the young man good.
Then he saw Davenhill, still in his leather topcoat, looking around at the Gallery, and Aubrey sensed that he was looking for him. Snow had turned to gleaming wetness on his hair and shoulders in the lights of the Chamber. He did not feel irritation — perhaps something about the younger man's attitude, an eagerness of body and face, intrigued Aubrey. He felt a swift pluck like mild indigestion at his stomach, and smiled. Then Davenhill saw him, and waved the newspaper in his hand, stepping immediately down the aisle to him.
'… The facilities for mutual inspection, by satellite and by military delegations, written into the terms of the Treaty, are surely all the Honourable Member could require, even for his satisfaction…' — the junior minister droned, raising two languid supporting breaths, and a mutter of denigration. Davenhill, who was looking extremely serious as he sat down, could not forbear to smile.
'Dear, dear — standards down again, I see. I don't know why you come here, Kenneth.'
'And to what do I owe the pleasure of your company?' Aubrey asked drily. 'To answer your remarks — I come because I find it all so reassuring. Don't you?'
'No initiations of mortality, then?'
'None at all. An abiding somnolence — I'm sure the map is still mostly pink, you know.' He studied Davenhill carefully for a moment, then added: 'What is it?'
'Folley…'
'What about Folley?' Aubrey found it suddenly difficult to control his interest; perhaps even panic — and knew that he was getting old.
'No contact.'
'What?' Something had been disturbing his calm — now he knew what it was. There had been an edge of concern that Folley had not reported in by the time he left his office to come to the House. He should have done — should have been picked up. 'What does Waterford think?'
'I've got him waiting downstairs — will you speak to him?'
'Yes, I must. Come.'
Aubrey cast one swift glance down at the floor of the House, then turned and made his way out of the Public Gallery.
Waterford was waiting for them near the Members' Entrance. Again, Aubrey was struck by his bearing; despite the military officer's civilian overcoat and the trilby hat, he still appeared like a prizefighter masquerading as a retired soldier, so looming was his presence, so marked his features by extreme experiences. He was a rogue operator — which was why he and Davenhill had chosen him. Waterford merely nodded to Aubrey as the little man gestured them through the doors out into New Palace Yard. The commissionaire saluted Aubrey as they passed.
Aubrey put on his bowler hat, and turned up the collar of his dark overcoat. It was still snowing, and beginning to lie. Davenhill belted the leather topcoat. The lamps in the Yard were great, faded billows of light; their footsteps were muffled by the thin layer of settled snow.
They patrolled the Yard once. Aubrey became irritated with their silence, the sense of them as machines who would not speak with his command.
'Well? Waterford — what's happened to him?'
'He's dead — or caught.'
'How can you know that?' Aubrey felt himself protesting too strongly; but an obscure sense of danger, threat, which placed what might have happened against the polite remarks inside the Commons in a chilly perspective. 'Weather?'
'Nothing to kill him off.'
'Delay?'
'He was to report if he needed more time.'
'Unless it would endanger him to do so — the helicopter is going back again tonight, isn't it?'
'Yes, it is,' Davenhill said, speaking for the first time. 'But — shouldn't we have a contingency plan?'
Aubrey was suddenly reluctant. His mind kept placing what he was being told, and what was surmised, in the blackest contrasts with the report he had made to the Foreign Secretary that afternoon — even to his recent conversations with Buckholz, Deputy Director of the CIA, talks with the Finns — he realised he was shivering; not with cold, not for Folley, not for any specific thing. But at a vague, oppressive sense that he had, simply had, to consider the Helsinki Conference in direct relation to the possible disappearance of Folley, and the certain disappearance of Brunton, and one test roll of unproven infrared film.