Then they were outside — Massinger shivered immediately in the thin raincoat he wore over his shirt. Margaret hunched into her fur jacket. Aubrey felt the wind whip at his sparse hair, blow coldly around his collar. The sky was bright with stars where racing clouds did not obscure them. Gravel crunched beneath their feet — dragged in the case of the limping Massinger. Margaret supported his weight as well as she was able. Their guards walked beside them, unworried. Aubrey felt his attention drawn towards the moving, changing, unreal clouds. His thoughts drifted.
He ducked into the rear of the black BMW, and a guard followed him. In the headlights, he saw haloes of breath like signals of distress around Massinger's head as the others were put into a Mercedes for the drive to the safe house. Then the driver slipped into his seat, and Babbington settled heavily into the front passenger seat, obscuring Aubrey's view of the other car.
Babbington ordered the driver to move off. The BMW bucked down the narrow track towards the road through the village, headlights swaying and jolting; illuminating the Massingers' heads in silhouette pressed almost together in the leading car. Reconciled, accepting.
Aubrey was envious, and angry. Babbington's head obscured his view of the other car when he sat back in his seat. The guard was silent at his side, hardly watchful, already assured of the old man's harmlessness.
Yes, the Massingers — he'd known it the moment he had first seen them together, seen it through the shock of her presence at the lodge — had achieved acceptance; had settled for the consolation of their reunion. It was to be envied, for he, after all, would die alone.
The lights glared as the BMW hit the final, slush-filled rut in the track and dirty, half-frozen water splashed the windscreen. Then, out of the lights and the action of the wipers, knowledge emerged.
From what Babbington had said, his scheme had the attractions of simplicity and effectiveness. Everyone would see the KGB recapture their supposed agent. The Massingers would go with him to Moscow…
A fault there—
Aubrey swallowed drily. No fault, only ruthlessness. Whoever was detailed to guard them at the Vienna Station safe house when they were handed over was to die. The Massingers would not be accounted for. The dead bodies would be irrefutable proof that the KGB took back their own. As for the Massingers, there were no witnesses to the fact that they had ever been in Aubrey's company.
And even if someone were to survive, no doubt Babbington's explanation to Parrish as Head of Station — and to Guest and anyone and everyone else — would be that the KGB took away the Massingers to silence them. Innocents — victims of circumstance.
It did not even have to be tidy, loose ends could remain. No one would regard them as significant once the bodies were counted and Aubrey had vanished in company with his friends from the KGB—!
He clenched his hands into useless fists and swallowed the hard lump of bilious anger with difficulty, as he might have done a lodged chicken-bone.
He closed his eyes. They were out of the village now, and the oncoming evening headlights hurt his eyes. An image of Elsenreith smiled in the flaring darkness, as if his face were outlined by the explosions of an artillery barrage. Clara appeared more faintly behind him, her face thin, undernourished waif-like, as he had first seen her. And, because of Clara — love? Yes, perhaps. Certainly regard, friendship unlike with any other woman…
Because Clara, Castleford.
He glimpsed the flicker of constant oncoming lights through his pressed shut lids. They had turned onto the autobahn. He opened his eyes, confirming his guess. Glimpsed then the two silhouetted heads in the leading car, leaning together like dummies or the heads of two dead bodies—
He shrugged, almost expecting their heads to loll away from one another in death and disappear from the rear window of the Mercedes. He closed his eyes once more.
Elsenreith, Clara, Castleford.
He had never felt as defeated, as alone and without hope while in East Berlin — the Russian Zone as it was then called, he pedantically announced to himself. The Russian Zone. Not as helpless as now, not as bereft of expectation. Hopeless—
His people had got him out — dragging him from the back of the car after they'd crashed a small truck into it as he was being transferred from one prison to another — moving up the ladder of interrogation and torture…
He had not expected them to rescue him, but even so he had hoped. Now, he did not, could not.
Castleford's face. His whining, pleading, ashamed face— then his slow-cunning, wary, treacherous, dangerous face. Then his dead face, lying in a spreading pool of blood on the floor of his apartment.
His face in the bombed cellar — no, first his face lolling slackly and abruptly out of the back seat of the car — then his face in the weak torchlight in the bombed-out, ruined cellar as Aubrey obscured it with shovelfuls of rubble. Aubrey remembered the effort, the strain, of levering the fragment of wall so that it fell into the hole of the cellar, burying Castleford's stiff, white, staring face.
They were traveling north-east through the Landstrasse district of Vienna, towards the Danube. Clara had been in Vienna, they had met once more, he'd helped establish her there in business and—
Memory disallowed success. Instead, he heard Castleford's broken voice, confessing. Voicing the trap that had closed about him when one of the bright, scintillating, glamorous young men, now with broken fingernails and a starved look about him, had pleaded to be saved from the authorities. Then another of the group Castleford had know at Cliveden and other great houses during the thirties had come, and then a third
And then Elsenreith had come and announced the conditions of Castleford's new employment. And he had done the work because there was no alternative; helping war criminals escape, evade justice and revenge.
The trap had closed on Aubrey now just as certainly as it had shut upon Castleford.
The Massingers — he glimpsed their shadowy heads once more as the cars crossed the river by the Praterbrücke — had achieved their calm, all passion spent, and for that, too, he envied them. It would be better to lie down and wait quietly for the inevitable — would be better…
In a matter of hours, a few hours at most, they would come for him. Killing those left, duped, to guard them at the safe house. Or leaving one survivor, like Ishmael, to tell the tale. And he and the Massingers would board the flight to Moscow before dawn.
The river gleamed with lights and then the BMW left the bridge and turned north. He began to watch the passing buildings, the oncoming lights. Numbing his mind with fleeting sensations.
In the darkness, Hyde held the luminous dial of his watch close to his face; it clouded with his breath. He wiped the glass to read the passage of time. Suk, the supervising cleaner, had been gone too long — far too long. The sour smell of drying mops, of half-closed old polish tins, of dust and cold, was the room's only reality.
The odour of detergent was strong and acrid. His stomach was watery. He had been waiting too long for a report from Suk, waiting too long to be taken down to the lower levels of the building… the penetration operation was on the point of being aborted…
However often he tried to dismiss that idea, it returned insidiously, always with greater strength. He was nothing more than a child hiding in an old dark house, playing sardines. But the game was long over, no one had come to find him and the darkness was growing more and more intense—
He shook his head, almost vehemently, clearing it. Around him lay the now unseen shipwreck of a hardware shop. Old vacuum cleaners, mops, brooms, buckets, tea-chests, shelving. The pistol lay near his thigh as he sat with his back against the wall.