Hyde realised that he could never trust the Pathans with regard to Petrunin. It would mean his having to travel in the rug maker's delivery truck towads Jalalabad when it left Kabul within the next half-hour, hidden in the back with the Russian. Without him, Petrunin would be a corpse by the time the raiding party took to the mountains.
Petrunin moaned again, entertaining nightmares. Hyde turned his back. The self-loathing that he could not avoid sensing in that low moan chilled and disturbed him. He felt the reality of the alien country and people around him once more. Petrunin was a prisoner of the war he fought. He had become, in essence, a light-skinned Pathan. How would he, he wondered, ever get this Petrunin to talk? What — tortures…?
Mutilation followed by an offer of the release of a quick death — would he have to use those threats, those bribes? He dismissed the Pathan thought.
Savagely, he pressed his foot on the accelerator and slewed the staff car out of the alley and onto a broad thoroughfare that might have belonged in any city of eastern Europe that the Soviets had rebuilt after the war; even in Moscow it would have been familiar. The wide road ran alongside the river, a sullen grey scarf in the first light. In the distance, the Hindu Kush was tipped with bright gold. Hyde accelerated. The mountains seemed impossibly high and endless, and alien like the streets of Kabul.
Aubrey left the main passenger lounge of the ferry because the carelessly disposed bodies of those sleeping suggested defeat to him and the high, raised voices of parties of schoolchildren seemed to taunt. The lights, too, were hard and unsympathetic. On deck, the wind was sharp and buffeting and chilly. Nevertheless, he made his way towards the stern. Long before he reached it, he felt himself to be an old, skulking figure, displaced and exiled. And, as if they had gathered to witness his departure from England, he could see the lights of Brighton along the coast, slipping behind the Dieppe ferry.
He had avoided Dover almost superstitiously, suspecting that any search for him would be concentrated there. He had not rung Mrs Grey — he could net bear to discover that the hunt was up. His journey from Victoria had been uneventful, the pursuit confined to the tumbled and broken terrain of his thoughts. His fears had chased him across the landscape of his imagination.
He gripped the stern rail, which immediately struck cold through his gloves. Brighton, a town he had never much liked, now appeared infinitely desirable; the last rescue craft moored to his country, ablaze with light. The wind filled his eyes with water. He refused to acknowledge the tears for what they were. Instead, he tried to concentrate upon the ease of his escape. One bored policeman at Victoria had seemed more interested in the antics of two drunks than in looking for someone like him. The passport that he had always renewed in a fictitious name had served him well. SIS knew nothing of this falsehood. It was a private matter. Almost everyone in the intelligence service possessed at least one other and unofficial identity. It was, to Aubrey, the twitch of distrust at the very centre of the animal that was always alert for the possibilities of deception. There was a subconscious comfort in possessing a secret and unused new identity. The secret world was habit-forming, perhaps incurable.
But him—? Him—
He was skulking away from England. The wind now seemed like an obscuring curtain drawn between himself and the lights of Brighton. The wake of the ferry straggled away into the darkness like a lost hope. Him—
He thought of them, then. The others. The secret others. The notorious ones, most of whom he had known or met or questioned at some time. William Joyce, sitting detached and even amused in the dock of the Old Bailey after the war. Lord Haw-Haw, voiceless. Then Fuchs, then Burgess and Maclean and Philby and Blake and Blunt, and others behind them. It was as if he had become a dream through which they paraded, much as the Duke of Clarence had seen the ghosts of those he had helped his brother to murder on the night they came to drown him in the butt of wine. He saw his own ghosts, who seemed to wish to number him among them. Traitors.
Aubrey knew he was full of self-pity. He looked down at the choppy, churned water as if it offered escape, then sniffed loudly. He was filled with anger, too. More than forty years of loyalty. When Joyce and Mosley had become Fascists and Blunt and the others had become Communists in secret, he had enlisted in the service of his country.
And now his country was slipping away below the horizon, only a haze of lights to remind him of its position, its existence. He was going into exile. When they discovered him gone, they would search for him, then they would wait until the mole popped its head above ground in Moscow to collect its medals and state pension.
In the darkness, too, he heard the laughter of his father, that ugly, exultant barking at the misfortunes and come-uppances of others that had served him as a source of satisfaction for as long as Aubrey could remember. The verger had hated the secret life, and Aubrey had often suspected that he had escaped into it to put a final and complete barrier between himself and his father. Perhaps he might not have been able to keep it from his mother, but she died while he was still at school. His increasingly infrequent visits to his father had been filled with that abiding satisfaction, that his whole adult life was a secret from his vindictive parent. Now, years after his death, his laughter at his son's downfall could be heard on the dark wind.
The noises of teenage horseplay — someone threatening to throw someone else overboard, he thought — interrupted his reverie. His body was chilled anew by the wind and the company. One of the group lurched into him, reeling from the spring of one of his companions. Aubrey shrivelled away from the contact. He clenched his lips to prevent an escaping moan of protest.
"Sorry, Grandad," a black face said, and disappeared laughing. Aubrey felt his whole body shaking. He gripped the rail fiercely. The wake seemed to fade close to the ship. Brighton was a smudge of lights, no more. He shuddered with cold and self-pity and fear. England continued to slide beneath the sea like a damaged vessel.
He turned his back on it, and went forward again, towards the lights and noise and sleepers in the lounge.
The British Airways Trident dropped out of the low, clinging grey cloud only hundreds of feet above the runways of Flughafen Koln-Bonn. No more than minutes later, Massinger and his wife were hurrying across twenty yards of cold tarmac to the terminal building from the aircraft. As she followed Massinger, who moved urgently yet without real purpose, Margaret puzzled at his strange, withdrawn mood, his constant half-smiles tinged with guilty sadness, his reassuring pats on the back of her hand. He seemed to wish to comfort her — or was it that he wished to promise something? Margaret was confused. Paul seemed distracted rather than tense or excited. For herself, she was relaxed after the tensions of their flight from Heathrow. She knew that no one was especially interested in them, that there would be, in all probability, no secret watchers. But she had not been able to believe it, not for whole calm minutes at once. Small tensions heated her body, tickled or twitched at her arms and legs and face. She hated Paul's secret world until they boarded their flight and the Trident lifted into the anonymity of grey cloud, then through to a uniformly blue sky above a white cloud-carpet. Then, with a gin and tonic, she had begun to relax.
But Paul—? She could not tell what seemed to be driving him. He had spent most of the night at the Australian's flat in Earl's Court, using the untapped telephone to talk to Wolfgang Zimmermann. Shelley had been there, too. Margaret had been unable to rest. She had packed and repacked in an attempt at self-therapy until Paul had returned to Wilton Crescent.