"When's your boy cut loose?" Strelski asks quietly.
"End of the week," Burr replies in the same low tone. "God and Whitehall willing."
"With your boy inside pulling and our boy outside pushing, I guess that makes us a closed loop," says Strelski.
Flynn laughs richly, nodding his great dark head like a deaf-mute in the half-darkness. Burr asks what a closed loop is.
"A closed loop, Leonard ― that's using every part of the pig except the squeal," says Strelski. Another pause while they sit and watch the sea. When Strelski speaks again, Burr has to lean close to catch his words.
"Thirty-three grown people in that room," he murmurs. "Nine different agencies, seven pols. Must be a couple of 'em telling the cartels Joe Strelski and Leonard Burr don't have a humint source worth shit ― right, Pat?"
Flynn's soft Irish laughter is almost drowned by the rustle of the sea.
But Burr, though he keeps it to himself, cannot quite share his hosts' complacency. The Purists had not asked too many questions, it was true. In Burr's uneasy judgment, they had asked too few.
* * *
Two ivy-coated granite posts loomed out of the mist. The engraved inscription said Lanyon Rose. There was no house. Farmer probably died before he got round to building it, thought Burr.
They had been driving seven hours. Above the granite hedges and the blackthorn, an uneasy sky was darkening to dusk. The shadows on the pitted track were liquid and elusive, so that the car kept bucking as if it had been hit. It was a Rover and Rooke's pride. His powerful hands wrestled with the steering wheel. They passed deserted farm buildings and a Celtic cross. Rooke switched his headlights to bright, then switched them down again. Since they had crossed the Tamar River they had known only dusk and rolling mist.
The track rose, the mist vanished. Suddenly all they saw through the windscreen was canyons of white cloud. A salvo of raindrops rattled against the car's left side. The car rocked, then tipped over the edge in a free-fall, its nose pointing at the Atlantic. They made the last turn, the steepest. A gust of warring birds clattered over them. Rooke braked to a crawl until the fury passed. A fresh burst of rain hit them. As it cleared, they saw the grey cottage crouching on a saddle of black bracken.
He's hanged himself. Burr decided, catching sight of Jonathan's crooked silhouette as it dangled in the porch light. But the hanged man lifted an arm in greeting and stepped forward into the blackness before switching on his torch. A patch of granite chip made a crude parking place. Rooke climbed out, and Burr heard the two men hailing each other like a pair of travellers. "Good to see you! Great! Christ, what a wind!" Burr in his nervousness stayed stubbornly in his seat, grimacing to heaven while he forced the top button of his overcoat through its hole. The wind was booming round the car, shaking the aerial.
"Get a move on, Leonard!" Rooke yelled. "You can powder your nose later!"
"You'll have to wriggle across, I'm afraid, Leonard," Jonathan said through the driver's window. "We're evacuating you to leeward, if that's all right."
Grabbing his right knee with both hands, Burr navigated it over the gear lever and the driving seat, then did the same for the left. He lowered one city shoe onto the gravel. Jonathan was shining the torch straight at him. Burr made out boots and a seaman's knitted cap.
"How've you been?" Burr shouted, as if they hadn't seen each other for years. "Fit?"
"Well, yes, I think I really am, actually."
"Good lad."
Rooke went ahead with his briefcase. Burr and Jonathan followed him side by side up the hacked path.
"And that went all right, did it'?" Burr asked, nodding at Jonathan's bandaged hand. "He didn't amputate it by mistake, then."
"No, no, it was fine. Slice, stitch, wrap it up ― didn't take above half an hour, the whole job."
They were standing in the kitchen. Burr's face was still stinging from the wind. Scrubbed pine table, he noticed. Polished flagstones. Polished copper kettle.
"No pain?"
"Not beyond the call of duty," Jonathan replied.
They laughed shyly, strangers to each other.
"I've had to bring you a piece of paper," Burr said, coming as usual straight to what was weighing on his mind. "You're supposed to sign it, with me and Rooke as witnesses."
"What does it say, then?" said Jonathan.
"Humbug's what it says" ― laying the blame on a convenient bureaucracy. "Damage limitation. Their insurance policy. We didn't push you, you'll never sue us, you have no case against the government for neglect, malfeasance or rabies. If you fall out of a plane it's your fault. Et cetera."
"Getting cold feet, are they?"
Burr caught the transferred question and turned it back, "Well, are you, Jonathan? That's more the point, isn't it?" Jonathan started to protest, but Burr said, "Shut up and listen. This time tomorrow you'll be a wanted man. Unwanted is more like it. Anyone who ever knew you will be saying, 'I told you so.' Anyone who didn't will be studying your photograph for evidence of homicidal tendencies. That's a life sentence, Jonathan. It'll never go away."
Jonathan had a stray memory of Sophie among the splendours of Luxor. She was sitting on a plinth, arms around her knees, staring down the aisle of columns. I need the comfort of eternity, Mr. Pine, she said.
"I can still stop the clock, if that's what you want, and no harm done except to my ego," Burr continued. "But if you're wanting to pull out and haven't the bottle to say, or if you're being too nice to your Uncle Leonard or some such idiocy, I'll trouble you to get up your courage and declare yourself now, not later. We can have a nice supper, goodbye, drive home, no hard feelings, none that last. We can't do that tomorrow night, or any night after."
Heavier shadows in the face, Burr was thinking. The watcher's stare that stays on you after he's looked away. What have we spawned? He glanced round the kitchen again. Wool pictures of ships in full sail. Bits of treen, Newlyn copperware. A luster plate that read "Thou see'st me, God."
"Are you sure you don't want me to put this stuff in store for you?" Burr asked.
"No, honestly. It's fine. Just sell it. Whatever's easiest."
"You could want it one day, when you settle down."
"Better to travel light, really. And it's all there still, is it ― the target, I mean? He's still doing what he's doing, living where he lives and so on? Nothing's changed?"
"Not that I know of, Jonathan," said Burr with a slightly puzzled smile. "And I keep pretty much in touch. He's just bought himself a Canaletto, if that's a guide. And a couple more Arab horses for his stud. And a nice diamond collar for his lady. I didn't know they called them collars. Sounds like a lapdog. Well, I suppose that's what she is."
"Perhaps it's all she can afford to be," said Jonathan. He was holding out his bandaged hand, and for a moment Burr thought he wanted him to shake it. Then he realised Jonathan was asking for the document, so he delved in his pockets, first his overcoat, then his jacket, and drew out the heavy sealed envelope.
"I'm serious," Burr said. "It's your decision."
With his left hand, Jonathan selected a steak knife from the kitchen drawer, tapped the sealing wax with the handle to break it, then cut open the envelope along the flap. Burr wondered why he bothered to break the wax, unless he was showing off his dexterity.
"Read it," Burr ordered. "Every stupid word as many times as you like. You're Mr. Brown, in case you hadn't guessed. An unnamed volunteer in our employ. In official papers, people like you are always Mr. Brown."
Drafted by Harry Palfrey for Rex Goodhew. Handed down to Leonard Burr for Mr. Brown to sign.
"Just never tell me his name," Goodhew had insisted. "If I've seen it, I've forgotten it. Let's keep it that way."