'Time enough for this to have finished — and don't you worry, Dickie, you're going to be a hero. Take me left.'
There was a low mist on the beach, hovering at the edge of the esplanade. He described it. He could see a pier, supported by pillars against which waves broke, a haze clinging round it.
'Am I getting on your nerves, Dickie? Don't mean to. I would have traded my right ball, right anything, in exchange for the sight of two good eyes. You're a friend to me. How far is the pier and what's beyond it?'
Naylor softened. He realized it now: the American's hand was loose on his arm. He 'could not imagine it, the darkness that was for always, and shuddered. He peered down the esplanade, squinted — damn tired from the drive and he hadn't slept in a bed for so bloody long, and tomorrow was his sixty-fifth birthday, and then he was as washed up as the weed the waves lifted — and said that there were more benches and a shelter hut. He told of all he saw.
Naylor's arm was held in a firmer grip. The voice rattled, as if the cold was in Hegner's throat. 'He'll have slept rough, depend on it, but stayed in sight of the sea. He has to see the boat come in, unload its people. Then he's within sight of safety. Don't reckon he's gone to the right, where you say it's commercial, because there'll be cameras there and security men and it won't be a place he can loiter. He'll want to seem like a vagrant, a drifter, and that's a bench or a shelter. Go into his mind. Right at this moment the ferry coming in is the single most important item in his life. The boat is freedom. He will be travelling alone…That kind of man, trusting damn near nobody, believes he is safest when solitary — on foot. Will see the boat come in, see it disembark its people, will come walking…Dickie, take my advice and I'll promise the red carpet out in front of you, except there'll be a fence round it so nobody sees you.'
He was beyond fighting, went with the flow. He was the bureaucrat who accepted orders. Had done all his life, could not change on the eve of a birthday.
'You don't have a photograph, don't even have a description.'
'It'll be the way he walks. How many male foot-passengers? A dozen or twenty? How many of them in the demographic window? Five or ten? But only he, the Twentyman, will walk in a way that betrays him.'
'Shuffling? Nervous, hesitant?'
'You're a mile off, Dickie. He's a leader. He's a man who has come, done his business. He's a captain of war, and is going back to familiar territory. He'll think not as a fugitive but as the guy who fucked you over. He'll walk as a leader does, like a captain. We go down from here towards that pier. We sit there and we wait. Each man who comes, you tell me how he walks. That'll be good enough for me.'
The gulls came over Naylor, and the wind freshened on his face. He searched the sea's horizon for the ferry-boat but saw only the pink of the sky on the grey of the sea. The car started up, U-turned in the road beyond the esplanade and headed off past the empty benches and the shelter hut. It stopped level with the pier. Naylor strode after them, and the beat of the waves against the pillars grew in his ears.
The lights, when Ajaq first saw them, were blurred in the mist.
The dawn grew bolder. A wetness from the night hours had settled on him and the damp hung on his face and hands. It was too soon for him to move, to leave the bench. He would have preferred rain and cloud low over the shoreline and the harbour because grey gloom dulled men's senses. He wanted them dulled when he reached the queue for the foot-passengers, when his passport was examined by men who yawned, fidgeted and shivered. A cleaning cart came behind him, the brushes scouring up rubbish from the gutter beside the esplanade's kerb. The first cars of the morning were on the road. A woman crossed it with a dog on a leash and took the animal down to the shingle and sand below him; he watched the dog squat close to the surf.
Now he could see the ferry clearly. Its decks were floodlit, its navigation lights flashed, its portholes and picture windows blazed. It came steadily on towards the harbour's marker buoys.
Twisting, as he had often done in the night since the man had come to him and taken the video-cassette, Ajaq stared up the straight road at his back. He was able to see, from the bench, the brilliantly illuminated sign and the wash of light round it at the harbour's entrance. If the place was staked out, if they watched for him, he would have noted columns of men disgorged from vans. When the Americans came to raid a safe-house, half of a battalion was deployed. Each time he had turned to look, he had seen only a few cars and more long-distance lorries tugging trailers behind them…and they did not have his photograph, he knew it.
The boat ploughed past the nearer buoy, where a red light showed. Then it turned on its own length and began to reverse towards a low light at the extreme end of a breakwater. He reached into his pocket, as he had many times, and felt reassurance as his fingers touched the slim shape of the ticket. He stretched on the bench, arched his back. It was nearly time, a few minutes more, for him to move.
He felt regrets.
Regret that he had not taken more time to toughen the mind of the Saudi boy, to prepare him better. In the country where he fought — and the boat would take him on the first step of his journey to return there — he had satisfied himself that a cuff on the shoulder and the murmur, always the same, of 'God waits for you, God loves you, God will give you virgins', the briefest of brush kisses on the cheeks was enough. And the Engineer, checking the wiring on a belt or to a switch on the dashboard, would have told the idiot that failure would mean torture by the Americans and worse torture from the collaborators, the Shi'a Iraqis. Should he have done more?
Regret that he had not organized classes in the cottage for the cell. Not classes in indoctrination and Faith, but on resistance to interrogation, of the procedures to counter surveillance, of the making of explosive devices, of the chemicals to be mixed if commercial and military dynamite could not be obtained, of the selection of targets…but he had thought them imbeciles and not to be trusted, except the girl with the scar on her face and the smooth skin on her belly.
And regret that he had not gone far to the north and found a man alive or dead, that he had not gone to the door of a small retirement house and confronted, with fury and violence, his father, or had gone to a cemetery and kicked down a gravestone, had not, on the step-or by the grave, spoken the name of his mother. It would never happen now, and that was the most wounding of the regrets.
The hull of the boat rose over the breakwater, dwarfed it. When he was on board, when the coastline — and there would be sunshine on it — faded, he would be on a remote corner of a deck. He would not use the canteen self-service or sit in a public area. He would find a place where the wind blustered cold and where passengers did not come, sit alone there with his thoughts, and the regrets would be gone. It would be two hours after the sailing that the boy walked into the square, went towards the crowds waiting for the doors to be opened. He would be on the deck, with the boat's wake stretching out behind him and the dark line of land barely seen, when the boy died.
The woman with her dog came off the shingle and sand, used steps that were close to him. She walked past him, then stopped, smiled. 'I think it's going to be a fine day,' she said. 'The sort of day it makes one glad to be alive.'
And she walked away.
Ajaq killed more minutes, and the light brightened the paving slabs of the esplanade, glimmered prettily on the sea's waves, and he felt the first traces of the sun's warmth.
Pricks of light, and zebra lines of it, crept through the holes in the plywood over the windows and the gaps between the planks nailed across the door.
She had not slept. She had held him.