Miles heard the sounds of guilt as he walked with Collins, and he thought, is this what I’ve been paid all these years to protect? He had been put in charge of everything, from the whitest lie to the guiltiest of traitors, all in the cause of the sanctity of secrecy itself. Was that it, then? Yes, that was it. That was all. He had been a schoolboy, collecting things for the teacher, no reasons needed, no excuses. He flagged down a taxi and motioned for the sullen Collins to get in. He was fairly certain that Collins wouldn’t attempt to escape, not now that he was in the enemy heartland. Miles had noted the newspaper headlines. The hunt was on for the Kew bombers. Besides, Miles had offered him a very generous incentive to stick around.
The new Miles had not been surprised when their return to England had turned out to be so uncomplicated. He felt that he could accomplish anything. The spider’s bite still tingled in his blood. He ducked into the taxi after Collins, and felt warm and safe and snug.
Snug as a bug in a rug.
‘St. John’s Wood,’ he said to the driver, then sat back to watch, as Collins was doing, the parade of all those who had been fitted out for the annual ugly bugs’ ball.
He couldn’t be sure which, to the taxi driver, would seem the more suspicious — perfect silence during the drive, or Collins’s accentuated brogue. He decided finally to play it as it came. The driver, in any case, seemed preoccupied. He was in the midst of an argument with the world at large and other drivers in particular, and he carried on the argument vociferously from his cab window.
‘Why St. John’s Wood?’ asked Collins, trying, Miles noted, not to make his voice sound too Irish.
‘That’s where I live,’ said Miles, quite loudly.
The driver looked in his mirror, interested for a split second, then turned back to harangue a pedestrian who had dared to step onto a crosswalk.
‘But won’t they be watching your house?’
Miles shrugged and smiled.
The traffic was crawling like flies through a pot of glue. Time was of the essence now that Miles had sneaked back. He had to finish this off while the element of surprise was his.
‘Do you know London at all?’ he asked Collins, whose eyes were transfixed by the passing parade.
‘Never been here in my life.’
‘It’s hell,’ said Miles.
‘Yes, I can believe that,’ murmured Collins, his hands planted firmly on his knees.
St. John’s Wood, however, was reassuringly the same, though the renovating and building work continued all around. Miles held the last of his money in his hand, ready to pay the driver, his wallet empty now, no credit cards, no checkbook, nothing. His identity lay somewhere inside the house in Marlborough Place, but he could no longer be sure that he wanted it.
He realized that it was, in its way, a blessing that he had been ordered to leave his identity behind him, for the firm had given him plenty of cash to make up for the lack of plastic money. The owner of the fishing boat had taken a fair whack, but that had been worth every penny. Then the rail fares had been expensive, but he had never enjoyed traveling by bus. In their carriage, he had read in the newspapers of the aftermath of the Kew bombing. It seemed that two people were still in hospital. Collins read, too, and his eyes registered a mixture of disgust and accusation that Miles found reassuring. He had changed sides once before; perhaps he would do so again. He knew what Collins wanted. He wanted what everyone, be they terrorist or spy, wanted eventually — he wanted out, plain and simple. But it was never plain and simple. It was not like quitting at roulette when you had won or lost. There were forces in this game, the old invisible rules that chained you to the table. No croupier ever said rien ne va plus, no wheel was ever still. But Miles was about to try to beat the table. He was going to break the whole system. And Collins, soulful, questioning eyes or not, was going to help him.
As the taxi turned out of Wellington Road and into Marlborough Place, Miles saw the figure. A woman, standing opposite his house, and quite obviously watching it.
‘Just keep driving,’ he said. The driver nodded. Passing her, Miles risked a glance. She was a brazen one, though, wasn’t she? They didn’t train them well enough these days. Well, let her wait there. He wasn’t going to announce his arrival.
‘I thought this was where you lived,’ whispered Collins.
‘It is,’ said Miles. ‘But I thought you might like to see where the Beatles made Abbey Road. It’s just up here. It would be a shame for you to come to London and not see that famous zebra crossing after all, wouldn’t it?’
Collins shook his head slowly. He had left a nightmare and entered a farce.
He hit him again, and this time the fanged alien stayed down, but as he walked toward the exit, another one came at him, hitting him hard in the back, and just as he crossed the threshold out of the room, his energy pack registered zero and he crumpled to the floor. A small angelic figure left his prone body and, to the music of the Funeral March, ascended to the top of the screen.
‘Damn!’
He had scored twenty-seven thousand, not even enough to put him on the top ten high scores. Jim Stevens turned from the machine and looked around the noisy arcade, seeking out another game to play. Nobody seemed at all curious about a middle-aged man in an amusement arcade full of children, which was just as well, since he was in no mood for looks and stares.
The Sizewell investigation had turned sour on him, and he had a raging toothache at the front of his mouth. He was also a little hung over from the previous night, a night spent wining and dining Janine. She had not fallen for his charm, but he had fallen to her gracefully executed karate chop to the neck. He had forgotten two important points: one, that she was a feminist, and two, that she attended self-defense classes in what free time she had. There was certainly nothing repressed or downtrodden about the blow she had given him. It still hurt when he turned his head to right or left. So, with everything conspiring against him, he had come down to the arcade to blitz a few aliens and shoot hell out of King Kong, Commando, the Frog, and Dizzy Miss Lizzie. All to the accompaniment of bleeps and squeals and the tight, businesslike sound of heavy rock music from the arcade’s sound system.
‘Give me another quid’s worth of change,’ he said to the beautiful, bored girl in the booth, whose languid features had first attracted him to this place. Forget it, he had enough woman trouble as it was. When the bars opened again, he would sink himself in whiskey and beer and damn the consequences. Everything was going wrong. Business as usual. Sizewell would be impenetrable now that he had the media behind him. He almost had a halo over his cursed head. In addition to which, the spy, Flint, had never come home, which left Jim Stevens with nothing but a pocketful of change and a screaming desire to blast hell out of the Zorgon Battle Fleet once and for all.
Sheila parked the Volkswagen with her usual care, reminding herself that the passenger-side taillight needed a new bulb. Taillight, taillight, taillight. She picked up her briefcase and a large hardback book from the backseat. The book was about literary Paris in the 1920s. What she remembered about Paris personally were the appalling toilets in some of the buildings and the outrageously priced café au lait of Montparnasse. She had not caught even a whisper of existentialism there, though she had found plenty of evidence of a dog-eat-dog philosophy.