Authors: Ian Rankin
They shook hands. “Pleased to meet you,” she said. She had a flushed complexion and a long braid of chestnut-colored hair. Her face was sharp, with angular cheekbones and a wry twist to her lips. Her clothes were loose, practical.
“Supper’s ready when you are,” she said.
“I’ll just show Gordon his room first,” Vincent said. He saw the surprise in Reeve’s face. “You can’t get back to London to-night. No trains.”
Reeve looked at Jilly Palmer. “I’m sorry if I—”
“No trouble,” she said. “We’ve a bedroom going spare, and Josh here made the supper. All I had to do was warm it through.”
“Where’s Bill?” Vincent asked.
“Young Farmers‘. He’ll be back around ten.”
“Don’t be daft,” said Vincent, “pubs don’t shut till eleven.”
He sounded very different in this company: more relaxed, enjoying the warmth of the kitchen and normal conversation. But all that did, in Reeve’s eyes, was show how much strain the man was under the rest of the time, and how much this whole conspiracy had affected him.
He thought he could see why Jim had taken on the story, why he would have run with it where others might have given up: because of people like Josh Vincent, scared and running and innocent.
His room was small and cold, but the blankets were plenti-ful. He took off his coat and hung it on a hook on the back of the door, hoping it would dry. His dark pullover was damp, too, so he peeled it off. The rest of him could dry in the kitchen. He found the bathroom and washed his hands and face in scalding water, then looked at himself in the mirror. The image of him injecting BSE into a tapped human vein was still there in the back of his mind. It had given him an idea—not something he could put into use just yet, but something he might need all the same…
In the kitchen the table had been laid for two. Jilly said she’d already eaten. She left them to it and closed the door after her.
“She never misses Coronation Street,” Vincent explained. “Lives out here, but has to get her fix of Lancashire grime.” He used oven mitts to lift the casserole from the oven. It was half full, but a substantial half. There was a lemonade bottle on the table and two glasses. Vincent unscrewed the cap and poured carefully. “Bill’s home brew,” he explained. “I think he only drinks down the pub to remind himself how good his own stuff tastes.”
The beer was light brown, with a head that disappeared quickly. “Cheers,” said Josh Vincent.
“Cheers,” said Reeve.
They ate in silence, hungrily, and chewed on home-baked bread. Towards the end of the meal, Vincent asked a few questions about Reeve—what he did, where he lived. He said he loved the Highlands and Islands, and wanted to hear all about Reeve’s survival courses. Reeve kept the description simple, leaving out more than he put in. He could see Vincent wasn’t really listening; his mind was elsewhere.
“Can I ask you something?” Vincent said finally.
“Sure.”
“How far did Jim get? I mean, did he find out anything we could use?”
“I told you, his disks disappeared. All I have are his written notes from London.”
“Can I see them?”
Reeve nodded and fetched them. Vincent read in silence for a while, except to point out where he himself had contributed a detail or a quote. Then he sat up.
“He’s been in touch with Marie Villambard.” He showed Reeve the sheet of paper. The letters MV were capitalized and underlined at the top. They hadn’t meant anything to Reeve or to Fliss Hornby.
“Who’s she?”
“A French journalist; she works for an ecology magazine—Le Monde Vert, I think it’s called. ”Green World.“ Sounds like they were working together.”
“She hasn’t tried contacting him in London.” There’d been no letters from France, and Fliss hadn’t intercepted any calls.
“Maybe he told her he’d be in touch when he got back from San Diego.”
“Josh, why did my brother go to San Diego?”
“To talk to Co-World Chemicals.” Vincent blinked. “I thought you knew that.”
“You’re the first person to say it outright.”
“He was going to try and speak to some of their research scientists.”
“Why?”
“Why? Because of the experiment they had carried out.” Vincent put down the notes. “They tried to reproduce BSE the way it had flared up in the UK, using identical procedures after consultations with MAFF. They brought in sheep infected with scrapie and rendered them down, taking the exact same shortcuts as were used in the mideighties. Then they mixed the feed to-gether and fed it to calves and mature cattle.”
“And?”
“And nothing. They didn’t exactly trumpet the results. Four years on, the cattle were one hundred percent fit.” He shrugged his shoulders. “They’ve got other experiments ongoing. They’ve got consultant neurologists and world-class psychiatrists working on American farmers who show signs of neurodegenerative disease. Bringing in the psychiatrists is a nice touch: it makes everyone think maybe we’re dealing with psychosomatic hysteria, that the so-called disease is actually a product of the human mind and nothing at all to do with what we spray on our crops and stuff into and onto our animals.” He paused. “You want any more casserole?”
Reeve shook his head.
“The beef’s fine, honestly,” Vincent said, smiling encouragement. “Reared organically.”
“I’m sure,” said Reeve. “But I’m full up, thanks.”
Well, it was 85 percent truth.
After breakfast, Josh Vincent drove Reeve to the station.
“Can I contact you on the farm?” Reeve asked.
Vincent shook his head. “I’ll only be there another day or so. Is there somewhere I can contact you?”
Reeve wrote down his home phone number. “If I’m not there, my wife can take a message. Josh, you haven’t said why you’re hiding.”
“What?”
“All these precautions. You haven’t said why.”
Vincent looked up and down the empty platform. “They tampered with my car, too. Remember I told you about the farmer?”
“The one who’s been campaigning against OPs?”
“Yes. A vet was helping him, but then the vet died in a car crash. His vehicle went out of control and hit a wall; no explanation, nothing wrong with the car. I had a similar crash. My car stopped responding. I hit a tree rather than a wall, and crawled out alive. No garage could find any fault in the car.” Vincent was staring into the distance. “Then they bugged the telephone in my office, and later I found they’d bugged my home telephone, too. I think they opened my mail and resealed the envelopes. I know they were watching me. Don’t ask me who they were, that I don’t know. I could speculate though. MI5 maybe, Special Branch, or the chemical companies. Could have been any of those, could have been someone else entirely. So”—he sighed and dug his hands into his Barbour pockets—“I keep moving.”
“A running target’s the hardest kind to hit,” Reeve agreed.
“Do you speak from experience?”
“Literally,” said Reeve as the train pulled in.
Back in London, Reeve returned to the apartment. Fliss had left a note wondering if he’d gone for good. He scribbled on the bottom of it “Maybe this time” and put the note back on the table. He had to retrieve his bag and his car and then head home. But first he wanted to check something. He found the page of Jim’s notes, the one headed MV. On the back were four two-digit numbers. He’d suspected they were the combination of some kind of safe, but now he knew differently. He found a screwdriver in the kitchen drawer and opened up the telephone: apparatus and handset both. He couldn’t find any bugs, so he replaced the screws and returned the screwdriver to its drawer. He got the code for France from the telephone book and made the call. A long single tone told him he’d reached a French telephone.
An answering machine, a rapid message in a woman’s voice. Reeve left a short message in his rusty French, giving his telephone number in Scotland. He didn’t mention Jim’s fate. He just said he was his brother. This was called “preparing someone for bad news.” He sat and thought about what Josh Vincent had told him. Something had been telling Reeve it couldn’t just be about cows. It was laughable, unbelievable. But Josh Vincent had made it both believable and scary, because it affected everyone on the planet—everyone who had to eat. But Reeve still didn’t think it was just about cows, or pesticides, or coverups. There was more to it than that. He felt it in his bones.
He made another call, to Joan, preparing her for his return. Then he gave the rest of the flat a once-over and locked the door behind him.
An engineer was checking the telephone junction box outside. The man watched Reeve go, then lifted the tape out from the recorder and replaced it with a fresh one. Returning to his van, he wound back the tape and replayed it. A thirteen-digit number, followed by a woman’s voice in French. He plugged a digital decoder into the tape machine, then wound back the tape and played it again. This time, each beep of the dialed number came up as a digit on the decoder’s readout. The engineer wrote down the number and picked up his cell phone.
PART FOUR
LIVING DANGEROUSLY
ELEVEN
GORDON REEVE HAD BECOME INTERESTED in anarchism because he needed to understand the minds of terrorists. He had worked in the Counter-Revolutionary Warfare Unit of the SAS. They were happy to have him—he wasn’t the only one among them who’d specialized in languages during his early training, but he was the only one with so many.
“Including Scots,” one wag said. “Could come in handy if the Tartan Army flares up again.”
“I’ve got Gaelic, too,” Reeve had countered with a smile.
After he left the SAS, he retained his interest in anarchism because of its truths and its paradoxes. The word anarchy had Greek roots and meant “without a ruler.” The Paris students in ‘68 had sprayed “It is forbidden to forbid” on the street walls. Anarchists, true anarchists, wanted society without government and promoted voluntary organization over rule by an elected body. The real anarchist joke was: “It doesn’t matter who you vote for, the government always gets in.”
Reeve liked to play the anarchist thinkers off against Nietz-sche. Kropotkin, for example, with his theory of “mutual aid,” was advocating the opposite of Nietzsche’s “will to power.” Evolution, in Kropotkin’s view, was not about competitiveness, about survival of the strongest individual, but about cooperation. A species which cooperated would thrive, and grow stronger collectively. Nietzsche on the other hand saw competitiveness everywhere, and advocated self-reliance and self-absorption. Reeve saw merit to both assertions. In fact, they were not separate, distinct arguments but parts of the same equation. Reeve had little time for government, for bureaucracy, but he knew the individual could go only so far, could endure only so much. Isolation was fine sometimes, but if you had a problem it was wise to form bonds. War created bizarre allies, while peace itself could be divisive.
Nietzsche, of course, could convince almost no one of his philosophy—give or take a tyrant or two who chose to misunderstand the whole. And the anarchists… well, one of the things Reeve found so interesting about the anarchists was that their cause was doomed from its philosophical outset. To grow, to influence opinion, the anarchist movement had to organize, had to take on a strong political structure—which meant taking on a hierarchy, making decisions. Everyone, from players of children’s games to the company boardroom, knew that if you took decisions by committee you came up with compromise. Anarchism was not about compromising. The anarchists’ mistrust of rigid organizations caused their groupings to splinter and splinter again, until only the individual was left, and some of those individuals felt that the only possible road to power left to them was the bullet and the bomb. Joseph Conrad’s image of the anarchist with the bomb in his pocket was not so wide of the mark.
And what of Nietzsche? Reeve had been one of “Nietzsche’s gentlemen.” Nietzsche had carried on the work of Descartes and others—men who needed to dominate, to control, to eliminate chance. But while Nietzsche wanted supermen, controllers, he also wanted people to live dangerously. Reeve felt he was fulfilling this criterion if no other. He was living dangerously. He just wondered if he needed some mutual aid along the way…
He was on a hillside, no noise except the wind, the distant bleating of sheep, and his own breathing. He was sitting, resting, after the long walk from his home. He’d told Joan he needed to clear his head. Allan was at a friend’s house, but would be back in time for supper. Reeve would be back by then, too. All he needed was a walk. Joan had offered to keep him company, an offer he’d refused with a shake of his head. He’d touched her cheek, but she’d slapped his hand away.
“I’ll only be a couple of hours.”
“You’re never here,” she complained. “And even when you’re here, you’re not really here.”
It was a valid complaint, and he hadn’t argued. He’d just tied his boots and set out for the hills.
It was Sunday, a full week since he’d had the telephone call telling him Jim had killed himself. Joan knew there was something he wasn’t telling her, something he was bottling up. She knew it wasn’t just grief.
Reeve got to his feet. Looking down the steep hillside, he was momentarily afraid. Nothing to do with the “abyss” this time; it was just that he had no real plan, and without a plan there would be a temptation to rashness, there would be miscalculation. He needed proper planning and preparation. He’d been in the dark for a while, feeling his way. Now he thought he knew most of what Jim had known, but he was still stuck. He felt like a spider who has crawled its way along the pipes and into the bath, only to find it can’t scale the smooth, sheer sides. There was a bird of prey overhead, a kestrel probably. It glided on the air currents, its line straight, dipping its wings to maintain stability. From that height, it could probably still pick out the movements of a mouse in the tangle of grass and gorse. Reeve thought of the wings on the SAS cap badge. Wings and a dagger. The wings told you that Special Forces would travel anywhere at any notice. And the dagger… the dagger told an essential truth about the regiment: they were trained in close-combat situations. They favored stealth and the knife over distance and a sniper’s accuracy. Hand-to-hand fighting, that was their strength. Get close to your prey, close enough to slide a hand over its mouth and stab the dagger into its throat, and twist and twist, ripping the voice box. Maximum damage, minimum dying time.