Brotherhood of the Tomb (4 page)

He opened the window all the way, pushing the sash up hard. Out of the night, out of the padded and frozen darkness, the sounds of the world rose up to him in waves: the stark lapping of water on stone, a train in the distance, loud on frosted rails, a ship’s horn, the bell on a rocking buoy.

Far out on the abandoned waters of the bay, he saw lights: ships coming in from the dark sea, from France and Spain and Italy, headed for Dun Laoghaire or Dublin harbour, an armada of tiny lights on a wind-darkened tide. The fog that had kept them out at sea so late had lifted, leaving a vast and empty darkness rich with stars. Out on the final edges of the night, a small boat passed like a firefly and was suddenly lost.

His eyes travelled over the darkness, and he thought how complete it was, how everything was dipped in it. How could twenty years make such a difference? he asked himself. Times change, people change, people die; but it was more than that.

He saw Beirut again, as though the darkness had become a screen for memories. On his left, the Syrian guard-post plastered with posters of Asad, to his right the abandoned al-Saqi Hotel, now occupied by a Hezbollahi group from Bi’r al-‘Abd. He saw the jeep turn the corner, the boy from Amal firing, low from the hip. And, in slow motion, Hasan Abi Shaqra running from the alleyway towards him, his own gun lifting, pointing, firing, Hasan falling at his feet, blood turning to dust on the dry earth. ‘He was coming in. He’d had enough.’

‘Come back to bed, Patrick.’

Ruth stood in the doorway, naked, her eyes dim with sleep. He turned from the window, blinking away the sunshine and the blood, suddenly cold.

‘I was working,’ he said, wondering why he felt a need to explain himself to her.

‘It’s after three. I woke up and you weren’t there. Come back to bed.’

He felt irritated by her presence, by the demands she made on him. It was so long since he had shared anything with a woman. He closed the window, shutting the world out.

She took him back to bed, her nakedness futile against his indifference. They lay there for a long time, shivering between cold sheets. Light from the street lamp filtered through the thin bedroom curtains, staining the bed with its unnatural light. Her arm lay beside his, almost translucent, like alabaster.

‘Do you love me?’ he asked, but she was asleep again, and he had not really wanted an answer. There was a sort of love between them, he supposed; and a physical passion that could still make him cry out, as though in pain. He tried to convince himself that the gulf between them was merely one of age - she

was more than ten years his junior - but he knew it was really something he had built inside himself out of all the little emptinesses of his life.

Getting involved with Ruth had been a big mistake. He thought he loved her, but that wasn’t the problem. Ruth belonged to the Agency, the way everyone did at first, the way he had at the beginning. That was the problem. Or part of it, at least.

They’d met at a party three, maybe four months earlier, not long after his arrival in Dublin. An old friend from Langley, Jim Allegro, was here on special attachment with the Irish Ranger Squad, liaising on anti-terrorist tactics. Jim had heard of Patrick’s arrival through the grapevine and contacted him. ‘I’m having a party tonight - come round and meet some people.’

The party had been dull: pieces of cheese and tinned pineapple on wooden cocktail sticks, stale French bread, cheap Australian red in boxes, wall to wall Dire Straits. The guests were the usual crowd: anaemic third secretaries from the embassy, a handful of spooks you could spot in a nudist colony, and awkward locals downing Guinness at a rate of knots. As usual, all the intelligence hounds were sniffing one another’s rears in a pack. She was sitting in a corner, going through Allegro’s bookcase like a censor looking for smut.

‘You won’t find anything in there,’ he said. ‘Jim’s cleaner than an operating table.’

‘On the contrary,’ she replied, ‘that’s precisely where all the messy things end up.’

How had he guessed she was in the trade? She didn’t look the type. Not that there was a type - but if there had been, she wouldn’t have been it. She was too well dressed for one thing. The sort of clothes that had their labels on the inside, if they had labels at

all. A single piece of discreet jewellery, a mere hint of expensive perfume. But for the accent, he would have taken her to be French. She was petite, with short blonde hair, a down-turned mouth, and tiny ears like shells.

Her next words had been, ‘Shall we get out of here?’ She had taken the initiative from the beginning, otherwise he would never have got as far as ‘Go’. They had driven down the coast in her small blue Mercedes. Everything was autumnal: the air, the sea, their mood. She drove too fast for the narrow Irish roads and too skilfully for it to matter. It was dawn when they arrived back at his house. ‘You have appalling taste’ was the last thing she said before leading him to bed.

After leaving the CIA, he had returned to Ireland to finish the doctorate he had abandoned eighteen years before. Coming back to Dublin had been like a physical blow: the old places, all the memories rushing at him, striking him deep in the pit of his stomach, and him helpless before their onslaught. Rathmines, Ranelagh, Donnybrook, Ballsbridge - the names had leapt out of maps and off the fronts of buses at him, each with its own sweet or bitter flavour, its own particular weight of memories and associations.

He had returned with such hopes, such expectations. Dublin would restore him to youth, or something like that. Dublin would revive in him the ideals of twenty-four years ago. Well, that had all been a fantasy, and he knew it now: even if the city had been preserved in aspic all these years, nothing of the past would have returned to him, or at the most a glimmer, a teasing reflection in a rusted mirror.

His years at Trinity had shaped his life. He had lived and worked in a palace of grey stone, surrounded by dreams and poetry. Not the past only, but a present

that seemed not wholly real. It had been less the magic of the place than the enchantment of youth: he had come to understand that in time. But then he was aware only of snow falling on dark, pitted cobblestones, and sunlight on mullioned windows, and the bell in the campanile ringing out against the shadows at dusk as he walked through soft-lit courtyards to Commons. And Francesca. Always Francesca.

Now he was back, but the magic and the poetry had gone. He had tried to find them again in Ruth, but all that remained was a sense of bewilderment and shame. Pressed for a reason, he could have given a dozen. But at heart he knew there had only ever been one reason for his inability to love or be loved: Francesca’s death. But that was the past. He had to come to terms with that. In the dark, he lay listening to the sound of his own breathing, unable to surrender himself to sleep.

He slipped out of bed again, knowing sleep would not come. There had been so many nights like this: they just had to be endured. He crossed to the window, as though drawn by the pale lamplight. A man can resign from the Agency, but his mind and body never relax.

He heard the footstep just as his hand reached for the curtain. A single step followed by silence. He stiffened and lowered his hand. Silence. Cautiously, he eased back the edge of the curtain and bent his eye to the crack.

His dark-adjusted eyes found the man almost at once. On the opposite side of the street, away from the lamp. He was cold and restless and looked like someone who had been standing there a long time. Waiting for something. Or someone.

FIVE

Patrick let the curtain fall. For half a minute he stood by the window, forcing himself to be calm. Ruth was still asleep, her heavy breathing plainly audible to him across the room. Moving quietly in the darkness, he found his trousers and the thick sweater he had been wearing the day before. His shoes were beside the bed.

Downstairs, he paused in the kitchen. A row of gleaming, wooden-handled Sabatier knives hung on a magnetic rack. He selected one with a six-inch blade and slipped it into his belt. It was razor-sharp: he knew, because he had honed the entire set three days earlier.

The back door led into the garden, but he knew better than to go that way. There might be more than one watcher, and the odds were that a second man, if any, would be at the rear of the house.

A side window gave onto the drive. He unlocked the dead-bolt and opened it without a sound. A blast of cold air took him unawares. The wind was rising. There was a roll of thunder, very far away, moving behind unseen clouds. The storm was coming.

He dropped to the ground, poised against possible attack. Here, beside the house, the darkness was complete. Clouds came up fast, obscuring the stars. He crouched, listening. Beneath the pounding of his heart, he heard cold waves turning on the shore. Above him, branches shifted. His skin felt taut and nervous. In spite of the cold, he was sweating.

Crossing the gravel of the drive took an eternity. Then grass, then the fence dividing him from the

next house. A frosted lawn led down to a low wall on the other side of which lay the road. From here he could still see the street lamp, but there was no sign of the watcher. Automatically, he checked the knife: the other man would carry a gun, he was sure of that.

Though he knew the darkness hid him, he felt utterly exposed as he sprinted across the road. On the other side, he vaulted the sea wall onto the path that wound along the beach. The tide was well in now, a heavy swell pushed by rising winds. The thunder sounded again, nearer this time, a low, animal growl threatening violence.

He kept to the sand, crouching low. The waves covered any sound. The man was still standing where Patrick had last seen him, in the shadows just beyond the lamp. His back was to the sea. He moved restlessly, trying to keep warm. About six foot, Patrick reckoned, and well built. There would be a car nearby, perhaps another man waiting in it.

Patrick removed his shoes. It was bitterly cold, but he had to be sure of silence. He slipped behind the wall, then over, never letting his eyes wander from his target. The frost felt like daggers on his bare skin. With his right hand he slipped the knife from his belt. Thunder like stones in the sky. Darkness closing in. The sea tormented, moving landward from the night.

He was behind the man now. Without a sound, he set his shoes down. Faint as gossamer, his breath hung in front of his face, trembling. He braced himself and reached with both hands at once. His left grabbed a clump of hair, pulling the man’s head back fiercely, while the right brought the knife round hard against his throat. He could feel the blade touch flesh, the Adam’s apple neat on steel.

‘Kneel.’

The old voice out of the darkness; his own voice, and yet not his voice.

The man grunted, about to scream, his throat bulging unseen against the blade. Then, slowly, his legs buckled and he lowered himself to his knees. Patrick moved hard behind him, a knee in his back, the knife well poised, the long throat taut. He could feel the stranger’s fear, acrid in the sea air, in the electric presence of the storm.

‘Take your gun and throw it to the ground. Please don’t force me to hurt you.’

The man struggled for words.

‘No ... gun ... I ... swear.’

‘Who are you?’

Silence. The wind moving, cold as death.

‘Who sent you?’

The knife again, a trickle of blood, frost on the blade. Silence. Death hovering breathless in the thin air. The man’s fear was rapidly giving way to something else: Defiance? Indifference? Transcendence?

‘Why are you watching me?’

Silence. Then a roll of thunder that echoed across the bay.

He switched to Arabic.

‘Min ayna ta’ti? Where are you from?’

No sign of comprehension.

He tried Persian.

‘Az koja amadi?

No answer.

Suddenly lightning flashed, turning the world to light for an instant. An image fixed itself in Patrick’s mind: a dark-haired man, his head held back, a knife against his throat, a thin line of blood across bruised flesh.

Patrick blinked, and in that instant the stranger

made his move. His right hand came up, grabbing Patrick’s wrist, knocking the knife away. He swung in sideways, his hair twisting painfully in his captor’s grasp, his left arm pivoting, his fist striking out hard. Patrick rocked, loosening his grip. The man staggered with him, then dropped forward, using his head to butt Patrick, knocking him down. At that very moment, the storm broke. Like a river bursting through a dam, rain came flooding out of the sky, thick and cold and heavy.

Patrick heard the man’s feet ring out on the hard ground. He rolled onto his knees and started scrabbling for his shoes. The rain smothered and blinded him. His clothes were already soaking. Frantically, he passed his hands over the road. He found one shoe, then the other, and hurried to pull them on, leaving the laces untied.

The stranger had headed off to the right. Patrick followed, hampered by rain and darkness. Lightning flashed again, sheet upon sheet of it, white and cold like anger. Stencilled against the night, he saw a car and a man opening the door. He stumbled forward, desperate now.

There was the sound of an engine rasping, unwilling to ignite. He had a chance. Panting, he ran through the darkness. The engine turned again and died. A lace caught beneath his foot and sent him off balance, pitching forward in a heap, skinning his hands badly on the rough ground. He heard the engine cough then hold. Biting back the pain, he hauled himself to his feet, staggering across the last few yards.

He crashed into the car as it pulled away from the kerb, turned, ran, snatched for the handle. The door opened and he threw himself into the seat as the vehicle picked up speed. The driver had not yet

switched on his lights. Rain and darkness flooded the windscreen.

Patrick reached for the wheel, pulling it towards him. The driver braked suddenly, sending them into a spin. The car mounted the kerb, tilted, and crumpled against the sea wall.

Panicking, the driver opened his door and stumbled into the road. He slipped, then picked himself up and began to run.