He put the discus-thing on the table, stared at it. For minutes, Morley stared at it, until he knew what it was that he felt: horrified, and bereft.
He should be happy. There was no hint of displeasure in the message. It seemed they were choosing a major task with which to finish his service. The job was done. That was the implication, it wasn't that
his
work was done, but that his
work
was done, that things were irrevocable now. He supposed he had helped bring in a better world.
As he wrapped the canister and put it in a box, though, he thought suddenly,
I've been replaced,
and became so enraged that he slammed the thing down.
Why've they replaced me? What did I do wrong?
In the post office, in the long, long queue, he could not stop staring at a woman three people in front of him.
She held a large padded envelope close to her. Abruptly she let it drop and held it loosely, while she looked round, taking in everyone. She drew her hands up again, slowly, the package creeping back towards her chest, and she tried to put it down again and walked briskly and with relief to the service window when it opened.
Morley was still. The queue became restive but he did not move. Behind him an elderly Rastafarian gripped a poster tube in two hands. A young mother fussed with the cardboard box she had put beside her baby in its pushchair. A teenager was picking with what looked like great nervousness at the large wrapped case he held.
“Excuse me, mate, are you going toâ” someone was saying, but Morley ignored him, stared at the parcels in the line.
I'm surrounded by colleagues,
he thought, and then almost instantly,
I'm surrounded by enemies.
Men and women from his own organisation, or from
splinters
from that organisation, renegades, or opponents dedicated to destroying him, those who would make things far worse for Chechnya, for the economy, those whom he must stop.
None of them know,
he thought. He was the only one who knew that there, in that post office, ignoring each other and filtering out the tiny mutter of a Walkman, glancing at the clock, fidgeting, they were all at war. There must be civilians among them, and they were in danger too. Innocent people could get hurt.
Careful now.
Be careful.
Morley swallowed. He closed his eyes.
I'm losing it.
“Mate, excuse me, but the queue's movingâ”
“Go on mateâ”
What am I doing?
It was sudden, a landslide of certainty. Seeing all his hidden enemies or comrades or random strangers, Morley could not believe he had been taken in, that he had been suckered by the implied do-gooding of his overseers, these skulking contaminators. He was aghast. He thought of the years he had done their work and of each message or item or weapon or computer code he had passed on. As rage grew in him and disgust for his foolishness, a fervour came too, to fix the bad he had done. He could hardly imagine what he must have been party to, but he made himself, he was unflinching. The flies on corpses, the slumps that wiped economies away and left people raging in the streets.
“Mateâ”
But Morley was out and running, pushing through the lines, holding his terrible package close, as if he would shield everyone else from it.
No,
he thought.
No.
He held the disc over the waters of the canal, he held it by a skip full of rubbish, by a bonfire on the allotments, but at last he took it back to his house and placed it on his table, a baleful centrepiece.
I won't be part of it anymore,
Morley thought.
Fuck you,
he thought, staring at the container. He put a potted plant on it. He tried to make it banal.
That night when his phone rang, Morley was horrified but not so surprised to hear the curt message, the voice so clipped he could not even tell the sex or age of the speaker.
“Is this . . .” it said, and then a gasp, a contained sound, and then, “You're just bloody
asking
for trouble,” and there was laughing and the line cut.
Morley did not leave his house for days. He picked up a knife whenever the phone or the doorbell rang, but that one call seemed to be the end of it.
I knew it,
he thought and most or much of the time believed.
I was right about them, they wouldn't
threaten
me if they were
.
.
.
on my, on our side.
Nothing came for him. He watched the disc. It sat below the china pot through the weeks of winter, into spring.
Morley carefully watered the plant. For a time he flinched when he shopped, and then he stopped, and he found nothing in his products. He watched what happened in the world, and was as sure as he could be that he was not to blame. He was more and more certain that he had done the right thing.
By March he had almost stopped worrying. When he came back to his flat one day to find his window broken and his home trashed, his video and stereo taken, his books thrown to the floor, he even fleetingly thought that it was just a burglary. But it did not take him long to trace the footsteps of the intruder, see how they had hurried from room to room, how they had been looking for something.
They had been interrupted, it seemed, had not spent long in the kitchen. The disc was untouched, fringed by the leaves that now half hid it. They would not have expected it to be there. Morley felt the raised instructions again and sat on the floor.
The police were sympathetic. They made it clear that he should not expect too much.
I expect nothing,
he thought.
You can't track the likes of these. You're no good to me at all. They want me.
“Is there . . . is it . . . Is it like most other break-ins?” he could not restrain himself from asking, and the liaison officer nodded and watched him carefully.
“Yes. It's . . .” He moved his lips. “Sometimes people find this sort of thing very upsetting. Would you like me to . . . I can put you in touch with someone to chat to about it. A counsellor . . .” Morley almost laughed at the man's misdirected kindness.
You can't help me,
he thought.
No one can.
He wondered what would happen, what the penalty was for renegacy.
I don't regret it,
he thought fiercely.
I'd do it again. I won't courier for them no more, no matter what they do to me.
When the policeman phoned him, some days later, it took Morley several seconds to understand what he was saying, the message was so unexpected.
“We've got him.”
Morley could not understand how the operatives could have been so careless. A botched job, a rush, the incompetence of some new agent; he could not understand it. “They were caught selling the stuff?” he kept saying.
“Yeah,” the officer said. They sat in the police-station canteen. “Junkies, they know they should use a fence and all that, but, you know . . .” He waggled his eyebrows to indicate that it was difficult to care when you were high.
Morley wanted to see him, the so-called junkie they had caught, but he was not allowed even to peer through the grille of the cell. His heart was hard in his throat. He thought of the man in that little room. Impassive, in nondescript, forgettable clothes. Waiting for the police to receive a message from some astonishing lawyer, or government minister, and to let him go; or for a midnight visitor to free him in some effortlessly daring raid. Morley imagined him a big man but not so big he was slow, with a face that showed no emotion at all, nor his purpose. Morley did not know if he could bear to see the face of his designated punisher.
Why did you get caught?
It did not take much to find out the supposed name of the man the police were holding. A word to a few of the officers he had dealt with, and he learnt when the suspect would be releasedâsoon to be rearrested, he was assured, immediately they could find a fingerprint or DNA (they'd be coming to dust again). Morley wasn't to worry, they assured him.
Morley could still not well believe what he was going to do. But he could not live this way anymore. He waited as the day went, and grew more and more frightened. He did not give the thought words, but he knew that this might be when he died.
How will I recognise him?
he thought, and remembered the photograph the desk clerk had shown him.
Those things aren't accurate. That made him look, I don't know
.
.
.
He considered the way the man would walk: ignorable, invisible, forgettable, and all full of power.
Have to be very careful
.
.
.
Morley thought again.
I'm going to see one of them,
he thought.
Any minute.
He could have retched.
When the man left the police station, Morley felt as if he could not breathe.
It was late. He tracked the man quietly toward estates that sprawled and seemed empty. The man's disguise was consummate: his furtive movements, his anxious little tics perfect. Morley hung back, but as he saw his target stop by a stairwell, in the shadows of some industrial bins, lighting a cigarette, he was overcome. He had thought he was only there to track, but now he ran forward in fear and anger and wondered as he came if this had always been going to happen. Morley was sobbing as he attacked. He knew he could not give his target a moment.
“Who are you?” he whispered through the scarf around his face. “You leave me alone.” He gasped, he sucked in breath, gripped the man's throat and barrelled him down. His hands were shaking very hard. “Who the fuck are you?”
The man he held was whining like a child. Morley pushed his face into concrete. “Shut up, shut up, you're fooling
no one,
you understand?” He jabbed. “
Tell
me, tell me, what do you
want
from me?” He stretched out his arms hard, trying to keep distance.
The burglar was crying. Desperately, Morley kicked him. “Tell me,” he said.
“Is it you I done?” the man whimpered. “It didn't mean nothing, it didn't mean nothing, don't cut me . . .” Urgently Morley watched his arms, his legs, ready for an attack. His quarry was thin, and his face was scabbed. It was hard to make sense of his expression. For one moment, Morley saw a calculation on the man's face, and he opened his own eyes aghast, but the expression was gone, and he was unsure.
“Who are you?” Morley said again, and the man, the young man, flapped his hand at the blood on him.
“I ain't nothing,” he gasped, and Morley watched him and suddenly understood and came in close.
“What did they tell you?” he said urgently. “I'll make sure you're safe. Whatever they threatened you with, I can, we, the police can protect you. Who were they, the ones told you to break in?
What did they want?
”
But though he shook him and hurt him again, badly, Morley could not make the man talk. He would only cry, holding his arms limp, and Morley had at last to throw him down and run, leaving the young burglar howling and tearing himself from tension and frustration. The man was a flawless actor; or was well-chosen by the hidden agency, for ignorance and expendability; or was too terrified to tell the truth; or the police had the wrong man.
Morley cleaned his flat, took the plant off the disc. He heard no more from the police. When he heard about the poison gas attack, he sat staring at the heavy circle, the evidence of his mutiny.
On the screen, rescuers in chemical suits dragged young men and women out of the subway. Most were dead; some were still dying, noisily drowning on their own deliquescent lungs. Morley watched. Their families mobbed the site, broke through the cordons, were held back by the police and by gusts of gas, braved them, reached their dead lovers and family with their eyes streaming from more than grief. Some succumbed.
Simultaneous attacks in other parts of the city, and Morley heard what the journalists heard, the screams and foreign entreaties. In places of worship, in the offices of giant companies, and in that modern subway, gas made hells. Several devices were found and defused before they were triggered: even more had been supposed to die than the hundreds who did.
A coalition of armies was amassed. There was an onslaught on the poisoners' refuge. Morley watched the conflict.
When his prime minister appeared, came onto his screen to ask for Morley's and his compatriots' support, Morley could focus only on the bookshelves behind the leader. Amid the spines were tasteful statuettes, a couple of plaques, and there at the prime minister's right hand an empty space, what looked like a deliberate gap, what looked like a stand for something, something circular, something the size of the pallet that had propped up Morley's flowers.
Morley felt as if he were choking.
It's a message,
he thought.
They're saying, âSee what we're missing?'
If I'd sent it on, they would have had it, and they might have stopped this.
It was too late to send it now. Morley was stricken.
He saw photographs of the hideouts from which the masterminds of the attack had fled, and in an alcove in the wall were two saucer-shaped things, covered with writing, and a space for a third, that was not there.
It could have been even worse,
Morley thought then, and his heart surged and misery lifted.
Oh thank God, that was it, it would have been even worse, if I'd not held this back from them.
He stared again at his container, but did not remain convinced. He could not.
Is it too late?
I'll send it. I'll send it.
But he did not want to make things worse.
It was murderous, it was going on, people were dying, and
he had started it,
or possibly perhaps had softened it and made it better. Morley felt that the guilt would destroy him. If it weren't for the great pride he felt at other times, he was sure he could not have survived.