‘Just the Georgian part!’ Luke yelled back.
‘I love this, hear me, Dick! I
love
! You too, huh?’
Briefly – although he was still worrying about that policeman – Luke was able to love it: and continued to love it as they climbed towards the saddle of the Kleine Scheidegg and slipped through the arc of orange lights shed by the great hotel that mastered it.
They began their descent. To their left, bathed in moonlight, rose the sinewy blue-black shadows of a glacier. Far away across the valley, they glimpsed the lights of Mürren, and now and then, through the density of the forest as it took them back, the fickle lights of Wengen.
16
For Luke, the days and nights in the little Alpine resort of Wengen were mysteriously preordained, now beyond bearing, now filled with the lyrical calm of an extended gathering of family and friends on holiday.
The ugly, built-to-let chalet that Ollie had selected lay at the quiet end of the village on a triangle of land between two footpaths. In the winter months it was rented out to a lowland German ski club, but in the summer it was available to anyone who could pay, from South African Theosophists to Norwegian Rastafarians to poor children from the Ruhr. A disparate family of incompatible ages and origins was therefore exactly what the village expected. Not a head turned among the flocks of summer tourists that trudged past it: or so said Ollie, who spent many spare minutes keeping watch from behind the curtained upper windows.
From inside, the world was almost unimaginably beautiful. Look downward from the top floor and you had a view of the fabled Lauterbrunnen Valley; look upward, and the Jungfrau massif rose glistening before you. Behind you lay unspoiled pastures and forested foothills. Yet from outside the chalet was an architectural void: cavernous, characterless, anonymous, and sympathetic to nothing around it, with white stucco walls and rustic grace notes that only emphasized its suburban aspirations.
Luke too had watched. When Ollie was out foraging for provisions and snippets of local gossip, it was Luke the habitual worrier who kept lookout for the suspicious passer-by. But watch as he might, no inquisitive eye lingered on the two small girls in the garden practising with their new skipping ropes to Gail’s direction, or picking cowslips on the meadow bank behind the house, to be preserved for all time in jam jars of dry sago bought by Ollie from the supermarket.
Not even the rouged and powdered little old lady in weeds and dark glasses sitting motionless as a doll on the balcony with her hands in her lap attracted comment. Swiss resorts have been receiving such people ever since the tourist trade began. And should any passer-by chance, of an evening, to glimpse between the curtains a big man in a woollen ski cap bowed over a chessboard opposite two adolescent opponents – with Perry as referee and Gail and the girls in another corner watching DVDs bought from Photo Fritz – well, if that house hadn’t had a family of chess-fiends before, it had had everything else. Why should they know or care that, pitched against the combined intellect of his precocious sons, the world’s number-one money-launderer could still outsmart them?
And if the same adolescent boys were seen next day, in their carefully different outfits, scrambling up the precipitous rock path that ran from the back garden all the way up to Männlichen ridge, with Perry out ahead urging them on, and Alexei vowing that he was going to break his neck any fucking minute, and Viktor insisting that he’d just stared down a full-grown stag, even if it was only a chamois – well, what was so remarkable about that? Perry even roped them together. He found a handy bit of overhang, hired boots and bought ropes – ropes, he explained severely, being for a mountaineer both personal and sacrosanct – and taught them how to dangle over an abyss, even if the abyss was only twelve feet deep.
As to the two young women – one sixteen-ish and the other maybe ten years older, both beautiful – stretched out on deckchairs with their books under a spreading maple tree that had somehow escaped the developer’s bulldozer – well, if you were a Swiss male, perhaps you’d look and then pretend you hadn’t looked, or if you were an Italian, you might have looked and applauded. But you wouldn’t have rushed to the telephone and whispered to the police that you had seen two suspicious women reading in the shade of a maple tree.
Or so Luke told himself, and so Ollie told himself, and so Perry and Gail as co-opted members of the neighbourhood watch agreed – how could they do otherwise? – which didn’t mean that any of them, even the small girls, ever quite got rid of the notion that they
were in hiding and living against the clock. When Katya asked at breakfast over Ollie’s pancake, bacon and maple syrup, ‘Are we going to England today?’ – or Irina, more plaintively, ‘Why haven’t we gone to England yet?’ – they were speaking for everyone round the table, starting with Luke himself, the hero of the party by virtue of having his right hand in plaster after falling down the steps of his hotel in Berne.
‘You gonna sue that hotel, Dick?’ Viktor demanded aggressively.
‘I shall be consulting my lawyer on the subject,’ Luke replied with a smile for Gail.
As to precisely
when
they were going to London: ‘Well, perhaps not today, Katya, but maybe tomorrow, or the next day,’ Luke assured her. ‘It’s just a question of when your visas come through. And we all know what apparatchiks are like, even English ones, don’t we?’
*
But when, oh when?
Luke asked himself the same question every waking and half-sleeping hour of the day or night as Hector’s breathless bulletins piled in: now a couple of cryptic sentences between meetings, now a whole jeremiad in the small hours of another endless day. Bewildered by the barrage of contradictory reports, Luke at first resorted to the officially unforgivable sin of keeping a written log of them as they came in. With the lurid fingertips of his right hand poking from the plaster, he scribbled away painstakingly in his own quaint shorthand on single sheets of A4 bought by Ollie from the village stationer’s, one side only.
In the approved training-school manner, he purloined the glass from a picture frame to press on, wiping it clean after each page, and caching the product behind a water tank against the remote possibility that Viktor, Alexei, Tamara or Dima himself might take it into their heads to search his room.
But as the speed and complexity of Hector’s messages from the front began to overwhelm him, he prevailed on Ollie to get him a pocket recorder, much like Dima’s, and connect it to his encrypted
mobile – another mortal sin in the eyes of Training Section, but a godsend when he was lying wakefully in bed waiting for the next of Hector’s idiosyncratic bulletins:
– It’s a knife-edge, Lukie, but we’re winning.
– I’m bypassing Billy Boy and going straight to the Chief. I’ve said it’s got to be hours not days.
– The Chief says talk to the Vice-Chief.
– The Vice-Chief says if Billy Boy won’t sign off on it, nor will he. He won’t sign off on it alone. He’s got to have the whole fourth floor behind him or it’s no deal. I’ve said bugger that.
– You’re not going to believe this but Billy Boy’s coming round. He’s kicking like hell, but even he can’t stay away from the truth when it’s rammed up his hooter.
All this within the space of the first twenty-four hours after Luke had sent the cadaverous philosopher spinning down the staircase, a feat Hector initially greeted as sheer genius, but on reflection said he didn’t think he’d be bothering the Vice-Chief with it for the time being.
‘Did our boy actually
kill
Niki, Luke?’ Hector inquired, in the most casual of tones.
‘He hopes he did.’
‘Yes. Well, I don’t think I heard any of that, did you?’
‘Not a sound.’
‘It was two other blokes, and any similarity is purely coincidental. Deal?’
‘Deal.’
*
By mid-afternoon on day two, Hector sounded frustrated but not yet downhearted. The Cabinet Office had ruled that a quorum of the Empowerment Committee must after all be convened, he said. They were insisting that Billy Boy Matlock must be fully apprised – repeat
fully
– of all operational details that Hector had hitherto held close to his chest. They would settle for a four-man working party
comprising one representative each from the Foreign and Home offices, Treasury and Immigration. Excluded members would be invited to ratify the recommendations
post facto
, which the Cabinet Office predicted would be a formality. With every kind of reluctance, Hector had accepted their terms. Then quite suddenly – it was in the evening of the same day – the weather changed, and Hector’s voice rose a notch. Luke’s illicit recorder played the moment back to him:
H: The buggers are ahead of us somehow. Billy Boy’s just had the tip-off from his City sources.
L: Ahead of us
how
? How can they be? We haven’t made a move yet.
H: According to Billy Boy’s City sources, the Financial Services Authority is shaping to block the Arena application to open a major bank and we’re the boys who’ve put the knife in.
L:
We?
H: The Service. All of it. The big City institutions are screaming foul. Thirty cross-bench MPs on the oligarch payroll are drafting a rude letter to the Secretary to the Treasury accusing the Financial Services Authority of anti-Russian prejudice and demanding that all unreasonable obstacles to the application be removed forthwith. The usual suspects in the House of Lords are up in arms.
L: But that’s utter bullshit!
H: Try telling that to the Financial Services Authority. All
they
know is, the central banks are refusing to lend to each other despite the fact that they’ve been given billions of public money to do exactly that. Now, lo and behold, along comes Arena to the rescue on its white horse, offering to put hundreds of bloody billions into their hot little hands. Who gives a shit where the money comes from? [
Is this a question? If so, Luke has no answer to it.
]
H [
sudden outburst
]: There aren’t any
unreasonable obstacles
, for fuck’s sake! Nobody’s even begun to
erect
any unreasonable obstacles! As of last night, Arena’s application was rotting in the FSA’s pending tray. They haven’t met, they haven’t conferred, they’ve hardly started their regulatory inquiries. But none of that has stopped the Surrey oligarchs from beating their war drums, or the financial editors being briefed that if Arena’s application is rejected, the City of London will end up a poor fourth behind Wall Street, Frankfurt and Hong Kong. And whose fault will that be? The Service’s, led up the garden path by one Hector bloody Meredith!
Another silence followed – so long that Luke was reduced to asking Hector whether he was still there, for which he received a snappish ‘where the fuck d’you think I am?’
‘Well at least Billy Boy’s aboard for you,’ Luke suggested, by way of offering comfort that he didn’t share.
‘A total turnaround, thank God,’ Hector replied devoutly. ‘Don’t know where I’d be without him.’
Luke didn’t know either.
*
Billy Boy Matlock, Hector’s
ally
suddenly? Hector’s convert to the cause? His newfound comrade-in-arms? A total turnaround?
Billy?
Or Billy Boy buying himself a little reinsurance on the side? Not that Billy Boy was
bad
, not bad like wicked, not bad like Aubrey Longrigg, Luke had never thought that of him – not your devious mastermind, your double or triple agent, sidling between conflicting powers. That wasn’t Billy at all. He was too obvious for that.
So when precisely might this great conversion have occurred, and why? Luke marvelled. Or might it be that Billy Boy had already covered his back elsewhere, and was now ready to offer Hector his ample front, thereby becoming privy to the most closely guarded secrets in Hector’s treasure chest?
What, for instance, had been in Billy’s head that Sunday afternoon when he walked out of the Bloomsbury safe house, smarting from his humiliating put-down? Love of Hector? Or serious concerns for his own position in the future scheme of things?
What great City eminence might Billy Boy, in the days of painful rumination following that meeting, have invited to lunch – famously parsimonious though he might be – and sworn to secrecy, knowing that in the great eminence’s book a secret is what he tells one person
at a time? Knowing also that he has gained himself a friend should events take a tricky turn?
And of the many ripples that might fan out from this one little pebble tossed into the City’s murky waters, who knew which of them might lap against the super-sharp ear of that distinguished City insider and rising parliamentarian, Aubrey Longrigg?
Or Bunny Popham?
Or Giles de Salis, ringmaster of the media circus?
And of all the other sharp-eared Longriggs, Pophams and de Salises waiting to jump on the Arena roundabout the minute it begins to turn?
Except that, according to Hector, the roundabout
hasn’t
begun to turn. So why jump?
Luke wished very much that he had someone to share his thoughts with, but as usual there was nobody. Perry and Gail were outside the circle. Yvonne was off-air. And Ollie was – well, Ollie was the best back-door man in the business, but no Einstein when it came to the cut and thrust of high-stakes intrigue.
*
While Gail and Perry were performing sterling work as proxy parents, troupe leaders, Monopoly players and tour guides to the children, Ollie and Luke had been counting off the warning signs, and either dismissing them or adding them to Luke’s ever-growing worry list.