then onto the Great North Road, now driving fast. They’re all willing to die to get me out, Frank thought. Though he was still full of dread about what might happen, he felt a rush of warmth towards his companions.
Around one o’clock, after Geoff had passed round some sandwiches the colonel’s wife had prepared, and Ben had given him another pill, Frank dozed off, dimly aware of the steady hum of the wheels beneath him.
He woke up at the sound of voices. It was getting dark.
‘That’s the second train we’ve seen stopped on the line,’ Ben was saying.
‘Maybe there’s a problem with the signals or something,’ Geoff said. ‘It always seems to happen on a Friday evening,’ he added lightly, as though they were ordinary people off for a weekend drive. Frank looked out of the window. On an embankment beside the motorway, he could see a stationary train and, through its lighted, steamed-up windows, passengers in their hats and coats. ‘Where are we?’
‘Another twenty miles to London.’ Natalia smiled at him as she turned to answer.
They drove on. Frank dozed again. He was woken by the car slowing down. He became conscious of a strange, unpleasant, sulphurous smell. He sat up. It was dark outside. They were in a long queue of traffic, moving very slowly. He realized he couldn’t see any lights from streetlamps or houses, and looking ahead he saw a thick, greasy, swirling vapour in the beam of the headlights. Fog, as thick as he had ever seen it.
He sat up. ‘What’s happening?’
‘We’re stuck,’ David answered. ‘That’s the last bloody thing we need tonight. It started half an hour ago and it’s getting thicker the closer we get to town.’
Geoff whistled. ‘This is some bloody fog,’ he said.
IT WAS THE DENSEST FOG David had ever seen, and he had lived in London all his life. Not ordinary fog but a sulphurous chemical smog, with a greenish-yellow tinge. Swirling in the headlights it looked almost liquid, flowing in little waves and eddies. Through it the traffic crawled along, inch by painful inch. The sharp, sulphuric smell in the car grew stronger, and David felt a stinging at the back of his throat. Behind him, Geoff coughed and David remembered his friend was affected by smog, that he sometimes wore one of the little white face-masks you could buy from the chemists now.
‘Where are we?’ David asked Natalia.
She looked at the map, holding it up to her face. ‘Just outside Watford, I think.’
David pulled down the car window. He could see almost nothing outside; even the streetlights were just hazy yellow smudges, distance impossible to judge. He wound the window up. The car in front juddered forward and David followed, but he could only drive a few yards before halting again. Now he could make out a red glow ahead, and peering through the windscreen he saw, in a brief gap in the eddies of fog, a glowing brazier with the hazy figure of a policeman beside it directing the traffic, his arms made visible only by long white gloves.
David looked in the mirror. Frank, sitting between Geoff and Ben, was staring fixedly ahead, an anxious look on his thin face. ‘You all right there, Frank?’ he asked.
‘What are we going to do? We’re not safe, sitting here. They could get us.’
Natalia leaned back and spoke reassuringly. ‘Nobody knows we’re here. The fog helps us, it must be throwing everything into confusion.’
‘Where are we going?’
‘South of the river. New Cross. To a safe house there.’
‘It’ll take fuckin’ hours in this,’ Ben said impatiently.
‘He’s right,’ Geoff agreed. ‘It’s going to get worse the further we get into the city.’ He coughed again.
David thought a moment, looked at Frank’s scared face in the mirror, then said, ‘We could leave the car at Watford and get the tube to town. At least we’d be moving.’
‘Yes,’ Frank agreed insistently. ‘We should move, we must move. It’s not safe stuck in one place.’
Ben looked at him dubiously. ‘You’d have to stay with us, no more running off.’
‘I will, I promise.’
The car in front jerked forward again. Slowly, painfully, they approached the roundabout. The policeman raised a gloved hand for them to halt. The light from his charcoal brazier cast a strange, dim red glow inside the car. Frank shrank back in his seat. The policeman waved them on and they passed into Watford High Street, moving at a snail’s pace. There was less traffic here but the cars still crawled along; you couldn’t see the tail-lights of the car in front until you were almost on top of it.
All the shops were shut, but eventually they saw the station entrance, indistinct figures moving to and fro in its light. ‘This is it,’ David said. ‘We have to decide.’
‘What about the car?’ Geoff asked.
‘We’ll just leave it,’ Natalia said. ‘There’s nothing to identify us. The number plates are fake. I think there are going to be a lot of abandoned cars tonight.’
They left the car and walked into the station entrance, following the signs for the underground. Frank was in the middle, Ben’s hand on his arm. To David’s relief he showed no sign of wanting to run; rather he seemed happy to have them between him and the anonymous crowds of people milling about. Everyone, it seemed, had decided to take the tube rather than struggle with cars and buses. The fog had even penetrated the station entrance; David could see it swirling around the lights in the tiled ceiling, a dirty yellow-green. He had seen smog several times before, but never this thick.
‘I’ll get the tickets,’ he said to Natalia. ‘What station?’
‘New Cross Gate.’
David pushed his way to the ticket booth, leaving the others standing by the wall, Frank shrinking back against it. David thought, he’s been shut away for weeks, and now he’s in the middle of all this. He bought five single tickets, realizing as he handed over a pound note that he had little money left. He put his wallet back, feeling the hard little pellet of the cyanide pill in his pocket.
They went down the escalator and stood at the back of the platform, which was heaving with people. A train came, but those like them at the back of the crowd were unable to get on. As it pulled out the remaining passengers moved up to the edge of the platform. Next to him David saw Frank looking down at the rails with a sort of horrified fascination. He gripped his arm. It felt painfully thin. ‘All right?’ he asked.
‘All these people,’ Frank muttered. On David’s other side, Geoff coughed again.
Another train rattled in. The doors opened, disgorging a crowd of passengers. They were tired and grumpy and one or two looked ill, coughing or gasping. David, still holding Frank’s arm, guided him quickly to a double seat and sat down beside him.
The journey into London was horrible. The train was packed, more and more people squeezing into the carriage at every stop. People were complaining about the smog, saying they had never seen anything like it. Some parts of the city were worse than others, they said; you could have a patch that was almost clear and then suddenly you couldn’t see a hand in front of your face. It was as though the fog moved about, like a living thing.
Frank sat staring down to where someone had dropped an empty bottle of cream soda, which rattled to and fro on the dusty wooden carriage floor. He watched it intently.
‘Bearing up all right?’ David asked.
‘Yes.’ He did not look up. ‘That bottle.’
‘What about it?’
‘You’d think you could predict how long it would take to roll from one side to the other, where it’s going to end up, but you can’t. Just little variations in the way the train moves change its trajectory.’ He looked at David seriously. ‘People can’t predict things the way they believe they can. Too many variables.’
David knew he was thinking of their journey, the hope of reaching safety. ‘Well, don’t you go rolling away anywhere.’
Frank glanced up. ‘I won’t. I promised you.’
David smiled at him uncertainly. He wished Frank hadn’t told him in the field that his secret involved nuclear weapons. He wondered if those in charge of the abduction knew, or just the Americans. He supposed that if Frank’s knowledge might help the Germans to build an atom bomb, it might help the British as well. And the Russians. Did the Russians have the knowledge or resources to do something like that? Nobody knew; they could have been
