Dan McLachlan had plainly and simply ignored his, anyway: the Russian Alek—the deadly man with the gun— walked five yards ahead of him along the beaten path on the top of the Wall, his hands held stiffly above his head. The stiffness, even at this distance, suggested to Butler that Alek was extremely nervous, which was reasonable enough with a shotgun in the hands of an amateur pointed at the base of his spine; a shotgun held one-handed, too—over his left shoulder McLachlan carried the spoils of war, a delicate-looking long-barrelled sniper's rifle.
Butler understood the reason for Alek's nervousness. Apart from the public humiliation of it, that casually-held shotgun was enough to frighten anyone. And that shot, a
dummy2.htm
Even as they watched him McLachlan raised the captured rifle in the air triumphantly, very much as he had waved the croquet mallet the evening before.
'The cheeky devil!' murmured Richardson. 'You know, David's never going to believe this. Never.'
Butler grunted non-committally.
'You think not?' Richardson's tone indicated that he found Butler's reaction ungracious. 'Well, I tell you one thing for sure: he's damn well saved our bacon. We don't have to mix it with Mike Klobucki's nonviolent friends any more. They can demonstrate until they're blue in the face now, thank God.'
Butler was slightly surprised at the feeling in Richardson's voice. Then he noticed, with an ignoble sense of satisfaction, that Richardson had the beginnings of a fine black eye.
'True. They can go or stay as they please now,' he replied curtly.
'And Alek?'
'You take him back to Castleshields. Then drive him to Carlisle or Newcastle and turn him loose.'
'Turn him loose!' Richardson's dented nonchalance cracked.
'Aye. He hasn't done anything.'
That was the irony of it all: nobody had done anything. Apart from a few punches on the causeway, which the demonstrators would soon forget in the interest of their own self-respect, the slate was clean.
Because of that, this operation would never go down as a famous victory, a close-run thing. Only a handful of people would know that the realm had been successfully defended without fuss, which was the mark of the most desirable conclusion.
Only one job remained now, to finish what Neil Haig Smith had started.
XIX
NOW THAT IT was no longer required, the drizzle perversely thickened into steady, slanting rain. With it the visibility quickly closed in around them, blotting out first the more distant ridges to the north and south, and then the crags on each side.
Butler stood silent, watching the bedraggled procession fading into the mist beyond the causeway. Their dummy2.htm
heads were down and their shoulders hunched against the downpour. Only Alek walked with any suggestion of spirit.
But then the sun shone for Alek, a sun of survival that no English weather could dim. How much he had known, or how much he had hoped, Butler couldn't tell. But knowing the way the KGB worked he guessed Alek had known little beyond the inescapable truth that he was the expendable man in this operation; the man with the dangerous and thankless task, the one-time tiger who had been demoted, like Butler, to the role of staked goat.
Butler had recalled that same feeling of bitter impotence so vividly—he had been prey to it himself less than twenty-four hours before—that it had softened the rough edges from the few words he had spoken to the man. It had not exactly warmed him to say those words—that would have betrayed a most dangerous and wrong-headed sentimentality. But it felt like an assertion of humanity as well as strength to grant freedom to an enemy.
So now Alek knew one more thing: that against all the likely odds he had once more survived. Until the next time, anyway.
McLachlan coughed diplomatically behind him.
'If we don't go and collect Polly soon we're all going to get soaked to the skin.' A lock of damp hair fell across the boy's face in agreement with his statement. 'I think the rain up here's wetter than the stuff down south, you know.'
Butler nodded. 'All right. Let's go then.'
McLachlan picked up the shotgun and fell into step beside him.
'That chap with the rifle—that was a bit of luck, you know.'
'I don't doubt it.'
'I mean... I just stumbled on him. He was fiddling with his gun—it wasn't loaded. I think he was putting it together.'
'You were lucky then, weren't you!'
'What I mean is, I didn't forget what you told me, sir,' McLachlan went on stiffly. 'But I didn't have any choice.'
'Aye, I can believe that,' said Butler.
dummy2.htm
McLachlan started to say something, then stopped in deference to Butler's taciturn mood, shaking his head to himself at the unfairness of it nonetheless.
They climbed in silence for a while along the track beside the Wall. The rain-mist thickened around them as they ascended, while the Wall itself rose and fell beside them, sometimes only waist-high and sometimes head- high, cutting off the edge of the cliff beyond it. And as they went higher the rocky outcrops on the open southern side began to build up too, enclosing them on the narrow path as between two walls, one natural and the other
