For the Good of the State

State and his grandfather’s, before the two world wars had demoted and promoted his line: another tall, raincoated figure, almost as broad-shouldered as Audley himself, waiting now to make them that offer which Audley had chosen not to refuse, with the headlands behind him already fading into the rain-squall which was sweeping into them, and over them, out of the infinite greyness of sea-and-sky which filled half their world.

He lifted his hand, to keep the driving rain off his cheek and out of his ear, and also so that he might hear what Audley might say, as the gap between them decreased step by step; and, at the same time, reached across his chest and felt the weight and shape of the Smith and Wesson; and finally glanced up to scan the gorse-broken skyline above them.

Odd that there was still a scatter of yellow flowers on this sea-blown wuzzy, when there hadn’t been a single flower on the gorse at Mountsorrel: and some of these were winter- browned at the edges (he saw each complex flower with a photographic clarity which surprised him); but others were blooming freshly, defying wind, and winter equally, against all the odds, while all the lower ground-hugging heather flowers were long-dead and colourless—

‘He’s a big bugger, isn’t he!’ Audley’s words, when they came, were utterly inconsequential. ‘I wouldn’t like to meet him in a dark alley in Berlin—either side of the Wall!’

Almost as big as you are—or maybe even bigger! The thought twisted through Tom’s brain, challenging him to wonder what Audley himself had been like in his own dark alleys, years ago, in the dark ages.

Price, Anthony - For the Good of the State

‘He doesn’t even look like a Russian.’ Audley hissed his final useless judgement into Tom’s protected landward ear in the instant that he quickened and lengthened his stride across the last few yards, to the man himself, thrusting out his hand in a classic gesture of false friendship. ‘ General Zarubin! Good morning to you. ’

A shaft of light—it wasn’t true sunlight, but it was something more than the murk which had shrouded them so far—lightened the two big men as they met, as Zarubin matched Audley with his own hand: it was a strange unnatural light, like the light of Limbo, between Heaven and Hell—

‘ Dr Audley—’

Time accelerated and slowed down, spiked on now and on for ever afterwards simultaneously, as the two meat-plate hands reached out towards each other, with an empty yard separating them which would never be bridged as the Major-General seemed to throw himself forward, on to hands and knees, to stare through Audley with blank astonishment in the same now-and-never instant that the bright red blossomed from his white shirt on each side of his tartan tie, and the blood gushed out of his mouth like vomit—

Tom hit Audley with his shoulder, every ounce of his weight spinning the big man sideways against the overhang of the hillside, above the path, even before General Zarubin’s dead body finally subsided into the mud.

Price, Anthony - For the Good of the State

‘ Oooff! ’ The sound of Audley’s breath and his own mingled as they both fell, binding them together into oak-tree-and-ivy flailing together in their fall, with no thought for afterwards. But then Tom’s training (never before exercised like that), and Audley’s lack-of-training (still uninformed from yesterday’s bullet, and still unbelieving), turned them both into a confusion of threshing legs and arms, all trying to re-establish their independence.

‘For Christ’s sake—!’ Audley mouthed the words into his ear.

‘Shut up!’ Tom pushed him down as he tried to sit up, pressing his face into the stony bank below the yellow- flowered gorse. ‘God—!’

God was not an appeal: God was the sight of Nikolai Panin still standing up in the open, above the still-twitching body of Major-General Gennadiy Zarubin, as though the rest of his life had minutes to spare, not seconds. ‘Get down, man! For God’s sake—!’

Panin threw away another precious second in shifting his surprised look from the hillside above to Tom. Then he hunched himself ludicrously, as though to make a smaller target, and sank to his knees beside Zarubin.

To hell with him! thought Tom, as Audley pushed and heaved beneath him. He could take his bloody chances!

‘Damn you, Tom! Let me up, damn you!’ Audley swore at him.

‘You stay right where you are.’ Tom kept his elbow on Audley’s neck as he watched Panin raise his comrade’s body slightly, and simultaneously tried to remember the instant of the bullet’s impact.

Because there was a dark mark no bigger than a shilling high up on the broad expanse of Zarubin’s back, just above the shoulder-Price, Anthony - For the Good of the State blade: so the high-velocity bullet had come downwards steeply, shattering flesh and bone, to blossom that huge exit-wound where the shirt had reddened—had come downwards from not far away, and not more laterally from some distance greater ahead of them—

He couldn’t hold the big man down much longer—

That was right! Because the three men had been hugging this same overhang above the path, where the wind hadn’t been so fierce, when he had first glimpsed them.

So the killer hadn’t killed before because he hadn’t had a clear shot until Zarubin stepped out to greet Audley —

Christ! The next thought rolled Audley away from him, even as he cleared the Smith and Wesson from its holster. ‘Get down, David!’

‘What the devil—?’ Even in the instant of his release Audley picked up his panic signal, and shrank into the overhang obediently.

‘Where’s Sadowski?’ Tom snarled at Panin.

‘Sadowski?’ The Russian let go of Zarubin’s shoulder, and the body dropped back into the mud as though gravity finally had a stronger claim on death than on life. ‘Major Sadowski is doing his duty, Sir Thomas.’ He looked down at the blood on his hand with evident distaste. But then calmly wiped it off on the dead man’s raincoat before looking up again at Tom. ‘Just as you are doing now.’

The freak wind suddenly howled around them, swirling the sharp raindrops into Tom’s face from a new direction, half-blinding him.