this. She knew that graft, logic and occasional inspiration solved problems in their world, not some kind of daft women’s intuition.
‘I like having you work with me,’ said Lyne. ‘You’re solid talent right through. The real thing. But if you’re going to buck against this, you may feel you’re more comfortable quitting and going back to Vauxhall Cross.’ Then he slapped his forehead. ‘Hey, you know what, I have an idea for getting you out of here for a while but not losing you entirely.’
‘What is it?’
‘I’ll tell you when I’ve talked to Jim Collins and Lord Vigo. Meantime, get your ass back to work.’
She returned to the desk, picked up the phone and dialled a number in Beirut. After a little while a familiar English voice answered. Sally Cawdor was placing her ineffably sunny nature at Herrick’s disposal.
In the headquarters of Albanian State Security in Tirana, Khan heard the other prisoners being beaten and brutalised during the day, and at night the groans and terrified whispers between the cells. Yet the interrogators did not lay a hand on him and after a week he was beginning to recover some of his health. They fed him well, or at least regularly, with pasta and potatoes and chicken broth. On the third day they even called a doctor to stitch the lip split by Nemim’s cane. The doctor smelled his breath and gave him antibiotics for the abscess. Throughout the visit the man did not say a word, but before leaving he touched Khan’s shoulder lightly and gave him a strange look, as though measuring him in some way, gauging his character.
PART TWO
CHAPTER TEN
Robert Harland inched upwards from his chair in the cafe on 31st Street and waited for the spasm to shoot from his lower back into his leg. He gritted his teeth as the pain reached a point behind his knee in a pure molten form. For a month now he had not been able to lie down, and had to sit perched on one buttock, holding his leg out at a particular angle. When he walked, he had first to stand, slowly stretching his frame, then move off with his right side leaning down and his head turned up to the left. The pain was unrelenting and lately, as he dragged himself between specialists, he’d begun to wonder if it would ever leave him.
He shuffled out of the way of the people on the sidewalk and reached a gingko tree where he fought for a space with a dog that scurried round him before squirting the other side of the trunk. He breathed in. Eva had once told him he could breathe into pain, but it didn’t help. What did help was the neat whisky he had poured into the black coffee. It blunted his senses, and he resorted to it increasingly even though he had been warned not to mix it with the anti-inflammatory drugs, pain-killers and sleeping pills.
He started looking out for a cab to take him just six blocks to the Empire State building. A couple cruised by with their lights on but did not see him flap his arm wanly from the kerb. Finally a waiter came out of the cafe and asked if he could hail one for him, but Harland had changed his mind. New York cabs were as much of a problem for him as a convenience. The only way he could travel in one was by almost lying across the back seat, exposing his spine to the full force of the jolts as the cab surfed over the bumps and metal plates that lay in Manhattan’s streets. That was his life today, a querulous, narrow existence filled with obstacles. The pain had come to occupy his whole being and it was now a matter of making small gestures of resistance. He decided to walk, whatever it damn well cost him, and moved off slowly, forcing himself to take notice of the early summer sun pouring into Park Avenue. He summoned Benjamin Jaidi to his thoughts.
The Secretary-General had called him at home that morning from a plane somewhere over North Africa and ordered him to phone Dr Sammi Loz. With a thousand things on his mind and a Middle East crisis, he was apparently worrying about Harland’s mysterious condition. True, the injury had prevented Harland from carrying out a mission on the West Bank in advance of Jaidi’s arrival in the Middle East and he had been irritated. Still, it was thoughtful of him to have phoned and elbowed a space in Loz’s schedule late that afternoon.
‘The appointments with this man are like gold, you understand,’ said Jaidi. ‘He will cure you, I have no doubt of that. But in return I will expect you to look after my friend. I believe he may be about to enter a difficult period. This is the deal, Harland.’
It was typical of Jaidi to leave the conversation without specifying the doctor’s difficulties or how Harland could be expected to help. But Harland had heard of Loz and dared to hope that, after the procession of chiropractors, nerve specialists and bone doctors, this man would do something for him.
He reached 5th Avenue and turned right towards the Empire State building. Now the sun was on his back and with the effort of walking like a clown he began to sweat profusely, something that Harland, once so fit and trim, loathed intensely. He paused and looked up at the building thrusting into the brilliant, almost white sky above Manhattan and remembered lines that Jaidi had pointed out to him. ‘This riddle in steel and stone is at once the perfect target and the perfect demonstration of non-violence, of racial brother-hood, this lofty target scraping the skies and meeting the destroying planes halfway.’
Jaidi had said, looking out over the city from his suite in the UN tower, ‘That was written in forty-eight by E.B. White, about the very building we’re standing in now. “A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy.” A great artist must be prescient, don’t you think, Harland? He must know things even though he doesn’t understand where they come from. Troubled times, Harland. Troubled times.’
Harland reached the entrance where a line of doughty American tourists stretched round the corner into 34th Street, passed through security and took the elevator to the sixty-fourth floor. He was grateful to be in the cool and when he got out of the elevator, he rested a while, mopping his face and neck, regretting the whisky which he knew had caused the sweating fit and made him smell. He looked around. The corridor was quite silent, except for the gasp and whine of the elevators as they rose and plunged through the 1,200 odd feet of the Empire State. A door opened and a man in shirt-sleeves looked out and examined Harland pointedly before turning back inside. At the far end of the corridor another man in a suit and tie showed a close interest in him. Harland called out to ask where Dr Loz’s office was. The man gestured with a turn of the head. ‘Four down on the right,’ he said and returned to his newspaper. As Harland crept along the wall, he passed a third man, sitting just inside an open door. This one was armed and wasn’t bothering to hide it.
He pushed on the door that announced Dr Sammi Loz DO FAAO and found a slender man in a smoke-blue tunic buttoned to the neck, standing behind the reception desk. He moved out to greet him.
‘You must be Robert Harland. Forgive me, I’ve sent my assistant off to organise the clinic at the hospital this evening.’ He stood still for a moment, his eyes running over Harland. ‘Yes, you are in a lot of pain.’ Loz was in his mid-thirties, with a high forehead, wavy, well-groomed hair, a thin, slightly aquiline nose and a generous mouth that spread easily into a smile. Harland guessed he was Iranian or Armenian, though he spoke with an unimpeachable English accent and his voice was modulated with concern as his eyes made easy contact with Harland’s. ‘Yes, we’re going to have to do something about this immediately. Come,’ he said, gesturing to a room. ‘Come in here and take the weight off your feet.’
Harland perched on a raised bed, now nauseous with the pain. Loz began to take down his medical history, but seeing that Harland could no longer really concentrate, helped him off with his trousers and shirt and told him to stand facing the wall. After examining him from behind for a minute or two, Loz moved round to his front and looked at his patient with a gaze directed about five inches to the right of him, in order, Harland assumed, to see his whole. He placed one hand on Harland’s sternum and the other in the middle of his back and exerted a tiny amount of pressure for about five minutes. His hands began to dart around his torso, pausing lightly on his upper and middle chest, neck, spine and the top of his pelvis. He was like a Braille reader finding meaning in every bump and depression, and once or twice he paused and repeated the movement to make sure he had not misunderstood. Then his hands came to rest on the marks and scars on Harland’s contorted body and he peered up into his face to seek confirmation of what he suspected. ‘You’ve had a rough, tough old life, Mr Harland. The Secretary-General told me you were the only survivor of that plane crash eighteen months ago at La Guardia. I remember seeing your picture on the television news. That was something. ’
Harland nodded.
‘And these burn marks on your wrist and ankles, the scars on your back. These are older, aren’t they? What
