Freddie Gaunt would back her and Justin
Braithwaite had not overruled her.
If she had not been hurt the way she had, belted, bounced off the walls like she was a rag doll, she would not have had that streak: bloody-minded awkwardness, her signature. She yawned again and felt the ache in her shoulders. A maxim of the Service was
'Find, fix, strike, exploit'. She thought, if she could stay awake, she would have the means to exploit.
The technique, using graphite powder – fine and black – was what they taught at the Fort down on the south coast. Recruits on the induction course, computer literate, grinned and patronized the instructor when he lectured on the use of graphite powder and told stories of how it had been used by old men, long retired, from the Service or the Soviet enemy or the east Germans. She had a double page of the Prague Post spread across her desk. On it was the first blank page of the notebook, where top sheets had been torn out. Difficult for her, in exhaustion, to keep her hands steady, but she lifted the sachet of powder and tilted its neck, then let the grains cascade down. God, what a bloody mess.
She lifted the open notebook, hands shaking, shook it and let the powder run on the page, up, down and across. Then she spilled the mess on to the newspaper.
She saw the writing, could make out the faint outline of the digits.
She copied what she read in a wavering hand.
A man had died that another might be given time to flee. A man was tortured and stayed silent that another's flight might be hidden. She saw them both: charred skull, bruised and bloodied features. She had respect for them… She would undo them, make the death and pain wasted. That was her work, done better because of respect.
Polly studied the numbers, then her mind glazed and the sheet of newspaper careered up at her, and the powder was in her nose, eyes and mouth. She slept at the desk and the graphite – a weapon of the long-past war – smeared her cheeks.
A hand shook his shoulder.
Gaunt woke, startled. His arm was thrown out from the blanket and scalding tea slopped on to his chest.
His eyes opened.
Over him, trying to steady the mug, was Gloria.
'Apologies if I frightened you, Mr Gaunt.'
'God… what time is it?'
'Two minutes after six o'clock, Mr Gaunt.'
She was always so precise, what made her so valued.
He reached up, took the tea from her and gulped.
Now that he was awake, she switched on the light.
Its brightness bathed him. He had slept only in his singlet and pants. She gazed at him with rather frank interest. He couldn't see why. He was skeletally thin, his facial features were drawn tight over his bones and his legs and arms were like fencing posts, but his shoulders were strong. Perhaps her interest in his white body, on which the sun was never permitted to shine, came from the absence of a man in her life. He would not have cared to list in priority the three features of her existence. Gloria, as he knew it, had her job, her self-appointed role of caring for Frederick Gaunt, and a spaniel, with the name C hung on a disc from its collar. Gaunt might come first or last, and did not ask. The tea cleansed his mind.
He shivered. New regulations demanded money be saved – of course it should be: without money saved there would not be the resources to pay for bloody pamphlets on glossy paper, The goddam Secret Intelligence Service in 2010 – the central heating came on at seven, no longer at five. He held his spindly arms across his chest, not for modesty but for warmth.
'What's in?'
'Wilco's signal and her passports. Nothing after that.' Then the stern schoolma'am reminder:
'Everybody has to sleep, Mr Gaunt – not just you.'
He drank the last of the tea, then waved the mug towards his desk. 'I think I'd like those pictures up so as we get under the blighter's skin.'
Off the bed. He padded to the door, retrieved his suit trousers from the hanger and slipped into them.
From his desk cupboard he took clean socks, an ironed and folded shirt, a towel and his washbag.
Gloria, the blessed woman, always made sure he had a change of clothes. He collapsed the bed, the blanket inside it, and took it to the little annexe off the office.
Then he was off, his waistcoat, jacket and tie on his arm, shoes in his hand, to wash, shave and ready himself for the day with a cooked breakfast in the canteen far below.
He saw the river traffic from the window and behind the capital city's waterway were the great buildings of prestige and government – any of them could be a target if the co-ordinator came this way.
From the door Gaunt glanced back. She had already Sellotaped the blown-up picture – A3 size – from the Argentina passport to the wall and was tearing off strips to fasten up the photograph lifted from the Canada passport. Strictly forbidden to cover office walls with posters and images – interfered with the master plan of the contract interior designer. The faces, one bearded and one clean-shaven with heavy-framed spectacles, stared back at him, seeming to threaten him. Again, Gaunt shivered, but not with cold.
He traipsed off down the corridor to the solace of the shower and war drums sounded in his ears.
The light came slowly under heavy cloud, and he waited.
The man did not go to the Florenc coach station for long-distance travel, or the principal rail terminus, the Mazarykovo Nadrazi, where the international trains left from. He was at a stop for a local bus that would take him only as far as the edge of Prague. His intention was to move away from the city in short, stuttered steps, not to use the coach station or any of the rail termini that he assumed would be watched.
He had slept rough in the Mala Strana parkland, had not dared since his flight to find a bed in a hostel.
Most of each day he had sat in the shadowed pews of St Thomas Church or St Nicholas Church or the Church of Our Lady Below the Chain, but for part of each of those days he had tramped the streets to learn.
The flight had taken him up through the hatch above the apartment's kitchen, and for a moment there he had reached down and grasped the hand of Iyad, their fists locking together. He had seen into the eyes of the bodyguard and had known that time would be bought for him – an hour, half a day, a day and a night. He would not waste the time. He had crawled, slowly, over the common wall between the buildings, scraping himself into the small space between masonry and roof tiles, and gone at snail's pace over the rafters and had heard TVs, radios and voices below him… and over another building's wall, and across more rafters.
The last had been the hardest. There he had had to scratch out the mortar, centuries old, that held the wall's stones, remove them silently, pray to his God that he did not make a disturbance. He had lifted a hatch, had found himself above a staircase, had dropped down, replaced the hatch, gone down the steps and out into the night air. A policeman had shouted at him: language not understood, gestures clear. The alley was evacuated. Residents should be gone. Why was he so late? His God had walked with him. A woman came behind him and held a pet, a lapdog, in her arms, and the policeman was distracted. The man thought she had slipped back in to retrieve her dog. He had drifted into the darkness.
An artisan, with his work bag on his shoulder, and his head protected against the rain by a cap, broke open a chocolate bar, ate two squares and gave one to the man. They smiled at each other. They were the only two persons waiting for the first suburban bus.
He had gone to the cafe near the coach station. He had seen the vans parked, had stood among the watching crowd and heard the smashing destruction of the search. He had seen the cafe owner led away, cowed and handcuffed. The crowds stayed to witness the show, but the man had sidled away. He had been alone in a strange city with only a tourist street map, a passport and the name of the contact he must reach.
He had thought the vigilance, once the apartment had been stormed and once Iyad's defence was ended, would be greatest in the first hours. He did not know if they had his face or the identity of the passport against his chest.
The chocolate made his stomach growl with hunger, but the bus came in the early thin light and the man travelled on through empty streets, past concrete tower blocks and by old factories, resumed his journey to the north and the coast.
