‘Did he have any family?’
‘I don’t think so. He had an aunt who brought him up, he once told me. Exeter, I believe.’ She glanced across. ‘What about you?’
The change of tack surprised him. ‘No.’
‘Wife… girlfriend?’
‘That’s private.’ He definitely wasn’t going to discuss Jean. Not with her.
‘I’m Six,’ said Clare. ‘Nothing’s private.’
He said nothing. After a mile or so, she said vaguely, ‘I should tell you, the target I got burned by?’
‘What about him?’
‘It was a woman.’
‘What’s this?’ he murmured, ‘you show me yours and I show you mine?’
Before he could take it further, she was sitting forward, staring through the windscreen. ‘What’s this?’
They drew level with a khaki-coloured jeep with its nose buried in a bank at the side of the road. It looked abandoned. Later, they saw a military truck on jacks, with three soldiers struggling to change a shredded tyre. They stared as the Land Cruiser swept by, and Harry watched in his side mirror as one of the men leaned into the cab and backed out holding a radio. Calling home?
Two miles further on, he had his answer.
They were rounding a long, sweeping curve over a wooded gully, when Clare jammed on the brakes and called a warning. The tyres bit into the rough road, causing the vehicle to bounce, and she wrestled with the wheel as it threatened to tear itself out of her grip.
Harry had enough time to grab for his seat, when he noticed a line of soldiers scattering from the road right in front of them.
TWENTY-THREE
Stones hammered underneath the car like machine-gun fire and a dust cloud billowed up around them as they skidded to a halt. Amid a volley of shouting and the rattle of automatic weapons being cocked, the doors were wrenched open and soldiers motioned them to get out.
Harry moved slowly with his hands in clear sight. All it needed was a stumble and one trigger-happy soldier, and all hell would break loose. Some of the soldiers looked nervous, and he put their average age at little more than twenty. Then a large figure pushed through the men, waving away the dust cloud.
It was Geordi Kostova.
Behind him came Nikolai. They looked at ease among the troops, who moved aside without complaint to let them through. Kostova motioned Harry to stay where he was, and signalled for Clare to follow him. They walked away a few yards, with Nikolai close by, and the mayor made a display of studying Clare’s passport. He rattled off a few questions, with gestures towards Harry, and although the words were indistinct, the bite in his voice was in distinct contrast to when he had spoken to Harry in the restaurant.
Harry concentrated on trying to stay calm and ignored the weapons pointed at him. Some of the men searched the inside of the vehicle and made a show of moving the seats and playing with the instruments.
An older man thrust his face forwards. ‘You American?’ He jabbed a grimy finger at the Land Cruiser, clearly seeing it as a badge of US wealth. ‘CIA? NYPD?’
‘Not me, mate.’ Harry smiled, one eye on Kostova and Nikolai. They seemed at ease, but he wondered how friendly they really were. Would Kostova help them out if things got nasty? ‘I work for the British Council. Education? Arts? Culture?’
The man scowled but fastened on one word.
‘British? Ah, yes. British.’ He looked towards Clare and asked, ‘What she do?’
‘She?’ Harry rolled his eyes. ‘She drives like a woman.’
The translation prompted an outbreak of laughter, and two of the men mimed jumping clear of the Land Cruiser at the last minute with slapstick grimaces and cries of alarm. Eventually, they lost interest and wandered away, lighting cigarettes.
When Clare returned to the car, she climbed behind the wheel and signalled for Harry to get in. Kostova and Nikolai stayed in the background, watching. When they were on their way back towards town, she asked Harry to pass her another cigarette.
‘That was lucky,’ she said, blowing out smoke. Her voice was shaky. ‘He said if we’d been anyone else, we would have been shot.’
‘Why?’ Harry said. ‘Is this a restricted road?’
‘It is now. Military use only. They must have closed it after we took the fork back there.’
‘Kostova must have clout, lording it over the military like that.’
‘He has.’ She glanced at him with a frown. ‘What was all the laughter for?’
‘I told them that back home you were a rally driver.’
She smiled. It transformed her face, an insight into how attractive she was under the cool exterior. A deliberate mask, he wondered, or a conscious desire to be as different as possible from the character she must have played in her deception role?
‘Did Kostova say what all the military is for?’
‘There’s been a general mobilization. All leave has been cancelled, all units are on stand-by, and there’s a push north towards the border.’
‘That was open of him.’
‘Perhaps because he knows they can’t hide it any longer.’ She pointed skywards, signifying the satellite overview of the planet from which very little could be hidden, then threw the cigarette out of the window with a grimace of distaste. ‘He also confirmed the general talk gathering pace around town for a few days.’
‘What’s that?’
‘The Russians are coming. Can you believe that?’
TWENTY-FOUR
‘ You told me Jimmy Gulliver got back.’ Harry pushed into Mace’s office without knocking. Clare Jardine was in the outer office, typing up a report for London on what they had seen that morning.
Mace looked up from his desk, blinking like an owl. An empty glass stood by his elbow, a smear of colour across the bottom. Brandy or whisky, Harry guessed, and not the first. ‘What?’
‘You said Jimmy Gulliver returned to the UK. Where did he go?’
‘I can’t tell you that. Restricted information.’
‘Crap. Who’s going to know?’
Mace chewed on his lower lip. It was like watching a laborious series of checks and balances being considered before spewing out a response.
‘You’re pushing your luck, lad,’ he muttered finally.
‘Don’t call me lad. I’ve been around the block nearly as many times as you.’ Harry was ready for a fight. The idea of being here for months was already getting to him, but now something else was niggling away at him, disturbing his frame of mind.
‘Why hasn’t Gulliver been in touch?’
‘Christ, what is it with you about Gulliver? Maybe he doesn’t give a rat’s backside. We’re history to him — so what? He’s hardly going to look back on this as his finest hour, is he?’ Mace breathed deeply and shook his head. He sat back with a wave of his hand. ‘OK… y’right. What difference does it make? No big secret any more.’ He coughed and stared at the surface of his desk as if it might contain a script he could read from. ‘Jimmy Gulliver. Good lad, he was… for a Sixer. Crying shame.’
‘What did he do, to bring him here?’
