Sea Leopard

'In a minute. Look, Tricia Quin is in trouble — not with us, before you harangue me again, with some people who you might think you like, but wouldn't if you met them.'

After a silence, the girl said, 'National security bullshit, I presume.'

'Sorry darling, it's the only excuse I have.'

'Why can't you fucking well leave her alone!' the girl suddenly yelled at him, her face bright red with rage. The mood was sudden, manic in its swing.

'I want to. She has to be protected.'

'Crap.'

'Not crap. Listen to me.' The girl's hands were bunched into fists in her lap, or twitched open, as if gripping some imagined weapon. There was a violence— of rage and guilt and outrage in her that found the body inadequate to express such depths of feeling. 'I can't help the situation in which she finds herself. Blame her father, blame national security, blame the bloody arms race if you want to — but I'm the only chance she's got. People want her because they can get to her father through her. They won't mind what they do to her to discover her father's hiding place. And before you say it — yes, I want her father, too. But I don't want to harm him, and I want to help her.'

His dismissal passed like a flicker caused by dust in her eyes. Politics in place, attitudes firmly fixed, cemented. She would not tell him. Hyde saw the weapon of threat present itself, and wanted to reject it.

'I don't know where she is — and I wouldn't tell you if I did.'

'For Christ's sake, girlie!' Hyde exploded. 'Some of the two hundred or so Soviet diplomats with the ill-fitting suits and the poor-diet boils are looking for your girlfriend right now! When they find her, it will be a little bit of slapping about, then the closed fist, then the bucket over the head and the baseball bats, then the cigarette ends for all I know — they won't have time to talk to her politely, some bigger bastard will be breathing down their necks for results. Even if they wanted to be nice. Your friend could tell them she was a card-carrying member of the Party and they'd pull her fingernails out until she told them what they wanted to know.' He was speaking quite calmly during the last sentence, but the girl's face was white with anger and with surprised fear. There was something unselfish as well as disbelieving about her.

'You really believe all that?' she said at last. Her composure, her closed-minded prejudices, had reasserted themselves. 'Christ, the perfect functionary!'

'My God, but you're stupid —'

Tricia's been frightened out of her mind — don't you realise that?' the girl shouted at him. 'Before her father disappeared, she was depressed, moody, frightened. Then she left — just like that. She hadn't slept a wink the night before. Doesn't that make any impression on you?'

'Was she frightened when you saw her two days ago?'

'Fuck off, clever sod.'

Both of them were breathing hard. Only the wind, moaning more loudly round the building, offered a larger perspective than the cramped hothouse of the small room. The girl's face was implacable.

Hyde stood up, then crossed swiftly to her, clamping his hand over her mouth, holding her wrists in his other hand. He pushed her flat on the bed, kneeling beside her.

'You know what's coming now, darling. You' ve imagined it, talked about it, often enough. You're Blair Peach, love — you're a Black in Detroit, you're Steve Biko. I'm untouchable, darling. It'll be an accident.' He could feel spittle on his palm, and sweat, and her eyes were wide with terror. 'Everything you' ve ever thought about the pigs is true. Now you're going to find out.'

Then he released her, moved away, sat down. The girl wiped at her mouth, rubbed her wrists. When she found her voice, she coughed out his eternal damnation.

'Sorry,' he said. 'You would have told me. Your eyes were already regretting your earlier bravado.' His voice was calm, casual, unemotional. 'We both know that. Tricia would tell them even quicker, even though it was her father.'

'For God's sake — ' the girl began, but there seemed nothing she could add.

'Yes. You're right again. She came here, didn't she?'

'She bloody didn't!' He knew, with an empty feeling, that it was true. The girl appeared hurt and useless. She'd have helped — lied, hidden Tricia, given her money, taken on the pigs, anything. But Tricia Quin hadn't even asked. Hyde felt sorry. Useless energy and emotion slopped around in Sara Morrison, mere ballast for a pointless journey.

'I'm sorry about that. Tell me where she might be, then?' On an impulse, he added: 'Her mother mentioned she hung out with a rock band a couple of summers ago — pot, groupie-ing, the whole naughty bag. Any news on that?'

'Those dinosaurs,' the girl remarked, glancing up at the Two-Tone group posturing down at her.

'Them?' he asked, looking up. The girl laughed.

'You remember a band called Heat of the Day?'

'Yes. I liked them.'

'You're old enough.' The girl had slipped into another skin, represented by half of the posters on the wall, and by the cassette tapes on one of the shelves, next to a huge radio with twin speakers. Something an astronaut might have used to contact the earth from deep space. The girl was now a pop music aficionado, and he someone with parental tastes. Hyde had wondered which way the retreat into shock would take her. It looked more promising than other possible routes, but it would not last long. Eventually, she would be unable to disguise from herself the threat he represented.

'I thought they disbanded.'

'They did. You don't read Melody Maker any more, obviously.'

'Nor Rolling Stone. My age.' He invited her to smile, but she did not respond. She did not look at him now, merely at her hands in her lap. She might have been drugged, or meditating.

'They're back together — on tour. I remember Tricia was interested.'

'How did she get in with them, originally?'

'The lead singer, Jon Alletson, was in school with her brother — the one who emigrated to Canada.'

'Would she have gone to them by any chance, would she still be in touch with them?'

Sara's face closed into a shrunken, cunning mask. 'I wouldn't know,' she said, and Hyde knew the conversation was at an end. In another minute, it would be police brutality, threats of legal action. He stood up. The girl flinched.

Thanks,' he said. Take care.'

He closed the door quietly behind him, hunger nibbling at his stomach, a vague excitement sharp in his chest. Rock supergroup? Friend of her brother? Perhaps the girl knew she was being chased round and round the garden, and had gone to earth where she would be welcomed and wouldn't be looked for, amid the electronic keyboards and yelling guitars and pounding drums, the hysteria and the noise and the cannabis and the young. In that thicket, she would recognise her enemies, from either side, with ease.

It might just be —

* * *

Tedium, anger, even anxiety, were all now conspiring to overpower caution. Aubrey felt within himself a surprising violence of reaction to his hour-long tour of the 'Chessboard Counter' room and operation. The broaching of Proteus's diversion to the Tanafjord proved the sticking point, broke the camel's back of his discretion. Perhaps, he reasoned with himself, it was the blase, confident, aloof manner in which the monitoring action on the stricken Russian submarine was explained that so infuriated him. But images of Quin, with their attendant fears, and the pervasive odour of a possible trap, conspired to assist the wearing of his patience. Clark, too, seemed to be waiting for his cue; expecting Aubrey to make some decisive move, influence events.

And the smoothly running, almost mechanical individuals in the room; the obtrusive freemasonry of serving officers. The sterile hangar of the room; his own sense of himself regarded, at best, as the man from the Pru. He could no longer keep silence, or content himself with brief, accommodating smiles and innocuous questions. The excuse that he merely sought enlightenment regarding Quin's project became transparent in its flimsiness; insupportable. Even so, the vehemence evident to himself, and to Pyott and the others, in his voice when his temper finally broke through, surprised him.

'Giles, what do you hope to gain from this monitoring action?' he snapped. He waved his hand dismissively at