On another screen, Beach organising checks and barriers and cross-fire. On the first floor. The cameras strained to pierce the darkness that Beach had ordered, the screens glowing grey-blue with the effort to register faces, movement, patches of light skin.
There — ground floor, rear passage. Someone wrapped in dark wool. Face dyed with polish. They meant business. The camera watched the crouching Russian move past and down the corridor towards the kitchen and the hallway beyond it.
Wilkes leaned over and pulled an R/T towards him. Its thick short aerial quivered as he picked it up and tuned it to the frequency he had been told the Russians would be using. Whispers in Russian immediately leaked from it. One of the screens — he imagined he could lip-read and match voice to face — showed the KGB man in command issuing orders, crouched in the well of the main staircase to the first floor.
Wilkes continued to hum. The prisoners huddled at the door, as if eager for their fate. Beach moved — he was registered on a screen showing the back stairs. He'd anticipated, then…
Wilkes was drawn into the tension of the twelve screens. The secure room of the house, in the attic, was silent and aseptic around him, filled with the ozone smells of electricity and static and charged or burnt dust. A screen crackled as he ran his finger across it, cancelling Beach.
For a moment, before the rattle of gunfire and the fall of a body away into the darkness of a staircase, his imagination seemed to throw onto the screen newsreel shots of Vietnam. Protest marches with the Capitol building behind the queue of idiots melted in and out of staring-eyed pictures of fatigued, beaten, hashed-out American faces. Then he blinked away the images as his attention was drawn to another screen.
'I left my heart…' he murmured. And continued: 'Oh, my love, my darling, I've hungered for your touch…' Jimmy Young's voice in his head for a moment, to be replaced by the voices of his grammar school's 1st XV, aboard a coach, on tour in Wales. They were singing 'Unchained Melody' for him and his girl-friend. Now his dull, suburbanised wife, a dull lover and duller mother. The song had been for her and himself, much younger. She'd been pretty then. Enough to have been put in the club…
'I left my heart…' he ground out through his clenched teeth.
The body finished falling, came to rest and silence, in a patch of darkness that the cameras could not penetrate. Then a woolen-jerseyed Russian with a blacked-up face climbed the staircase warily, towards the camera.
'S-waneee, S-waneee, how I lub yuh, how I lub yuh—!' Wilkes burst out, almost giggling. Who was that who'd been killed? He didn't know the name. One down, and the Russians had already moved to the first floor back. Another blacked-up minstrel followed the first up the stairs, teeth gleaming as he whispered urgently into the R/T clamped to his cheek. Wilkes heard his voice like static hissing behind a broadcast.
Wilkes hummed. Beach moved quickly on one screen, two more Vienna Station staffers on another, crouching together, looking scared in the darkness. Russians moved in the main hallway, on the back landing, pressing down the first of the corridors—
To be met. Wilkes jumped to attention in his swivel-chair, startled and surprised; the involved, vicariously- thrilled observer of the drama. Shots, ducking bodies, one cry over the R/T near his hand, that of a wounded Russian. Shots in singles, doubles. Two screens revealed the log-jam, the crouching bodies at either end of the corridor — a single flight of stairs and a corridor away from the prisoners' room.
Come on, come on — don't get stuck now, Wilkes pleaded. He glanced at his watch. Three minutes, a little more. His call would be logged exactly at the embassy. He had to call Parrish now and tell him what was happening. It was his reason — his excuse — for being in the secure room.
And to switch on the alarms—!
He reached over and threw the switch, hearing the bells begin to ring in muffled and distant parts of the house. Then he picked up the telephone. They'd been ordered not to cut the wires, even though they knew the location of the terminal box for the landline. The convincing lie, the final mounting of Aubrey in his gilt frame, began with this telephone call.
He dialled. Shots through the R/T, a body slumping too quickly back out of sight. Two down. A fusilade, then a rush at the stairs by the black-jerseyed group that had gathered in the stairwell, in shadow. Someone at the top of the stairs, outnumbered and running to save himself or to get help.
It was Parrish's direct number. Wilkes blurted the emergency code, screamed for assistance, acknowledged futile orders from the Head of Station, looked at his watch, put down the telephone. He reassumed his passive role before the bank of screens. They held the whole first floor now. Beach and his group were retreating towards the prisoners and the secure room.
Come on, come on—
He had given the operation its time-limit — too soon? Had to. Look suspicious otherwise—
Who was that — Davies? Moving away from the prisoners' door towards the turn in the corridor and the staircase up which Beach and another man were retreating. One, two, three left — and himself, Wilkes; the full complement.
All the screens were empty now, except for those revealing the staircase, the corridor, and the prisoners' room. Davies appeared to be calling out. Above the noise of the alarm on the wall near his head. Then another screen and another revealed the hurried, crouched, run of two men in black. Down that corridor — which? — that corridor, yes, Davies beginning to turn, but they had him and then they had the door-handle to the prisoners' room, then Beach and the other man — who? Liske, was it? Liske. Surrounded. Angry, frightened, letting guns drop, hands and feet spread as they were searched, leaning towards the wall. Beach's face looked up at one camera and stared at Wilkes from the screen. His expression was puzzled, confused. He was wondering where Wilkes had got to, why he hadn't come down… Beach's head shook, then hung defeatedly against the wall as the prisoners were hurried past him. Pleasure, congratulation, delight came in a chorus from the R/T. The bluff was evident, overplayed, easy to interpret. He watched Aubrey and the Massingers moving across the various screens as he measured their progress towards the door, towards the gravel drive and the cars now pulling up to await them.
Aubrey tired and ill and white. Massinger angry, wincing with rage and with the pain in his leg. The woman bruised and weak. For a moment, on every screen, he thought an after-image lingered. His imagination lit each of the screens with flickering memories. Tanks rolling into Prague's Old Town Square and across the Charles Bridge; napalm in Vietnam; Russian MiL-24s in Afghanistan. Black arms raising aloft Kalashnikovs in a sugarcane setting. Red Square parades. The weak, compromising faces of Presidents and PMs. The row of implacable faces and stances along the top of the Lenin Mausoleum, the tanks and missiles passing beneath their gaze.
Then the hard-lit night, the faint whirl of snow in the wind. Aubrey and the other two huddled and bundled into the black cars. The black-garbed team hurrying now, the exhausts smoking in the spotlights. Burgeoning smoke, roaring engines over the still-open R/T—
The movement, then the message.
'OK, Wilkes,' the R/T said, then clicked into an ether-whispering silence.
Finished. Wilkes gazed at the bank of screens. At Beach and Davies and Liske beginning to move, to clatter down the staircase. Almost time to join them. He quite clearly saw images of El Salvador on one screen, on another a retinal image of Sadat's funeral. That inevitable motorcade and the blood on a fashionable pink suit — mini-skirted — on a third screen. The cradled, ruined head in Jackie's lap.
'I left my heart—' he began, but the song faltered. Joke over. The cars had vanished out of the gates of the house. On the screen Wilkes could see the gasworks in the distance.
The West was finished, he had decided. Decided long, long ago. Finished, washed up, a waste of everyone's time. Losers.
He'd stuck by that insight, and the decisions which followed it; and been satisfied. No complaints. He flicked off the screens, one by one. No retinal images now. Only Beach and Davies and Liske running around like chickens with their heads cut off — Liske wounded.
The only thing he'd ever disliked was the KGB's total knowledge of him. They'd understood him, utterly and completely understood him, from the moment he'd first approached them with — with the offer of his services. As if they'd always expected him to turn up—
Working for winners. For those who were ruthless, not half-baked. The winners.
He walked to the door of the secure room, shaking his head slightly. They'd understood him too easily, he was too much like them. He dismissed the idea.
'I left my he-aaart in San Fran-ciscooo…' he whispered intensely, then composed his features to concern and
