Shelley rubbed his cheeks with his long fingers and was silent for a time. Eventually, when the tense breathing of both women was audible above the occasional spitting of logs on the fire, he looked up and said: 'It's thin — it's almighty thin.'
'Do you think Mr X existed in 1974?' Alison demanded.
'No, but I believe he exists now — and he isn't Kenneth Aubrey, Mrs Massinger—' She waved the assertion dismissively aside.
'I'm keeping his two guilts apart,' she announced quietly, frostily. 'It is this business which threatens Paul, not my father's murder.'
Shelley nodded. 'Very well.'
'If he exists now, he would have to be high-up, wouldn't he?' Alison asked.
Once more, Shelley nodded, but this time it was in response to some inward image or realisation. 'Yes, he would,' he murmured. 'He would indeed.'
'If he's helping the Russians now — then couldn't he have been the one helping them in 1974?' Alison felt her hands clenching into fists at her sides, felt herself willing her intuition upon her husband. A fragmentary sense of Margaret Massinger's continuing problem, the identity of her father's murderer, was dismissed as soon as it appeared.
'He could… he could indeed,' Shelley said, then: 'It's a very long shot, though.' He looked at Margaret. 'But it would get Paul out of the country for a while — to Germany. He'd be safer there. Can you two do that?'
Margaret nodded, and said: 'But, where? Why?'
'The German security service, BfV, cooperated with Aubrey and our people, later with the M15 investigation. They have files — and we have the man Paul can ask.'
'Who?'
'A German—' He grinned like an adolescent. 'Who owes Aubrey his innocence, his career, his respect… just about everything.'
'Who?'
'Wolfgang Zimmerman.'
'The man—?' Alison began.
'The man the KGB tried to frame as a double agent when the Berlin Treaty collapsed. He can repay Aubrey's efforts now. Time to call in the loan.'
'But — didn't the previous Chancellor sack him?'
'He resigned.'
Margaret was aware that Peter and Alison Shelley were oblivious to her. She envied them their easy communication, their intuitive, quick-minded cooperation. They represented an image that contrasted with her own past days, the rift that had yawned into a chasm between herself and Paul. She would take this chance now, go to Germany with him. Her father would have to wait — as he had waited beneath the ruins of that bombed house in Berlin for five years, decomposing…
She shook her head. Her companions did not notice as their talk bubbled and flew. She had to forget him. She had to help Paul, keep him alive. She could not bear the thought of his death, that new, utter, final loss; the loss of the man who had replaced her father-husband-lover-father Paul.
'Yes,' Shelley was saying to his wife as she attended once more, 'when the plot was exposed, the Chancellor wouldn't take him back on the payroll, but he appointed him Special Adviser to the BfV. The man has a lot of power — he can get into the old files, rake them over for you… even arrange some protection for you.'
'Can you do all this?' Margaret asked confusedly.
'Yes. I can talk to him. He'll do it. Ever since his own people informed him of the debt he owed Aubrey rather than themselves for being cleared, he's wanted the chance to clear the slate. He'll do it.' Shelley's face darkened, then he added: 'Who knows, Ally — we might find your Mr X this way. I think we may have just found another, hidden door into the fortress. A Judas-gate.' He smiled directly, disarmingly at Margaret. 'I should get packed for a trip — discreet departure, I think. You're probably being watched. The flat, certainly, will be under surveillance.' He paused, then added: 'Believe me, Mrs Massinger — you won't be helping the man who killed your father. Kenneth Aubrey couldn't have done that, not even for a personal motive. I swear he could not.'
Margaret Massinger stood up abruptly. 'Thank you, Mr Shelley. Thank you so much.' From her eyes, it was evident she disbelieved Shelley's oath testifying to Aubrey's innnocence.
A burst of wailing pop music from an unlit upstairs window, further back down the alley; someone laughing, then a child's grizzling crying. The smell of food and dung and garbage. Even as the heavy tyres of the BTR-60 armoured personnel carrier squeaked as the vehicle trundled slowly into the square, Miandad was returned to his own childhood. All that was lacking from the familiarity of odours was the hot, foetid scent blowing off the mouths of the River Indus. Here, in Kabul, the night was colder, and the familiar smells changed to sharpness in his nostrils. In Karachi—
No, it was different; the illusion could not be sustained. The personnel carrier was head-on to him now in the dull fire-glow of the infra-red nightsight. There was a flat-helmeted head behind the black hole of the 14.5mm machine gun which was mounted on the squat turret above the two slightly open viewing ports. The rubber eyepiece of the nightsight pressed around the socket of his right eye. He could feel his perspiration becoming chilly beneath his arms and across his back. Behind him, Hyde was waiting, dressed in the dead boy's uniform — Lieutenant Azimov resurrected. Mohammed Jan was behind him, too, with two other Pathans. The rest,of his men — no more than seventeen of them now, after the attack of the patrol — were in their positions around the square. Seventeen, he thought again. Enough, but perhaps only just enough. A shadow-army of fanaticism swelled their numbers.
The BTR-60 came on towards them, skirting the hard-lit square past the shops and the hotel as if it, too, sensed it had no place there. Now, it was no more than seventy yards from the unlit alleyway where he and Hyde and Mohammed Jan waited. Somewhere, a bell struck the hour. Three, four — four in the morning. Miandad's right hand tensed around the forward stock, his finger squeezing gently at the trigger of the rocket launcher. His left hand steadied the slim barrel on his shoulder with the rear stock. The projectile, looking like a miniature closed umbrella, waited at the end of the barrel. The personnel carrier came on. Except for the vehicle, the square was empty; it looked like a stage without performers, a great stadium in which the white light glared and smouldered pointlessly.
Except to him. To him, the square was red. Dull red, like the last of a fire, through which a dark shape composed of wheels, hatches, machine guns, approached. His target. Forty yards away now.
He squeezed the resisting trigger of the RPG-7 launcher. The tube on his shoulder bucked, noise enveloped him. Through the nightsight, he saw the projectile ignite its own internal rocket, then watched the spit of flame moving on its brief, flat, accurate trajectory towards the bulk of the BTR-60.
The HEAT shell struck the personnel carrier just below the slightly open viewing hatches, penetrating the 10mm armour immediately upon impact. The flare of the explosion was like watching a backward-run film of a gunshot. The flame from the projectile was swallowed by the bulk of the carrier which, at the same moment, buckled, swelled like a green, squat toad, and then erupted — two, three, four times its size, then no more than wheels bouncing away, flanks disintegrating into sheets of torn metal, turret opening like flesh sliced with a sharp knife. Smoke, the thunder of detonation, the first tinkling and crashing of windows and falling pieces. Something like a dummy, arms akimbo, was thrown perhaps a hundred feet without its lower torso. Two more dummy-things were flung out of the viewing hatches like jacks-in-the-box. Exploding ammunition filled the square with panic-making firepower.
Miandad loaded a second projectile onto the end of the hot tube of the RPG-7. He glanced up at Hyde. An alarm was beginning to sound in the embassy compound. Incredibly, someone was screaming in the shattered maelstrom of flames. Miandad shuddered, then adjusted his body to comfort in his crouch. He focused the nightsight. The pale concrete of the guard bunker outside the embassy gates was perhaps a little over one hundred yards from where they hid in the alleyway.
'Begin,' Miandad told Hyde. Two Russian soldiers had emerged, dazed and horrified, from the refuge of the guard bunker. Miandad could see their surprised, desperate, fearful faces, very pale even though reddened by the nightsight. They seemed very young, like Azimov. Farmboys or factory-hands, not professional soldiers. 'Good luck,' the Pakistani added.
