He unbuttoned his tunic and reached into its inside pocket for the map of Kabul they had given him. He stopped the car in the narrow, silent street that was little more than an alley, and switched on the courtesy light over his head. He studied the river, the warren of narrow streets, the broad Soviet-Western thoroughfares, the suburbs, the road to Jalalabad.
A helicopter beat low over the buildings that lined the street, startling him. His finger twitched on the map where it had been tapping the location of the bazaar, his point of rendezvous with the Pathans and Miandad.
The narrow street was grey now, not black. Hanging lines of washing emerged from the featureless profiles of blocks of flats. Many windows were lit. A helicopter made another pass over the street in the direction of the square. He laid the map on the passenger seat, checked Petrunin's unconsciousness once again, and accelerated. The visualised map of the city's network of avenues, streets and alleys unrolled in his head. He reached for the red light, to attach it to the roof, and looked for the switch for the staff car's siren. It would be easy. He would move in the direction of army headquarters, only turning into the warren of the bazaar district at the last moment, doubling back through the chilly, vile, winding alleys and packed-earth streets to the rug maker's shop.
He reached out of the window and clamped the red light to the roof. New York, he thought. Playing cops. Behind him, Petrunin murmured and Hyde turned, startled into a sense of danger once more. The hand that still held the red light twitched, then let go of the seeming-toy that had reminded him of celluloid policemen and blank cartridges. He stopped the car at the end of the alley and turned in his seat to look at the Russian, as if for the first time.
The man was still unconscious. In the faint grey light of the first of the dawn, his features appeared sickly, unfed. There were deep lines in his cheeks and brow and beside his lips. He looked much older; he looked vulnerable and alone and someone who had become superannuated and unable to frighten Hyde any longer. Yet this was only a sleeper's mask. Hyde had been shocked by the changes he had seen in Petrunin's face the moment he had slammed shut the door of his office. Older, cunning, the eyes haunted, even totally empty until they filled with a transitory fear and then with a violent urge towards self-preservation. He had come face to face with a savage, degenerate man, someone who had taken lives indiscriminately and often — and had learned to enjoy that power; desiring and needing it. He had been certain of that from the moment the red helicopter had hovered, watching the incineration of fifty tribesmen in the narrow, snow-covered valley. Petrunin's altered, corrupted face had confirmed Hyde's certainty.
Hyde shook his head. He rubbed his throat where the uniform collar had chafed his skin after the loose robes of his Pathan disguise. Disguise — the clothes had smelt, but it wasn't that, either. He hated, had come to hate, the way they implied a common identity between himself and someone like Mohammed Jan. He dismissed the Pathan's image and returned his consideration to the unconscious Petrunin. He had become a wild, dangerous animal, instead of a senior KGB officer bound by the unwritten rules governing the conflicts between intelligence services. Like the Pathans he pursued and destroyed, he was without emotion and mercy.
Hyde realised that he could never trust the Pathans with regard to Petrunin. It would mean his having to travel in the rug maker's delivery truck towads Jalalabad when it left Kabul within the next half-hour, hidden in the back with the Russian. Without him, Petrunin would be a corpse by the time the raiding party took to the mountains.
Petrunin moaned again, entertaining nightmares. Hyde turned his back. The self-loathing that he could not avoid sensing in that low moan chilled and disturbed him. He felt the reality of the alien country and people around him once more. Petrunin was a prisoner of the war he fought. He had become, in essence, a light-skinned Pathan. How would he, he wondered, ever get this Petrunin to talk? What — tortures…?
Mutilation followed by an offer of the release of a quick death — would he have to use those threats, those bribes? He dismissed the Pathan thought.
Savagely, he pressed his foot on the accelerator and slewed the staff car out of the alley and onto a broad thoroughfare that might have belonged in any city of eastern Europe that the Soviets had rebuilt after the war; even in Moscow it would have been familiar. The wide road ran alongside the river, a sullen grey scarf in the first light. In the distance, the Hindu Kush was tipped with bright gold. Hyde accelerated. The mountains seemed impossibly high and endless, and alien like the streets of Kabul.
Aubrey left the main passenger lounge of the ferry because the carelessly disposed bodies of those sleeping suggested defeat to him and the high, raised voices of parties of schoolchildren seemed to taunt. The lights, too, were hard and unsympathetic. On deck, the wind was sharp and buffeting and chilly. Nevertheless, he made his way towards the stern. Long before he reached it, he felt himself to be an old, skulking figure, displaced and exiled. And, as if they had gathered to witness his departure from England, he could see the lights of Brighton along the coast, slipping behind the Dieppe ferry.
He had avoided Dover almost superstitiously, suspecting that any search for him would be concentrated there. He had not rung Mrs Grey — he could net bear to discover that the hunt was up. His journey from Victoria had been uneventful, the pursuit confined to the tumbled and broken terrain of his thoughts. His fears had chased him across the landscape of his imagination.
He gripped the stern rail, which immediately struck cold through his gloves. Brighton, a town he had never much liked, now appeared infinitely desirable; the last rescue craft moored to his country, ablaze with light. The wind filled his eyes with water. He refused to acknowledge the tears for what they were. Instead, he tried to concentrate upon the ease of his escape. One bored policeman at Victoria had seemed more interested in the antics of two drunks than in looking for someone like him. The passport that he had always renewed in a fictitious name had served him well. SIS knew nothing of this falsehood. It was a private matter. Almost everyone in the intelligence service possessed at least one other and unofficial identity. It was, to Aubrey, the twitch of distrust at the very centre of the animal that was always alert for the possibilities of deception. There was a subconscious comfort in possessing a secret and unused new identity. The secret world was habit-forming, perhaps incurable.
But him—? Him—
He was skulking away from England. The wind now seemed like an obscuring curtain drawn between himself and the lights of Brighton. The wake of the ferry straggled away into the darkness like a lost hope. Him—
He thought of them, then. The others. The secret others. The notorious ones, most of whom he had known or met or questioned at some time. William Joyce, sitting detached and even amused in the dock of the Old Bailey after the war. Lord Haw-Haw, voiceless. Then Fuchs, then Burgess and Maclean and Philby and Blake and Blunt, and others behind them. It was as if he had become a dream through which they paraded, much as the Duke of Clarence had seen the ghosts of those he had helped his brother to murder on the night they came to drown him in the butt of wine. He saw his own ghosts, who seemed to wish to number him among them. Traitors.
Aubrey knew he was full of self-pity. He looked down at the choppy, churned water as if it offered escape, then sniffed loudly. He was filled with anger, too. More than forty years of loyalty. When Joyce and Mosley had become Fascists and Blunt and the others had become Communists in secret, he had enlisted in the service of his country.
And now his country was slipping away below the horizon, only a haze of lights to remind him of its position, its existence. He was going into exile. When they discovered him gone, they would search for him, then they would wait until the mole popped its head above ground in Moscow to collect its medals and state pension.
In the darkness, too, he heard the laughter of his father, that ugly, exultant barking at the misfortunes and come-uppances of others that had served him as a source of satisfaction for as long as Aubrey could remember. The verger had hated the secret life, and Aubrey had often suspected that he had escaped into it to put a final and complete barrier between himself and his father. Perhaps he might not have been able to keep it from his mother, but she died while he was still at school. His increasingly infrequent visits to his father had been filled with that abiding satisfaction, that his whole adult life was a secret from his vindictive parent. Now, years after his death, his laughter at his son's downfall could be heard on the dark wind.
The noises of teenage horseplay — someone threatening to throw someone else overboard, he thought — interrupted his reverie. His body was chilled anew by the wind and the company. One of the group lurched into him, reeling from the spring of one of his companions. Aubrey shrivelled away from the contact. He clenched his lips to prevent an escaping moan of protest.
'Sorry, Grandad,' a black face said, and disappeared laughing. Aubrey felt his whole body shaking. He gripped the rail fiercely. The wake seemed to fade close to the ship. Brighton was a smudge of lights, no more. He
