‘Dalby said it’s not him that laid the complaint?’ I asked.
‘No — he said that one department gives you a higher clearance than he has at present — him working away from the office caused that of course — he didn’t seem very happy about that, by the way.’
She paused, and said apologetically, ‘Did you kill those men?’
‘Yes,’ I said a little viciously, ‘I killed them. That brought my total up to three, unless you count the war. If you count the war…’
‘You don’t have to explain,’ Jean said.
‘Look, it was a mistake. There’s nothing anyone could do. Just a mistake. What do they want me to do? Write to Jackie Kennedy and say I didn’t mean it?’
Jean said, ‘He seemed to think they’d wait to see if you made a contact before doing anything. He wondered if Carswell was working with you, and radioed a code message to have Carswell and Murray isolated.’
‘He’s too late,’ I said. ‘They bludgeoned me into giving them a leave of absence just before we left.’
‘That will probably convince Dalby,’ Jean said. She looked great with the sun behind her and I wished I had more of my frontal lobes to spare to think about it.
‘That Carswell’s my contact?’ I mused. ‘Maybe. But I’d say he’s more likely to suspect you.’
‘
‘I know that, dope. If I was really working for the KGB I’d be smarter than to be suspected, and I’d know who my contact was before I reached an island like this one, or there’d be no way for me to cross-check on you. But since I’m not working for that six-storey building in Dzerzhinsky Street, there isn’t a contact, so you’re not one.’ Jean splashed a foot deliberately into the water and smiled a childlike smile. The sun was behind her head like the open door of a Scunthorpe steel furnace. A light breeze coming off the ocean had her dress clinging like cheap perfume. I dragged my mind back to earth. She said, ‘It seems I didn’t listen as closely as you did at Guildford.’
A tank track lay half out of the water like a giant caterpillar, and the waves spurted and splashed through the intricacies of the interwoven castings. Beyond us, B61, the tank with one track missing, lay head down in the glistening foam. The sea, to which it had returned in a great involuntary semicircle, drummed and slapped at the great metal hull in restless derision. Jean stopped and turned back to me; across her gold face a strand of black hair hung like a crack in a Sung vase. I must concentrate.
‘Suppose you don’t work for the KGB but whoever thinks you do, wants to do something to stop it, what will they do?’
‘It’s something no one in our position ever dares think about,’ I said.
‘But suppose it happens. Then they have to think about it.’
‘OK,’ I said, ‘then they think about it.’
Jean’s voice was husky, a bit edgy and rasplike. I realized she’d spent a lot of night time wondering what to do about me, and at least I owed her enough not to kid her around.
I said, ‘They don’t give them free legal aid at the Old Bailey, and let them sell their memoirs to the Sundays if that’s what you mean.’
‘No, that’s what I thought,’ she said. ‘It’s only multiple murderers who are allowed to do that.’ She paused. ‘So what does happen?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It’s never happened to me before. I suppose it’s “Slip your feet into this bag of wet cement, the boat’s just leaving.”’
The breakers bombarded the reef in thundering crashes that shook the sand beneath our feet.
‘It’s getting chilly,’ she said. ‘Let’s go back to the car.’
Chapter 21
[
The next two days were nerve racking. Life on the atoll busied itself into a frenetic but organized scramble as the day for the explosion neared. As far as I could tell, my role as observer was uninterrupted, and my entree to the dreariest possible conferences unfortunately unimpeded. Jean and I had few opportunities for more than a word or so without the risk of being overheard or recorded. Our decision to appear rather distant meant a chance of remaining unimplicated for her — but a feeling of sharpened desire in me that no man should feel for his secretary if he wants to stay in a position to fire her. I saw her waiting for signatures or documents in the long grey fibreboard corridors. While standing still, her smooth body would move — slowly and imperceptibly — under the thin summer uniform fabric, and I would think of the small circular gold ear-ring of hers that I had found in my bed-clothes on Wednesday morning.
More times than I care to provide excuses for, I edged past her in narrow corridors and doorways. Electricity passing between us assuaged the deep aloneness I felt. My desire wasn’t a burgeoning pent-up explosive fullness, but a gentle vacant need. Fear brings an edge to physical desire sharper than a Toledo blade, and a pitch more plaintive than a Dolmetsch flute.
I’d spent most of the two days working closely with Dalby. It was a pleasure. The difference between Dalby and the other people from the Intelligence units with his background was his readiness to use information from his inferiors — both socially and militarily speaking. He was prepared to let the technicians conclude opinions from their data, where others would try to understand the techniques in order to jealously guard the privilege of deciding anything at all.
Jean and I had discovered the box in the blockhouse on Tuesday. On Thursday the General Commanding — General Y. O. Guerite, had invited all commissioned men and available girls to a party in his house.
The General’s house backed on to one of the coves on the rocky side of the island. The sun made the tree trunks a pink that stampeded the gastric juices. Once more the sunset was a layer cake of mauve and gold. The insects had come out to do their daily battle with the resources of the American chemical industries, and through the trees an obliging Engineers Corps had remembered to provide lines of winking fairy lights. Large martinis clinked with ice and glowed with lemon and cherries. Small pasty-faced waiters walked heavily on their flat, perpetually aching feet, and looked ill at ease out of doors. Here and there well-built clean-cut figures, tanned and alert, moved briskly to distribute trays of drinks, and tried to look like the pasty-faced aching waiters whose white jackets they shared.
Three army musicians moved coolly and mathematically within the modal range of ‘There’s a small Hotel’ and linking modulated inversions walked around the middle eight with creditable synchronization. Here and there a laugh walked up the foothills of noise.
Beyond the lights at the far end of the General’s little garden, Dalby was sitting perched uncomfortably on a rock edge. Two or three feet below him the water moved quietly. Out at sea a grey destroyer sat at anchor, a trace of smoke demonstrating its ever-ready head of steam. On its sides, a huge white ‘R’ told me it was one of the ships used to measure force and radiation underwater by means of vast wire nets to which measuring equipment was attached. Upon a launch alongside, shiny black rubber-garbed frogmen climbed, explained, ordered, carried and descended, as they checked the net fittings on the hull.
Dalby made circular motions with his glass of martini, swirling it into a thin layer of clear centrifugal controlled violence. He sipped a little of the undulating alcoholic surface and rubbed the glass edge on his lower lip.
‘There’s no way of contracting out,’ he was saying.
I couldn’t help connecting his remark with myself, but he went on, ‘To do any sort of bargain with them is quite out of the question, merely because there is no guarantee that their word will be kept. The minute war becomes the better way to expound Communism, war will be begun by Communists. And make no mistake, they won’t be using kids’ stuff like this bomb. It will be area saturation with suitable nerve gases.’
He looked across the imported and carefully laid out grass turf now crowded with summeruniformed men and women. Between me and the big long tables of food a plump girl in white held the arms of two Marine Corps
