Алистер Маклин - Borrowed Time

‘I have to report back to my people, that’s the World Health Organization, maybe you’ve heard of them? On the basis of my findings, as well as those of maybe a hundred other ecology monitors, revised cultivation and crop-planting regimes will be devised, and it’s hoped that communities such as this one will see real benefits in the years to come.’

The man on the pumps nodded, took the money for the petrol and disappeared indoors.

Ten minutes later, as Sabrina walked through the local market and spoke to people, the same thing kept happening. She was not directly shunned, but people wanted no prolonged contact with her. It could have been a local trait, but she didn’t believe that. Sabrina knew when people were scared of saying too much, or were frightened by the consequences of being seen in certain company. She had experienced identical behaviour in Sicily before the Mafia trials, she had seen it in Guatemala, too, and in Chile and Bosnia.

She tried to get lodgings for the night in Palanjal, but no one had rooms. There was a hotel, empty-looking, but the clerk said sorry, they had no accommodation available now, or for the foreseeable future.

‘Maybe you could recommend some place else?’

The clerk shook his head. ‘There is nowhere else, I assure you.’

‘Then I guess I’ll have to sleep in the car.’

‘There is time to move on to another town,’ the clerk said. ‘It is not advisable to stay here without proper accommodation.’

‘I see.’

She left the hotel and got in the car. It was four in the afternoon. She decided to head for the next town, which according to her map was Jullaspur. If she couldn’t get to the bottom of what troubled the people in this town, at least she could make a comparison with the way visitors were treated at the next place.

As she drove to the end of the main street, following the sign pointing to Jullaspur, a man stepped out in front of the car. Sabrina had to brake hard to keep from hitting him. He stood in the roadway with his hands on his hips, staring at her through the windscreen, his bearded face expressionless.

Sabrina sat tight, waiting, avoiding conclusions. The man, she noticed, was wearing western clothes: leather trousers, a striped collarless shirt, shiny black leather boots. He also wore a gun and a bandolier of ammunition across his chest.

Sabrina’s door jerked open. Another man was there. He was clean-shaven and looked more Arab than Indian. He wore one silver earring and had a deep scar from the side of his nose across his cheek to his left ear, from which the lobe was missing.

‘Out, please,’ he said.

‘Get away from me,’ Sabrina said.

He took hold of her arm and pulled sharply, jerking her out on to the road. She landed on her back. He put his foot firmly on her stomach and snapped his fingers at the man standing in front of the car. He came and between them they put Sabrina on her feet and frog-marched her across the road to a battered Mitsubishi pickup. Sabrina made a show of squirming resistance, but she was careful to do nothing to show she could handle herself in a situation like this.

‘You will lie still in the bottom,’ the cleanshaven one said as they hoisted her into the back of the pickup. ‘This man will sit near you. If you try to escape, he has orders to shoot you in the knees. Do you understand?’

Sabrina nodded, looking terrified, choking back a whimper. She was dumped without ceremony into the hard metal bottom of the pickup trailer. The hairy-faced man got in beside her. When the engine started she closed her eyes and curled over on her side.

‘Listen!’ the man said harshly. ‘You listen and remember!’

She nodded, her lower lip between her teeth.

‘You move and I shoot.’

No worries, she thought. Escape was the last thing she planned. This might be dangerous, it might be fatal, but it was progress. In her job progress was always the option of choice, wherever it led.

C.W. Whitlock stood in a small, tidy laboratory two doors away from the TF3 suite in the UN Secretariat building, listening to a recital of complaints from Luther Flint. Luther was head of Scientific Resources, a subdivision of UNACO Clandestine Enterprises. He was also, in the view of many, a borderline clinical paranoid.

Today he had chosen Whitlock as the target for what Philpott called a ‘querimonius diatribe’.

‘I don’t know how you people expect us to function, C.W. Time and again – you’d think it was deliberate, a matter of policy – you give us the scantiest, lowest quality material to work with, and expect us to turn in results of shimmering, incandescent excellence. And if the results of our exertions are disappointing, if they’re less than you wanted, you put the word about that we just aren’t up to the job we were hired to do.’

‘That just isn’t true–’

‘Now you’re calling me a liar.’

‘I’m saying you’re mistaken when you say people criticize you or evaluate your work in a negative way.’ Whitlock knew there was no way to placate Luther. The best he could do was get him on a low simmer. ‘Speaking for myself, I’ve nothing but admiration for the job you do. I appreciate that your consistently splendid results are all the more impressive considered alongside the downright cruddy source materials you often have to work with.’

‘Well,’ Luther grunted, ‘just so long as you know the conditions imposed on us aren’t ideal. The fact is, they’re not even reasonable.’

‘Sure, sure.’ Whitlock pointed to the coloured snapshot mounted on a copy easel on the bench beside them. It was the picture he had borrowed from Clancy Spencer. ‘I’m not asking you to do the impossible here, truly I’m not. I just want you to make the best copy and the best blow-up you can, then scan the blow-up into your computer, enhance it, print it out at roughly fifteen hundred dpi and do another blow-up from that.’

‘And of course you wouldn’t be trying to tell me how to do my job, would you?’

‘What?’

‘All you have to do,’ Luther said, ‘is tell me you want the best quality-enhanced blow-up I can make. No need to tell me the way I should achieve that. I’m a professional, remember. It’s part of my job to know how to do whatever you ask.’

Whitlock was tempted to pull the picture off the easel, march out of there and do the job himself. But he held on to his composure; Luther, after all, did the best job of anyone in his field.

‘I didn’t mean to offend you.’

‘I accept it maybe wasn’t intentional.’ Luther shook back a strand of white hair and adjusted his horn-rims. ‘How soon do you want the print?’

‘Tomorrow?’ Whitlock ventured.

‘Sweet God.’ Luther glared at him. ‘This isn’t the only work I have to do, you know.’

‘I appreciate that, but this is kind of pressing …’

Luther sighed. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

Whitlock left the laboratory without another word. He went straight to the Secure Communications Suite and sat down at one of the computers. For a few seconds he was motionless, letting the padded, dimly-lit interior of the room work its soothing effect on him. He closed his eyes and sat back in the chair, feeling the reassuring support on his shoulders.

It had been a bad twenty-four hours. The pressure for once had not been professional – although there was plenty of that – but domestic. His wife had finally moved out. She had gone because his work received more of him than she did, and because she had found another man who was keen to devote himself to her and to the life they would build together. Instead of her absence creating a gap in Whitlock’s life, he was finding that it was more like a disheartening presence, something solid, a wall perhaps, that separated him from the life he would have preferred. On the other hand, he could never have come up to his wife’s expectations, so there was a measure of relief in his gloom.