Алистер Маклин - Borrowed Time

Before Mike, Ram and Lenny got back in the Land-Rover with old Nisar, Arberry led them down a steep stairway at the foot of the lawn behind the house. It took them a hundred metres underground. At the pitch-dark bottom of the stairs Arberry told them to stop, then he threw a switch.

‘My God,’ Mike breathed. ‘That’s amazing.’

They were in a natural subterranean cave lit by dozens of concealed spots and floodlamps.

‘I call it the Golden Cavern,’ Arberry said. ‘That isn’t very imaginative of me, but I think you’ll agree the name fits.’

‘It’s like a dream,’ Lenny said.

The craggy walls and high ceiling were covered in gold. The light thrown back was so bright, so sparkling, that Ram had to shield his eyes.

‘It’s actually not gold at all,’ Arberry said. ‘It’s iron pyrites, but in this setting it’s as beautiful as any real gold. And nature put it there all by herself.’

Before they left, he gave each of his visitors a fat wallet of papers. ‘Facts and figures,’ he said, ‘my observations concerning crime in this area. Perhaps, if you take the information to heart, you may bring collective pressure on your people to do something to help us.’

‘He’s a charismatic guy,’ Lenny said on the way back. ‘I meant to ask what made him come here in the first place. I can imagine him being a lot more at home in good ol’ gregarious Manhattan.’

‘It’s a sad story,’ Ram said. ‘He was in private surgical practice in Massachusetts, quietly going places, and he came out here on a holiday with his wife.’

‘When?’ Lenny asked.

‘Fifteen years ago. It was at the time they advertised the Vale of Kashmir as the Switzerland of India. Mrs Arberry was so in love with the place she persuaded the doc to buy a plot of land, so they could have a house to go to on holidays. But breast cancer killed her before she ever got a chance to come back.’

‘I wondered about a wife,’ Lenny said. ‘Men like that don’t usually live alone.’

‘He told me her death changed him,’ Ram said. ‘He felt her spirit was where the plot of land was, so he moved here and bought acres around the spot. He built the mansion and since then he’s devoted himself to improving the area his wife fell in love with.’

‘Reverend Young was afraid the troubles might drive Dr Arberry out,’ Mike said. ‘The way it sounds to me, he would take some budging.’

‘But I bet he knows they could do it,’ Lenny said. ‘He’s civilized, remember. Civilized people don’t stand a chance against the bears. He’s certainly keen that the UN should find some way to run the bad guys off the territory.’

‘I only had a quick skim through this,’ Mike said, patting the wallet of papers on his knee, ‘but it looks like a better dossier on the killing and the sabotage and the drug-running activities around here than you guys on Drugwatch International ever put together.’

Lenny stared at him in the dim yellow glow of the overhead light. ‘You really know how to wound a person.’

‘Nothing personal.’

‘It’s the doc’s drive that makes him so capable,’ Ram said. ‘I’ve watched him. He won’t settle for less than excellence. Everything he does is a masterpiece of its kind.’

‘I wouldn’t mind a smidgen of that drive,’ Lenny said.

‘The secret’s in his sense of impermanence,’ Ram said.

Lenny looked at him. ‘You going philosophical on us?’

‘I’m talking about the way he’s convinced that even the best, the most seemingly everlasting, can be taken from us. It began with his wife. Now he sees something he loves with as much intensity coming under threat. And that makes him want to hang on harder. He lives every day with the pain of the threat, and the pain makes him want to prevail at all costs.’

‘He said the whole thing when he was seeing us off just a few minutes ago,’ Mike said. ‘Remember?’

The other two nodded. Standing with them on the steps in front of the white porch Dr Arberry had said, ‘What hurts me most, what pains me to my soul, is to see mindless thuggery reduce beauty and progress to ashes.’

Srinagar, the summer capital of Kashmir, is a noisy, colourful, bustling city with its own distinct look and atmosphere. Each time Lenny Trent went there, he could not shake the feeling that he was much further east. The people even looked different, and he had heard businessmen, preparing to return south, say they were going back to India.

Nowadays Srinagar looked like occupied territory. Everywhere there were roadblocks; armed soldiers sat in bunkers on all the major street corners. An after-dark curfew was in operation and most nights there was fighting, most of it in the old city.

‘It resembles Beirut over there,’ Commissioner Jabar Mantur told Lenny. He pointed from the barred window of his second-storey office towards the craggy skyline of the old quarter. ‘So many factions it’s hard to keep track. New movements spring up overnight, every weekend old ones get wiped out.’

Commissioner Mantur was the second most senior police officer in Kashmir. He was a short, thickset man with iron grey hair that swept down each cheek in wiry sideburns, almost touching the ends of his moustache. He wore a lightweight grey business suit, a stark white shirt and a red tie. As he spoke he smiled a great deal and shook his head, as if it were necessary to disparage most of his own remarks.

‘You will have noticed,’ he said, ‘that our police station here is more like a fortress. Twice in three months we had a bomb thrown into the reception area, and a grenade which was lobbed through the canteen window wounded ten of my officers. I was under pressure to do something about our security, so I took my lead from Northern Ireland.’

Lenny noted the benevolent eyes and the affable smile, and realized he was in the presence of a born diplomat. This wry, civilized administrator had a reputation for operational toughness that made Norman Schwartzkopf look effete. Confidential records at the HQ of Drugwatch International revealed that less than a month ago, Mantur had personally broken into a drug laboratory, shot the three guards dead and beaten up four chemists who were free-basing cocaine with industrial solvents. A note from a field agent formerly based in Kashmir described Mantur as ‘a hands-on police chief who can’t keep his hands off criminals’.

‘I have a Security Council memo telling me I should co-operate with you, Mr Trent. You must be an important man.’

‘I’m a reliable functionary, Commissioner. I’m a good bridge between sources of information and the people who have to act on it. Important is something I’m not.’

‘To be reliable is more satisfying, anyway,’ Mantur said. He went behind his desk and unlocked a drawer. ‘These maps I will give you, they do not officially exist. They contain information which my masters in government would call speculative. They would call it that because nowhere on the maps, or in the accompanying notes, have I indicated how I obtained any of the information, nor do I offer anything else by way of corroboration.’

He put a sheaf of folded maps on the desk. Lenny picked up the top one, unfolded it and stood with his arms spread wide, marvelling at the scale and the detail.

‘I can see this is done by hand, Commissioner, but it looks like the work of an artist …’

‘The work of a jailed cartographer, as a matter of fact. I managed to, um, how do you say – cut a deal for him with the Justice Department on condition he would co-operate on the project. He would have co-operated anyway, you understand, but because I made it seem that his eventual early release would depend very much on the quality of the work, he turned out the best stuff he’s ever done in his life.’