Tim Stevens - Delivering Caliban

From behind her in the living room, Nina heard Rachel give a little cry.

Kyle said, his voice faltering, ‘What’s the charge?’

Nina winced. It was the wrong response. Effectively, it was an admission that she was in the apartment.

From beyond the door the voice was louder, an edge to it. ‘Sir, I’ve already shown you ID and answered your question. Either you open this door right now, or you and Ms Carver will be charged with aiding and abetting a felon.’

Nina watched Kyle’s back. His breathing was faster, and uneven.

After a moment he said, ‘Hey, fuck you, pal,’ and backed down the passage, gun arm raised, almost colliding with Nina in the living room doorway. Rachel was just behind her, gripping her shoulder.

Kyle said, ‘The fire escape.’

It ran past the bathroom; Nina remembered seeing it through the clouded glass. Rachel jerked at her arm.

‘Go,’ she whispered.

‘You’ve got to come.’

‘No way. I need to speak to these guys before Dirty Harry here gets himself killed.’ She gave Nina a small shove in the direction of the bathroom. ‘You were never here.’ To Kyle she muttered through clenched teeth: ‘Put the gun away, for God’s sake.’

The first blow against the front door splintered the wood around the lock and one hinge, the sound reaching Nina’s ears a fraction of a second after the door bulged at them. The second came before any of them had a chance to yell. This one was accompanied by a crack as the safety chain was yanked taut.

Rachel pushed Nina so hard she stumbled. Nina made it to the end of the passage and stopped. At her feet was her violin in its case, where she’d propped it against the wall on her arrival. She lifted it. Kyle’s stance was one of dynamic indecision, the gun raised and aimed but his posture suggesting imminent flight. Rachel clung to his other arm.

Over her shoulder Rachel shrieked, ‘ Go ,’ and the command was like a blow knocking Nina through the doorway and into not the bathroom, but Rachel and Kyle’s bedroom. Behind her the front door gave way in a roar of tearing timber that was drowned by yells.

Nina strapped the violin case across her back, leapt over the bed and dragged the drapes apart as the first blast came, horribly close — a vague part of her understood it must have been Kyle who fired — and hauled at the sash window, ramming it upwards as far as it would go. The apartment was one storey up. Directly below was a concrete walkway at the rear of the block. The lawn was impossibly far away.

She had one leg across the sill when noise exploded after her. She looked back. Rachel had backed into the room and was screaming. Beyond her Kyle came running in, except he wasn’t running, he was flying, propelled by something that was punching him along and flinging his limbs crazily. Rachel lurched towards Nina and she recoiled instinctively, dragging her other leg across the sill so that she was perched on her ass. The front of Rachel’s dress was a Rorschach of gore, her face a wide-eyed fright mask. Then Rachel spun through ninety degrees, the same forces that had turned Kyle into a bloody marionette having their way with her.

Nina dropped through the cool evening air for an astonishingly brief moment before the shocking impact with the walkway drove pain through her ankles and her knees and up through her back and neck. She tipped forward, the violin on her back her baby, needing protection no matter what the cost to herself, and came to rest, with her face pressed against the concrete. She felt nothing; no heart hammering in her chest, no breath sawing in her throat.

So this was death.

She twisted her head round and peered up.

High above her, God gazed down. A bald man with white, flashing eyes.

Reborn, resurrected, Nina scrambled into a stooped, loping posture like an ape’s, every bone and muscle screaming defiance at her.

She began to run.

Hamburg

Sunday 19 May, 6.20 pm

‘You’ll find everything you need in here.’

Bracknell, the agent in the Service’s Hamburg station assigned to help Purkiss, had taken an instant dislike to him. He was used to the reaction, but the hostility wasn’t normally quite as undisguised as this. She barely made eye contact, ignored his proffered hand, and after leading him in silence to the tiny office they’d provided for him, slapped a memory stick down beside the antediluvian desktop computer.

After she’d left — no tea or coffee was offered — Purkiss set to work. The stick contained details of all Pope’s operations during his time in Hamburg. As Gifford had said, Pope had been in the city two years and his work had involved humdrum if essential stuff: analysis of immigration patterns, the forging of connections with local agencies such as the police, the occasional background check on up-and-coming local political figures. No liaison, officially or otherwise, with the city’s CIA presence, as far as Purkiss could tell.

Vale had also arranged for the Hamburg station to provide whatever was known about the local CIA structure and personnel, and this too was on the memory stick. It proved even less useful than the material about Pope. Neither Jablonsky’s nor Taylor’s names came up, and there was no suggestion of any overlap between known Company operations in the city and those Pope had been involved in, even peripherally.

Two hours later Purkiss stood and stretched, feeling weighed down by frustration. There was nothing there he could work with. Nothing that gave any indication as to why Pope might have been surveilling two CIA operatives in Amsterdam, and have shot them dead. The information could as easily have been sent to Purkiss in Amsterdam, but he’d come to Hamburg because of the possibility that Pope had returned here.

He walked the cramped corridors, knocking on a few doors until he found Bracknell hunched over her own computer. She looked even surlier than before. Purkiss realised it was after eight in the evening, that she was probably supposed to be off duty.

‘Couple of questions.’

She shrugged.

‘Did you know Pope yourself?’

‘Yes.’

‘What’s your impression of him? Thumbnail sketch.’

For the first time she looked Purkiss in the eye. ‘He’s a hard worker. A charmer, yes, but deeper than that. Committed. Passionate, even. Wasted here.’

He turned you down, but you still hold out hope , Purkiss thought. He said: ‘Bent?’

Anger flared in her eyes. It was more interesting than the dislike. ‘No more than the rest of us. Less so, probably.’

‘All right. Thanks.’ He tossed her the memory stick.

To his back she said, ‘You don’t know what you’re doing. The effect people like you have on morale. Hounding us. Persecuting us.’

‘You don’t know what Pope’s done.’

‘And you can’t tell me.’

‘No.’

*

Purkiss had booked a room at a hotel on Stephansplatz near the city centre. He ate a light supper, then stretched on the bed, going over the events of the day methodically, laying them out in his head for his mind to work with while he slept.

He’d never been an insomniac, and still wasn’t, but in recent months early nights had been a bad idea because the hour before sleep would be filled inevitably with brooding. Tonight was no exception. Claire’s death used to fill the crevices of his mind; now it was Claire’s betrayal as well. How much of their life together had been a lie? It was a question that could never be answered. Vale had once said to him that self-delusion was one of the few things that enabled people to cope, or words to that effect. Purkiss, a sceptic by inclination and education, found himself increasingly craving certainty in his life.