Stella Rimington - At Risk

Jim Dunstan’s eyelids fluttered. The blood drained from his face. He looked blankly from Mackay to Don Whitten.

The SAS captain was the first to move, punching out an internal number. “Sabre teams scramble for immediate action, please. Repeat- Sabre teams scramble to go. ”

“West Ford,” said Liz. “The village is called West Ford.”

A dozen voices at the level edge of urgency. Running feet, the slash of rotors, and the spotlit hangar falling away beneath them.

The Green Man was large and plain and beery, with a long oak bar and an impressive array of pumps. There was no jukebox or fruit machine, but the clientele was young and boisterous and noise levels were high. A cloud of cigarette smoke hovered a little above head height. After a brief search, Jean and Denzil found a table against the wall, and Denzil went to buy the first round. At the bar, as he waited, Jean saw him surreptitiously counting his money.

He returned with a pint of Suffolk bitter for each of them. As a Muslim, Jean hadn’t drunk alcohol for some years, but Faraj had suggested that she have at least one drink to show willing. The beer had a sour, soapy texture but was not altogether unpleasant. It gave her something to do with her hands and, equally important, something to look at as they talked. Early in the evening she had made the mistake of looking Denzil in the eye-of meeting his open, inquisitive gaze-and it had been almost unbearable.

Talking to him was harder than she would have believed possible. He was awkward and shy, but he was also sensitive and self-deprecating and kind. He was almost painfully concerned that she should enjoy her evening with him, and she sensed him casting around for subjects of conversation which might engage her interest.

Don’t look at him, look through him, she told herself, but it didn’t do any good. She was sharing a small and intimate space with a young man whom she found herself liking very much. And planning to kill him.

When it was her turn to buy the drinks, she returned with a pint in each hand and gave them both to him. Her first pint was still only half drunk.

“To save time,” she explained. “It’s a bit jam-packed up there.”

“It gets a lot more crowded when the Americans are here,” he told her. “Not to mention making things a lot harder with the girls for us local boyos.”

“So why aren’t the Americans here tonight?”

“Grounded, probably. Apparently there’s been a terrorist scare. There’ve been a couple of murders up towards Brancaster and they think it might be something to do with Marwell.”

“What’s Marwell?”

“One of those RAF bases that the US Air Force use. You know, like Lakenheath… Mildenhall…”

“So what have they got to do with Brancaster? I thought that’s where people went sailing.”

“To be honest, I haven’t followed the whole thing very closely. My stepfather told me. He’s…”

She waited.

Denzil frowned awkwardly at his pint. “He’s, um… he’s a bit more clued up than me, localwise. They reckon the people who committed the murders on the coast might be about to launch some sort of attack on Marwell.”

“Why?”

“Honestly, I haven’t really followed the whole thing. I’ve been out for most of the last few days.”

“Is it near here?”

“Marwell? About thirteen miles.” He raised his glass as if to check the steadiness of his hand. “And given that there are three battalions of troops between us and it, I’d say we’re probably pretty…”

She turned to him. She could feel the faint, dizzying effects of the alcohol hitting her system. “Suppose we weren’t? Suppose it all ended tonight? Would you feel you’d lived… enough?”

“Wow! That’s a bit of a heavy…”

“Would you, though? Would you be ready to go?”

He narrowed his eyes and smiled. “Are you serious?”

She shrugged. “Yeah.”

“Well, OK. If I had to, like, die, this would probably be as good a moment as any. My mum got remarried a couple of years ago and is happy for the first time that I can remember, and I’ve now got a baby sister-seventeen years younger than me, can you imagine it, seventeen years younger than me -who hasn’t really had the chance to get to know me, and so wouldn’t be hurt by my death, but who my mum would still have. And I haven’t really begun doing anything with my life, careerwise, so in a sense there wouldn’t be anything wasted, so… Yeah, if I had to go, now would be as good a time as any.”

“What about your father? Your real father?”

“Well… He walked out on us years ago, when I was a boy, so he can’t ever have really cared for us…” He rubbed his eyes. “Lucy, I really like you, but why are we having this conversation?”

She shook her head, her eyes unfocused. Then, draining her pint glass, she nudged it towards him. “Could you…?”

“Yeah, sure.”

There was a distant roaring in her head, as if she had her ear to a giant sea shell. Yesterday morning she had killed a boy, much the same age as this one, with a silenced Russian pistol. She had smiled at him and squeezed the trigger, felt the gasp of the damped recoil, and seen the boy’s head empty itself into the corner of the car boot. Now she was reborn, a Child of Heaven, and at last she understood what the instructor at Takht-i-Suleiman had always found so funny-so funny that it regularly reduced him to shaking incoherence.

She had been reborn dead. The moment had, as promised, changed everything. It had thrown a switch inside her, jamming the circuitry and paralysing the networks. She had feared that she would feel too much; instead, infinitely worse, she felt nothing. Last night, for example. She and Faraj had been like reanimated corpses. Twitching in each other’s arms like electrified frogs in a school laboratory.

And Jessica. She had put aside the question of the baby. Lifting her forearm, she bit it until the teeth met, and when she released herself there were two purplish crescents in the skin, oozing blood. It wasn’t that it didn’t hurt, it just didn’t matter. For a moment, a split second, she felt the dark presence of her pursuer.

“… Another pint for Mademoiselle Lucy. You’re not married by any chance, are you?”

“Not by any chance, no.” She drank.

“So tell me, unmarried Lucy, just where exactly are you staying round here, and just why are you inviting yourself to pubs with strangers?”

Familiarity, she saw, had emboldened and calmed him. Her head sank slowly forward until her forehead touched her glass. “That’s a good question,” she said. “But a very hard one to answer.”

He leaned forward. “Try.”

She was silent. Took a deep swallow of the beer. And another.

“Or not, of course,” he murmured, straightening up and looking away.

The alcohol raced round her system. In the old days, with Megan, it had never taken much. A couple of glasses and she was flying. “If I told you that the conversation we’ve just had was the most important of your life…”

“I’d…” He shrugged. “I’d guess that’s possible.”

In his eyes she could see the dawning of the knowledge that the evening was not going to end magically. That she was just one more flaky, difficult woman who was not for him.

She took his hand. It was large, warm, and damp from his beer glass. Holding it by the fingers, she examined his palm, and as she did so, something-in fact, everything-became blindingly obvious. She laughed out loud. “See,” she said. “Long life!”

“We’re a long-living family,” he said warily.

She smiled at him, and releasing his hand, drained her glass. “Lend me your car keys,” she said. “I need to get something.”