Ian Rankin - Westwind

Dreyfuss was already on his feet. He opened the bag and brought out trousers, underwear, a cotton shirt, socks and a pair of canvas shoes.

Stewart watched him dress, but his words when he spoke were directed at Parfit.

‘You know this is crazy, don’t you? Esterhazy will blow all his fuses when he finds out.’ But he sounded as though this was not a wholly unpleasant thought.

‘I’m hoping he does just that,’ Parfit returned.

Dreyfuss knew there was some undercurrent to this exchange, something they were managing to say to one another without his understanding. He slipped on the shoes. The clothes were a near-perfect fit.

‘Ready?’ said Parfit.

‘Ready,’ answered Dreyfuss.

‘I’m glad we managed to have some time together, Major,’ Stewart was saying. Dreyfuss smiled but did not reply. Parfit had already turned in the doorway, and held the door open as Dreyfuss took his first steps out of the room, into the bright, disinfected corridor.

Parfit kept a couple of steps ahead of him as they walked. Dreyfuss felt elated at first, light-headed, but then started sweating. He had paced his room, but that had called for little real exertion. Now, after sixty or so strides, his hair was prickling and his back began to feel damp. The corridor was quiet: no staff, and all the doors except his own looked to be locked tight. They came to a set of swing doors and opened them. Now they were in a larger, noisier, busier corridor, one of the hospital’s main arteries. Dreyfuss looked back at the doors they had just come through and saw that a large NO ADMITTANCE sign and a radiation symbol warned the unwary against entering his own silent corridor.

He had been expecting to see an armed guard at least. What had been stopping journalists from trying to visit him? Not just that sign, surely. Then he noticed an orderly sitting on a chair by the door, pretending to be on his break and browsing through a newspaper. His eyes were toughened glass as they fixed on Dreyfuss and Parfit, and Dreyfuss knew he was a guard of some kind, but an unobtrusive one.

‘Does he know who we are?’ he said to Parfit as they walked on.

Parfit glanced back towards the orderly. ‘Well, he knows who I am. I’ve had to get past him to see you, yesterday and today. But he’s here to stop people getting in, not coming out.’

‘What took you so long to come back?’

But Parfit was flurrying on again, and it took all of Dreyfuss’ energy and concentration to keep up with his pace. The question lapsed.

‘How much did you tell Stewart?’ Parfit asked.

‘Quite a bit.’

‘Mmm. That’s all right then.’

‘What do you mean?’ But Parfit wasn’t about to answer this question either.

Everybody was too busy being sick or being a comforter of the sick to pay them much attention, but at the main door, Dreyfuss hesitated. Something would happen. They’d be stopped. He’d be dragged back to his room and questioned again. They wouldn’t get away with it. As Parfit approached the glass doors, they opened on a motorised hush, and then both men were outside.

Outside, it was warm, but with a strong breeze. And there was cloud cover. A storm was coming. Dreyfuss began to shiver as the sweat on his body cooled. A large sedan pulled up to the kerb, and Parfit opened the back door, ushering him inside. The driver was a thickset man with the face of a well-used hammer. He stared at Dreyfuss in the rear-view mirror. Parfit closed the door after him and they drove off.

‘This is Ronald,’ Parfit said to Dreyfuss.

Ronald nodded, unsmiling, then concentrated on his driving.

‘Where are we going?’ asked Dreyfuss.

‘Washington. There’s a private jet waiting for us at the airport.’

‘A private jet? Is that standard Foreign Office issue?’

Parfit smiled. ‘It’s not ours, I just borrowed it from someone who happened to owe me a large favour.’

Dreyfuss nodded.

‘So,’ Parfit was saying, ‘I think you’d better start at the beginning, hadn’t you?’

‘I nearly died up there.’ Dreyfuss turned towards him. ‘Why didn’t you warn me?’

‘But if you’ll remember, I did warn you. That’s why we’re sitting here today.’

Yes, Dreyfuss remembered all right. The telephone call telling him he’d been picked for the Argos flight, and then the arrival at his home of a man in a pinstripe suit, introducing himself as ‘Parfit, Foreign Office’. He had come, so he said, to give Dreyfuss a pre-briefing briefing. In fact, he had come with a warning.

The first thing he had done was go through Dreyfuss’ curriculum vitae, but in much more detail than the interview panel had done. He had cited Dreyfuss’ age as a point against him. Other minus points included lack of experience and slight problems of stamina. Dreyfuss, who had been elated at the news of his selection, began to feel distinctly uncomfortable at this.

‘Yes, but they still chose me,’ he had said.

‘Exactly, Major Dreyfuss,’ Parfit had replied. ‘Exactly.’

So there had to be a good reason, and Parfit was intrigued to know what it was. Dreyfuss had been bottom of the British list of candidates — no disrespect intended — and they couldn’t figure out how he could come top of the American list. But there would be a reason, and it was judged worth warning Dreyfuss to be on his guard, and to give him a few tips, a few lessons in the art of survival in a hostile environment.

‘You were right about that,’ Dreyfuss said now. He had just been telling Parfit what he had told Stewart, but in a little more detail this time. ‘I didn’t get into a space shuttle, I got into a coffin.’

‘So you think the shuttle itself is the coffin that had to be buried?’

‘Don’t you?’

Parfit rested his head against the seat-back, thinking things through. ‘No,’ he answered at last. ‘No, I don’t, not entirely.’

‘So what do you think was being buried?’

‘I don’t know. Perhaps we should just ask General Esterhazy. He seems to be involved after all, doesn’t he?’

‘But you don’t think Frank Stewart is?’

‘If he were, he wouldn’t have been asking you questions the way he did. He wasn’t questioning you to find out how much you knew. He was doing it because he doesn’t know much of anything himself.’

‘It’s a military thing then?’

‘Perhaps. Whatever it is, someone’s going to a lot of trouble over it, which would seem to indicate that it is fairly special and not very small in scale.’

‘Such as?’

‘I could only posit a few guesses.’

‘Posit away.’

Parfit sighed. ‘Anything between an assassination and a war.’ He paused. ‘They’re not mutually exclusive.’

‘A war ?’

‘Why not? Look at the way things are going.’

‘Christ... a war.’ Dreyfuss felt weak again. ‘But wait, if it’s such a big thing, why did they keep me alive?’

‘Well, that’s easy enough. Five men had already died, and yet you had been pulled alive and in surprisingly good health from the wreckage. The TV cameras and newspapers caught all that. So your sudden death in hospital would have looked a mite suspicious.’

‘We were all supposed to die, though, weren’t we? All the crew?’

‘It looks that way. A kamikaze mission to launch a communications satellite. An unlikely scenario, you’ll admit.’

‘But it wasn’t just a comms satellite, was it?’

Parfit turned towards Dreyfuss and smiled, seeming pleased that he had worked this out. ‘The question is,’ he said, ‘what was it?’

‘I know one way we might find out.’

Parfit seemed interested now.

‘How?’