Part 26 (1/2)

Amos was better. Always had been.

Howard poured another gla.s.s of water.

Amos was better than Axel, and the pair of them had been the best field agents the Department had ever had. A happy worker is a good worker, Howard's predecessor had told him. That pair like their work. Some parts in particular, Axel had liked too well: his specialized tastes had got him into trouble more than once. The Department's function was to clear up other people's messes, Howard had frequently had to remind him. Not make our own. Axel, then, would become petulant, and seek to lay the blame on whoever else had been involved a useful choice of scapegoat, as they were rarely alive enough to object. Howard, frankly, had been sick and tired of him, though he'd been careful to pretend amused affection.

Amos, the elder, had been more controlled. Not today, of course. And his record was far from spotless. But of late he'd been prepared to adapt: unlike Axel, he'd realized that the days of guns and roses were numbered, and if he'd wanted his career to last, he'd better be prepared to take up a more executive role. Not that he was suited for it, but experience mattered. He had a calm head. Nothing fl.u.s.tered him. He accepted the outrageous at face value. Axel, though, he'd always indulged, which had been fatal to the current op, and alone gave Howard enough of an edge to give him the chop, even without the a.s.sault. Howard rubbed his poor throat once more, and painfully sipped his water. Amos was making things personal: well, he wasn't the only one.

He studied Downey's file again. The man had been a good soldier, once. His bad luck, really. If he'd been a worse one, he'd never have made it past Crows' Hill. As it was he had Amos Crane on his case, not something you'd wish on your enemy, and had somehow managed to involve the woman, Sarah Traf-ford, too. She definitely came under the heading of Bad Accidents. The mess afterwards was going to take weeks to red-ribbon.

But Downey had killed Axel Crane, remember, and while Amos was better than Axel, that didn't make him invulnerable. Michael Downey, after all, had a cause. What Amos had been banking on from the start: that Downey wouldn't stop until he'd found the child. And a soldier with a cause was a different proposition from a lot of the targets Amos Crane had drawn a line through. Perhaps Crane was stepping in something deeper than he'd realized. The state he was in at the moment, you couldn't accuse him of thinking straight.

Downey surviving this was unthinkable, obviously, but if he despatched Amos Crane in the meantime, it wasn't going to spoil Howard's day. He closed the file, locked it in his cabinet, and after a good hard think about it, crept down the stairs to check on Amos Crane. But Crane was gone, his office in darkness; the dead eye of his computer screen reflecting just the debris of his desk. Among it, Crane's spectacles, neatly folded. He wore them only for screen work, and wouldn't need them now.

Daylight was bleeding out of the sky. Above the rooftops of the houses opposite a few last red smears were fading to black, as if an old wound were going bad, and it took an effort for Sarah to remember the obvious: that this was the way it always was, and the sky would be healed by morning. With the pictures in her head mingling with the onscreen images, it was easy to imagine instead that this was the end. Some wounds never got better. The boy soldiers had melted.

She did not press Michael for details: there were some things it was better never to know. And anyway, the word 'melted' contained enough bitter knowledge to last a lifetime. They had sat in silence after its utterance, the pair of them on the floor somehow; Sarah leaning against the bed, and Michael cross-legged, back to the window, so he couldn't see the sky as Sarah could. She wondered if he too would have thought it mortally wounded. Or perhaps he'd have expected a helicopter, and the sound of breaking gla.s.s: same thing.

'Are you all right?' she prompted gently at last.

'I'm fine.'

'What happened next?'

Michael didn't know what happened next.

He had pa.s.sed out; wished he had pa.s.sed out seconds earlier, and been spared the nightmares since. When he came to he was a red sore: his skin flaking, peeling; his hair scorched. He was tied to a hospital bed. He didn't know where he was. He thought . . .

'I didn't know what I thought.'

'You thought you were a prisoner.'

'It was our helicopter. One of ours. I know that now. But back then, tied to that bed . . . I wondered. I thought maybe I'd got it upside down.'

'But you hadn't.'

'We were guinea pigs. That bomb, it was some kind of chem- ical agent. And the stuff we'd been painted with, that was supposed to protect us.' He paused. 'You used to hear stories, back during the war. About the super-weapon. They called it a Patriot Bomb. You ever hear of that?'

Sarah shook her head.

'It's the Holy Grail. Something that kills the enemy, but not your own troops. I don't think it exists, not yet. But not everybody's stopped trying.'

'But that's illegal, chemical weapons, they're . . .'

They were against the law. She didn't bother finis.h.i.+ng.

He pulled his s.h.i.+rt up and showed her his stomach. Ugly red weals coloured it, strange blotchy stripes, like the camouflage of a new beast. He didn't comment, having no need to. He pulled his s.h.i.+rt down again. Sarah couldn't say sorry: mostly she felt sick, but not for the sake of his appearance. She said nothing.

'I don't know how long I was there. We were all there, the six of us, but I didn't know that until later. There were tests. Blood tests. A machine, like they use for a brain scan, but for the whole body. They never spoke to me. It was as if I'd dropped from outer s.p.a.ce, and they wanted to know all about my planet. You know what happened? I became an un-person out there in the desert. I was just a result, the result of an experiment. And they didn't give a f.u.c.k I was also human.'

She would have reached to touch him then, but sensed he didn't want that.

'It was only when I saw through a window I knew I was in England. After that, they moved us anyway. All of us.'

'Where to?'

'An island. Off the west coast of Scotland. I was better by then. Better as I'll ever be. I'm not sure why they didn't just kill us.'

'They pretended you were dead.'

'We learned that on the island. One of the guards told Tommy. Funny, we didn't really think they were guards until then. They were just guys, a bunch of guys, there to make sure we were all right. That's what they told us. And every time we asked, which was every day, they'd say we were going home soon, and it was just a few things needed sorting, that was all. Tomorrow. Maybe the next day. I can't remember how many tomorrows I lived through, waiting for the boat. Must have been hundreds. Then one of the guys, one Tommy got really friendly with, told him we were all supposed to be dead anyway. In that helicopter.' He laughed, but didn't sound amused. 'I've never been to Cyprus. Never been dead, either.'

'What did you do?'

'That was the end. The end of pretending. They weren't armed just because the regulations demanded, and we weren't kept in cells for protection. We were already dead, it was just n.o.body had pulled the trigger yet. I don't know. Maybe there were more tests they wanted to do. Maybe they wondered if we'd all die anyway, through long-term side effects. Or maybe and this is what I think really happened they couldn't kill us without heavy back-up. Like a signed letter from the Prime Minister, for instance. We were members of Her Majesty's forces, for Christ's sake. They weren't going to execute us without covering their backs. But they weren't going to let us go, either. Not now they'd told the world we were dead.'

Sarah said, 'Jesus wept . . .'

'Yeah. Right.'

He stood abruptly, and went to look out of the window after all. It occurred to her, the way she might cotton on to the plot half-way through a TV drama, that the reason people wanted to kill him was because of everything he knew. And now she knew it too.

'What happened?' she asked.

'We left.'

'Just like that.'

'No. Not just like that.' He turned back to look at her. 'Tommy and I left. That was all.'

'What about the others?'

'Dead.'

'And the guards?'

'Dead.'

'Did you . . .'

'We were still at war, don't you get it? It's just that n.o.body had explained whose side we were on. There were four guards, six of us. Only Tommy and me walked.'

'I don't blame you.'

'I wasn't asking your forgiveness.'

'I wasn't saying that. I meant '

'Or your understanding. I'm telling you what happened, that's all. Okay?'

'Okay,' she said softly. She could hardly make him out, now. The room so full of shadows, she couldn't tell where they stopped and he started.