Below the Thunder Page 10

  All this must have passed in a micro-second of dreaming because he awoke to the full blast of the explosion. Followed by a moment of absolute silence, and a rising tide of screams and shouting. A fire alarm burst violently into life. People started running down the corridors.

  He rushed out, grateful that he was fully clad, and followed some men and women in shorts and towelling down the corridor and out to the front of the building. Flames were bursting from a shattered room near the entrance to the hotel. He recognised at once that it was his room. Or rather: the room that until a few hours previously had been his.

  There was no point in hanging around. He retraced his steps and gathered up his bag and ran to find his car. Too late to pay the bill: they had his credit card details in some safely remote database anyway. Too late to retrieve his passport and tickets from the police. Too late to bother about the rest of the Ring Cycle. The only imperative was to get the hell out of there. It was not that he was scared. He was terrified.

  As he accelerated up the alleyway from the motel’s underground car park, he could hear the ear-splitting scream of incoming San Francisco City fire engines. Two police cars were already drawing up, their sirens howling like dogs in desperate misery. Nessun dorma indeed.

  His one thought was to drive north again. Utah and the south was out of the question. That was where they – whoever they were – would expect him to go. The north was where wilderness and open spaces lay, and if necessary the safety of the border.

  He feinted south towards the airport and found an ATM where he withdrew as much cash as his cards allowed. Then he turned a hundred and eighty degrees and took off up Route 101 on and on and on into the dawn. Through Manchester and Rockport, Eureka, Crescent City and Florence to Route 5 and across towards the northern Cascade mountains.

  He had never claimed to be a brave person. If his reaction to the explosion was excessive, so be it. He was in too febrile a state of mind. He was in no doubt that an attempt had been made on his life, he did not know by whom or for what reason. But he had also recently witnessed a murder, been in the company of the suspected gunman, even been pursued by him to San Francisco.

  In other circumstances, the wisest course might well have been to drive straight to a city police station and throw himself on the protection of the authorities. But his last meeting with Slocumb had left him disturbed and uncertain. It was – as likely as not – the purest paranoia. But he needed to gather his wits and think.

  He had arrived in Washington State, beyond which lay Canada. The Canadians were reputedly less protective of their border than the Americans and he might be able to slip across and make for the British consulate in Vancouver. A story about a lost passport should do it. He could fly straight back to London. After all, there was nothing any longer to detain him here.

  He had driven virtually non-stop since leaving San Francisco. Seven or eight hundred miles in eleven hours. It was mid afternoon but he needed to stretch his legs and get a night’s sleep. He was not far from Mount Rainier National Park. Perhaps there was lodging there.

  The Park’s Paradise Inn was a long, dormered, cedar log building standing back from the road. Everything about it looked full – the car parks, the lobby, even the mountain ridges to the east were packed with hiking groups queuing down the tracks. He’d expected at best a slim chance of accommodation; but a receptionist found a just cancelled ‘historic’ lodge room – very rustic with no en suite shower or toilet, but cheap. Exactly what was needed. He declined the credit card machine and paid, in advance, in cash.

  All he had eaten since early morning was half a bag of some huge red rainier cherries bought by the roadside a hundred miles earlier. He stocked up at the Inn takeaway with a beefburger and a Budweiser and set off up the mountain.

  The higher he climbed the thinner the crowds became. The well marked trails at the lower levels were as busy as Piccadilly Circus – or as Yosemite – but few walkers strayed beyond them, as if there were bylaws against adventure. He struck off on his own, up paths scarcely wide enough for mountain goats, past yellow potentilla bushes and through thickets of huckleberry. The air was colder and damper than it had been in California. It felt a lot closer to home.

  He passed an occasional hiker, usually a young man and woman travelling together. He could hear one couple approaching from a quarter of a mile away, shaking a necklace of bear bells every few steps – to frighten off hungry grizzlies, no doubt. He had not progressed far beyond them when he saw, away to the left and deep amongst the huckleberry bushes, not the Great Predator he’d half hoped for, but a smaller, slimmer, less dangerous Black Bear. He held his breath and stood as silently as he could, watching it gorge on the blue-black berries; until it must have heard him, and dropped to all fours and scuttled away.

  He came to a natural rock bench beside the path, overlooking a glacier tucked like a curling tongue into the opposing mountainside. He could make out the tiny Lowry figures of a school of student skiers, strung out across it in Indian file, silhouetted against the dirty white ice. At so great a distance they barely seemed to move at all.

  A bleached disk of sun was struggling to break through the cloud cover. It was a good moment to break open the Budweiser, the burger, and the remains of the cherries. For a while, with only the faraway matchstick figures for company, he was entirely alone. Relaxed and able to turn his thoughts to the wild events of the last few days.

  And formulate some kind of plan.

  So it was an irritation to spot, away to the right where the path disappeared around the northern crest of the mountain, his first pair of hikers since the bear bell shakers. He watched them work their way downwards. They were both carrying frame backpacks, both goggled against the snow, with woollen skullcaps crammed down over their heads: a middle-aged man and a slim, athleticlooking woman, noticeably more agile than her partner.

  He turned away as they drew nearer, not wishing to encourage unnecessary socialisation. The woman passed behind along the path. But the man stopped. He sat rudely alongside him on the rock; and unloosed the muffler around his throat.

  ‘So we meet again, Professor Williams,’ he drawled.

  Chapter 9

  Marcus.

  Why should he have been surprised?

  As long as he had known him, periods of years without contact had been separated by unexpected encounters – on the street, in a restaurant, at the opera. Very often in some foreign country. He’d even once accused his cousin of following him around. So meeting now on a ridge high in the northern Cascade Mountains, in the lee of Mount Rainier, six thousand miles distant from their last conjunction in a gentleman’s club in London should – perhaps – have been less of a shock than it was.

  But at first all he could do was stare while his cousin drew a box of Japanese sushi and a tin of chocolate brownies from his backpack, and laid both fastidiously on the rock between them. He squeezed a tiny drop of soy sauce onto a California roll.

  ‘Marcus?’ said Bryn finally.

  ‘Have one,’ said his cousin, and offered the box. ‘If you insist on leaving your mouth open, you might as well pop something into it.’

  ‘This is too much, you know.’

  ‘Of all the bars, in all the towns, in all the world… which reminds me.’

  Without bothering to turn around, he held out his hand and his female companion placed a bottle in it. Thirty Year Old Douglas Laing, already a third empty. Not a distillation frequently found in duty free.

  ‘A couple of tumblers, Agnete. Three if you’re joining us.’

  And then Bryn’s brain really began to swim – queasy and light-headed as if it was filling with air. He could never have prepared himself for this. The blonde hair buried within a red and white beanie, a muffler covering the lower half of her face. The cool mist-blue eyes exactly as he remembered. She handed him a glass – typical of Marcus not to bring plastic – with the same appraising basilisk gaze that had so riveted him in Bayreuth. He made an uncoordinated at
tempt to scramble to his feet, slipped on the rock, and sat down again.

  ‘You know each other?’ he enquired fatuously.

  ‘Ja,’ she replied.

  ‘Have you been working together for a long time?’

  ‘Nej.’

  She settled down on the other side of the rock. Tumblers, scotch, sushi and soy passed to and fro across him.

  The sushi was fishing-boat fresh, a bouquet of disparate flavours. He could not guess how his cousin had come by it or what new wonder he might next produce from his travel pack. With Marcus, the original jack-in-a-box, the unpredictable was only to be expected. The one thing he knew for sure was that this entire visitation had been contrived for maximum theatrical effect, and for his benefit.

  Agnete leaned across and gathered in a couple of crab sticks. She braced herself for a second against his body and his nostrils caught a whisper of some Asian perfume. He was now closer to her on this silent Pacific peak than he had ever been in Bayreuth.

  Marcus was watching him.

  ‘Agnete’s my assistant,’ he said. ‘You’ll find she’s very able.’

  She rose to her feet and took herself and two handfuls of sashimi away to an adjacent rock.

  Marcus slopped some whisky into Bryn’s glass.

  ‘Sorry about the surprise,’ he murmured, between pieces of eel. ‘I needed to talk to you, old boy. You are such a difficult chap to keep up with. Oh, but do try the Ikura. Salmon Caviar. Delicious. Or the Saba,’ he said, pointing at a morsel of shiny, caramel-coloured meat wrapped in a strip of mackerel skin. ‘First things first.’

  There was no point in pressing him. And Bryn was beginning to find his presence, especially after the events of the last twentyfour hours, vaguely comforting. There would be a rational explanation for this bizarre meeting eventually; in Marcus’s own good time.

  And so they sat and ate and drank. Bryn’s mind was less preoccupied by anything Marcus might be about to reveal, than by Agnete’s tangible proximity. The memory of that tiny hint of perfume persisted like a sea mist, precluding other thought – until the shape of something less welcome began to form: a certainty that there could be no good explanation for her presence here with Marcus.

  When Marcus started to talk, it was in a conciliatory – even anxious – tone of voice, one with which Bryn was unfamiliar. He’d always tried, as a general rule, not to take his cousin too seriously. What Marcus did for a living hardly bothered him. It would not have occurred to him, for example, that Marcus – whose role in MI6 he had neither understood nor attempted to understand – might ever wish to involve him in his affairs. So the further Marcus’s narrative progressed, the more alarmed Bryn became.

  First, he apologised. Bryn was unaccustomed to apologies from Marcus. It was not the kind of thing he did. What was even more disquieting was the evident genuineness of his regret.

  ‘I have to be honest with you, old boy. Certain things have happened which should not have happened. You have become involved and I am extremely sorry. My excuse is that I do not think we could have anticipated how things would escalate. I’m afraid we’re going to need your help to resolve a quite serious situation.’

  He paused – no doubt, to let his words sink in. It gave Bryn a chance to gather his wits. He was not sure he understood much of Marcus’s characteristically opaque pronouncement. Except perhaps for one thing –

  ‘I do not think so, Marcus. Whatever this is, it is not for me,’ he said. Firmly, he thought.

  ‘Of course. That’s understandable,’ his cousin replied.

  ‘You should also know that the reason I am here,’ continued Bryn, ‘and not in San Francisco or Salt Lake City, is because I am getting out of this country and going home. Tomorrow.’

  Agnete was standing on her rock watching the track to the north. She swivelled left to check southwards.

  ‘Let me tell you a story,’ said Marcus.

  If Bryn had had any sense he would have stopped him there. But this was not the brash, confident Marcus he thought he knew. He was intrigued. And the sushi was excellent, Agnete Valkyrielike on guard, the setting spell-binding.

  ‘This,’ said Marcus, waving a hand towards the rugged panorama of mountains, valleys and glaciers, ‘this is America. In reality nothing changes here. Not the landscape, nor its government. In the rest of the world, new countries form, regimes move on, old politics are overthrown by the new. But in America the only template is an ancient constitution unaltered since the eighteenth century. Politically this was always the most conservative nation on the globe. Its presidents have never moved more than a few degrees from the centre, a few slightly to the left, a few more to the right, but never, ever, into political territory that a European might recognise as radical. Until now.’

  ‘Is it so radical?’ said Bryn.

  ‘It is radical from the perspective of the people who matter. The people who really run this country, always have done, always will.’

  ‘You make them sound like feudal barons.’

  Marcus shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘We have a Madame President now who plans to raise taxes from the rich to fund social adventures. I ask you: a Universal Health Service. She even proposes to impose political balance on the media. The next project will be to emasculate the banks by prohibiting them from using people’s private accounts to play the markets. It will not do.’

  ‘I don’t see why not.’

  ‘I’ll tell you why not, cousin. Because your feudal barons will do anything to destroy her. I believe we are entering the most dangerous period I have known since I took on responsibility for American affairs.’

  ‘And that’s why you’ve come to see me?’

  He laughed out loud. He could not prevent himself.

  He and his cousin lived in two different worlds. Marcus and his heady sphere of global politics, Times leaders and absence of self-doubt. Bryn a little closer to the earth – in his view at least. Where decisions were made by normal ground-dwelling people. Two parallel realities, with quite distinct ways of dealing with problems and making decisions. A person could no more inhabit both than coexist with anti-matter.

  Marcus forced a thin smile.

  ‘Let me tell you a story,’ he said, for the second time.

  And that, after one further brief preamble, was what he did. It was worse than anything Bryn had feared.

  ‘Normally we leave the Americans to sort out their problems for themselves,’ said Marcus. ‘A watching brief. At most a recalibration on the margins, to ensure they make the right choices. That’s what I do. Only if the problem threatens to get out of control, would we intervene unilaterally. We’ve never done that in my time. Until, as I say, now.’

  He took a slug of the Laing and passed it over.

  ‘At the epicentre of this problem is someone you know: a man called Udell Strange. He is an easy person to overlook. He keeps a low public profile and tends not to appear in the Forbes magazine wealthy lists. But Udell Strange nonetheless is one of the half dozen or so richest men in America. With interests in many things but chiefly banking and currency speculation. And arms dealing.

  ‘Mr Strange is now beyond wealth. Though not a politician himself, he controls politicians. Power is what energises him. For example, he is currently bank-rolling the campaign to destabilise the Madame President. Stirring up trouble in Congress. Creating a run on the dollar. Even though the President’s party has a majority in both Houses, money still buys support and Strange has plenty of both.’

  ‘Wouldn’t scaring up a financial crisis undermine his own position?’

  ‘Not Strange, nor his allies. Their main fortunes have long since been expatriated into other currencies and holdings, property in Hong Kong, rare metals, first growth French wines. High-end commodities whose value rises as fast as everything else goes down – because their availability cannot be increased and our new-rich Chinese and Indian friends need something to spend their disposable gazillions on.

  ‘But you shoul
d be very concerned about Strange,’ he added. ‘He and his like-minded friends are what I believe you would call neo-conservatives.’

  Bryn relished the irony. How unbearable for Marcus to discover himself on the same side of the political divide as his cousin. And what a culture shock, given MI6’s well-known conservative perspective, if the organisation was now finding Strange’s activities actually disagreeable.

  ‘The problem,’ Marcus continued, as if reading Bryn’s thoughts, ‘is that we believe – in order to achieve destabilisation of the President – Strange is looking to engineer international as well as domestic crises. And that affects our interests directly. Specifically, we believe he and his friends are promoting a new war in the Middle East. The usual combatants but more dangerously armed than before. This is a threat to the current President of the USA because, of all the areas in which she lacks credibility, it is in the role of commander-in-chief in a global crisis that – as a woman – she is most vulnerable. It is no accident that, of the last twelve Presidents, two alone did not do military service.’

  The cloud cover had begun to disperse. On the slope beyond the glacier, a few pockets of water and ice twinkled in the emerging sunlight. Bryn was happy for Marcus to continue with his dissertation. In time, though, he would come to the point where he would ask him to do something. And would be disappointed. His mind was set.

  ‘And now I expect you want to know what really happened in Bayreuth,’ Marcus continued.

  ‘It’s the reason I’m still here.’

  Agnete had taken off her cap and shaken out her hair. She raised her face to the sky to enjoy the warming rays. Her eyes were closed.