Below the Thunder Page 16

  In the distant opposite wing from the grand piano, a rosewood table had been laid as if for dinner. There were eight settings each of white porcelain, white napkins, engraved crystal glasses, heavy silver cutlery. How remarkably tasteful Ricky had turned out to be.

  Bryn picked up a champagne flute to check if, nevertheless, the star had celebrated his name in the engraving. He noticed that the glass – and the rest of the table – had a light mantle of dust, as fine as the powder that had covered his car in Lassen Park. The place could not have been visited or cleaned for weeks. He pulled out one of the tapestried dining chairs and settled back, like Miss Havisham at her wedding feast, and looked about him.

  At the dining end of the room, the star had hung several framed photographs of himself on the wall. Three or four showed him receiving awards: not Oscars, and none recognisable to Bryn. Another photograph had him with California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, each with an arm on the other’s shoulder. There was even a picture of him shaking hands, rather stiffly, with George W Bush. Every one of them looking much younger.

  He lifted each picture up and checked the wall behind. Entirely cavity-free.

  Perhaps the dust might give a clue. Interestingly, there was far less on the polished floor than on the dining table. No indication of any footprints apart from his own. He wondered if, when the isotope was brought in – if it had been brought in – some attempt had been made to erase the traces. That might explain the dust on the table and its relative absence elsewhere.

  He pointed the torch at the exposed cross-beams in the ceiling. Mahogany evidently, with lighter floorboards on top. He climbed one of the flights of stairs to explore.

  The upper storeys of the house were quite empty and unfurnished. It appeared that Ricky might have moved out some time ago and sold or removed most of the furniture, leaving the ground floor perhaps as a display case for any prospective buyer. If indeed there had ever been one.

  He spent a further hour searching. A dozen upstairs floorboards fruitlessly raised, chimneys explored, fittings removed, until the beam of the torch expired. He retreated finally to the kitchen. It had retained its charming early twentieth century fittings, with a minimum of modern adornments – a dishwasher, mainly, and a tall American refrigerator.

  The refrigerator opened with such a blaze of light that Bryn slammed it shut again. He went back to the saloon and pulled down a curtain to drape over it so that he could have another try without giving himself away. The fridge was empty except for half a dozen nicely chilled cans of a micro-beer new to him. He snapped one open. Not bad at all.

  By now a stubbornness was setting in. He had been in the house for the best part of two hours and was damned if he was about to give up. The whole thing might well be a wild goose chase – and maybe no isotope had ever been here or, for that matter, anywhere else either. But if it was here – then he was bloody well going to find it.

  He gave himself another thirty minutes. No more.

  In the movies, the correct routine is to put yourself in the mind of your opponent. How clever might Ricky Gaunt, or his security advisor, have been? Might they have been crafty enough to hide the safe box somewhere utterly unpredictable – specifically avoiding all those obvious places he’d spent so much wasted time exploring? Or should he be looking for something more in tune with the personality of the Hollywood icon? Somewhere a bit cute and flamboyant, for example? But showing unexpected taste.

  As the half-hour deadline approached, and Bryn was no nearer his objective, he returned his third empty can to the refrigerator and paid his second tedious visit of the evening to what polite Americans, he reflected, quaintly called the bathroom. Or restroom, powder room, comfort station, washroom, John. Anything of course to avoid addressing its actual function.

  This particular small room was windowless, with illumination which for once he could switch on. After a few minutes in the happy relief of a trio of beers well spent, he took to studying Ricky’s white Ferrara marble tiles, light-filled ceiling and minimalist chrome fittings. He could have been adrift in a shadowless space capsule æons from anywhere, like the final survivor in Kubrick’s 2001. A small fortune had been spent to make it all so clean and pristine. Even the cistern had been hidden out of sight behind a false marble-faced wall. The one thing disturbing its uncluttered smoothness was a discreet little handle to flush away the last memories of the visit.

  He took a closer look at it. The grouting of the surrounding marble tiles was a slightly, subtly, different shade of white from the rest of the room. He flushed the toilet a second time, but much more energetically. There was a perceptible ‘give’ in the handle. He tried levering it in the wrong direction: up rather than down. At first it felt immoveable, but – when he put all his weight and both hands behind it – the entire cistern wall shifted half an inch towards him.

  He leaned into the handle with every ounce of his strength, forcing it upwards until, with a conclusive click, the handle settled into a position pointing directly at the ceiling. It needed a quite modest exertion to pull backwards on it; and an entire panel, three feet by three feet, swung out – soundlessly cantilevered on a single stainless steel bar. Behind the familiar working parts of the cistern there was a recess and, deep within the recess, a safe.

  It was quite modest in size and may have originally been intended for cash or jewels. But if Marcus had expected its removal to be a simple matter, he had been sadly misinformed. It was efficiently cemented in on four sides. Neither the crowbar, nor the hammer and chisel, nor Bryn’s most strenuous efforts to drag the beast bodily from its hiding place, made more than a trivial impact upon it.

  After much struggle, he leaned back against the opposite wall and contemplated the scene of defeat.

  There was a small door on the front of the safe, shinier than the rest, as if it had been added more recently. At its centre sat a little bevelled dial, as inscrutable as the Sphinx. The kind with an inset window which, if you spun the dial clockwise, offered the letters of the alphabet and the numbers one to ten.

  He tried a few half-hearted combinations. There was less likelihood of hitting the right one than winning the national lottery. With the lottery, at least you knew how many elements to put in; and could probably assume they were all numerical. He tried the star’s name, his birth year again, the titles of every film of his that he could remember, and the names of some of his co-stars.

  After that he went out and had another beer.

  He stood on the verandah and watched a thin wisp of cloud, or the vapour trail of a jet plane, drift across the full moon, like a stripper’s veil. The darkness and silence of the streets beyond the house belonged more to the deep countryside than the suburbs of an American city. Even the birds were mute.

  It occurred to him that if the safe door and its dial had been added since Ricky Gaunt moved out, the unlocking combination would be even more unguessable. He wondered if Udell Strange could have arranged it himself. Judging by his car plate, he was every bit as solipsistic as the ageing Hollywood star. And what was that he’d said in Bayreuth?

  It’s my 75th birthday tomorrow. We can celebrate it. You can bring your new girlfriend.

  Hah! It was a trick he had pulled once, maybe he could again. Go for it.

  He was sure he’d remembered the date correctly. But neither the year nor the day, nor any combination of those elements, worked the oracle. He tried variations on the 4th of July 1776, American Independence Day and the cell phone number on Strange’s card, still in his pocket. The mocking tolerance of the dial kept him going: there appeared to be no limit to the number of times you could put in an incorrect sequence of numbers or letters.

  He returned to the saloon. The street beyond the gates was glowing in the headlights of a stationary car. He was out on the verandah at once, ready to bolt. But the car started up again and its beam flickered between the trees as it drove very slowly down the road. At the end of the block, where the curtain wall turned a corner, it stoppe
d and waited, headlights still full on. Bryn stayed where he was, ears straining, until – after several minutes – the headlights finally eased away and disappeared.

  It may have been nothing. Merely a fortuitous reminder that he needed to move on. He went back to the toilet to retrieve the tools. It seemed sensible to restore the cistern to its previous condition, and he was halfway through swinging the false marble wall back into position when he recalled Udell Strange’s boastful car number plate and, on a parting whim, dialled in the letters. USPATRIOT.

  The shiny little door clicked open about five millimetres.

  He slipped his fingers into the gap and tugged till it swung all the way back. There was one object inside. No lead-lined flask or steel cylinder. Just a simple wooden box containing, according to the label, a bottle of ‘Reserve Ten Year Old Canadian Club Whiskey’.

  He took the box out. And nearly dropped it. It was even heavier than Marcus had predicted. So heavy that it needed to be supported with both hands. But what a neat idea to disguise the isotope as the kind of homecoming gift a tourist might buy in duty-free. Though the weight, surely, was a bit of a give-away.

  He closed the door, spun the dial, replaced the false wall, reset the household security system, and crept out of the house. He retraced his steps through the camellias and the rhododendron bushes, hauled the box over the wall and returned to the car.

  Chapter 15

  For a moment, with a churning rush of alarm, he thought the Ford Focus had vanished – so embedded was it within the shadows and the acacia branches. Only the moon gleam on the body chrome gave it away. He opened the boot and laid the Canadian Club box under the piece of carpet; and took out the tools and the fold-up trolley and threw them into a patch of overgrown woodland on the other side of the car park.

  When he came back, he realised that a small package had been taped to the front windscreen. A parking ticket, no less, courtesy of The Professorville Tennis Club. He tossed it onto the passenger seat as a souvenir for his cousin – with a contented chuckle at the idea of Marcus being pursued through the Californian courts, long after he was gone.

  Then, as he turned out of the car park, he caught a glimpse in a side mirror of some movement by the gates to the mansion. No sooner seen than it dissolved back into the shadows. And whether male or female or even human he could not be sure; but cared so little to find out that he floored the accelerator and bolted towards the freeway with the blood beginning to pound again at his temples.

  He was now facing an unexpected problem – one that should have been anticipated had he taken the likelihood of success more seriously – the sheer insubstantiality of Marcus’s putative exit plan. What was he required to do next? He needed to contact either his cousin or Agnete and divest himself of his alarming booty. But where? When? How in all this vast land were they supposed to find each other?

  An hour or so north of San Francisco he drew up at a roadside diner. Since leaving Professorville, he had obsessively watched his rearview mirror for any sign of a pursuing vehicle. There’d been one or two scares with drivers sitting in behind for longer than seemed natural; but they had all eventually overtaken or turned away. Now he wanted a final certainty that he was on his own. While he waited, a couple of cars did draw up, but one contained a young family, the other a gangly youth who let himself into the diner through the kitchen door to noisy shouts of welcome.

  He should persuade himself to relax.

  The absence of any clear hand-over arrangement was – on consideration – more than a tad insulting. Surely they’d had some faith that he might succeed? He checked under the bonnet and around the vehicle for any sign again of Marcus’s tracking equipment. None: they had not bothered even to take that precaution.

  They must in that case have intended to follow along behind and make contact at a convenient time. The present moment, for example. It was a pity that they’d not thought to alert him to their intentions, because they had now clearly and comprehensively lost him. He had no phone number or one-time cell phone; or any other means of communicating with them.

  He debated going back to San Francisco and hanging around some of the locations where Agnete might look for him again: the Opera House or the university cinema or the coffee shop. The prospect chilled him. San Francisco, with thirty pounds of isotope and a bunch of assorted murderers searching for it, was not where he wanted to be.

  An alternative option was to travel north up the Cascades and hang out for a couple of days near Mount Rainier, where they’d managed to discover each other before. But if that failed, what could he do? Cross the border? Try for a flight home? With the isotope?

  It looked very much as if the game was over. Perhaps he should consider finding the wooden box a new hiding place. Lassen Park appealed to him – a neat irony – somewhere near the peak. And one day, who knows, Marcus might pick it up.

  The overnight hold-all was still on the back seat where Agnete had left it. He burrowed around till he found his orange vinyl Harrods bag, full now with his dirty clothes; and emptied them on the floor. He retrieved the Canadian Club from the boot. The old carrier would amply serve the purpose if anybody saw him with it: quaintly and unsuspiciously English, and – crucially – sturdy.

  He was zipping the carrier and its new contents back inside the hold-all when he noticed that the unwanted Tennis Club parking ticket had fallen into the passenger-side footwell. Something was loosely wrapped within it: a document of some kind. He scooped the package up, slit open its plastic envelope and unfolded the enclosure.

  It was a single Business Class e-ticket from Calgary to Heathrow. In the name of Hathrill. Someone – possibly Agnete – had written across the top in capital letters: CARRY ON BAGS ONLY.

  He apologised for his cynicism. Either she, or Marcus or both, would be at the airport waiting for him, poised to relieve him of his fatal cargo.

  He checked for anything else. Just a card for the fast track service. The flight, however, was scheduled for next evening. That left him a little over twenty hours to travel thirteen hundred miles. Even without sleep that would require an average speed of sixtyfive miles per hour. Time to get a move on.

  He took off up Route 5, aiming for Oregon. This would be the fastest part of the journey and a chance to eat up the miles. Because it was so late in the evening, the highway traffic was light and he was able to plant himself in the outside lane at a constant eighty-five to ninety, slowing when he thought he might have glimpsed a police vehicle. With one stop for petrol and some leg stretching, he was already east of Portland seven hours later.

  And dog tired. He could not afford the time to find a proper bed, so he hid the car in a crowded motel car park, curled up on the back seat and fell asleep immediately.

  When he awoke, the dawn was already upon him. He breakfasted on pies, biscuits and coffee from the motel’s dispensing machines, freshened up in the washroom, and took off again to the east. There were about twelve hours left to accomplish the second half of the journey. The fear was that, as he approached the Rockies beyond Spokane, the fast freeway would give way to much slower mountain roads. He also needed to slip into Canada by one of the smaller country highways: the kind with the least heavy border security. He would be lucky to keep up the sixty miles an hour average required to get to Calgary in time.

  A problem not anticipated was the rising sun. His early start meant that the roads for the first couple of hours were virtually bare of traffic; but the glare of the sun ahead transformed his windscreen into an opaque, speckly shroud and forced him for periods to travel more cautiously than he’d intended. He did not pass Spokane till noon. Then, as he got closer to the mountains, the road began to sweep round some soaring rocky outcrops and through heavily shadowed canyons and he had a chance to make up for lost time.

  He avoided the usual and shorter route up the west side of the Great Divide and crossed the Rockies through Glacier National Park. He turned north up the smallest road on the map and arrived at the bord
er in the late afternoon.

  It was everything he could have wished for. The American side had no interest in him at all. The Canadians were pre-occupied with a South Asian family whose loaded station wagon was being sifted through by three punctilious Mounties. He hoped that meant they’d be correspondingly relaxed about the contents of a white middle-class Englishman’s car; and he was not disappointed. A Mountie confined himself to checking the Hathrill passport and asking if he’d been on holiday. He pointed towards the car window shelf and the Glacier Park entry permit he’d paid for a few hours earlier. The Mountie waved him cheerfully through.

  He reached Calgary Airport with time to spare. He abandoned the Ford Focus in a long-term car park and printed off a boarding pass from an e-machine. He had remembered Agnete’s clear instruction not to check his bag in. So he stood by the entrance to the fast track channel, and waited.

  It was a reasonable assumption that Marcus, or possibly Agnete, would intercept him before he passed through security. The fast channel was the obvious rendezvous. But after an hour hanging around the entrance, with time beginning to run out, neither had turned up and he was becoming concerned that officials might start taking an interest in him.

  He wandered around the main concourse in case Agnete and Marcus were waiting somewhere else. His confidence in his cousin, never particularly robust, was beginning to sag again. He flogged his memory for any clue he might have missed as to his intentions. He could think of none. Surely Marcus could not have expected him to take the wooden box onto the plane? Apart from anything else, there was the well-publicised ban on liquids of more than a hundred millilitres, and a battery of security checks. He wondered if he should abandon his cargo in a wastepaper bin. Or simply walk out of the airport. Both seemed to him unacceptably feeble conclusions.

  He was out of time. There was nothing left but to make the best of a bad job. And hope, against the evidence so far, that this had been Marcus’ intention all along. He found a food store off the concourse and – with his cousin’s mountainside advice in mind – bought a bunch of bananas and half a dozen doughnuts for good measure. He packed everything into his bag, put further rational thought on hold, and marched through to security.