A Spy's Life (44 page)

Harriet had been in the room for most of the time. She suggested that an eye-gaze machine – a video camera which tracked the movements of a pupil – could be used in conjunction with what was called the brain-computer interface. That way he could look at a particular spot and activate the computer.

He was impatient for these adjustments to be made because he knew he was fading. He felt wiped out all the time, which surprised him because he had not expended any energy on movement. He had thought perhaps that it was the drugs but now suspected that this inert body was running on very low reserves.

He was just thinking that he would have a sleep when Harriet answered her phone to Harland. Then she told him what he had already guessed. Harland and his mother were on their way to the hospital. Jesus, that was the very last thing he wanted now. Although he knew the meeting would require nothing from him – no reaction, no remorse, no apology – he still felt he ought to consider his attitude as though he was going to have to talk and explain things. God, it was going to be strange to see his parents in the same room for the first time.

He needed time to prepare. But he needed a lot else besides – to fill his lungs with the fresh air of a winter’s day, a glass of red wine or a beer, the sensation of a woman’s hair – Flick’s hair – in his fingers, sex, a cup of coffee and newspaper, live music and a landscape. He wanted the sense of distance in front of him, to let his eyes travel over the fields and forests, taking in the extraordinary beauty of the world before he left it. It was odd because all his adult life he had tended towards music and the patterns of mathematics. That was the bent of his brain, but now he thought only visually and spent his time summoning places in his imagination, remembering the smallest details of bars he used to go to in Prague, a friend’s apartment or the walks they used to take in the mountains – he and his mother and his grandmother, tramping through woods, the village below them like that picture by Breughel. What was it called? Ah, yes,
The Hunters in the Snow
. He missed snow and wanted badly to scoop some up in his hands, compress it and touch his lips with it.

He decided he would doze before they came. As he drifted off, he heard Harriet and the technician moving the equipment to one side, then felt her detach the electrodes from his head. She squeezed his hand and left.

25

DISASTERS OF WAR

Harland knew that the hospital would be watched, probably by Vigo’s people. But there was also a good chance that the same men who had put a bullet in Tomas’s head would be deployed to end Eva’s life.

She was agitating to leave, wringing a scarf in her hands and glancing about as she had done in her apartment in Karlsbad. But he insisted he make a call to Philip Smith-Canon before they left. He got through and asked the doctor whether there was another way into the hospital. He replied that there was a staff entrance but it was just as public, then he said he would send someone to meet them a couple of streets away at a pub called the Lamb and Falcon. It would be a young woman called Nurse Roberts. She would bring a white coat and the essentials of a nurse’s uniform. That way they could pass unnoticed through the staff entrance.

It was then that Smith-Canon dropped the news that the police had been to the hospital to take Tomas’s fingerprints. They had made a connection between Tomas, the flat where the murdered girl was discovered and two computers found in London. But the more important point was that the policeman had noted Tomas’s resemblance to Harland and said out loud that he thought Tomas was probably Harland’s son.

They took their leave of The Bird, who said that he would be away for the night on unavoidable business, and set off through the damp early evening to Bloomsbury. On the way Harland thought about Vigo. It would be only a matter of time before Vigo heard about this. But if he had been working for Kochalyin he would surely have known who Tomas was all along. From all his actions, it was clear that Vigo hadn’t known. Harland was sure that there was something he didn’t understand, another level of the affair of which he had only the slightest intimation.

They arrived at the pub and found a nurse whom Harland recognised from his first visit to the neurological unit. She handed them a Sainsbury’s supermarket bag which contained the coat and uniform. They put them on and the nurse led them back to the hospital. On the way she told them that Tomas had mastered a new piece of equipment which allowed him to write messages.

They passed through some iron gates and up a short flight of stairs to the staff entrance. Harriet was waiting for them outside the room on the second floor.

‘He’s pretty tired,’ she said, smiling at Eva and taking her hand briefly. ‘The doctor is with him. He said you should go straight in.’

Harland ushered Eva in, saying that he would join them later. He knew she would want to be alone with him.

Harriet took him for a cup of coffee down the corridor.

‘How is he?’ he asked.

‘Weak – his lungs aren’t very good.’

‘What about the police?’

‘Well, there’s nothing they can do, is there? He won’t respond to their questions and they can’t lock up someone who’s already in a prison.’

‘So they don’t know he can communicate.’

‘They suspect it, but they’ve no idea that he can use this new equipment. He’s really impressive, you know.’

‘Eva says he has a very good mind – starred student and all that.’

Harriet looked at him with a significant arch in one eyebrow. ‘And? What’s it like, seeing her again?’

‘She’s not at all as I expected. Not at all. There’re parts I recognise. But she’s changed a lot.’ He told her the story about Kochalyin. He took it at a gallop, throwing out shorthand observations about Eva’s life and what he regarded as her eerie detachment. When he told her that Kochalyin was the torturer she touched him on the shoulder. For some reason he winced. He explained how Kochalyin’s focus had shifted from Tomas to Eva who now represented a far greater danger to him.

‘But you also,’ she said quickly. ‘You’re still his major threat.’

‘Which is why I’m going to write the entire report tonight. Most of it’s in the bag. Once it’s delivered, there’s nothing he can do.’

‘And Vigo? Where’s he in all this?’

He felt himself smiling although he wasn’t sure why.

‘I wonder how many times we’ve asked that in the last three weeks,’ he said. ‘I’m almost at the point where I shall go and see him, hand him a copy of the report and say fuck you.’

‘Are you putting him in it?’

‘Not by name, because I don’t have the evidence. I know that the intelligence services were all desperate to close down Tomas’s operation and that they used Kochalyin to do this. But the UN will probably view this as simply a question of these different countries protecting their interests. Anyway, I haven’t been able to make the leap to tie Vigo in with the plot to release Kochalyin from his obligations at the War Crimes Tribunal. And I have no evidence whatsoever about the crash because my one contact in the FBI has gone cold on me. So, it’s down to the war crime.’

‘What about Eva? Can she help with any of this?’

‘Yes, I imagine with the background. Tomas can. He saw the massacre. He can make a statement about the murders. That’ll be an important addition to the stuff that Griswald was marshalling. The next step will be to find the site of the massacre. I have high hopes of that.’

His sleep had not taken him to some pleasant scene from his childhood, but to a hot mountainside where the noise of insects was deafening and his mind was clouded with fear and incredulity. How odd it was that now his eyes had fastened on to a tree with curiously black bark and limp grey leaves which he hadn’t registered at the time. Now he could see it as if it were in front of him.

He knew she was in the room – he had heard the door. He opened his eyes and saw her beside him. She looked down at him as if she was waiting for a reaction. She wore the same perplexed expression she greeted him with when he returned from his classes and wouldn’t tell her what his day had been like. He wished he could give her that reaction now – the smile and peck on the cheek that he’d always eventually conceded.

He saw she was shocked. She hadn’t grasped that he would be
completely
paralysed. Her eyes moved frantically around the room alighting on each piece of equipment. She was trying to work out what they all did. She touched his arm and his forehead, but her eyes were still darting about the tubes and monitors. He knew he looked like some kind of installation, and he was aware that he was making one of his uncontrolled grimaces because he could see the horror in her face. It wasn’t like her to be afraid.

He blinked a hello at her. This seemed to encourage her and she began speaking, jumping from one subject to the next without finishing her sentences. He wished she would relax and tell him how Harland had traced her and what she thought of him after all these years. Was she angry with him for going to find his father?

He waited. He had already learned that people calmed down after a while. Sooner or later they became aware that they were sounding stupid or hysterical. Then something else happened, to do with the lack of emotional feedback. They began to speak almost as if they were alone. He became a kind of bathroom mirror, a confessional.

His mother stopped and sighed. She picked up his left hand and drew it to her.

‘Forgive me, Tomas, I’m in shock. I find this very, very distressing. I can’t … don’t know what I’m saying. Forgive me for everything. God, how did we get here? When you went away, Tomas, I was so hurt. But I understood why you had to go and find your own life, away from me and Nana. She has missed you too. With her past, it mattered a lot that a third of her entire family had vanished. But we read your e-mails and we knew you would come back to us one day.’

She looked at him. Her eyes had softened; the fear was beginning to go.

‘Did Bobby tell you who did this to you?’

At last a direct question, he thought. He blinked once, meaning that he knew who had done it to him.

‘What else did he tell you?’

Wrong sort of question. He refused to blink in the hope that she would realise he was only capable of giving a yes or a no answer.

‘I’m sorry.’ She had understood. ‘Did he tell you anything else?’

He blinked once, though it seemed to him that he had more to tell Harland.

‘What did you feel? Did you like him?’

He blinked once.

‘He told me what happened in Bosnia. Is it true?’

One blink.

‘Oh, God, how could I have failed you like this?’

This was not a question he could answer in any circumstance, but especially now. Anyway she hadn’t failed him. The truth was that he knew what Oleg was like – but when he was a teenager he had found him glamorous, a challenge, a rule-breaker.

Minutes passed during which she started several sentences, then smothered them. ‘He said that you were forced to kill someone,’ she said eventually. ‘Is that true?’

One blink.

She hid her face and murmured something into her hands.

‘And he put you here,’ she said, dropping her hands. Tears were running down her cheeks. He had seen her cry only a few times. ‘Do you want me to tell you everything?’

One blink.

She sniffed and composed herself.

‘You remember how we went to Prague in ’89? You know I took you out of school. I wanted you to experience this great moment because I knew you’d remember it for the rest of your life. What I didn’t tell you then is that I had caught sight of Bobby Harland on television. It was fifteen years since I had seen him, but he’d changed very little. I recognised him immediately. Bobby was in Prague. I cannot tell you how happy it made me. I thought we were bound to find him. How crazy can you get? I was right, though – he was in Prague. But by the time we got there he was already under arrest. Then Oleg got hold of him. I don’t know how he found him. Oleg always knew who he was and that you were Bobby’s child. He was insanely jealous – you remember how he could be? He hurt Bobby very badly during that time. That’s why I should have suspected that something would happen when you went to Belgrade with him.’

How he wished he could stop her. She was rushing over things. He wanted to know what Oleg had done to Harland. That was important – couldn’t she see it was a pattern? How had Harland escaped? What had happened to him after that? Did she know at the time what Oleg had done? Why didn’t she find him then if she had been so damned keen to see him again? Tomorrow he’d put some questions on the screen for her and beg her to take things more slowly and to think of the things he would want to know.

‘Bobby says that all this time you have been using your knowledge of Oleg to get back at him. Is that right?’

He blinked.

‘And that you published pictures of him to help the War Crimes Tribunal?’

One blink.

She gave him a quick, ironic smile. She seemed to be about to tell him something, but he suddenly felt drained again. He thought of himself as diminished by the equipment around him – a lump of flesh in the middle of the rhythmic iteration of the machines. He couldn’t keep up with them. He closed his eyes and sank into sleep, much quicker than usual.

A nurse came and told Harland that Eva was sitting with Tomas while he slept. He went in once to give her a cup of coffee and a sandwich. She thanked him but did not look up. He left because he felt she wanted to be alone with Tomas. His one impression of Tomas was that he was paler than before and a little thinner.

He spent much of the evening alone in the waiting area. Harriet had gone to fetch him fresh clothes, a laptop, a telephone, the War Crimes Tribunal interviews and copies of the two coded images. He would need most of these things in order to start work on his report later that evening.

At just past 10 p.m. Smith-Canon appeared in the corridor with Eva. She looked drawn and smiled nervously at Harland, shy perhaps of showing her grief to him.

Sensing that he should take his chance while he could, Smith-Canon had come back from a dinner engagement to talk to them. He took them to his office, produced glasses and made them each a weak whisky and soda. Harland thanked him for all he had done, particularly for keeping Tomas’s identity secret. It had bought them valuable time, he said.