Once he had agreed to be repatriated from the Anatolian base by the OOR, he had yielded to the temptation to allow other people to make decisions for him. There was apparently an itinerary, a plan someone had worked out, a structure: the swift return to IRGB, the private meeting with Melanie’s parents, then a debriefing session at this place called Warne’s Farm, and finally he would be turned free to live his life once more.
What that would entail was something Tarent did not fully know and so far had barely had a chance to think about: their flat in south-east London, Melanie’s property and personal possessions to be sorted out. At least she had made a will. Then afterwards, what? He could resume his freelance career, perhaps travel across to North America again, find some work there?
It did not feel like much but it had the attractions of a plan, of a practical way forward, even if the prospects for it were largely unknown. But also largely unknown was the alternative: Flo wanted him with her. There was no plan, no itinerary for that.
After a few minutes he wrote an answer on the back of the slip of paper: Still thinking about it. I want to be with you. But if I go to Warne’s how would I contact you later?
When he saw her left hand dangling over the rear of her seat he passed the slip back to her. She showed no reaction and indeed continued to sit there in front of him for many more minutes, the paper resting loosely in her fingers. She did this for so long that Tarent began to wonder if she was even aware of it, but finally she shifted position and moved her hand into her lap. Tarent was reminded irresistibly of note-passing in school, when the teacher was thought not to be looking. In spite of all this digital technology, people sometimes still preferred to scribble private messages on paper. She spoke to her male colleague about something, and laughed lightly and shortly at something he said. Moments later the hand that had been holding the slip went up to the implant behind her ear. If there was any sign that she had read the note, Tarent never saw it.
Tarent later drifted back into his reverie, an uncomfortable half-sleep, trying to doze but always aware of his surroundings. He was fully roused only when the Mebsher halted and the driver shouted his name on the intercom. He heard the turbine winding down. While he moved hastily to pick up his cameras and his shoulder bag, Flo leaned back towards him as if to help him with his stuff. Her hand touched his and briefly squeezed it. She said nothing, and nothing was pressed into his hand. The other two passengers showed no sign of having noticed this.
Then he was outside on the windy hill, shivering, nursing the gash in his hand and waiting for the Mebsher to power up and drive away.
He felt tormented by his indecision. Maybe Flo really did have some new information about Melanie? He was only going to this Warne’s Farm place because someone at OOR had told him to. He stepped forward, raised a hand, but he heard a change in the note of the turbine. Tarent moved quickly, clambering up the uneven slope to a point where he was sure he could be seen by the drivers, but it was already too late.
The turbine began to turn more quickly and a cloud of black smoke belched away from the outlet. Tarent had to step back to avoid being anywhere near the exhaust if the vehicle made a turn. The Mebsher first climbed at an even more extreme angle, because of the rise of the hill where it had stopped, but then it swung around and the vehicle levelled with a downward lurch. The programed reactive suspension system anticipated much of the weight of the movement, but from long experience Tarent could easily imagine the effect on the passengers inside.
He had lost his chance. The Mebsher went slowly down the trackless hill, rocking from side to side and leaving behind it two huge scars in the soft earth. Gases from its exhaust swept past him, with a smell of kerosene, burning oil, hot metal, scorched plastics or other synthetic materials. The noise was terrible, but within seconds the heavy machine had moved down across the edge of the escarpment and the sound level diminished at once. The only wind now assaulting him was the one blowing from the north, with its load of stinging ice pellets.
He shifted his shoulder bag so that the strap ran across his chest, freeing both hands. He carried the camera holdall in one hand, then hefted his suitcase in the other. Treading carefully but heavily, trying to maintain his balance, he set off along the footpath that Ibrahim had indicated. After a few steps, though, he paused and put down his bag again.
He dug out the cellphone he had been given and selected the GPS feature. As it loaded the address appeared as text: The Paddock, Warne’s Farm, nr. Tealby, Lincolnshire.
The simple Englishness of the address brought a wave of brief and unfocused nostalgia to Tarent: a sudden memory of a time when there were still farms with paddocks. Indeed, when there was still a county properly called Lincolnshire. And further behind that, to a time when England was the place of his childhood, or some of it. He glanced around ruefully at the landscape, almost entirely devoid of trees.
The electronic map loaded and an indicator instantly showed his position in relation to the target address – as Ibrahim had implied it did not look as if it would be too far to walk, but he still had to carry his luggage over the uneven ground. He picked everything up again and continued. Having to hold the cameras separately made the weight of his luggage unbalanced and it was soon weighing heavily on his arm. The handle of the case cut into his fingers and palm. He was anyway out of condition after the long stay at the field hospital and the weeks of enforced idleness while he was there. For a short time at the beginning he had tried taking exercise at night outside the compound, when it was supposed to be cooler and in general safer. But he found the air temperature at night was still stifling, and the darkness of the bare hills seemed to make them into places of greater danger than they were in daylight.
The path unexpectedly led to a steep decline, with taller grasses and shrubs leaning across it and bushes on either side. The GPS display went blank, but he carried on. Satellite gain must be weak here, but at least in this lee the wind lessened a little. He walked another hundred metres or so, climbing uphill again, then came to a high metal fence, expertly and stoutly built, with blanking panels to above head height, wire mesh above that, then two counter-spiralling coils of razor wire. He could not see much ahead of him through the fence, but there was a small familiar symbol mounted on a metal plate: the skull-and-crossbones mortality warning, plus the international trefoil symbol of radiation hazard.
To his left, the fence followed the contour of the hill, moving up through the trees – to the right, the fence ran down into an area of rough brambles and undergrowth. He set off to the left, up the hill, moving away from the fence. After a while he came to another path, slightly wider than the first. He crossed this and continued climbing the slope, and not long afterwards came to the edge of the hilly ridge. Tarent put down his luggage for a moment, to rest his arms.
He looked away down the slope to the west, the direction taken by the Mebsher. The large personnel carrier had returned to his view and was now moving slowly away from him across a wide, roughly rectangular field. The Mebsher appeared to be heading towards a road, whose position was shown by a long sequence of high steel poles, with mesh laid between them, often seen along roadsides in areas where farming still continued and trees could no longer be relied upon to provide a wind-break. He glimpsed a village beyond the screen of poles. From this height and position the Mebsher looked a lumbering, difficult vehicle, anomalous in this familiar English landscape, making a heavy business of crossing the soft earth, tearing up whatever crops there might or might not be in the ground. The icy wind sent veils of cold precipitation across the view.
As he watched it the machine halted abruptly, swivelling around slightly to the side, as if coming to a skidding halt, something of which Tarent knew the vehicle was incapable. Almost at once, a point of brilliant blue-white light, small but intensely bright and threatening, appeared in the air directly above the Mebsher. It was impossible to say from where it had come, but it was a glint of sinister, painful luminance, against the dark rai
n-clouds scudding swiftly above.
The light grew even more intense. Tarent was already lowering his eyes, looking away, looking back quickly, fearing some kind of blinding laser beam, but now he raised his hand to his eyes, tried to watch from between his fingers. The light-point suddenly exploded like a firework, shooting three angled white shafts of light directly down to the ground. They surrounded the Mebsher, one each of the light shafts striking the ground a short distance away from the wheels. A skeletal pyramid of white light surmounted the Mebsher, a perfect tetrahedron, and moments after it had formed it solidified into pure light.
There was a huge concussion, an explosive blast. Tarent was thrown violently backwards, and he tumbled helplessly through the rough bushes and weeds on the level ground immediately below the edge of the ridge. The shock and sheer shattering noise of the explosion stunned him, made him incapable of motion or even thought. All he knew was that he was still alive, because he could feel movement around him, branches and pieces of vegetation and earth falling to the ground. The immediate memory of the explosion kept returning, terrifying and paralysing him.
Gradually a sense of normal life began to return. He moved his limbs tentatively, scared of discovering serious injuries, but apart from a feeling of having been assaulted and bruised by the wall of blast, there seemed to be nothing broken. None of his body felt as if it had been burned, not even his face and hands, unprotected at the moment of the blast. It was more difficult to breathe than normal because his chest was hurting. He had taken the concussion full-on. He rolled over, pressed down with his hands, brought up one knee, then the other, tried to shift his weight. He made himself breathe regularly, but his chest was in agony. Beyond that there was little pain as such in his limbs but a sensation of overall stiffness, a shocking feeling of having been dealt a physical hammer-blow of vast pressure. He raised himself more, so that he was crouching, balancing on his hands and knees, deep in the tangle of vegetation where he had fallen.
Half crawling, half walking, he worked his way back towards the edge of the ridge, to where he had been when the Mebsher was attacked. He became aware that he had been thrown back much further than he had realized. He passed his luggage, dislodged by the blast, but apparently undamaged. His suitcase had not burst open, and when he anxiously examined his camera cases he found those too appeared intact. All three cameras responded normally when he briefly switched them on and off.
Carrying the Nikon he at last regained the ridge. There had not been many trees along it when he was there before, but now none remained.
A drift of grey smoke rose from where the Mebsher had been when it was attacked, but in the time it had taken for him to recover, most of it had dispersed. If there had been a mushroom cloud after the moment of explosion, it too had either blended with the rain-clouds or been spread out by the wind.
Nothing was burning on the ground.
There was no sign of the Mebsher. Where it had been travelling there was now an immense black impact crater.
The sides of the crater formed a perfect equilateral triangle
2
He took many photographs of the crater, but he did not feel it was safe to walk down to inspect it closely. His hands were shaking, and for a while he had to lie flat against the ground to steady himself. He returned to his cameras, changed over to the Canon, then took some more pictures, taking advantage of its slightly greater focal length. While he was still shooting he heard the sound of emergency sirens and saw vehicles hurrying along the road that ran alongside the field where the explosion had occurred.
Tarent sat down on the ground, staring at the inexplicable shape of the huge crater, charred into blackness, a triangle carved into the ground as if with a precision instrument. It was identical to the trace of the explosion that had killed Melanie in Anatolia. It terrified him, the enigma of it, yet also the familiarity, the sense that both had happened so close to him.
But what had happened to the Mebsher? It had been destroyed in the explosion – not just badly damaged, not blown apart by the detonation, not even smashed into small or unidentifiable pieces of wreckage, but utterly obliterated. Flo had used the word annihilated. There was no trace of it at all. And what of the people inside? Just about everyone he had encountered since returning from Anatolia had been in that vehicle. Like the first blast of the explosion, the realization that those five lives had been wiped out was a stunning shock, one that kept replaying itself in his mind.
Above all, Flo. What of her? What had he discovered about the woman other than the fact that he should call her Flo? He had known her physically and sexually, but only briefly. Any deeper knowledge of her still lay mainly in questions. Now, those would never be answered.
Down at the site of the crater a number of uniformed men and women had arrived, with more vehicles turning up every minute or so. A group of armed soldiers in full combat gear had debarked from five huge armoured personnel carriers and were now fanning out slowly across the field, inspecting the ground, but also looking about in every direction. Several of them were moving towards the ridge where Tarent was crouching. He decided that he did not wish to be found, treated perhaps as a witness, taken in and interrogated about what had happened, or what they might think had happened. How could he answer a single question about it? He had seen it occur, but he would have found it almost impossible to describe it or attempt to explain it.
He backed away so that he could not be seen from below, packed his cameras securely, then hefted his heavy bags again and set off in what he hoped was the general direction of the place he was supposed to be going to.
The freezing wind was still blowing but at last the sleet had turned to rain. He barely noticed the cold as he struggled along through the tangle of undergrowth and broken vegetation. He reached the path. Two helicopters, their markings invisible because the machines were black against the sky, swept past swiftly and at a low altitude, heading towards the scene of the explosion. They descended rapidly and soon Tarent lost sight of them.
He started to run, responding to a feeling of growing panic. All that was around him seemed threatening, inexplicable, out of control. He felt himself to be somehow responsible, for the destruction of the Mebsher, for the end of Flo’s life, for the end of Melanie’s, everything. He was haunted by the image of the triangular crater, whose shape had no logic other than the fact that it existed and he had seen it happen. Weighed down by his luggage, feeling the bulk of his case bashing against his knees and sides as he ran, Tarent sensed that this was the end, that his life was over, with nothing left for him.
He did not have far to go. In this state of mental fear and confusion, close to panic, not paying much attention to his surroundings, and when he had lost hope of finding any kind of refuge, he glimpsed the roof of a large building, made of grey metal. Behind it was another, then a space, and beyond that a third tall building, this one with a high chimney. Several big trees, stripped of most of their leaves but still standing, surrounded the buildings. With no expectation of what the buildings might be Tarent came to a halt, put down his bag and stood still, trying to recover his breath and to become calm. His heart was pounding. He waited a few minutes, hoping that someone might appear, or that there would be some outer indication that he was in the right place. He checked the GPS display, which had started working again, and it confirmed that his position coincided with Warne’s Farm.
He flexed his body, collected up his bag and cameras, then hastened further along the path towards the nearest of the buildings. He encountered the fence again, just as forbidding, but at least at this point there was a gate. A stand, made of concrete and steel, was next to the entry, with an electronic reader built into its upper surface. The familiar logo for the OOR was engraved on the surround. Tarent had to put down his bag once again to retrieve his security card from an inside pocket, was relieved to find it, and more so when the gate swung swiftly open. It began to close again just as quickly so he hurried through, dragging his property.
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He went along a made path towards the building. It was much larger than he had thought at first sight. There were several wings and extensions, all apparently built at different times and now extending behind the main block. The original building appeared to be a nondescript twentieth-century farmhouse, but any character it might once have had was concealed by a number of alterations. Most of the extensions, flat-roofed and lined with monotonous rows of windows, were constructed of concrete panels and sheets, but these were cracked in many places. A zigzagging line was etched across the main wall facing him, from the ground to roof level, with mosses and other plants prodding through. The windows were metal-framed and looked as if they had not been cleaned in years, although lights were glowing behind some of them. The overall impression was that the building was being clamped to the ground: numerous wide straps, some made of metal, others of thick ropes, had been thrown over the roofs and secured firmly in the concrete like a huge restraining web.
There was no sign of a paddock, Tarent noted as he walked across to the building: just a large yard with a rough concrete floor where several vehicles were parked. As he approached the main door he could smell woodsmoke and something being cooked. He began to think of Flo, then in agony thrust memories of her from his mind.
3
A woman in a burqa checked him in, quietly scanning his body and baggage with electronic analysis equipment, then efficiently, and apparently knowledgeably, examining all three of his cameras and the other photographic equipment he was carrying. Throughout this she said nothing. When Tarent volunteered his name she gave no sign that he was expected.
Two or three printed lists of statements and instructions were mounted on the desk between them, under a protective sheet of thick but transparent plastic. She led him silently to the positive result of each examination with a point of a gloved finger to the relevant words. Her pale skin showed through tiny ventilation holes in the glove, the only glimpse possible of any part of her body. There were four columns of text: Arabic, Spanish, Russian and English. She guided him to the column of English phrases. He glimpsed, or at least sensed by the motions of her head, the quick movement of eyes beyond the veiled aperture of her shroud. There was no discernible eye-contact with him. Tarent knew what she and other security officers would be on the look-out for, and like most people who travelled frequently he did not object to being searched, but he was always anxious when anyone handled his cameras. The woman held them delicately, though, then passed them back to him.