The Lure Part 38

'Of course you are. I suppose your friend is Obadiah. Do you want coffee?

'No, thank you.

Of course not. All that DNA left around.

'But finish yours. The man wasnt trying too hard to be friendly but that might just have been tiredness after a long journey.

'Thank you.

Petrie thought, This is bizarre. Civilised conversation with the man whos about to murder me.

'Well, Dr Petrie. The man leaned back perilously on the kitchen chair. Tom could hear footsteps on the floor above. 'I understand you have a disk.

'Uhuh.

'And where is it?

Petrie sipped at his coffee. 'Somewhere safe.

The man grinned. 'Posted to a friend, maybe?

'Theres always that possibility, although that would just shift the burden. Not that a friend or anyone else could read it. We encrypted the message. The pa.s.sword is as long as your arm. Even the NSA would take centuries to get into it.

'I see. And where is this electronic key, Doctor? Somewhere safe, you say?

Petrie tapped his head.

The mans smile had a trace of sadness. 'I wouldnt call that safe, my friend, not at all.

Petrie didnt respond. Vashislav had set up a duress pa.s.sword, one which would instruct the computer to erase the disk. For contingencies, the Russian had said. The disks equivalent of a suicide pill.

'The deal is that you give us the disk and we get you to the States.

Someone was clattering down the open-plan stairs. 'And as I say, the disk is no good without me. Its both or neither. How do you plan to do that?

'The High Tatras straddles Poland, Russia and Slovakia. Here were very close to the border with Poland. There are lots of trails, this being a National Park. Some of the routes are used by Russian Mafia for drug-running into Poland. a.s.suming you have the disk here, the plan is to take you across the border to Cracow and then on to Warsaw.

'What happens in Warsaw? Petrie asked.

'You do have the disk here? It sure complicates life if its in Bratislava or someplace.

'Tell me what happens in Warsaw.

'Dont fence with me, friend. Were here to help. In Warsaw I have contacts. Youll stay snug and cosy in a flat in the Old Quarter for a couple of weeks while we fix up doc.u.mentation. After that its a one-way ticket to New York.

It was all rea.s.suringly plausible.

'Okay, the disk is here. Ill get it.

There was a tap on the door. A tall man in his mid-thirties was waving a silver disk. 'Is this it?

Amos said, 'Theres no time to waste. Contrary to anything Callaghan may have told you, this is not, repeat not, a safe house. People will be checking up on him and this is an obvious place to check out. Bad people could arrive here at any moment.

'Maybe they already have, Amos.

Amos gave Petrie a thoughtful look. 'Well, I guess youll just have to trust us on that.

'What about Callaghan and Alice?

'Theyve been taken care of.

Petrie slid into the pa.s.senger seat. The van smelled of stale cigarettes and the floor was covered with sweet papers. Amos took the wheel with a grunt, wiping a clear patch on the windscreen with his hand. Obadiah sat in the back, and slammed the door shut. He was clutching a black canvas bag. Petrie tried not to think about what it might hold.

The road levelled and joined another narrow one taking them north. The churning black cloud on the horizon had now reached the zenith and looked remarkably like a Plinian explosion from some volcano. Amos put his foot down and Petrie fantasised that they were fleeing from a pyroclastic flow. Hed have preferred that.

The High Tatras, Petrie was learning, consisted of forested tracks, chairlifts and ski slopes. Many of the side roads were closed. There was a trickle of cars and the occasional bus. From time to time Obadiah, his finger on a map, would issue some terse instruction. Apart from that he was effectively mute. Maybe, Petrie thought, Obadiah saw himself in the traditional mould of the Western hero; others gabbled, he rode G.o.d-like and aloof like Gary Cooper.

Following a one-word instruction from Obadiah, Amos turned left and was confronted by a track with a chain across it. Obadiah said, 'Roads closed.

Amos gave Petrie a look. Petrie jumped out and unhooked the chain. He thought that a closed track through a dense forest was the perfect place for murder. He wondered how long it would be before his body was discovered, whether it would be identified. He wondered what Priscilla and Kavanagh and his parents would think as his absence stretched from days to weeks and then to months. The snow was about three inches deep and light flurries were coming down.

The road was steep and the van slithered its way up through the forest track. More than once it threatened to leave the path. The pyroclastic flow had finally caught up with them and the falling snow thickened as they ascended. Amos was gripping the steering wheel and pushing his face up against the arc of visibility created by the wipers. Petrie looked into the forest but saw only darkness. He could easily have jumped out and run.

After about twenty minutes of climbing, a beep came from inside Obadiahs black bag. 'Message.

Petrie had forgotten all about Vashislavs phone. Obadiah seemed to think the message was public property. He read it aloud: 'Dearest Tom, Still in Albena. Quiet in winter, but have found a man with a boat. Am just about to sail for Odessa. If I can get to Norway I have lots of friends. Will try for Svalbard. Know the people at the Eiscat radar and will get them to fire a message back at the signallers.

Are you alive? Please reply via Unur.

Freya.

'Youre just good friends? Obadiah asked. Petrie ignored him.

'Whos this Unur? Amos wanted to know.

'Forget it, Petrie snapped. 'How can the stupid woman be broadcasting like this? I warned her.

'Your friend wont last, said Amos. 'Not moren a day or two.

And how long have I got? Petrie kept the thought to himself. They drove under a pair of thick metal cables. The trees were thinning and then the van was suddenly above the treeline, and the road was levelling out. There was a building with narrow slotted windows and a tall control mast studded with little antennae. The snow around it was pristine and there were no cars.

Amos said, 'This is it.

Icy air blew around the van as he slid open the door. Petrie stepped out. His heart was thudding in his chest. They were on a plateau. Conifers fell steeply away on all sides. A single-file track led down through the trees, pointing to the north he thought it was the north. On the horizon, beyond the track, he could make out a line of peaks, glimpsed through the snow flurries.

Amos caught Petries look. He said, 'Poland.

The van door slammed shut. Obadiah, with his black canvas bag.

Petrie said, 'Its cold.

'After you, said Amos, pointing to the track.

There was nothing else to be done. Petrie headed down, snow getting into his shoes and wetting his feet. He heard the men at his back, their breathing heavy with exertion. He wondered when it would come, what it would be like.

Petrie wondered, and he thought, and he hoped.

He wondered about the signallers. Were they living creatures, human-like? Were they thinking machines, having supplanted organic life millions of years ago? Was he right about the probe in the Oort cloud and was the probe in it just an insensate robot, some super-powerful computer? Or by some trick of time beyond imagination, did the signal really come from the Whirlpool galaxy, sent to us before we existed?

He thought, what a way to end! To have been offered the interstellar hand, to have almost touched it, and yet to have sunk back into the slime.

And he hoped that, when they got to Freya, she wouldnt suffer.

The corpse was sprawled stomach-down on a flat, icy boulder, as if it had been kneeling before execution. It wore a black hooded fleece, heavy gloves, thickly padded trousers and furry, knee-length boots. Its face was expressionless. Its lips were thin and cruel, and its small black eyes stared unblinkingly ahead as if fixed on the Hardangerfjord far below.

The waters of this fiord were black and heavy, and speckled with little ice floes. Across the water, mountains glowed white under a sky dotted with stars and auroral curtains, dancing and shimmering, silent and awesome. Up here, on the roof of the world, Thor and Odin were a tangible presence.

In the Arctic cold, any corpse more than a few hours old would have solidified. Cracks would have split its internal organs and its cell walls would have burst, as the water they held expanded and turned to ice. But then, in the near-dark, something moved. It was a slow, careful, barely discernible movement, but it was there: a finger and thumb were adjusting a black, knurled k.n.o.b. The corpse was alive after all.

The man standing next to the p.r.o.ne body was identically dressed, except that a scarf covered his mouth and nose. He was shivering violently and flapping his arms. The scarf m.u.f.fled his voice, but failed to conceal its tension. 'Range?

The corpse pressed a b.u.t.ton and frosty breath drifted through the line of a red laser beam. 'Two kilometres. Just under.

'Can you do it?

'Of course.

'Cold airs denser. Bullets have a different trajectory.

'You live and learn.

'Look, if you miss...

'I dont miss.

'... sh.e.l.l run like a jack rabbit. Youll only get one shot.

'Shut up.

'I cant stand much more of this cold.

The rifle, on a little tripod, was a precision instrument. It had been custom-built by the Tanyard Springs gunsmiths in Texas. From its origins in their Honey Grove factory, it had travelled in the boot of a car to Colombia, for service with one of the major drug families who had been having trouble with a judge. From there it had crossed water to Kingston, Jamaica, where it had seen action from the roof of a Trench Town slum. Then it had travelled back to the States where, for a few hours, it had lived in a large South Carolina mansion. In an attic of this house a fine lasergrip sight, product of the Crimson Trace Corporation, had been added to the barrel. Having been fired just once its owner regarded repet.i.tion as bad business practice the rifle crossed the Atlantic in a private yacht to Northern Ireland, part of a large consignment of rifles and pistols. Its trail then led to a flat in the Fifth arrondiss.e.m.e.nt in Paris and at last, by train and car, to seventy degrees north, inside the Arctic Circle.

The rifle was loaded with a single bullet, reflecting the marksmans confidence. While the 300 FAB Magnum was a popular choice amongst his peers, the rifleman preferred a 173 grain HV. This was purchased from a source in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. It was a 30-calibre bullet, with an exit speed of 3650 feet per second, quite capable of stopping an elephant or piercing body armour. In a few minutes, if all went well, the powder in the bullet would be detonated and the shocked vapour would propel the soft-nosed head through the cold, dense air on a precise trajectory to the targets skull, spreading brain and bone fragments across the gritted road.

'Switch off the laser, you fool. You want someone to see it? The man stopped flapping his arms and picked up his night-vision binoculars. A thin road, already gritted, led into the town below from the left. At the towns entrance was an open yard. In it, half a dozen big diesel trucks were throbbing, the noise drifting faintly up to them. Steam from their exhausts rose up to roof height and disappeared into the blackness. Over the door of a single-storeyed building in the yard, harsh lights illuminated the words Henrik Hedstrom.

There was nothing to say what business Henrik Hedstrom was in. For all the waiting a.s.sa.s.sins cared, Henry Headstrong was Santa Claus. What mattered was that the target had hitched a lift in a Hedstrom truck and was heading this way; that she would get off either in the street or the yard; and that for a few moments, while she was saying her farewells to the driver, she would be a static target.

The man said again, 'Im going to die of f.u.c.king cold. He swung his binoculars to the right. Next to the yard was a post office, and then a two-storeyed timber house, glowing yellow in the streetlights. Pastel-coloured wooden houses lined the road, which hugged the fiord to the point where a ma.s.sive rocky outcrop hid the view. At intervals there were boat-houses, and a mile away a pier jutted into the dark water. Smoke from overnight fires curled into the sky. In a few houses, c.h.i.n.ks of light filtered through shuttered windows. One room had its shutters open and lights on, and it blazed into the darkness like a searchlight. The man peered into it, hoping to see something interesting like a woman undressing, but there was only shabby green wallpaper and a wooden dressing-table to be seen.

Somewhere below, a dog howled, wolf-like; answering howls came from around the little town. The noise died down. 'What if he takes her past the yard?

The corpse grunted. 'Will you shut up? You want me to miss?

'Not with what were paying you.

The marksman said, 'Its not enough. Im losing my nuts.

His nervous companion had no time to wonder if the statement was intended literally. His binoculars were picking up headlights, far to the left, where the road appeared round the edge of a mountain. His mouth was dry with fear and he could hardly get the words out: 'Here she comes.

49.

Endgame The cabin steward shook him awake and Petrie was. .h.i.t by his third surge of terror in twelve hours.

The first had been in Warsaw. At the check-in he withered under the steady gaze of hard-eyed officials. And again at Heathrow, the Special Branch officers seemed to have X-ray eyes which penetrated his mind. Petrie knew that a mistake at either of these key points, a tremor of nerves attracting attention, would have been fatal.

And now, on the screen showing the transatlantic progress of the jumbo, the aircraft was pointing south and practically touching Washington. He looked down, and glimpsed snow-covered ground through clear patches of cloud.

The endgame. A good one wont save you. It needs to be devastating.

In the Dulles terminal Petrie defiantly pulled off the wig and sideburns and the heavy spectacles, eased the plastic padding out of his mouth and the stupid little moustache from under his nose, and tossed the lot into a litter bin. He put on his usual round-framed spectacles from a case. Amos and Obadiah escorted him to the sidewalk at the front of the airport, where a stretch limousine was waiting, with another large black car behind it. Amos opened the door for Petrie and said, 'So long, Tom.

In the back of the limousine, three people. Eau de cologne lingering in the air. He sank into leather opulence next to a strikingly beautiful young woman who gave him an open, almost naive smile. Her voice was melodious and tinged with a Scandinavian accent: 'What took you so long?

For the first time in his life Petrie was out of words. He squeezed her hand.

The driver merged smoothly into the flow of airport traffic. A middle-aged woman sat across from Petrie, on the luxurious backwards-facing long seat. She pressed a b.u.t.ton on the arm rest and a gla.s.s part.i.tion slid up between the uniformed driver and the pa.s.sengers. She extended a hand. 'Im Hazel Baxendale, the Presidents Science Adviser. On behalf of President Bull Id like to welcome you to the States. Dont let Dr Strmer kid you. She arrived only a few hours ago.

Her companion, elderly and white-haired, nodded at Petrie but didnt extend his hand. 'And Im Al Sullivan. I run the CIA, for my sins. Glad we got you out okay.

Heady company for a junior post-doc. Petrie said, 'I feel as if Im inside a Bond movie or something.

Sullivan managed a near-smile. 'We have a few guys like that on the payroll.

The limo was now moving smartly along the freeway, the heavily tinted gla.s.s protecting them from the curious stares of other drivers. The CIA Director leaned forward. 'The deal is this. You give us the pa.s.sword to the DVD. In return we go public with the ET signal. We put everything into the public domain, all the new knowledge and all the material still to be decrypted. But all of us agree to keep one thing back.

Petrie waited.