Edie Investigates Page 3

  “I’m terribly sorry,” she said, reaching into her bag for a pair of wire-rimmed glasses she had found, broken, on the floor of a party in 1974 and never quite managed to throw away. “Would you mind if I—oh, dear, now I shalln’t be able to see anything at all, oh, my—would you mind if I sat just here? I don’t want to crowd you, of course.”

  And when the young man smiled in great embarrassment and assured her that the table next to his own was exactly where she should sit, he would not dream of her going anywhere else, and the driver winced at this folly and buggered off, Edie was left able to let her perfectly good eyes wander. And understood at last what it was her subconscious had wanted her, needed her to know.

  Across the back of the folder was the single word: BARIKAD.

  It was the fashion in some Russian families, during the Soviet period—which Edie regrettably must acknowledge she remembers—to choose names for children which reflected their devotion to the socialist cause. A thousand young Bolsheviks were christened Revolution, Proletariat or Potemkin. But there was only one Barikad.

  He had no patronymic, no other names at all. He was the iron man of Stalin’s secret research towns, out in the tundra between Moscow and the Pole. It was said he had transformed his nation’s old superstitions into a new science of the mind. In the stone white of the Russian winter, he built machines to empower his brain, ran current from hydroelectric dams through his bones and mortified his flesh, and achieved a species of transcendence. He had projected his aetheric body into the secret councils of other states. He could curse a man to death, cause sickness with his thoughts. He was the Party’s wizard, and armies and secret organisations and even parliaments went in fear of the Eye of Barikad.

  Except finally it was all a lie: a brilliant, implausible, impossible campaign of disinformation to send Western scientists down blind alleys, seeking defences they would never find against attacks which did not exist. Millions of dollars, thousands of hours of research, US marines staring fixedly into the eyes of confused goats; psychic tests run on Celts in Wiltshire and Kerns in Brittany; years of divining, dowsing, spoon-bending and card-reading; Barikad was a fantasy, and he cost the West more money as a dream than he ever could have as a tangible truth. The man, yes, had been real. He had tortured himself on steel frames, drunk wormwood and spoken with spirits. And, predictably, he had died, cooked to cinders in the electric discharge of a turbine driven by the waters of a nameless river. His great engines were never built. The science outposts he supposedly constructed were just labour camps, bizarre make-work for the losers in Stalin’s games: Abkhaz and Ingush forced from the Caucuses, unwise poets, and Party members rash enough to remember yesterday’s promises. In their hundreds of thousands, the unwanted of the Soviet Union were made to disappear, spent as coin to persuade the beancounters in London and Washington of an enormous and uneconomic falsehood.

  For a while, it worked.

  The liner is terribly grand, and Edie’s wardrobe is made to match. She has learned in the last few weeks the fine points of fluttering, and faffing, and even—in spite of her considerable misgivings—simpering. She quite enjoys simpering. In the compass of the simper lies a vast and nuanced syntax of vapid communication which can mean anything from “Tell me more about your enormous investments” or “Not until after we’re married, Your Grace” to “Get lost, creepy, before I call a copper”. She has to acknowledge, too, that the cruise as a concept is not without charm. All the stultifying rules of sexual conduct which prevail in England seem to be left behind when the ship leaves the White Cliffs in its wake. Note to self. All the same, she’ll be glad when this mission is over and she can go back to her natural habitat.

  She turns to the wall briefly as if to fuss with her hair and adjusts a part of her dress which is doing something she would generally expect only from a confident and somewhat risquée lover. These outfits have no shame.

  When she looks back across the lounge, she can see the man she is meeting. Stocky to the point of tubby, he has a wide face with watery eyes which reminds her—as it did in his file—of a poached egg.

  “Good evening, Lady,” he booms. “It is very fine to have such a rose of England on our wessel!”

  Edie simpers, broadly, so that the room can see. And the room is watching, no question about that, two lads by the bar in sharp suits who aren’t visiting academicians for all they claim to be, but Hungarian AVH. The left one has a bulge in his pocket too small to be a gun, so she suspects it’s a billy cosh. The other, leaner and fastidious, plucks an olive from his martini and affords her a glimpse of a narrow case she identifies as holding a syringe. So.

  “Oh, why, how very flattering! And who are you, sir?” she says aloud, letting it fall into a gap in everyone else’s conversation. “I don’t believe we’ve been introduced.” A mild chastisement there, and some of the other men, the ones who have already tried their luck, wince a little in sympathy. The Lady Edith has proven elusive, and the beaus are growing frantic. Contests of strength are becoming something of a daily matter—shuffleboard, chess, even shooting from the top deck—they all mysteriously come to a fever when Edie chances to walk by.

  “I am Dmitri. To you always I am Dima! I am from Soviet Embassy the cultural attaché,” which is true, though he doesn’t mention he’s about the eighth assistant attaché, which is naughty, or that he’s a spy, which is an open secret everyone is too polite to mention. Anyway, Lady Edith is a pinhead aristocratic wife-in-waiting, and not the sort of person to know that sort of thing at all.

  “Oh, how terribly thrilling! You’re a Bolshevik! You must think me absolutely awful!”

  “No! But why?”

  “I’m a Lady! A terrible oppressor.”

  “Is accident of birth, Lady. Also, the wretched enemy from glorious socialism bourgeois capitalism. You are feudal. A necessary part of the ascent to perfected mode. And very pretty! I am a man who does not fail to notice this, even if you must be put up against the wall sooner or later!”

  The entire assembled company of kibitzing young men gapes briefly at this last suggestion, but it seems to go right over Lady Edith’s head.

  “Oh, my, must I? Am I in frightful danger from you, then?”

  “Of the gravest sort,” replies the tubby Soviet, with a twinkle, and Lady Edith actually flushes slightly and makes a gesture of insincere shock.

  “You are incorrigible, Dima,” she flusters, “and entirely too forward!”

  “I am a peasant, Lady,” Dima says quite untruthfully, “but you should not fear my rough hands. With you they will be gentle. And as for the revolution—if you have the right sort of friends anything is possible!”

  “Goodness,” simpers Edie. “Then I do hope we shall be friends. I shall no doubt find use for your rough hands. And in any case,” she adds, placing a lingering index finger on his round shoulder, “I do enjoy the company of a man of substance.”

  Dima goggles at her a little, obviously hoping this is the simple truth, and the thwarted suitors groan to one another. All that time practicing the exercises of Joseph Pilates when they should have been eating eggs and sitting still. A disaster. And an unfair one at that.

  The boys at the bar give each other a regulation sneer. Cheap theatre!

  And it is. Edie knows fine well that this charade will not persuade them, and that is not her intention. Her employer wishes devoutly, however, that they believe that is her plan, so that they will look no further, and certainly not at Dima, who is very brave and very endangered.

  “I believe,” Lady Edith smoulders, “that I should like a walk on deck. Perhaps you could lend me your arm, so that I do not slip and fall on my back?” Dima swallows again, but nods. They walk out together.

  Six minutes later they are in his cabin, and Edie has ditched the dress for a more practical outfit. Dima resolutely turned to the wall while she did this, which would have been very gentlemanly if Edie hadn’t caught him peeping at the vanity mirror. Gone, thank God, is the ridiculously
constrictive frock, and in its place a set of trousers and a light jacket in a new fabric whose name she has forgotten. Warm, light, and above all close fitting.

  “Give me the file,” she says, and when he does she slips it quickly into a waterproof wallet and into the long pocket along her thigh. “Thank you, Dima,” she says, and when he smiles shyly she belts him in the eye with everything she has. He staggers, and she follows up hard with an elbow and a knee. He falls, and she wraps a rope around his arms but does not tie it. “Okay?”

  “Good,” Dima says, and once again she finds herself impressed by him. She shouldn’t be surprised. Dima’s father was sent to one of Barikad’s towns ten years ago, and the boy trekked up there and saw it for himself, fourteen and alone, using a dog sledge. He camped in the ice and cold for months, hunted and stayed alive, and came to understand what the place actually was. And when he knew his father was dead, had died before he left of cold and hunger, he went back and joined the Party and became a British agent as soon as he possibly could. The crown’s man in the Barikad con. In the wallet at her hip, proof positive, as solid as it comes, the Barikad is and has always been a fiction.

  She’s still thinking this when he roars to his feet and his head takes her in the chest—not the stomach, which would have winded her and made the next bit impossible, but just a little higher. All the same, they crash through his door with a convincing bang and out onto the deck, almost at the feet of the lads from the AVH. Edie chops at him, and they separate, Dima coming up in between his supposed allies and their target, fumbles in his coat pocket and roars again. Edie takes flight. When she reaches the rail, Dima gets his gun out and fires.

  Bullets whizz past, plucking at her hair. Very close indeed. Bloody hell! She waits a beat, then hurls herself back in time with his final shot, wrenches her shoulder round as if struck and falls head first from the rear of the boat into the sea. Before she hits the water, she can hear Dima demanding that they kill her, kill the blasted British witch, shoot her fucking dead, but no more shots sound and she realises he is yelling all this while still getting in the way. Good lad.

  And then she’s in the body of the wave, and down, and down. She twists her bracelet hard and it lights, a gloomy greenish glow made from chemical muck. Down she goes, and pray to God the timing is right and this will work, because her ears are hurting and this water is much, much colder than the water over Fender’s Hollow. Cold and dark. Edie Banister, a falling doll in black water.

  Ba-boom.

  She can hear the sound of the ship, but it’s fading, no longer a roar but a sort of rattle, drawing away.

  Ba-boom.

  She imagines, up on deck, Dima proclaiming that he was attacked by the British agent and manfully fought his way free, and the AVH men will be trying to look suspicious, but Dima will be bellowing that they were supposed to protect him, yes, keep him safe, and they somehow allow him to leave a public space with a British spy, poor Dima all unknowing! Or were the Hungarians playing a fucking game here? Had they used him as bait? He would have them shot as traitors! And so the facts would begin to blur, an agreed version would emerge in which they were all heroes. The documents are gone, yes, and that is bad, but the main thing is that they are not in the hands of the enemy.

  Ba-boom.

  It’s too cold. Too dark. This was not a good plan.

  Ba-boom baboom. Ba-boombaboom. Baboombaboombaboom …

  And now she can see the geegaw waiting, and she is getting warmer. If she can just reach it and turn around, it will all be well. She stops swimming, stops falling, and it rises towards her. She breathes out and calms. The sea swallows her, and then something enormous swallows her again, and gravity and ice grip her and she screams.

  Choking on the floor of the submarine, Edie Banister swears and shudders and says she will never, never, never again, until Donny Caspian’s hands wrap a warm towel around her and he tells her it will all be okay.

  “I died, Donny,” she says, “I fucking did.”

  “I hear that happens, Edie,” Donny says. “But I don’t recommend it so early in the day.”

  For no good reason, this makes her laugh.

  Reading the Barikad file, Tom Rice was conscious of two concurrent and conflicting responses. On the one hand, he felt he was being admitted to the room behind the curtain, to the secret councils of Europe in years gone by—and by extension, being tested and prepared for the moment, perhaps sooner than he thought, when he might be given similar access to contemporary things. Possibly his misgivings in London had been first-night nerves. Perhaps he really had just lucked into something which would take him to the heights. Promotion. Power. A knighthood, and in due course directorships, or the top job in an Oxbridge College for his retirement.

  On the other, he found himself rejecting the histories in the file. It wasn’t that they were ridiculous. They were almost certainly all true—odd and alien in this new century, but true. The numbers of the dead might seem too immense, but Stalin’s time had been a horror. Russia was enormous, and she could die like almost no other country on Earth. Uncle Joe had spent her people freely, used them up to drag the nation into something like industrialism, if you didn’t look too closely. Millions had died, and tens of millions. So that was all plausible.

  The notion that in modern times a government might expend serious money on something so outré as psychical research, and that somehow it might be relevant here, might seem wretchedly deluded: a tabloid story in the making. Again, though, it had happened. The Americans had verifiably had programmes which pursued these same goals. They had done stranger things, actually: experiments on wounded soldiers and radioactive material that read like the first pages of a comic book. And the Star Wars project which had ended the Cold War had been much the same idea: a gigantic boondoggle the Russians just had to chase, and could not afford. No, that part was possible too.

  The idea that a British intelligence agency might indulge in a stunt as reckless as the one described in the final pages of the file he found bizarre, and if it had been today he would have assumed it was disinformation to conceal something more mundane and drab, like a blackmail plot or a well-placed bug. He knew, though, that the Special Operations Executive had done things of equal madness in its day, which was why SOE had numbered a huge proportion of dead heroes among its ranks, why the organisation had been considered wayward and annoying by serious agencies such as MI6, and why it was now defunct. All true.

  But, but. The fashion in which a file is arranged, the context, structure, and manner of its presentation: Rice knew well that these things were as important in a way as the information it contained. He had himself produced reports which endorsed in every particular a given policy, while at the same time so setting them out that no elected leader would ever consider the policy’s implementation. It was one of the key skills of the British civil service, because politicians had to be forced to think of things which would happen after they were voted out, and didn’t want to.

  So if he was flattered by this information, that was because he was supposed to be flattered—or so his more cautious mind declared. And if the end of the story suggested that there was more to come, that was not accidental, was not merely because life continued. It was because the narrative had been constructed to invite ideas of continuance. Frankly, on a professional level, he thought the document a little overdone. It could have been a great deal subtler. It was garish, almost prurient. It invited speculation of the wilder sort, lent itself—spuriously, so far as he knew—to connections to the present day which could not be sustained. It reminded him, in its apparently unmerited confidence, of the now-notorious dossiers which had preceded the invasion of a certain Middle-Eastern nation. There just was no clear reason why anyone involved in the Barikad project would come for Donny Caspian out of the past. Caspian’s dusty secrets were insignificant now. He could have given an interview to The Times, and it would have been cleared quite happily and read by almost no one. He had never been near a n
uclear missile, hadn’t known dirty truths about the Casanova sons of foreign dignitaries now themselves ascended to the heights. That wasn’t him. Donny Caspian—odd as it might seem—had been a gunslinger and a daredevil, and for all that that was very laudable, it didn’t make you a target sixty years down the line. The file was hogwash. Throw in a bit of sex, and it would do very nicely as the worser sort of airport novel.

  Tom Rice was new to the secret world, but he was not new to dirty tricks. He had been for several years charged with monitoring the trade in guano on one of Britain’s residual overseas territories, and while this was not overly glamorous, it had been massively educative. Guano might be the slimy product of the digestive systems of birds and mammals, but it was expensive and desirable, which meant people lied, cheated, and occasionally killed for it. Guano was sold in bulk at the international level, often traded on paper several times before it was ever actually shipped. And where there was paper, there was fraud. Warehouses were filled with ordinary mud and topped off with a layer of the good stuff; inspectors were bribed not to use a dipstick, and the presence of the fantasy guano was used to depress the market price so that someone could buy low, then sell high when the fraudulent guano disappeared. Sometimes you turned up to collect your product and found someone else had bribed it out from under you: the forms insisted you had taken delivery, and you’d be out your stake and your sale. And all that was before you even touched the arcane business of gaming the subsidies, which was where it got really bad and the guano trade started to dovetail with drugs and sex slaves. Tom Rice had been provided with a bodyguard of three when he was working the guano desk, and been trained in surviving a kidnapping. He’d had a hot button on a lanyard around his neck at all times, even in the bath.