The activist did not linger at the layby, but kicked his Ducati into life and took to the road past a series of signs requiring him to ‘Beware of Falling Boulders’. At Morar, he turned off the dual carriageway and swung down to the shore. Two hours were easily spent watching the tide retreat before he remounted his machine and roared back to Fort William in time for a relaxed afternoon tea amongst zimmers and walking sticks. He felt good.
This venture, this minor piece of anarchy, was by way of keeping himself exercised while in limbo. His attempt to compromise a bonesman with an aggressive homosexual tendency (impossible! bonesmen are impeccably homophobic by birthright!) at Yale had gone badly wrong and the young millionaire had set the dogs on him from an expensive hospital bed. The activist had fled Connecticut and gone to ground in Nova Scotia, where a retired union official who knew his background buried him for a month, then sailed him off from Halifax to Cork. He tiptoed through the Emerald Isle and fetched up in Scotland six weeks later.
Drifting around Edinburgh’s trendier nightspots by way of trawling for human mackerel, he spotted an amusing foursome being conspicuously conspiratorial in the alcove of a Royal Mile bar and overheard sufficient to realise the group saw themselves shock troops for environmentalism.
He had regarded them for a time. An imitation hunting jacket and cravat was dominating the conversation, forty-eight hours from his most recent attempt at shaving. A white towel peeped from the Nike sports bag at his feet. He was wearing the look of a man who had recently returned from a rhino saving expedition, and was drinking a glass of the house red.
The activist had contemplated this scene for a time, suppressing a desire to laugh aloud, and the idea of having a little fun, a little ‘downtime’ as they might say in Connecticut, grew within him. So it had begun.
He had introduced himself to Control by openly flying a false green flag. A whispered confidence that he was on sabbatical from a bout of derring-do with Greenpeace had gone down rather well.
In the ensuing weeks the environmentalists had become delighted with his commitment to their cause (indeed seemed delighted with anyone’s commitment to it) and he been invited entry to their ranks with a degree of naïve enthusiasm which caused him genuine embarrassment.
“Where there is great property, there is great inequality,” he had repeated as if the polemic informed his every waking moment, and saw their faces dimple in pleasure, these intellectual gnats. He discovered too that in sex they performed with the dismal enthusiasm of placard carriers.
He had urged them to light a fire under the Commission, and volunteered to be message boy. The environmentalist shock troops, in their perpetual state of heightened nervousness, pleaded the difficulty of obtaining leave and wished him ‘Godspeed’. He had a final bout of sexual activity before biking north.
The message had been delivered, and the fire lit. ‘Downtime’ was over. It was time to disappear, he knew, and leave no spoor. So many months had gone since he had beaten up the young bonesman in New Haven. Pursuit would have fallen off, embarrassment would have seen to that. He would go back to England. The four that with him constituted a ‘cell’ would be bewildered at his disappearance. Two of the three whose flaccid passions he had aroused, might briefly become distraught. There was certain to be an investigation, which would be pursued relentlessly given the apparent severity of the blaze in the forest. ‘Control’, self-titled from reading John le Carre novels, was a jackass upon whom forces of law and order would fall with dispassionate severity.
Control would blab of course and give them every nonsensical ‘personal’ fiction that he had been fed; his name, the Greenpeace connection and all the rest that the halfwit had eagerly absorbed during their plotting phase together. Blotting paper was more discriminating in what it soaked up.
But first Control should enjoy his brief moment of fulfilment. Nodding genially to hotel guests loitering in the lobby, the activist sauntered into sunshine and along a busy street.
He thumbed his cellphone as he strolled, heard it ring and ‘hello’ come in a tentative voice. Be effusive, he thought, cheer the idiot up. He might be wearing snuggies in case he peed down a trouser leg. Amateurs had little stomach for any kind of action.
“Glorious weather we’re having, delightful. Spectacular scenery, glens at their best. Amazingly, there are still patches of snow high up on The Ben, I refer to Ben Nevis, of course.”
“Really? But is our friend having fun?” Control forced himself to ask. “Is he active, John?”
“Absolutely, and done us proud.”
“Really?” Control repeated and the activist heard the little glotal sound of an adam’s apple bobbling. He smiled and deliberately gushed, “Our friend has been having a wonderful time. He has done it well. Done us proud, as I said. There may be something on the News later tonight. He has certainly lit a serious fire under the paper industry, as we hoped he would. I thought you should know.”
“You are sure? And no kickbacks? No slip ups?” Control was unable to restrain himself. There was a sound of swallowing.
“Absolutely sure. You take it easy and I shall see you in ten days, on the Wednesday. No need to call again.” the activist kept his voice cheerful.
“Yes, until then,” Control said, his pulse hammering, knowing his cheeks had flushed.
The activist hung up. ‘Bye, now,’ he whispered, and strolled slowly back to his hotel where he informed an underpaid Reception that family crises necessitated his return to Leeds in the morning. He would not request to be refunded but should the hotel find a tenant for his prematurely vacated room…well, that would be different, of course. He was upset at having to leave, having been enjoying his stay in this ultra beautiful…and so on.
“Delightful man,” the manager said to his concierge, a convicted cocaine addict in rehab. “Wish they were all like him.”
Control put down the phone, red faced and unable to rid himself of deep unease. He should have been buoyant, uplifted; instead, he felt downcast and vulnerable. His girlfriend was flipping through her gaudy magazine, silently screaming that she was bored rigid. He put on the jacket hanging over the back of a chair and went to rummage in a drawer.
“Going out?”
“Something’s come up. I won’t be long,” he said, already at the door. He wished that the telephone call had been less jocular and that ‘our friend’ had done them all less ‘proud’.
For fifteen minutes he disciplined himself to maintain the steady pace of a man enjoying his Sunday amble. Children were playing in the park, and he paused at the main gate. He fumbled in his pocket, made a movement of his hand, and the number ’8’ appeared in chalk on a pillar of masonry. He lingered for a moment, pretending indecision, then turned away from the park entrance.
He walked back to the flat and an unshakeable sense of something being very wrong walked with him. Entering, he feigned unexpected interest in a repeat TV programme and she sulked noisily, the flamboyant pages of her shiny magazine crinkling under scarlet fingernails. When she asked where he had been, he gave a dismissive wave of one hand, not deigning to look in her direction.
An imitation Victorian mantel clock ponderously tocked over the sitcom he pretended to watch. His girlfriend, having lost patience with his mood, took herself off to see a Brad Pitt movie. He switched the TV off. A little after eight o’clock he returned to the bookcase a book he had not been reading, put on his jacket, and left the flat.
At the rendezvous, the members of the cell were waiting. The message conveyed by white chalk had been understood. ‘White’ signalled tonight; the hour to be the number plus one. They had rehearsed this twice before, both occasions being dummy runs. All four had known immediately that this was not another.
“Our John has been in touch,” he announced, and the room crackled with tension.
“Today we struck a blow at the Commission, and we must go into deep cover,” he said theatrically, dredging from le Carre. “No meeting up, no calls, no contact whatsoever. Chalk an ’X’ at the park if you have been questioned. Yellow chalk if it seems routine, white chalk if it does not. Stick to your tradecraft and all will be well.”
The quartet looked at him.
“Where is John, has he come back? Will we see him again?” It was the woman who spoke.
“Deep cover includes John,” he said. “No contact.”
A thrilled silence tingled the atmosphere.
“Let’s have a drink, a last drink to our John,” he said finally. He had an absolute conviction that the cell would never meet again. He opened a veneered plywood cabinet and poured them each a whisky. There was a moment’s embarrassment before all four asked to be excused drinking because they were driving.