PASCAL RAN FAST UP the slope, breathing hard. He ducked under the branches of the chestnut trees, pushed past a group of children, and ran out to the ring road. McMullen had disappeared.
He glanced to his right, toward the residence. He heard first one engine, then a second, start up. He glanced to his left; a group of people were approaching the park. He ran across the road and looked over the fence into the mosque courtyard beyond. Still deserted. He hesitated, wondering if he could have been mistaken. Perhaps the man with the Barbour jacket had not been McMullen? How far could he have gotten with a one-hundred-yard start? Not far, surely? Pascal had expected to see him in the courtyard below. He stared down, scanning the space and the main road beyond. He looked back over his shoulder, and as he did so, the first of the ambulances passed him, driving fast. A second followed fifty yards behind. They came out from the residence, lights flashing. A second later they emerged into the main road beyond. One swung north, the other west. Pascal vaulted the fence into the mosque precincts and took the slope to the courtyard very fast.
There was nobody there. He looked this way and that, counting seconds. There was no sign of the man, no sign of anyone. The minaret’s door was solid, and it was locked. He looked up and could see nothing, just the edge of the parapet wall around the minaret’s platform, and the pillars that supported its roof canopy. He could see nothing and no one up there. He listened. Only silence, a tight, tense silence in the courtyard, a silence intensified by the hum of passing traffic beyond.
I was wrong, he thought, and then he saw it, tucked in under the bushes at the edge of the courtyard—an old dark green rolled-up Barbour jacket. He crossed to it, moving quietly and stealthily now. The jacket was just a jacket: Whatever it had been used to conceal had been removed. Quietly, Pascal laid it back down. He edged back to the foot of the minaret tower and pressed himself against its walls. He moved around it until he was directly beneath the side of the platform that overlooked the residence gardens. He looked upward, the sun dazzling his eyes. At first he could see nothing but stone, and beyond it white sky. Then slowly something appeared. He could glimpse it only when the sun glinted on its metal. From where he was standing, so far below, it was infinitesimal, but Pascal knew what it was, this thin metal object, narrow as a blade of grass.
He shouted then, loudly enough to give warning, loudly enough to spoil an aim. Nothing happened. He shouted again, McMullen’s name this time, and as he shouted, he ran back to that locked door.
He hurled himself against it with his full weight. It did not move. He threw himself against it a second time, and still it did not budge. He drew in his breath. Silence sped past him. In the second before he hurled himself against the door again, he heard a minute sound from above him. It was a sound he had heard many times in the past, the click of a safety catch being released on a rifle.
“Can you make out the pattern?” Hawthorne was saying. They were fifty yards from the bench where Lise had been sitting, with the open lawn behind them, and the low, neatly clipped box hedges that made up the knot garden directly in front of them. The sky was cloudless, the sun dazzlingly bright. Hawthorne gestured to the hedges, separated by miniature paths of immaculately kept gravel.
“There are many different traditional patterns,” he went on. “They date back to the sixteenth century and beyond. I designed this one with a dual function. The pattern is decorative, but if you look closely, you see it’s also a maze. Mazes are very interesting, you know. Originally they appear as tiled patterns on church floors. Penitents had to negotiate them on their knees. It was an allegory of the soul’s search for redemption. …” He glanced at her with a smile. “I like that kind of thing. I’d have fared much better in the medieval world, I sometimes think.”
“Why do you say that?” Gini asked, watching him intently.
“Oh, I don’t know. The connection between morality and religion was very strong then. People had very clear beliefs—perdition, salvation. Damn.” He bent to examine one of the box plants. “The frost has damaged some of these….”
He leaned forward, looking closely at the tips of the plants. Gini looked down at him-. She thought: Another minute, then I’ll speak.
“I’ve always been interested in gardens,” he continued. “As were my grandfather and my father. Another inheritance, you see.” He glanced up at her. “Shall we sit here for a while, or would you like to go in?”
He gestured to another white-painted bench, just on the edge of the lawn, overlooking the knot garden. As he looked up at her, the sun shone directly on his face. It lit his fair hair like a helmet. A trick of the light, Gini thought. For an instant he looked dazzlingly young and invincible, like some warrior prince.
He straightened, and moved across to the bench. Gini watched him, then glanced over her shoulder. Two of the security men, ever vigilant, had stationed themselves twenty yards back. Shading her eyes from the sun, she saw that one was Romero, the other Malone. Romero’s eyes were fixed on her; Malone’s gaze constantly moved. She saw him check the ambassador, scan the gardens, look back toward the house.
She followed his line of sight, taking in the lawn, the trees, the brilliant horizon. There was a gap in the screen of trees that marked the boundary between the residence and the park, no doubt the result of the pruning and felling activities she had overheard earlier that week. The day she had stood there, listening to the whine of the chain saw and Lise Hawthorne’s instructions to the workmen—that had been the day she found Napoleon dead.
She felt her throat tighten. Through the gaps in the trees she could see the glittering gold dome of the mosque; against the bright white sky rose the thin silhouette of its minaret. A beautiful view, a fine garden, a sequestered place. The privileges of power, she thought; she crossed to Hawthorne and sat down next to him on the bench.
“Tell me,” she said quietly. “There’s something I don’t understand. Why did you kill my cat?”
His reaction was very quick. Just a tiny and momentary hardening of the eyes, then the puzzled smile.
“I’m sorry. You’ve lost me. What cat, Gini? I didn’t know you had a cat.”
“Oh, I think you did. And he scratched you, didn’t he? I can see the marks. There, on your arm. And on your neck.”
“What, that?” He gave a gesture of bewilderment, then sighed. “You want to know how I got these scratches?”
“Yes. I do.”
“Then ask Mary.” His voice hardened. “She was there in the room the day Lise inflicted them. Didn’t she tell you about that?”
Even then, for a moment, she very nearly believed him. It was so perfectly judged, so well timed, the tone so correct. She looked at him, and he looked back at her. She glanced down at his arm, then back at his throat.
“No woman did that,” she said quietly. She raised her eyes to his. “You’re lying.”
“Gini, I’m not. I told you—I’ve had enough lies to last me a lifetime.” He hesitated, then took her hand. “Can’t we move beyond this?” he went on in a low voice. “I thought you understood. I wouldn’t lie to you. Not now. You know me too well. We’ve been through too much.”
“Oh, but you would lie,” she replied. “You’d lie to me just as easily and well as you lie to anyone else. Your wife lies too, nearly as well as you do. And your father…” She hesitated. “I’m not sure how much your father lied to me. Not a great deal maybe. You didn’t tell him did you?” She touched the scratch on his arm. “Your father doesn’t know about this.”
There was a long silence. Hawthorne continued to hold her eyes, and Gini waited. Then, at last, there was the tiniest alteration in his face, a tightening around the eyes, before he covered her hand with his.
“No,” he said. “You’re right. My father doesn’t know about this and he wouldn’t understand if he did.”
He released her hand then, and leaned against the back of the seat. He turned his eyes away and looked across the gardens toward the park.
“It was Wednesday morning,” he said in a quiet, level voice. “I had seen you at that dinner at the Savoy the previous night. I couldn’t sleep. I was thinking about some of the things I’d said in that speech. I thought of you, once or twice. Early that morning, my father played me one of his damn tapes. It was you, in your apartment with Nicholas Jenkins. You agreed to drop the story on me. That didn’t satisfy my father, of course, but it should have reassured me. It had the opposite effect. I wanted to see you then, very much. I wanted to tell you some of the things I finally told you last Friday—about my marriage, all that. So I went to your apartment. You weren’t there, of course.”
He glanced toward her in an unfocused, frozen way, as if he scarcely saw her. “I was in a very strange state. Desperate, perhaps—very pent up. I don’t know why. I think I wanted you to know—who I was, what I was. I wanted someone to know….” He produced a tight smile. “A lifelong Catholic, you see? It’s been a long time since I went to confession. And I can’t take communion. Maybe it was that.”
He paused. Gini said nothing. From behind them she heard the crackle of radio static. A bird began to sing in the branches to their left, then flew off. In the distance, a very long way away, a universe away from this conversation, she thought she might have heard a shout.
“When you weren’t there,” Hawthorne said, “I was appalled. I had to get into your apartment. It wasn’t difficult—you have locks a child could force. When I went inside, I wanted you. I started to look for you. I went into your bedroom. I touched your clothes, and your sheets. I could smell your skin and your hair. I went through all your papers, the drawers in your desk. I thought, if you weren’t there, I might find you in a letter or a diary. Then I thought that maybe I would write to you, leave you a message, or just wait, and then I looked at these things I’d found in your desk—the handcuffs, the stocking, the shoe, and I didn’t know why they were there. I knew nothing about how they’d been sent. But they made me think of my wife, of things I’ve done with my wife, and other women too, sometimes, and that…excited me, I suppose, though it never feels like excitement—it feels black. I wanted you then. And one part of my mind wanted you the way you are, but another part wanted you wearing those things, even the handcuffs, especially the handcuffs, so you were just like all the other women, and I could make you do what I like….
“I can’t explain.” He lifted his hand, then let it fall. “It’s something that happens. I have to find out what’s on the other side, the dark side. Sometimes I can control it, but sometimes I can’t, and that day it was very intense. If you’d come in then, I’d have made you wear those things. Anything could have happened. I might have killed you. I might have killed myself. But you didn’t come in, and your cat was there, watching me, and I had the stocking in my hands, so I killed an animal instead. Then I put everything away. Then I got rid of all the pain and agony and want. Then I left.”
Gini gave a low cry. She rose, almost stumbled, and moved blindly away from the bench. Hawthorne came after her and took her by the arm. He pulled her around so she was facing him. She stared at him. Her eyes were blurred with tears, but just for an instant she thought she saw light move against his face.
“That is what I am,” he said in a low voice. “You knew earlier anyway. You were asking my father—I heard you, your last question when I came into the room. Who was with my wife once a month, last year? Who watched her with her strangers? I did. Because she liked to watch me watching her, and because that’s the point I’ve reached. I want to know, if you go down far enough, whether you get to a place where you’re really damned, where you’re finally beyond reach.”
He released her and stepped back. Again something moved, glanced, against his face.
“You know it all now,” he said in a dead voice. “All in all, for better and worse, you know me more than anyone does.” He smiled. “Except for God, of course. If there is a God. He sees. And I don’t imagine he forgives.”
There was a silence then. Gini stood very still. Hawthorne moved away from her, then moved back. Behind them, at a distance, were his two security shadows. She heard a crackle of radio static; she saw one of the men swing around, look toward the boundary, swing back. But that was far away, outside this tight little cone of silence in which she and Hawthorne stood.
“Why,” she began in a low voice, “why did you let this happen to you? You could have been so different. You were given so much. Who made you this way—was it your father? Lise? Why couldn’t you fight back?” She broke off. She could see it quite clearly now; something was moving on Hawthorne’s face.
“Neither of them is responsible,” Hawthorne was saying. “I made myself. I found out what I was in Vietnam. Gini, listen to me….”
But Gini could not listen to him. She was mesmerized by this tiny moving mark on his face. It reminded her of a game she’d played as a child with a pocket mirror, reflecting the sun’s beams into a tiny patch of dazzling light, then directing them onto a friend’s hand or face. Except this moving thing was not white, not dazzling. It was a small red circle, no more than a centimeter across, moving across Hawthorne’s face.
Hawthorne seemed not to be aware of it. He moved and it disappeared, then he moved again and it came back. It wavered across his cheekbones, moved up to his hair. Hawthorne was continuing to speak. He was saying something about her father, and something about My Nuc, and something about how her father had not witnessed what happened there, though had possibly guessed.
“What?” Gini said. “What’s happening here?”
Someone behind them was moving. Hawthorne glanced away, then back. The red circle reappeared in the center of his forehead. He gave a sigh.
“Gini, I killed that girl,” he was saying quietly. “She was a communist agent. Most of my platoon were dead. She was being interrogated inside this hut. It was hot. It wasn’t the way McMullen claims. It was war, Gini. One woman and fifteen men who’d just watched their friends die. I was twenty-three years old. So, yes, it all went wrong and yes, she was raped, and when it was over, I killed her. She wanted to die, she died holding my hand. I shot her once in the back of the neck—”
“Wait,” Gini cried. “Stop. Something’s wrong. Your face—”
She stared at him. The red circle moved fractionally. Hawthorne’s expression became puzzled. He frowned, and she saw his eyes take on a look of concern.
“Gini, what is it?” he said. “Shall I take you back inside?”
He made a small movement toward her, then stopped. The red circle reappeared. His frown deepened, and time, already slow, was slowing even more, so the frown took a long time to form, and the shout from twenty yards away took hours to reach them, and the fact that someone was running, both Malone and Romero were running, that too seemed to Gini to be happening very slowly and somewhere else. There was the mark, like a caste mark just between Hawthorne’s brows, and as Gini stared at him and the silence lengthened, she saw him start to understand. For one tiny second something flared in his eyes, a knowledge, perhaps even a relief. She saw his lips move. She felt him start to push her away, and then his face split.
Redness misted the air. Something red spouted, drenching her face and her hair and her clothes. She was covered in this terrible copious red liquid. Time was immensely slow now, space huge. It was warm, this liquid that came out of the air. It smelled of iron. When she looked down at herself, she saw she was soaked with the stuff and also something else, some vile creamy pulpy matter. She started to jerk away, to pull away. Hawthorne was reeling backward; the wet air was filled with motion. Then she heard the crack of the rifle, the whine of an event already over.
“Get down, get down, and get d—”
Malone cannoned into her. He knocked her to the ground. She lay on the damp grass, staring at a white sky.
After a while it seemed safe to turn her head, so she did turn it, just a fraction, and she could see Hawthorne. He was lying a few feet from her. Malone was crouching beside him. Frank Romero was lying half on top of Hawthorne in a tangle of limbs. He was talking over and over into his wrist mike, his voice breaking with shock. He was saying, “It’s a hit. He’s been hit. Scorpio’s down.” Gini wanted to reach across and tell him that it was more than this, that Hawthorne was dead, but her limbs and her lips would not move.
Did Romero understand? She was not sure he did. Shock could affect even professionals, even killers, even ex-soldiers, and he started to do a terrible thing. He was sobbing, trying to scoop brain spillage from the grass and replace it, cram it, back inside the cranium.
Gini closed her eyes. She began to retch. She rolled away, closer to the box bushes, closer to Hawthorne’s knot garden, to his penitential design.
“Get down. Leave him. Christ, get down!”
She heard Malone say this. Moaning, she covered her ears with her hands. There was a huge silence, then the crack of the second shot.
The door gave at last. Pascal heard the first shot as he reached the foot of the stairs. He began to run up that tight, endless one-hundred-foot spiral. The second shot came about forty seconds later, as Pascal reached the last turn. He cried out. He thought: Hawthorne, and who else? Fear clamped around his heart. He ran faster, his steps echoing on the stone stairs. There was silence above him. He thought: Is he reloading, or doesn’t he need to reload? How many will he shoot?
He could see light above him now. When he reached the minaret platform, McMullen was standing facing him. His rifle was pointing directly at Pascal’s heart.
He said in a calm, quiet voice, “Oh, it’s you. Don’t move. I’ve no reason to kill you, but if you move, I will.”
Pascal froze. The rifle was a serious weapon, an advanced weapon. A Heckler and Koch PSG1. It had laser sights. At this point-blank range the bullet might pass straight through him, doing little damage—or it might not. It would depend on the ammunition, on luck, on God.
“Who?” he said. He could scarcely speak. “Why did you fire twice? Who did you kill?”
McMullen looked first puzzled, then impatient. “Hawthorne, obviously. And Frank Romero.”
“You hit them both?”
“At a seven-hundred-yard range? From this height? Of course I hit them. Hawthorne’s dead. Both of them are dead. Once I had them in the center of the garden, it was an easy shot. A textbook line of fire.”
McMullen glanced over his shoulder, then back. He had heard the sound of running feet below, as had Pascal. “If you’re worried about that woman reporter friend of yours,” he said, “she’s safe. She’s over there in the gardens. She was talking to Hawthorne just now.”
“What?” Pascal went white. “Gini was with him—she was with him then?”
“Sure.” McMullen gave him a cool glance. He lowered his rifle slightly. “She wants to cover wars, doesn’t she? That’s her ambition? Well, now she knows what modern weapons do to people.”
Pascal stared at him. McMullen was slightly pale, but absolutely calm.
“How do you know that?” Pascal said. “That was never mentioned. How do you know that?”
McMullen gave a slight shrug. He raised the rifle again. “I know more than you suppose. Stand over there, would you? No, farther to your right. Up against the parapet wall.”
Pascal moved. Glancing down, he could just see into the courtyard behind the mosque. Two black-clad male figures moved fast across the courtyard and took cover.
“Are they armed?” McMullen said.
“Yes.”
“Fine.” He moved toward the stairs. At the top of them, he paused.
“Did you get those photographs of Hawthorne?”
“No. Nothing that was usable.”
“He went to the house as planned?”
“Yes. He did. But it wasn’t an assignation with a stranger. He went there with his wife. With Lise.”
McMullen, who had been moving, became very still. “You mean he compelled her to go there with him?”
“I saw no signs of compulsion, The reverse. She took the initiative. She was clearly there of her own free will.”
There was a silence. McMullen moved his hand very slightly. His finger was now on the trigger of the rifle. He said, “Are you telling me she went there to make love to him? That can’t be true.”
“I can’t deny what I saw,” Pascal said quietly, and waited. The odds were about sixty-forty, he thought, whether McMullen would fire, whatever answer he gave. The silence lasted only a few seconds, but it felt to Pascal very long. In the distance, sirens began to wail.
McMullen hesitated. He took one step back, closer to the stairs. He could hear, and Pascal could hear, that there was movement below. “You’re mistaken,” he said. “Wrong. It couldn’t have happened that way.”
“I have photographs,” Pascal replied.
“Photographs? Photographs prove nothing. Hawthorne’s father sent me photographs he claimed were of Lise. I wasn’t taken in. They were faked. I never intended to rely on photographs, interviews, evidence. Did you realize that?”
“I realize now.”
“You can fake such pictures, can’t you?” McMullen suddenly shot him an almost pleading look.
“Yes, you can,” Pascal answered truthfully. “The only photographs I trust are my own.”
He hesitated, looking at McMullen’s face. He was fighting back his doubts, Pascal could see, fighting down his emotions. More noise came from below.
“Are you intending to die for Lise?” Pascal asked quietly. “Because if you stand here asking questions much longer, that’s exactly what you’ll do.”
“You think so?” McMullen gave a tight smile. “Why would I want to die now? Lise is free. She can’t be committed unless Hawthorne signs the papers. He’ll never sign them now. I shall be with Lise, driving her away from that hospital, two hours from now.”
“You will?” Pascal moved behind one of the platform pillars and looked cautiously down. “There are five men in that courtyard. You’ve heard the ones at the foot of the stairs. I doubt you’ll get more than halfway down. Especially with a Heckler and Koch in your hands.”
“Maybe.” McMullen smiled again. “I think you’re wrong. Shall we see? You could be right about the rifle. And I won’t be needing it anyway. Here.”
He tossed the rifle to Pascal. The movement was so swift and so unexpected, Pascal reacted instinctively. He reached forward and caught hold of the rifle stock. There was a blur of movement as it traveled through the air, and in that split second, McMullen was gone.
Pascal listened to the sound of his footsteps descending the stairs. He bent forward and carefully placed the rifle on the stone floor, at a distance. Crouching, he approached the staircase and listened intently. He could still hear McMullen’s footsteps echoing down the stairs. He must have been running, making no attempt at caution. Pascal listened, and then he heard the car. He straightened up, pressing himself against a pillar and looked down onto the ring road below.
The car was there, engine running, doors open, one black-clad man in the driver’s seat, one already out on the sidewalk by the open doors. Two others must have been waiting for McMullen at the base of the stairs, because they came out with him, all three men moving fast. McMullen was clearly identifiable. Although he wore black also, he was the slightest of the three in build, the only one with his head uncovered. He was running fast between them. Pascal saw him glance back once, over his shoulder. He seemed to know the men with him.
From the base of the stairs to the car took the first of the men about fifteen seconds. He vaulted the fence, was across the sidewalk and into the car. As he slid into it, he shouted, “Now.”
McMullen was no more than twenty yards behind him, the second man immediately on his heels. Pascal thought afterward that McMullen never once guessed that there was anything wrong. The man behind him shot him once, in the back, just as he reached the fence. McMullen slumped against it. His companions were inside the car, and the sedan had disappeared with a screech of rubber before McMullen twisted. He coughed up a long spurt of bright arterial blood, and fell to the ground.
Pascal moved fast. He wiped the rifle stock clean of his own prints. He removed his camera and wound on some fifteen frames of unused film. He moved silently and very fast down the stairs. The sirens were closer now, and very loud.
It would have been timed, he knew, so the police cars arrived about a minute and a half after it was all over. He might have about thirty seconds; he needed no more than fifteen.
The door at the bottom of the stairs was open. No one was visible in the courtyard now. Pascal walked out, his hands raised, holding the camera above his head. Five yards from the entrance he bent and carefully placed the camera on the ground. The sirens were very loud now, whooping and wailing. He could see the flash of blue lights in the corner of his vision, to his left, near the entrance to the park. Keeping his hands to his sides, he walked away from the lights, across the courtyard, and out into the main road beyond. He thought he was probably safe, because a dead French photographer would be an inconvenience, an unnecessary complication to whatever cover story had been planned, but even so, as he walked, he could feel vulnerability the length of his spine.
He reached the main road two seconds before the first of the police cars drew alongside. He could not see his camera from here, but he knew it would already have been removed. He began to walk away at a fast pace, heading for the rough open ground beyond the mosque and immediately opposite the residence lodge. There he vaulted the railings, ran fast across the rough grass, and crossed the road.
He reached the residence lodge a few seconds after the mayhem began. Men were running in all directions. The driveway was blocked by cars. The first of the ambulances had already arrived; white-coated men were running in the direction of the rear gardens. The air was flashing, alarms were ringing, and out of the havoc and confusion, Pascal saw the white-haired man appear. He was in a wheelchair which he was propelling along the path from the gardens. He burst through the group of paramedics, wheeled the chair around fast, began to follow them back toward the gardens, then seemed to change his mind. He wheeled to his left, then his right, then spun around to face the ambulance. He came to an abrupt halt at the edge of the drive.
He sat there in magnificent isolation amid the running figures and the shouts and the sirens and flashing lights. His hands gripped the arms of his chair. Then two men in black blazers ran up to him. One bent over him; the other, who was weeping, knelt by his side.
A second ambulance was arriving, and a third. The gates were jammed open with vehicles and people. Pascal was about to pass through in the confusion, when a hand touched his arm. He swung around, to find Gini and that huge security man, Malone, at her side.
“Get her out of here,” Malone said. “Get her out of here fast.”
Pascal took off his jacket and wrapped it around her. She was drenched in blood, and scarcely able to move. As he began to guide her away, he looked back one last time through the havoc.
The man in the wheelchair had arched back and lifted both his arms. His face was distorted with rage and grief. As Pascal watched, he began to scream abuse at the sky.