The Walking Dead

He went fast down the steps, past a drenched policeman who stood guard with a weapon slung against his chest, hit the pavement at speed. He ducked his head to keep the rain from his eyes, the car's tail-lights ahead. He ran, did not slow to see the car's make or its registration. As he charged towards it, the rear door on the pavement side was opened — but the rain sluiced on the rear window and he could not see inside it. He fell into the car, sagged down on to The back seat, and an arm came across him and pulled the door shut. At the same moment the driver raced the engine and they screamed out into the empty, glistening road. He wiped the water from his face and heaved a sigh of relief, and the sigh hung on his lips…Pain flooded him, then darkness.

It was done so expertly and so fast. The pain was when his arms were wrenched behind his back, then pinioned. The darkness was from the hood, with the smell of cold sacking, that covered his head. He lashed out with his feet but caught only the back of the front passenger seat, and there was more pain from a blow across his face, and more darkness as he screwed his eyes shut in response. Then tears came through his closed eyes, and the fight fled him. He subsided.

From the front, a voice asked calmly, 'Everything all right back there, Donald?'

From beside him, a voice replied softly, 'Everything's fine here, Xavier, and I'm confident the gentleman's going to be sensible.'

Then, quite gently, as the car sped into the night, he felt a force he could not struggle against, pushing him down on to the floor, wedging him between the seats; boots lay across his spine and the back of his head.

* * *

'Does it ever stop raining in this country? Describe this place to me, Dickie. I feel the emptiness, but paint me a picture.'

They stood under the umbrella that Naylor held. He favoured Hegner with it but could not protect the American's legs. Unnecessary, really, to have left the car hidden in the only one of the wide Nissen huts that had survived. They were on old Tarmacadam, beside a single-storey building's open doorway; its iron window-frames had long lost every pane of glass. In the dawn light, a red flag flew limp on its pole. The approach road, a taxiing run for the aircraft, had become obsolete sixty years back.

Naylor said, 'There's one runway left, the others were dug up by the landowner for urban hardcore. One Nissen remains, probably would have been a workshop for damaged aircraft, and the rest were dismantled after the war and sold off. About all that's left is the Tarmacadam, the Nissen, and a single building that was once the station's armoury, too solidly built for easy demolition. This part of England was thick with bomber stations, and most are in this condition — desolate and forgotten. As far as the horizon there are flat, ploughed fields and it looks to me as though the crop will be peas, for the supermarkets, and there's a red flag flying. It's used a couple of times a year for live firing by the local police, and the flag's hoisted so that the locals know to stay clear…So, I had it run up last night. They're very good, the locals, not at all inquisitive. We use it every two or three months for A Branch, open country, surveillance exercises — and it is, I promise you, damn difficult to get a mile from here and not be seen. So peaceful now. Sixty years ago it would have been a base for a heavy-bomber squadron, twenty-two Lancasters if they were at full strength, some limping home with flak holes, and others belly-flopping down with their casualties. So quiet now…I'd say it's a place of ghosts.'

'I have that picture. You chose well, Dickie,' Hegner said, and Naylor saw a slow, sardonic grin cross the.American's lips and he thought the man had not the slightest sprinkle of charity in his soul. 'It seems to be a real good place for a new ghost — know what I mean?'

Naylor did. At Riverside Villas there were enough, mostly from the recent intakes and young, who derided the Agency's tactic of shipping detainees, known as ghosts, off to the remote military bases of the willing Polish, Romanian or Albanian allies, or to Uzbekistan and North Africa. No information was given on them. They disappeared without a trail of paper. They were exposed to brutality, to the extremities of agony, and an American from the Agency would sit in an outer room and wait to be passed tapes of the interrogations. Naylor felt the damp that had gone into his shoes. He, too, dealt in ghosts and had done so since service in Aden, during time in Northern Ireland and in the worst days of the bloody Balkans affair. Naylor valued them, and had less than two working days to exploit the latest ghost to cross his path…But it was war, wasn't it? It was as much a time of war as when the heavy-laden bombers had trundled on the triangle of runways and lifted off, had flown to targets where civilians cowered in shelters, where firestorms had raged — wasn't It?

'Dickie, you've gone quiet.'