I reached the bed and lowered myself down. My head hit the pillow, the doctor turned out the light and I drifted into a strange unconsciousness.
Chapter Forty-seven
THE FEVER ROCKETED during the confusion of days and nights that followed and the doctor barely had a chance to leave the small room. He told me later that he had sat at my side, sipping on a bottomless glass of Jack and listening to me roam across a remarkable dreamscape.
He heard tell of a man tied to a plank drowning in an endless ocean, a father beheaded in the blistering sun, a city littered with people bleeding out from an incurable virus, a child with Down’s syndrome hanged by the neck. He said, smiling, that the mind was a strange thing – how, under the onslaught of a fever and high doses of medication, it could invent such terrible fantasies.
If only he had known.
Worried that the horrors were growing worse, and convinced that it was a bad reaction to the drugs, he decided to wind them right back. Maybe it was the adjustment to the medication, or perhaps nature just ran its course, but the fever peaked and the nightmare memories diminished. When I finally managed to take some solid food he decided to venture into the village to pick up some groceries and other supplies. I figured he had probably run out of Jack.
He returned a troubled man. He told me that a man and woman had arrived, claiming to be tourists on a road trip, and had made supposedly casual inquiries at both village cafés about whether any Americans had passed through recently.
I always knew that Whisperer and his legions would find me – people talk, Echelon listens, somebody would have gone into the archives and found the account of Mack’s death all those years ago. I didn’t fear the strangers, though, I knew they had been sent to help me in case I needed it – and yet I had no intention of talking to them. I was a ruin of a man, but I had done my duty, nobody could ask any more than that, and how I stumbled my way through the wreckage that remained was entirely my business.
I told the doctor nothing about the interlopers, but I noticed as the day wore on that he was becoming increasingly worried about what had turned up on his doorstep. That night, for the first time, I made my way slowly down to the kitchen and discovered that he was quite a cook. As he seasoned what he called his signature dish – lamb marinated in thyme and garlic – he asked me if I still sang the ‘Midnight Special’.
‘Do I think about Mack, you mean?’ I replied. ‘More times than I ever imagined.’
‘Me too,’ he said. ‘A terrible night. Just after you left I heard a chopper come in. They picked up his body, huh?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Where was he buried?’ He tried to make it sound casual, but it was a strange question and I knew where he was heading.
‘Arlington,’ I replied.
‘He was in the military?’
‘Sure – he just happened to be a fighter in a war that had never been declared.’
The doctor put his herbs down and turned – he had arrived at his point. ‘You too, Jacob? Is that what you do?’
‘Worried, Doctor?’
‘Of course I’m fucking worried! I’ve been worried since the night you arrived. As soon as you went to sleep I opened your backpack. There was a SIG covered in gunshot residue and enough ammunition to arm a small African country. Now two people turn up and I’m wondering when the shooting is going to start.’
He was a good man, he had done the right thing by me, and he deserved an honest answer. ‘Yeah, I’m a soldier too.’
‘Enlisted or mercenary?’
I smiled. ‘Drafted on this occasion.’
‘CIA, or something worse?’
‘I like to think better, but your mileage may vary.’
‘And the people in town?’
‘They’re ours. They’re here to check that I’m okay.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘They’re not killers, Doc. If they were, we’d already be dead. There’s nothing to worry about – I give you my word.’
I could see it reassured him, and I was glad I had done it. A few days later, just after dusk, there was a knock at the door. There was something about it – the loudness, the fact that the front gate hadn’t creaked on its hinge, the time of day – that worried me.
I nodded to the doctor to answer it and limped as fast as I could to the old bedroom, where a narrow window offered a decent view of the front door. A guy in his thirties was standing there – dressed like a tourist, but so hard-wired, so full of tension, that the clothes would have fooled only the most casual observer.
The doctor opened the door and the tourist told him that he wanted to speak to the man who had arrived at the house a few weeks previously. The doctor told him the only other occupant had been his brother, on a family visit, who had returned to Australia a couple of days earlier.