Lie down with lions - Ken Follett [75]
He thought about how it had gone wrong. He and Anatoly had become careless. They should have met in a place from which they had a good view of the approaches all around, so that they could have been forewarned of any approach. But who would have thought that Jane might follow him? He was the victim of the most appallingly bad luck: that the wounded boy was allergic to penicillin; that Jane had heard Anatoly speak; that she was able to recognize a Russian accent; and that Ellis had turned up to give her courage. It was bad luck. But the history books do not remember the men who almost achieved greatness. I did my best, Papa, he thought; and he could almost hear his father’s reply: I’m not interested in whether you did your best. I want to know whether you succeeded or failed.
He was approaching the village. He decided to turn in. He was sleeping badly, but there was nothing else to do but go to bed. He headed for home.
Somehow the fact that he still had Jane was not much consolation. Her discovery of his secret seemed to have made them less intimate, not more. A new distance had grown up between them, even though they were planning their return home and even talking about their new life back in Europe.
At least they still hugged one another in bed at night. That was something.
He went into the shopkeeper’s house. He had expected Jane to be in bed already, but to his surprise she was still up. She spoke as soon as he walked in. “A runner came for you from Masud. You have to go to Astana. Ellis is wounded.”
Ellis wounded. Jean-Pierre’s heart beat faster. “How?”
“Nothing serious. I gather he’s got a bullet in his bum.”
“I’ll go first thing in the morning.”
Jane nodded. “The runner will go with you. You can be back by nightfall.”
“I see.” Jane was making sure he had no opportunity of meeting with Anatoly. Her caution was unnecessary: Jean-Pierre had no way of arranging such a meeting. Besides, Jane was guarding against a minor peril and overlooking a major one. Ellis was wounded. That made him vulnerable. Which changed everything.
Now Jean-Pierre could kill him.
Jean-Pierre was awake all night, thinking about it. He imagined Ellis lying on a mattress under a fig tree, gritting his teeth against the pain of a smashed bone, or perhaps pale and weak from loss of blood. He saw himself preparing an injection. “This is an antibiotic to prevent infection of the wound,” he would say; then he would inject him with an overdose of digitalis, which would give him a heart attack.
A natural heart attack was unlikely, but by no means impossible, in a man of thirty-four years, especially one who had been exercising strenuously after a long period of relatively sedentary work. Anyway, there would be no inquest, no postmortem, and no suspicions: in the West they would not doubt that Ellis had been wounded in action and had died of his wounds. Here in the Valley, everyone would accept Jean-Pierre’s diagnosis. He was trusted as much as any of Masud’s closest lieutenants—quite naturally, for he had sacrificed as much as any of them for the cause, it must seem to them. No, the only doubter would be Jane. And what could she do?
He was not sure. Jane was a formidable opponent when she was backed up by Ellis; but Jane alone was not. Jean-Pierre might be able to persuade her to stay in the Valley for another year: he could promise not to betray the convoys, then find a way to reestablish contact with Anatoly and just wait for his chance to pinpoint Masud for the Russians.
He gave Chantal her bottle at two a.m., then went back to bed. He did not even try to sleep. He was too anxious, too excited and too frightened. As he lay there waiting for the sun to rise, he thought of all the things that could go wrong: Ellis might refuse treatment; he, Jean-Pierre, might get the dosage wrong; Ellis might have suffered a mere scratch and be walking around normally; Ellis and Masud might even have left