Gabriel still sprawled across the back seat asleep but he was sitting up and pressing his skull with his hands as if in great pain.
Stratton opened the rear door. ‘Are you okay?’ he asked.
Gabriel didn’t move as if he had not heard him. Stratton touched his shoulder and Gabriel lowered his hands and looked into his eyes, his own darkly drawn and filled with dread.
‘What is it?’ Stratton asked.
Gabriel shook his head. ‘I don’t know,’ he said in frustration. ‘I don’t know . . . I can feel him. He’s filled with excitement but at the same time there is guilt, but he’s suppressing it . . . He has no doubts about what he wants to do. He’s committed . . . I’m beginning to wonder if he’s insane.’
‘Do you know where he is?’ Stratton asked getting down to basic tangibles.
‘In a dark place. Cramped. Surrounded by things, objects. I can’t make them all out. I saw beds, boxes, containers . . . There was some writing. Quick, give me a pen and paper.’
Stratton took a pen and notepad from his pocket and handed it to him.
Gabriel placed the tip of the pen on the page and then went still and closed his eyes. Stratton wondered if Gabriel was summoning up the image from memory or actually remote viewing it.
Gabriel started to scribble, eyes closed, and after drawing what looked like several squiggly lines he stopped and opened his eyes to see what he had done. Stratton leaned in to look. There were half a dozen separate markings but he could not tell if they were drawings or foreign letters. They looked Greek, or Russian perhaps.
‘Is this happening now?’ Stratton asked.
‘It’s now,’ Gabriel said.
‘Is this at the air base or the forest?’
‘How can I know that?’ Gabriel snapped. ‘I told you it’s in a small room . . . or perhaps it wasn’t a room,’ he said tiredly as he dropped his head into his hands again.
Stratton was beginning to see why this was such a low percentage success-rate intelligence-gathering programme. He wondered how many visions Gabriel had had that were never proven. It seemed too easy to say something was happening and expect to be taken seriously. The phrase ‘con man’ came to mind. Perhaps these characters had sucked everyone in. The CIA said the skill was real, put millions into it and, since they were committed, who could doubt them. It might be feasible and viewers might actually exist in the world, but who could tell if this guy was a fraud? Maybe the tanker was just a coincidence?
Stratton checked his watch. He decided that since they were here he would humour Gabriel a while longer before heading back to London.
‘The ceiling was low and arched,’ Gabriel then said.‘It was made of metal, steel, not brick or concrete. Like a submarine.’
Stratton gazed at the petrol station which was now empty. ‘Now we’re in a submarine,’ he mumbled to himself. He wondered if he could lure him into a pub for last orders. A drink might help make this easier to deal with.
‘What do you want to do?’ Stratton asked.
‘I want to find him, of course. That’s why we’re here.’
Stratton rubbed his face as if to push away the tiredness he was suddenly feeling, then closed Gabriel’s door, opened the driver’s door, climbed in and started the engine. He drove out of the garage and on to the highway, passing a sign to Thetford Forest.
Zhilev searched in the blackness under one of the bunk beds, his hands becoming his eyes as he felt around for what he knew had to be somewhere in the room. If it took him all night and the next day, searching every inch of the steel tube, he would find it. Zhilev was a patient man but his growing frustration was being fuelled by his own feeling of incompetence. The issue of the failed torch would never leave him, not for as long as he had a memory. As he cursed himself out loud, his hand brushed against what felt like a cable hanging below the mattress.
He pulled it through his fingers until it divided into two thinner cables and then he found the ends, both of which had crocodile clips attached. He followed the cable back in the opposite direction to where it disappeared inside what felt like a junction box. This was what he was looking for. Taking hold of the crocodile clips he stretched under the bed, fanning out his