Chapter Fifty-two

I SAT ON the deck until long after night had fallen, thinking about the two women and the events which had drawn us into each other’s lives.

As a covert agent, darkness had always been my friend but, since my visit to the Theatre of Death, I had a fear of it which I suspected would outlast everything else in my life. I got up to switch on the running lights and check my course. Halfway along the deck, I stopped.

It seemed that my course was already set. I stared at the arrangement of the stars, the position of the moon and the pitch of the sea. When I listened, I heard a silence so loud it screamed.

I had been there before.

It was the vision of the future that I had seen the night I looked out of the window of the Oval Office. Just as I had glimpsed back then, I was alone on an old yacht, the sails patched and faded, the wind driving me into darkness, the boat and I growing ever smaller on a limitless sea.

Now this was the night and this was the moment, and I waited alone, barely willing to breathe, as the sea rolled towards me. Nomad heeled over and white water foamed at her bow as the wind backed a little and rapidly grew stronger. We were travelling faster and I stepped to the railing to work the winch. The rigging started to sing under the strain and, though there was not a soul on the dark-painted ocean, I was no longer alone.

Bill Murdoch was on the other winch, his wide shoulders pumping, yelling and laughing at me once again to get her damned head up into the wind.

Up for’ard, a woman scrambled to set the running lights. Because my mother had died when I was so young I remembered very little of her and it was a source of secret pain to me that with each passing year I could picture less and less of her face. Tonight, lit by the navigation lamps, I saw her clearly, every detail.

Voices, speaking in Polish, came from behind me. The woman whose photo I had seen as she held her children tight and walked them towards the gas chamber was on board with me now. She was sitting in the cockpit, grown old and happy, with her adult kids and grandchildren all around her.

Yes, things were dying, and it had certainly been a vision of death that I had seen, but it wasn’t mine – it was another kind of death. I was bidding all the ghosts of my past goodbye. Just like the Buddhist priest had told me on the road to Khun Yuam all those years ago: if you want to be free, all you have to do is let go.

And under that vaulting sky, sailing on the wine-dark sea, I realized that I was born to the secret world, I was meant to be an agent. I didn’t choose it, I had never really wanted it, but that was what had been dealt to me. I had started on the journey thinking it was a burden, and that night I saw that it was a gift.

And I knew that not this year, but maybe next, I would return to New York. On a certain day, at an appointed hour, I would go to a building near Canal Street, ring the buzzer and walk up the stairs to Old Japan.

The apartment door would open and, inside, I would see a table set for three, because I knew that the man who lived there would always keep his word.

As Rachel watched, Battleboi would laugh and reach out his huge arms towards me. After a moment we would look at each other and he would ask me why I had come.

I would smile and say nothing, but in my heart I would know the answer, I would know exactly what I had put behind me: it was what was written in the Gospel of St Mark, chapter sixteen, verse six.

That was the part of the epic story about coming back from the dead, being restored to life. ‘He is risen, ’ it says.

He is risen.