Ascension Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Connect on Social Media

  Copyright © 2021 by Oliver Harris

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  hmhbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Harris, Oliver, 1978– author.

  Title: Ascension / Oliver Harris.

  Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021. | Series: An Elliot Kane thriller ; 2

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020044137 (print) | LCCN 2020044138 (ebook) | ISBN 9780358206668 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780358448969 | ISBN 9780358449423 | ISBN 9780358171904 (ebook)

  Subjects: GSAFD: Spy stories. | Suspense fiction.

  Classification: LCC PR6108.A7658 A92 2021 (print) | LCC PR6108.A7658 (ebook) | DDC 823/.92—dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020044137

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020044138

  Cover design by Laserghost

  Cover photographs: Getty Images

  Author photograph © Eamonn McCabe

  v1.0621

  For Taehee

  1

  They unloaded the coffin last: gray plastic, of the kind hospitals have for mass-fatality incidents. It had been at the far end of the C-17 aircraft when it landed at Brize Norton an hour ago, bare, untagged. Six men carried it into the cargo bay. It wasn’t clear to anyone present what procedure to follow, because no one had any idea who it contained.

  Flight Lieutenant Trevor Hughes was responsible for the loading and unloading of all aircraft. He had walked through the plane’s stale air, checking equipment and coordinating its discharge. It was only when the tents and packs had been cleared that he’d seen the coffin, secured by webbing at the back. A sealed box of possessions sat beside it.

  “Picked it up at Cape Verde when we refueled,” the aircraft’s warrant officer said. “Nothing’s written on the docket. I was told there’d be someone here to meet it.”

  Hughes shook his head. He took pride in his job, but it depended on clear lines of communication.

  “Got a contact? A regiment?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What am I meant to do with it?”

  “Unload it, I guess.”

  Brize Norton was the sole airbridge to all British forces serving internationally. It was a portal through which the UK military could inject itself into the world, and whatever remained of those missions at the end flowed back. It was a border, and, as at any busy border crossing, a settlement had grown, with its own hotel, fire station, medical center, and post service. It ran like clockwork, never more so than surrounding a repatriation.

  No one had told Hughes about a repatriation.

  Usually there would be a hearse waiting, a chaplain, flags at half mast, wreaths for the bereaved. The flight lieutenant didn’t feel qualified to receive the dead alone. Something had gone wrong, but not as wrong as to whoever lay inside the box. Hughes had a ritual he performed when bodies returned, and he performed it now: He touched the coffin and said, “Welcome home.” Then he added, “Whoever you are.” He turned to the warrant officer. “Find something to cover it.”

  The warrant officer removed a sheet of burlap from a broken refueling hose and draped it over the plastic. With the help of four other men, they moved the coffin swiftly out of the plane, onto a luggage truck. Hughes was painfully conscious that the everyday noise of the airfield continued, oblivious. Once inside the cargo bay they placed it on a gurney with the box of possessions on the rack beneath it.

  Hughes checked his messages and emails but there was nothing about a corpse returning. He made calls, steadily moving up the chain of command. A squadron leader radioed back, equally puzzled.

  “No ID?”

  “No, sir. I’d appreciate it if you could ascertain who’s responsible and notify them of the situation.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  No one came. It couldn’t stay among the cargo. Hughes remembered the gymnasium once being used as a temporary morgue—a row of nine arrivals from Helmand, stately enough on the parquet floor—and he made the decision to transfer the anonymous coffin there while they sought its owner. He enlisted the help of twenty-year-old Jack Trafford, a leading aircraftman from the specialist reserves, and they wheeled it through the back corridors together.

  People stopped playing as they entered the sports courts. Games concluded and the place emptied. The two men waited.

  Both were tired at the end of a long shift. Trafford had been hoping to get to the staff bar. Hughes had a six-month-old daughter at home. But the coffin lent their evening a solemnity that eclipsed those concerns. It spoke of events far away, a reminder that this was no normal airport.

  Hughes radioed again. Again, a message came in: Guard it for now, someone would be tracked down.

  No more flights were due in that night. The clank of gym equipment could be heard next door, occasional grunts and laughter. The negligence became an increasing source of anger for Hughes: that a corpse might become misdirected mail. The vast machine of the military was nothing if it forgot the meaning of these deliveries.

  He checked the blank docket again as a morbid curiosity grew. Hughes took the knife from his belt and levered the top of the coffin open. He stood back as the gases dispersed, covered his mouth and nose with a hand.

  The corpse belonged to a man in his midforties, six foot something, with long ginger hair and stubble. His eyes remained partially open but clouded. He wore shorts and a T-shirt. Nothing about him seemed military. No more than two or three days dead, Hughes guessed, but his face was blue-gray and swollen, with hemorrhaging around the eyes and also around the throat, where purple marks had begun to blacken in the shape of a ligature.

  A spook? Caught up somewhere? Had the RAF done someone a favor by bringing him home? The mystery seemed bound to the absence of anyone to receive him. But it didn’t solve the problem they faced. Hughes replaced the lid, then opened the cardboard box and looked through the dead man’s belongings.

  They were divided into clear evidence bags marked POLICE PROPERTY. No indication which police. Included among them were several meters of thin yellow cable. It took Hughes a second to realize what it was. The cable had been severed twice: once above the knot, once across the noose, exposing copper wiring inside. He tutted.

  Other bags contained more clothes, a small guitar that Trafford said was a ukulele, and finally a wallet. Governmental ID in the wallet gave them an identification at last: Rory Bannatyne, Engineering Consultant, UK Government Infrastructure and Projects Authority.

  “Works for the government,” Hughes said.

  “On time travel?” Trafford asked. “Look at this.”

  Money
had spilled from the clothing: small change and one crumpled note. Trafford flattened the note in his palm.

  A young Queen Elizabeth II gazed up. The paper was cherry red. It looked like money from the 1940s or 1950s: Elizabeth II with her life and half the twentieth century ahead of her. On the reverse, the ten-pound note bore a technicolor sunset and two old sailing ships cruising toward the watermark.

  “He’s come from the past.”

  The coins, likewise, were definitely sterling, but unlike any Hughes had seen before. The ten-pence piece was larger than current ones, and had dolphins on the tail side. A two-pence piece bore the image of a donkey carrying wood on its back.

  Finally, among some books and toiletries, they found a postcard, stamped and addressed to a “Nicola Bannatyne” but with no message written. The front showed a landscape of black rock and the name Ascension Island.

  “Where’s Ascension?” Trafford said.

  But his colleague had been distracted by the rapid clip of a woman’s heels. They turned to see her enter: tall with an air of civilian seniority, her long brown hair tied back, flanked by two Force Protection officers.

  As she drew closer you could see she was flustered, looking ahead of her to the coffin as if late for an appointment and ready to burst into apology.

  None came their way. The older of the accompanying officers told Hughes and Trafford they were dismissed. Trafford raised an eyebrow at Hughes and marched off. Hughes looked at the coffin for a final time. He didn’t feel confident the body was about to get the respect it deserved. But this was not his problem anymore.

  It was only once outside the building that Hughes realized he still held the ten-pence piece with the dolphin. It looked even more magical in the airfield’s floodlights. He returned to the gymnasium, wondering how best to return it, and saw the woman standing very still beside the coffin. The lid had been removed again. Her guards remained a few meters away, eyes averted, so there was something oddly intimate to the scene. She held the blank postcard, and Hughes wondered if she was able to discern some message that had escaped him, a message that the man had carried all the way from Ascension Island and that had survived his own will to live.

  2

  Kane paused with the marker in front of the whiteboard, then wrote Ecstasy. Beneath it, to form a triangle, he wrote Finding and Being. He turned to check the faces of the nine individuals who had chosen to spend the last hour of a sunny Monday afternoon listening to him rather than absorbing the beauty of Oxford outside. The turnout was low again, but then he’d made the lecture as niche as possible: “Sufi Influences on the European Tradition.” The room was in a remote corner of St. John’s College, because he wanted to see who would find it. More people found it each week, and he no longer knew each attendee by name. But still he had noticed the man at the back as soon as he arrived.

  He was young, dressed smartly, with the fine features of eastern Africa and a deep, attentive gaze. Kane hadn’t seen him before. Newcomers turned up, of course, in spite of Kane’s bid for obscurity—sometimes lost, sometimes merely misguided. But instinct told Kane this was an employee of the Secret Intelligence Service.

  For the last year Kane had been the subject of an inquiry under way deep within the entrails of Vauxhall Cross, MI6’s headquarters. After ten years working undercover on behalf of the British government, it wasn’t about to let him leave without a fight. His exit hadn’t been made any easier by a final escapade in Central Asia that broke a lot of rules. And while Kane knew that he had saved more faces and more bloodshed than his bosses would admit, he carried an aura of danger now. Hence he was currently at risk of being found guilty of appropriation of operational funds, disobeying orders, and the magisterially nondescript “unauthorized absence,” which was one way of describing a battle for his life in Kazakhstan. He was forbidden to leave the country and no doubt monitored while he was here, all pending a decision as to whether to press charges. This hypothetical prosecution was insurance against him speaking out. It meant there was always the prospect of a decade in a high-security prison if residual loyalty wasn’t enough to keep him onside. The god they worshipped was not the law, but silence.

  This humiliation remained invisible to his students. Kane was reduced to traveling the world through its languages, just as he had done twenty years ago—a hunger for losing himself in other cultures that had led him into intelligence work in the first place. His doctorate had begun well. The college had been surprised by his existing range of knowledge and had pressured him into teaching a couple of courses. His former bosses at MI6 even had the audacity to suggest Kane keep an eye out for potential recruits. And if he had taken down the maps of the Middle East from the walls it was simply to help him remain focused on the present. An acknowledgment that beneath the bandage of his new life, old wounds refused to heal.

  The students weren’t sure what to make of him. In self-conscious moments he wondered if they detected a fracture. When Kane had been working undercover, he knew what to wear. Now he didn’t. He knew that they believed something had gone wrong in his life, but also that there must be something they could glean from his lectures for their own self-advancement. These were bright kids. They wanted a ticket into their future, the perpetuation of achievement that had borne them this far, oblivious that others would use this for their own ends. So as a secret favor, Kane gave them something beautiful and useless: a history of poetry. And they wrote it down as if it would help them.

  “While Europe saved its love for God, the Middle East was articulating the spiritual complexities of human romance. That’s why we’re looking at Persia today, and in particular at the knot of ideas within this word wajd. Sufi writers believed that it had its roots in wa-ja-da, which means devotion but also discovery and even being itself.” Kane picked up the board marker again, then added Grief at the bottom. “Alternatively, wajd can mean ‘grief’ or ‘pain,’ because the experience can only arise through separation.”

  Students typed sedately, filling their MacBooks with thirteenth-century mysticism. Kane kept his focus on the regulars. He had allowed himself to believe that if he conformed enough to this new cover, the intelligence service would forget he was here. But they never forgot.

  The man at the back was a few years older than most of the audience, but it was his clothing and physicality that made him conspicuous. He leaned back in his seat, leg crossed, tie neatly knotted. He nodded appreciatively when his eyes met Kane’s, writing occasionally in a black notebook. As Kane began to wrap up, he returned the notebook to his jacket, withdrew a phone, and punched in a message.

  “Let’s leave it there,” Kane said. “Next week we’ll touch on the Cathars. For those who’ve not come across them before, they were a Christian sect who believed that any God responsible for creating this world must be an evil one. They refused to have sex because reproduction perpetuated existence. You’ll like them. Take a look if you’re keen.”

  His audience stared uncertainly. A few students ventured a smile.

  “We’re done,” Kane said. “I appreciate your attention.” Laptops slammed shut. Bags unzipped. The suited man eased himself forward. A few students thanked Kane as they left. Next time, he thought, he would ask them why they returned. If there was a next time.

  “You didn’t have to subject yourself to that,” Kane said when it was just the two of them. He collected up his notes. “You have my number.”

  “I’m Daniel. Pleased to meet you, Elliot.”

  Kane shook his outstretched hand. Up close, he seemed younger—not so far off the students after all. The suit had been misleading.

  “Pleased to meet you, Daniel. What do you want?”

  “Kathryn Taylor is outside. We have a car.”

  “Kat Taylor?”

  “That’s right. Okay to say hello to her?”

  They walked through the corridors in silence. Kathryn Taylor had been a colleague of Kane’s in Oman, a one-off job, seven or eight years ago. They’d got on well, not se
en each other since. It didn’t make much sense.

  Taylor stood beside a silver Audi across the road from the college entrance. Seeing Kane, she flicked her cigarette into the gutter and approached, caught between a smile of reunion and the anxiety of whatever necessitated it.

  “Elliot.”

  “Kat, been a while.”

  “You’re okay?”

  “I was.”

  “I know. I realize this is a bolt from the blue. I could really do with a moment of your time. I apologize for gate-crashing this scholarly refuge. Are you up for a drive?”

  “How long will this take?”

  “Couple of hours. We’ll talk when there, if that’s okay.”

  No suggestion of where “there” might be. No suggestion he might decline the invitation. Surely not back to Vauxhall Cross. Taylor was already climbing into the driver’s seat.

  Kane stood for a second amid the flow of students and tourists, imagining the protest he might make, the appointments he might have had. But he had no appointments; perhaps they knew that. The facade of his new life was already crumbling. He got in the back of the Audi and Taylor started the car.

  “He was fascinating,” Daniel said, once they’d set off. “Did you know, Arabic has at least eleven different words for love, and each of them conveys a different stage in the process of falling for someone?”

  “I had no idea. That’s beautiful. How are the students, Elliot?”

  “Very young.”

  “Isn’t everyone these days?”

  Taylor drove cautiously, one eye on the mirrors, continuing out of town. Kane wanted to get some purchase on the situation.

  “How have you been?” he asked.

  “Up and down,” she said, tightly.

  “Where are you working now?”

  “South Atlantic desk. I run it.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “Thanks.”

  Kane thought through world affairs: the newspapers he’d tried not to read, and, when he did succumb to a browse, not to decrypt. Nothing pertaining to the South Atlantic came to mind. It had certainly never been his domain. He wasn’t as up to speed with world news as he used to be, but then his job no longer fed a hunger for omniscience.