Proof of Life, page 1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Also by R.J. Ellory
Credits
Copyright
Acknowledgements
This book was born out of an abiding fascination for the political and social upheavals that filled the newspapers, magazines and television screens of my childhood. Researching the events I remembered was both nostalgic and unsettling, if only because it highlighted the fact that so very little has changed in the last five decades.
I also have to acknowledge writers such as Fleming, Forsyth, Ludlum, Deighton and MacLean, whose works and adaptations were so thoroughly addictive, entertaining and transporting for a lonely, introverted kid.
My thanks go to Emad Akhtar and Tom Witcomb at Orion for letting me write a very different book, and for their wisdom and utterly invaluable support during the editing process.
Last of all, my heartfelt gratitude goes out to my readers, without whose unfailing loyalty I would be dead, in jail or on the run.
1
Airports, like crowded cities, seemed a perfect contradiction to Stroud.
People escaping, people returning, the swollen hearts of tearful separations and long-awaited reunions, emotions exaggerated inside an endless wave of anonymity: at once both the crossroads of humanity and yet somehow the loneliest places on earth.
From a bench in Schiphol Airport, Stroud watched faces and eyes and body language. A girl alone, beautifully fragile. A small man, muscle-bound and furious, patience tested in every direction as he hurried his wife and children along the concourse. An elderly luggage attendant, carrying not only the world-weariness of someone to whom things just happened, but also the knowledge that he was powerless to change them.
Stroud wanted a drink, badly. He wanted another cigarette but had smoked too many already. He had decided to go back to London and face the music. If he knew one thing, it would not be a melody he wished to hear.
In truth, Stroud’s primary motivation for leaving Amsterdam was money. The flight, the hotel, the promise of a further two hundred pounds just for showing up. ‘No obligation, no expectation,’ he’d been told. Marcus Haig, subeditor at the foreign department of The Times. Long ago, they’d been compatriots. Despite the time, the distance, the memories they both wished to forget but perhaps never would, they’d remained friends.
‘Just come and talk to me, Stroud. Let me tell you what’s happened, and you can decide if you want to get involved.’
Involved didn’t sound like something he wished to become.
‘Two hundred pounds. Cash.’
‘No promises, right?’
‘Christ almighty, Stroud, just get on the sodding plane, will you?’
No matter where he went, Stroud carried the same things. His cleanest dirty shirt, his ever-faithful camera, his notebooks, his pens. He carried shadows and awkward memories, moments of his life that seemed hollow and unrelated to anyone or anything else.
Behind him were a number of failed relationships, none so significant or burdensome as his marriage, the bitter divorce that followed, the daughter he’d left behind. Eva. A girl he’d not seen in a decade. As had been said, it would all be okay in the end. If it wasn’t okay, it just wasn’t the end.
Stroud wanted to believe this. He needed to believe it.
The flight out of Schiphol was delayed. Stroud found a bar, drank two doubles, smoked three more cigarettes. The news played on TV in the background. The Israeli Defense Forces had pulled off a rescue mission at Entebbe Airport in Uganda. Two hundred and forty-six passengers and twelve flight crew had originally departed from Tel Aviv. A layover in Athens saw a further fifty-six passengers and four hijackers board the aircraft. The hijackers took control, diverting the plane to Benghazi for refuelling, and then continuing to Entebbe. Once there, a number of hostages were released – the elderly, the sick, mothers with children. They were flown to Paris, and it was from these people that Mossad had secured their intelligence. Full details were not known and would not be known for some time. Regardless, an Israeli mission had been initiated, and the hostages had been rescued with negligible collateral damage. Prime Minister Rabin and Defence Minister Peres were outwardly resolute, inwardly jubilant.
Stroud was thirty-seven, looked at least forty-five. He had covered everything from Khrushchev in the US, the Belgian Congo, the OAS insurrection in Algeria, the Paris riots of ’68, Biafra, Yom Kippur and Palestine to the Black September hostage crisis at the Munich Olympics. Between March of ’65 and February of ’68, he’d been into Vietnam nine times. In March of ’75, just a little more than a year ago, he’d been asked to cover the fall of Da Nang. He’d refused. By that time, too many seams had come undone.
For the last year he had drifted without anchor. Prague, Paris, a couple of weeks back in London, back again to Paris and then south for warmth and wine. In Montpellier he had met a girl. Elise Durand. She was from Marseilles, so there was fire and violence in her blood. Stroud was English: stubborn, prone to bouts of harsh self-criticism, so quick to find blame elsewhere. Hard now to say which of them was more damaged. Their relationship had been a car crash of personalities. Drunken sex, hangover arguments, often unnecessarily recriminatory and bitter. With hindsight, even though it was only three months in the rear-view, Stroud knew that neither and both of them were to blame. Their union had been one of strangers, to one another and to themselves. The person he’d been with Elise was now someone he would not recognise. As was the case with so many love affairs, people tried so very hard to be that which was desired, forgetting who they really were in the process.
Leaving Montpellier, Stroud had headed for Amsterdam. Despite its supposedly libertarian and free-thinking reputation, he found the city self-absorbed and unengaging. He had stayed in a series of shabby hotels, money running out fast, and when Marcus Haig had called him, he had been down to his last few hundred guilder. He had considered fleeing the hotel, but they’d checked his passport on arrival. Haig – one-time foreign correspondent, a man who’d dodged bullets and venereal disease on three continents – was settled in London, holding down a nine-to-five, married, a family, and yet requiring of help for some unspecified task. If he had called Stroud, then whatever he had in mind was foolhardy and potentially fatal, and he had run out of options.
Stroud had worked with Haig on the Sharpeville massacre in March of 1960. They’d covered the Elisabethville killings in the Congo, the Greek–Cypriot war just four years later, and together they’d watched the horrors of Biafra unfold. The last time they’d shared column inches was in Dacca. In an attempt to subvert Bangladesh’s hopes for independence, Pakistan had resorted to genocide of the Bengalis. For Haig, it had been the last in a long line of horrors. ‘If I stay, I will lose my mind or my life,’ he’d said, and left the next day.
Haig was a good man – tough, uncompromising, yet somehow forgiving of others where he would not forgive himself. He was a professional, through and through, and Stroud didn’t resent the man his Chelsea flat, nor his weekend place in St Albans. Of course, the wife had money. She came from a long line of money. Haig had been seduced and tamed by it.
It was through Haig that Stroud had met his wife. His ex-wife, to be exact. Marcus Haig and Julia Montgomery were cousins, and Haig had been the inadvertent catalyst that brought them together.
For Stroud, Julia Montgomery had represented everything he had once believed unreachable.
For Julia, Stroud had been a challenge, perhaps more of a challenge th
What he’d imagined he would find in her he didn’t know, and still didn’t understand. Perhaps some kind of peace, some sense that not everyone in the world was hell-bent on self-destruction. What she had found in him was the absence of routine and predictability, at first exciting, after a while merely exhausting and fraught with worry.
‘You have a death wish,’ she said. ‘It’s not normal.’
‘You didn’t marry me for normal.’
‘Sometimes I wonder what I did marry you for.’
‘Because you thought you could make me into the husband you really wanted.’
‘You weren’t this cynical when we met.’
‘You weren’t this complicated.’
‘I can’t talk to you. And frankly, I have lost the will to listen.’
And Stroud – weary, a little battered, feeling like a stranger in his own life – would smile and say no more.
They’d met in 1960. Between coverage of Berliners escaping the east in April and Belgians fleeing across the Congo River, Stroud had been back in London. A private art exhibition in Kensington, his attendance secured by Haig’s promise of infinite free booze and good-looking, unattached rich girls. He had gone, was immediately out of place in leather jacket and shabby boots, spent much of the time haunting the open bar, glass of Scotch in his hand, listening to people he didn’t understand talk about pictures that made no sense.
‘You don’t belong here.’
That was Julia Montgomery’s opening line.
‘There are very few places I do belong.’
She smiled and introduced herself, said she was Marcus’s cousin.
‘I’m Stroud.’
‘What’s your first name?’
‘I’m just Stroud. Have always been called Stroud. I don’t answer to anything else.’
‘Why are you here?’
‘Honestly? Haig told me there’d be an infinite supply of free booze and good-looking single rich girls.’
Julia smiled. ‘I might be one of those good-looking single rich girls he promised.’
‘How rich are you?’
She laughed suddenly, sprayed Stroud’s sleeve with champagne. She grabbed a serviette. ‘Shit, I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘That’s pretty disgusting.’
‘If having pretty rich girls spray you with champagne is disgusting, then all I can say is that you’ve led a very sheltered life.’
‘You’re one of Marcus’s war junkies, aren’t you?’
‘Is that how we’re known?’
‘Isn’t that what you are? I mean, seriously, why would you want to risk life and limb in some godforsaken hellhole on the other side of the world that no one even knows about?’
‘So that people do know about it.’
She looked at him wilfully, held his stare. She was beautiful, no doubt, but there was something cold and aloof and altogether disconnected about her.
‘And you really think what you do makes a difference?’
‘I don’t want that discussion with you,’ Stroud said. ‘You have your own thing. Your wine-tasting and your art galleries and whatever. We’re just different people who are interested in very different things.’ He nodded towards a gaggle of suited business types on the other side of the room. ‘And to be honest, I’m not really into the sort of conversations you have with trust-fund wankers.’
Julia didn’t flinch.
‘Why are you still here?’ Stroud asked.
‘I’m waiting for you to get a pen.’
‘A pen? Why do I need a pen?’
‘So you can write down my phone number, you belligerent arsehole.’
Stroud smiled. ‘Just tell me. I’ll remember.’
She told him. He remembered. He called her the next day. He took a taxi, paid for on arrival, and he went up to her Knightsbridge flat where they smoked weed and fucked like teenagers.
Stroud married Julia in August of 1961. Her family disapproved. She didn’t care. At least not at first. But when his lifestyle and habits gave her cause for aggravation, she never missed an opportunity to remind him of how she really should have taken her parents’ advice.
‘I should have listened,’ she said.
‘You don’t listen to anyone but yourself,’ he countered.
And so it went on. It was not a bad marriage. Not at all. It was just a marriage that perhaps should never have happened. They didn’t hate one another. Even their fights were strangely half-hearted. They could have been great friends, and had it stayed that way they probably would have been great friends for the rest of their lives.
Ultimately, the only truly good and worthwhile thing to come out of the marriage – aside from memories of those first wild, passionate months – was Eva, born in May of ’62. Their divorce was finalised in September of 1966.
The judge decided that Stroud was ‘neither capable nor equipped to provide a stable domestic environment in which the nurturing of a child could be accomplished’.
Stroud couldn’t disagree. Besides, his legal counsel was no match for Montgomery money. Julia got sole custody.
Haig stayed out of it, taking neither one side nor the other.
Eva was now fourteen. A while ago Stroud had waited outside her school and watched her leave. She was tall and beautiful like her mother, but she seemed to possess more substance. Delusion it might have been, but he knew that there was something of himself in his daughter, something that would soften and temper the harder facets that Julia wore for the world. If he could only have talked to his daughter – really talked to her – he knew he would have been able to make her understand. He had not left her; he had been excommunicated. He had not abandoned her; he had been cast out into the wilderness for various crimes, some revealed, others not. He appreciated one thing, however: she was Eva Stroud, not Eva Montgomery. Understanding Julia as he did, that must have been Eva’s choice. He had been there for the first four years of his daughter’s life. They had been inseparable. Perhaps there was still a true connection, despite the distance, despite the silence. Stroud so desperately wanted Eva back in his life. He had convinced himself that the sentiment was reciprocated.
On the plane, he drank more. More than he should have, but when did he not? If it was there, he would drink it. If it wasn’t, he would find a way to make it there. The blunt fist of alcohol facilitated selective amnesia. He remembered things the way he wanted to, leaving out those moments when he had been the architect of his own undoing. It was a pretence, and he knew it. A lie that he just kept on telling.
One day he would stop drinking, or perhaps it would stop him.
It was gone seven in the evening when Stroud landed. He found a phone kiosk on the airport concourse and called Haig.
‘Where are you?’
‘Outside the airport,’ Stroud said. ‘The flight was delayed. Do you want me to come over to the office?’
‘I have something to do. Let’s meet in the morning.’
‘I don’t have anywhere to stay.’
‘But you have money? You must have enough to get a hotel room.’
‘I’ve got about thirty quid, but it’s in guilders.’
‘Jesus Christ, Stroud.’
Stroud said nothing.
‘Do you know the Grange in Covent Garden?’
‘I can find it.’
‘I’ll call them, get you a room.’
‘Thanks, Marcus.’
‘Bloody hell, Stroud, you really need to pull yourself together.’
‘I’ve been busy. I’ll get to it.’
Marcus hung up.
Stroud changed his guilders for sterling and took the Underground into London. The city was suffering a record-setting heatwave. Stepping out into the street, Stroud was sideswiped by the humidity. It didn’t serve to improve the place, nor heal the psychic bruises it had left him with. Though it had been his home for more years than anywhere else on the globe, he didn’t like it. To Stroud, London represented more loss and grief than any other place in the world. It was here that his life had unravelled. It was here that demons awaited his return from whichever far-flung corner of the world he had last tried to escape from them.
