INCARNATION by Daniel Easterman Read Free Book Online

someone who has started to drown, but who still has enough sense to know when to start swimming.
    ‘Tell me about the project,’ he said. 'Tell me everything you know.’

CHAPTER SEVEN
    ‘F arrar did not turn up that afternoon. David tried more than once to contact him. Each time a secretary with an icy voice told him Sir Anthony was not in his office, or Sir Anthony was in a meeting, or Sir Anthony had just stepped out of the building, and would Mr Laing please ring back later? He gave up ringing in the end. Try as he might, he could not stop thoughts of Farrar and Elizabeth from forming in his brain. When he thought of them now, they were sweating and naked, writhing together on a hot bed. He sneezed several times and went back to room number seven.
    ‘No luck,’ he said. ‘The great man’s still out and about.’ 
    ‘He’ll have to speak to you.’ Pauline was adamant. She disapproved of Farrar, she’d never made a secret of it. He wasn’t qualified to run the China Desk, she argued. Just because he’d spent a few years as First Secretary in Peking, taken a year off to learn something rudimentary which he called Chinese, and licked every upper-class backside in sight, did not make him desk head material. In her opinion. And, though he was never so forthright, in David’s as well.
    'I’ve asked him to ring back.’ He sneezed again. His hay fever had been late in coming on this year. Rain had kept the pollen at bay until a week ago. But now he could feel it marshalling its strength to make the summer miserable.
    ‘He could be on his way,’ suggested Donaldson. Pauline gave him a withering look.
    There were several sessions with Tursun, each more frustrating than the one before. The boy knew a great deal, that became more and more obvious as the day wore on; but not everything he said made sense, and a lot of the information he passed to them was self-contradictory.
    He gave them a place name - Karakhoto - but could not locate it on any map of the region. Nor could anyone else. When asked for the names of the generals responsible for liaison with the Iraqi scientists and military men, he could only name two - Wang Chigang and Zhao Chingyu - neither of whom rang bells with David, who knew the names of everyone in the provincial military hierarchy. There were several map coordinates, but when David pressed for details of what they referred to, the boy became visibly confused and started contradicting what he’d already said.
    At times it was hard to pin him down. He would allude to things in an imprecise, airy fashion, as if he were a medium at a travelling fair.
    ‘There’s a man with thin hair,’ he said. ‘In the Taklamakan. Be careful of him.’
    ‘What’s his name?’ asked David. Tursun shook his head sadly and said he did not know.
    ‘Black walls,’ he said. 'There are black walls without windows or doors. They are hiding something behind them.’
    ‘Hiding what?’ The boy shook his head again and lowered his eyes.
    To David, the whole affair had a bad smell about it, an overpowering odour of incense sticks and tarot cards, cheap horoscopes cast in old bazaars, oracles murmured darkly at wayside shrines. He’d seen it all in his day - sleight of hand and sleight of tongue, old men touched by madness more than holiness, little boys with large eyes and outstretched hands. The only thing was, this time he couldn’t for the life of him work out how it was done.
    By mid-afternoon, the boy began to flag. His confidence was leaving him. He said he was tired, that he’d travelled a long way, and had had little sleep. They were all exhausted by then anyway, so David called an early halt to the last session. Mrs Hughes took the boy back to his room, where he went straight to sleep. His parents were being kept in a separate suite on the top floor for as long as the debriefing lasted. They were frightened and, without Tursun to interpret, they talked to no one.
    David went upstairs and knocked on