by Mark Dawson
Sonya was Isabel’s sister. They had a boy, Logan, who was the same age as Sean. Jimmy swallowed again; he wanted to see his boy before he left, but now it wouldn’t be possible. It wasn’t Isabel’s fault; it was his own. His own stupidity and credulousness had landed him in this mess.
He held her by the shoulders and looked into her eyes. “I was arrested. The man I was working for—he fitted me up. I woke up in Scotland Yard.”
She reached up to touch his cheek. “They did that to you?”
“We had a little difference of opinion,” he said. “I was trying to get home. They didn’t want me to.”
“But you sorted it out?”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re here now. You’ve fixed it? Nothing’s going to happen?”
“Not quite.”
“What does that mean?”
“I’ve got to go away.”
“Where?”
“Scotland.”
“Why do you need to go to Scotland?”
“A man came to see me in the cells this morning. He works for the government. He said the charges against me would be dropped if I do some work for them.”
“What kind of work?”
“I don’t know,” he said honestly.
“For how long?”
“Two weeks, then I’m home again and we can go back to how we were before.”
“What do I tell Sean?”
“I don’t know,” Jimmy said. “Maybe that I’ve a job to do, and I’ll be back as soon as I can—tell him I’ll bring him a present.”
“You’re going to buy him something and hope he forgets you’ve left us for two weeks?”
“Come on, darling,” he said. “I’m doing my best. I don’t want to go.”
“So don’t.”
“I have to. If I don’t, they’ll charge me. They got me bang to rights and they’ll throw the book at me. I’m sorry—I have to go.”
She looked away, turning her face to the side so that she could wipe away the tears without him seeing that she was crying. “This has to change,” she said. “I can’t do this any more. I worry; every time you go out to work I worry that you’re not going to come back. I thought something had happened last night. I thought you’d been hurt or worse. I…”
The words petered out, replaced by a sob. Her shoulders juddered as Jimmy pulled her against him, wrapping his arms around her and holding her tight until the crying subsided.
“It’s going to stop,” he said. “It’ll be different when I get back.”
“You’ve said that before,” she said, her voice raw.
“I mean it this time. No more jobs. I’ll go straight. The house is paid for—I’ll get a job. Something kosher. I promise.”
He heard the blast of a horn from outside.
“Who’s that?” Isabel asked.
“The man who got me out this morning. I have to go with him now.”
She held onto him tighter, burying her face into his neck. He could smell her tears. He gently reached down and removed her arms from around his shoulders. Her face was streaked with moisture; he reached down and wiped the tears away.
“I don’t want you to go.”
“And I don’t want to go, but I have to. Tell Sean I love him. I’ll be back as soon as I can.” He held her face with both hands and kissed her. “I love you,” he said.
He turned away from her before he changed his mind, opened the door and walked across the garden to the pavement. He could feel the wetness in his eyes and blinked it away; he didn’t want Mackintosh to see him crying. He got to the Jaguar and opened the door.
“Ready?” Mackintosh said.
Jimmy nodded, not trusting himself to speak without the emotion choking his words.
Mackintosh put the car into gear and pulled away. Jimmy watched in the mirror as they nudged into the traffic. Isabel was at the door, watching him leave.
18
Mackintosh took the coffees to the table that Walker had selected. He put them down and lowered himself into the spare seat. He looked at Walker. He had given the Irishman a change of clothes and he had put them on in a bathroom when they arrived: a black sweater with black jeans and boots. He had been assessing the Irishman during their drive to Heathrow and he watched him now. Mackintosh hadn’t spent time in the secret service, stationed in some of the most hostile and dangerous cities in the world, without developing the ability to quickly size a person up. Were they trustworthy? Frightened? Would they do what they had promised to do? After a while, he had not even needed to go through the process of a formal evaluation; he just knew.
Walker looked distracted now. There was a window next to the table and it offered a view of the runway. He was staring at a jumbo as it sped up and, gradually, rose into the air.
“James.”
He was distracted, even a little wistful.
“James. Jimmy.”
Walker looked away from the window.
“You’re coming back,” Mackintosh told him.
“Two weeks,” Walker said, parroting what Mackintosh had told him earlier. “Why don’t I believe that?”
Mackintosh didn’t answer. It was possible that they would be able to do what he intended in two weeks, but there were variables. And, of course, coming back again assumed that they were successful. There was certainly no guarantee of that. His plan was audacious, very dangerous, and, if he was honest, the odds were against it.
But he couldn’t tell Walker that.
“So where are we going?”
“Berlin.”
“What?”
“West Berlin, to be precise. You haven’t been there before, have you?”
“I’ve never been outside the country.”
“I know,” Mackintosh said. “You don’t have a passport, do you?”
“Never needed one.”
“Here.”
Mackintosh reached into his pocket and took out an envelope. Walker opened it and took out a brand-new passport. He flipped to the back; he looked at his own photograph.
“Where did you get this?”
“I pulled some strings.”
Walker opened the envelope and emptied it: two more documents and a wad of bank notes.
“There’s a boarding pass for the flight,” he said.
Walker examined it. “One way?”
“We’ll sort the return out later.”
Walker held up the final piece of paper. “The Berlin Hilton,” he read.
“You’ve got a reservation there.” He laid his finger on the bank notes. “And a thousand Deutschmarks. Enough for everything you need. When you land at Tempelhof, get a taxi to the hotel. Check in and make yourself comfortable. I’ll come to your room tonight and we can talk about what we’re going to be doing tomorrow.”
“What are we going to be doing?”
“A little reconnaissance. We’ll talk about it tonight.”
“Why am I going to Berlin?”
“You’re going to have a meeting with a man. You’ll take the meeting, find out what I need to know, and you’ll be on your way back home again with a clean record and the thanks of a grateful government.”
“That’s it?”
“Mostly,” Mackintosh said.
“You’re full of it,” Walker said with a derisive chuckle. “What else?”
“I’ll brief you tonight,” Mackintosh said. He decided to change the subject and pointed to the coffee. “Finish that and go to the gate. You’re leaving in thirty minutes. It’s two hours to Berlin. Did you sleep last night?”
“Not much.”
“Try and get some on the flight. You’re going to be busy.”
Part III
19
The ticket to Berlin was in his name and the woman behind the counter at check-in processed him with the sluggish boredom that one might expect from someone who had repeated the same monotonous task over and over all day. He made his way to the gate and saw that the flight had been delayed for an hour. He had seen a bar on his walk through the terminal and so he returned to it and ordered a pint. He drank it quickly and ordered another. The customers around him were unremarkable: couples travelling together, businessmen discussing the meetings that they would take in Paris, Milan, Vienna and Bonn. Jimmy sat at the bar and concentrated on his pint. He felt out of place and uncomfortable. Mackintosh had been right; he had never had a passport before. He had never even set foot on an aeroplane. The prospect did not concern him, but it gave him a feeling of inferiority that he found difficult to ignore.
He finished his second pint, ordered and drank a third, and, finally beginning to feel the effects of the drink, made his way back to the gate. Boarding had commenced and, after relieving himself in the bathroom, he presented his boarding pass and passport to the member of staff who was working her way through the queue and made his way down the air bridge and onto the jet.
*
The flight was uneventful. Jimmy had a seat in economy and it was too uncomfortable for him to think about sleeping. He took out one of the ten-Deutschmark bills that Macintosh had given him and bought a gin and tonic. He drank that, ordered another, and then picked at the tasteless sandwich that the attendant had brought him.
He looked out of the window as they passed over Europe and wondered what Isabel and Sean would be doing. He had hated to leave his girl like that, and had hated the idea of leaving without seeing Sean even more. But what choice did he have? The police would have been able to have him convicted if that was what they wanted. He had been done up like a kipper; they had him on tape discussing an armed robbery, and there was evidence in his car that would be impossible for a jury to ignore.
Jimmy knew, too, that what Mackintosh had said was true: men like Mackintosh would be able to drip their poison into the ear of the judge responsible for sentencing and would be able to ensure that Jimmy received punishment at the upper end of the tariff. Ten years? Fifteen years? Jimmy was not prepared to countenance that. He was thirty now. The thought of throwing away the best years of his life and missing the chance to see his son grow up was something that he could not bear to contemplate.
He had no choice.
He looked down at the lights that prickled the landscape below and tried to imagine what the next few days might bring. He was finding it difficult to process what had happened to him since he had left his house earlier that morning. Mackintosh had him exactly where he wanted him. Jimmy didn’t know what would be required of him in Berlin, but he knew that there was no going back now.
20
The flight landed ninety minutes behind schedule. Jimmy thanked the winsome flight attendant who had flirted with him as she delivered his drinks and then disembarked and made his way into the terminal. He had no luggage to collect and so went straight to immigration, where he presented his papers to a taciturn man working the queue from inside a glass-fronted cubicle.
“What is your business in Germany?” the man asked him in staccato English.
Mackintosh hadn’t told him what to say. Jimmy found himself unusually self-conscious. “Business,” he said.
“Where are you staying?”
Jimmy remembered the papers. “The Berlin Hilton,” he said.
“You have a one-way ticket.”
“I’m not sure how long I’ll need to be here for,” Jimmy said. “Probably a week.”
The man looked down at his passport, looked up to his face again and then, without another word, stamped the empty page and handed the document back to him. Jimmy thanked him and, before the man could say anything else, made his way between the booths and into the baggage collection area. He continued through the terminal, following the illustrated signs until he located the taxi rank outside. He waited in line and, after five minutes, stepped into a car.
“I don’t speak German,” he said as the driver pulled out into the traffic.
“No problem,” the man said. “Where do you want to go?”
“The Hilton,” Jimmy said.
The driver set off, plotting a route into the heart of the city. Jimmy watched as the landscape changed: they passed through an industrial area into streets that were lined with residential buildings and then a central area with hotels and office blocks.
The Hilton was a spectacularly ugly building. It was almost as if it comprised two separate buildings: the first was beige concrete, a slightly taller structure that was topped with the hotel’s name in bold, confident capitals; the second, main part of the building was decorated like a chequerboard, white concrete slabs alternating with black windows to create an eyesore that loomed over the hotel’s parking lot and the road, Mohrenstraße, that ran alongside it.
“Here we are,” the driver said, pulling off the road and parking next to the entrance.
A bellboy appeared from the foyer, his breath misting in front of his face. He opened the door and Jimmy got out, putting his heels down and immediately skidding on a sheet of black ice. He lost his balance, but managed to stay upright by grabbing the car and the bellboy’s shoulder.
“Nearly,” Jimmy said.
“English?” the bellboy asked.
“Irish.”
“It’s a cold one tonight.”
“I’ll say.”
“Any luggage, sir?”
“No.”
“Very good. This way, please.”
Jimmy followed him inside. He handed his reservation to the receptionist, checked in and followed the woman’s directions to the lifts. His room was on the eighth floor, facing out onto a bleak block that still bore the scars of the war. The building had been struck by a shell and the damage had not yet been repaired. Smoke rose from vents at the top of the building and there were lights in the windows, suggesting that, despite the poor condition of the building, it was still occupied.
He closed the blinds, took off his coat and shoes and sat down on the bed. He was tired and alone, a stranger in a strange city, his family hundreds of miles away.
He found the minibar, poured himself a drink and waited for Mackintosh.
21
Mackintosh took a later flight. He would be recognised at the airport and he didn’t want to risk the chance that Walker might do something stupid and compromise operational integrity. The Irishman had no experience, no tradecraft, and Mackintosh couldn’t take the risk.
He landed at ten, took a taxi to the consulate to read the latest intel reports and then found a pool driver to take him to the Hilton. The driver knew not to go directly to the destination, and went in the opposite direction until he reached the subway. Mackintosh hurried down onto the platform and got on the first train heading East. It was late and the carriage was empty. He didn’t think that he was being followed.
He thought about the intelligence reports that he had just read.
They were appalling.
Foulkes was dead. The remaining agents were inexperienced, and their assets were a mix of businessmen, bureaucrats, lowlifes and border rats. The rats were Berliners wh
o flitted back and forth across the border. Some of them were good at it and had even managed to smuggle East Germans across. But their information was nearly always old, and, on the occasions when it was fresh, it never proved to be wholly reliable. Mackintosh needed to shake things up. And he had a plan for doing that.
“Last stop in West Berlin,” the guard announced.
The line passed for a short time beneath the Wall and into East Berlin. Mackintosh gazed out of the window as the carriage passed through one of the Geisterbahnhöfe, or “ghost stations,” with an armed guard peeking at the train through a narrow slit in a bricked hut. The train accelerated and they were gone, turning back into the West once more.
His thoughts turned to Walker. He knew that he would need to test him soon. There wasn’t going to be a comfortable period of settling in. There would be no acclimatisation; there was no time for that. SIS needed to assert itself against the Stasi and PICASSO was the means that had been chosen to do that. There was an unwritten rule that the men and women of the intelligence services—on both sides—were off limits. The rule had held the line for years; there would be a bloodbath without it. What Karl-Heinz Sommer had done was intolerable. Mackintosh was going to stamp down hard on him and the Stasi and teach them that there were consequences for the things that they had done.
Easier said than done? Perhaps. But sitting back and taking it was out of the question.
The train rumbled into Stadtmitte. Mackintosh collected his bag and got to his feet, holding onto the leather strap that hung down from the roof and waiting until the train came to a stop. The doors opened with a wheeze and Mackintosh disembarked. The hotel was a short walk from the station. Mackintosh set off.
22
