Vagabond

by Seymour, Gerald

  The bureaucrat once occupying a back office at the Finance Ministry in Moscow had slipped out on a spring afternoon five months before and none of those with whom he worked had noticed that his briefcase was in his hand. Why take a briefcase if the destination was a park, and the purpose to eat a sandwich? Memory sticks did not weigh heavily or bulge. It had not been noticed by those colleagues that this official had spent all of his previous lunch breaks in the last fortnight with sticks in the computers and passwords tapped into the machines. His absence had not been noticed on a warm, sunny afternoon. It was not until the next morning and his failure to arrive at his desk that security personnel were sent to his bachelor apartment. It had been wiped clean, the owner’s personality deleted. He was gone – well gone. An evening flight had taken him from Domodedovo airport to Vienna. He had been airlifted on to Zürich and taken to a safe-house by Swiss financial authorities. Now he had moved on. The investigators had shifted him to a small gated estate just inside the M25 and to the south-west of London. At first, after arriving in the United Kingdom, he had been too scared to cough and had stayed inside the four-bedroom house with the handyman/housekeeper couple – both formerly with the anti-terrorist command – who were responsible for his safety. He had begun to relax. The secrecy around him had slackened. In the small hours of a morning in August, at first light, he had tiptoed downstairs and telephoned his mother’s home, near to the aluminium smelter in Krasnoyarsk at the heart of Siberia. Where was he? his mother had demanded from her apartment in the Sovetsky district of the city. He had not answered her. He had repeated that he was well and would urge the authorities handling him to attempt to bring her out of Russia to him.

  The conversation had been a disaster. Part of the disaster he had known of: she had refused to leave her motherland. The other part was the capability of Russian electronic intelligence to pick up the call to the Krasnoyarsk number, locate the caller and set a watch on the streets, lanes and bridle paths on that side of Weybridge. When he was found, Timofey Simonov was given a contract and turned to his considerable diary of contacts. A weapon had been made available to a Bosnian Serb marksman who had perfected the skill of using a precision rifle at long range while working from high ground, above the Jewish cemetery, during the siege of Sarajevo. It would be a deniable killing, and no trace could be laid at the feet of important men in the commercial banking world of the Russian state. The killing would send a message and whistle-blowers poring over files and computer screens in Moscow would hear of it.

  The target, of course, knew nothing of plans being made to abbreviate his life. Now that the security regime had relaxed, he walked more often in the garden, seeing only a distant wall of trees on the south side of the property. It was another afternoon of rain so he did not go for his run, three circuits of the grounds. He had never heard of Timofey Simonov, and boredom had supplanted fear. That afternoon he played chess against himself on a laptop computer.

  He woke with a start. The shadow moved in the room. He had been among the trees, the vandalised ruins and wilderness of the abandoned aircraft hangars. It was said to be the safest town in the Czech Republic and the police took great care of the residents of the street that ran up the hill. The evening had begun. Timofey Simonov had been asleep on the sofa in the first-floor room with the big windows that overlooked the town. The curtains had not been drawn and the dusk had crept up on him. The figure flitted across his eyeline.

  The ghosts had been with him as he dozed. He had not been to Milovice for three weeks. It was almost home to him. He had nothing to fear, yet the breath had caught in his throat. He coughed. A light was switched on.

  The brigadier came into the room most days at this time with a pot of coffee. It surprised Timofey Simonov that he had felt a frisson of apprehension when he had become aware of his man’s presence. What had he to fear? Nothing that he knew of. And to look forward to? A concert that evening, and next week he had tickets for a Glenn Miller orchestra playing in the town. In his sleep he often walked on the old runways and aprons of Milovice, among the weapons arsenals and the side roads that went to the firing ranges where the battle tanks had performed. And, so many times in his sleep, he cringed at the engines of the Mig-29s of the 114th Regiment of Interceptors. They had been, to the NATO people in Germany, the fulcrum designation of Soviet air power . . . All gone, and weeds grew at Milovice. It was a scandal, a disgrace, an insult to the country of his birth and— The tray of tea was put down beside him.

  He stretched and yawned, stood up and slipped on his shoes. ‘Any calls?’

  There had been none from Yekaterinburg or London, but his English friend had confirmed his arrival in Prague the next day. ‘You’re sure you want to see him?’

  ‘Certain.’

  ‘You knew him a long time ago – and his business is ridiculous, for someone like you to get involved in.’

  ‘He helped me when it mattered.’

  The brigadier gave a slight shrug. He had accepted that his advice was rejected. He said that ‘necessary matters’ were in hand.

  Timofey Simonov hadn’t shared with him the incentive to make available the weapons: they would be used against the government, the military and the authority of the United Kingdom . . . The memories were sharper each time he resurrected them. The meltdown of power in 1989, when he had been twenty-eight. The frantic efforts to clear the Milovice base of millions of dollars’ worth of equipment; the accompanying triumphalism of the World Service from London and the Americans’ Radio Free Europe. He had been at a humiliating conference in east Berlin, at the Ministry of Defence. They had discussed the practicalities of keeping the deployed nuclear arsenals safe while preparations were made to return them to a shrunken, shrivelled Russia. The Americans had been crisp, superior but practical. The French were indifferent. The British he had thought were simply patronising – they had offered an airlift to get the warheads home. He, only a captain in the GRU, had snapped at an RAF air vice marshal, ‘We have, believe me, enough wheelbarrows to bring home our warheads.’ The bastards had chuckled. He could see them now and still hated them. A suited official had remarked chirpily to the brigadier, Nikolai Denisov, ‘Your problem is that you tried to match the big dollar’s spending, failed big-time, and broke the bank. You didn’t know when to stop so your country’s in liquidation and your ideology is bankrupt. What a fuck-up.’ He had watched the official and the RAF officer drift away across the salon.

  And Moscow, where his ‘roof’ rested, had no love of the British, who harboured terrorists, fraudsters and enemies of the regime.

  Weapons were wanted and would be supplied.

  After a fashion, the war continued. Not at the same intensity as forty years before, but it was a ‘clear and present danger’. In the Six Counties of Northern Ireland, policemen still patrolled in paramilitary uniforms and, in some areas, carried automatic assault weapons. They used cars and jeeps with armour plating, and state-of-the-art water cannon made regular appearances to soak rioters hurling Molotov cocktails.

  Bombs of increasing sophistication appeared outside public buildings and were laid underneath policemen’s cars. More calls were made to the police report lines about crimes being committed in the hope of drawing officers into a field of fire.

  Most of the old men of the IRA’s Provisional wing were bought off, given inflated wages as ‘community officers’, or were paid off by their former active-service-unit commanders, with government hand-outs to drive hospital cars or see kids across the road at the school gate. Others, though, rejected the ceasefire and kept a suspicion of war alive.

  Security officials learned they were under surveillance. Their home addresses were watched, their families intimidated and nerves shredded. The political wings of the principal gaol, HMP Maghaberry, were full. A peace dividend seemed ever elusive.

  There was a new and growing confidence among the activists and an increasing boldness. After each attack, politicians resurrected the old words: it had been an ‘atroc
ity’, the work of ‘evil’ men who had ‘no care for democracy’. The killers were labelled ‘cowards’.

  It was as if, in parts of those Six Counties, a virulent disease had returned after the false dawn of remission. The need to prevent fresh supplies of weapons and explosives reaching the Province was of critical importance in the battle against the activists.

  ‘Keep the fucking hardware out of their hands and we stand a chance of inching towards some sort of normality,’ a departing intelligence officer had told his replacement. ‘Let the hardware back into the Province and we go back to the dark days – fast.’

  Gaby Davies took him into Thames House. More to spare herself than him, she brought him in through the side entrance, just up from the café and beyond the gardens in the square. She flicked her fingers irritably as he fumbled in an inner pocket for his wallet, then reached inside and took it out herself. She flashed her own ID and went through the gate, then swiped his and pulled him through. He might have been a truculent child wanting to skive off school for all the dignity she allowed him. The security team watched them.

  They would have known Gabrielle Davies and might have reckoned her a little like girls from their own homes and streets, one who had done well and usually had time for a fast smile and a crack about one of the bloody awful football teams they might support. They’d have assumed that Hugo Woolmer, hangdog and cowed, had been out on the piss and was suffering. She took him up in the lift.

  They were an unlikely couple spilling out on the second floor. His coat stank of old cowshit, and there were still oddments of straw caught in the pocket flaps. His shoes were mud caked and he was unshaven. Their driver had rewarded her with a baleful look that seemed to blame her for the filth her companion would dump on his upholstery. At the Belfast end she had cleaned her shoes in the toilet. On the shuttle, she’d washed her ankles, sponged the hems of her jeans and sluiced her face. In the services’ toilets, she’d run a comb through her hair. The contrast between them was obvious, intended. She sat him down at his usual console.

  She said to him, a clear voice, ‘I suggest, Hugo, that you spend the next few minutes clearing your desk. After I’ve been in with Matthew I can’t see you spending any more time here. Your performance was a disgrace to the Service. You were pathetic.’

  She knew all about Hugo Woolmer from himself: father an accountant and mother a GP in the East Midlands, private school, Oxford, first-class honours, the family revelling in the ‘hush-hush’ and ‘need to know’, ‘lips sealed, but it’s important work he does – national security’. He’d seemed to regard her as ‘staff’, close to getting her to sort out his laundry. She was from a town on the North Sea coast, had the accent to prove it, and not many – if any – from her street had matched her.

  She swept out and went down a wide corridor. Only the angels had individual offices. No name, but a number. She knocked. There were voices inside so she had interrupted a meeting. There was a sharp response: ‘Enter.’

  It was the lair of Matthew Bentinick. He was more the ‘dominant wolf’ or the ‘alpha male’ than an angel. She saw no expression on his face. Neither querulous nor irritated. He nodded to the two women with him. Laptops were switched off and files shuffled into bags. He would have expected, since she’d barged in, that her business was urgent. She had spoken to him only on the secure phone link from the base of the mountain, and again from the service station west of Heathrow. The door closed behind them.

  Gaby Davies launched in. A story of a fog blanket and an agent going forward with no wire and no bug. The collapse of her superior and the return of the agent, pale and shaking but intact. He’d passed whatever tests they’d put him through, including waving a drill, power on, in his face. There had been new people at the meeting in the safe-house and it was hardware they wanted, a supposed opportunity in Prague to cosy up with Russians. He chewed gum while he listened.

  ‘Did he learn the names of those who interrogated him, the principals?’

  ‘One called Brennie did most of the talking. There was a younger one, less to say, seemed uncomfortable. He thought the name was Malachy, or Malchie, something like that. I reckon he did well.’

  ‘Prague? When?’

  ‘Within a couple of days.’

  ‘So, our boy’s best contact in the Czech Republic – who would that be?’

  ‘Timofey Simonov. He’s Russian. That’s all. It’s funny, Matthew, but the Joe talks his head off about the Irish and is economical with stuff about his pal who’ll provide the hardware.’

  ‘The relationship will go back a long way – not to worry. Thank you, Gaby. I’d like a few minutes.’

  ‘Of course. Can I say one more thing?’

  ‘Whatever.’

  ‘Hugo Woolmer is complete crap, a waste of space. He needs a shrink. I can handle this, Matthew. I can lead the team that travels. The Joe likes and respects me. He’ll jump when I tell him to. I just need a sidekick, but I’m up to running the show.’

  There was a pencil in his hands and he twisted it, the motion constant with the movement of his jaws. He had shown neither interest in nor indifference to the names from the mountain, nor had seemed to register that of Timofey Simonov. She’d thought her play for taking charge was not to be argued with. Nothing wrong with ambition. It had taken her clear of her street, and driven her through American studies at Essex University, then into the Security Service. A girl with her accent and background had had hurdles in front of her and she’d cleared them. She was a little in awe of Matthew Bentinick, and it was his style to give away nothing of his feelings or inclinations. She had no partner at the moment. If Bentinick – double her age – had made a pass at her she was likely to have accepted: part of the ‘ambition’ package. It was hard enough to maintain a relationship outside Thames House and shagging guys on the inside often led to tears or gossip. An older man had his attractions – but no invitation had been forthcoming.

  ‘Thank you, Gaby. As I said, a few minutes, please. Could you ask our Dragon to attend here? Persuade her.’

  A man sat in a fourth-floor office. He let slip a small suspicion of emotion, but not for others to see. Memories were stirred and pain recalled. He thought an opportunity was paraded, unannounced, in front of him. There was a light knock at his door.

  ‘You’d go for Vagabond.’

  ‘It would be a powerful call.’

  The Dragon was Jocelyn. She was a tall woman, flat-chested. From the creases in her dress it was possible she’d slept in it, and there were food stains by the buttons. She wore open leather sandals. Her hair was grey, her complexion ragged and wrinkled. She was at the top of the tree, and the ethos of the Service ran in her veins: her grandfather had interrogated senior German officers after the 1945 surrender while hunting for war criminals and a few, as a result of his diligence, had gone to the gallows. Her father had served in Cyprus, Aden and Ireland while her mother had filed expenses dockets in an admin department.

  Jocelyn had been with them since 1973. It was said of her that she didn’t suffer fools, also that her memory was elephantine. She had been an ally of Matthew Bentinick through all his days in the Province, knew his teams in Force Reconnaissance Unit and liaised between the FRU and the Service. He sought her guidance on any remotely contentious matter that crossed his desk. Half of the floor was quietly nervous of attracting one of her outbursts of fury at what she might consider incompetence or lack of commitment. She had never married, but had a large, lemon Persian cat and lived in a Barnes apartment. Bentinick rarely ignored her advice. She leaned against the wall and declined his offer of a chair.

  ‘He was the best you ever had.’

  ‘But ran out on me.’

  ‘A long time ago. It was never categorised as “desertion”. As I remember, it was “compassionate leave” to start with, then “disability”, sorted out with decent discretion – as he bloody well deserved.’

  ‘It wasn’t the same at Gough after he’d gone. We never had the same contr
ol over our agents. He was wrecked when he went.’

  ‘Yes, indeed, but he’s had long enough to climb off the rocks and refloat himself.’

  ‘I think I know this, but what does he bring to the party?’

  She grimaced. ‘He’s ruthless, focused, committed to the cause. To hell with the Davies girl. You put in the best man.’

  ‘The best man?’

  ‘For what’s at stake.’

  ‘Malachy Riordan, son of the unlamented Padraig Riordan, a weapons shipment that would be the equivalent of scattering paraffin on old embers. It’s attractive. I quite like your reasoning . . . and there are other agendas.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Matthew, get into the serious league. Hoist yourself up to high table.’

  ‘Help me.’

  The Dragon did. She was at his desk, pushed his wheeled chair aside, squatted in front of his screen and typed rapidly. He thought she used a password and digits that were beyond his security classification. The picture came up, and the name.

  ‘That’s high table.’ Bentinick bent forward.

  ‘I’d say so. I’d also say that you don’t have a handler who isn’t up to his chin in affairs that count. None of them, anyway, would match Vagabond.’