They reached a café. It was cool, bright and a wind was blowing off the Vltava, as usual, but Mr Bentinick had decided they’d sit outside. Pilar was given two hundred Czech koruna to buy coffee. At the church of St Cyril and St Methodius, Mr Bentinick had spoken of ruthlessness. Karol Pilar did not doubt that he possessed it.
They were on the road and far out of Nürnberg, running late on the schedule. The driver seemed reluctant to burn some rubber, even though they were on the E51, a dual carriageway. There had been fog at the airport and they had spent more than an hour in stacking circles. When they had come down, his knuckles were white from gripping the top of the seat in front.
Malachy Riordan had been met. The fog had made a close wall around the car park and terminal buildings.
They had crept away and at snail’s pace. It was rare that Malachy Riordan was a passenger on a long-distance journey. He was in the front seat, belt on, and the car was an old Mercedes, with more than two hundred thousand kilometres on the clock. In the fog, great lorries with trailers had surged by – intimidating. He didn’t know where he was, recognised none of the place names, knew nothing of the old German Democratic Republic. Eventually the fog lifted and they had got stuck in Dresden’s rush-hour traffic.
The driver talked but Malachy Riordan didn’t. He ached for silence.
He knew the driver’s name: Sean. Knew his age: twenty-seven. His job: he worked as a barman in an Irish-themed pub in Nürnberg. His origins: the family was from the Ballymurphy part of west Belfast and his father was a walking no-hoper after interrogations in the old Castlereagh barracks: an uncle limped from a wound above the knee where he’d been shot by a paratrooper; his mother had a cousin who had not bought into the war of the volunteers, and the martyrs. Malachy could not comprehend why the driver thought he would be interested in all of that. He could, of course, tell him to shut his face, but then the man could have pulled over onto any hard shoulder opened the door on the passenger side and said, ‘Well, fuck you, man. Find your own way.’ He could have been dumped on a roadside not knowing where he was or how to move on. He sat and endured.
Malachy Riordan never asked a question about the job in the Irish bar or whether the man had a family in Nürnberg. He didn’t have to: he was told. The man leaked information. He imagined how it would be when the driver was back on his own territory. It was a mark of how far the Organisation had declined. In the old days, before the betrayal and the sell-out of the so-called ‘peace process’, people had been going regularly to the States, and for negotiations with the regime in Libya for weapons shipments; a delegation had gone to Colombia to teach workshops in mortar building and wiring. It strained his faith, but he knew nothing else – there were few days when he didn’t go to his father’s grave, and few weeks when he didn’t pause in front of the monuments in Cappagh or Galbally on the slopes of the mountain. He couldn’t imagine his faith being broken.
If the faith went, he would have to face the black marble headstone that bore his father’s name and blurt that he had compromised. He would follow the bastards who had gone into politics or who supervised the crossing in front of a school. He had never crossed his father, had always done his best to please and had hoped for praise.
Bridie was a hard woman. Brennie Murphy said she had the strength of granite. She might spit in his face and walk out on him, with the boy. So he let the man talk as they went towards the rising sun.
He learned more about the bar, the beers that were drunk, the bands that came over from the west of Ireland, the English football that was shown on TV, and buttoned his lip. Finally the driver had run out of small-talk. He asked, ‘I suppose a man like yourself – they didn’t give me a name, only the type of coat you’d be wearing – is important. Does that mean you’re a soldier? You’re a fighter, aren’t you?’
They were in the fast lane and he watched the German traffic going about its business.
The driver said, ‘Don’t mind me. I know when to keep my mouth shut. My family always told me it’s the touts you have to watch for.’
Malachy put the man’s drivel from his mind and thought of home – Bridie would have taken the boy to school. Then he thought of his army.
The boys lived close to each other, were almost inseparable. Neither had work and neither was studying. They hung about together and most days were in each other’s kitchens. Every adult in the village knew why they didn’t have jobs or go to the college on the far side of Dungannon. It would be Pearse’s mother’s kitchen, or Kevin’s mother’s, and the other kids of the two families were gone for employment, training or to school. The boys were set apart, neither criticised nor encouraged: the subject was off limits.
It was Kevin’s mother’s kitchen. Physically, the boys were different. Kevin had red-gold hair and was tall, with spindly limbs. His voice had a reedy twang. Pearse was shorter, heavier, and had a deeper voice. His hair was jet black, Celtic, and curly. Kevin was quiet, Pearse more outgoing and overtly confident. The last time they had been taken to Gough they had sat in separate interview rooms and a detective had said to Kevin, ‘You’re sharp enough to keep better company. You’ll bring ruin on yourself if you run with the shites and failures we see you with.’ In another interview room, a woman detective had said to Pearse, ‘Do you not realise that the time for killing and maiming people has gone and that you should be thinking of your future? It could be better than staring at a closed cell door, because that’s what it’ll be if you stay with Riordan and Murphy.’ The last time they’d come out almost cocky, and had taken the bus back home to the mountain. In their different ways they had felt a new confidence.
That morning it had ebbed.
The kettle whistled. Kevin’s mother was at work, cleaning the community hall, and the smaller kids had gone to school. The radio played the local station. There had been stone throwing and bottling in east Belfast, a boy had been shot in the kneecaps in Brandywell, Derry, and a ‘viable device’ had been found under a pile of rubbish at a tax office in Antrim. Normally they would josh and mess and be their age, but both were subdued.
It was the day when, alone, they would take their own length of piping, and the linked wiring for the detonation to the cabling hidden under the hedge, then wait for the car to come – Eamonn O’Kane’s – and blow him away. They drank coffee, ate biscuits, and watched the hands of the clock on the wall crawl round.
It was as if there had been a death in the corridor.
Early in the morning, there should have been a strip of light under his door, with the indistinct glow from the ceiling distorted in a frosted-glass panel beside it. Jocelyn went by: no light, no voice speaking into a phone, no rattle of the keyboard, no hacking cough. She wore lightweight flat shoes and shuffled towards her own door. From anywhere along the corridor, she, and any other occupant, would have identified the metal tips clattering at the toes and heels of his brogues. The absence left an emptiness.
There were men and women on that corridor, senior management, who went to conferences and seminars, travelled internally or abroad, and left their rooms locked and darkened. They weren’t missed. His window looked out onto the river. The glass was reinforced and supposedly shatterproof against a car bomb in the street. It was not supposed to be opened, but Jocelyn had heard reports of someone hanging out of a fourth-floor window, pipe smoke obscuring his face. She hated him to be away, was almost desolate in his absence.
She fancied she knew more about him than anyone else who worked there. When she was in that office she took no liberties. She would not slouch in a chair. She would not gossip or expect him to. Neither would she share what she knew of him. Jocelyn understood. She had been told once, and once was enough. It was a damp morning in central London and she had her raincoat draped over her shoulders. She made no concession to fashion and had never considered that dress might make her marginally more attractive to him. Both would have seemed, to strangers, emotionless, but they were bound by a fierce, unswerving pursuit of end-games.
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If there had been a strip of light under it, or a whiff of pipe tobacco, she would have knocked courteously, would have been called inside and they’d have talked. They did so four times a day, at least.
She went past. It would be a big one. A high-value target was on offer, the most important in two or three years. She walked down the stairs, unwilling to wait for the lift, then through the lobby and past a desk where her card was read by the machine. A barrier opened, and she was out of the side door into the street. She could smell fresh coffee and bacon grilling from the café.
She didn’t stop. The wind blew the sides of her coat hard against her. She cut through side-streets and headed towards Petty France, where buildings had privileged views over the parks and were close to the seats of power. She went through an unmarked doorway. A screen was consulted, her identification checked and a card issued. She went up two flights.
A young, smartly dressed lawyer was waiting for her. She shook his hand and was led towards a far room. The window that would have looked down into a central well was masked and the blind drawn. She had been told that this man, barely out of university, was a prime expert for the Ministry of Justice in areas affecting warrants, sealed or open, powers of arrest, the courts in which a case might be tried, and matters affecting international borders. He made coffee and offered biscuits. They settled. She assimilated advice, guidance, as Matthew Bentinick would have expected of her.
They finished.
He said, ‘I was once taught, Jocelyn, the legal creed. “Be he ever so mighty, no man is above the law.” Any observation you’d care to make?’
She said, ‘We’re not offenders. In the old days, we used “little people” for the nasty bits and let them run far enough to be out of sight. Then we couldn’t account for what they’d done. But that, of course, was the old days.’
He’d sat in his room. She hadn’t come or called: the mountain and Mahomet. He had gazed out of his window at the street opposite, a few chimneys and some satellite dishes. Nothing there to excite Ralph Exton.
His breakfast had been brought up on a tray – coffee, juice and a croissant. At home he was usually up early. When he was downstairs and dressed, Fliss and Toria still in bed, he had his desk in the dining room to himself and could shuffle the brown envelopes, make the decisions on which bills to pay and which to slip to the bottom of the heap. He could also consider new deals. Furniture always paid well, and he’d heard that there were good lines in clay garden pots from Vietnam – it was simple enough to run off the FairTrade stickers the garden centres liked. That was the trouble with Ralph Exton’s life: money. When he was away the brown envelopes couldn’t follow him. Maybe Fliss and Toria weren’t at home. Maybe Toria was with a friend, and maybe Fliss had an early appointment in the chair, before the nurse arrived. Some men would not have accepted his wife’s behaviour – they might have gone at her with an axe. There were men who stabbed or strangled their wives, then hanged themselves in the nearest woodland. That did not appeal, and the dentist was welcome to her. What did appeal to him was the next big deal, something that eclipsed the arrangements he had with the Irish for the cigarettes and was way bigger than the weapons he was brokering for them. It was elusive.
He could harbour an idea, then see it retreat into the mist when he dissected it. In the meantime there was business to sort out with Miss Gabrielle, and something rather firmer in the way of remuneration. He reckoned, with her in Prague and away from Thames House, he stood a better chance. It was the moment when they needed him. The mountain had not come to him, although he thought she liked him. He needed a pay-day.
He had a sheet of hotel paper, from beside the phone, and had made some calculations on it with the hotel’s pencil. In his home bathroom there was a glass jar from a jumble sale, filled with hotel soaps, shampoos and shower gel. He was a serial pilferer and would slip the pencil into a pocket, then the replacement that the maid would leave.
He would be Mahomet. He left his room. The corridor was quiet as he padded its length. At her door he stood for a few seconds, listened, and heard the TV playing an English-language channel. He took a breath and knocked. ‘Who is it?’
He looked up and down the corridor. ‘Ralph.’
‘Hold on a moment.’
He had his back to the door and kept a watch on the corridor, with the lift entrance at the far end to his right. It opened behind him.
‘Yes?’
The lift came to that floor. Two girls walked out. They were Vietnamese – or Chinese, Japanese, Korean or . . . He turned. Gabrielle stood just back from the door. She was dripping. A towel was wrapped round her and her calves glistened. She seemed small, and the skin on her arms was white, as if it was never exposed to the weather. She stood there, legs a little apart, and stared up at him.
‘Well?’
‘Sorry, I’ll come back.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. Come in and make some coffee – milk and no sugar for me.’
He thought, couldn’t be sure, that the towel had slipped an inch. She went back to the bathroom. There was a kettle, a bowl of coffee sachets, teabags and little milk pots. He boiled the water and poured. He heard her in the bathroom, clattering, then the whine of an electric toothbrush.
‘Ralph?’
‘What?’
‘There’s a pile of my clothes on the chair by the window – I put them out for today. Could you bring them here?’
He did so. Her hand came out and she took them from him.
‘I was about to call you.’
The kettle had boiled and he made the coffee. There was no book beside the bed and the sheets were barely disturbed. He reckoned she had slept well. Why should she not? She would have thought she had control of him. He poured. She hummed to herself in the bathroom.
‘What couldn’t wait for me to contact you, Ralph?’
‘I need to talk to you.’
‘What about?’
She was in the door of the bathroom. Her jeans were on, fastened at the waist but not zipped, and her bra. She was towelling her hair.
He said it quickly: ‘My future. I don’t have a budget from you. We have an arrangement, week to week, day to day, and—’
‘I can’t offer you a wage, Ralph.’
‘I need something better in place.’
‘Are the Irish not paying up front?’
‘My future is when I come out. Where’s the exit?’
She pushed him down onto the bed, then brought over their coffee. She sat beside him.
‘We’ll look after you, Ralph. It’s about trust, and you have good reason to trust us. You’re really important. All the people in our building who need to know about you are rooting for you. All of them. We really admire what you’re doing.’
A sweet voice, the burr of her accent, and nowhere near to an answer. His phone rang. She eased back, stood up and carried her cup to the window. He answered it. ‘Hello . . . Yes, that’s me . . . Yes, I have it. I’ll be there.’
In his mind he saw the young woman he had walked past at the airport, a fleeting memory. He hung up. ‘Gaby, we never seem to consider it appropriate to discuss my future.’
‘That’s for London, not here. How often do I have to tell you, Ralph, that we’re all committed to you.’ She put on her T-shirt. ‘You worry too much, and there’s no need for it. You meet her and come back to me. Your future? Well, that depends how all this shakes down.’
‘Of course.’
She was alone and lonely. Frankie McKinney hadn’t anticipated that. She was dressed and ready but had nowhere to go for two more hours. She felt like a wallflower at a dance for teenagers in a community centre. He’d sounded distant. There had been no enthusiasm in his voice but she lacked the street-level tradecraft to know whether it was basic procedure or meant crisis. It would be good in the evening when the Big Man came. She lay on her bed. She had an idea of how he would be: inspirational. When they went to the place where there would be test-firings, she would ask if sh
e could go first, charge the adrenalin, see the flash as the cartridge case was ejected. Or better: shoot the launcher. Then she would meet the Russians who were far beyond her understanding. Two hours to kill.
On the hill among the beech trees, Timofey Simonov was content. His dogs had picked up the scent of deer and were quartering as the autumn leaves fell around them.
He had an agenda of sorts to go with his walk, matters he should consider. The future: the call from his friend, the meeting that would be arranged for the next evening, the journey for collection, then the test-firings and Milovice, the camp that had been his home. It would be good to be with his friend because he had no others.
He loved the dogs, but nothing else. The present: he could take satisfaction, as he walked on the dried leaves, that the hood in Yekaterinburg had spent the night strapped into the chair, his feet tight in the concrete. About now he would be moved. His disposal would take place in daylight, seen by many. Because it would be witnessed, other young men with ambition would step back from interference in the existing order, and the booths from which narcotics were sold would not be trashed. He did not think that the sniper would shoot that day in the London suburb because his computer had told him the weather was bad in that area. If it rained the man would not step outside, would not offer a target. An invitation had come that morning by email. His company was requested at a dinner on Saturday at the Grand Hotel Pupp: the charitable cause was repairs to the roof of the main Russian Orthodox church. He might go or he might send the brigadier with a cheque. The present was calm.
The past: that was where he spent many of his waking hours. He was with his father and mother at Perm 35. His childhood, with so little company of his own age, had shaped him. When the leaves or needles fell in the forests surrounding the barbed-wire fences, winter was approaching, the season most feared when snow settled on the fences and gates, and the watch towers where the guards shivered. The life expectancy of young men existing in the tundra communities was as little as thirty-five, and when they died many of them had already suffered a crude castration from drinking home-brewed alcohol in the depths of winter, then needing to piss, going outside and exposing their genitals to the ravages of frostbite. Amputation was required. His home was in the heart of a gulag for criminals, for those designated insane, and for men convicted under Article 70, which took in the failed escapers from the Union and the dissidents. Sometimes, not often, a dignitary would come from Moscow – a thousand miles away and a four-hour drive from the airport. At this time of year the first snow would have fallen and the chill was gathering strength; half-frozen men would have splashed paint on everything static in the camp. He had been educated among the younger prisoners. For three years, Timofey’s best friend had been Mikhail, who wanted to be a musician and had mauve-dyed hair. They had studied mathematics. Others had learned chemistry and engineering. More of the criminals had worked at his parents’ home, cleaning, washing, cooking. They tended the small garden in summer and were trusted prisoners. Some had talked to him, out of his father’s and mother’s hearing, of the criminal underworld, and others had told stories of samizdat, hidden printing presses and smuggled manuscripts. He had grown up without loyalty, either to the state or to his family, with the lesson dinned into him that the greatest crime was to be caught. His response had been to join Military Intelligence; its motto ‘Greatness of Motherland in your glorious deeds’. He had turned his back on the wire, the convicts and his parents, and had ridden in a bus down the one-way road to Perm and the outside world. He often brooded on the past when he was walking his dogs.
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