He shut the dogs into the kitchen, went out through the front door and down the steps. The pistol was in the pocket of his windcheater, and a power torch was in his hand – it was long enough to double as a club. He went up the street, then disappeared into the darkness of the alleyway, which led to a footpath behind the house. He moved warily, with care.
He was back and the Czech was forward. It had never had been Danny Curnow’s way to allow another man to be on the ground, alone, doing work in his name. He was exhausted but he was there and would stay. Danny was among trees high on the bank and the path was below them. Karol Pilar had the camera. They needed a single image: two recognisable faces in the same frame. There would be a moment when the Russian and the agent stood up. Then the shutter would clatter and they could get the hell out.
It was cold and there was an owl about. Karol Pilar had a frog in his throat, the dreaded tickle of close surveillance. Little suppressed coughs.
Wood, a dry twig, snapped.
For half of his adult life, Danny had been away from surveillance and being alerted by snapped twigs. He was very still. There was no moon, and the lights from the house and those at either side did not reach beyond the fences. The path and the bank were dark. He strained to hear and see. He thought he knew where Karol Pilar was and the camera would be up to his face, lens focused, ready for the moment: two faces, same frame.
A softer, less intelligible sound.
Old habits and skills slipped back. The softer sound would be the pushing aside of a crisp leaf. He remembered the cat that had spent time with the old marine: the man and the boy used to watch it hunt in the undergrowth, once the bungalow’s garden, moving with such stealth and weighing each move of a paw, understanding the significance of the noise made when a leaf moved or a twig cracked. Danny knew when a stranger came forward – unlikely in innocence – and probably brought danger. Karol Pilar’s attempt to smother his cough was a thunderclap in comparison with the stick and the leaf.
His eyes had found the light’s level and had made the compensation equations. It was a shadow, almost black on black. It had the frog in the throat to guide it. He could identify an object in a hand, and a shiny surface. He reckoned he heard the click of the camera. The shape passed in front of him and moved steadily towards the cough. Danny didn’t know when to break cover. It was hard to steady his breathing, and he had no weapon. He heard a sharp oath, nothing he understood – and chaos broke.
A shout – it might have been Russian, not Czech – and surprise was lost. Two men grappled, black movement against black background. He could barely see. Danny launched himself. The mind worked well. It was the moment when an operation subsided into failure or came through. Failure was unthinkable – always had been. He went forward towards the squirming mass ahead of him. The torch came on – it threw light but had been dropped. The target between the two men, visible at the rim of the light pool, was the pistol. Danny reached them. Decision time. Which of them to belt when he intervened? The pistol was held high, the barrel pointing up, towards the slope of the woods. One man tried to drag his arm down so that the weapon was levelled while the other sought to keep the thing high. He realised Karol Pilar was the smaller and hit the higher shoulder with a chopping blow. The sort of blow the instructors taught, and that recruits reckoned was a waste of energy. He used the heel of his hand and heard the yelp. The fingers must have opened and the pistol fell. It hit the ground and bounced once, then rested in the torch’s beam. Danny lashed at it, caught it on his toecap and it spun away.
Combat of a sort.
The torch showed a face he recognised. He kicked hard, punched, used his fingers and nails and, once, his teeth. Nothing more came back.
All done so quietly. No flashlights from the houses, no shouts, no dogs set free.
It was finished. The fight had gone out of him.
Danny eased himself up. The torchbeam showed a bloodied face. Karol Pilar knelt over the victim, stripped off a wristwatch and went through pockets until he found a wallet. He snapped it open, peeled out banknotes, and threw it down. He stayed on his hands and knees – his victim’s eyes were tight shut – to pick up minute fragments of glass.
They ran as if for their lives. They left the torch behind, the pistol and the man who moaned and was long past an age for street scraps. They were gasping when they reached the car. The camera’s lens was broken and the back screen was fractured. The light came on in the car. They were wrecked: faces bloodied, hands scraped, clothes torn.
‘Are you happy?’
‘I am if you have the picture, Karol.’
They heard nothing, saw nothing and knew nothing. Timofey Simonov kept the brandy coming, and Ralph Exton kept the level in his glass sliding down.
Voices slurred. Old anecdotes renewed: the story of the arrival at the airfield at Ostend was told twice, but the right moment to ask about slipping away and a changed identity was elusive. The night settled on them. The schedule was decided.
Ralph was content to slip into the booze haze and thought himself safe from the handlers who persecuted him. In the morning he would raise the matter of how to disappear.
Interesting, but half a dozen times, Timofey Simonov had left the table to gaze at the screen of a laptop. It was not locked onto the indices of the Far East markets, or the closing prices in New York, but to the meteorological assessments of the coming day’s weather conditions to the south-west of London. They showed a likely break in persistent rain, but not till the afternoon, and the forecast was the same each time he checked it. Interesting. He would have liked to trust Gaby Davies, but did not.
They drank, and for both it was a way to forget. The house was quiet.
In the car, Danny Curnow thought the Czech had been hurt worse than himself but Pilar drove.
The road was dark, empty.
There had been two pauses on the way to where the car was parked. The first was at a rubbish bin beside a pizza place. From a glimpse, Danny thought that the Rolex watch was worth three or four thousand sterling, far out of the price range of almost all of the tourists who came to the battlefields. It went into the bin and Pilar thrust his hand in after it and disturbed the contents so that it was not on the top. The second stop was at the big church facing onto the river and a charity box for the starving of East Africa. Close to four hundred euros went through the slot, all that had been taken from the wallet. Danny could have clapped. Good thinking to ‘steal’ a watch and empty a wallet because that was what a mugger did. It was not the behaviour of a trapped intelligence-gathering team.
They were well out of the town when they reached a fuel station. Pilar went first, a lightweight scarf covering most of his face. He didn’t use the pumps or go into the shop but used the toilets. When he came back his face was wet from washing. They were beyond the range of the cameras for long enough to allow Danny to follow him. He cleaned the dirt and blood off his face. It would be a long day when morning came. A hard day.
He could be thankful. There was a damaged camera on the floor between his feet, but most of the detritus was in his pocket. It would never take another picture. No problem. Mission successfully carried out: there was – he had been assured of it – a good image on the memory tab. They passed the sign for Lidice. He remembered the children fashioned in bronze, the open spaces where a village had been. It had been about taking responsibility, living with it, and about ensuring that an enemy could never feel safe – wherever they hid.
The lights of the airport were ahead. He would be a changed man before he was there and knew it. He couldn’t flee from it. He no longer felt either clever and competent or in control. He was on the treadmill, as he had been before. It spun under his feet and he was running so that he didn’t fall. The pace was increasing, and wouldn’t slow until the end.
Chapter 13
‘You had a fight with a door?’ she asked, and rolled her eyes.
He didn’t answer her.
Gaby Davies amplified it: ‘Did
it have big fists and hob-nailed boots? Did it win?’
They had met outside her hotel, walked fast towards the south of the city and tracked along the river. She had come out onto the pavement a minute before the rendezvous time and he had been there. He would be, she reckoned, the sort of man who was never late, had never missed a train or an appointment.
She had said, ‘You’re a sight. What happened?’
He had said, ‘Something to do with a door.’
For a while, as they trekked, she’d left it. The wounds were clean and the cuts were already knitting but the abrasions were ugly and the bruises were colouring. His lips were puffed out of shape, and he’d looked at her through slit eyes because the lids were swollen and the bags under them grotesque. They’d crossed Resslova Street, and she’d pointed down it, indicating a tall church spire. She’d said, ‘I haven’t been there, but it’s significant in Prague history. It’s St Cyril and St Methodius. There was a shoot-out in the crypt, and some partisans were killed. It was after the assassination of a Nazi administrator and . . .’ He had shown no interest and she hadn’t bothered to go on with the story. Extraordinary, because she’d read the guidebook and wished she had time to go there, feel the place and sense the event. The hotel was huge, modern, glass and steel, without the heritage of the church behind them. She rated him a philistine, shorn of sensitivity.
She quit irony, did flippant. ‘Will you tell me why you and the door were fighting?’
‘No.’
‘Make a habit of it?’
He glanced at her. The file in the archive said he had run agents but that was a long time ago. Life had moved on. Perhaps he’d gone out for a few drinks in the old town, been jumped and mugged. Not something to boast about. So bloody patronising, and he’d been beaten up. She wondered if he’d lost his wallet. Street-thieving in central London – Romanians, Bulgarians and Albanians, the favourite villains – was a constant moan in the office, the hassle of sorting out the damage. Police she knew in the capital told her that only idiots fought to protect their property. It was best to let the scumbags have it. He wouldn’t have. It would impinge on his pride to cave. He’d been done over on a street in the Stare Mesto and his pride was injured. It was almost worth a giggle.
‘I don’t make a habit of fighting doors.’
‘Glad to hear it.’
They were close to the hotel when he slowed, then veered off to the left and the wide car park. He said, ‘Just a little query. Did you see our Joe this morning?’
‘Exton? No.’
‘Sleeping in, was he?’
‘I checked his room, but didn’t get an answer.’
‘Last night, how was he? Standing up well?’
A gulp. Perhaps her irritation showed. ‘I didn’t see him last night. I did the Irish. Didn’t you know? Followed her back. Saw her inside, then went to my room. Yes, I tried him – I opened his door and the bed hadn’t been slept in. He wasn’t there.’
‘Wasn’t there last night or this morning?’
Reluctant. ‘Something like that.’
‘Well, well . . .’
She saw the girl, Frankie.
‘I’d have thought, you having a good relationship with your Joe, that he wouldn’t go to the toilet without your say-so. Anyway, we’ll close that down.’
They were at the edge of the car park and could see the route to the hotel’s revolving doors. He didn’t rate her; she didn’t like him. Frankie had been in the black trouser suit she’d worn before and a neutral blouse. Her hair had been pinned up at the back of her head. She was new to it all, Gaby thought, naïve and stood out. She didn’t take precautions.
She didn’t need to say it, but did – as if it were important to prove her tradecraft. ‘Standing out, obvious. My mum and dad used to take me and my brother to the Northumbrian coast, and on the Farne Islands there’s a lighthouse, the Longstone. She was about as obvious as that is when it’s flashing.’
‘Do you reckon she’s crap?’ He had spoken quietly, as if her opinion was important.
‘Absolutely.’
‘You don’t think it’s intended?’
She was rocked. She felt as she had on the first day of the surveillance course when she’d spotted none of the people tracking her. She had almost failed.
She murmured, didn’t know if he heard, didn’t care, ‘Fuck you.’
He thought it a test of wills. In Danny Curnow’s mind there was a similarity between the places he knew best: there had been that trial of morale on the beach at Dunkirk, on the shingle slopes of Dieppe and on the wide sands in front of Hermanville-sur-Mer. He could have backed away or accepted the challenge. It was, of sorts, a game. At best, the reward for showing out would be the failure of the mission. At worst, if his efforts were inadequate and the tail was seen, lives would be cut short. The location for the game was the garden around the church at Vyšehrad and inside the fortress walls. He had not chosen the ground: Malachy Riordan had.
They made a good-looking couple. They seemed to chat and joke together. He led through a narrow entrance under a low arch and the defensive walls were high on either side. Gaby Davies followed him. He wasn’t proud of the way he had treated her but had thought it necessary. If they showed out, everything that had been done was of no value. Why was he doing it?
He could have seen Malachy Riordan approach the hotel, swing away to the right, head along a residential street above the river and follow the signs to the castle. He could then have backed off. Dusty would have understood, Matthew Bentinick too. It was about superiority, claiming the bragging rights. He was doing it for himself.
A challenge issued and accepted.
There was a café to the right. Malachy Riordan took a seat and the girl, Frankie, went to a hatch and ordered coffee. He led Gaby Davies into the souvenir shop on the opposite side of the cobbles where she bought the necessary guidebook. He stuck himself at the postcard carousel, where he could see them. He and Gaby lingered, were fussy about which map they needed. When he saw, across the road into the gardens, that they had finished their coffee, he told Gaby to pay quickly. Then they went down towards a small church that was only a circular tower – she told him it was St Martin’s Rotunda, a millennium old. Malachy and Frankie passed them – so close that he could see the stress lines at the girl’s mouth. Had she joined up for this? Had she anticipated what participation in guerrilla warfare was about? Did she know what a prison cell looked like, how the food tasted? Had she imagined what it was like to be shot, wounded, down in the gutter with the blood seeping? He doubted it. They went on.
He told Gaby that they would leapfrog, and keep eyeball. Danny Curnow could not have backed off.
Bloody men, and their ego. To Gaby Davies there was a world of madness around her. She read it.
Malachy Riordan would walk with Frankie McKinney through the gardens of Vyšehrad and would use all the skills he possessed in anti-surveillance tactics, as practised and perfected by the experience of forty years’ sporadic conflict on Altmore mountain. He’d look to see whether Ralph Exton had brought baggage with him and whether Frankie McKinney had a tail. She and Curnow did not have to be there – the madness merged to insanity. He had no reason to prove his skill other than feeding arrogance.
Or something else.
Fear?
Interesting. She was beside him. She had the guidebook. She had to talk for the sake of authenticity. ‘It’s about a woman who married down. She was Princess Libuše and this was her dad’s castle site, more than a thousand years ago. He was Vratislav the Second. She insisted on marrying a peasant, Pre˘msyl – might have been a ploughman. Their dynasty founded Prague. Fascinating. You riveted? Of course you are. Anyway, the main defences were put up in the late seventeenth century. Did you ever get married, Curnow? Don’t answer. I didn’t either. Do I have to keep going? Over there, that’s the church of Sts Peter and Paul. Across the square – show some bloody interest – the statues are of Libuše and Pre˘msyl. How are we doing
?’
They were bronzes, more than life-size. He wore a close-fitting helmet, had a shield on his arm and held her close. Gaby could turn with her map, orient herself, and was well placed to see the two targets going towards the church.
‘There’s a cemetery for national heroes. Want me to book you in?’
He didn’t rise, seemed calm enough, and other visitors drifted by them. A couple of kids had a football. She sensed a trap was baited but didn’t know where or when. She could imagine how it would be if the teeth snapped shut on her ankle. She would go back to Thames House on a crutch, take a lift up and go past Jocelyn’s cubicle. She’d see the expressionless face, feel the condemnation, and make her way to Bentinick’s lair for the dressing-down. Unthinkable. How had it happened? The instructor who had done the early courses with her intake had told a story of a Soviet trade attaché who had been regarded as a top-priority surveillance subject and was supposedly in blissful ignorance of the fifteen men and women from A Branch who traipsed after him, buses, trains, taxis and on foot. There might have been micro-dots at dead letterboxes or brush contacts. Even had a big chief out of the office doing it. An edict: no showing out. It had ended in red-faced embarrassment one sunny spring afternoon by the Serpentine. The Soviet had turned, without warning, had walked briskly back. He had gone up to the ‘big chief’, identity a matter of national-security secrecy, and had told him that the techniques and procedures of his people were exceptionally poor, that the Syrians, even the Egyptians, would make a better fist of it. He had handed over his card and offered to arrange for surveillance training courses, then buggered off. She thought Curnow needed the adrenalin surge pound, that the game mattered more than the result.
Vagabond Page 29
