by John Meaney
"Or further afield."
I put my hand on the cold stone balustrade. It seemed to me that the USSR had enough work to do maintaining the iron hand of peace inside its current vast borders. But there was something in Fern's voice that suggested something more, some hidden bitter knowledge that a part of her wanted to share with me. It was a professional reflex, the way I altered my body posture (the angle of my shoulders mirroring hers) and used subtle inflexion in my voice.
"I'm interested in how exactly they'll—"
But she knew how to interrupt what I was doing.
"David... I'm going to Washington. For some time. At least until next autumn."
In boxing, they say that it's the punch you don't see coming that knocks you out.
"Alone?"
"Jean-Paul's got Paris Station to run."
"So." Above us, steel clouds floated against an otherwise clear night sky. The moon was a silver-white eye. "Any particular reason why?"
You know what I was hoping for. But if Fern wanted to be with me, she didn't have to go to the States – she just had to leave France. And Jean-Paul.
"It's an operation," Fern said. "I've got to establish myself in place."
"No matter the cost to your marriage?"
What was wrong with me? Was I trying to get her to stay with him?
"Do anything to survive." Fern crossed her arms, shivering. "Remember I told you that?"
"You said it was your mother's rule."
"Well it was. She meant, do anything to achieve your goals. Hers was to kill Nazis."
"No matter what the cost?"
I was thinking of my own heart now, not Jean-Paul's.
"I thought you at least" – her voice was unexpectedly bitter – "might understand."
Fern's mother had already been pregnant – Fern had been an only child before that – when they joined the Merkl Company deep in Lithuanian forest land, where iron-black trees stood hard in the snow and every day was about survival: eking out food, avoiding the Wehrmacht hunter divisions that scoured the cold wilderness, looking for renegades.
In such an environment, certain abilities were paramount: being able to walk for long distances, to move silently, and to go to ground in an instant, perfectly still. Hiding so that nothing betrayed your presence to the determined enemy... because it was your comrades' lives you risked, not just your own; and that was why they could never tolerate the presence of a newborn baby. Not when the sound of crying could carry so far in the still, frozen air.
The baby, when it finally came (as Fern waited nearby, held in place by one of the band's toughest fighters, a skew-eyed man missing three fingers on his left hand), was no cause for celebration. It (for Fern never knew whether it was a boy or a girl) was a potential disaster, the subject of the hardest decision a mother could ever make.
But logically, when the sound of a baby crying was so dangerous – and we can hear such a sound no matter how faint, because we as humans have evolved to be vigilant parents, what a joke – there was only one choice Fern's mother could make.
I don't think I could have done it.
They say that before the war, women's shoes had squared-off toes so that they could stand closer to the kitchen sink where they belonged. But my mother, raised in an affluent Massuchessetts home, dug for potatoes in the Kent countryside, mucking in alongside the local women, before ending up in a Rolls-Royce factory, helping to build the Merlin engines that kept Spitfires – like my father's – flying in the dangerous skies. Flying, until the day he went down burning into the North Sea.
But such experiences were nothing if you rated them against Fern's mother, trying to survive the Lithuanian winter and keep Fern alive.
"Look, Fern," I told her now. "I don't think you're happy here. I just—"
Then the cloud obscuring the moon drifted away, and silver-white light bathed her face, and something happened in that moment. Nothing altered in her expression... except that her eyes changed, blazing darkly with a longing I had never seen before, not in anyone. A longing focused on me.
On me.
I was shocked into silence.
"David," she said. "I... need to go inside now."
And she was gone, through the double doors and back into the apartment, while I could only stand in the night, frozen not by chill air but my own hammered nerves. Had that been a glimpse of Fern's true soul, of how much she truly wanted me?
But there was nothing I could do besides follow her into the civilized world of inconsequential chat, and remain until it was time for me to head back to my hotel before I was the only guest left. Professor Bazargan had already gone.
And so I went, heading back to a plain hotel room for a few hours' worth of grey, unsatisfying sleep.
Nine hours after that, I was sitting in a vibrating window seat on a Soviet-built Tupolev turbo-prop, with the landing-gear whining until it locked into position for descent. Some of the passengers were white-faced, while outside the snow swirled in kaleidoscopic chaos as the nose dipped and the engine-note flattened.
Back in Paris, Fern and Jean-Paul would be at their desks, sipping their first coffee of the working day. But I was in a plane that bucked twice in the cross-wind, hard, and I hoped the pilot knew what he was doing. Someone began to pray.
There were empty seats. I wondered how many of my fellow passengers were headed home, and regretted not handing themselves in at a gendarmerie and demanding asylum in the West. Or perhaps they were looking forward to seeing their families again.
(And what about the man who followed me in Paris, then dropped the tail. Because he'd realized I'd spotted him? Had he picked me out because I'd talked to Charles? Or had he seen me earlier, with Fern? Perhaps he'd been her watcher. That was a new thought.)
Any time was a bad time to be going East, but the recent tank movements were part of a pattern, just as Fern had mentioned last night, before hitting me with that whammy about going to Washington on her own. (Surely not timed to stop me pursuing Fern's speculations about Soviet military build-up.) New Jerusalem might have pissed off the French and seeded hatred in Outer Germany, but if the Soviets went after Berlin – that exposed tiny area in the midst of Soviet soil – we'd fight back, and the Americans would help us, wouldn't they? That knowledge should hold back the Soviets. But thoughts of what was reasonable seemed easier back home. Here, it wasn't just the weather that was cold – it was the hard determination of the State to bring order to people's lives.
The plane bounced once as we struck and a woman give a tiny shriek, but then we were down with the air-brakes howling in full deceleration along the icy runway, and in seconds we knew that the plane was slowing under control and we were safe.
I took my bag from the overhead locker, and was in the middle of the disembarking passengers as we went out into the cold. The metal steps were slick with ice, and I helped a bulky woman who almost slipped. Then we were gathering in a group on the tarmac, waiting for the men in militia greatcoats and fur hats to tell us what to do.
After a few moments, they herded us across to the terminal building. We crowded inside the small hall. One by one, militia officers beckoned us into a short corridor that led past an inspection booth. Then they pointed at me, and I stepped forward.
My face went deadpan. At the booth, the stone-eyed officer flicked his gaze down to the passport and then up at me. The passport details included my height, and the gradations marked on the armoured glass were accurate to the nearest centimetre. At floor height, mirrors allowed him to check my shoes; I could not slide a suspicious package along the floor. Here, even a nervous shuffle of the feet could betray me all the way to the execution yard.
So this was the moment.
I could not believe that Fern – or Moshe, or Jean-Paul, or anyone in Branch 7 – could be a traitor. But the KGB bosses probably wouldn't want to believe that their own officers would collaborate with a foreign power either, yet the second phase of my mission was a rendezvous with a KGB colonel in Mos
cow. If someone had alerted Black Path to Moshe's arrival in Hamburg – and if Black Path had clandestine Soviet assets – then this was more than an entry to the paranoid East.
This was the moment when, if someone had pointed the finger, the trap slammed shut.
Maybe it would have been better to call everything off and stay in Paris. But Fern had made things clear enough. She wasn't about to leave Jean-Paul.
Sometimes inaction ruins a life. The French prisoner in Sartre's novel saw mortal danger when he was in the death train, had an opportunity to leap from the cattle car, but failed to take it. And then the moment was gone.
When Fern's mother gave birth deep in the forest, no one suggested strangling the newborn, and certainly not shooting the poor thing: wasn't silence the whole point? Instead, they left the baby naked, turning from red to white to blue, exposed upon midwinter snow. It cried – the enemy were safely distant for a time – growing colder and colder as the evening passed, the only evening of its life. In the morning, the forest was silent once more, and the Communist partisans trudged away without looking back.
Now, as the officer checked my passport, troopers waited behind him in the booth and out in the concourse. They stood with Kalashnikov rifles at port arms, neither bored nor excited, simply waiting to fling themselves into action against an enemy of the state.
But I was Thierry Foucault, consulting engineer, innocent in security matters. In Berlin they teach us the Stanislavski method of acting: complete immersion in a character's life beyond the few minutes glimpsed on a stage. I had to keep an unbreakable grip on the certainty that my name was Foucault.
Worry showed in my eyes but that was all right, because this was a danger zone and an aura of ennui could kill me. I was a loyal French citizen of the République realizing I had no legal rights in this alien country, and what if someone had made a mistake?
Then the officer moved, raising his hand...
It's a trap.
... and the stamp swung down, all done, and he pushed the passport toward me. I took it and headed into the concourse. Some of the blank-faced men in suits would be Polizia Ubespieczenia; others would be KGB. All of them were enemies.
I stepped outside, scalp tightening because open air did not mean freedom, not when the eyes of the State were everywhere. In my mind I heard the Iron Curtain clanging shut, the rattling of a lock, and perhaps the sound of a naked, newborn child crying in the snow and turning blue.
SEVEN:
KATOWICE, December 1962
The UB agents are on me, heavy men with crushing bulk, but I will not give in as I stab my forefinger along the cheekbone groove, thumb reaching the eyeball to rip sideways as I jerked awake, heard myself snort, and a woman sitting opposite me smiled.
"Sorry," I said in Polish.
"No problem."
A nightmare, either the thing I'd woken up from or the reality surrounding me. The train carriage was crowded and warm (in contrast to the icy Silesian countryside rolling past outside) and the carbon dioxide levels were high, which was probably why I'd dozed off. Spooks don't, as a rule, fall asleep in a hostile foreign environment. If I hadn't talked in my sleep then it helped me to blend in with these ordinary Polish men and women.
No one was staring at me. Everything was OK.
A grey-bearded passenger began to hawk and cough. People ignored him or glanced at him with pity. Perhaps the man worked in the uranium mines at Kowary Podgórze, and that was the reason for his sickness. The Polish prime minister, Gomułka, had moved away from a hard Stalinist line; but the mines remained under the direct control of Moscow's Politburo, who believe that safeguarding workers' health causes unnecessary delays in bringing about an economic paradise on Earth.
In the winter gloom outside, beyond snow-covered fields, distant figures trudged in shadow, heading home on foot. I wondered how many hours a day they spent walking to and from work.
This was the province of Stalinogrod. Maybe some locals still used the old provincial name of Katowice, the same name as the principal town; but this side of the Curtain, insulting Josef Stalin buys you a one-way booking to the gulag where the only way out is a freezing grave hacked into Siberian tundra.
I caught a glimpse, reflected in the window, of a man getting up from his seat and heading down the carriage towards the tiny toilet, perhaps to smoke. (In some ways the Communists are more civilized than us. In the East, public smoking is forbidden.) The blurred reflection bore a goatee beard, in the style of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Just for a moment, he paused and looked back.
Contact?
If so, our rendezvous was here on board, or else (if anything seemed untoward) at the fallback position, a café on Kopernik Aleja in Katowice. Before I could rise, a wave of electric prickling swept across my skin. It was a form of premonition I'd felt before, my unconscious reaction to subliminal signals. Nothing supernatural: it's just that our species has evolved to sense danger, using neural circuits buried way down in the reptilian brain. Perhaps the most unsettling thing I'd learned in Branch 7 was this: Trust the reptile.
I settled back as the rear door slid open and a UB patrol entered the carriage, hands on holstered guns.
"Dokumenty."
In the Polish alphabet there are two similar characters: L and Ł, the latter pronounced like an English W. According to the typed letters in my pocket, my visit was with the Silesian Coal Mining Cooperative tomorrow, meeting their technical director, Dr. Stanisław Słowacki. I mangled the pronunciation as a Frenchman might.
"I visit Doctor Stanis-law Slo-wakee," I told the UB officers.
The letter was damp with my fingerprints but that was OK – as at the airport, I was supposed to be worried in the presence of the State's iron fist. There were four uniformed officers and a man in civilian clothes. The UB officer holding my letter gave a twitch of the mouth. He could have told me how to pronounce the name properly, as Stan-ees-waf (emphasis on the second syllable) Swoe-vaki, but it wasn't his place to educate a bourgeois capitalist foreigner.
The other man, the one dressed in civilian clothes, did not react at all.
Crap.
Perhaps he had no sense of humour, but the thing is that Polish and Russian sound similar, yet Poles use the western alphabet, not Cyrillic.
During a NATO training exercise, I once listened while a Spanish paratrooper discussed freefall technique with an Italian airman. Neither spoke the other's language, yet they understood each other. Poles and Russians can do the same in conversation, but not in writing. All of this flashed through the basement of my mind with the speed of intuition.
The hard-faced 'civilian' was KGB.
Only three months ago, a junior CIA officer had assumed that the first floor of a London hotel was at ground level, and the result had been three dead men, two of them leaving widows and children, plus a missing blueprint that might cost who-knew-how-many lives in the future. Knowing the local language can make a vital difference.
My name is Thierry Foucault.
Remember. Foucault. Concentrate. Because this check was not routine, not after their comrades checked our papers at the station. But Foucault shouldn't know this.
I'm an engineer, nothing more.
Never to see Fern again. That was my fear.
"Pravilnaya." Russian, saying it was OK. He handed the passport back to the UB man.
But I didn't speak Russian – Thierry Foucault spoke no Russian – so I tightened down my facial muscles, because premature relief would be fatal.
In a second, the UB officer gave me back the passport, then turned to the woman sitting beside me and began the procedure again.
"Dokumenty."
The station in Katowice was cavernous, with gouts of white steam rising from black engines, and the imperious whistle of a train about to depart. Passengers waiting for their trains, and families waiting to greet arrivals, stood in their heavy drab coats.
Our train slowed with a squeal of metal brakes, then edged its way along the platform, o
ne foot at a time. The driver was taking a great deal of care, perhaps because of the stationary train on the other side of the grey platform, and the two platoons of soldiers lined up in front of it. Perhaps this was the reason for extra security.
Of course we were close to the uranium mines, my mission objective.
Finally our train halted. There was no sign of Lenin Beard, my putative contact. I stood up to fetch my bag from the netting overhead that acted as a shelf. Could Lenin Beard be in hiding? He hadn't returned to the carriage since the UB officers passed through.
If they've caught him...
My fellow passengers disembarked first. The soldiers paid no particular attention, so I hefted my bag and stepped down from the carriage. Train-sounds echoed louder now, bouncing around the cavernous space.
The soldiers were guarding a rust-brown freight carriage that remained sealed with bars and padlocks. But as I passed another carriage, cattle-truck style with the sliding door left open, there were half a dozen cannonballs lying inside, tucked in one corner.
Spetsnasz.
One of the officers was turning towards me, picking up those vibrations. It was like the savate coach in the Paris gym. We give off subliminal electrochemical signals: every human being, all the time, particularly fighters. The Russian officer was alert, sensing my presence somewhere among the sparse crowd. So I did what I could, hunching my shoulders and tensing my ribs, hollowing my chest, making my gait uncoordinated.
Don't look.
No shout rang out from the soldiers.
The things that looked like cannonballs had shaved lower surfaces to stop them rolling, each with a handle forming an upturned U. They were kettlebells, more challenging to use than dumb-bells, yet easier to transport: the kind of thing a special forces unit, a Spetsnasz team, would use.
But élite forces don't do normal guard duty. My scrotum tightened with the thought of invisible radiation spraying through me and everybody present; because there was only one kind of valuable cargo likely to pass through this place, and I hoped to God their lead shielding was up to scratch.
