Gerald Seymour

by Traitor's Kiss (b) (epub)

  With her cargo taken off by the docks' cranes, and her holds empty, she was high in the water. The Princess Rose, call sign 9HAJ6, had been launched in 1983 from the Den Helder yard of the Netherlands, and in the nineteen years since she had slipped out from the Wadden See, through the Marsdiep channel, she had performed as an overladen but willing baggage mule for her Cyprus-based owners. She had flown the convenience flag of Malta as she had plied around the Mediterranean, the eastern Atlantic European coastline, the Bay of Biscay, the North Sea and the Baltic. She was now worth no more than a hundred thousand American dollars, and her future was uncertain.

  With the lemons in lorries and heading for French fruit-juice and soft-drinks factories she towered in her rusting glory above the quay. No care, no tenderness, no love or respect had been wasted on her. She was doomed, a liability to her owners, and soon she would be gone, probably on the one great voyage of her life to the Indian Ocean beaches of Pakistan where the demolition teams would pick her apart and destroy the memory of her.

  In the night or in the morning, tossed in the Biscay, or the following night or the following day, or in a week, the owners' orders would be given to the master and his crew by radio. None of them knew where those orders might take them, and none believed that the orders would lead to anything more than the dreary routine of sailing to a familiar port, loading a cargo, then sailing to another familiar port, then unloading. Such was the life of the Princess Rose in her dying days.

  Rupert Mowbray had been born to take his place on a stage, to have a spotlight shining at his face, a microphone on the lectern his hands gripped, notes in front of him that he did not need to refer to because he was the master of his subject, and an audience hushed and hanging on his words.

  'You may call me—should you wish to, and it will be your privilege—an old fart. I would not take offence. You might also call me—because this is a free country, and I value the liberty of speech and have spent my adult life attempting to ensure it—an unreconstructed warrior of the conflict between East and West, between dictatorship and democracy. I would be proud if you did. The Cold War lives. It is about us at all times, and should concern defence analysts, students such as yourselves of international relations, and the men and women tasked with protecting our society. Perhaps you do not believe me—then I quote for you the words of Colonel General Valery Mironov who, from his vantage-point as the Kremlin's deputy defence minister, remarked in a rare interview, "The Cold War still goes on. Only one definite period of it is over." Yes, cuts have been made, but I can assure you that the knife has only been taken to the flab of the body of the Russian military. Key armoured units, the most advanced squadrons of the airforce, and the fleet of nuclear-missile-carrying long-range submarines still have every devalued rouble thrown at them that the State can muster. Friendship, trust, cooperation do not exist. It would be folly to relax our guard.'

  He sipped from his water glass. Rupert Mowbray, now professor of the newly formed Department of Strategic Studies, had returned in glory to University College, London, from which he had graduated thirty-six years before. A niche had been found him. The deputy provost had been lunched by the Service's director, and it had been arranged that a place be manufactured to support his retirement. He had a room, a secretary, a budget generous enough for research and travel, and a captive audience of postgraduate students. Behind his back, because rumour of his past employment had spread, his students called him by the unflattering name of Beria. They indeed regarded him as an old fart, but he flattered himself that they still found him amusing. There were seldom empty seats at his weekly lecture.

  'President Putin takes tea from Her Majesty's best crockery at Buckingham Palace, dines with Chirac and Schroeder, and is a barbecue guest of Bush, but that does not mean friendship. Under the ageing and boozed-up Boris Yeltsin, the Russian intelligence gathering agencies were in free fall. No longer. Putin came to power on the back of a promise to resurrect Russia's status as a world power. He is a man of those agencies and dedicated to giving them a degree of authority in modern Russia, today, that might be greater than they have ever known—even in the horrendous days of the Purges. Nuclear missiles are deployed again in oblasts from which they had been withdrawn—the testing of those missiles, which are designed to carry warheads of mass destruction, has been resumed.

  'The President has spoken publicly of the need to boost Russia's nuclear potential. Physical and verbal freedom for the mass of citizens is diminishing, as more and more positions of influence at the heart of power are doled out to his old chums in the FSB, the Federal Security Bureau, that is the successor to the Second Directorate of the KGB—different name, same mindset. Our own Security Service employs some two thousand personnel—the FSB has seventy-six thousand, and that excludes security and support staff. Our Secret Intelligence Service runs to some two thousand two hundred men and women—their SVR is twelve thousand strong. The FAPSI, electronic espionage and security, has a staff of fifty-four thousand, while our GCHQ has fewer than a tenth of that number. How many are thought necessary to guard the leaders of Putin's regime and strategic facilities? Another twenty-three thousand. Add to that the twelve thousand responsible for military intelligence, the GRU, and you are nudging close to two hundred thousand persons charged with the responsibility of protecting the Russian motherland…I ask, where do they think the threat will emanate from? From here? From you? From me? They seek to control—and Putin demands this of them—those free spirits that we regard as having an integral place in our society. Do not, in Russia today, seek to be an environmentalist, or an investigative journalist, or a powerful but independent-thinking industrialist, or a local-government officer with his own mind. In Putin's new fiefdom a man challenges the status quo at his peril.'

  He paused and drank again, and when he had set down his glass he used his palm to sweep back his silver hair.

  'Do we care? Is it our business how Russia is governed? If the brave and the few who have the courage to stand up to be counted go off to a new generation of camps, have their careers wrecked and their lives destroyed, who are we to shout? We can be Pharisees…But, but, there is, and it cannot be ignored, a kleptomaniac psychology about the new Russian government. They steal. They cannot keep their hands in their pockets. If we have it, they want it. They don't steal the know-how and blueprints in order to put more fridges and dishwashers in their people's ghastly, inadequate housing, or more cars on the road. They thieve so that they can make their submarines faster and more silent, their attack aircraft more efficient, their tanks more resilient to counter-measures. They are the jackdaws of espionage. Remember the names of Walker, Ames, Hanssen—all Americans, and I thank God for it—recruited to feed an insatiable appetite for military knowledge. You would be foolish if you believed that the handshakes and deals between our governments and the Russians over this current Afghanistan adventure were anything more than window-dressing. Everything in Putin's Russia is subservient to military power, before the World Trade Center and after it…

  'Gentlemen, and ladies, thank you for offering your time to this old fart. May I leave you with this thought? If we were to drop our shield, our guard, then we will suffer.'

  As he stepped back from the lectern there was a small, underwhelming stutter of applause, soon drowned by the scrape of the chairs. The spotlight beamed on him and he smiled…It was twenty eight weeks, half a year and a finger-count of days, since he had left the Service and, God, he missed it. The reason he smiled was that the good, faithful, loyal George would be on the final approach to Heathrow at this moment with a briefcase chained to his wrist, and there would be a package in it. The dead-drop collection was made on that day of each second month and that calendar pattern was always with him.

  Ferret was his man, the crowning pride of Rupert Mowbray's life.

  It had not been good.

  Not good, not even indifferent: it had been lousy sex.

  Locke lay on his back on his bed. He stared at the ceil
ing. They had had the ceiling light on above them. It was the baby oil that had made it lousy. The baby oil, for both of them, was as regular as having the light on. She'd had her shower when he was doing his duty and pressing the flesh at the ambassador's residence, then anointed herself with it, and he'd come in, rushed, stripped down and lain on the bed, and she'd crouched over him, shaken the bottle and he had been ready for a little rivulet of the oil to run on to his stomach, which she would have massaged into his skin. The oil had come in a gush, had splurged on to him and on to the bedspread, which was ruined. He'd cursed. In the middle of it, her on top of him and slithering over him, their bodies glistening under the ceiling light, he had actually asked her if she knew of a good laundry in the city, close and convenient, where he could take the bedspread. She'd tried, at first, to make it work, then gone into automatic mode with a few grunts that he'd known were pretence. Then she'd rolled off him, lain on her belly and turned her head away from him. It was another of their habits that the curtains of his bedroom were never drawn when they had sex, and usually that seemed to add keen tension to their loving. He'd looked at other windows across the street, seen people moving in them and the flickers of their televisions, the big tower blocks on the far side of the river, and he'd said sharply to her that if she didn't know of a laundry then could she, please, ring round in the morning and locate one. But she hadn't turned and hadn't spoken.

  'Can you move, please? If you hadn't noticed, it's all over the sheets now.' Couldn't help himself, he was petulant and annoyed.

  He had met Danuta in Warsaw two months earlier. Their first dates had taken place where they had met, in an Internet café, before they graduated to his bed or hers. Her English was fluent and his Polish was passable. She was from outside the cocoon of embassy life, and she had travelled. Her parents had emigrated from Poland to Australia nineteen years ago and she spoke with the accent of a town up the coast from Perth. She was one of the new generation of young Poles who had come home, and he'd found her warm, vibrant and fun, a blessed relief from the tedium of being the junior in an isolated corner of the embassy's second floor.

  He knew he'd destroyed the relationship, and he knew that when she left that evening she would not return, but the anger in him made for his persistence. She rolled off the bed, didn't seem to care that the curtains weren't drawn, and moved slowly in front of him, bending from place to place to pick up her clothes. Then she stood, framed by the window, and began very slowly to dress.

  Danuta was Locke's first girlfriend in the last thirty months. There had been no woman in his life while he was stationed in Zagreb, and none before Danuta after he had been abruptly transferred to Warsaw. There had been a girl from Library at Vauxhall Bridge Cross after he'd passed his probationer period, but she'd been looking for a ring and had wanted him to visit her parents. Before that there had been a girl from the physics department at Lancaster, but she'd slipped away from him at an end-of-term booze binge, and he'd found her on the floor with the hero of the university's lacrosse team. Everybody said he was good-looking and a catch, so the ambassador's wife had told him and Libby Weedon, but whatever it was he searched for had eluded him.

  As she dressed, she paraded herself in front of the window.

  Did the bloody bedspread, the bloody sheets and the bloody pillowcases matter? He had screwed up and didn't care enough to rescue himself. In the morning he would tell his Station Chief, trying to be casual and offhand, that his relationship with a Polish national was over.

  Danuta never spoke. She looked around her, as if she had forgotten something, then went briskly to the dressing-table, picked up the small wood photograph frame, slid out the photograph of herself, tore it into small pieces and let them flutter on to the carpet. He heard her quietly close the apartment's front door. In any of those long moments after she'd risen from the bed he could have called her back and apologized. He could have said that he'd had a bloody awful day, but he hadn't. He was left alone in the silence of the room.

  It was the fault of Ferret. A dead drop had not been serviced.

  After he had showered and stripped the bed, he lay on it again and tried to sleep. He did not have the experience to know what older men and women in the Service could have told him, that crises rarely broke with a thunderclap demanding attention. The veterans would have said that crises dribbled into the consciousness of the officers of the Service, came hesitantly and without prior notice, then incubated at leisure like a tumour. He tossed but could not find sleep.

  'I've come for the package—from Warsaw station.'

  The older man behind the desk blinked, as if woken by her arrival. Behind him was a closed steel door and behind the door were the racks on which were laid the packages brought to the building by couriers from abroad.

  She showed her ID card, the one she had used to swipe her way through the security check on the main door. Because she thought he had been asleep and needed it spelled out, she said, 'Alice North, 48 RD 21. There'll be a package for me, out of Warsaw.'

  The clerk at this small unit off the wide atrium lobby area on the ground floor balefully shook his head. 'I've had nothing.'

  'From Warsaw, George would have brought it in. It'll have my name on it.'

  'George hasn't been…'

  She interrupted, 'George would have brought it in two hours ago, could have been two and a half hours. Were you on supper break?'

  'Just had sandwiches. I know George. I've been here all evening, not seen George, he's not called by. Fact is, I haven't seen George for five days. Can't help you, Miss North.'

  'Look, I don't want to make a fuss, but George flew this morning to Warsaw where he will have collected a package addressed to me, and he will have delivered it, at least an hour and a half ago.'

  'He's not been here.'

  'George has to have been here, and left a package, addressed to me.'

  The clerk grinned comfortingly. 'Perhaps, Miss North, George's flight's late. The new security, you know.'

  'I checked on my mobile, the flight was on time. Could you, please, go and look? I'm sure you'll find it.'

  First the clerk pushed his ledger book towards her, then turned it so that she could read the open page. There was no entry that was relevant to her. George's name was not listed. But the clerk pushed himself up heavily from his chair, sighed as if it were his fate to be the victim of bullying young women, and shuffled to the steel door. He opened it and disappeared inside.

  Alice eased her weight from left foot to right foot, then reversed it. If this had not been a dead-drop date at Malbork Castle, she would still have been down at Fort Monkton: the rest of them on the refresher course had stayed the night and would not reappear until mid-morning the following day. On the three-day course, with eleven others, she had done sessions with the instructors to refresh her memory of the techniques of property entry, anti-terrorist ambush-driving tactics, and self defence—from which her hips and the bones at the base of her spine still ached. She had been on Ferret since the start, and had collected every dead-drop communication received since that day. She knew him…

  The clerk emerged. 'Like I told you—but you wouldn't listen, Miss North—there's no package come in here from Warsaw tonight. I've nothing for you.'

  She clattered away on her low shoes, and took a lift to the fourth floor. In a corner of East European Controllerate was her cubbyhole, adjacent to the ever-diminishing team doing Russia Desk. She'd been insinuated into that hole eight years earlier after the move from Century House to the magnificence of the present building, when Russia Desk was still the priority focus of the Service. She thought it was now little more than the equivalent of a once-patronized seaside resort where few with ambition wished to holiday. It was near to midnight. She sat in front of her computer for a full two minutes before switching it on.

  Alice North was a gentle girl. In the thirty four years of her life she had never been confronted with the need to practise the violence of either the driving course or t
he self-defence training. She had a premonition and it frightened her. Rupert Mowbray was no longer in place to soothe the fear. She tapped in her password and entered the ATHS labyrinth. She was cleared for access to that part of the Automatic Telegram Handling System which covered the agent whose package she had come back to London to open. She rocked on her low swivel chair.

  ferret: no show.

  As she drove home across London, through the City and out into the Docklands developments, Alice told herself each of twenty reasons why the dead drop had not been met. Her maisonette overlooked the dark Thames waters but reflections played on the eddies. To Alice, it was normally secure, comfortable and warm. She thought of him, why he had not travelled to Malbork, and she felt a chill she could not escape. Her fingers found the pendant stone, polished amber, that hung at her neck from a light gold chain. She held it.

  In his bed, hearing the chimes of the hours passing from the tower of the cathedral in the old town, unable to sleep, Gabriel Locke made a note in his mind that first thing at the embassy he must cancel his journey to Krakow for the conference of the security police. In a week's time he would not be in Krakow but on the road to the northeast again and going to Braniewo's street-market, which was the fall-back dead drop if Malbork Castle failed.

  He lay alone and cold on the bare mattress of the bed.

  ... Chapter Two

  Q. Which Russian military base is a front-line fortress confronting NATO?

  A. Kaliningrad.

  From the window of his office, on a clear day, it was possible to see the spire of the Holy Cross cathedral across the lagoon at Braniewo. The window was in the highest office building of the naval base, once German, once Soviet, now Russian, outside Kaliningrad. The Soviets and Russians had erased the German name, Pillau, and called the base Baltiysk, and it was home to the Baltic Fleet. The buildings had been reconstructed in old German style after being flattened by artillery and air attack. They were spaciously laid out, and that window overlooked a wide parade-ground. Beyond the building were the quays, dry docks and moorings of the fleet's warships. Standing at the window with his binoculars, made in Leipzig and with 10x42 power, he could close that gap of thirty-seven kilometres and note the brick texture of the spire. But the thirty-seven kilometres from his office to the spire that dominated the street-market in Braniewo was a delusion, a distance that mocked him. Only a gull could have travelled there directly from his office in the naval base at Baltiysk in the Kaliningrad oblast. He could not. The shallow lagoon was covered by military radar, patrolled by fast craft, under constant and vigorous observation.