Gerald Seymour

by Traitor's Kiss (b) (epub)

  Alice said softly, 'Bertie, your last remark, is that for the record?'

  A flush of colour to the man's cheeks, blood running in the surface veins. 'No, I don't think anything of my last little contribution was made for posterity—just thinking aloud. Thank you, Alice.'

  None of that speech would be erased with her India-rubber, however; none of it would be crossed out. When she typed up the record it would be there, and she'd make damn sure it went to the top-floor suite where the Director General held court. And then she had gone back into her corner shadow. It was to be Alice's only intervention. No one around the table would have seen it, but her eyes watered. They didn't know him, didn't want to, didn't care what he went through—stress, strain, pressure—to provide the damn detail on hull coating, diving depths, propeller noise. Alice knew. She flipped the page over and wrote on.

  AP: We're not quite yet at doom-and-destruction mode. God knows, Rupert's notes were thin enough—I don't think he trusted any of us, you know—but there is a final dead drop available to Ferret, were he to believe himself under surveillance. What I'm suggesting for now is that Gabriel takes on a role as factotum…

  Alice knew her medieval Latin. 'Fac' was 'do', 'totus' (adj.) was 'all'. She looked at him and thought he was weighing up whether this was good for his career's future, or whether he might be damaged by it.

  …pulls the committee's decisions together and gives teeth to them. First things first, the last dead drop. Stay behind, would you, Gabriel, please?

  Alice put her notepad and pencils into her bag. As she walked to the door she heard Courtney, the Hereford officer, saying conversationally to Giles, 'Don't get me wrong—who dares wins and all that crap—but I meant what I said. We're hardly going to volunteer to go into that rat's nest, Kaliningrad. Don't even think about it—count us right out.'

  Ponsford said, 'Like everything else in this life, it was good while it lasted. I have to say it, if an agent misses two dead drops, and has never missed before, then he's in trouble. Poor bastard…but that's the way it goes.'

  As she went out through the door she heard the naval intelligence man ask Giles, 'What would be the form on their side?'

  And she heard Giles say, 'They'd call up an interrogator, a very high-quality man…'

  She closed the door, and thought none of them saw her leave.

  Guided by a flare of red smoke, the helicopter put down in a field close to a burned-out farmhouse. The thrash of its rotors lifted up what was left of the farmhouse's roof and tossed aside the corrugated-iron sheets, like paper flaking over a bonfire.

  A reception committee of men and officers stared at Bikov and his escort as they jumped down from the hatch. He looked around him. A half-dozen armoured personnel carriers were drawn up in a line surrounded by the treadmarks of their tyres where they had manoeuvred to make the line. They were blank and expressionless faces, the faces of men who fought a war they had realized long ago lacked the possibility of victory. He understood why the helicopter could not take him further forward—the cloud ceiling was low. Only the base of the hills was visible to the south. The snow fell lightly on his shoulders as he walked forward to meet the men who waited for him. If it had not been for the officer and the men who were captured and held in the high ground that was covered by the cloud's fall, and if it had not been for the patrol of Black Berets who were hidden in a cave with their prisoners and, most importantly, if it had not been for the reputation that travelled fast ahead of Yuri Bikov, then no man sane or lunatic—would have gone up into the killing ground around the Argun gorge.

  He was briefed. He took a mug of lukewarm coffee, looked at the maps on which the snow fell, and said little. The four men charged with the immediate protection of his life were from the Vympel unit, controlled by Directorate V of the FSB's Special Operations Centre, and they said less. While he went over the maps and the pitifully small amount of recent intelligence, they checked their gear, weapons and medical equipment. Bikov had not been given their names, and if he'd asked for them he would not have been told. He couldn't read their faces because they had masks over them through which only their eyes were revealed, but their breath came through the cotton and he sensed that they, too, thought this an idiot place to be. But he trusted them, as he had to. He was put with his men in the third of the six carriers, and he fastened the studs of the bulletproof jacket, felt the warmth of its weight, and was given a helmet, which he wore.

  They had driven for eighty-seven minutes, were already high in the dense clouds and on a hairpin track of slushy ice and snow, when the first RPG-7 shell hit the carrier in front.

  An arm snatched him and threw him down on to the steel-plate floor. The second RPG-7 shell took off the forward wheel, right side, and his carrier lurched then slid into a ditch at the track's side.

  One of the Vympel men was over his legs and another lay on Bikov's head. The two others crouched on the crazily angled floor at either side of him. He was deafened. The machine-gun blasts, with the anti-tank weapons firing over open sights, and the grenades were from the ambushed carriers. The incoming fire was from the RPG-7 launchers, and mortars, and machine-guns, and rifles, and the sound crashed around him, and men screamed—a soldier fell on the body covering his head and he felt the warmth of blood. The Vympel men never shouted, spoke, or fired their weapons. They protected him: his was a chosen life.

  He heard the screams and the pounding of the gunfire. They were like vermin in a darkened pit, and Bikov was choking on the smoke of burned tyres, flesh and fuel. He had been in combat situations before in Chechnya, but nothing as terrifying as this contact. He had crouched at the corner of buildings in Grozny city when small-arms fire had come from an apartment block, and tanks and artillery had pounded the suspected firing position, and he had not felt endangered. The side of the carrier took the full weight of an RPG blast and the interior sang with the shrapnel. He did not know how it was possible that he had not been hit. He moved his toes, his fingers, opened his eyes in the acrid gloom, then ran his hands down his stomach and motioned his spine forward and down, as if he were fucking, and knew he had not been hit—it was hard to believe. But the smoke would kill them.

  Who would care enough to come to his funeral if his body was n extracted and brought home? Not his parents because he hadn't listed them as next-of-kin on his file, and they wouldn't hear of his death unless it made a paragraph in a newspaper they might read before they lit the paper in the grates of their separate fires. Not his wife, because it was twelve years since the divorce. Not Natasha, who was now fifteen, because her mother had poisoned the child's mind against him. Maybe a few at the Lubyanka would come with flowers as an excuse to get away from their desks for a couple of hours…the brigadier would care. Yuri Bikov was the lifeline of the brigadier.

  He shouted, 'Let's get the fuck out of here.'

  Maybe there was a poorer chance outside, but better to die there than like rats in a darkening hole. The smoke fumes were choking him.

  He couldn't read their eyes, expressionless in the slits. One moment he was on the floor of the carrier. The next, he was being dragged its length like a dead-weight sack of potatoes. He snagged against a body, had time to see that its left leg was severed free at the groin. As he was pulled out into the daylight, the loose leg came with him. They went into the ditch and their fall broke the ice covering. He went under, then was pulled up. He spat wet mud from his mouth. Among the rocks and scrub bushes, and in the trees above the track, men fought for survival. In the carriers the troops blasted into the murk of the cloud and prayed they might live.

  The Vympel men took him down a slope, a rush between each rock then a stop and a murmur between them, then another rush. They used sign language to communicate, and never fired. The convoy of carriers, and its fate, was not their concern: he was. Only for a reputation such as Yuri Bikov's would such an operation, with the risk of such casualties, have been mounted.

  They left the firefight and the killing behind them
. Bikov knew enough of the war in Chechnya to understand that if the convoy's troops were overrun the men would have saved a last grenade or a last bullet for themselves. The brigadier and his escort had either not been able to, or not had that moment of courage, which was why he and the Vympel men were huddled between the rocks or bent and running.

  They went down the slope for more than a kilometre, then took cover in trees. After checking him over to see that he was not hurt, they used their maps and a handheld GPS system to plot their position and work out their route.

  For a long time they heard the shooting and the explosions, but Bikov could not tell whether the attack was being driven off or whether the men would need the last grenade or bullet.

  The cloud's mist was tight around them as they climbed and Bikov struggled to keep the pace set for him.

  He hadn't painted that afternoon but had been on the roof of his hut hammering in the nails left for him on the far side of the loch by the postwoman, beating down on their heads to secure the sheet-iron sections. There had been bad gales the previous winter and this was work Billy Smith should have accomplished in the spring or the summer, but he had left it, and now the autumn was with him and time was against him. All day he had been on the roof, not coming down for a sandwich or a mug of coffee, and it was his penance. When he'd started he'd believed that he'd finish in time to get in three hours of painting, not up the mountain behind the hut but down on the shore where the ducks were preparing restlessly to go south for the winter. His painting was abandoned for the day, and he regretted that. Other than when he used his full strength to thump down the six-inch nails, and the sounds echoed back from the cliff slopes and the gullies, there was a limitless quiet around him.

  When the room had cleared, Albert Ponsford poured the dregs of the coffee into his cup and Locke's, and then said, 'I don't think, speaking frankly, it's going to go anywhere, but it's important we move by the form book. The last dead drop of course has to be visited, and we go through the motions of exfiltration. I'd like you to handle all that, Gabriel.'

  'Be very pleased to, Bertie.' Gabriel Locke was well enough versed in the Service culture to appreciate that a request made by a senior man with elaborate politeness was in fact an instruction. Willing hands were always welcomed hands at headquarters.

  'Rupert left so little for us…there's a rumour abroad that he spent his last morning here shredding material on Ferret. Extraordinary behaviour, and so insulting to colleagues. It's a minor miracle he deigned to provide us with the details of this last drop procedure. He did—and I don't think time is on our side…I noted your hostility to Ferret.'

  Locke said abruptly, 'It's not personal, no…just that there's nothing to be done. I'd call it a pragmatic approach, the real world against a bygone age of sentiment and emotion.'

  Ponsford smiled, always the enigma when one to one with juniors, and handed the young man a single sheet of typed paper. Locke thought he had said the right thing but could not be sure.

  'You'll take care of it, send the signal, yes?'

  'Consider it done—as you say, Bertie, that's the form book. By the way, I came without a bag. I'll need some clothes…'

  'Can't have you wandering around like the great unwashed. Buy them and bill us.'

  It took him a full fifteen minutes to find Alice North. Upstairs, down in the elevator, along corridors, and finally he located her, tucked away on the fourth floor, in East European Controllerate, tapping her keyboard, transcribing her shorthand. She was quite pretty, not beautiful like Danuta, not stylish, but she had good colour in her cheeks, and her dark auburn hair was cut short—he thought that was for convenience not effect. The only jewellery she wore was a half-hidden amber pendant hanging from a gold neck-chain- He hovered behind her. She went on typing. He read on her screen his own initials, then: 'Cut him adrift, forget him. Not worth the hassle. In our station we have excellent relations with the Russians, and…' Of course, she knew he was there. He coughed. She continued typing.

  'Excuse me, Alice, but I've a signal to send, and I've got no clothes other than what I'm standing in. I've cleared it with Bertie. Could you, please, slip over to the Strand and get me two or three pairs of socks, for size-nine shoe, two Y-fronts and singlets for a medium fit, and a couple of shirts that are pretty neutral, fifteen-and-a-half collar, a pair of pyjamas, one of those little packs of plastic razors, and some soap? A hundred from petty cash should do it. Thank you.'

  She gave no indication that it was not her job to do his shopping for him. She ignored him as she closed down her screen, went through the laid-down procedures for storage, then locked her notepad in her personal safe. She had her coat on and was gone Locke thought her sad. He grinned to himself. He liked the word he'd used—'pragmatic'—to Bertie Ponsford. It had set his stall out. He was of the new generation and unburdened by old baggage. When he had been on the IONEC course, the young probationer, the intake's lecture room had been visited by the Director General. On his entry they'd all stood until the man, close to retirement, had motioned them to sit. He'd said, 'Russia remains and will remain a potent military threat. Though their military intentions may no longer be belligerent, their capability remains. The unpredictability and instability of the regime could make them all the more dangerous. This Service will have an important role for many years to come in warning this country of danger signs on their long road to democracy.' Then, he'd turned on his heel and gone.

  The students had discussed what had been said to them. Locke's contribution to the seminar had been, 'What we heard was the leaden weight of the old Service, all the stuff that should be consigned to history books. I, for one, intend to move on and fight the real battles that mean something to GB's security—organized crime, Mid-East terrorism, Islamic fundamentalism, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in the third world. We all know where the real threats lie.' The tutor had not contradicted him. That Director General was now out to grass and the old guard's message should have been dead, buried. Ferret was history.

  He took the workstation next to Alice's and typed the signal into the automatic telegram handling system and pressed the 'send' code to move it on its way. Then he waited for her to return with his new clothes.

  He sat in a small dank cell. The custody officer had taken his tie and belt but had left him with his shoelaces, and the detectives had kept hold of his wallet. Up to that afternoon Ham Protheroe had always been ahead, but he'd stayed the extra day: he'd reckoned there was one more killing to be made from the woman's credit cards, and that had been his last mistake. His bag was packed in the hotel room and he'd planned to slip out a little after midnight, having sent the night porter away from Reception to get him a drink from the closed bar. The detectives had been waiting for him when he'd come back from the cashpoint. She must have checked her accounts by phone, then rung the police. He wouldn't have targeted her if he'd thought there was the remotest chance that she'd have the face to turn him in. He sat in the cell and felt the harshness of the light burn down on him.

  It was problematic but achievable for a general-service officer to be promoted on merit to the rank of officer in the Service. Those who beaver away at clerical and administration duties can, if dedicated, ambitious and able, win such promotion. Daphne Sullivan had the dedication, ambition and ability. Upon the arrival of Gabriel Locke's signal to the Service's quarters at the embassy in Berlin, after its deciphering, it was passed to her. She made no comment but took it to her desk and made three phone calls for guidance, then took from her safe a German passport that carried her photo, heaved on her coat, knotted her scarf round her throat and left the building on Wilhelmstrasse. One call had been to the local colleagues in the Office for the Protection of the State, a second had been to a particular named official in the Association of Travel Agents, a third was to a travel company in the far west of the city, close to its outer limits.

  She drove herself to the Marzahn housing complex, where sixty thousand rat box apartments had been
built in ten years under the Communist regime, the pride of Honecker's government. Among a mix of rectangular garden allotments with wood huts for summer weekends, and a moonscape of wasteground, she found a parking space by the S-bahn station, in the Allee der Kosmonauten.

  The travel agency she sought had been brightly fitted, was warm, comfortable and had the reputation for extreme efficiency. Its prosperity was based on the owners' sharp appreciation of a growing market niche. Werner Weigel had been a middle-ranking officer in the formerly supreme secret police and his wife, Brigitte, had been a manager in the Ministry of the Interior before the Wall had come down. Their past had disappeared during the last days of Communist rule into the overworked shredders. They were now respected and reliable tour operators. They arranged visits by elder citizens to the old homelands of east Prussia, in particular to the city that had been Konigsberg and was now called Kaliningrad. A compelling whiff of nostalgia drew that dying generation back to the region of their childhood, a last visit to scratch in their memories of youth.

  Daphne needed a visa to enter that Russian territory. Under normal circumstances it took the bureaucracy at the Russian embassy five working days to issue such a visa for a visit to Kaliningrad.

  It would be about money. The one-time Stasi officer and his wife had done well after reunification in their business venture, and they intended to do better. Euros were passed discreetly over a table in the back room. Daphne Sullivan had been stationed in Berlin long enough to know that, in the new Germany, money had a loud voice. Every day of the week a Mercedes-built luxury coach took a party of elder citizens to Kaliningrad. One would leave the next afternoon. Money bought the cooperation of Herr and Frau Weigel. Fraulein Magda Krause, who had intended to travel to Kaliningrad to search for her grandparents' heritage, had planned to take the tour in November, but her holiday had been cancelled and she could only travel that week, in late September. Money ensured that her German passport would be taken by hand to the Russian embassy on Unter den Linden, and more money paid to a clerk would guarantee that the necessary visa was in place in time for the coach pickup the next day at the car park of the Am Zoo station. Daphne's fluency in German was sufficient for the Weigels, who did not question her story, and the palmed euro notes were slid with effortless ease into the drawer behind the desk. The couple might have wondered why this young woman, who gave an address in the northern district of Pankow, was so anxious to travel so quickly, but their curiosity was mitigated by the generosity of the payment in cash.