Gerald Seymour

by Traitor's Kiss (b) (epub)

  He stirred. Right eye first, then left, opened languidly. 'You're very sweet, my dear. What time is it?'

  'Six o'clock, still raining. It's going to be a foul day.'

  'Oh, I don't know, Alice—could be rather fun.' Mowbray grimaced. He had a spark of mischief.

  She had been recruited in February 1992. A late-night train journey from central London to stay with a friend, from her convent-school days, in Thames Ditton and a shopping binge arranged for the next morning. An austere older man with silver hair sitting opposite her reading papers from his briefcase. The train jolting to a halt at Teddington. Him dropping papers on the carriage floor and not realizing it, hurrying to open the door, and gone into the night after he'd slammed it shut. Seeing the papers. Picking them up. The papers were stamped 'secret'.

  Opening the carriage door as the train started to ease away, stumbling on to the platform, whistles blowing, station staff yelling. Ignoring them. Running to the barrier and seeing the man lowering himself into a car driven by a woman, and it driving away from the station forecourt. Jumping the queue forming for a taxi, telling the driver to follow the car ahead, clutching the classified papers. Losing the car, then finding it after fifteen minutes of kerb crawling. It had been parked outside a semi-detached yellow brick house in a side-street. Ringing the bell. A woman opening the door. Thrusting the papers at her, and showing the stamped 'secret' on the top of the pages, explaining.

  'You'd better come in,' the woman had said, then had called out, a stentorian voice, 'Rupert, you're a bloody fool, but—not that you deserve it—the good Lord has smiled on you. Come here, Rupert.'

  Being sat down, given a large whisky, being a witness to Rupert Mowbray's gratitude. Hearing the woman say, 'They'd have hanged you, Rupert, cut you down, drawn out your bowels and burned them in your face, then chopped you into quarters. Your head would have been on a pikestaff at Century House.'

  She'd missed the last train to Thames Ditton and the woman had insisted she stay the night, and they'd fussed round her. At breakfast the next morning, Rupert Mowbray had asked for her address, before Felicity Mowbray had driven them to the station. She'd waved him off on the London train and he'd held up his briefcase in the carriage window, tapped it and smiled sheepishly. The application form had arrived at her apartment five days later. The Service suited her.

  Alice kissed his forehead again.

  He sipped his coffee. 'It's not my birthday, Alice—but still appreciated.'

  It was to express her gratitude. 'You did well last night—for Viktor.'

  He was grinning. 'Well, I've certainly put my head on the block…'

  She wandered into the next room, a tiny box under the sloped eaves with a single bed that would be hers if ever she had a chance to use it. She opened the wardrobe. She hadn't checked it in the night, had been too busy with the calls to the shipping agent that the Service used, and those that had brought Wilberforce to Covent Garden, and then the interminable arrangements for Locke's flight schedule from RAF Northolt. In the wardrobe was a rack of men's and women's clothes, assorted styles and sizes. She took what she needed for herself, and what he would need. The top-floor rooms were a frequently used safe house for the Service. She hadn't told Locke about the wardrobe: he could buy himself whatever else he was short of. She came back into the big room.

  'You've only an hour.' Mowbray sat up, rubbing his eyes. 'I think I'd prefer to walk.'

  'Then you ought to be up.'

  Mowbray beamed his smile. 'Head on the block, as I said…it'll be a fine show, worthy of the best traditions of the Service—or I have to hope the blade's sharp. Do you know, my dear, when the unlamented Duke of Monmouth was beheaded the axeman took fourteen chops? Wouldn't want him! Right, the last hurdle.'

  He crawled off the bed.

  The last hurdle was the politician.

  'This is the real battleground, not playing at "Bash the Taleban" or having a game of "Kill the Tribesmen up the Khyber", this is the territory that matters. It's what we do well, an operation calling for verve, expertise and clear-minded thinking.'

  Political sanction was necessary. The Secretary of State, who had nominal and tolerated responsibility for the Service, was a tired man after a late-night dinner at The Hague, and a flight back in the small hours. His office had been told by the Director General that a decision on this matter was necessary and urgent—and the Prime Minister was holidaying. The Secretary of State was alone and vulnerable. Caught in the headlights, he sat behind his wide desk, and the Director General lolled in an easy chair close to him, near enough to be a comforting presence.

  Mowbray continued, 'I wouldn't want you to think, sir, that we are advocating a mission high on risk. Far from it. We are talking about a surgical lift carried out by trained personnel, men with a first-class record. One minute our agent will be there, the next his surveillance team will be scratching their heads and wondering where the hell he's gone. We're very good at this sort of thing. In and out, without fuss or fanfare…but we have to move at speed. Each hour that goes by, so, such an operation attracts difficulties. Give us the green light now, and the risk is minimal.'

  A civil servant had opened the door, stood in the Secretary of State's eyeline, and gestured to his watch.

  'Let's do it. Go for it. I'll look forward to meeting him when you've brought him over.' The Secretary of State laughed shrilly. '"The risk is minimal." You said that, Mr Mowbray?'

  'You heard me clearly, sir. You've made a very wise decision, thank you. You won't regret it.'

  It had been one of the great bravura performances of Rupert Mowbray's life. It went without saying that the support of the Director General was critical to his success. In turn, he had entrapped them both. The difference: the Secretary of State had not recognized that a gladiator's net was thrown over him. When he stood he received a little bob of respect from Mowbray. The politician would clatter down the stairs of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office building, but Mowbray and the Director General would follow at a more dignified pace. By the time they stood on the step, each under his own umbrella, the official car was pulling out through the archway with a tail vehicle in pursuit.

  'Have I ever told you about Betty's aunt, Rupert?'

  'I don't think you've ever discussed your wife's family with me.' Mowbray's eyebrow flicked upwards.

  'She's a grand maiden lady, now in her eighty-second year, and Betty's her favourite niece. She always comes to us at Christmas…it's an arrangement set in stone. One of our boys goes up to Euston and meets the train from the West Midlands, where this delightful old lady lives, then escorts her down into the Underground and on to the Northern Line. They travel to Waterloo main terminus, emerge above ground and take a train to Wimbledon where Betty and I are waiting. Pretty straightforward, yes? You make it sound, Rupert, as though lifting Agent Ferret out of Kaliningrad will be as simple as seeing Betty's aunt safely between Euston and Wimbledon. And I almost believe you.'

  'A good plan and good men, that's the key to a good result' Mowbray said. 'You'll go down in the history of the Service as the man who gave it back its dignity.'

  'Go carefully. There aren't too many naval-infantry battalions between Euston and Waterloo. Don't embarrass me.'

  Mowbray walked out into the rain.

  Locke's plane and its pilots had a punishing schedule to meet. They landed at Inverness, where an RAF helicopter waited. When the helicopter returned him to Inverness, he would be flown on to an airstrip west of Wolverhampton. After Wolverhampton he would be taken cross-Channel to Bruges in Belgium. From Belgium the plane would go west and follow the southern English coastline to a runway at Torbay used by a flying school. The schedule was tight, but the pilots said it was possible.

  For Viktor, back from his meeting at headquarters, the day flickered by. He scarcely saw the papers placed in front of him by the secretariat. In his own big office, Admiral Falkovsky catnapped and did not need him. Was his cry for help heard? Was it acted on? Viktor did not
know. There was nothing to tell him that the noose tightened on him. Around him was normality, but he felt that he was slowly, steadily, being crushed.

  The shelducks, black-throated divers and mergansers usually gathered in the day on the shallow waters of the loch's edge close to his hut, where it was his habit to feed them, but they had been scattered in terror by the helicopter's landing on the shingle beach, and had not returned.

  William Smith, former sergeant in the Special Boat Service—what he called the Squadron—known to the few close to him as Billy, prepared to leave. Dusk had gathered over the water. Where the cloud was broken, along towards the forested spur under Beinn Resipol and the cliff of Rubha Leathan, towards Acharacle, defined pools of gold light had settled. Only a military helicopter, and one flying in emergency conditions, would have landed in the early grey texture of the day on the gradual slope of the beach.

  He was called back. He felt no satisfaction at it, but he had not refused. He hammered planks across the windows on either side of the hut door. The outside wood of the hut was faded creosote and the windows were well built, except that the putty holding the panes had been loosened by the pine martens that chewed it; he had thought it best to nail the planks across the windows.

  The young man, off the helicopter, had said he would be back within ten days. 'It's just a quick one, Mr Smith, in and out.' But Billy had seen the evasion in the young man's eyes and he thought it right to make the hut secure against the winter. Beside him, as he swung the hammer, was his filled rucksack, and his dog lay close to it. He had finished inside the hut. Most of his day, since the morning when the helicopter had left, had been spent inside tidying. Out at the back the fire of his rubbish smoked in an oil drum, nearly dead. He had packed away his paintings in his old trunk; it had been with him in both his marine commando and his Squadron days.

  Old ways died hard with Billy. He had folded his bedding neatly and piled it on the exposed mattress. To leave the refuge that was his home, beside the loch and under the high mountains, wrenched him to the guts, but he had not considered refusing the work offered. Across the water, the headlights of the post van flashed. The young man had made the arrangement on his mobile phone. Billy Smith padlocked the hut door. He lifted his rucksack, called the dog to heel and went down to the shore, his boots scattering the shingle. The dog jumped into the boat, where its basket and a supply of food were already stored, and Billy launched it. He began to row across the smooth loch waters towards the far side and the waiting post van, his hut diminishing as he pulled strongly away until it was lost beneath the height of Beinn Odhar Mhor.

  He had not thought of refusing the offer of work because the guilt still weighed heavy on him, and the escape to the hut and his watercolour painting had failed at the ultimate test to rid him of it. Billy Smith had been the sergeant, the patrol's leader. The others had followed him. He rowed across the loch. Twelve years before, on a night in early summer, he had led the patrol on the east side of Carlingford Lough, between Causeway Bridge and Duggans Point. He had felt no guilt then, but time had changed that. He beached the boat and the dog ran to the postwoman. He didn't look back. Ahead of him was the night train from Fort William and the journey south.

  There was a fight in A&E. Usually they came later, when the pubs chucked out into the night. This scrap, men and women, was from a lunchtime birthday session. They were all in their finery, best suits and blouses, and it had started in the bar and moved on to the car park, then followed the ambulance to the waiting area of A&E.

  Colin 'Wickso' Wicks, ex-marine commando and Squadron member, finished his shift. Other porters moaned rotten about having first the night shift then the quick changeover to day duties, prattled on about the strain of it. It didn't bother him. He was wide awake. He'd discarded his green overalls, dressed in his civilian clothes and come to the waiting area in search of his supervisor. In his lunch break, eating a pie and chips in the canteen, he'd been called out into the corridor where a young man was waiting for him. They'd spoken. He was told he was wanted. When he'd left the Squadron he'd gone on to the books of Security Shield Ltd, as they all had, and he'd endured two years of escorting businessmen to Kazakhstan, Albania and Colombia; he had been an elite man of arms, not a valet, a servant, a door-opener, and he'd cited the boredom when he'd begun to refuse further work offers. He was trained as a battlefield medic but nursing jobs required references and he didn't want any employer going back to Poole and sifting through his records. References didn't matter, weren't important, for a trolley pusher.

  He ignored the fight and rolled forward on the balls of his feet towards the door, looking for the glow of his supervisor's cigarette in the evening darkness. He stayed fit because he ran the streets every night when he was on day shift and every morning when he was on nights. Last year, a nurse had persuaded him to run in Wolverhampton's half-marathon, and Wickso had won by a clear hundred metres, but he hadn't stayed around to collect his prize because he might have been photographed. It was an obsession with him that his picture should not appear in any newspaper—the chance of his parents seeing his photograph in a Midlands evening paper was nil, they lived in west London under the flight paths of Heathrow. The last time he had been home, after his discharge, he had seen the shrine they kept in the front room to their hero, special forces son, photographs, cups, medals, and he'd left early because what had happened to him was like a bad and painful wound to them. The idolized young man had become a pariah and their dreams were broken.

  His supervisor came back through the door, and coughed hard. Wickso told him that he would be away for a few days, at least two weeks, but it could be longer. Overseas.

  'Well, don't expect any favours from us, sunshine, if you're just pissing off, leaving us in the lurch, and us short-handed enough. Don't come back to us begging.'

  Wickso had never begged anything of anyone. He didn't rise to the bait, just walked on and out through the door, then ran loosely the mile to his bedsit. The young man in the corridor had told him where he should be, and at what time, the next morning. He lived with the shame of what had happened on the early-summer night on Carlingford Lough, near to Duggans Point.

  The patrol's target had been Sean O'Connell, Provo quartermaster, and from their lie-up bivouac they'd seen the man ease a boat onto the shore and lift a weighted sack from it. It was where Intelligence expected O'Connell to run guns from the South to the North. Billy had whispered they'd have the bastard, not shoot him, but see him shit himself. They'd gone for him. There was a struggle. Billy and Lofty in the water with him, and the thrashing fight as they'd tried to hold his head under so's the spunk would go from him. Wickso had had a torch on them and he'd seen the man's throat as it came up from under the water, and the throat was clean of distinguishing marks. Sean O'Connell, the briefing said, had a distinctive mole on his throat, but Wickso hadn't shouted, hadn't intervened.

  He ran easily back to his bedsit, and there he'd pack what little he owned, grab a couple of hours' sleep, and catch an early train.

  It was when the ghosts came out and sat around and smoked and brewed tea and talked of girls and home at the end of the evening and the start of the night. There were still enough leaves in the poplar trees at the bottom of the cemetery by the pillboxes for the wind to rustle there. The ghosts came from their sleeping places of square-cut Portland stone.

  At the end of many days, 'Lofty' Flint—one time of the Marines and former member of the Squadron—sat with them and spoke with them. The rest of the gardeners employed by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission at Tyne Cot reckoned Lofty had 'grave fever', but his work could not be faulted and each year his contract was extended, and he did no harm. In the dark, with the cloud heavy over him and the wind on his face, he could no longer see where he raked.

  The young man had come in the late afternoon, by taxi. Lofty had never looked up from his raking, had made the young man stoop with him, walk with him and stand with him as he fed the leaves on to the bonfire.
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  He put away his tools and his barrow. There were only the ghosts to see him go. He turned on his bicycle light and it threw a stuttered beam ahead of him. At first he had told the young man that it was quite impossible for him to leave Tyne Cot for two weeks, or even two days, because the Remembrance Day services were only two months away, when the leaves must all be cleared and the graves must be cleaned. The young man had said, without sympathy, 'After what you did, after the disgrace of it, I'd have thought you'd be ready for a chance to make amends. These men, here, they served their country—aren't you up to that?'

  He cycled on the straight, flat road towards the farmhouse in Passchendaele where he lodged, away from the only place where he knew he belonged, and he heard the singing of the ghosts as he went. He had only done one job for Security Shield Ltd—as driver/escort/handyman for the recently retired commander of 39 Brigade in Northern Ireland, a man thought to be at risk from reprisal terrorism. For six years at the brigadier's Wiltshire home, it had been an idyll for a man severely psychologically troubled. The brigadier's retirement hobby had been a fundraising committee for the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. Lofty had twice driven him to Belgium to visit the cemeteries at Hop Store, Essex Farm, Spanbroekmolen and Bedford House, and twice they had visited Tyne Cot. The brigadier had died, the house in Wiltshire had been sold, the widow had written a letter to the CWGC commending Lofty for work as a gardener/labourer, as he'd requested. He hoped to live out his life there because, with his rake, hoe, shears and digging fork, it was the one place where he could exorcize the demons.