... Chapter Eight
Q. Where was the home of the philosopher Immanuel Kant?
A. Kaliningrad.
She hugged the dressing-gown around her, and the draught of the dawn came in through the opened kitchen door. If Gail Ponsford heard her husband moving downstairs when it was still dark she always left her bed, went to the kitchen and made an early pot of tea. She knew when he was disturbed, fretted. She watched him, out in the garden, fill the songbirds' peanut cage. That was a waste of time: the squirrels would have emptied it before he was off the train, well before he'd walked into Vauxhall Bridge Cross. She waited till he saw her.
'Tea?'
'Be blissful.'
'Couldn't sleep?'
'Bit of a bad one—sorry.'
'Going to talk about it—or "need to know"?'
Bertie, her husband of twenty-eight years, grinned ruefully. Gail Ponsford had been a General Service girl in Century House. The then head of Russia Desk had been their best man and her matron-of-honour had been a dragon from Personnel. She was steeped in the Service, knew the people and the procedures.
'You remember Rupert Mowbray?'
She could play the comedienne. 'Rupert the Professor, Rupert the Pompous, Rupert the Patriarch, Rupert the Principled…but he's Rupert the Pensioned now, isn't he?'
She'd put the kettle on the ring, and he'd slumped at the table.
'He came back, did a Lazarus, and preached to the DG. Doesn't matter who he is, where he is—out beyond our back fence, where civilization stops, there's an asset in trouble. Likely to be arrested, might already have been arrested. Rupert used to handle him. Remember Alice North? Of course you do—the little grey spinster. She tipped Rupert off. He's at the outside gate. What do I do? Turn him away? I can't…he charmed me, enthused me, made me feel big and tall—he'd sell whale blubber to the Greenlanders—then did the same to the DG…and he repeated the dose for a minister. We're going to exfiltrate the asset. He had us all in the palm of his hand—talked about loyalty and integrity, and making the Service great—you know, admired. He made it seem so easy, and we swallowed it. You know what? It would have sounded wimpish to put the old hand up and query: "What if it all goes wrong?" Nothing ever went wrong in Rupert's day.'
She poured the boiling water into the teapot.
'A few hours ago a ship docked in Gdansk—that means it's all in place.'
'Are we talking, Bertie, about Kaliningrad?'
'Not a fair question.'
'But isn't that a closed military zone?'
'And don't arch your eyebrows like that, please. It's all in place. I won't survive if it goes wrong, and I doubt the DG will. We'll go quietly, in a couple of months, but go we will. Only Rupert is ring-fenced. He's retired and we've rubber-stamped him. If it goes right, and we bring our man home, to clarion calls of applause, then the people on their side are on the train to the salt mines. Who's going to be left standing? Someone has to lose. Me, our crowd—them, their Service—who's going to be left standing?'
'Is it today?'
'Tomorrow we are going into Kaliningrad, to lift out our dubious asset, with guns. Jesus Christ…and I sanctioned it, and the DG did, and the minister.'
Gail Ponsford poured the tea, strong.
'Please, would you pass me the marmalade?'
The dining room of the Excelsior Hotel overlooked the junction of the waterways, the Stara Motlawa and the Nowa Motlawa that sliced through Gdansk. From the window, across the water, was the old town of the Hanseatic port. On his previous visits, Rupert Mowbray had always taken the seat with the panoramic view. He was able to share the majesty of the historic buildings, but was protected from a sight of the harshness of another East European city that struggled to make a living from the post-Communist times. The cranes of the docks—Solidarity territory, where the rotten apple had infected the barrel that was the Communists' territory of satellite regimes were beyond his vision. What had happened here, the strikes, the lock-outs, the police baton charges and the bloody-minded obstinacy of the dockyard workers, had brought down the whole damned pack of cards…and had destroyed the certainties in Rupert Mowbray's life.
Gabriel Locke passed him the marmalade, and returned to his Herald Tribune.
'Thank you so much.'
Locke had eaten yoghurt and fruit, Rupert had eaten a full cooked breakfast and was now on toast. Locke, behind his paper, and Rupert, his back to the door, did not see her entry into the dining room. He was smearing butter on to the toast when Alice eased into the chair beside him…as she had that first time, after the first long night.
Rupert Mowbray remembered it with the clarity of crystal.
The evening:
Rupert Mowbray had been with Alice in his hotel room, waiting. The messages had been passed; there was nothing to do but wait. Dead drops before that in Murmansk and Malbork, but never a meeting until that first evening in the hotel in Gdansk. The hesitant knock on the room door and the moment's meeting of his eyes and hers, then she had been on her feet and at the door, unlocking it. He had stared at the door, then seen him. Calling him 'Ferret', him not understanding, Rupert had hugged him, Alice had gravely shaken his hand, and the tension had dripped off Ferret.
Such a handsome young man, such dignity, and such painfully obvious stress. Like a blind date, he'd written in his report for London. For a quarter of an hour, not more than fifteen minutes because time did not allow it, they had sparred and made small-talk about the weather, the journey to Gdansk from Kaliningrad and the business of the delegation at the dry dock, then to work. Bundles of papers, blueprints and manuals, work procedures and diagrams outlining chains of command. Then the talking. A tape-recorder turning, and Alice doing the backup shorthand, her eyes never off him. Intense and exciting, as Ferret had bolted the sandwiches they'd provided and had never stopped talking, as if each minute with them was the last available. Rupert never interrupting the flow…it was the best source material, raw and clean, that he had ever handled. Ferret sweating, driblets coming down his forehead, shoulders knotted tense and the hands always moving, tie pulled down, jacket slung on the floor. Four hours of it, and Ferret starting to ramble when asked why. His father and his grandmother…and the thread lost because of his tiredness. The first time they had put a face to the agent they called Ferret.
The night:
He hadn't wanted to finish, but the coherence had gone. They had moved past the point of useful communication. Ferret was losing concentration. Rupert had done a few minutes on trade craft, because this man was an innocent. They'd talked personal security, and he'd reached forward from the chair where he sat to the bed where Ferret was propped and held the man's hand, tried to squeeze the shaking from it, as he would have gripped his children's if they had been in crisis. Ferret was his new family, Ferret craved to be admitted to the circle. Easy enough for him, for Rupert Mowbray, in a room at the Excelsior Hotel, with a diplomatic passport in his room safe, to lecture on personal security. He hadn't wanted to go, to walk out into the night and slip away back to the hotel where the rest of his delegation stayed.
Rupert had watched the way Ferret gazed, awestruck, at Alice North, little sweet Alice. He'd said, 'I'm a bit tired, not as young as I used to be,' had grimaced, and then had spoken so softly and with such innocence: 'Alice, you've a bottle in your room. What about a nightcap for our friend, a little drink for him—yes, Alice?' The complete performer, he'd yawned wide and rubbed his eyes, then blinked—so natural—and he'd loosed Ferret's hand, and stood.
'Yes, I've a bottle,' Alice had said.
He'd hugged Ferret, wished him well and muttered about the next dead drop, how much he looked forward to the next visit of the delegation to sort out the negotiation for the use of the dry dock. He'd yawned again and seen them out through the door, then moved with a cat's speed to gather up the papers brought for him and whip the spool off the tape-recorder.
The morning:
He'd been at breakfast when she'd come in and sat down
beside him. He'd murmured, 'Good morning', to her. There had been on her face, at her mouth and in her eyes, a meld of defiance and shyness—what he called 'the first-time look'. No cosmetics on the eyes, mouth or cheeks, no little splash of perfume or toilet water at her neck. She'd kept her head down, toyed with a single piece of toast, and hadn't spoken to the waitress who brought her coffee. It was how Rupert Mowbray had hoped she'd be. It was what Ferret had needed. To Rupert Mowbray, the worst that could have come from the first meeting, face to face, in a hotel room was the request by an agent for a defection package, when they caved and wanted out. Then they were useless…but the best, the best of all, was when the agent left the meeting and walked tall, was enthused, went willingly back behind the fences, the guards, the guns, and dug, stole and eavesdropped for more, went strengthened. He hadn't supposed that Alice North was a virgin—who was at that age? No woman he knew with a pleasing face was a virgin, certainly neither of his own daughters. She had looked like a deflowered virgin that morning at breakfast. Not sex for the first time, but love. Emotion, romance, lust—for the first time—he hadn't cared which Alice North had found. He'd said something about the time he'd booked the taxi for, and she'd nodded, distant.
Over the weeks and months that had followed he'd watched Alice in Warsaw at the Station, and in London and, he was prepared to bet his shirt on it, no other man had been welcomed where the Ferret had been. He'd seen men try and had seen them summarily dismissed. The second time, and the third, that they had come to the Excelsior Hotel to debrief Ferret he had, each time, slyly, called a halt to the talk of submarines and missile warheads and the biographies of military commanders, and left them to slip away to her room. And each time, in the morning, she had come to breakfast with the defiance and shyness highlighting her prettiness. He had used her, as he had used Ferret, and the glory that had come to him from it shamed him.
She wore no makeup now, but her eyes were reddened and he thought she had cried in the night. He passed her a sheet of paper from his leather-cased notepad. 'It's the number, the extension and the message. I suggest you use a handkerchief. Right, it's going to be a busy morning, so let's get on with it.'
The ship, predictably, had engine trouble. The engineer of the Princess Rose, Johannes Richter, told the officials of Customs, the harbour master's office and Immigration who trooped on board that it might be in the engine's main drive shaft or perhaps the piston heads. Any who cared to listen were given a full diatribe on the age of the engine and the work it had put in during its nineteen years at sea—but, and Richter emphasized the point by hammering his oil stained fists together, he was confident that the Princess Rose would be able to sail when the cargo of fertilizer was in the holds, on schedule. To back his story, in addition to the master and mate's protestations that the engine would soon be serviceable, a representative of the Cyprus-based owners was on board, and an additional engineer.
Through the morning, parts of the diesel engine were taken off the Princess Rose and replacements were carried on board.
There was no reason for the officials of Customs, the harbour master's office and Immigration to be suspicious. The necessary passes were issued for entrance and exit of the dock area on the Motlawa river, and the movement of vessels from Hamburg, Toulouse, Piraeus, Tallinn and Stettin demanded their presence elsewhere.
Rupert Mowbray, the owner's man, was on the bridge with the master, and Jerry the Pole played the part of the additional engineer. While Mowbray stayed deep in conversation with the master and worked through the charts of the coast off the oblast of Kaliningrad, Jerry the Pole was the courier. By the evening, the time the Princess Rose was due to sail on a full tide, she would be laden with nine hundred tonnes of fertilizer in fifty-kilo sacks. Four handguns, three stun-grenades, six smoke-grenades and a field medic's kit would have been taken off, and a state-of-the-art communications system would have been brought on board.
At midday, the official from the harbour master's office came down the ladder into the engine room for final reassurance. He was confronted with a frightening puzzle of pieces laid out on oily newspaper. Was it definite that the ship would be ready to vacate its berth on the fertilizer dock?
'If I am left alone to work, then it is definite,' Richter growled. A rider was added by the master: even if the work was not completed to his own satisfaction and that of the owner's representative, the ship would have power enough to leave the berth and would tie up further down the Motlawa river—it was a guarantee.
Buried in a bag under grease-coated engine parts, the pistols and grenades were taken out of the docks and driven by Jerry the Pole to the hotel. Then he went to the Excelsior, where he collected from Gabriel Locke the scrambled radio equipment that could receive and transmit encodes and 'burst' high-speed messages, and returned to the Princess Rose.
The Immigration men were told that, in order to facilitate the departure on schedule, the representative of the owners would stay on board for the sailing.
'Where am I going to be?' Mowbray asked.
'I promise nothing,' the master said. 'We do not usually carry passengers.'
'You'd better find somewhere…and remember it's a full-fare paying bloody passenger.'
As a young Service officer, Mowbray had been posted to the high commission in the protectorate of Aden and once a month, before the danger had become too great, he had gone up-country and stayed with tribal chiefs. He had acted out the part of the young Lawrence, sleeping on mud floors, cursing the discomfort and the smell. He thought this experience would tax his tolerance.
The Princess Rose was foul, filthy and uncomfortable, and he had only seen the deck area, the cramped bridge, the engine room, where he had stepped in an oil pool and damn near fallen and could have broken his neck, and the storeroom from which the handguns and grenades had been retrieved. It would be his base, his command n and control centre, for a day and a half if his planning played to the optimum. The coffee brought him by the Filipino cook-boy was disgusting. He had seen a leviathan cockroach appear in a corner of the bridge as the mate had eaten a sandwich…but it was the nearest he would come again in his lifetime to running an operation across a hostile frontier.
The Princess Rose, his new home, rolled on her moorings and he heard the banging down below, a heavy wrench on metal, for the benefit of the man from the harbour master's office.
It was a regret that he would not be there when Ferret and Alice were reunited. He would be incarcerated on this heap of rusting scrap when they met again, by his hand. He, the magician who conjured with their lives, was sorry he would not be close to Braniewo the next evening to see it.
The message on the notepad given her by Rupert Mowbray was in front of her.
Alice sat on the bed, legs tucked up, her back against the headboard, and reached into her handbag for a handkerchief. Then she picked up the mobile phone.
Jerry the Pole had bought it early that morning in the street-market behind the flower shops on Podwale Staromiejskie. Under the counters there, for sale, were mobile phones from Poland, Germany, Sweden and Kaliningrad. If records existed, and that was doubtful, the number would be registered as from Kaliningrad, and the report of its theft buried.
The second time they'd met, Viktor had given them all the numbers and extensions for the outer office in the admiral's suite. She tapped out the digits for the international code, then the general switchboard of Fleet Headquarters.
A woman answered, sharp and superior.
She held her handkerchief over the mobile's mouthpiece, as Rupert had suggested, spoke in Russian, and gave the extension she wanted, for the clerk who sat at a small desk beside the larger desk of the fleet's armaments officer. By now the number of Viktor's direct line and his extension would be bugged, but there were nine other lines into the outer office.
It was curtly answered. She asked if that was the extension.
'I know what was the matter with me—it will not happen again.'
'They were like w
olves round you. You saw how they sneered at you. I do not like my man to be sneered at, to be shown to be asleep.'
Viktor said evenly, 'I can apologize again, if that is required.'
'You want leave, or a woman? You are unwell? What the fuck is the problem, Viktor?'
He could have said that for four years his life had been a deceit and that he was now under close surveillance. He could have taken the admiral to the wide, polished window and shown him the watchers hovering by the front door of the headquarters building and across the parade area. 'Just a bit tired—and I am grateful, sincerely, for your concern.'
He organized Admiral Falkovsky's in-tray, what must be read, what must be signed, and slipped out.
In the outer office, Viktor settled at his desk, picked up his pencil and began to sift the documents and memoranda in front of him. A clerk came to him and handed him a slip of folded paper.
He read. 'We should meet at the zoo, by the hippopotamus pen, at 4 p.m. tomorrow, Wednesday, love, Alicija.'
For a moment Viktor thought he might faint. To steady himself he bit on the end of the pencil, filled his mouth with little wood splinters. He thought of her, Alice, and the touch of her. He crumpled the paper in his hand, and began to read, vacantly, his work for the day. At the first chance he flicked the switch on the shredder beside his desk and fed into it a document on training programmes for two frigate crews, the sheet of notepaper, and a memorandum on the meteorological forecast for the coastal waters of the eastern Baltic for the next week, then turned off the machine. He thought of her smile and her love, and he trembled.
An officer, a captain lieutenant, stood in front of him and said there was a deterioration problem in one of the torpedo tubes of a Vashavyanka-class submarine moored in basin number two. Could he come personally and inspect it before a report was written for Admiral Falkovsky's attention? He went with the captain lieutenant to the naval dockyard. He was often used as a filter before reports were written and submitted. He did not recognize the trick.
Gerald Seymour Page 19
