In Polish, 'Him, each of those dates?'
In Russian, 'Certain?'
The night porter's Polish, 'And here last night and checked out this morning?'
Raincoat Man's Russian, 'Again, last night?'
Raincoat Man pushed the banknotes off the sheet of photographs and the night porter slid them into his hip pocket. His hand was gripped, squeezed. Raincoat Man spun and strode quickly to the door.
This was not a training exercise, he was not at Fort Monkton. He was far from his instructors, far from the tradecraft lectures on the hill beside the golf course used by the members of the Gosport and Stokes Bay club, far from having his hand held and orders given him. The sweat ran cold on his neck and his back. He followed blindly. The door swung in his face and he careered through it. He had seen a Russian intelligence officer identify a photograph of Rupert Mowbray. The cold of the air hit him. Raincoat Man was fifty metres in front, going towards a car parked under a light by the marina's pontoon bridge. Nothing moved, only him and Raincoat Man—no cars, no pedestrians. They were alone in the night. Locke started to run.
Raincoat Man's pace quickened. Locke closed the gap, started to sprint, his shoes stamping for speed. Why? His mind was blurred. What did he intend? He was dazed by what he had seen.
Raincoat Man reached a family Fiat saloon car. Locke saw the bright material of kids' seats in the back. The door was opened, the attaché case was thrown into the back, on to the kids' seats. The shape ducked inside and was reaching out to drag the door shut after him. Locke was beside the car.
What would the instructors have said?
The scenario had never been played out for Locke at Fort Monkton on the IONEC course. Never, on the Intelligence Officers New Entry Course, had they told the rookie recruits what to do when confronting Raincoat Man—of Russian counterintelligence—beside the marina on the Motlawa river in old Gdansk. They taught the trade craft of surveillance and anti-surveillance procedures and dead drops and brush contacts and the techniques of short-range agent communication and evasion-driving and self-defence. Nothing that Gabriel Locke had been taught in the lecture rooms and the courtyard of the Fort would help him at that moment. A special-forces man, there for the day, had preached a clear mind and a clear head: Piss Poor Planning makes Pathetic Performance. He had no plan. Unarmed-combat training at the fort was gentle, well inside the rules laid down by the Health and Safety Executive, just a few rolls on to the mat off the instructors' shoulders, no pain.
Locke grabbed him. He dragged him up and out of the car. His fist was locked in a crumpled mass of Raincoat Man's coat. He saw the fear, heard the gibbered entreaties. Raincoat Man was terrified, too frightened to scream. So ordinary, like the Russians, the bright young ones, that Locke met on the cocktail circuit in Warsaw, the sort of guy he'd have buttonholed at a party. He did not know what he intended, what was the end of the game. He threw the man back against the wall of the Fiat saloon's side and saw him crumple, go down.
The eyes pleaded. Perhaps it was the names of the kids that sat in the back seats, but Locke only heard little squirts of sound. He swung back his foot and kicked him in the gut, low. And because he had kicked once, he kicked again. He was past his limit of control.
The instructors at the Fort, on self-defence, always yelled for 'control'. He had lost it. No scream, only a whimper below him. Locke pulled at the flabby weight of the Raincoat Man, lifted him. Held him up. There was no resistance, and pain had dulled the fear in the eyes that stared at him, cried to him. He threw the man away from him, as careless as the dropping of a sack of coal by the back door of the farmhouse in west Wales. The man left his grip and slumped, staggered once, then collapsed. Piss Poor Planning makes Pathetic Performance. Raincoat Man's fall took an age. The goal replayed in grinding slow motion. The head going down. The stagger had taken him away from Locke. A bollard of old black metal was set in the quay's edge, half a metre high. The head hit the bollard's rim and jerked as if rubber held it to the body.
Locke knelt beside him. He took the head in his hands and shook it and seemed to cry to the man to react, to speak, but the head lolled in his hands. He laid it down, left it to lie at its strange angle. His hands shook but he felt Raincoat Man's neck, tried to find a pulse and failed. He heard the wind in the riggings in the marina, whistling and rippling, and the creaking heave of the pontoon bridges. He looked around and saw nobody, nothing that moved. Across the city, on the junction of Nowe Ogrody and Third Maja, was the police headquarters of Gdansk. Locke had seen the building that morning, tall, austere, formidable. He had also seen that behind the police headquarters was the city's gaol, bleak, dirty and secure with razor-wire topping the walls. He had killed a man, had murdered him with his own hands. If he cried in the night for an ambulance, for help, he would be taken to the police cells, then to a court, and then to those prison cells whose small barred windows he had seen. He stood.
His father had taken him out once from the house and into the right near corner of the five-acre field and had shot a dog that could no longer work. His father had said it was good for the ten-year-old's character to watch life and death. Together, father and child had dug a grave for the dog. Father had told him to put the animal into the bottom of the pit, but the child could not touch it. His father, with his boot, had pushed the dog in. The child had run, streaming tears, back to the farmhouse, leaving his father to fill the pit. He had often walked close to that corner of the five-acre field, where only nettles grew, had thought of the dog and put primroses there in spring. He had gone there the day he had left home while his mother called for him that his father was in the car and waiting for him.
With the end of his shoe, Locke prodded Raincoat Man past the bollard and over the edge of the quay. There was a sluggish splash, then the marina's debris and the oily water closed on the body. He took the sheet of photographs from the attaché case, closed the car door and went back to the hotel.
In his bathroom, bent over the pan, Gabriel Locke was sick, sick again, and again. Each time he flushed it he vomited another time. When his stomach had no more to throw up he tore the photographs to small pieces, waited for the water to fill the cistern, dropped them into the pan and flushed it finally.
He knew what he had done, not why. He lay on the floor, dressed, curled up like a baby.
Alice was at the memorial. They had been there together on a summer's morning, the sun rising away to the west and breaking the mist. Behind them the taxi engine was purring, the clock still running. It was where they had been together the last time they had met, after they had made love and before he had gone back to the hotel where the delegation was lodged. He had understood her camera, had set the delay action, propped it on the plinth of the monument, run back to her and put his arm around her, his hand against her hip. She had dropped her head against his shoulder, and they had laughed and heard the shutter's click. He had pointed towards the sun, where it broke the mist, and had said that that was where he would be—Kaliningrad.
'You don't have to go,' Alice had said.
He'd kissed her, then smiled rakishly. 'But I'm not finished. I have work to do. There is no danger, I am very clever. I will come over, when it is the right time, when…'
He'd run. The taxi had driven away. She'd taken the first bus of the day back to the hotel, and as she had packed her bag before joining Rupert for breakfast she had found a little gift-wrapped package, had torn it apart, and found the pendant of amber stone and its gold chain.
It was dark still. Then it had been light. Now the summer was gone and the autumn was settling. Another taxi waited for her and there was the glow of the interior light as the driver read a magazine. She only heard the wind in the tall trees and the beat of the sea on the beach below the promontory. Alice had asked them to wear a talisman for her, and she had shown the men her photograph so that they would better recognize him at the zoo. Billy, the team leader among them, would have seen a trickle of emotion on her mouth and the flash of wetnes
s in her eyes. He'd spoken for all of them when the meeting had broken, when she'd marked the quiz and given Ham the prize, out of petty cash, fifty zlotys, spoken quietly. 'You don't want to lose your beauty sleep, ma'am. We'll bring him out.'
... Chapter Nine
Q. In a security emergency, where in the Russian Federation would units of naval infantry patrol a land border?
A. Kaliningrad.
The plan, as dictated by Rupert Mowbray, was simple, straightforward to the point of banality.
Jerry the Pole led the team past Braniewo until they turned off at the farm gateway and parked up to leg it cross-country. He had the papers to go through the frontier post in his old Mercedes. The team would go through the fence where they had holed it, then move on foot to the barn outside the village of Lipovka, by the Vituska river, where Jerry the Pole would pick up three of them, drive for the city of Kaliningrad, the zoo, and the rendezvous point at the hippopotamus pen. The Mercedes, with Ferret aboard, would drive back to the barn .ad Ferret would be taken over the fields into the forest line, and through the fence, while Jerry the Pole negotiated the frontier post. A simple plan, Rupert Mowbray maintained, was always the best plan.
Locke hadn't slept, had risen at dawn plagued by the notion that what was done could not be undone. He had met Alice at breakfast, they had driven to Braniewo—now they walked the streets.
'So, what the hell's the problem?' Alice was at his shoulder and gripped his coat sleeve. He shook her off. 'If there's a problem, it's better talked through.'
Ahead was the open street-market, the stalls laid out with vegetables and cheap clothes. Among them were older men and their women, and housewives with small children, peering at the produce, tugging at the clothes and looking wistfully at the price tags. Past the open street-market was the concrete block, graffiti-scrawled, of the public lavatories.
'For God's sake, Gabriel, it's the big day—what's the bloody problem?'
When he had risen, and gone out of the hotel—while Alice was at breakfast—he had seen the local men, who hadn't work to go to, sitting, smoking, on the benches overlooking the marina. Others had promenaded past the yachts and launches, had gone by the pontoon bridge to the piers. One had stood close to the bollard, unwrapped a sticky sweet and dropped the paper beside it. Cars hemmed in the Fiat saloon. Everything was as he had remembered it in the night. The man chewing his sweet, cracking it in his teeth, would not have seen the slight blood smear on the bollard, level with his knee, but it was there. Locke had moved on past the benches and had gone near to the car; the men lounging nearby would not have seen that the Fiat was unlocked, the button on the door clearly in the 'up' position, and the open briefcase lying between the kids' seats. He had edged towards the pontoon and the water lapping it. The leg floated under the pontoon's planks among plastic bags, drifting cans and wood spars—Locke had seen it. The sodden dark trouser turn-up, the grey sock and the laced black shoe. He had seen them, then hurried away.
'You want out, don't you?' Alice accused. 'You think this is all beneath you?'
Beyond the lavatory building, above the flapping canvas stall roofs, was the high spire of the church. Two young men—shaven heads, T-shirts, genuine leather jackets—were emptying the boot of a shining Audi 6-series of cartons of American cigarettes and stacking them on a stall.
'It's in your mind that he's a traitor…'
He snapped, 'Do me a favour, Alice, don't presume to know what's in my mind.'
'Obvious to a blind deaf mute—he's a traitor, he's not worth bothering with. You have a big, big attitude problem. You know that? How did you get through IONEC? They're supposed to weed out the misfits. A traitor. A hundred years ago, army officers wouldn't touch agent intelligence unless they'd gloves on—"Mustn't get our lily-white hands dirty, must we?" When he first walked in there were idiots at VBX who couldn't believe he was genuine, wanted him to do a polygraph. Rupert gave them a good kicking. Our Service is nothing—got me? nothing—without agents. Viktor—'
Locke spun, faced her. 'Oh, thank you. Viktor—I've never been trusted with his name.'
For a moment he'd stopped her. She gagged. 'Ferret…Ferret has more bravery, more than you'll ever know, more in his fingernail than in your whole bloody body.'
His face was set, cold. 'If you say so, Alice.'
Alice softened. 'Sorry—tell me about the problem.'
Locke said grimly, 'Did I say there was a problem? Did I? Fine, you want a problem. Try this. We are asked to take risks. People get hurt when risks are taken. We are sanctioned to hurt people—for a flawed bloody daydream, a lunatic policy. We play as if we are above the law, like morality doesn't count for us. We—'
'Not we, Gabriel. We are here, not in Kaliningrad. The people who are trained for it, they're going to Kaliningrad. We're cosseted here leaving the sharp end to people who know what they're doing. Get real.'
He could not tell her. He wondered how long it would be before the body was fished from the marina.
It was like the time between life and death, or the hours when darkness turned to light.
Viktor did not know about religion, and few of his fellow officers were churchgoers because that was still a hindrance to career advancement, but his mother had turned to the Orthodox faith after his father's death. His mother had said that death was not darkness.
Time had to be spent, exhausted, used up. He had barely looked round the room that might be contaminated by the presence of a radio microphone or a fisheye lens. He must struggle, for the remaining hours, to follow a routine of total predictability. The first decision: whether to run on the beach. He had not. He had dressed in his best, as he would on any day that he went to work in the admiral's outer office, and he had taken breakfast in the senior officers' mess. He had left the cache of papers behind the tile in the shower unit. When he was gone, and his flight was confirmed, that night or the next morning, his quarters would be taken apart with crowbars and sledgehammers. By then his new life would have begun. Viktor would have liked to take the picture of Malbork Castle down from the wall and put it into his briefcase, but it was left, as was everything else. Before he had locked the door behind him, he had looked a last time around the room. He had eaten sparingly, because that was his way, and an officer from Personnel—a decent man—had come to his table to talk leave charts; another, from Armaments, had come to mutter of a difficulty with munitions' shelf life. He had dealt with them the way he always did, curtly but not unpleasantly. The route between life and death was the zoo in Kaliningrad. He'd felt a strange peace as he'd sipped coffee and eaten a roll.
He walked from the senior officers' mess across the parade ground. In front of him were the low dormitories of the conscripts and beyond was the complex of the fleet commander where he would spend those hours.
Viktor Archenko had been seventeen years old when his father had died at Totskoye. Outside that town, 225 kilometres west of Orenburg, hidden from outsiders by a forest, guarded by fences and patrols, was a closed community of the airforce. His father, Pyotr, was a major, a test pilot. The base was dedicated to the preparation of air-launched nuclear weapons. His father's illness had come quickly. As the leukaemia had gripped him, as plans were made for his retirement from the airforce, Viktor had watched, in his own unspoken agony, the deterioration. A month before the family were due to move out of the base, already avoided by the neighbouring families living beside them, his father had died. At the funeral, an airforce general had suggested that the young Viktor, with his athleticism and parentage, would easily find a berth as a pilot when he left high school. There was in him—well hidden a streak of rebellion. He had seen the way his father's colleagues shunned him in illness, and he had volunteered for the navy. Fourteen years later, when the same leukaemia had taken his mother—when he had learned on her deathbed of his grandmother—he had been told also the cause of the disease that had taken his father's life. A test pilot had been ordered up in a veteran MiG-17 fighter that was loaded with measu
ring instrumentation. He was Major Pyotr Archenko, and he had told his wife of his fear. The fighter aircraft was aged, at the end of its working life, as was the pilot. His father had said that the order could not be refused, or the charge at a court martial would be that of treason. A nuclear device was exploded, on stilts and a few metres above ground level. A test pilot was instructed to fly through the spreading mushroom cloud. The generals had cowered in the safety of radiation-proof bunkers. His father had flown through the pitching storm of the explosion. The instrumentation's information had been downloaded, the test pilot had been checked over by doctors cocooned in radiation-protective suits.
Viktor had heard the story, and the story of his grandmother. He had taken the first opportunity. An earlier chance, five weeks before, had been a visit of Archangel convoy veterans from Great Britain who had come to the city to celebrate the bringing of war munitions to the Soviet Union, but he had not been able to get close to them. The first opportunity had been the arrival of a Hull-based trawler to Murmansk. It was in memory of his father and his grandmother, and the hate had burned in him, with the demand for revenge.
He walked briskly, the way he always walked. His name was called, softly and with respect. Workmen were on the top of the second-nearest dormitory building where they were replacing a section of metal roofing, through which machine-gun bullets, 12.7mm calibre, had been fired. He turned, and saw the conscript, Vasiliev.
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