If they'd had the strength, if their ribcages had not been so prominent and the muscles on their hind legs so withered, the five deer in the pen could have leaped out because the wire enclosing them had collapsed. They grazed on mud, not a blade of grass available to them, and they sniffed at old sandwiches and orange peel thrown for them. The television showed antelope and gazelle feeding on the African plains, and Viktor liked those programmes, but these deer were unrecognizable. There was a bear in a concrete pit, pacing as if demented, and the children gathered above it and shouted for its attention.
He crossed a canal of stagnant filth, walked over the footbridge, the children tripping and dancing in front of him. He saw the cause of their excitement. Near to the side fence of the zoo park, was another concrete bunker. The old sign said it was the home of the hippopotamus. But the teacher dashed the enthusiasm.
'No, children, I am sorry. There are two hyenas from Africa that we are going to see. There are no elephant and no rhinoceros, and no hippopotamus—soon they will be here, but they have not arrived. Listen to me, children. Before the great Patriotic War the zoo was filled with animals, but most were killed and eaten by the German Fascists then living in Kaliningrad before the city was conquered by the Red Army of heroes. Only four animals survived the war—one deer, one fox, one badger and one hippopotamus. When the zoo was taken, our soldiers found the hippopotamus and loved it and tried to save it. It would not eat. It was dying, it had been traumatized by the fighting and by neglect. After many days, as it starved, and the soldiers despaired, the decision was taken to try vodka…yes, vodka…for two weeks, four times a day, the hippopotamus was given vodka, and it is remarkable but the hippopotamus regained its health. Until it died, it was the best-loved animal in the zoo, and the symbol of the zoo is that great creature. It is promised that soon there will be another here. Now, come on, keep together, and we will find the hyenas.'
He could no longer hear her. She led the children away. He looked again at his watch. Four o'clock and two minutes. He had to stop. It would be hard to be natural. If he had had a cigarette to smoke it would have been easier, but he had no cigarettes, and no guidebook to look at. He saw the man on the far side of the hippopotamus pit, and caught his eye. The man stared back at him. He turned, breaking the rule of dry-cleaning, and there were two more men who stood and watched him, not caring that he had identified them. Far at the back, his hair receding and the wind lifting the wisps of it, was Piatkin. They were all around him, within three or four seconds' running of him.
He could only wait: it was where he had been told by Alice that he should be. A stocky man, with a little stomach paunch disguised under artisan's overalls, came into his eyeline, and carried with him two rilled plastic bags, as if he had been to do shopping. The man was on course to collide with Viktor or to brush against him. The man's head seemed to bob down and for the briefest moment it rested on his collar-bone, and Viktor saw that his lips moved.
'Delta One from Delta Two. Going in for the brush on Target One. I confirm there are bandits. Stand by, stand by. Delta Two out.'
Billy Smith knew that brush contacts were the hardest, were to be avoided like the plague. In a brush, a message was passed, verbal, or a scrap of paper was palmed. It was bloody difficult. His hand rested on the pistol butt between his legs. The man came on, sauntered towards Viktor.
Viktor looked away from him. He looked to the right, for the contact's approach, and then to the left. It was bad tradecraft but he could not help himself. Where were they? Why did they not come? Around him were the watchers. The man who looked like an artisan came closer, slow and relaxed, and Viktor thought he had taken time from work to shop and now took a shortcut across the zoo park to go back to whatever he did—builder, plumber, engineer, fitter—and Viktor could not see the contact and it was now four minutes after |
Four o'clock. He felt the beat of his heart. He could not see the contact, only the watchers who were twenty, thirty metres from him. He was not trained in counter-surveillance, nor in evasion. Those were not the arts of a chief of staff to a fleet commander. The man, the artisan, came past him, close. He heard the words, at first hardly registered them, in Russian.
'I'm from Alice. Follow me in ten. Go where I go.'
Viktor rocked. The man was past him and walked away, whistled a tune to himself and had no care. His Russian had been flawless, but in the idiom of a classroom, and the accent foreign. He began to count. One and two and three…what should he think of as he counted? Four and five and six. He thought of the sun sinking on the city and its bright warmth flooding his face, and the early sun of the dawn the last time he had been with Alice. Seven and eight and nine. He thought of where the sun never reached, at dawn or dusk or in the middle of the day, and his mind had a picture of a prison yard with a heavy mesh grille over it, and the handcuffs cutting his wrists and the men who held his arms on the walk from the barred door to the yard's centre, where the drain was, and ahead of him, already uncoiled and ready, was the water-pipe leading from the tap. Ten. His legs were knocked from under him, and he knelt. The man was walking away from him, and the speed of his stride quickened.
Viktor followed. He had to kick his feet forward to move. There were no children now to watch, no teacher to listen to. He had spotted the watchers ahead of him, and when he went to the right of the bear pit and could see the demented beast pacing the concrete and scratching at its own shit, another watcher was on the far side of it. They hemmed him in. Another was separated from him by the pen for Arctic foxes. And they would be behind him, tracking him, and at the back—he did not need to turn for the evidence of it—would be Piatkin with his radio. Even with the weight of his legs slowing him, and the shudder of his heart's pulse, he wanted to break and run, to chase the man in front of him. That was what they wanted. Then they would close on him. When Viktor stopped, the watchers on either side of him stopped. He started off again, and they did. He veered away from the direct route, the way the lone man in front of him had gone, and went to the left of a solitary caged elk that had a broken horn. It was a choreographed dance, the steps coordinated. He could not break the tempo of it.
His eyes misted with tears. The back of the man ahead was blurred. He could see four watchers, beside and in front, as they moved in the dance towards the perimeter fence around the zoo's park, but there could have been ten, or fifty, or an army. They trapped him. Viktor walked in an avenue of overgrown, rubbish strewn flower-beds, with the watchers. The fence was in front of the man. It was hard for Viktor to see clearly. At the fence, behind a clump of birch trees, off the path, the man hesitated, stopped but did not look back. Viktor stopped. They all watched him, faced him. Viktor realized the skill of the man who had made the contact; they had not seen him, had not noticed him. Viktor blinked to clear the wet from his eyes. The man ducked down, and was gone.
Viktor saw the hole in the fence, half masked by the trunks of the birches.
Through the hole was freedom. The point of escape, little more than a hundred metres ahead, beckoned him. He could hear the rumble of traffic behind the hole and the trees, and he saw the upper part of a lorry's cab speed past. He forced himself to step out, punching his feet forward. The pace of the watchers quickened. He started to trot, and they matched him. He sucked the air down into his lungs a few more seconds, a few more metres, and the hole gaped wider. He went faster, a longer stride than when he was on the beach. The watchers ahead, as if marionettes and controlled, as if they had long rehearsed the steps, turned, faced him, and the two watchers on either side of him each cut across the mud and weeds of the flowerbeds and a line of them formed and blocked the way to the birch trees and the hole in the fence. Viktor slowed, the sprint to the jog, the jog to the walk. He was a few short metres from them. They gazed back at him; no mercy in their eyes. He heard the clatter of heavy feet behind him.
Viktor looked through the trees, and through the hole gaping in the fence. An old Mercedes was parked against the far kerb.
He was blocked.
The watchers stood in his path. The fists of one were clenched in black-leather gloves. The hands of another were buried menacingly in the coat pockets as if they concealed a weapon. One held a Makharov pistol close against his body, poised to raise it and aim. Viktor had no hidden weapon, no protection.
The back door of the Mercedes was held open. The man who had brushed against him, whispered the message, who had given him Alice's name, was framed in the door. Another man was in the back, hardly visible. Two more were in the front. He could see, through the trees and the fence, across the road and into the open door, that the man who had brushed him now jerked his head. Come…come…for fuck's sake, come. They waited for him. In a moment, Viktor knew it, if he gazed any longer at the open door of the car he could not reach, one of the watchers would turn to follow his sight line. So slowly, imperceptibly, Viktor shook his head.
He turned on his heel. He heard behind him a door slam and a car drive away at speed. He walked briskly back towards the hippopotamus pen, the caged elk, the bear's pit and the concrete den of the Arctic foxes. He dropped his entry ticket into an overfilled rubbish bin, went out through the gates, and unlocked his car.
Viktor would be back in Fleet Headquarters in an hour, back with his telephone and the filled in-tray. The next day or the day after, he thought he would be arrested.
He had cried for help…been heard. They had come. It had failed. He sat in his car and his head rested on his arms. The wheel took the weight of them, and Captain, second rank, Viktor Archenko wept. It had been the one chance and the last chance.
As he lurched in the speeding car, Billy sent the message on the communications gear half out of the glove box in front of him: FERRET ABORTED. 'Don't know whether it'll get through,' Billy said. 'Not with us being down here and all the crap around us. You saw his face? Fucking haunted, poor bastard, poor wretched…'
Ham mimicked the grate of Billy Smith's East London accent. '"You don't want to lose your beauty sleep, ma'am. We'll bring him out." Oh, yes.'
Eyes never off the road, taking the turns called by Jerry the Pole, Lofty said, 'Not our fault—we did what we could.'
'But it wasn't good enough,' Billy said, and the bitterness rang through the car.
... Chapter Ten
Q. Where, between 1709 and 1711, did plague claim more than a quarter of a million lives?
A. Kaliningrad.
Three times Locke had said, with anger in his voice, that they must have fouled up, and that was why the communications had stayed silent, and three times Alice had stubbornly answered him: 'They could have been in a dead hole when they lifted him, and then they're on the road and too busy, and then it's cross-country and they've more to think about.'
Hope died for Alice, and confirmation came for Locke, when the headlights of the old Mercedes picked them out beside the road. They were two miles back from the border, and a mile and a half short of Braniewo. The lights caught them, blinded them, and Alice snapped out of their car and ran to the Mercedes. Locke had the engine running and the rear lights threw a dulled reddened glow on to the windscreen of the Mercedes when it pulled up behind them. He saw Alice at the driver's window and he saw the explanation from Jerry the Pole—and a helpless shrug. She didn't come back to the car where he sat but paced around him in a circle. Her head was I down as she walked at the edge of the darkness. He wasn't going to beg, wasn't going to call across to her: 'Excuse me, if it's not inconvenient, would you mind telling me exactly what has happened?' He didn't have to be told, because Jerry the Pole's shrug was enough to educate an imbecile. It was what Gabriel Locke could have told them a week before, and had done, and had not been listened to: 'There's nothing to be done. I'd call it a pragmatic approach, the real world against a bygone age of sentiment and emotion…' He'd said it. He could hear his own words. He remembered the calm appraisal of the Hereford major. They should have listened. If they hurried, stamped on the accelerator they could be back in Gdansk by mid-evening, across the German border by the small hours and into London by mid-morning. They came out of the ditch.
He counted. From their body shapes, and the slight light available, he counted the four of them. They were peeling off their overalls, the ditchwater running off them. Locke left his car. He had the right to be told, but would not beg. He looked into Billy's face, but the man turned away and worked at pulling the leggings of the overalls down his thighs and shins. Locke went to Ham. He remembered the man in his cell, his arrogance and his Russian: 'Yes, I'll do that. No problem, I'll go to Kaliningrad.'
Ham said, 'We did what we could, and what we were asked to do. It was slick, it might have worked. What happened? OK, I'll tell you. He came into the zoo and we were in place with enough time to do a good recce. We'd spotted this place where there was a gap in the fence and then a drop down on to a fastish main drag. We were there and could have made it away quick. We saw him, he was on time, there on the dot. That zoo is a dump. You'd have to be sad to want to go there. Maybe there are too many sad people in Kaliningrad, but not too many of them were in the zoo. Apart from a few kids it was near empty…I saw him, doing what he was told to do, and I saw the tail. You said he would be under "close surveillance", but that didn't tell the half of it. Before I went close for the brush approach, I reckoned there were six of them, with a back marker doing the radio control, and there were more men behind the back marker, but standing off. The ones standing off, I thought they were the head honchos, the big guys—you get to sniff them—especially one of them. Anyway, they moved in a box, classic stuff, except that they didn't seem to make any effort not to show out. It was like intimidation. Like they wanted to be seen, and wanted to pressure him. OK, so that's a tactic—build on him, break him. Any way he looked he would have seen the box. But it wasn't clever. The eyes were on him, not on me…I did a really good brush. I went past him, eleven words—that's a touch under four seconds of speech—and I told him what to do. We never had eye-contact, and I was moving all the time. I did it well, and I know that because the box didn't pick me up. I have to say, with that box round him, I'd have been justified in quitting before I brushed him. He was in uniform but with a coat covering his tunic, all smart, like he'd just left the office or wherever, just as he should have been, not carrying anything. I didn't see him again, not till I was at the car. I couldn't turn and watch him, not with the box around him. I should have been picked up, but I wasn't, and that was sloppy of them. They only had eyes for him. I went down through this hole, got across the road and to the car. We were all ready to go. From the car, door open, I saw him. He'd have had to fight through those bastards, and at least one had a weapon. We weren't shouting, of course not, we were willing him—for fuck's sake, go for it. All of us were. If he had, if he'd broken through, got across the road, if Billy had fired over them and kept their heads down for the necessary seconds, he'd have been in the back of the car, and Lofty would have been doing the business, and we'd have had not a hope in hell, not a snowball, of getting through. He looked, just a moment, at us, and then he turned away. It was sensible and realistic, and it saved us from some real shit. He walked off like we weren't there, like the tail wasn't. That's what happened.'
Locke said, 'It was futile, a waste of everybody's time. Let's get out of here.'
What surprised Gabriel Locke, they didn't hurry themselves. Billy was still bowed and shook the ditchwater out of his boots, and Lofty held tight to Alice. Ham rolled a cigarette and lit it. Wickso produced a metal thermos flask and poured coffee or tea from it into its cap and passed it round, but Locke wasn't offered any.
'Are we going to stay here all night?' Locke demanded. 'It fucked up as it was always going to. What do you want—a tent? Are you intending to bivouac here for the night? I said, let's go.'
But they waited until Billy had dried out his boots, Ham's cigarette was smoked, and Wickso's thermos was finished. Then they were ready. Lofty had his arm round Alice and they went in a tight group towards the old Merc
edes. Billy took the front seat and the rest of them squashed into the back, with Alice perched on Lofty's lap.
Before he closed the door, Ham said, 'Mr Locke, one last thing. We came out clean because of him. He had the guts to walk away from us. If you'd seen his face, you wouldn't be talking like such a fucking prat.'
The door slammed.
Locke drove after them, alone, and Ham's venom played in his ears.
The cell had been warm and the mattress in it had been comfortable. If the woman had stood up in court, and he'd gone down, Ham Protheroe could have survived a year banged up in gaol. Not liked it, but survived it. She wouldn't have gone to court. She'd have cracked, pulled out, looked to keep her dignity intact. For fourteen years no one had ever come to him, asked something of him, wanted his help.
Not his parents in the Cheshire suburb after he'd 'borrowed' from them. The photographs of him, they'd promised, were out of the frames, shredded and bin-dumped—and he was out of their wills. And he was out of the 'Royals' and out of the Squadron. Russian linguist and communications expert, Ham was thirty-nine years old, and a little boy lost—an evacuee kid on a train going nowhere, but with the label identifying him torn off. There was no love in his life. When the body had been lifted from the water, when the bleak-faced bastards of the local Crime Squad had interrogated him, he had lied and had not broken, but when he had gone out of the interview room they had not hidden their contempt for him. For twelve years, without a family, he had lived off lies.
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