Why was he there?
Locke—the 'fucking prat'—had taken him out of the police station and given him back his family. It was like he was again in the snow and on the ice, or in the canoe, in the wastes and fjords of northern Norway—and like he was back on the exercises when they climbed the steel ladders of the oil rigs while the North Sea pounded below, and like he was back on the yomp treks on Exmoor and across the Brecons, like he was back with his pride. It was, for Ham, a purging, a cleansing, of the stench of that contempt. He had walked the Damascus road. He had allowed himself to be recruited to get the smell of it from his nose.
Locke parked by the marina, not in the lit yard available to the Excelsior Hotel's guests.
The Fiat was still there. A couple kissed on a bench near to it. Locke walked past the car, past the couple, and towards the pontoon bridge—against common sense and tradecraft's rules. He should not have gone near the car, should not have approached the bridge that led to the moorings. He looked down. There were low lights on the pontoon and on the piers, but brighter light from the high floodlit buildings of the old city on the far side of the river was thrown across the marina, and more light came from the cafés and restaurants. The reflection of the light helped him, and he knew where to look.
He could not see the trousered leg, or a flash of white skin that would have shown between the trouser turn-up and the sock, but he could see the shoe. It was between a bag of white plastic and a floating container that had held lubricating oil before being thrown overboard. All day the shoe had been there and had not been noticed. If he had walked out on to the pontoon bridge, stepped along the spaced planks, he might have peered down because he knew where to look and, through a gap in the planks, he might have seen the eyes of the man he had murdered.
Locke drove his car into the hotel's yard. He collected his key at Reception and was asked whether he would be dining in that night. He declined a table, and went to his room. For a full minute he leaned against the closed door, then went to the bathroom and sluiced his face with cold water. While it ran and splashed on his skin, he saw the shoe move in gentle motion beside the pontoon.
He drove to the meeting, and would be late.
'Ah, the estimable Mr Locke…we were almost starting to worry about you. It's never a good meeting without its conscience present. I'll recap in a moment, for your benefit, so's you're not in the dark. Please excuse me.' The smile, Locke thought, on Mowbray's face had the chill of a January storm blowing off the cliffs on to his father's farm. The team were packed into the cabin. A cat could not have been swung there. A map was spread over the bed and they were sitting, kneeling, squatting round it; Alice was beside the porthole window with her notebook. Mowbray had taken centre stage, and Jerry the Pole guarded the door in the narrow corridor, stood flush against it, but was the outsider, not on the inside. Jerry the Pole had to knock twice before it had been opened to Locke.
'We're all here, Gabriel, bar the master, who was present for the first half-hour of our meeting but has now left to prepare for sailing. It's been a good, productive meeting, but would, I'm sure, have been all the better for your usual valuable contributions. Again, excuse me. So, that's it, gentlemen. I've told London it can work. I never travel with only a single option in my backpack. I have always believed in the inevitability of the unexpected. Proof against the unexpected is a second option. I've told London that it can work if we have reasonable good fortune—which is a fair evaluation, wouldn't you say? But, and it is a huge but, it is not I who will be fulfilling this second option, it is you, gentlemen. Twenty years ago I would probably have been with you. I won't be there, you will. I've lost track of the days, happens with age, but however many days back it was, at that revolting place in Surrey, I said to you all and say again now, "If any of you wish to leave, now would be the correct moment." Are there any changes of heart?'
In the silence, Locke heard a slight scratching outside the cabin door, then a soft thud, then a dog's yelp, and the silence came again. Alice never looked up from her notepad. Billy's fingers still scratched the hair on his neck thoughtfully, and Lofty used a toothpick aimlessly in his mouth while gazing at Alice. Locke looked at the floor. He would speak when the room was cleared, not in front of them all when he would be ridiculed. He saw his scuffed right shoe where he had tripped as he had come on to the Princess Rose, taking the step down from the gangplank. When he looked up and his eyes roved over them, he was drawn to Ham's quiet, incessant tapping with his finger on the map. It was the map he had seen at Poole, the admiralty chart, number 2278, covering the navigational approach to Baltiysk where the Baltic Fleet was based. He saw the flecks of grey in Billy's hair, and Ham's little paunch, and wondered why none of them spoke up.
Mowbray's voice boomed into the void. 'All on board? Thank you, gentlemen. What the great man said: "I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips, straining upon the start. The game's afoot." Well done.'
'I don't think we know that one, Mr Mowbray,' Wickso said.
'Henry the Fifth, Act Three, Scene One.'
They filed out. Ham held a slip of paper and seemed to read it. His lips moved and Locke caught the murmured words, Russian.
Alice lingered, her fingers loose on the pendant at her throat; Locke hadn't looked to see whether the men still wore their gifts. Her face was set, her lips tight, narrow, and a frown cut her forehead, like she carried a burden. Of course she had been upset when it had gone down, when Lofty had held her. It was as though she knew Gabriel Locke was spoiling for the fight. Mowbray glanced at her: he nodded momentarily and his finger pointed to the door. Their eyes met, Mowbray's and Alice's, like they held a mutual secret, and Mowbray smiled at her, as if he had no concerns and neither should she. As she went by him her hand brushed the tweed of his jacket. Locke was on the outside, as cut off as Jerry the Pole, who guarded the door from the corridor. He'd bloody well change that.
They were alone.
Mowbray said, 'A great shame you couldn't make the meeting, Gabriel. Anyway—'
'I think we've exhausted the sarcasm.'
'Anyway, where we are is…from the top. The Princess Rose sails tonight, but makes slow progress. Shortly after the pilot leaves us—that is the crew, myself and our Dogs of War—when we are off Russian territorial waters, we will again suffer recurring engine trouble. The weather forecast is a blessing, a most welcome bonus. We will drift on a roughening south-westerly towards Kaliningrad. Tomorrow evening, as soon as we have darkness, the Dogs will go ashore by inflatable dinghy, with a landfall on the Baltiskaya Kosa. As members—I correct myself—former members of an elite force they have been trained for this. They will meet Ferret, and will—with him—return to the inflatable and ferry him back to the Princess Rose. Our engine trouble will miraculously disappear—and we head off into the great blue yonder, like we're a porpoise with a killer whale up our tail. You, with Alice, will—'
'That's insane,' Locke spat. 'Utter madness.'
'If you had been here, Gabriel, instead of being wherever you were, you would have heard the Dogs' evaluation of acceptable risk. They're on board.'
'Because they're losers. Look at them.' Locke's voice rose, bounced off the cabin walls. 'You should be ashamed—you've manipulated them, you old fool. They're no-hopers. You've lied to London.'
'An "old fool" perhaps, Gabriel, but a bare-knuckle fighter for all that. The lesson of street-corner fighting, as I've learned it, is always get the retaliation in first. You understand me, Gabriel? London's with me. Want to find that out for yourself? Give Bertie Ponsford a call. Secure communications here. Try Peter Giles. Don't like the sound of that? Give the Director General a ring, have him pick up his blue phone. Got a job in the City lined up, have you? I wouldn't ring, if I were you, Ponsford or Giles or the DG, if I hadn't alternative employment arranged. They're so excited, all of them. Just marking your card, Gabriel, and meant kindly.'
'What I think—'
'Do I need to know what you think? You, barely
off the training course…'
'I think you have deceived London.'
'They are adults, used to making up their own minds. Do you actually believe they will welcome doom and gloom from you, been nowhere and done nothing? Your choice—try it.' Mowbray waved expansively to the communications box that was wired to a laptop on the table across the cabin from the bed.
He could not. He was beaten, boxed as tight as Codename Ferret had been in the zoo park that afternoon. He could make a report, but afterwards. With the operation sanctioned, he could not take a negative tack. Mowbray beamed at him, as if recognizing victory.
Locke blistered him. 'You're on the shelf. You've wheedled your way back in, but at a cost. You're living off your ego glands—vanity's your food. You're too conceited to admit the failure of your preposterous plan, so you dig a deeper hole and will drag others down with you. All the bullshit you've peddled will spatter in the fan…'
'You disappoint me, Gabriel.'
'I want out. Damn you, don't you listen? Out.' But his head hung. He was beaten, could not tell his part of the story. 'And he's a traitor,' Locke finished sullenly. 'He's not worth it.'
For a moment Locke thought he was about to be struck. Mowbray's fist clenched, then caught at the material of his trousers. The voice was quiet, conversational. 'When you get back, Gabriel, to London, I would like you to ask your line manager for permission to take a day in Library. Read about Popov and Penkovsky, read about the agents betrayed by Blake, Ames and Hanssen, read about the men whose names had crossed Philby's desk before they were parachuted into Estonia or Lithuania or Latvia, or sent by fast boat to Albania. Read about the deaths of brave men who were beyond reach. Will you do that, Gabriel?'
He was surly: 'That was decades ago.'
'Always know your history, Gabriel, it's what I teach my students. Without the clothing of history on your back then you will walk naked. Now, where were we? Yes, you with Alice, and Jerry the Pole to drive you, will go up the Mierzeja Wislana, the Polish end of the sand spit—before it becomes the Baltiskaya Kosa—right up to the border, and that's where you will get the best communications from the Dogs when they're ashore. You'll be my half-way house, my relay point. You up for that, Gabriel?'
Locke nodded grimly.
'Why don't we have a drink, eh? A good, stiff Scotch, yes?'
Locke said, 'If this goes foul, which it will, I give you fair notice that I will report on every aspect of this piece of lunacy. Any reputation, under the Old Farts Act, which you may now enjoy will be in tatters. I will do what I have to, but I promise you I will not take a single step forward, not even half a step shuffle, beyond what is required of me…and I'll see you rot.'
'Don't tell Alice that, there's a good fellow. Scotch straight or with bottled water?'
Locke left him.
A policeman, given its description and its registration number, found the car. He circled the Fiat warily. He could see the briefcase in the back, between the children's seats, and the flap of it hanging open. He noted that the driver's door was unlocked. He called in, radioed his news. The radio waves were flooded. The consulate in Gdansk called the embassy in Warsaw. The resident at the embassy called the Lubyanka. The necessary officials at the Lubyanka, now alerted, called the consulate in Gdansk and demanded an immediate response: What had been found in the car? Were there indications of where the official had been? A further flurry on the radio waves between the consul and the Lubyanka: Was the briefcase empty? Was the car close to the Excelsior Hotel? The briefcase, as collected by the consul from the Gdansk police headquarters on Nowe Ogrody where the lights burned late, was empty except for the missing man's personal organizer—the car was parked two hundred metres from that hotel. The Lubyanka forbade, in the strongest and most direct language to the consul, that any reference to the man's employment in the ranks of the Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti should be made to the local police. An unaccounted-for sheet of photographs of Britons working for the Secret Intelligence Service vexed the Lubyanka's section. More radio messages, coded or scrambled, passed.
Yuri Bikov was informed at the room in the Kaliningrad complex of the FSB where he worked late…and Vladdy Piatkin was woken from his bed: 'If we send our own people,' Piatkin was told, 'we admit our work in counterintelligence activities in Gdansk. In the climate of relations with Poland that is unacceptable.' It would be well after midnight that Piatkin called back with a solution to the delicacy of the problem, and the radio traffic could slow.
There were three policemen now guarding the car while two detectives painstakingly examined it. One of the policemen, bored and cold, reached into his pocket for his cigarette packet. He took out the last cigarette, lit it, saw that he was not watched and threw the empty packet over the quay edge. He dragged on his cigarette and the smoke was carried off by the wind. He shivered and stamped. When he had finished the cigarette and it was down to the filter, he flicked what remained of it into the water. He could still see his packet floating away…and then it snagged close to the pontoon. If he had not thrown away the packet after taking from it his last cigarette, the policeman would not have seen the shoe.
The brigadier, intoxicated from the many drinks thrust into his hand, was the star of the Ministry of Defence party thrown in an annexe of the Moscow building. Only favoured foreigners were invited, those who would be impressed that the power of the Russian military reached far enough to pluck a favoured officer from certain death. Again and again, the brigadier told his story to a select few who had been ushered into the inner room off the outer salon. He did not, of course, name the young lieutenant colonel who had saved his life but spoke of him with an almost childlike gratitude.
'And, what is worse, I never had a proper chance to thank him. We met at the helicopter pad after I had been released, after he had come down from the high ground above the Argun gorge, and we immediately took off. It was impossible to speak in the helicopter, with the noise. We landed. I thought then I would have the chance to talk with him, to learn more about him. He has the reputation of being the finest interrogator in the whole of FSB, and so young and calm. We landed at Grozny, and an airforce jet was waiting for him. He was gone—another assignment. A matter of national importance. The general told me what he said to the interrogator, my saviour, "I would almost feel sorry for the next wretch that faces you." He is unique, formidable, and because he already targets another "wretch", I could not thank him. He is remarkable.'
Among those taken into the inner room was an artillery colonel from the Ukrainian embassy. In the outer salon, as the hospitality flowed, the Ukrainian colonel repeated the story to a Belarus major, who in turn passed it verbatim to a Swedish military attaché, who happened to have a lunch appointment the next day, a long-term commitment in his diary, with the British attaché.
Good stories were rare in Moscow, and were always passed on as barter to lighten the boredom of the posting to the Russian capital. The story of the interrogator's achievement was launched.
Bikov worked in his room at the FSB headquarters. He prepared himself. Papers from Moscow and local files were strewn across his desk. The next day he would strike.
His sergeant brought him coffee. His major was away at the base, making the final necessary preparations. The message came through, decoded by his sergeant, that a missing FSB officer had been found; a body had been hauled from the river in Gdansk. The drowning of a junior officer in the Polish port city was a setback, but small in the scale of the interrogation for which he readied himself. The next day he would face Captain, second rank, Viktor Archenko across a bare room.
Fast notes were scrawled on his pad as he gutted the files and papers. He consumed them. The challenge lifted him, excited him and drove away his tiredness. He would break his prey by the skill of his questioning, by finding the weak point and then by launching his attack through the crack in the man's defences. The next day the notes would be abandoned and his eyes would never leave those of his prey.
Bik
ov was calm. He believed he controlled his destiny, and the traitor's.
The window of his hotel room was open to the night, and the traffic was far below. The noise blown through it by the wind would distort his voice and hide his accent.
Billy, Wickso and Lofty sat near him, there to give support to Ham. He was always the confident one. None of them had ever seen Ham as nervous and hesitant, but what was asked of him was harder than anything else he had attempted. He had good linguist's skills, but they were old and untested. He was asked to speak as a native would. Their bags were packed and piled by the door, their bills were paid, and by now Jerry the Pole would be waiting at the front entrance with the old Mercedes. The slip of paper given him by Mowbray was on the bed beside him as he lifted the phone, and dialled.
It rang out. Ham took a deep breath. He waited an age.
'Fleet Headquarters. Yes?'
'Night duty officer, please.'
Another wait, another age.
'Mikoyan, night duty officer.'
'Please, this is airforce Headquarters, I am the exercise planning officer. I have a message for Captain Archenko, chief of staff to Admiral Falkovsky.' The air expired from Ham's lungs. He thought his accent was crap and his hand shook on the receiver. They were all looking at him, willing him to succeed, like they were family to him.
'Yes, the message?'
Ham breathed again. 'I wish to inform Captain Archenko that we I will conduct a low-flying exercise over the Baltiskaya Kosa at 20.00 hours tomorrow, that is Thursday, the fourth of October. The line of the air assault will be east-west at the eight-kilometre-mark point from Rybacij. We invite Captain Archenko to attend.'
Ham heard the distant voice, 'I don't have his diary. I don't know if he is free to attend at this notice.'
Ham had read what Rupert Mowbray had written for him. He was now alone, cut adrift. For an eternity, the words, vowels and consonants gagged in his throat.
Gerald Seymour Page 24
