Gerald Seymour

by Traitor's Kiss (b) (epub)

  'You will find that no obstructions are put in your way by me. You have the freedom of my base, I guarantee it…but you understand that I am sick—a knife is in my back.'

  A man such as this did not come on a wasted errand. If any other counterintelligence officer had blundered into his office and laid down vague, unsubstantiated accusations, he would have grabbed his collar, twisted him round, frogmarched him to the door, then pitched him far into the outer office. Not this man, not this Bikov. There was a confidence, a serenity of calm, that spilled across the room. This man, Bikov, could destroy the long career of Alexei Falkovsky. For all of the gold on his shoulders and on his tunic's sleeves, for all of the seven rows of medal ribbons on his chest, he had sensed that his future lay in the hands of this man. Loyalty? Fuck loyalty…as Viktor, his protégé and proxy son, had fucked him. Already the worm was in his gut. What was his future? At best—his mind raced—it was to end his life in a miserable tower apartment, with an inadequate pension, in the anarchy of outer Moscow or Murmansk, disgraced because a spy had operated under his nose, and had been given his friendship. At worst—and it chilled him as he offered the guarantee of total cooperation—he would be prosecuted for negligence of duty, locked up among the zeks, the criminal scum.

  'What do you need to nail the bastard? Whatever you want I give you.'

  The answering voice was quiet, matter-of-fact. 'I want evidence. I don't have it yet. I have only impressions of guilt, but not the confirmation of it. I am tasked to find irrefutable evidence. In these times, to arrest a senior officer and charge him with treason, with aiding a foreign power, which I believe to be Great Britain, with leaking every document that crossed his desk—that lay in your locked safe, Admiral—I must have evidence.'

  'Where do you get that?'

  'From interrogation, from a confession. Always a confession is…'

  He was hunched over his desk, his voice was hoarse. 'Do you hurt him?'

  On the journey of his career in the navy's upper echelons, Viktor had travelled with him. Viktor had sponged away his frustrations, had fixed anything he asked for, had protected and guarded him. He leaned on him, Viktor was his crutch. His ultimate ambition, to end his naval life as commander of the Northern Fleet, was being snatched from him. Fuck…fuck…but he could not bring himself to hate him.

  'No.'

  'You don't hurt him?'

  'I will talk to him.'

  'You talk to him…and he will condemn himself with talking?'

  'Yes.'

  'When does it happen, his arrest?'

  'I am almost ready.'

  His head was in his hands, his fingers masking his eyes. He was drained of life and strength. He was a man feared by those who worked for him. Officers and men stiffened when he glanced at them, were afraid of him. He felt himself shrunken.

  'I don't want to see it.'

  'Very natural, Admiral Falkovsky. Please do not communicate with him, do not order up any classified files, do not open any safes, do not take any calls, do not leave your office. Your attitude is natural because he was your friend.'

  The door closed soundlessly on them. From his drawer he took a packet of Camel cigarettes from the carton Viktor had brought him. The tears ran on the old sailor's cheeks.

  'I expected more of him—more fight, more argument,' Bikov's major said.

  On the headquarters building the flags and pennants were whipped by the wind. The sun shone. It was a good autumn day and would have been perfect without the wind's bluster.

  'Most men watch their own skin. Skin usually measures the depth of friendship,' Bikov responded.

  Ahead of them was a squat concrete block that housed the military police and the offices of the FSB on the base. Only the final preparations remained to be confirmed.

  His major persisted: 'I expected him to stand in Archenko's corner, but he abandoned his man.'

  Outwardly the block gave the same appearance as it would have the previous day, or the previous week. The difference was subtle. Inside the door was a desk and at the desk were two armed military policemen, who had not been there the previous day or week. On the first-floor landing, at the entrance to the FSB's rooms, was a table and, behind it, a third military policeman sat with an assault rifle across his knees. And, though the midday sunshine gave brightness and warmth, the windows of those rooms were covered with sheets of newspaper, the blinds were drawn, and from the smallest of the rooms all furniture had been removed. They surveyed what had been done at the supervision of his sergeant, but his major returned to the theme.

  'I expected more from the admiral. Archenko is alone.'

  'Not quite alone,' Bikov mused. 'He will have me. I will be his friend.'

  The heavy machine-gun, the NSV 12.7mm, chattered on the range. The conscript, Igor Vasiliev, knew every working part in its body. Blindfolded, he could strip the barrel, the breech block, the firing chamber, and reassemble them. It was difficult firing on the open range on the sand spit, with the fierce cross wind, at 2000 metres. Between each burst of five rounds he checked the angle of the range's windsock and looked for rubbish blowing over the range. His hits on the targets were radioed back to the trench from which he fired. The other conscripts of 8 platoon, 3rd company, 81st regiment of Naval Infantry crouched behind him and watched, as did the instructors who had nothing to teach him, and his platoon sergeant. The latter was now cautious, wary, with him. It was midday. When he had finished shooting, and the barrel was hot, Vasiliev pushed himself up from his hunched firing position.

  'I would like to shoot again this afternoon, because the championship—'

  'This afternoon there is the navigation lecture, then the gymnasium.'

  'I would like to shoot after the lecture, instead of the gymnasium.'

  Because of the power of Vasiliev's friend, the chief of staff to the admiral, and because of his own guilt, the platoon sergeant buckled to him. 'You may shoot again this afternoon.'

  In Moscow, at the table of a quiet restaurant on a street behind the Bolshoi, a place favoured by foreigners, the Swedish military attaché was being entertained by his British colleague. A second bottle had been called for. To repay the quality of the hospitality, the Swede was retelling his choice anecdote.

  'Picture it, the interrogator returns to Grozny, to be feted, to be the hero of a party where their disgusting champagne substitute will flow until the small hours—but he's not there. The star act is gone. Doesn't even have time for a shit, shave and a shower. The Lubyanka's sent a jet for him. He's top of the bill and he's gone. What everyone wondered, down in Grozny—what's so important that the interrogator isn't allowed his moment in the spotlight? What they were saying last night to the esteemed Ukrainian, who told the valued Belarussian, who told me, there has to be a scandal on the greatest scale, at the heart of this horrid place, for the interrogator to be called away from his moment of glory.'

  'You didn't hear, did you—I don't suppose you did—what section of FSB the interrogator comes from? Did you?'

  'Military counterintelligence.' The Swede beamed. The second cork popped.

  'My father was here,' Jerry the Pole said, and he chewed the toothpick.

  'I'm sorry.' Alice bowed her head. Locke reckoned she couldn't think of anything better to say. Himself, he said nothing—nothing was appropriate.

  Small flashes of sunlight danced on the barbed wire. By the gate, over which there was a platform to support a watchtower, a single cluster of fresh-cut sunflowers was fastened to the strands and their brightness competed cheerfully with the pinpricks on the wire. Locke counted thirteen strands nailed to the vertical creosoted posts, and there were four more off angled struts at the top, set so that a man could not climb the fence and break out.

  'My father was here in the war,' Jerry the Pole said.

  When they had left Gdansk, Alice in the back and Locke beside the Pole, the question of the pension—its non-payment—had once again been raised. The wheedling query: was there not something they,
as decent people, could do? Mr Mowbray could do nothing, was there something they could do? Locke had said curtly, without enthusiasm,that he would look into it, a deflection. The old Mercedes had been on a long, straight road after the junction at Stegna. Jerry the Pole had cracked the silence and started again: he was as good and as loyal a servant as any ever employed at the Olympic Stadium, no work in Berlin was ever avoided by him. Alice had interrupted. Too much coffee at breakfast, she wanted a toilet. They had turned off the road, an avenue of beech trees. Locke hadn't noticed the sign, and they'd pulled into a wide car park, empty but for a solitary coach. Alice had been directed to the toilet, and Jerry the Pole had walked to the camp gate and bought two tickets.

  'It is called Stutthof—that is the German name, you have heard of it? No? My father was here for three years.'

  Locke looked stonily ahead. He thought an expression of extreme gravity, of stolid seriousness, was appropriate. He had heard of Auschwitz-Birkenau in the south, and Sobibor close to Lublin, and Treblinka, but he had not visited them. Too much work, not enough hours in the day, too much pressure. He would have said to Danuta, or when he met young Poles at symposia, that to live in the past was to live in a prison. He had never heard of the Stutthof concentration camp.

  'Let's go,' Jerry the Pole said. 'Let's take a walk while she pees.'

  'Why not? We'll do that.'

  Locke did not know what else he could have said. His agreement was a politeness. The Pole rolled in front of him on weak hips, and Locke followed. They went through the open gate into an oasis of quiet. A teacher at his school, the comprehensive in Haverfordwest, had once said to the class that these were places where the birds did not sing. 'Ridiculous,' the kids had shouted in the stampede along the corridors to maths or Welsh language or economics. How did bloody sparrows know what had happened five decades before? Daft. He listened, and heard no birds, but there were layers of birch trees the far side of the wire ahead and at the side, beyond the huts. No birdsong came to him.

  They left the brick guardhouse behind them. The coach in the car park had brought schoolchildren from Düsseldorf, handsome teenage boys and pretty little Lolita girls: the Pole and Locke played a sort of tag behind them, not catching them, letting them do their tour of each hut and leave it before they went in. They saw the bunk beds, on two levels, and the little guidebook that had come with the tickets said that at the end four men had slept on each bunk on a mattress of compressed straw. They went into the hut that had been the bath-house, where half a dozen circular tubs would each have held six men for the few minutes allowed them to scrape off dirt and pick off fleas and lice. After the children had left it they went into the medical room where there were rusty, grimed trolleys; the book said this was where 'experiments' had been performed.

  He fingered the book. Stutthof camp had been the first to open in occupied Poland. It had stayed open for 2,077 days, and 110,000 prisoners had walked through the gates, as Locke had. In the camp, 65,000 men had died from starvation, disease, lethal injections, hangings and gassings. There was dark gloom in the huts but the sunshine warmed his face each time they stepped outside. At the far end of the compound, beyond the wire but in clear view of the huts, was a single gallows, a vertical pole with a horizontal bar supported by a strut; a hook was screwed in under the bar's end. Locke felt sick. He leaned against the post, as if admiring the sunflowers' bloom.

  He hardly heard Jerry the Pole's litany. 'My father, Tomasz, was like every other man—he must work and feed his family. There were several of them, and the commandant needed them, these Poles. They were called "honorary Germans". What did my father do that was wrong? He backed the wrong throw of the dice, the loser's throw. For three years he worked there, and then we moved in 1942 to Krynica Morska on the peninsula—it's where we are going, and I will show you our former house, Mr Locke, and the cemetery where my grandparents lie before we go on to Piaski, and I think you will be very interested. At Krynica Morska my father was a foreman on the project to reclaim land from the lagoon—he supervised the prisoners' work. That was till February of 1945, and I was then eleven years old. We had to go. The Russians were coming. The camp was evacuated, and the "honorary Germans" and their families walked with the prisoners and the Germans to what is now Gdansk. Then there were trains to Rostock, and from Rostock there was a boat to Denmark. It was a great adventure for a small boy. My father settled in Lübeck and again found work as a carpenter. Six years later I went to Berlin, for a future, and five years from then I was employed as a junior interpreter, what your people called a "bottle-washer", at the Olympic Stadium. I learned from my father, Mr Locke. I only work for the winners, for Mr Rupert Mowbray…and I believe that you also, Mr Locke, are a winner.'

  The mirrors destroyed him. Locke saw the shoe in the water. Death would have been in the drowned eyes as surely as it had been in the eyes of the men in the gas chamber, in the crematorium and below the gallows. The mirrors made the shoe huge.

  They were near to the gate, near to Alice.

  Jerry the Pole smiled at him. 'I think you enjoyed your tour, Mr Locke, found it interesting. Many of the huts my father built are gone, not because they were poorly built but people from the villages took the wood to burn in cold winters. Mr Locke, you are a kind and intelligent gentleman. Please, look into the business of my pension, please. May I depend…?'

  'Hear me, Jerzy fucking Kwasniewski, you bloody Fascist—why not just shut up about your fucking pension?'

  He walked past Alice. Far from the gardeners' store shed, and at the end of those two days he had bicycled away into the dusk, had gone off the straight flat road to the village and pedalled along tracks that led to the clusters of poplar trees that had been planted on the old pocked battlefields. He had intended to take his life. Once he had gone as far as throwing the rope up over a branch…he had not had the courage to take the coward's way. He had told them all, all the stones, on his last day, why he went, and where.

  Lofty was a country boy. His childhood was from the woods and hills around a village close to the Surrey town of Guildford. He had made his own entertainment, played his own games, and knew how to manufacture a secret hiding-place that would only be found if it were stepped on. The basher they built under Lofty's supervision was more expert than any an instructor could have constructed. Where a pine tree had been felled in a gale, its roots lifted from the ground leaving a shallow sandy hole, the basher had been made and its roof was from fronds and dead branches. Around it there was no indication of their presence—no snapped twigs, no disturbed needles, no prints.

  The machine-gun had stopped firing. Huddled together, they lay in the darkness and waited for the day to pass.

  ... Chapter Twelve

  Q. Where in the Russian Federation is the military base that has won seven of the last thirteen nationwide competitions for 'Readiness and Excellence'?

  A. Kaliningrad.

  The bow waves streamed back from the hull of the patrol-boat. The yellows and greens of the land's line, the high towers and the cranes of the harbour were clearly defined behind it. Mowbray had it in his binoculars. It headed for them, an arrow. The Princess Rose rolled viciously and Mowbray had to cling to the screwed-down table at the back of the bridge. Above him, on the mast, now hung two black balls—the daylight signature for Not Under Command. When they had been under control, and had had power, Mowbray had been able to cope well enough with the ship's pitch, fall and lift, but since they had drifted it had been worse than anything he'd known. He'd refused food and had huddled over the radio. The radio was an excuse. There would be communications silence until the zero hour, 20.00, but staying close to the radio focused a little of his mind away from the ship's motions. The patrol-boat ate up the distance, surged closer. 'Do you know what it is?'

  'If it is important, Mr Mowbray, it is a Nanuchka III. It carries six tubes for launching the NATO-named Siren surface-to-surface missiles, range forty sea miles, and—yes, and—it has a single surface-to-air launc
her, and one anti-aircraft gun, and if that is not enough it is also armed with a 30mm Gatling. I know because I used to sail Karachi to Bombay, and the Indians had them. It could put us out of the water, or under the water, in under two minutes.'

  Mowbray growled defiantly, 'There's nothing to worry about. We're clean.'

  'Forgive me to correct you—almost clean. We no longer have your Dogs with us, Mr Mowbray, and their kit—but we are inside their territorial waters, are subject to their laws, and we are only almost clean because we have you on board. If they were to find you, Mr Mowbray, we would not be clean.'

  'You got paid,' he hissed.

  'Better you go down, Mr Mowbray. The engineer, good Johannes, will help you.'

  When he went below and down to the engine room, he wouldn't know what happened when the Princess Rose was boarded by men from the patrol-boat. He would be incarcerated in the space where the kit had been, sealed in against the hull and below the waterline, in darkness. Before the departure from Gdansk, he'd thought he could pose as the owners' representative, but the mate—the Croatian Zaklan—had spoken contemptuously of his complete lack of seafaring knowledge; he was consigned to the hiding-place, smaller and a deck below where the Dogs' gear, kit and weapons had been stowed.