Gerald Seymour

by Traitor's Kiss (b) (epub)

  'I only went to Malbork Castle.'

  '…privileged. I'm sorry. You only went to the castle at Malbork?'

  It was all in the eyes. The eyes led him. He looked for them but they evaded him.

  'It's filthy. It's a disgrace. What are you, incompetent or idle? Which?' His visit was unannounced. At the end of the working day, Admiral Alexei Falkovsky had come without warning to the harbour. The commander of the minesweeper flotilla had been called back from his second drink in the senior officers' mess and was lashed by the admiral.

  'Rodents, vermin wouldn't use those toilets—there're cockroaches in the galleys and the potatoes are rotten. Fucking incompetent or fucking idle, which do I choose? Pack, go—you are dismissed.'

  The admiral left a stunned, quivering officer behind him as he strode away. He had no escort. On any other day, for any other inspection of the fleet, his chief of staff would have hovered at his shoulder. His car followed him at a discreet distance as he strode from Basin Number One to Basin Number Two. The submarine flotilla was his second target. He was betrayed, and he was frightened.

  In Basin Number Two they had already been alerted. A reception line of officers and senior NCOs was waiting. The grapevine would have spread the news faster than he could walk with his pounding stride.

  He was greeted. 'Good evening, Admiral, a pleasure to see—'

  'I want to inspect every toilet, every galley, every torpedo tube, every weapons storage unit, every bunk in crew quarters. If I find dirt, you go,' he barked. Men cringed.

  His anger was usually held in check by the calming presence of his chief of staff beside him, but he was not there and never would be again. He stamped over the gangway, then hauled himself up the conning tower's ladder. Few men, if any, frightened him, but the one who had come into his office had shrivelled him. It had been in the man's eyes. Merciless, piercing eyes. That man now held Viktor and interrogated him.

  Blind fear consumed him as he began a search for dirt, inefficiency and idleness. The first toilet he inspected in the Vashavyanka-class vessel was blocked with a wedge of sodden paper and faeces. He rounded on the submarine flotilla's commander. 'You clean it yourself. With a bucket and a brush you fucking clean it yourself, then you get off my base.'

  The men behind him in the cramped corridor, he knew it, had loved him, had boasted that they served the best fleet commander in the navy, and he saw them reel from his attack. He could not combat the fear.

  The candle was burned down half its length, and the wax dribbled off it. It gave no heat. Viktor shivered.

  'Heating's off,' Bikov said. 'That's how crap the system is here—no heat for serving officers, or for the NCOs, or for the conscripts. The money for the heating oil will have been pilfered by the likes of the weasel Piatkin. Heating oil and weapons stolen. Is the cold bad, Viktor?'

  'They took my coat.'

  He did not see the trap set for him. All the time, with each line of questioning—his family, the castle at Malbork, his daily work—he looked for the big traps: there were none. Opposite him, beyond the name, Bikov peeled off his sweater. Bikov wore only a singlet against his chest. The sweater was thrown over the candle and fell beside him.

  'I don't need it.'

  'Put it on, Viktor.'

  'The cold does not affect me.'

  'Wear it, Viktor.'

  'I can stand cold. If you had been in Murmansk—' He threw the sweater back, fluttering the flame.

  'If you are cold and won't wear my sweater, then I too will be cold.'

  Bikov pushed the sweater away from him. Viktor saw his arms, the freshness of the scrapes and scars that covered them.

  'What happened to you?' Again he was led and did not know it.

  'Last week I was in Chechnya. There was a fire-fight—the war there is criminal and incompetent. We were ambushed and had to escape across a hill…rocks, diving for cover, any place to hide.'

  'Why were you there?'

  'To save a man's life.'

  Viktor stared, big-eyed, at him. 'Did you? Save his life?'

  'He is a decent man, worth respect. I saved an officer's life.'

  He saw Bikov's scarred and welted arms close around the singlet. They would be cold together; they shared the cold.

  'Christ knows if this is going to be readable.'

  Ham broke the quiet in the basher, and his laughter tinkled. They'd been sombre when they'd started. The team had withdrawn inside personal corrals having wriggled for space. Lofty, who played quartermaster, had given each a sheet of paper and an envelope. Inside their lockers in the Ballykinler camp there had always been a sealed, addressed letter, and there had been the same at Poole when they had left the base for more dangerous exercises.

  'Can't see the paper myself. God knows how anyone's going to read it.'

  Billy shifted. 'Who you doing it for, Ham?'

  'That's personal, nobody's business.' He was subdued again. 'My mum and dad—if they ever get to read it, if they don't bin it when they see the handwriting.'

  The machine-gun's firing had finally stopped. It had unsettled them, made them nervy. It was a full ten minutes now since it had last fired.

  'What about you, Lofty?'

  'Don't care who knows. The place where I lodge in the village. Just to tell them to sell up what I left there, not that it's much, and buy some flowers and put them in the chapel. Even the children of the 282 veterans are pretty ancient—they sit in the chapel, rest up after they've gone to the graves. It's near to that time of the year, when they come. That's where mine's going. My bicycle, a few clothes, some books—should make a couple of bunches of flowers.'

  When Lofty had brought out the paper, the envelopes, and the pencil, they'd all taken turns to bollock him. As quartermaster he should have done it on the boat, where they would have had light, space and time to think. They were crushed together in the basher and the rain was coming in in dribbled columns. What were they going to do with the letters? Who was going to have them? If they caught it—why they were writing the bloody letters—when would the letters be posted? He'd taken stick, but each of them had bothered to write something on the paper, a name and an address on the envelope.

  'Shit,' Ham said.

  The machine-gun had started up again.

  They each licked the flaps, sealed their envelopes and gave them to Lofty.

  'What do I do with them?'

  Wickso grinned in the darkness. 'When we're all gone, Lofty, and you're lying there and blubbering for your mum, with your last breath, Lofty, as this big Spetznaz bastard's lifting his bayonet to finish you, ask him very nicely: "Sir, can you direct me to a postbox?"

  Then Lofty gave them each a strip of adhesive tape. They groped at their throats for the amber pendants and wrapped the tape round the chain and the metal that held the stones so there would be no rattle. They did it because none of them would take off the pendants and dump them.

  Billy said they should try to sleep. They would go forward in two hours.

  A quarter of the candle remained. 'Admiral Falkovsky…'

  'The fleet commander.'

  'I know, Viktor, that Admiral Falkovsky is the fleet commander. A good man?'

  'A very good man.'

  'And fair?'

  'Very fair. You would not find a single officer at Baltiysk who will not say that the fleet commander is a fair man.'

  'Trusting?'

  The time for Bikov to listen.

  'For his best subordinates he has total trust. If he wishes to he can make you feel special and important. He is not a man of detail. He has the broad vision and he relies on trusted officers, I was one, to do the detail for him. We are very close.'

  He saw his prey shiver, so he shivered as a response. 'Go on, Viktor.'

  'Every time he has an important meeting to attend, we go through it together first. I tell him, as I see it, what matters will be raised that are detrimental to the navy's position and what matters are advantageous. He hears what I say. His door is op
en to me. What he reads, I read. I accept that I am junior to him, but we are colleagues.'

  Bikov thought it was a combination of cold, arrogance, tiredness, conceit that led Archenko to condemn himself.

  'I have a problem and I need your help, Viktor. Two years ago, when Admiral Falkovsky was already fleet commander, it was reported that American intelligence officers had identified the redeployment of the Tochka 22-21 missiles with nuclear warheads at Baltiysk. What was Admiral Falkovsky's reaction to those reports?'

  'What could be his reaction? It was true.'

  'How did Admiral Falkovsky think the Americans had learned of the redeployment?'

  'We talked about it. It was a very serious matter—there was a strain on relations with the United States. I agreed with the admiral's response to Moscow when he was queried on it. I wrote the signal he sent. The Americans have spy satellites over the Kaliningrad oblast. They must have photographed the transfer of the missiles and the warheads from the ship that brought them, or the transfer to the storage bunkers where warheads are kept. It must have been spy satellites.'

  Bikov did not allow himself to smile. His sincerity and concern were sculpted to his face. 'Of course, Viktor—what other explanation…?'

  Locke sat in the kitchen, his shoes hitched up on to the pine table. Everything around him was German. The pictures on the walls were of views of the Rhine and the calendar on the page for August showed a sketch of the Harz forests.

  Where his parents were was prime territory for 'second homes'. Professionals—solicitors, surgeons, surveyors—came from the West Midlands to the Welsh coast, bought up old cottages and made them into weekend boltholes. Their money bled the life out of the local community by driving up property prices. They made their new homes little sanctums of Sutton Coldfield, Solihull and Bromsgrove, and at the end of each summer they scrubbed the rooms clean, emptied the fridge-freezer and were gone for the winter months. They were despised and envied by the community. He hated the owners of the house into which he had broken, and hated himself.

  All Locke could find in the kitchen units to eat was a solitary packet of sweet biscuits. To the crime of breaking and entering, he added that of theft. He had wolfed down five biscuits, scattering crumbs on the washed-down table, and they had not alleviated his hunger, or his hate. Beside his shoes, circled by the crumbs, was the radio equipment. The rain beat on the windows but the lights shone brightly on the console's dials. In little more than an hour and a half Mowbray's Dogs would be moving.

  She came in, slowly circled him and the table. He'd heard her washing. She had changed into thicker trousers and a heavier sweater. There was a new freshness in Alice North's face, and he had made it. The mischief still sparkled in her as she rounded him and the table. His sneers had brought the light back to her: Did you sleep with him? You didn't think, did you, that he loved you? The light in her dazzled him and gave maturity and strength to her; he was unloved and it made him hate her.

  'And just what sort of little romantic nest is it you're going to build?'

  She stopped, turned, faced him.

  'Has Mowbray told you what'll happen? You'll have to quit. You'll be out through the front door in double-quick time. Security risk and all that. Treachery is an infectious disease. He's a traitor, done it once and can do it again. You're out. They'll be grateful enough to buy him a semi-detached in Coulsdon or Croydon, pebble-dash and a bit of mock-Tudor, and there you'll vegetate. All of them, once they've come over, die for nostalgia of the Motherland. At first he'll be useful. You won't see him for three or four months while they gut him of what information he hasn't already passed. Then he's on his own. There's a cheque into the bank every month, not a big one. Does he want to be with you? Does he, hell. He wants to be with the other sad cases who've travelled the same route, wants to talk Russian with them and moan about the politics in Moscow. Nothing to do but complain. He'll get, after the first few months, an occasional trip to Portsmouth or Plymouth to talk about his navy to our navy, but pretty damn soon he's out of date. You'll be as safe, as bored and as pathetic as any other suburban couple. Get to learn tennis, Alice, you'll have plenty of time for it. Ignore what I say if you want to…I'm going for a walk.'

  His feet swung from the table. Jealousy wounded him, envy cut him. He was at the kitchen door.

  She said, 'I don't think you've ever loved, Gabriel, or been loved. I'm sorry for you.'

  The first time. Alice going down the corridor, leading, taking his hand, feeling the tremor of it, and only loosing it to get her key from her bag, unlocking her door, taking him inside and kicking the door shut behind her. Standing in the centre of the room and the light filtering through the drawn curtains and knowing that time was precious, reaching out for him. He'd come slowly to her as if he did not believe what was offered. His jacket on the floor, and his tie, starting as unspoken duty for Rupert Mowbray, then changed, all changed. The light from the street had shown the desperation, and she had wanted to wipe it from his face. When she had unbuttoned his shirt then stripped it off him, she had taken his hands and brought them to her blouse. So frightened, fumbling with the buttons, and when he'd done it, an age later, she had shaken her blouse off her shoulders, and then she had brought his fingers to her bra clasp, and when that had fallen away she had seen the awe in his eyes. When they were naked, he had ducked down to his jacket and taken the little plastic sachet from his wallet. She'd thanked him and he'd grinned, and they had gone down on to the bed and she had peeled it on to him. Bad, desperate, frantic sex, the first time, but afterwards—as the little bedside clock had spun away the minutes and hours—he had lain with his head on her breast and she had held him, and had known that she had stilled his fear. He'd gone, she'd knotted the condom and flushed it down the toilet. She'd not slept. It was not for duty, she had found love.

  'You are tired, Viktor?'

  'Yes, I am tired.'

  'I am enjoying our talk. Every day I work with idiots. It is rare and a pleasure for me to be with a man of integrity and intelligence. You can continue?'

  'Yes.'

  The tiredness came in waves, but each time his eyes closed and his head sagged the light of the candle burned them open, and the humanity of the man opposite held him. He should have feigned sleep, should have slumped.

  'That's good, Viktor. Viktor…many of the papers that cross your desk, or the admiral's, are confidential…they are state secrets and military secrets. You see them because you are cleared to, have the highest vetting. You also see papers that have come from GRU sources or civilian agencies. Some are from electronic intelligence and some are from human intelligence. When you read them, Viktor—analysis of the American navy, NATO formations, whatever—which do you value more highly? The electronic intelligence from satellites and intercepts or the human intelligence from agents on the ground? Which?'

  'HumInt, always HumInt.'

  'Very interesting. You see, your insight fascinates me. Explain, please.'

  'Look at the Americans in Afghanistan, the war against terror. They have no agents but the sophistication of the electronics they employ is their substitute—without success. The picture given by electronics is only bland, it is without substance. HumInt has depth, understanding…'

  The voice murmured, 'Provided by brave men and women.'

  'The bravest. A spy plane or intercepts gives you pictures and sounds, but it is only a fraction of the intelligence a human source can give. If the Americans had agents inside Taleban or al Qaeda, they would capture the principals.'

  'Very dangerous work, the agents' work.'

  Two mackerel and one plaice and they were now dead in the bucket beside the gasping cod. It was a poor return for a day on the beach with his hand-line, but the evenings always fished better, and the evenings after a storm fished best as the tide turned. He was baiting the hook again.

  A new voice came softly from behind him.

  'Would you mind if I fished?'

  Roman turned. He understood a
little Russian, and was about to spit, curse, and rid himself of strangers. The man was short, squat, heavy, and had sand sprayed over his shined shoes. Maybe the coat was mohair, maybe it was camel-hair, and Roman would not have known the difference, but he thought the cost of it would have kept him and his family through the winter. The rain ran off the man's forehead and onto a shirt collar of brilliant white. It was a request, 'Would you mind if I fished?', but the body, the physique, and the soft tone of the question did not brook argument. The man grinned and there was a boy's enthusiasm on his face. Roman thought the hands held out for the line could have broken every bone in his arms, his legs.

  'I have not fished since I was a child—may I, please?'

  Another shrimp was wedged down over the hook's barb. Roman handed the line to the man. His first cast barely reached the sea's edge, but by his fourth the weighted line was well out into the surf. He stood very still with the line tucked in his fingers, as Roman did. The rain fell on the three men now standing on the beach.

  'When I was a child I loved to fish.' He turned and faced Jerry the Pole. 'At the café I saw the Mercedes car and they told me its driver had walked in this direction. It is my pleasure to meet you. I am Boris Chelbia…we have reason to meet. But, first, I wish to fish.'

  Roman gave him the line.

  His head bobbed, a little bow, as if the line was a valued gift. 'Thank you, I appreciate your generosity.'

  'Would you like something to eat, Viktor?'

  'I would, thank you.'

  The claps of his hands, three of them, were the signal Bikov had agreed with his sergeant. They gusted the flame, small now, of the candle.

  'I hope they can find us something to eat. Viktor, you were telling me about the meeting you went to at the headquarters of the missile unit. Please continue.'