Timebomb : A Thriller (9781468300093)

by Seymour, Gerald

  Lawson said, ‘Might provide an opportunity for promotion, something of advantage to us … When is your next scheduled meeting?’

  He was told where and when. He asked, without an explanation as to the use it would be put to, for a fast sight of the undercover’s file. With no good grace George lifted the telephone, sent for the file. Nothing more to say. Lawson went further back on his chair legs. George chewed a nail and his lips seemed to move as if he was rehearsing what he should have said but had not. Rob was following the flight of gulls between the blind’s slats, and had the look of a man who has lost something as precious as faith. The file was brought in. The girl was boot-faced, as if she confronted an enemy. Quite a pretty girl, made prettier by the undisguised anger at her mouth. Lawson assessed her as the girl Friday. She reached out with the file, to pass it to her superior, but Lawson stretched out his arm, the quickness of a snake’s strike, and his fingers intercepted it. For a moment he and the girl had hold of it, then it was loosed.

  Lawson held it high, above his shoulder. It was taken behind him, a relay baton. He imagined it would be speed read. Silence fell. He thought that little would be left of the man’s nails, and that every seagull traversing the skyline of SW1 had been tracked. There was the rustle of papers behind him. The file was passed back and, without comment, he handed it on to the girl, and thought she hated him. He stood.

  Of course, there would be a final throw. George said, ‘This is a very professional and dedicated officer, currently working in a difficult environment. Nothing should be done that puts his safety at risk.’

  Lawson smiled, the enigmatic one that betrayed nothing of his aspirations. Clipper Reade had always referred to agents as the mushrooms of intelligence officers in the field. ‘You know it, Christopher, they’re best kept in the dark and fed on shit.’ Lawson had always chuckled when the Texan growled out his mushroom bit.

  ‘I’ve matters to deal with, gentlemen – and young lady. Thank you for your time … Yes, matters are coming to a head and I believe they involve dangerous men.’

  Rain lashed down. Flooding on the road between Poznan and the frontier had delayed them, and the approach to the bridge had been slow. They had been in single-line queues of heavy lorries. A six-hour journey had taken ten, but the last run had been faster, on the autobahn.

  Mikhail brought Reuven Weissberg down the wide street, past the grey mass of the Russian embassy, took the diversion around the Gate, then went left. He skirted the memorial to the killed Jews – a great open space of rectangular dark stone blocks, like rows of different-sized coffins – flashed the code on the zapper, then drove down into the basement parking area and into the numbered slot. The jolt woke Weissberg.

  He was home.

  He took the lift up, Mikhail with him. It was standard duty for the bodyguard to escort him from the car to the lift, and from the lift to the penthouse door. Mikhail, from his past, knew the theory of close protection and put it into practice. A man who could be a target was most vulnerable when arriving at a destination. He put his key into the door’s lock, and the sound of it turning would have alerted her. She would have been waiting for him, and he rehearsed in his mind what he would say about the delay through flooding west of Poznan because she would scold him for his lateness. Had barely turned the key when he heard the shuffle of feet. Mikhail always waited with him until he was inside, then would go down and clean the car, take it out and top up its fuel tank. Mikhail always left him alone when he came back, was greeted by his grandmother.

  He held her.

  She was tiny in his arms, but his bear-hug was gentle, and he was careful not to hurt her. She offered him each cheek in turn and he kissed the lined skin. He saw clouded opaque colours in her eyes and wetness. The damp was from the infection, not tears. He had never seen her weep. He was now in his fortieth year, and for the last thirty-five – as a child, a teenager and as a man – he had lived with her, been cared for by her and had loved her. She stood on tiptoe in his embrace. Had her heels been on the floor, her height would have been 1.61 metres, and her weight was a fraction under forty-eight kilos. As always she was dressed in black: flat black shoes, thick black stockings, a black skirt and a black blouse, and because winter had not yet passed for her, she had a black cardigan over her shoulders. She wore no jewellery, had no cosmetics on her face, but her hair was pure white. As he held her, his fingers were in the hair at the back of her head, and it had been white – with the purity of fresh-fallen snow – from his earliest memories. He loosed her and she stood back to gaze up at him.

  She did scold him. ‘You’re late. I’ve been waiting for you. I cooked and it’s ruined.’

  He told her about the flood on the road west of Poznan, the delays near the frontier bridge across the Odra river.

  ‘Have you eaten?’

  He said he had not.

  ‘Then I’ll cook for you – but you smell. First wash yourself, and when you’re clean come to the kitchen and your food will be ready.’

  He did not tell her that although his belly was empty he had no appetite.

  ‘What did you find?’

  He told her he had searched for a whole morning in the forest but had not found the dip in the ground that might have marked the disturbance needed for a single grave, that he had sat for a whole afternoon with his back against a tree and had heard the songs of small birds, that he had watched a house built of wood planks for a whole evening.

  ‘Did you not see the bastard who was then a child?’

  He told her that Tadeus Komiski had not been at the house, but that the dog had barked, warning the bastard, who had hidden.

  His grandmother held his hand tight. ‘But one day you will find him and the place?’

  He promised he would. He stared into her eyes, and thought the colour was that of a little milk in water. But there were no tears … He said that the two men were coming, that their journey had started, that it was beyond recall.

  ‘Is it too great a risk? I don’t think so.’

  He leaned forward and kissed her forehead and murmured that it didn’t compare with the risk she had faced.

  ‘You smell bad. Go and wash.’

  Reuven Weissberg, who had been an avoritet in Perm at the age of twenty-one and had then outgrown the city, having taken control of the roofs of the fruit and vegetable market, who had ruled a gang’s empire in Moscow, providing protection for foreign business enterprises by the age of twenty-eight, who now controlled an octopus enterprise in the German capital city and was five days from the biggest and most hazardous deal of his life, went for his shower. He took it because his grandmother had told him to.

  He had never refused her, and never would. Had never contradicted her – water splashed over his head – and would not have gone for the deal if she had opposed it.

  ‘Did you sleep?’

  ‘Until you woke me.’

  ‘Did you sleep through the night, or just now? I ask because of the time. I thought we were to start early.’

  Molenkov watched as Major Oleg Yashkin tried to push himself up from the contorted position in which he had slept, then wiped his eyes. Himself, he felt good, had already been down to the river, knelt close to the water, cupped it over his face and rubbed hard to remove dirt. He had washed without soap, then come back to the car. There had been two elderly fishermen close to him but he had not spoken to them, or they to him: old habits of former times dictated that citizens did not interfere or pass comment on the actions of others. They saw nothing and remembered nothing. And when he was clean and had dried his face with his handkerchief he had gone to a stall at the far end of the park and bought two kalatchi rolls, fresh baked.

  ‘You shouldn’t have let me sleep so long. We have so far to go today. It’s three hundred and twenty kilometres to—’

  ‘Just now, you slept like a mother holding her baby.’

  ‘Fuck you, Molenkov.’

  ‘You had your arm over it, as if it was a baby. Is it alive?�
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  He saw that Yashkin blinked, then smiled, then ran his filthy hand across the tarpaulin, and said, ‘In a fashion, yes.’

  ‘It has a pulse, a beat, does it breathe?’

  Yashkin wriggled out stiffly from the hatch of the Polonez. He stood and stretched – his breath was foul – then jabbed a finger at Molenkov. ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘I want something to eat, but first I want to know what it is, have more understanding of it.’

  ‘Why now? Why not last week or last month?’

  ‘I regret nothing, I just ask. Some detail, what is it?’

  ‘I need to piss.’

  He followed Yashkin towards the riverbank, where he sheltered Yashkin from the view of the fishermen while he urinated against a tree trunk – with the weak flow of the old – and listened.

  ‘I’ll tell you once more and not again. We call it a Small Atomic Demolition Munition. I do not know exactly, but it would have been assembled at some date between ‘sixty-nine and ‘seventy-four, and it would have gone to the Special Forces who were attached to the mechanized divisions. But every six months it would have come back for maintenance work. They came back for the last time, to be dismantled, in ‘ninety-two and ‘ninety-three … and it was called the peace dividend. This one had been returned a week before I took it. Right, now I’m going to wash.’

  Molenkov steadied him as he went down to the edge. Water splashed across his face and there was a gulped curse at its cold. He spat to clear his mouth.

  ‘I didn’t see this one’s inside, but a similar batch had been brought to Arzamas-16 two weeks before from Ukraine. As a security officer I could be anywhere. I was shown the process of breaking up the weapon. You ask what’s there. It’s very simple. The complication’s in the engineering, but the principle is basic – that’s what I was told. First, there’s a canvas bag round it, with carrying straps and handles. Open that and you expose something that looks like a small oil drum, which has hatches in it, screwed down tight. You undo the screws and you see moulded shapes to hold materials in place. A tangle of wires, inside and out. Then conventional military explosive is packed into a sphere, but when the detonator system is removed it’s not dangerous. There is engineering sophistication that I was not told of, and would not have understood – I can only tell you what I saw.’

  Again and again, Yashkin had poured the river water over his face and across his short hair. Now he cleaned his hands. Molenkov watched, and tried to build pictures from what was described.

  ‘Inside the explosive is the “pit” – that’s what the engineers call it. It’s very small. A little bigger than a tennis ball, the size of an ordinary orange, and a perfect sphere. That ball, the pit, is heavy, weighs perhaps four and a half kilos and is plutonium. To go for highly enriched uranium is a different process, but ours is plutonium. It is known in scientific terms as Pu-239. Actually, I held a pit in my hand.’

  Wonderment, and a tinge of horror. ‘You held it?’

  ‘With a glove, but I was told that wasn’t necessary. They say the pit – Pu-239 – is benign. Most extraordinary. It was warm.’

  Molenkov closed his eyes, squeezed them shut, pondered, opened them and saw Yashkin shake his hands vigorously to dry them. ‘Warm?’

  ‘Not hot, but not with the chill of any metal. You asked me if it was alive. Perhaps. It has a natural warmth, not the cold of the dead.’

  Molenkov turned to walk back towards the Polonez. A fisherman had a rod that bent over the water. He called, excited, to his friend to come. Over his shoulder, Molenkov shouted to Yashkin that he had new bread rolls in the car, and that they should start out for Kolomna, on the second stage of their journey. And as he walked he gazed down at his open palm and tried to imagine that he held in it a warm orange, which lived.

  ‘Don’t I get to see Mr Goldmann? For God’s sake—’

  ‘Mr Goldmann is busy. He is not to be disturbed,’ Viktor said.

  Hanging back, half in the shadow of the hall, Carrick watched. It had been predictable that the scene would happen, and it played out predictably. His sarge, Simon Rawlings, was on the top step but blocked by Viktor in the doorway, with Grigori at his side. Carrick thought he hadn’t slept last night, looked washed our. His eyes were bagged and his face stubbled.

  ‘I want to see him, or I want to see Mrs Goldmann!’ His sarge’s voice rose.

  ‘It is not possible, and Mrs Goldmann, too, is busy. I am asked to give you an envelope, and it is the finish of your work here.’

  Carrick saw it passed, saw it ripped open. It was packed with banknotes, fifties. One flew clear and floated in the wind that came up the street, but his sarge didn’t grovel and didn’t scrabble on the lower steps for it. He stood his ground, but had pocketed the envelope and the remaining notes. ‘So, that’s it. That’s the end.’

  ‘It is the finish of your work. Please, I require the keys.’

  ‘I was spiked. Don’t you know that? I was set up. Doesn’t that interest you?’

  ‘Please, the keys.’

  The hand went into the pocket, emerging with the keys. The keys on the ring were thrown forward and caught low down by Grigori. Carrick thought his sarge was losing it – fast.

  A snarl: ‘I have clothes downstairs. I want them.’

  Viktor, beside the seam of his trousers, flicked his fingers. That was predictable and had been planned for. From behind him, Grigori picked up and passed forward a black bin-liner. Carrick had packed it: spare suit, spare underwear, spare pair of shirts, socks, shoes and – junk items that went with the job – overalls for car maintenance, heavy-duty gloves, torches, pepper-spray canister and a truncheon, a couple of well-thumbed books. Carrick thought it was because of the disrespect shown to Grigori, the chucked keys, that the bag was heaved forward, landed close to his sarge’s feet.

  ‘You aren’t listening to me. The drink was spiked. Aren’t you interested?’ There was froth on his sarge’s lips. He seemed to look up and his jaw clenched. ‘You all right, then, Corp? You look all right. Hot-bedding already, are we? Not got a voice? You moved into my space? I’m listening, and I’ve not heard you speak up. I suppose it’s a good bloody career move for you, me being set up. Well, listen to your old sarge. Listen hard. If they fuck me, they’ll fuck you. Remember who told you.’

  His sarge had turned, had bent and trapped the one dropped note and it went into a pocket. Then he hitched the bin-bag on to his shoulder and stood straight. ‘Don’t worry about me. I’m not going to make trouble and I won’t be looking for a reference. You won’t hear of me and I’ll have forgotten you. Go steady, guys – and don’t trip in your own shit.’

  Carrick thought it well done, but there was a month’s money in the envelope and it was clever to let the steam fly, then walk. His sarge went off the bottom step and never looked back. Carrick edged towards the door, watched him go. His sarge had most likely saved his life, and had later remembered a friend and had tried to help with work. Now he was gone. He heard the shout of his Bossman from behind him, up the stairs: ‘In five minutes I am ready to go, Johnny.’

  Viktor pushed the door shut, and Carrick lost sight of the lone man, bag on his back, walking away with a sort of hard-won dignity.

  At least he was soothed by Johnny’s smooth driving. He could be a nervous passenger in the back of the Audi if the car wove through traffic and accelerated past obstacles. Simon Rawlings attacked the road ahead, not Johnny. Josef Goldmann had more on his mind, and his progress towards the City was far back in his thoughts.

  The image of Reuven Weissberg overwhelmed him. He could not back out. He saw himself as having little more importance in the schemes of the master, the leader, than any of the men who had the rank of brigadir in Perm or boevik in Moscow. He was a junior, a handler of money. His opinions were not asked for and his loyalty was assumed to be automatically given. They were on new territory here, faced new dangers, moved in new circles, but no exit route presented itself. The next day, when he travelle
d with Viktor, the quagmire under his feet would be deeper, more cloying … He realized it, he shivered, and the papers he tried to read quivered in his hands. He shook his head sharply, an attempt to break the image’s hold.

  Josef Goldmann said, ‘You drive well, Johnny. You are very relaxing.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  ‘If it’s not too much trouble, could you tell me, please, what we are doing here, and why?’

  ‘You’d best stand, not wave a flag or make yourself conspicuous, and observe.’

  He didn’t do Davies the courtesy of turning to face him, but spoke from the side of his mouth and stared down the street at the entrance to the building. Christopher Lawson had long believed that courtesies and explanations were usually a waste of breath.

  ‘What am I supposed to observe?’

  ‘It will all, I hope, become apparent – and chattering will not accelerate it.’

  Pretty much the same thing had been said to Lawson, all those years ago, when he was new in the company of Clipper Reade. Waiting on a dark night, a breeze rippling the surface of the Landwehr canal, the floodlights on the Wall. A hissed flood of questions asked, the second time he had been out with the heavy-built American, and the sharp rejoinder that silence was a better virtue than blather. ‘More valuable in this trade to keep quiet, watch, wait and observe, Christopher, than make useless talk.’ Chastened by the reprimand, he had stayed silent and watched the water, had heard ducks and radios playing beyond the Wall’s height. The name ‘Clipper’ was already in place when he’d met the Texan on his first posting abroad to the British headquarters at the old Olympic park. ‘Clipper’ was a British accolade: had come from the UK’s station chief in Berlin at a meeting when, apparently, the American had downed four mugs of tea, then asked for another pot to be brought him, and an hour later another. The station chief had remarked, drily, the story said, that they’d have to run a particular tea-clipper up the Spree river to satisfy the guest’s needs; then five minutes had been lost in descriptions of nineteenth-century trading vessels. It had stuck: from then, Charlton A. Reade Jnr was Clipper Reade. The name had had legs and had been accepted by the Americans out at their place in the Grunewald forest. He was Clipper Reade to all who met him, and his trademark was a vacuum flask in the leather bag he carried on his shoulder, which had hot water in it, a little plastic box of teabags and a Bakelite mug. The last time they’d met, Lawson had given him a present, gift wrapped, that he’d had sent from the shop at the museum in Greenwich, and he’d watched as it was opened, paper discarded, a cardboard container pulled apart and the mug with the tea-clipper on it, under full sail, had been revealed. Clipper Reade had smiled grimly at his protégé and his voice had had the pitch of pebbles under a boot, ‘Don’t ever get sentimental about friendships. Don’t. Be your own man, and fuck the rest of them.’ Most of his professional life had been governed by the teachings of Clipper Reade, an icon of the Agency.