Timebomb : A Thriller (9781468300093)

by Seymour, Gerald

  The Goldmanns were in shock. It was one thing for the family to have the trappings of protection, men in the house to drive them, scan pavements when they were dropped and open doors for them, another thing to have a snub-nose pistol waved in the face, and two shots fired before an aim could be drawn. The Bossman looked small against the cushions of the settee and the boy on his lap had his arms round his father’s neck. The Bossman’s wife sat upright, but had her arm close round the daughter. Not every day that a husband and father came home from work to report survival from a killing effort, but there again it wasn’t everyone’s husband and father who laundered big money out of eastern and central Europe.

  The Bossman’s wife said, ‘We would like to thank you, Johnny.’

  He, of course, collecting the kids had said nothing. He’d seen them into the hall, had watched them bolt upstairs, then gone down into the ready room. He wondered what they had said. ‘Daddy’s had a difficult day’ didn’t really do it. Esther gave her daughter a sharp nudge, as if something was planned, and the child came off the settee, skipped behind it and emerged with a big, like big, bouquet of flowers. More red roses than Carrick had ever seen in a bouquet. He didn’t care who knew it, he liked the kids. George knew he liked them, and Rob. He saw awe on the child’s face, as if she’d been told that this man had offered his own safety in the protection of her father, and there was sweetness and sincerity there, and she seemed to do a little bob curtsy, what she would have learned in a nine-year-old’s dance class at a private school, and the flowers were given him, and he realized how great his fondness was for those children, with the gentle banter they gave him in the car and their innocence.

  He blushed, felt the heat in his cheeks. No one had given Johnny Carrick flowers before. Esther Goldmann said, a brittle voice, ‘For you, with our thanks, Johnny. Perhaps you will pass them to someone precious to you.’

  The flowers were in the crook of his arm. He assumed, always, that Esther was not the shrinking violet who knew nothing of her husband’s trade, but it was the part she played. She took the children past him, past Viktor, through the door. He hadn’t realized that Viktor was there – silent, watching, arms folded across his chest.

  Josef Goldmann sat upright now, as if energized, the haggardness of his face gone, and said briskly, ‘I am, Johnny, a businessman who buys and sells, who trades on his expertise, who is successful and therefore attracts envy. I am also an immigrant to your country, and I am a Jew … I do not seek to attract attention. You will be surprised that I have not contacted the police and reported this attempted murder. It is not, Johnny, in my interests to parade myself. Neither is it in the interests of Esther or our children. My work involves discretion and would be harmed if I were to be written about in sensational terms in newspapers. The police have not been told of what happened, or of your heroic defence of me. Is that understood?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Do you have, Johnny, a problem with my attitude to the police and my wish to avoid the spotlight of publicity?’

  ‘No problem, sir.’

  ‘That street, I have learned this in the past from those I visit there – in casual conversation – is not covered by security cameras, one of the few in the City. This afternoon Viktor went there, met the newspaper-seller, who assured him he had seen nothing of what happened. Does that, Johnny, make a difficulty for you?’

  ‘No difficulty, sir.’ Carrick wondered how much money had been passed, and whether the seller had now abandoned his pitch and retired to a bar to consider his good fortune.

  ‘You are recovered from this morning?’

  ‘Quite recovered, sir.’ He could look back, could try to piece together each moment of the confrontation. He could feel in his knee the jarred blow into the man’s groin and could feel in his fist a rawness from the punch to the bridge of the man’s nose.

  ‘You will be rewarded for what you have done today – and I hope you will feel that the reward is generous – and your terms of employment will be reviewed. In the future, Johnny, I want you close to me.’

  ‘Whatever you say, sir.’

  ‘You have, of course, a valid passport?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘With Viktor, I travel abroad tomorrow. You have a family occasion tonight, yes? You should be here by seven in the morning, and you go with us. You will be away for perhaps a week. Johnny, the events of this morning have gone by and will not again be referred to. I have avenues that I will use to learn who was responsible for the attack on me, and I will use them. Thank you, Johnny, and I will see you in the morning.’

  Not asked whether it was convenient, not asked whether it suited his plans, but Carrick did not expect to be asked. He realized he had stepped higher up a ladder, that luck and good fortune had pushed him there. Felt, almost, a pride in the trust now placed in him.

  He nodded, turned. Viktor opened the door for him.

  He watched. Josef Goldmann stood back from the window but his finger hitched aside the net curtain. He saw Johnny Carrick go down the steps from the front door.

  He asked of Viktor, ‘Is the trust justified?’

  ‘You said that two shots were fired, and Grigori says so too. He did not stop, think and debate. He acted. Grigori’s reaction, to freeze, was the more normal in close protection when an attack is made. He did not.’

  ‘Which tells you?’

  He heard a slight chuckle, but it had no humour. ‘Perhaps that he lacks intelligence or imagination, and that he was a soldier. Only a corporal – with intelligence and imagination he would have been an officer. He can be given limited trust.’

  Josef Goldmann saw his saviour pause on the step and against the grey of his suit was the great bundle of roses he held to his chest. Then his man walked away at a fast pace.

  ‘What I like about him is that he is limited in what he looks to know of us. Like a machine, robotic. He asks no questions. I do not see him listening. Neither is he where I do not expect to find him in the house. He gives me no surprises. Yes, limited trust.’

  Now the chuckle had faint, grim humour. ‘If you take him you will expose him to Reuven. To win Reuven’s trust, as much trust as can be held between thumb and forefinger, a pinch of trust, that will be harder for him. Perhaps he will be turned out on to the street and sent home.’

  The pavement was clear, and the brightness of the flowers gone.

  ‘If you had been there, Viktor, and had seen what I saw, you would understand my trust in him.’

  He was in the outer office, sharing the woman’s workbench. She did not speak to him, but nothing, any longer, surprised Luke Davies.

  The file contained sheets of paper, every one a printout. He could have challenged her, could have said that he had, until that afternoon, been unaware that the Stone Age was alive and well at Vauxhall Bridge Cross, but he’d noted the sharp darts of her glances at him while he scanned the pages, and reckoned her defensive. He had not heard of any other floor, corner or cranny of the building where paper still existed. If he had challenged he believed he would have embarrassed her and won an evasive reply, something about Mr Lawson’s preferences.

  He’d been back to his old territory, Russia Desk (Baltic), had endured a volley of quips. He’d told them to wrap it, belt up, get lost, and then he’d had to laugh. He’d hacked into his computer and downloaded maps. They were now on his desk.

  Fastening the map sheets together with Sellotape, he’d made an extended montage that went from London in the west to the city of Sarov in the east. And her ruler had been within reach.

  The lines made a pattern, were as concise as a web left by spiders on a morning when hoar frost had formed. Had to admit that the pattern made a shape … and he had read about Sarov, home of St Seraphim, who had been canonized by the Orthodox church in 1903, and about Arzamas-16, home of the team that had built Joe One, the first of their tested atomic weapons, and Joe Four, the first of their tested hydrogen warheads. Lines on his map were traced between Sarov and L
ondon, to Colchester in Essex, to the east of Poland and Berlin. More lines ran to the Gulf. His pleasure, at understanding gained, was stabbed.

  ‘What’s that?’

  Must have looked like a startled rabbit: spun on his chair, thwacked his knee against the bench edge, hadn’t heard the entry. Hated himself for it, but stammered, ‘It’s to show the linkage of the calls.’

  ‘I know what the linkage is.’

  Feebly, ‘I thought it might help.’

  ‘How can it help me to understand what I already know? Do you think we’re children and idiots? Waste of time. What’s not a waste of time is that we have a name. I had it last night, and for the agent, but the DG’s sanctioned it. You know, there are some people here, modernists and work-makers, who sit on a committee that thinks up operational codenames. True. You can’t credit it. All damn Greek stuff, mythology and that self-serving military nonsense, “Shock and Awe”. The DG, and I’m not arguing, said I was thin on facts, and that if I was right I’d be looking for a …’

  He paused theatrically.

  Davies said, ‘You’d be looking for a needle …’

  ‘So we have an “N”, which is tidy. The agent is the needle, is the “N”, is November. Where is the needle?’

  ‘In a bloody haystack.’

  ‘Language, please.’ He was chastised but then – rarer than winter sunshine in Sheffield – God smiled. ‘That’s our operational title.’

  And Lawson reached across him, almost elbowed him, took up a thick marker pen from a tray in front of the woman, and scrawled across the face of the cardboard file Davies was reading the one word ‘HAYSTACK’. Then he seemed to do a little jig, one foot to the other, as if the name excited him, as if, with it, they were launched.

  Luke Davies asked, so softly: ‘Will it be that difficult to find, even with November, a “needle in a haystack”? Will it?’

  Lawson said, ‘Yes, it will be that difficult, if it exists.’

  Nothing said between them for four hours.

  It irritated Yashkin. He was better able to concentrate on the road, but the quiet of his passenger, the navigator, annoyed him. And nothing said when they were at a road junction, only a gesture of the hand – right or left or straight ahead. On each hour, he steadied himself to ask the direct question. He had put it, he thought, with sufficient force beside the river at Murom, and had not been answered.

  He was tired, had driven more than three hundred kilometres, always on the back roads. He was hungry, had eaten nothing cooked, only a sliced-meat sandwich from a stall in a village. He was thirsty, only one coffee in the middle of the day. He was a security officer by training, not a zampolit, but Oleg Yashkin, retired major of the 12th Directorate, had the talent to realize that the question must be confronted. The retired political officer must answer it.

  A signpost showed up in the gloom: twenty more kilometres to Kolomna. Better it was settled now, dealt with. Yashkin thought the political officer would have been more skilled in probing for an answer, more polished, able to extract a tooth without pain. Too little time left on that day’s leg for it to be put off any longer.

  ‘I have to know it, your answer … Do you regret it?’

  ‘Honestly?’

  ‘Yes. Do you regret what we’ve done?’

  ‘A little, yes. When you talked about it, described it, I thought then, does this thing, the Zhukov, which you sleep against, which you say has warmth, does it work? Is it effective? No, no, another time, not now. Some of me regrets it.’

  Yashkin said, ‘In half an hour we’ll be in Kolomna. In Kolomna there are trains and buses. You can go home. There, you can lean over the fence, near to where the hole was excavated, and you can tell Mother that her man is crazy, a lunatic, without a brain in his head.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I’ll go on alone to the Bug. I’ll stop when I’m at the river.’

  ‘Why?’

  Yashkin said, ‘I can tell you each word used at my dismissal. I can tell you about each minute I spent in my office on my last day, and each step of my last walk from my office to the car, with no gratitude offered me. I can tell you about near-starvation through winters when my pension was not paid, the hunger, and about driving drunks, addicts, those diseased creatures in my car, of scavenging for charity rates in the market, and of selling for a pittance what little Mother and I had that was precious to us. Whatever happens, I’ll go on to the Bug river.’

  ‘Fuck you again, Yashkin. Alone, you wouldn’t find it.’

  ‘I would – and when you’ve gone, I will find it.’

  ‘I doubt – fuck you again and again – you’d find Belarus. I see you driving in circles inside Ukraine, or perhaps still inside our glorious country. I couldn’t.’

  ‘A political officer may speak in riddles, but a security officer hasn’t the education to understand. What does “I couldn’t” mean?’

  ‘I couldn’t, Yashkin – you are my friend and a fucking idiot – leave you to get lost, which you would. Without me, my knowledge of the maps, you’re lost.’

  ‘Where, then, is regret?’

  The voice beside him dropped, was a whisper, a murmur, and he had to lean towards the other man to hear. ‘I don’t ask, “Does it work?” because then I increase the guilt for what I’m doing, what you’re doing … Perhaps I believe it doesn’t work, is harmless and of value only as a relic, which mitigates the guilt. And it isn’t entirely to avenge myself, for what was done to you and me … It’s the money. I’ve dreamed of that money. I spend it again and again. Should I feel shame? I don’t … It’s for the money. Fuck! We should have turned right.’

  ‘Molenkov, you talk too much.’

  ‘I’ve forgotten the regret.’

  ‘You talk too much so you missed the turning.’

  The Polonez was reversed, then put into a three-point turn. The back wheels went up off the roadway, and a stone wedged under the chassis. The weight of the Zhukov was responsible, but Yashkin revved hard and cleared it.

  He was coming into the town of Kolomna, and his eyelids flickered with exhaustion. To stay awake he had to talk.

  ‘I read about this town. A population of one hundred and fifty thousand, at the last census, is resident here. The town was founded in the year 1177 and had strategic significance because the Moskva and Oka rivers merge there. It is important today as a rail junction.’

  He yawned, his eyes closed and he felt the wheel go before he righted the Polonez. Traffic flowed round him and oncoming lights dazzled him.

  ‘It matters not a fuck to me.’

  At that moment, Yashkin was about to explain his need to talk – so tired, the strain caused by his belief that his friend regretted participating in the venture, or was a coward, or was afflicted by moral doubt, whichever was worse – and relief flooded him because, together, they would reach the Bug. There was a road junction as they approached the main bridge and too many headlights bouncing in his eyes.

  He hit the car in front, a BMW 3 series, shining and new. The old rusted bumper of the Polonez hit a glancing blow to the metallic silver BMW. Glass spewed out from the tail-lights. Brakes screamed. A young man in a black leather jacket – the damned uniform of trouble – climbed out, saw the wreckage and his fist clenched.

  Yashkin did not hesitate. From driving on minor roads all that day and the one before, mud would be plastered over his registration plates. He swung out. He thought he missed the young man by no more than half a metre, and he heard a fist thumped on the roof of the Polonez. As he turned, he saw that Molenkov gave the young man a finger. He sped off, drove like a madman in the traffic. He stopped as soon as he believed it safe, got out and bent to examine the plates. He reckoned it possible to read them, difficult but possible. Would the collision be reported to the police? Would they respond and look for a red Polonez that had left the scene of an accident?

  They went through Kolomna, and on the far side of the citadel they found a decaying roadhouse, with the virtue of sec
ure parking at the rear, and booked a room.

  A minicab pulled up beside him.

  Most of the drivers working that part of Dudley, in the West Midlands, were known to Sak, but he didn’t recognize this driver.

  The window was wound down. He was asked his name by the driver, whom Sak thought to be north African, perhaps from Algeria or Morocco. At the school where he worked as a laboratory technician he was Steven King. The name he gave to the minicab driver was Siddique Khatab.

  ‘Repeat that.’

  ‘Siddique Ahmed Khatab.’

  ‘And your father’s name?’

  He gave it. The light was failing and the street was a crowded bustle of kids and parents surging away from the school’s gates towards the estate. On the far side of the estate was the guesthouse his father and mother owned. It was used by sales representatives and lorry drivers on long hauls and those coming to the town for weddings or funerals. He understood the wariness of the approach, as careful as the message that had woken him: the arrests of the last two years had shown the futility of using telephones, analogue or digital, and email links. The driver accepted what he was told, grinned as if he enjoyed the sense of conspiracy, and reached into the glove compartment. An envelope was passed to Sak.

  He took it, folded it quickly, thrust it into his hip pocket. He gulped. The minicab drove away. It would have seemed to any who hurried by him on the pavement that he had given a driver instructions on a destination.

  Where there were longer shadows, and the crowds walking with him had thinned, Sak took out the envelope. He examined the tickets and the dates on them, returned them to their envelope and the envelope to his pocket.

  There was a reason for him having been woken.

  From university, in 1997, he had gone to work in the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston. There, he was Steven Arthur King, BSc, involved in low-level work but it had interested him. He had felt a part of a great team involved in the far frontiers of science. He had lived in a hostel for single professional and qualified staff. He had revelled in it, had taken time to read in the library of the early giants of the laboratories and test-beds, and had felt he belonged to an élite. After five years, he was outside the main gate for the last time – no appeal permitted – his access card withdrawn.