Timebomb : A Thriller (9781468300093)

by Seymour, Gerald

  They reached the hippopotamus house. It was closed – was being refurbished – and would not open for another week. He saw a flash of annoyance pass over Lawson’s face.

  ‘Right,’ Davies said. ‘Can we move on along the agenda, please? I think it’s going to rain, and I don’t want to get soaked again. I’ve much enjoyed our jaunt but …’

  Lawson headed for the aviary and beyond it were the penguins.

  Lawson said, ‘You are in the heart of Europe, young man, not on an offshore island. Everything here is governed by the last war. Boundaries, attitudes, loyalties, all are affected. This was the finest zoo in Europe, but we bombed it to destruction. The lions had to be shot by the keepers or they would have been free to roam the streets and attack people. Elephants were crushed by the collapsed concrete of their enclosures. Deer and birds were slaughtered by citizens desperate for food. It irritates me that the hippopotamus house is shut. One great beast – Knautschke – survived the bombing and hid in the mud of its pool. It was resurrected, fed back to health, and its sperm started a new hippopotamus collection. Of five thousand animals here at the start of hostilities only ninety-one were alive when the white flag went up.’

  ‘What’s your point?’ Davies could see none.

  ‘I would have thought it apparent even to an idiot. This city breathes history. The past cannot be discarded, is a ball and chain. You must sniff at the history here if you are to comprehend the present. Is that disrespectful to the genius of youth? Are you so arrogant that you cannot find room for history, are fearful that it will dull the lustre of your glory? When you know history you will know, too, the motivation of men. A sense, warped, of history will drive forward those we attempt to challenge.’

  ‘Were you here with Clipper?’

  ‘A good place. No microphones, difficult for counter-surveillance. We met people here, talked about things … Yes, we were often here. Come on.’

  ‘Can’t I go to the hotel and put on dry socks?’

  ‘You cannot.’

  They walked out of the zoological garden. Lawson set a brisk pace. They went past modern embassy constructions, where the Japanese were and the Saudis, the Mexicans, Malaysians and Indians. He asked why they walked and was told that atmosphere was gained by walking on a city’s streets, not by sitting in a car. He presumed that Clipper Reade had walked in Berlin, and Christopher Lawson merely imitated him slavishly. He resented his treatment. They reached a building faced with clean-cut grey stones. Through an open archway there was a wide courtyard, with leafless young trees in a line at the far end, and a shallow plinth in the centre with a charcoal grey statue, larger than life, of a naked man. Against the left wall, level with the statue, was a plaque and below it were a wreath and a bouquet of fresh yellow flowers.

  ‘You realize, of course, who this statue commemorates?’

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘Claus von Stauffenberg.’

  ‘Never heard of him. Sorry and all that,’ Davies said.

  ‘God, the ignorance of the young. At the Wolf’s Lair, he put the bomb under the briefing table. He tried and failed to assassinate his Führer, on the twentieth of July 1944. Hitler lived and von Stauffenberg, who had returned by air to Berlin and had seen his coup d’état fail, was shot by firing squad where the plaque is. I’m trying to show you the confusions under which we operate. To most, even in those dark days when defeat loomed, he was a traitor. To almost none was he a hero. Today, the best that can be said for him is that he is – now, at this late hour – respected. Myself, young man, I make no judgements. I am no crusader for democracy, not a champion of our concept of freedom, merely an observer. Very little in our world is clear cut, and that is best remembered.’

  Davies wondered whose words they were, guessed they were spoken first by Clipper Reade. He tried to imagine the two of them, the gross, overweight Texan and a young Englishman feeding from an American hand. He snapped back, ‘Is there not right and wrong? Don’t we make that choice?’

  ‘You are, or you purport to be, an intelligence officer. Look for sugar or saccharin and you’ll be boring and pompous. Come on. More for you to see. I’ll fight my opponents tooth and nail, but I will not have judged them.’

  There had been no talk in the Polonez, merely laughter puncturing the quiet, but now his old friend was silent. Yashkin drove, and wondered what new demon tormented the former zampolit. They had turned off the minor road to a village, had purchased bread at a shop and then pressed on. A range of low hills blocked their view of the Oka river, but they would meet it again when they came to Kaluga. There, the third stage of their journey would be complete and four more would remain. He saw the black soil of the fields, too wet to be ploughed yet, and his speed was seldom above forty-five kilometres per hour – and then they were behind a tractor that pulled a trailer loaded with cattle dung. An old man – older than himself – drove it, and a teenage boy was perched beside him. He thought he watched Russia, his Russia, as he slowed and tucked in behind them, and the manure stench wafted to him. They were the peasants of Russia, obstinate and stubborn, exploited and deceived. The tractor coughed fumes. If he made a victim of the peasant – as he was a victim – he could ally himself to the tractor driver.

  It must have welled inside Molenkov, but whatever had been dammed now burst out. ‘Yashkin, have you seen one?’

  ‘Seen what?’

  ‘An explosion.’

  ‘What explosion? What are you talking about?’

  ‘Have you seen a nuclear explosion? With your own eyes?’

  Had Major (Ret’d) Oleg Yashkin ever lied to his friend, Colonel (Ret’d) Igor Molenkov? He couldn’t remember having done so.

  ‘I have not.’

  ‘I thought you had, at Semipalatinsk-21.’

  ‘I have never seen a nuclear explosion, big or small.’ He couldn’t remember offering even the most trifling untruth to his friend. If his friend had asked him, after they had gone their separate ways in the fruit and vegetable market at Sarov, in the late afternoon when prices were lowest, whether he had found potatoes, cabbage or turnips at what could be afforded, and he had enough for Mother and himself, he would have said what he had bought – and then he would have shared. If he were down to the last bucket of coal, needed as a base under wood for the kitchen stove, and his friend came to the door to ask if he could spare some, he would not have denied that he had it. He had always shared the truth with his friend.

  ‘In your papers, do I not remember seeing you had the security clearance to accompany weapons to Semipalatinsk-21 and for the test site?’

  ‘I did the escort but didn’t visit the test site.’ He lied again.

  ‘You passed up that opportunity?’

  ‘I have never seen an explosion, and have never visited a test site, so let it go.’

  The weapon had been taken from Arzamas-16 by road to Kazakhstan. The journey had lasted five days, and Yashkin – then a lieutenant – had been third in command of the detachment of 12th Directorate troops. The device, and he did not know its power or the delivery system intended for it, was to be exploded deep underground. There would be no mushroom cloud and no flash, as there had been in earlier years when First Lightning was detonated, and the RDS-37 hydrogen bomb. The one he had seen was called Project 7. He could not have described it honestly. If he had, his friend would have abandoned him. He did not yet believe fully in Molenkov’s commitment. At the edge of the Semipalatinsk-21 test site was the dry bed of the Chagan river, and a shaft had been sunk among the stones. Kilometres back, safe in a bunker with reinforced-glass slits to view through, he had waited, heard the countdown and had not known what to expect. First the movement of the riverbed, then a towering column of stones, mud, earth and rock as strata and layers from far down were thrown up. The noise had pierced the bunker, a rumbling roar that he couldn’t describe adequately. The concrete floor had shaken, men had clung to walls and chairs, and coffee cups had fallen from the table. The cloud had surged into a clear sky an
d darkened the sunlight. It had reached its height but had not dispersed for many hours, and dirt from the far down subsoils coated the ground. He had been among those permitted, the next day, to go forward. He had seen a crater that was a hundred metres deep and four hundred wide, and the ground’s contours had changed. He had heard, the next year, that the explosion had formed a dam that would block the flow of the Chagan river in spring when the winter snows melted, and would make a new lake. He had heard, also, the year before his dismissal, that Lake Chagan was dead and polluted, contaminated by radiation. He could not have told his friend what he had seen.

  ‘If you say so.’

  He pulled out recklessly and hooted. The tractor driver slewed to the side, and the Polonez had enough room, barely, to squeeze past. He had to mount the verge and the car bucked, but he had silenced the questions and would not have to lie again. Molenkov grabbed the dashboard and braced himself.

  The most incredible sight Oleg Yashkin had witnessed in his life was the eruption in the bed of the Chagan river, and no man or child in Russia would live long enough for it to be safe to walk where the spring waters had made a lake.

  He said, ‘I think we’ve made good time. We’ve earned a bath and good food tonight.’ He talked then, with his friend, of the beers they would drink, and how many, and what was the local brewery in the Kaluga district, how often they would need to get up to piss in the night, and the laughter returned.

  The hawaldar told the Crow – and sighed, holding out his hands as if to mark the dimensions of the sum – that a huge amount of money was guaranteed.

  The Crow told him that the guarantee was from the Base, whose word had never faltered, and was not an advance of one-tenth already made in Dubai.

  The hawaldar told the Crow that the necessary messages had been sent by courier to a German city, that confirmation had been received of the courier’s arrival, and the acceptance by a colleague and trusted friend to make payment.

  The Crow told the hawaldar that he would be gone from the Gulf in the morning, would fly to Damascus, and from there the trail of his movements would be lost.

  A construction-site foreman and a banker of the Islamic faith prayed together. Then they hugged. The hawaldar had prayed fiercely and hugged tightly. He had thought the Crow to be a man of the greatest importance if he was entrusted with purchasing an item for ten million American dollars. He showed the Crow out of his villa and asked if he would ever return to the harbour-front skeletons at Dubai. His answer was a noncommittal shrug. So the hawaldar asked a question that had concerned him since he had met this man: how was it possible that the giant crane stayed stable when the winds blew in from the Gulf? Patiently, the Crow detailed the science of cantilever weights, and he found the answer fascinating. He watched the Crow walk to his car, climb into it and drive away. He thought he was a small part in a great network, one of the many wheels turning behind a clock face, and that so many others, of whom he would never know, were also wheels in the clock.

  ‘I’m going to be away for a few days,’ he announced, breaking the silence at the evening meal.

  ‘How is that possible?’ Sak’s father asked. ‘There are three more days of term.’

  ‘The classroom laboratory is now closed. A school trip is planned to Europe in the autumn, but if it is to be successful it must be reconnoitred now.’ He was fluent at deception, had been taught well.

  ‘That will be nice for you,’ his mother said.

  He saw on their faces – in the dark chestnut eyes of his father, the pale blue ones of his mother – relief. They did not know the full reason why, that afternoon in January 2002, he had arrived at the front door of the guesthouse as they prepared for their evening’s clients. He had had two bulging suitcases of his possessions from the hostel room at Aldermaston. From the West Midlands, he had lethargically chased some work opportunities in academic research under the name of Steven Arthur King and with hospital trusts, but he had gone for a job with police forensic investigation when hoping for ethnic discrimination with the name of Siddique Ahmed Khatab. He had always been turned down, or his applications had gone unanswered, so he had worked for his father and had helped his mother to clean the guest bedrooms. In the last summer he had gone to his father’s relatives in Pakistan and had stayed seven weeks. He had returned revitalized – his parents had noticed the change in him and rejoiced at it – and had been offered a job at the nearby comprehensive school. ‘Not important work, not yet,’ his father had told a friend, ‘but steady, with security.’ He had presumed the role of laboratory technician was too lowly to feature in the computer checks where he had failed on previous applications.

  ‘Only for a few days,’ he said, shrugged, and ate.

  It had been the start of a day like any other. He had bicycled from the hostel to his workbench. Before going to the centrifuge unit, he had been enjoying a mug of coffee and light gossip with colleagues, and a call had come for him to go, immediately, to the headquarters/ administration block. He was given a room number to ask for. There had been three men. He had recognized Summers, who was CSO for the Aldermaston complex: everyone knew the chief security officer who obstinately smoked a big pipe when he was outside a building. Another was introduced as a sergeant in Special Branch. The third man was not introduced by name or occupation – Sak now believed him to be from the Security Service – and in front of him was the folder with Sak’s personal file. There was little preamble. Summers had awkwardly revolved the bowl of his filled but unlit pipe, and had spoken.

  ‘This is not easy for any of us – for you or me. You understand that the world was turned upside-down in New York four months ago. The aircraft into the Towers, and all that, altered perspectives. We have gone with painstaking care through your record and note family links with the Tribal Areas of Pakistan. We are making no accusations concerning your loyalty to all of us at Aldermaston, nor is there a criticism of your work. However, security and the safety of the nation demand, in these difficult times, that we make hard decisions. You will be “let go”. This is not a dismissal, you are not sacked, but your clearance to work here is, with effect today, withdrawn. In conditions of confidentiality, your union has been informed that your employment is terminated, and I have their guarantee that they will not, repeat not, support legal action by you against us. You have been with us for five years, but you will receive six months salary in lieu of notice, which I consider generous, but it will be in staggered payments. Should you, in the vernacular, “go public” on this matter the payments will be halted. Also, don’t take this as a threat, we would counter any public statement you made with accusations concerning the quality of your work and your fitness to be employed here. You are a casualty of this war. Your family in Pakistan ensure that. I am very sorry but that is the situation, and no appeal procedure exists. I wish you well in finding other work that does not involve nuclear weapons and materials. Do you have any questions?’

  He had had none.

  A cousin of his father, living in West Bromwich, would do the redecoration of Room 2, it was decided, in the summer when the guesthouse business was slackest. A new shower unit, an upgrading, would be fitted in the bathroom outside Room 3, by a nephew of his father who lived in Brierley Hill. To his parents these were matters of importance weightier than Sak’s travelling to Europe on school business.

  It was the last boat of the day. They had walked all afternoon on the streets of the new Berlin, Lawson’s voice dripping in Davies’s ear. On looking out at a panorama of huge glass-and-concrete constructions that seemed to trumpet corporate wealth: ‘It is a mirage of affluence and the comfort zone does not exist. Grand façades, but not backed by reality. An attempt to plaster over the history of this city, but it cannot – not while the grandfathers still live. It’s skin deep, and society is raddled with high-level corruption.’ Going past the designer benches in public parks and seeing the drunks, destitutes and druggies sprawled out on them: ‘The money’s run out. The economic miracle was
a mirage and is no longer even pretended. This city is a place where the rats with the sharpest claws and the biggest teeth survive. Do you see charm? Anything attractive? This city is a sack where rats fight – and it’s where Clipper taught me my trade. There were rats here then, and little is different now.’

  It was a big pleasure-boat. It was raining hard now and the open seats on the deck were empty. They sat in the lounge cabin, and only one other couple – talking French but more interested in kissing than the sights – was there. Three girls lounged at the bar, but Lawson had waved them away when they had offered coffee or drinks. Luke Davies endured it, and did not know the journey’s purpose.

  They had walked past the great buildings, re-created, of the war where Bormann and Speer, Hess and von Ribbentrop had had their offices, where the Gestapo had been – and their sunken holding cells: ‘The past dominates, cannot be escaped from. Know the past and you can fight the modern danger. Ignore the past and you’re defenceless.’ And past a building where a sign indicated there was a Stasi museum, and outside it bronze statues of a uniformed man from the Democratic Republic’s security police, and civilian workers who symbolized the network of informers used by the regime: ‘The mentality still lives. The mentality was bugs and microphones, friend denouncing friend, a daughter betraying a father. The mentality is now pushed further to the east, beyond the Bug. It is alive in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. The men who bred it still have their desks in Warsaw, Budapest and Prague. That’s why we don’t share. Here, they even collected smells. In glass jars, hermetically sealed – the sort of jars your mother would have used to store beetroot in vinegar – there were handkerchiefs, socks and underwear for a dog to track. A jar stored in the basement of Normannenstrasse held a crushed cigar end. Clipper Reade’s.’