Timebomb : A Thriller (9781468300093)

by Seymour, Gerald

  Mikhail held the cordless drill, and worked his index finger on its trigger.

  The drill made less mess.

  With questioning, lowering over the man, sometimes shouting and sometimes hissing the questions, he had attempted to create fear – had failed. He sensed now that he had little time. In Perm, in the first months since he had gone to work for Reuven Weissberg – Viktor with him – it had been hammered into his mind that he must create fear. Without fear he was nowhere, no roofs sold, no customers coming and no rivals backing off. He was paid well to make fear. He had little time, knew that because Josef Goldmann was whimpering like a fucking kid, and Reuven Weissberg had shifted twice in his chair as if bored that the questioning had led to no admissions. Sweat streamed on the man’s forehead. He had done interrogations, enough of them, in his work with State Security and had rarely felt the need to raise his voice. Now, because failure faced him, he screamed the questions as he held the drill, racing, close to the kneecap. Mikhail had never in his life gone to an Orthodox church, had never sunk to his knees, had never offered up a prayer, and he did not believe in angels. He did not believe this goddam man, but sensed the threat of him.

  His screams rose, were incoherent. He mixed the English language with his own. ‘Who controls you? Police or Intelligence? How are you to contact your control? The attack on Goldmann was bogus, do you not admit that? What is the briefing of your control? What do they want? Is the target Goldmann or is it Reuven Weissberg? Do they know of the delivery? Is it the washing of cash or the delivery?’

  The response, repeated: ‘I have answered that … have answered that …’ Silence when the questions were in Russian.

  His hand shook, and the drill tip wavered a few centimetres from the trouser over the kneecap. He couldn’t make the fear. His arm stiffened. It was what Viktor had told him, and it had not before seemed important. Mikhail clutched at straws, was drowning.

  ‘You left outside your room, for laundry, sodden clothing. Why were you out in the night, in the rain? Did you meet your control in the night?’

  He saw his man flinch. At last …

  He hit again, and the drill tip spun not five centimetres from the kneecap. ‘It rained. You were out. You met your control.’

  There was a surge of breath. Mikhail held the drill steady, let it race. He waited for the confession, and the smile spilled at his mouth.

  He heard, ‘Reuven Weissberg, your employer – arsehole – has a bullet wound in the arm. I saw it. Where were you? Fucking a whore or with a hand down a kid’s trousers? Where were you, arsehole, when Mr Weissberg was shot?’

  He was about to drive the drill tip into the trouser covering the kneecap. The voice behind him was a murmur. ‘Enough.’

  He stopped. Mikhail let his finger slide off the trigger and the power died. He would never disobey an instruction from Reuven Weissberg. Weissberg was the only man he feared and he was at the point of success, but he would not disobey an order. He let the cordless drill slip from his fingers. It bounced on the concrete and splashed in a puddle of rainwater.

  The voice behind him said, ‘Free him.’

  Beside Reuven Weissberg, shaking and sobbing, was Josef Goldmann.

  As Mikhail bent to loose the man, their eyes met. He thought the man’s eyes laughed at him.

  He was in the minibus.

  It should have been the time that Shrinks exuded authority and competence, was listened to. He sat hunched and stayed silent.

  A full half-hour earlier he had slid back the minibus door, gone to the car and said to Lawson that, in his considered opinion, their man was in extreme danger and, following the description given him of the night’s events, was in no realistically fit state to defend his cover. Lawson had responded, ‘When I want your contribution I’ll ask for it, and right now I do not,’ then pulled his door shut. The younger man, Davies, had rolled his eyes and shrugged, and Shrinks had returned to the minibus.

  He had not worked with Lawson before. A little of a fearsome reputation had reached him, but he had dismissed that as jealousy – there was enough of that at VBX – but he had been on the team long enough to believe each last syllable of the drip of criticism addressed to Christopher Lawson. Small mercies, but at least the man was an interesting subject. ‘Interesting’, but not the centre of his attention.

  His focus was on November. From the far end of the long approach to the warehouse yard gate he had seen the cars drive in. Then he had had Deadeye’s binoculars passed abruptly to him, and there had been a flash sight of November’s head, front passenger seat, blurred, then gone. Precious little to work from, and the features had been expressionless, but he’d seen wide-open eyes and the pallor that stress brought. He had gone to the car, to Lawson, to tell him that the agent was defenceless and critically vulnerable, and his cheeks had flushed at the blatant rejection. Where would his advice have led, had it been accepted? Obvious. To go in and get the man clear – he had heard, faint but clear above the cries of wheeling gulls, the sounds of a chain-saw. Lawson, that ‘interesting subject’, had shown no hesitation and not a modicum of doubt in dismissing him. God, if he ever had that man, with certainties by the bucketful, on a couch … His own science, that of forensic psychology, was inexact and men who apparently harboured no doubts had always fascinated him.

  Shrinks – he hated the name but it had stuck – worked two days a week at VBX and had been allocated a cubbyhole on the second floor in the Medical Section; the other three days he spent at University College Hospital in old Bloomsbury where he was attached to the Department of Psychiatry. Most of his colleagues at UCH treated varying degrees of mental illness, but he researched all aspects of human behaviour – and at VBX he sat in on selection of recruits panels, had influence in the planning of courses and monitored the progress of the younger officers. Normally he was listened to and what he said was used and seemed valued; this was the first time he had been ignored, then rejected, when he had stepped out to let his opinion be known.

  The ambition of this big, shambling man – a couple of months short of his thirty-sixth birthday – was to be taken on at VBX full time. The secrecy and need-to-know culture appealed to him. The building burgeoned with excitement. He was, and had no problem admitting it, an enthusiast, and the two days a week when he jogged across the bridge and flashed his card at Security, then fed it into the machine at the entry barrier and went inside, gave him the greatest happiness he knew. Had to be careful in expressing that. He lived with Petra, a wood sculptor, in a housing-association one-bedroom flat in Islington. He could not blather on to her about his greatest happiness being at work … Petra, hacking away at wood with chisel and hammer in her council-sponsored studio, did not know where he was. The secrecy of the life, up to the time he sat cramped in the minibus and with the pain in his constricted knees, had thrilled him.

  That ambition, he believed, was now threatened.

  He wondered, even at that distance and through the crumbling brickwork of the building far ahead, if he would hear a scream of terror, of agony.

  If he were to return to VBX having been an integral part of a team that had lost its most valuable asset, its agent on the ground, his ambition would crumble. He needed the operation to succeed. He had long hair that fell to his shirt collar and his fingers worked in it. The girl bit her fingernails, Bugsy stared fixedly ahead, and Deadeye hummed the same damn tune again and again. Then he saw the receiver light wink on Dennis’s lap.

  The minibus was in fast reverse, and when Shrinks looked out through the back window he had a view of the car turning the corner.

  ‘Don’t mind me,’ Shrinks said, and the tension had reached him. ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘Adrian’s found a vantage-point where we may get an eyeball,’ Dennis said.

  He thought they would see a weighted bundle carried out of the building, two or three men taking the strain. He realized he knew so little of the trade of VBX. It was simple and straightforward to sit in on selection bo
ards and have young men and young women recite their CVs and all the dubious reasons they had concocted for joining the Service. But this was different: he had seen, just a flash of it, the face of a man taken to the limits and knowing it.

  There was much that Shrinks could have said, had he been asked … Could have said that an agent working beyond the reach of backup must possess supreme motivation, not that of a crusading knight fighting criminality, but have the self-induced need for success, and syringefuls of it. Could have said that a degree of stress was beneficial to the agent, that lack of stress was a road to complacency, but the stress levels the far side of the brick walls were beyond his experience as a psychologist. He liked to say, when a candidate had gone from the interview room and before the next was called forward, that he looked for ‘an organized mind’.

  They were at the door of a derelict three-storey building, ancient bullet holes on the rendering. There was a gap in the doorway, where a nailed barrier had been prised back. Shrinks thought he would get a grandstand bloody view of a body being removed for disposal.

  No one helped him, nor would he have asked for help.

  There was an aged staircase with one in two, or two in three, of the wood steps missing. Those that were in place creaked and protested at their weight. At the biggest gaps Lawson sank to his knees, crawled and straddled the spaces, but no one looked back to see if he was able to bloody compete. On the first floor of the building – once an apartment block – there was a doorway and a distant window, bird shit on the floorboards. Trouble was that the bird shit lay on the boards that remained, and there were not too many of those. He hesitated in the doorway. Adrian was at the window. Davies and the cuckoo girl, Charlie, were halfway across the room and walked on the beam that had once supported the boards, not much more, damn the thing, than a couple of inches across. Davies had gone first and had good balance, held his arm out behind him and her fingers rested on his. She matched his steps. The drop between the boards and the beams to the ground floor would have been twenty-five feet. As if they had tossed for it and the loser went first, Bugsy stepped on to the beam and Shrinks had an arm out, held tight to the shoulder in front of him and might have had his eyes half closed. They could not back off, he knew it, because he was behind them. He waited his turn. Perhaps squatters had been in the building. His turn had come. Water came down, heavy and continuous, missed the beam by less than half a foot, and went on down. He could hear its patter far below. The beam shook as Bugsy and Shrinks joined Adrian, Davies and the girl on the one board under the window. Lawson went across. They were not looking at him. At the final stride, no hand reached out. He controlled his breathing.

  He inserted himself beside Adrian. There was a clear view out across a bombsite not yet developed, the roadway that went nowhere, the building of weathered brick and the small doorway set in it. He saw the cars parked there, and the man who watched the gate.

  The rain had come on heavier.

  Then Davies said, ‘Well, Mr Lawson, here we all are with a Grand Circle view. What’s going to be the show ? Tragedy or a comedy with a bag of laughs? Me, I’m banking on tragedy. I think it’s pretty well known that Russian organized crime gets about as vicious as any – unless it’s the Albanians on a red-letter day. You could – damn you, Mr Lawson – have picked that poor bastard up out of the gutter last night, when he was down and beaten, and called time on all this, blown the whistle. Not your way, was it? Gave him a verbal kicking and sent him back into that snakepit. I suppose you followed the edicts, as handed down on bloody tablets, of the peerless Clipper Reade … Well, look where it’s dumped our man.’

  He remembered it well, Clipper’s story of the meeting on a park bench at the south side of the city of Gdansk, underneath the ramparts of the fortress built by Napoleon. With Clipper had been the young Pole, just past his twenty-first birthday, who worked in the division of the railways that cleared the tracks for military traffic. The kid had been buckling, and was refusing to continue supplying information on the timetables and content of the traffic that rolled at dead of night. Clipper had lashed him with his Texan tongue. Had achieved two more dead-letter drops. The second had listed the passing through the Gdansk junction yard of twenty-four MAZ-543 launch vehicles, with Scud-B missiles mounted, all loaded on flatbed stock. Scud-B had high explosive and chemical and nuclear warhead capability, and it was Clipper’s biggest success story in 1978 that he had identified the shipment coming through the junction yard at Gdansk and on to Polish territory. After that dead-letter drop, no more. The kid had been correct in his assessments that time was running short for him. Arrested, tried in camera. An American diplomat expelled from Warsaw, and a tit-for-tat reaction in Washington. Clipper Reade long gone from the scene, selling tractor spare parts somewhere else, and the kid with the timetables had gone off the radar – maybe beaten to death, maybe hanged, maybe executed by pistol shot, but he had not coughed a description of the big American from the Agency. Clipper had said he’d quite liked the kid, that he was decent, honourable and probably a patriot, but that his life – ‘Because we don’t ever go squeamish, Christopher’ – was fair exchange for knowing that Scud-Bs, with nuclear capability, had gone through the junction yard at Gdansk. The night the courier – a Canadian exchange student – had brought back that information, collected from the dead-letter drop, Clipper Reade and Lawson had killed two bottles of German sparkling wine with chasers of Earl Grey from the pot.

  ‘What you did should lie on your conscience.’ The hissed whisper was in Lawson’s ear. ‘You sent him back … Where he is, that’s the sort of place those bastards take a man they suspect. It’ll be their damn abattoir. Feel good about that, Mr Lawson, do you?’

  He was nudged. Adrian passed him pocket binoculars. It took him a moment to get the focus right, and voices were in his ears.

  Adrian’s murmur: ‘That is unbelievable. Incredible.’

  ‘Never, never would I have reckoned it,’ Davies mouthed.

  Shrinks’s voice, breathy: ‘It’s the Stockholm thing. It’s that syndrome … but I couldn’t have predicted it. Only you could, Mr Lawson.’

  He had the sharpness of the image. Josef Goldmann seemed to run in front of the group as if he needed to be gone from the place and was scarred by it. The lenses raked over the two hoods, Viktor and Mikhail, who hung back. There was frustrated fury on their faces and their feet seemed to stamp as they walked; Lawson felt the chuckle in his throat. His man, November, lifted out of an office doorway in the night, came with a weak, loose step towards the car, and was supported by Reuven Weissberg, who had his arm round November’s back and his fist gripping November’s coat. He had the focus clear now. Reuven Weissberg reached up with his other hand and, as if they were friends, pinched November’s cheek. November would have fallen if Reuven Weissberg’s arm had not held him up. Lawson knew what Stockholm syndrome was, and had aimed to create it.

  Adrian said, ‘It’s a triumph, Mr Lawson – and we need to move fast.’

  They ran to the stairs and were going down, skipping over the gaps where the steps had been taken out. Bugsy and Shrinks helped each other. None of them looked back. Lawson started after them. Bloody well past sixty-one years, bloody near pensionable. Was wobbling on the beam. Should not look down. Heard the clatter of them on the steps. Felt himself going, but Lawson did not cry out, then seemed to see the face of Lavinia, his wife, and Harry, his son. They looked away … Had hooked his right leg over the damn beam and had a hold of it with his left hand. Was suspended. Could look down and see them all crossing the lobby, going quick, not looking up. Thought the left arm was about ready to come out of its socket. Then he’d fall. The angles of the beam were sharp enough to cut off his right leg at the knee, and then he’d fall. Took the strain. Pulled himself up. Was astride the beam, and panted. Crawled along it, and came to the doorway. His fingers clawed on the wall and he stood, went down the steps and crossed the hall. Funny that, first time since he’d reached Berlin that he’d though
t of his wife and son.

  The car was already gone, but the minibus waited for him. He climbed in.

  He spoke, silent and without lip movement: ‘Just as you said it would be, old boy … Pity me, Clipper, with all these damn Thomases for company.’

  Stone-faced, Viktor drove.

  Josef Goldmann had a hand on Carrick’s shoulder, leaned forward and spoke in his ear: ‘How did you know, Johnny?’ Play dumb and play ignorant. ‘Know what, sir?’

  ‘How did you know that Mikhail was with Reuven Weissberg at the shooting and did not react until the shot had been fired, and it was only Reuven’s good fortune that the shot took the flesh of the arm and not the chest or skull? How did you know that?’

  ‘I didn’t know it, sir. I guessed it. I wouldn’t have a kneecap if I hadn’t guessed something.’

  Laughter behind him, but hollow.

  ‘Mikhail was not fucking a tart when Reuven was shot, and he was not masturbating a young boy. He was there, Johnny, but he was slow with his reaction. You were not slow when I was attacked. It was a good guess.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Chapter 11

  13 April 2008

  He was numbed and quiet. Carrick sat in the apartment’s kitchen. The grandmother moved around him, but it was as if he weren’t there. A coffee mug had been placed on the table near to his elbow, and he had nodded but was not acknowledged. The grandmother spent her time washing dishes and saucepans in the sink, then drying them and putting them in cupboards. Afterwards she prepared a meal, peeled vegetables and stripped cold meat off a bone. He believed her to be wary of him, but felt her suspicion was ingrained, not personal.

  When she had made his coffee, she had taken a tray – four mugs and a steaming pot – out of the kitchen and had been gone two or three minutes. Carrick had not moved from his chair at the table. Reuven and Mikhail, his Bossman and Viktor were in another room, If a door was opened he could hear their faint voices, but the language used was beyond him. Mikhail had brought the tray back.