Molenkov smiled. ‘You could ask humbly and I could reply graciously with an explanation.’
‘Fuck you. Why do you feel better?’
‘At last I feel luck is with us. Do you understand me? In thirty-five minutes, my estimation, we’ll be in Klincy and—’
‘I know nothing of Klincy, its history, industry or layout. Where we will sleep, I don’t know.’
‘Can you not interrupt me, Yashkin? Then we’ll be at the end of the fifth day, and will have achieved three-quarters – almost – of our journey. We’ve survived, haven’t fought each other, have kept the wreck on the road. With each kilometre we travel we’re each nearer to a half-share of one million American dollars. Those are achievements, and they tell me that luck is with us.’
‘You believe in luck, my friend?’
‘I do. What was it but luck that caused the sentry at the main gate not to search the cart and find the thing? More luck for you that I, the political officer, didn’t see you dig the hole and bury it, because I would have reported you. More luck that Viktor came and you, my friend, confided in me. I believe in luck.’
‘We’ll need luck for two more days.’
Molenkov, now sombre, said, ‘I think you have to earn it.’
They were dwarfed by lorries, most with swaying trailers, that streamed past them. The passenger in the cab of a lorry that hauled timber had his window wound down and hurled abuse at Yashkin, who gave him the finger. Molenkov turned in his seat, cursed the stiffness of his pelvis and reached back. He let his fingers fall on the rough canvas that covered the thing. He thought of his wife, dead, and his son, dead, and wondered with growing bitterness why they had not earned luck. A horn screamed at him.
The voice chirped in his ear. ‘You want to know about luck, Molenkov?’
He turned his head, saw bright mischief in Yashkin’s eyes.
‘A story about luck?’
‘Go on.’
‘Have you heard of the luck of the scientists at Arzamas-16 who did the first test?’
‘No.’
Yashkin said, ‘It was the twenty-ninth of August, 1949, the test was to be called Operation First Lightning, and the bomb was on a tower in what has become the Semipalatinsk test site. Lavrenti Beria, head of security for all of the Soviet Union, was overseeing the programme to build the bomb and he came to view the test. The device was fired. It worked. The bomb was the triumph of Igor Kurchatov. Beria then read, with the mushroom cloud in the sky, a letter of congratulation from Stalin, addressed to all the scientists who had made the firing successful. Kurchatov was lucky. He spoke afterwards to close colleagues of his luck and theirs. He said Beria had carried two documents from Stalin: the letter of congratulation and the warrant for the scientists’ execution. Had they not been lucky, had the device not exploded, they would have been killed – Kurchatov said so. One document in the right pocket of Beria’s jacket, and one in the left. You could say that Kurchatov earned his luck … There were nomads who lived in transient villages inside the zone of radioactive fall-out and they were not lucky. They were not moved before the test. As always, luck must be earned. You look miserable, Molenkov. I tell you, we’ll earn our luck, and take what’s owed us.’
They came off the M13 and drove into Klincy.
Lawson came to the car, panting. Davies followed, carrying the bags for both of them. The car was parked on the kerb behind the minibus, a hundred and fifty metres up the street from the hotel.
The girl pushed open the rear door for him, and said, ‘Goldmann’s wheels are at the front. All of that party is loaded up, their gear in the boot. They’re moving out. We’re ready to go.’
Lawson slipped into the rear seat and closed the door abruptly. Wasn’t going to tolerate young Davies beside him. He had exchanged only banalities with him since the spat in the minibus. Not that he wanted more. He preferred quiet. Not ten minutes ago, he had been in his room. Throwing his clothes into his bag, he had seen the biro he had used beside the notepad on the bedside table, had bent to pick it up, and his hand had brushed the telephone. He had not called Lavinia since he had left London. He had not told her where he was headed. He could have lifted the phone, punched the numbers, muttered a couple of platitudes to the answerphone, or even spoken to her.
‘Are we all fit?’
‘Never been fitter.’ There was still that bloody sneer in young Davies’s voice.
‘Ready to go,’ the girl said.
Lawson remembered the telephone he hadn’t lifted, the number he hadn’t dialled, and a slow frown formed on his forehead. He had been away from home for two nights, and he couldn’t have said with certainty that Lavinia would have noticed his absence.
‘A little change of plan,’ Lawson said. Like a bloody bright light that had come on – God, his mind was clouded, confused, and he’d not acted on an impulse. Should have done. They were staring at him from the front. ‘Slipping, sorry. Luke … Apologies to both.’
He said what he wanted done.
He climbed out of the car, took his bag from the boot and started to walk to the minibus. Wasn’t damn well losing it, was he? They’d be standing in a bloody great queue winding round the corridors of VBX for a chance to take a peek at him if word surfaced that Christopher Lawson had lost the plot. He reached the minibus, pulled open the side door. ‘Coming with you, gentlemen, wherever we’re headed. They’ll be following tomorrow.’
Mikhail was at the wheel of the car that had stopped behind theirs. Reuven had come to the front passenger door of their car and opened it. Clear enough what was intended.
Josef Goldmann was out, quick as a rat up a drain. Reuven was talking fast, but quietly. Josef Goldmann gaped. Reuven’s finger pointed to Carrick, who knew nothing. Showed no interest because that wouldn’t have been expected of him. He thought Goldmann tried to argue, that he was brushed aside. Carrick saw his shoulders slump.
Goldmann came to Carrick’s door. Beside Carrick was Viktor, who would have heard and understood but was impassive and stared straight ahead. Carrick opened his door.
‘He wants you to go with him.’
‘Sorry, sir?’
‘Reuven wishes you to travel, Johnny, in his car.’
Carrick said, ‘You are my employer, Mr Goldmann. I ride where you want me to ride.’
Carrick saw defeat cut Goldmann’s face. ‘Thank you, Johnny. I wish you to ride in his car.’
‘As long as you’re happy, Mr Goldmann.’
‘I am happy, Johnny.’
He went, sat in the Audi. Mikhail’s smile was as cold as bloody winter. Wondered then if, in fact, he had failed the test as the drill tip had neared his kneecap, wondered if he was dead. Recalled the support given him by Reuven Weissberg when they had walked from the warehouse. Knew nothing. Reuven Weissberg passed him a peppermint. Knew less than nothing.
Mikhail drove fast into the Berlin night, and headed east.
Chapter 12
14 April 2008
They came into Warsaw at dawn. The horizon ahead, to the east, had no brightness, only degrees of grey. It was a landscape of greyness. Merging the land and the sky, a carpet of smog hung in the air. Carrick had not been told why he had been scalped from Josef Goldmann’s car to Reuven Weissberg’s.
He had not been questioned during the six hours on the road. Mikhail said nothing to him, spoke only – occasionally – to Reuven in Russian. Carrick found the silence unsettling. The radio was on softly, but only to catch road reports. The long quiet times were difficult for Carrick because the motion of the car and the warmth of its interior lulled him. He had decided he had been taken from his paymaster, Josef Goldmann, his Bossman, as a gesture of supremacy. Simple stuff. Someone else had something that was wanted, desirable and valued, and it was the mark of Reuven Weissberg that an alpha dog could take what it chose to.
Well past Poznan, with the signs showing for Warsaw, he had decided his assessment was flawed.
When he was stalking Jed and Baz, or Wayne, he ha
d seen the greed that ruled them, the need for the pecking order to be displayed and worn, as uniformed officers hankered after their rank badges. Greed was the biggest factor in criminals’ lives. Either side of Poznan and in the quiet of the car, he had been applying ill-founded stereotypes, had stuck labels on his image of Reuven Weissberg, which had drifted away as the kilometres were swallowed. More to this man … No sign of a mistress, but the grandmother who displayed authority over him was there. No indication of affluence in the apartment, just heavy old furniture that would have filled up the back of a junk store in London or Bristol. No top-of-the-range car, and the big Audi that Mikhail drove had gone past a hundred thousand kilometres on the clock. The clothes weren’t Armani and the hair wasn’t styled. Would have walked past him on the street and not noticed him.
Wrong. Carrick would have noticed him, had he looked into Reuven Weissberg’s eyes.
Coming into the suburbs of Warsaw, Carrick’s thoughts took new turns. Behind him, Weissberg had discarded the big leather jacket with the scuffed elbows and frayed cuffs and it lay on the spare seat beside him. He wore a clean, ironed shirt with short sleeves. The leather jacket had been shrugged off outside the Berlin hotel when it had been demanded that Carrick walk away from Josef Goldmann. Then Carrick had held open the car door, and as Reuven Weissberg had dropped into the seat, the right sleeve had worked up. Again, Carrick had seen the closed hole where a bullet had punctured the flesh.
Now, as Mikhail took the car up on to a main route flyover, Carrick believed he understood. When they had tested him, pushed him to the limit, and he had exploded with the yell of accusation about a gunshot and lack of protection, then – like a thunderclap – a mood had changed.
About protection … about the boasts of Josef Goldmann that he was protected by a guy who would risk his own life to earn his corn, about protection in a world of acute and extreme danger. It had been almost enough to make Carrick laugh out loud. But he did not … He could have laughed because a criminal feared for his own safety and had taken possession of his associate’s bodyguard, as if that bodyguard was a flak jacket, proven against small-arms fire … All about protection. As a child, Carrick had been taken by his grandfather into the Cairngorm mountains to the south of the Spey’s mouth when autumn turned the high slopes golden. They had gone, then, to lofty viewpoints, with binoculars and a telescope on a tripod, and his grandfather had searched the range for stags and hinds. The season of the rut, when the king stag mated with his hinds, fascinated his grandfather and bored the child Carrick near to death – unless there was combat.
Younger stags approached the king, and there was the bellowed defiance of the big old boy who controlled the herd. Some pretenders plucked courage and came to fight – horns locked, wounds made, blood seeping. Rare, but he had seen it, a pretender usurped the big old boy, sent him from the field where the hinds grazed. At the sight of the one-time king creeping away, injured and desolate, his grandfather always let rip squeals of excitement and thought his grandchild should ape him.
They said, on the courses he had done and in the office when time was idled, that the fear of every major criminal – at level three, into organized crime with international links – was that a young gun would topple him. They did not, of course, retire and slip away to the villa with the pool and the patio, milk the building-society account and allow an old world to drift away. They tried to stay the course and hang on to power, authority. They ended up, damn near the lot of them, in handcuffs because of the one ‘final’ big-shot deal, or dead in the gutter from a contract man’s weapon, with blood coming off the pavement and heading for the drain. Carrick remembered the strength of Reuven Weissberg’s grip on his sleeve and the way he had been held up when they had left the warehouse.
The car swung off the flyover and came down a slip road, then swerved across traffic lanes. They came to a hotel whose floors reached, almost, to the cloud base. Porters hurried forward but Mikhail waved them away. He did his own parking and they carried their own bags inside. Only Mikhail went to the desk to check in and collect the key cards. Carrick noted it. He did not have to give a signature. Neither did Reuven Weissberg, nor Mikhail. They waited a few minutes, not many, then Viktor came with Josef Goldmann.
Funny thing, but Johnny Carrick had never thought of Josef Goldmann – in the months he had been with him – as anything other than a target, and he sensed that Goldmann was small fry and insignificant in comparison with Weissberg. And he had never thought of Reuven Weissberg – in the two days since he had met him – as a true target.
He was told he should rest because it was the last day and the last night that there would be time to sleep. Difficult, standing in front of a lift, then entering it, feeling its surge up through forty-something floors, to remember that he was an undercover with SCD10, but on secondment, and that a matter of national security involved him … Too damn difficult to comprehend.
He stood at the plate-glass window as the rain ran on it and stared out. He said quietly, ‘I wonder if, at the end of it, they’ll have the balls?’
Viktor shrugged. ‘It was their proposition. If they hadn’t talked of it, how would I have known of it?’
Reuven grimaced. ‘We have to believe they’ll be there.’
‘They made the approach.’
‘Old men, both. Each kilometre takes them further from what they know.’
Viktor now smacked his fist into the palm of his hand. ‘Me, I take responsibility.’
‘You believe in them.’
‘Yes.’
His room faced the Palace of Culture, the Stalin monument to domination, and his window was level with an aspect of its upper structure. For a moment, Reuven Weissberg’s tongue wiped his lower lip, darting and hasty. ‘Should we have agreed it?’
He saw puzzlement scud over Viktor’s features. ‘You can’t hesitate now. I say that with respect, but you cannot. The deal is done. Not only us, and the old men. Others, too, are travelling. It’s not possible to withdraw.’
Turning, the smile at his mouth and the brightness in his eyes, Reuven Weissberg said, ‘If you say that the old men have the balls and will reach the place you agreed with them, I’ll be there. And I’ll honour the sale onwards. Do you understand the past?’
‘Yes,’ Viktor said.
‘What was done in the past, you understand that?’
‘Yes.’
‘Because of the past, I buy and sell … Will we hear from the old men again?’
‘We heard that they’d started out, and that’s enough. There’s something I wish to ask of you.’
Weissberg listened. He recalled what his grandmother had said, and heard the boasts of Josef Goldmann on the pedigree of a bodyguard. Reuven Weissberg accepted the advice offered him. Then he caught Viktor’s arm, held it vice-tight and whispered that it would be the last time Johnny Carrick was tested.
She recognized quality, and she thought the guy was good. First up, he didn’t mess with the puerile codenames, so she was no longer C for Charlie, and he was no longer D for Delta. All explained for her with a grin, and it had made her chuckle. G was not for Golf, the call sign, but was for the sour old fool’s insistence on the ‘Good Old Days’, and D was for Disciple: the poor creature trailing around after the lunatic.
They were at the door. He rang the bell.
Dinner was at the café on Hardenbergerstrasse, and Luke Davies had imitated Lawson ordering dinner the previous evening, not showing the menu but insisting he do it himself, speaking German with the English accent that destroyed it, and selecting the wine as if he alone knew his way round the list. She’d sat where Lawson had. Same chair that the man had used perhaps twenty or thirty years before. Luke Davies, she thought, had been good company, and fun, and she was short enough of that.
He pressed the bell three times, long rings.
He had taken her back to the little pension in the side-street, had booked himself again into the room he’d vacated in the evening, and her into w
hat had been Lawson’s room. He’d ordered the nightcap in the bar downstairs, and talked of his work – not the classified stuff – and she’d warmed and told him about what little amusement came out of the Pimlico office. She’d sensed it was an age, if ever, since he’d talked of his work with an outsider to VBX: she’d known it was the first time she’d spoken as an insider of SCD10 to someone outside the loop. They’d gone up the stairs and paused by their doors. He’d smiled at her and she at him, he’d wished her a good night’s sleep and they’d parted. Maybe it was because of the wish, but she’d slept well, right through till he’d banged on her door … What they hadn’t talked about, because there’d have been no fun and no laughter, was N for November. Truth to tell, once he’d been called to the Audi and away from Target One, and Lawson had changed his bloody mind, given new instructions, she hadn’t thought of Johnny Carrick, which might have been selling him short.
A sharp, reedy voice answered the bell, distorted by the connection to the grilled speaker.
Katie had confirmation of the quality of Luke Davies. Damn good German, and what she thought was bloody good Russian. Not rushing an old woman high in the building above them.
She knew what he’d said because he had rehearsed it with her.
He was a student, Jewish. She was a student, not Jewish. He was involved in Holocaust studies and she was working on contemporary Russian history. Frau Weissberg had been recommended as a prime source for the era covered by the Second World War. How did they know the address? Because they had been given it by Esther Goldmann, wife of Josef. Had Josef Goldmann, who, his wife had said, was in Berlin, not told her of their visit? Esther Goldmann had said Frau Weissberg had a history of suffering, heroic courage. Students would be privileged to hear her speak of the past. A whistle of breath, then the click of the outer door unlocking.
When he had rehearsed it with her, Katie had said, ‘How do you know she’s affected by the Holocaust?’
‘In a forest, in fatigues, holding a baby. Photograph in the kitchen. Partisans in the forest. That’s “affected” … Next?’
Timebomb : A Thriller (9781468300093) Page 28
