‘What about “suffering” and “heroic courage”, are they guaranteed?’
‘In the forest with a baby, with partisans, her hair white at twenty, twenty-one. They fit.’
‘She calls Josef Goldmann, wherever he is, on a mobile. Checks you.’
‘Doesn’t. Knows mobiles are tracked. Basic security, mobile off.’
Katie had said, ‘So, she calls Esther Goldmann for verification.’
‘Then we blow out, but she won’t have done. I’d bet on it.’
She’d pulled a face. ‘On your head be it.’
He’d blinked. ‘Wrong. On Carrick’s head.’
And the lift rose smoothly and fast.
He said, ‘Don’t forget the old bathroom routine, and getting her to show you. Lead, and look harmless.’
She was undercover-trained. Had done the same courses as Johnny Carrick and heard the same lectures. Her major experience was as a girl trying to break into the gang doing a street opposite King’s Cross station, and having to leg it each time the pimps, Ukrainian and Albanian, came after her. She brought them out and was the bait for them to break cover. The camera in the parked van did the identification, and she’d played the part of the girlfriend on three different operations. She knew what she had to do, but seemed not to mind being told.
It was always bullshit.
Bullshit opened doors.
Katie could do that smile, the one about melting butter, and do it well, and Luke Davies was good. She didn’t know what he said in the shadowed gloom of the hall, as they were taken through to the kitchen. She was doing smiles and he was doing sincerity, and it was bluff and it was bullshit. A pot of tea was made, and poured before it had stood. It was thin and tasted stewed. Katie kept smiling, and Luke was nodding, as if what he was being told was a message from God. The old woman, Anna Weissberg, made short, staccato statements that were, Katie thought, bare of redundant explanation. Maybe it was five minutes before the tea was poured, and maybe five more before the mugs had been pushed towards them.
Katie understood. She saw the increasing agitation of the grandmother of Reuven Weissberg. Too right, my old girl, because it was a piss-poor decision to let in soft-talkers off the street, with an introduction that couldn’t be checked. Fidgeting and fretting, answers drifting to brevity, then to one word. She was at the door, and holding it open for them. Katie did her stuff. The toilet, please. Could she use the toilet? Always worked … and couldn’t find the switch for the light, and was shown it. She stood inside the toilet, heard the slippered feet shuffle away – wondered if Anna Weissberg had any clothes other than black or whether she mourned perpetually – counted to fifty, pulled the flush and came back into the hall.
In English, Luke said to her, ‘I am afraid that Esther Goldmann was presumptuous in offering us this introduction. Anna Weissberg was in a camp, was freed from it and lived in the forests with partisans. Her grandson’s father was born in the forests. It was a time of great strain that she doesn’t feel happy talking about. It would have been better if we’d waited till her grandson was at home. That’s what she’s saying.’
‘Please would you thank Mrs Weissberg for her kindness, Luke, and for the tea and for letting us into her home, and say we hope we haven’t disturbed her and woken bad memories. For that, if we did, we apologize.’
It was translated.
The welcome had been outstayed. Katie recognized the discomfort they had visited on the woman. The brilliant bullshit had wormed them in but couldn’t keep them there. She sensed a loneliness into which they had intruded, and an isolation that had been fractured, and thought the woman would regret, damn deep, permitting them to enter.
The door closed behind them. They heard a key turn in the lock and a bolt go across, but they had broken into a fortress and lies had done the Trojan Horse for them.
‘What did we learn?’
‘I’m not sure,’ Luke Davies answered. ‘Don’t know. I mean, we’ve accessed a big player’s home, but inside it’s what I imagine a functionary’s apartment would be in fifty Russian cities. There’s nothing. No wealth, no opulence, extravagance. So, what’s the motive for criminality, doing the big deal that Lawson blathers about? I suppose she’s central, but I don’t know why. All I can say is that she had white hair when she was in that forest, and she would have been about twenty.’
‘Could a scarring emotional experience turn your hair white?’
‘I suppose so, but I don’t know.’
‘And that’s it?’
‘That’s it. We go and find them.’
Katie nodded. She did the mobile call, reached Lawson. Did he want a run-down? He did not. She didn’t bother to express her opinion that Luke Davies had been bloody double-time brilliant in gaining entry, and that she had achieved the hoary old one of needing the toilet and had won him half a minute alone in the kitchen. She didn’t think Lawson would have jumped for joy. They should drive to Warsaw.
She took the wheel, and he did the maps.
The sign said it was still two kilometres to the Customs point.
Right to the last, before accepting the inevitable and joining the crawl of the queue, they had debated whether a diversion north or south, and an attempt to use side-roads, was worthwhile. Had decided, with grim reluctance, that the M13 was the only possible route. Molenkov’s finger traced the frontier line on the map across his knees, and he’d bent low over the unfolded sheets to see the detail better. He had muttered of an absence of roads, too many rivers that would not have bridges and would be so swollen as to make ridiculous the thought of fording them, forests that were great blocks on the map.
Earlier there were two, three opportunities when they might have turned off the M13 and gone south, towards Klimovo, or to the north and on a side road to Svatsk, or tried for a larger loop and gone far north and west to Krasnaja Gora, but Molenkov had pulled a long, mock-despairing face when they had come close to the signs and Yashkin had driven on. They had reached the queues. At first they had progressed in little darted movements. Then it had been a crawl but continuous. Now they were halted.
Molenkov’s cough was hacking. Yashkin checked the windows. They were, of course, closed tight against the rain but something of the foulness around the Polonez seeped in. The lorries belched fumes from their exhausts. Yashkin thought they were surrounded by a fog of polluting gases. The taste was in his mouth and dried his throat, seeming to scratch rather than tickle it.
Did the Belarus authorities have modern detection equipment to scan the vehicles crossing to their territory? Did they have the devices that would read radiation traces? He had not thought so, and Molenkov had not known. Because of rivers and forests it was decided, after the debate, that the chance must be taken: fucking Belarus, with an economy still back in medieval or at best Tsarist times, would not have the equipment to recognize the signature of a plutonium pit in the heart of a Zhukov weapon.
Another anxiety, now more pressing, intruded on the mind of Yashkin. It would not have reared itself if they had driven fast and directly to the twin Customs points. What he would have called, all those years before when he had worked, the ‘human factor’. The pompous official, the man who revelled in the power given him, the arsehole consumed by self-esteem, the bastard who sauntered to a vehicle, peered through its windows, examined passports and driving licence, then demanded a search of the interior. That worry had been a pimple head, a mosquito’s bite, but the irritation was now scratched and had become an open sore.
He drove the car forward, braked again, saw tail-lights in the queues ahead, watched the drift of the fumes across the windscreen. He told Molenkov that the anxiety for the equipment should have been secondary to the worry over the human factor of an official demanding to search the Polonez.
‘I mean, it’s hardly hidden, only covered. Well, tell me – you’d know, my friend, because you could act the part of a zampolit and be pompous, an arsehole and arrogant. You were the small bureaucrat official with no st
atus beyond that given you by the uniform.’
His friend was grinning. Between the violence of the coughing, Molenkov gave a black chuckle. ‘Can’t you see yourself, Yashkin? Weren’t you such an official?’
Hands raised, Yashkin accepted his point. ‘What do we do?’
A little frown from Molenkov, an index finger tapping his chin as he thought. The pursing of lips because a decision was reached. ‘It’s the uniform.’
‘No riddles. Speak clearly.’
‘You said it yourself, idiot, the uniform is his status. The official withers to insignificance when he doesn’t wear a uniform.’
‘But when he sees us he’s in the uniform. Russian Customs or Belarus Customs, they have a uniform. We can’t expect him to be naked when we reach him.’
Molenkov said, ‘We brought our uniforms. We didn’t know for what purpose. We use medals and uniforms. I talk and you’re silent. We both wear uniforms.’
They went forward again, stopped again.
Yashkin eased his foot off the brake pedal. ‘Full uniform?’
‘Full uniform and medals, the medals over the ribbons.’
‘Good.’ Yashkin chuckled, then switched off the engine. It guttered. ‘I was stupid not to realize that a minor bureaucrat, a political officer, would understand the limited mentality of a Customs arsehole.’
They climbed out, stood and stretched. The fumes made Molenkov’s coughing worse. The side door was opened, and each took out his uniform, then searched his bag for his medals. They carried the uniforms and medals to the verge and climbed a couple of metres up a shallow bank. They stood in the rain among the dead grass of winter and stripped. They gave a show, heard shouts of mock-abuse and derisory whistles. Engines roared and noxious fumes spurted from the exhaust pipes. Molenkov was convulsed with coughing. Horns bellowed. The vehicles edged forward but those behind the Polonez couldn’t move.
‘Do I look the part?’ Molenkov demanded of his friend.
‘Yes,’ Yashkin responded. ‘You’re the perfect example of a minor official.’
Molenkov punched him. He was grinning, but the blow made Yashkin gasp. The shouts, yells, whistles and the noise from the horns burgeoned. They picked up their clothing, took time to fold the items roughly, then skipped through the moving lorries and went back to the Polenez. Yashkin started up and cruised the space left empty in front of them. When he reached down to change gear he could hear, satisfyingly, the tinkle of the medals. The fit of his tunic disappointed him. It hung on his chest now as a loose cloak would, and it was the same with Molenkov’s but he wouldn’t tell his friend.
Molenkov said, ‘Do you remember the power of that uniform?’
Yashkin paused, but only briefly. ‘The year before I was dismissed an NCO was brought to me. He had been caught at the wire of Zone Twelve and was about to carry three typewriters through a hole he’d made in the wire. Not radioactive material, not the blueprint of the layout of a warhead, but three fucking typewriters. He was so frightened of me – of my uniform – that he messed his trousers. I told him to take the typewriters back to Zone Twelve, after he had changed his trousers, and gave him extra night duties on the north perimeter where it was always coldest. He thanked me for my clemency and was blubbering his gratitude, weeping like a kid. He would have been on his knees had it not been for the escort holding him up. That was the power of my uniform.’
Molenkov said, ‘An engineer in explosives was reported to me for saying at a party that our warheads were technically a decade behind those of the Americans at Los Alamos, and that we didn’t service them often enough because we lacked the financial resources to do the work, and many would fail to detonate if fired. He was brought to me. I berated him for “negativity” and “defeatism” and for “spreading lies” and “disloyalty to the state”. He cringed in front of me. I could barely hear his response because he squealed in fear. I think he believed he was headed for the gulag. I had been twice to his apartment as a guest. My wife was the friend of his wife. To have pursued him would have meant more trouble than it was worth – reports to be written and sent to Moscow, investigations, inquests as to the effectiveness of my work. When I told him to go home, and not to be such an imbecile again, he fainted. I shan’t tell you his name, but he was one of the brightest stars of Arzamas-16 and to have lost him would have created a void hard to fill. He was carried out of my office. That was the uniform.’
Yashkin braked, waited, then nudged forward again. ‘Did you ever see him again after you’d been dismissed, and no longer wore the uniform?’
Molenkov said, ‘I was passing the museum. It was three years ago. I’m older than when he knew me, and my clothes were those of a vagrant but he would have known me. A face doesn’t alter whatever circumstances affect the body. He walked right past me and looked through me. He would have thought himself as of the élite and me as a functionary. I wasn’t wearing the uniform.’
‘I saw that NCO, and definitely he saw me. He was with his children, parking his car outside the cinema. I wore that old coat – the one from the street market with the moths – but he knew me. How do I know he knew me?’
‘How do you know he knew you?’
‘Because he spat at my feet because I wasn’t wearing the uniform.’
Without thinking, Yashkin chopped the heel of his hand hard on to the steering-wheel. The shock went from his wrist to his elbow and then his shoulder joint. But he felt no pain. Yashkin said, ‘We owe them nothing, nothing. Be certain of it.’
Nodding fierce agreement, Molenkov began to pick fluff from the material of the tunic above where his medals were pinned.
In their finery of former days, they stayed locked in the queue and, metre by metre, were taken forward, at snail’s pace, to the Customs point where they might be confronted by a vehicle search. Silence fell, as if talking were no longer valuable. They were alone and sealed in the car, their attention directed at what lay immediately ahead, not a wider world.
She was one of those who was rarely remembered. If she was remembered, she was easily forgotten. Not recognized as skills by her line managers, her characteristics had helped to create a rather dogged individual, with the trait of persistence.
The problem gnawed in the mind of the liaison officer, Alison. It had been with her for close to two days and nights. It was the matter of Haystack, the name of Johnny Carrick and the sense of responsibility she felt that had distracted her. She could have taken a blank sheet of paper, drawn a vertical line down it from top to bottom. She could have written on the left side: ‘Imminent danger? … Where are we on a scale of one to ten, Mr Lawson?’ And written underneath it: ‘A scale of one to ten? Probably between twelve and thirteen.’ If the gaunt, brusque Christopher Lawson was to be believed, and national catastrophe loomed, she had been morally and operationally correct in divulging the name of Johnny Carrick, an undercover of SCD10. It was the sort of difficulty she had not faced before, but she had no inclination to head off towards her line manager’s office and unburden herself while still existing in such ignorance. It had come to her, what she should do, at around four o’clock that morning, and about damn time too.
The power of the computer she was linked to from her workstation was immense. From it she could enter bank records, credit-card transactions, driving-licence details, telephone-usage printouts, pension schemes, electoral registers, marriage and birth certificates. She could open a man or woman’s life, split it wide and examine it.
She might, later, have to justify such an intrusion, but that was a minor concern. Information spewed on to her screen. Him, a wife, a son, an address … and she felt the chance to shift a minimum of that burden from her shoulders.
She had driven without stopping. The big car with the big engine had eaten the miles between the eastern outskirts of Berlin and the western approach flyover into Warsaw.
For Katie Jennings, the long drive was like fulfilment. She was in her thirty-second year, had been brought up in a Worcestershire v
illage under the bleak spine of the Malvern Hills. Her father had been a Water Board engineer and her mother had taught at junior level; they were now adrift, had packed in their jobs before retirement age and spent half of the year scraping the hull and painting the interior of the Summer Queen, the other half navigating the canals of southern and western England; they had achieved a sort of freedom, and she hadn’t.
She had thought, once, that joining the Metropolitan Police, aged nineteen, would provide the independence and drive she yearned for – which she recognized her parents now had – and had grown disillusioned. The first flushes of excitement had faded. And then she had thought, four years before, that the transfer into SCD10 would give her the adrenaline surge – and it had at first. She had done King’s Cross where the ‘toms’ paraded and had known that back-up was reassuringly close. She had done the trips to the Spanish island, where her job was to sit with the big players’ women and pick up the little morsels they offered in their asinine conversations, and then she had been pulled inside the Pimlico office. There, she did the filing, made the tea and kept the diaries for Rob and George. Katie Jennings did not know whether she was relegated to office duties because of a personal failure or, a simpler explanation, because she was convenient and it was comfortable to have her in the building. She knew the way the system worked and, most probably, Rob and George dreaded the day she moved on and they’d have to find the next sucker who understood the work, made good tea and coffee, and knew what fillings they liked in their sandwiches. She had become professional in the quality of her moans, not that she showed them.
It was late afternoon when she brought them into the city.
Part of the stereotype of the ‘little woman’ was that she should have a fling with Johnny Carrick. The star, the guy who was trusted and worked at the edge, had no attachments. If she slept with him she wasn’t a marriage-wrecker. That, too, had seemed a route to excitement, but no longer. He didn’t do it well any more, was too tired, too frazzled or too stressed, and the sessions on the bunk bed in the Summer Queen had been of consistently poorer value to her. Bloody hell. It was what she thought about as she drove through the Warsaw suburbs below the flyover. She had seen Carrick come out of the warehouse, leaning for support on and half carried by Reuven Weissberg, their top target. What it added up to: the trusted stellar guy, Johnny Carrick, had lost his lustre. Was that pretty bloody cruel?
Timebomb : A Thriller (9781468300093) Page 29
