‘What do you know of this fucking shit-heap, Yashkin?’
‘Not much. Two American balloonists in an international race were blown off-course into Belarus airspace. Their balloon was shot down by a gunship helicopter, and they were killed. Also, they had troops weld up the gates of the residences of the American and European Union ambassadors, which made life intolerable for them so they left. They assassinate their journalists, they imprison their opposition politicians. They are in a verbal and diplomatic war with Moscow and Washington. It’s a state the ghost of Josef Stalin still stalks. Today there’s a personality-cult dictatorship and total economic stagnation. Outside, nobody loves Belarus. Inside, nobody in Belarus cares.’
‘Are they right for more of the same?’
‘More of the old shit, heroic veterans meeting heroic comrades in Minsk.’
The light for them to go into the check bay should have been green but was still red. The barrier that should have been raised automatically to permit entry to the bay stayed down until an official heaved it up, then waved them forward.
‘You see it, Molenkov? A fucked-up place where nothing works. Do they have radioactive-material detectors? Do pigs fly? Do your stuff.’
An official came forward, greeted them, and Molenkov came awkwardly off his seat and out of the Polonez. His medals jangled as he stretched and straightened, and another official had started a slow walk round the car and was behind the tail, peering through the murk of the rear window. Molenkov handed over the passports. They were studied.
Before he had launched into the matter of the veterans’ reunion, alcohol and fraternal friendship between two fine peoples, a question was asked: Did they have anything to declare? Were they carrying any banned items?
Sweat pumped from Molenkov’s pores.
She had done the bit about the neat prettiness of the garden, and the taste displayed by the new wallpaper. Had done also the quiet remark on the aptness of Mrs Lavinia Lawson’s hairstyle. She was in the kitchen, sitting at the table, had been given tea and had remarked, without an over-fulsome gush, on the mug’s nice floral design. She had utilized the tactics laid down by the course instructors at the Service for skewering a way into a house and home.
She must have won something or she wouldn’t have been admitted past the front doorstep, but that victory was trifling.
The liaison officer, Alison, said, ‘I’m grateful to you for seeing me.’
Christopher Lawson’s wife washed up.
‘Very grateful. I have to say my visit to you is highly irregular.’
The head with the aptly styled hair was turned to her. The neat, pretty garden was behind her, seen through a picture window, quite a big garden for an Edwardian terrace in the south-west suburbs.
‘I’m not authorized by my line manager to be here. Probably he’d blow a gasket if he knew. I’m about to explain why I came, having looked you and your husband up in the computer system, which is at best an irregular action. There are three courses open to you, Mrs Lawson. You can ask me to leave, and I will. You can ring Thames House or report my having been here to your husband’s office, and I will face dismissal pretty damn fast. Or you can talk to me and I’ll listen. It’s about a problem I have.’
Plates and bowls, a pan and a solitary wine glass were dried. Cupboards were opened and the items put away, but most often the eyes of Mrs Lavinia Lawson were locked on her.
‘I’m not very important. I do the work that’s pretty dreggy, and right now it’s liaison between our place and your husband’s. I had to send him some information on something – you won’t want me to be specific – and it was all a bit eccentric as we met in the rain and outside on the Embankment. I needn’t have done, but I gave him the name of an undercover police officer who was on a criminal investigation and close up with the principal target. I thought that would help your husband. Mr Lawson said to me that national security was threatened – was at risk big-time – and I felt giving him the name was the right thing to do. Now, back at Thames House, I hear nothing but badmouthing of your husband. I can put that down, perhaps, to the juvenile rivalries that men have. Then I was at a meeting on their ground, Mr Lawson’s, and it was the same refrain. Your husband was condemned as selfish, arrogant and a user of men. Mrs Lawson, I put a man into your husband’s hands, and I’m doubting now whether I should have. You are not, of course, under any obligation to tell me anything, you can show me the door and dump my career, or you can talk to me.’
She had a carefully fostered urchin’s look. Dark hair cut short on her scalp, no cosmetics, no jewellery, not even stud earrings. The appearance that the liaison officer, Alison, cultivated was one of earnest simplicity. It usually did the business for her.
She was asked, ‘Do you know what I do?’
Honesty always did the business. ‘I looked you up before coming. It’s victim support, yes?’
‘There’s a crime epidemic on our streets.’
‘Yes.’
‘And money’s short for services, resources are slashed and customer numbers are rising.’
‘I realize that.’
She was offered more coffee, and accepted. Lawson’s wife tossed aside the tea-towel, let it lie on the draining-board, came and sat opposite her, and pushed aside an unopened copy of the day’s newspaper.
‘Well, my dear, I could throw you out and dump your career, or I can help you with your problem. You were never here, were you?’
‘I was never here.’
She listened. Alison was a good listener and could use the innocence of her eyes to nudge a narrative forward.
She was told, ‘To keep my desk minimally clear, and to stop the line of my customers stretching round the corner of the street, I leave here, five mornings a week, at seven, and I’m back here at seven in the evening. You were lucky to find me, but I’ve the start of a cold and got away a little early. At the weekends I do paperwork, expenses and reports. You see, my dear, we don’t actually live together. Under the same roof, in the same bed, meals at the same table, but I’m too damn tired to talk. He does his own breakfast, I do the supper and the crossword, and he’s at the word teasers, and we read our books in bed – maybe ten minutes – and we’re asleep. We go for the same train in the morning, so we’re walking beside each other and usually hurrying, and he’s never home before me. Are you getting an idea of our life? We’re adjacent to each other, certainly no closer.
‘Our son might have bound us once. Not any more. He’s in Vietnam, does aid work in the Highlands there, tries to help communities around Pleiku start up cottage industries that can be marketed in Europe. He hasn’t been home in two years and when he was last here he hadn’t anything to say to his father. Put bluntly, I don’t either. We don’t share hobbies because I haven’t time for them. We used to do holidays, but not any longer – there isn’t a common area. Now I go on those all-inclusive trips where you get painting or sketching instruction in France or Italy. He, for his annual leave, which they force him to take, goes to the West Country and scours the villages for churches, fourteenth or fifteenth century, and the bed and breakfast he’s staying at will find him someone who’d like their dog walked in the lanes and along the bridleways. He lives for his work.
‘He’s a driven man. Nothing else matters to him. I think, but he doesn’t confide now and never has, that he came from one of those army families where showing affection was forbidden, then boarding-school and university. Quite a good degree from Oxford, where we met, and he was recruited on the old-boy recommendation, which was the routine. I don’t think he ever believed that a job which might be completed that day, or evening, should be left for tomorrow. Went against his nature. Exacting standards were set, still are, and those who fail such examinations are rated failures and set aside. And one day, of course, it will end. There’ll be a leaving party, and I’m damn sure I won’t be there, and he’ll be home. This place will go on the market and we’ll buy something small and easy in Kingswear or across the river
in Dartmouth, and I suppose we’ll rattle around, and maybe we’ll find each other.
‘We used to be a pretty normal couple, with the baby. He was posted to Berlin, three years, and married accompanied. We were out at the Olympic stadium. I did a dinner party every week and had a circuit of some of the most devastatingly boring men and their wives to entertain. Then one Saturday night he invited an American. I bitched about it when he told me whom he’d asked because it was going to get the numbers wrong and I had to scrape up a secretary from the field station to match the table up. He had a ridiculous name, Clipper A. Reade Junior. He lit his first cigar when I served salmon and salad – I promise you, my dear, it was a meal I haven’t forgotten – and smoked it right through the next course, beef, and kept it going when I gave the guests fruit salad and meringue, stubbed it out and spread ash across my tablecloth, then lit another when I did the cheeseboard. He talked the whole time, barely ate, didn’t drink the wine and I had to dive into the kitchen repeatedly for little pots of tea for him. At first, at that meal, as the American hogged the conversation, others tried to ignore him and talk among themselves, but he steamrollered them. By the end of the meal, they were hanging on what he had to say on the craftwork of agent-running. He did anecdotes so well: near misses with the Stasi, the KGB and the others, triumphs that were fascinating and not boastful, techniques and tactics of brush contacts and dead-letter drops. But the silence when you could have heard that lousy cliché fulfilled, could have heard a pin drop, was about the loss of an agent – shot and drowned – in the Spree river, by the Oberbaumbrücke. Nobody spoke as that story was told. No emotion to it, and no passion, could have been the description of the death of a pet rabbit, and it sort of killed the evening. I remember, all our other guests left pretty early. Christopher never admitted it, but good old female intuition did the job. My husband was present when the agent was lost, but he gave no sign of it and let the story unfold. I hazard it for you, my dear, but Christopher was under the spell of that American, was – by then – a changed man with his personality altered and soft in that man’s hands. Needless to say, Clipper Reade was never invited to dinner with us again.
‘Where is my husband now? His life is his work. I don’t know. Wherever. Why is he there? I’m not included. He’ll come back, wash his own clothes and probably iron them, and he’ll tell me nothing. He’s not a crusader, doesn’t wear patriotism or ideology on his sleeve, but I don’t believe it’s acceptable to him to fail. Those stupid little word puzzles, the teasers in the paper, if he can’t do them he’s coldly furious but he doesn’t come to me for help. To fail is not on his agenda, and it was certainly not on the agenda of Clipper Reade – I curse him – and he doesn’t believe anyone else should contemplate failure. For that he lost the love of his son, and stretched me near to snapping-point. He wouldn’t recognize the cost of the agenda.
‘Heavens, the time. I’ve kept you. I’ve not talked about Christopher like that to anybody before. Should you have given that name, put that policeman into my husband’s clutches? I can’t say. Have I been of any use to you? I can’t see how I have been. I don’t know where he is, or what danger he faces. My dear, he won’t back off, or allow those with him to back off. Do you recognize what I’ve said of Christopher? Did you like him?’
The liaison officer, Alison, stood. ‘You’ve been very helpful, and I apologize for the intrusion. No, I’m not with the big battalions – I liked him very much. Whatever is happening is close, I think, and for all involved these are desperate times. I’m grateful to you.’
The Crow, that afternoon, had taken the bus from the airport into the city.
At the terminus he had been met. The contact had been good. He had been barely aware of the man coming up fast behind him but he had felt the slip of paper wedged into his palm and snapped his fist shut on it. He could not recall the man’s face.
He stood on a pavement in a narrow street of shops, apartments and a hotel. The wealth with which he was familiar in the Gulf was not here. Drab grey concrete walls pierced by drab windows of sparse goods for sale seemed to close around him. The paper had been the section of a map that covered this street. There was a drab light over the desk inside the hotel lobby. He gave a name, false, filled in his passport details, false, in the register, and paid cash for one night in advance. He was handed a room key, then a sealed envelope with the number of the room written on it in pencil. The Crow tore open a corner of the envelope, enough for him to see that it held the onward flight ticket he would use the following day.
Did he want anything? An explanation: did he want a woman for the evening? The Crow shook his head, smiled at the drab face behind the reception desk of a back-street Belgrade hotel. He didn’t want a woman, not then and not ever.
*
On the platform at Wolverhampton, Sak waited for the train to Birmingham New Street. For the schedule he must keep, he could have gone an hour later, even two. The atmosphere in his home had suffocated him, and each time he’d emerged from his room there had been more questions. When would he be back? Was he certain there was no contact number should they need to reach him in an emergency? Had he enough money – cash and cards? So he had gone early.
At New Street station, it had been decided for him that he should change, then take a later train directly to London. He would cross London and reach the Eurostar terminus. He would travel by night, would be at his destination by dawn.
He felt excitement and believed himself valued.
He had been shown monuments and plaques.
Carrick had stood in front of a montage of double-life-size figures, sculpted in bronze, who wore uniforms and army helmets, carried rifles, machine-guns and hand grenades and seemed to run from one point of cover to the next. Reuven Weissberg had told him it was the commemoration tableau for the rising by the Catholic Christian Poles against the Germans, and it had happened a year after the fall of that bunker, and that it was done by men who had not lifted a weapon to help the Jews. He had seen, against an old wall of red brick, a statue of a child who carried an automatic weapon and whose helmet dwarfed a little head. A wreath of flowers was tucked under the statue’s arm, and Reuven Weissberg had said that the Catholic Christian Poles helped themselves but had not supported the Jews. Plaques had been pointed to and Carrick had not the language but realized they marked the streets where captured men had been shot by firing squad, and where units had made their command posts, but it had been a year after the Jews in the bunker had killed themselves rather than surrender. His feet had been on old manhole covers and below had been the sewers through which the uprising had been resupplied and, at the end, a few had escaped. He must not show feelings – he was a bodyguard, a cipher, a servant – but the relentless criticism of those who had died fighting for themselves, and had not risen in defence of the city’s Jews, disturbed him. The bitterness confused him. Here, there was defeat, and the bitterness could flourish. Images seemed to bounce towards him that he had not known before – the scale of a slaughter beyond his comprehension.
‘You want to know how many died in the uprising, Johnny? They say twenty thousand of the Christian Poles who were fighters died – and two hundred and twenty-five thousand of the Christian Poles who were not fighters died … but more Jews died, Johnny.’
The light was failing as Reuven Weissberg led Carrick across a wide square, past shops that were closing for the evening. He heard the scrape of steel shutters falling. There were horses between the shafts of the open carriages, but the tourists and visitors had gone, the rain dripped and they were idle. Ahead of them was the Old City, and he followed Reuven Weissberg, and did not know the purpose of it.
Chapter 14
14 April 2008
Now Carrick understood. He knew what was done, and why.
Reuven Weissberg had brought him to the main square of the Stare Miasto. They had passed the Royal Castle and the cathedral and had cut down a street where shop staff were removing trays of amber jewellery from the wi
ndows. The square was long, broad, and in front of them was a black statue, in bronze, of a rampant woman, naked, protected by a circular shield and holding up a short-bladed battle sword, and all around him were the old town houses, four storeys high, and faced in plaster that was painted in ochre shades, pink and dull yellows. It didn’t matter what colour the buildings were because now he understood.
It was an exercise in counter-surveillance, and he remembered a long-ago pub evening off the long main drag in Colchester. Carrick and other recruits to Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion, had listened in hanging silence to a veteran sergeant whose star turn was to tell the stories of the Province postings he had survived, and had a Distinguished Conduct Medal to prove his knowledge of what he talked about. He thought of himself, part of an exercise in counter-surveillance and not able to influence its outcome, as bait. The sergeant had been big on bait. He, Carrick, was bait and it was difficult for bait to survive.
They crossed the square. Waiters were lowering the big parasols over the outside tables and chairs of the restaurants, and dusk was falling. He had no option but to follow Reuven Weissberg – freedom to help himself did not exist.
Carrick imagined that out of his sight and hearing, there had been one last dispute between Reuven Weissberg and the hoods – it would not have involved Josef Goldmann. Of course he would be followed. He did not know how many of them trailed him. They had been at the Glienicker bridge, and on the street at night in the rain, and had led Lawson to the kiosk round the corner from the hotel. They would be tracking him.
What did his life depend on? On how damn good they were.
They stopped in front of windows and Reuven Weissberg professed to study the last trays of amber items, watches, pendants, necklaces and bracelets, and in front of restaurants where the menu boards were going inside, and by a church door through which a few of the faithful – men, women and children – scurried to catch a late Mass.
Timebomb : A Thriller (9781468300093) Page 32
