Timebomb : A Thriller (9781468300093)

by Seymour, Gerald

  ‘I know that thyroid cancer is up for those who lived inside the zone by more than two thousand per cent, congenital birth deformities are up by two hundred and fifty per cent, and leukaemia has doubled. There was fall-out here. It came down in rain. I talked once with a “colleague”, an oaf from Belarus, at a conference I attended. He said that Russian territory was not affected because our air force seeded rain clouds that would have blown over Russia, used chemicals to induce premature rainfall, and prevented the radionuclides from coming down on our territory but instead on Belarus. Is that enough?’

  Molenkov pursed his lips and a frown slashed his forehead. Thoughts cavorted in his mind. He could see little from the side window because the rain was beating on the Polonez’s roof, coming from the south, then flowed in rivers down the glass. The wipers on the windscreen hummed on full power. He watched the slow flight of a stork, the big wings flapping lethargically, as it traversed the road and stayed low.

  Molenkov asked, ‘It reached this far, yes?’

  ‘What reached this far?’

  ‘Don’t mock me, Yashkin. Did the poison reach this far?’

  ‘It did.’

  ‘And will it last for ever, for all the horizons of time that you and I can think of?’

  ‘Watch the map.’

  Molenkov breathed in hard. He thought of what he wished to say, how to express it. His friend of many years, his neighbour, his confidant, his partner in the enterprise, kept his eyes on the road, didn’t look at him and wouldn’t help him.

  He said, ‘We worked at the place where weapons were made. The weapons, if ever used, would have spread the same poison, left the same disease in the air, in the ground. Am I correct?’

  ‘Wrong. We had mutually assured destruction. With MAD there was no question of the weapons being used. The safeguard against nuclear war was that they had them and we had them. It couldn’t have happened. It would have been national suicide for us and them.’

  It had formed in his mind, what he would say and the action he would take. Molenkov could not have said why he had lingered so long. He took another surging, gulping breath. In his mind, pictured there, was the device in the back of the car, covered by the tarpaulin. He could have reached back, twisted, ignored the pain in his pelvis and touched it. If his hand had been able to go under the tarpaulin and under the webbing cover of the thing, and if he’d had a screwdriver and had unfastened the casing, he could have touched it and felt its living, breathing, hideous warmth. He did not reach behind him, but he pictured it. ‘What we carry, what we intend to sell, will do the same.’

  ‘You’re talking shit, Molenkov.’

  ‘It’ll make the poison.’

  ‘What do you want, Molenkov?’

  ‘I want no part of it.’

  ‘See if I care.’

  ‘Do you want a part of it?’

  ‘You’re too late to ask that.’

  ‘Stop the car, Yashkin.’

  A hand didn’t come off the wheel, didn’t go to the gear lever and change down. The Polonez did not slow. The brake pedal was not pressed. Yashkin kept the car at his steady speed, fifty kilometres per hour.

  It welled in his throat, and Molenkov shouted, ‘Stop the car! Turn it round! We should go back.’

  Yashkin said, without anger, ‘If you want to go back, then do so. I go on. Without you, Molenkov, I go on.’

  ‘You couldn’t. You haven’t the strength, not on your own.’

  ‘I go on, with or without you.’

  ‘Think of your wife. Come back with me.’

  Now the hand moved fast. From the wheel to the gear lever. The Polonez lurched and slowed. Molenkov saw the foot stamp on the pedal. Yashkin reached across him, opened the passenger door, thrust it wide, then jerked round, caught a strap of Molenkov’s bag and dumped it in his lap. He reached for the uniform on the hanger and threw that, too, on to Molenkov’s knees.

  Molenkov climbed out. His feet went down into a water-filled pothole. He felt the damp settle in his shoes and saturate his socks. Rain hit his face, and within the first few seconds his uniform was spattered. He looked right and saw only trees on the near side and a lake on the other. He looked left and saw a wood-plank home, but no smoke came from the chimney and no washing was out.

  The door was slammed after him. The car started slowly to pull away.

  He had no food. He had little money in his wallet. He told himself then that he was a man of principle, not a criminal. Told himself, also, that Yashkin would go a hundred metres, find the entrance to a field, turn and come back for him. Told himself as well that he and Yashkin were joined at the fucking hip. The car had disappeared round a bend. He thought of the cold that would now have settled on his small home, and the damp because a fire had not been lit, and he thought of going back to the bed and the musty sheets, and of setting off for the street market of Sarov, spending a day searching for scrag meat and old vegetables that he could afford, and the previous day’s milk, which would be sold off cheap. He thought of the great gate and the sentries, and of the men behind it who despised him because he was a zampolit and a former political officer of the old regime. He had no other friend.

  He started to walk. He didn’t go in the direction of Sarov, twelve hundred kilometres back. He followed the road the Polonez had taken.

  The Polonez was, of course, round the first corner, parked at the side of the road. When he reached the car, the door was opened for him.

  He threw his bag and uniform into the back, on to the tarpaulin, and dropped down into the seat. ‘Fuck you, Yashkin.’

  ‘And fuck you, Molenkov.’

  They hugged … All around was the desolate land of the marshes and swamps where the poison of Chernobyl had fallen, but Molenkov no longer thought of it.

  Adrian called, reported he had lost the target. Dennis spoke on the net, said they had lost the target and the agent, code November. Adrian then made the confession: they were both so damn tired. Dennis added that exhaustion was killing them.

  Katie Jennings grimaced at Luke Davies. He grinned.

  She said, with a hint of smugness, that in the minibus they had an eyeball, and Davies touched her arm, as if the success over the professionals – however sleep-deprived they might be – was cause for congratulation. Lawson said nothing, but Bugsy contributed that it was well past the time that the agent, November, should be wearing a beacon harness. Deadeye said that when the circumstances were right he’d go forward and hand over the gear. Shrinks said that exhaustion was a killer and could wreck them.

  From a distance, they sat in the minibus and watched, kept the eyeball. Katie Jennings heard a rasped snore, turned sharply. Lawson was behind her, flopped back on the seat. His mouth was wide and the snore a growl. She leaned her shoulder hard against Luke Davies, then buried her face in his coat to stifle her giggles.

  Davies did not acknowledge it, had the binoculars up, saw them.

  They stood in the rain, back and by the gate.

  Mikhail said, ‘He’s like a kid who’s been given a new toy.’

  Viktor said, ‘I see him as an old man with a young whore sitting on his knee.’

  Josef Goldmann said nothing but he watched Reuven Weissberg move among the stones and with him was Johnny Carrick, whom he had thought special, loyal, and now did not know him.

  ‘And all other toys, us, are dumped.’

  ‘The young whore will turn the old man away from his family, us, who have cared for him.’

  Josef Goldmann hated the world, everything about it. He was forbidden to make a mobile call to his wife for fear it could be tracked. His stomach for the trading, as he stood in the tipping rain under trees without leaves at the gate, ebbed.

  ‘We have looked after him, helped him, worked with him, are rejected.’

  ‘And the Jew woman, his grandmother, the witch who has never laughed. We looked after him and her, but are ignored.’

  Josef Goldmann, watching them, felt his influence slipping.

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nbsp; Mikhail said, ‘I don’t need to work as a servant for a kid with a new toy and that woman. I have enough. I haven’t been there but I hear Cyprus is good.’

  Josef Goldmann thought of what he craved beyond all else. He thought of a life without deception, without fraud, a career of legitimacy. He was in the rain under a bare-branched tree beside a rusted gate that hung askew. He thought of the parents he met at school evenings, their legitimacy, and he thought of meetings in the City to which his deceit gave him access. He thought of staring down at the street from the first-floor window of his salon, and seeing it filled with police cars.

  ‘We’re all trapped men. You are, I am. Whether Johnny Carrick is the new toy or the young whore, he’s trapped too. So, I hear you both. Now answer me. Will you go to him, Mikhail, and say you wish to leave and go to Cyprus? Will you do it, Viktor? Will I? Does it only rain in this fucking country?’

  They shuffled, fidgeted, smoked, and they waited as they had been told to, and the two men moved among the stones, tortoise fast, in front of them.

  Carrick was led. He sensed that, long ago, all of the stones in the Jews’ cemetery at Chelm had been toppled and that some were replacements for those broken an age ago. A month after the invasion of Iraq and a few weeks before the roadside bomb had exploded, he had been to another cemetery, on the outskirts of Basra. He had held his rifle warily and had walked with others in the patrol among flattened headstones and fractured ones, had trampled in the weeds that grew there and had paused several times to read the faint, wind-scoured, sun-bleached words carved, and he had learned of young men who had died far from home and had served in regiments that had been disbanded after the Great War of which they were casualties: We shall remember them … Yes, an effort had been made here to right an old wrong and to give a trifle of dignity to the graves of the Jews of Chelm. No, the cemetery outside Basra would not have been repaired and the dead there would not be honoured.

  Their feet squashed down layers of wet leaves.

  They did a circuit of the graveyard.

  Turning, facing the gate where Josef Goldmann, Mikhail and Viktor waited, Reuven Weissberg said, ‘You ask little, Johnny.’

  ‘If I talk I don’t concentrate, sir. If I don’t concentrate I can’t do my job.’

  ‘And you don’t ask about what I involve you in.’

  ‘In its own good time, sir.’

  ‘As yet I have shown you nothing, Johnny. But I will. I will show you what governs me.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  They reached the gate. Carrick ignored the hatred shown him in the eyes of Viktor and Mikhail, did not need to note it because he had his own, supreme, protector.

  Chapter 16

  15 April 2008

  Another town. Another fine church for Catholics and another magnificence for the Orthodox, the one with elegant towers and the other with a great onion dome. Another memorial to the bravery of the Red Army soldiers who had liberated the town, and it was eroded as if the stonework had been eaten by termites. Another neat little square with the clean paving that showed a minimal amount of European grant money had reached the town, and the square had been the priority for renovation. Another street market, where the thinness of clothing and the cheapness of footwear demonstrated that the economy of this forgotten corner of the Union was wrecked. Another corner where a bank had opened, but had more staff than customers, and another pavement where kids lounged with hoods over their heads.

  Wlodawa was sited on the Bug river, a triple-junction point where Polish territory met Belarus and Ukraine, and he assumed – from the map he had looked at in the car – that the frontier was in midstream.

  Again, he followed, a half-pace behind Reuven Weissberg, and he had the pressure of a pancake holster, filled, on the right side of his belt. He sensed it to be a well-worn trail. He saw nothing that threatened and his right hand hung loose and relaxed against the coat pocket that hid the pancake and the Makharov. They turned off a main road. There was open ground, worn, mud-smeared, with the tracks of cars and bikes, and with split-open rubbish bags on it, and there were concrete apartment blocks.

  His man stood, hands on hips. At every other moment, his man had stature and magnetic authority, but here, staring at open ground and blocks of raggedly crumbling apartments, he seemed to shrink, his shoulders to sag. Carrick saw it, and thought he recognized humility.

  The rain had eased but sufficient fell on the sloped roofs of the blocks, and he saw the waterfall from two places on the nearest where the guttering was broken or blocked. But, Carrick thought, in his man’s eyes this was a shrine, and his man was a pilgrim.

  Carrick did not ask for an explanation as to why they were there, why the mafiya criminal stood in front of a mess of apartment blocks, his shoulders rounded as if defiance was gone. He looked behind him, as a bodyguard on duty would, and saw the two parked cars but only Mikhail was out of the lead car, lounging against a lamppost and smoking. It was a shrine. His man was a pilgrim.

  Reuven Weissberg said, ‘It was where they lived. “They” were the parents, sister and brothers of my grandmother. And where her cousins lived, her uncles and her aunts. It was the place for Jews in Wlodawa. There were small streets, with mud, not tarmacadam, and small houses. Most were built of wood, and there were shops here in kiosks. In other streets there were Polish Christians, the neighbours of my grandmother’s family. He, the father of my grandmother, was an expert repairer of watches and clocks and many came to him, Jews and Christians. His skills gave him a reputation. Then there was the war. The Jews were moved, taken to the synagogue and kept there in filth. They were treated no better than cattle. No, I am wrong, it was worse than cattle. Do I bore you, Johnny?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘After many months they were moved again. I believe the father of my grandmother would have kept a few of his tools, what he could carry, when they went to the synagogue. He would have had them with him when they were moved the last time. Did you see the synagogue, Johnny?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘I did not identify it for you. I did not think you would be interested in every place in this town that is important to me, that is in my blood. The street where my grandmother’s family had lived was flattened, but there were other streets where Jews and Christians had lived beside each other and they were not destroyed. Christian Poles now lived where Jews had lived, had stolen the homes. Neighbours of the Jews and the customers of my father, whose watches and clocks he had laboured over, abused the column of Jews, threw mud and stones at them. It was done here, where now there is concrete and open ground. And they were marched by Germans and Ukrainians across that bridge. Do you see it?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Carrick could see an old bridge of steel girders, had a view of it between the blocks.

  ‘Across that bridge. You will see today, later, where they were marched to.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘I told you, Johnny, it is in my blood. What happened here and in the forest is in the veins that carry my blood. Can you understand that?’

  ‘I am trying to, sir.’

  Carrick thought his man, Reuven Weissberg, a prisoner of a past that had been shaped long before his birth. He seemed to see that column of humanity, men, women and children, young and old, tramping under guard past abusers and their missiles, and seemed to recognize a man who carried, perhaps in an old leather bag, the tools of his trade. Seemed, too, to see a young woman from a photograph, but her hair was as dark as the ravens over the Spey’s mouth, not pure and brilliant white.

  ‘I want you to know, sir, that I think I can imagine your grandmother and her family being marched here at gunpoint, and I can hear the abuse given them by those who had lived beside them, and I can feel the blows of rocks hurled at them. I can, sir.’

  It was the truth.

  Reuven Weissberg reached out, took the hair at the back of Carrick’s head and ran his fingers through it. Carrick had not seen him do that to Mikhail or Josef Goldmann.

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nbsp; He did not believe himself to be a wasp or a fly, trapped in a gossamer web, unable to break out. They walked back to the cars.

  There was a long embankment, newly built, the Customs buildings, then a modern bridge that spanned the Bug. Flags hung desolate from poles and the wind could not stir them.

  Davies had demanded they come here. ‘Stands to reason, doesn’t it, that a road crossing of the frontier will be here?’ Davies had said. ‘They went to Chelm, and this is the road over the border, so it’s where it will be. What do you think, Mr Lawson?’

  He had won only a slow, sardonic smile; pretty damn typical of the old bastard. Then Lawson murmured about going in search of a toilet, and headed for the café.

  It was the Dorohusk Customs point. It straddled the main road from Chelm, Route 12, that crossed the Bug and went on into Ukraine. The only other road links were fifty kilometres to the south, at Ustyluh, where the Bug curved to the east, or ninety kilometres to the north at Brest-Terespol. It had to be here, at Dorohusk, that the weapon – if it was more than a figment of bloody Lawson’s imagination, if it was a warhead – would be brought over the Bug. They’d be here to meet it, of course. Luke Davies stood beside the minibus door and looked at the creeping flow, the pace of wet mud on a slope, of lorries and trucks, vans and cars that went both ways along the embankment road. If it existed – there would be due warning because the targets would have parked up and the undercover would be with them – it would be on a vehicle such as those in the slow, edging motion towards the bureaucracy of the Customs checks. Their intervention might not be necessary, and that amused Luke Davies. British guys from Revenue and Customs had been on attachment in Poland to drag the locals up to speed, and the Germans had shipped in good detection equipment.

  Davies had found something to focus on. A car went forward, a dozen yards at a time, a tiny four-door saloon. It might have been a Fiat, and was heading for Ukraine and it had three – yes, three – fridge-size cardboard crates perched on and bound to its roof. He thought this to be the most miserable, God-forsaken corner of the world. The town behind them had been rain-saturated,with an old tank mounted on a plinth in its centre, had oozed failure and decay. There had been life in Sarajevo, sunshine and crisp snow, mountains to get up in summer, and the start-up of wine bars and cafés; even the fought-over villages and small towns of Bosnia-Herzegovina had tried to pull themselves up after the ceasefire. Poverty ruled here, and deprivation, sheer damn drabness and rain.