Traitor's Kiss

…Chapter Eleven

The Princess Rose drifted.

In the master's cabin, commandeered by Rupert Mowbray, the dog had finally won admittance. For the dog, the mate's cabin or the engineer's was not home. Home was on the master's cabin floor by the bed, and now the dog shared the territory with the weapons and the gear. Billy had shared out the equipment, had allocated responsibility.

The freshening winds from the south-west pushed the Princess Rose in a jagged north-easterly line up the coast from the exit of the Inshore Traffic Separation Scheme.

Lofty had the weapons. They had been lugged up the narrow ladder, through the entry hatch from the engine room and he had made four heaps of them. They had talked about what they wanted, what suited them, and what they could best remember from the long-ago days. They were men not inclined to noisy exuberance, but the sight of the weapons served further to quieten them. The heaps made a square around the sleeping dog.

Each time he took a weapon from the black bags, Lofty — the disciplines were not forgotten — checked the breech to be certain it was empty then rattled the arming mechanisms and clicked the firing trigger. He had a respect for weapons, dinned into him by instructors at the commando training centre on the south coast of Devon and at the base at Poole. The respect would never be lost.

Lofty had always been big with firearms, at Lympstone, at Poole and wherever he had served in the happy days. He had been the one who lingered in armouries, spent time with the men who were the custodians of weapons, and who read the magazines and the books cover to cover. For Billy he had laid out, by the dog's docked tail, a Vikhr SR-3 9mm short assault rifle with a rate of fire on semiautomatic of thirty rounds a minute and on automatic of ninety rounds; it had a maximum effective range of 200 metres. It was the right weapon for a leader who would take them where they were going. He knew that 'vikhr' was the Russian word for 'whirlwind', and he judged it right for suppressive, defensive fire. With it were the six magazines he had loaded with the 9mm bullets.

By the sleeping dog's back legs, in the next neat pile, was Ham's firearm: a Model 61 Skorpion 7.65mm machine pistol. From a Czech factory, it was short, had a fold-over stock and was a mafiya firearm capable of intense volume of fire but effective only at short range. Lofty had seen the Skorpion fired on a range and would never forget the crashing punch of its power; it was for close quarters, in a building, on a stairwell, a last throw to drive back a superior force. He had loaded six more magazines and left them beside the Skorpion.

By the dog's front paws, Lofty had laid the weapon selected for Wickso, the OTs-02 Kiparis submachine-gun, in service with Russian interior-ministry troops; the range of the Kiparis was little more than 100 metres, but its rate of fire on automatic was higher than that of the Vikhr. It came from Kazakhstan.

At the dog's thrown-back ears, as it snored, was the hardware he'd chosen for himself. Lofty would be back marker when they had done the pickup, when they moved back towards the dinghy and their beach-head. It was the AK-74 assault rifle with a 40mm mounted grenade-launcher. He had fired it on a range, he knew the procedure of reloading the grenades, four a minute on a bad day and five on the best day. The weapon would buy time if the pack followed them, closed on them. Lofty would be principal fire support: he had loaded ten magazines of ammunition for the rifle and had laid out beside them twenty high-explosive grenades, five more that threw out phosphorus, and six loaded with smoke. If it all went to hell, Lofty with the grenade-launcher was the last best chance they would have. Then there was a pistol for each of them, a Makharov and two magazines, useless but Lofty knew it would make them all feel better.

They drifted in the darkness and the navigation of the master was expert. Only rarely did they hear him use the main engine to correct the direction they took.

Ham handled the communications. A headset for each of them, with a bar microphone, plastic earpieces, and a control box to be strapped to their belts. His voice murmured as he tested each earpiece and each microphone, from the workbenches of a Bulgarian factory. When he was satisfied, he put the earpiece, microphone and control box on the pile beside the weapons and the ammunition.

The sea caught them, rocked them. It was the best sort of night they could have.

The kit was for Billy. He plundered the boxes. To each pile of weapons, ammunition and communications gear, he added a wet suit, a pair of flippers, socks, camouflage tunics and trousers, boots from Slovakia, the night-sight goggles, the compasses…and the Meals to Eat, dry rations that had not been opened since their capture in the Kuwaiti desert eleven years earlier, which still carried the Russian instructions duplicated in Iraqi Arabic…and the condoms for keeping weapons' barrels dry, the webbing for ammunition magazines and stun grenades, the masks to keep the smoke out of their windpipes, toilet paper and clingfilm…and bergens, the inflatable waterproof bags, the sealed water canteens, the explosives and detonators. Like a housewife, Billy checked each item, and any label not Russian or Russian satellite was snipped off. They were deniable, and each of them had been taught — long ago, brutally — the science of Resistance to Interrogation.

The Princess Rose ducked, climbed, and the waves' swell battered them. None of them cursed it.

Wickso added to the piles around the sleeping dog. He had little to offer, but none of them cared to gaze at what he placed on their pile: an olive green package holding a first field dressing, what they called a 'sanitary towel', with the Cyrillic stamped print of the Serbian army, enough for one wound, but Wickso kept four for himself. A morphine syringe for each of them, but five more for Wickso. A single bootlace for each pile, but three more for Wickso, for tourniquets, and an indelible marker pen, which Wickso also retained. The others didn't look at the medical gear Wickso gave them; there was so little of it, and the creed of the Squadron had always been that first aid came second to carrying ammunition.

Billy went out into the night to do a final check on the dinghy that had been brought deflated and trussed to the Princess Rose off the Devon coast, the outboard engine and the gas bottles. The others would pack the bergens and the inflatable bags. They would be gone in an hour.

He clawed his way along the deck, above the holds loaded with fertilizer sacks, towards the stowed dinghy. By now they would be over the line on the chart that divided Polish waters from Russian sea space. Where they drifted, rising and falling, with the spray climbing to the deck, was marked on the chart as formerly mined, and they would be marked on the scanners of Kaliningrad radar. Above him, from the mast, behind the bridge and before the funnel, two red lights shone. They would be visible through the whole 360 degrees, and gave notice that the Princess Rose was NUC. They were Not Under Command, their engine had failed, they drifted, and he heard the master shouting into the radio that if he did not quickly regain power he would need to anchor. The white wave crests were bloodied where the red lights fell on them. It was the best of weather, enough to confuse the shore's radar. In the 'poppling' water, a dinghy with a low profile would not be seen.

Gabriel Locke slept, his arm around a girl and a youth's arm around him.

Alice looked down on him. The first of the fast-food kiosks in the tunnel were opening, the shutters coming down. The waft of new bread and fresh pastries filled the tunnel and overwhelmed the stench. She would not have known him if she had not recognized the blanket from the hotel. The tunnel was filling with the early rail passengers, and the vagrants, for whom it was a night home, were scattering.

He woke when Alice put her toe against his shin and prodded him.

He blinked at her. He loosed the girl and shook off the youth. The sides of the girl's scalp were shaved. The youth's hair was overgrown and tangled but his beard had only a flimsy strength, and a ring was set in his lower lip. Alice held out her hand and Locke took it. As soon as she felt the clasp of his fist, she jerked him up. He rubbed his eyes.

'I was waiting upstairs, where you were supposed to be,' Alice said. 'I waited ten minutes. I thought you might have come down here for a coffee, or a roll. What the hell are you doing here?'

Locke's eyes flickered nervously. He arched and stretched.

'Well,' Alice said, 'if you can bear to wrench yourself away from your friends, perhaps we can get on with our lives.'

She walked off, fast, towards the far tunnel exit. It was the sort of place, with its stink of shit and urine, that she hated. He must have run to catch her. Her arm was taken. She turned and saw his anger. 'Yes?' She could not break the hold he had on her coat sleeve.

'Don't play the bloody madam with me. Actually, they're rather nice people. I was alone, they talked with me — have you ever bloody talked with me? They wanted to share with me, their lives and their kindness…'

'Let's hope the needle was clean,' she said evenly.

He was shrill. 'It's charity. They found me. I was in crisis, they got me through the night. That I came through it is thanks to their charity. From you, Miss Fucking Organized Perfection, I get no charity.'

'Why do you need charity, Gabriel?' she asked, with mock gentleness.

'Why do I need charity?'

'That's what I asked, Gabriel.'

'I need charity because of you…because…'

On the steps up from the tunnel, he loosed her arm. They spilled out into the smeared dawn light. Train passengers buffeted them. She walked ahead of him. Across the station's forecourt the headlights of the old Mercedes flashed them. The wind was up. Leaves and rubbish were blown low and hard across the cobbles and bounced on I her shins. She realized he had left the blanket for his charity workers. He was changed. Locke was different, altered, sculpted in a new way, and he had told her that she was responsible, and Alice did not know what she had done.

She left the back to him, took the front passenger seat.

'Right, Jerry, let's go. Sorry about the little delay. Let's hit the Mierzeja Wislana.'

The dry sand, lifted by the wind, pricked against Roman's clothes and found the folds, the tears in the trousers and the long-used jacket of the fisherman. It stung his eyes, although he had his hand raised to shield them.

The Mierzeja Wislana was his home, his life, his place. The sea, the beach, the pinewoods, and the lagoon behind were his birthplace and would be where he died. He swore a fisherman's oath, which he would not have dared to utter within the hearing of the Father who led the community of Piaski from the new village church. Time was running out and the autumn rushed to engulf them. Very few fishing days remained, and without them his income dried up; the winter's months were long and the strain of providing for his wife and five children, without money, was a burden.

He had risen at five, from habit, and had pretended to himself that he did not hear the wind singing in the electricity cables. His two bedroom home overlooked the lagoon and was not exposed to the worst of the wind. He had left his wife and children asleep, and had walked through the forest, across the dunes and down on to the beach.

He swore because the weather that morning made fishing impossible. And Roman swore again because all of his fellow fishermen in Piaski village had read the singing cables better than him and had stayed in their beds. The yellow- and white-painted boats were high on the sand, above the tideline, and would remain there that day. His eldest girl, the Father said, was talented at the piano and would benefit from lessons — which cost money. His eldest son, the Father told him, had a brain for science and mathematics and should go abroad to university, perhaps to Canada — which cost more money. It was impossible for a fisherman to earn the money necessary to pay for piano lessons and to send a student to Canada.

The sand stung him. He squatted down in the lee of his own boat, slipped a first cigarette of the day from the packet and cupped his hands to light it. He dragged on it, and a small spasm of pain fired in his lungs. The sea thundered on the sand. When there was a big storm, small pieces of rough amber were left on the beach and he, his wife and the children would walk in a line to collect them, as would the families of other fishermen, and what they had collected in a plastic bag was sold to a shopkeeper in Krynica Morska, which was west along the peninsula, but the shopkeeper paid only a few zloty, not enough.

Far out in the darkness and to the east, beyond the dawn's throw, Roman saw two faint lights, red, one above the other. He knew all the laws of the sea. Beyond the surge on the shore, the breaking waves and the white caps, a ship drifted and signalled that it was Not Under Control. It was in Russian waters, close to the old minefield that was said to have been cleared but was not trusted by the Russian fishermen who came out from Kaliningrad. If the growing storm did not soon drop then his boat and the other boats would be hauled higher on the beach for the winter. He would earn no money for five months or more. He laughed.

It amused him that the Russians would panic if a ship, Not Under Command, edged closer to their military shore where the missiles were and their fleet. He laughed until his throat hurt.

In a black 7-series BMW, Boris Chelbia was driven along the dual carriageway and into Gdansk.

At the Russian border posts that straddled the road between Mamonovo and Braniewo, his driver had powered past the waiting queues of vehicles to the front. Word had gone ahead. The inspection of documents was cursory: he was saluted and waved through. Boris Chelbia was a man of the highest importance, the mission entrusted him was of extreme delicacy; he was not Piatkin's man: Piatkin was his.

In the world of the Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti, as it had been in the former times of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti, informers ruled. Piatkin might have regarded Chelbia as his informer, and would have deluded himself: the reality was that the racketeer, who now called himself a businessman in import and export, sucked information from the FSB major, just as in the old days he had squeezed it from KGB officers. What he learned he paid for in cash and by carrying out small missions, for which there was great gratitude. The payments to Piatkin, and Piatkin's superiors, guaranteed that the opportunities of rivals were checked and that his own trade flourished. Out of Kaliningrad's docks and through its frontier posts, Chelbia exported narcotics from Afghanistan, refugees from Iraq and Iran, and weapons from the Russian Federation — the same docks and posts were the import point for whisky from Scotland, luxury cars from Germany, newly printed dollar bills from the United States of America and computer software from anywhere. He preferred to pay in cash, from the roll of banknotes that bulged his hip pocket, but occasionally a small task was given him which was in lieu of cash.

The matter entrusted to him now was so delicate, of such sensitivity, that counterintelligence officers of the FSB had not travelled from the Warsaw embassy, the Moscow headquarters or the Kaliningrad outstation…and it would cost them a high price. The cost to Piatkin, and Piatkin's people, would be heavy. He had never been involved in the movement of radioactive waste, weapons-grade enriched uranium or plutonium, and he understood there were many buyers. With the increasing gratitude of the internal security agency, that trade would come.

Boris Chelbia had his villa in Kaliningrad and an apartment block on the Cote d'Azur in France and a four-star 300-bed hotel on the Black Sea. He had investment accounts in the City of London, in Nassau and on the Caymans. Cash oozed from every orifice of his body, but he still went after it, with a ruthless drive, because money was as addictive to him as the refined heroin from Afghanistan that he shipped through the docks and over the frontier. Money was his Christ. A naval officer had come to his villa with a grenade in his hand and with the pin pulled. He had taken back a single heavy machine-gun, and ammunition. On the open market, Boris Chelbia would have received a hundred US dollars for the machine-gun, and the ammunition would have rounded its value up to a hundred and twenty-five dollars. But the whole shipment of arms from the base, going out buried beneath a timber cargo from the docks the next week, would fetch him two hundred and ten thousand dollars from the Lebanese. He had not understood the naval officer, had thought him a crazy man, but he had been cheated of a hundred and twenty-five dollars and that stung him. Piatkin had said that if he fulfilled his mission, he would earn the FSB's gratitude and would hurt the naval officer. No man cheated Boris Chelbia lightly…yet he had liked the naval officer's boldness, had admired him.

The car wound its way through the old streets of Gdansk. He had allies, associates, affiliates in the city, but this was work for himself. With his jet-black dyed hair and his black Italian suit, Chelbia came like death's angel over the bridge crossing the Motlawa river.

The car stopped within easy walking distance of the hotel, near to the quayside and close to the marina.

As he stepped from the car, Chelbia saw a young woman bend at a bollard at the edge of the quay. Her hands held a small but bright bunch of flowers. Two children clung to her legs. He glanced at the sight, then turned away. It was of no interest to him. He walked to the hotel.

He was smartly dressed. He was the sort of customer the hotel craved. How could he be helped? Chelbia spoke fluent German to the young woman at reception. He had been a guest at the Excelsior a month before — and she was too polite to admit she did not remember him. The night porter had done a service for him, and had not been paid for it; regretfully he would not be in the city at the time the night porter came back on duty. It was irregular, of course, but could he be given the man's address so that payment and thanks could be made in person?

He was so grateful and his smile was so sweet. Boris Chelbia went to wake the man who had worked all night.

Without glancing at him, they walked past Viktor's desk.

Piatkin, the stoat, led and two men followed. One was middle aged with his hair carefully combed, wearing a good civilian suit, carrying a briefcase of polished leather. The second man was younger, shabby to the point of scruffiness; stubble carpeted his chin and cheeks and he wore old jeans and a sweater on which strands had snagged and been pulled. There was long-dried mud on his walking-boots.

They passed Viktor's desk, and the communications clerk's, those on either side of the liaison officers and of the headquarters staff's specialists, and went to the final desk that guarded the fleet commander's door.

The second man, the unshaven one, the one who looked as though he had slept in his clothes, had a strong face. He was Viktor's age, not more. He had a hawk's eyes and a jutting, beaked nose, and he walked after Piatkin with supreme confidence. Viktor, involuntarily, shivered. Piatkin spoke, out of earshot, to the fleet commander's guardian — a severe woman, grey hair gathered in a meticulous bun, without humour and without emotion. She had been with the admiral for years before Viktor had become a chosen man. Viktor could not read her face, which was expressionless as she put down her pencil and, for a moment, tidied her desk. Then she was on her feet and knocked quietly at the door she protected. She went in and closed it after her.

He had shivered because he knew.

She came out and stood aside for the two men to go into the admiral's inner office. The door closed on them, and Piatkin stood, arms folded, in front of it.

Eleven o'clock in the morning. Always at eleven o'clock a trolley was pushed into the outer office, and the pretty young girl with the ponytail of blonde hair came with tea, coffee, hot chocolate and biscuits. Mugs and plastic plates for the outer office, bone china for the fleet commander. He had primed himself for his day, but was suffering. Work, the minutiae of it, and the glances at his watch were not filling the time he needed to pass until the late afternoon when he would make the journey to the rendezvous. Endlessly, that morning and through the last night, he had covered that journey.

Viktor scraped back his chair as the pretty girl put hot chocolate — the drink he had every day — in front of him. He advanced on Piatkin. 'Excuse me, Major. I had not been informed that you had made an appointment to see the fleet commander. I—'

'Captain Archenko. I have no appointment to meet Admiral Falkovsky.'

'You should have told me.' Viktor attempted to stifle the choke in his throat. 'I always sit in on meetings attended by the fleet commander.' Piatkin smirked. Viktor was a half-metre from him. They were chest to chest, chin to chin. It was Piatkin's grin, that of a stoat, that destroyed him. All eyes were on him. In such a moment, power was transferred. All of them in the outer office would have seen the way Captain, second rank, Viktor Archenko — who had the admiral's ear — deferred authority to a major of the Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti. He should have run when he was in the zoo park, should have run when he was last at the castle at Malbork and making the dead drop, should have run when he was with Alice on the promontory by the monument at Westerplatte. Should have run; but he had not.

He turned his back on the closed door and went to his desk. He had to hold the mug of hot chocolate with both hands to drink from it.

'I find it very hard to believe — no, impossible to believe…' Had there been a mirror in his office, and had he looked into it, Admiral Alexei Falkovsky would have seen the pallor of his face and the shock that widened his eyes. 'If what you say is true, then it is incredible, too incredible for me to comprehend.'

He could not doubt the man. In front of him, held tight in his fists, was a single sheet of paper from the Lubyanka that served to introduce Lieutenant Colonel Yuri Bikov of Counter-Intelligence (Military), and to order his full cooperation with the FSB officer. He could have blustered, shouted, but it would have achieved little and damaged him more.

'I have treated him like a son, trusted him.'

Damage was the key to it, the limitation of damage was the only sure route to his survival. He had had, throughout his thirty-eight years in the navy, acceptable relations with the men of the Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti. He had played the game with them, had never sought to frustrate them. He understood their power, had recognized it when he was young and knew it now. Twice a year in Kaliningrad he met with an FSB general, took lunch with him, and wine, and they would gossip together about subordinates and rivals, the tittle-tattle of who slept with whom, who drank too much, who rifled his garrison of building materials for sale to the mafiya, and they would embrace at the end of the lunch. By the time his staff car was half-way back to Baltiysk he would have forgotten what he had said and what he had been told. But the power of the FSB was ever present. At each stage of promotion a serving officer would be vetted. If the vetting was negative that officer would not gain access to classified material. Without the access to secret files there would be no possibility of promotion. They did not have to love each other, but to live together as fleas and dogs.

'I don't doubt what you say, Colonel Bikov, but it is hard, very hard, to accept. I think it would be easier to believe my wife is being fucked by a conscript. The bastard…'

Only on one occasion in his life had he deliberately refused an order from the old KGB. After he had taken control and ordered the stopping in the water of the Krivak-class destroyer, the Storozhevoy, on its flight to Swedish waters, he had led the boarding party that retook the ship from the nest of traitors, and had brought them back to Riga. Then, he had been ordered to hand his prisoners to the KGB's investigators, and he had refused. He had, himself, brought them down the gangway, taken them to the military prison and thrown them into the cells. Only then had he given the key to the investigators. It was the one time. Not for a moment did he consider that he should defend Viktor Archenko.

'You will find that no obstructions are put in your way by me. You have the freedom of my base, I guarantee it…but you understand that I am sick — a knife is in my back.'

A man such as this did not come on a wasted errand. If any other counterintelligence officer had blundered into his office and laid down vague, unsubstantiated accusations, he would have grabbed his collar, twisted him round, frogmarched him to the door, then pitched him far into the outer office. Not this man, not this Bikov. There was a confidence, a serenity of calm, that spilled across the room. This man, Bikov, could destroy the long career of Alexei Falkovsky. For all of the gold on his shoulders and on his tunic's sleeves, for all of the seven rows of medal ribbons on his chest, he had sensed that his future lay in the hands of this man. Loyalty? Fuck loyalty…as Viktor, his protégé and proxy son, had fucked him. Already the worm was in his gut. What was his future? At best — his mind raced — it was to end his life in a miserable tower apartment, with an inadequate pension, in the anarchy of outer Moscow or Murmansk, disgraced because a spy had operated under his nose, and had been given his friendship. At worst — and it chilled him as he offered the guarantee of total cooperation — he would be prosecuted for negligence of duty, locked up among the zeks, the criminal scum.

'What do you need to nail the bastard? Whatever you want I give you.'

The answering voice was quiet, matter-of-fact. 'I want evidence. I don't have it yet. I have only impressions of guilt, but not the confirmation of it. I am tasked to find irrefutable evidence. In these times, to arrest a senior officer and charge him with treason, with aiding a foreign power, which I believe to be Great Britain, with leaking every document that crossed his desk — that lay in your locked safe, Admiral — I must have evidence.'

'Where do you get that?'

'From interrogation, from a confession. Always a confession is…'

He was hunched over his desk, his voice was hoarse. 'Do you hurt him?'

On the journey of his career in the navy's upper echelons, Viktor had travelled with him. Viktor had sponged away his frustrations, had fixed anything he asked for, had protected and guarded him. He leaned on him, Viktor was his crutch. His ultimate ambition, to end his naval life as commander of the Northern Fleet, was being snatched from him. Fuck…fuck…but he could not bring himself to hate him.

'No.'

'You don't hurt him?'

'I will talk to him.'

'You talk to him…and he will condemn himself with talking?'

'Yes.'

'When does it happen, his arrest?'

'I am almost ready.'

His head was in his hands, his fingers masking his eyes. He was drained of life and strength. He was a man feared by those who worked for him. Officers and men stiffened when he glanced at them, were afraid of him. He felt himself shrunken.

'I don't want to see it.'

'Very natural, Admiral Falkovsky. Please do not communicate with him, do not order up any classified files, do not open any safes, do not take any calls, do not leave your office. Your attitude is natural because he was your friend.'

The door closed soundlessly on them. From his drawer he took a packet of Camel cigarettes from the carton Viktor had brought him. The tears ran on the old sailor's cheeks.

'I expected more of him — more fight, more argument,' Bikov's major said.

On the headquarters building the flags and pennants were whipped by the wind. The sun shone. It was a good autumn day and would have been perfect without the wind's bluster.

'Most men watch their own skin. Skin usually measures the depth of friendship,' Bikov responded.

Ahead of them was a squat concrete block that housed the military police and the offices of the FSB on the base. Only the final preparations remained to be confirmed.

His major persisted: 'I expected him to stand in Archenko's corner, but he abandoned his man.'

Outwardly the block gave the same appearance as it would have the previous day, or the previous week. The difference was subtle. Inside the door was a desk and at the desk were two armed military policemen, who had not been there the previous day or week. On the first-floor landing, at the entrance to the FSB's rooms, was a table and, behind it, a third military policeman sat with an assault rifle across his knees. And, though the midday sunshine gave brightness and warmth, the windows of those rooms were covered with sheets of newspaper, the blinds were drawn, and from the smallest of the rooms all furniture had been removed. They surveyed what had been done at the supervision of his sergeant, but his major returned to the theme.

'I expected more from the admiral. Archenko is alone.'

'Not quite alone,' Bikov mused. 'He will have me. I will be his friend.'

The heavy machine-gun, the NSV 12.7mm, chattered on the range. The conscript, Igor Vasiliev, knew every working part in its body. Blindfolded, he could strip the barrel, the breech block, the firing chamber, and reassemble them. It was difficult firing on the open range on the sand spit, with the fierce cross wind, at 2000 metres. Between each burst of five rounds he checked the angle of the range's windsock and looked for rubbish blowing over the range. His hits on the targets were radioed back to the trench from which he fired. The other conscripts of 8 platoon, 3rd company, 81st regiment of Naval Infantry crouched behind him and watched, as did the instructors who had nothing to teach him, and his platoon sergeant. The latter was now cautious, wary, with him. It was midday. When he had finished shooting, and the barrel was hot, Vasiliev pushed himself up from his hunched firing position.

'I would like to shoot again this afternoon, because the championship—'

'This afternoon there is the navigation lecture, then the gymnasium.'

'I would like to shoot after the lecture, instead of the gymnasium.'

Because of the power of Vasiliev's friend, the chief of staff to the admiral, and because of his own guilt, the platoon sergeant buckled to him. 'You may shoot again this afternoon.'

In Moscow, at the table of a quiet restaurant on a street behind the Bolshoi, a place favoured by foreigners, the Swedish military attaché was being entertained by his British colleague. A second bottle had been called for. To repay the quality of the hospitality, the Swede was retelling his choice anecdote.

'Picture it, the interrogator returns to Grozny, to be feted, to be the hero of a party where their disgusting champagne substitute will flow until the small hours — but he's not there. The star act is gone. Doesn't even have time for a shit, shave and a shower. The Lubyanka's sent a jet for him. He's top of the bill and he's gone. What everyone wondered, down in Grozny — what's so important that the interrogator isn't allowed his moment in the spotlight? What they were saying last night to the esteemed Ukrainian, who told the valued Belarussian, who told me, there has to be a scandal on the greatest scale, at the heart of this horrid place, for the interrogator to be called away from his moment of glory.'

'You didn't hear, did you — I don't suppose you did — what section of FSB the interrogator comes from? Did you?'

'Military counterintelligence.' The Swede beamed. The second cork popped.

'My father was here,' Jerry the Pole said, and he chewed the toothpick.

'I'm sorry.' Alice bowed her head. Locke reckoned she couldn't think of anything better to say. Himself, he said nothing — nothing was appropriate.

Small flashes of sunlight danced on the barbed wire. By the gate, over which there was a platform to support a watchtower, a single cluster of fresh-cut sunflowers was fastened to the strands and their brightness competed cheerfully with the pinpricks on the wire. Locke counted thirteen strands nailed to the vertical creosoted posts, and there were four more off angled struts at the top, set so that a man could not climb the fence and break out.

'My father was here in the war,' Jerry the Pole said.

When they had left Gdansk, Alice in the back and Locke beside the Pole, the question of the pension — its non-payment — had once again been raised. The wheedling query: was there not something they, as decent people, could do? Mr Mowbray could do nothing, was there something they could do? Locke had said curtly, without enthusiasm,that he would look into it, a deflection. The old Mercedes had been on a long, straight road after the junction at Stegna. Jerry the Pole had cracked the silence and started again: he was as good and as loyal a servant as any ever employed at the Olympic Stadium, no work in Berlin was ever avoided by him. Alice had interrupted. Too much coffee at breakfast, she wanted a toilet. They had turned off the road, an avenue of beech trees. Locke hadn't noticed the sign, and they'd pulled into a wide car park, empty but for a solitary coach. Alice had been directed to the toilet, and Jerry the Pole had walked to the camp gate and bought two tickets.

'It is called Stutthof — that is the German name, you have heard of it? No? My father was here for three years.'

Locke looked stonily ahead. He thought an expression of extreme gravity, of stolid seriousness, was appropriate. He had heard of Auschwitz-Birkenau in the south, and Sobibor close to Lublin, and Treblinka, but he had not visited them. Too much work, not enough hours in the day, too much pressure. He would have said to Danuta, or when he met young Poles at symposia, that to live in the past was to live in a prison. He had never heard of the Stutthof concentration camp.

'Let's go,' Jerry the Pole said. 'Let's take a walk while she pees.'

'Why not? We'll do that.'

Locke did not know what else he could have said. His agreement was a politeness. The Pole rolled in front of him on weak hips, and Locke followed. They went through the open gate into an oasis of quiet. A teacher at his school, the comprehensive in Haverfordwest, had once said to the class that these were places where the birds did not sing. 'Ridiculous,' the kids had shouted in the stampede along the corridors to maths or Welsh language or economics. How did bloody sparrows know what had happened five decades before? Daft. He listened, and heard no birds, but there were layers of birch trees the far side of the wire ahead and at the side, beyond the huts. No birdsong came to him.

They left the brick guardhouse behind them. The coach in the car park had brought schoolchildren from Düsseldorf, handsome teenage boys and pretty little Lolita girls: the Pole and Locke played a sort of tag behind them, not catching them, letting them do their tour of each hut and leave it before they went in. They saw the bunk beds, on two levels, and the little guidebook that had come with the tickets said that at the end four men had slept on each bunk on a mattress of compressed straw. They went into the hut that had been the bath-house, where half a dozen circular tubs would each have held six men for the few minutes allowed them to scrape off dirt and pick off fleas and lice. After the children had left it they went into the medical room where there were rusty, grimed trolleys; the book said this was where 'experiments' had been performed.

He fingered the book. Stutthof camp had been the first to open in occupied Poland. It had stayed open for 2,077 days, and 110,000 prisoners had walked through the gates, as Locke had. In the camp, 65,000 men had died from starvation, disease, lethal injections, hangings and gassings. There was dark gloom in the huts but the sunshine warmed his face each time they stepped outside. At the far end of the compound, beyond the wire but in clear view of the huts, was a single gallows, a vertical pole with a horizontal bar supported by a strut; a hook was screwed in under the bar's end. Locke felt sick. He leaned against the post, as if admiring the sunflowers' bloom.

He hardly heard Jerry the Pole's litany. 'My father, Tomasz, was like every other man — he must work and feed his family. There were several of them, and the commandant needed them, these Poles. They were called "honorary Germans". What did my father do that was wrong? He backed the wrong throw of the dice, the loser's throw. For three years he worked there, and then we moved in 1942 to Krynica Morska on the peninsula — it's where we are going, and I will show you our former house, Mr Locke, and the cemetery where my grandparents lie before we go on to Piaski, and I think you will be very interested. At Krynica Morska my father was a foreman on the project to reclaim land from the lagoon — he supervised the prisoners' work. That was till February of 1945, and I was then eleven years old. We had to go. The Russians were coming. The camp was evacuated, and the "honorary Germans" and their families walked with the prisoners and the Germans to what is now Gdansk. Then there were trains to Rostock, and from Rostock there was a boat to Denmark. It was a great adventure for a small boy. My father settled in Lübeck and again found work as a carpenter. Six years later I went to Berlin, for a future, and five years from then I was employed as a junior interpreter, what your people called a "bottle-washer", at the Olympic Stadium. I learned from my father, Mr Locke. I only work for the winners, for Mr Rupert Mowbray…and I believe that you also, Mr Locke, are a winner.'

The mirrors destroyed him. Locke saw the shoe in the water. Death would have been in the drowned eyes as surely as it had been in the eyes of the men in the gas chamber, in the crematorium and below the gallows. The mirrors made the shoe huge.

They were near to the gate, near to Alice.

Jerry the Pole smiled at him. 'I think you enjoyed your tour, Mr Locke, found it interesting. Many of the huts my father built are gone, not because they were poorly built but people from the villages took the wood to burn in cold winters. Mr Locke, you are a kind and intelligent gentleman. Please, look into the business of my pension, please. May I depend…?'

'Hear me, Jerzy fucking Kwasniewski, you bloody Fascist — why not just shut up about your fucking pension?'

He walked past Alice. Far from the gardeners' store shed, and at the end of those two days he had bicycled away into the dusk, had gone off the straight flat road to the village and pedalled along tracks that led to the clusters of poplar trees that had been planted on the old pocked battlefields. He had intended to take his life. Once he had gone as far as throwing the rope up over a branch…he had not had the courage to take the coward's way. He had told them all, all the stones, on his last day, why he went, and where.

Lofty was a country boy. His childhood was from the woods and hills around a village close to the Surrey town of Guildford. He had made his own entertainment, played his own games, and knew how to manufacture a secret hiding-place that would only be found if it were stepped on. The basher they built under Lofty's supervision was more expert than any an instructor could have constructed. Where a pine tree had been felled in a gale, its roots lifted from the ground leaving a shallow sandy hole, the basher had been made and its roof was from fronds and dead branches. Around it there was no indication of their presence — no snapped twigs, no disturbed needles, no prints.

The machine-gun had stopped firing. Huddled together, they lay in the darkness and waited for the day to pass.