Archangel

Chapter 1

The distance between the steel-faced door and his bed mocked the man. A few moments before he might have quarried the strength to crawl across the floor to the door, might have gathered the will to beat his fists below the spy hole. But the chance had gone. He lay on his tousled blanket and the soft pillow, and the pain in him swelled and blustered like an autumn stormcloud.

There was always a light burning from the ceiling of a cell for men like him. Bright in the evening, dimmed in the night after lock-up. A dull light now, but his eyes fastened on the wire webbing around it, as if that small bulb was a talisman.

A terrifying loneliness because he could not reach the door, and his voice had fled in defeat from the surging agony that consumed his chest and left arm, and that ebbed at the pit of his throat.

His mind was alive. Thoughts and memories competed with the crushing weight on his upper ribs, the pressure of a pitiless binding that pinioned him to his bedding. Thoughts of the screw who would be sitting in his cubicle at the end of the landing with the central heating pipe against his feet and his newspaper on the table. Memories that were laced in a foreign tongue, wreathed in foreign smells, dinned by foreign sounds, wrapped in foreign tastes. The thoughts and the memories were the intruders because the pain was creeping wider and would win.

There was no one to listen for his whimpered call. He was isolated from the living, breathing world of a thousand souls who eked out their existence beyond his cramping cell.

He wrapped his arms across his body, squeezing at the pressure that engulfed his heart, as if he might spirit away the growing wound.

But he was no fool, this man. He knew the meaning of the pain. A few brief hours earlier, he could have described to his companions in the exercise yard or the Recreation hall the classic symptoms of the cardiac attack. Often they came to him as a counsellor, tapping at what they regarded as his superior knowledge. He told one man of the treatment necessary for hernia and abscess, he told another man of the letter he should write to the solicitor who had acted in defence, he told another how he should conduct himself at the next visit with the wife who was being bed-humped by the lorry driver next door… All the cons came to his cell.

They asked and he answered. He would know the sign posts of the coronary. It would have been expected of him.

He lay very still on his bed because movement aggravated the pain and his legs were useless things.

A man lying in an upper-landing cell of Her Majesty's Prison, Wormwood Scrubs, and watching death scurry closer.

Just a small snapshot kept him company, a wallet-sized picture stuck to the cream-painted brickwork beside his face. A woman with fluffy blonde hair that had been combed before the wind caught at the strands. A woman in a short-sleeved blouse and a dowdy grey skirt. The photograph had been sent to him after conviction and sentence, after the stripping of his cover. The photograph dug out his buried history. The woman posed before the red-stone mausoleum containing the few earthly remains of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. He had taken her there on the last day before he had left Moscow. A spring day with summer closing on them quickly, and they had made the pilgrimage down the steps into the hushed sepulchre, made themselves a microcosm of the slow shuffling queue. Afterwards, when the sunlight had again recaptured them, he had positioned her so that the edifice of the tomb peeped over her shoulders. He had used the foreign-made Instamatic which his position permitted him to purchase in the Foreign Currency shop at the hotel down from the square. When they had brought him to this place and slammed a door on his freedom, she had sent him her photograph. Pretence had no more value.

He gazed at the photograph, looked on it, loved it.

He would not see the woman again. He would see nothing of the past again. Not the wastelands of Sheremetyevo airport, nor the Lubyanka offices behind the curtain of guards, nor the primly ordered sleeping-quarters of the training camp at Ryazan, nor the small flat on the outer span of the Prospekt Mir. It was only a small flat, but adequate for a man who travelled, and for his woman who would wait a year or a month for his return, or eternity. A good woman, laced with Georgian temper… and the pain ripped again deep into his chest, and he gasped, and his voice rattled a call for help and his body was swept in wetness.

He heard the footsteps far away on the landing. Steps that paused and halted. The screw was checking the spy holes.

Sometimes he would look into each cell, sometimes into the first three, sometimes a random selection from all those on the landing.

Shit. So unfair.

Three years in this place, three years of desiccating boredom, and they kept saying that soon he would go, and he had dreamed of nothing beyond the aircraft and the car to his flat, and the body of the woman who had stood before the Mausoleum for his camera. And now he would be cheated. No sound from the landing. The screw might have returned to his cosy room, he might have opened one of the other cells and stepped inside to take a cigarette with a lifer.

On this landing all men were solitaries. Why should he bother to peep through the other spy holes, at men who slept or played with themselves or read trash books? Why bother to look in on a man whose chest was crushed by a granite weight?

He called again and could not hear the reed voice. There was no echo from the shining white tower of the corner lavatory, nor from the oakwood table made by an earlier generation of prisoner, nor from the metal chair, nor from the books, nor from the transistor radio. A silence kept company with his short bursts of breath, and he thought he could hear the perspiration running to the pits of his arms.

He was dying and there was no witness.

The footsteps dragged closer to his door. Measured, confident steps. No way to stop the pain, and his body could not outlast the hurt. They would find him dead. They would stand in the cell and talk in quiet, controlled whispers of his age, fifty-one years. They would speak of his weight, seven kilos over. Of his smoking, two packets minimum a day. Of his exercise, the least that he could escape with. Of his eating, all that was put before him, and wiping up with bread the slicks of fat left on his plate. Textbook abuse and textbook penalty.

To die alone, that was an obscenity. To die without a hand to hold.

The footsteps reached his door.

The man tried to move on his bed, he failed. He tried again to shout, and there was only the thin wheeze of his breath.

There was the scrape of a drawn bolt, the hiss of a turned key in an oiled lock, the tinkling of a light chain cascading loose. He saw the face, shadowed by the steep black peak of the cap. Ironed shirt, pressed uniform, polished boots, bright splash of a medal ribbon. The man saw all of that and could not speak. A voice was directed towards him, there was the command for an answer. Slowly he moved his head as if that were a gesture of respect in itself. The moving of his head brought new agony, and his cheeks twisted. The uniform spun into a blur as it stepped back into the brightness of the landing. The man heard the voice, registered the urgency.

'Mr Jones… It's Demyonov… grey as a bloody battle-ship. Reckon it's one for the medic…'

Another set of pounding feet.

Another shadowed face at the door. Another strident call, and the man could not respond.

'Come on, Demyonov, let's have you. What's the matter?

Lost your bloody voice for once?'

His lips fluttered. There was a kaleidoscope of thoughts in his mind, and none could slide to his tongue. He peered back at the men at the door, and his eyes bled for attention.

'Get the medical orderly, and I should say a bit of speed about it.' Mr Jones was senior duty officer. The 'cons' stood up when Mr Jones came into their cells. He liked to say that he ran a tidy landing. No messing, no back talk. But the man could not rise, could not speak, and the burden of pain overwhelmed him.

'Not feeling so good, Demyonov? Well, not to worry.

Medic's coming over to have a look at you. You're a bit grey, I'll say that.'

From far down on the bed he heard the voice. He stared at Mr Jones's knees, and saw the careful darn of a short rip beside the knife crease. He remembered that it was said that Mr Jones had a kindly way with him. The cons reckoned there was a softness hidden behind the booming mouth and florid lips. The cons said that he'd learned a garrulous friendliness when he was young and had done shifts in the Pentonville death cell. They said that when things were really grim, like hideous and worse, that then Mr Jones could make himself almost a human. The old cons reckoned he'd have had a bright word for the lad who was being tripped through the door and up the steps and onto the platform as the clock chimed. He'd heard all those things about Mr Jones. You heard everything about everybody when you'd done three years in the Scrubs.

He raised his eyes. He saw the care of the afternoon shave, the eruption of worming veins on the cheeks, the nervousness flickering at Mr Jones's mouth.

'Don't you worry, Demyonov, Medic's on the way. Can't have you going under, can we? Not when you're going home. Well, that's the talk, isn't it?' The Medical Orderly was puffed by the time that he reached the cell door. The warder stayed outside, and the Orderly took Demyonov's fingers from Mr Jones. It was a cursory check, the wiping of the damp sheen from the prisoner's forehead, an open hand laid across his chest, two fingers on the wrist for the pulse.

'I'm going to get the Doctor in.'

'Drag him in from home?' queried Mr Jones.

'I'm not taking the rap for shifting this one… '

The Orderly turned from his patient to the warder in the doorway.

'… Get yourself down to the telephone, tell Admin that I want the Doctor. Make sure he knows who he'll be seeing, that'll bring him fast enough. Better get the Deputy Governor up too, but the Doctor first.'

And then there was nothing to do but wait and watch.

The Orderly crouched over the bed, wincing at the man's pain, and Mr Jones paced on tip-toe the short length of the solitary cell, and both wondered how long he would last. If he moved the man and killed him, he'd be subject to inquiry and inquest; if he let him be and allowed him to slip, the brickbats would fall as hard. This man above all others.

Everyone knew him in the Scrubs. Oleg Demyonov… described in chorus by the Attorney General and the Lord Chief Justice as the most dangerous individual threat to the security of the state of the last decade. A pudgy little bugger, overweight and balding, ready with a riposte to anyone.

Hold out, you little creep, hold out until the Doctor gets here. It was cold in the cell. Had to be, because for the last two years they'd shut the central heating down earlier. Not that Demyonov was shivering, he'd enough on his plate without feeling the chill of a January evening. The Orderly was cold, only the short white coat over his shirt, and his ears strained for sounds on the iron staircases.

The Doctor was young, with the aloof stamp of his trade.

Into the cell, opening his bag, taking the place of the Orderly. The Deputy Governor hovered behind him. The Doctor enacted his routine. Pulse, blood-pressure wrap on the arm, stethoscope to the chest. He spoke gently to the man who had been a spy, reacting to the faintest twitches of the eyebrows.

'Where's the pain, Demyonov…? Just in the chest…?

In the left arm as well…? Does the pain go further…?

Problem with breathing…? Has this ever happened before… ?'

The Doctor eased away from the bed, stripped off the wrap, laid the passive hand back across the man's chest.

'I want a 999 for an ambulance – he might have a chance at the Hammersmith. He's none here. His blood pressure's down in his boots.'

'If he's to go out of here to hospital, Home Office have to sanction it.'

'If he doesn't get to the Hammersmith, he'll be going out of here in a box.'

'It has to be cleared…'

'The ambulance or he's dead,' snapped the Doctor.

It was not a quick affair, the transfer of Oleg Demyonov some eight hundred yards from the Scrubs to the Hammersmith Hospital. Authorization to be granted, the patient to be carried tortuously on a stretcher down the steep staircase from the upper landing, locked gates to be negotiated. The prison was a whispering murmur of information by the time that the high wooden gates reluctantly swung'open, and the ambulance roared into a left turn past the gaunt homes of the gaol's staff. As if sensing freedom, the driver played a tattoo on his siren, though the road ahead was well lit and clear of traffic.

Into the Medical Block, into the lift, into the Coronary Care unit. The Doctor peeled away as the plastic double doors flapped shut in the wake of the wheeled stretcher. The Deputy Governor was at his shoulder.

'I wouldn't go in there if I were you. I mean he's not going to run away, is he? They're going to have their work cut out. He's not going to make a dash for the fire escape.'

The Deputy Governor and Mr Jones fidgeted in mutual discomfort. It went against the grain of their lives to let a prisoner out of sight. They heard through the doorway staccato shouts for jelly; for drip, for ECG. A small stampede of men charged past them and through the door. They heard the whining of a buzzer, the noise of fists beating on flesh.

'Cardiac Arrest team. They're walloping his chest now, trying to beat it back into action… Being who he is I suggest you give the Home Office another bell. That's my lot, good night.'

The Deputy Governor followed the Doctor down the stairs.

Mr Jones was abandoned in the deserted corridor, hands folded across his stomach, skirted by passing nurses and doctors. A bloody shame for old Demyonov, he thought.

Even a bloody Russian would look forward to going home, wouldn't he, even if it meant traipsing back to Moscow?

Funny thing was that he wasn't a bad chap, and they'd miss him at the Scrubs whether he went out in a box or with a one-way airline ticket.

From his tunic pocket Mr Jones took a set of clippers and started to tidy his nails. There would be a few minutes before the storm broke.

He walked from East Acton Underground station through the estate of Council homes, where the walls were daubed with tribal soccer slogans and teenagers fumbled in the entries to the garages with their girl-friends' zippers.

Past the prison with its floodlit walls topped with barbed wire coils, past the twin towers of the gate house, past the surveillance cameras. His hands were deep in his overcoat pockets, and in the rush out of his home he had forgotten the scarf that was a month-old Christmas present. He had been lucky with his connections, had caught the trains quickly.

God alone knew how he was going to get back to Century, but Alan Millet's wife always took the car on a Saturday night to her bridge session. He'd have to go back into Century, after a thing like this it would be expected of him.

Of course, all the business could have been managed at the end of a telephone, but that wasn't the way of the Service.

Not that Alan Millet could complain. Holly was his man, and once, long ago, Holly had been his pride.

The lights of the hospital blazed down on him as he turned off the pavement and threaded his way through the car park.

The Medical Block had a certain venerable charm, and the warmth cascaded around him. He was stopped by a porter. What was his business? Coronary Care, first floor, he was expected. Alan Millet ignored the uncertain statement that visitors were not permitted this late at night. In his wallet he carried the authority of a polaroid-printed identity card that governs entry to Century House. He hesitated for a moment at the top of the stairs, looked both ways down the corridor, and saw the upright figure of a uniformed prison officer.

He nodded a courtesy greeting and pushed his way through the doors. He saw two occupied beds and, from the pillows, pairs of concerned eyes peered at him. They were the living, they could resent the circus arrival that had been summoned to the curtained laager in the far corner. There was a trolley beside the semi-concealed bed, its top stretcher surface empty. A nurse was detaching electrodes from their cables, another was writing her notes busily. Two young doctors stood close to each other, their eyes hollowed by tiredness. A pair of West Indian porters, expressionless, wheeled the trolley away across the open-plan unit and out through the door.

'Doubtfire, Home Office.' A sharp voice behind Millet.

'You're a bit late, old chap.'

'Millet…' he paused,'… Foreign and Commonwealth.

What's happened to him.'

'Just gone on the trolley. There's a box underneath the top, they put them in there, doesn't upset people that way.

About twenty minutes ago they gave up. Not a chance, everything done that could have been, he had the red carpet.'

'They said he hadn't long when they called me at home. I suppose I was sort of hoping… they're sometimes wrong.'

'Good riddance. What'll he get, Hero of the bloody Soviet Union?'

A nursing Sister approached the two men. The message was bright in her eyes. This was an operational area.

Doubtfire had a car and driver. Night Duty Officer for the Home Office, a travelling fire brigade. He was returning to his cubbyhole in Whitehall and the telephone that he prayed would stay silent, and a thermos of instant coffee. Millet was thankful to accept a lift. In the back of the car they talked in desultory fashion. Two practised civil servants, uncertain of the other's role and standing, and cautious of confidences. Millet was dropped in Great Charles Street at the entrance to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, which left him a long walk along the river to Century House.

The wind whipped at Alan Millet's legs as he hurried along the empty pavements. The sleet pecked at the skin of his cheeks, fluttered his close-cut hair. He was obsessed with a man called Michael Holly. A tall man, alive with enthusiasm, totally self-contained. Memories more than a year old. He supposed that every desker felt a stifling involvement with his field man. Like the first whore of a man's life, never forgotten, never to be escaped from. There was a pub across the river, where he had taken Holly – he always called himself that, never bothered with his given name – where they had sipped their drinks and nibbled at the tired bread and ham, where Holly had asked the expected question. What happens if

…? No problem, Alan Millet had said, no problem there. The ransom money's under lock and key in the Scrubs, and a bloody good laugh he'd had as he said it. Nothing for Holly to worry himself with, and of course it wouldn't come to that anyway. A bloody good laugh… The street lights picked out the man who stood against the river parapet, and who stared down at the ruffled water. Must have been the antibiotics he had been taking to stifle the influenza bug, must have been that which had loosened his tongue. A field man should never have been given a guarantee.

But Millet had offered Holly a promise.

It won't happen, of course… but there's a man in a cell at Wormwood Scrubs. Of course it won't happen… but if it did, well, there'd just have to be a swap.

Bloody marvellous, wasn't it? And all the spadework done through Belgrade, all the ribbons tied. All ready for the flight to Berlin, and the only haggle was over which crossing-point, what time, which day.

Michael Holly for Oleg Demyonov. Them happy and us happy.

But now a man lay in the mortuary of the Hammersmith hospital and Alan Millet's promise was a worthless thing.