Our kind of traitor

16

For Luke, the days and nights in the little Alpine resort of Wengen were mysteriously preordained, now beyond bearing, now filled with the lyrical calm of an extended gathering of family and friends on holiday.

The ugly, built-to-let chalet that Ollie had selected lay at the quiet end of the village on a triangle of land between two footpaths. In the winter months it was rented out to a lowland German ski club, but in the summer it was available to anyone who could pay, from South African Theosophists to Norwegian Rastafarians to poor children from the Ruhr. A disparate family of incompatible ages and origins was therefore exactly what the village expected. Not a head turned among the flocks of summer tourists that trudged past it: or so said Ollie, who spent many spare minutes keeping watch from behind the curtained upper windows.

From inside, the world was almost unimaginably beautiful. Look downward from the top floor and you had a view of the fabled Lauterbrunnen Valley; look upward, and the Jungfrau massif rose glistening before you. Behind you lay unspoiled pastures and forested foothills. Yet from outside the chalet was an architectural void: cavernous, characterless, anonymous, and sympathetic to nothing around it, with white stucco walls and rustic grace notes that only emphasized its suburban aspirations.

Luke too had watched. When Ollie was out foraging for provisions and snippets of local gossip, it was Luke the habitual worrier who kept lookout for the suspicious passer-by. But watch as he might, no inquisitive eye lingered on the two small girls in the garden practising with their new skipping ropes to Gail's direction, or picking cowslips on the meadow bank behind the house, to be preserved for all time in jam jars of dry sago bought by Ollie from the supermarket.

Not even the rouged and powdered little old lady in weeds and dark glasses sitting motionless as a doll on the balcony with her hands in her lap attracted comment. Swiss resorts have been receiving such people ever since the tourist trade began. And should any passer-by chance, of an evening, to glimpse between the curtains a big man in a woollen ski cap bowed over a chessboard opposite two adolescent opponents – with Perry as referee and Gail and the girls in another corner watching DVDs bought from Photo Fritz – well, if that house hadn't had a family of chess-fiends before, it had had everything else. Why should they know or care that, pitched against the combined intellect of his precocious sons, the world's number-one money-launderer could still outsmart them?

And if the same adolescent boys were seen next day, in their carefully different outfits, scrambling up the precipitous rock path that ran from the back garden all the way up to Mannlichen ridge, with Perry out ahead urging them on, and Alexei vowing that he was going to break his neck any fucking minute, and Viktor insisting that he'd just stared down a full-grown stag, even if it was only a chamois – well, what was so remarkable about that? Perry even roped them together. He found a handy bit of overhang, hired boots and bought ropes – ropes, he explained severely, being for a mountaineer both personal and sacrosanct – and taught them how to dangle over an abyss, even if the abyss was only twelve feet deep.

As to the two young women – one sixteen-ish and the other maybe ten years older, both beautiful – stretched out on deckchairs with their books under a spreading maple tree that had somehow escaped the developer's bulldozer – well, if you were a Swiss male, perhaps you'd look and then pretend you hadn't looked, or if you were an Italian, you might have looked and applauded. But you wouldn't have rushed to the telephone and whispered to the police that you had seen two suspicious women reading in the shade of a maple tree.

Or so Luke told himself, and so Ollie told himself, and so Perry and Gail as co-opted members of the neighbourhood watch agreed – how could they do otherwise? – which didn't mean that any of them, even the small girls, ever quite got rid of the notion that they were in hiding and living against the clock. When Katya asked at breakfast over Ollie's pancake, bacon and maple syrup, 'Are we going to England today?' – or Irina, more plaintively, 'Why haven't we gone to England yet?' – they were speaking for everyone round the table, starting with Luke himself, the hero of the party by virtue of having his right hand in plaster after falling down the steps of his hotel in Berne.

'You gonna sue that hotel, Dick?' Viktor demanded aggressively.

'I shall be consulting my lawyer on the subject,' Luke replied with a smile for Gail.

As to precisely when they were going to London: 'Well, perhaps not today, Katya, but maybe tomorrow, or the next day,' Luke assured her. 'It's just a question of when your visas come through. And we all know what apparatchiks are like, even English ones, don't we?'

*

But when, oh when?

Luke asked himself the same question every waking and half-sleeping hour of the day or night as Hector's breathless bulletins piled in: now a couple of cryptic sentences between meetings, now a whole jeremiad in the small hours of another endless day. Bewildered by the barrage of contradictory reports, Luke at first resorted to the officially unforgivable sin of keeping a written log of them as they came in. With the lurid fingertips of his right hand poking from the plaster, he scribbled away painstakingly in his own quaint shorthand on single sheets of A4 bought by Ollie from the village stationer's, one side only.

In the approved training-school manner, he purloined the glass from a picture frame to press on, wiping it clean after each page, and caching the product behind a water tank against the remote possibility that Viktor, Alexei, Tamara or Dima himself might take it into their heads to search his room.

But as the speed and complexity of Hector's messages from the front began to overwhelm him, he prevailed on Ollie to get him a pocket recorder, much like Dima's, and connect it to his encrypted mobile – another mortal sin in the eyes of Training Section, but a godsend when he was lying wakefully in bed waiting for the next of Hector's idiosyncratic bulletins: – It's a knife-edge, Lukie, but we're winning. – I'm bypassing Billy Boy and going straight to the Chief. I've said it's got to be hours not days. – The Chief says talk to the Vice-Chief. – The Vice-Chief says if Billy Boy won't sign off on it, nor will he. He won't sign off on it alone. He's got to have the whole fourth floor behind him or it's no deal. I've said bugger that. – You're not going to believe this but Billy Boy's coming round. He's kicking like hell, but even he can't stay away from the truth when it's rammed up his hooter.

All this within the space of the first twenty-four hours after Luke had sent the cadaverous philosopher spinning down the staircase, a feat Hector initially greeted as sheer genius, but on reflection said he didn't think he'd be bothering the Vice-Chief with it for the time being.

'Did our boy actually kill Niki, Luke?' Hector inquired, in the most casual of tones.

'He hopes he did.'

'Yes. Well, I don't think I heard any of that, did you?'

'Not a sound.'

'It was two other blokes, and any similarity is purely coincidental. Deal?'

'Deal.'

*

By mid-afternoon on day two, Hector sounded frustrated but not yet downhearted. The Cabinet Office had ruled that a quorum of the Empowerment Committee must after all be convened, he said. They were insisting that Billy Boy Matlock must be fully apprised – repeat fully – of all operational details that Hector had hitherto held close to his chest. They would settle for a four-man working party comprising one representative each from the Foreign and Home offices, Treasury and Immigration. Excluded members would be invited to ratify the recommendations post facto, which the Cabinet Office predicted would be a formality. With every kind of reluctance, Hector had accepted their terms. Then quite suddenly – it was in the evening of the same day – the weather changed, and Hector's voice rose a notch. Luke's illicit recorder played the moment back to him: H: The buggers are ahead of us somehow. Billy Boy's just had the tip-off from his City sources. L: Ahead of us how? How can they be? We haven't made a move yet. H: According to Billy Boy's City sources, the Financial Services Authority is shaping to block the Arena application to open a major bank and we're the boys who've put the knife in. L: We? H: The Service. All of it. The big City institutions are screaming foul. Thirty cross-bench MPs on the oligarch payroll are drafting a rude letter to the Secretary to the Treasury accusing the Financial Services Authority of anti-Russian prejudice and demanding that all unreasonable obstacles to the application be removed forthwith. The usual suspects in the House of Lords are up in arms. L: But that's utter bullshit! H: Try telling that to the Financial Services Authority. All they know is, the central banks are refusing to lend to each other despite the fact that they've been given billions of public money to do exactly that. Now, lo and behold, along comes Arena to the rescue on its white horse, offering to put hundreds of bloody billions into their hot little hands. Who gives a shit where the money comes from? [Is this a question? If so, Luke has no answer to it.] H [sudden outburst]: There aren't any unreasonable obstacles, for fuck's sake! Nobody's even begun to erect any unreasonable obstacles! As of last night, Arena's application was rotting in the FSA's pending tray. They haven't met, they haven't conferred, they've hardly started their regulatory inquiries. But none of that has stopped the Surrey oligarchs from beating their war drums, or the financial editors being briefed that if Arena's application is rejected, the City of London will end up a poor fourth behind Wall Street, Frankfurt and Hong Kong. And whose fault will that be? The Service's, led up the garden path by one Hector bloody Meredith!

Another silence followed – so long that Luke was reduced to asking Hector whether he was still there, for which he received a snappish 'where the fuck d'you think I am?'

'Well at least Billy Boy's aboard for you,' Luke suggested, by way of offering comfort that he didn't share.

'A total turnaround, thank God,' Hector replied devoutly. 'Don't know where I'd be without him.'

Luke didn't know either.

*

Billy Boy Matlock, Hector's ally suddenly? Hector's convert to the cause? His newfound comrade-in-arms? A total turnaround? Billy?

Or Billy Boy buying himself a little reinsurance on the side? Not that Billy Boy was bad, not bad like wicked, not bad like Aubrey Longrigg, Luke had never thought that of him – not your devious mastermind, your double or triple agent, sidling between conflicting powers. That wasn't Billy at all. He was too obvious for that.

So when precisely might this great conversion have occurred, and why? Luke marvelled. Or might it be that Billy Boy had already covered his back elsewhere, and was now ready to offer Hector his ample front, thereby becoming privy to the most closely guarded secrets in Hector's treasure chest?

What, for instance, had been in Billy's head that Sunday afternoon when he walked out of the Bloomsbury safe house, smarting from his humiliating put-down? Love of Hector? Or serious concerns for his own position in the future scheme of things?

What great City eminence might Billy Boy, in the days of painful rumination following that meeting, have invited to lunch – famously parsimonious though he might be – and sworn to secrecy, knowing that in the great eminence's book a secret is what he tells one person at a time? Knowing also that he has gained himself a friend should events take a tricky turn?

And of the many ripples that might fan out from this one little pebble tossed into the City's murky waters, who knew which of them might lap against the super-sharp ear of that distinguished City insider and rising parliamentarian, Aubrey Longrigg?

Or Bunny Popham?

Or Giles de Salis, ringmaster of the media circus?

And of all the other sharp-eared Longriggs, Pophams and de Salises waiting to jump on the Arena roundabout the minute it begins to turn?

Except that, according to Hector, the roundabout hasn't begun to turn. So why jump?

Luke wished very much that he had someone to share his thoughts with, but as usual there was nobody. Perry and Gail were outside the circle. Yvonne was off-air. And Ollie was – well, Ollie was the best back-door man in the business, but no Einstein when it came to the cut and thrust of high-stakes intrigue.

*

While Gail and Perry were performing sterling work as proxy parents, troupe leaders, Monopoly players and tour guides to the children, Ollie and Luke had been counting off the warning signs, and either dismissing them or adding them to Luke's ever-growing worry list.

In the course of one morning, Ollie had observed the same couple pass the house twice on the north side, then twice on the south-west side. Once the woman wore a yellow headscarf and a green Loden coat, once a floppy sunhat and slacks. But the same boots and socks, and carrying the same alpine walking stick. The man wore shorts the first time and baggy leopard-spot pants the second, but the same peaked blue cap and the same way of walking with his hands at his sides, barely moving them with his stride.

And Ollie had taught observation at training school, so it was hard to gainsay him.

Ollie had also been keeping a wary eye on Wengen railway station in the wake of Gail's and Natasha's encounter with Swiss authority at Interlaken Ost. According to a servant of the railway with whom Ollie had had a quiet beer in the Eiger Bar, the police presence in Wengen, normally restricted to resolving the odd punch-up, or conducting a half-hearted quest for drug pushers, had been increased over the past few days. Hotel registers had been checked out, and the photograph of a broad-faced, balding man with a beard had been surreptitiously shown to ticket clerks at the train and cable-car stations.

'I don't suppose Dima ever grew a beard at all, did he, back in the days when he was opening his first money laundromat in Brighton Beach?' he inquired of Luke during a quiet walk in the garden.

Both a beard and a moustache, Luke conceded grimly. They were part of the new identity he assumed in order to get himself to the States. Didn't shave them off till five years ago.

And – call it coincidence, but Ollie didn't – while he was at the railway news-stand, picking up the International Herald Tribune and the local press, he had spotted the same suspicious pair that he had seen casing the house. They were sitting in the waiting room and staring at the wall. Two hours and several trains going in both directions later, they were still there. Ollie could offer no explanation for their behaviour except cock-up: the relief surveillance team had missed the train, so the two were waiting while their superiors made up their minds what to do with them, or – taking into account their chosen position overlooking platform 1 – waiting to see who got off trains arriving from Lauterbrunnen.

'Plus the nice lady at the cheese shop asked me how many people I thought I was feeding, which I didn't like, but she may have been referring to my somewhat oversized tummy,' he ended, as if to lighten Luke's load, but humour wasn't coming easily to either of them.

Luke was also fretting about the fact that the household included four children of school age. Swiss schools were running, so why weren't our children at school? The medical nurse had asked him the same question when he went to the village surgery to have his hand checked. His lame reply to the effect that the International Schools were having a half-term had sounded implausible even to himself.

*

So far, Luke had insisted on confining Dima indoors, and Dima out of indebtedness had grudgingly submitted. In the afterglow of the scuffle on the staircase of the Bellevue Palace, Luke at first could do no wrong in Dima's eyes. But as the days crawled by and Luke had to find one excuse after another for the apparatchiks in London, Dima's mood turned to one of resistance, then revolt. Tiring of Luke, he put his case to Perry with characteristic bluntness:

'If I wanna take Tamara a walk, I gonna take her,' he growled. 'I see a beautiful mountain, I wanna show her. This isn't fucking Kolyma. You tell this to Dick, hear me, Professor?'

For the shallow climb up the concrete path to the benches that overlooked the valley, Tamara decided she needed a wheelchair. Ollie was sent off to find one. With her hennaed hair, splurged lipstick and dark glasses, she resembled some necromancer's artefact, and Dima in his boiler suit and woollen ski cap was no prettier. But in a community inured to every kind of human aberration, they made some sort of ideal elderly couple as Dima pushed Tamara slowly up the hill behind the house to show her the Staubbach Falls and Lauterbrunnen Valley in all their glory.

And if Natasha accompanied them, which she sometimes did, it was no longer as the hated love-child sired by Dima and inflicted on Tamara after she was ejected half-mad from prison, but as their loving and obedient daughter, whether natural or adopted was no longer relevant. But mostly, Natasha read her books or sought out her father when he was alone, blandishing him, stroking his bald head and kissing it as if he were her child.

Perry and Gail too were integral parts of this newly constituted family that was forming: with Gail forever thinking up new activities for the girls, introducing them to the cows in the meadows, marching them off to watch Hobelkase being planed in the cheese shop, or looking for deer and squirrels in the woods; while Perry played the boys' admired team leader and lightning-rod for their surplus energy. Only when Gail proposed an early-morning four at tennis with the boys did Perry uncharacteristically demur. After the match from hell in Paris, he confessed, he needed time to recover.

*

The concealment of Dima and his troupe was only one of Luke's accumulating anxieties. Waiting out the nights in his upper room for Hector's random bulletins, he had too much time to assemble the evidence that their presence in the village was attracting unwelcome attention, and, in his many sleepless hours, to concoct conspiracy theories that, when morning came, had an uncomfortable ring of reality.

He worried about his identity as Brabazon, and whether the Bellevue's diligent Herr Direktor had by now made the connection between Brabazon's inspection of the hotel's amenities and the two battered Russians at the foot of the staircase; and whether from there, with police assistance, investigations had progressed to a certain BMW parked under a beech tree at Grindelwald Grund railway station.

His most drastic scenario, prompted in part by Dima's light-hearted reconstruction in the car, ran as follows:

One of the bodyguards – probably the cadaverous philosopher -manages to haul himself up the staircase and hammer on the locked door.

Or perhaps Ollie's speculative reading of the emergency door's electronics was a little too speculative after all.

Either way, the alarm is raised and news of the fracas reaches the ears of the better-informed guests at the Arena apero in the Salon d'Honneur: Dima's bodyguards have been attacked, Dima has vanished.

Now everything is in motion at once. Emilio dell Oro alerts the Seven Clean Envoys, who take to their mobiles and alert their vory brothers, who in turn alert the Prince in his castle.

Emilio alerts his Swiss-banker friends, who in turn alert their friends in high places in the Swiss administration, not excluding the police and security services, whose first duty in life is to preserve the integrity of Switzerland's hallowed bankers, and arrest anyone who impugns it.

Emilio dell Oro further alerts Aubrey Longrigg, Bunny Popham and de Salis, who alert whomever they alert, see below.

The Russian Ambassador in Berne receives urgent instructions from Moscow, fuelled by the Prince, to demand the release of the bodyguards before they can sing, and more specifically to track down Dima and return him post-haste to his country of origin.

The Swiss authorities, who until now have been happy to provide sanctuary for Dima the wealthy financier, instigate a nationwide manhunt for Dima the fugitive criminal.

But there is a twist even to this lugubrious tale and, try as he may, Luke cannot unravel it. By what trail of circumstance, suspicion or hard Intelligence, did the two bodyguards present themselves at the Bellevue Palace Hotel after the second signing? Who sent them? With instructions to do what? And why?

Or put a different way: did the Prince and his brethren already have reason to know, at the time of the second signing, that Dima was proposing to break his unbreakable vory oath and become the bitch of all time?

But when Luke ventures to air these concerns to Dima – albeit in diluted form – he sees them brushed carelessly aside. Hector himself is no more receptive:

'Go that route, we're fucked from day one,' he almost shouts.

*

Move house? Do a night flit to Zurich, Basel, Geneva? For what, finally? To leave a hornet's nest behind? – mystified traders, landlords, the letting agents, the village gossip mill?

'I could get you a few guns, if you're interested,' Ollie suggested, in another vain effort to cheer Luke up. 'According to what I hear, there's not a household in the village isn't bristling with them, whatever the new regulations say. It's for when the Russians come. These people don't know who they've got here, do they?'

'Well, let's hope not,' Luke replied, with a brave smile.

*

For Perry and Gail there was something idyllic in their day-to-day existence, something – as Dima would say wistfully – pure. It was as if they had been landed in a far outpost of humanity, with the mission of exercising a duty of care towards their charges.

If Perry wasn't out scrambling with the boys – Luke having urged him to take out-of-the-way paths, and Alexei having discovered that he did not, after all, suffer from vertigo, it was just that he didn't like Max – he was strolling with Dima in the dusk, or sitting beside him on a bench at the edge of the forest, watching him glower into the valley with the same intensity that, crammed into the pepper-pot crow's-nest at Three Chimneys, he had broken off his monologue and glowered into the darkness, wiped the back of his hand across his mouth, taken a pull of vodka and gone on glowering. Sometimes he demanded to be alone in the woods with his pocket recorder while Ollie or Luke kept covert watch from a distance. But he kept the cassettes to himself as part of his insurance policy.

The days, however many there had been, had aged him, Perry noticed. Perhaps the enormity of his betrayal was coming home to him. Perhaps, as he stared into the eternity, or murmured secretively into his tape recorder, he was searching for some kind of inner reconciliation. His demonstrative tenderness towards Tamara seemed to suggest this. Perhaps a revived vory instinct towards religion had paved his way to her:

'My Tamara, when she die, God gonna be deaf already, she pray so fucking hard to him,' he remarked proudly, leaving Perry with the impression that, regarding his own redemption, he was less sanguine.

Perry marvelled also at Dima's forbearance towards him, which seemed to grow in inverse proportion to his contempt for Luke's half-promises, no sooner made than regretfully withdrawn.

'Don't you worry, Professor. One day we all be happy, hear me? God gonna fix the whole shit,' he declared, strolling along the footpath with his hand resting proprietorially on his shoulder: 'Viktor and Alexei think you're some kinda fucking hero. Maybe one day they make you vor.'

Perry was not deceived by the roar of laughter that followed this suggestion. For days now he had seen himself increasingly as the inheritor of Dima's line of deep male friendships: with the dead Nikita, who had made him a man; with the murdered Misha, his disciple, whom to his shame he had failed to protect; and with all the fighters and men of iron who had ruled over his incarceration in Kolyma and beyond.

*

Perry's improbable appointment as Hector's midnight confessor, by contrast, came out of the blue. He knew, and Gail knew – Luke did not need to tell them, the daily prevarications were enough – that things were not going as smoothly in London as Hector had anticipated. They knew from Luke's body language that, conceal it as he tried, the emotional strain was telling on him also.

So when Perry's mobile chimed its encrypted melody in his ear at one in the morning, causing him to sit immediately upright, and Gail, without waiting to know who the caller was, to hurry down the corridor and check on the sleeping girls, his first thought on hearing Hector's voice was that he was about to ask Perry to bolster Luke's spirits, or – more wishfully – to play a more active role in spiriting the Dimas to England.

'Mind if I chat with you for a couple of minutes, Milton?'

Was this really Hector's voice? – or a recorder, and the batteries were running down?

'Chat ahead.'

'Polish philosopher chap I read from time to time.'

'What's his name?'

'Kolakowski. Thought you might have heard of him.'

Perry had, but didn't feel a need to say so. 'What about him?' Was the man drunk? Too much of his malt whisky from the Isle of Skye?

'Very stern views on good and evil – which I'm tending to share these days – Kolakowski had. Evil is evil, period. Not rooted in social circumstance. Not about being deprived or a drug addict or whatever. Evil as an absolutely and entirely separate human force.' Long silence. 'Wondered whether you had a take on that?'

'Are you all right, Tom?'

'I dip into him, you see. At bleak moments. Kolakowski. Surprised you haven't come across him. He had a law. Rather a good one in the circumstances.'

'What's bleak about this moment?'

'The Law of Infinite Cornucopia, he called it. Not that Poles do a definite article. Not indefinite either, which tells you something, but there you are. Nub of his Law being, that there are an infinite number of explanations for any single event. Limitless. Or put in language we both understand, you'll never know which bugger hit you or why. Rather comfortable words, I thought, in the circumstances, don't you?'

Gail had returned and was standing in the doorway, listening.

'If I knew the circumstances, I could probably form a better judgement,' Perry said – talking to Gail as well now. 'Is there anything I can do to help you, Tom? You sound a bit fragged.'

'Think you've done it, Milton, old boy. Thanks for your advice. See you in the morning.'

See you?

'Has he got anyone with him?' Gail asked, getting back into bed.

'Not that he mentioned.'

According to Ollie, Hector's wife Emily had ceased to live with him in London after Adrian's crash. She preferred the arctic cottage in Norfolk, which was nearer to the prison.

*

Luke stands stiffly beside his bed, encrypted mobile to his ear and Ollie's lash-up connecting it to the recorder parked on the side of the handbasin. It is four-thirty in the afternoon. Hector hasn't called all day and Luke's messages have gone unanswered. Ollie is out shopping for fresh trout, and Wienerschnitzel for Katya, who doesn't like fish. And home-made chips for everyone. Food is a big topic these days. Meals are taken ceremoniously, since each one may be their last together. Some are preceded by a long grace in Russian, whispered by Tamara to many crossings of the breast. At other times, when they look to her to do her piece, she declines, apparently to indicate that the company is out of divine favour. This afternoon, to fill the empty hours before dinner, Gail has decided to take the small girls down to Trummelbach to see the terrifying waterfalls that tumble down the inside of the mountain. Perry is less than happy with the plan. Agreed, she will have her mobile with her, but deep inside the mountain, what kind of signal is she going to get?

Gail doesn't care. They're going anyway. Cowbells are chiming in the meadow. Natasha is reading under the maple tree.

'So here it is,' Hector is saying in a rock-steady voice. 'The whole, dismal fucking story. You listening?'