Timebomb

Chapter 9

There were four hours available to him. Carrick did not recognize himself. Should have gone back into his room, locked the door, then set the small alarm beside his bed. He did not recognize himself because he had never before felt such uncertainty and loss of purpose.

He did a part of what he should have done, was inside his room, had locked the door and armed the alarm, but he did not strip and crawl under the counterpane. Dressed, he sat on the end of the bed. The room’s walls seemed to press close, as if they intended to suffocate him. He could hear vague sounds seeping down the corridor, televisions, voices and footsteps, but they were nothing to him. At the heart of it was his feeling, deep held, that he wasn’t progressing in the infiltration. He had sat for nearly three hours in the kitchen, and the old woman had worked round him but had not acknowledged him. He might not have been there. No communication. His thanks for his meal, in English and understandable to an imbecile, had not been accepted. An offer to go with the empty tray to collect the four plates had been ignored, and she had done it. He had sensed, though, when his back was to her, that her eyes were on him and their force had seemed to burn his neck. But if he turned and sought to meet them they had snapped off him. When they had left, when he had held out his hand, she had kept hers behind her back. He knew nothing of what had been discussed. The dilemma was clear to him: if he did not push for inclusion his time was wasted and he would learn nothing; if he pushed, he attracted greater attention and risked greater suspicion.

Carrick left his room. He tiptoed down the corridor and past the doors to the anteroom, where Viktor would be in an easy chair, and to Josef Goldmann’s bedroom.

Carrick took the lift down, rocking with its motion, and held the bars at the glass sides as it plunged. He could feel the weakness in his legs.

He walked past the darkened reception desk, and past the night porter. The door was locked and he tried to force it. Panic rose. The night porter came to him and produced the key. Cold air hit him and chilled the sweat on his forehead, at his neck and groin. He had only his jacket on, no coat.

Beyond the canopy above the door, rain fell on the pavement. He went out and heard the door closed behind him.

Before him was the great edifice of a church, a ruin that was a monument. The orange lights from the street-lamps illuminated the rain on old stones still dark from the scorching of incendiaries. He did not know its name or history. He ducked his head and walked faster, skirting the square round the ruin. As he passed the church, a clock chimed — a mournful, doom-laden note — but Carrick did not recognize whether it struck the hour or a half. Dribbles of rain ran down his cheeks and forehead. He saw a cluster of drunks with bottles tilted to their mouths. One called to him and another started to lurch towards him but was pulled back, and he went on, left them behind. A girl beckoned to him. She had blonde hair that the rain disfigured and he thought the wet washed out the dye. He saw her heavy thighs below a short skirt, and went on, leaving her behind too. For much of his walk, though, there were no cars on the streets, and no winos, tarts or druggies on the pavement, only emptiness and the sound of his squelching shoes. He was off a main drag and crossed the side-streets between Kleiststrasse and Hohenstaufenstrasse where apartments were blacked out for the night and offices were charcoal-grey caverns behind their windows.

If Carrick had hoped that by walking through a strange city he might again recognize himself, he had failed.

He was sodden, cold, confused.

The sign on the corner of the block above him said he had come on to Fuggerstrasse. So damn tired … Another clock chimed, and he did not look down at his wristwatch to see how much of a four-hour window remained open. There was a doorway with a high step, and a door of heavy wood that was closed — probably chained, bolted and barred against the pariahs of the night. There was a polished brass plate beside the bell button, but he didn’t bother to read who worked, at what, in the building.

Carrick slumped down. Wet came off the mat and soaked the seat of his trousers. He wedged himself into the corner and had one shoulder against the wall below the bell and the bright plate, the other against the door. He drew up his knees so that they were against his chest, wrapped his arms round his upper shins and rocked. He couldn’t have made himself smaller or more insignificant, and his mind had clouded. He was beyond, now, any evaluation of the consequences of not being in a hotel room when a small alarm bleeped on a bedside table. Nobody cared. Not fucking Katie, not fucking George, who had cut him adrift and handed him over, not the fucking man who called himself Golf. What did they know of goddam Viktor, goddam Mikhail, goddam Weissberg, and the goddam old woman who was a grandmother? And what did they know of being alone? Not a living soul cared. He had no responsibility for missing the call of the clock beside the bed. A man passed, was across the street, walking briskly under an umbrella, but the rain must have blown into his face because he, too, had a drip on his nose. No, he didn’t recognize himself.

Johnny Carrick was huddled in the doorway, his head on the arms that were round his legs, and his resolve leached away.

‘What do you reckon?’ Adrian asked.

‘He’s gone,’ Dennis said.

‘Can’t argue with that.’

‘Ready to chuck in the towel, because he’s — like I said — gone.’

They were at the far end of Fuggerstrasse, where it joined Motzstrasse. Dennis had led down the street and identified the doorway in which their man, November, was sitting. They were contrasting personalities, with dissimilar hobbies when not working as increments for VBX, but in matters of their trade they shared skills. Dennis claimed peripheral vision of 140 degrees, and Adrian rated his at up to 160 degrees. When they were not being used as increments, they lectured on the National Surveillance Course for recruits and there they taught the necessity of ‘third-party awareness’, which meant scanning from the corners of their eyes without shifting their heads — peripheral vision. Neither had had to twist his head to see November in the doorway.

‘You happy that he hasn’t a tail?’

‘Would have showed if he had, but it hasn’t.’

‘Well, seeing the state of him, we’ll have to call the gaffer.’

‘If he’s a goner, the whole thing’s down the tube.’

By touch, Dennis activated his mobile, which was bulky in his anorak pocket because of its built-in encryption devices, tapped the keys, waited for his call to be answered. He was in his fifty-third year, married but without children, and found relaxation in an apron in front of his cooking range where he did serious French cuisine. He would have described his colleague — standing with him on the junction of Fuggerstrasse and Motzstrasse in the damn rain — as the best partner it was possible to acquire, but he did not take their professionalism to social levels and had never cooked for Adrian. What was common with them was a mastery of surveillance, being seen without being noticed.

‘That you, Mr Lawson? … Right, sorry and all that. Bit of a problem with your November. We were kipping in the wheels by the hotel when he came out. I was doing watch, woke Adrian. He was just shambling about, walking but going nowhere. The rain’s been pissing down on him but he has no coat. He’s drenched. Right now, he’s in a doorway … Hold on.’

Adrian tugged Dennis’s sleeve, said softly, ‘Lay it on a bit thicker, give it some juice. He’s about to cop out.’

‘You should get here, Mr Lawson, and quick. From the body language of him, we’re about to lose him … Right, right. It’s the junction of Fugger and Motz … Mr Lawson, don’t hang about.’ Dennis dropped his wrist from his mouth, and his hand in his pocket closed the call. ‘How was that?’

‘Had to be said — wasn’t the time for mucking about.’

If they had been thrown together on a train or in a bar, and they had not been linked by their skills in surveillance, they would have had little in common. Their creed was to pose the question: ‘Can I be remembered, recognized or described?’ Dennis did not think so. Neither did Adrian. But, his opinion, the anticipated hard stretch was still ahead of them if the agent — November — put his act together and insinuated further into a conspiracy … got his act together and quick. Many times before Dennis had trailed in the wake of undercovers, had watched them from a remote distance, been unseen and unheard; had seen the stress on them, like they smelled of it, and had thanked his good God it wasn’t asked of him.

‘Did the gaffer say how long?’

‘Did not.’

‘Bringing the whole gang?’

Dennis grimaced. ‘Wouldn’t you, if it’s all going down the bloody drain? Without his access, we’re dead in the water.’

‘We trusted nobody,’ she had said, in her thin, whistling voice, as if she blew through a reed when she spoke. ‘To seek trust is to look for comfort where there is none.’

He lay on a Spartan, institutional, steel-framed bed. Under Reuven Weissberg the old mattress had lumps and did not protect him from the sharpness of the coiled metal springs. He had slept in that bed, on that mattress, since he was a child. It had been given him on the first night he had spent in his grandmother’s care. He had been four years old and his feet had barely reached halfway down the bed. Now his bare toes stretched beyond its end. He knew it was her belief that the bed would harden him.

She had gazed down at him as she said it, and had put on the wood slats of the chair beside the bed the chipped china mug of warm milk. The same mug had been brought him every night that he had slept under the same roof as her, and every night he would wait for the quiet to fall on her room and listen for the faint rhythm of her snoring. Then he would go to the lavatory, tip the warm milk into the bowl and flush it away. He hated its taste, and would not have dared tell her. She had voiced her doubts on the wisdom of trust, and her eyes — as they always did on this matter — had screwed and blinked as if the word was an obscenity.

‘If you trust, you make yourself weak,’ she had said.

He had spoken of Goldmann’s trust in the young soldier.

‘When you trust, you depend on another. You should trust only yourself, as we did.’

He had spoken of Goldmann’s trust in the young soldier who had saved his employer’s life without thought of himself.

‘Trust is softness, tenderness and pity. They did not exist where I was, except with the dead.’

He had spoken of Mikhail, who had been late on a reaction. His fingers had massaged the gouge in his upper arm where a bullet had hit. He had spoken of the young man he believed worthy of trust.

‘Believed? Only believed? Do nothing until you have tested him with extreme rigour. Test him to the point of breaking him. I will not have him back in my home until you have. I will not see him again.’

She had gone. He smelled the milk in the mug on the chair beside his head. The bed hurt his back and hip but he would never complain of it to her. It would have been a similar bed on which his father, Jakob, had eked out the last days and nights of his life — hacking and coughing, a victim of pleurisy — in the criminal camp north of Perm; dead and gone when his son was four. It was on similar beds that he had slept during his conscription service. Others alongside had wept, but he had not … or from the beatings of the NCOs.

He had not heard her return, but the door opened. She looked down at him. ‘You have not, Reuven, drunk your milk.’

‘I’m waiting for it to cool. I will, of course, as I always do.’

She wore a thin dark wrap and it was tight round her tiny body. She was at the end of the bed, by the iron rail. ‘Do you remember my story of trust?’

‘Every word.’

He listened, as he had so many times, and saw the trees of the Forest of the Owls and the concrete supports of the central watchtower, and the path that was the Himmelstrasse of sixty-five years before — the Road to Heaven. He saw it today and saw it then, and heard her voice.

Three hundred Jewish girls — that was the figure we heard from the rumour — were brought from Wlodawa many months after I had come to the camp. It was February 1943, and I was surprised, when I heard of their arrival, that there were still Jews left in the town. They must have been among the last.

I did not see them. Had I, then there would have been girls I knew, those I had been to school with and more who had come with their fathers to my father’s shop. They came in a larger transport — I do not know it for certain but the rumour said they arrived by train and were then separated. Old men and young, older women, who were mothers and grandmothers, and all the children were sent ahead of them into the Tube, or the Himmelstrasse as it was called. Three hundred Jewish girls were kept back.

It was said that they were put into storage, as meat would be put into a refrigerator. After the rest of the transport, their relations and friends, had gone down the Tube, the band had played, the fraudster in the white coat had led, the Ukrainian bastards had driven them on, the doors had closed and the engine had started … they were put aside.

We did not know then why three hundred young Jewesses remained in the Tube. We were not fools. If a man or woman lives as close to death as we did, then the sense that interprets events will rear. We did not know, but we had opinion. All the talk that evening in our barracks hut, among those who had only the intention to live another week or another month, was of the Jewish girls who were in the Tube, in the area that had been cleared of the suitcases and travel bags that were normally left there. I believe those girls would have trusted, thought there was truth in what they were told because the kitchens in our section were ordered to produce bread and soup for them. It was the first time that food had been taken to those who had entered the Road to Heaven. They would have slept with the comfort of trust.

The following day — it was 11 February: I cannot say how we registered the date of each day of the week, each month of the year — although we did not know, the opinions grew, flourished and fattened. We were taken off our usual work. The sorting of jewellery and money and clothing was stopped. The tailors and bootmakers were taken from their benches. The laundry was given more people to help and the best uniform of each German was brought for pressing and starching, their boots for polishing. I was among those women who were escorted to the SS quarters, the Swallow’s Nest, and others went to Commandant Reichleitner’s office, which they called the Merry Flea, and we had to clean and scrub the floors until they shone. The capos would not say what was expected but, of course, we realized a visitor of the highest importance was expected. The men used pine branches to brush the sand of the compound where the snow had been cleared. I remember that it was bright, sunny, and there had been a heavy frost, but we had not had snow for more than ten days. There was bitter cold, and ice hung from our huts, but in the Swallow’s Nest a fire burned, so it was good to work there. I do not believe that any of us — I did not — considered the cold in the shed where the three hundred Jewish girls were kept.

And another night passed. We shivered in our bunks, we held each other for warmth, and another dawn came.

It was 12 February. I was with those who were taken again to the Swallow’s Nest to do more cleaning, which was ridiculous because the rooms could not have been cleaner. I saw, through a window on the first floor high enough to have a view over the fence with the pine branches, that policemen on horses rode round the edge of the camp. All the Germans were excited, and nervous, and they shouted at us, and the capos hit us if we looked up from cleaning the floorboards.

We were being led back to our compound when the train came. The outer gate was open. It was possible to see through it, when he got out of the carriage. Then we were in our compound, and it was impossible to see more. The image of him was frozen in my mind. He wore a long open leather coat, spectacles without rims, and he was saluted with a forest of raised arms. An older woman knew, Miriam Bloch. She had survived because she was the finest seamstress in the camp. She had seen him. Miriam Bloch said he was Heinrich Himmler.

Because Miriam Bloch had identified him — Heinrich Himmler — we now knew why three hundred Jewish girls from Wlodawa had been kept back from the transport. They had been in the baggage shed for two days and nights. Did they still trust in the lies they had been told? Were they still calm? We were now at our normal duties, but we listened. That day I worked in the section that sorted clothing. There had been a Dutch transport a week before, and the clothes worn by Dutch Jews were superior in quality to those of Polish, Ukrainian and Belarussian Jews. The clothing of the Dutch would be shipped to Germany for issue to those who had lost their possessions in the bombing. The capos were fierce and had whips that day; we were told we might be inspected and might not, but if we were visited by Heinrich Himmler we should not look up, should not speak, should carry on with our work.

He did not come to us.

We listened.

There would have been time for coffee to be served to Himmler and his party in the Swallow’s Nest, and time for him to walk along the path cleared of snow to reach the Himmelstrasse, and time for the procedure to be explained to him by the commandant. More time while the liar in his white coat gave his speech on the need for delousing Jews, then began to lead them — the three hundred Jewesses — down the Road to Heaven. Perhaps, even then, most believed him and trusted his words. More time while Heinrich Himmler watched as their hair was cut, as the three hundred Jewish girls stripped naked, as they shivered in the cold, then began to run after the trotting white coat, with the guns of the Ukrainians behind them, inside the narrow width of the Tube towards the doors of the chambers. I think they would have used three, and I think Heinrich Himmler would have strode forward quickly after them so that he saw the doors opened and the girls forced in, the doors slammed shut and the bolts pushed home.

We listened. Some, afterwards, said they had heard the singing of the girls, the prayer of despair. I did not. I was collecting silk blouses when I heard the engine of Gasmeister Bauer switched on, and I had started to cut off the labels from Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Eindhoven when the geese began to squawk, and then there was quiet.

Before leaving on his train, Heinrich Himmler stayed to dinner in the Swallow’s Nest. We heard later that he had offered his congratulations to the officers, and that he had promoted Commandant Reichleitner to the rank of Hauptsturmführer and Deputy Commandant Niemann to Untersturmführer. And he left us. We lay on our bunks in the barracks and heard the train pull away. Had he smiled when he first saw the Jewish girls?

I did not cry myself to sleep that night, 12 February, in the knowledge that — for a demonstration of the efficiency of the process — three hundred Jewish girls from my own town, Wlodawa, many of whom I would have known, had been put to death with fumes from Gasmeister Bauer’s engine. I was alive. I would face another day. I could hate and loathe. I survived, and they did not, to see the light of dawn seep into our barracks’ windows. And that day there came a new rumour. It said that the Germans had suffered a defeat in battle against the Russians, at the city of Stalingrad, and that they were in retreat … But I had no trust and did not believe that another would save me — only myself. I was, as we all were, alone.

‘Where is he?’

Adrian pointed down the length of the shadowed street.

Dennis said, ‘Third doorway from the far end, this side.’

‘I’ll do this on my own.’ Lawson left them and strode off down the pavement. He heard steps behind him — Davies and little Charlie, the cuckoo girl. He went fast and fancied they hurried to keep up. Once he flicked his fingers, irritably, behind his back as a gesture that he didn’t want them close, but they ignored him and kept coming. He had been fast asleep, dreamless as usual, when the call had come, and he had pulled on clothes over his pyjamas.

He remembered Clipper Reade’s story. Clipper had had a good story for a similar situation … Dennis had said: From the body language of him, we’re about to lose him. It was the same as Clipper had faced on the bench in the park below the old fortress at Gdansk. He’d listened well to the big American’s story, told over two pots of Earl Grey, some thirty years before.

He came to him.

He looked down into the dark of the doorway. The man was curled up, foetal, his shoulders seemed to shake, his hands were clasped tight below his knees but still trembled, and his head was sunk. Well, small mercies, while half recovering from the confusion of that damn call coming in he had made one correct and important decision: to keep bloody Shrinks out of it.

He turned. Caught Davies and the cuckoo girl in his glance. ‘You stay back. On no account do you interfere. You are not a part of this.’

He crouched. With a short jabbing movement, he slapped November’s cheeks, right and left, little stinging blows — and the eyes in front of him opened wide.

‘Do I have your attention?’

The eyes, glazed, stared back at him.

Lawson spoke briskly: ‘I’m not getting into a debate about your state of mind. Neither will I tolerate some navel-gazing examination of what we’re about and where we’re going. I will, however, remind you of one thing. You were a volunteer.’

He saw his man stiffen and anger glowed in the eyes. Better.

‘It’s not acceptable, if you didn’t know it, to be Volunteer Man on Monday, everyone gets to speed on Tuesday, and become Quit and Run Man on Wednesday. There is a team behind you, good men and women at the top of their game, but your response is to hunker down in a doorway and snivel. You happy with that?’

A fist clenched and the body, Lawson thought, was coiled with anger.

‘Right now you’re pathetic. You’re a disappointment, at acute level, to those working with you. So the going’s rough. Well, sonny boy, you volunteered. Get up off your backside, start walking, and walking fast — oh, and before that, tell me, words of one syllable, about dinner at Reuven Weissberg’s, and when the move out is scheduled for.’

He had to strain to listen, but his man was now standing. Lawson leaned close, had an arm on the shoulder, felt the tightness of the muscles, and heard the story of the evening.

‘Right, that’ll do for a start. We’re here, think on it, in your wake — and think also that you’re one cog, just one, in a complex but dedicated machine. Not least yourself, you’ve let down many people this evening, this morning. It cannot happen again. When the pace quickens, you may have cause to cringe in a corner, but not now. Now we’re barely started. On your way, young man.’

Lawson was shouldered off the step, and nearly fell. He had to grope for the wall, where there was a brass plate, to steady himself. He had felt the aggression as the shoulder had buffeted him aside. Aim achieved.

His man, November, shambled a few paces, then stopped. Lawson watched. He saw November kick out a leg, then almost march forward, as if a decision had been taken. Lawson breathed hard. Saw him reach the corner, shoulders thrown back, turn into the next street, and lost sight of him.

From behind, Davies hissed, ‘That was pretty unnecessary, about as savage as anything I’ve ever seen, and—’

Lawson said evenly, ‘Well, you’re young, inexperienced, and have seen very little, so your comment is quite simply inappropriate.’

‘—was brutal and vicious, and I feel dirty to be part of it. Have you made a career of walking over people and—’

‘Keep your toys in the pram.’ Suddenly so bloody tired. He started to go, slowly, back up the street towards where the surveillance men were. She skipped up to be alongside him. Little Charlie, the cuckoo girl, matched his step and her head bobbed by his elbow. Yes, so bloody tired.

Matter-of-fact, she said, ‘I’ve been putting it together, Mr Lawson, the little bits and pieces that drop from your table, what you’ve said for us low-life to hear, and what’s happened. If the people I work with knew what you’d done they’d be standing in a line to kick your head in. It’s all very clever, Mr Lawson. I suppose that winning, to you, justifies everything.’

He did not say that losing was unacceptable. If he was right in his judgement, and a warhead was now travelling overland towards some damn place on some damn border from faraway Sarov, for purchase and collection, then — indeed — losing was not an acceptable option.

‘How did it go, Mr Lawson?’ Adrian asked him.

‘He’s fine.’

‘Stiffen his spine, Mr Lawson?’ Dennis asked him.

‘Did what was necessary.’

He slid into the car’s seat, was bloody near asleep as soon as he did so.

He kissed the cheeks of his wife gently so that she wouldn’t wake. Then, in stockinged feet, the Crow went out into the corridor and along it. He pushed open the door to the children’s bedroom, went to each bed and kissed the forehead of each child.

In the hall he put on his shoes, lifted his bag and hitched it on his shoulder. He left nothing behind him, no mobile phone or laptop computer from which evidence might later be taken. He unlocked the front door, and the first smear of dawn was coming from across the Gulf sea. In the middle distance, he could see the crane on the building site. A taxi waited for him. He did not know when, if, he would return home to his wife and children. He hoped to, but did not know if it would be possible.

The taxi drove away. If he never again saw his wife, whom he loved dearly, or his children, if he took delivery of the weapon and was successful in moving it on to the target zone, he believed the sacrifice of his family would be easy.

The taxi took the Crow to the airport.

His mind churned with the implications of what he was committed to, and Sak had not slept. In the narrow single bed, he lay on his back and the thoughts rampaged.

If, when he had embarked on his journey, he was suddenly aware of men round him with guns, would he run or would he stand and raise his hands? Would they give him the chance to raise his hands or would they shoot him down? He had seen himself, in the night, spreadeagled on a pavement with a pistol barrel crushed against his ear, or crumpled, with blood flowing from the bullet wounds and a crowd gathered at safe distance from him.

Also in his mind, intruding, were the images and voices of his visit to Summers, the chief security officer. Your clearance to work here is, with effect today, withdrawn and security and the safety of the nation demand, in these difficult times, that we make hard decisions; he doubted, now, that any at Aldermaston remembered him, that any recalled seeing him walk like a zombie from the headquarters building to the hostel, clear his room and pack his bags, and that any spoke of his going to the main gate, feeding his card into the machine, knowing it would not be returned, and going to the bus stop. He had fear, but had hate to counter it.

The house was quiet. He yearned to sleep but could not. The thought jolted him.

At his journey’s end he would not be a lowly technician in a school physics laboratory. He would be a man of importance, substance and stature, integral to the plan of those who had recruited him. Could hold his head high, yes, because the examination he would make and the utilization of his expertise were not for money. He was not owned by greed, avarice, could tell himself that his acts were governed by principle.

Igor Molenkov did not sleep. Beside him, Yashkin slept after a fashion, but the rhythm of his breathing was punctuated by groans.

Every muscle in Molenkov’s body ached, every joint had pain locked in it, and every time he moved, it got worse. The floor on which he sat was concrete hard, and the two blankets they had been given were too thin to offer decent protection against the cold. At least the noise had stopped and the mechanic’s work was finished.

They had been — he did not know how many hours before, had lost count — on the final stage of the run into Bryansk. The countryside, flooded fields, flooded rivers and flooded forests, had been behind them. They had reached the lines of factories on the approach to the city and — of course — it had been raining when the engine had died, without a cough of warning. It was as if it had simply given up the ghost and gone happily, but inconveniently, to the arms of St Seraphim. It was twenty-four years since his beloved wife had passed on — twenty-four years, one month, two weeks and four days, never forgotten — and she had gone like that. She had been in the hospital bed, listening to his awkward talk, had turned to the window, where the rain lashed the glass, and had died, without warning. They had pushed the Polonez at least three-quarters of a kilometre, him at the back where the fucking useless heap was heaviest, and Yashkin at the side with his hand through the open window, manoeuvring the steering-wheel. Traffic had built behind them, horns had blasted, but no one had helped. They had pushed the Polonez half the length of Komsomolskaya Street, almost reached the city, when Yashkin had wrenched the wheel and they had been on the forecourt of a small garage.

Molenkov had sagged against the car’s roof and gasped for breath.

Yashkin had negotiated. Of course, the men were about to finish their day. Cash had oiled the palm of the chief mechanic.

Molenkov had heard the man say that the Polonez would be repaired and ready for the road by morning — the description of the engine’s death indicated an electrical malfunction, and the two old gentlemen should find lodging for the night.

And he had heard Yashkin say that they would sleep on the floor with their car. The chief mechanic had suggested that the Polonez be unloaded, the weight in the back taken out, before the car was pushed on to the ramp above the pit, and Yashkin had refused, with vehemence, then winked, as if he were an old thief moving stolen goods, or contraband. More money had been passed. More than a half of the cash they carried between them had slid into the back pocket of the chief mechanic, the fucking criminal.

They couldn’t have gone together to find a café and food. Molenkov had lumbered off into the night in search of rolls, cheese and an apple each. They had eaten, then lain down on the floor, with the dirt and the sump oil.

An hour ago, Molenkov had heard the engine started, and the old girl had run, he’d admit it, sweetly. He had tried to wake Yashkin to tell him that the repair was effected, but he had been sworn at and Yashkin had rolled over on to his side, away from him.

He shifted again. The bones of his buttocks dug into flesh. No respite to be found on the concrete floor. A night light, dulled, had been left on. He saw it. Was not certain, at first, of what he saw, then had confirmation. A rat quartered the oil-covered floor around the edge of the pit.

He looked across and saw the tail of the car weighed down.

He thought of what the car carried — lost all hope of an hour’s sleep in the last hour of the night — its weight, what he did, and what Yashkin did, and— A convulsing cough broke next to him. Yashkin shook, his head jerked up, and his hands rubbed hard at his eyes.

Yashkin grinned. Then he punched Molenkov’s shoulder and chuckled. The pain in his body was sheer and clear-running, and Yashkin chuckled.

Yashkin said, ‘I wouldn’t have believed it. In all this shit, on the floor, I slept like a baby. As good a night’s sleep as I can remember. What’s the matter? Didn’t you sleep?’

Molenkov had been awake to think of guilt.

Yashkin’s arm was round the shoulder where his punch had fallen. ‘I can sleep anywhere. I feel refreshed. You know, Molenkov, it could have been worse.’

Molenkov stood up, went to the pit, reached up, lifted the tail door and removed his bag. He unzipped it and took out his razor, some soap and the shaving-brush. He went towards the back of the workshop where there was a stinking lavatory and a grimy basin.

Yashkin called after him, ‘We should face the new day with confidence. What a team we make.’

He came out of the bathroom. Carrick had run the shower at full power as hot as he could bear it, and his skin tingled. He thought he had put some warmth back into his body. He had towelled himself with aggression, every word spat at him and every nuanced gesture from the night’s actions and encounter alive in him. He stepped over the sodden suit, shirt and shoes that littered the carpet.

The alarm went. He had reached the hotel some fifteen minutes before, had shown his guest card to the night porter or would not have been admitted. In the room’s mirror, he had seen himself half drowned, dishevelled, and had stripped. He had put on the TV. God alone knew why — maybe for company.

Carrick killed the alarm. He stood naked in the centre of the room, grimaced, and let his fingernails scrape into the skin of his palms, as if that would purge him of what he had done. He blanked out the insults spat quietly at him. The TV showed commercials. He took a plastic laundry sack from the wardrobe and dumped his clothes and shoes in it. He wrote his name and room number on it, as if his work still had a future ahead of it. He dressed. Had only the one change. A weather forecast played on the TV. He buttoned a shirt, knotted a tie, smoothed his hair, buffed his second shoes with a handkerchief, pocketed his wallet and the mobile phone, had everything, and was three minutes away from changeover time.

He left his laundry outside his door. Went the few paces down the corridor. Knocked. If the surveillance hadn’t tracked him, if the bastard hadn’t come to the step in the doorway on Fuggerstrasse, he wouldn’t have been at the outer door of the anteroom now, and it would have been over. Damp passport in a damp hand, taken from a damp jacket, offered at Tempelhof, and a flight home, telling himself he didn’t give a damn, a bus into London and a walk to a Pimlico street: ‘Sorry and all that, George, but I wasn’t up for it. Anything else on the horizon?’ The door was opened and he saw Viktor.

Carrick thought the man studied him. He thought the eyes covered his hair, his face, his tie knot and the clean shirt, the well-pressed suit that had been hung long enough in the wardrobe to lose the bag’s creases, the shoes.

Carrick was hit by it. Why did a man coming on guard duty at four in the morning, to lounge for four hours on an anteroom settee, shower and shave as if it was party time, put on a clean shirt and suit and change his shoes? Couldn’t answer it, and didn’t know whether Viktor asked. And didn’t know whether the Russian, an hour or two back, had come out of the anteroom, gone to his door, rapped on it and not been answered. Viktor had on scuffed shoes with the laces undone, crumpled trousers, a shirt open halfway to his waist and no tie. No comb had been through his hair. When Viktor turned to fetch his jacket, Carrick saw the pistol in his belt.

‘Is there anything I should know?’ he asked.

He thought Viktor smiled but could not be certain of it, then shook his head.

‘What’s the programme for the morning?’

Now Carrick was sure Viktor smiled, and was gone.