Timebomb

Chapter 10

They drove out from the new centre of Berlin.

Carrick had come off duty in the anteroom. He had missed breakfast and had been on his bed for perhaps an hour. Then Viktor rapped hard on his door and told him to be dressed, ready to leave in ten minutes. He had sensed a different mood in the man; something smug, contented, as if a decision had been taken.

Viktor was at the wheel and Carrick was beside him, the Bossman on the back seat. No talk. Viktor concentrated on traffic, the tail end of the rush-hour, but they were going away from the commercial district of glass, steel and concrete towers, and went through old streets. Many of the signs there were in Turkish, and a street market, a long line of stalls that backed on to a canal, had appeared. The day was starting up. Clothing was being hung on rails, meat was being displayed, vegetables and fruit carefully heaped in pyramids. Music wailed from radios and speakers. Carrick did not know where he was because he had no knowledge of Berlin. Neither did he know where they were headed because he had not been told; it was not right for him to ask. He sat beside Viktor, eyed the pavements and acted the role of bodyguard.

He thought his Bossman was subdued and that, in contrast, Viktor had found confidence. He reckoned that the route and destination had been agreed by Josef Goldmann and the minder, but he was not inside the loop.

Carrick sensed growing danger, but could not identify it so could not respond. It was what they talked about endlessly in SCD10. The sensing of danger and the response to intuition were subjects they chewed at daily. It was an unwritten law, at SCD10, that the safety of the officer was paramount — but he’d thought the law had no writ over Golf, who had lectured and humiliated him in the office-block doorway. At SCD10, there was a laid-down tactical approach of specifics and generalities. The agent was not expected to hazard his security in pushing an investigation the extra mile. Where possible, meetings with targets should be in public places, restaurants, bars and hotel lobbies, so that the back-up could be close enough to intervene; and there were those dark times of uncertainty when an eyeball view of the agent was not available, and it was said that those times, for the handlers, were like the old space shots when the returning capsule was on re-entry and radio contact was lost, and they must wait for the call sign to be given, the sight again of their man. They also said, in the Pimlico office, over tea and coffee, that the first rule for an undercover was to hatch an idea of his exit route. Where was the door? Where did it lead to? Carrick didn’t know, now, where there were firearms in close support — whether they even existed — and he had no idea of where his exit route should be, but his sense of danger cut the silence in the car.

They had gone past the street market.

The buildings around him were more dilapidated.

There was the greyness of neglect. Shadows fell further and deeper.

Women, kids, old men wearing caps, fags hanging from their mouths, stared at the big car crossing their territory.

Then they were beyond the blocks and the rain fell harder on the windscreen, the wipers working faster.

Into a cul-de-sac. There were steel security railings topped with spikes and rambling coils of razor wire. A gate was open. A man stood by it and waved Viktor inside. Carrick could not see the man’s face because he had a scarf across his mouth and cheeks. In the mirror, the gate was closed after them. The first rule of the Pimlico office was to know the exit route: he did — it was that gate set in a spiked, wired fence. He thought that, behind him, Josef Goldmann’s breath came faster and, beside him, that Viktor smirked. The car braked in front of an old brick-built warehouse. Some of the windows were open to the elements, the glass panes smashed, and some were boarded up. Water cascaded from two useless gutters, and grass grew from the space under the eaves. A small door was set in the brickwork where Viktor had stopped the car

They walked through, his Bossman first, then Carrick and Viktor … Guys came to SCD10 and lectured. A few were from the FBI but most were older men who had packed up doing undercover for a living. Some dealt with it — what was going through Carrick’s mind and louder than the alarm beside his bed — and some spoke of it only when questioned. Yes, they all looked for exit routes. No, they had never used the cop-out and run. Yes, they had all felt the instinct of danger. No, they had never quit, thrown that bloody lamp through the window, or made an excuse, gone out through the door and turned their back on the business. The last FBI man to come to Pimlico had used the word ‘iced’ to describe an undercover pulled out because the danger was thought too great … No chance that the head honcho, Golf, would lift him out — no damn chance.

Their feet crunched on broken glass, and once his Bossman slipped on the corridor floor. Carrick thought he might have stepped in a dosser’s shit, or a dog’s.

They went through a door hanging crazily and on to the floor space that had once been a factory with machinery, all stripped out. More rain came down from the high roof’s skylights, spattered and bounced. Must have been the noise they made, but when they were in the middle of the open space there was a shout that echoed in the emptiness. His Bossman turned towards it.

A partition of wood sections was in front of Carrick. The shout came again. His Bossman looked behind him, seemed to bite his lip, then headed towards it. At the end of the partition, Mikhail waited for them. He stood in front of Josef Goldmann, made him check his step then pointed to the side. The eyes glistened, were on Carrick, and he gestured behind him. A chair was in the centre of the space.

There was no exit route. The chair was screwed to the concrete floor and had thick, strong arms. It was like the one his grandfather had had in the dining room where the family had eaten only on Sundays after morning worship, but his grandfather’s carver did not have leather straps with buckles nailed to the arms. There were dried stains at the feet of the chair that had not been scrubbed away. Mikhail gestured for Carrick to go to the chair. He saw a table with a cordless drill on it, and a small chain-saw half under it.

Reuven Weissberg sat close to the table and Josef Goldmann went to him. Carrick saw that the light, life and blood had gone from his Bossman’s cheeks.

He stood in front of the chair, Mikhail before him. Carrick saw a wart on the right side of his nose, a scar on his cheek, and all the places where acne scabs had left craters. He smelled the man’s breath and thought Mikhail had eaten strong salami not an hour before. His arms were yanked out, and Mikhail’s foot went between his legs to kick them a little further apart. He was frisked. Thick muscular fingers were under his arms and at the small of his back, the waist of his trousers, fingering the stitching, and down to the crotch, pushing up into Carrick’s groin. It was as good a search for a wire as would have been done by police. There was no wire, no microphone, no recorder or transmitter, no battery pack for him to find. Mikhail stepped back and motioned for Carrick to sit.

Carrick did not sit.

It had been what they called in SCD10 a ‘dust-down’. The instructors preached that any undercover must expect to be searched for a wire, and they taught a response. The response was hammered at recruits.

There was a moment when surprise clouded Mikhail’s face, and he tried to push Carrick into the chair. His fist brushed Carrick’s chest.

No exit route. No way to call for back-up. Carrick took a half-step forward, fast and sudden.

Reuven Weissberg saw the blur of movement and the shock spreading on Mikhail’s face. Saw it, and enjoyed it. Two fighting cocks put against each other, or two starved rats, and good sport — except that the matter was more important than play-acting.

Carrick yanked Mikhail’s arms up, turned him, shoved him against the partition wall, then kicked his legs apart. Reuven understood. ‘I permit it,’ he called.

The man, Carrick, he had been told, was a former soldier. He thought the turning of Mikhail, his bodyguard, was done in the military fashion. He wondered when, last, Mikhail had been subjected to a body search, fingers into the groin and armpits. The weapon was taken, Mikhail’s pistol, from the shoulder holster, checked, cleared, then thrown — as if casually — towards him. Reuven caught it.

He did not know about a dust-down as a response to suspicion.

It was brilliant, theatre. He put the Makharov pistol on the table. The man, Carrick, had searched Mikhail for a wire as if he, too, threatened as an infiltrator … Incredible. Carrick nodded as if satisfied, went to the chair and sat, but Reuven noticed that his knuckles whitened as his fingers gripped the chair’s arms. Mikhail had demanded it, Viktor had supported Mikhail. Josef Goldmann, the launderer, had backed away from involvement. Should have had a fucking opinion. Josef Goldmann had brought the man.

Reuven turned to him now. ‘Speak for him.’

He despised Josef Goldmann. Reuven thought he provided a service but had never taken a strategic decision, was merely there, a lapdog at his heel. He ordered Goldmann to repeat the story.

He despised Josef Goldmann because he had admitted his debt but only vaguely stood in the corner for his man. He should have raged at the insult to his own judgement that his saviour was treated in this way, an object of suspicion. Reuven sat back. This was work for the men who had been with him since the early days of building roofs in Perm. Fifteen years before, he himself had led the one-time hard men recruited from State Security, and they had followed. For Reuven Weissberg, they went down into the gutter.

Questions came.

How had Carrick been approached?

What had Carrick done before the approach?

Why had he chosen to work for Josef Goldmann?

Tricks thrown into the game. Who did Carrick report to? How often did he report? Tricks mingled with questions … It was difficult for Reuven to understand the English-language questions posed by Mikhail, some with aggression and some soft-spoken, but he was less interested in the answers than in the face of the man who sat in the chair.

When had he left the military? How long between leaving the military and his first work as a bodyguard? How many employers? How much did the employers pay him? Viktor scribbled the answers. He would be on the telephone to Grigori, giving him details for checking. How often had he seen Simon Rawlings before the suggestion of work was made? How often had he met the contact? How much did he know of the business dealings of Josef Goldmann? He did not see a mistake made, or recognize evasion — but it was early.

Carrick was told to produce his mobile phone. He did so, and Mikhail passed it to Viktor. Questions, most of them repetitive, were asked as Viktor hit the keys and opened the memory. Answers, all repetitive, were offered. Reuven was interested that the man, Carrick, used statements of few words to explain himself. Did not ramble, did not say in four ways what could be said in one, offered minimal explanation. Viktor leaned towards him and whispered that no calls had been made on the mobile since Carrick had reached Berlin, and no calls had been received.

But it was early. A cordless drill lay on the table and a chain-saw underneath it.

‘You are too convenient. You came too easily. You do not explain it.’

‘I have explained it.’

‘What to you is Josef Goldmann?’

‘My employer.’

‘To die for?’

‘Do what I am paid to do.’

‘And report to a senior officer? How many times?’

‘You’re talking shit. You know nothing.’

‘How often did you meet your controller?’

‘You were a policeman once?’

Reuven saw Mikhail flinch. ‘I ask—’

‘You were a crap policeman. We had interrogators in Iraq and you wouldn’t even have made a junior.’

Mikhail spat, ‘You are the angel when someone steps off the street and supposedly attacks Josef Goldmann, and you have the chance to shine … That was convenient. Yes?’

‘Never been in a combat situation? No? Well, you wouldn’t know, would you, how a man reacts? Too fucking ignorant.’

‘The story, I tell you, is too good.’

‘Ask Mr Goldmann. He was there and you were not.’

‘And the angel — what we have to believe — is prepared to give his life for a man who is a stranger to him. Why? Why?’

Viktor had been close to Reuven. He moved now, edged away and stayed close to the partition wall, moved cat-quiet to be behind the chair, was poised to strike … and Josef Goldmann did not speak up for his man.

The answer was quiet. ‘If you had been in combat you would know, but you haven’t so you do not.’

Reuven thought the man, Carrick, had not made a mistake, but still it was early. It interested him that the man hit back, was not intimidated — should have been if the suspicion was justified.

Molenkov asked the question that had circled in his mind since they had driven from the garage. ‘What’s it for?

Beside him, Yashkin frowned, ‘What’s what for?’

‘We take the thing, sell it, we—’

‘You can speak the thing’s name — it doesn’t bite. A Zhukov, as you know, is a Small Atomic Demolition Munition. It has a serial number of RA-114. It is, for the moment, benign. You can talk about it.’

‘You always interrupt me. I was thinking aloud. I—’

‘You were rambling like an old fool. I repeat, “What’s what for?” Tell me.’

The one-time political officer had been able to allow his thoughts to flow freely because the engine of the Polonez ran sweetly. Their wallets were half empty but he fancied the car had received a better and more thorough working-over than it had had for ten or fifteen years. Flat countryside slipped behind them, with little to engage him — less to compete with burdens that seemed to flourish like a virus in his mind — nagging and unwelcome.

He stumbled through what he had to say. ‘We’re paid, that’s the deal — it was agreed. We get paid and—’

‘We get paid a million American dollars. We divide a million American dollars into two equal parts. The story ends.’

‘Security officials are always arrogant. They interrupt.’

‘And a zampolit? Is a political officer not arrogant? The most unpopular and disliked individual in a camp is a zampolit. True or false? True.’

‘I concede. I don’t want to fight. There are two unpopular and disliked individuals in a camp. You were one and I was the other. Nobody loved us, and we didn’t care. It’s ridiculous for us to bicker … What’s it for?’

It was, of course, long gone. He could think, sometimes, of who Colonel Igor Molenkov had been. If a call came for an official, a scientist or manager to attend at a specified hour the office of the zampolit, any man, however senior, sweated, fidgeted, lost sleep and went over in painstaking detail what he had said to whom in an unguarded moment, in an aside with sarcasm — and had that individual reported him? His only friend had been the security officer who had had the same power to destabilize a man’s confidence: a quiet remark in a canteen about documents rated classified having been taken out of the secure zones could reduce anyone working at Arzamas-16 to a trembling wreck. But they had no power now.

‘What’s what for?’

‘My friend, you don’t make it easy for me.’

‘Beat my ear, why don’t you? And warn me of the right turning at Trubcevsk, and the road for Pogar. I’m listening.’

Molenkov breathed hard. ‘A half-share of a million American dollars, what’s it for?’

No answer.

Again, Molenkov tried. ‘What will I do with a half-share of a million American dollars? Is it for a tin under the bed? Is it for an apartment in Cannes or Nice, or on the Black Sea? Is it for hoarding or spending?’

Yashkin kept to the centre of a straight and narrow road, lips pursed, forehead knotted, but did not respond.

‘I am now sustained by anger,’ Molenkov said, ‘bred by what was done to me. Dismissal. My pension paid only erratically. My status taken. Cold to freezing in the winter because of the cost of fuel, hungry throughout the year because I have to scavenge in the street market for the cheapest food. All around me is corruption, an anarchy of criminality, the disease of Aids and the affliction of narcotics … and so, my friend, what will I do with a half-share of a million American dollars?’

Past sodden fields, and a river about to burst its banks, past dripping forestry, the horizon short, misted by low cloud.

‘We talk about it, make jokes, and dream of the apartment in Sochi or above the Mediterranean, and the wealth that comes from the sale of it … My friend, would you leave Sarov? Your wife wants her remaining years to be spent close to the monastery, to be in the quiet company of St Seraphim. She’ll want to sweep the floors there and bring flowers, meditate on the story of his sainthood, when the thieves beat and crippled him, when he argued before the court that mercy be shown them. She would wish to be in Sarov to celebrate the day of his birth and the anniversary of his canonization. Not important to you or me, my friend, but she won’t go with you. Will you abandon her? Will you take the money, drive back to Sarov and put the money in a tin? Spend it slowly for fear of attention being attracted to new-found and unsubstantiated wealth? I ask you, what’s it for?’

Yashkin said, ‘I think we’re close to the turning. The next village is Trubchevsk, and I think the road to Pogar will be off the main street.’

‘Can’t you answer me?’ With growing desperation, Molenkov hurled the question at Yashkin. ‘Or won’t you?’

Yashkin said, in a flat monotone, ‘It’s important we don’t miss the turning at Trubchevsk or we’ll have to go many kilometres off our route.’

Molenkov said, ‘Tell me, because I want to hear again, how you took the thing out.’

He was told. The detail never changed. A dozen times in the two months since Viktor, the friend of his dead son, had come to Sarov, Yashkin had told him the story. All bullshit, bluff and the authority of rank, the creaking cart, the grunts of conscripts and the salutes of the sentries. He had to laugh.

Molenkov said, ‘Today, surely, it wouldn’t be possible to get one out.’

Yashkin said, ‘Then there was a window, and it was wide open. I assume now that it’s closed. Then, as I did, you could walk through it.’

That day, at that hour, an American general of the Strategic Command was the guest of a Russian general of the 12th Directorate. His tour was of the storage zones and silos at the Federal Nuclear Centre outside Sarov in the Nizhny Novgorod oblast. The American regarded himself as a trusted friend of the Russian and had escorted his opposite number to missile installations in the Midwest of the United States. As military men of experience, they talked a similar language. A coffee break had been called, and an opportunity for a comfort stop. The American used the time to speak quietly into the portable Dictaphone he carried, the better to remember his thoughts when it came to writing up a report that would be studied by a congressional committee.

It was a whisper. ‘I believe old suspicions and anxieties about security at Sarov are now groundless … I have seen, in an action exercise, Special Forces troops who are now deployed on the base perimeters, and they were working with gunship choppers. They are élite troops, well motivated and well paid … Old stories of scientific personnel taking to the streets in demonstrations and, in effect, striking on the grounds of non-payment of wages are surely a matter of the past. I have been shown sections of outer and inner fencing around the storage zones, which are fitted with high-technology security sensors donated by the US and identical to those in place at our Los Alamos installation, New Mex, and I am assured that minor thefts of equipment and material are now blocked. One silo for nuclear warheads in storage was opened for me. It was behind two steel-reinforced doors, which were sufficient to withstand any conventional or nuclear bomb blast. I am informed that the military of the 12th Directorate have a good handle on the personnel in sensitive positions, and they’re thoroughly vetted. Conclusions on the visit here: Sarov is in the hands of serious, high-quality people. I do not believe leakage is possible, and it is denied with emphasis that any such leakage of warheads or materials took place in the past.’

‘This is it. Go right. This is the Trubchevsk turning,’ Molenkov said.

Yashkin thanked him. His friend had said the previous day that he promised to try not to talk of the thing, but might not honour his promise … and in the centre of that community, where no signpost stood, he swung the wheel and turned right.

Could the man not stop talking?

Molenkov asked, ‘Where, friend, will it be hardest?’

Yashkin answered, ‘At the border. We cross it tomorrow. Molenkov, do you talk to hear your own voice when you’re frightened, or because of the profundity of your opinion? Tomorrow we face a challenging difficulty. Tomorrow we cross the border. Don’t ask me what’s at the border on our side or on the Belarus side because I don’t know. I have no knowledge of the equipment there. If there’s equipment for detection I don’t know how sophisticated or sensitive it is. Please, my friend, can we just drive?’

‘After the border we have five hundred more kilometres to go. How will you feel then?’

‘Excellent. We’re going to the river where we’ll meet your Viktor’s employer. I think him to be a man, at his trade, of ability.’

‘He’s criminal scum, no more or less. However, he’ll be carrying a million American dollars.’

‘My knowledge of such people — obviously limited — tells me he’ll be careful, and all the people with him. The border is the difficulty, not people who are careful with their security. Molenkov, please, give me some fucking quiet. Such people understand security in a way that I never — and I don’t hesitate to admit it — did.’

Viktor had him by the throat, but that was Viktor’s second movement.

Mikhail had given the signal, and Viktor’s first movement had been to a wrist, then to the straps and his fingers had wrestled the buckle into place. Mikhail had fastened the other wrist to the chair arm. He had long missed Viktor, his old friend and fighting companion. It had been a bad day when Viktor was ordered to London.

He had the chain-saw started. Fumes in his nostrils. It had taken four pulls to wake the engine and he had revved it so that the chain raced on the cogs. Now the saw was near the Englishman’s feet, but out of reach of his kicks. It idled and spluttered. Mostly the chain-saw was for show, and he didn’t like using it because of the blood it threw into his face, but he had used it when he thought it necessary in Perm, Moscow and in Berlin.

Mikhail held the cordless drill, and worked his index finger on its trigger.

The drill made less mess.

With questioning, lowering over the man, sometimes shouting and sometimes hissing the questions, he had attempted to create fear — had failed. He sensed now that he had little time. In Perm, in the first months since he had gone to work for Reuven Weissberg — Viktor with him — it had been hammered into his mind that he must create fear. Without fear he was nowhere, no roofs sold, no customers coming and no rivals backing off. He was paid well to make fear. He had little time, knew that because Josef Goldmann was whimpering like a fucking kid, and Reuven Weissberg had shifted twice in his chair as if bored that the questioning had led to no admissions. Sweat streamed on the man’s forehead. He had done interrogations, enough of them, in his work with State Security and had rarely felt the need to raise his voice. Now, because failure faced him, he screamed the questions as he held the drill, racing, close to the kneecap. Mikhail had never in his life gone to an Orthodox church, had never sunk to his knees, had never offered up a prayer, and he did not believe in angels. He did not believe this goddam man, but sensed the threat of him.

His screams rose, were incoherent. He mixed the English language with his own. ‘Who controls you? Police or Intelligence? How are you to contact your control? The attack on Goldmann was bogus, do you not admit that? What is the briefing of your control? What do they want? Is the target Goldmann or is it Reuven Weissberg? Do they know of the delivery? Is it the washing of cash or the delivery?’

The response, repeated: ‘I have answered that … have answered that …’ Silence when the questions were in Russian.

His hand shook, and the drill tip wavered a few centimetres from the trouser over the kneecap. He couldn’t make the fear. His arm stiffened. It was what Viktor had told him, and it had not before seemed important. Mikhail clutched at straws, was drowning.

‘You left outside your room, for laundry, sodden clothing. Why were you out in the night, in the rain? Did you meet your control in the night?’

He saw his man flinch. At last …

He hit again, and the drill tip spun not five centimetres from the kneecap. ‘It rained. You were out. You met your control.’

There was a surge of breath. Mikhail held the drill steady, let it race. He waited for the confession, and the smile spilled at his mouth.

He heard, ‘Reuven Weissberg, your employer — arsehole — has a bullet wound in the arm. I saw it. Where were you? Fucking a whore or with a hand down a kid’s trousers? Where were you, arsehole, when Mr Weissberg was shot?’

He was about to drive the drill tip into the trouser covering the kneecap. The voice behind him was a murmur. ‘Enough.’

He stopped. Mikhail let his finger slide off the trigger and the power died. He would never disobey an instruction from Reuven Weissberg. Weissberg was the only man he feared and he was at the point of success, but he would not disobey an order. He let the cordless drill slip from his fingers. It bounced on the concrete and splashed in a puddle of rainwater.

The voice behind him said, ‘Free him.’

Beside Reuven Weissberg, shaking and sobbing, was Josef Goldmann.

As Mikhail bent to loose the man, their eyes met. He thought the man’s eyes laughed at him.

He was in the minibus.

It should have been the time that Shrinks exuded authority and competence, was listened to. He sat hunched and stayed silent.

A full half-hour earlier he had slid back the minibus door, gone to the car and said to Lawson that, in his considered opinion, their man was in extreme danger and, following the description given him of the night’s events, was in no realistically fit state to defend his cover. Lawson had responded, ‘When I want your contribution I’ll ask for it, and right now I do not,’ then pulled his door shut. The younger man, Davies, had rolled his eyes and shrugged, and Shrinks had returned to the minibus.

He had not worked with Lawson before. A little of a fearsome reputation had reached him, but he had dismissed that as jealousy — there was enough of that at VBX — but he had been on the team long enough to believe each last syllable of the drip of criticism addressed to Christopher Lawson. Small mercies, but at least the man was an interesting subject. ‘Interesting’, but not the centre of his attention.

His focus was on November. From the far end of the long approach to the warehouse yard gate he had seen the cars drive in. Then he had had Deadeye’s binoculars passed abruptly to him, and there had been a flash sight of November’s head, front passenger seat, blurred, then gone. Precious little to work from, and the features had been expressionless, but he’d seen wide-open eyes and the pallor that stress brought. He had gone to the car, to Lawson, to tell him that the agent was defenceless and critically vulnerable, and his cheeks had flushed at the blatant rejection. Where would his advice have led, had it been accepted? Obvious. To go in and get the man clear — he had heard, faint but clear above the cries of wheeling gulls, the sounds of a chain-saw. Lawson, that ‘interesting subject’, had shown no hesitation and not a modicum of doubt in dismissing him. God, if he ever had that man, with certainties by the bucketful, on a couch … His own science, that of forensic psychology, was inexact and men who apparently harboured no doubts had always fascinated him.

Shrinks — he hated the name but it had stuck — worked two days a week at VBX and had been allocated a cubbyhole on the second floor in the Medical Section; the other three days he spent at University College Hospital in old Bloomsbury where he was attached to the Department of Psychiatry. Most of his colleagues at UCH treated varying degrees of mental illness, but he researched all aspects of human behaviour — and at VBX he sat in on selection of recruits panels, had influence in the planning of courses and monitored the progress of the younger officers. Normally he was listened to and what he said was used and seemed valued; this was the first time he had been ignored, then rejected, when he had stepped out to let his opinion be known.

The ambition of this big, shambling man — a couple of months short of his thirty-sixth birthday — was to be taken on at VBX full time. The secrecy and need-to-know culture appealed to him. The building burgeoned with excitement. He was, and had no problem admitting it, an enthusiast, and the two days a week when he jogged across the bridge and flashed his card at Security, then fed it into the machine at the entry barrier and went inside, gave him the greatest happiness he knew. Had to be careful in expressing that. He lived with Petra, a wood sculptor, in a housing-association one-bedroom flat in Islington. He could not blather on to her about his greatest happiness being at work … Petra, hacking away at wood with chisel and hammer in her council-sponsored studio, did not know where he was. The secrecy of the life, up to the time he sat cramped in the minibus and with the pain in his constricted knees, had thrilled him.

That ambition, he believed, was now threatened.

He wondered, even at that distance and through the crumbling brickwork of the building far ahead, if he would hear a scream of terror, of agony.

If he were to return to VBX having been an integral part of a team that had lost its most valuable asset, its agent on the ground, his ambition would crumble. He needed the operation to succeed. He had long hair that fell to his shirt collar and his fingers worked in it. The girl bit her fingernails, Bugsy stared fixedly ahead, and Deadeye hummed the same damn tune again and again. Then he saw the receiver light wink on Dennis’s lap.

The minibus was in fast reverse, and when Shrinks looked out through the back window he had a view of the car turning the corner.

‘Don’t mind me,’ Shrinks said, and the tension had reached him. ‘What’s happening?’

‘Adrian’s found a vantage-point where we may get an eyeball,’ Dennis said.

He thought they would see a weighted bundle carried out of the building, two or three men taking the strain. He realized he knew so little of the trade of VBX. It was simple and straightforward to sit in on selection boards and have young men and young women recite their CVs and all the dubious reasons they had concocted for joining the Service. But this was different: he had seen, just a flash of it, the face of a man taken to the limits and knowing it.

There was much that Shrinks could have said, had he been asked … Could have said that an agent working beyond the reach of backup must possess supreme motivation, not that of a crusading knight fighting criminality, but have the self-induced need for success, and syringefuls of it. Could have said that a degree of stress was beneficial to the agent, that lack of stress was a road to complacency, but the stress levels the far side of the brick walls were beyond his experience as a psychologist. He liked to say, when a candidate had gone from the interview room and before the next was called forward, that he looked for ‘an organized mind’.

They were at the door of a derelict three-storey building, ancient bullet holes on the rendering. There was a gap in the doorway, where a nailed barrier had been prised back. Shrinks thought he would get a grandstand bloody view of a body being removed for disposal.

No one helped him, nor would he have asked for help.

There was an aged staircase with one in two, or two in three, of the wood steps missing. Those that were in place creaked and protested at their weight. At the biggest gaps Lawson sank to his knees, crawled and straddled the spaces, but no one looked back to see if he was able to bloody compete. On the first floor of the building — once an apartment block — there was a doorway and a distant window, bird shit on the floorboards. Trouble was that the bird shit lay on the boards that remained, and there were not too many of those. He hesitated in the doorway. Adrian was at the window. Davies and the cuckoo girl, Charlie, were halfway across the room and walked on the beam that had once supported the boards, not much more, damn the thing, than a couple of inches across. Davies had gone first and had good balance, held his arm out behind him and her fingers rested on his. She matched his steps. The drop between the boards and the beams to the ground floor would have been twenty-five feet. As if they had tossed for it and the loser went first, Bugsy stepped on to the beam and Shrinks had an arm out, held tight to the shoulder in front of him and might have had his eyes half closed. They could not back off, he knew it, because he was behind them. He waited his turn. Perhaps squatters had been in the building. His turn had come. Water came down, heavy and continuous, missed the beam by less than half a foot, and went on down. He could hear its patter far below. The beam shook as Bugsy and Shrinks joined Adrian, Davies and the girl on the one board under the window. Lawson went across. They were not looking at him. At the final stride, no hand reached out. He controlled his breathing.

He inserted himself beside Adrian. There was a clear view out across a bombsite not yet developed, the roadway that went nowhere, the building of weathered brick and the small doorway set in it. He saw the cars parked there, and the man who watched the gate.

The rain had come on heavier.

Then Davies said, ‘Well, Mr Lawson, here we all are with a Grand Circle view. What’s going to be the show? Tragedy or a comedy with a bag of laughs? Me, I’m banking on tragedy. I think it’s pretty well known that Russian organized crime gets about as vicious as any — unless it’s the Albanians on a red-letter day. You could — damn you, Mr Lawson — have picked that poor bastard up out of the gutter last night, when he was down and beaten, and called time on all this, blown the whistle. Not your way, was it? Gave him a verbal kicking and sent him back into that snakepit. I suppose you followed the edicts, as handed down on bloody tablets, of the peerless Clipper Reade … Well, look where it’s dumped our man.’

He remembered it well, Clipper’s story of the meeting on a park bench at the south side of the city of Gdansk, underneath the ramparts of the fortress built by Napoleon. With Clipper had been the young Pole, just past his twenty-first birthday, who worked in the division of the railways that cleared the tracks for military traffic. The kid had been buckling, and was refusing to continue supplying information on the timetables and content of the traffic that rolled at dead of night. Clipper had lashed him with his Texan tongue. Had achieved two more dead-letter drops. The second had listed the passing through the Gdansk junction yard of twenty-four MAZ-543 launch vehicles, with Scud-B missiles mounted, all loaded on flatbed stock. Scud-B had high explosive and chemical and nuclear warhead capability, and it was Clipper’s biggest success story in 1978 that he had identified the shipment coming through the junction yard at Gdansk and on to Polish territory. After that dead-letter drop, no more. The kid had been correct in his assessments that time was running short for him. Arrested, tried in camera. An American diplomat expelled from Warsaw, and a tit-for-tat reaction in Washington. Clipper Reade long gone from the scene, selling tractor spare parts somewhere else, and the kid with the timetables had gone off the radar — maybe beaten to death, maybe hanged, maybe executed by pistol shot, but he had not coughed a description of the big American from the Agency. Clipper had said he’d quite liked the kid, that he was decent, honourable and probably a patriot, but that his life — ‘Because we don’t ever go squeamish, Christopher’ — was fair exchange for knowing that Scud-Bs, with nuclear capability, had gone through the junction yard at Gdansk. The night the courier — a Canadian exchange student — had brought back that information, collected from the dead-letter drop, Clipper Reade and Lawson had killed two bottles of German sparkling wine with chasers of Earl Grey from the pot.

‘What you did should lie on your conscience.’ The hissed whisper was in Lawson’s ear. ‘You sent him back … Where he is, that’s the sort of place those bastards take a man they suspect. It’ll be their damn abattoir. Feel good about that, Mr Lawson, do you?’

He was nudged. Adrian passed him pocket binoculars. It took him a moment to get the focus right, and voices were in his ears.

Adrian’s murmur: ‘That is unbelievable. Incredible.’

‘Never, never would I have reckoned it,’ Davies mouthed.

Shrinks’s voice, breathy: ‘It’s the Stockholm thing. It’s that syndrome … but I couldn’t have predicted it. Only you could, Mr Lawson.’

He had the sharpness of the image. Josef Goldmann seemed to run in front of the group as if he needed to be gone from the place and was scarred by it. The lenses raked over the two hoods, Viktor and Mikhail, who hung back. There was frustrated fury on their faces and their feet seemed to stamp as they walked; Lawson felt the chuckle in his throat. His man, November, lifted out of an office doorway in the night, came with a weak, loose step towards the car, and was supported by Reuven Weissberg, who had his arm round November’s back and his fist gripping November’s coat. He had the focus clear now. Reuven Weissberg reached up with his other hand and, as if they were friends, pinched November’s cheek. November would have fallen if Reuven Weissberg’s arm had not held him up. Lawson knew what Stockholm syndrome was, and had aimed to create it.

Adrian said, ‘It’s a triumph, Mr Lawson — and we need to move fast.’

They ran to the stairs and were going down, skipping over the gaps where the steps had been taken out. Bugsy and Shrinks helped each other. None of them looked back. Lawson started after them. Bloody well past sixty-one years, bloody near pensionable. Was wobbling on the beam. Should not look down. Heard the clatter of them on the steps. Felt himself going, but Lawson did not cry out, then seemed to see the face of Lavinia, his wife, and Harry, his son. They looked away … Had hooked his right leg over the damn beam and had a hold of it with his left hand. Was suspended. Could look down and see them all crossing the lobby, going quick, not looking up. Thought the left arm was about ready to come out of its socket. Then he’d fall. The angles of the beam were sharp enough to cut off his right leg at the knee, and then he’d fall. Took the strain. Pulled himself up. Was astride the beam, and panted. Crawled along it, and came to the doorway. His fingers clawed on the wall and he stood, went down the steps and crossed the hall. Funny that, first time since he’d reached Berlin that he’d thought of his wife and son.

The car was already gone, but the minibus waited for him. He climbed in.

He spoke, silent and without lip movement: ‘Just as you said it would be, old boy … Pity me, Clipper, with all these damn Thomases for company.’

Stone-faced, Viktor drove.

Josef Goldmann had a hand on Carrick’s shoulder, leaned forward and spoke in his ear: ‘How did you know, Johnny?’ Play dumb and play ignorant. ‘Know what, sir?’

‘How did you know that Mikhail was with Reuven Weissberg at the shooting and did not react until the shot had been fired, and it was only Reuven’s good fortune that the shot took the flesh of the arm and not the chest or skull? How did you know that?’

‘I didn’t know it, sir. I guessed it. I wouldn’t have a kneecap if I hadn’t guessed something.’

Laughter behind him, but hollow.

‘Mikhail was not fucking a tart when Reuven was shot, and he was not masturbating a young boy. He was there, Johnny, but he was slow with his reaction. You were not slow when I was attacked. It was a good guess.’

‘Yes, sir.’