Timebomb

Chapter 13

Carrick came out of the hotel. He carried his bag from the swing doors, and there was a siren in the air — might have been fire, ambulance or police answering an emergency, might have been for a politician’s convoy. He looked up. Had there not been that distant sound of a siren and had he not done that everyday thing of trying to identify where it came from and where it went, he wouldn’t have seen her.

She was sitting on a low wall. It ran along the front of a schoolyard, which was beside an ornate church façade, and kids were screaming and chasing behind her. She had a magazine on her lap but had glanced up from it. She was, perhaps, a hundred yards from him and they had visual contact but it was as though she looked right through him and focused on nothing. Two days ago, or three, it would have given him a lift to see Katie, would have raised his morale, spirits, motivation, whatever he ran on. But Johnny Carrick was a changed man, accepted that.

He saw Golf with her, and the young man who called himself Delta. There might have been others with Golf, Katie and the young man, but he was not certain if the group included others who lounged nearer the school gate.

The eye contact should have given him exhilaration … He went down into the depths of his professionalism. The instructors spoke of that: a guy could feel himself isolated, could think he was abandoned trash, but could survive if he clung to the creed of professionalism. Behind him, Viktor supervised the moving of Josef Goldmann’s quality luggage on to a porter’s trolley. Carrick went to Goldmann’s car, and a man was there, working on the bonnet paint. In front of that car was Reuven Weissberg’s. The man polished the paintwork with a soft duster, but not with enthusiasm; he made short savage movements, halted, then resumed, as if it was unimportant what the goddam car looked like. He wore the obligatory dress of faded jeans and a heavyweight leather jacket. His skull was covered with close-cropped hair and a snake tattoo was wrapped round his neck. He didn’t look at Carrick. Carrick dropped his bag, turned to Viktor, seemed to ask the question with his eyes, eyebrows: which vehicle was he to travel in when they moved on? As if in answer, Viktor zapped Josef Goldmann’s car doors. Couldn’t bloody Viktor speak? Silences, the lack of communication, should not have crushed Carrick as they did. He threw his bag into the boot.

So, he was going walking, would do the tourism bit, and he didn’t know why.

The siren was long gone. Carrick stared over the burnished roof, and the car park, through the wire fencing and across a street, and watched her as she sat on the low wall of the schoolyard.

It could still rule him, professionalism.

He stood aside from the boot, and Viktor supervised the stowing of Josef Goldmann’s bags. Carrick said, ‘I’m going to get some mints.’

Viktor didn’t answer.

Carrick said, ‘Going to get some mints from a kiosk.’

A small frown formed on Viktor’s forehead.

‘I’m not buying them in there.’ Carrick gestured towards the hotel’s swing doors. He was breaking a law of the trade he practised, was failing on due care, diligence. Needed to create the opportunity of a meeting but shouldn’t have started up on explanations: least said, best. Broke it. ‘Not paying the prices they want in there.’

A shrug, distaste. He didn’t know how much Viktor was paid for being the hood in Josef Goldmann’s shadow — might have been two hundred and fifty thousand euro a year, might have been more. Himself, he had been promised a new settlement, new terms of employment — not as part of the conspiracy of laundering — and the upgraded role of personal bodyguard: maybe a hundred thousand euro a year. Why would an employee of Josef Goldmann quibble over paying two euro for a tube of mints from a shop in a hotel lobby, and instead need to go down the street to a kiosk, or a small bar, and pay one euro for the same item? Convenience cost an extra euro, was that important? Explanations split open a legend. An instructor would have shuddered.

Tried to make a joke of it. ‘I suppose it’s sort of in the blood, not wasting money. Have to get the best deal …’

He walked away from the car, and from Viktor.

At the street corner, beyond the car park, he paused and waited for lights to change. It was an excuse for him to check both ways. He saw, coming up the pavement and with a good stride, that the big man — the bastard Golf who had ripped into him in the doorway, had humiliated him — closed on him … a bloody window of opportunity was presented. Didn’t see Katie with him, and was undecided if that mattered to him. He couldn’t look behind him, didn’t know what Viktor did, whether he was followed.

The lights changed.

Carrick crossed the street.

He was in a flow of people, anonymous. He passed the door to the library of the British Council and saw in the hallway a poster advertising the chance of rail travel from London to the Lake District. There was a shop ahead with a rack of newspapers outside it.

Mikhail came to the cars. ‘Where is he? Didn’t he come down?’

‘Gone to buy mints.’ Viktor’s response.

‘Why?’

‘Because the mints in the hotel are too expensive.’

‘You’re joking.’

‘No.’

‘Where’s he gone?’

‘Round the corner to a shop or a kiosk.’

‘How much will he save?’

‘I can’t say. His bag’s in my car.’

The grimace played at Mikhail’s mouth, and his hand rested on Viktor’s sleeve. ‘If I’m correct, he won’t be needing a place in your car or mine. He’ll be in the fucking river without a boat.’

He pulled the street map from his pocket. He talked, jabbed with his finger at the creased paper, and Viktor listened, and did not interrupt but nodded approval of Mikhail’s planning. They had entered State Security the same year, they had worked in the city of Perm and in the same section of investigations into corporate fraud, and they had been together when recruited by Reuven Weissberg. They had done protection together and had killed together. They had been together, day in and day out, till the day Reuven Weissberg had moved to Berlin and Josef Goldmann had gone to London. The separation had not divided them. They were like brothers, and wounded by the intrusion of a stranger.

Viktor said, ‘If it’s there, we’ll find it.’

‘I believe it is.’

‘Find it, watch him go into the river — and see him sink.’

British Homing World boasted that it was ‘The World’s Premier Pigeon Racing Weekly’, and on an operation Bugsy was never without it — or, more likely, without a minimum of three copies. On any trip of more than a week, the magazines were read, reread, and his invaluable companion. Their worth to Bugsy was that they lessened the frustration brought on by failure.

For hours now, all day, he had watched the two cars but the opportunity he waited for wasn’t offered.

In the pocket of Bugsy’s anorak was the tag, but the chance to clamp it had not come.

He had been through the stock lines of birds for sale, and their price, and in his mind had checked the cost of ‘Quality farm cleaned: Tic Beans, Maple Peas, Oil Seed Rape and Whole Maize …’ Without the magazines, he would have raged.

But it was clear to him, and this conclusion could not be avoided, the chance of getting a tag into Reuven Weissberg’s car had not offered itself. The goon had been there all the hours that Bugsy had watched. The guy with the lump-hammer head and the tattoo round his throat hadn’t even gone for a piss. The car shone. Would have made the job a hell of a sight easier if the goon had gone walkabout — hadn’t … Maybe the job of putting a tag into the car wouldn’t happen and maybe it would mean risking a wire on the undercover. Needed to happen, something did, because they had driven as if the Furies chased them to get to Warsaw, hold the contact and the visuals, and the bloody old minibus had been a croaking wreck after what had been asked of it.

Bugsy had listened closely to the guv’nor’s briefing. He’d been on big operations, enough of them, but he’d sensed this to be on a scale of threat greater than he’d known before. The guv’nor had authorized him to try to place a tag, but it just wasn’t possible. He saw, from his vantage-point, the bags loaded into the cars, and that just lifted the weight of the failure.

So, again, they’d be careering on the seat of their pants, and it would be down to the driving skills of Adrian and Dennis — and they’d bitched like fuck at what had been asked of them, Berlin to Warsaw.

‘I don’t know how long we have. Spill it.’ Lawson was at his shoulder.

‘You’ve taken your bloody time.’

His man spun. Carrick had been pointing to a tube of mints in a cardboard box on a shelf behind the shop woman’s head. Didn’t finish. Lawson thought him like the familiar old rabbit in the headlights and reckoned the degeneration faster than he’d anticipated. ‘I’m here, we’re here. What’s new?’ Did the calm and quiet bit, that of the man in charge.

‘Well, for a start, I damn near had my knee taken off with a drill.’ A rising voice, at the edge of hysteria. ‘Try that for starters.’

‘But you didn’t have it taken off so can we get to something of relevance?’

‘First, in that bloody place I’m quizzed, and the hoods aren’t believing me — how close were you?’

Not the time to make assessments as to whether a man was a potential coward or a potential hero. Clipper had always maintained that the true hero was frightened fit to piss his pants, and that the true coward would concoct an excuse and slip away to the shadows. He thought the man was brave enough for what was asked of him, and he said what might just encourage the bravery he needed from him. ‘Close enough, always close enough, and with firearms. You could say it’s just a matter of sliding a safety and you’e back with us — but then we’d have lost the big game. Don’t mind me, but can we hustle?’

Two kids had come into the shop, had pushed past Luke Davies, who stood just inside the door. The woman at the counter, arms folded, had been waiting for their discussion — in a language she hadn’t a word of — to be resolved. Lawson didn’t do ceremony, pushed his man aside and let the kids through.

‘I think — yes, I’m sure — the time is about right for me to know what the “big game” is.’

‘Dream on, starshine … You don’t get big pictures. You have a target, Reuven Weissberg, and you stay up adjacent to him. Consider pilchards in a tin. That near.’

‘What do you think I am? Some sort of fucking robot?’

The kids had their sweets, and pushed back out, and again the woman waited on them.

‘What did you come here for? What was the excuse used?’

‘To buy a tube of mints.’

‘Well, buy them, young man.’ Lawson turned to Luke Davies. ‘Go on, buy a pocketful for him. You’re moving on, what’s the destination?’

‘Don’t know, haven’t been told,’ his man said. ‘Look, what we have to do is simple enough, we—’

‘Whose confidence do you have, and whose enmity?’

‘Reuven believes in me — not Viktor and not Mikhail. But if you were close enough to intervene when my kneecap was on the line, you’d have known that, wouldn’t you?’

He saw the flush in the cheeks and the blaze in the eyes of short-fuse temper. ‘We were close enough …’ He had oiled. Didn’t believe in splashing it liberally, thought the brusque tone better, like that was a short-cut to a slap on the cheeks. ‘Now, are we doing inquests or are we looking forward? Cop on, and get a grip. Should you have a wire on you?’

‘A sweep’s just been done on the room, and on me.’

‘Understood.’

‘What we have to do is this. We need a system of meeting, or connecting, having communication every few hours. And I have to know what I’m expected to learn about. It’s that simple.’

‘No, young man.’ Lawson stood his full height — he hadn’t the bulk and weight that had made Clipper Reade formidable — and jabbed his finger repeatedly into the agent’s chest, as if it was an emphasis tool. ‘What is simple is that I make decisions and I exercise authority at all times. As I said, your one job — only job — is to be up against Reuven Weissberg. Later, when you’ve got to where he’s taking you, I may — might — consider a wire on you. Not possible today, but an option for the future. Only a beacon wire. Do the job that’s given you, and only that job. And — it’s exercising me — why is Reuven Weissberg demanding you at his side?’

‘He was shot, had a flesh wound. That was in Moscow. When that creep came after Josef Goldmann, and I — well, Goldmann boasts about it. I’m the bloody angel.’

‘Is that so? Very fortunate for us …’ His little moment of wry irony was lost on the man. Time pressed, wasn’t there for wasting. ‘And you don’t know where the end of the road is?’

‘Do you not listen? No, I do not. Short term is what I know.’

‘I doubt we’ve all afternoon to converse. What’s short term?’

‘He’s showing me the Old City, don’t know why. We’re going to leave from there. Him and me are walking, then the hoods pick us up, and I don’t know where we go then … Are you really close to me?’

‘You couldn’t get a cigarette paper through the gap, believe me.’

‘It’s not fucking easy, you know.’ The head hung and the voice muttered.

Lawson took the seven tubes of mints that Luke Davies had bought, thrust them into his man’s hand. Did the smile, the confident one. ‘Nobody said it was.’

‘I’m isolated.’

‘Just keep cuddled up with Weissberg.’

‘If I lose his patronage, I’m dead.’

‘But you won’t, will you?’ He pushed him out. Took his collar, led him to the door, had Davies open it, and did the push, sent him out on to the pavement, saw him half stumble, then regain his balance and walk away. And Lawson saw the bright paper wrapping of the mint tubes in his hand. He counted to ten. ‘I’d have liked to give it longer. Can’t.’

He went outside, and Davies closed the shop door after them. Their man turned the corner, seemed bowed, and was gone.

‘Well, what’s your gripe?’

Luke Davies said, ‘He’s all but done for. He’s screwed up. There’s not much more left in him.’

Lawson sniffed. Seemed to him that an entire nation had smoked on that street, and he took the air into his lungs of a thousand smoked cigarettes, smoked cigars and smoked pipes and felt better for it. ‘He’ll do. He’ll last.’

‘For how long?’

‘Long enough, because it’s near the end. More to the point, young man, will we last the course?’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘You will. It’s us that the pressure’s on now, believe me.’

They walked back down the pavement, past Katie Jennings, and went towards where the others waited. In front of the hotel, on the far side of the street, he slowed, sauntered and tossed his head back so that he could admire the height and majesty of a modern hotel. In so doing he took the opportunity to see his man stop beside one of the two cars and stand apart from the hoods. Could he have guaranteed it? Not with confidence. Would his man last the course? No alternative existed. The man stood alone, and his shoulders were hunched, and there seemed about him, to Lawson, despair.

High up and with a crow’s view, Reuven Weissberg had his face pressed hard against the window.

He saw Carrick join Mikhail and Viktor, saw also the man who watched the cars, saw Mikhail look down sharply at his watch, then Viktor, and saw the slump in Carrick’s back.

He wanted to believe in the man’s loyalty. He craved the loyalty that had been the possession of Josef Goldmann. He had himself ordered the killing of men protected by bodyguards, and had made the equation that — in the crisis moment — the bodyguards hesitated and looked first for their own safety, then for the survival of the paymaster. Each time he had ordered the killing of protected men, in Perm, Moscow and Berlin, the bodyguards had lived. The blood on the street had not been theirs. And he could well remember the moment, the few seconds, when he had faced the pistol barrel as he came down the bank’s steps, and Mikhail had not thrust forward to stand in the way of the aim. They said, the bodyguards, that they were not ‘bullet-catchers’. Could remember the hammer blow in his upper arm, the pain, losing the ability to stand, and then, only then, Mikhail had reacted. The memory was clear. Mikhail had fired, killed, had had the look of pride, satisfaction, triumph, had picked up the spent cartridge cases from his weapon, then had gone to the man who paid him, knelt and examined the wound. Josef Goldmann told a different story.

He wanted to believe in Johnny Carrick’s loyalty, but had agreed to one last hurdle being put in the man’s path.

Reuven Weissberg checked his room a last time, then the anteroom, closed the outer door after him and went down the corridor to the lift. He craved to be able to place trust in a man’s loyalty. He had been to the funerals of many men who had put their safety in the hands of bodyguards; men who had ordered before death three-metre-high gravestones of malachite or serpentine, dead men on whose corpses vodka would be poured and banknotes scattered to see them comfortable in the ‘afterlife’, decaying men whose waxen cheeks had been kissed by living rivals. He didn’t know of an avoritet, alive or dead, who could swear on the loyalty of a bodyguard.

His grandmother had schooled him in suspicion, but he knew her story of the one man in whom she had laid trust, knew it well.

It bloomed. It had no right to be there but it was. In the grimness of that place, in its awfulness, it grew.

How could it have been nurtured there, love? I mean love, not the coupling of dogs when a bitch has her season. I mean tenderness, gentleness, shyness. We thought it was love.

I didn’t know how long love could last. My father and mother had loved and would have believed it would endure until death took them in old age; they wouldn’t have believed that they would be separated and pushed naked down the Himmelstrasse by men who didn’t acknowledge love. Myself, I didn’t believe in the possibility of love until chance threw me close to Samuel. For us, love was stolen moments. Moments in the food queues that were kept apart by the Ukrainian guards when our eyes met. It might have been when I worked in the sewing room at a bench beside the window and he was taken out on a work party that went by our hut. He would look at the window, and his face would light. It might be when we stood near to each other in the exercise yard before we were sent to our barracks for the night and we would simply look at each other and have nothing to say. It might have been when we touched hands, his fingers rough and calloused from the forest work and mine bruised black from using needles at the sewing bench.

Once he brought me a flower. He said that it was an orchid and grew wild in the forest. It was small, delicate, with violet petals. He had carried it from the forest inside the front of his tunic. When he gave it me in the evening it was already without life, but I could imagine it when it grew and flourished. I could have killed him if I had kissed his cheek in gratitude for the orchid. Physical contact between prisoners, male and female, was forbidden. Had I kissed him and been seen from the central watchtower or by the Ukrainians at the gate of Camp 1, he might have been shot, and I might have been … I took the flower into our barracks hut and laid it between the planks of my bunk and the straw palliasse that was my mattress.

We lived beside death, we walked with death. Our love might survive that day, or next week, we didn’t know. It was clear to us that the old role of the camp was ending, and the transports of those destined for extermination were rarer. None of us believed that we would survive the camp’s closure. It might have been at any hour of any day of any week that we would be taken from our huts, whipped to the Himmelstrasse, terrified, screaming, stripping, then be running down the last stretch of the path to where the doors were open and waiting for us; at the last we would sing, us women, the anthem and demand of God why He had forsaken us.

Because of my love for Samuel, I was not given more strength. Now I had another to care about, which weakened me.

I gave trust. By doing so I lost a little precious strength. I hated to do it, give trust. It was dragged from me.

It was 13 October. I walked one way in the compound and Samuel walked the other. I had seen men slip away from one of the male barracks huts, and among them had been Pechersky, the Russian officer, and Leon Feldhendler … and he told me what I should do the next day. He walked north to south and east to west, and I did circuits that were south to north and west to east, and when we passed he told me a little more.

I should try to find thick, warm clothes and wear them the next day, 14 October.

The next day was the first day of Succos, which follows Yom Kippur, the time of Atonement. I was not good in my faith, but in the camp it didn’t matter to me.

I should beg or steal the heaviest, strongest boots I could find and wear them the next afternoon.

The holy days of Succos celebrate God’s protection of the Jews who had escaped from captivity in Egypt and wandered for forty days in the desert before coming to the land of Israel.

The next day, in the afternoon, I should watch for him. I should try to stay close to him. I should follow where he led. Whatever happened, whatever, I should stay near him.

He broke away. He had done three circuits. I realized the enormity of what he had done, had given me complete trust.

I made one more circuit. I seemed crushed by the weight of the lights above the fence. It had begun to rain. The drops bounced and glistened in the power of the lights, and some of the drips came from the barbs on the wire at the top of the fence. There was a fence I could see, beyond it was a ditch — which I had not seen — and past the ditch a minefield. Beyond the minefield was the forest. He had sensed that I returned his love, and had trusted me as I had him. He did not know for certain that I wouldn’t go to a capo, one of those who thought collaboration with the barbarian would extend a lifespan, to a Ukrainian or to one of the SS officers. Some would have.

I was prepared to trust him, him alone.

To wear extra clothing for warmth, and stronger boots, to watch for him and follow him on the first day of the festival of Succos meant an attempt to escape. I wasn’t an idiot. Idiots didn’t survive at the camp. Was it possible that we — starved and exhausted — could defeat the power of the ‘master race’?

I didn’t sleep that night. Who would have? I alone in the women’s barracks knew, and I alone had the broken, faded beauty of a flattened and lifeless orchid under my palliasse. The next day, in the afternoon, I would learn what was possible and what was not — and would learn where trust took me.

The two cars had gone in convoy. Carrick was with Reuven Weissberg, and the man who had polished the bodywork had driven. They had been dropped by a shallow mound of dead winter grass, and the signs said they were on the junction of Ul. Mila and Ul. Zamenhofa.

The cars pulled away fast, but Carrick had seen the look, keen and hating, of Mikhail, and that of Josef Goldmann, which was expressionless, as if in denial. He couldn’t answer the question bouncing in his mind: why had he been taken into the city to walk with Reuven Weissberg?

Not for him to talk. For a full minute Reuven Weissberg stood by the mound in silence. Carrick searched for the explanation, but it didn’t come.

Then Weissberg turned to him. ‘You are not a Jew, Johnny?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Do you have a prejudice against Jews, Johnny?’

‘I don’t think so, sir. I hope not.’

‘Do you know Jews?’

‘No, sir. Before being employed by Mr Goldmann, I didn’t know any.’

‘Do you know what happened to the Jews of this country, in this city, here?’

‘We did a bit of it at school, sir. That’s all I know.’

‘There was a ghetto here for Jews, Johnny.’ Reuven Weissberg spoke quietly, almost with reverence, and Carrick thought it was humility. ‘Jews from all over Warsaw and the near towns were brought here. Nearly half a million Jews were in the ghetto behind walls. They were taken from here to the death camps, those who were not already dead from starvation and epidemics. In April 1943, the Germans decided to clear the ghetto and send the last survivors to the camps. Weapons had been smuggled in, enough to start a resistance, and more were captured … As you are not a Jew, Johnny, you may not be interested, and I will keep the story of this place short. It was called the “ghetto uprising” and it lasted a few days short of a month. Below this place was the last bunker of the resistance — it was known as ZOB, which, loosely, is Jewish Combat Organization — and the leaders committed suicide rather than be taken. The name of the Jewish commander was Mordechai Anieliewicz, but if you are not a Jew you would not have learned of him. Then the ghetto was finished and all the Jews who lived were murdered … but this is where the bunker was, where they fought.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘Why do you thank me?’

‘For teaching me, sir, what I didn’t know.’

They walked back up the street. By the edge of a park where the old leaves of the long-gone autumn were still not swept up, there was a monument of big granite blocks. Set into it was a carved grey façade in stone of near-naked bodies, the women stripped to the waist, the men with bared chests, and some held weapons.

‘There are many monuments in this city, Johnny, but they do not bring back the dead.’

‘No, sir.’

‘Would you despise a man, Johnny, who looks to the past — to what was done?’

Carrick said, ‘If I was a Jew, sir, and if those things were done to my people, my blood, then I’d not think it right they were forgotten.’

For a moment, Reuven Weissberg let his hand rest on Carrick’s sleeve. They crossed the street.

Carrick looked back at the gaunt power of the monument. ‘Sir, did they have no help? Didn’t the Christian Poles help them?’

‘The Christians came. They stood behind the perimeter made by the German Army. They wore their Sunday best clothes and they watched the destruction of the ghetto. They lined the street when it was finished to see the Jews, their countrymen, marched away to the trains to go to their deaths. There was no help.’

Carrick couldn’t read him. There was no expression in his words, their passion withheld. On the skyline were the spires and domes of churches, and he thought it was there that the Old City would be.

‘Where are you going?’

Molenkov spoke: ‘We go, retired officers, to a military reunion to be held in Minsk.’

Two of the Customs officials were by the open window. One was bent low to hear Molenkov and the other examined their passports.

‘What arm of the military did you serve with?’

‘State Security, in the field of national defence. We were both privileged to serve in areas of exceptional importance.’ Molenkov had smiled, then tapped his medals, and the official chuckled.

‘And may I assume, esteemed Colonel and esteemed Major, that an unpleasant duty at a reunion such as you will attend might be the taking of drink?’

Molenkov turned to his friend Yashkin … Behind him, close to the back of the seat was the fucking great lump under the tarpaulin that was worth a life sentence in gaol, and a half-share of a million American dollars, and had in its pit the warmth of a four-kilo perfect sphere of plutonium, Pu-239. He made a face of the utmost gravity. ‘Major Yashkin, will there be occasion in Minsk when we are among colleagues for the consumption of alcohol?’

‘Never.’

‘Never.’ He beamed at the official, shed the gravity.

Yashkin chipped in: ‘We would never consume alcohol before breakfast, never. But, believe me, we take breakfast early.’

Laughter pealed around them. Their passports were handed back. Sweat ran on Molenkov’s body. He heard one official mutter to the other, as they were waved forward, ‘Old farts, they’ll be drunk as rats by each mid-morning. Sad bastards.’ Beside him, Yashkin started the Polonez.

A kilometre ahead was the Belarus Customs shed. Over it the flag hung limp in the rain. Beyond was the horizon, cloud and treetops. Molenkov couldn’t stop his hands shaking and the sweat was now on his forehead, forming silky drips from his nose. He took out his handkerchief and wiped his face, then his neck. He clutched it in his fist, screwed it up, then laid his other hand on the fist but the trembling continued. They were over a white line that was hard to see because many thousands of tyres each day went over it and the paint was nearly obliterated. They went up a slight hill and tucked into a lane as far from the centre of operations as possible.

‘What do you know of this fucking shit-heap, Yashkin?’

‘Not much. Two American balloonists in an international race were blown off-course into Belarus airspace. Their balloon was shot down by a gunship helicopter, and they were killed. Also, they had troops weld up the gates of the residences of the American and European Union ambassadors, which made life intolerable for them so they left. They assassinate their journalists, they imprison their opposition politicians. They are in a verbal and diplomatic war with Moscow and Washington. It’s a state the ghost of Josef Stalin still stalks. Today there’s a personality-cult dictatorship and total economic stagnation. Outside, nobody loves Belarus. Inside, nobody in Belarus cares.’

‘Are they right for more of the same?’

‘More of the old shit, heroic veterans meeting heroic comrades in Minsk.’

The light for them to go into the check bay should have been green but was still red. The barrier that should have been raised automatically to permit entry to the bay stayed down until an official heaved it up, then waved them forward.

‘You see it, Molenkov? A fucked-up place where nothing works. Do they have radioactive-material detectors? Do pigs fly? Do your stuff.’

An official came forward, greeted them, and Molenkov came awkwardly off his seat and out of the Polonez. His medals jangled as he stretched and straightened, and another official had started a slow walk round the car and was behind the tail, peering through the murk of the rear window. Molenkov handed over the passports. They were studied.

Before he had launched into the matter of the veterans’ reunion, alcohol and fraternal friendship between two fine peoples, a question was asked: Did they have anything to declare? Were they carrying any banned items?

Sweat pumped from Molenkov’s pores.

She had done the bit about the neat prettiness of the garden, and the taste displayed by the new wallpaper. Had done also the quiet remark on the aptness of Mrs Lavinia Lawson’s hairstyle. She was in the kitchen, sitting at the table, had been given tea and had remarked, without an over-fulsome gush, on the mug’s nice floral design. She had utilized the tactics laid down by the course instructors at the Service for skewering a way into a house and home.

She must have won something or she wouldn’t have been admitted past the front doorstep, but that victory was trifling.

The liaison officer, Alison, said, ‘I’m grateful to you for seeing me.’

Christopher Lawson’s wife washed up.

‘Very grateful. I have to say my visit to you is highly irregular.’

The head with the aptly styled hair was turned to her. The neat, pretty garden was behind her, seen through a picture window, quite a big garden for an Edwardian terrace in the south-west suburbs.

‘I’m not authorized by my line manager to be here. Probably he’d blow a gasket if he knew. I’m about to explain why I came, having looked you and your husband up in the computer system, which is at best an irregular action. There are three courses open to you, Mrs Lawson. You can ask me to leave, and I will. You can ring Thames House or report my having been here to your husband’s office, and I will face dismissal pretty damn fast. Or you can talk to me and I’ll listen. It’s about a problem I have.’

Plates and bowls, a pan and a solitary wine glass were dried. Cupboards were opened and the items put away, but most often the eyes of Mrs Lavinia Lawson were locked on her.

‘I’m not very important. I do the work that’s pretty dreggy, and right now it’s liaison between our place and your husband’s. I had to send him some information on something — you won’t want me to be specific — and it was all a bit eccentric as we met in the rain and outside on the Embankment. I needn’t have done, but I gave him the name of an undercover police officer who was on a criminal investigation and close up with the principal target. I thought that would help your husband. Mr Lawson said to me that national security was threatened — was at risk big-time — and I felt giving him the name was the right thing to do. Now, back at Thames House, I hear nothing but badmouthing of your husband. I can put that down, perhaps, to the juvenile rivalries that men have. Then I was at a meeting on their ground, Mr Lawson’s, and it was the same refrain. Your husband was condemned as selfish, arrogant and a user of men. Mrs Lawson, I put a man into your husband’s hands, and I’m doubting now whether I should have. You are not, of course, under any obligation to tell me anything, you can show me the door and dump my career, or you can talk to me.’

She had a carefully fostered urchin’s look. Dark hair cut short on her scalp, no cosmetics, no jewellery, not even stud earrings. The appearance that the liaison officer, Alison, cultivated was one of earnest simplicity. It usually did the business for her.

She was asked, ‘Do you know what I do?’

Honesty always did the business. ‘I looked you up before coming. It’s victim support, yes?’

‘There’s a crime epidemic on our streets.’

‘Yes.’

‘And money’s short for services, resources are slashed and customer numbers are rising.’

‘I realize that.’

She was offered more coffee, and accepted. Lawson’s wife tossed aside the tea-towel, let it lie on the draining-board, came and sat opposite her, and pushed aside an unopened copy of the day’s newspaper.

‘Well, my dear, I could throw you out and dump your career, or I can help you with your problem. You were never here, were you?’

‘I was never here.’

She listened. Alison was a good listener and could use the innocence of her eyes to nudge a narrative forward.

She was told, ‘To keep my desk minimally clear, and to stop the line of my customers stretching round the corner of the street, I leave here, five mornings a week, at seven, and I’m back here at seven in the evening. You were lucky to find me, but I’ve the start of a cold and got away a little early. At the weekends I do paperwork, expenses and reports. You see, my dear, we don’t actually live together. Under the same roof, in the same bed, meals at the same table, but I’m too damn tired to talk. He does his own breakfast, I do the supper and the crossword, and he’s at the word teasers, and we read our books in bed — maybe ten minutes — and we’re asleep. We go for the same train in the morning, so we’re walking beside each other and usually hurrying, and he’s never home before me. Are you getting an idea of our life? We’re adjacent to each other, certainly no closer.

‘Our son might have bound us once. Not any more. He’s in Vietnam, does aid work in the Highlands there, tries to help communities around Pleiku start up cottage industries that can be marketed in Europe. He hasn’t been home in two years and when he was last here he hadn’t anything to say to his father. Put bluntly, I don’t either. We don’t share hobbies because I haven’t time for them. We used to do holidays, but not any longer — there isn’t a common area. Now I go on those all-inclusive trips where you get painting or sketching instruction in France or Italy. He, for his annual leave, which they force him to take, goes to the West Country and scours the villages for churches, fourteenth or fifteenth century, and the bed and breakfast he’s staying at will find him someone who’d like their dog walked in the lanes and along the bridleways. He lives for his work.

‘He’s a driven man. Nothing else matters to him. I think, but he doesn’t confide now and never has, that he came from one of those army families where showing affection was forbidden, then boarding-school and university. Quite a good degree from Oxford, where we met, and he was recruited on the old-boy recommendation, which was the routine. I don’t think he ever believed that a job which might be completed that day, or evening, should be left for tomorrow. Went against his nature. Exacting standards were set, still are, and those who fail such examinations are rated failures and set aside. And one day, of course, it will end. There’ll be a leaving party, and I’m damn sure I won’t be there, and he’ll be home. This place will go on the market and we’ll buy something small and easy in Kingswear or across the river in Dartmouth, and I suppose we’ll rattle around, and maybe we’ll find each other.

‘We used to be a pretty normal couple, with the baby. He was posted to Berlin, three years, and married accompanied. We were out at the Olympic stadium. I did a dinner party every week and had a circuit of some of the most devastatingly boring men and their wives to entertain. Then one Saturday night he invited an American. I bitched about it when he told me whom he’d asked because it was going to get the numbers wrong and I had to scrape up a secretary from the field station to match the table up. He had a ridiculous name, Clipper A. Reade Junior. He lit his first cigar when I served salmon and salad — I promise you, my dear, it was a meal I haven’t forgotten — and smoked it right through the next course, beef, and kept it going when I gave the guests fruit salad and meringue, stubbed it out and spread ash across my tablecloth, then lit another when I did the cheeseboard. He talked the whole time, barely ate, didn’t drink the wine and I had to dive into the kitchen repeatedly for little pots of tea for him. At first, at that meal, as the American hogged the conversation, others tried to ignore him and talk among themselves, but he steamrollered them. By the end of the meal, they were hanging on what he had to say on the craftwork of agent-running. He did anecdotes so well: near misses with the Stasi, the KGB and the others, triumphs that were fascinating and not boastful, techniques and tactics of brush contacts and dead-letter drops. But the silence when you could have heard that lousy cliché fulfilled, could have heard a pin drop, was about the loss of an agent — shot and drowned — in the Spree river, by the Oberbaumbrücke. Nobody spoke as that story was told. No emotion to it, and no passion, could have been the description of the death of a pet rabbit, and it sort of killed the evening. I remember, all our other guests left pretty early. Christopher never admitted it, but good old female intuition did the job. My husband was present when the agent was lost, but he gave no sign of it and let the story unfold. I hazard it for you, my dear, but Christopher was under the spell of that American, was — by then — a changed man with his personality altered and soft in that man’s hands. Needless to say, Clipper Reade was never invited to dinner with us again.

‘Where is my husband now? His life is his work. I don’t know. Wherever. Why is he there? I’m not included. He’ll come back, wash his own clothes and probably iron them, and he’ll tell me nothing. He’s not a crusader, doesn’t wear patriotism or ideology on his sleeve, but I don’t believe it’s acceptable to him to fail. Those stupid little word puzzles, the teasers in the paper, if he can’t do them he’s coldly furious but he doesn’t come to me for help. To fail is not on his agenda, and it was certainly not on the agenda of Clipper Reade — I curse him — and he doesn’t believe anyone else should contemplate failure. For that he lost the love of his son, and stretched me near to snapping-point. He wouldn’t recognize the cost of the agenda.

‘Heavens, the time. I’ve kept you. I’ve not talked about Christopher like that to anybody before. Should you have given that name, put that policeman into my husband’s clutches? I can’t say. Have I been of any use to you? I can’t see how I have been. I don’t know where he is, or what danger he faces. My dear, he won’t back off, or allow those with him to back off. Do you recognize what I’ve said of Christopher? Did you like him?’

The liaison officer, Alison, stood. ‘You’ve been very helpful, and I apologize for the intrusion. No, I’m not with the big battalions — I liked him very much. Whatever is happening is close, I think, and for all involved these are desperate times. I’m grateful to you.’

The Crow, that afternoon, had taken the bus from the airport into the city.

At the terminus he had been met. The contact had been good. He had been barely aware of the man coming up fast behind him but he had felt the slip of paper wedged into his palm and snapped his fist shut on it. He could not recall the man’s face.

He stood on a pavement in a narrow street of shops, apartments and a hotel. The wealth with which he was familiar in the Gulf was not here. Drab grey concrete walls pierced by drab windows of sparse goods for sale seemed to close around him. The paper had been the section of a map that covered this street. There was a drab light over the desk inside the hotel lobby. He gave a name, false, filled in his passport details, false, in the register, and paid cash for one night in advance. He was handed a room key, then a sealed envelope with the number of the room written on it in pencil. The Crow tore open a corner of the envelope, enough for him to see that it held the onward flight ticket he would use the following day.

Did he want anything? An explanation: did he want a woman for the evening? The Crow shook his head, smiled at the drab face behind the reception desk of a back-street Belgrade hotel. He didn’t want a woman, not then and not ever.

On the platform at Wolverhampton, Sak waited for the train to Birmingham New Street. For the schedule he must keep, he could have gone an hour later, even two. The atmosphere in his home had suffocated him, and each time he’d emerged from his room there had been more questions. When would he be back? Was he certain there was no contact number should they need to reach him in an emergency? Had he enough money — cash and cards? So he had gone early.

At New Street station, it had been decided for him that he should change, then take a later train directly to London. He would cross London and reach the Eurostar terminus. He would travel by night, would be at his destination by dawn.

He felt excitement and believed himself valued.

He had been shown monuments and plaques.

Carrick had stood in front of a montage of double-life-size figures, sculpted in bronze, who wore uniforms and army helmets, carried rifles, machine-guns and hand grenades and seemed to run from one point of cover to the next. Reuven Weissberg had told him it was the commemoration tableau for the rising by the Catholic Christian Poles against the Germans, and it had happened a year after the fall of that bunker, and that it was done by men who had not lifted a weapon to help the Jews. He had seen, against an old wall of red brick, a statue of a child who carried an automatic weapon and whose helmet dwarfed a little head. A wreath of flowers was tucked under the statue’s arm, and Reuven Weissberg had said that the Catholic Christian Poles helped themselves but had not supported the Jews. Plaques had been pointed to and Carrick had not the language but realized they marked the streets where captured men had been shot by firing squad, and where units had made their command posts, but it had been a year after the Jews in the bunker had killed themselves rather than surrender. His feet had been on old manhole covers and below had been the sewers through which the uprising had been resupplied and, at the end, a few had escaped. He must not show feelings — he was a bodyguard, a cipher, a servant — but the relentless criticism of those who had died fighting for themselves, and had not risen in defence of the city’s Jews, disturbed him. The bitterness confused him. Here, there was defeat, and the bitterness could flourish. Images seemed to bounce towards him that he had not known before — the scale of a slaughter beyond his comprehension.

‘You want to know how many died in the uprising, Johnny? They say twenty thousand of the Christian Poles who were fighters died — and two hundred and twenty-five thousand of the Christian Poles who were not fighters died … but more Jews died, Johnny.’

The light was failing as Reuven Weissberg led Carrick across a wide square, past shops that were closing for the evening. He heard the scrape of steel shutters falling. There were horses between the shafts of the open carriages, but the tourists and visitors had gone, the rain dripped and they were idle. Ahead of them was the Old City, and he followed Reuven Weissberg, and did not know the purpose of it.