Timebomb

Chapter 15

‘A teacher said I was old before my time, had the body of a child and the mind of a man — do you understand that, Johnny?’

He wasn’t expected to reply, and did not. Carrick sat beside Mikhail in the front, and Reuven Weissberg’s voice was soft behind him, but clear.

‘My father was dead and my mother had gone to do strip-tease in the East at the oil-exploration sites, so I do not think it was remarkable that my mind was old, and I lived with my grandmother. There was no place in my life to be a child, to have such a luxury. My grandmother had fought and she taught me what was necessary. You fight to survive. It was what she told me. She knew … And I was a Jew. I doubt you could understand what it was, is, to be a Jew in yesterday’s or today’s Russia.’

Carrick stared ahead into the night, and the headlights showed the road in front of him. Villages, little towns, fields and forests slipped by and were gone.

‘We had nothing. No saved money, no possessions of value. My grandmother was a cleaner in a ministry building in Perm. She was a Jew and they would not give her regular work, and she had the worst jobs — lavatories and waiting areas for the public where filth came in off the street — and at the end of each month she did not know whether she would work for the next four weeks or not work. I looked at her and saw what it was to be a Jew. She said to me, and it was repeated every morning and every evening, that I must fight to live. It was like I was in the Kama river that flows in Perm and was sinking and the water was in my nostrils and I must struggle and kick and thrash if I am not to sink. That is what it was to be a Jew in Perm. I fought and I survived, and I was a Jew. I could only do business. Business was survival.’

He thought of them as people who meet in a hotel bar, who talk for an evening then separate and go to their rooms and will be gone their different ways by the early morning and will not meet again — but they talk. He remembered himself as a kid, at school and bored, probably messing about, and a teacher had read a poem that had caught his mind. Afterwards he had found the anthology and learned it. The American writer Henry Longfellow:

Little from classroom days had stayed with him, but those few lines had.

‘I did business at school. I am twelve or thirteen years old, I am condemned as a “disruptive influence” and as a “malcontent”, and several times I am beaten by teachers, but more often I am sent home. Each time I was sent home my grandmother returned me to school. She lectured me on how to survive, and I did, and I played at business. To survive is to fight. To fight you must look into the eyes of an opponent and show him you have no comprehension of defeat, no fear of pain, supreme determination. The enemy may be bigger, more muscles, have more friends, but you must find and exploit his weakness — she told me. I did. If a teacher punished me, I went to his house. In the night I broke the teacher’s windows and built a fire at his door, and I would hear his wife scream and his children cry, and in the morning he would smile at me and be polite. If the leader of a gang of kids objected that I tried to take money from those he protected, I fought him. Boots, fists, teeth, nails, I used them. Always I won. When I won — I standing and the other not — his allies, his kids came to me. I grew. I did roofs in the school, and was paid. Children brought me money — stole it from their parents — and for the money they had my protection. I made money and the only other Jew I knew of was Josef Goldmann, and he cared for my money.’

In the darkness, with the motion of the car lulling him, Carrick thought himself exposed to a great truth. He lived a lie, and he believed Reuven Weissberg lived a lie — but a greater one.

‘If you are in business, Johnny, you must always expand, grow bigger. You cannot stand still. I had an empire in Perm, in the district where my grandmother lived, and it was a battlefield while I built my roofs, and took traders from under other roofs. She would treat me when I had fought and was hurt, would bandage me, clean the cuts, and could stitch slashes because she had those skills. I never had to come back to her and tell her of failure. She would have despised me if I had not fought and won. Then I was conscripted. There, I was thrashed, beaten, and I was far from my grandmother, but I never cried out. I did good business in the army, buying and selling, and each week I posted the money back to Josef Goldmann, who was excused the military because his feet had fallen arches. There were great warehouse stores of equipment for selling, and narcotics for buying and trading. That was business, and it prospered. I did well. Even senior officers came to me because I could get for them anything they wanted. I had control of a market. I came back to Perm. You find it interesting, Johnny, my story?’

The lie they shared was about loneliness, isolation and an absence of trust. He could have asked where they were going, and what business took them at hammering pace on the road to the East, but Carrick did not. For himself, he understood what it was to feel the pang of loneliness, the pain of being isolated and the desolation of living without the possibility of having a friend in whom trust was placed.

‘From the army, coming home, I had to re-establish authority in Perm. It was a fight, but I succeeded. Everything I did to regain my business position I talked of first with my grandmother. I had the control of the open market in Perm, which was remarkable for a Jew, and Mikhail and Viktor had joined me. Then the city of Perm had no more for me. One day I was there, and one day I was gone, and my grandmother came with me, and Josef Goldmann, Mikhail and Viktor. It was the same in Moscow. There were powerful business groups in the capital city. I did what I had done before, fought. Then, the rivals in business came and offered accommodation, compromise, because they had no stomach for war. I told you, Johnny, in business you cannot stand still, lean against a wall and let the world pass. You must run — run faster, run a greater distance. Moscow to Berlin. Roofs and deals, more roofs and more deals. Running and never stopping. Do you understand what I say to you, Johnny?’

What he understood was his growing fondness for the man sitting in the car behind him, talking in the quiet voice — showing his own loneliness and isolation, and starting to give that precious thing, trust. And, in his blurred mind, he valued the man’s confidences.

The city prided itself on the title ‘Gateway to the World’. It boasted the most advanced container port ever built. Hamburg, in northern Germany, was sited on the Elbe river, sixty-five land miles from the estuary spilling into the North Sea. From its docks flotillas of cargo vessels sail on journeys to all points of the globe.

The Crow had flown from Belgrade to Munich, then taken a taxi to the railway station there, paid cash for a ticket to Cologne and taken the night train to Hamburg. Dawn was breaking. A low mist slowed the morning light, and the rain spotted his shoulders, but he walked well, not furtively. Instructions and directions had been given to him, and a schedule, and he followed them exactly. They took him away from the Hauptbahnhof, and across an empty square where the first flower-sellers and traders in fresh fruit and vegetables were setting up their stalls and erecting canopies to catch the rain. He went on to Steinstrasse, then took the left turning as instructed.

There was little traffic that early and he was able to hear the call to prayer, the first of the day. He saw the minaret of the mosque, topping chimneys and the roofs of office blocks. The tower was a beacon for him. He thought for a moment of those who had been in that mosque, had worshipped there, and flown the aircraft into the Twin Towers and into the Pentagon building, of their commitment to their faith and their cause. He was humbled by them, but dismissed it. The world had moved on, and a new war had developed. Many had died and many more had been taken to gaols and torture rooms. He followed a route given him. His focus was on the memorized instructions and directions. He came to a door.

The Crow pressed the third from the top of seven buttons.

He heard a guttural cough, then the request that a stranger identify himself.

The Crow gave the word he had been told to use, in Arabic, spoke it to the microphone hidden by the grille.

He heard the lock click open.

The Crow climbed three flights of stairs.

He stood on a landing and waited until a door was opened and he was admitted.

The Crow was asked, hesitantly, by an older man, if he had had a good journey.

He said it had been satisfactory and ducked his head in appreciation at the courtesy of the question.

The Crow was told of the arrangements in place, confirmed by this hawaldar, for the transfer of a bond valued at one million American dollars to a bank in Leipzig, and the coded number that would release it for transfer to accounts in Greek Cyprus specified by Oleg Yashkin and Igor Molenkov, both Russian citizens. Then it was confirmed to him that a further sum of ten million American dollars was now available for payment to the Russian citizen Reuven Weissberg, and it was understood that such payment would be overseen by another Russian citizen, Josef Goldmann.

He confirmed, of course, that payment for purchase and sale depended on safe delivery and verification of the capabilities of the item under negotiation.

The Crow added that such necessary verification would be carried out by a qualified expert.

They shook hands, then hugged, kissed briefly, and he was on his way out into the morning mist that rose from the Binnenalster lake, the Oberhafen canal and the Elbe waterway.

He was exhausted, had not slept. With a swaying, shambling step, Sak walked from the Hauptbahnhof. The British passport in the inside pocket, against his chest — it had been shown on the Brussels-to-Cologne leg of the journey — was in the name of Steven Arthur King. The previous evening, he had left the St Pancras terminus on a Eurostar connection to Brussels and had used a Pakistan-issued passport giving his identity as Siddique Ahmed Khatab. He saw stalls of bright flowers, fine fruit and the best vegetables, and the rain dripped from the striped awnings protecting them.

He could have caught a direct flight from Birmingham International to Hamburg-Ohlsdorf, but that had been forbidden by those who had planned his journey. Sak had taken the last train of the evening from London, then sat alone and fearful in the Brussels station to wait for the night connection to Hamburg. The great station had been darkened while the hours had eased past. Under the one pool of lights was a cluster of seats and he and other nightbird travellers had waited there. He didn’t understand fully why he had not been permitted to fly. The lit area seemed to him an oasis of safety. He had joined a few students and a few grandparents and had sat up through the rest of the night in a carriage with dimmed lights and hard seats.

In the dawn, with rain running ribbons down the window, the night train had brought him to Hamburg.

The worst part of the whole journey, he would have said if asked, was the walk from the train door along the platform, up the long flight of steps, and the length of the bridge over the tracks towards the dull light of morning, the stalls and the taxi rank. What caused the fear was the halting memory of boasts made. The boasts had been of his importance in the structure of the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston in the Thames Valley, and had tripped easily off his tongue in the garden of a villa on the outskirts of Quetta. He had been listened to with respect in that garden, and the enormity of the betrayal he had suffered had seemed irresistible in the telling. Walking the last few strides towards the light and the traffic roar, seeing the spread of the square in front of him, Sak realized his liberty was now in the hands of others: those he had met in Quetta, those who had spoken his name in communications, those who had put forward his name, those who had staked out the pavement between the school and his home, the young woman — not robed but in hipster jeans, a T-shirt and a Puffa anorak, with lipstick on her mouth and highlights in her hair — who had given him the tickets, had accosted him by the machine that measured blood pressure, and those he had not yet met. So many knew his name and had decided on his journey.

The fear made him shiver until he was out of the railway station and into the heart of the square, but he was not felled from behind and there was no gun barrel against his neck and no handcuffs on his wrists. He began, then, to control the trembling.

As he had been told to, Sak took a bus to the west of the city, up the Elbe estuary, and in his mind was the address of the car-rental company he must get to. With the shivering not eradicated but lessened, self-esteem returning slowly, the old arrogance and bitterness coming back to roost within him, he could not imagine how an operation of such sophistication, of such extraordinarily detailed planning, could be obstructed or by whom.

Mikhail came off the highway, did the half-circle on the roundabout, then braked abruptly. A lorry slewed away from behind them, and there was a fanfare of a horn’s protest. Mikhail, as if it were his privilege on a roundabout to change his mind, swung the wheel and went round again.

Carrick play-acted the game, used the passenger side mirror and the central mirror.

It was the old and familiar one of checking for a tail — as old and familiar as doing shop-window reflections. Nothing crossed Carrick’s face, no sardonic amusement at the manoeuvre. He wore the Makharov in the pancake on his belt. It was loaded now and he had checked the mechanism. The safety was depressed and the weapon could not be fired without that lever being moved … but he carried an illegal firearm and it was loaded with illegal ammunition. He seemed not to care over what line he had strayed.

That line was well whitened or double-yellowed. It would not have been tolerated for a police undercover, for any SCD10 man or woman, to step so far out of legality. He had not carried a firearm since his army days, and the anniversary was coming up soon — next month — the fifth, since the improvised explosive device, the bastard IED, had been detonated alongside his wheels. But Johnny Carrick was crossing many lines, all the colours of the rainbow: he liked the man.

‘Maybe he will buy you, Johnny.’ It was said with a hint of humour, but that was bogus.

‘I didn’t know I’d been put up for sale, Mr Goldmann.’

Now sadness in the voice, as if something precious had been lost. ‘He can buy what he wants, Johnny, anything.’

‘Yes, Mr Goldmann.’

‘You know what is worst about being with him, Johnny?’

‘I don’t I’m afraid, Mr Goldmann.’

‘What is worst is that you get to sleep too often in motor-cars. I cannot abide to sleep in a car. Because of him I have to. A bed is nothing to him. Johnny, do I smell?’

He sniffed loudly. ‘Can’t smell anything, Mr Goldmann.’

There was a snort, disbelief. They had pulled off the main road, before the city of Lublin, and had gone on to the concrete track that led to a farm. That was the place for sleeping, and the car seats made the beds. The smell of three bodies, Reuven Weissberg’s, Mikhail’s and Carrick’s, had been foul, and his throat had been raw and … He had thought that if they were avoiding a hotel reception desk then the business must be close. They were parked in a side-street off the town’s main square. It sloped away, was newly cobbled, a picture-postcard view of the town of Chelm. The square had a sign up that announced a European cash grant for modernization and reconstruction, and boutique-type shops lined its sides. When Reuven Weissberg had walked out into the centre of the square, Carrick had gone to follow but there had been a sharp whistle from Mikhail. When he had turned he had been waved back. So, Reuven Weissberg who did business, who fought for his survival, who was the target of an operation mounted by the Secret Intelligence Service, had space and was alone.

Carrick stood with Josef Goldmann.

‘Do you know why we are here, Johnny, in this shit-hole of a town?’

‘I don’t, Mr Goldmann … but I don’t need to be told.’

‘This is Chelm. It is where his grandmother would have come as a girl, as a child. This square was here then. The Jews were one in three of the population. The town had their culture stamped over it. His grandmother, Anna, would have been brought by her parents to Chelm for special days, like a birthday. He tries to live his grandmother’s life, Johnny. Do you understand that, why he does it?’

He could have answered, ‘Because of the loneliness.’ He shook his head. In front of him, Reuven Weissberg walked towards a little wood-built shed, in which a hatch was open. Inside, past a woman’s shoulder, he could see shelves of sweets, chocolates, gum. The shed was on a wide plinth of neatly set cobbles.

‘There was a similar kiosk shop there when his grandmother was a child. When she was brought to Chelm, on any day of celebration, and wearing her best clothes, her father would have bought a newspaper there, printed in Yiddish or Polish, I don’t know, and some sweets for his children. There is little now that remains of the Jewish past in Chelm … this kiosk, a cemetery — the cemetery has been cleaned, but now it is a place for addicts. He had two fears, Johnny, and I do not know which is the greater. One fear is that he should die, be killed, gunned down on a street, and that his grandmother is left to live her last years, or months, solitary, forgotten and without a carer. The other fear is for the day when she passes on, now she is in her eighty-fifth year, and who then is left for him to love and talk with? There are great fears in his life.’

Carrick watched the man’s back, thought of the old woman marooned in the apartment in Berlin, high above the pulse of the streets, and he saw Reuven Weissberg go on across the square, leaving the kiosk behind him, then pause at the top of a side-street that ran down a steep hill. The man whose fears were now identified to Carrick gazed at a building. Carrick followed the eyeline and saw a big sign on it: McKenzee Saloon. It had once been, he thought, a fine building.

‘His grandmother would have been there on those celebration days, when she was a child. It was the synagogue, the holy place, the place of worship, learning and culture. She was there … For many years it was a bank. Now it is a bar. She is the past. Everything about him is controlled by the past, his grandmother’s. Be careful of him, Johnny. As his grandmother controls him, so he controls men. I tell you, be careful of him. I think, Johnny, you are too honest a person and would not welcome the contamination of poison. He has poison fed to him by his grandmother. Believe in me.’

Reuven Weissberg was still at the top of the narrow street. A window cleaner now worked at the first-floor windows of the McKenzee Saloon. Carrick had the picture in his mind, the woman who was young and held the baby, a weapon slung loosely on her shoulder, and had brilliant white hair.

‘Has he told you about fighting, Johnny, fighting against the world? He will. He can recite stories of suffering, agonies and fighting. He knows them, is perfect in each word of them. They were taught him by his grandmother, from the time he sat on her knee to today. She has fashioned him. He is her creature. He likes best the story of when she fought. Stay with him and you will hear it.’

I did not know where he was. All through the day I looked for Samuel, but I could not see him.

I had done what I had been told to. I had dressed as warmly as was possible in the clothes I owned. I had no shame, no guilt, but I took a jersey from a woman in our barracks who was sick. I stole it. I didn’t think she would need it because she wasn’t strong enough to go out of the camp. Later, as the days became shorter and the nights colder, she would have needed it, but I thought only of that day and the coming night. I was able to ‘borrow’ a pair of boots. I told another woman, who worked in the section that converted the clothes of the dead into clothes that could be sent to Germany for those put out in the streets by the bombing, that I wanted her boots for the day and would return them in the morning. They were good boots with strong soles, and I told her I would do a shift for her in return for what she ‘loaned’ me. At first light I was ready. I wore the jersey and the boots. At breakfast, I begged for a third slice of black bread and was given it.

All through the day I was ready, but I didn’t see Samuel.

The morning passed so slowly. Because I knew, had been trusted, I sensed an atmosphere. I wouldn’t have recognized the changed mood among a few of the men. Where was Samuel? I never saw him through all the hours of the morning, or when the detail came back from working in the forest. It doesn’t matter where he was, but it was agony to me that I hadn’t seen him. I didn’t know how it would happen, or when.

It rained that day.

The darkness came early.

The lights were on above the fences and the rain made jewels of the barbs in the wire. Above the fences and lights were the watchtowers. On each of the watchtowers, with the Ukrainians, were machine-guns. I saw everything … I saw the height of the fences, the brightness of the lights and the size of the machine-guns, I saw the guards and the swagger of the Germans. I couldn’t imagine how it was possible that we — starved, exhausted, weak — could defeat them. I think I was losing faith … Then I saw Samuel.

He came out of a hut, the one beside the kitchen where the bread was made. He looked past me, then through me, as if determined not to attract attention to me or to himself. He tried to walk by me, but I held in my palm the flattened orchid he had given me and opened my hand to show him. He reached out and I saw that fresh blood was on his hands, and he was wide-eyed — as if in shock. I knew it. It had begun. I could not know how it would end.

I did not have to be told. I followed him.

I went into a hut, the one where we ate. There were, perhaps, thirty men inside and I recognized Feldhendler and a few who had been in the camp as workers all the time I had been there, and all the Russians. The speaker was Pechersky. He was on a table and spoke with the intensity of a fighter. I caught the end of what he said: ‘Our day has come … Most of the Germans are dead … Let us die with honour. Remember, if any of us survives, he must tell the world what has happened here.’

There was no applause. I looked at the faces, grim, haggard, but determination lit them. On many hands there was blood, and I saw guns in the hands of a few, and knives or axes, which were stained and wet.

Samuel whispered to me, ‘The first was Wolf. He was killed in the tailors’ shop. Then it was Beckmann in his office and with each stab on him there was shouted in his ear the name of a relative of Chaim who had died here. Chaim killed him. Unterscharführer Ryba we killed in the garage. Stay with me, trust me.’

We went out into the dusk. I think it was five o’clock. The whistle went. Prisoners lined up, were in their formation and ranks. The roll was called. I could see the fences and the gates. I didn’t know how it could be done. The women were in a group apart from the men but I kept my eyes always on Samuel. He stood in the rank behind Pechersky. In a moment of silence there was a shout. Very clear. We all heard it. A guard cried: ‘Ein Deutsch kaput’. The shooting started.

Some ran for the gate.

Some stayed in the ranks.

Some ran for the wire.

Insufficient Germans had been killed. Frenzel organized Germans and Ukrainians at the main gate.

Samuel ran to me, took my arm. There was shooting at the gate, incessant, and the screams of those hit. Samuel took me to the wire. It was laced with pine branches and easy to climb. We were between two towers. We reached the top of the wire, were together, and the barbs caught in my clothing, ripped it. He jumped down, crouched and called me. Men came down from the wire all around us. I think the few who had guns were shooting at the Ukrainians in the towers. I looked back. I remember my shock at what I saw. Many had stayed behind, like statues in their ranks.

Did they believe, those who stayed, that the Germans would look kindly on them? Did it take more courage to run at the wire than to remain in the lines for roll-call? I think half stayed, and half ran.

I came down from the wire, fell. Samuel broke the impact. Then I was beside him.

In front of us was open ground, and beyond it the forest. He held me. He gripped my arm, and I couldn’t have broken away. Others came off the wire, tumbled, regained their feet, ran.

The explosions deafened us. If Samuel had shouted in my ear I wouldn’t have heard his words. The machine-guns traversed the top of the wire, and some screamed, some cried out and some swung from the barbs. Samuel and I were the only ones who stayed at the base of the wire. The ground lifted, flew. The noise of the mines detonating was awesome, terrifying, but many still ran, driven like cattle in headlong flight, and I saw legs taken off and thrown clear, stomachs slashed open, the head of a man sliced off cleanly. That was what awaited us.

He pulled me up. He loosed my arm and took my hand. He pointed to his feet, then to mine. There was chaos around us, terror. The machine-guns were constant, the mine explosions frequent, scattering shrapnel. It was hell, at the base of the wire. He stood but was bent at the waist. Without warning, he jerked me forward. How desperate must you be to run into a minefield? So desperate. There was no turning back.

I saw some, a few, reach the trees. I saw some, many, felled in the minefield. I copied Samuel, was on the toes of those boots I had ‘borrowed’.

It was the first time in so many months that I had seen the trees of the forest, their darkened depth, and I sucked breath into my lungs. I knew what I had to do … Samuel ran. He wove, skipped and danced — and I saw then that Pechersky was ahead of him. I understood that his feet landed always where others had gone before, had detonated the mines. We went past those who were down, who had lost limbs, who held their intestines in their hands, whose faces had been taken off by the shrapnel. Where the open ground was cratered, he put his feet. I followed, dragged forward, and my boots went on to the loosened ground where his treadmarks were. He had waited, as had the other Russians, for those in panic to clear a path. We took advantage of others’ death and mutilation. We went through the minefield.

More were cut down between the minefield and the tree line.

Samuel, now, did not swerve. He ran straight, fast, bent low. I tripped once, fell, was on my knees. He did not stop or hesitate. With all of his strength he pulled me up. He held my hand so tightly.

We hit the trees.

We had fought them. The gunfire, their death camp, their world, their evil was behind us. We ran till it was muffled and distant. Rain dripped from the trees. We ran till the breath would not go down into our lungs, till we staggered. There were so many in the forest, blundering and crying. I could go no further. I said it to myself, again and again, that we had fought them. They were behind us, with their guns, fences, the Himmelstrasse and the chambers for gassing with carbon-monoxide fumes.

And I was trembling and gasping. ‘What do we do now, Samuel? What should we do?’ It would have wheezed from my throat,

‘We have to find Pechersky. We depend on him. Pechersky will save us.’

He said it with faith. He trusted. I believed him.

‘I really have to speak, Mr Lawson.’

‘If you have something to say, say it.’

The target had walked back from the summit of a side-street, had crossed the square and gone close to a slatted wooden shed that served as a shop, had come back to the agent and had seemed to whisper something in his ear, then had slapped the agent’s shoulder. The target’s arm had stayed loose across the agent’s shoulder as they had gone right and out of sight. Adrian came by them in the car and cruised to get locked into the tracking position behind the target’s vehicle.

What Lawson could recognize, what seemed a priority factor to him, was the increasing exhaustion of his team, Adrian and Dennis at the top of the pecking order for rest, but no opportunity had yet shown up for handing the beacon harness to the agent.

‘It’s the body language, Mr Lawson.’ Shrinks had paused.

Lawson said, ‘If you have something to communicate, spill it. Don’t wait for my prompt. God Almighty …’

‘Yes, Mr Lawson. What I wanted to contribute is about the body language of the agent. He demonstrates the characteristics of pure Stockholm syndrome.’

‘Get to the point.’

‘Of course, Mr Lawson. We talk about a universal strategy for victims of personal abuse. Could be hostages, battered women, incest victims or procured prostitutes. In all cases, the victims ingratiate themselves with their abuser. The victim believes absolutely in an actual or perceived threat to his or her personal safety — that’s what we call a “precursor” to the syndrome. A second precursor is the relief if a gesture of kindness, mercy, is made by the abuser to the victim — could be as little as a smile or a gentle word. The third common precursor involves the circumstance in which the victim exists — in isolation from any normal, familiar environment, cut off from contact with the outside world. Our last precursor is the victim’s belief that he or she cannot walk away, escape. All of those factors now exist for November. We have threat, we have humanity and isolation, and we have the inability to turn his back, walk off down the street towards sunlit uplands. Put bluntly, Mr Lawson, your man regards Reuven Weissberg as a more important figure in his life than you.’

The girl, Katie Jennings, drove the minibus off the square. Lawson liked what he was told, but wouldn’t show it.

‘He is, of course, Mr Lawson, a highly trained and motivated officer. I venture to suggest that nothing in the agent’s training would have prepared him for this situation. Stress factors for him will be high. Motivation will have been weakened by the factor of his being outside a net of regular contact with us. We should—’

‘Summarize — without waffle.’

‘I’ll try, Mr Lawson. Your agent has colluded with his abuser, and that is a classic symptom of the syndrome. I would suggest that his perspective on events ahead of him is not that of a serving police officer. His perspective is that of his abuser. The victim becomes, we’ve found, hyper-vigilant to the abuser’s needs.’

‘And you’re getting all that from the body language, with your viewpoint ranged from a hundred yards plus away?’ Lawson snorted sarcasm.

‘I am. The agent cannot now divorce himself from the target — a battered wife remains with a violent husband. The agent’s greatest fear is of losing the only positive relationship left him. He’s in denial of reality. It’s that simple.’

Lawson reckoned Shrinks was frightened of him. Looking into the minibus front mirror, he could see that the girl wore an expression of suppressed anger, and that young Davies, beside her, fought to hold his silence. Probably both detested him. He had the back seat to himself, and the jump seats behind him were taken by Bugsy, Deadeye, Shrinks and their luggage. He stretched his legs. They were out of the square, plunging down the hill and away from the modernized prettiness of the old town into the more recent concrete shapes of Chelm.

Lawson said, ‘Yes, very helpful. Do you want a mention in dispatches?’

‘Just trying to do my job, Mr Lawson. Getting nearer, isn’t it, whatever the conclusion will be? And that’s piling the stress on him. Difficult thing to handle in his circumstances, acute stress.’

‘Everyone, Shrinks, will be feeling the stress in the coming hours,’ Lawson said cheerfully. ‘I guarantee that stress, like piano wires pulled to break-point, will play a part in the actions of everyone involved.’

He licked his lips. Molenkov couldn’t help himself. ‘Yashkin, where we are now, is it inside the Chernobyl area?’

‘You know as much as I do.’

Their leg for the day was from Gomel to Pinsk. It would be one of the longest. On the map, Molenkov had reckoned, it was around three hundred and sixty-five kilometres. They had not rejoined the M13, and Molenkov had guided Yashkin to the side roads going south. They were on a single-carriageway road, and had crossed a long, narrow bridge over the Pripat river, were among a wilderness of uncultivated fields, sparse forestry and stagnant lakes. Where there had been villages there were only slight indications of habitation. The meltdown at the nuclear reactor on the outskirts of Chernobyl had occurred two years after the death of his wife and a year before the death of his son.

‘I know little of Chernobyl, only that the country to the north was contaminated, that there is a considerable exclusion zone, that the poison will stay for many hundreds of years and—’

Yashkin snapped, ‘And the level of radiation at Chernobyl, which is due south of us, is on average measured at 1.21 milliroentgens, and that’s a hundred times more than the natural level of radiation.’

‘Then you know something.’

‘I know that thyroid cancer is up for those who lived inside the zone by more than two thousand per cent, congenital birth deformities are up by two hundred and fifty per cent, and leukaemia has doubled. There was fall-out here. It came down in rain. I talked once with a “colleague”, an oaf from Belarus, at a conference I attended. He said that Russian territory was not affected because our air force seeded rain clouds that would have blown over Russia, used chemicals to induce premature rainfall, and prevented the radionuclides from coming down on our territory but instead on Belarus. Is that enough?’

Molenkov pursed his lips and a frown slashed his forehead. Thoughts cavorted in his mind. He could see little from the side window because the rain was beating on the Polonez’s roof, coming from the south, then flowed in rivers down the glass. The wipers on the windscreen hummed on full power. He watched the slow flight of a stork, the big wings flapping lethargically, as it traversed the road and stayed low.

Molenkov asked, ‘It reached this far, yes?’

‘What reached this far?’

‘Don’t mock me, Yashkin. Did the poison reach this far?’

‘It did.’

‘And will it last for ever, for all the horizons of time that you and I can think of?’

‘Watch the map.’

Molenkov breathed in hard. He thought of what he wished to say, how to express it. His friend of many years, his neighbour, his confidant, his partner in the enterprise, kept his eyes on the road, didn’t look at him and wouldn’t help him.

He said, ‘We worked at the place where weapons were made. The weapons, if ever used, would have spread the same poison, left the same disease in the air, in the ground. Am I correct?’

‘Wrong. We had mutually assured destruction. With MAD there was no question of the weapons being used. The safeguard against nuclear war was that they had them and we had them. It couldn’t have happened. It would have been national suicide for us and them.’

It had formed in his mind, what he would say and the action he would take. Molenkov could not have said why he had lingered so long. He took another surging, gulping breath. In his mind, pictured there, was the device in the back of the car, covered by the tarpaulin. He could have reached back, twisted, ignored the pain in his pelvis and touched it. If his hand had been able to go under the tarpaulin and under the webbing cover of the thing, and if he’d had a screwdriver and had unfastened the casing, he could have touched it and felt its living, breathing, hideous warmth. He did not reach behind him, but he pictured it. ‘What we carry, what we intend to sell, will do the same.’

‘You’re talking shit, Molenkov.’

‘It’ll make the poison.’

‘What do you want, Molenkov?’

‘I want no part of it.’

‘See if I care.’

‘Do you want a part of it?’

‘You’re too late to ask that.’

‘Stop the car, Yashkin.’

A hand didn’t come off the wheel, didn’t go to the gear lever and change down. The Polonez did not slow. The brake pedal was not pressed. Yashkin kept the car at his steady speed, fifty kilometres per hour.

It welled in his throat, and Molenkov shouted, ‘Stop the car! Turn it round! We should go back.’

Yashkin said, without anger, ‘If you want to go back, then do so. I go on. Without you, Molenkov, I go on.’

‘You couldn’t. You haven’t the strength, not on your own.’

‘I go on, with or without you.’

‘Think of your wife. Come back with me.’

Now the hand moved fast. From the wheel to the gear lever. The Polonez lurched and slowed. Molenkov saw the foot stamp on the pedal. Yashkin reached across him, opened the passenger door, thrust it wide, then jerked round, caught a strap of Molenkov’s bag and dumped it in his lap. He reached for the uniform on the hanger and threw that, too, on to Molenkov’s knees.

Molenkov climbed out. His feet went down into a water-filled pothole. He felt the damp settle in his shoes and saturate his socks. Rain hit his face, and within the first few seconds his uniform was spattered. He looked right and saw only trees on the near side and a lake on the other. He looked left and saw a wood-plank home, but no smoke came from the chimney and no washing was out.

The door was slammed after him. The car started slowly to pull away.

He had no food. He had little money in his wallet. He told himself then that he was a man of principle, not a criminal. Told himself, also, that Yashkin would go a hundred metres, find the entrance to a field, turn and come back for him. Told himself as well that he and Yashkin were joined at the fucking hip. The car had disappeared round a bend. He thought of the cold that would now have settled on his small home, and the damp because a fire had not been lit, and he thought of going back to the bed and the musty sheets, and of setting off for the street market of Sarov, spending a day searching for scrag meat and old vegetables that he could afford, and the previous day’s milk, which would be sold off cheap. He thought of the great gate and the sentries, and of the men behind it who despised him because he was a zampolit and a former political officer of the old regime. He had no other friend.

He started to walk. He didn’t go in the direction of Sarov, twelve hundred kilometres back. He followed the road the Polonez had taken.

The Polonez was, of course, round the first corner, parked at the side of the road. When he reached the car, the door was opened for him.

He threw his bag and uniform into the back, on to the tarpaulin, and dropped down into the seat. ‘Fuck you, Yashkin.’

‘And fuck you, Molenkov.’

They hugged … All around was the desolate land of the marshes and swamps where the poison of Chernobyl had fallen, but Molenkov no longer thought of it.

Adrian called, reported he had lost the target. Dennis spoke on the net, said they had lost the target and the agent, code November. Adrian then made the confession: they were both so damn tired. Dennis added that exhaustion was killing them.

Katie Jennings grimaced at Luke Davies. He grinned.

She said, with a hint of smugness, that in the minibus they had an eyeball, and Davies touched her arm, as if the success over the professionals — however sleep-deprived they might be — was cause for congratulation. Lawson said nothing, but Bugsy contributed that it was well past the time that the agent, November, should be wearing a beacon harness. Deadeye said that when the circumstances were right he’d go forward and hand over the gear. Shrinks said that exhaustion was a killer and could wreck them.

From a distance, they sat in the minibus and watched, kept the eyeball. Katie Jennings heard a rasped snore, turned sharply. Lawson was behind her, flopped back on the seat. His mouth was wide and the snore a growl. She leaned her shoulder hard against Luke Davies, then buried her face in his coat to stifle her giggles.

Davies did not acknowledge it, had the binoculars up, saw them.

They stood in the rain, back and by the gate.

Mikhail said, ‘He’s like a kid who’s been given a new toy.’

Viktor said, ‘I see him as an old man with a young whore sitting on his knee.’

Josef Goldmann said nothing but he watched Reuven Weissberg move among the stones and with him was Johnny Carrick, whom he had thought special, loyal, and now did not know him.

‘And all other toys, us, are dumped.’

‘The young whore will turn the old man away from his family, us, who have cared for him.’

Josef Goldmann hated the world, everything about it. He was forbidden to make a mobile call to his wife for fear it could be tracked. His stomach for the trading, as he stood in the tipping rain under trees without leaves at the gate, ebbed.

‘We have looked after him, helped him, worked with him, are rejected.’

‘And the Jew woman, his grandmother, the witch who has never laughed. We looked after him and her, but are ignored.’

Josef Goldmann, watching them, felt his influence slipping.

Mikhail said, ‘I don’t need to work as a servant for a kid with a new toy and that woman. I have enough. I haven’t been there but I hear Cyprus is good.’

Josef Goldmann thought of what he craved beyond all else. He thought of a life without deception, without fraud, a career of legitimacy. He was in the rain under a bare-branched tree beside a rusted gate that hung askew. He thought of the parents he met at school evenings, their legitimacy, and he thought of meetings in the City to which his deceit gave him access. He thought of staring down at the street from the first-floor window of his salon, and seeing it filled with police cars.

‘We’re all trapped men. You are, I am. Whether Johnny Carrick is the new toy or the young whore, he’s trapped too. So, I hear you both. Now answer me. Will you go to him, Mikhail, and say you wish to leave and go to Cyprus? Will you do it, Viktor? Will I? Does it only rain in this fucking country?’

They shuffled, fidgeted, smoked, and they waited as they had been told to, and the two men moved among the stones, tortoise fast, in front of them.

Carrick was led. He sensed that, long ago, all of the stones in the Jews’ cemetery at Chelm had been toppled and that some were replacements for those broken an age ago. A month after the invasion of Iraq and a few weeks before the roadside bomb had exploded, he had been to another cemetery, on the outskirts of Basra. He had held his rifle warily and had walked with others in the patrol among flattened headstones and fractured ones, had trampled in the weeds that grew there and had paused several times to read the faint, wind-scoured, sun-bleached words carved, and he had learned of young men who had died far from home and had served in regiments that had been disbanded after the Great War of which they were casualties: We shall remember them … Yes, an effort had been made here to right an old wrong and to give a trifle of dignity to the graves of the Jews of Chelm. No, the cemetery outside Basra would not have been repaired and the dead there would not be honoured.

Their feet squashed down layers of wet leaves.

They did a circuit of the graveyard.

Turning, facing the gate where Josef Goldmann, Mikhail and Viktor waited, Reuven Weissberg said, ‘You ask little, Johnny.’

‘If I talk I don’t concentrate, sir. If I don’t concentrate I can’t do my job.’

‘And you don’t ask about what I involve you in.’

‘In its own good time, sir.’

‘As yet I have shown you nothing, Johnny. But I will. I will show you what governs me.’

‘Yes, sir.’

They reached the gate. Carrick ignored the hatred shown him in the eyes of Viktor and Mikhail, did not need to note it because he had his own, supreme, protector.