Timebomb

Chapter 16

Another town. Another fine church for Catholics and another magnificence for the Orthodox, the one with elegant towers and the other with a great onion dome. Another memorial to the bravery of the Red Army soldiers who had liberated the town, and it was eroded as if the stonework had been eaten by termites. Another neat little square with the clean paving that showed a minimal amount of European grant money had reached the town, and the square had been the priority for renovation. Another street market, where the thinness of clothing and the cheapness of footwear demonstrated that the economy of this forgotten corner of the Union was wrecked. Another corner where a bank had opened, but had more staff than customers, and another pavement where kids lounged with hoods over their heads.

Wlodawa was sited on the Bug river, a triple-junction point where Polish territory met Belarus and Ukraine, and he assumed — from the map he had looked at in the car — that the frontier was in midstream.

Again, he followed, a half-pace behind Reuven Weissberg, and he had the pressure of a pancake holster, filled, on the right side of his belt. He sensed it to be a well-worn trail. He saw nothing that threatened and his right hand hung loose and relaxed against the coat pocket that hid the pancake and the Makharov. They turned off a main road. There was open ground, worn, mud-smeared, with the tracks of cars and bikes, and with split-open rubbish bags on it, and there were concrete apartment blocks.

His man stood, hands on hips. At every other moment, his man had stature and magnetic authority, but here, staring at open ground and blocks of raggedly crumbling apartments, he seemed to shrink, his shoulders to sag. Carrick saw it, and thought he recognized humility.

The rain had eased but sufficient fell on the sloped roofs of the blocks, and he saw the waterfall from two places on the nearest where the guttering was broken or blocked. But, Carrick thought, in his man’s eyes this was a shrine, and his man was a pilgrim.

Carrick did not ask for an explanation as to why they were there, why the mafiya criminal stood in front of a mess of apartment blocks, his shoulders rounded as if defiance was gone. He looked behind him, as a bodyguard on duty would, and saw the two parked cars but only Mikhail was out of the lead car, lounging against a lamppost and smoking. It was a shrine. His man was a pilgrim.

Reuven Weissberg said, ‘It was where they lived. “They” were the parents, sister and brothers of my grandmother. And where her cousins lived, her uncles and her aunts. It was the place for Jews in Wlodawa. There were small streets, with mud, not tarmacadam, and small houses. Most were built of wood, and there were shops here in kiosks. In other streets there were Polish Christians, the neighbours of my grandmother’s family. He, the father of my grandmother, was an expert repairer of watches and clocks and many came to him, Jews and Christians. His skills gave him a reputation. Then there was the war. The Jews were moved, taken to the synagogue and kept there in filth. They were treated no better than cattle. No, I am wrong, it was worse than cattle. Do I bore you, Johnny?’

‘No, sir.’

‘After many months they were moved again. I believe the father of my grandmother would have kept a few of his tools, what he could carry, when they went to the synagogue. He would have had them with him when they were moved the last time. Did you see the synagogue, Johnny?’

‘No, sir.’

‘I did not identify it for you. I did not think you would be interested in every place in this town that is important to me, that is in my blood. The street where my grandmother’s family had lived was flattened, but there were other streets where Jews and Christians had lived beside each other and they were not destroyed. Christian Poles now lived where Jews had lived, had stolen the homes. Neighbours of the Jews and the customers of my father, whose watches and clocks he had laboured over, abused the column of Jews, threw mud and stones at them. It was done here, where now there is concrete and open ground. And they were marched by Germans and Ukrainians across that bridge. Do you see it?’

‘Yes, sir.’ Carrick could see an old bridge of steel girders, had a view of it between the blocks.

‘Across that bridge. You will see today, later, where they were marched to.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘I told you, Johnny, it is in my blood. What happened here and in the forest is in the veins that carry my blood. Can you understand that?’

‘I am trying to, sir.’

Carrick thought his man, Reuven Weissberg, a prisoner of a past that had been shaped long before his birth. He seemed to see that column of humanity, men, women and children, young and old, tramping under guard past abusers and their missiles, and seemed to recognize a man who carried, perhaps in an old leather bag, the tools of his trade. Seemed, too, to see a young woman from a photograph, but her hair was as dark as the ravens over the Spey’s mouth, not pure and brilliant white.

‘I want you to know, sir, that I think I can imagine your grandmother and her family being marched here at gunpoint, and I can hear the abuse given them by those who had lived beside them, and I can feel the blows of rocks hurled at them. I can, sir.’

It was the truth.

Reuven Weissberg reached out, took the hair at the back of Carrick’s head and ran his fingers through it. Carrick had not seen him do that to Mikhail or Josef Goldmann.

He did not believe himself to be a wasp or a fly, trapped in a gossamer web, unable to break out. They walked back to the cars.

There was a long embankment, newly built, the Customs buildings, then a modern bridge that spanned the Bug. Flags hung desolate from poles and the wind could not stir them.

Davies had demanded they come here. ‘Stands to reason, doesn’t it, that a road crossing of the frontier will be here?’ Davies had said. ‘They went to Chelm, and this is the road over the border, so it’s where it will be. What do you think, Mr Lawson?’

He had won only a slow, sardonic smile; pretty damn typical of the old bastard. Then Lawson murmured about going in search of a toilet, and headed for the café.

It was the Dorohusk Customs point. It straddled the main road from Chelm, Route 12, that crossed the Bug and went on into Ukraine. The only other road links were fifty kilometres to the south, at Ustyluh, where the Bug curved to the east, or ninety kilometres to the north at Brest-Terespol. It had to be here, at Dorohusk, that the weapon — if it was more than a figment of bloody Lawson’s imagination, if it was a warhead — would be brought over the Bug. They’d be here to meet it, of course. Luke Davies stood beside the minibus door and looked at the creeping flow, the pace of wet mud on a slope, of lorries and trucks, vans and cars that went both ways along the embankment road. If it existed — there would be due warning because the targets would have parked up and the undercover would be with them — it would be on a vehicle such as those in the slow, edging motion towards the bureaucracy of the Customs checks. Their intervention might not be necessary, and that amused Luke Davies. British guys from Revenue and Customs had been on attachment in Poland to drag the locals up to speed, and the Germans had shipped in good detection equipment.

Davies had found something to focus on. A car went forward, a dozen yards at a time, a tiny four-door saloon. It might have been a Fiat, and was heading for Ukraine and it had three — yes, three — fridge-size cardboard crates perched on and bound to its roof. He thought this to be the most miserable, God-forsaken corner of the world. The town behind them had been rain-saturated,with an old tank mounted on a plinth in its centre, had oozed failure and decay. There had been life in Sarajevo, sunshine and crisp snow, mountains to get up in summer, and the start-up of wine bars and cafés; even the fought-over villages and small towns of Bosnia-Herzegovina had tried to pull themselves up after the ceasefire. Poverty ruled here, and deprivation, sheer damn drabness and rain.

Lawson had returned, chewing chocolate, and didn’t offer him a piece. Shrinks and Bugsy were in the minibus.

‘What, in your wisdom, have you decided?’

Damned if he was going to lie down. He wasn’t a bloody mongrel with a stomach for scratching. ‘This is where it will happen, if anything happens.’

‘That’s your considered opinion?’

‘It is. I don’t have, Mr Lawson, the rank or the authority to countermand you — if I did, I would — so I have to plan on the basis that we don’t have the help of the Polish agencies. Personally, I would think it could only be beneficial to be alongside the Agencja Bezpieczenstwa Wewnetrznego in this situation.’

It rather pleased Luke Davies that he could reel off the name of the Polish counter-intelligence set-up, not have to rely on the initials, but Lawson gave him no encouragement, was impassive.

‘Yes, the ABW would give us additional surveillance capacity, and firepower, and would enable the area to be sanitized. The way you’re doing it, Mr Lawson, we could be in place, we could have an eyeball, and a hundred and one unforeseens could create a foul-up and we’ve lost it, whatever it is. Don’t, please, have any misplaced ideas of me thrusting myself forward and taking flak when it’s your responsibility. Then you’ll be on your own and I’ll be cheering from the sidelines. Don’t say I haven’t fronted up with you, Mr Lawson.’

‘Put it all in your report at the end, young man, and I’m sure it’ll receive due attention.’

He saw Lawson walk away and the fist crumpled the chocolate wrapper. The paper was taken to an overflowing bin and laid on top of the rubbish. Lawson had walked through what was almost a dense carpet of cigarette packets, dog ends, empty crisps bags and other junk. Davies thought it the gesture of pomposity. His temper was rising, and his inability to rouse reaction hurt him.

‘And another thing. I heard what Shrinks said. He talked about the syndrome. I spoke to him about it. A victim of the syndrome will need aftercare, maybe hospitalization and certainly counselling. He will be traumatized and potentially scarred. It’s down to you, Mr Lawson. You’ve thrown our man, November, into the arms of a psychopathic criminal. That, too, will be in my report.’

‘It’ll be a weighty volume.’

He could have hit the man. Luke Davies could have clenched his fist, swung it back and punched his full weight quite happily and he was breathing hard, towards hyperventilation. No, no, damned if he’d lose his career for this priggish, vain old man.

He heard Lawson say to Bugsy, at the driver’s window of the minibus, ‘I think young Davies has concluded his comprehensive reconnaissance, so it’ll be safe to leave this place. It’s totally irrelevant as a location, but he’s been humoured.’

The engine started. Lawson had taken his place on the wide back seat. A door was left open for Davies. He stamped to it. He didn’t understand where, if not here, a contraband package of the size of a warhead — if it existed — could be brought across.

Mikhail had a GPS wedged between his legs. It bucked when his feet moved on the pedals. With gum, he had stuck a scrap of paper on to the dashboard at the base of the wheel, but the characters scrawled on it were in Cyrillic. Carrick couldn’t read them. They were off the main road.

The track was deep-rutted, sandy soil. Trees pressed close to it, broken only occasionally by small fields in which the grass had no goodness. Carrick thought the snow had thawed only days earlier. Small houses were in the trees or at the fields’ edges, and there was a cross of white-painted stone with its arms broken off. The wide nests of storks were on high poles.

He had seen lakes on the left side, wide and rippled by the wind. Reuven Weissberg had not spoken. Neither had Mikhail.

Carrick could see a wide expanse of water through ranks of birch trees that sloped down to it. Mikhail passed the GPS back over his shoulder, then the paper with the numbers. Carrick understood. The numbers were longitude and latitude co-ordinates, and now they matched the GPS reading. An oath was spat behind him. Doors snapped open.

They tripped down the slope, swerving between the trees, and reached the water’s edge. Carrick was not called and hung back. Josef Goldmann and Viktor came to him. Carrick swung to face them and saw Josef Goldmann shake his head slowly and sadly, as if it was a moment of defeat, and Viktor grimaced as if to indicate that the problem was not his, or the solving of it. The water stretched away, and Carrick saw the tops of fence posts jutting up, and on the far side of the water a dense tree line and in it a place of bright colour. He squinted to see the source better. There was a red post. He understood more.

He understood about rain, about floodwater rising over fields, about frontier markers, about co-ordinates given for a meeting-place.

Carrick would go to Reuven Weissberg when he was called, not otherwise. Understood that they had not taken cognizance of the flood-waters rising in Ukraine and filling the Bug river far beyond its capacity. He heard Reuven Weissberg’s howl. The volleys of his swearing seemed to bounce away over the water as if flat stones were thrown and skipped. Beside Carrick, in his good coat, Josef Goldmann sat on wet sand and leaves, and held his head in his hands.

Carrick walked away, stepped carefully over the loose, sodden ground, and took a place among the trees. He’d thought that the banks were steeper less than a quarter of a mile from where he was, and that where the banks were steeper the river was deeper, faster and better confined.

Storks came upstream, flew prettily with a slow wingbeat, but they veered off when confronted with the oaths, blasphemies, obscenities of Reuven Weissberg.

He had a large-scale map of the place. The Crow had driven his hire car south-east from Hamburg and he was out in the depths of the Lüneburger Heide. The instructions given him had guided him to a point north of the town of Münster and west of Ebstorf. He turned into a car park.

There were the skeleton frames of swings and kids’ slides ahead of him, and near the entrance to the car park was a wooden-faced toilet block. Just beyond the gravel-stopping area a rail prevented vehicles going further. One car was there, its interior light on, engine running, fumes billowing from its exhaust, but the toilets were padlocked and the play area was deserted.

His headlights moved on the swings and slides, the toilet block, flitted over the expanse of gorse and bracken and caught the bare branches of birches at the end of their reach. Then they came to rest on the other car. The Crow’s lights had no power because the late afternoon was not yet evening, and he had only a marginal glimpse of the man in the driving seat. He thought he was young, cleanshaven, with neatly cut hair, but it was only an impression. He came to a stop about twenty-five metres from the other car but on the same side of the parking area, and switched off his engine.

The quiet fell on him.

He knew little of quiet. The greater part of the Crow’s life was lived among the deafening action of major construction sites. To be heard above the roar of dumper trucks, excavators, bulldozers, pile hammers driving down foundation columns, it was usual for him to shout and for that harsh voice to resonate; his voice was heard throughout the big building developments of the Gulf. When he went to Pakistan, to the crowded towns and cities of the North-West Frontier, it was his habit to hold his meetings and exchange information in the noisiest, most crowded bazaars. He was at home in noise, bustle and confusion. He moved on the car seat to ease a slight stiffness, and the squeak of the springs rang in the interior. So quiet … He wound down the window. More quiet flooded round him.

He had no photograph and no name. The Crow knew only that the man was from the subcontinent, had no facial hair and was in his early thirties. He had been given a sentence to start, and the contact would complete it.

He strained to hear, but there was only the low purr of the car’s engine along that side of the parking area. They could be in the gorse, or the bracken, or in the dunes where the birches grew, or behind the toilet shed. They might have weapons, high-velocity sniper rifles and low-velocity machine pistols, trained on the two cars. He approached, and knew a moment of maximum danger. He knew of no operative — as experienced as himself, or as inexperienced as he expected the contact to be — who did not dread the ‘cold’ meeting with a stranger. Then the chance of compromise was greatest, and of ambush, arrest and the nightmare of interrogation. It must be done. His heart pounded. The Crow was a survivor, long term with the Organization, had adapted from the disciplines of the old central authority of the sheikh and his inner circle and taken on the broken cellular system with cut-outs and fire-walls. But he felt the hammering tension in his chest as he opened the car door.

Cold wind hit him. Rain specked his cheeks. He shivered. He wondered if they watched him and if they had guns aimed on him.

He walked towards the other car, and the light around him was fast fading.

The window was lowered.

The Crow spoke in Arabic: ‘Where was the cave in which Gabriel appeared to the Prophet …?’

He said what he had been told to say, said it exactly in the Arabic that was so foreign to him. ‘The cave in which Gabriel appeared to the Prophet was in the mountain of Hira that is near to the holy city of Mecca.’

Sak hoped he had pronounced it correctly. He had rehearsed it endlessly while he sat in the car in the parking area on the heath.

He saw a man with lined skin, thin lips and scars on his face. The hands extended to him were rough, calloused. Sak had thought that the man he would meet, who held seniority, would have the appearance of a scholar, an intellectual, a thinker and a hero. His fingers were crushed briefly in the fists of a labourer — and the voice was frightening. The words had been croaked at him.

He had waited for three hours, had agonized at the isolation of the heathland. No children had come to play here, no hikers or dog-walkers, and the fears in his mind had multiplied like bad dreams. They had stacked up, one after another. His fingers were loosed. Three hours … The man turned away. Three hours, and the contact moment, already, was broken.

‘Please, what should happen?’

‘We rest, we wait.’ The man spoke over his shoulder. ‘We wait until they come.’

‘When will that be?’

‘They make their collection in the morning before dawn. They should be here at the end of tomorrow, but perhaps before.’

It was said like a dismissal, but Sak pressed: ‘For the night, do I come to your car? Do you come to mine?’

The man had not turned. ‘And you see my face better, you hear my voice better, I see your face and hear your voice? No … And we have no names, no life histories. We work and we part.’

Sak felt as if he had been kicked. The man went to his car, reached on to the back seat and lifted clear a big plastic bag, well weighted. When he returned to Sak he had adjusted his headscarf so that his cheeks and mouth were obscured. The bag was dropped through the window on to Sak’s lap.

He was abandoned. Often he would look across the empty space at the other car, but he never saw movement in it before the dusk thickened. He sat in the car, trembled and thought that, at last, the war he had been recruited to was real, touchable. He held the package close but didn’t open it.

They were out on their feet, Deadeye had reckoned, but they’d done well. Now Adrian and Dennis would be in the car, one sprawled out across the back seat, the other wedged against the wheel, the handbrake and the gear lever, and they’d have crashed. They’d brought Deadeye to within a half-mile of the river. Beside the car he had slipped on his camouflage coat, then threaded sprigs and branches into the cloth slots. He wore a woven mask over his face. Deadeye had checked his appearance in the side mirror of the car and been happy. He’d gone forward.

He’d recognized that limping walk.

He’d seen the agent sidle away from the cars and the Russians, had recalled the little bastard he’d jumped on the step of a City of London office block, and had watched him move upstream, then settle and take a position against the base of a tree trunk. Deadeye had seen a kingfisher flash past, low over the water, a spark of colour in the gloom.

Time to do the business.

He did a long loop behind the agent. He would approach from the far side, away from the Russians and the main man, the target, who was still at the bank, but whose cursing was now sporadic, not on automatic. Far back in the trees, Deadeye walked quiet and easy on the balls of his feet. Coming closer, losing the dense cover and the darkness, he was bent double, minimizing the shape and silhouette of his head and torso. He tested each footfall and had the sensitivity in his toes, through his boots, to find dead branches that a sprinkling of old leaves might have covered. Shape and silhouette were important, but sound was as big on Deadeye’s check-list.

When he was within fifty yards of the agent, Deadeye went down on his hands and knees. It would have been best to use the good old leopard crawl, but that would have disturbed too much of the detritus on the forest floor, and he’d have made a noise like a damn pig rooting. He still had the suppleness in his elbows, shoulders, pelvis and knees, good at his age, to match a crab’s advance, and his stomach was held at a constant couple of inches above the leaves and twigs beneath him. He couldn’t see the agent’s face, only the top of his arm and his kneecap.

He had learned to survive off cold meals-ready-to-eat, to wrap his faeces in tinfoil, to defeat the interest of sheep, cattle and farmers’ dogs, to be a hidden creature on the move.

He reached the agent, was behind him.

‘Don’t make a fracas, mate,’ Deadeye whispered.

The head twisted, eyes raked him.

‘Don’t jump, shout. Keep still.’ He pulled the mask netting off his face. ‘That’s right, mate, nothing sudden and nothing loud … like nothing’s happening.’

The package, light, narrow cloth straps and the box, which was the size of one for safety matches, had been snug in his pocket. He lifted it out.

‘Now, mate, without a fuss, swing yourself round a bit, body this side of the tree.’

The agent did. Well, that was a shock for Deadeye. He’d seen the man at a distance — in Berlin, in Warsaw, in Chelm that morning and in Wlodawa that afternoon — but it was the first time he’d been up close to him since the pavement in the City. God, he’d bloody aged. ‘That’s good, mate. Now your coat off, easy movements, nothing sharp.’

The agent had that haunted look in his eyes, a pallor on his skin, and the lines at his mouth were deeper set. Then the light was in the eyes, and they blazed.

‘Look, mate, I don’t have time to mess. Just get the coat off.’

The straps and the box, the tracker beacon were in Deadeye’s hand. The eyes were on him, recognition knotting the forehead, but the fingers fumbled for the jacket fastenings.

‘You were, I saw you — you …’ A stammering voice.

‘I was, mate — doesn’t matter. That’s right, coat off and shirt open.’

‘In London, you were … The gun. You tried to—’

‘Nothing’s what it seems, mate. I didn’t try much. It was you did the action. Now, arms out.’

He reached inside the shirt and started to thread the straps of the harness across the agent’s spine and over his shoulder.

‘You fired twice, you tried to kill …’

‘Easy. You gave me a bloody great kick in the goolies. Not black still, but bloody yellow.’

‘You fired twice. It was to murder—’

‘You know nothing, mate.’

‘Two bloody shots. I know about that.’

Deadeye grinned. God, the agent was an innocent. He shifted him, worked the straps round the spine, then tightened them for the Velcro to grip. And when the agent shifted, Deadeye saw the pancake in the belt, and the butt of a handgun. God, the agent was an innocent and had gone native. Didn’t think Mr Lawson would like hearing that November had packed a weapon provided by the bad guys, wouldn’t like that at all.

‘That’s it, nice and steady, just fastening it up. You’ve led the surveillance a fair old dance. They can’t keep it up, have to kip, so we need the tag on you. Very nice, good fit.’

He eased his hands back. Didn’t like the handgun, and Mr Lawson wouldn’t … The harness was close to the agent’s vest, and he smelled — and Deadeye smelled. Probably they both smelled equal to well-hung ducks, or like the badgers’ carcasses that were tossed into the ditches alongside roads. He saw anger build in the eyes.

Wasn’t for Deadeye to button up the shirt and refasten the jacket. ‘So, mate, that’s it. Oh, so’s you know, we’re all with you. It’s a good job you’re doing. Keep at it, mate.’

The hiss in the voice. ‘You tried to kill my boss. You fired twice. He was dead if I hadn’t intervened. I could have taken a bullet. I was unarmed, my boss was — I reckoned it rivals, hoods, mafiya, not my people. Two men, defenceless … That makes you a right bloody coward.’

‘Dead? Ooh, yes. Coward? Right you are, mate. Great imagination.’ Those who knew him, had worked with him, didn’t regard Deadeye as chatty, thought of him as a man of few words, usually necessary ones. Not just Adrian and Dennis who were tired. Deadeye was too. Hadn’t slept properly in four nights, hadn’t slept at all in the last forty-something hours, and was pretty much at the end of his tether.

‘Imagination? The weapon discharged twice.’

Deadeye had the agent’s shoulder in his fist. ‘That was blanks. Didn’t you know that? Thought you were a paratrooper. There was nothing real. Only thing real was the kick in my goolies, and the bruises. The worst the blanks could have done was singe you. It was to push you, give you the shove into their arms. It worked, just as the guv’nor said it would. Don’t call me a coward.’

The agent stared at him and it was like the light died in those eyes, and the anger.

Deadeye had the receiver box in his hand and a green light flashed. Had he tweaked the volume he would have had a constant bleep. Good signal, strong.

He was gone.

On hands and knees for the first fifty yards, bent low for the next hundred, fast on his toes and the balls of his feet till he reached the car. They were both snoring gently. Deadeye put the receiver on to the grille on the dashboard, beside the satnav. He crawled into the back, eased a bit of space for himself from Dennis but didn’t wake him. He closed his eyes and let his head drop. The bleep was good, comforting.

Yashkin had set himself a target, a challenging one.

The target of Major (Ret’d) Oleg Yashkin was to find, that evening, entertainment in the Belarus city of Pinsk that would change the mood, ease the melancholy, of Colonel (Ret’d) Igor Molenkov.

The light had dropped and the rain had not lifted when Yashkin drove the Polonez into the inner streets of the city. His first impression: Pinsk was a pit. He said, with bogus cheerfulness, ‘I reckon it looks a fine place.’

‘You must be blind,’ Molenkov growled. ‘It’s a shit-hole.’

‘A fine place, and one where we’ll find a meal, a bar, somewhere to sleep for three, four hours before we move on.’

‘You think, here, we’ll find a good meal without cockroaches in the kitchens, a good bar where the glasses have been decently washed that’s not for whores to work in? You’re optimistic. What do we know of Pinsk?’

‘A definition of optimism: “Whatever is, is right.” I was told that by Poliakoff, the academician in theoretical physics in my time. It was how he coped with the regime, pressures, then the scaling down in resources. The quotation is from the German philosopher, Leibniz.’

‘It’s shit. I repeat, what do we know of Pinsk?’

Yashkin could have told him what he’d read in the guidebook when he’d planned the legs of the journey. Pinsk was on the confluence of the Pina and Pripat rivers, had been a Slavic centre in the eleventh century, sacked by Cossack marauders and the captured wounded buried alive. A canal linking the city to the Vistula river and the Baltic Sea was in disrepair, but it had the church of St Barbara and the Franciscan monastery … but he didn’t know where they could eat and drink.

‘I know nothing, except that we must eat something, then sleep a little and move on.’

‘Yes, yes,’ Molenkov said heavily. ‘And after that we must make our delivery.’

Yashkin found a parking place at the edge of the old town. It was dark, poorly lit. In front of him was the start of what he presumed would be a network of narrow streets. He saw few cars — and those that were there sped past — and fewer pedestrians, who were hurrying as if anxious to be elsewhere. He looked for neon signs advertising food and drink, and a hotel that would have secure lockup garaging, and saw only shadows. The schedule, to be kept to, allowed for a meal, a drink or three, a short sleep, then the last section of the drive west. The rendezvous point from the code message was now — Yashkin estimated — a mere hundred and thirty-five kilometres ahead. He stepped out of the car, went to the back and unlocked the tail hatch.

He gazed at the bulk of the tarpaulin. He reached inside, past their bags, wriggled his hand under it and let it lie on the canvas coating of the Zhukov. He was smiling to himself. Had he expected to feel its warmth? Of course not. Was he certain he hadn’t expected to register on his fingertips the evidence that it lived? Well … no, not certain. He understood and was tolerant of the doubts, hesitations, confusions that battled in Molenkov’s mind. Molenkov had not lived with the beast for the past fifteen years — it had not been in his garden, under lettuces and carrots, cabbages and potatoes in summer and under the winter snow, it had never been on a cart pushed by conscripts under Molenkov’s control, going through the security of the main gate at Arzamas-16. He took his hand from the roughness of the canvas, strewed sheets of newspaper over the uniforms to hide them, then slammed the hatch. He locked the Polonez, walked round the car and tested each door, satisfied himself that the vehicle was secure and offered no target of opportunity to thieves.

Molenkov was up the street and called, ‘Yashkin, up here, on the left. I think there may be a place.’

Yashkin wondered if they could eat fish there, or whether Pinsk was too near to the zone of Chernobyl and that part of the Pripat river. He would like some fish — carp or bream, but a pike would be best, with herbs … A dream. Yashkin would eat anything, and wash away the taste with beer — was there a local brew? Food occupied him, and drink. He felt the acute stiffness in his hips and lower back from that long leg, and the legs he had driven in the previous days. He did not look around, was not alert, had no suspicions. The street was empty except for Molenkov and a distant light in garish red and green. He did not ask himself why it was empty and what district of Pinsk he had come to.

He remembered. Now Yashkin remembered what the book had said in the library reading room in Sarov. Beer was indeed brewed in Belarus — three beers. Now he could recall the names of only two: Lidskoe and Krynitsa. He struggled to remember the third, and he was ten paces from Molenkov.

‘Age, my friend, the ravage of age. I can’t name all the Belarus-brewed beers, only two of three. One escapes.’

He would have expected Molenkov to give him a finger of derision, to laugh at him or curse the irrelevance of his memory difficulty, but he saw, instead, Molenkov sag to a crouch, his mouth wide open as if to shout, his fists raised. The blow, from behind, felled Yashkin.

He was clubbed. The impact point was between the back of his neck and the centre of his left shoulder-blade. The breath sang from his throat. He gasped, but had no voice. His legs were kicked from under him. He collapsed, sprawled on the darkened pavement. Two men came past him.

He could barely distinguish them. They closed on Molenkov. Yashkin had no strength and less will to fight. Didn’t think, had he wanted to, that he could have struggled to his feet and gone to his friend’s aid.

Molenkov fought them.

His eyes welled, but he was able to blink hard enough to keep back tears, but the pain was a cruel ache that spread down his arm, up his neck and along his back. Maybe in Molenkov there were faint stirrings of the memory of an unarmed combat course in his early days as an officer recruit in State Security. Maybe, before going to the arsehole spying role of political officer, Molenkov had been on a gymnasium mat and shown how to throw men around, near break their arms, legs, whatever. Yashkin could only watch, couldn’t intervene.

They laughed. The two bastards laughed.

They stood away from Molenkov for a moment, and their laughter — more a fucking giggle — rang out on the street. Molenkov confronted them, dared them to advance on him, but the crouch posture made it seem he was about to crap and his hands were raised, like they did in bad movies. They laughed one last time, then went in on Molenkov. Punches broke through his guard, and the short cosh swung down. Molenkov slumped, and the boots went in. Still he fought them. They were over him, fucking hyenas, and his legs thrashed at them. He must have bitten one because there was a stifled scream, then an obscenity, then a shower of blows. Yashkin thought it brave of Molenkov, and didn’t know whether he would have dared to do the same. They were bent over his friend, and Yashkin saw the wallet held up. Then one broke away, came to him and knelt over him.

Now Yashkin knew he would not resist, not imitate his friend. He was curled up, and his head was hidden by his hands but he could see through his fingers. Hands came into his coat, searched, pried, and found the fold-over wallet his wife, ‘Mother’, had given him as a May Day present thirty-one years earlier. It was taken, and the man stood. The smell of his breath, beer and nicotine, faded, but he saw a guy with a leather jacket, black, a tattoo on the neck, and a shaven head that the rain danced on.

He realized, and it came hard, that they were not any more a colonel and a major of State Security. They were two old men who did not have the wit to protect themselves in a strange city — fucking Pinsk. Their wallets were opened, the cash was taken out with the credit cards — not that they would be of any use in Pinsk — and the bastards took the time, had the arrogance, to count the money. Even divided it.

Their emptied wallets were dropped on the pavement.

The bastards did not run to get clear; they walked. They did not look back, as if they had left behind them nothing that might threaten.

He did what he was capable of. He crawled to his friend. He took Molenkov’s head in his hands and listened to the moan of breath sucked between swollen, bloodied lips.

Molenkov slurred, ‘What did you say “optimism” was?’

Yashkin said, ‘I said, quoting Leibniz, “Whatever is, is right.”

Molenkov staggered to his feet, and Yashkin supported him. The one-time zampolit said, ‘I have a few coins in my pocket, enough for the toilet cleaner, but all my banknotes were in my wallet.’

‘I have some coins in my pocket, and my wallet is empty.’

‘What else is near to empty, my friend, if not quite?’

‘I don’t know.’

Each now held the other upright, breathing hard, seeking to control pain. What was worse than pain — Yashkin’s view — was the humiliation of what had happened.

Molenkov tried to crack a smile, which hurt and his teeth ground together. He mumbled, ‘It will be hard to be optimistic — “Whatever is, is right” — but we need money to fill the fuel tank, and we’re against the red, very near to it. We have no money to buy fuel. Maybe enough for bread, but not for fuel.’

He sagged. Molenkov would have gone down again, on to the pavement, had Yashkin not held him. Yashkin took him back up the street and, near to one of the old churches, found a bench. He could see the car from there. Molenkov slept first, snored through his weeping, thickened lips, and Yashkin knew he would follow him.

He remembered it … He rejoiced. Yashkin remembered that the third brand of beer brewed in Belarus had the Alevaria label but Molenkov slept and snored and he didn’t wake him.

He heard a whistle, then his name was called.

Carrick did not know how long he had sat in darkness with his back against the tree, but the stiffness was locked in his hips and knees, and his balance almost betrayed him as he stood. He had to grasp the tree trunk to stop himself sliding down and away.

The whistle, then the call, had come faintly, but both were foreign sounds, recognizable against the constant rumbling murmur of the river. The clouds had broken. A moon flitted in the gaps and then there was light on the water. The rain came in spasmodic bursts and he was drenched from sitting against the tree above the Bug. He thought that if he lost his footing and went into it — if he went under — he would be lost. He might panic, open his mouth and swallow a stomach and lungful of water, might have his head hit by a submerged branch and be stunned, might be so disoriented that he swam for the centre of the river where the currents were fiercest and not for the bank where he might catch a root or a rock in his fist. If he went in, chances were that he was gone.

He started out along the bank, headed for where the whistle had come from. Deep in thought, Carrick had wiled away time. The harness was tight on his skin and the vest under his shirt, sweater and coat, while the box pinched the flesh at the small of his back when he moved.

In the darkness, he groped back towards Reuven Weissberg. Almost careered into him. Was a yard from him when the moon’s light hit his shoulders and lit his face.

‘What do I do, Johnny?’

‘Tell me, sir.’

‘They come to the far side.’

‘You meet them on the far side, sir?’

‘Meet them, then take back what they bring. Lift it across the river … I had not thought of the flood. I was going to use a rope between trees on their side and our side. I had not considered the flood. What do I do?’

Alone against the tree, while dusk had gone to evening and dullness to black, he had thought of the command in the warehouse that Mikhail back off, of the kiss on the cheeks beside the Vistula under the walls of the Stare Miasto, of the trust given him and the weapon handed to him … had thought of the friendship.

For a moment Carrick pondered. He filled his lungs, and didn’t realize that the scales tipped further. There had been a week on the Brecon mountains in a tent bivouac, way up north from Merthyr, and there had been one of those shite courses for leadership evaluation. Carrick’s platoon had been tasked to do the humping for the officer candidates, and a river was in spate. The winning team had had an officer — not the usual Rupert idiot — who had called the best solution, the only time he had spoken. Carrick remembered.

‘How big is what they’re bringing, sir?’

‘Perhaps fifty kilos. The size would be nearly a metre high and nearly a half-metre across. Then I assume it has extra protection round it.’

‘Can it get wet?’

‘I don’t think so. That cannot be risked.’

‘Can the men who are bringing it take responsibility for getting it to this side?’

‘No. They are old.’

Carrick remembered how the officer had planned the crossing of a river in spate in the Brecon mountains. He asked, ‘Could you, sir, find a small boat?’

‘I think I have seen one.’

‘It’s a small boat we need, sir, for you and me.’

And Johnny Carrick, beside the Bug river, which was huge and flooded with the rain falling on central Ukraine, did not see that his loyalties had blurred and slipped.