Timebomb

Chapter 18

Carrick stayed close to Reuven Weissberg.

Hours were there to be killed, the sun had started to drop from its full height and the shadows of the trees were thrust on to the river. Mostly Carrick just looked at the power and drive of its flow. Reuven Weissberg had talked to him about building a church in a village outside Perm, paying for its construction, and had said it was what many did who were in business and who wanted to put something as a legacy into the community. Carrick had nodded and let him talk, had no interest in a church built by a Jew in a place he couldn’t picture. He thought the idea tacky and sentimental, but he didn’t say so and made a pretence of listening.

He watched the far side of the river.

Behind him, hidden, was the boat and the length of rope. The greater preoccupation in Carrick’s mind was getting a rope across the river, then using it as a line to cling to and heave on while they were in the boat. Pretty bloody incredible that the height of the river had not been predicted, or its strength, but he hadn’t criticized.

When he watched the far bank of the Bug it was without enthusiasm. Between where he sat, near to Reuven Weissberg, sharing the same patch of damp sand, leaning against the same wet tree trunk, and that far bank, the river careered by. He watched the far bank, the mess of sprig bushes and taller trees where the base and the roots were submerged, the coloured border marker, and tried to keep his head and his eyeline up. If he did not, he saw the river’s pace and drive, the dislodged trees it carried. If he didn’t watch that far bank, well lit by the sun, he saw the water and the debris running fast in it, and he would think of the boat, and darkness.

He was far from anything that was familiar. Back-up seemed beyond reach.

Carrick — tired, cold, wet, hungry — believed that only Reuven Weissberg cared for him.

He could make out a slight path that came out of the far trees, then dropped down to reach the water’s edge. Maybe deer used it, or pigs, or foxes. The longer he stared at the path, the better he saw it. There would be a torch flashed along that bank, and the answering light would be the signal from Reuven Weissberg that they should move along and get opposite to where they now sat.

What was being brought that would bring the big boss to the Godforsaken side of a river on Poland’s frontier? What was of such value? Not drugs — they came in bulk in container lorries. Not girls — they could be brought, he assumed, by the busload from Ukraine. Not forged passports and not bogus Rolex watches. Not computer chips and not cartons of contraband cigarettes. Didn’t leave much that could take priority on Reuven Weissberg’s shopping list.

He thought of weapons. Looking at the little path across the river, he had gone back over the weaponry he knew from days in Iraq. The improvised explosive device, which had damn near shredded his leg, could have been put together by an engineer — or a car mechanic or an electrician — in the Basra equivalent of a lock-up garage. Rocket-propelled grenades and their launchers were washing about all over Europe after the Balkans fighting. The market was saturated. Ground-to-air missiles would be harder, if they were required to bring down an airliner on approach to or take-off from Charles de Gaulle, Fiumicino, Schiphol or Heathrow, but three or four would be big bulk in their protective casings, and as much as the boat could carry, and there would have to be an easier way to do a border than in darkness and across the Bug in flood.

He doubted ground-to-air missiles were enough to bring Reuven Weissberg here, certainly not Josef Goldmann. A former paratrooper with a hole in his leg from scrapping with jihadists was hardly the man for deployment on attachment to the anti-terror people, infiltration into a Muslim community and its mosque. Not even to be considered. Didn’t matter. The Pimlico office of SCD10 had been cleared out one Tuesday morning in March two years back, had gone up to the Yard in best bib and tucker, had sat in a curtained-off area at the back of a lecture theatre with a few anonymous others and had listened to a lecture on the big three. They were microbiological weapons, chemical weapons and nuclear weapons. The lecturer had been a spook, and his name had not been given. He had not used the word if, but had talked of when. It had not made a deal of sense then, and Carrick had gone back to Pimlico and got on with reading up on the background biographies of Jed and Baz, club owners …

He thought of Josef Goldmann. Thought of Goldmann’s pretty wife, decent children, swank house, respect in the City and the social scene of smart galleries and top-grade parties — thought that only weapons of mass destruction would bring him out to this wet bloody riverbank with a forest that had been a killing ground behind him, the river and the bloody Belarus border in front. The spook lecturer, from Box 500 on the Embankment, had talked of an explosion that scattered lethal germs, and an explosion that scattered an aerosol effect of nerve-gas droplets, and an explosion that spread radiation from a dirty bomb.

Carrick could not cope with the thought of it. Did not try to. Blanked it and blocked it. Felt the warmth and strength of Reuven Weissberg alongside him.

They brought the food in two brown-paper bags. They had bought rolls, fruit and cans of Coke. It was long past midday, and it should have been the team’s breakfast.

Lawson understood.

It would have been Deadeye who had made the decision not to blurt out the bad news on a mobile-telephone link. Bad news always came better face to face, eye to eye. They had driven into the camping area, had closed the doors quietly behind them, had wandered — as if strolling in Sunday-afternoon sunshine — towards the minibus. Lawson had climbed out. Adrian and Dennis had followed him. Young Davies and the girl had come from a picnic table.

The food had been given to the girl.

Now, meeting Lawson’s gaze full on, Deadeye twisted his head and nodded to Bugsy. Bugsy had that perplexed look, which said he’d gone into uncharted territory and didn’t have a mental map for it. His fist went into his anorak pocket and emerged with the loose lengths of strapping, tangled with the Velcro, and the box hung down from them.

Deadeye said, ‘He’d dumped it.’

Bugsy said, ‘Well, someone dumped it. Might have been him, might have been one of the others. I’m not there, I can’t say whether it was voluntary or under duress, and I can’t say whether or not who he was with was aware of him doing it. It was hung from a tree. Might not have been done openly, because the last time the damn thing moved was in the night. That’s where we are.’

Deadeye said, in the flat voice that didn’t change whether it ranged across triumph or something worse than disaster, ‘There are two sets of footprints there, only two. I would assume, Mr Lawson, that it was the agent with the main target. It’s by a place where a boat was kept but a few yards from it. It’s only what I’m thinking, the agent stripped it off and left it but not where our target would have seen him lose it.’

Bugsy said, like it was a slur on his capabilities, ‘It was working well, had a very decent signal. It was going to do the job for us.’

Deadeye said, ‘He gave no indication, not at all, that he wasn’t prepared to wear it. What he’s done, it’s come out of a clear blue sky.’

Lawson pondered on it, kept his counsel and gave no indication — not a trifle — of the stampeding emotions in his mind.

Bugsy said, ‘Well, that was me out of it.’

Deadeye said, ‘The marks were of two sets of feet, clear enough in the mud. Then there was a scrape, like a flat-bottomed boat but with a keel had been hauled up from the water. It had been dragged along a path from the lake to the road. That was easy enough to follow and no effort had been made to disguise the track that was left. Then there was a road. It’s the main drag, Wlodawa to Chelm. They’d gone along it. Of course, no traces. No scrapes, at the side, no footprints. I have to guess but it can’t be a big boat. What took us so long, we went a mile up the road and looked for a trace, and a mile down the road, and we can’t find it, Mr Lawson. Before you ask me, I don’t reckon there was a vehicle involved. I’m almost certain of that. If a car had been pulled off the road and waiting there would have been fresh tyre marks, and if a car, or a pick-up or a truck, had been called up and arrived just for the loading, there would have been the stamped-down places where the boat had been and their feet while they waited. I’m thinking, Mr Lawson, that the boat was carried along the road and then they went back into the forest and towards the river. Stands to reason, they want the boat for the river. We searched for that point where they came off the road, and we couldn’t find it. I’m not happy, but that’s the way it is.’

‘Why would he do that, Mr Lawson, ditch the gear? I mean, where’s he coming from?’

First, Lawson searched his mind: there had been bad moments when he had been with Clipper Reade, the intensifying-ass-pucker moments, but nothing as desperate as the moment now confronting him. What would Clipper have done? What would have been the response of the big Texan from the Agency? Well, for a start he would have lit a cheroot and — for a finish — he would have displayed no panic. Not a vestige. He asked how they were.

Bugsy said, ‘I’m flat, on my heels — No, I’m fine.’

Deadeye shrugged. ‘What do you need us to do, Mr Lawson?’

About as bad it could get was the loss of eyeball and contact in the last hours before an operation went critical.

He acknowledged the thoroughness of what they had done, thanked them for it, and suggested — not as an instruction — that they head for the river, that flooded area where Reuven Weissberg, his cohorts and the agent had been the last afternoon. He felt hammered by what they had told him, weak and old.

Lawson smiled broadly, displayed supreme confidence. ‘Yes, head on down there and get an eyeball again. It’s where they’ll be, with their boat, at the river. On you go.’

They had left. He had watched them drive away. Now Shrinks broke ranks. ‘I need to contribute, Mr Lawson.’

‘Best that you contribute when you’re asked to.’

‘Mr Lawson, the last time I ventured an opinion, I suggested that the agent had stress piled on him — in fact, “acute stress”. I seem to detect a marked lack of interest in what has been, and is being, inflicted on the poor wretch.’

‘If your “expertise” …’ Lawson’s tongue rolled contemptuously on the word ‘… is unwanted it could be because of its irrelevance.’

‘You’ve already asked too much of him.’

‘Have I?’

‘The effect on him of what you’ve done may last with him for years, psychiatric disorder brought on by the trauma of stress.’

‘Is that so?’

‘Damn it, you pushed him there.’ Shrinks’s voice rose. Never had before. Couldn’t have recognized himself. ‘You are responsible, only you, for driving him into a condition of the syndrome from which he may not recover. Even with the best supportive intervention and the best counselling this could be a long and potentially unpredictable business. But I see no indicators of you losing sleep over the inflicting of long-term damage on this man. And now he’s screwed you. What bloody irony. You pushed him that far, into the arms of those brutal creatures, and he has rewarded you by turning his back on you. Try this one. “Sow the wind and reap the whirlwind.” That’s about the limit of your achievement, Mr Lawson. You’ve played God with a man’s mind, his decencies and loyalties, and I doubt you’ve noticed.’

There was a hoarseness in his throat, a dryness. What upset Shrinks most was that Lawson seemed not to have been jolted by his outburst. No grandiose threats of ‘never working with us again, chummy’ had been made; no conciliatory waffle about ‘Let’s sit down, get this off our chests and look for what’s best.’ Nothing. Lawson looked through him as if he did not exist, and as if his tirade had gone unheard.

He looked to the others for support, but they wouldn’t meet his eyes. Then Luke Davies took Katie Jennings’ hand and spun her. Shrinks saw that, and thought Luke Davies didn’t care a fig what he saw.

Luke held the hand firm. He said, ‘Can you think of anything useful you can do right now?’

‘Can’t.’

‘Can you think of somewhere, other than here, you’d rather be?’

‘Anywhere.’

‘It’s where we’re going.’

‘Why?’

‘It has the failure smell about it. A bad smell.’

She said, ‘I know about smells. It’s what constables experience. The old biddy hasn’t been seen for a month, and nobody’s thought to report it until there’s the stink, and we break the door down and go in first. Rats may have beaten us to it, and the maggots are hatching. That sort of smell.’

‘Come on.’ He tugged at her arm.

For a moment her heels stuck, dug in. ‘Is that a good enough reason?’

He hesitated, then blurted. ‘Absenting myself from failure is a part of it. Another part is being away from here and with you.’

He saw her eyes open wide, and then there was a mocking grin. He liked that mouth, no makeup, and the myriad little veins in her lips. She didn’t answer, but let him lead. He ran his other hand through the shock of bloody ginger hair that stood him out in any crowd. He wasn’t good with girls, women, never had been … The American in Sarajevo, Frederika, had been something of a convenience to him and he to her. There were girls, women, in VBX and there might be a meal after a film, but nothing had stuck. He took his mobile out of his pocket and held it up so that Adrian or Dennis or Shrinks would see it, stepped out and she didn’t pull back.

They walked on a forest track, and a tractor’s wheels had gouged it.

They headed for ‘anywhere’ and had no idea of where the track would lead. Far in front of them they heard the harsh whine of a chain-saw. She hadn’t spoken, but her fingers were in his.

The sun came through low, dropped, the birds had quietened, and their footfall was silent on the carpet of the forest floor. He saw the lines of trees, birch and pine, and sometimes they were bright lit by the sun shafts and sometimes they were dark and held secrets. It was where that woman had been. He remembered the painting in the kitchen, the photograph of her and her whitened hair, the child in her arms. Almost, Luke Davies would have been frightened to be among the trees — beyond sight and reach — on his own. He was not alone, had Katie Jennings with him. She hadn’t spoken, but she had that smile, not the grin, and a sort of recklessness went with the smile.

‘Tell me.’

‘I’m thinking beyond my station. I’m thinking of Lawson.’

‘He’s a bastard. He’s a—’

‘Let me bloody finish. Now, I’ve never been into your place. Nearest I’ve been is when we were all on the pavement outside. But I’m seeing him going in through the front door, and everybody who works there is looking at him and they know about his failure. I promise you, Luke, I’m not vindictive, but the thought of it is making me laugh. How’s he going to cope with that?’

‘Every piece of advice given him has been ignored. Now it’s gone belly-up.’

‘I suppose he’ll try and bluster it out.’

‘Not with me beside him,’ Davies said. ‘I’m not going down with him.’

She frowned and the smile was gone, and the laughter. She said, ‘Nothing’s for ever, Luke, is it?’

He read her. ‘You can move on. It’s not a ball and chain. You pack the bag, go to the station and leave.’

‘Yes.’

‘And maybe you finish up somewhere you hadn’t planned on. It’s what happens … and you can’t feel bad … and “somewhere” you meet someone else.’

Her hand tightened on his.

They walked on.

Neither his mobile nor hers rang.

They were near to a railway track.

Luke Davies sensed death, with him and around him as close as the darkening trees, but she had his hand. The sun slipped, shadows lengthened.

‘Should we turn back?’ he asked.

‘I wouldn’t have thought so.’

There was a knock and the door opened before she had time to respond.

She looked up. She tried to remember when last the director general had called in on Christopher Lawson’s office in Non-Proliferation — might have been a couple of months back, might have been three.

‘Hello, Director.’

‘Lucy, isn’t it? Yes, hello.’

‘I don’t have to tell you, Director, I’m sure, that Mr Lawson is away and—’

‘You don’t, no.’

So why had he come to her outer office? Her desk was placed as a strategic barrier and it blocked the entrance to the inner office. A visitor in search of Christopher Lawson could not slip by covertly and bounce her man. She was his gatekeeper and had been for more than twenty years.

‘How can I help, Director?’

He wandered across to the window. Her man, Mr Lawson, might be detested the length, breadth and on every floor of VBX, but he possessed impressive clout. The inner and outer offices allocated him, and her, and the open-plan where juniors worked, had a fine view out on to the river and across it to Millbank. He was at the window and his eye traversed the river, then came to rest on the edifices of Parliament. He turned and faced her. ‘I spoke to him this morning.’

‘Did you, Director?’

‘Talked to him on a secure line.’

‘Well, you’re ahead of me, Director, as I haven’t talked with him since he left — five days now. Wouldn’t expect to. Would you like a coffee?’

‘I would, thank you.’

She was up from her desk, and slipped to the electric kettle behind her. She’d use Mr Lawson’s personal mug, the one with the spaniels on it. It wouldn’t be out of order for the director general.

‘You see, he didn’t say very much.’

‘Did he not?’

‘I expected something more … Some detail. Crisp is what I had, crisp, brisk answers.’

She spooned Nescafé into the mug, and took the milk from the small fridge.

‘I offered him the cavalry. You understand? He was out on the banks of the Bug, a forest behind him and Belarus in front. With him is that tiny little team of increments. I asked when he thought it might happen, a collection by his targets of what he believes is being brought to the river. He said, quote, “Within the next several hours is my estimate”. So I asked if he wanted the cavalry.’

The kettle boiled. She poured water on to the coffee grains. She held up the milk carton and he nodded. She stirred vigorously. The director general had the reputation of coming unannounced to offices, then wandering the floor space, rambling and musing, not wanting interruption. She believed it was a habit he employed to clear chaff from his mind. She passed the mug, and he ducked his head with old-world courtesy in thanks.

‘Where was I? Yes … I offered him the cavalry. You see, we go back a long way. When he was young he had an American as his mentor, and when my turn came as a rookie, Christopher was my mentor. He taught me a mass of detail, also the value of a good nose and its use in sniffing, the value of instinct. I learned to trust him and his instincts. Excellent coffee …’

He was pacing now, quartering the carpet. She watched and stayed silent. He seemed not to be talking to her but to the walls, the door and the window. With Mr Lawson away, Lucy had been busying herself with his paperwork and had tidied recent papers into the filing systems — he still used documents and the computer memory was for back-up — and the director general couldn’t be accused of keeping her from something that was necessity. She thought him troubled.

‘He’s a difficult man to read, Christopher is. Anyway, I’m giving him the offer of cavalry support. We could get to him, within a couple of hours, the best of the Polish agencies, a unit of their military, perhaps American Special Forces based in-country. Certainly the whole team from our Warsaw station could be there mob-handed. If he’s right, if his assessment of danger is correct, then — and I told him — “Failure is not acceptable.” Did he want the cavalry? A rather brusque answer: “Nice offer — no, thank you.” I ask myself, why is Christopher not prepared to share the load of responsibility?’

He finished the coffee, put the empty mug down on her desk.

‘It was a blunt refusal. Why would he have declined help and the chance of boosting his role as an interceptor? My difficulty is that I can see only one reason … I’m going back a few days to when he came to see me. He told me of his suspicions, hunches, and laid it out. More circumstantial than evidence. Very frankly, if it hadn’t been Christopher, I would have rejected the propositions I agreed to. That one reason, refusal of the cavalry, has a simplistic answer that is increasingly nagging at me, irritating me. Does he believe it himself, this threat? Does he believe wholeheartedly in this conspiracy?’

Her chin dropped, her mouth gaped. She found control. ‘I really wouldn’t know, Director.’

‘Is it just a figment of his imagination? Did I not examine it with due rigour? Does he not want support because the arrival of fresh teams would lead to a lorryload of witnesses to his fantasies? Well, I suppose we’ll know soon enough. He’ll be a laughing stock if he’s failed, if it were never about to happen, and I doubt that a seasoned friendship would be sufficient cause to save him. So kind of you, Lucy, to make me coffee. I have to say that where I’m going is towards blaming myself for indulging him.’

He was gone. The door closed after him.

Herself, she had never doubted Christopher Lawson. She pushed herself up in her chair, gained a few extra inches of height and could see over the window-ledge to the river. It flowed dark, brown and steady, and she wondered what the river Bug was like, whether it was fiercer or calmer. It had been Lucy’s intention to ignore a message that had reached her that morning, offering a chance to meet at a particular place and time. Now she checked it again. She would be late, at least a quarter of an hour. She stood, tidied her desk, looked through the glass door at the gloom of Mr Lawson’s empty inner office, and her jaw was set in defiance. She locked the outer door after her, went down the corridor and past the open-plan area of Non-Proliferation towards the lift. She passed staffers but none acknowledged her. She had no friends at VBX, could not have done. She worked for Christopher Lawson.

Alison, the liaison officer, said why she had asked for the meeting, and thanked the older woman for coming. She had been about to leave the café, had finished two espressos, had gutted her newspaper, front to back.

The woman grimaced. ‘You’ll get no tales out of school from me, or anything classified. I came because I admire and respect Christopher Lawson and have felt privileged to work for him for more than two decades. I came because he spoke well of you, because he is about to be ridiculed and his superiors have lost faith in him.’

She hadn’t intended it, but a wan smile crossed Alison’s face. She thought she recognized that degree of loyalty, the same as that of the small dog her parents kept.

‘You identified an undercover whom Mr Lawson took over. The undercover is leading him, and Mr Lawson is following in his wake with his team, and you had doubts: if you had kept your mouth shut, we might not have identified the undercover, so you may have put that man — and he’s only a face in a file to you — into circumstances of extreme danger. You are agonizing … Should you have involved him? Is Mr Lawson a fit individual to run the undercover?’

She nodded, couldn’t disagree with the précis of her concerns. It was a Greek-owned café. At other tables there were mechanics, bus drivers and some mail people just off duty. It wasn’t a place where VBX officers and support workers came, and she reckoned that the location gave her credibility, that the personal assistant would talk here, not spend the minutes looking over her shoulder.

‘He is obstinate, aloof, dismissive, sometimes cruel, and he is the most effective intelligence officer in that wretched building. That is who the undercover is working for. He is honourable, he has honour, and that is not a word often echoing through the corridors of our building. I don’t know why I came …’

There were, she thought, tears welling in the woman’s eyes, little glistening marks of wet, and redness. Alison reached her hand out and laid it on the other’s.

‘I came, I suppose, to stand in his corner. Easier to speak to a stranger. The high and the mighty, the brightest and the best have concluded that the mission is flawed. Wishful thinking on Mr Lawson’s part. He’s unwilling to call for more back-up and their conclusion is, therefore, that his confidence in his judgement has gone, and further back-up would merely expose it. He was never more certain, when he left here, of the shipment coming through — never more sure of the critical importance of the agent. For him, it’s all about trust. He would not have trusted the integrity of the back-up offered. It’s his courage that makes him take responsibility — that is, responsibility for the undercover you gave him.’

Alison offered, now, to go to the counter, get a coffee and a cake or a roll. It was declined. Instead, she learned about Christopher Lawson’s refusal to take a post with one of the new beefed stations in the Middle East, or a position on one of the augmented desks tracking the Islamists and their martyr teams through Europe. She learned about a bomb, and unbridled havoc.

‘It didn’t happen, did it? I wasn’t here.’

‘Thank you for coming, Lucy. Neither of us was.’

Alison stood, picked up her handbag from the adjacent chair. A man beside her ate a cholesterol mountain of breakfast and it was late in the afternoon. She eased back the table and nudged the pram a young mother guarded as she smoked and talked with her friend.

She said, ‘Please, one more question. Is it real, the threat they’ve gone after?’

The answer was given her when they were out on the pavement and the dusk thickened round them. ‘Others may not, but I believe it’s real. If it wasn’t, Mr Lawson wouldn’t have gone there and wouldn’t have recruited that undercover.’

They split, went their separate ways. Everything the liaison officer, Alison, had done was in the name of a young man she had never met, but into whose life she had inserted.

A kingfisher had gone downriver, but had not returned. For a long time, Carrick had looked for it. Storks had flown up the river, but not the kingfisher. There was nothing else to distract him, and he thought of what he wanted to do.

It played repeatedly in his mind. It was as if, he believed, he required a target on which to vent the pent-up pressure-cooker grievances. It was what he wanted to do to Mikhail. He saw it in images: walking up to the man and having no fear of him, calling him forward, seeing his surprise at the curtness of the command and seeing him obey, lunging at him, taking on a street-fighter with the tactics of his own gutter.

And he did not care, not now, what would be the consequences of doing what he wanted — had no more thought of consequences than of helping Reuven Weissberg bring a package across the swollen river. He was a new man, changed, and did not expect the recognition of those who had known him before. He sought respect, satisfaction, and to be treated as an alpha player, and he wore a criminal’s weapon in a pancake holster on his belt.

The last shafts of the sunlight, and the final warmth from it, were on his shoulders and neck. He heard Mikhail cough again. Maybe something from those thoughts passed over his lips, came from his throat, but Reuven Weissberg looked sharply at him, was puzzled, then glanced at his watch before resuming his study of the river.

Carrick dropped his hands into the mud beside his hips and heaved himself upright. His back was to Reuven Weissberg and he faced Josef Goldmann, Viktor and Mikhail. He let his right hand drift behind his buttocks and flexed his fist, tightened and squeezed it. He had never had a street-fight, but he had seen them and knew that surprise, commitment and speed were key factors. He felt good, and it was what he wanted to do.

He took his eyeline on Mikhail and walked towards him. The man smoked, sat hunched and seemed unaware of him. He saw that Josef Goldmann shivered, could not stop trembling, that Viktor had let his head fall back against the bank, where it was steep, eyes closed and might have slept.

Carrick said, in his mind, ‘Something I want to show you, Mikhail. Over here, now.’

He repeated it. In a moment he would say it out aloud.

He did, said it, what he had rehearsed in his mind.

Mikhail looked up, languid, disinterested.

He said it again and hoped his voice had hardness.

Mikhail stood. Josef Goldmann watched, as if curious, but Viktor slept on.

Mikhail came towards him, seemed relaxed, not wary, but the shadow was on the face and Carrick wasn’t certain of it. Two more steps, then Mikhail would be close enough for the first strike with the fist.

He sucked in air. His wrist was held. He had not heard the movement. His wrist, at his back, was held tight, then twisted up high against his spine. He realized he was helpless. He was edged back, the sharp, stabbing pain in his shoulder and elbow, and could not resist. He was taken to the place beside the river where he had sat, his wrist was freed, and the water swirled past. He saw Mikhail slump again beside Josef Goldmann.

Reuven Weissberg said, in his ear, ‘He would have broken your neck, Johnny. With a broken neck you are useless to me.’

‘Where does it go?’

‘Where does what go?’

‘Life …’ Luke Davies said. ‘Us.’

‘Does it have to go somewhere?’ She faced him.

A great log had been left by foresters. Among the pines and birches it had been a rare oak, uprooted by a winter gale years back. The upper sections had been cut off and carted away, but where the trunk joined the splayed roots it had been left for the weather to destroy. Luke Davies leaned against it and Katie Jennings sat astride it. He held her hand, or she held his, and neither loosened the grip.

‘It would be nice,’ he said.

Her eyes rolled. ‘That’s a big word to use to a girl, nice, makes her feel pretty special.’

‘I think it would be good,’ he said, slowly and with care, as if taking steps on ground where cluster bomblets had rained down. ‘Yes, pretty good, if things sort of moved on, went somewhere.’

‘Are we talking futures?’ Mouth open, eyes wide, mocking but not cruel. ‘Is that where we’re going?’

‘I think it’s where I’d like to go.’

‘For a proposal of cohabitation it’s a little off the obvious. Nothing agreed, right. Nothing accepted, understood. Just conversation. Where do you live? What’s there?’

He said, ‘It’s a room in a house, Camden Town. A grotty road and a nasty house. I have a room, single-occupancy tenancy, and the rest is full of nonentities. I can’t afford anything better. Shall I do my CV, what and where I am? I live there because what I’m paid doesn’t let me get higher up the bloody property ladder. I don’t have a car, and I save on the transport fares by cycling to work and back. I eat in our canteen because it’s cheap and subsidized, and I’m working late most evenings. I’m twenty-eight, I have first-class honours in East European and Slavonic studies, I’ve been with the Service for five years, and I think what I do is important and —’

‘And you’re paid a subsistence wage, probably less than me.’

‘— and most of the guys round me, and the girls, have had a lift up, financially, from parents. I haven’t — my dad cleans office windows and my mum’s a dinner lady. I have this bloody accent, can’t lose it unless I do speech training, and that typecasts me at VBX. What I’m saying is that I work hard, I don’t have any link left with home, and I’m not on everybody’s invitation list in the section. I suppose I’m pretty lonely, and I don’t like it.’

She grinned. ‘You and your tragic life.’

‘Sorry, I didn’t mean, you know …’

‘God. I have a one-bedroom place, with a living room, a kitchenette and a bathroom not much bigger than you’d need to swing a cat in. It’s down in south-west London, where I did beat work. I’m well paid, I do all right. I like going to work each day. Remember the narrowboat?’

‘I do.’

‘It’s my dad’s. I have the run of it any time I want. Wake up in the morning, nothing but cows on the bank, and the odd rat, and quiet, and—’

‘I remember it because he was there.’

‘What did I say?’

‘You said, “Nothing’s for ever.”

Katie Jennings’s leg was hard against his shoulder. He felt her warmth, the heat in her hand. Her eyes danced. ‘I decide who goes there. Me. No one else has ownership.’

‘Do you think they need us?’

‘If they need us they’ll call.’

He kissed her. More exactly, she kissed him.

Tadeuz Komiski saw them, their bodies locked together. The search for Father Jerzy’s wood had taken him longer, and he had gone further, than he had expected.

He stopped. Where they were, the curse had taken hold of him. He stayed. They were at the place where guilt had been born. He was among the trees, unseen by them, and a child’s memories were stirred.

Lawson listened.

Bugsy hung back but Deadeye spilled it. ‘We’ve been to the river, where they were yesterday. They’d left footmarks and fag ends but — and sorry about it, Mr Lawson — they’re not there today, haven’t been, and there’s no trace of the boat. Stands to reason it was where they did the reconnaissance and where they expected to find their people on the opposite side. Not there. We backtracked up- and downstream, tried to find them that way. Didn’t. We cut back into the forest and looked for the cars. By then, have to say it, we’d little chance because the light’d gone. Mr Lawson, we don’t know where they are, don’t know where to look. We’ve lost them. Somewhere they’ll be hunkered down and waiting for their pick-up, but I don’t know where to start looking for it.’

Lawson said briskly, ‘What we need now, Deadeye, is a smidgen of luck.’

He thought he’d spoken with confidence and authority. Where did luck come from? They stood in a half-circle but away from him. He thought they had such faith, deep reservoirs of trust. He smiled at each in turn, at Shrinks, Deadeye and Bugsy, at Adrian and Dennis, and they waited on him for an answer handed down as to where luck could be gained. He realized then how long young Davies and the girl had been gone, but they were not a solution. Two more bodies would make no difference.

He turned away from them. They should not see the deep worry lines that cut his face.

His one certainty stood firm. It would be here, close to the site of the Sobibor camp, that collection would be made and delivery taken. That much he knew.

‘I give it an hour. We’ll move then. Just let the light settle a little,’ Lawson said. Anxiety squirmed in his stomach, but he summoned up the medley of confidence and authority. ‘They won’t come until it’s decently dark, I’d bet on it.’

Two kilometres back, they had worked for two hours, Molenkov doing better than Yashkin, and had shifted a tree’s lower trunk — three metres long and a half-metre in diameter — that blocked a trail into the forest. They had left an apology for a road, the only route going south from the village of Malorita. They had — together — sweated, cursed, grunted, sworn, gasped, but had moved it, and had been left with feeble strength after the log that had been embedded in winter mud was slid aside sufficiently for Yashkin to wriggle the Polonez past it. Then they had had to reverse the process. Molenkov had insisted on it. The log must be returned to its old place. It had sunk back into the mud groove it had lain in before its disturbance. They had done it, and they had fallen on each other and hugged. Neither had known who supported the other. Then they had kicked out the rigid lines of the Polonez’s tyres and used dead branches to smear the mess they had made in the mud. Yashkin had driven into the forest and Molenkov had the map on his knee. Each metre the car took them, with its petrol-gauge needle stationary at the bottom of the red section, seemed important and an unlikely bonus.

A kilometre back, the Polonez had sunk into mud on the trail. The engine had died after Yashkin had tried to accelerate out of the pit they’d gone into, then reverse out, and had failed in both. They had been there an hour. The solution, Molenkov had announced, was to make a secure base on which the tyres could find a grip. They had gathered up every branch and pine frond, every limb that the winter snow’s weight had broken off. They had brought the wood in armfuls to the trail, had slapped it down into the mud, heaved the pieces against the tyres and insinuated them under all four wheels. Then more had gone in front and been stamped down. Yashkin had started the engine, Molenkov had pushed and mud had flown. He had thought he had used the last energy he possessed, had sworn oaths at the great mound in the Polonez underneath the tarpaulin and … the wheels had gripped. The Polonez had surged forward. Molenkov had been left, a filthy, grunting, muddy wretch, on his hands and knees.

They had come off the trail and Yashkin had woven between the trees, the lower branches scraping the car’s sides.

Molenkov had his arms up as if he expected, with each lurch of the wheels, to be thrown against the dashboard or the lower part of the windscreen, and he had tried to read the map. The light was failing, and his eyes could make out only the blur of a deeper shade of green and the line of the Bug. Among the trees, off the track, the ground was firmer than it was on the trail, and they made progress — slow but steady, Molenkov thought. Almost, he had relaxed. Almost, he had forgotten.

And then there was a cough, like a fucking death rattle. It was the way his wife had gone, a cough deep in the throat that persisted for three, four seconds and then quiet. When the quiet had come, his wife was dead. The Polonez, too, was dead, engine expired.

Yashkin could be an idiot, could be precise and disciplined. He was in the middle of a forest with a car that was going nowhere and had a dry fuel tank. His response was to set the gear in neutral and apply the handbrake.

They climbed out of the car. They met at the back, and each took hold of a corner of the tarpaulin. Together, they dragged it clear. It was not done with words but from some instinctive agreement. Each reached forward and laid a hand on the covering, where the writing was stencilled and the serial number posted. It did not breathe, did not hiccup. It showed no sign of life. Again, without consultation or debate, they took the side straps and heaved, lugged, dragged the fucking thing off the tail. Yashkin locked the car.

They took their positions on either side of it.

They lifted, felt its weight.

Yashkin asked, ‘How far?’

Molenkov answered, ‘More than three kilometres. My friend …’

‘Yes?’

‘Why are we doing this?’

Yashkin stuck his chin forward. ‘To show that we can, and because we said we would.’

They went forward, towards the fall of the sun.

Carrick stared at the water, and saw only the dull flecks where the flow held debris in a swirling eddy. He waited for the moon to rise, and for a light to flash. Reuven Weissberg’s hand still rested on his coat, and they were together. The others, behind them, were apart.