Timebomb

Chapter 19

Carrick felt the cold around him. He scanned the bank for a light.

With the darkness, Reuven Weissberg had been decisive: the boat had been dragged from cover and was beside them with the coil of rope. The instructions had been given for Viktor, Mikhail and Josef Goldmann to spread themselves out, take the positions at hundred-metre intervals, but that evening they were ordered to be downstream of himself. Carrick was told that Reuven Weissberg and he were at the best place for a crossing, where the flow was fastest but the river narrowest. He sensed certainty in the man beside him that the delivery would be made.

Carrick would have sat in the quiet that was threatened only by the rumble of the river, owls’ cries and the motion of the high branches behind him. He did not need to talk. He was numbed by tiredness and hunger. Reuven Weissberg talked to him, and, if he had wished to, he could not have escaped the purr and persistence of the voice alongside him.

He wanted it over, done with, wanted to see the light, make the crossing and bring back what was bought.

The voice dripped in his ear.

Reuven Weissberg said, ‘I could have arranged, Johnny, for it to be carried up north to the Finnish border, or taken into the Kaliningrad oblast, into Latvia or Estonia, because there all the frontiers leak. It could have gone into Ukraine far to the south or to a Black Sea port. I have the connections to have collected it at any of those places … but it had to be here, Johnny.’

Only blackness and lines of deep charcoal grey were in front of Carrick. He couldn’t see the water, only hear it.

‘From the time I was a child, Johnny, I have known of this place. She did not, but she could have taken a knife and used its tip to carve its name on my chest or my forehead. When I was a child, in Perm, when I lived first with my grandmother, I knew this place, the paths and huts inside the fences and the tracks in the forest better than I knew the route to the block where we lived and the streets around it. I could have walked from the hut where the clothes of the dead were sorted and the hut where the cut hair of the dead was graded and the hut where the valuables were parcelled, and I could have gone to the Happy Flea or the Swallow’s Nest or walked on the Road to Heaven. If I was late for school, I ran. I was a child and was late for the bell at school, but I did not think of punishment from a teacher. I was always running from the fence through the minefield, then through the open ground and the machine-guns fired, and I was running through the trees in the forest. If I fought in the yard at school, it was not against an older child who tried to keep me from his customers over whom he had made a roof, but I was one of those who waited in hiding for the German officers to visit a place that it was routine for them to come to, and I imagined I hacked with an axe and stabbed with a knife. Everything about me was the creation of my grandmother. It was from this place.’

He waited and watched and did not see a light, and constant with the voice was the river’s unbroken surge.

‘I am shaped by it, Johnny. When I was a child she told me of it, and I sat at her knee. When I was a man, she came into my room before I slept. She would bring me a drink. She would not sit on the bed but would stand in the darkness of the room, not moving, and she would tell me of what happened here to her. You cannot free yourself from it. Man and child, after the door had closed behind her and whether or not I switched a light back on, I could not be free of it. No part of the story is better than another. It is a slide towards despair. The man does not exist to whom I am in debt. She was out of the camp, was with Samuel, was in the forest where dragnets closed on them. One enemy? A German enemy only, with a Ukrainian ally? No, Johnny, many enemies. Vultures circling to find food. My blood carries no debt to any man.’

We had made love that morning. For him it was the first time, and for me, the first time that it had been meaningful. It was after the dawn. We had slept on the forest floor and the rain had fallen on us, but we had slept and had held each other for warmth through the night. I think we were too tired to have done it in the dark and it was better, then, to sleep. The morning had come.

In the night the forest had been quiet except for owls, the bark of a fox and the fall of the rain. The wind had thrashed the trees. We had some shelter against a big pine. I wanted him to do it … Germans came near to us, and had dogs, but the rain had killed the scent we had left and the wind would have covered what tracks we had made. I think we were now five or six kilometres from the camp. They were in a line, and their officers could not ride their horses because of the denseness of the trees so they led them. The end of the cordon line they made would have been less than fifty metres from where we hid, and we held each other close. Samuel had whispered to me that if we were seen we would run together. It would be better for us to be shot than taken and herded back to the camp. And they were gone …

So we lived. To celebrate, two rats that the dogs had not found, we made love. He knew what to do, he said, because it had been talked of endlessly in the unit he had been with. Always they had talked of it. He was gentle with me. I wanted to do it, but was frightened … I was in a forest, I was hunted, I had lived more than a year in the shadow of death, and it was ridiculous to be frightened of love. He opened the clothing on my chest and touched me, and as he touched me I felt the wetness coming. It did not matter to me that the rain dripped hard on us. He had lowered his trousers to his knees, and I had lifted my skirt, and he had taken my hand and had guided me to hold him. It did not hurt when he came into me. I had thought it would, but it did not. The only sensation I felt was love, no writhing pleasure. It was love. I buried him in me, squeezed my muscles, held him, and did not want him to leave me. It did not last long, but I told myself I would remember each moment of it. He was spent. He was more tired than I after it. I held him close to me, and I could see his white buttocks and they had the marks on them where my fingers had been. His head was against my chest. It could have lasted for ever … Those minutes, gripping him and holding him, were the only ones in more than a year that I had lived. In those minutes the shadow of death was gone. They did not last.

Minutes of love were snatched. Death took them.

Men came. They were not Germans, not Ukrainians. They were of the Armia Krajowa. The first to see us shouted that he had found ‘Christ killers’ from the camp. Others came running. We could not run. Samuel could not because his trousers were at his knees and my old knickers were at my ankles. We were trying to cover ourselves. I was a Pole, Samuel was a Russian from the army attempting to liberate Poland, and they were Poles. To them — partisans in the forest who were from defeated units of the Polish Home Army — we were Jews and as much of an enemy as the Germans. They would have shot us, then and there, but did not — I believe — for fear of the noise of a gunshot. There were perhaps a half-dozen of them, and the leader was a bear of a man with a great beard. He stood over us, his legs apart, took the bayonet from his belt and fastened it — I heard the click, metal on metal, of the action. Then Samuel tried to save me. He fell across me. We were fighting each other for the right to protect the other, but Samuel had more strength than I. He was across me, covering me, and I felt the blows to his body as he was stabbed. Then there was a whistle, a signal. Again there was the shout of ‘Christ killers’, and they were gone. Perhaps they thought the Germans were close. They were around us. Then there was the emptiness of the forest.

I examined him.

He was conscious.

He was bleeding in many places, his back and sides. If the whistle had not blown the man would have had time to kill him, but the whistle had blown. He was in huge pain. Any movement hurt him. He said then that it would have been better if we had died on the fence or in the minefield. He thought himself too severely hurt to move, and tried to urge me to leave him and go on, further into the forest, alone. And the rain fell on his back and the water was reddened. I didn’t know what to do. I was against the tree and he was across me. I had my shirt, my blouse, against the wounds. My chest was bare but I didn’t feel the rain or the cold, only his pain. I wasn’t strong enough to move him — if I had been able to move him I didn’t know of anywhere I could take him.

I saw the child.

A child, a boy of five or six, stood among the trees and watched us. He had clothes on that were little better than rags. I thought him to be the child of a peasant family. He stood with his hands behind his back, and the look on his face was curiosity. I called to him to come closer so that I could speak to him, but he wouldn’t move. He was among the trees. I didn’t know whether the child was an idiot from birth, was simple, but there was no fear on his face, or excitement, and no charity. I was pleading with him to find me help, and he stared back at me. I lied to him. I offered him money: I had no money. I pointed to the wounds on Samuel — as if it were necessary to point. I showed him my hands, which were washed in Samuel’s blood. I screamed for him to help me. And he ran. I shouted after him that he must bring help.

I was alone again with Samuel.

I don’t know for how long. His strength was going. Too much blood had been lost. I couldn’t save him. All I hoped for was that he would be comfortable and — in his own time — slip away. I talked to him and didn’t know if he heard me. I said to him that I was privileged to have known his love and that I would survive to carry the memory of him … and I heard the voice of a child.

We, who were in the camp for a week or a month or a year, had forgotten how to weep or show joy. I could have cried, in my desperation, for joy when I saw that child and the man who followed him. The child led him, skipped ahead. He was a man of young middle age, rough-dressed and rough-faced, and he carried a woodsman’s axe, a long-handled one, and a dog was with them. I heard the child’s voice, then the dog barking, and I thought help had come.

The child’s father had not come to help.

I saw greed in his face, and hatred.

He crouched over Samuel, who had wriggled across my body. At first he didn’t speak but started to search through what pockets he could reach in Samuel’s trousers, Samuel’s coat. I crawled, writhed, was no longer under Samuel and turned on his attackers. I tried to stop him. Samuel screamed at the pain made by my movements and by the father’s. The man shouted at me that all Jews had money, all Jews had jewellery. I struggled with him. He slashed at me with his axe but I was moving and it didn’t hit me. The blade hit the top of Samuel’s head. He came again: where was the money, the jewellery? I fought him. He had kicked Samuel with old boots, and that was his anger at his failure to find money and jewellery. I scraped my nails across his cheeks, hard enough to draw blood. He swung a fist at me, I caught and bit it, felt the bones of his fingers — and he backed away. He yelled now at me that I was worth a two-kilo bag of sugar at least. His voice had risen and his hand was bloodied. More blood was in his beard, and he told me he would bring Germans and the reward for identifying Jews in the forest would be paid him in sugar. He had the same hatred for me as the men of the Armia Karjowa had shown. He circled me. I faced him. I stood over Samuel and defended his body. I heard Samuel’s labouring breathing and knew his death was close. The forester did not dare to come closer to me. He said he would bring the Germans and spat at me.

He went with the child. He hurried. He went to earn his two-kilo bag of sugar.

Death had come.

His last moments, those last struggles of his life, were frantic and brave, and he had attempted to stand that he might protect me. There was no dignity in his death … but neither was there dignity for those going to the chambers at the end of the Road to Heaven, or for those on the wire and in the minefield. There was no mercy there, in the camp or in the forest. Only betrayal.

I took Samuel’s weight, had my hands in his armpits. I dragged him as far as I could. I cannot say where I found that strength.

I buried him.

With my fingernails, my hands and a length of dead wood, I made a pit for him. I worked him into it. I was exhausted to the point of collapse. I had to use my boots to push him in. I filled it, handful by handful, with earth and then I kicked leaves over it.

I was alone. I went on into the forest. I no longer knew the direction I took or what I hoped to find. So many had betrayed me, and at the end a child with an innocent face had joined the others. I vowed then never to love, never to trust, never to care about the deaths of others. I walked until the darkness closed on me, and kept walking, hit trees, fell into ditches — but felt no pain, only hatred.

‘Do you understand, Johnny?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘The story makes me the man I am.’

‘I understand, sir.’

He thought the hatred, as expressed in the great mass of the forest behind him by a young woman, still lived with the same snake’s venom as in the days its culture had been bred. Carrick thought of the hatred as something that could not be turned away from. Reuven Weissberg’s world was his world.

‘You will stand with me, Johnny?’

‘Yes, sir.’

The punch hit his shoulder, rocked him. Johnny Carrick, too, was a part of the madness at the Sobibor camp. He seemed to see the young woman blundering among the trees in the darkness that hugged him, and he wondered if by then, in those minutes and hours, the lustre of her hair had changed to white.

The director general, Francis Pettigrew — without a knighthood yet, but it would come — tapped into the console and the lock clicked open. He went into Operations (Current) Control. The room was in the heart of the building, on a second floor down in the basement. He had not had the sword tap his shoulder, but possessed the necessary stature. He glided into the room, made a presence. He saw Banham hunched at a desk with a wall of screens in front of him, telephones, a flask, a half-eaten sandwich and … Of course, if the director general had believed without equivocation in the judgement of Christopher Lawson, it would not have been only Giles Banham here: the full team would have been out — Lambert, Amin and Carthew would have been competing for desk space.

The room was where operations of sensitivity were monitored in the hours up to the predicted climax of crisis, the time when it screwed up or the corks popped.

‘Heard from them over there, have you?’

‘No, Director, nothing. Left a couple of texts for Lawson — had an FO response to each. At least to the point. I suppose he’s getting a bit frantic. Don’t mind me saying it, Director, but isn’t this all a tad Ice Age?’

‘It’s the way it is, where we are, what we have.’ The director general had known Banham since he was knee high, and his parents three decades. There were not many from whom he would have permitted that slight curled lip when Christopher Lawson was discussed. Not that he could pass blame to Banham. It was he, Francis Pettigrew, who had nominated minimal manning for the room. ‘If something materializes across that bloody river, give me a shout.’

‘You’ll be, Director …?’

‘At the club.’

‘I’ll call you.’

He realized then what he had done. Banham, who would remain alone in the room and had already started to consume the remainder of his sandwich, was justified in his visible lack of excitement in a mission called Haystack. Had he merely humoured Christopher Lawson or had he sold him short? Pettigrew didn’t know.

He slipped out. On that night of the week they did a rather good casserole at the club. Perhaps he had allowed his one-time mentor to bully him — shouldn’t have done. He walked off down the corridor that led to the lift. Should have asked for greater provenance before signing off on Haystack and committing those resources … Well, he’d be charitable and decent when Lawson came on the phone: ‘No show, Francis, may have been overegged. Worth a try …’

‘Absolutely, Christopher, well worth a try.’

He didn’t have a picture in his mind of where Lawson and his increments were and what it would be like for them.

He took a lift up. His protection intercepted him, the reception people stood. Security opened the swing doors so that he did not have to swipe his way out. It was the departure of the king-emperor of VBX. His car waited.

And much else lay on his mind. The door was opened. Damn it, more was on his mind than the comfort of Christopher Lawson, who had taken squatter’s rights on the banks of the Bug river.

They slipped away.

Adrian, Dennis and Deadeye headed for the river as they had been told to. Adrian had only a vague sense of history, and thought Deadeye got none of the romance and tragedy of it, but Dennis had a keen interest in the past and with it a love of all things French. Not merely the cooking and wine production, but France’s military history. Dennis thought of their dispatch back to the river as the nearest thing to the final throw, the sending forward of the Imperial Guard — 18 June 1815 — on the field of Waterloo. If they — himself, Adrian and Deadeye — did not turn the day and locate their targets on the river-bank, it was lost. They were the last chance. It was reassuring, in a gallows sort of way, that Deadeye had retrieved a weapon from his baggage, loaded it and was carrying it.

They had left the guv’nor, the boss, with Shrinks, pacing, deep in his thoughts and murmuring to himself. If Lawson had felt a mounting panic, he had not shown it … Impressive, that. They went off and away, through the trees and towards the Bug, moving carefully because that was their skill, but he seemed to hear the tramp of those marching feet and the squelching mud of the Imperial Guard’s advance. The last throw.

Yes, if they were coming — with their filthy, contaminated cargo — they would be near. That, at least, he could be certain of.

‘Would you choose this fucking place to take a fucking holiday?’

‘I would not, Molenkov. Nor would I talk. It takes breath to talk, and breath takes energy.’

‘You’re so pompous, always were and always will be. I talk about holidays. Where shall I go on holiday? Not here, so where?’

‘Shut up, Molenkov. Use your energy to pull.’

‘I have no energy left. I need to think of the beach, the sunshine, the beer, not mud. How far?’

He didn’t answer. Yashkin heard the drip of Molenkov’s voice and the moan of the wind in the trees. He heard his own gasps and Molenkov’s wheezing hisses. How far? He didn’t answer because he had no idea how far it was to the river, but he used the moon’s climb behind him — between the trees — as a guide. It had risen high enough to show where paths and tracks had been fashioned through the dense planting of the pines. But every pit in their way was an obstacle filled with water, and sometimes they saw them in advance and could skirt them and sometimes they couldn’t. The deepest pit took the water above their knees and doused the beast they dragged. Every rut, where the tracks were wider and long-ago forestry tractors had been, was filled with flooding pools and had cloying, clinging mud at the bottom. Yashkin did not know but he hoped the river was now within a kilometre of where they struggled, and he hoped, also, that his calculations on direction were exact. Each had hold of one of the side straps of the weapon, codenamed RA-114. Clear from a resting-place in the back of the Polonez, and without its tarpaulin shroud, it had the shape of a small oil drum and was encased in a canvas jacket. The straps were stout. The weight was in excess, Yashkin believed, of sixty kilos. Heavy enough when he had been fifteen years younger and had manoeuvred it from the porch at his home, down the side of his house and into the hole he had dug in his vegetable patch. Fifteen years of existing on the Sarov scrap heap had wasted his strength. The week of driving west had sapped what he had left, as had lack of sleep and food, the beating at Pinsk, the high-octane stress of the frontier crossing into Belarus … and for two hours or more they had slipped, slithered and dragged the thing through the forest. Little strength remained, and he thought Molenkov weaker. The weight and awkwardness of it seemed to grow with each metre covered.

‘Yashkin …’

He heard the bleat of his name. ‘Yes?’

‘If we ever take the holiday — you, me and Mother — and we’re somewhere that has a beach, sun and many cans of beer …’

‘What?’

‘Would they come after us?’

For a moment he gagged, then whispered, ‘I don’t know.’

‘Would they try to poison us? Would they pay for a contract hit with a pistol? Would they explode a bomb under the car? You don’t know, but what do you think? Tell me.’

‘I don’t know, and I don’t think. Will you take your share of the weight, my esteemed friend? Do I have to do everything?’ Yashkin swore. The pit in the track was deeper than the others. The mud at the bottom was stickier than it had been in others. Yashkin was in the pit, with the water almost at his crotch, and Molenkov had missed it, and was a half-metre above him, and the weight of the beast seemed to pitch towards him, and it was pushing him lower into the water. He realized what he had lost. Molenkov was pulling at him.

‘Oaf — you’re so clumsy. Get up, get out.’

‘I’ve lost … fuck …’

‘What have you lost?’

‘My shoe.’

‘What do you mean?’ Then a chuckle. ‘Lost it? Look at your foot, try there.’

He thrashed in the water. He came up the side of the pit. He was very close to hitting Molenkov with a clenched fist. He looked back. His left foot was already a frozen, unfeeling mass. He could see the water, silver in the moonlight, and the great ripples flowing on its surface. He didn’t know where he had been in the hole when the mud had caught his shoe, clamped on it and torn it from his foot when he had struggled to free himself. He could have wept. The pit he had gone into was, perhaps, two metres long, a metre wide and more than a metre deep. He swore again. To grope in the mud and search for his shoe would require him to immerse his whole body in the water, maybe even his fucking head.

Yashkin said, ‘I’ve lost my shoe in the mud and I doubt I can find it.’

He hopped at first and was reluctant to set his stockinged foot down on the ground. But the track was of soft compost, matted pine needles and old leaves, and had give in it. With each step he was prepared to test more weight on the forest floor. They dragged it between them. They went down into more ruts and more pits. They kept going.

Molenkov had started again to talk about holidays, another beach, endless sun, beer without limit, but Yashkin didn’t hear him. Above the wheezing and the gasps, the whine of the wind in the branches, was a far-away murmur that grew in intensity with each faltering step they took. He knew what he heard. There was no break in the murmur. He felt pride surge in him and the loss of the shoe seemed irrelevant. He made Molenkov move faster.

Yashkin said, ‘I can hear, at last, the voice of a great river. My friend, we’ve done it, survived it. Soon you will have, maybe in an hour, a half-share of one million American dollars in your pocket, and you can take a holiday anywhere you want. We’re very close to the river, to the Bug.’

Viktor saw them.

They had come through an open space — where a storm might have brought down a cluster of trees — and the moon’s light had caught them. Two were together and one was a few metres apart from them, nearer to the riverbank.

Viktor was end marker. Upstream from him was Mikhail, Goldmann, then Weissberg and the bastard who was a stranger among them.

They were fifty metres short of him, he estimated. He rated the one nearer the water as being the more competent, moving quieter and not coming into the silver filtered light. He reckoned the pair were short on the art of crossing rough ground. Thoughts came very fast to Viktor’s mind, and images to his memory. In the Stare Miasto they would have been on familiar territory; on the cobbled streets and the pavement slabs they would have been apart and expert in the environment. He could not recognize in that faint light what clothes they wore or their build, but he had no doubt of it: had the sun been high, had the forest been lit, he would have recognized them from the Old City of Warsaw. He would have seen the same men coming through the choke-points.

Viktor knew the art of surveillance and knew what gave professional esteem.

They had not seen him. Most of his body was sheltered by a birch clump. Beside it on the river’s side, there was a similar open space to the one the two men had just come through, and the same degree of moonlight shone into it. Viktor stepped out. He exposed himself, stood tall in the middle of the space, let the light come down and catch his forehead. Maybe it would glint in his eyes. He could recall what instructors had done when he was a recruit officer in State Security and the course was on the finer art of surveillance; it had been done to a friend, not to him, but that recall was sharp, as was the humiliation of his friend. They had frozen, the two men. He couldn’t see the third because his eyeline was directly ahead, locked on the two. Viktor had no doubt now that the surveillance had been on them from the time they had driven down the fast road to Heathrow. Vengeance would come later. It was not to be rushed — was like a good fuck or a good meal, best done at convenience and after consideration. They stared back. They were in their pool of light and he was in his.

It was his supreme moment.

He felt a slow smile break on his face. One thing alone irked Viktor. He did not have sufficient light to see their faces. He missed not having a big flashlight to shine at them and catch the moment. He did it like that instructor had at the counter-intelligence school at Novosibirsk, when he had served in the 3rd Directorate. He could imagine what would be on their faces, the dumb shock, the astonishment and the shame.

Viktor waved to the two men. Not big, not flamboyant, just a raised hand and a short wave.

He was gone.

Adrian trembled, had never before felt that shockwave in his gut, his limbs and his mind — as if he had lost control.

In the craft talk of his trade, the top men preached a mantra: If the next stage is to show out, you pull out. He and Dennis had gone through that stage and not known it. They had shown out.

Casual, the target had waved.

And the conventional wisdom said: We call it the heat stakes — one to ten. Ten is when you’re busted, have shown out. Go to gaol. They were busted. The dial needle had hit ‘ten’ and they had failed.

From the height of the target, Adrian had realized it was Viktor. Viktor was KGB-trained. The wave had been enough to show his contempt for them.

When they talked about ‘sterile areas’, ‘control’ and ‘housing’, the best men — and Adrian and Dennis would have reckoned themselves top of the tree — always exuded supreme levels of confidence. But a lecture session never finished without the final message: The desperate moment for any surveillance officer, far and away the worst, is when the target looks you in the eye and waves to you. Viktor had.

He thought himself a serious man, and Dennis, was unused to the taint of failure. He had to clasp his hands across his stomach, but it was inadequate — however tight he squeezed his fingers — to kill the shake.

Adrian whispered the question, ‘Did you see it?’

Dennis murmured in his ear, ‘I saw it. We screwed up.’

Stuttered: ‘Big-time.’

‘Doesn’t get any bigger. What to do?’

Adrian said, ‘We can’t go forward, not after that. I can’t get my head round it. Never happened to me before. Twenty years of this, more, and it’s the first time. I’d bollock a rookie who showed out as bad as that. He was laughing at us.’

‘Me too, first time — I feel a prat. They could be anywhere along the bank, and they’re alerted. You got a better definition, Adrian, of disaster?’

‘Could be anywhere, could be a quarter of a mile upstream, more. What to do? That’s the guv’nor’s shout. Have to tell him, come clean. He makes the decision. Say it up front. We don’t know where they are.’

‘And lose what they’re bringing across?’

‘Got better ideas?’

In front of them, where the target had been and where he had waved, gentle and mocking, was a solid wall of darkness. They did not know whether he had backed off by ten yards or a hundred. Right to assume that he carried a weapon, Mikhail too, and that Reuven Weissberg — top target — was armed. They had heard Shrinks talk his syndrome stuff on the agent and knew he, too, was tooled up. They heard only the river’s rush and the wind high above. They would back off, leave decision-taking to Mr Lawson, the guv’nor. Couldn’t blunder on. They left Deadeye down by the water and suggested he didn’t move … Adrian thought the wound was well shared, that Dennis would feel as bad as himself because a target had faced up to them and had waved.

Their professionalism demanded they said it, four square, to the guv’nor’s face. Neither would hide the catastrophe of a show-out and a failure to locate the prime target.

‘Come on,’ she said.

She led. Katie Jennings had pushed up her sweater, undone her blouse buttons, hitched up her bra and put his hands on her breasts. He didn’t do much for himself.

‘It’s all right, I don’t bite.’

She was astride him. He was against a fallen tree, had his back to it. She heaved up her hips, lowered her trousers and pushed her knickers down her thighs. Hadn’t done it like this since she was a kid, a couple of weeks before her sixteenth birthday. What was the bloody order of battle? She blinked, remembered what the guy had done all those years before because he’d known what he was at. She felt the cold air on her stomach and back, and on her thighs.

‘Don’t go all scared on me. You haven’t a worry, I’m up to date with taking them.’

It was a sort of madness. She was, in reality, a mature young woman. Katie Jennings did not make a habit of shagging around. Those who knew her well, in the Pimlico office, her neighbours, and especially her parents, would have been shocked to observe her baring her buttocks to the evening darkness, then heaving at the clothing covering Luke Davies’s body. It was the way the guy had done it when she was short of her sixteenth birthday; had worked then, didn’t seem wrong now. She had his coat open and his fleece unzipped, his shirt open and his vest up. Then she went to work on the belt and his trousers. She accepted it, the madness. She could put it down to stress, strain, trauma, had the excuses stacked high — but didn’t need them. She was tugging at his trousers. Rare excitement now gripped her. She could not have stopped herself and had no wish to.

‘Just enjoy it, like it’s a chauffeur ride.’

Under her the whiteness of his skin was made silver by the moonlight. Who cared about madness? Not Katie Jennings. A woman in a man’s world, she had been subject enough times to what was called harassment, or gender abuse, but she had never complained of being rated the token female. She thought his body quite thin, spare, rather pretty. He was supine … No, he wasn’t going to help her so she’d have to do the damn job herself. Hadn’t a word to say for himself but his eyes were big and longing and his breath came faster — came a bloody sight faster when she eased back, reached down and took him. The eyes were big, popping, and he was staring over her shoulder. Then he was pushing her back. For a moment, she tried to fight him, then gave up — quit.

She looked over his shoulder, followed his line of sight.

‘Fuck me,’ Katie Jennings mouthed.

It had been, for Tadeuz Komiski, the incredible moment.

He was the child.

He was in his seventh year. He was in the forest two days after the shooting at the camp, the explosions and the howl of the sirens.

He remembered what he had seen as if it had happened an hour before.

A young man down and propped against a fallen tree. A woman crouched over him. The young man’s skin white and exposed.

Two Christ killers on the ground among the trees.Filthy old clothes on both of them.

They were watching him, gazing up at him, and words spat from their mouths.

He had run to call his father. His father had spoken of a reward of two kilos of sugar for identifying where fugitives hid. He had come with the axe.

The curse had been made.

Much floated in his mind. They stared at him as they had then. Now he was a man and old, but once he had been a child. Visions came to him of his father’s swinging axe and of the young woman fighting back … He remembered the painful death of his father from the cancers, the long, sad silences of his mother before she had gone to her rest, the birth of a dead baby and the slipping away of his weakened wife. He remembered the loneliness of his life and the nightmare dreams … the life of the curse.

Remembered, also, that men had been in the forest, had seemed to search for him and watch him. He had followed them that day and when the dusk had come they were by the river.

The man covered his skin. The woman wriggled. They shouted at him.

He saw the priest. The priest had brought him a meat pie, had asked him to bring wood to the church house in the village. He heard the priest’s soft words: Was it when you were a child and living in this house that the guilt was born? You don’t have to answer me — but the only palliative for guilt is confession. All I can say, Tadeuz, is that if ever the chance is given you — it is unlikely — to right a wrong then take it, seize it. Each word of what the priest had said was clear in his mind.

Soldiers had hunted through the forest, and had offered the reward of a two-kilo bag of sugar for help in the capture of fleeing Jews, and again men hunted and were down at the Bug banks. He had betrayed a boy and a girl. It was to right a wrong that he went forward.

They cringed away from him.

When he was closer, they stood. He saw now that they took defensive postures, that their arms were out and their fists clenched. He showed them his own hands, empty.

He said, ‘There are hunters in the forest. I can take you to them. It will right a wrong. You can hurt them and make vengeance.’

The girl hissed at the boy, ‘What is he? Some goddam pervert?’ He did not understand her language.

He said, ‘I will show you them, and lift the curse.’

He reached out his hand, and the girl was shrill: ‘What you reckon? Going to watch us and jerk off?’

He took the boy’s arm. He said, ‘The curse is my burden, help me … The hunters are here, I will lead you to them and you will destroy them. I beg you, come with me.’

He had hold of the boy’s sleeve. ‘A deranged lunatic, what else? Sorry and all that. I was up for it. Just get rid of him and let’s get the hell out.’ He tugged at the coat.

The boy spoke in German. ‘Where are they?’

‘Beside the river.’

‘Can you show me where they are?’

‘I will. It is to be free of the curse.’ The boy allowed him to pull at the coat and didn’t try to break away from him.

‘You’re not bloody going with him …’

‘He knows where they are. I am.’

The great weight, the burden of Tadeuz Komiski, seemed shed. He led them. He knew what he would do when the curse was cast off, and felt happy. He took them through the forest, away from where the old fences had been, the huts and the watchtowers, the burning pits and the chambers joined by the rubber piping to the truck’s engine, away from where the geese had been chased so they would scream louder. He glided among the trees, as he had when he was a child.

He had spoken to Mikhail. With Mikhail, he had found Josef Goldmann.

Together they talked. Where was the nearest international airport? Was there any indication of a cordon or roadblocks? Which passports were available to them? Which of the cars should they take? Would they tell Reuven Weissberg that they were fleeing into the night?

When Goldmann had wavered, Mikhail had gripped his shoulders. ‘We do not have a meeting, we do not set up a committee, we do not debate and discuss. We go. You’ve seen him when the fury’s alive. That anger burns. Would you tell him? I won’t. Viktor is clear. Viktor reports on men tracking along the river. Who, in darkness, comes covertly along the banks of the Bug? A farmer? A forester? A tourist? Surveillance officers from an intelligence agency? I think so. I think also that we have very little time.’

Viktor could not have faulted Mikhail.

He pushed Josef Goldmann, a violent shove. The man half fell but Mikhail caught him, then threw him on. Mikhail would not have told Reuven Weissberg that he was abandoned, nor would Viktor. He imagined, a brief thought, a tonguetied and terrified Josef Goldmann stammering out a message of treachery and the voice would have died before it had been blurted. They went.

They held Josef Goldmann between them, as if he was their prisoner. They hustled him away from the river. They took him because he was the banker. He had made the investments, he knew in which banks’ strong boxes the deeds of ownership were held, he had the account numbers in his head. Josef Goldmann had control of the millions of dollars, sterling and euros, hidden under layers of nominee names and code numbers, that would offer a comfortable future to Viktor and Mikhail. Without him they would be paupers. Paupers would have no protection, and paupers could not buy a roof.

They dragged Goldmann behind them, his feet scraping the forest floor. Viktor had no sense of wrongdoing, or of betrayal: he did not recognize such feelings. He had a sense, though, of anger. It had been Reuven Weissberg who had demanded the outsider walk alongside him, who had treated the outsider as a favoured toy, an indulged pet: he would have liked to hurt the toy, heard the pet squeal. He could not take out that frustrated anger on Josef Goldmann because the flabby, pasty-faced Jew knew the codes, the numbers and the banks.

Bugsy said, ‘It’s gone down the tube, Mr Lawson. Normally I’d not speak out, but I’m going to. It’s down the tube, Mr Lawson, because of you. There’s going to be shit in the fan, but I’m not prepared to take the rap for it, and I don’t reckon any of us is, or should. They were your decisions, Mr Lawson, and you’ll have to stand by them. They were the wrong decisions.’

Adrian and Dennis were at the edge of the group, had said their piece alternating the delivery of news that was awful, then inched back. In his career, Christopher Lawson had not experienced what was, almost, a moment of mutiny.

Shrinks said, ‘If you’d treated your agent with a modicum of sensitivity, Mr Lawson, this fiasco wouldn’t have been bred. You contaminated the man’s loyalties. In effect, to drive him deeper into their arms, you lost him. The result is plain as a pikestaff. We have only a vague idea of where this hideous weapon may be brought to. Your leadership, or lack of it, has engulfed us in abject failure. When we get back, when there’s the inquest, don’t expect me to respond to your usual bully-boy tactic. I’ll put the knife in and twist it.’

He could see their faces. They despised him. It was as if they had torn off badges and insignia, had thrown them into the mud and sought flight — sought, above all, to preserve reputations. What to do? It exercised him. Didn’t know. What option was available to him? To move along the bank of the Bug, only the moonlight to guide them, and hope for a visual sighting.

Dennis’s torchbeam caught them.

Well, it didn’t take an intelligence officer of Christopher Lawson’s experience to read the runes. Her coat was open, and in the V-neck of her pullover it was clear that the blouse buttons were fastened out of kilter. Davies’s fly was unzipped. He had little fight left in him.

The girl did the talking for them both. ‘Everyone here, except Deadeye. Does that mean you’ve no eyeball?’

He didn’t bluster. Didn’t refer with cutting sarcasm to the state of her dress or Davies’s. He nodded.

‘We’ve had an eyeball on the riverbank,’ she said, calm and no triumphalism. ‘It’s why we’ve been so damn long. It goes on for ever, the explanation … Enough for now, a deranged idiot, babbling, Luke says, about hunters and vengeance, took us down to the river edge. Sod his code-call, Johnny’s there and Target Two, Reuven Weissberg. We saw them and beetled back.’

He thought, but couldn’t have been certain in that frail light, that she grinned. He thanked her.

‘Well, is that what you’ve been waiting for? Our idiot buggered off but we can lead you.’

Did he allow relief to flicker on his face? He did not.

‘Right. Let’s be on the move,’ Lawson said.

‘They’ve gone, Johnny.’ Reuven Weissberg hunched down beside him.

‘Who has, sir?’

‘All of them, the bastards.’

‘Has Mr Goldmann gone, sir?’

‘All of them. I went to where he was, and where Mikhail was. They were gone.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘I am betrayed, Johnny, as my grandmother was. It is a place of betrayal.’

‘Why would they do that, sir?’

‘It is a place for traitors, Johnny.’

And the light flashed.

Carrick started up. His feet slipped on the mud’s sheen. He found his balance. He stood.

It was downstream of them. Perhaps two hundred metres along the far bank from the point opposite. Four short flashes, then killed.

‘Do you have the torch, sir, or did they?’

‘Goldmann had the torch. The pig. He goes in concrete. First I strangle him, then the concrete. I—’

‘You have a lighter, sir.’

‘You think well, Johnny. Good.’

He felt the movements beside him, then heard the click. The lighter flame was shielded in Reuven Weissberg’s hands, and Carrick helped him protect it.

The darkness came again. It was behind them and in front of them, but the moonlight on the water was splitting the darkness. Carrick went back and scrambled up the bank to where the boat was. He threw the coil of rope into it. At the end of the rope was the device — he was proud of it — that he had fashioned in the last hour. It was a broken-off branch, two inches thick, and protruding from it was a slighter branch, which he had snapped six inches from the main stem. Inverted, the branch was lashed with string to the rope. He had made a hook. He saw the light again. It had moved so slowly, but had come along the far bank and upstream, had halved the distance to the point across the water from them. Reuven Weissberg had to protect the lighter flame, and the wind off the river guttered it.

Carrick took hold of the front of the boat. He heaved it free from where it had settled against birch trunks. He levered the boat down the steep bank, and lost control of it. It cannoned into his shins, and the pain ran rich. He arrested its slithering fall. He worked it down, short pace by short pace, towards the waterline. Took an age. In his ears was the rumble of the river, and its roar seemed louder to him now, keener. He brought the boat to the edge.

The back end had gone into the water. He held it there — had he not, it would have slid down and been taken.

‘You are with me, Johnny?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Will not betray me? Are not them? Traitors all.’ The words came with spittle on the breath.

‘Will not, sir.’

He saw the light again, four flashes. It was across the river from them. Now Reuven Weissberg called, but Carrick didn’t understand. Over the water’s roar, at this narrow point, came a croaked, feeble response, then a hacked cough, but from near enough for Carrick to hear it clearly. A second shout from Reuven Weissberg, an instruction. Carrick took the rope with the improvised hook he had made, gave it. Didn’t know whether the rope could be thrown far enough. He had the boat further into the water, clung to it, and saw Reuven Weissberg pirouette as he hurled the rope across the water towards the far trees and saw it snake out. Willed it … Another shout from the far bank, and the rope went taut. He tested it, and Reuven Weissberg did.

A moment. Reuven Weissberg reached out, snatched at Carrick’s neck, held it and kissed him. They were in the boat. Then they were launched.