Timebomb

Chapter 20

Carrick clung to the rope, arms high above his head, hands clenched on it. Had his grip failed when they had pushed off, or when they were at the mid-point of the river, or at the moment when the boat’s front end hit the far bank, they would have been lost. He had taken the weight of the boat. In front of him, Reuven Weissberg was too short-built to use both hands on the rope and have his feet wedged against the sides. He had used the rope as kids did in an adventure playground, hand over hand and swinging, desperate to keep his feet in the boat and to guide it. The worst had been when a tree trunk — might have been thirty feet long — had hit the back end when they were beyond mid-stream but where the current had a fiercer thrust. The boat had rocked with the impact but stayed up.

They had scraped against sunken branches, had had to heave on the rope to get through them, and had reached the bank.

Weissberg skipped off. Carrick groped, found a tree root and heaved at it to test its strength, then used the cord hooked to the boat to moor — did that one-handed, then let the rope go free and swing up.

He heard, ‘Stay close to me, Johnny.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘You have your weapon?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Be careful of them.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Dangerous and desperate, these people, and thieves.’

‘Yes, sir.’

They went up the bank, Reuven Weissberg first, then Carrick. He was on his hands and knees, grappling with mud, when he came to the top. Branches slashed at his face. He crawled forward, then the foot ahead of him, unseen in the black darkness below a mat of branches and tall weeds, kicked against his chin. He did not call out.

He cleared the rim of the bank, and the torch came on.

Carrick blinked. For a moment he was blinded. He thought it was held less than fifteen feet ahead of him. He screwed his eyes shut to lose the brightness. The beam shook, as if the hand holding it could not keep steady. There was a bad cough from behind the torch, which made the beam shake worse. He heard a question called, and Reuven Weissberg answered it. The beam was lowered.

Where was he? Where he had not been before. Why was he there? He had no idea. Who was he? He didn’t know.

He saw them. Each had a hand on a young tree and used it as a support. The torchbeam flared out and showed enough of them. Two old men. Two old men with stubble and filth on their faces. Two old men with mud-smeared, torn clothes. Two old men, and one gasped for breath while the other was bent half double with coughing. He saw that one, the shorter, had lost a shoe. His sock was sodden and ripped, and blood seeped into the mud round it; it was the other who coughed and couldn’t spit out what was lodged in his lungs. He had thought they would be young, aggressive and athletic, the same as Viktor and Mikhail, would have the same flat, thin fair hair and smooth skins and … Between them was the canister.

He realized then that two old men had dragged it across country to meet the rendezvous. Carrick thought it would have been the same on that side of the river as what they had trekked through, coming past the Sobibor camp, to reach the Bug. Already the canister was settled in the mud and had the weight to make a puddle round its base. The torchbeam shook because the hand of the taller man trembled. They were both, Carrick reckoned, on the point of collapse.

It was like a dance, but the artists were exhausted and clumsy.

Reuven Weissberg advanced on the canister and reached for one of its side straps.

The taller one, holding the torch, used his second hand to pull the thing back.

The shorter one inserted himself between Reuven Weissberg and the canister.

Argument broke out. Reuven Weissberg told Carrick, low voice, that they wanted money. Where was it? Carrick was told there was no money until the content was verified. Had they not known there would be no money paid to them for delivery? He was told it didn’t matter what they had believed: they would get money on verification. They were two old men, not mafiya. They couldn’t have fought with Reuven Weissberg, and Carrick saw no weapons. He could tell from their faces that they had come expecting to be paid. He could see fragments of writing stencilled, black on olive green, on the canister’s canvas cover. The voices were raised but Carrick turned away.

He went back down the bank to the water.

He took a handkerchief from his pocket, dipped it and felt the chill water flowing against his arm.

Carrick climbed the bank and walked back to them. The dispute cascaded around him. The old men couldn’t win it. Each would be broken, as a matchstick was snapped after use. He pushed past the one who blocked Reuven Weissberg, bent in front of the canister, wiped hard and saw the letters and numbers. He couldn’t read Cyrillic. He cleared the dirt off the canvas. It was obvious to him that the letters and numbers represented a batch number, or a serial number, or designated a weapon type. Two old men had gone through hell, many shades of it, to bring the thing to the Bug. Reuven Weissberg had come from Berlin and Josef Goldmann had travelled from the soft comfort of London to collect it but Goldmann, Mikhail and Viktor had copped out, as if the thing were too big, too dangerous … He saw them. They were crowded into the long cabin of the narrowboat. They had lassoed and corralled him, then bloody exploited him. Wouldn’t have done it for a sack of grenades, wouldn’t have hazarded him for a drum of Kalashnikovs, RPGs or even Stinger ground-to-air jobs. Carrick looked up.

He was near to the one without the shoe. He saw the face, its weariness and despair. He broke into the argument. ‘How much do they get?’

Surprise at the boldness of his demand for an answer. ‘What? Not your business.’

‘How much?’

‘They get a million American when it is verified. It is a good price — but not your business.’

‘Yes, sir.’

He knew what was that size, what was worth two old men carting a canister to the Bug river, what a weapon worth a million American could do to a city. Carrick hung his head and the argument resumed.

‘We were never told. I was not, Igor was not.’

‘If Oleg had known, and I, we would never have come.’

‘You’re a cheat.’

‘It’s trickery, deceit. We were told we would be paid.’

Molenkov led. He had no fear, which surprised him. ‘We did everything as we had said we would. We’ve come, we’ve brought it. We were promised we would be paid when we delivered. We have delivered. Do you have no honour? Does your word mean nothing?’

Old sensitivities ran through him. In front of him was the squat little bastard in the old leather jacket, a mafiya tsar. He thought of how it would have been for this pig if he had worn his uniform and been in his office, had owned the power and influence that sustained a ranking political officer. He tried to ape who he once was, who he had once been. The bastard, the pig, did not react. The torchbeam shone into the man’s face. Alongside him Yashkin babbled in near-incoherence. Lightly, but with malice, he kicked Yashkin’s ankle. There was more chatter about a ‘new life’, about ‘sunshine’ and about a ‘future’, so Molenkov kicked Yashkin again, harder, and it was sufficient to silence him. He had no fear, not after what they had endured — the trauma of the frontier, the beating by the thieves, the exhaustion of dragging the canister through the forest — but he had a view of reality. So many of the scientists, chief technicians and prominent engineers at Arzamas-16 had been Jews, and at other secret cities where there were fewer of them the complex was called — had the sneered name — ‘Egypt’. He had never been able to read them; they were separate, apart and aloof.

The mafiya Jew heard him out, then snapped his fingers. ‘It will go for verification. If it is what you say, it will be paid for. You will be told the address of a bank and an account number. It will be in Cyprus. My word is as strong as my arm.’

Finish. What could he do? End. Could he and Yashkin fight for possession of it and take it back? It was the moment that a dream ended. The torchbeam showed the strength of the Jew, the muscle power of his shoulders and the great size of his hands. Another man hovered behind him, but had not intervened and watched, observed, but when the light fell on his face, it was impassive.

Molenkov made the gesture. He took out his wallet, shone the torch on to it, showed it was empty and replaced it. Then he put his hands into his trouser pockets and pulled out the insides to show what they held: a sodden handkerchief, a ring with keys, a few coins that were almost worthless. He had tried to fight and failed. He pleaded. They had been robbed. They had no money. They had no fuel in the vehicle. He had imagined they would be big men, each with a half-share of a million American dollars, each able to purchase a view of the sea. They had nothing.

From his hip pocket, the Jew took a wad of notes, peeled some off and gave them as though it were a charity thing. Molenkov took what he was offered and hid the anger. The Jew waved for the man behind him to come forward. Each took a holding strap, and they turned their backs. They went past the point where the hook was lodged secure among a mass of birches, went under the rope that stretched away over the water and down to their boat.

He felt, almost, an affection for the fucking thing. They carried it easily as if the weight were a trifle. He had the torch on it. It was lifted into the boat. There had been no handshake, no hug, no kiss. They were gone and with them was the dream. It was hoisted into the boat.

‘Can you do without a shoe, Yashkin?’

‘I can,’ Yashkin said. His voice was a murmur under the roar of the flooded Bug. ‘Perhaps, in a week, they will tell us that the money is lodged.’

‘I want to go home,’ Molenkov said. ‘Perhaps they will tell us.’

Neither looked back as they took their first steps into the darkness of the forest.

A few feet from the bank, Lawson stood erect, tall and proud. Beside him was Deadeye who had his rifle up to his shoulder and whose right eye was lodged against the aperture of his image-intensifier sight. Deadeye gave him the whispered commentary. Lawson had no need of it now. All he had required to know was that an object, near to waist height and with the thickness of a stout torso, had been manhandled aboard. The boat and the two figures were a dark blur against the silver of the water. There were soft voices behind him. He could imagine the triumph awaiting him. Might just, and he’d fight damn hard to achieve it, get the covering off the thing — after the boffins had cleared it for contamination — and walk it back along the corridors of VBX and show it to them in Non-Proliferation, then take it up in the lift, dump it on the floor of Pettigrew’s office and have a drink with him. Yes, he allowed himself the luxury of imagination.

Rather them. The black shape of his agent, his target, their boat and its cargo inched out towards the river’s main flow. The rope that was tied to the tree root was near to him and shivered with the strain it took. He fell back on more immediate imagination. Two men stood upright in that small battered craft and dragged themselves across, hand over hand, on the rope. He could see, now, the white water swept back from the shape and it poisoned the cleanliness of the silver. He thought that every muscle in their bodies was strained with the effort of holding the rope and bringing the boat across.

‘How are they doing?’

‘So far so good, Mr Lawson, is how they’re doing.’

‘No misunderstandings, Deadeye. The target comes ashore, is bumped and taken.’

‘Of course, Mr Lawson.’

‘If he fights, he’s dead.’

‘Yes, Mr Lawson.’

Always a regret, never a life without a regret to harbour. He wished Clipper had been there. Clipper Reade might have enjoyed this rather substantially. He thought they were close to halfway across and the wind sang on the rope’s tightness. When it bucked, Lawson saw that one or other of them was changing hands and pulling harder to make progress against the flow. It would be a triumph, his vindication.

The rope burned Carrick’s palms. He thought his arms were being dragged slowly, inexorably, from his shoulders. He took more of the strain because he was taller than Reuven Weissberg.

He had been the confidant who was told the story of the extermination camp and of an escape from that place. Had been the chosen man of Reuven Weissberg when the other rats had fled. Had been the bodyguard of Josef Goldmann, money-launderer. Johnny Carrick had been, also, an officer of the Serious Crime Directorate 10, and had sworn the oath. His knees were clamped on a weapon of massive killing power. He took the Makharov pistol out of the pancake holster, clung one-handed to the rope, twisted and called for Reuven Weissberg to watch him. There was sufficient moonlight. He held up the pistol, where it was seen. He waved it in front of Reuven Weissberg’s eyes, a few inches from them. He threw it, and white spray bounced from the silver, feathered up, then was lost. Again, both hands were on the rope and he dragged the boat closer to the black wall that was the bank. He thought he had seen, against the trees, a man standing but could not have sworn to it; thought he had seen the moonlight flash momentarily on metal, a rifle’s barrel. It was a nuclear weapon and it had jolted the skin off him.

Carrick shouted, ‘Can you hear me?’

‘Why you do that? Why? I hear you.’

‘I am a lie, live one and act one. Time for truth.’

‘What?’

‘Wearing the gun was a lie.’

‘You talk shit.’

‘Truth says I’m a police officer. I’m a police officer seconded to an intelligence agency. I targeted Josef Goldmann for criminal investigation. I came here to live a lie, to betray you.’

‘Not you, Johnny — not you?’ He thought he heard agony, as if a scream was raised, like the owls’ shriek, like branches grating together when a gale blows. ‘Not you? Tell me, not you?’

They were at the mid-point where the strain on arms, shoulders, hips and knees was greatest. The boat juddered and was turned half round. The big log hit it, seemed to snag it, brought water in and freed itself. He pulled the boat nearer to that bank, yard by yard.

‘It’s the truth. When we get there you’ll be arrested. Men are there who have tracked you. I’m bringing you to them, Reuven Weissberg. If it hadn’t been for the weapon it wouldn’t have happened, but the weapon’s there. It’ll be cordoned and there will be guns. Sir, I understand about the camp and I’m sorry.’

The yell cut the night, was over the Bug’s roar. Reuven Weissberg shrieked, ‘We owe them nothing. Everything was betrayal. An officer rode a horse beside them and said they would be shipped to the east. It was betrayal. An officer in a white coat pretended to be a doctor as he led them to the death chambers and betrayed innocence. A man seemed to come from God and led them from the camp, then abandoned them and betrayed trust. A child found them and betrayed them to his father. Nobody, because of what was done, is owed anything.’

I had been in the forest for two weeks and had eaten only decomposing berries, chewed roots, and drunk rainwater from puddles. I was deep in the forest and heard no man, nor saw one. It was because I was asleep that I hadn’t run. I was found by men from a partisan unit. They were Jewish, of the Chil group, and their leader was Yechiel Greenspan. When they woke me, I thought at first they were Polish Christians and tried to fight them. There were too many and I was too weak. They took me back to their camp, far into the Parczew forest.

When we came to where the sentries were they gave a password. It was ‘Amcha’, the password of our people when they fought the Syrians two thousand years before. I learned that it had survived, used through history by Jews in flight. I learned also that their principal enemy was the men of the Armia Krajowa. They said that more of the escapers had been killed by the Armia Krajowa than by the Germans.

I lived with them.

I became a fighter with them.

I killed with them and hunted for food with them.

They were people I trusted, but no other man or woman.

The child grew in me.

My son was born on 22 July, two weeks late. The pain of the birth was worse than anything I had experienced. I called him Jakob, which was the name of our sub-unit commander. The same day that I gave birth we heard the sounds of artillery and tank fire. The noise of the fighting came from outside where we were, in the most dense and remote part of the forest, but still within six hours’ walk of where the camp had been.

It was impossible for me to go. Others went.

On the day after the Red Army had gone through Sobibor and had advanced towards Chelm, Hask, Sawin and Cycow, a patrol of the Chil partisans set off to find out what had happened at the camp, to make contact with the rear echelon of the Red Army, and to beg for food.

They were gone at dawn and were back in the long evening before the late dusk. They had not met Russians but they had seen men of the Armia Krajowa strutting in the street at Suchawa and Okuninka. They had hidden from them. One sat down with me and told me of what he had found at the death camp of Sobibor. He said there were many Poles there.

There were farm peasants, forest workers and women from Osowa and Kosyn. There were shopkeepers from Wlodawa, and some had brought their families. They were all Catholic Poles. With them they had carried abandoned shells and mortar bombs, which had been left by the Germans as they had retreated back from the river Bug, and they had brought a very small amount of dynamite from a quarry, only a small amount was necessary, a few grams, and fuse cord. While I suckled my baby, he told me what he had seen from the cover of the trees.

In the hours after the escape, the Germans had shot dead all the prisoners who had not escaped, shot dead all the wounded and all of those recaptured in the forest. They were shot, in their clothes, above a pit and their bodies fell into it. The Germans covered the pit.

The camp was then closed, abandoned, destroyed and made to look like a farm. The huts were taken down. Work parties were brought to Sobibor, shifted more soil into the pit and levelled the ground. By the next summer it was impossible to know where the pit was, where some four hundred Jews were buried.

Those people who came, whom he saw, did not know where the bodies were.

As he watched, hidden, the people buried the shells and bombs, with the small amounts of dynamite to help the explosion, and they lit the fuse cords. They blew up the shells and bombs, then searched in the craters for Jews’ bodies.

When they found corpses, rotting, stinking, they stripped off the clothes and hunted for gold and jewellery that might have been stitched into them. They believed, those people, that all Jews had money and valuables. And they looked in the jaws of the dead for the teeth.

Even the dead of Sobibor were betrayed.

You should never forget the betrayal of your people, of your blood. You owe no man, no woman, no child anything.

After Sobibor, softness was dead, love and kindness with it.

‘My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?

‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.’

Remember what I have told you, dear Reuven. Remember it well.

The boat bucked, rocked.

Reuven Weissberg hung on the rope and launched the kick towards the turned spine of the man he had believed loyal.

He heard, against the thunder of the water and the moan of the wind, the click that was metal on metal. It carried to him over what remained of the river to be crossed, and he knew that a weapon was armed. A sight would now be focused on him and the cross-hairs would be over his chest.

He had wanted a clear kick with the maximum impact and the greatest surprise.

The bastard held on to the rope, had it and rode the flow. The boat shook and the shape of the thing slithered in bilge water along the planks, came to rest against his feet, and he could not make the second kick.

At that moment what was Reuven Weissberg’s plan? There was none. His life and his power were built on the twin foundations that came from careful planning. Fury consumed him.

They were twenty metres from the blackness of the far bank. He hung, now, with one hand on the rope, and with the other he groped forward for Johnny Carrick’s throat. If he found the throat of the man who had betrayed him, he would break the neck bones, crush and snap them. He felt flesh but didn’t have a good hold.

The boat shook and the river water slopped into it and lapped around the cargo.

A hand tried to free his, but could not.

Lawson hissed in his ear, ‘Shoot, damn you. Take him out.’

In the sight, the cross-hairs bounced on two pastel shapes in a washed-out green that were against a background of a harsher green, that of lawn grass after rain. But the shapes had merged. The boat seemed to Deadeye to be marooned out there in the river, but the flow force struggled to break it free and the white water powered round it. He was not there to watch pretty pictures of the wake the boat created or to see the balletic dance of the figures, those shapes. Yes, safety was off. Yes, the lever was on ‘single’ and not automatic. Yes, his right index finger was off the guard and on the trigger. Yes, it rested there gently, without pressure. No, he had no damn target. What made it harder was following the shapes with the water behind and in front of them because the moonlight reflected back up off the surface and flared.

‘Can’t separate them.’

‘You have to take out Weissberg.’

It was an old rule for marksmen. He — true for any marksman — could not be ordered by a superior to shoot. His decision. No man, whatever his seniority, made the decision for him. His finger stayed on the trigger bar and the pressure was not applied. They were together. The shapes were one, writhing and moving, heaving and shaking, but indivisible.

‘For God’s sake, Deadeye, do it.’

‘Fuck off …’ afterthought ‘… sir.’

Stress mounted in Deadeye. They were locked together, and the dazzle came off the water, spoiling the quality of his view. He held off. Inside the sight, with the cross-hairs, was the range finder, and the digits showed the figure 30. Thirty metres range. The stress surged. He thought it a struggle for life. His mind wobbled, shouldn’t have done, and he saw the man come fast, rat speed, across the pavement — six days before — and seemed to feel the barged weight of him in the moments that he’d fired two blank rounds. He heard the girl, whom Lawson called ‘the little cuckoo’, murmur that if their man went into the water he was gone, lost. Didn’t need to be told it, knew it.

He couldn’t buck the stress.

Deadeye waited for the heads to come apart, not the bodies. He thought, from what the sight showed him, that water came into the boat. They each had one hand on the rope and fought with the other, and he saw each of the punches thrown and each of the flailing kicks. He leaned hard against a sapling tree, used it for support, and had the cross-hairs wavering on their heads. At that range, with the image intensifier’s magnification, he could see half of the snarled face of his target. Needed the whole of the damned face.

Had it, squeezed, went for it.

Deadeye felt the recoil belt his shoulder joint.

They flinched. They ducked. Any man with a high-velocity bullet blasting over his head would flinch and duck. The two hands came off the rope.

Fucking missed. When had he last missed? Top scores always on a range. Didn’t understand. Had missed.

The rope, without the weight on it, leaped up, seeming to shimmer and shiver, then went slack.

They had balance for a moment, but briefly.

Two seconds, or three. The rope was now high above them. Either man, to have caught the rope again, would have had to reach up and leave himself defenceless. If Carrick had done it, stretched his arm towards the rope, his stomach and head would have been open … and the chance was gone. The river took the boat.

Again, Reuven Weissberg came at him. Fingers gouged at his eyes and a knee came into the pit of his stomach. Carrick gasped. They were rolling.

They were lost, gone, and he knew it. He fought back, had to. Had to free himself and the water surged round him and he felt it round his legs. They went in.

Still struggling, hands now on his clothing. Reuven Weissberg’s head was inches from Carrick’s and water was spat from it. Carrick could not have said where his strength came from. Fingers found Reuven Weissberg’s eyes. A little choked gasp of pain. Carrick was free. The great current tugged and the undertow sucked at him.

He could no longer see Reuven Weissberg or the boat, or what the boat had carried.

A branch cannoned into his back He snatched it, but it lacked the buoyancy to hold him up. The water went round him.

Darkness closed on him.

‘Who’s going in?’ Lawson faced them.

In chorus: ‘Waste of time. Can’t swim, never have. Bloody suicide. Nothing lives in that.’

He did not identify the voices. It seemed clear-cut. A kaleidoscope of sights and thoughts rampaged in him. He was God, the relic of the Good Old Days. Sorry, and all that, Clipper, but I’m stepping out of line. Lawson kicked off his good brogues and heaved down the zip of the waxed coat. He thought of the Spree river, the agent who had been Foxglove and the great open water by the Oberbaumbrücke, and himself waiting in the cold, stamping to keep his feet warm. He loosened his tie, went forward in his stockinged feet, slipped down the bank. No one tried to stop him, funny that. Had they, he would have pushed them away. Seemed to see the searchlights and hear the rattle of gunfire, machine-guns using three- or four-round bursts with tracer. One was using a flashlight and it played over the water’s surface and caught a branch. There might have been the top of a head but it was moving too fast for him to focus on and retain. And Foxglove had screamed, a shrill, piercing call for help. Then his tube had been holed, its buoyancy gone. He’d not seen Foxglove for a full minute before the body had tangled in one of the nets that ran down the river. He’d lived with it so damned long, and made a pretence that what happened to an agent was all part of the game — greater good of the greater number. God, Clipper, it’s bloody cold …The water was at his knees and the eddy by the bank drew him out and into the flow. Then his feet lost contact with the bottom. He started to swim, used the combination of breast-stroke and dog-paddle he’d learned at school.

He was guided by shouts from behind him and by the direction in which the torchbeam was aimed. He might have seen a head bob up, and what was ahead of him might have been the bottom of the little boat or it might have been another of those wretched trees coming down the river.

I remember what you said, Clipper. ‘An agent is lost and you go find another.’ Good counsel. And you said, ‘Get close and sentimental to an agent and you get to be useless.’ It’s what I am, Clipper, bloody useless. What he had thought might have been the bottom of the boat was indeed a log, and when the swell surge carried him closer to what might have been a head, the torchbeam showed a deflated football.

He was beyond the reach of the torchbeam. They’d be running along the bank to get ahead of him and light the river again. They would.

So damn tired, and cold.

You quit when you were ahead, Clipper. Best thing you could have done … But heh, Clipper, it was there, it was coming. Not any more. They can’t take that away from …

The water was foul-tasting. It was in his eyes, up his nose and inside his ears. Each time he tried to spit it out, more of the Bug water slopped into Lawson’s mouth.

He thought himself free.

He believed the curse lifted.

The dog sat patient on the floor and watched him. Tadeuz Komiski stepped up on to the seat of the wooden chair and reached for the noose. He felt no fear. Guilt had been purged and a grave would go undisturbed.

The Crow said, ‘It is time. We leave.’

Sak asked, ‘What could have happened? Why didn’t they come?’

‘Do you think it is easy to fight? Go home. Forget you were ever here. Erase from your mind the image of my face. Ask no questions and you will be safe. Talk of this and you will be dead. They did not come, but the struggle stays alive.’

Two cars pulled away from a picnic site on the Lüneburger Heide. One would head for Hamburg, and the first flight in the morning would take a school-laboratory technician back to his home in the West Midlands of Britain. The other would be driven to Cologne and, en route, a device for testing a man-portable nuclear weapon for confirmed and heavy plutonium presence would be discarded in a rubbish bin. Before the next evening a deal prepared carefully and secretively with a hawaldar banker would be cancelled. Cranes would beckon that man and the fierceness of the Gulf’s sun would shine on him.

And later …

It was a summer’s day, pleasantly warm. He had thought it necessary to be there. The church was between the Clapham Road and the Lambeth Road and had an association with the VBX building, he was told by an usher. It was not only appropriate but convenient as it was at most a five-minute walk from that awful green and cream and tinted-glass edifice. He had been late to arrive and had squeezed into a pew near to the back, but he’d been noticed, and he’d heard a little murmur run down the nave. He’d been stared at and identified by pointing fingers. There had been a photograph on a table in front of the altar of the man — he’d never known his name until he was handed the order of the service — who had dragooned him on the narrowboat, and a candle had burned beside it. The service had started with a bizarre touch: a mobile phone had rung and its call jingle had been ‘Deutschland Über Alles’ and there had been a ripple of laughter he’d not understood. Then there had been an address from a big cat and a reading by a young man he’d presumed to be Lawson’s son. Two hymns — ‘I Vow to Thee My Country’ and ‘Amazing Grace’ — brief prayers and, after a bare half-hour, they spilled out of the church into the sunshine. There were to be sandwiches and drinks in the hall adjoining it, but people seemed reluctant to wander there and milled around. He realized then that two confused queues had formed. One waited to shake the widow’s hand, and her son’s, but the second was near to him. It was as though his queue waited for a man of importance to break the ice.

That man came. ‘You’re Johnny Carrick. I’m Pettigrew, the director. Most in there would have had to swallow their bile for the length of the proceedings. Christopher Lawson was cordially detested by the huge majority of his colleagues, but not by me. Without him, this city or another would be in dire danger. A few hours before he died he spoke on his phone to me and praised you to the hilt. I’ll miss him, not that others will. Anyway, well done. Haystack was one of our better efforts. You didn’t see him in the water, did you? No, I didn’t think you would have. Must press on.’

He recognized the next in line, the young man who had been with Lawson on the narrowboat and whom he had seen under the wall of Warsaw’s old quarter, holding Katie Jennings tightly.

‘I’m Luke Davies. When you made it to the bank, it was me who dragged you out of that bloody river. Sorry and all that about the other side of the coin. I suppose you’ve realized Katie and I are together, and she’s transferred out of that unit you were with. I think it’s the sort of thing that happens in a stress situation — it was, you know, stressful for us. Anyway, the best of luck. I suppose at the end of the day it was a good result. Not that it’ll matter to you but I’ve been promoted on the back of it. Keep safe.’

The next in line had a tangled mess of hair and a cheerful smile.

‘I had the job of pumping your chest, getting all that sewer water from the Bug out of your lungs. Remember, the psychologist, Shrinks? Did you act on my advice, get the counselling bit in? Very important for someone who’s been exposed to the syndrome, as you have. Did you?’

He shook his head. Yes, he remembered being dragged up the bank and having his chest beaten, and then he’d been left while they’d scoured the river’s edge. He looked over the man’s shoulder, like people did at parties when they were searching for a more interesting guest. He was rewarded.

‘Hello, I’m Giles Banham. I was running the crisis desk that night, and was short-handed because we didn’t actually believe it was real. Anyway … Look, this is confidential, Official Secrets and that guff, but you’ve the right to know. Josef Goldmann came fast back to London, then quickly did the flit. We think he’s in Israel, and the word is that his family hate it, and that he’s chucked a pretty considerable bung at the government, and they’ll give him citizenship and protection. The thugs, the two of them, ended up in northern Cyprus and are training the locals in security. Extradition isn’t done from there. Reuven Weissberg made it out of the river, back to Berlin. There’s CCTV of him at his apartment, going in and still looking like a semi-drowned rodent. He was there half an hour and exited with his grandmother — bizarre, but all they had was basic hand baggage, and what looked like a picture wrapped in newspaper. Must have been something important. There was a report that they’d showed up in Moldova, and another that said their refuge was Paraguay, but we don’t have confirmation. The two old men you met on the Bug’s far side we haven’t heard of. The good thing out of it all is, when it suits us, we’ll shove a sanitized part of the file to the FSB, just to cause some keen embarrassment. All of them — Weissberg, Goldmann and the thugs — will spend the rest of their days looking over their shoulders, and being pretty damn careful what they drink and eat. We’ll leave them for a bit in their new homes, then exert some civilized pressure. I expect they’ll turn and answers to our questions will be provided. We’re short of who was the purchaser, who the device would ultimately have been sold to, but we’ll get there, believe me.’

He recalled them all. He saw the hostility of Viktor, the malice of Mikhail. He could hear the respect and gratitude of Josef and Esther Goldmann. He could feel the bear-hug, before the anger, and the warmth of Reuven Weissberg. He could picture the painting of a forest’s trees. An older man with wispy grey hair that had been allowed to grow beyond tidiness came forward.

‘Good to meet you, Mr Carrick. I don’t have a name, not one that you need, anyway. In a quiet corner, I do threat analysis. Excessive rainfall this spring in central Ukraine, floodplains rising and river-banks bursting, but all manner of silt and filth carried down the main arteries. We think, from your description of it, that the weapon was in the RA series, man-portable and dating from the seventies — not big but giving a useful bang for the buck, enough to destroy the heart of an urban mass, a deep-buried command post or a missile silo, to demolish a strategic bridge — and we think, also, it went down into the Bug, would have been tumbled along the bed then snagged. Probably covered within an hour and well buried by the following morning. By the end of the week it would have been under four or five feet of muck. The chance of it going on downstream and eventually into the Vistula or even the Baltic is — we estimate — remote. Best place for it, buried and forgotten. It could not of itself have exploded. It would have needed a precursor agent, commercial or military dynamite, to be activated. Then it would have contaminated the centre of a city, New York, Los Angeles, Paris, Berlin or — most probably — London. One of those cities, spattered with plutonium, would have been poisoned for all time. No centre of population could survive such an attack. So, we won this time but in a difficult world we have to win every time. Good to have met you.’

He had not seen him before, not in the church or in the garden between the door and the street gate. He was bent, his weight was suspended over two hospital sticks, and the clothes hung loose on him. Must have been a big man once but was shrunken now.

‘Won’t hold you, young man. I’m told you did a fine job, beyond the duty call … These guys hated his guts because he was a stickler for detail and commitment, and had a bad way with idiots. These guys, goddam hypocrites all of them, and doing the hand-wringing … They told me a little of what happened — I envy you. I have a powerful amount of envy for you for being there and having done it well. He’s better where he is than where I am. A retirement home, Delray Beach in Florida, is a degree of hell. Won’t keep you … Ever in Delray Beach, ever on Angelo Drive, ever by the Corpus Christi Retirement Home, come see me and we’ll go get a beer. My privilege to have met you, sir.’

A young woman had her hand outstretched. ‘My name’s Alison and I’m from the crowd on the other side of the river. No one wanted to come because Mr Lawson was loathed so I picked up the ticket. I didn’t turn up because of him, it was you I wanted to meet. I think I owe you an apology, Mr Carrick, a big one.’

‘Do you?’

‘I do liaison between our lot and theirs. We helped with the background stuff right at the beginning, and your name came up as a staffer for Goldmann. Then our computers threw out that you were funny — the National Insurance and the driving licence had been doctored. Our gear can do that. I told Mr Lawson you were an undercover, SCD10. I chucked you in it. Isn’t that worth an apology?’

‘Maybe, maybe not.’

‘Are you about through here?’

‘Leave’s finished, and I’m due back in my office. First time back there after … Yes, I could be finished here.’

‘Going to walk over the bridge?’

‘Sounds right.’

In the line was the man he had kicked in the groin on the City pavement, and three others who had been on the banks of the Bug. He went past them, as if they didn’t exist, and up the side-street that led to the bridge.

The sun was on his back and it warmed his face. He slipped off his coat and hitched it over his shoulder. He didn’t think he needed an apology. He told her, Alison, as they walked across the river bridge, about a forest of birches and pines, and of the place where a revolt had been fashioned. He spoke of a camp that was demolished and how the fences and watchtowers, minefields and barracks huts had been buried and hidden, and of the darkness under the trees, the despair that still lived, and the hate. He did not talk about the events and incidents of Haystack, but of a track called the Road to Heaven that ran between newly planted pines, and of the plank-faced homes that had once been the Swallow’s Nest and the Merry Flea, and of a great mound that was formed of incinerated bodies.

Carrick said, ‘If you haven’t been there and haven’t heard the stories, it isn’t possible to understand the present. It’s about the camp, the killing there and the escape. What happened is rooted in that past. So, I go back to work. I forget it. I forget where I was and who I was with, and what person I became. I have to. I was there and thought I walked and ran with them.’

They were at the end of the bridge. He realized then that she had hold of his hand and his cheeks were wet.

‘Will you be all right?’

‘I’ll be fine. It never happened. I don’t need your apology.’

She loosed his hand, and went right, along the Embankment and towards the Box 500 building. Carrick blinked, wiped his face on his sleeve, and set out with a good stride towards his Pimlico office. He killed the faces that had clamoured in his mind. Best to believe it had never happened.