Timebomb

Chapter 2

He was aware of more phone calls than usual coming to the house.

Flowers were delivered that afternoon, a massive bouquet that filled Carrick’s arms when he took them from the van driver. An hour after the flowers, another van had brought a dress from the shop in the High Street that Mrs Goldmann patronized. Both had come to the main door so Carrick had escorted the housekeeper, Irena, up from the basement, had done the checks through the spyhole, opened the door and signed the dockets with a scrawl.

And he was aware of greater activity upstairs in the reception rooms, had heard an unfamiliar pace in the movement there of Josef Goldmann.

Carrick had sensed the changed mood and had heard phones when he had gone up the front stairs — the formal rooms used when they entertained were on the ground floor and off the hallway, but the family’s rooms where they ate, watched the TV and lived their lives were on the first floor, bedrooms above. Under the roof and reached by narrow back stairs were the cramped attic rooms where the Russian minders and the housekeeper slept. It was unspoken but understood that Carrick was not permitted up the stairs unless by invitation or unless he was accompanied. The housekeeper was with him and he trailed behind her, first with the bouquet, then with the dress box.

An atmosphere of urgency penetrated the house. He couldn’t isolate it, or make sense of it … A problem for Johnny Carrick, one that went with the job, was to lead two lives — to act like a civilian, and to retain the suspicion and prying wariness of a police officer … Something was different, strange, as it had not been before.

When he had brought up Mrs Goldmann’s flowers, had hovered behind the housekeeper, had heard the lady of the house exclaim with extravagant delight, had watched her rip open the little accompanying envelope, had listened as she had read out a note of gratitude for the generosity of her donation from the organizing committee of a charity raising funds for Chernobyl children, he had seen through an opened inner door that Viktor spoke on a mobile and that Josef Goldmann was close enough to him to take in both sides of a conversation. On the way back down the stairs he had heard two telephones ring. Returning with the dress in the box, through that same inner door, Carrick had seen Josef Goldmann and Viktor in deep whispered conversation. Then his view had been masked by the lady holding a cocktail frock across her body and twirling in circles. Her eyes had met his, a flash of the briefest flirtation, and he had mouthed silently, as if it were expected of him, ‘It’s very fine, ma’am, very suitable.’

It had been hoped, of course, that the presence in the Goldmann house of a skilled police officer — one with the talent and nerve to reach level one in the small, closed society of SCD10 — would open up the hidden secrets of the launderer’s existence.

He had assumed, as weeks went by and as the family and the minders became more used to him, that he would be increasingly accepted. It hadn’t been that way. Truth was, Johnny Carrick knew little more about the life and criminality of his employer than when Katie had put the file into his hand for him to speed read, than when George, his controller, had done the ‘big picture’ briefing, than when Rob, his cover officer, had talked through the details of communications for routine reports and for a crisis moment. He dealt with the children and with Mrs Goldmann. He lived alongside the housekeeper, Irena, who either did not have English or cared not to use it. He shared the ready room, off the kitchen and in the basement, with Grigori, who spoke only when he needed to and slept in a recliner chair, smoked or watched football on the satellite channels. Simon Rawlings had the access to the Bossman, and was a gossip-free zone.

With Rawlings, when they were together, the talk was of forgotten wars — a tour of Northern Ireland, down by the border, as the ceasefire was shaking down, the advance into Kosovo, the firefights and bombs in southern Iraq — but nothing that had meat on it. He did not believe himself to be suspected by either of the minders, but they seemed to live by a code of total secrecy and silence. In honesty, Carrick could say that he had not learned one item of intelligence that could have been presented as evidence of criminality in the Central Criminal Court.

The target, Josef Goldmann, seemed indifferent to him. Always polite, but always distant. They met rarely — on the stairs, in the hallway — and then the Bossman was remote. Carrick would be asked how he was, how the school drive had gone, how he liked the Mercedes. He was no closer to the man than he had been on the day he had arrived. Always he was greeted with a smile, but behind the smile and the quiet voice was a wall. Light on his feet, almost dapper in his walk, slim and slight, with styled hair cut short on his scalp, the best suits on his back, fashionable stubble on his cheeks and chin, the Bossman appeared like a host of other immigrant businessmen making their names, and fortunes, in London … The frustration of failure gnawed in Carrick when he reflected on his lack of success. It was worst when he had the meetings with his cover officer and his controller. Then he saw the disappointment on their faces. It would be the same the next evening, on the narrowboat, when he told George, the DCI, and Rob, the DS, that he had learned — frankly — fuck-all. There was no bug in the house, and no tag on the big Audi car. Grigori swept the house every other day, and the car each morning.

But for the first time something in the pulse of the household had stirred that day. It beat faster and harder. He didn’t know what it was, only that it was something.

He killed time before the drive to collect the kids. He sat in the ready room, read a paper for the third time and watched the security screens.

It stood to reason: if it didn’t improve — and fast — George and Rob would be hacking at the old calculator, Katie would be offering up an inventory of cost against effectiveness and they’d be cutting the cable. Too damn soon he’d be going to Rawlings and saying, ‘I’m really sorry, Sarge, and it was good of you to get me this little number, but actually I don’t think it’s for me. Reckon I’ll be going, busted leg and all, for protection work overseas. But thanks for what you did for me.’ Simon Rawlings was a good guy, straight. He would be devastated and disappointed. Carrick did not know of an alternative to him coming out, operation abandoned. He might be told of it as soon as the next debrief session on the narrowboat. It bloody hurt, failure did.

Josef Goldmann was taken back in time. He had heard the voice of Mikhail, and later that of Reuven Weissberg, and memories had flooded him.

An ethnic Russian Jew, Goldmann was from the city of Perm, twenty hours by the fast firmeny train south-east from Moscow. It was the city used by Chekhov as the inspiration for his Three Sisters, and its name had been stolen to identify the ‘special regime’ prison camp of Perm-36. A few, today, would have delighted in the city’s association with a considerable man of letters, but many more would have acknowledged the links with an archipelago of gaols where politicals and criminals had been held and had laboured.

From the age of ten, on his entry to secondary school, Josef Goldmann had known Reuven Weissberg. Jews, the minority in the city, either stood together or were bullied, abused, beaten. From its birth, it had been a relationship based on mutual need. Reuven, four years the older, had recognized that Josef possessed an extraordinary ability to understand money, its value and the use to which it might be put, and was sharp with figures that were to become balance sheets: Josef had accepted the need for protection and the source where it could be found. They had become inseparable.

Reuven Weissberg had built little roofs over the heads of schoolkids whose parents were in the nomenklatura of the city’s life. A father was a noted physician in the central hospital, a factory manager or a senior police officer. The roof, the krysha, offered protection not from the snow and the springtime rain, but from the thugs who stalked school corridors and playgrounds. When it was known that Reuven Weissberg provided the roof for a kid, and was paid for it, the thugs had learned quickly to back off. There were fights. Knives flashed. Along with the knives there were clubs with leaded ends. A culture of premeditated and exceptional violence had swept through a school that was in a concrete jungle wasteland behind the Tchaikovsky Theatre of Opera and Ballet, and then the calm had descended.

The head teacher and her department heads had been shocked, horrified, at the sight of scarred and bruised kids attending classes, then had marvelled as peace had fallen across the complex. That head teacher, a perceptive woman, had realized the cause of the violence and the cause of the calm and had, herself, bought a roof from the Jew teenager, Weissberg. For three more years there had been no hospitalization of students, and the pilfering of school property had ended. The head teacher, of course, had never written down in any report for the Education Committee why, for a brief period, the statistics of violence in her school had soared, or why, almost as suddenly as conflict ended on a battlefield, the statistics of property stolen from her students and her school had ebbed away, like water into sand. The conclusion of such a report, which remained unwritten, would have mirrored the judgement of another Jew kid, Goldmann. The provider of the roof had no fear, was a beast of ruthless cruelty, was a man-child capable of inflicting horrific injuries without losing sleep. From the age of eleven to just past his thirteenth birthday, Josef Goldmann was the banker.

He had had no training in investment, no background in economics, no tuition in finance. With a squeaky, not yet broken voice, he told Reuven Weissberg where the fees for the roofs should be put, what should be bought and how the money could be hidden. In the city of Perm, a portfolio had built and a treasure chest of bicycles, leather jackets and alcohol had gone into store for selling on when shortages dictated there was demand for the unobtainable. The new business had broken out of the perimeter walls of the school and had moved on to the city’s streets. Kiosk-holders had received visits from the hugely muscled Weissberg, who had explained the risks of fire engulfing a kiosk, and from Josef Goldmann — with a pimpled face and large spectacles perched on a shallow nose — who made fast estimations of what a kiosk business should take in a month and therefore what should be the cost of protection. Where there was refusal, there followed fire. Where there were rivals and a roof already in place, there were skirmishes. Reuven Weissberg was never bested.

Defectors came. Tongue-tied and awkward, kids from other teenage gangs pleaded to be allowed to join the Weissberg brigada. Loyalties shifted. At eighteen, in one of the toughest cities in the Soviet Union, Weissberg was acknowledged as an avoritet, and Goldmann as a brigadir, and there were more than twenty gofers, couriers and hooligans behind them who were at the level of a boevik in the expanding banditskaya krysha. Then Weissberg was gone.

More memories. With Weissberg a conscript into the army, Josef Goldmann, only thirteen, had no roof. Power shifting. The banditskaya krysha collapsing. The city of Perm, without the roof over him, was a frightening, threatening place. He had lain low, had concerned himself with his studies and with the money accumulated before Weissberg had left. Three times, in the following two years, he had been beaten — clothes ripped, spectacles smashed — and had thought himself lucky not to have been tied at the wrists and ankles and thrown into the waters of the Kama river.

Two years later, Reuven Weissberg had returned to Perm — harder, fitter, leaner — and Josef Goldmann’s roof was once more in place. He owed everything to the man. In the shadow of the krysha, they had climbed together. Goldmann owed Weissberg his town house in Knightsbridge, his villa outside Albufeira on the Algarve coast, his penthouse in Cannes, where the motor yacht was moored, and his stature as a multi-millionaire who required bodyguards for his and his family’s protection.

He dressed. In the adjacent room, his wife slipped over her head the little black dress that had been delivered that afternoon. They were due in the early evening at a reception for the launch of a new collection at a Cork Street gallery, and probably he would bid in the auction for a watercolour landscape, go to a quarter of a million and be applauded for his generosity — because half of the work’s fee would go to a charity. Esther came to him. He smelled the scent on her, kissed her shoulder and made to fasten the clasp of her necklace. But his fingers — normally so certain — fumbled with the clasp because his mind was distracted, and he heard his wife’s brittle intake of breath when he pinched her nape. Why?

Because Viktor, on family business, had travelled to Sarov two months before. Because an offer of an item to be sold had been made. Because, via a courier, Josef Goldmann had told Reuven Weissberg of the item that was for sale, and a price had been agreed. Because a purchaser had been found for it, and the process of the sale was in place. Because the item was beyond the limits of anything ever handled before. Because he and his colleague could make vast sums, even though neither had need of money. Because money was power, was confirmation of power.

Because two old men had set off, that morning, on a journey.

He could not see the reddened pinch mark at the back of Esther’s neck. He said they would take Viktor and Grigori to such a public place as a gallery on Cork Street, and that Johnny would stay at home with the children.

‘Is Simon not coming?’ she asked.

‘He’s off duty tonight. It’s not a problem … Johnny’s all right for the children.’

‘They like him. I like him.’

He said, as if it were of no importance, ‘Simon is best for us. Johnny will do the children.’

Offered the item, Reuven Weissberg had snatched at it, as if the risk didn’t concern him. Perhaps, today, Josef Goldmann saw too little of his protector and was too far distanced from the aura of confidence Weissberg provided. The deal terrified him.

Esther frowned. ‘Are you all right, Josef?’

‘I’m fine.’

‘Is it because Simon has to have a night off? He’s—’

He spat, ‘Forget Simon, forget Johnny, think only of looking pretty tonight. Do what you do well, and I’ll do what I do well.’

‘You don’t bust your balls when there’s no need, Christopher. Sit and scratch them, let the world go by. Then when the need comes out of a clear sky, you go after it and get frantic.’

The sayings of Clipper Reade, if written down, would have made a Bible for Lawson, but he had had no need to write them down because he remembered them, each emphasis and inflection.

He had gone after it, was frantic. And Lucy with him. Sarov, its importance, was not a problem; he knew all about Sarov. Any veteran, laced with Cold War experience, and any desk officer in Non-Proliferation was familiar with it. His screen and hers had pumped up a map of Knightsbridge, a particular street and a particular trio of properties. Number twelve was the workplace of a practice of architects with studios below and the senior partner occupying the top floor. Number fourteen was leasehold, forty-nine years to run, in the name of Josef Shlomo Goldmann and lived in by his family and staff. Number sixteen was a freehold property in the name of a charitable trust that aided ‘gentlewomen’ who had fallen on ‘hard times’. Lucy had led with the matching of mobile-telephone calls into one of those terraced, fat-cat houses, and the links splayed out to Sarov and to the forest wilderness by the Bug river. He knew about the Bug river, knew almost everything about where the Red Army had been in former times. He had gone past her, as if he had his chest out and the tape loomed, and had identified the ownership of the three.

Clipper Reade had said, ‘Better believe me, Christopher. You may get, in this business, a small window that’s ajar. It’s criminal not to jump through it. Windows, my experience, slam shut if you’re too finicky to take the opportunity of advantage. Don’t call for a committee to sit — just jump.’

He doubted, profoundly, that a firm of architects had links to Sarov or to a marshy and forgotten corner of eastern Poland; beside him, Lucy had scratched out the charitable organization from the list of three. She had been with him since 1980. If he had been sacked when he’d refused to work any longer on Middle East associated desks, she would have left on that same Friday evening. She lived in a tiny apartment across the river in Victoria and spent her evenings in the company of a long-haired blue Norwegian Forest cat. She did not ask a question when she knew the answer, did not speak unless to make a necessary contribution: she was rewarded. Christopher Lawson had never barked at her, and he had never criticized her work or contradicted her opinions. On other desks it was suggested by some that he shagged her, but a more general opinion was that she loved only her cat and he loved only his work … yet they were soul-mates.

Lawson went now for the liaison officer from ‘that shambles across the river’ to demand from the Box 500 building on the north side of the Thames a detailed breakdown of the occupants of number fourteen — Josef Shlomo Goldmann and everyone living under his roof — and he snarled into the phone that he wanted it ‘yesterday’ and would not accept delay. Lucy tracked, with greater politeness, to a source in Special Branch at Scotland Yard. She had never remonstrated with Lawson for his rudeness to others, and those who had felt the whip of his tongue, then seen him speak with her were astonished to find him capable of minimal pleasantries.

Clipper Reade had said, in the dry drawl of a broad Texan accent, ‘Things that matter don’t hang about and wait for you, Christopher. Sort of float by you, maybe gossamer, like a butterfly on the wing. You have to snatch or the moment’s gone and it does not — believe me — return. Snatch and hold hard.’

Twenty-six years of Christopher Lawson’s career had slid by since he had last been with the American, learning and listening. Special Branch came back to Lucy before the Security Service liaison. She scribbled a list of names and he grabbed it from her. He read the names of Joseph Shlomo Goldmann, Esther Goldmann and her children, then the retinue, Viktor and Grigori, a woman whose occupation was given as ‘housekeeper’, Simon Rawlings and Jonathan Carrick. He told her he wanted more on all of them, and that he was off to the upper-floor suite of the director general.

She would have known he had no appointment, but on that afternoon of the week the director general always hosted a meeting of political figures who concerned themselves with the intricacies of intelligence-gathering and were allies.

Clipper Reade had said, ‘At first sight, Christopher, the skeins don’t seem to have a shape and make patterns. But it’s the art of our trade to give them shape. Men and women now are coming into view, and some don’t know each other and some do. Some are connected and some have never met. You watch those skeins and the tangle they make until the patterns unravel the chaos. Then you have success. You have an open mind but you go where the skeins take you, however dense that chaos.’

On the upper floor, in an outer office of the suite — politicians left to sip coffee and nibble biscuits — he clattered through the situation to the director general at machine-gun speed. ‘It’s because of Sarov, Francis. I cannot ignore anything involving that place. Ask me where I’m currently heading and I’ll respond that I haven’t the faintest idea, but Sarov is not something I ignore. I don’t know yet who I’m dealing with, but I expect to very soon, by the end of the day. I have the feeling that once the chatter starts there may not be much time. Trust me, anything to do with Sarov means the involvement of serious people.’

From far back in the trees he watched the house. He waited for a man to show himself. But for a dog, the house was empty.

Darkness had gathered around him and the canopies of the pines were inadequate as cover in the heavy rain. Incessantly, water dripped from on high on to Reuven Weissberg’s hair and shoulders, protected by his thick leather jacket. Only rarely did he wipe the rainwater from his face. More often he reached inside his coat and under his shirt to scratch a small indent in his upper arm where there was dark scar tissue.

He knew the man was named Tadeuz Komiski, knew that he was now seventy-one, knew that he had been born in that house. A priest, a schoolteacher and a social worker had given him that information. He knew the story because his grandmother had told it to him, and he had hoped that evening to be told what he wished to know … He doubted that information would be gained by conversation — more likely in the aftermath of a beating or the extraction of fingernails or the placing of a lit cheroot cigar on the testicles. But the house was empty.

Behind him, Mikhail would be waiting, arms folded, never impatient. Reuven Weissberg stared at the house and his eyes were long accustomed to the gloom. If it had not been built in a clearing, with a patch for vegetables at the front, if it had been surrounded by pines and birches, he would not have been able to see it. He could, just, make out its silhouette. There was no lamp lit inside. Light, had it been there, would have peeped from cracks round the door or windows. No fire had been started or he would have seen the smoke spill from the brick chimney-stack. He looked past a small flat-top lorry from whose body the engine had been removed, and past a stable block where the doors hung off their hinges. It was a place, he thought, that had once been cared for but now decayed. He sensed already that he had stayed too long.

The dog inside knew he was there.

How it knew, Reuven Weissberg could not have said.

From the the pitch of the barking, he had identified it as a big dog, and reckoned it would have to be slaughtered if he were to get past and ask the question he wished to put to Tadeuz Komiski. He would think nothing of shooting a dog. Neither would Mikhail. It was the fourth time he had come for Komiski and he had never found him — but he would.

Reuven Weissberg had come to the forest to locate a grave. There was a monument half a kilometre away through the trees, along a track made by the woodmen’s lorries, a circular and precise mound of ashes. It could have been said to be a grave. In the trees there were the mass graves that might hold a thousand skeletons or a hundred; they were buried deep under layers of pine needles and composted birch leaves. No stone or indentation marked their resting-place. He had come, again as on those times before, to learn of the place where one corpse was buried, and Tadeuz Komiski would tell him. But the man did not come.

An owl called, as it would have done on the night that a grave was filled.

He was far away but Tadeuz Komiski’s sight was as keen as it had been during his childhood.

There were deer in the forest and wild boar, and sometimes the small and protected pack of wolves strayed over from the national park that straddled the marshes west of the Lublin road. He heard the cry of the short-eared owl that hunted close to his home. The deer, the boar, the wolf and the owl had no better sight than Tadeuz Komiski, nor the lesser-spotted eagle that would now be perched close to its high nest in a pine.

All through that day and that evening, he had watched the man in the heavy leather jacket. All of his life, from the age of six, he had known that a man would come, sit and watch … It was because of what his father had done that he knew a man would come. He did not dare go back to his house in the clearing where his dog had not been fed. The dog had told him that the man had moved in the late afternoon from a place close to the monument and had taken a new position, seated, close to the house. Throughout his life he had carried the burden of knowing that a man would come — the thought had been easier to bear when he was younger. He could not remember now whether it was the third or fourth time that he had seen the man, sitting in the forest, so patient, and whether it was three or four years since he had first seen him.

Every summer visitors came. They walked on the weed-free raked path from the parking area, past where the foundations of the tower were to the mound of ashes. They circled it, paused by the monument and sometimes laid sprigs of flowers there. A few walked a little way into the forest, on the woodsmen’s tracks, and paused, heard the birdsong and gazed round, seeming frightened at the density of the trees. Then they hurried away.

He was now seventy-one. His father, who had made the burden for his life, had been dead more than forty years, and his mother a year longer; both had breathed a last gasping cry in the wooden house that the man watched. Perhaps he should have burned it to the ground, put petrol in it and razed it. It was cursed. He had married Maria in 1964, and she had died eleven months later in childbirth, in the same bed in which his father and mother had died. His wife was buried, the stillborn baby with her, in a crudely cut pine coffin in the churchyard at Orchowek. If he stood beside the stone he could see over a low wall to the trees that lined the banks of the Bug river and the cemetary but it was many years since he had been there. Because of what his father had done, the house was cursed. The curse had killed his mother, his wife and the girl-child who had never lived. The curse had remained alive.

For the evil done by his father a punishment had been handed down to him. It was never out of the mind of Tadeuz Komiski. And he was responsible. It was him, the six-year-old, who had run back to the house, fleet-footed, and told his father what he had seen. And perhaps then his father had not believed him because he had hesitated, but his mother had spoken of the reward on offer. He had led his father back into the forest, and the evil was done in the hope of gaining that reward: two kilos of sugar. That day the curse had been set in place as the rain fell softly in the forest.

He could see the shape of the man’s shoulders, and if he moved his head there was a suspicion of his pale skin colour. The man never coughed, never fidgeted, except to scratch one place on his arm below the right shoulder — but insects from the forest floor would by now have found him and would be crawling over him. He never stretched or cracked his finger joints. Earlier, he had seen him walk slowly, carefully, weighing his steps, on the needle and compost carpet, and Tadeuz Komiski believed he searched for the grave that was the mark of the evil done and the cause of the curse … And his father had never been given the reward.

Behind the man, sitting against the tree trunk, there was another. Two hundred metres back towards the monument, another watched and listened but lit cigarettes.

Only the owl shouted and only the rain fell, and he waited for them to leave. But the lesson of the curse told Tadeuz Komiski that if they left he would still find no peace — they would return. He thought the grave cried to them … The curse had maddened him, made hallucinations … What he had done at the age of six had destroyed his life.

Now they moved on.

‘Your car, Major, is like the story of our lives.’

‘Our lives, Colonel, are shit. I accept it, my car’s the same.’

‘A broken car and broken lives — agreed. Both shit.’

‘When I first took possession of a Polonez, in 1986, I thought it an accolade, like the award of a medal. A car driven by a man of importance, a mark of personal success. Four cylinders, 1500cc version, top-of-the-range, four-speed transmission, the quality of Fiat technology. When I first had it, and drove through the main gate each morning — forgive me the indulgence, my friend — I was proud to be the owner of such a vehicle.’

‘It’s still a piece of shit.’

They had lost four hours, and it was only the first day of the journey.

Halfway up, the punctured tyre not yet clear of the road, the jack had collapsed, corroded by the same rust that afflicted the coachwork and doors. The car had subsided on to the flat rear left tyre. Molenkov had dragged the jack clear, Yashkin had hurled it into the lake and it had disappeared into a reed bed. They had sat together beside the tilted Polonez, on the spare tyre, and had waited for help. Each vehicle that came they greeted with shouts, waved arms and pleas for help. The first four had ignored them. The fifth was a van, and had stopped, but the driver had commented immediately on the weight the Polonez carried under the tarpaulin and the bags, and had seemed curious to know what two old fools carried that was so heavy; they’d sent him on his way. It was nearly dark when a saloon car had pulled up behind them. A schoolteacher, with a life history to be told but also a jack that fitted the Polonez. By the time they knew his name, and where he taught, the names of his wife and children, the success of his pupils at indoor soccer and his hobbies, the spare was in place. They’d waved him on his way, both exhausted from the effort of listening … and four hours had been lost.

‘There are winners in this world and losers, Igor, and …’

‘A profound psychological analysis of the state of society, Oleg, and of the quality I would expect from a retired political officer. A zampolit would be expected to demonstrate such insights.’

‘You sarcastic bastard — and it was your tyre that was shit, and your car. I would have said that winners and losers have little contact in our state today. A very few win, a great many lose … We’re in a particularly rare situation. We’ve been losers, dismissed from our work after years of dedicated service, the victims of total disrespect. Our pensions are at best erratic and at worst unpaid, shit identical to your car. But we leap a chasm to a new world, to that of the winners. Doesn’t that cheer you? It should.’

Yashkin frowned, pondered, then asked the question that had long been in his mind. ‘Is it greed that motivates me — pure greed and envy of others?’

The former zampolit was certain. ‘No, not greed and not envy. I was a judge of men — the political officer’s work. I looked for weakness, but with you I never found such a base condition. They betrayed us. They made a state that is criminalized, corrupt, riddled with disgusting disease, a state in which loyalty is no longer recognized. You have done nothing to feel ashamed of, or me … I remember the night you told me what lay buried in your garden, and you were nervous of confiding your secret. I thought then how greatly I admired your skill at removing it from the Zone and your opportunism. Now we have set off. The talking’s done.’

Yashkin grinned and turned to his friend. He saw his tired, worn features and the long greying hair caught at the back of his neck with an elastic band, the worry lines at his eyes and the stubble on his cheeks. He knew the hardship of his friend’s life as it ticked towards its close and remained unrewarded — as his did. The grin split his face wider. ‘I have a feeling that the Polonez — as shit as we are — will get us there.’

They clasped hands. The headlights speared the road running past wide lakes, over rattling wood bridges and through forests. Behind them was the cargo they would deliver, shielded by the tarpaulin and their bags. Two old, thin, calloused hands were held tight, and the road was clear in front of them.

She had been warned about the man she would meet. Her line manager had said that Christopher Lawson had a reputation for verbal violence on an unacceptable scale. With the cardboard file-holder close to her chest, she’d walked down Millbank, along the north side of the river, past the high tower, the Tate Gallery and the Army Medical School, then strode across the bridge. In front of her she saw the hideous floodlit mass of the sister organization.

The main crowds, commuters going home at the end of their day and spilling towards Vauxhall station, had thinned. She saw him easily. Not particularly tall, without horns growing from his forehead. She smiled to herself because he looked twice at his watch and it did not concern her: she knew she would make the rendezvous a full thirty seconds before the scheduled time.

He was looking over her shoulder, maybe expecting someone older, a man, peering down the length of the bridge. She’d been told he’d be wearing a raincoat and a trilby — as if he’d been dug out of the Ark, her line manager had said — and it was, truth to tell, damn strange to meet face to face on a bloody cold bridge when the age of email communication had arrived and there were closet rooms for shielded meetings back at the Box and at his place. But it was where she had been told to come, and she thought this was the way that unreconstructed veterans did their business.

She wasn’t tall, she was young, and probably fitted no stereotype he’d made — which cheered her. She walked up to his shoulder, saw a thin aquiline face and the growth from a careless early-morning shave. ‘Mr Lawson? It’s Mr Lawson, isn’t it?’

He glanced down, a reflex, at his wristwatch.

She shook his hand, gave it a good squeeze. ‘Myself, Mr Lawson, I love getting drenched, turning my feet into frozen lumps, screwing up my hair. I love everything, Mr Lawson, about meetings al fresco. So, before I drown and before I get blown away, let’s do our business.’

They did. She was led down the steps at the end of the bridge to a bench that the wet wind hit.

A plastic bag from her pocket covered the file, and the bullet point digests with the accompanying photographs had been laminated — thoughtfully — as protection against the rain. The full-length biographies stayed in the dry file.

The liaison officer, rather enjoying the daftness of the setting, said, ‘I’m only doing thumbnails. Right? Top of the tree is Josef Goldmann, Russian national, born in Perm. Serial criminal, expertise in money laundering … Believed associate, try junior partner, of Reuven Weissberg, major-league Mafia, who bases himself in Berlin. It’s all in there, and lines for you to follow …’

She was not interrupted. She thought he listened closely, but his eyes roved across the river and, maybe, took in the river traffic — tugs and barges — and, maybe, he gazed at the floodlit seat of government. The big clock chimed.

With the photographs, the rain dripping off them, she identified Esther Goldmann, complete with shopping bags, and the children with their private-school satchels. Still he did not speak and nothing was queried. She thought of all those in the Box who would have chipped in with questions designed to demonstrate keenness or authority; many would have stamped on her fingers. Only the twitch in his mouth showed his interest. The minders’ pictures were displayed, and an indistinct image of the housekeeper. Then a man’s photograph, moderately expensive suit, with severely cut hair.

‘He’s Simon Rawlings — ex-sergeant, ex-paratrooper — the factotum. Drives and fixes. No criminal record and never in trouble — has the Military Medal from Iraq. Probably straight as a telegraph pole, and heavily trusted by his employer. I would say, from what I’ve read, that he walks through life with blinkers over his eyes and plugs in his ears. He’s adjacent to Goldmann, but not alongside him, if you know what I mean … and he’s muscle. Doesn’t want trouble and is unlikely to be part of any criminality. A duty man. There’s one more.’

She lit a cigarette. The tobacco Fascists ruled in the Box, but if she was going to sit in the cold and wet she’d damn well enjoy the luxury. The smoke floated by his nose, but there was no curled lip, annoyance. She warmed to him. She held the final photograph on her lap and damp ash fell on it.

‘This one’s as interesting as it gets. Jonathan Carrick, aged thirty-six but only possibly … more of that. He’s the junior bodyguard, takes the lady shopping and socializing and the kids to school, a dogsbody. He, too, is a one-time paratrooper but was injured in Iraq and invalided out. He’s a phoney. Mr Lawson, put it this way, he’s not what he seems. Seems to be a professional bodyguard, but our computers show that the DVLA, Social Security and National Insurance records for that name, and that military background, were erased and replaced three months ago. It’s what they do for policemen, those going undercover. You might have the clout — national security and all that — to break open SCD10 because that’s where I think he comes from. Do you understand me?’

There was a quiet growl beside her. ‘Understood.’

‘So, Goldmann is a Serious Crime Directorate target, of sufficient importance for an undercover to be introduced, but he’s pretty far down the line. That’s all I can give you. Of any use?’

‘Possibly.’

She passed him the folder in its protective cover. Stood. Rather formally, he thanked her, but she sensed awkwardness as if that were unfamiliar territory to him.

Boldness took her, a degree of recklessness. ‘So, what do you think? Are we talking of imminent danger?’

‘Possibly.’

‘Where are we on a scale of one to ten, Mr Lawson?’

She saw that his eyes had fastened on her. In the dreary evening light thrown down by the dull lamps, they glistened, startling her. He seemed to be assessing her question … The eyes now were mesmerizing, and the voice had changed to a scraping intensity.

He said, ‘None of your business, and unlikely to be in the future. I compliment you on your briefing. Very adequate … A scale of one to ten? Probably between twelve and thirteen. Goodnight.’

She walked back over the bridge, into the teeth of the wind and rain, and was alone with the implications of her naming Jonathan Carrick, an undercover.

Back in his office, feeling pressure and knowing that action was demanded, Christopher Lawson scanned the files. The programme for proceeding was instinctive. There was a number on the file, and he rang it. He asked for a name and was told the man he wished to speak to was off duty. Would he find the man of that name at home? He might. He had spoken to a voice that had a firm, decisive tone, and a hint of a Scots accent. He shuffled the picture that went with the voice to the top of the heap and gazed at it. He thought a key had been found — and, damned obvious, keys were for opening doors. He always followed his instinct, because that way had been taught him by Clipper Reade. He called to Lucy, ‘Get into that increments list.’

‘Any special skills?’

‘God alone knows, I don’t. “General skills”, thinks on his feet — whoever’s available. To meet me in the Prince Albert, back bar, half an hour.’

‘Will do.’

He left his desk, went to the floor safe and tapped in the combination numbers. There were cardboard shoeboxes in there, taking three of the four shelves, all brimful of equipment that had been standard in Cold War times, the times when he had learned a trade from Clipper Reade — pens that fired a single bullet, bottles of invisible ink, hollowed papier-mâché rocks that could hold a microphone, little Minox cameras, the detritus of a life that few recognized as having contemporary value. He rummaged through cartons of pills, each labelled, and made his selection.

He’d rather liked the girl, the liaison from the plodders across the river. Bizarre that. Nice girl, yes — and able. And … Lucy, who never raised her voice, murmured from the outer office that he would be met, in twenty-eight minutes, at the Prince Albert, in the back bar, by an increment.

A doorbell was rung. The man whose finger pressed down the button was a freelancer employed by the Secret Intelligence Service at an hourly rate of fifty pounds, and expenses. He did work, on a casual basis, that was either too mundane for a full-time staffer or was too dirty for a staffer to be involved in. A host of increments waited for their phones to ring and meeting points to be fixed, and the work made for a reasonable living … Above all else, an increment was deniable.

A woman came to the door, holding a screaming child in its night-clothes. ‘Yes?’

‘Sorry to bother you. My problem, my memory’s like a sieve. Simon said I was to meet him, but I’ve clean forgotten where or if it’s here.’

‘You on the team … darts?’

It was his skill that he could react at speed to whatever presented itself, was worth fifty pounds an hour, cash and no paperwork. ‘That’s right — well, if they’re still short.’

‘He’s already gone.’ She hugged the baby, stilled its crying. Might have been attractive once.

‘I’m a right clown — help me. Forget my own name next. Where’s the game?’

‘They’re at that one down off the Balls Pond Road, on the right, before the mini-mart. Across Essex Road, along Englefield Road, turn left into Beauvoir — can’t miss it. There’ll be a green Golf, 04 plate, parked there. His.’

‘Thanks so much. You’ve been a real help.’

The increment was smiling as he backed away, and the baby had begun to bawl again.

A photograph was glanced at, studied long enough for recognition. The door of a public house was pushed open and a wall of noise — music, raised voices and laughter — bounced into a man’s face.

A voice shouted, ‘Come on, Sim, you’re next up. Double top, ten and a five, and we’re in.’

A second voice shouted, ‘Your Coke’s on the table, Sim.’

And Simon Rawlings a former paratroop sergeant who was now bodyguard to a Russian-born launderer and integral to a pub darts team, glanced sideways, saw his drink put on the table among filled and empty glasses, and walked to the line in front of the floodlit board. He gazed at his personal arrows and readied his concentration. His team, and the opposition, crowded behind him. The first arrow was the double top, neat. His people cheered and the others groaned, and he prepared to throw his second dart … and nobody had a view of the table and the Coke glass on it … and nobody saw the miniature bottle of pure alcohol — tasteless — tipped into it.

Simon Rawlings had the ten, and elation coursed in him. He eyed the segment of the five … and nobody saw the intruder slip from the pub, or heard the door close after him.

A quiet evening, as it always was. He sat alone in the basement ready room. Viktor and Grigori were gone with the Bossman and the Bosswoman. The housekeeper had finished the washing-up, the clearing and stacking of dishes in the kitchen, and had gone up the stairs to her comfortable chair on the landing outside the kids’ rooms. She would spend her evening there.

He didn’t like the quiet. It made for complacency, and complacency was a killer in Johnny Carrick’s work.

The television was off and he had read the newspaper, had completed two of the puzzles.

Two lives were his existence. They merged, then separated. Carrick would have said that any human being who had not experienced twin lives could not contemplate the stress of deceit. Of the two, one was factual biography, and one was legend. That night, on the settee, in front of the security screens, he thought factual — which was safe, as legend was not — and childhood.

On his birth certificate was his mother’s name, Agnes Carrick, and the address given was of his grandparents, David and Maggie Carrick, both with the listed occupation of schoolteacher. Where his father’s name and details could have been entered there was a blank space, free of the registrar’s copperplate pen. The certificate was still in place, could be referenced by a thug or a private detective or launderer who checked out his name and his story.

The screens showed the front porch, the rear gardens, the back basement door, the front hall, the landing and the top of the stairs outside the family’s bedrooms. Only the one on the front porch moved, traversing slowly. If there was duller work than watching screens in the late evening, Carrick hadn’t experienced it.

The address on the certificate was a road in the village of Kingston where a bungalow overlooked the mouth of the Spey river. It was Scotland’s premier salmon water then and now, and the kid’s earliest recollections were in spate time when the flow drove melted snow off the Cairngorms, carried their great fallen boulders and rolled them on its course towards the grey North Sea. Spectacular for a kid. Not so special was learning, as a kid, that his mother had gone to London for work, aged twenty, had had a fling — older man, married — and returned to bear the baby in her parents’ home. Then she had gone to work in the food factory at Mosstodloch. Hard, that, for a kid … Hard also that his grandparents were high on the church, went twice every Sunday, tried to love their daughter’s bastard but couldn’t hide from young eyes the difficulty of giving that love. On the kid’s learning curve had been the origin of his name, biblical, and an old man gripping his wrists and whispering, breath on his face: I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan: very pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy love for me was wonderful, passing the love of women. II Samuel, I:26. His grandfather had been David, and it was like they were inseparable friends, and it was suffocating, and he was kept in view and watched. Couldn’t go down on to the riverbanks and scramble on the stones, watch otters or seals and have the ospreys swooping over him without the eyes of his grandfather on his back. For all those childhood years, the factual life and the legend were merged. He had left school, in the big market town of Elgin, on a June morning, had taken a bus in the afternoon to the recruiting office in Inverness, had been there ten minutes before the doors had closed, had requested to join the Parachute Regiment — that regiment because David Carrick, his grandfather, suffered vertigo nightmares, was terrified of heights. It was safe for him to relive childhood.

A telephone rang.

He jerked alert. His eyes went to the screens, then to the telephone, on a side shelf, that was linked to the ready room. Those that the family used, and the line into the Bossman’s office, did not ring in the basement. It was for him to answer, and he did. The telephone was from the world of his legend, was where safety ended.

He gave the number curtly.

‘Christ, that you, Corp? It is you?’

He recognized the voice of Simon Rawlings, but unreal and strained, hoarse. He asked what had happened.

‘Bloody life’s fallen in on me, that’s what. I can hardly believe this. They’ve given me one call, and it’s to you. I’m throwing darts. I’m not, you know me, on the piss. Finish the game, get in the car, drive off. Gone a hundred yards, not even round the corner, and I’m pulled over — I’m breathalysed, positive, way over. If it hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t have believed it. “Must have been spiked,” I say, and the copper says everyone uses that line. I say the kit must be defective, and the custody sergeant says it’s never the kit’s fault. I’m going into the cells overnight, that’s routine. I’m drunk in charge, I’m going to lose my licence for twelve months. Corp, I’m fucked … I’m just telling you, there’s nothing you can do … You’ll have to tell the Bossman. Don’t know whether I’ll see you again, Corp, because I don’t think my feet’ll touch the ground when the Bossman hears—’

The call was cut and the phone purred in his ear.