Timebomb

Chapter 5

‘Mrs Goldmann requires to see you upstairs,’ Viktor said.

He couldn’t read Viktor, impassive, unemotional and masked. Grigori was different. Grigori had sat in the ready room all afternoon, and hadn’t spoken, just sat with sullen, blurred, glazed eyes focused on the middle distance. He seemed to see and note nothing. Grigori did not have to speak to betray his feelings. Grigori was a failure and Carrick assumed he was spoiled goods, would be replaced at a time of convenience, never again trusted. The older and more senior man, Viktor, had been closeted with the Bossman and the Bossman’s wife upstairs, and Carrick assumed the crisis would have been thrashed out. Sitting in the ready room off the kitchen, with Grigori not speaking to him, Carrick had calmed, had lost the knots in his arm muscles and the slackness at his chin, had felt strong enough to get the kids from school.

He pushed himself up from the chair. ‘Yes, of course.’

Viktor held the door open for him. It was not a gesture of respect but an indication that the summons was immediate. Two things had happened, and he understood neither. Simon Rawlings should have been at the wheel of the Audi going into the City; had been removed on a drink-driving charge, but did not use alcohol. An armed attack had taken place, an attempt to kill: nothing in the atmosphere of the household or from the body language of his employer had shown him to be fearful of a killing strike.

He went up the main staircase, with its gold-leaf paint, with the softly lit pictures at eye level. He paused to rub hard with the heel of his hand at the stain on his knee from the pavement, then at the smear on his elbow.

When he had come off the training course, had won his admittance to SCD10, Carrick had been told: ‘We think we’re going to like what we’re getting from you. What we appreciate most is that you’re not painted over with police procedures — you are still, at heart, a squaddie. We reckon you behave more in the old military characteristics than police stereotypes. It’s a good legend you have, the paratroop background, and it’s checkable. We can use you as a contract hit guy, as a muscle doorman and as protection. It’ll go fine. Welcome to the team.’ The controller, George, had been allocated to run him, Rob had been the cover officer on his first job and Katie sorted out the office. Katie had told him, shouldn’t have, that his first rating had had a handwritten paragraph in the margin: ‘… has common sense, is down to earth, above all has bottle’. On his first job, he had been assigned to a team of north London detectives, with club owners as a target.

Ahead of him, Viktor knocked at the door, didn’t wait for an answer, and opened it. He saw the family on the settee. Josef Goldmann had Peter sitting astride his knees and Esther Goldmann had Selma cuddled close to her. He was ushered forward.

The club owners were Jed and Baz — brothers. They had a place off Green Lanes, in Haringey, had made an alliance with the Turks there, and were careful, clever and did Class A stuff. A Chis had done the digging to get him in. The Chis was a Covert Human Intelligence Source, a low-life rag, and he’d made introductions, then been paid to fuck off up north, and was looking at a tenner inside if he reneged on the deal.

For seven months, Carrick had been on the door and inside, but he’d taken a night off when the uniforms did the raid. Wasn’t there to rubberneck, and enough Class A stuff was on the premises — as he’d said it would be, and where — for him not to be needed as a prosecution witness: that was about as good as it got. If an undercover could do the business, and not have to go into court and give evidence, it was big-bonus time.After the raid and the arrests, he’d had one drink with the detectives, just the one, and he’d gone off into the night, leaving them to get well pissed up. They’d never know his name, only the bogus identity he’d assumed. They’d never see or hear of him again. About three months ago, he’d read in the evening paper that Jed and Baz had gone down for fifteen years each. Not bad blokes, actually, for company, quite amusing but over-greedy.

The Goldmanns were in shock. It was one thing for the family to have the trappings of protection, men in the house to drive them, scan pavements when they were dropped and open doors for them, another thing to have a snub-nose pistol waved in the face, and two shots fired before an aim could be drawn. The Bossman looked small against the cushions of the settee and the boy on his lap had his arms round his father’s neck. The Bossman’s wife sat upright, but had her arm close round the daughter. Not every day that a husband and father came home from work to report survival from a killing effort, but there again it wasn’t everyone’s husband and father who laundered big money out of eastern and central Europe.

The Bossman’s wife said, ‘We would like to thank you, Johnny.’

He, of course, collecting the kids had said nothing. He’d seen them into the hall, had watched them bolt upstairs, then gone down into the ready room. He wondered what they had said. ‘Daddy’s had a difficult day’ didn’t really do it. Esther gave her daughter a sharp nudge, as if something was planned, and the child came off the settee, skipped behind it and emerged with a big, like big, bouquet of flowers. More red roses than Carrick had ever seen in a bouquet. He didn’t care who knew it, he liked the kids. George knew he liked them, and Rob. He saw awe on the child’s face, as if she’d been told that this man had offered his own safety in the protection of her father, and there was sweetness and sincerity there, and she seemed to do a little bob curtsy, what she would have learned in a nine-year-old’s dance class at a private school, and the flowers were given him, and he realized how great his fondness was for those children, with the gentle banter they gave him in the car and their innocence.

He blushed, felt the heat in his cheeks. No one had given Johnny Carrick flowers before. Esther Goldmann said, a brittle voice, ‘For you, with our thanks, Johnny. Perhaps you will pass them to someone precious to you.’

The flowers were in the crook of his arm. He assumed, always, that Esther was not the shrinking violet who knew nothing of her husband’s trade, but it was the part she played. She took the children past him, past Viktor, through the door. He hadn’t realized that Viktor was there — silent, watching, arms folded across his chest.

Josef Goldmann sat upright now, as if energized, the haggardness of his face gone, and said briskly, ‘I am, Johnny, a businessman who buys and sells, who trades on his expertise, who is successful and therefore attracts envy. I am also an immigrant to your country, and I am a Jew … I do not seek to attract attention. You will be surprised that I have not contacted the police and reported this attempted murder. It is not, Johnny, in my interests to parade myself. Neither is it in the interests of Esther or our children. My work involves discretion and would be harmed if I were to be written about in sensational terms in newspapers. The police have not been told of what happened, or of your heroic defence of me. Is that understood?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Do you have, Johnny, a problem with my attitude to the police and my wish to avoid the spotlight of publicity?’

‘No problem, sir.’

‘That street, I have learned this in the past from those I visit there — in casual conversation — is not covered by security cameras, one of the few in the City. This afternoon Viktor went there, met the newspaper-seller, who assured him he had seen nothing of what happened. Does that, Johnny, make a difficulty for you?’

‘No difficulty, sir.’ Carrick wondered how much money had been passed, and whether the seller had now abandoned his pitch and retired to a bar to consider his good fortune.

‘You are recovered from this morning?’

‘Quite recovered, sir.’ He could look back, could try to piece together each moment of the confrontation. He could feel in his knee the jarred blow into the man’s groin and could feel in his fist a rawness from the punch to the bridge of the man’s nose.

‘You will be rewarded for what you have done today — and I hope you will feel that the reward is generous — and your terms of employment will be reviewed. In the future, Johnny, I want you close to me.’

‘Whatever you say, sir.’

‘You have, of course, a valid passport?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘With Viktor, I travel abroad tomorrow. You have a family occasion tonight, yes? You should be here by seven in the morning, and you go with us. You will be away for perhaps a week. Johnny, the events of this morning have gone by and will not again be referred to. I have avenues that I will use to learn who was responsible for the attack on me, and I will use them. Thank you, Johnny, and I will see you in the morning.’

Not asked whether it was convenient, not asked whether it suited his plans, but Carrick did not expect to be asked. He realized he had stepped higher up a ladder, that luck and good fortune had pushed him there. Felt, almost, a pride in the trust now placed in him.

He nodded, turned. Viktor opened the door for him.

He watched. Josef Goldmann stood back from the window but his finger hitched aside the net curtain. He saw Johnny Carrick go down the steps from the front door.

He asked of Viktor, ‘Is the trust justified?’

‘You said that two shots were fired, and Grigori says so too. He did not stop, think and debate. He acted. Grigori’s reaction, to freeze, was the more normal in close protection when an attack is made. He did not.’

‘Which tells you?’

He heard a slight chuckle, but it had no humour. ‘Perhaps that he lacks intelligence or imagination, and that he was a soldier. Only a corporal — with intelligence and imagination he would have been an officer. He can be given limited trust.’

Josef Goldmann saw his saviour pause on the step and against the grey of his suit was the great bundle of roses he held to his chest. Then his man walked away at a fast pace.

‘What I like about him is that he is limited in what he looks to know of us. Like a machine, robotic. He asks no questions. I do not see him listening. Neither is he where I do not expect to find him in the house. He gives me no surprises. Yes, limited trust.’

Now the chuckle had faint, grim humour. ‘If you take him you will expose him to Reuven. To win Reuven’s trust, as much trust as can be held between thumb and forefinger, a pinch of trust, that will be harder for him. Perhaps he will be turned out on to the street and sent home.’

The pavement was clear, and the brightness of the flowers gone.

‘If you had been there, Viktor, and had seen what I saw, you would understand my trust in him.’

He was in the outer office, sharing the woman’s workbench. She did not speak to him, but nothing, any longer, surprised Luke Davies.

The file contained sheets of paper, every one a printout. He could have challenged her, could have said that he had, until that afternoon, been unaware that the Stone Age was alive and well at Vauxhall Bridge Cross, but he’d noted the sharp darts of her glances at him while he scanned the pages, and reckoned her defensive. He had not heard of any other floor, corner or cranny of the building where paper still existed. If he had challenged he believed he would have embarrassed her and won an evasive reply, something about Mr Lawson’s preferences.

He’d been back to his old territory, Russia Desk (Baltic), had endured a volley of quips. He’d told them to wrap it, belt up, get lost, and then he’d had to laugh. He’d hacked into his computer and downloaded maps. They were now on his desk.

Fastening the map sheets together with Sellotape, he’d made an extended montage that went from London in the west to the city of Sarov in the east. And her ruler had been within reach.

The lines made a pattern, were as concise as a web left by spiders on a morning when hoar frost had formed. Had to admit that the pattern made a shape … and he had read about Sarov, home of St Seraphim, who had been canonized by the Orthodox church in 1903, and about Arzamas-16, home of the team that had built Joe One, the first of their tested atomic weapons, and Joe Four, the first of their tested hydrogen warheads. Lines on his map were traced between Sarov and London, to Colchester in Essex, to the east of Poland and Berlin. More lines ran to the Gulf. His pleasure, at understanding gained, was stabbed.

‘What’s that?’

Must have looked like a startled rabbit: spun on his chair, thwacked his knee against the bench edge, hadn’t heard the entry. Hated himself for it, but stammered, ‘It’s to show the linkage of the calls.’

‘I know what the linkage is.’

Feebly, ‘I thought it might help.’

‘How can it help me to understand what I already know? Do you think we’re children and idiots? Waste of time. What’s not a waste of time is that we have a name. I had it last night, and for the agent, but the DG’s sanctioned it. You know, there are some people here, modernists and work-makers, who sit on a committee that thinks up operational codenames. True. You can’t credit it. All damn Greek stuff, mythology and that self-serving military nonsense, “Shock and Awe”. The DG, and I’m not arguing, said I was thin on facts, and that if I was right I’d be looking for a …’

He paused theatrically.

Davies said, ‘You’d be looking for a needle …’

‘So we have an “N”, which is tidy. The agent is the needle, is the “N”, is November. Where is the needle?’

‘In a bloody haystack.’

‘Language, please.’ He was chastised but then — rarer than winter sunshine in Sheffield — God smiled. ‘That’s our operational title.’

And Lawson reached across him, almost elbowed him, took up a thick marker pen from a tray in front of the woman, and scrawled across the face of the cardboard file Davies was reading the one word ‘HAYSTACK’. Then he seemed to do a little jig, one foot to the other, as if the name excited him, as if, with it, they were launched.

Luke Davies asked, so softly: ‘Will it be that difficult to find, even with November, a “needle in a haystack”? Will it?’

Lawson said, ‘Yes, it will be that difficult, if it exists.’

Nothing said between them for four hours.

It irritated Yashkin. He was better able to concentrate on the road, but the quiet of his passenger, the navigator, annoyed him. And nothing said when they were at a road junction, only a gesture of the hand — right or left or straight ahead. On each hour, he steadied himself to ask the direct question. He had put it, he thought, with sufficient force beside the river at Murom, and had not been answered.

He was tired, had driven more than three hundred kilometres, always on the back roads. He was hungry, had eaten nothing cooked, only a sliced-meat sandwich from a stall in a village. He was thirsty, only one coffee in the middle of the day. He was a security officer by training, not a zampolit, but Oleg Yashkin, retired major of the 12th Directorate, had the talent to realize that the question must be confronted. The retired political officer must answer it.

A signpost showed up in the gloom: twenty more kilometres to Kolomna. Better it was settled now, dealt with. Yashkin thought the political officer would have been more skilled in probing for an answer, more polished, able to extract a tooth without pain. Too little time left on that day’s leg for it to be put off any longer.

‘I have to know it, your answer … Do you regret it?’

‘Honestly?’

‘Yes. Do you regret what we’ve done?’

‘A little, yes. When you talked about it, described it, I thought then, does this thing, the Zhukov, which you sleep against, which you say has warmth, does it work? Is it effective? No, no, another time, not now. Some of me regrets it.’

Yashkin said, ‘In half an hour we’ll be in Kolomna. In Kolomna there are trains and buses. You can go home. There, you can lean over the fence, near to where the hole was excavated, and you can tell Mother that her man is crazy, a lunatic, without a brain in his head.’

‘And you?’

‘I’ll go on alone to the Bug. I’ll stop when I’m at the river.’

‘Why?’

Yashkin said, ‘I can tell you each word used at my dismissal. I can tell you about each minute I spent in my office on my last day, and each step of my last walk from my office to the car, with no gratitude offered me. I can tell you about near-starvation through winters when my pension was not paid, the hunger, and about driving drunks, addicts, those diseased creatures in my car, of scavenging for charity rates in the market, and of selling for a pittance what little Mother and I had that was precious to us. Whatever happens, I’ll go on to the Bug river.’

‘Fuck you again, Yashkin. Alone, you wouldn’t find it.’

‘I would — and when you’ve gone, I will find it.’

‘I doubt — fuck you again and again — you’d find Belarus. I see you driving in circles inside Ukraine, or perhaps still inside our glorious country. I couldn’t.’

‘A political officer may speak in riddles, but a security officer hasn’t the education to understand. What does “I couldn’t” mean?’

‘I couldn’t, Yashkin — you are my friend and a fucking idiot — leave you to get lost, which you would. Without me, my knowledge of the maps, you’re lost.’

‘Where, then, is regret?’

The voice beside him dropped, was a whisper, a murmur, and he had to lean towards the other man to hear. ‘I don’t ask, “Does it work?” because then I increase the guilt for what I’m doing, what you’re doing … Perhaps I believe it doesn’t work, is harmless and of value only as a relic, which mitigates the guilt. And it isn’t entirely to avenge myself, for what was done to you and me … It’s the money. I’ve dreamed of that money. I spend it again and again. Should I feel shame? I don’t … It’s for the money. Fuck! We should have turned right.’

‘Molenkov, you talk too much.’

‘I’ve forgotten the regret.’

‘You talk too much so you missed the turning.’

The Polonez was reversed, then put into a three-point turn. The back wheels went up off the roadway, and a stone wedged under the chassis. The weight of the Zhukov was responsible, but Yashkin revved hard and cleared it.

He was coming into the town of Kolomna, and his eyelids flickered with exhaustion. To stay awake he had to talk.

‘I read about this town. A population of one hundred and fifty thousand, at the last census, is resident here. The town was founded in the year 1177 and had strategic significance because the Moskva and Oka rivers merge there. It is important today as a rail junction.’

He yawned, his eyes closed and he felt the wheel go before he righted the Polonez. Traffic flowed round him and oncoming lights dazzled him.

‘It matters not a fuck to me.’

At that moment, Yashkin was about to explain his need to talk — so tired, the strain caused by his belief that his friend regretted participating in the venture, or was a coward, or was afflicted by moral doubt, whichever was worse — and relief flooded him because, together, they would reach the Bug. There was a road junction as they approached the main bridge and too many headlights bouncing in his eyes.

He hit the car in front, a BMW 3 series, shining and new. The old rusted bumper of the Polonez hit a glancing blow to the metallic silver BMW. Glass spewed out from the tail-lights. Brakes screamed. A young man in a black leather jacket — the damned uniform of trouble — climbed out, saw the wreckage and his fist clenched.

Yashkin did not hesitate. From driving on minor roads all that day and the one before, mud would be plastered over his registration plates. He swung out. He thought he missed the young man by no more than half a metre, and he heard a fist thumped on the roof of the Polonez. As he turned, he saw that Molenkov gave the young man a finger. He sped off, drove like a madman in the traffic. He stopped as soon as he believed it safe, got out and bent to examine the plates. He reckoned it possible to read them, difficult but possible. Would the collision be reported to the police? Would they respond and look for a red Polonez that had left the scene of an accident?

They went through Kolomna, and on the far side of the citadel they found a decaying roadhouse, with the virtue of secure parking at the rear, and booked a room.

A minicab pulled up beside him.

Most of the drivers working that part of Dudley, in the West Midlands, were known to Sak, but he didn’t recognize this driver.

The window was wound down. He was asked his name by the driver, whom Sak thought to be north African, perhaps from Algeria or Morocco. At the school where he worked as a laboratory technician he was Steven King. The name he gave to the minicab driver was Siddique Khatab.

‘Repeat that.’

‘Siddique Ahmed Khatab.’

‘And your father’s name?’

He gave it. The light was failing and the street was a crowded bustle of kids and parents surging away from the school’s gates towards the estate. On the far side of the estate was the guesthouse his father and mother owned. It was used by sales representatives and lorry drivers on long hauls and those coming to the town for weddings or funerals. He understood the wariness of the approach, as careful as the message that had woken him: the arrests of the last two years had shown the futility of using telephones, analogue or digital, and email links. The driver accepted what he was told, grinned as if he enjoyed the sense of conspiracy, and reached into the glove compartment. An envelope was passed to Sak.

He took it, folded it quickly, thrust it into his hip pocket. He gulped. The minicab drove away. It would have seemed to any who hurried by him on the pavement that he had given a driver instructions on a destination.

Where there were longer shadows, and the crowds walking with him had thinned, Sak took out the envelope. He examined the tickets and the dates on them, returned them to their envelope and the envelope to his pocket.

There was a reason for him having been woken.

From university, in 1997, he had gone to work in the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston. There, he was Steven Arthur King, BSc, involved in low-level work but it had interested him. He had felt a part of a great team involved in the far frontiers of science. He had lived in a hostel for single professional and qualified staff. He had revelled in it, had taken time to read in the library of the early giants of the laboratories and test-beds, and had felt he belonged to an élite. After five years, he was outside the main gate for the last time — no appeal permitted — his access card withdrawn.

On the train home, returning in ignominy to the West Midlands, he had dropped his head on to his arms and wept, such was the humiliation he felt.

The anger had been born.

A man came to the Portakabin where the Crow worked. The door was rapped. He opened it. A package was given him. He closed the door. He had not seen the courier’s face, and was confident that once the man had left the site, under the huge crane, the entry pass given to him would be destroyed.

Inside the package he found airline tickets, a passport issued by a Canadian agency and a map of the rendezvous point where he would meet a brother and the criminals. There was a contact address for the hawaldar in the German city of Hamburg. He would provide the funds to be paid to the criminals. He had no love of such people, but times were hard and survival ever harder.

Too many were now arrested, were in the gaols of the Americans. Too many networks had been broken into, too many plans, near to execution, had been disrupted. But this would be a great strike, the greatest, and the Crow’s part in it — though small — was of prime importance. He must work and deal with criminals, pay them for what they delivered in American dollars supplied by the hawaldar, though they were kaffirs. It was necessary to buy from whoever could supply, even from unbelievers.

The hate in his heart was undiminished by the years that had gone by, was fresh and keen. He locked the package and its contents in his floor safe. To work with unbelievers — to achieve a great strike — was justified, as it was to buy from criminals.

He returned to his work and quantified how many tons of cement mix were needed for the coming week, but he would not be in Dubai to oversee its delivery. He would be with mafiya men whom he despised.

Reuven sat quietly in the shadows. This part of the warehouse was Mikhail’s territory.

Back in Perm, in the early days, he and Mikhail had owned expensive pedigree dogs, two Rottweilers and a German Shepherd. They were vicious beasts and controlled only by Mikhail and him, but gentle with his grandmother. She could handle them and they slobbered at her whisper, all of them, but the dogs created terror. Reuven thought Mikhail more violent and more sadistically cruel than the dogs at their worst. When they had left Perm, moved to Moscow, he had asked his grandmother what should be done with the dogs, to whom they might be given. She had said, ‘Shoot them. You want a dog, put a collar on Mikhail.’ She had walked away and the dogs were not spoken of again, but she had stroked their heads, had bent her small head low so that they could lick her face, and she had condemned them.

Two weeks before, the chair had been taken by a Bulgarian who had tried to muscle into the Kurfürstendamm trade in girls. The stains were still on the concrete floor, with the dirt that had been thrown over the wet blood. Those who already ran strings of girls on the Kurfürstendamm paid for the protection of their businesses, and two weeks before, the competition had been removed. They would have thought their investment in a roof was money well spent, and they would have seen the reports in the Morgenpost newspaper and on television after the Bulgarian’s body was discovered on the banks of the Tegeler See. Reuven had been away, reconnoitring the Bug river, but he had seen what Mikhail had done, and what his clients would have read and watched, and knew they would be satisfied.

In the chair now was an Albanian.

The Albanian, an immigrant from the Kosovo city of Priština, had tried to sell passports. Not good passports, inadequately forged ones, but they competed with those sold to non-European Union men who had come across frontiers to Germany and needed legitimacy, and who would pay ten thousand dollars for a passport, however poor. But Reuven Weissberg provided the roofs for a Russian and a Romanian who sold better passports. The day before he went to Poland he had visited the Albanian and had spoken calmly of the need for this man to transfer his business to Dresden, Rostock or Leipzig, anywhere other than Berlin, but the man had spat in his face.

That evening the Albanian was brought — having been lifted off the street when walking his daughter, the child abandoned to find her own way home — to the old warehouse in the Kreuzberg district between the canal and the Spree. Tied down in the chair, where the Bulgarian had been, the Albanian had again spat defiance, but then had seen what was his fate.

A cable brought the power from the wall. Among the multiple plugs at its end was the lead for a power drill. On a table beside the drill was a small chain-saw, a welding burner, lit, and a loaded pistol. A message was about to be sent to the two traders in passports who would read the Morgenpost and see the city news on television.

The chair was screwed down to the floor. The Albanian was tied fast to it. His shirt was pulled back and the marks of the flame disfigured his body. He was not gagged and not blindfolded. He could see what would be used on him next, and could scream, but no one came to that warehouse. It was as it had been in Perm, to enforce the roofs, and in Moscow … This, of course, was only minor business in the empire of Reuven Weissberg. He had links in Sicily and Milan; he could arrange protection for any American business looking to exploit the new wealth of Russia; he could transfer cash sums, suitcases and boxes of it, to London where it was handled by Josef Goldmann. But the small detail of insignificant contracts — the protection of men running girls or selling passports — excited him.

The screams expired in the dark steel joists high above the Albanian. The purr of the drill was drowned by them. The needlepoint went for the kneecaps. He watched.

He had survived beatings as a conscript in the army, and a killing attempt when shot in the arm in Moscow. He knew pain, but not fear. In two years in the army, stationed at the Kaliningrad base, he had been thrashed by NCOs and officers for selling off military equipment pilfered from stores, and for organizing the shipment of Afghan heroin out through the docks, but he had never cried out. After the fourth beating he had cut his infantry colonel into a share of his profits, then been left free to trade. His ability to endure what was handed out to him, with boots and clubs, by the NCOs and officers had made Reuven Weissberg, the Jew, a hero among the conscripts. He had never howled for the pain to be stopped. Had he done so, he would have disgraced his grandmother.

It was enough. The Albanian was burned, his knees were pierced and he had fainted with the pain.

Mikhail shot him. Stood behind the chair, held the pistol and fired one bullet. He thought he heard the cry of geese. If the Albanian had not fainted, Mikhail might have started up the chain-saw. The geese squawked and the shot seemed a faint retort. Blood spattered the concrete floor and the plastic hooded cloak that Mikhail wore.

Then the silence came, and the geese did not call. Weissberg sat for a moment, then glanced at his wristwatch. He told Mikhail they must hurry or be late. A body was to be moved, taken to open ground by the Teltow canal, and the plastic clothing disposed of, the chain-saw, the drill and the welding burner put away in the concealed safe. The warehouse was returned to the pigeons that nested on its roof beams. He and Mikhail worked fast, then dragged the body away, leaving a thin smear of blood across the concrete.

I learned it, every detail. I could have walked each step of it. I knew how long it took from beginning to end.

The women on the bunks at either side of me, level with me, in the barracks said I had no right to ignorance. I think they were jealous that it had protected me and not them. I was told what happened.

They came by train. If they were Polish Jews or Jews from the east, they expected to be murdered so they were controlled with extreme violence. They were so terrorized that they had no idea of how to resist, and they were exhausted from their journey. From the Germans, there was no pretence of a new life awaiting those Jews. It was different for those who came from the west, from Holland or France.

The western Jews, and there might be a thousand in the train transport, were greeted with deceit. Often they came in the best carriages with upholstered seats, had brought luggage with them and wore their best clothes. They came to this small station in the centre of a forest and had no idea where they were, or what awaited them. Their carriages were detached from the engine, then shunted to the siding. From the windows they saw flowers in pots, an orchestra played, and young Jews, who were dressed in railway uniforms, waited on the platform. They were helped down from the train and their heavy bags lifted for them.

They were escorted first to a building where they were asked — it is correct, asked — to leave their luggage, and ladies’ bags. Then they went through the gate into Camp 2. When that gate closed behind them, they were dead, but they did not yet know it. They were separated, man from woman, but the children stayed with the women. And they were moved on to a covered but open area. Already the bags were being searched for valuables and money by the Pakettentragers, Jewish men who could do this work and live a week or a month longer. The Jews from the train were now addressed by SS Scharführer Hermann Michel: not an old man, a little more than thirty, with a smooth face, a baby’s. From a low balcony, he would say that he was sorry about the hardship of the journey from Holland or France, that he welcomed them, that because of extraordinary sanitary conditions at this transit camp — their home only for a short while before they moved to settlements in the east — everyone must be washed and disinfected. Then he would tell them in glowing words of the life that awaited them after they rejoined their men or women. He spoke so sympathetically, was so pleasant, that often at the end he was applauded.

An officer in a white jacket, appearing to be a doctor, then led these west European Jews into the yard and requested they undress. There were Ukrainian guards with guns, and the Germans with whips, but still the deception succeeded and the Jews retained their innocence. They undressed. It might be snowing or raining, or the sun shining, they might be young or old, with perfect bodies or ugly ones, but they had to undress to complete nakedness. They were led into the Tube.

The Germans called it the Himmelfahrtstrasse, that is the Road to Heaven, the Heavenly Way. It was about a hundred and fifty metres to the far gate, and the surface of the track was sand, and wide enough for three to walk abreast, and they could not see what was beyond the Tube because of the pine branches placed in the wire. Guards were behind them to hurry them, and ‘the doctor’ led at a brisk pace. Before they reached the end they came to the Barbers’ House. Here, the hair of the women was cut short — but the men were led straight past it. A few more yards and there was one more gate.

The officer, the ‘doctor’, worked now with great skill. He would make jokes, and talk, and then, abruptly, this gate was opened, and beyond it were the doors of the chambers that awaited them, and the sign above them was ‘Bathhouse’. They were pressed in, forced close. The chambers were four metres long and four metres wide, and they put many more than a hundred people in each. Six chambers could contain a thousand souls. Then the doors were shut.

Now, they did not have to be Polish, Ukrainian or Belarussian Jews to know the deception: the French and Dutch Jews, too, understood … By now the next train transport would have arrived at the station platform, the orchestra would be playing, the jewellery and money was gone from the bags, and the clothes moved to sorting sheds — it was a production line.

Many would sing in the last moment before the engine was switched on. Schma Israel! Adonai Elohaynu! Adonai Ehad. The voices would rise. ‘Hear, O Israel! The Lord is good! The Lord is One.’ The engine killed the noise.

A German, Erich Bauer, was responsible for the good functioning of the engine, which had been stripped from a heavy Russian lorry. He was the Gasmeister, and his assistant was a Ukrainian, Emil Kostenko. Only once did I hear that the engine failed and the Jews were in the chambers for four hours before it was repaired. Then they were gassed with the carbon monoxide that was piped from the engine’s exhaust into the six chambers. There would be great screaming, but the engine and the walls made it seem like the rumble of artillery guns, and a Jew was always in place to chase after the geese and make them squawk. They sang, in the last moments of their lives, ‘God, my God, why have You forsaken me?’

The engine of the Gasmeister and his assistant could kill a thousand men and women and children in twenty minutes.

When the engine was switched off, the geese were left to run free and there was silence in the chambers, the far-end doors were opened and a Jewish Kommando started work to clear out the bodies and make the chambers available for the next transport — perhaps already listening to sweet words of reassurance or stripping naked or walking along the Tube. Most of the bodies still stood because there was not room for them to fall when they died.

Twenty minutes, crushed in the chambers, to die. Two hours from the shunting of a train to the opening of wide doors and the escape of the poison.

Once, naked women fought the Germans and Ukrainians in the Tube and were machine-gunned. Those who lived were driven at bayonet point into the chambers.

Once, an old Jew threw sand from the Tube into the face of a German and told him that his Reich would vanish as dust and smoke. He was shot dead.

Most went to their deaths in ignorance or terror. Few had the opportunity or the strength of will to fight … We did. We who lived and serviced the camp and knew its purpose, and knew our own fate when our usefulness was exhausted, demanded to live — and did not know how to achieve it. If we had not wanted to survive, clung to life, worked in the camp, Sobibor could not have existed. We, the living, enabled it to function.

I knew. I had lost the protection of innocence and ignorance. I wanted to live.

The darkness was over the forest. Tadeuz Komiski sat by a grave. The place where he had dug it, beside which trees, the distance from his home, was his secret.

The summer of 2004, four years ago, had been spoken of on the radio as the worst in a half-century. Torrential rain had caused the Bug to break its banks, fields to flood, tracks to be blocked and the roots of trees to be washed away. A grave had been opened and a skeleton exposed. The layers of needles, composted leaves and shallow sand had shifted under the incessant rain.

He remembered the young man and the woman. The bones still wore the uniform of the camp. He had moved the remains. The uniform had disintegrated and the bones had come apart, but he had tried to do it with dignity. He had dug a new grave, deeper than she could have, with his long-handled spade. His life was cursed by this man, but he had buried him again and had mumbled a prayer before filling in the earth.

If it had not been for his fear of watchers in the forest, as there had been the day before, he would have put posies of wild flowers on this spot. He could not. They would be seen. A crime would be uncovered.

He knew of no one else who lived under such a curse, with such guilt.

Alone, Tadeuz Komiski watched the grave.

He picked blackberries. Little Jonathan. Ignored by his grandparents and left to roam while his mother was at work in the food factory. Below him, in mid-stream and on a spur of submerged rocks, an angler wielded a great salmon rod and cast a many-coloured fly, with big hackles, towards the top of a wide pool. He picked the fruit and dropped the berries into a plastic bowl.

He was not asleep, but dozed. Sometimes he was the child who heard the thin cry of the osprey over the Spey near its mouth. Sometimes he was the man and there was the clatter of ducks on the river outside the narrowboat’s hull. He was too tired to sleep.

Only in a few early autumns had there been enough sunshine to bring on the blackberries in the last days before term started. He might have been eight or nine, but he remembered everything of that afternoon, and he had searched the banks for the bramble clumps among the gorse on the banks.

The narrowboat was the Summer Queen and she was moored at another bank, of another river, was held by two ropes and two iron pins hammered into the grass. He had been there three hours, and Katie had been waiting for him. She had cooked for him but he had only toyed with the food and he knew she had expected to get into bed with him, but he had pleaded exhaustion so she’d left him. Still dressed, his shoes kicked off, he had stretched out on the bed. In his mind was his weakness that evening. He had left the house, had walked away down the street with the family’s bouquet in his arms, had turned the corner — only reached it by extreme willpower — and had known he was out of their sight, and had damn near collapsed against an iron railing. He had realized how weakened he was. He had leaned on the railings and shivered.

The child, Jonathan, picked and filled the bowl. The little cry of excitement from the river, an arching rod, then the silver flash in the water as the fish was brought to the net. He had seen that, and its clean execution with a hammer blow to the head. A tear had welled at the killing of the fish but he had wiped it away. The fish’s death was not important. It was not why he recalled that afternoon above the Spey.

If he had not recaptured a moment of his youth, Carrick would have been overwhelmed by the suddenness of the gunfire in the street and by the long stress of living the lie. He would have seen again the family’s gratitude, the perfect brilliance of the flowers given him. It had taken a toll of him, he recognized. By now he should have written up the Book: it was obligatory for an undercover level one to take the first secure opportunity to write up the Book in which all matters of potential evidence and interest were listed. The Book was too sensitive an item for him to keep. Katie had brought it. He should have written up the events of the last several days — the routine, the confusion over the arrest of Simon Rawlings and his own promotion on the household’s ladder, the chaos of gunfire in a City street, major material, and the promise of Josef Goldmann that Johnny would, in future, be at his side. It should all have been in the Book, but it was not.

Why did a grown man remember seeing a salmon killed, and picking a full bowl of blackberries? He had gone home to the bungalow, let himself in quietly, had put the brimming bowl beside the sink, had not told his grandparents of what he had done — or of the killing of something as beautiful as the salmon — and had gone to his room. He had waited there for praise and thanks. He had heard his mother return from the factory, had heard her in the kitchen, then her trill of pleasure, and she had gone to the sitting room to thank her parents for picking the blackberries — had never thought it might have been him. They had accepted her thanks, had not disclaimed them. A pretty small matter in the life of a child, the denial of gratitude for picking a bowl of blackberries, but it had cut him off from the adults who had reared him — a never-forgotten memory, never erased. He had thought then, as a child, he could live alone and without company.

And he was alone. Katie had abandoned him. She was in the sitting area, waiting for them to come. He was alone and suffering: she knew it, no one else in the team did. Quite deliberately, Carrick hit his forehead against the varnished planks beside the pillow, as if that would clear bloody melancholy. He pushed himself up, shook his head hard, as if that would expel demons. The Summer Queen was owned by Katie’s parents, and through the months of August and September they would take extended leave from work and navigate at snail’s pace through the networks of canals in the South and West Midlands. For the rest of the year it was available to Katie and she used it as a safe-house where an officer, in deep cover, could come to be debriefed, write up his Book and crash out from his stress. Every month, for a weekend, her parents would come to the Summer Queen, get the old Ford Escort engine coughing and alive, then move her to another branch of a canal or to the Thames. It was good, and secure, and no pattern of its movements existed.

Most times when they came to the narrowboat, they had sex on the bed — not wonderful but good and adequate — and they’d roll away, feeling the better for it. Not that evening. When he’d turned her down, with her blouse nearly unbuttoned, her shoes off and the zip on her skirt undone, he’d glimpsed her hurt, and had twisted to face the varnished wood and the porthole window. Most times, when George and Rob came, she had to scamper after their warning shout to get herself half decent for them. Always the Book was written up before they went down on to the bed. It was bad that he’d hurt her, but the gunfire was still in his head, and he lived with greater deception. All the guys in the SCD10 team had bad days when they screamed to be let free. Rob understood, and George, and they soothed the scratches. God … God … There was a whistle from the field.

Rob’s voice: ‘You there, Katie?’

A torchbeam scudded past the porthole. Maybe it was what they all needed, an ego massage. Rob, the cover officer, was expert at lifting the bloody dark clouds of an undercover’s doubts. George, the controller, could lift a level one’s self-esteem. Carrick wasn’t the first, wouldn’t be the last, to need them. He cursed himself that he had wounded Katie, had treated her like a tart.

‘I’m here. Come aboard.’

Then George’s voice, ‘Half Oxfordshire’s bloody cattle seem to be in this field, and I’ve walked in three heaps of their shit. What’s wrong with the marina?’

‘Marina’s full. Exercise does you good, sir.’

He had never worked alongside Katie on a plot. She’d had two runs as an undercover. She’d played at being a prostitute in an investigation of the call-girl trade in the Kings Cross area of London, had had her face scratched by rivals for the pitch, and had learned to accept volleys of abuse each time she found an excuse not to get into a punter’s car. Armed back-up had never been more than a hundred yards down the street. She had played the role of an undercover’s girlfriend up in Manchester, tracking the import of Croatian firearms, to give the officer his get-out excuse for refusing to screw girls and drink all night. She’d given evidence in the Manchester case, at the Crown Court, and it was thought she was compromised. She hadn’t wanted to go back to uniform routines and had been taken on as a desk worker in the Pimlico office George used. Carrick thought her the best girl he’d known — natural, easy, without ceremony, honest and, most of all, with a bucketful of loyalty — and that evening he’d failed her. He swung his legs off the bed.

And heard a voice he didn’t know: ‘Don’t mind me saying it, but a pretty stupid place to choose. I wouldn’t have.’

Feet hit the deck, then the steps down. Carrick smoothed his hair, tucked his shirt into the waist of his trousers, pushed on his shoes and knotted the laces.

Rob’s voice, chuckling: ‘Nice flowers, Katie — rather grander than my lady’s used to.’

‘He brought them.’

George’s voice, serious: ‘In my experience, the more lavish the expenditure on flowers, the more abject the apology it’s intended to cover. You got a problem with him?’

‘Just that he’s knackered, hasn’t talked much. It’s the biggest armful I’ve ever had.’

The voice of an unknown: ‘Very pretty, very charming. My colleague and I have not travelled to listen to your little soap opera. Can we get down to business? And I’d like coffee.’

He slid the door back, came out, pushed it shut behind him, walked past the kitchenette and into the living area.

Carrick nodded to George, took Rob’s hand and held it tightly for a moment, then saw the other two. One was older and suited, had neat grey hair, the other was younger than himself, wore a loose anorak over a crumpled checked shirt, faded jeans, and had tousled red hair. The flowers he had brought for Katie were still in the wrapping-paper but filled a plastic bucket on the screwed-down table.

The older man said briskly, ‘I haven’t yet worked out my name, or my colleague’s, but you’re N for November. Of course, I know your correct name, but it will no longer be used. You’re November.’

George said, ‘I’m afraid things have moved a bit quickly, and—’

Rob said, ‘Just what I’m looking at, sorry, but you seem shattered. Everything all right, old boy?’

Carrick grimaced. ‘Yes, I’m all right — not by much. Two things. First, Rawlings is done for drink-driving last night, and as far as I’ve ever known is teetotal, like a priest’s celibate, and is sacked. I get to drive the Bossman. Second, a hood tries to kill the Bossman down in the City today, two shots fired — God knows how they missed him and me. It’s not been reported. I’m now the Bossman’s flavour, and we’re travelling in the morning — don’t know where to. Shattered, yes. Dead, no. Otherwise, everything’s all right. Who are these gentlemen?’

George looked down, evasive. ‘Don’t know much more than I said. What I said was that things have moved a bit quickly.’

‘Meaning?’

Rob said, ‘These gentlemen are from the intelligence services.’

‘What? Dirty raincoats in the shadows? Spooks?’

George said, ‘I am hardly, as has been made clear to me, inside the need-to-know loop. Josef Goldmann is now of interest in a matter of national security.’

‘Nothing I’ve seen adds up to that.’ Carrick shrugged theatrically.

The older man rasped, ‘Then perhaps you haven’t been looking, November, where you should have.’

He bridled. ‘That’s rubbish. If it was there, I would have—’

‘And haven’t been listening. I’d appreciate coffee, soonest, but appreciate more that we conclude the preamble.’

‘Excuse me, I was damn nearly killed. If you didn’t hear me, two shots, bloody near on a slab — so don’t, whoever you are, tell me I’m not doing my job. Got me?’

‘These “gentlemen”, and it has authority from on high, require you to be seconded to their control.’ George looked at the carpet on the floor and the mud and shit he had brought on to it.

‘It’s out of our hands — sorry and all that.’ Rob fidgeted his fingertips aimlessly against his palms.

‘You washing your hands of me?’

Neither answered. Neither George nor Rob met Carrick’s gaze.

‘Right. Can we now get to work?’ the older man said, with a studied calmness. ‘Matinée performance over — and the coffee, please.’

‘Might just be premature, going to work …’

The older man sighed, not from exasperation or annoyance but from a reckoning that time was being wasted and it was a commodity of value.

‘What if I refuse? What if I tell you to look elsewhere? What if I say I’m not interested in your invitation?’ Carrick felt a chill around him, not the heat of anger, and it settled on his skin.

The older man beaded his eyes on him. ‘Three very fair questions, November, and deserving of very brief answers. Do I have to make that coffee myself?’

Katie caved. As she went past Carrick she gave his hand a momentary squeeze — but she couldn’t help him and he knew it.

‘To the point. Refusal is not an option. Do I want you? Not particularly. Would I prefer to substitute for you an officer from my own organization? Most certainly. You alone have the access I need … Just pause for a moment, November, and think. Having thought, I imagine you wouldn’t believe I come lightly. It is not for some minimal personal amusement … I’m taking you over, and into an area that I predict will be of maximum danger, in the clear knowledge that national security may be involved. I will have a team with me, behind you, whose job will be to ensure — if possible — your personal safety … I tend to find morale-boosting speeches boring and usually irrelevant to the matter at hand. At last. Thank you.’

He was given by Katie, who glowered at him, a mug of instant coffee.

‘I’m not in the business of concessions, but the role of the young lady has been explained to me, and her detailed knowledge of the files associated with Josef Goldmann. She, too, I am co-opting. I suggest we sit down. Oh, gentlemen, goodnight.’

He had dismissed Rob and George. He saw the senior bite his lip, the junior shrug, as if this was a force beyond their remit. Embarrassment wreathed them, as if neither knew of anything apposite to add. Carrick realized that the transfer of an undercover, mid-investigation, to different masters was beyond their experience, would conventionally be regarded as disastrous and unprofessional. They left, tramped out and up the steps, and the narrowboat shook as they jumped off.

The younger man slapped his briefcase on the table, pushed the flowers aside, and said to the older man, ‘I suggest that you’re now Golf, and I think it would be appropriate if I were Delta. That all right with you?’

At that moment, Carrick believed the older man — Golf — betrayed confusion, as if he wondered whether the piss was taken but couldn’t be sure of it, and he thought Delta an ally of sorts, but it passed.

Carrick listened, and Katie stood behind him, her fingers gripping the muscles of his neck, and the man, Golf, said, ‘You will be told the minimum of what we have. Bluntly, the more you know the greater is the potential compromise to the operation — it’s called Haystack — in the event of you being suspected, then tortured. And you would be tortured … The stakes, for us and for those we regard as the potential enemy, are very high.’

He flicked his fingers. Delta opened the briefcase, and took out a map. Its sheets were Sellotaped together, and lines were drawn across it. Then photographs spilled out and he saw the images of Josef Goldmann, Viktor, and a bull of a man, with dead and chilling eyes. Delta’s finger stayed on that picture.

The man, Golf, said, ‘Where they lead you, you go. I imagine it will be to him. I don’t gild it, November. This man, Reuven Weissberg, will be as ruthless as a ferret in a rabbit warren, and if you fail with him — though we will try, bloody hard, to save you — you are, without question, dead. So, no misunderstandings. Dead.’