Timebomb

Chapter 7

Carrick was first out. He did the routine. The car braked, the doorman advanced, but he was out and checked both ways on the pavement. Had reason to. How had the bastard missed at that range, so close? But the routine took his attention, not the events of a previous day. He would work out how the bastard had failed in the hit some other time. He stood across the car door.

The street was clear of dawdling vehicles and he did not identify a loiterer, just people, nothing to show that their business was in any way extraordinary or threatened him. The only gawpers were on the far pavement, separated from the hotel entrance by the traffic flow. Trouble was, Carrick had to act out the part of a man with more than two years’ active experience of bodyguard work, not the two weeks that had been allocated him. On the bodyguard course, more trouble: the teaching was for mob-handed protection, maybe seven or eight men deployed, maybe with an outer screen of police officers. Carrick knew nothing of what to expect. Maybe at that hour of the day everyone — old men in suits, young men in jeans and sweats or hoods, women with shopping bags and women with pushchairs, kids skiving off school, the elderly wrapped against the cold — hurried in Berlin, except two men on the far side of a six-lane street who watched indifferently.

‘Right, Mr Goldmann, let’s move — please — and quickly.’

He saw, could not miss, the worry lines knitted across his Bossman’s face, and also the gratitude shown him. ‘Out of the car, Mr Goldmann, and straight to the door.’

Everything happening to him was distorted, as if mirrors were bent, throwing up images that were grotesque and malformed. Concentrate, he told himself, and cut the shit. He reached down, took his Bossman’s arm at the wrist and levered him up from the depths of the car seat. Realized the dependence, could feel it, the way the man’s fist clawed into his sleeve.

‘That’s it, Mr Goldmann, and let’s go.’

The role-play consumed him, filled his thoughts. He looked round, saw that Viktor was behind the Bossman, strode for the swing doors and a man materialized. Hadn’t seen him coming. He came fast in a line, shambled and swayed. Might have been a drunk or a druggie. He was unshaven, dressed in clothes that had been slept in. A junkie’s young body but aged and haggard, his hair a dank tangle.

Carrick dropped his shoulder, and nudged him clear of them in one brutal, sharp action. The man crumpled. Carrick glanced down and saw a grimy face that pleaded. He knew the man was harmless, that he had reacted beyond a level that was necessary. He had thrown aside a beggar or a derelict, and the door was held open for him.

He saw hostility on the doorman’s face, and there was a jumble of words, German.

‘I don’t speak German,’ Carrick said, and walked towards the lift at the far side of the lobby.

The doorman called after him, in angry English, ‘He scavenges from the kitchen, is harmless, sir. For what he is, sir, we give him some respect.’

Carrick ignored him. He did the role-play well. He saw his Bossman and Viktor into the lift, stepped in with them and pressed the button. It was a glass-sided lift and he saw the doorman stalk away. He had known his ground or would not have spoken out so forcefully to the bodyguard of a guest, Carrick reckoned. The doorman went out now through the swing doors, on to the pavement, bent and lifted the man off the pavement, then seemed to slip something — money? — into his hand. Beside him, Viktor was impassive, but he thought Josef Goldmann’s mood had lightened, calmed by the display of force. They came to the reception floor.

A girl behind a desk said, ‘You are very welcome, gentlemen. It is three rooms now, not two, and one is a superior suite, yes? The reservations are for two nights — it is for departure on the thirteenth of April, correct? Just your signatures, please.’

His Bossman’s scrawl was unrecognizable. Carrick just did his initials.

They were given key cards. Carrick led back to the lift and they went up six more floors. Along a silent corridor. He stood aside as his Bossman worked the lock and opened a door.

Viktor said to Carrick. ‘I work out the rosters, which you will accept. Now get the bags.’

He was dismissed, as if he was low-life.

He went back down. Had to make peace, of a sort, with the doorman because he needed him to organize the parking of the prebooked hire car, arranged by a Berlin contact — but Carrick hadn’t been told a name — in the basement under the hotel. A good-size euro note was passed, not acknowledged as it was pocketed. The doorman, now, had that aloof look, and Carrick reckoned it was to show his contempt for the hirelings of a Russian Jew mobster who needed the swagger of protection. He took the three bags out of the boot. He didn’t know where they were moving on to — It is for departure on the thirteenth of April, correct? — whether they had enough clothes or would buy more. The man who had come to the narrowboat, who had invaded the Summer Queen, had said that the risk against him, in Berlin, increased to the level of … dead, so there are no misunderstandings. Dead. He hitched a bag on to each shoulder and picked up the third. Across the road he saw, in a doorway, the hunched shape of the derelict he had thrown on to the pavement. A stream of lorries passed on the street and in a gap between them he noted that two men still lingered on the far side.

He took the bags through the swing doors. He thought his life depended on how well he played the role. And, here, Carrick understood nothing.

He brought the bags to the rooms, was told what hours were his to rest, and what hours were for duty stretches.

In his room, stretched out, he slept.

They waited till a uniformed porter took away the hire car.

‘What did you think?’ Reuven Weissberg asked.

‘I thought it peculiar. The little boy held his father’s hand as if it were dark and he was frightened.’

‘And scum was pushed away.’

‘Harmless scum.’

Reuven Weissberg turned away from the place where they had watched the front entrance of the hotel on the Joachimstaler, and began to walk towards the U-bahn. There was a question he did not ask Mikhail. In fact, many questions were in his mind and he asked none. Did the man, shown on the reservation as Carrick, demonstrate his qualities as a professional bodyguard when pushing scum aside? Was the man merely professional or was he also loyal? The questions floated with him as he walked. Was a bodyguard ever loyal? How far would a bodyguard risk his own skin in defence of his paymaster? Was any bodyguard to be trusted? Should Carrick, on the word of the launderer, be trusted? Had his own Mikhail earned trust? That last question, never answered, was like a stone in the shoe of Reuven Weissberg. When guarded by Mikhail he had himself been shot.

They walked to the Uhlandstrasse station and went down the steps. He had been shot in Moscow. In the hectic days when he had battered his way into territory where other groups had believed themselves supreme, when he had snatched clients and given them new roofs, when he had recruited from State Security and Special Forces to enforce the roofs, he had made enemies of stature. In Moscow he had not used restaurants because that was where men such as himself were most vulnerable — and where he chose to attack rivals.

He had lived with the fever of the bunker, had surrounded the villa where his grandmother cooked and cared for him with high walls, electronic alarms and guards. He did not display himself at the wheel of a high-grade Mercedes, but drove old cars that could disappear on the streets and stay unrecognized. But he had been shot on the steps of a bank after depositing money. He could count few mistakes in his life, but it had been a mistake to visit that bank on three consecutive Fridays. He had come out into the sunlight, had paused because the snow had not been cleared adequately off the steps, and looked for a sure footing. Mikhail had been behind him — not in front — and the pistol had come from a pocket. He had seen the recoil and had dived to his left. There he would have made a good secondary target had the impetus of his fall on to the icy step not caused him to slide two steps lower. The second shot had missed him. Then Mikhail had reacted.

One shot into the chest and two into the head Mikhail had identified the getaway driver, whose panic had caused the wheels to spin, and shot him, a bullet in the head. They had fled. They had slithered away to their car. Mikhail had made it plain he thought himself a hero. He, Reuven, had congratulated him, had found the words as the pain reached beyond the numbness in his arm. They had not gone to hospital. At the villa, his grandmother had cleaned the wound, then had boiled water and used the scissors from her needlework box, tweezers and a knife to take out the debris of his coat that the bullet had forced into the cavity. She had not stitched the holes. He knew it was long ago, during times in the Forest of the Owls, that she had learned to treat wounds. He had never cried out when she had probed for debris, would not have dared to. Within the next week, six more men had died from weapons fired by Mikhail and Viktor, and a new business roof was successfully taken under his control. It had been his first step into the multi-billion-rouble death industry, and the killings made his control of an entrepreneur’s roof absolute.

Of Mikhail, his grandmother had said to him, ‘Why was he behind you, not in front? Why did he only shoot when two shots had been fired at you? What did he risk? Trust only yourself. Never put your life into the hands of another. Guard your own body.’

He stood on the platform and waited for a train, Mikhail a pace behind him. He thought of the man, Carrick, whom he had seen barge aside scum, and the trust written large on the face of Josef Goldmann as he held the man’s arm.

The train came, clattered alongside the platform.

His grandmother had told him that survival was in his own hands, as it had been in hers, in her stories that he knew by heart.

How much did I want to live? How often did I wish I was dead?

Always, I wanted to live.

In Camps 1 and 2, where the Jews were whose work made Sobibor function, there were few who did not wish to live. Only twice do I remember that a prisoner ran at the wire and started to climb, in the certain knowledge that the Ukrainians in the guard tower would shoot and kill. I learned that life is the flame of a candle. Whatever the gale of misery, we shelter it and try to protect it. Those who knew their fate, understood that they were condemned, would — not often — fight the guards as they were herded from the train. They would be shot on the platform or clubbed, then dragged down the Tube. Most of those close to death spent their last minutes in prayer.

For us, in Camps 1 and 2, however awful the experiences, there was little thought of death as a release. Few believed liberty came with it. To survive, to wake at first light the next morning, was the goal. Some claimed it was their duty to survive in the hope they would become a witness to the atrocity of Sobibor. For most it was the simple glory of breathing that next morning, the freshness of the air, the scent of the pines, and forgetting the foulness of the smoke from the burning pits.

There was a brothel for the Ukrainian guards outside the perimeter. The girls there, at first, were not Jews but prostitutes from Lublin. I heard it said that they were ugly, old, diseased … It was even said that a farmer from Zlobec sent his twelve-year-old daughter there for money because the Ukrainians wanted younger girls.

There were no prostitutes from Lublin for the SS, the Germans. They used Jewesses. For a month after I had learned this I waited for it to be my turn to be taken to the Forester House, which the Germans called the Swallow’s Nest. I knew I would be taken one evening. In the days of waiting, I could have killed myself. I could have eaten glass, I could have spat in the face of an officer and been beaten to death, I could have run at the wire and been shot. Instead I waited.

Three days before I was taken, I knew it would be soon. The Germans relied on the capos to bring Jewish girls to the SS house. The capo who supervised us in the sewing room came and stood behind me. She reached over my shoulder and held my breast. Her fingers seemed to weigh it, as if it were fruit in the Wlodawa market, and then she reached lower, poked at my stomach as if to learn whether I was slim under the loose smock I wore. I endured, after that, three days of waiting because I wanted to live.

It was the late afternoon, a Friday. It was February. It was cold. We were in the barracks. I was on my bunk when the capo came for me. She stood in the door, pointed to me and beckoned. In the month since I had known about the Forester House, I had seen six Jewesses taken out of our camp, and only one had returned. I did not think about five, but of one. She sat, always alone, in a corner of the compound, or apart from the rest of us at a bench in the workshop, or she lay on her bunk hunched up and cried without sound. She did not talk of it.

As she took me out into the dark and the night chill, towards the lights of the internal fence and the gate, the capo said to me, If you want to see the light of the morning, be alive. Don’t fight them but appear to enjoy it.’

There was music in their house, from a gramophone. The capo escorted me through the gate into their compound, and in through the back entrance to their house. I heard the music, very loud, and their shouting. In the kitchen I was told to strip by the capo, then a tin bath was produced from a cupboard. I stood in it and she poured water over me from a jug. I was soaped, then dried with a towel. I was given underclothes with French labels, and I thought they had belonged to a lady who had been brought from France in the Pullman cars, who had been innocent of the purpose of Sobibor and had worn her best underwear and silk stockings for the journey to her ‘new home in the east’. The clothes would have been left in a neat little pile, then the lady would have run down the Tube, thinking of the cleansing shower ahead and the chance to dress again. I wore the brassiere, the knickers, the suspender belt and the silk stockings of the dead. My hair was smoothed, and perfume — I was disgusted by it — squirted over me. The capo took me to the door, and said, ‘Show you enjoy it and please them. Then you may live. Show you hate it, and you will die. You decide.’ She opened the door, pushed me through it, and I heard it slam behind me. A wall of noise, their music and shouting hit me, and all their eyes were on me.

They wanted me to dance. I wasn’t a whore, I was a girl whose father repaired clocks in the town of Wlodawa. I didn’t know how to dance other than to the folk music of our people. They clapped to the beat, and I tried to dance. I’m not ashamed that I tried, because it was for survival.

They were drunk.

They weren’t young — not as old as my father but far older than I was.

Perhaps I didn’t dance well enough. Perhaps it was the urge in them.

I was pushed from behind and tripped from the side.

I was on the carpet. The underclothes were torn off me. One made a bandanna of a silk stocking, and I recognized him as being in charge of Ukrainian guards. I was naked. But my mother and my grandmother had been naked when they had been taken down the Tube, and they had not had the chance to live. I could accept my nakedness, and their eyes on me, as the price paid.

I bled when it started. The first grunted and pushed, swore and heaved. He had taken off none of his uniform, had only unbuttoned his trousers, and his boots forced apart my ankles. They would have seen the blood, and they cheered. Glasses were thrown into the fire, and I screamed at the pain, which excited them still more. The first hadn’t finished when he was pulled off, because others wanted to feel my blood. By the third, I moved. I did it to live. I let my hips rise when they thrust and drop when they withdrew. One was sick on me, and it was wiped away with their handkerchiefs. They all did it to me, except the senior officer. All — except SS Scharführer Helmut Schwarz, who usually commanded and supervised the men’s work parties outside the compound — penetrated me, and then they came round a second time. I was on the carpet till they staggered back from me, exhausted and limp.

He took me upstairs. They cheered Scharführer Schwarz when he led me out through the door. He took me to his room and hung a dressing-gown over my shoulders. I understood. There was a photograph of his family beside his bed. A father in full uniform stood and his hand rested on the shoulder of a girl, his daughter, and a mother gazed proudly at her man and her growing child. He thought me like his daughter. He sat on the bed and held my hand. He was near to tears, and if I had had a knife I could have slit his throat, but then I would not have lived.

I became his. I was the property of Scharführer Helmut Schwarz, and in his room I acted the part of his daughter and the bastard stroked me each time I was brought to him. Did not come into me, but stroked me, and I would pant and groan as if I took pleasure from him. There was danger. An SS man, Groth, fell in love with a Jewish girl, and softened in his attitude towards us — animals, a subhuman species — and when he was on leave the girl was taken down the Tube and shot. Other girls, Austrian Jewesses called Ruth and Gisela, who had been actresses in Vienna and were far more beautiful than I, were taken to the Forester House, then shot the next morning. I did not know if I would live.

He went on leave, went back to Munich to see his wife and stroke his daughter. The women helped me. I had no protection. They put ash on my face so that I looked older. I shuffled with bent shoulders so that my bosom was hidden. New girls came, younger girls, and were taken to the Forester Hut, but I never went back. I was forgotten, and I lived.

Never in that night when they struggled with each other to be the next, or came into me with violence, did I wish I was dead. I knew that only God, good fortune and I could save myself. I thought love forgotten and had learned to hate.

‘I don’t understand — why are we here?’

He had been brought to the zoological garden. Luke Davies was baffled.

He was answered, ‘That you understand better where we are and what we’re doing.’

‘Mr Lawson, I haven’t been in a zoo since I was a kid.’

It was ridiculous. They had been met at the airport by the deputy station chief, Berlin. All of them had fitted snugly, or squashed, into a minibus, and the deputy station chief had driven them into the city. The vehicle had stopped in a side-street near to the old Zoo Hauptbahnhof. Lawson had climbed out, had gestured for Davies to follow him. They’d taken their bags from the tailgate and walked to the door of a small, perhaps discreet, hotel. Inside, Lawson had been greeted by an elderly porter as if a prodigal had returned. Then an old lady had come through an inner door and Lawson, with full formality, had kissed her hand. The bags were dumped and they were gone without even checking in. He had asked where the minibus was and everyone else. He had been told that Lawson never stayed at the same hotel as his team. And enigmatically, ‘They’ll take on the transport, and they’ll go to work. We’re going for a walk.’ They had been hit by a shower, and had sheltered under the arch outside the zoological garden, then Lawson — in fluent German — had bought the two tickets, an age concession on his own, and they’d gone inside.

There was a smell about the place. Luke Davies had never been inside a gaol, but men he knew had always spoken about the distinctive stench, like a zoo. Might have been the fodder, the bedding, the stale, green-tinted water in the pools, or the creatures’ droppings. The zoo’s smell was in his nostrils, and was worse when they went inside the big cats’ house. He focused on one cage. A lioness had just been fed. A great joint of pink-fleshed bloody meat was between her huge front paws, and her eyes were malevolent as she licked the meat. He could have asked a hundred trite questions. Didn’t, held his peace — and wondered what was so important about the zoo that it took priority over checking in to the hotel … He wondered too what the team, with its disparate characters and daft identification codes, were doing.

They reached the hippopotamus house. It was closed — was being refurbished — and would not open for another week. He saw a flash of annoyance pass over Lawson’s face.

‘Right,’ Davies said. ‘Can we move on along the agenda, please? I think it’s going to rain, and I don’t want to get soaked again. I’ve much enjoyed our jaunt but …’

Lawson headed for the aviary and beyond it were the penguins.

Lawson said, ‘You are in the heart of Europe, young man, not on an offshore island. Everything here is governed by the last war. Boundaries, attitudes, loyalties, all are affected. This was the finest zoo in Europe, but we bombed it to destruction. The lions had to be shot by the keepers or they would have been free to roam the streets and attack people. Elephants were crushed by the collapsed concrete of their enclosures. Deer and birds were slaughtered by citizens desperate for food. It irritates me that the hippopotamus house is shut. One great beast — Knautschke — survived the bombing and hid in the mud of its pool. It was resurrected, fed back to health, and its sperm started a new hippopotamus collection. Of five thousand animals here at the start of hostilities only ninety-one were alive when the white flag went up.’

‘What’s your point?’ Davies could see none.

‘I would have thought it apparent even to an idiot. This city breathes history. The past cannot be discarded, is a ball and chain. You must sniff at the history here if you are to comprehend the present. Is that disrespectful to the genius of youth? Are you so arrogant that you cannot find room for history, are fearful that it will dull the lustre of your glory? When you know history you will know, too, the motivation of men. A sense, warped, of history will drive forward those we attempt to challenge.’

‘Were you here with Clipper?’

‘A good place. No microphones, difficult for counter-surveillance. We met people here, talked about things … Yes, we were often here. Come on.’

‘Can’t I go to the hotel and put on dry socks?’

‘You cannot.’

They walked out of the zoological garden. Lawson set a brisk pace. They went past modern embassy constructions, where the Japanese were and the Saudis, the Mexicans, Malaysians and Indians. He asked why they walked and was told that atmosphere was gained by walking on a city’s streets, not by sitting in a car. He presumed that Clipper Reade had walked in Berlin, and Christopher Lawson merely imitated him slavishly. He resented his treatment. They reached a building faced with clean-cut grey stones. Through an open archway there was a wide courtyard, with leafless young trees in a line at the far end, and a shallow plinth in the centre with a charcoal grey statue, larger than life, of a naked man. Against the left wall, level with the statue, was a plaque and below it were a wreath and a bouquet of fresh yellow flowers.

‘You realize, of course, who this statue commemorates?’

‘No idea.’

‘Claus von Stauffenberg.’

‘Never heard of him. Sorry and all that,’ Davies said.

‘God, the ignorance of the young. At the Wolf’s Lair, he put the bomb under the briefing table. He tried and failed to assassinate his Führer, on the twentieth of July 1944. Hitler lived and von Stauffenberg, who had returned by air to Berlin and had seen his coup d’état fail, was shot by firing squad where the plaque is. I’m trying to show you the confusions under which we operate. To most, even in those dark days when defeat loomed, he was a traitor. To almost none was he a hero. Today, the best that can be said for him is that he is — now, at this late hour — respected. Myself, young man, I make no judgements. I am no crusader for democracy, not a champion of our concept of freedom, merely an observer. Very little in our world is clear cut, and that is best remembered.’

Davies wondered whose words they were, guessed they were spoken first by Clipper Reade. He tried to imagine the two of them, the gross, overweight Texan and a young Englishman feeding from an American hand. He snapped back, ‘Is there not right and wrong? Don’t we make that choice?’

‘You are, or you purport to be, an intelligence officer. Look for sugar or saccharin and you’ll be boring and pompous. Come on. More for you to see. I’ll fight my opponents tooth and nail, but I will not have judged them.’

There had been no talk in the Polonez, merely laughter puncturing the quiet, but now his old friend was silent. Yashkin drove, and wondered what new demon tormented the former zampolit. They had turned off the minor road to a village, had purchased bread at a shop and then pressed on. A range of low hills blocked their view of the Oka river, but they would meet it again when they came to Kaluga. There, the third stage of their journey would be complete and four more would remain. He saw the black soil of the fields, too wet to be ploughed yet, and his speed was seldom above forty-five kilometres per hour — and then they were behind a tractor that pulled a trailer loaded with cattle dung. An old man — older than himself — drove it, and a teenage boy was perched beside him. He thought he watched Russia, his Russia, as he slowed and tucked in behind them, and the manure stench wafted to him. They were the peasants of Russia, obstinate and stubborn, exploited and deceived. The tractor coughed fumes. If he made a victim of the peasant — as he was a victim — he could ally himself to the tractor driver.

It must have welled inside Molenkov, but whatever had been dammed now burst out. ‘Yashkin, have you seen one?’

‘Seen what?’

‘An explosion.’

‘What explosion? What are you talking about?’

‘Have you seen a nuclear explosion? With your own eyes?’

Had Major (Ret’d) Oleg Yashkin ever lied to his friend, Colonel (Ret’d) Igor Molenkov? He couldn’t remember having done so.

‘I have not.’

‘I thought you had, at Semipalatinsk-21.’

‘I have never seen a nuclear explosion, big or small.’ He couldn’t remember offering even the most trifling untruth to his friend. If his friend had asked him, after they had gone their separate ways in the fruit and vegetable market at Sarov, in the late afternoon when prices were lowest, whether he had found potatoes, cabbage or turnips at what could be afforded, and he had enough for Mother and himself, he would have said what he had bought — and then he would have shared. If he were down to the last bucket of coal, needed as a base under wood for the kitchen stove, and his friend came to the door to ask if he could spare some, he would not have denied that he had it. He had always shared the truth with his friend.

‘In your papers, do I not remember seeing you had the security clearance to accompany weapons to Semipalatinsk-21 and for the test site?’

‘I did the escort but didn’t visit the test site.’ He lied again.

‘You passed up that opportunity?’

‘I have never seen an explosion, and have never visited a test site, so let it go.’

The weapon had been taken from Arzamas-16 by road to Kazakhstan. The journey had lasted five days, and Yashkin — then a lieutenant — had been third in command of the detachment of 12th Directorate troops. The device, and he did not know its power or the delivery system intended for it, was to be exploded deep underground. There would be no mushroom cloud and no flash, as there had been in earlier years when First Lightning was detonated, and the RDS-37 hydrogen bomb. The one he had seen was called Project 7. He could not have described it honestly. If he had, his friend would have abandoned him. He did not yet believe fully in Molenkov’s commitment. At the edge of the Semipalatinsk-21 test site was the dry bed of the Chagan river, and a shaft had been sunk among the stones. Kilometres back, safe in a bunker with reinforced-glass slits to view through, he had waited, heard the countdown and had not known what to expect. First the movement of the riverbed, then a towering column of stones, mud, earth and rock as strata and layers from far down were thrown up. The noise had pierced the bunker, a rumbling roar that he couldn’t describe adequately. The concrete floor had shaken, men had clung to walls and chairs, and coffee cups had fallen from the table. The cloud had surged into a clear sky and darkened the sunlight. It had reached its height but had not dispersed for many hours, and dirt from the far down subsoils coated the ground. He had been among those permitted, the next day, to go forward. He had seen a crater that was a hundred metres deep and four hundred wide, and the ground’s contours had changed. He had heard, the next year, that the explosion had formed a dam that would block the flow of the Chagan river in spring when the winter snows melted, and would make a new lake. He had heard, also, the year before his dismissal, that Lake Chagan was dead and polluted, contaminated by radiation. He could not have told his friend what he had seen.

‘If you say so.’

He pulled out recklessly and hooted. The tractor driver slewed to the side, and the Polonez had enough room, barely, to squeeze past. He had to mount the verge and the car bucked, but he had silenced the questions and would not have to lie again. Molenkov grabbed the dashboard and braced himself.

The most incredible sight Oleg Yashkin had witnessed in his life was the eruption in the bed of the Chagan river, and no man or child in Russia would live long enough for it to be safe to walk where the spring waters had made a lake.

He said, ‘I think we’ve made good time. We’ve earned a bath and good food tonight.’ He talked then, with his friend, of the beers they would drink, and how many, and what was the local brewery in the Kaluga district, how often they would need to get up to piss in the night, and the laughter returned.

The hawaldar told the Crow — and sighed, holding out his hands as if to mark the dimensions of the sum — that a huge amount of money was guaranteed.

The Crow told him that the guarantee was from the Base, whose word had never faltered, and was not an advance of one-tenth already made in Dubai.

The hawaldar told the Crow that the necessary messages had been sent by courier to a German city, that confirmation had been received of the courier’s arrival, and the acceptance by a colleague and trusted friend to make payment.

The Crow told the hawaldar that he would be gone from the Gulf in the morning, would fly to Damascus, and from there the trail of his movements would be lost.

A construction-site foreman and a banker of the Islamic faith prayed together. Then they hugged. The hawaldar had prayed fiercely and hugged tightly. He had thought the Crow to be a man of the greatest importance if he was entrusted with purchasing an item for ten million American dollars. He showed the Crow out of his villa and asked if he would ever return to the harbour-front skeletons at Dubai. His answer was a noncommittal shrug. So the hawaldar asked a question that had concerned him since he had met this man: how was it possible that the giant crane stayed stable when the winds blew in from the Gulf? Patiently, the Crow detailed the science of cantilever weights, and he found the answer fascinating. He watched the Crow walk to his car, climb into it and drive away. He thought he was a small part in a great network, one of the many wheels turning behind a clock face, and that so many others, of whom he would never know, were also wheels in the clock.

‘I’m going to be away for a few days,’ he announced, breaking the silence at the evening meal.

‘How is that possible?’ Sak’s father asked. ‘There are three more days of term.’

‘The classroom laboratory is now closed. A school trip is planned to Europe in the autumn, but if it is to be successful it must be reconnoitred now.’ He was fluent at deception, had been taught well.

‘That will be nice for you,’ his mother said.

He saw on their faces — in the dark chestnut eyes of his father, the pale blue ones of his mother — relief. They did not know the full reason why, that afternoon in January 2002, he had arrived at the front door of the guesthouse as they prepared for their evening’s clients. He had had two bulging suitcases of his possessions from the hostel room at Aldermaston. From the West Midlands, he had lethargically chased some work opportunities in academic research under the name of Steven Arthur King and with hospital trusts, but he had gone for a job with police forensic investigation when hoping for ethnic discrimination with the name of Siddique Ahmed Khatab. He had always been turned down, or his applications had gone unanswered, so he had worked for his father and had helped his mother to clean the guest bedrooms. In the last summer he had gone to his father’s relatives in Pakistan and had stayed seven weeks. He had returned revitalized — his parents had noticed the change in him and rejoiced at it — and had been offered a job at the nearby comprehensive school. ‘Not important work, not yet,’ his father had told a friend, ‘but steady, with security.’ He had presumed the role of laboratory technician was too lowly to feature in the computer checks where he had failed on previous applications.

‘Only for a few days,’ he said, shrugged, and ate.

It had been the start of a day like any other. He had bicycled from the hostel to his workbench. Before going to the centrifuge unit, he had been enjoying a mug of coffee and light gossip with colleagues, and a call had come for him to go, immediately, to the headquarters/ administration block. He was given a room number to ask for. There had been three men. He had recognized Summers, who was CSO for the Aldermaston complex: everyone knew the chief security officer who obstinately smoked a big pipe when he was outside a building. Another was introduced as a sergeant in Special Branch. The third man was not introduced by name or occupation — Sak now believed him to be from the Security Service — and in front of him was the folder with Sak’s personal file. There was little preamble. Summers had awkwardly revolved the bowl of his filled but unlit pipe, and had spoken.

‘This is not easy for any of us — for you or me. You understand that the world was turned upside-down in New York four months ago. The aircraft into the Towers, and all that, altered perspectives. We have gone with painstaking care through your record and note family links with the Tribal Areas of Pakistan. We are making no accusations concerning your loyalty to all of us at Aldermaston, nor is there a criticism of your work. However, security and the safety of the nation demand, in these difficult times, that we make hard decisions. You will be “let go”. This is not a dismissal, you are not sacked, but your clearance to work here is, with effect today, withdrawn. In conditions of confidentiality, your union has been informed that your employment is terminated, and I have their guarantee that they will not, repeat not, support legal action by you against us. You have been with us for five years, but you will receive six months salary in lieu of notice, which I consider generous, but it will be in staggered payments. Should you, in the vernacular, “go public” on this matter the payments will be halted. Also, don’t take this as a threat, we would counter any public statement you made with accusations concerning the quality of your work and your fitness to be employed here. You are a casualty of this war. Your family in Pakistan ensure that. I am very sorry but that is the situation, and no appeal procedure exists. I wish you well in finding other work that does not involve nuclear weapons and materials. Do you have any questions?’

He had had none.

A cousin of his father, living in West Bromwich, would do the redecoration of Room 2, it was decided, in the summer when the guesthouse business was slackest. A new shower unit, an upgrading, would be fitted in the bathroom outside Room 3, by a nephew of his father who lived in Brierley Hill. To his parents these were matters of importance weightier than Sak’s travelling to Europe on school business.

It was the last boat of the day. They had walked all afternoon on the streets of the new Berlin, Lawson’s voice dripping in Davies’s ear. On looking out at a panorama of huge glass-and-concrete constructions that seemed to trumpet corporate wealth: ‘It is a mirage of affluence and the comfort zone does not exist. Grand façades, but not backed by reality. An attempt to plaster over the history of this city, but it cannot — not while the grandfathers still live. It’s skin deep, and society is raddled with high-level corruption.’ Going past the designer benches in public parks and seeing the drunks, destitutes and druggies sprawled out on them: ‘The money’s run out. The economic miracle was a mirage and is no longer even pretended. This city is a place where the rats with the sharpest claws and the biggest teeth survive. Do you see charm? Anything attractive? This city is a sack where rats fight — and it’s where Clipper taught me my trade. There were rats here then, and little is different now.’

It was a big pleasure-boat. It was raining hard now and the open seats on the deck were empty. They sat in the lounge cabin, and only one other couple — talking French but more interested in kissing than the sights — was there. Three girls lounged at the bar, but Lawson had waved them away when they had offered coffee or drinks. Luke Davies endured it, and did not know the journey’s purpose.

They had walked past the great buildings, re-created, of the war where Bormann and Speer, Hess and von Ribbentrop had had their offices, where the Gestapo had been — and their sunken holding cells: ‘The past dominates, cannot be escaped from. Know the past and you can fight the modern danger. Ignore the past and you’re defenceless.’ And past a building where a sign indicated there was a Stasi museum, and outside it bronze statues of a uniformed man from the Democratic Republic’s security police, and civilian workers who symbolized the network of informers used by the regime: ‘The mentality still lives. The mentality was bugs and microphones, friend denouncing friend, a daughter betraying a father. The mentality is now pushed further to the east, beyond the Bug. It is alive in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. The men who bred it still have their desks in Warsaw, Budapest and Prague. That’s why we don’t share. Here, they even collected smells. In glass jars, hermetically sealed — the sort of jars your mother would have used to store beetroot in vinegar — there were handkerchiefs, socks and underwear for a dog to track. A jar stored in the basement of Normannenstrasse held a crushed cigar end. Clipper Reade’s.’

They had walked past a section of the Wall. Seventeen years since it had been breached, and the Cold War, the war of the gods, had been wound down. Yes, certain of it, in Luke Davies’s book, but not Lawson’s … ‘They regret now that they took down so much of it. Should have left it up. A good, clear, understandable world then, not the confused quagmire we now thrash around in. Look at the end of this section, how narrow it is, just the width of a concrete block, but it defined cultures as clearly as if it had been a chasm a mile wide. It’s where I was with Clipper Reade. I yearn for those days again when ideology was the battleground, not this damn faith business.’ They had gone to the boarding point for the boat trip at the Potsdamerplatz, had waited by the pontoon. He had thought Lawson mad, certifiable. At least they had a shrink with them. He would broach it with the guy.

The voice over the loudspeakers urged him to look forward. Now Lawson reacted. He had been slumped in the plastic chair, not peering out of the windows on which the rain dribbled. He jerked upright, light in his eyes.

The voice spoke of the approaching Oberbaumbrücke, completed in 1896, the finest bridge construction in nineteenth-century Berlin and …

Lawson said, ‘This is why I brought you. You needed to feel the width of the river, not just to stand on a bank and look across. We were on the left side, Clipper and I, and Foxglove was on the right where the Wall was. He worked in the east sector’s central telephone exchange. It was always difficult to debrief him, and the tractor-salesman cover was getting thin — about six weeks before Clipper was blown in Budapest. He was useful, and we used exchange students, military people who had the right of access to East Berlin and tourists — anyone with a visa — to bring back tapes, logs and lists of ministry numbers, but he wasn’t important enough for us to mount a full-dress exfiltration operation. You see, he was of no use to us afterwards, only when he was in place. Foxglove was a good agent, but not priceless, and his shelf life was gone.’

The bridge was misted by the low cloud and the rain dropping from it. Luke Davies’s head was at the window. It had seven low arches of brick with stone facings. A U-bahn train was crossing its top deck, but a lower one seemed empty. There were twin towers in the centre and they straddled the central arch, which their boat headed for. The voice said that the Oberbaumbrücke had been dynamited in 1945 to prevent Soviet troops using it, then rebuilt after Berlin was joined again; the central arch was from the design of a Spanish architect.

Lawson said, ‘He was on his own, really, Foxglove was. We told the police on this side that “someone” was trying to come that night. They had an inflatable ready and an ambulance was on stand-by, but he had to get halfway. I suppose we’d been running him for six months, Clipper and I, and we’d reckoned him a decent young man. No dinghy available to him, of course, but we’d suggested to Foxglove that he try to get hold of an inner tube to keep himself up, then kick like hell. There were booms and barrage nets on their side, and we didn’t know how he’d cope with them, but that was his problem. We didn’t see him go into the water.’

The boat splashed foam aside, then slowed in front of the bridge. Davies thought that later in the season, when it was loaded and the sun shone, this would give a better photo opportunity to those wishing to recall a sight of the Oberbaumbrücke. The wake died, and the boat idled. He looked down into the dark depth of the water, and sensed the terror of a man in flight.

‘We knew he was in the water only when the searchlight found him. It locked on him. He was on an inner tube, as we’d suggested. Then there was tracer, one round in four, red lines of it. He must have been hit but not badly by one of these first shots. He screamed. Had no chance then. There was concentrated fire on him, not only the machine-gun but from rifles. Then the searchlight lost him, which meant he’d gone under and the tube had been holed. We waited, owed him that. Next time we saw him he was tangled in one of the barrage nets, dead. I was young, a bit cut up about it.’

He looked across at the left bank, saw old buildings that now seemed derelict, and wondered where Lawson had stood, and the American, where the boat crew had waited and the ambulance people, and seemed to hear the sirens, the crack of the guns, and the lights seemed to dazzle him.

‘Clipper didn’t do emotion. Clipper said to me, “Let’s go get a beer.” We went off to a bar, and did just that. Four or five beers, actually, and a half-bottle of schnapps. Spent the small hours in a bar with drunks and pimps, and I learned the creed of the agent-runner from Clipper Reade. He said, “Lose an agent and you go find another.” And he said, “Get close and sentimental to an agent and you get to be useless:” And the dawn was coming up, and he said, “Treat them like dirt in the gutter, and when you’ve finished throw them back there.” We went out into the dawn light, and he said, “Agents are just means to an end, and you owe them nothing.” I brought you here, young man, so you’d know where I’m coming from and where I’m intending to go.”

They left the boat at the next stop, at the Jannowitzbrücke. Luke Davies no longer thought of Christopher Lawson as mad but reckoned him brutal, cold and utterly detestable. And there was an agent out there who was owed a damn sight more than Foxglove had been given. It was damnable, what was asked of November, the agent of today, not a bloody ghost from the past.

Carrick was on four-hour turns. Slept for four hours, then sat on a hard upright chair just inside the suite’s outer door, which had the chain fastened.

Thought of it as pretty much a wasted day because he had learned little, if anything.

One visitor. A Russian, in a uniform of shaven head, worn leather jacket and boots laced up over the ankle, as if they were required for his role. Must have come when he’d slept and Viktor had done the guard turn. Josef Goldmann had brought the Russian out of the inner room, had escorted him to the outer door and the hotel corridor. Carrick had watched the man amble away, then gone back inside and secured the chain again. He’d noted the face of his Bossman. If he had been filling in the Book, he would have written: ‘Target One had a meeting of at least two hours with unidentified male (Russian) and appeared anxious and under major psychological pressure at the end of it.’ His Bossman lingered in the outer room, lips writhing and throat heaving, as if he weighed the consequences of confiding — did not, but let his hand rest on Carrick’s sleeve, clutched it, then broke the grip and went to the inner room. He looked, Carrick reckoned, more pressured than when he had been chucked into the car after two shots had been fired. Carrick wondered if chickens had come back to roost, but knew no more than what was in front of him to see.