by Mark Dawson
“The Russians?”
“Oksana, really. She gave me another way out.”
“And how did you find me now?”
“The Russians, again. I called the embassy. They found you and told me where you were.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
Walker smiled. It wasn’t necessarily friendly; there was a glint in his eye that gave Mackintosh cause for concern. “I’m pleased I found you,” he said. “There’s something we need to discuss.”
“Yes,” Mackintosh said. “We do.”
Mackintosh started off and Walker settled in alongside him.
“You wanted me to get Schmidt,” Walker said. “I did that. And you wanted Sommer dead. That’s done, too. I went back into the cell after you left. I saw what you did.”
“You did everything I asked you to do, James. And, yes, before you ask, I know what I said I’d do for you. The charges against you will be dropped. I’ll call Scotland Yard this afternoon. You don’t need to worry about that—it’s done. You have my word.”
“That’s good of you,” Walker said. “And I don’t want to sound ungrateful, but I do worry. Your word doesn’t give me a huge amount of confidence. You kept information from me in Berlin. You made me make a decision without knowing all the facts.”
“Would you have said no if you’d known?”
“Probably not, but that’s beside the point. You weren’t truthful. You’re not trustworthy.”
Mackintosh felt a flicker of anger; he suspected he was about to be threatened. “So what are we going to do?”
“I just want you to do what you promised to do. That’s it. And I don’t want you ever to bother me or my family again. You, the intelligence services, the police—I just want to live a normal life, no interference, no fear that you’ve got something that you can hold over me.”
“So stop robbing banks and you’ll have nothing to worry about.”
Walker smiled, but it was thin and without humour. “Here’s the thing,” he said. He reached into his jacket and took out an envelope. “I broke into Sommer’s vault. I found this.”
He held out the envelope and Mackintosh took it. He slid his finger into the seal and opened it, taking out several pieces of paper that had been stapled in the top right corner. Mackintosh turned the pages. He felt sick, and he felt worse with every fresh line that he read.
“You can have that,” Walker said. “I have the original—you won’t be able to find it. It’s my insurance. If anything happens to me, it gets sent to the papers.”
Mackintosh hardly heard him. He stared at the page, unable to credit what he was seeing. The Stasi had had him under surveillance for months. There were photographs of him and Élodie. He had thought that they had been careful, but, evidently, they had not. There was a long-lens photograph of them at Hochosterwitz, the two of them embracing in front of the castle. The next page was a copy of the Swiss bank account that he had set up.
“The front page is a summary,” Walker said. “It’s in German—I translated it with a dictionary. I think I’ve got the gist of it. Seems that the woman in those pictures with you was French. They said she worked for French intelligence.”
“Yes,” Mackintosh snapped, feeling the noose tightening around his neck and yet still struggling to loosen it, to deny what the Stasi had found out. “The operation to get Schmidt was a joint operation with the DGSE.”
“But they say that you and her were involved, and that bank statement says you were receiving large deposits. The Stasi seem to think she was paying you.” He shrugged as they walked. “I’ve no idea how your business works, but, in my business, Swiss bank accounts are usually used by people who have something they want to hide.”
Mackintosh tightened his fist, crumpling the papers.
“Don’t think I’m passing judgement,” Walker said. “I don’t care if you’re getting paid, who’s paying you, how they pay you—I don’t care about that. Like you say, I’ve made my money robbing banks. I’d be a hypocrite. Anyway—I wanted you to have that. And you’ve got my word that, as long as you do right by me and my family, that never sees the light of day.”
Mackintosh felt his cheeks throbbing with blood, and knew that he had no choice but to take a deep breath, to bite his tongue, to tamp down his anger. It was the loss of control that stirred his temper. Secrets were an inevitable part of the life of an agent, but the ones who lasted—the ones who didn’t get cashiered, or posted to pointless outposts, or killed—those agents made sure that they held the secrets, and were not the ones with secrets that could be used against them by others. And there was embarrassment, too: that the Stasi had known this about him, and that James Walker—a two-bit, no-account bank robber—knew about it, too.
Mackintosh had been played, twice, and he hated it.
They had reached the bottom of Whitehall. Parliament Square was in front of them and, to the left, Big Ben was just chiming the hour. Traffic was flowing in both directions and they had to wait to cross.
“Do we understand one another?” Walker asked.
“Piss off,” Mackintosh said.
“I will, but I need to hear you say it.”
Mackintosh took a deep breath, trying to put enough air in his lungs that he might be able to relieve the tightness that felt like an iron band around his breast.
He forced the words out, one by one. “We do.”
Walker had his hand out. Mackintosh put his bottom lip between his teeth and bit down, hard enough to draw blood, then reached out and took it.
“I’d love to say it was a pleasure, but—”
“Just fuck off, James.”
Walker grinned at him, let go of his hand, turned toward Westminster Bridge and walked away.
64
Jimmy flagged down a taxi. He got into the back and told the driver to take him to Hackney.
The man looked back at him in the mirror. “You all right, mate? You look done in.”
“It’s been a long week,” he said.
*
That was the truth.
Jimmy had found a car with official plates in a parking lot a short walk away from the Pfarrhaus. It was a luxury sedan—a GAZ Chaika—and Jimmy had decided that it would be a good choice given that he was dressed as a senior Stasi officer. He knew that his cover was flimsy, and would be blown as soon as he was asked to open his mouth, and so he decided to bank on the chance that by looking important he would reduce the possibility of a junior man risking the opprobrium of inconveniencing him.
He had driven north out of the city, passing through Schönholz and Rosenthal and then out beyond its outer boundaries. He maintained a northerly heading and drove for five hours without stopping. The landscape was flat and covered with thick snow. He passed Neuruppin, Wittstock and Güstrow, aiming for Rostock and then heading northwest for the coast.
Kühlungsborn was a small fishing port. Jimmy followed Oksana’s directions to a café that looked out over the Baltic Sea. The proprietor was a gruff East German called Burmeister. He had recognised Oksana’s name and, after a short conversation, he took Jimmy to a small bedroom in the attic. He told him to stay out of sight while he made the preparations for his exfiltration. Jimmy took off the uniform and replaced it with warm clothes that Burmeister’s wife brought to him: jeans made from thick denim, a flannel shirt, a heavy wool jumper. There was a bright yellow oilskin, too, and heavy waterproof boots.
Burmeister drove him to the harbour just before midnight and led him to a skiff that was tied up at
the end of a pier. Jimmy lowered himself down into the boat. Burmeister started the engine and they cast off. Burmeister warned him that the low levels of salt in the Baltic Sea made it prone to large waves, and he had been quickly proven right. The skiff was tossed around as soon as they were beyond the harbour walls, and Jimmy was convinced that they would capsize. Burmeister was skilled, though, and his fears of drowning were quickly replaced by the certainty that they would be picked up by the patrol boats that Jimmy had seen moored in the harbour. That fear, too, had been misplaced.
The lightship was seventeen kilometres out to sea. Burmeister pulled alongside and secured a ladder that was thrown down. Jimmy scaled it and was pulled aboard the bigger boat. His bag was hauled up on a rope; Jimmy didn’t let it out of his sight. He was given dry clothes and a hot drink as the captain of the lightship radioed the local post boat to come and collect the stowaway, using a codeword in case the Stasi was monitoring radio traffic. Jimmy hid below deck for twelve hours until the post boat arrived, transferred onto it with his bag and hid again as it made the choppy crossing to the Danish island of Møn. It was easier from there: a ferry to the mainland, and a train to Copenhagen.
He had taken a room in a hotel near the airport and slept. When he awoke, he set to work. He went down to the business centre and made photocopies of the file on Mackintosh that he had taken from Sommer’s vault. Next, he made an appointment at the branch of Nordea in Taastrup, twenty minutes west of the capital. The bank offered safe deposit boxes, and Jimmy had rented one of their largest for six months. The manager took him down to an antechamber next to the vault and had left him with the box. Jimmy transferred the ingots, arranging them so that they filled the bottom half of the box. He put most of the money on top of that, keeping three thousand pounds to take back home with him. He put Mackintosh’s Stasi file inside, too, keeping the photocopies. He waited as the bank staff struggled with the weight of the box, replacing it in the vault, and then made his way back out onto the street.
Jimmy knew that he would have to be creative in finding a way to get the bullion out of the country, but that was a problem for another day.
65
The taxi reached Hackney and plotted a route through streets that Jimmy knew. He looked out of the window with a smile on his face. He had wondered whether he would ever see these houses and shops again. The driver turned onto Valentine Road and parked next to the house. Jimmy paid him, adding a generous tip, and got out. It was a cold, fresh day, and Jimmy stood on the path for a moment and breathed it in. It was refreshing, nothing like the frigidity of East Germany or the bone-freezing chill of the Baltic. He climbed the steps to his front door, took a moment to compose himself, and then rapped his knuckles against it.
The door opened. Isabel was standing there, her mouth open.
“Hello, darling,” Jimmy said. “I’m home.”