Gerald Seymour

by Traitor's Kiss (b) (epub)

  Slowly, as he willed himself faster, the water tower grew closer. The road was now close to the beach, but the trees shielded it. Often he heard the thunder of the lorries coming to the base or leaving it, but that morning he could only hear the lesser purr of the black van and the silver saloon tracking him.

  High on the sand, below the water tower, was the wreck of a fishing-boat. It would have been seven metres long and two wide, and half a century before it would have held thirty or forty escapers. It had been caught on the beach by a strafing aircraft, and cannon shells had holed it. Perhaps his grandmother had been close, hiding in the pine trees and pressed down on the needle-strewn ground when the aircraft had come over on its low pass and destroyed her final hope. Viktor always ran as far as the wreck on the sand, and never further. There he would rest for three minutes, timed on the stop-watch dial of his wristwatch, a routine set in stone.

  It was his cry for help. In the face of the wind his back rested against the old plank timbers of the fishing-boat. From the dunes, as they smoked their cigarettes, his watchers might see the top of his head. If he had been in the lee of the wind, sheltered, they would have been able to see him, and what he did. He reached into the pocket of his shorts and took out the piece of chalk. Near to the bow, where once the name of the boat and its number would have been painted, close to a shell-hole, he made two short crosses, and underneath the crosses he wrote the letters Y and F. He did not know how his friends would answer his cry. He pushed himself up, his three minutes gone.

  He was a traitor. He imagined the unpitying, feral eyes of the men on the dunes before they turned to scurry back to the van and the saloon car.

  He was a traitor for two reasons. The learning of the life and death of his father and of his grandmother had tipped him into the chasm and down in freefall to treachery. If he had been told only of his father he might not have taken the big step, crossed that line. Within a few months of his mother telling him of his grandmother's life and death, Viktor had walked the trawler's gangplank in Murmansk. It was fitting he should now be posted to Kaliningrad.

  His grandmother was Helga Schmidt, the daughter of Wilhelm and Anneliese, who had had a prosperous prewar grain-export business in the east Prussian city of Konigsberg. Wilhelm died in the air raids of August 1944 when the old town and his warehouses were bombed with incendiaries.

  Helga and Anneliese had not believed until it was too late that the Reich could disintegrate. Then, daughter and mother had fled in a final crocodile of refugees from Konigsberg the day before the Red Army surrounded the city. They had reached Pillau, walked there, but the last ships had gone. The army garrison at Pillau had fought on for two weeks after the final surrender of Konigsberg by General Otto Lasch.

  Pillau had fallen when no ammunition remained to defend it, and the women had stood behind white flags and faced the Red Army.

  Anneliese had been bayoneted. She had not survived long enough to see what happened to her daughter—which was God's small mercy.

  The victorious troops were from Central Asia, but their officers were ethnic Russians. The officers chose the prettiest, and Helga was among them. Helga Schmidt was raped by a battalion's officer, then by the NCOs, then by those of the troops still able to achieve erections—it was what happened in dark days at the end of a war of brutality. When they were all flaccid, spent, satiated, she was left.

  The girl, impregnated, was shipped back to the city, now called Kaliningrad, and existed there as a gypsy waif. She kept herself alive through her love for an unborn child. Starved, half frozen, living in the bomb ruins, Helga survived her pregnancy, but was too weak to feed her boy baby, born on 25 January 1946.

  Helga Schmidt wrote down what had happened to her, wrapped her son in the thickest rags she could find, with the paper that told her history, and left him on a snow-covered step at a side door to the city orphanage. The same day she had given up her baby, she hanged herself from a beam in the cathedral's ruins, having used the torn strips of her skirt as a noose.

  The baby, adopted by a Russian family, was named Pyotr. The family, farmers from the east and resettled on formerly German property in Kaliningrad, had the name of Archenko.

  Pyotr Archenko was only twenty years old when he married his childhood sweetheart, Irina, whose stomach bulged at the ceremony. Their only son was given the name of Viktor. On her deathbed, Irina's mother-in-law had shown her the faded, creased sheet of paper on which Helga Schmidt had written her testament. In turn, on her own deathbed, Irina had allowed Viktor to read it, then had taken it back from him and had held it over a candle until it had burned and her fingers had blistered.

  The story, and that of the death of his father, had bred betrayal.

  Viktor had done what his handlers had told him to, and he ran back along the beach. The gloom of the dawn had gone and the sun now edged over the tips of the pine trees. On the return leg he ran more loosely. He never looked at the dunes to see whether the men watched him. That he lived was because of his grandmother's strength and that was a small but solid comfort to him. Would they hear his cry, and would they answer it? He did not know.

  In the night the battery on the alarm clock had failed. The bleeper hadn't sounded.

  Locke woke, glanced at the clock's digital face, was turning over to go back to sleep when he saw the first glimmer of daylight through the thin curtains. He looked at his watch and surged out of his cold bed.

  For a week now the bed had harboured an icy chill in Danuta's absence. He shaved in the shower and dressed while he was still wet. A best shirt and a best tie, his best suit and his best shoes were snatched from the wardrobe and from the drawers and he dripped pools of water on to the carpet. As he closed his front door for the charge down the stairwell, the lights were still blazing behind him, but he didn't have time to go back and switch them off.

  He ran for his car. He had not filled the tank since yesterday's drive to and from Braniewo and the needle flickered in the red segment of the dial. He prayed he had enough petrol to get him to Okecie. If he was caught in the city's early rush-hour gridlocks he would miss the flight. He had the protection of diplomatic plates but that would not stop a policeman waving him down with a luminous baton, for amusement. He was still on the wide Al Jerozolimskie, had not yet reached the Zawisky roundabout, when he made his first clear-cut decision of the day. He would drive straight past any policeman who tried to stop him—and bugger the consequences.

  An hour after sending the signal, and a quarter of an hour after he had come back to the apartment after sitting with a coffee for twenty minutes at the Sklep z Kawq Pozegnanie z Afrykq—she hadn't been there. His mobile had rung. Libby Weedon. He was summoned to London, first flight in the morning with LOT, the national carrier. 'Don't miss it, you're in with the big girls,' and she'd hung up. Libby Weedon, clever lady, had distanced herself from Ferret, and left him, the young man on his first Service posting abroad, to do the driving and the collection from the dead drops. What could he bloody well tell the 'big girls'? No detail was more telling than the three words of his signal: ferret: no show.

  He broke most of Poland's traffic laws on the way to Okecie, and beat the early traffic. He was close to the airport when he remembered that he was due to meet a speech writer of the KPN party for lunch. He fumbled with his mobile and left a message on Libby Weedon's voicemail asking for the duty secretary to ring with apologies. The needle banged on the dial's 'empty' segment, but the tank held out and he made it to the airport. He was the last one onto the flight.

  Gabriel Locke's upbringing had been on the southern tip of west Wales. His parents still ran a 150-acre dairy farm on fields that were edged by cliffs that fell to violent seas. It was a harsh place and made for a hard and uncertain existence. Their lives were dominated by the extremes of weather, the coldness of the impersonal banks, the milk quotas, the per-litre price, the ever-increasing callout fee charged by veterinary surgeons, and most recently by the scourge of foot-and mouth disease. They sur
vived on the edge of poverty, reduced to hoarding pounds, squirrelling away the silver coins, putting the pence in jars before collecting enough to dump them on the counter of the village shop and the post office. He had wanted none of it. He was one of the few from his comprehensive-school class who had bettered himself and broken free. He had thought he would never suffer as he believed they did. He rarely phoned home, only sent anodyne messages on occasional postcards. He wanted structure and certainty to his life and it was ridiculous to him that—in this new millennium—a storm, or a Whitehall bureaucrat's decision, or a virus could tip the difference between minimal financial survival and bankruptcy. Yet for the first time in his adult life, going down the pier and seeing the force of the wind scudding across the tarmac, he felt unsure as to what the future held.

  There was turbulence ahead. They lifted off and the aircraft shook as it gathered height. It would be a foul flight. The uncertainty festered in his mind. The cream of the Service's new intake, his contemporaries on the IONEC course, were now scattered round the Gulf, in Islamabad, Tashkent and Tehran, in Damascus and Tel Aviv, in Beirut, Cairo and Khartoum, and the prize bitch among them was in Kabul. They were at the sharp end of the Service's work, and Gabriel Locke was in Warsaw where less than fuck-all relevant work was done…and he was being summoned back to London because two dead-drop procedures—as antiquated and outdated as the plumbing of his parents' milking parlour—had failed. The sourness engulfed him as the plane ducked through the choppy air. His annoyance, for want of a better target, focused on the outmoded system that had produced Ferret in the first place.

  Alice North was at the far end of the conference room where she would hardly have been noticed with her back to the window. The bright sunlight that was thrown over her shoulder cast a shadow on her face. Her legs were crossed and on her upper thigh was the notepad in which she wrote her shorthand, with sharpened pencil.

  Before the meeting had settled, Alice had written at the top of the first page of the foolscap pad:

  Codename Ferret

  Meeting at VBX, 21 September 2002.

  Present:

  Albert Ponsford (AP) Russia Desk; Peter Giles (PG) Dep. Director Covert Ops; Gabriel Locke (GL) Warsaw station; Maj. William Courtney (WC) Special Air Service/Liaison; Lt Cdr Geoffrey Snow (GS) Naval Intelligence; Alice North.

  Alice's face, without makeup, was a mask. Of all of them in the room she knew the most of Codename Ferret, but she was not expected to speak…she was only there to take the record of the meeting, not to contribute.

  GL: It's ridiculous—in this day and age, with the electronic capability we have—for us to be dependent on drops where we have no control of the situation. I don't know what's going on, and it doesn't seem anybody else does. Anyway, if he's in difficulty, this Codename Ferret, I cannot see that anything can be done for him.

  She had met Gabriel Locke once, at Rupert Mowbray's retirement party, and from the first sight of him she had disliked the young man. Not tall, a nice head, fine dark hair, well-cut features, but humourless, cold and without humanity.

  PG: We have a good reputation, deservedly so, for providing help and succour to those who are in need of it. But there are two limitations on what we can do—first, what is possible in the circumstances, second, what is desirable in the current political, diplomatic mood.

  AP: I don't want to pour cold water on this—I'm as keen as the next man to do the right thing by an agent, but there are very serious areas that we must look most closely at. HM Government policy is now towards rapprochement with our Russian neighbours. Nobody suggested, of course they didn't, that in light of the rapprochement we should wind down what we were running inside their territories, but we most certainly do not shove two fingers up in their faces. I would assume that ministers would expect, should our man be arrested, that events should be allowed to take their course.

  Peter Giles had always been a snake in the grass. And Alice had scant respect for Ponsford either, a time-server with a knapsack of pomposity since the last New Year Honours and his OBE award.

  PG: Minimize the damage—for heaven's sake, we now have collaboration committees meeting monthly, and Afghanistan couldn't have been attempted without that exercise in good relations, because we were the conduit between them and the Americans. Ride it out, let the storm blow over. We couldn't dream of jeopardizing the new relationship for one man. He's only a junior naval officer, isn't he?

  Alice glanced up from the notepad and saw the naval intelligence man wince. All the faces were turned towards him. She thought him not a man to put his head unnecessarily on the block. He coughed. The delay he put into the hack deep in his throat, then the shovelling in his pocket for a handkerchief seemed to her to be in the hope that someone else might speak up. There was no escape.

  GS: It's difficult to quantify his value. It's not state-of-the-art research and development, but it's all useful. All right, occasionally we get something that's hot, but most frequently we get what is relevant. How I'd summarize—we're being given a rather unique insight into the modern Russian navy. From him we have confirmation of much that we believed but were not certain of, and he's surprised us with detail on submarine depths, hull coatings, engine noise, missile-preparedness and range. What is also clear is that the quality of the material has reached a higher level than we received in that first package. His access is good. Now, I don't know who he works for, but I have to assume he's close to a senior admiral. I suppose the possibility is that the admiral will go right to the top, and take his man, our man, with him. Conclusions? Because of him we feel comfortable about the Russian navy. Then there're the airforce insights, which colleagues appreciate. But if we lost him, would it matter? No, the world wouldn't stop—I don't think we'd miss him.

  Again, Alice looked up and saw heads nod agreement. Others now took their cue from the navy's man. She scribbled busily.

  AP: It's all about embarrassment—formally we'd deny all knowledge of him…

  PG: Never seek to justify, never look to apologize. Anyway, when they walk in, these people, they must have a pretty clear idea of the risk being undertaken. What would he get—ten years, a bit more?

  AP: Something a little more drastic than that.

  Her face was down and close to the notepad, her pencil moved silently, but her coverage of the word 'drastic' was emphatic, and if she had pressed harder the lead might have snapped.

  PG: I thought they'd abolished capital punishment in the Federation…

  AP: Well, they'd find a way round that little obstacle—but it's not our problem. Our problem is our ministers and how they'd regard the fallout from an arrest. Deniability is indeed the name of the game. It was good stuff about the redeployment of the Tochka missiles into Kaliningrad, and good fun the kicking we were able to give them over it…even if it did have to be sourced as satellite photography.

  GL: Cut him adrift, forget him. Not worth the hassle. At our station we have excellent relations with the Russians, and it's two way traffic. They're getting techno know-how, and we're getting decent stuff on organized crime…it would hurt if we lost that. What's the worst case—they expel a couple of ours, we expel a couple of theirs, then it's history? What we should not do is exacerbate a situation, turn a clean cut into something that's infected.

  PG: He was, wasn't he, Rupert's man?

  AP: Rupert's gone—sadly missed. [Irony] Don't know how we manage without him, a wonder the building still stands.

  She heard the little ripple of laughter around the table.

  WC: What's the exfiltration plan?

  He'd waited for his moment. In the past two years Alice had twice met William Courtney. He'd be a few years older than herself, might be thirty-eight, and she thought that the best years of his soldiering were behind him. His reward, for ageing, was a transfer from Hereford to liaison work with the Service. It was a part of the Service's glory legacy that a troop was permanently on standby down at Hereford for the rougher end of the Service's work. He
wore his grey-flecked hair long on his shoulders, and she thought a ponytail would have been smarter, but it was apparent to her that smartness did not fit the hippie/traveller image he cultivated. No jacket, a thick sweater that looked to have been worn that week in a sheep-pen on the Brecons and had unravelling wool in the elbows and at the cuffs, and jeans that were clean but had not been pressed after an obligatory run through a launderette. He had on trainers that were faded but had probably shared space in the same wash as the jeans.

  Alice knew Ferret's file backwards. She could turn up any page without going to the index. She had never seen an exfiltration plan, only an 'alert' procedure of chalk signs on a beach. Her pencil was poised. Her eyes rose and she saw Ponsford look away, and Giles stared down at the blank paper in front of him then reached for his glass of water. A smile, fading towards impertinence, wreathed the Special Air Service major's mouth.

  WC: Sorry—am I being dim? There is a plan to lift him out, take Ferret out—or isn't there?

  PG: Actually written down? No, there isn't.

  AP: Never seemed necessary—or Rupert never got round to it.

  WC: No plan? No recce been done, no dry run, right? Starting from scratch, yes? Time not on our side? I read up on Kaliningrad last night, briefed myself. It's a bloody fortress. Naval infantry, marines, mechanized regular army. Other parts of good old Russia might have had the capability degraded, not this place. Quite frankly, and it's my job to ensure there are no misunderstandings. I don't think my people would be that keen on a trip in there, not to Kaliningrad.

  GL: These people make their own beds, and then they have to lie on them.

  AP: Sad, it goes without saying, but that's the life of an agent. Gabriel has put it bluntly but quite fairly—and there is no room for sentiment in these affairs, even if it's the death of an agent.