The Weigels' was the new world. They would not inform the Russian embassy of any suspicion they might harbour. They had received a telephone message an hour earlier from an official at the Association of Travel Agents. They floated in a sea of mutual favours. Frau Weigel herself would be at the Am Zoo pickup point with Fraulein Krause's passport and the stapled visa.
Daphne drove back to the embassy, reported on her visa application, then went in search of a historian at the Humboldt University who would provide her with background cover. She would spend the rest of the afternoon with him.
His papers called him Peter Flint but all of his teenage and adult life he had only answered to the name of Lofty. He raked the dry brown leaves from around the headstones in the Tyne Cot cemetery. They'd fallen thickly that day because there had been a bitter wind, and away in a far corner, near to the old German pillboxes, he had a good bonfire going for them. He picked up the leaves and barrowed them to the fire—he could not keep pace with the speed of their fall. It was the time of year he disliked most: impossible for him to keep the little squares of hoed earth in front of the stones and the short-cut grass corridors between them as neat as they should be. He would work that afternoon and evening as long as there was light for him to see the leaves. To Lofty it was a duty.
On his third whisky, and still nursing his temper, Rupert Mowbray heard the bell ring. Late that afternoon he had been ambushed. The ambush had ridiculed him. He assumed it had been planned the previous evening in the bar of the Students' Union. He had been made to look foolish, which hurt, and antiquated, which hurt more severely. He had come home, slammed the front door behind him, and it had taken him his third whisky before he could bring himself to explain to Felicity the wound he had suffered.
'I was well launched, on my feet for ten minutes, and had the total attention of the front row. I'd captured them all—well, all of them who were sat in front of my students. I was on to Putin and democracy and the premise that we're cosying too quickly with a demagogue…and I saw those bloody students move. It was concerted, planned. They held up a banner—"Mowbray is a Cold War warrior". They'd done cardboard sheets, "Mowbray the fossil from the Ice Age" and "Mowbray, fight your wars someplace else". One was on his feet, cupped his hands and shouted through them, "You're a disgrace, Mowbray, because all you preach is hatred." Then they were gone. Every row behind the front just emptied, out they went. It was humiliating, I went on, I finished, damned if I was going to be beaten by them. It was as if those kids didn't know, didn't care, what I've done with my life, where I've been, what I've achieved—all my experience and the bedrock of my knowledge, just pissed on it…'
Now Felicity murmured that she wasn't expecting anyone and went to answer the door.
Rupert Mowbray, his pride chastised, sat in his chair with both fists clamped around his crystal tumbler. He heard the murmur of voices in the hall, too indistinct to learn the identity of his visitor. He had served his country, from his desk in the Secret Intelligence Service, for close to forty years. That country, while breeding its ignorant, ungrateful youth, had posted him to Aden, Berlin, Bonn in western Germany, Berlin again, South Africa, Berlin once more, and Warsaw. In all, twelve Director Generals had overseen his work. He had survived the butchery of personnel numbers in '90, the Christmas massacre of '93, the staff cull of '98 Rupert Mowbray was, dammit, a man who should have been listened to, and into his mind leaped the image of the empty rows in the lecture room.
His wife was in the sitting-room's doorway: 'It's Alice, she's popped by to see you, Rupert.'
Then she stepped back, made space so that she could be passed, and Alice North was walking hesitantly across the carpet towards him. She still wore it, the amber pendant, as she had the last time he'd seen her. He struggled to stand.
'Don't get up, please. It's an awful intrusion, I know. It was just that I had to speak to somebody, somebody who…'
Her voice died. To Rupert Mowbray, his one-time clerical assistant, then secretary, then Girl Friday, looked washed out, exhausted. She was pale and the colour had gone from her cheeks. He thought she might have been crying earlier: her eyes were puffy, but dry, and a fierce fire burned in them. She had worked for him for ten years and one month, up to the day of his leaving party. Instinctively he looked at her ears, for the quiet flash of the studs, pearls in a diamond setting. They had been his present to her at the party where he had received the crystal decanter and glasses from the Director General. She wasn't wearing them, only the pendant. He hadn't bought the ear studs himself, Felicity had. He knew she lived in Docklands. She had travelled a long way to see him. He held out his arms, took her as he would have welcomed a favourite niece.
'…somebody who cared.'
Rupert Mowbray did not need to be told. It was about Ferret. Ferret had been his…and Alice North's. The verbatim transcript of a meeting chaired by Bertie Ponsford, of Russia Desk, was handed to him and he read it.
He was doing the late shift. The other porters queued to hang their heads and plead with him to swap duties, every one of them loathed the midnight start, and 'Wickso' Wicks seldom disappointed them. Ten minutes after he'd started, as he hung around with his trolley at the entrance to the hospital's A&E department, a man suffering the extremes of a heart-attack was rushed by his wife to the swing doors; she hadn't waited for an ambulance. He knew what to do, and that seconds were critical—a colleague ran inside to call the coronary team. The man had stopped breathing, and he had him out on the pavement, away from the car, and he was kneeling over him when the first nurse had sprinted through the doors. She elbowed him aside. 'For Christ's sake, get back. You're only a bloody porter. Leave him alone. Who do you think you are?' The nurse was young enough to be his daughter, and knew nothing of his past. He didn't fight his corner, never did, just waited till the rest of the team were there and the patient was on the trolley, then wheeled it at speed to the coronary unit.
Alone in his room, the darkness around him, sleep did not come easily to Captain, second rank, Viktor Archenko. Dancing before his eyes was a thread—and he thought he hung from it, and below him was the abyss. When he could no longer endure the sight of the frayed thread he swung off the bed, which was sweat-soaked, and made himself a beaker of coffee.
... Chapter Four
Q. Where does 90 per cent of the world's amber originate from?
A. Kaliningrad.
The mist merged with the sea and painted grey walls that blocked off the beach on either side of Daphne Sullivan.
She had used her time well. On the coach from Berlin she had been at her cheerful and chatty best. In the twelve hours of the journey, including the comfort stops at Szczecin and Elblag, she had sifted through the histories of her forty-one fellow passengers on the coach. All of them had welcomed the kindly, interested conversation of this younger woman, and she had made them laugh and had listened to their stories.
Effortlessly she had become an integral part of the visit to Kaliningrad. It had been near to two in the morning when they had pulled up outside the hotel and surly porters had offloaded the suitcases. Even when the coach juddered to a halt Dieter Stangl's frail head still slept noisily on her shoulder. He had been sitting alone after the coach left Elblag, and a moment after she had made a quiet request to sit beside him she had realized why. His breath stank of his pipe and his tobacco, and the ham sandwiches his daughters in Frankfurt had made for him, laced with garlic and gherkins. From Elblag to the border, she had sucked the tale of Dieter's life from him and had decided before he sagged into sleep with his head lolled on her shoulder that his company was what she needed. On arrival at the hotel he had tottered into the hotel lobby and she had seen that his bags were brought to Reception, where she had made it her personal business to ensure that they were quickly taken upstairs as soon as his key was issued to him. In the morning, at breakfast, he had been looking for her as she had come through the glass doors: he had stood for her at his table with old-world courtesy and dragged back a ch
air for her to join him.
She stood on the dunes close to a place where there were the imprints of two men's shoes and beside a couple of recently ground out cigarette filters.
She had learned that Dieter Stangl was seventy-one years old, that his father had been a crane-operator manager in the Kaliningrad docks, that the family had lived at what was now Primorsk on the lagoon to the west of the city, and that they had fled on the last train from Konigsberg to Berlin four months before the ultimate catastrophe. It was a pilgrimage for the old man: there would be a house at Primorsk which he hoped to be able to visit, and a cemetery, perhaps even access to the docks where new cranes would have replaced those his father had managed. If she had been bored by him on the coach and was bored by him at breakfast, she showed no sign of it. She told Dieter Stangl that her own family were from Povarovka, which was north up the coast from the coach destination that morning, but a great-aunt had lived further south along the beach and her late mother had often talked of that place. The coach wouldn't have time for such a detour, she'd said, but she'd hired a driver and she insisted that Herr Stangl, Dieter, should accompany her in the car and they could share the opportunity for mutual convenience and memory-making. He had jumped at the opportunity of her company and her transport.
Behind her was the water tower. In front of her, down on the beach, was a wrecked ribbed carcass of a fishing-boat.
She'd told the driver, a scowling, shaven-headed brute with a special-forces emblem tattooed on his throat between his earlobe and his windpipe, where she wanted to go and had warbled conversation about her family and about Dieter Stangl's. It was good cover, perfect, if eyes watched the place.
'I don't remember it here,' the old German muttered.
'Oh, yes, you do,' Daphne Sullivan said crisply. She gave the old man from Frankfurt a sharp push and propelled him down towards the beach and the wrecked boat. As her driver had turned off the road she had seen fresh wheel marks, and then she had found the footprints and the cigarette ends. The driver was behind them, puffing on a cheroot. She took Dieter's arm to be certain he would not fall and their shoes slipped on the gentle incline of the dunes. She could not see the base down the beach to the south and the fog had closed in on them, but she knew from the maps in Berlin that she was four kilometres to the north of the exclusion zone around Baltiysk. She held tight to his arm and gave an impersonation of those tourists who came to bathe in nostalgia for the past, often seen meandering on the beach to suck up images of childhood: the professor of history at the Humboldt had briefed her well. He shivered and told her again that he could not remember being at this place, but she told him that he should light his pipe. The fumes from his tobacco wafted to her nostrils. She left him on the upper beach—she had done enough to avoid attention. She came to the wreck.
'Do we have to be here long?' Dieter Stangl's voice was guttural behind her.
A metre above the sand, where the boat's name might once have been painted, were two crosses in white chalk and the letters Y and F. The signal sent to Berlin had been most specific. From her coat pocket she took an inch-long length of orange chalk and bent as if a particular shell had attracted her attention. Her own shoes had settled into the indentations left by a man's trainers. She did not know the significance of the chalk crosses and the letters, but she understood the importance of what she had been asked to do. She made two fresh crosses with her orange chalk under the white crosses—then picked up a nothing-special shell and called loudly back to him, 'Do you remember this place now?'
Through the smoke pall of his pipe, Dieter Stangl shook his head. She went quickly to him. She needed to be away from the beach, the wreck and the chalk marks, and took a firm grip on his arm to lead him back up the slope and on to the dunes. They walked together I back to the car. The driver eyed them. She told the driver that it was where her grandparents would have taken her parents to swim, and that it was where Herr Stangl had played as a child. The driver pulled away. They would catch up with the tour party in time for the afternoon concert of the Kaliningrad Philharmonic Orchestra, but they would still have time to visit Primorsk. She anticipated that Dieter Stangl would stand rheumy-eyed in front of an old brick house and prattle on about his Fascist, Hitler Jugend childhood, and after the concert the schedule dictated they would go to the bunker from which the German surrender had been given and then the Oceanography Museum.
On the road, Dieter Stangl complained, 'I do not remember that place.'
Smiling sweetly, Daphne Sullivan said, 'It'll all come back to you. Terrible thing, memory loss.'
She'd ditch him, of course, with his foul breath and awful pipe, before the concert. It had gone well. She'd take credit from it.
The torch beam edged to the rear of the cave.
The roof, back from the entrance, was too low for Yuri Bikov to stand. The beam flickered on the stones of the fissure down which water dripped and icicles hung. On his hands and knees, behind the narrow throw of the light, he crawled forward. At the entrance were the Black Berets, who had taken the prisoner and his son, and his own team of the Vympel men. He and they had struggled for two days to cross the high ground above the gorge on their journey to the cave. No fires for warmth or hot food. No tents to shelter in, no sleeping-bags to wriggle into. On the last afternoon a blizzard had come on but they had not had to worry about leaving tracks because the wind-whipped drive of the snow had obliterated their footprints within moments. Without the GPS to guide them they would never have found the cave and the men who guarded the prisoner and his child.
They had been within ten metres of the cave's entrance and as near as two metres from the nearest Black Beret when the challenge had been made. Bikov's heart had pounded—rifles and submachine guns, on hair triggers, were aimed at him. A swig of vodka was the only refreshment offered him and he'd listened to the story of the prisoner's capture with his son. The Black Berets had their prisoner and the sullen-faced, defiant child—and they could not extricate themselves. First the cloud and rain had blocked the helicopter flights, now it was the snow. The six Black Beret men were marooned, and the forecast was that the weather would not change for five days. It was not thought likely that the brigadier and his escorts, held in a similar cave, farm byre or woodcutter's shelter, would survive five more days. It was a war, Yuri Bikov knew, of excessive brutality.
His journey might be wasted effort. If the decision were taken by the 'bandits' to kill the brigadier then it would be with a knife, eyes out, stomach disembowelled, penis and testicles off, throat slit at the end of life. But the work of an interrogator was not fast work, not in a police cell, not in a forward army command post and not in a mountain cave. The work was for a patient man. He had told them at the cave's entrance that he was not to be disturbed, not to be interrupted, however long he was at the back of the cave, and they would have seen his torch beam slip away from them and go deep into the crack between the great boulders. His stomach growled with hunger, his clothes were soaked wet from the snow, and the cold seemed to gnaw into his bones. He had left his personal weapon with the Black Berets and the Vympel men.
The torch found little specks of white on the cave's floor as he crawled forward.
He took his damp rag handkerchief from his trouser pocket and his cold fingers were numb as he picked up the teeth and laid them in the handkerchief. He raised the torch. If it had not been for the eyes, a man's and a child's, he might not have seen them. Ibn ul Attab, scion of a family of wealth and influence in Riyadh, had inserted his body into the furthest recess at the back of the cave. Bikov shone the torch full into the man's face and saw the black mat of the beard, the blood at the nose and mouth, and the hate. The Saudi man, wiry thin, was on his side and, peeping over his hip, was the head of the child, whose smooth skin was cracked by the same lines of hatred. Ibn ul Attab's hands were hidden, manacled or trussed behind his back, and his ankles were fastened with plastic stays. Bikov smelt him, faeces and urine.
Bikov said, a gentle voi
ce in the Arabic taught him at the training college, 'I am going to ask you, Ibn ul Attab, to roll on to your stomach and then I am going to unfasten your arms. Then I shall free your legs, because it is not right that your son should see his father in such condition. I have no gun and no knife. Should you overpower me and try to reach the cave entrance the Black Berets have orders to kill you—but not to kill your son. You will be dead and your son will be at their mercy, and it will go badly for him. Not only are you a fighter for freedom but you are also a man of intelligence. I don't ask for your word, I ask only that you conduct yourself with good sense.'
The eyes of the warlord flashed with loathing and did not blink in the brightness of the torch beam. He did not roll on to his stomach, and through the gaps where his teeth had been he spat phlegm at Bikov.
The length of the flight from Moscow and far into the night he had spent in Grozny, Bikov had studied the fat file on Ibn ul Attab. The man killed with cruelty but was also rated by the few staff officers bold enough to write unvarnished reports as a commander of outstanding ability, and fearless. The child was the way to him. It was the skill of an interrogator to recognize the smallest signs of weakness. The child cowered behind his father's hip. Bikov was a well-read man, but he had never been as far as Greece. He knew the story of Achilles, the hero who was the son of Peleus and the sea goddess known as Thetis. If the Black Berets had been allowed to they would have taken Ibn ul Attab down the mountain to the vehicle track in the gorge and would have lashed a leg to the back of a personnel carrier and dragged him down to the command post. His body would have been split on the rocks, and the death of the brigadier would have been inevitable.
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