Gerald Seymour

  'May I speak to you?'

  'Speak,' Viktor said sharply. It broke the pattern of his everyday life that he should stop for conversation with a conscript. He had not seen the watchers, but assumed they were around him. It was his discipline that he did not look for them.

  'I am going to shoot on the range tomorrow.'

  'That is good.' Viktor took a part of cruel indifference: it was necessary. He walked on, indicated he did not wish to linger.

  But the conscript followed him. 'Because of you—to thank you for saving me, for bringing back the NSV machine-gun, Captain, I went to your room yesterday.'

  'It was not necessary.' Viktor was brusque, as if he sought to brush away an irritation.

  'You should know…' Vasiliev blurted, '…I went to your room yesterday. Men were coming out, they had been in your room. They hid their faces from me. Three men. They had a key to your room.'

  From the side of his mouth, without turning his head, 'Was Piatkin with them? Was the zampolit one of them?'

  'No, no…I had not seen them before. I had never seen them before, with Major Piatkin or not. The one who seemed in charge, controlled them, he was the youngest…but he dressed like a derelict, not like an officer…I had to tell you.'

  'Thank you. I hope you shoot well tomorrow. Go back to your duties.'

  He walked on, leaving the conscript behind. The very action of talking to him endangered Vasiliev. A watcher would not have known the bond between a captain, second rank, and a young soldier of Naval Infantry. There would be many who would face danger by association when his flight, and his guilt, were discovered. They had come, the new men. They would have come from Moscow. Time ran, sand slipped in the glass. Did he have enough time, now that the new men were on the base? The sentries saluted at the entrance to the fleet commander's headquarters building.

  Viktor found Admiral Alexei Falkovsky in a mood of noisy good humour.

  Jerry the Pole was late.

  The frontier checks had been slow, but that was predictable. First the Polish formalities, with a long, stretched queue of cars and lorries: he had allowed for that. Five hundred metres beyond the Polish border post was the first Russian block, and more delays as his papers were examined by the stolid-faced military. Then a further half-kilometre on was Russian Customs and more questions to be answered. Beyond the border, Jerry the Pole had accelerated. Then he had heard the siren. The speed limit in the Kaliningrad oblast was seventy kilometres per hour. Jerry the Pole was used to Germany, where there was no limit on a motorist's speed on an open road.

  The siren was behind him, and the police car filled his mirror. He slowed, then pulled over. He sat bolt upright in his seat, and wound down the window as the policeman advanced on him. A fat sloth of a man in dull blue uniform, shapeless and ill-fitting, sauntered to him and, with studied contempt, pulled out a notebook.

  What to do? Jerry the Pole asked what was the fine for speeding. He was told that for being guilty of speeding it was forty roubles. He paid the fine with a 100-rouble note and gestured that he did not expect change and a receipt. He wondered when the traffic policeman had last been paid, and whether he would have a pension when he retired. There was a large pistol holstered at the traffic policeman's belt. If it were the return journey from the city across the oblast, if he had had the three men inside the Mercedes, and the one they had gone to lift, and if a traffic policeman had stopped them, what would they have done? He smiled ingratiatingly and stumbled his apologies. On the road again, he made certain that the speed limit was not exceeded.

  When he reached the village of Lipovka he reached into the glove box for the map drawn by Billy. He took a wrong turning because he was not expert in reading a map, and that delayed him further. He'd lost fifteen more minutes before he came to the rendezvous point at the barn. As he turned the car, they emerged from the undergrowth—three of them.

  Billy rapped on the window. 'You are fucking late.'

  Lofty opened the back door, snatched at it. 'Don't you carry a bloody wristwatch?'

  None of them had asked why he was late, had queried if he had had a difficulty and how he had overcome it. When the doors slammed shut on them, the wheels spun in the mud near the barn and he drove away. Beside and behind him they were silent. Jerry the Pole drove towards the main road and at the junction was the signpost to Kaliningrad. Inside the speed limit they would be in the city, and the zoo, in an hour. Billy was in the front, hunched over the map spread across his thighs, and his coat was thrown open. Jerry the Pole could see the pistol butt jutting from his waistband.

  Billy Smith was the team leader—why was he there?

  He had left behind the tin-roofed, plank-walled hut on the shores of the loch, and his paints and his paper, and the panoramic views that were his inspiration. The owner of the gallery in Glasgow that handled his work had told him that his was a rare talent. He went to Glasgow to deliver his work twice a year; the larger watercolours were priced by the gallery at 3250 pounds and the smaller ones fetched 1195 pounds apiece. They were hung in the boardrooms of Glasgow banks, in the waiting rooms of investment brokers, the lobbies of medical consultants, and they were in the homes of the elite of the city. The gallery owner had introduced him to a money man. His takings from his work were in gilts, blue chips and government bonds. He could have lived in a smart apartment in Glasgow, in a warehouse conversion. He had no financial need to be bent into an old Mercedes, with a pistol handle gouging his stomach, heading into Kaliningrad. The money man sent a monthly cash package to his wife, Josie, for the upkeep of the children, Tracey and Leanne; he was long divorced and had not seen his children for fourteen years, but he kept them in food and clothes, and paid for the roof over their heads.

  Why?

  Life, for Billy Smith, was a slow dribble of failure. The refuge on Loch Shiel, under Beinn Odhar Mhor, was an escape, a bolthole. His work, his watercolours, were a flight from the consequences of what he had done. He had taken the life, on the foreshore of Carlingford Lough, of a young man who had gone to lift his pots for lobsters and crabs, and had protected himself and his patrol from prosecution by brazen lies. He had failed himself and, as their sergeant, had failed Ham, Wickso and Lofty. He had failed the Marines and the inner family of the Squadron. He was like a vessel that was dry, like a tube of paint squeezed empty.

  He blessed the moment that the big naval helicopter had fluttered down on to the shingle beside the loch and the young man, so fucking supercilious, had dropped from the hatch. There was no mirror beside the sink in the hut. He did not look at himself when he shaved or snipped his beard: he did it by touch. He rode towards Kaliningrad and felt it was a chance, the last one that would be offered, of redemption. He could still see, would always harbour the image, of the young man's eyes—staring, drowned, lifeless.

  Billy Smith knew redemption did not come easy, came harder than brushing paint on paper. They were driving into the city, going past the tower blocks, towards the bridge.

  Because the Princess Rose was clear of the wharf, her cargo of fertilizer loaded, the port authorities had lost interest in the movement of the ship, and the problems of its engine. They were tied to the quay under the towering Westerplatte monument. The dog scratched at the door of the master's cabin, but Rupert Mowbray ignored it. The communications were in place, although it was an hour since Locke had come through. What Mowbray knew: it was launched, Jerry the Pole was across the border and had made the rendezvous, the team was heading for Kaliningrad. The last message had come, relayed on, from Locke. He did not believe in unnecessary radio talk. They were now as helpless, useless, as any ground-control team monitoring one of those old moon-shot spacecraft from thirty years before when orbit had taken the astronauts to the far side. He must wait…as they must wait at Vauxhall Bridge Cross. It would be vindication, a moment of saccharine sweetness, a wonderful ecstasy for Rupert Mowbray when he could send the signal: ferret: onside. He would bask in glory. He sat by the communications equipment, but hurle
d a shoe at the door to frighten away the mongrel outside.

  The wife of the FSB officer, attached to the consulate in Gdansk, had telephoned four times. Her husband had gone out the previous evening in the family car, and had not returned.

  The consul had no knowledge of the work practices of his FSB man. He did not have access to his room, to his diary, and knew nothing of the content of the signals from the Lubyanka.

  Initially he had done nothing. Although the woman was verging on hysterical, he was loath to interfere in what might be an operation of sensitivity—or a matter of domestic infidelity—so he had sat on what little he knew of a counterintelligence's officer's disappearance.

  After her fourth call, the consul sent an urgent signal to the embassy in Warsaw and asked for guidance. A return signal had come from the senior officer of the Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti stationed in the Polish capital ordering him to check around Gdansk's police and hospitals. By the early afternoon the missing man's description was in the hands of the police, but hospitals reported he had not been admitted, and the plates of the Fiat car had been circulated.

  The complication was that only the section in the Lubyanka dealing with the probable treachery of Captain, second rank, Viktor Archenko knew of the mission undertaken the previous evening by the officer in the Gdansk consulate. Those dealing with the report of the missing man were outside that loop of information.

  There was confusion. The wife sat by the phone, held her tearful children, and waited for it to ring, but it did not…and the police in the city did not know where to search.

  Viktor slipped away from his desk. The last memorandum he initialled concerned the programme for the visit of the fleet commander to the cadet school to watch athletics and present prizes, and he left, uninitialled and unread, at the top of the in-tray a note requesting the fleet commander's inspection of a frigate back from recommissioning in the Far East. Viktor Archenko told the outer office staff that he was going for an early lunch in the senior officers' mess. He had not informed his secretary, his personal assistant or Admiral Falkovsky that he would be driving off-base that afternoon.

  As he walked to the parking area, Viktor saw a man in civilian clothes throw down a cigarette and start to follow him. There were many civilian workers on the base, so there was nothing peculiar in a man strolling after him in jeans and a windcheater; another lounged on a car bonnet close to where his own vehicle was parked and read a pocket magazine. He knew he was watched, did not have to turn to confirm it. As he drove out of the base, he was followed by the black van with the smoked windows and the red saloon. If his room had been searched, he thought that his arrest would follow within a day, two days at the most.

  He did not look back at the base. He did not see, in his mirror or by twisting his shoulders, the flags of the Federation and the fleet flying from tall poles; nor did he look a last time at the Lenin statue, or the headquarters building, or the facade of the Sailors' Club, or at the castle where his grandmother might have been, or at the high radar scanners perched on the upper masts of the fleet in the dockyard. It was all behind, him, and he did not see the van and the car tucked in and close.

  He wondered where he would sleep that night…where they would sleep. He would be with Alice. He drove slowly. The needle of the speedometer was within the legal limit, not because of any respect he held for the law, or from a fear of being intercepted by the traffic police, but he knew that to go fast to the zoo would weaken him. Speed demonstrated the intensity of his flight. He went slowly, and that gave him the sense of control. The lights were against him. He braked. Instinct made him glance at the interior mirror.

  Immediately behind him, as if joined by a tow-rope, was the black van, which shared his traffic lane. In the outer lane, level with it, was the red saloon.

  Viktor eased away from the lights. His fists clamped on the wheel. Within an hour he would be in the hands of trained men sent by his friends; until then his control and discipline were of paramount importance. He was breathing hard.

  Bikov was called. He worked on his notes in the room at the back of the FSB's city block, prepared himself for interrogation, and waited for the information to be serviced from Gdansk. Archenko was on the move. With his major and his sergeant he hurried down the back fire-escape staircase.

  The autumn sunlight settled on the city, fell low over the river.

  It was on the big concrete apartment blocks and on the addicts who lay slumped in doorways, and on the abandoned monstrosity of the House of Soviets and on the infected HIV victims who staggered gaunt on the streets, and on the old cathedral where slow renovation had started with German money, and on the whores who guarded their pavement pitches, and on the polluted rubbish-filled canals and on the mafiya men who strutted to their BMW vehicles. The low sunlight could not brighten the city, even the zoo park where the shadows lengthened.

  The paint on the letters was chipped and had flaked: it was hard for Viktor to read the sign. He had to brake sharply or he would have missed the turn. He gave no warning of the braking and the turning, and when he looked in his mirror he saw the windscreen of the van was almost against his boot and back bumper. Two men were in the van, vague shapes behind the tinted glass, and they would have known that he saw them, recognized them. He remembered what Rupert Mowbray had said to him, the second of the fast fifteen minute sessions tacked on after the principal debrief, before he and Alice had sidled from Mowbray's room: 'Russians are Pavlovian. They instil psychosis and nervousness to render you inoperative.' He realized that they wanted to be seen, it was the route to psychosis. If he followed it, the nerves would shred him. If he were 'inoperative' the pickup at the zoo would fail.

  He parked the car. Kids on a school tour of the city were peeling out of their bus, their last stop of the day's tour of the oblast capital. He saw their teachers, pale and tired, threadbare men and women, struggling to marshal them. The kids were alive, noisy, and surged from the bus as their teachers shouted at them. When he looked at the kids, and past them,Viktor saw the watchers from the black van and the red saloon and they didn't turn away. There was nothing to take from the car other than his coat and he shrugged into it, buttoned it so that the sight of his uniform, with the gold on the sleeves and the medal ribbons on the chest, was hidden. He bought his entry ticket from the babushka crone, who scowled at him from the depths of her kiosk, and walked to the gates, a heaviness weighting his legs.

  'Has he been here before?'

  Bikov stood at the zoo's gate. His office had been alerted by Piatkin, the zampolit, and they had careered round corners, tyres screaming, as the directions given by the tail cars had zeroed them on to the target's vehicle. They had jolted to a halt in the parking area and Piatkin had strode to Bikov.

  'Not that I know of,' Piatkin said.

  'What's here?'

  'Very little.'

  'Why would he come to see "very little"?'

  'I have no idea.' Piatkin shrugged.

  'Stay close.' The instruction was quietly spoken. 'He does not come here without a reason…'

  He waved Piatkin away, let him speak softly into the microphone that protruded from the buttonhole of his coat's lapel. Archenko was a hundred metres in front, going past the zoo's closed café. Bikov watched his man, the target. It was not possible that the target came to this decayed, soulless place without good reason. The target walked behind the flurry of shouting, whooping children. As if he were armed with an antenna, Bikov watched and the suspicion flowed in him, but he could not see the 'good reason' why the target had come here. He could identify each of Piatkin's six watchers, all blended to the surroundings of the pens and cages. Two were behind the target and two were wide but level with him and two had gone ahead and would be controlled, from their moulded earpieces, by Piatkin's button microphone.

  He watched the target moving behind the children, saw him glance down at his wristwatch. He looked at his own watch. Five minutes to four o'clock. The best pleasure Yuri Bikov
knew was the final minutes of a chase, closing on a prey.

  'Delta One from Delta Two…I have an eyeball. He's doing dry cleaning. I have eyeball on Target One. Present speed he's two minutes from the RV. I'm in position to brush him. Wait out, wait out…I think he has bandits. Will confirm on bandits. Delta Two out.'

  Billy said, 'Get over, Jerry. Get the wheel, Lofty.'

  Jerry the Pole was wriggling over the gear-stick, vacating the driver's seat. He snagged the stick and Lofty's fist thumped into his back, pushed him, then Lofty was behind the wheel and rolling his shoulders as if to loosen himself. They were on the far lane of the road from the retaining wall that flanked the side of the zoo. There was a seven-foot drop from the top of the wall to the pavement. Above the wall was a sagging chain-link perimeter fence in which rubbish—paper, wrappings, plastic—was caught.

  Billy said to Lofty, 'Ham's got him in sight. He's acting natural, doing it well, less than two minutes till Ham's with him…'

  'That's great.' The breath sighed between Lofty's teeth.

  '…and Ham thinks he's got a tail.'

  'Oh, shit.' Lofty gunned the engine once, tested its power, then let it fade to idle. Billy took his pistol from his belt, armed it, slipped the safety with his thumb, and laid it down between his thighs, half covered but close to hand.

  Viktor followed the children and listened, half aware, to the commentary given them by the eldest of the teachers, a dour woman. She was by a pen where the low concrete wall had crumbled, and the wire above it was holed. Inside was a concrete cave entrance in which weeds grew. A crazily angled sign showed a lion's head.

  'There are no lions now. Once this was a very famous zoo, but these are difficult times. It is expensive to keep animals, and it is difficult to justify spending money on animals' food when many people do not have enough to eat. But soon there will be monkeys here, chimpanzees and all the apes. There is going to be a programme of development to return the zoo to its former status, one of the best in Europe. The zoo was opened in 1896, and by 1910 there were 2126 animals in residence, including two Siberian tigers that had been donated by the zoo in Moscow. Look, children, there are deer…'