Gerald Seymour

by Traitor's Kiss (b) (epub)

He glanced a last time at the approaching boat. He no longer had control.

  'If they come on board, what will you do?'

  'Give them your whisky, Mr Mowbray, as much as they wish to drink—and show them the engine room. Go below.'

  He struggled down the steep staircase to the accommodation floor, then gingerly lowered himself into the hatch and felt frantically for the steps of the narrow ladder, half falling to the oil-slicked floor of the engine room. The engineer, Richter, eyed him. In the dim light thrown by a single swaying, uncovered bulb, he tripped on the engine's cowling, his hip cannoned into a workbench, and he swore. Richter grinned at him, the same hidden laugh of the master, Yaxis. The sheet of metal plate was removed for him and he stepped into the cavity. There was room for him to stand or crouch, but not to lie down. He wouldn't have lain down anyway, because he could feel the cold of the bilge water seeping into his shoes. The metal sheet was replaced.

  The darkness became blackness. He heard the screws being tightened, then the scrape as rubbish was piled back against the sheet.

  The sea broke against the hull and threw shivers down his spine. Later, in his priest's hole, he heard the echoing impact, and felt it through every bone in his body, as the fenders hanging from the deck of the patrol-boat were crushed against the hull of the Princess Rose. And when he heard the muffled voices through the sheet of metal he barely dared to breathe. God, if he came through this, every bloody novice going down to Fort Monkton would know his story.

  Boris Chelbia climbed the concrete stairs, followed by his driver. Ahead of him, a flight above, a woman struggled with three small children and her shopping. Every second flight she paused to recoup her strength. Chelbia stopped and waited for her to go on. He had no wish to be noticed.

  From the landing windows there was a fine view out over the roofs and church spires of Gdansk and beyond to the docks. The high cranes of the shipyards were a part of his history. Twenty years earlier—not for Jaruzelski's secret police, nor for the Red Army based with their battle tanks at Braniewo, but for the KGB—Boris Chelbia had been an agent. When the yards and their workers had been in ferment, the time of strikes, riots and barricaded lock-ins, he had appeared to be a trusted courier for the Solidarity movement. He had represented—his story went, and it was believed—sympathizers from the docks at adjacent Kaliningrad. One month he would bring to the workers' committee a telex machine, and another it would be money. A third month it would be a lorryload of basic food supplies. It was all done quietly, but sufficient to create trust, and he had been able to provide a blueprint of the names and functions in the movement of the strikers' principal personalities. The cranes in the shipyards of Gdansk, which could be seen from these windows of the workers' block, had been his launch pad. Then the KGB had controlled him, and the influence they had given him had started Boris Chelbia on the road to fortune. He was the king of Kaliningrad. He understood, and had no squeamish qualms about it, that a king must dirty his hands, must go down in the gutter when necessary. The king could kill as easily now as on the day he had started out on his journey to power. The past had no hold on him. He did not look from the windows, down at the cranes, as he followed the woman up the flights of stairs.

  He heard her gasp with exhaustion. Radios played in the block, blared out music. Graffiti, which he did not read, were daubed on the walls of the stairwell.

  His finger closed on a doorbell.

  He waited. He assumed that the wife would be at work or out, that any children would be at school or college or gone. It was a long wait before he heard the shuffling feet approach the door, and the faint mutters of impatience as he pressed continuously on the button. The night porter wore only underpants and a vest and stood in the doorway, wiping the sleep out of his face, puzzled to be confronted by a man of obvious wealth, who was smiling as if to greet an old friend.

  Without explanation, other than Chelbia's smile, the driver took the night porter's bare arm, then reached with his other hand to pull the door to, and led him up the last two flights to the roof. Perhaps the night porter realized that his door was now shut to him, and that he had no key to re-enter his apartment, and perhaps he realized that to scream was futile, and that, against the grip on his arm, resistance was not possible. He did not struggle. Chelbia was strong. His muscles were tuned on the weights in his villa. He put his shoulder twice against the door to the roof, and it swung open.

  The wind ripped at them. If the driver had not held his arm, the night porter would have collapsed into the puddles of rainwater.

  Chelbia's cupped hands were against the night porter's ear as he whispered his questions, and after each question he put his own ear against the night porter's lips to hear better the answer—and the wind shrieked in the television aerials. The answers came in a messy confusion. A Russian had come to the hotel, money had passed, photographs were shown and one was identified, but that guest had moved out. The guest's colleague and a woman had stayed. The colleague, younger, had followed the Russian from the hotel, and he had not seen him again. The woman had stayed the night, had left early after breakfast, had paid up.

  'Where did she go, the woman?'

  The night porter would have known, because he was in his underpants and vest and his door was locked on him, that he faced the inevitability of death. He was beyond a point of return, but he answered the questions as best he was able, as if that were his duty. It was the experience of Boris Chelbia that the condemned were most often supine, cooperative.

  'I carried her bags out. There was a Pole driving her, a big grey Mercedes, old model. She said, "How long does it take, Jerry, to Mierzeja Wislana, the far end?" It's what she said.'

  He was thanked by Chelbia, as if courtesy were appropriate. On the rooftop, among the television aerials and dishes, was a hut of concrete blocks with a wooden door half rotted by rain, snow, gales and sunshine. Nailed to the door, with tacks, was a maintenance sheet of reinforced paper, on which the engineers were obliged to write their signatures confirming work had been carried out on the elevator that served the twenty-four floors of the block. Chelbia put his shoulder to it, but cautiously. The third time he battered it, the door opened, but his instant reaction was to cling to the jambs and prevent himself falling into the chasm. The FSB—once the KGB employed him because he left behind him no evidence, and dirtied his hands while theirs stayed clean. He stood aside.

  The driver took the night porter to the top of the elevator shaft. At the last the man struggled. His shout was carried on the wind towards the idle cranes of the shipyard. Then he was gone, falling and twisting.

  'There's a fucking rat in there,' was the first thing Mowbray said, when the last screw in the sheet of metal plate had been removed, and the rubbish hiding it had been manhandled away. 'A big bastard. I felt its fucking tail on my ankle.'

  The master gave him his hand, the engineer grinned, and Mowbray lurched clear into the engine room. The lights, only faint, dazzled him. He had been in there more than an hour.

  'They were good guys, very considerate of our problem,' the master said. 'It took time because we had to examine the charts to find where it was permitted to anchor. Then we hit your Scotch.'

  From inside his hole, he'd heard the echoing drop of the anchor's chain. The roll of the Princess Rose was worse at anchor than it had been when she drifted.

  'You didn't bloody finish it?'

  'They wouldn't go till it was finished. At sea, Mr Mowbray, the hospitality of Scotch always creates trust. They were on their way out to sea but they were asked to check us, in spite of what I said to them by radio. Any vessel that is Not Under Command makes suspicion. In spite of the Scotch, Mr Mowbray, they will watch us closely, and I think other boats will be sent to visit us. You will see, I regret, your hiding-place again.'

  'And that fucking rat,' Mowbray said dismally.

  He was helped up the ladder and through the engine-room hatch. They steadied him as he climbed the stairs to the master's cabin. In it, he reac
hed for his binoculars. He peered at the strip of land and the trees, the gold-white of the beach. Past the trees he saw a red windsock flying horizontally. Then he raked back over two kilometres of open ground until he reached the treeline. The edge was because he had measured it and the Dogs' leader, Billy, had confirmed it on the map—exactly eight kilometres from a village given the name of Rybacij. He was asked if he wanted lunch, but he shook his head. After he was left alone he stared a long time at the treeline and the distant windsock past which Viktor, his boy, would come as evening turned to night. The confidence drained from him. Without control, he was helpless. He could not take his eyes from the magnified vision of the treeline, where they waited for the sun to sink…but the sun had far to travel.

  Locke stood on the dunes, and the wind caught his clothes, tugged them. As far as he could see, to the north-east and the south-west, the beach was empty save for one man and the cluster of bright-painted fishing-boats pulled up high on the sand. He gazed out over the rough swell of the sea.

  Jerry the Pole had driven Alice and Locke into Krynica Morska and had gone off the road and into a car park. The town was a resort and, out of season, desolate. They had business ahead, at the grass binding it. He walked towards Alice. The wind and the air suited her. Her hair was ripped and the colour flushed into her cheeks. Before, he had barely noticed her: she was the woman who sat in the corner at meetings and never looked up from her shorthand pad; she arranged the transport and the accommodation; she was only General Service, not an officer. She had her hand up and against her forehead, shielding the sun from her eyes, and she stared away down the beach, past the watchtower, past the end of the tree line, past the open ground of the spit.

  She looked for him. He knew it.

  Back in the hotel, she had shown the Dogs her picture of Ferret. Locke hadn't seen it. He, Codename Ferret, was there, where the land and the skyline met.

  When he reached her, she was still looking along the beach, her hand was still up, and he thought she kept a vigil, but she said, from the side of her mouth, 'There's a grave over there.'

  'A what? A grave?'

  'It's what I said, a grave.' With her free hand she pointed behind her.

  He walked to where she pointed. Near to the path was a picnic bench in a half-moon of pines. In the third line of the trees, a break in the lush grass, was a bare square of ground with a raised mound in the centre of it. A wooden cross had a wreath of evergreen foliage fastened where the cross spars met; at its foot was a second wreath and some pottery jars, which held long-spent candles. A sheet of laminated paper was tacked to the lower part of the cross. The sun threw shafts on to the grass he walked over to reach the grave. It held eight men's decayed corpses. He saw the names of six of them, and their ages, typed on to the laminated paper, but two more were listed as 'Unknown', and the date against the eight was the same: 30 April 1945. They had died in the last hours of the war, been buried in a pit, and only recently had been found; they had been left by those who had discovered them in the resting-place beneath the trees; that April, fifty-seven years later, people had come with flowers and a wreath, and had lit little candles. It should have been a place for kids to play and for parents to bring food and beer—but it was a place for the dead. He was tricked. Everything Locke saw deceived him. He strode back to her. She gazed into that far distance.

  Locke asked, with a harsh snap, 'You showed the men a photograph—not the file one. May I see it?'

  She didn't turn to him but reached into the bag slung from her shoulder. She took out the small leather pouch, unfastened its clasp and gave it to him. It had been taken with a flash, delayed. It was a snapshot in the night. She stood in her coat, and pride, joy lit her face. He was beside her, his arm was around her shoulder and her head was tilted to rest on his chest; he was comforting her, protecting her, and the broad smile of happiness creased his features. He closed it, fastened it, gave it back to her. 'Right, let's go,' he said.

  Jealousy cut him as he walked back up the track, away from the sea, towards where Jerry the Pole waited with the car.

  The room was ready.

  Before the flair for interrogation of Yuri Bikov had been recognized, when he was posted to the section of the Officer Cadet Training School that fed the Dzerzhinsky division, the lecturers had hammered at the cadets the value of preparation. Only, they said, on the rarest and most exceptional investigations—where time was critical—should preparation be less than thorough. Bikov had now read every file that was available to him on the professional career of his target, and he had had faxed to him the files on the career and death of his target's father. His major had been to an academic at the university for briefing on the importance of the castle at Malbork to archaeologists. Bank accounts had been gutted. Every place he had looked had told Bikov more about his target. The very clothes that he wore—dirty, smelling, mud-spattered—were a part of the preparation.

  The room was the final brick in the block he built, and it was ready.

  The lecturers had taught him the basic skills and had awakened an interest that he had not known existed. Every matter beyond the basics he had learned for himself—and they were little things, but each was weighed with importance. In the room, the windows were papered over and the blinds were drawn. Every picture, calendar, duty-roster chart, plan and map had been taken down, every hook and nail removed from the walls. The previous evening, under the supervision of his sergeant, the radiators had been switched off, and overnight the windows had been left open. Not until the morning had they been closed, then covered. The rug on the carpet had been taken out, and the carpet had been lifted from its adhesive fastenings, and the under-felt. All furniture, any trace of civilization, had been removed.

  He had turned the room into a grey tomb without any focus point that might help his target. There would be nothing in the room but himself, the predator, and his prey, and a single candle. The candle, passed to him by his sergeant, was held upright on a plain plate by congealed wax. His eye roved for the exact centre of the room and when he had found that point he set the plate down on it.

  Nothing was to chance.

  'He is still at his workplace?'

  'Yes.'

  'No phone calls and no visitors?'

  His sergeant was linked by radio to the admiral's suite. 'None.'

  'And Falkovsky?'

  'In his room, has cleared his diary, takes no calls.'

  Bikov went to the side of the room, leaned against the wall and slid his back down it. When he sat on the concrete floor he drew up his knees and wrapped his arms around them.

  'Then we wait another hour, or perhaps two hours—while the anxiety cripples him, until it is an agony for him. Until he would—almost—thank us for ending it. Yes…yes…thank us for taking away his pain.'

  He rested his head on his knees and closed his eyes. The next day, or the day after, the electronics housed in the nose cone of an MI-24 attack helicopter, below the main machine-gun and forward of the rocket pods, would home in on the beacon that was hidden in the stock of an assault rifle, and his head filled with the crescendo of the general's laughter. In truth, he liked what he had seen of the man and thought him worthy of the preparations that were made. But it was not important to Yuri Bikov that he had liked what he had seen, or what would happen to the man once his job was done. He dozed.

  The conscript, Igor Vasiliev, had boastfully told the corporal in the armoury everything of the difficulties of shooting that morning, the cross-wind's strength, and how he'd hacked it—then had told the corporal of his special permission from his platoon sergeant to return to the range in the late afternoon and shoot again. The corporal said he was 'shit' and 'crazy', if he wanted to go back to the range at dusk when any man of half sense would be getting his arse up close to a stove or a radiator. Anyway, did he know that the forecast was changing to north winds and rain? Vasiliev lodged the NSV heavy machine-gun back in the armoury, initialled the log, then said when he would return for it,
and what time in the evening he would check it back in.

  The excitement of the shooting still ran within him. He went for his navigation lecture. Afterwards, before going to the armoury, he would hang about outside the headquarters block in the hope that he would see his friend, who should know how well he had shot with the cross-wind so strong. He would tell him, if he saw Captain Archenko outside the headquarters.

  They had waited now for more than twenty minutes. Bikov's major and his sergeant sat in the car at the bottom of the steps to the main door of the headquarters block, with the engine running and the doors half open.

  The in-tray was empty, the out-tray filled. His computer was switched off. Viktor knew it would happen but did not know when. On any normal day he would have been summoned three times, or four, into the fleet commander's office to wrestle with a planning paper, or the diary, or to act as a sponge while the admiral talked. Since the men had come that day, he had not been called.

  The trolley came again, as it always did, in mid-afternoon. The hot chocolate was put on his desk and the girl with the ponytail smiled warmth at him, then went to the guardian's table and put on it the tray with the china cup, saucer and plate. She poured the tea. She waved to them all, her day's work done, and backed her trolley out. None of the other officers or the secretariat would have known what had changed, but all would have known that for the greater part of a working day the chief of staff had not entered the inner office of the fleet commander. The silence clung. They waited for resolution. They would have heard Piatkin's refusal to allow Captain, second rank, Archenko into the admiral's office when strangers had come. In the 260 outer office, men and women made themselves small and unnoticed, and whispered into telephones. None caught his eye. The admiral's guardian took the tray to him. The door was open behind her. Viktor could see the admiral, side on, at his desk, his head down, his shoulders shrunken.