Roman remembered the address given by the Father in the new church in Piaski in the last of the winter months. There had been hardship in the village, and for the first time that he could remember a holiday home owned by Swedes had been broken into and items of value stolen. There was no money in the village. The Father had told his congregation, the fishing families idle in the winter, of an old proverb: The devil dances in an empty pocket. The Father had said that poverty or an empty pocket leads to temptation or crime, and had told them that in history many coins were minted with a cross on the reverse so that the devil could not go down into the pocket if one of those coins was there. There were zloty, a few coins, in his pocket, but none of them had a cross on the reverse. He held onto the two hands tightly.
Free at last from company, alone as he wanted to be, the engineer made good the engine. He crooned softly to himself and his thickened fingers moved with a lover's gentleness over the pistons, plugs and cables. He would not find another job at sea. None of the Lebanese-, Maltese- or Liberian-registered lines would want to employ a forty-seven-year-old engineer whose last ship, for more than ten years, had been a coastal freighter, a rust bucket. When the Princess Rose went to the breakers, so would Johannes Richter. The ship would be scrap, as would he. And there was no work in Rostock: Rostock was awash with unemployed engineers from the shipyards that had been, until 1990, the pride of the Baltic. He would go back to his apartment alongside the railway line that ran between Rostock and Warnemunde, and he would tend the balcony flowers. He would have money for his daughters, which was important to them but not to him. He had seen the determination on the team's faces as they ate their last meal. Win or lose, succeed or fail, they would be suffering hot pursuit when they came back. The patrol boat had returned and had scoured them with its light—it would be out again when the pursuit started. The Princess Rose would sail towards the shore at speed, let them scramble on board, with or without their man, and then they would churn for the safety of the International sea boundary. Two extra sea knots might make the difference. In the engine room, he was below sea level. If she were holed by the patrol-boat… He had no fear. The master's voice, from the bridge, boomed over his radio. 'Give it to me, Johannes. Give me the engine.'
The engineer threw the switches. He heard the rumble, the throb of the thing he loved. It was sweet. She rolled in a slackening swell, the engine idled…and he waited.
He had had only the one day in the forest near Brockenhurst to prepare himself.
It was almost a catalogue of disaster. If the radio in the watchtower had not been switched on, had not played dance music from a Polish station, he would have blundered against the legs of the tower. If the jeep on the track beyond the tower, by the inner fence, had not revved to full power to escape a pond of mud, he would have been on the track and caught in its lights. If a tree had not come down on the inner fence and collapsed it, he would not have known how to climb eight feet of mesh and two feet of barbed wire. He hurried, driven on, and his feet crackled over fallen branches.
The voice he heard was the instructor's, Walter's, when they had sat around him in the half-circle. Rumour had him as a onetime sniper, but now elderly and past a shelf life; the gossip at Fort Monkton said he had killed men from the Derry walls over the Bogside and from the mountain overlooking the Crater District of Aden. Locke could hear his voice, but not distinguish what the damned man had said.
Birds, disturbed by him, screeched into the night off the pines' canopy, and once there was a bullocking charge away from him. Then he'd stopped, a statue, pounding heart, and thought it must have been a boar or a deer, until its stampede had died. He hurried until he could no longer force air into his lungs…and her face was always ahead of him, and her forehead, which he had kissed. Lower branches lashed his face, caught at his jacket, and twice he was in small bogs. Once his shoe was prised off his foot and he had to grope in slime to find it. There had been a boy, Garin, from the next farm to that of his parents. Garin went at night to a wood on the farms' boundary and could get close to a vixen's earth or a badger's sett and not break a twig, not disturb them when he sat on the moss carpet. He had thought Garin Williams an ignorant little creep. Useless at language and literature, mediocre at maths and sciences, inept at history and geography—only able to walk in silence into an oak wood in the depth of night. He'd felt contempt for Garin…now he would have cried out in relief if Garin Williams had been beside him, leading him.
They came back slowly to him, the words of the old sniper. The Book of Walter. About a stick, about being a blind man. About keeping off paths and looking for animal trails…and never putting down the weight of a foot before the ground was tested. About using the protection of trees, about never making a silhouette against a skyline, about never crossing the middle of a clearing.
Locke stood against a tree and took from his pocket the keys to his apartment in Warsaw, and some zloty. He bent and laid them on the mould carpet at the base of the tree. Then, he moved forward, very carefully, testing with his shoe and with his hand held out until he came to a hazel bush. Breaking off a sprig seemed like a gunshot in the forest, and he waited until the sound had echoed away, then he stripped the side branches off it. It was his wand. The Book of Walter said that, cross-country, good boots should be worn and a camouflage tunic. Locke wore lightweight lace-up shoes, a grey suit, white shirt, and a red anorak with yellow piping.
He hoped Tasha, Justin, Charlie and Karen suffered, pleaded for them to be screwed, because they had talked and deflected when he should have listened to Walter and learned his Book. At the next big tree, brushed against by his wand, he knelt and scratched up a fistful of earth in his hand, spat on it to moisten it and wiped it over his forehead, cheeks and chin, on his wrists, the backs of his hands, and then put more on his anorak.
Locke moved forward. He found a trench system of zigzag pits and a bunker of concrete but didn't blunder into them because he had his wand, and had Walter—and Alice, not that she would ever know.
The base slept.
While it slept, a few radios played and a woman in married quarters screamed at her NCO husband. Close by, a baby cried, wind caught overhead wires, the sea was a distant murmur. A dog barked for attention, unheard. To save electricity in the base every second streetlight was extinguished and those that were lit had been fitted with low-power bulbs. The base, sleeping, was a place of shadows. Brighter lights beamed from the windows of the senior officers' mess where Vladdy Piatkin and friends who massaged the conceit of the zampolit still drank. A lesser light shone down from the inner office of the fleet commander where he sat unmoving at his desk with a small key in front of him. A single dull strip light above the dormitory's doorway illuminated the young conscripts of the 'Ready' platoon. Arc-lights were above the guarded main gate, and a searchlight played over the base from a tower on the walls of the historic fortress. Cats, feral and emaciated, moving on their stomachs, occupied the shadows between the lights. Only the cats knew that intruders stalked in their territory while the base slept.
They did not need to speak. On the paper map was the name of a street: Admiral Stefan Makarov. A low wooden hut on the street was marked: 'Shop'. Another square building was outlined: 'Gymnasium'. Ham peered down at the map he held. It was the map of a semi-literate kid, and they depended on it. Ham could see the street's name on the sign near the wooden hut where conscripts would have come to buy chocolate and soft drinks, and a solitary light was above the double doors of the gymnasium. Lofty opened the bag and his fingers groped inside it. They were at the end of a building, opposite the shop and short of the gymnasium. At the end of the street, Admiral Stefan Makarov, was an isolated three-storey building, a throwback to the days of a former regime. Ham thought that once a swastika would have flown from its roof. On the map it was double outlined and written beside it in a spider scrawl was the title: Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti. It was hard for Ham to make out the scrawl of the map. They faced the side of the building.
To reach it, they would have to cross open ground that was lit by every second light. An open jeep went past the side of the building, two men in it huddled against the cold, and the sound of it drifted away, as the lights caught the glare of a cat's eyes in a black corner.
'That's it,' Ham whispered. 'If the map's right, that's it.'
For stating the obvious Ham was rewarded with a sharp jolting elbow from Billy. It hurt him. Billy took Wickso's arm and pointed, a short-arm gesture, to the left side of the building, then reached for Ham and pointed to the right. Ham felt the fear. Back at Poole, long ago, the moment was called 'Fight or Flight'—go forward or go back. They listened to the night and the night's sounds, and the jeep had gone. Ham was shoved hard, like when he had done his first jump and the dispatcher had heaved him out of the gate in the wicker basket of the balloon tethered eight hundred feet above a Dorset field. He crossed Admiral Stefan Makarov in a pounding charge and thought every man and woman, every officer, NCO and conscript in the base would have been woken. His harness, worn over the wet suit, thudded against his chest and stomach. He held the Skorpion tight in his hands, as if it were salvation. He reached a door and shadow, and nestled into it. He listened, and heard only the radio's music, the woman and the baby, and the beat of his heart. He left the safe place, went past three more doors. The last doorway in the street was his goal. He looked across the open ground.
In front of the building was a saloon car. Between the car and the steps to a closed heavy door was a pacing sentry, his rifle over his shoulder. As he stamped backwards and forwards, the sentry raised his gloved hands to his mouth and breathed uselessly into them. Beside the door was a window, and Ham saw through it a second guard whose back was to him. The door opened, and a plastic cup was passed out. The man from the inside wore a pistol on his belt. The door was closed. Two drunks, in uniform, staggered along the far side of the lit area, one supporting the other.
He went back.
Ham told Billy what he had seen, then Wickso returned to them. Wickso said there was a fire escape at the back, unguarded, with a closed steel door on to each floor. Billy said they'd go through the back.
They were going into the building. None of the team disputed it. Lofty made spaghetti. He rolled it in his hands, about an ounce of it, and thinned the military explosive into a lengthening, narrowing strip. Wickso had the detonator and Billy had the firing box for the electric impulse. Lofty's hands moved fast. Ham thought himself a battleground survivor—had done ever since he was a child in the playground—but his legs seemed fastened in clay. When Lofty had done the spaghetti he laid the strips carefully on Wickso's arms, like a woman's knitting-wool. Ham's grip on the Skorpion whitened his knuckles, and Billy had Lofty's grenade-launcher.
Ham thought of the police cell and, momentarily, wished he were there. Billy had said they would need speed and surprise and a shit bucket full of luck. The bile choked in Ham's throat, and he hooked the mask on to his head.
In the quiet, with only the cats watching them, they headed to the back of the building.
He had been given friendship—had not been beaten, kicked, punched.
His body rolled in tiredness.
In the worst of his dreams over the long months before, Viktor had seen men in uniforms, men in heavy leather jackets and men stamping in and out of a cell with shit on the floor, and he had been scum to them—yet only friendship, sympathy, kindness had been handed him by the man in shabby clothes and mud-caked boots.
He hardly heard the words.
'I have it all, Viktor, I know everything…I know of your grandmother and your father, and the castle at Malbork and the visits of the delegation to Gdansk, and I know of the mistake you made. I shall tell you about your mistake, Viktor. A book of matches from the wrong hotel. Such a small mistake. You pocket a book of matches from a hotel that you did not visit, and a little sliver of suspicion is aroused—a worm turns. I don't expect, Viktor, you can even remember the moment you picked it up. A trifle, a small present for yourself, taking a book of matches and you don't smoke. You had no need for the matches, you gave them to another officer. They were used to light the cigarette of Major Piatkin, the zampolit…'
He rocked. He remembered…such a little moment, of such insignificance. And he remembered, too, the sharp, sneered anecdotes about Piatkin that so delighted the admiral when he told them, and his smiles and Falkovsky's bellied laughter. He remembered also the contempt that he, a senior serving naval officer, felt for the base's zampolit, who knew nothing of the science of naval warfare. The man was a clown, a fool. The man was mediocre. Piatkin was a grubby little shite on the take…and had brought him down. A rat gnawed at the base of a great house built of wood, and it crashed. Piatkin, whom he despised, had destroyed him. He did not see Rupert, or the men in the zoo park, or Alice. Above him, grinning and superior, was the face of Piatkin.
'How would you describe Major Piatkin, Viktor? A corrupted criminal? An imbecile? Or would you call him a counterintelligence officer with a prying and suspicious mind? He undid you, Viktor. You are now alone. The words of your handlers were lies. You have only me.'
Captain, second rank, Viktor Archenko swayed and his voice was a hoarse whisper, 'What will they do to me?'
He saw a hand cup the tiny flame of the candle. A breath blew across it and into his face, and the flame died.
'Nothing, Viktor. You have been so helpful, and I am your friend and we are together.'
A hand was on his shoulder and a body slipped beside him, was warm. An arm held him close.
Bikov's major pushed the earphones off his scalp. He checked the spool still turned on the tape-recorder. He murmured to the sergeant that he should go down the stairs to the car and should start the engine. From his pocket, he took thongs for a prisoner's ankles, a hood and handcuffs. On tiptoe he followed the sergeant from the outer office and watched him go down the stairs. Bikov, he thought, was the finest interrogator he had known, the best. Without evidence, with no proof, the interrogator had bluffed his way to a confession. Incredible. On his mobile he called Kaliningrad Military and warned the pilot that they would be leaving Baltiysk within five minutes—with a prisoner. He cut the call and there was a mirthless quiet chuckle in his throat. What will they do to me? He had heard the whine on the earphones. Nothing, Viktor. Only a bullet in a prison yard. Or only a fall from the open hatch of a high-flying helicopter. It was hard for him not to laugh out loud.
They went up the rusted ladder. There was a light above it, they were exposed. They were on the steps below the little platform, the light shining on them. Lofty worked the explosive strip down over the hinges of the metal door and Wickso passed him up the small detonator, which Lofty sank into the putty. They were all breathing hard, and Lofty seemed to take an age. What he had told Ham, the kid on whom they depended had never been in the building and knew nothing of its interior layout, only that the office of the zampolit major was on the second floor. Each of them slipped the gas masks down. Billy gestured, like his nerve was going, that Lofty should go faster.
'A spy?'
The kill was made. He was on his haunches, he had pressed himself close to his prey and he held him tight in his arms. He was the mantis. The tape would be turning. That evening he would sleep in Moscow. The wretch would lie on a concrete bed in a cell, and in the rooms of the Lubyanka the lights would burn late and the bottles would be drained, and couriers would take the transcripts to the President in the Kremlin. A crisis would break and an ambassador would be summoned to receive an expulsion list—and it would be because of him, because of the skill of Yuri Bikov. He could not think of what he had missed, but he knew that one piece was outside the puzzle.
'Yes.'
'Can I hear it again, please? A spy?'
'Yes.'
He was not surprised that he felt no pleasure. The chase was done. He was drained, washed out. On the aircraft to Moscow, while the prisoner sat handcuffed, trussed, hooded, he would sleep.
'Each tim
e you say it, Viktor, you will feel better, liberated. Again, a spy?'
'Yes.'
He saw a pit, a circle of discoloured concrete. The slot in the puzzle that troubled him was a circle. He bored on.
'Because of your grandmother and your father? Your dead drop was at Malbork Castle? You met your handlers three times in Gdansk? Everything that crossed the desk of Admiral Falkovsky you delivered at the dead drops or gave to your handlers?'
'Yes…yes.'
'They were British, the handlers who have abandoned you?'
He tried to read the sign above the pit, to complete the puzzle's picture. He was not listening for the answer. Bikov did not realize the stiffened tenseness that rippled in his prey's body. Without thinking, wearied, he repeated…'Who have abandoned you.'
His prey twisted. Hands were at his throat. Nails gouged at his neck's flesh. He could not cry out. He was pushed down. His prey was above him, a knee in his stomach and little choking, crying sounds played in his ears. He could not breathe. Who have abandoned you. He tried to shout, could not. He saw the scraped picture above the animal pit, made out the faint outline of a hippopotamus. He heard a thud of noise beyond the closed door. The legs of his prey were above his and smothered his effort to kick, to beat his heels on the concrete, to alert his major and his sergeant.
For Bikov, the last piece of the puzzle was in place…a rescue from the zoo park, not abandoned. He should have…
The fingers tightened on his throat. He should have posted a guard…
The second noise, from outside, was not the same dull thud, but a whipcrack of sound—the fall from a height of a metal dustbin on to concrete. His voice was a coughing gurgle. He should have posted a guard of naval infantry around the building…
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