by Craig Thomas
‘What about the rest of it — is there more?’
‘If we get a warrant, now, we can search the whole place from top to bottom, with this as evidence. Come on — I’
Marfa clutched the cellophane package against her breasts like a long-desired baby or some other cherished dream.
‘Come on!’
Then he paused and caught her hand. She, too, heard the footsteps coming along the corridor.
Lock could not have planned it. It had been nothing like his anticipation. The conclusion of a waggled pistol and enraged threat — the collapse of Kauffman before his gaze. Nor had he anticipated how committed he would be on the other side of a singular accidental moment when the pistol slipped from his raincoat pocket. It had been like some desperate hand in a high rolling card game, that had changed the whole atmosphere of the apartment and their relationship.
Yet even that was not quite all of it. There was Kauffman’s insistent, abstracted confession. His unburdening.
Yes, Tran had been recruited … Tran had been a shopkeeper outside Saigon, attached himself to Vaughn’s group, or so I was told, but his family had come from a border area and his local knowledge was vital … he was on Vaughn’s staff, unofficially but importantly …
Kauffman talked to an exact spot on the pale rug, where the last of his second martini had been spilt and was now drying.
The rain ran down the windows, the headlights flowed like pale mercury against the open blinds and the tyres swished like stiff skirts outside on the parkway. Kauffman had had little to do with Vaughn’s Special Forces group, but he knew the story; or could now reassemble it into a narrative. Lock sat opposite him, watching the man’s bent, middle-aged, sagging shoulders, feeling himself filled with a creeping, pitying horror at the confirmation of all his most appalled speculations.
I just ran into Tran from time to time, or news of Grainger’s project… Tran had undertaken trips to Saigon, to My Tho and Vung Tou on the Mekong Delta. Tran was a good friend, that much was obvious to a blind man — the kind of passes the guy had, the protection he was given …
Lock rubbed his forehead insistently as he listened, as if to ease a headache; in reality it was because the nightmare threat ened to burst out of his head, so great was the pressure inside.
Kauffman’s hands were together, reminiscent of prayer.
Why was Tran important? Lock wasn’t certain he had even voiced the question, but Kauffman seemed to answer him almost at once.
Putting people back on the land … Project ReGreen, you wouldn’t remember it, you weren’t there… Right in the border areas. Resettlement, providing an economic and human bulwark against Charley, the Viet Cong. Lock had vaguely heard of it.
A naive and noble ideal, to turn the south into a prosperous agrarian region and bolster it against the north. Making capitalism on the hoof, what the Communists in Vietnam were doing now — ironic, that. They replanted fields, gave grants, machinery, repopulated abandoned villages, grew a new harvest, a new hope …
That’s what Vaughn had been angry about when he saw Coppola’s vision of Vietnam and had had to endure the scorpion of Robert Duvall’s line about the smell of napalm on the morning breeze … but that couldn’t really have been it all, could it?
Lock felt concussed and nauseous, as if he had survived a car accident … only to realise that the accident was happening again and again, as it would in a nightmare.
The trial scheme for Project ReGreen had been established under Vaughn Grainger’s command only for a matter of a year and some months before the Pentagon decided that large-scale resettlement would be impossible. Kissinger’s apparent diplomatic successes suspended the resettlement programme before it had really gotten started … Lock nodded.
It was the original trial scheme, Kauffman said, that Vaughn used. It had been set up in the Da Dung river area of the central plateau, a sparsely populated region of scattered tea plantations.
It was nothing like the main rice-growing areas of the crowded, chaotic delta and the Cambodian border. And it was easy, man, it was so easy … Lock flinched and swallowed.
The CIA’s own airline, variously nicknamed Gremlin Airlines, Poltergeist Pan Am or Thin Air, had flown in the supplies, machinery, equipment, money — for camouflage, build-onsite greenhouses and warehouses, silos … The flights came into Vung Tou on the coast, Tran was overseer for their shipment upcountry to Tho Da Dung… Lock swallowed painfully. It was like watching the slow, painful death of a beloved older relative. Kauffman’s words were changing Vaughn Grainger’s identity, it was becoming its own opposite. The granite, frontiersman image that had always somehow accompanied Vaughn Grainger was gone.
/ clerked the docketing out at Vung Tou for a few months, that’s why I had to be bought off… Kauffman did not look up for sympathy, or to assess reaction, even at that point… The money was good, it was a lot of money. I turned my back… The project and the trial sites were finally abandoned in 1973, late in the year. Vaughn and whoever eJse — Tran — had had almost eighteen months before the trial project was closed down. Two, three harvests?
He realised that he was sweating. The rain on his hair had long dried, but his collar was again damp, his forehead chilly.
ReGreen, Thin Air and its C-130s and medium haul Boeings, a couple of Starlifters … He remembered the rumours that the CIA was smuggling heroin in Afghanistan, to offset the costs of the Stinger missiles and the other weaponry. In that war, everyone had wanted to deny it and believed the denial. The mujahideen had grown heroin, the Russians had used it, bought it, smuggled it…
Kauffman’s narrative continued.
They had harvested the heroin at Da Dung, the heroin the Special Forces and their Vietnamese allies like Tran had grown, and the CIA’s airline had flown it Stateside. Kauffman and people like him had assisted, or turned their backs, for the right price. Vaughn and Tran … no wonder Vaughn had turned around the fortunes of Grainger Technologies in the ‘70s, he had the money from the Vietnamese heroin to invest… maybe that was why he had done it?
It didn’t matter. He had done it. And had gone on doing it … Vaughn had claimed he and Billy were trying to stop it, but they had been the ones behind it. And … been killed for it.
He stood up. Kauffman, still contained by the aura of prison or the confessional, did not look up or pause in his rambling narrative. Lock stumbled to the door and let himself out of the apartment. His stomach lurched with sickness.
Beth had been killed because of Vaughn and Billy, not for any other reason on earth … The rain lashed against his hot face, chilling him. Ran into his collar, his eyes, soaked him. He blundered across the parkway, amid the glare of headlights and the noise of tyres, towards the hire car.
He had to see Vaughn, make him tell him … and, if it was true, then he would kill Turgenev. He had to see Vaughn.
The dawn was leaking into the eastern horizon like a lighter slain as Vorontsyev stopped his car beside the crumbling, leaning picket fence that marked the boundary of Dmitri’s dacha. The leafless trees drooped under their weight of snow. A solitary bird croaked and hopped amid the skeletal branches. There was a bird table, but it had not been supplied that early in the morning. There was a light on in a side room; probably the bathroom., Vorontsyev got out of the car and shut the door quietly. The town was a silent glow a couple of miles away, like the scene of a nuclear meltdown, and the flames from the rigs were less real in the growing light. He pushed open the gate and stumped up the trodden but uncleared path to the low wooden home.
House. It had ceased to be a home when the daughter had overdosed. Now, he was about to heap a greater burden on Dmitri’s broad, drooping shoulders. It could not be avoided. He couldn’t carry it alone, and he couldn’t act alone.
He rang the bell. It sounded echoingly in the house, as if there were no rugs or furniture inside.
The door was opened by Dmitri, dressed in trousers and a greyish vest. There was shaving lather on his right cheek and
chin, the left already scraped clean. Their breaths mingled.
‘Alexei! I’ve only been home an hour or so — couldn’t sleep
— come in.’ He gestured Vorontsyev inside. The narrow, pine walled hall opened into the large sitting room. Dmitri, waving the razor, said: ‘Won’t be a minute, Alexei — is it important?’
He did not wait for a reply. ‘Sit down,’ he called, ‘I’ll make some coffee when I’ve finished.’
As Vorontsyev sat himself on the sofa, amid the scattered newspapers and the plastic plate stained with Dmitri’s last meal in the house, Dmitri called out:
‘Lubin and I got the registration forms for the other two they’re on the table there … Probably not their real names ‘
Vorontsyev heard the splash of water, then the doglike splutterings of a wet animal as Dmitri towelled himself. ‘What did you find out?’ he heard in a muffled voice.
Vorontsyev picked up the forms from the Gogol. He noted the names and the professions neatly filled out. The addresses some place in Georgia, another in Byeloruss. His hand, he realised, was quivering. Dmitri re-entered the room, towel in one hand, shaving soap lingering on an earlobe. His eyes looked as if he habitually wore spectacles, his shoulders sagged like his paunch; he seemed dogged and ineffectual.
‘Pomarov. It was his real name, apparently. I had a call from Kiev …’ His voice tailed off.
‘Good. What else — who was he?’
‘Make some coffee, old friend.’
Dmitri looked anxiously quizzical, and then shrugged compliantly, vanishing into the kitchen. A noise of drawers and implements, and eventually the boiling of water and the smell of coffee. Vorontsyev looked at the registration forms as if willing them to reveal their subjects’ whereabouts, or to render themselves meaningless. Both men dealt with the gas companies, the forms claimed. With GraingerTurgenev.
‘Learn anything at Misha’s knocking shop?’ Dmitri asked, handing him a brown mug. ‘I take it there weren’t any unexpected guests?’
‘No.’
‘Don’t be so gloomy, Alexei. I’ve combed quickly through the routine passenger manifests the airlines deliver to headquarters — left Lubin to go through them more carefully — and there’s been no one on a Western passport on any flight to Tehran or points south. I take it that’s where they would be heading, whoever they are? Maybe they were just in town to pick up supplies, and returned to wherever they came from …?’ He studied Vorontsyev. ‘What’s the matter? They can’t be important, can they? Stands to reason. Just couriers?’ Vorontsyev shook his head. ‘What, then?’
‘They — unless I’m wrong, and I wish to God I was, they’re nuclear scientists.’
‘What?’ Dmitri breathed after an interminable, oppressive silence.
‘Pomarov, the dead one, worked at Semipalatinsk. He suddenly and mysteriously disappeared from Kiev, left no message, didn’t even say goodbye to his only daughter. Our Iranian friend had his Dutch passport ready for him, and a job ‘
‘~ in Tehran. Jesus … you’re certain about this?’
Vorontsyev nodded. ‘There’s a trade in brains. In scientists who’ve worked on advanced nuclear research, on lasers maybe
… on bombs, weapons. On the Bomb, Dmitri … It’s almost too terrifying to think about, isn’t it?’ He looked up at Dmitri, as if he felt himself exaggerating. Selling the means of making the Bomb to the fundamentalists, the unstable regimes, the expansionists. ‘Christ, every tinpot dictator, every ethnic or religious psychopath — could end up having his own bomb.
Doesn’t that frighten you, old friend?’
In the silence, he sipped his coffee, watching Dmitri absorb the information and its implications. Eventually, Dmitri said:
‘Did they get out before Vahaji got himself killed? Are they still here?’
‘Let’s hope so.’
‘Then we’d better find them, Alexei. We’ll need the whole team for this, and quickly.’ There was no shock, no creeping sense of disaster. Just the practical, the narrow perspective of immediate action. ‘Don’t look as if you’ve stumbled on something unique, Alexei, like the secret of the universe — that it will end tomorrow, at precisely three in the afternoon! Come on — you know we’ll sell anything these days for hard currency.
They took a dozen of these people off a plane in Moscow last year.’
It was true. A hamperful of nuclear and biological warfare scientists on. their way out of Cheremetievo airport, bound for Iraq and Pakistan. Bought and sold as simply as any other export, any other product of Russian origin! There were as many poorly paid and redundant scientists in the Russian Federation as there were tanks for sale.
‘Agreed,’ he replied heavily. ‘Were they paying for them in heroin — was that it?’
‘That might be too neat. Right, what time? I’ll get the people we can trust organised.’
‘Ten. My office.’ He stood up. ‘Thanks, Dmitri.’
‘For what? Not being terrified at the prospect? Come on, Alexei, it’s not the end of life as we know it — not yet!’ There was almost a grin on his shabby, worn face. Nothing was real for Dmitri, nothing except the people who killed his daughter and rendered his wife a vegetable. This was little more than a distraction, incredible though that seemed.
For himself, he had no distractions, there was no lessening of his fear. Anyone who wanted it, who could pay — cash or kind
— would have their own nuclear arsenal, their own nuclear threat, in five years or less. Russia was selling these people the means of her own destruction. It was a suicide note. Dmitri sensed his foreboding and added with deliberate cheerfulness:
‘We’ll find the buggers, don’t worry. We’re getting close, Alexei, I can feel it. These scientists could be the way in. We’re nearly there!’
‘Yes, they’ve just reported back. It’s been taken care of … No, I wouldn’t have ordered it if it hadn’t been necessary. They were getting close to the other business, not the heroin … Good. No, without him, the others won’t make a move. Why did he wake up? I’ve no idea, but he did. Sadly for him. I did warn him off, I took the investigation out of his hands — he should have realised, gone back to sleep … yes, all right, I underestimated him. But it’s been taken care of. What? Yes, I’ll call you when I hear the result. Don’t worry — all right, you’re not worried.
My people know what to do. You think no GRU training sticks?
Yes, I’ll call you just as soon as ‘
The call was ended abruptly. GRU Colonel Bakunin put down his receiver with a grimace. Bastard … The sky had lightened now. His people had a tail on Vorontsyev, and the policeman was doing exactly what was required of him to become a victim.
Stupid bastard. He was so ineffectual, like a daydreamer; an intellectual, a moral posturer who never actually did anything.
Until now -
and without him, his team would subside like an old wall being knocked down.
Vorontsycv locked the car and warily crossed the rutted, ungritted row of parking spaces outside his apartment house. He could smell petrol fumes on the cold air as a delivery van pulled away onto the street, into the noise of traffic heading into the town or out towards the rigs. He had picked his way across the treacherous surface of the investigation just as warily. Always the intellectual — had been for years, he mocked himself. Tut-tutting the state of the world from some ethical pinnacle made only of sculptured ice.
Dmitri’s commonsense and eagerness had upbraided him, justly so. He did not feel resolve, merely less depressed, shaking his head at vices as if they were follies.
Most of the still-curtained windows in the large, dilapidated old house were lit. Shadows hurried across one, then another as his neighbours stumbled towards their jobs or their children’s schools. Against a rear curtain, no doubt Vera Silkova was holding up her new baby — the one that kept him company during his sleepless nights, voicing simpler protests than his own through the bedroom wall. He smiled. His eyes were gritty with ti
redness, but his body, though cumbersome, was satisfied, lacking any edge of nerves. Dmitri’s plain man’s attitude had done that much for him. The men they sought could well still be in the town … it was a simple manhunt. If one forgot that they were nuclear scientists being sold to Iran.
He unlocked the front door and entered the house. Isolated amid the newer blocks and shops, it was as if it had become lost in its present unfamiliar surroundings, a building suffering from senile dementia or amnesia. He had nothing in common with his neighbours, despite his momentary lapses into fellow feeling.
They liked him living there; the police didn’t bother them, they felt safer from thieves.
He closed the door behind him, hearing the noises from other apartments, as innocuous and unsuspicious as ever; the way ordinary people registered their lives. He always felt, coming off duty, as if he had arrived with a search warrant. He climbed the stairs towards his own door on the first floor. On the ground floor behind him, Otzman the civil servant’s door slammed as he hurried to work. Vorontsyev yawned and fished out his key.
It was after eight. He’d try for an hour’s sleep, then shower and shave before the ten o’clock briefing.
‘Major?’ He winced, hearing the voice of Otzman’s wife, Nadya. His key was in the lock and he half-turned it as she called out: ‘The gas fitters said they’d repaired the leak you’d reported. They didn’t—’ He had turned the key in the lock -
was blown backwards, upended, then crushed against the landing wall by the fragmenting door. He understood that much.
Understood, too, that there had been a bomb, that walls were crumbling, that his body was hurt, badly hurt … and that he was beginning to scream.
Then, nothing
PART TWO
CAPITAL
‘The capitalist class of a country cannot, as a whole, overreach itself.’
Karl Marx: Das Kapital
NINE
Bad Old Ways
He returned to the Georgetown street in the evening gloom, the rain hardly diminished against the windscreen by the action of the wipers. He pulJed the car into the kerb and switched off the engine. The tape’s relentless Dylan ceased at the same moment and his thoughts returned like angry hornets to fill the silence.