Connections

by Hilary Bailey

  Darren and the other two got the tube to the Strand at about seven thirty one evening, wearing suits and carrying sports bags like office workers off to the gym together. They went into the hotel and spoke to the receptionist who called upstairs and let them go up. This had been planned in advance.

  So up they went. A large man opened the door to the suite. This led through a short, narrow hallway to a large room, all white and gold with flowers, fruit, a trolley still standing there with dishes and covers on it.

  Sitting in an easy chair, smoking and apparently reading a book, was a tall, thin man in jeans, a collarless shirt and an expensive leather jacket. He was young, in his early twenties, with a very pale wide-cheekboned face – deadly pale – and big light blue eyes, slightly protuberant and almost colourless. His hair was so fair it was white and it hung down to his shoulders. “A good-looking guy,” Darren had told Goolies, “and my first thought was ‘rock star’, but then I saw he was serious. A second later I realised he was trouble. That was when he looked at me and by then it was a split second too late.” The guard who’d let the group in had promptly left through the open door and gone off down the corridor somewhere. The second guard, as soon as they’d entered the suite, disappeared through the door into a bedroom. “We were three against one,” Darren had said, “and we took him by surprise. Should have been all right. Should have been – wasn’t.”

  One of them kicked the door shut. Darren produced his pistol. The other weapons were still in the sports bags. At that moment when it happened one man was in the hallway, bent over the bag with the guns in it, the other was a quarter turned, just having kicked shut the outer door, while Darren was standing just inside the sitting-room, pointing his gun at the target. The guy should have sat still, with a gun on him. Instead he came out of the chair as if propelled by a spring, bounded across the room in three long jumps, smashed Darren in the face with one hand and grabbed the gun with the other. He kicked the man just straightening up from the sports bag right in the crotch, which left only his third opponent, unarmed and startled, between him and the door. “He had a knife somewhere,” Darren had reported. “He shouldn’t have had – but he did. He swiped it right across my mate’s face, cutting downwards. Geoff was yelling and blood was running down into his eyes. So this geezer just pushed him aside, hauled open the door and ran off down the corridor like a stag.”

  It had taken one minute, Darren said. “One minute from when the guard opened the door and we went in – a minute later Chaz is rolling on the floor in agony, Geoff’s there with blood running down and I’m standing there without my shooter and a silly grin on my face. What a shocking exhibition.”

  Darren had gone straight to the door, looked out carefully and seen their so-called victim turning the corner leading to the staircase. No knife or gun was visible. He wouldn’t pursue him publicly down the stairs and into a crowded lobby. He just shut the door and he and the others tried to sort themselves out, knowing the man they had come to kill was now sauntering through the foyer of the hotel and out into the Strand as if about to take a nice walk down to Covent Garden.

  “They were outclassed,” Goolies told me, stating the obvious. “Darren’s face is still red. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when he told me.”

  “Did Uncle Roger give the money back?” I asked.

  “No, because he was never asked,” Goolies said. “I’m presuming the plan was for the guards to come back after an interval, find the target dead and report they’d been overwhelmed by the opposition, who’d killed him and escaped. Of course, what they found was that the target had crippled Darren and his mates and escaped himself. I know Darren and I know he wouldn’t have taken idiots with him. This guy was very tough, very fast and very quick-thinking. From the minute they came in the room he had his moves planned. He was a champion, Darren said.”

  “Well, Darren would, wouldn’t he?” I remarked. “So – who was this man they were sent to kill?”

  “They’d never been told. And he didn’t stop to introduce himself. Darren had him figured for a drug dealer turned informant, under police protection. The people in the pub all thought the hirer was official business. So why would the law try to rub him out, if he was co-operating?

  “We’ll never know,” Goolies added after a moment in a definite tone. And I agreed.

  Except, William, that now I do know and it’s a very nasty tangle indeed.

  What happened next? You know some of it. During November rumours had started to circulate about the Russian. You know how it is in this village. The first stage is people putting little fragments of information together. Someone leaks something to a paper. There’s a tiny paragraph. A denial. There’s a piece in Private Eye, just mentioning the name. That’s the point at which there may be no second stage. Or it goes on.

  The quality of this whole affair, William, is its persistence. From the first moment of that so-called burglary at Gordon Mews the issue just kept on growing, dying down occasionally, making you think it had gone away, perhaps, but always returning, stronger than before, like a weed you keep on trying to eliminate but can never quite get rid of.

  The facts behind the initial story were small and fairly uninteresting. By late December the German Customs and the German Foreign Office had been getting increasingly fed up with our Immigration Department, and our Home Office, because they’d approached them at the end of November with a perfectly valid request for the extradition of a man they believed to be a big-time Russian criminal, known as August Tallinn. The Germans had caught one of his couriers in Frankfurt smuggling a nasty cargo, plutonium.

  The arrested courier, a woman, had named Tallinn as the boss behind the operation. The Germans had heard of him before but had never had any way of arresting him, still less getting enough evidence to bring him to trial. They were hungry for Tallinn. They also wanted to know, urgently, where the plutonium was going to and whether any other cargoes had gone that way before.

  The courier said she didn’t know. She was carrying a lead-lined suitcase weighing about ten kilos, half a kilo of which was refined plutonium. She was meant to hand the case over to a man at the airport who would identify himself to her using a code word.

  Eight kilograms of plutonium containing ninety to ninety-five per cent plutonium 239 will produce a twenty-kiloton atomic bomb. So the captured courier’s luggage contained a sixteenth of the material required to produce the bomb dropped on Nagasaki in 1945.

  The creation of twenty-seven new democracies between 1985 and 1992 out of what was once the Soviet Union caused social chaos. The poor economic conditions following “liberalisation” caused a crime wave of disastrous proportions. Drugs from Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan were routed through Bulgaria, into the former Yugoslavia and then on into the rest of Europe, until the war in Bosnia and sanctions against Serbia made the route difficult to use. Then two new ones were created, one through Greece and Albania to Italy, the second through Istanbul, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary and the Czech and Slovak Republics into Germany.

  The Germans knew Tallinn was bringing drugs into Germany and routing them on from there, but they’d never caught him, or anyone prepared to testify against him. Now they had what they wanted, a courier carrying highly dangerous illegal material ready to inform against him. Better than that, they knew where Tallinn was – in friendly Britain.

  The woman had been carrying plutonium 239, refined uranium. The reactor required to process it costs millions of dollars to build and maintain and requires a staff of five to seventy-five engineers and 150 to 200 skilled technicians. It’s reckoned there is around 200 tons of weapon-grade uranium in existence in the world, and half of this is in Russia, the Ukraine and Kazakhstan.

  A small state may not be able to produce refined plutonium because of the cost and the technology it requires. What they can do is buy it from a source, if that source is willing to sell. With the Russian Federation and its people broke, desperate and in possession of half the refined plu
tonium in the world, there’s the source – all that’s needed is a guy like Tallinn to broker the deal and arrange transport through routes already open to him. Which is what, apparently, had happened. Only the destination and the identity of the customer were unknown.

  Apparently the Manhattan Project physicist Luis Alvarez once said, “With modern weapon-grade uranium the background neutron rate is so low that terrorists, if they had such material, would have a good chance of setting off a high yield explosion simply by dropping one half of the material on to the other half.”

  It makes you wonder, doesn’t it, William, not whether it’s going to happen, but why it hasn’t already?

  Someone was planning a low-technology effort. The shells would be eight to ten metres long, weigh about 1,000 pounds and be launched from mobile units no wider than a couple of buses side by side. The launchers could deliver a ten-kiloton explosion – smaller, but not much smaller than the Hiroshima bomb – anywhere within a range of 1,600 miles. The Pope could hit London from the Vatican with one of those shells if, God forbid, he chose to do so; the Canadians could strike into the centre of Manhattan from the shores of Lake Winnipeg. And, of course, another nightmare is the lone suicide bomber in a plane, dropping a bomb anywhere he chooses.

  Tallinn had made that long-running Western government nightmare, the bomb falling into the hands of “irresponsible foreign governments” – Foreign Office speak for governments it doesn’t trust, especially in the Middle East – come true.

  The woman in German hands began to die of radiation sickness. Then she owned to having delivered other consignments of plutonium to Germany, over the Polish border, once by train to Berlin. At some point she’d come too close to a load with poor shielding. This news was depressing for the Germans partly because their case against Tallinn, when they got him to trial, would be harder to prove if the chief witness had died.

  So the Germans had applied in late November for the man they knew was in British hands, stating they required him for questioning and possible arrest. They confidently expected the Brits to send them Tallinn. But they didn’t. Instead, the Foreign Office retaliated with a letter stating that August Tallinn was in Britain claiming asylum on the grounds that if he returned to his native Russia he would be subject to persecution, imprisonment and possible death at the hands of his own government. Tallinn’s reasons for suspecting he might meet an unjust fate in Russia were not given and the most ingenious minds couldn’t work out what they were.

  I got some sidelights on this when I had a pre-Christmas lunch with my Uncle Roderick at his club. There was another man there, a friend of my uncle’s, a correspondent for the Daily Telegraph. Over the meal he began to tell us, by way of a joke, about the matter of the extradition of a certain Russian crook, called Tallinn. This had been going on for almost a month by then. The Germans had requested his extradition. After the first reply from the Brits, claiming HMG was investigating the claims of this notorious drugs and arms salesman that he faced political persecution if he returned to his native land and that he had to stay in Britain until the decision was made, the Germans responded that he was wanted in Germany to answer charges concerning a very serious crime, smuggling nuclear materials. They asked for the grounds on which Tallinn considered he faced persecution in Russia. They also pointed out that if Tallinn was tried and convicted in Germany he would serve his sentence there, not in Russia. If the German authorities found no reason to try him, or if he were tried but found innocent, he would no doubt find it possible to return to Britain and renew his request for political asylum.

  The Foreign Office riposted feebly that they were investigating Tallinn’s case and would get in touch in due course. The Germans came back, more agitatedly. Their witness was ill, they needed to talk to Tallinn quickly. He’d been suspected for years of drugs and arms smuggling and they found the denial of their request hard to comprehend. They so nearly had him, said my uncle’s friend. They must have been scared someone would get at the courier and persuade her to withdraw her accusations, or that she’d just die.

  The reply from the Foreign Office said what they’d said before – they had Tallinn, they were looking into his claims, they’d address the German request when that matter had been settled. A hail of letters, telegrams, faxes and so forth began. My uncle’s Telegraph pal told us that the FO’s excuses got sillier and sillier and the German reaction chillier and chillier. They, no doubt, made a mental note not to help the Brits out if we ever asked them for anything similar.

  Then the Brits did a silly thing. Sent a very uncivil note, the equivalent of a rude postcard saying, “Sorry, Krauts. Tallinn’s run away. We can’t find him, so you can’t have him. Yah boo and who won the war anyway?”

  The Germans just replied to this saying this development was very unfortunate. They trusted all measures were being taken to find Tallinn, whose status must surely now be that of an illegal immigrant. A warrant for his arrest now existed in Germany and they were consulting with Interpol about discovering Tallinn’s whereabouts. They wished their continuing interest in his welfare to be recorded by Great Britain.

  The Germans, said the Telegraph man, must have been wondering if this latest claim concerning Tallinn, that he’d escaped and couldn’t be found, was just a childish excuse to get out of returning him to Germany for trial. He added that no one could doubt that the Germans had acted properly and politely in asking for the perfectly legitimate extradition of the man and had been met first with obfuscation of a stupid sort and then with a discourteous communication saying Tallinn had fled. When, in all likelihood, the Germans took their revenge for all this, he told us, he’d be the last to blame them.

  That was Christmas, as you’ll note, William, and it was a few weeks later that Goolies told me the story of the attempt on the life of the man in the Savoy. I didn’t put two and two together then, which shows I’m not always as clever as I think I am.

  I was at my doctor’s, a specialist on tropical diseases, waiting to get a little problem I’d developed in Africa sorted out, when I first saw the name August Tallinn in print. It was in a German newspaper, Die Welt, lying around for the benefit of the doctor’s international clientele.

  I could just make out the headlines – Russian Criminal Tallinn Escapes After British Government Refuses Extradition. There was a photograph, too, taken in what looked like a Moscow street. It showed a tall man in a fur hat, a long leather coat and boots, with a casual gunfighter air, talking to a squat and villainous-looking cove who was head-on to the camera. He had murder written all over a deeply pockmarked face. Tallinn, on the other hand, was young and tall, poised lightly and smiling at his associate co-conspirator, employed assassin or whatever he was, looking as if he hadn’t a care in the world. “Insouciant” is the word that springs to mind. He had a long, attractive face and very fair hair, almost white, which fell below his fur hat almost to the shoulders of his coat. That was when it struck me this might be the man Darren had been sent to kill at the Savoy. The description fitted. The man had been under some kind of official protection in Britain. Attacked, he’d responded as only a man used to violence would have. And he’d escaped at the time when, my uncle’s friend had said, the Foreign Office was telling the Germans they’d lost him.

  Which made me wonder if the Brits were so keen not to hand Tallinn over to the Germans they’d decided to kill him. Which meant in turn the matter was very serious because, no matter what they say, murder is still not the British Secret Service’s first choice when it comes to solving difficulties, unlike others we could mention. There’s always an Inner Policy Club, a group of some sort of illuminati, and they might go too far, too soon, but those aside, the spooks do try hard not to go around killing people all over the place. This isn’t America, after all.

  Abandoning the paper due to faulty German, another bit of reading material caught my eye. Lying on a table was Hello!, open at a double page spread of a lot of well-dressed people in Barbados. And there on a terrace wi
th sun and sky as a background was the girl in the photograph Hoppo had brought back from the cemetery in Cray Hill, the very picture which had startled Mr Robinson so much. It was her. “Reunited for Christmas, Fleur Jethro and her father Sir Richard exchange news on the terrace of Braganza House, the Andriades’ retreat in the West Indies.”

  Here was a girl who apparently lived on a council estate, and worked behind the bar of a pub in Cray Hill, on holiday in the Caribbean with an immensely wealthy father. Maybe she’d wanted to make her own way in the world, I thought. Or maybe there’d been a row and she’d been chucked out, thus the term “reunited”. It was all a mystery, I thought, a mystery I would never solve. If only that had been true. I solved it all right, William, and it’s put me into exile.

  Twenty

  Fleur returned to Adelaide House the day after Boxing Day, still toting her Barbados luggage after a riotous Christmas at the Stadlens’. A dozen of them had eaten and drunk themselves to a standstill several times and recovered with noisy games of cards, charades and board games. Fleur earned much appreciation when she intercepted Jess’s ten-year-old nephew as he charged the tree like a berserker on Christmas Eve. It was never established who had paid the boy to try.

  When Fleur checked her answer machine there were no messages. She’d half expected some reproaches from Barbados and a message from Ben telling her when he’d reach London. The absence of any word from Ben confirmed her suspicion that he wasn’t coming, was angry with her for leaving and might have decided to stay and play with his new rich friends. Probably her taking half the Atlanta money hadn’t cheered him up much. This was depressing, but she put the thought away and went straight over to the Findhorn Star to ask Patrick if she could have some shifts. As it turned out, he needed her.