Timebomb : A Thriller (9781468300093)

by Seymour, Gerald

  Because of the heat from the open fires under the soup, we hade the window slats open, and I heard the clank of a train behind our fence and beyond the officers’ compound, the howl of its wheels as it stopped.

  The woman looked away and did not meet my eyes.

  The capo, Miriam, flicked my buttocks with her whip so that I should turn and face her. She said, ‘We live here by sound. We exist by hearing – our ears are our eyes. A train comes. Musicians play. We hear those sounds. Our ears pick up the shouts of the Germans. After that there are screams, which are drowned, but not completely, by an engine starting. Then we hear geese. A prisoner goes into a little place where geese are kept, not to be eaten. He has a stick and chases them. The squawking means we can’t hear the screams and the engine. It is very short, this process. A train coming, an orchestra playing, orders, screams, an engine and the geese – it is what we hear every day. We heard it on the afternoon you came … You should not worry about your sister’s stomach because she was dead before dusk. All those you came with were dead before the light failed that afternoon … Stir harder, or the taste of the potato and turnip will not get into the water.’

  I found that innocence lost is never regained.

  They crossed the bridge over the Oka river and ahead were the ancient streets.

  Yashkin said, ‘They boast here that Murom is the prettiest town in all Russia.’

  ‘They talk shit.’ Molenkov yawned, could not stifle it.

  ‘Gorky wrote, “Whoever has not seen Murom from the Oka river has not seen Russian beauty.” ‘

  ‘Fuck him.’

  ‘It’s the birthplace of the bogatyr, the epic hero, Ilya Muromets. Look, there’s the statue of him …’ Yashkin had his hand off the wheel and pointed from his window. A knight in armour, a cloak across his shoulders and a battle sword held high, triple the size of a man, was floodlit on a plinth. ‘It’s very fine.’

  ‘Another fucker.’

  ‘You know there are monasteries here that were founded nearly a thousand years ago. I think that’s the roof of the Monastery of Our Saviour.’

  ‘I don’t give a shit for a monastery.’

  ‘I read all this in guidebooks. It’s where the kalatchi bread comes from. Yes, we knew that.’

  ‘I don’t need to know about heroes, monasteries or bread. It’s ten to midnight. I’m exhausted and I want to know where we’ll sleep, that’s all.’

  Yashkin grimaced. ‘I was only talking to keep myself awake.’

  He heard the yawn again, then a groan, blinked and tried to keep his eyes open. At night in Sarov when he drove the Polonez as a taxi he always slept in the afternoon, at least four hours. At the thought of it, an officer of the 12th Directorate forced to ply for trade with his old car to put food on his table and light in his home, bitterness surged in him. Such a long day. He would have collapsed on his bed now if he’d had the chance.

  And again Molenkov, beside him, wheezed his yawn. ‘I need to sleep.’

  Yashkin took the Polonez down narrow streets, past the square that had the illuminated Cathedral of Our Saviour and Transfiguration – he’d read of it – and saw the scaffolding climbing towards the dome. They had money to rebuild old and useless monuments, but not to pay the pension of an officer who had given his life to the 12th Directorate. They reached the doors, closed, of a hotel. He parked. His friend was asleep, but he shook him hard.

  They went together up the steps and hammered on the door, a tattoo of their fists. There was the muffled shuffle of feet, then a chain rattled and a bolt scraped. Light flooded them. Was a room available? A porter’s eyes raked over them. His head shook decisively. There was an inner door of glass behind him. Yashkin saw, through it, the reception desk, the line of hooks and keys hanging from the majority … and he saw his face and Molenkov’s reflected in the glass. The door was shut, the chain replaced and the bolt pushed home.

  They went to two more hotels. At the last, they gained admittance to the desk, but were turned away. They were told by a girl, challenged but evading, that the rooms with the keys on hooks were undergoing ‘refurbishment’ and not available. There was a mirror behind her head, and it showed two old men, unshaven, with dirt and grease on their faces, and he remembered how they had struggled with the spare tyre before the jack had broken.

  Beside the Polonez, Yashkin said, ‘It’s because of how we look. Did you see us?’

  ‘What do we do?’

  He was pleased that the colonel (retired) deferred to the major (retired). Yashkin shrugged. ‘We must wash, but I’m not going to the Oka river to get clean at this time of night. We’ll find a park and sleep in the car.’

  Under old elm trees, Molenkov lay across the front seats with the gear stick wedged in his crotch and snored. Yashkin was on his back, his spine pressed against the tarpaulin and what it hid.

  ‘Are you all right? You’re not ill or anything, are you?’

  Sak’s head jolted up off his hands, which were on the table, and the sudden movement tipped sideways a pile of books. He saw the cleaning woman, anxiety cutting across her face. He stammered that he was fine.

  ‘Don’t mind me saying so, but you don’t look it – you look like you’ve seen a ghost.’

  He opened a book but barely glanced at the pages. She started close to him, as if to emphasize her displeasure at finding someone studying in the school’s sixth-form library, and not a pupil or teacher but in the white coat of a laboratory technician. He ignored her, did not flinch when the vacuum-cleaner thumped against his feet under the table – no apology – and did not move a centimetre when a damp cloth was wiped hard on the table surface. Their eyes never met, and she moved away with her vacuum-cleaner and cloth. He called himself Sak. The name was bred from his split life, his split cultures and split races. To his mother, British born, he was Steven Arthur King, her maiden surname. To his father he was Siddique Ahmed Khatab. With his mother’s family he was anglicized; when he had visited his father’s relations in the Pakistani city of Quetta he was Asian … A racial hermaphrodite, a college guy had called him. Now the name Sak suited him, and the kids he worked alongside were rather taken by it, as if it had uniqueness. It was his position as a laboratory technician that was unique.

  He had left Imperial College at London University in the summer of 1997, at the age of twenty-two, with an upper second-class degree in nuclear physics, to the huge delight of the one-time Miss King, now Mrs Khatab, and his father. Eleven years later, bruised by what had happened to him, and harbouring the secret, he was a laboratory technician in a comprehensive school on the edge of the West Midlands. The work was humiliatingly easy, barely taxed him. But since his world had collapsed, Sak had allowed himself to be recruited. If he had had a confidant, which he did not, he might have admitted to offering himself for recruitment. He had two attractions for the recruiting sergeants operating from a villa on the northern outskirts of Quetta.

  He thought himself rejected and betrayed.

  He had worked from ’97 until his dismissal in ‘02 in the secret world of nuclear weapons.

  Sak was gobbled and sent back to the UK to wait and sleep.

  He was a dour man, and as he approached early middle age, with receding hair to prove it, there was little about him that was romantic, and such fantasies were rarely in his mind. A brush contact that morning, walking the last couple of hundred yards to the school gates, not seeing the man whose shoulder had hit him – couldn’t have said what he was wearing, what his skin colour was – and Sak had realized that a minutely folded piece of paper was in his hand. Had looked round, had seen only droves of kids coming to school.

  Sak was ordered to be ready to travel; the details would follow.

  He had not gone home. He had stayed in the library, and the story, in minutiae, of what had been done to him ran over and over in his mind.

  High above the port of Dubai, the wind off the Gulf rocked the crane driver’s cabin – not yet as high as the Dubai World Trade Centre, whi
ch had thirty-seven floors, but climbing.

  Not a bird but a man, the Crow could look down on the lights of the creek, the ruler’s office, the yacht club and the docks, and far out to sea where the container ships and tankers were anchored, all brightly lit.

  He was squashed into the small space behind the heavily padded chair in which the crane driver sat. The name ‘the Crow’ came from the pitch of his voice, which croaked when he spoke. His vocal cords had been minimally damaged in Afghanistan twenty-one years before by the shrapnel of shell-casing fired from a Soviet 122mm howitzer artillery piece. That period of his life was hidden, and those who needed to have the scars explained were told of an operation, successful, for throat cancer. He was known as the Crow across the construction sites of Dubai.

  The Crow’s responsibility was to keep teams, from labourers to skilled craftsmen, working efficiently on the developments along the coast. He was supreme at his work, in demand and a trusted friend of architects and quantity surveyors. He was admired by potential purchasers of property. He had been hauled up by the hydraulic winch, in a secure basket, to the cabin because the driver had reported stress on the cables running the length of the crane’s arm, and to see for himself the shake. That he went himself, in the middle of the night, was a mark – so the professionals who relied on him said – of his dedication to the projects on which he worked.

  They knew nothing.

  The crane’s driver had returned the previous day from a month’s rest in his home town of Peshawar, on the fringe of the North-West Frontier of Pakistan, and a slim, rolled piece of paper had been retrieved from a tiny pocket sewn inside the waist of his trousers. The Crow had thanked him gutturally, then read the message sent in answer to a note he had sent with the driver when he had gone home. There were no bugs and no cameras in a crane cabin that rolled in the blustery wind some two hundred and fifty feet above the Gulf shoreline. He read it, digested it, then methodically tore the paper into myriad tiny pieces, then let his hand go to the window and opened his fingers. The pieces scattered and gulls chased them.

  He was asked by the driver if it was good.

  The Crow growled, ‘As good as the cables under your crane arm.’

  They laughed. High over the harbour, above the dhows and yachts, a ripple of laughter, a meld of shrill and a black crow’s call, spilled down. The driver radioed for the basket to be made ready.

  The Crow stepped over the void between the cabin and the basket floor, feeling it pitch. He waved at the driver, then was lowered at speed.

  Then – because such men did not sleep – he went in search of the hawaldar in his home beyond the Fish Roundabout. The hawaldar had prepared for the Crow the details of the transaction that had been taken back to Peshawar, passed on and moved forward until it had reached a compound hugging the foothills of a mountain range. The answer, by a similarly complicated route, cut-outs, blocks and checks, had returned in the lining of the driver’s trousers. The hawaldar whom the Crow would see had in the financial world connections dedicated to the Islamic faith who could guarantee great sums of money, coffers and treasuries of it, with no electronic trace and beyond the reach of investigators.

  The Crow would tell him to make the arrangements, then wait to be told of his own travel schedule.

  He climbed from the basket, did not need a hand to help him. The wind ripped his hair, and he was smiling. He said to the site’s night foreman, ‘There’s no problem with the cable. The driver’s an old woman, frightened of his own shadow. The cable is fine … Everything is fine.’

  Once a fortnight, Luke Davies did the late evening shift.

  The girl who was doing night duty was away down the corridor, would have been getting chocolate out of a machine, or a coffee. The area, open plan, around his desk was empty and the ceiling lights were dimmed. The girl would be looking after a dozen desks during the night and would not be relieved till after six in the morning. He rather envied the quiet and the peace she would experience after he’d gone and she had the area to herself. He tidied his desk a last time, dumped a final file in the small floor safe beside his knees, closed its door and flicked the combination to random numbers.

  The desk told little of Luke Davies. Years before, the staff of the Secret Intelligence Service had been uprooted from a shabby tower block, Century House, and shifted a few hundred yards west along the Albert Embankment to a green and yellow angular building on the east side of the bridge that ended in the junction of Vauxhall Bridge Cross. It was a monument to a modern architect, derided by many and loved by a few. Luke Davies was among the few, thought it magnificent and reckoned it a fitting home for the Service that he was proud to belong to. But the architects’ remit reached inside the outer walls and windows, and carefully drawn-out colour schemes ruled the interiors. They had been chosen, after expensive advice from consultants, to provide the best working environment; walls and partitions were not to be cluttered with calendars, pictures, personal photographs, printouts of joke emails, Post-it reminders or the images of targets. Discreetly shown on the partition dividing the desks of the juniors of this section of the Russia Desk (Baltic), close to his mouse-pad, screen and keyboard, were three snapshot photographs: himself in mortarboard and gown, holding the rolled degree certificate – first-class honours from the School of East European and Slavonic Studies; himself again in front of the little bridge over the Miljacka river, standing on the spot where Gavrilo Princep had fired the shots that launched the First World War and made Sarajevo famous – his first, only, overseas posting had been to Bosnia-Herzegovina; and a smiling girl with a blue UN helmet rakish on her head, pouting as if she was blowing a kiss. Around her was desert and behind her were huts of dead branches and thorn hedges and by her knee was a child, African, with a ribcage showing semi-starvation. He called her his girlfriend but she was in Darfur, or Lebanon, or Afghanistan, and the photograph was two years old. Most of the story of Luke Davies’s life was captured in three photographs. He left his desk, went to the far wall and the line of lockers, and opened his.

  He had his back to the door at the far side of the room – and did not see it open. He pulled out the waterproofs he had worn when he’d come to work, and lifted the cycling helmet off the locker floor. He heard, ‘It’s Luke Davies, isn’t it? You are Luke Davies?’

  ‘That’s me – I’m him.’ He had a soft south-Yorkshire accent, had tried to lose it and failed, was stuck with it. He thought his accent, at VBX, counted more against him than his degree – rated ‘outstanding’ by his tutor – benefited him.

  ‘Good thing I caught you. I’m Wilmot, Duggie, Human Resources. Just going off, I see. Sorry and all that. Cycling, eh? Not much of a night for that … You’re to be seconded for a week or two, immediate effect. I was called by Pam Bertrand – she’s your desk chief, yes? She said it should be you.’

  Something evasive about the guy, as if that was only half the story. He asked, ‘Where am I going?’

  ‘It’s Non-Proliferation, Mr Lawson. You’re to be seconded indefinitely, but not for ever, to Mr Christopher Lawson in Non-Proliferation and—’

  Eyes closed, hugging the waterproofs and the helmet, sucking in breath. ‘I’m not hearing this.’

  ‘Authorized by Pam, not in my hands.’

  ‘That man is a Class A shite.’

  ‘Pam said you’d not be happy. Came to her from above. I’m afraid it’s set in dried concrete.’

  ‘Should have been put out to grass a decade ago.’ He felt the sweat on his back and his voice was louder than it should have been. The night-duty girl was back, had stopped eating her chocolate to watch his display. Didn’t care. ‘What if I go sick?’

  He saw a smile spread. ‘You’d get dragged out of bed – wouldn’t wash. Suicide might do it.’

  ‘He’s the most unpleasant man known to exist in this building, an antique and—’

  ‘And you’re seconded to him. Non-Proliferation, third floor west, room seventy-one. Got that?’

  He
subsided. ‘Right. I’ll be off home and into my bathroom cabinet to count the painkillers, see if I’ve enough and—’

  ‘He’s waiting for you, Mr Lawson is …’ a little laugh ‘… expecting you. Oh, Pam said – I nearly forgot – it’s sanctioned by the DG. Good luck.’

  Davies threw the waterproofs back into his locker with the helmet, then slammed its door. He stomped past the night-duty girl and out to the corridor.

  At the end of the corridor he banged his fist against the lift’s call button. Lawson was one of those who harked back in time to when everything was fucking perfect, talked of the Good Old Days. In the Good Old Days of the fifties, sixties and seventies, Cold War era, everything worked a fucking treat. Unlike today, which, to a god, was useless, pathetic, and the new intakes were crap. Davies had been five years in the Service, and other gods had been pointed out to him before his Sarajevo posting – red-faced old bastards, mumbling about the time when the Ark floated off – but they’d gone by the time he’d returned from the Balkans. Only one remained. Didn’t matter if every seat in the canteen was taken except at one table, he would be left to eat alone. Stories of his rudeness were legion. Davies came out of the lift. He swore and his voice was spirited down the corridor, then bounced back in an echo to him, as if his efforts were mocked.

  He knocked.

  A woman came out, glanced at the laminated ID he offered, pointed towards an open door.

  Lawson’s back was to him. Had a phone against his ear. Shouted at it. ‘If I say I want two increments and that gear at seven tomorrow morning, it’s what I mean. Pretty clear to me, and should be clear to anyone who’s not an imbecile or obstinate. I want them where I said at seven – not a minute later – and the gear.’

  The phone went down and the chair spun.

  ‘Are you Davies – Luke Davies?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How many years with the Service?’

  ‘Five.’

  ‘Oh, time enough to know it all, be an expert. Do you know it all?’