Timebomb : A Thriller (9781468300093)

by Seymour, Gerald

  ‘I’m sure when you were told I was being seconded to you that you’d had sight of my file. You’ll have read what my line managers have reported on my abilities and—’

  ‘If I want a speech I’ll ask for it. When I don’t want a speech I should be given answers of one word, two or three … Sarov, what does that name mean to you?’

  He blustered. ‘Excuse me – is that a person’s name or a place name?’

  ‘I hadn’t been with the Service a year – let alone five – before I knew what Arzamas-16 was and where Sarov was, but the sort of people inducted into the Service then were of a different quality … Six thirty, here, in the morning. Don’t stand around, go away and learn.’

  Luke Davies was flushed and his cheeks burned as he spun. He went out, past the woman, and into the corridor. He had never heard of Arzamas-16 or a place called Sarov, but had six hours and twenty-six minutes to discover them.

  After the bus ride Carrick walked the last mile. It was a routine for him since he had gone on the plot and into the household of Josef Goldmann. Hadn’t used his mobile. The worst place for an undercover, a level one, to call in to his case officer was on the street. Couldn’t say there whether he was under surveillance. Worst thing was to get away from the work location, then be seen to use a mobile. Back in the first weeks after being embedded he had had a back-up car tracking him during work hours, and sometimes a back-up walking behind him when he’d finished his duties, but nothing had happened in the last month, the threat assessment had been reduced and back-up guys had been deployed for other undercovers. If he had taken the risk and used his mobile – to report the arrest of Simon Rawlings, drunk in charge, and the invitation to go a small step up the ladder and replace the sarge – he would have found, probably, Katie at the end of the call, not Rob, who was his cover officer, and not George, the controller. Not a risk worth taking. Everything could keep till the evening of the day already started. Couldn’t say, when they met for the debrief, whether the promotion was enough to keep the operation going. Neither could he have said that he was now guaranteed greater access than before.

  He felt flat, washed through. Simon Rawlings had done him well, too damn well to have deserved betrayal and deceit. But that was the world of an undercover, level one. Everything exploited, and every man. No relationships allowed to count.

  It had been the question at the interview board. ‘Let’s put this pretty crudely, Johnny – and my colleague will forgive me the vulgarity. You get to like people in the target area, you get a bit fond of them, you get to see the better sides of them, but the job says you have to fuck their lives. Screw them down, fuck them and walk away … Up for that, are you?’

  The board had been a superintendent from the Murder Squad – it had been his question – a divisional commander, a woman in a starched blouse and a well-pressed uniform, and a psychologist, middle-aged, intense stare, not speaking but watching.

  He’d said, ‘I would regard myself first and foremost as a police officer. My duty as a serving officer is to obtain evidence of criminal activity. It’s paramount. I’d do my job.’

  The friend down in Bristol, the older man, had told him before he headed for London and the interview that he should not flannel his answers, should keep them brief and focused, that he should display honesty at all times, that he should be his own man.

  The woman had asked, ‘Can you live on your own, Johnny? Can you survive in an environment that is a lie? Can you field the solitariness of the work, which is demanded by the deception? I promise you, it’s not easy.’

  They had been the two big questions and they had stayed in his mind, with his reply: ‘I had a sort of childhood that wasn’t dependent on company. Left to myself, valued my own scene. Didn’t need a shoulder to cry on when I was a kid, and I haven’t been home since I walked out on them and joined up … I did two months in hospital, a convalescent, and I didn’t have a visitor. I’m fine on my own, doesn’t frighten me.’ He had set out his stall, had done it pithily, and his interview before the board had lasted only ninety-two minutes – those of others had lasted in excess of three hours. He’d known he was accepted. Brave words: I’d do my job … I’m fine on my own, doesn’t frighten me. More questions about his ability to live among druggies, alongside prostitutes, close up with paedophiles … Gutsy words spoken, but in the easy times and before they were tested.

  He remembered a final statement from the Murder Squad man, who leaned back, sort of avuncular. ‘You, with your background, will reckon to be able to take care of yourself. With us, I’d like to emphasize, you’ll never be beyond the reach of help. We take the safety of our people very, very seriously. We ask them, after due consideration of realities, to go into unpleasant and dangerous situations, but we’re there all the time, close by. And if a situation deteriorates unexpectedly we’re not in the market for heroes. We expect our man to cut and run.’

  He reached the steps of the house. He had moved into the room upstairs two weeks before joining the household of Josef Goldmann.

  He unlocked the front door, picked up some circulars and started on the stairs.

  Ahead of him, as he climbed, was a barely furnished top-floor conversion into a one-bedroom apartment: his home. Where he was alone, where no one needed his lies.

  Chapter 4

  10 April 2008

  Maybe it was because of his new status, but that morning he fancied he was more clearly watched.

  An instructor had said during the training period, ‘The deeper you go into the organization, the more access you have, the closer you will be observed. The natural suspicion they harbour for an outsider cannot, ever, be totally erased. Each step up means greater care must be taken.’ They had done role-play at the start of the training, simple stuff: buying Class A drugs, dumping counterfeit money on a bureau de change, drinking till late, then they’d been quizzed abruptly about an area and the specifics of the legend, had been tested on their ability to lose the police ethic.

  The front door had been opened for him by Grigori. Carrick was eyed, as if he was meat on a slab, no greeting or welcome offered. He could not have said whether his advance in the household made him, now, a competitor for Grigori’s position. He smiled warmly, but the gesture was not returned – and it was strange to him because it was hard to believe in danger when the whoops and shouts of the children billowed down the staircase, there was the smell of cooking from the basement kitchen and of fresh coffee. He’d gone down to the ready room.

  An instructor had said, ‘You’ll think you can handle the isolation of the lie, but we don’t know, none of us does. Role-play is useful but it’s a poor substitute for actuality. If you’re going to crack, feel yourself slipping, then for God’s sake come out. Don’t take it as a failure of the macho-man you want to be. There’s no disgrace in not being able to field the pressure.’ They did sleep-deprivation, and slap-around questioning that left small bruises – and had lessons in the use of bugs, where to hide them, and the fixing of tags to cars. Seven of his intake had passed, but two had dropped out and never been referred to again. He’d done as well in his training as he had on his appearance before the selection board, and had told himself that pressure didn’t faze him, or stress.

  The internal phone rang.

  Viktor for him, to go upstairs. Grigori’s eyes were locked on him till he had gone out through the door. The briefing papers said that Grigori and Viktor were from Perm – wherever that was. They were believed to be former officers in a security police unit and were thought of as long-term associates, providing muscle for the family.

  Viktor met him on the first floor. Hard, piercing eyes gazed into Carrick’s. Just the glance, nothing said. The look in the eyes gave Carrick certainty: nothing that he had done so far in the household had yet clinched trust. He wondered, a snap thought, what weapon Viktor had used in his past when he was enforcing protection. A pistol? Unlikely, too clean. A pickaxe handle was more likely. Fire, or power drills and cutters would have
been the best and would have given him a rare thrill – like a jerk-off. He smiled again. His aim was to appear simple and straightforward, not stupid, to be a piece of furniture that was there and unnoticed. He reckoned Viktor would have loathed the very idea of employing foreign nationals in the house, but Viktor had only halting English, Grigori less, and the family needed to have around them men who were both reliable and familiar with roads, traffic , driving and … Viktor did not answer his smile.

  ‘You wanted me up here.’

  Viktor jerked his thumb at a door. ‘Mr Goldmann waits you.’

  He went through to the salon, used for entertaining, where the drapes were still drawn. The kids’ shouts, behind him and up another flight, were in Russian, but it was just kids’ noise and he sensed nothing of importance; but there had been nothing of importance. If the legend of Johnny Carrick had marked the actual limits of his life, and he had been a bodyguard, handyman, chauffeur to a Russian émigré businessman, who was clean and legitimate, he would have liked them. Nothing to complain about. But he had read a briefing paper, with an attachment, and lived a lie in the house. The family sitting room was at the end of the salon, and beside it was the door to the little office area that Josef Goldmann used. Maybe there was a tickle in Carrick’s throat, a cough he didn’t register, maybe there was a floorboard below the pile that was loose enough to creak. Whichever, the Bossman was alerted, and was in the office door, and he held two tickets – airline style – in one hand.

  ‘Ah, Johnny …’

  ‘You asked for me, sir.’ Carrick could do the corporal-to-middle-ranking-officer act well. No impertinence, no cheek.

  ‘It is incredible to me, what happened last night.’

  ‘Difficult to understand, sir.’

  ‘You have to take the place of Simon, of Rawlings, as I said last night.’

  ‘Yes, sir. If that’s what you want, sir.’

  He saw the tickets, noted the logo of the agency on Kensington High Street. He stood, feet slightly apart, straight-backed, hands clasped behind him, as if he was the corporal and he faced his officer.

  ‘You do the school drive.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Then you take me to the City. Viktor does not drive well in the City.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And you bring me back, and you collect the children.’

  ‘Of course, sir. I apologize, sir, but I mentioned last night a family commitment.’

  ‘You did.’

  ‘And I would need to be away by six, sir. In the future, in the new circumstances, I would not make any commitments without checking with you first.’

  ‘That is satisfactory.’

  He thought his Bossman was worn down, at the edge of exhaustion. Josef Goldmann was pale, looked not to have slept, seemed burdened. Wouldn’t be from the loss of Rawlings, no way … The fingers fidgeted with the two tickets. The instructors had said that an undercover should press for information only in exceptional circumstances: ‘I see you’ve got two tickets there, sir. Are you going somewhere interesting?’ would have been about as bad tradecraft as was possible. To push for information, hurry it, was flawed practice.

  ‘I’ll be off, sir, on the kids’ run, then.’

  ‘Yes, Johnny, thank you. Then we go to the City, late morning.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘I don’t have time to mess about. You either have an officer in that household or you do not. Which?’

  It was a few minutes past eight. Lawson was in charge and gloried in it. An hour and a few minutes earlier, at one minute after seven, there had been the rap on his office door, room seventy-one on third floor west, and he had admitted – Lucy not yet at her desk – the young man, Davies. He had asked if the detail of Sarov had been learned, had seen a half-awake nod. Had asked if the history of Arzamas-16 had been studied, again the nod. He had not asked a clever or trick question to assess Davies’s reading of the history. The young man’s face had fallen when he’d realized he was not about to be tested on his work. Then he had told him he was late and received a sulking apology. A good start to the day. All in good time, the young man would be told the code-name of the operation and shown the file – it would be done later, if time allowed. He had led and Davies had followed. They had crossed Vauxhall Bridge, had not headed for Scotland Yard but had branched away into Pimlico, had found the door of a tatty, tacky office block and had rung a bell. When their business was asked by a porter, Lawson had given the name of who he had come to see, though not his own, and they had been escorted up two flights.

  ‘I’d have thought it a pretty simple question, requiring a pretty simple answer: yes or no. So, I repeat – which?’

  He was in a room that had not recently been decorated, and the iron window frames had traces of rust where he could see them through the open slats of the dropped blind. There was a tidy desk, a pair of filing cabinets, a plastic-coated board on the main wall with a cover draped over it to prevent a visitor reading what was displayed on it, the compulsory mounted photographs of senior police posing and a family shot. He thought that in the moments before his arrival, with Davies in tow, the room had been sanitized. He had introduced himself only by his first name, and Davies’s. The other men had been George and Rob – and George had said, ‘Why don’t you take a pew, and tell me how I can be of help, Chris—’

  And he had snapped back, with venom and interest, ‘It’s Christopher, thank you.’ He had not come to negotiate, or to be deflected.

  ‘I’m a busy man – yes or no?’

  He watched George fidget and shift on his chair, and his fingers cracked together as he clasped them. His companion, Rob, peered out through the blind’s gaps. George drew air into his lungs, then let it hiss out.

  ‘I’m waiting.’

  George bit his lower lip, whitened it. ’Would this be a matter of national security?’

  ‘I raised from his bed, at three this morning, a deputy assistant commissioner. I am assuming, or I would not have breached your front door, that you were instructed, ordered, to give me your full cooperation. Are you going to obstruct me? In which case I guarantee you will be spending rather more time with your family. Yes or no?’

  Lawson thought George turned as if seeking support from his colleague, but the head was averted. No comfort to be gained there. The man caved: they usually did if kicked hard enough. Clipper Reade had preached that public servants when threatened with an early pension inevitably crumpled. He had found little, from thirty years back, in the creed of Clipper Reade that he could fault.

  A small voice, as if the habit of a professional lifetime had been ditched: ‘Yes.’

  ‘Thank you, and I don’t know why we spent so long getting there.’

  ‘I confirm, with extreme reluctance, that we have an officer inside the home of Josef Goldmann. He is there as part of a criminal investigation into the laundering of money, an investigation mounted by the Serious Crime Directorate. I have never seen, or heard of, anything in the investigation that involves national security.’

  ‘Do you have bugs in the house?’

  ‘Is that question in the interests of national security?’

  ‘Bugs or no bugs?’

  Again the lip was bitten, and the fingers now unwound the shape of a metal paperclip. ‘There are no audio or visual devices in the house. It is swept most days, and – for the same reason – there are no tags on the cars.’

  Lawson leaned back, as if he owned the room, tilted himself, as if he was on home territory. He took pleasure from the obvious intimation that he was detested inside that office. Clipper Reade had said that an intelligence officer could never be loved, should not seek to be … He remembered that huge figure, a beast of a man, the battered hat, the crumpled raincoat, the cheroot, the wisecracks and the homilies … He thought rudeness created domination, and it was needed, and he believed time raced.

  ‘How well has your man done since his insertion?’

  ‘Not as well as we’
d hoped.’

  ‘What’s working against him?’

  ‘The circumstances.’

  It was like drawing teeth, but Christopher Lawson – if need be – could wield pliers and drag out a back wisdom. When he rasped his voice, and the police officer, George, winced under attack, he heard slight gasps from behind him, where Davies sat, as if in reaction to the directness of the frontal assault. No, it was not about negotiation.

  ‘I seldom make idle threats, so listen carefully. If you do not provide me with complete co-operation I give you my solemn promise that you will be clearing your desk and on a lunchtime train home – not to return. Prevarication with me is not an option. So, what circumstances are working against him?’

  George swallowed hard, as if discussing an undercover was a personal hurt to him, and against every instinct. ‘Right, he is the junior in the household. He does school runs and drives the lady – both she and the kids would be possible kidnap targets so he escorts them. He has little to do with Josef Goldmann. Alongside the subject – we don’t call them ‘targets’ any longer, it infringes their human rights – alongside our subject are two Russian-born thugs who do close protection. Then there is Rawlings—’

  ‘Poor old Rawlings.’ Lawson grimaced a smile.

  ‘Rawlings – I don’t understand your comment – is unlikely to be a member of a criminal conspiracy. He’s outside the loop of confidences, but has access and has never shown any sign of utilizing it. I don’t understand what you find amusing. These are serious matters. Officers take considerable risks. This is dangerous and delicate work, no laughing matter.’

  From his briefcase, Christopher Lawson took a sheet of photocopied paper and passed it. It was taken and read. It listed the offence of driving a vehicle with excess alcohol in the blood, and gave the name of the accused.

  George shook his head, pushed the sheet to his sidekick. Lawson saw their frowns, shaken heads, disbelief.

  ‘That’s extraordinary. He doesn’t touch it. This doesn’t make sense.’