Timebomb : A Thriller (9781468300093)

by Seymour, Gerald

‘Not the faintest idea where those names come from. You’ll find them rather ordinary, but that’s their trade and they do it well. They represent the mobile and foot surveillance element of our team. They will have particular responsibility for tracking November and reporting on where he leads us. They have the additional responsibility of checking, by counter-surveillance, whether November is under suspicion and tailed – “dry-cleaning”, in their jargon. From my experience of them, they’re seldom satisfied with the resources available, and will bleat they need a dozen operatives, not two. We cut our cloth according to our budget and the practicality of Haystack. There are two of them. Next, Shrinks.’

  A man grinned, waved a fist in an airy gesture. Davies thought him only three years or four older than himself. There was a buzz of confidence about him, he didn’t have to talk to demonstrate it. He was squatting easily on his haunches in the walkway. The chill off the river did not seem to affect him: sleeves rolled up, a safari-style waistcoat worn loosely, a wooden imitation of an animal tooth hung from a leather thong at his throat, and his hair was a messy tangle, coming down on to his collar.

  ‘He’s always been Shrinks since he started to work with us. He tediously protests that a “shrink” is a psychiatrist and that he is a psychologist. Ignore this. It seems standard today that such a profession is regarded as necessary on a field operation … We seemed to manage in the past pretty well without one, but I must live with it. He will evaluate, as best he can, the morale and state of mind of November as Haystack progresses, and whether he is capable of continuing to operate effectively. Whether I take a jot of notice of his opinions remains to be seen. Then, we have Deadeye.’

  He was rather small and sat cross-legged on the walkway, eyes roving. Davies had noted the facial wound and the halting way in which he had walked to the Embankment. It had taken him several minutes, well into Lawson’s introduction of the electronics guy, to recall where he had seen him before, where he could place the jacket and the hooded sweatshirt.

  ‘He’s been Deadeye as long as I’ve known him. He’s responsible for the protection of our backs. We may get to a stage where we believe a solitary individual is inadequate for that purpose. Then we’ll swallow the complaint and make do. He is to be listened to at all times and his word, alongside mine, is law. You will find him at the best of times to be sour and ill-tempered, as he is now. The degree of animosity arises from his injured nose – suffered in Haystack’s cause – and, should he drop his trousers and underpants, you would see that his testicles are quite severely bruised … He is an experienced marksman, shoots straight.’

  Davies recalled the charge, the scuffled struggle, the crack of the pistol, the knee going into the groin, the clatter of the weapon into the gutter, and the roar of the car powering away down the street. Saw everything, but struggled to comprehend its meaning … then realized his mouth gaped open at the implication.

  ‘Now, the Miss in our ranks, C for cuckoo, so she is Charlie.’

  She was apart from them and her frown seemed chiselled on her forehead. She had dressed that morning in jeans, layers of sweatshirts, and tough hiking boots. To Davies, it seemed that nothing about her was designed to attract, as if she had forsworn sensuality, and he thought that made her prettier than she intended, but not beautiful. He remembered how her fingers had worked at November’s muscles, to lift him. He thought her stronger than November, and hard.

  ‘I didn’t ask for Charlie, but her presence with us was a small compromise I felt obliged to make. In gaining control of November, and ditching the people who formerly looked after his case, it was suggested I take her on board. She knows November, his capabilities and weaknesses, and has worked from its inception on the police investigation that deals with the money-launderer – our Target One, Josef Goldmann. If she steps over the line I’ve drawn for her, she’ll be on the plane home without time to blow her nose. That’s it.’

  There were no questions. Luke Davies thought these the sort of professional operatives who did not need to hear their own voices. He would have admitted it, Christopher Lawson – prize shit and alpha-grade bully – had done it well and had achieved domination expertly.

  ‘In conclusion, they fly this morning to Berlin, and we follow. My colleague Delta has dipped into a travel agent’s computer and learned where they have booked accommodation. My assessment is that Berlin is a staging post. Where they, and we, move to, I don’t know. Where an end game may be played out I simply do not know, but wherever it is, I promise we’ll be there.’

  The Bug river swelled and its level rose. That week, the rainfall over the Volhynian-Podolian hills in the central regions of the Ukraine was at record levels, and the sluice gates of the canal that linked the Bug to the Dnieper river were opened in the hope that the huge volume of surplus water could be taken up the Bug’s flow. With an angry, mud-laden power, the Bug spewed out of the heartlands of the Ukraine, then took its course along the frontier with south-east Poland, and its route swung north.

  The river, rising by the hour, formed a new, more formidable frontier where it separated Poland from Ukraine and from Belarus. Other great European rivers had done that work before, but politics and alliances had changed. The Elbe was no longer the boundary between East and West as it had been for forty years. Briefly, the Odra river that divided the recent greater Germany from western Poland had acted as a fault across the northern area of the continent. The most recent realignment of cultures and regimes gave that role to the Bug.

  At a United-Nations-sponsored conference to draw up a framework for the Protection and Use of Transboundary Watercourses, a scientist said to a colleague, ‘To swim in the Bug is pretty near to suicide. Personally, I’d eat nothing grown within several kilometres of it. That foul water spills out over the agricultural plains.’

  Where it meets the Polish border, the Bug is a filthy drain. Too high now for a fisherman going with a pole rod after carp for food. But in late summer when the Bug is at normal height, a fisherman would be insane, or near starvation, to eat his catch. The river carries extreme levels of pesticides and herbicides from agriculture, toxic chemicals that include heavy metals and phosphorus from industrial wastelands, and the untreated sewage from many of the three million people living within its basin. The Bug’s strength, as it approached the moment when the banks would break, was awesome – a power without mercy.

  The scientist finished his coffee. ‘I don’t know whether you’ve heard the forecasts – no? Particularly severe rain over Ukraine. Floods by the end of the week.’

  The Bug marked barriers that were clear to the eye and obvious to the mind: the Catholic faith of Poland divided from the Orthodox of Ukraine and Belarus; the democracy of western Europe and the Russian-dominated society of the neighbours. Old enemies squared up on that river, and old enmities were kept alive by it, but apart. As the waters rose, lapping at defence walls, the river Bug – had it a living soul – seemed to have taken on a brooding, resentful anger, as if it dared men to challenge its thrust.

  The colleague finished a last cake. ‘And the floods distribute more of the filth. Don’t quote me, I never want to see that place again. To me, it’s damned and dangerous.’

  Reuven Weissberg asked, ‘Who is it? Who’s he bringing?’

  Mikhail answered, ‘A minder. An English minder.’

  ‘Is Viktor not with him?’

  ‘He is, and an English minder – a new man.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘There was an incident yesterday. He was impressed by the reaction of the new man.’

  She moved, like a wraith, into and out of the room. His grandmother listened but did not contribute.

  Reuven asked, ‘What did Viktor say?’

  Mikhail answered, ‘I haven’t spoken to him.’

  ‘I’m perplexed as to why Josef would bring a new man with him, at this time. Where is the sense of it?’

  ‘There was not the opportunity for explanations.’

  His grandmother was at the d
oor, watched him. Her head was cocked forward to hear better and a wisp of hair, pure white, lay across the lobe of her right ear. She would not comment unless her opinion was asked. He did not ask: it had been dinned into Reuven Weissberg since he was a child at her knee that trust should rarely be given and then only with great caution. Her mind was moulded, he knew, by a place where trust had not existed.

  ‘Josef lives in London, the life of the fat pig. Has his mind softened? Could he be mistaken?’

  ‘Perhaps, but it would surprise me if Viktor was. It’s what Viktor is for – to prevent mistakes.’

  Reuven Weissberg exploited the mistakes of others. When he was still a teenager, an avoritet had agreed to share the pickings from a part of Perm’s taxi trade, and before his nineteenth birthday he had pushed aside that avoritet and had answered the man’s protests by beating him unconscious. Back from the military, he had sensed the weakness of an avoritet who was losing control against rivals for the meat stalls of the open market. He had put in his own boys – Mikhail and Viktor among them – seen off the rivals at gunpoint, and put that avoritet in the Kama river. Mistakes had made openings for him in Moscow, and more mistakes in Berlin had given advantage. Mistakes stripped men of their status, left them on a pavement in a blood pool, or in an oil drum, with hardening concrete, bouncing on the bed of a great river.

  ‘Did you say to Josef that he shouldn’t bring a stranger?’

  ‘He said he was coming, and that it was not for discussion.’

  It did not have to be said – his grandmother eyed him from the door, suspicion in her eyes – but a mistake brought every avoritet down. And concern had settled on Mikhail’s face: no avoritet chose a time to walk away from the power, influence, status, wealth. It all lasted until a mistake was made. So much to plan for in the days ahead, and the talk among them – time wasted – was of a minder his launderer brought with him.

  ‘When the stranger comes, before business is done,’ Reuven had the smile of a stalking cat, ‘we will look at him, and if we like him it will be good for him, and if we do not …’

  The increments and the policewoman were in a Transit ahead of them.

  A pecking order of seniority was clear to Luke Davies. He and Lawson were chauffeured by a driver from the Service’s pool. About fifty questions had rampaged in his mind, but his silence was governed by the need to choose where to start. They were on the motorway, going west, and had passed the first sign for the airport turn-off. He had wondered how it would be in the Transit, had imagined a quiet murmur of voices as the team bonded to the necessary level of effective co-operation. He reckoned bonding would have low priority for Lawson, but those questions jarred in his head. He had, finally, determined where to start.

  I suppose this is all down to Clipper, his legacy, the director general had said.

  Lawson had said, I think Clipper, from what I recall, was clear on such a situation … You use what’s available. As I said, he’s what we have …

  ‘Do you take questions, Mr Lawson?’

  A word puzzle on the back page of a newspaper was interrupted. ‘I do, yes, if they’re relevant.’

  He could have asked about the lack of liaison with friendly agencies, the lack of provenance in the Haystack operation, the lack of planning and the rush to action. Instead he asked, ‘Who is he? I believe I’ve the right to know. Seems he’s a bit of an oracle, put on a pedestal by you and the DG. Who’s Clipper?’

  Looking into those clear eyes, he saw what he imagined were minute cogs turning as if an apparatus was at work; what should he be told, how much need a junior know? Then, remarkable, there seemed to be a softening in Lawson’s face – as if he’d forgotten himself. He let his jaw sag from the normal aggressive jut – and a limp smile spread.

  ‘He was from the Agency. He was Clipper Reade. He did central Europe out of Berlin.’

  ‘What did he look like?’

  ‘Big, what we would today call obese, and tall with it. Had a fine shock of hair but it was mostly under a trilby. Smoked cheroots. Had a voice that could be a whisper or a foghorn. He was pretty well known throughout the seventies and—’

  ‘How does he get to stand on the pedestal?’

  The chauffeur took them on to the airport’s feeder road.

  ‘Don’t interrupt, just listen. When kids interrupt I fancy it’s to hear their own voices. He did a cover of being a salesman for spare parts in Czechoslovakian-made tractors. Could produce anything for the Romanians, Bulgarians, Poles or Democratic Germans when their tractor fleets packed up. We never quite knew how he’d landed the contract, but he had and it was a miracle of achievement. Amazing how many collectivized farms with broken tractors seemed to be on the edge of a runway used by the Soviet’s bomber fleets and interceptor aircraft, and how many farms on the Baltic coast overlooked their naval facilities. For almost ten years he swanned through those countries with officials from economic-development or agriculture ministries eating out of his hand. If you knew your history of the Service, had read it up in the archive, you wouldn’t need to be told. He was a genius at suborning agents, but most of all he had a nose for his work. Got me? A nose that sensed the frailties of men, and how they could be used. It permitted him to second-guess opponents, to anticipate, to act when others would hang back. I was privileged to work alongside Clipper Reade, and for nine months my junior was Pettigrew. In your modern jargon, Davies, “icon” is an overused word, but Clipper Reade was truly iconic. Of his generation, he was the finest intelligence officer.’

  ‘And he handed down words of wisdom that you cling to.’ Said tersely as a statement, not as a question.

  ‘Because you don’t understand your response is sarcasm. The DG and I know otherwise. Clipper was of an age before the computers you rely on, before analysis of El Int ruled. In his day, and mine – and the DG’s – officers were happy to get their feet and hands dirty. They were prepared to exist at the sharp end. Does that give you an idea of who Clipper was?’

  Luke Davies pursed his lips, looked hard at him, and thought he hacked at the coal face of the Good Old Days, bloody days that were long gone. ‘Not quite finished – what happened to him?’

  ‘Busted, of course. Inevitable. Scrambled clear from Budapest not more than a dozen hours before he was due to be picked up, made it over the Austrian border, incredible in itself. Couldn’t last for ever, but was pretty damn good while it did.’

  ‘And drinks all round, back in Berlin?’

  ‘A few taken, yes—’

  He interrupted. ‘But not party time for the networks left behind. Tell me. Arrested, tortured, imprisoned, shot?’

  There was the roar of aircraft on the runway. They went down into the Heathrow approach tunnel and dead yellow light bathed them.

  The softness was gone, the hardness returned and the jaw protruded. Lawson said coldly, ‘They were agents. Volunteers. They chose their own road. Agents never last, never can. Months if they’re lucky, weeks if not. Agents don’t last if they’re where you want them, at the heart of the matter – you’ve much to learn. They get burned.’

  Carrick was jolted, shaken. The cabin shuddered and rattled. He remembered those landings at Basra when the transport aircraft had come down in a corkscrew approach, then flattened out and hit the runway hard – but it was Berlin, which was not a combat zone.

  He turned to Josef Goldmann and smiled politely but ruefully, as if to say he understood and sympathized. His Bossman had one fist clinging to Carrick’s sleeve and the other to Viktor’s, his skin was milky pale and bore a sheen of sweat. His Bossman was, the file Katie had prepared said, a major player in international crime. He laundered money for Russian mafiya gangs, among others. He was a target for intelligence guys defending national security – and was shit scared of flying. He had bad shakes if there was turbulence. Carrick did not have that fear: he could jump from a moving aircraft with a ’chute on his back, or from a tethered balloon that was eight hundred feet up. For him, the fear was of being o
n the plot and alone.

  Viktor pushed Josef Goldmann’s hand off his sleeve, while Carrick let the other stay. For the flight out of Heathrow, the Bossman had been wedged between them.

  They went through Customs, then to Immigration. It wasn’t Josef Goldmann’s name on the passport he offered, but his photograph was there.

  Carrick did not know where the back-up people were, how close or how far. He carried his own bag, as Viktor did, and he had said that Josef Goldmann should carry his so the minders would each be free to react.

  A man met them, heavy, muscled, and hugged Viktor. They were led to a Mercedes. He thought of his own world as having been tipped on to the floor of the narrowboat by the men who had corralled him. Everyone said, when they were volunteered, that the moment never came to spin on a heel and walk in the other direction.

  They were driven towards Berlin. Carrick tried to act out his role, the bodyguard’s, but found himself staring listlessly at the streets of a city he did not know.

  Chapter 7

  11 April 2008

  Carrick was first out. He did the routine. The car braked, the doorman advanced, but he was out and checked both ways on the pavement. Had reason to. How had the bastard missed at that range, so close? But the routine took his attention, not the events of a previous day. He would work out how the bastard had failed in the hit some other time. He stood across the car door.

  The street was clear of dawdling vehicles and he did not identify a loiterer, just people, nothing to show that their business was in any way extraordinary or threatened him. The only gawpers were on the far pavement, separated from the hotel entrance by the traffic flow. Trouble was, Carrick had to act out the part of a man with more than two years’ active experience of bodyguard work, not the two weeks that had been allocated him. On the bodyguard course, more trouble: the teaching was for mob-handed protection, maybe seven or eight men deployed, maybe with an outer screen of police officers. Carrick knew nothing of what to expect. Maybe at that hour of the day everyone – old men in suits, young men in jeans and sweats or hoods, women with shopping bags and women with pushchairs, kids skiving off school, the elderly wrapped against the cold – hurried in Berlin, except two men on the far side of a six-lane street who watched indifferently.