Timebomb : A Thriller (9781468300093)

by Seymour, Gerald

  They had walked past a section of the Wall. Seventeen years since it had been breached, and the Cold War, the war of the gods, had been wound down. Yes, certain of it, in Luke Davies’s book, but not Lawson’s … ‘They regret now that they took down so much of it. Should have left it up. A good, clear, understandable world then, not the confused quagmire we now thrash around in. Look at the end of this section, how narrow it is, just the width of a concrete block, but it defined cultures as clearly as if it had been a chasm a mile wide. It’s where I was with Clipper Reade. I yearn for those days again when ideology was the battleground, not this damn faith business.’ They had gone to the boarding point for the boat trip at the Potsdamerplatz, had waited by the pontoon. He had thought Lawson mad, certifiable. At least they had a shrink with them. He would broach it with the guy.

  The voice over the loudspeakers urged him to look forward. Now Lawson reacted. He had been slumped in the plastic chair, not peering out of the windows on which the rain dribbled. He jerked upright, light in his eyes.

  The voice spoke of the approaching Oberbaumbrücke, completed in 1896, the finest bridge construction in nineteenth-century Berlin and …

  Lawson said, ‘This is why I brought you. You needed to feel the width of the river, not just to stand on a bank and look across. We were on the left side, Clipper and I, and Foxglove was on the right where the Wall was. He worked in the east sector’s central telephone exchange. It was always difficult to debrief him, and the tractor-salesman cover was getting thin – about six weeks before Clipper was blown in Budapest. He was useful, and we used exchange students, military people who had the right of access to East Berlin and tourists – anyone with a visa – to bring back tapes, logs and lists of ministry numbers, but he wasn’t important enough for us to mount a full-dress exfiltration operation. You see, he was of no use to us afterwards, only when he was in place. Foxglove was a good agent, but not priceless, and his shelf life was gone.’

  The bridge was misted by the low cloud and the rain dropping from it. Luke Davies’s head was at the window. It had seven low arches of brick with stone facings. A U-bahn train was crossing its top deck, but a lower one seemed empty. There were twin towers in the centre and they straddled the central arch, which their boat headed for. The voice said that the Oberbaumbrücke had been dynamited in 1945 to prevent Soviet troops using it, then rebuilt after Berlin was joined again; the central arch was from the design of a Spanish architect.

  Lawson said, ‘He was on his own, really, Foxglove was. We told the police on this side that “someone” was trying to come that night. They had an inflatable ready and an ambulance was on stand-by, but he had to get halfway. I suppose we’d been running him for six months, Clipper and I, and we’d reckoned him a decent young man. No dinghy available to him, of course, but we’d suggested to Foxglove that he try to get hold of an inner tube to keep himself up, then kick like hell. There were booms and barrage nets on their side, and we didn’t know how he’d cope with them, but that was his problem. We didn’t see him go into the water.’

  The boat splashed foam aside, then slowed in front of the bridge. Davies thought that later in the season, when it was loaded and the sun shone, this would give a better photo opportunity to those wishing to recall a sight of the Oberbaumbrücke. The wake died, and the boat idled. He looked down into the dark depth of the water, and sensed the terror of a man in flight.

  ‘We knew he was in the water only when the searchlight found him. It locked on him. He was on an inner tube, as we’d suggested. Then there was tracer, one round in four, red lines of it. He must have been hit but not badly by one of these first shots. He screamed. Had no chance then. There was concentrated fire on him, not only the machine-gun but from rifles. Then the searchlight lost him, which meant he’d gone under and the tube had been holed. We waited, owed him that. Next time we saw him he was tangled in one of the barrage nets, dead. I was young, a bit cut up about it.’

  He looked across at the left bank, saw old buildings that now seemed derelict, and wondered where Lawson had stood, and the American, where the boat crew had waited and the ambulance people, and seemed to hear the sirens, the crack of the guns, and the lights seemed to dazzle him.

  ‘Clipper didn’t do emotion. Clipper said to me, “Let’s go get a beer.” We went off to a bar, and did just that. Four or five beers, actually, and a half-bottle of schnapps. Spent the small hours in a bar with drunks and pimps, and I learned the creed of the agent-runner from Clipper Reade. He said, “Lose an agent and you go find another.” And he said, “Get close and sentimental to an agent and you get to be useless:” And the dawn was coming up, and he said, “Treat them like dirt in the gutter, and when you’ve finished throw them back there.” We went out into the dawn light, and he said, “Agents are just means to an end, and you owe them nothing.” I brought you here, young man, so you’d know where I’m coming from and where I’m intending to go.”

  They left the boat at the next stop, at the Jannowitzbrücke. Luke Davies no longer thought of Christopher Lawson as mad but reckoned him brutal, cold and utterly detestable. And there was an agent out there who was owed a damn sight more than Foxglove had been given. It was damnable, what was asked of November, the agent of today, not a bloody ghost from the past.

  Carrick was on four-hour turns. Slept for four hours, then sat on a hard upright chair just inside the suite’s outer door, which had the chain fastened.

  Thought of it as pretty much a wasted day because he had learned little, if anything.

  One visitor. A Russian, in a uniform of shaven head, worn leather jacket and boots laced up over the ankle, as if they were required for his role. Must have come when he’d slept and Viktor had done the guard turn. Josef Goldmann had brought the Russian out of the inner room, had escorted him to the outer door and the hotel corridor. Carrick had watched the man amble away, then gone back inside and secured the chain again. He’d noted the face of his Bossman. If he had been filling in the Book, he would have written: ‘Target One had a meeting of at least two hours with unidentified male (Russian) and appeared anxious and under major psychological pressure at the end of it.’ His Bossman lingered in the outer room, lips writhing and throat heaving, as if he weighed the consequences of confiding – did not, but let his hand rest on Carrick’s sleeve, clutched it, then broke the grip and went to the inner room. He looked, Carrick reckoned, more pressured than when he had been chucked into the car after two shots had been fired. Carrick wondered if chickens had come back to roost, but knew no more than what was in front of him to see.

  Chapter 8

  12 April 2008

  Carrick was beside Viktor, who drove. They had left the wide avenues of the city and the squares of the Charlottenburg district behind them. They were on a highway going west. He had not been told their destination, only that at all times he was to be close to his Bossman. He’d nodded, and had been told that they drove to meet his Bossman’s associate, Reuven Weissberg. Words had seared in his mind: Reuven Weissberg will be as ruthless as a ferret in a rabbit warren, and if you fail with him – though we will try, bloody hard, to save you – you are, without question, dead. So, no misunderstandings. Dead. They went between wide forests of birch, and the roofs and walls of fine houses were masked by the trees. Discreet lanes led to them and bore security notices at the junctions with the highway. He could stare at the houses between the trees because it was his job to be wary and to scan outside the windows of the car.

  He felt the hand settle on his shoulder. Josef Goldmann asked him, ‘Do you own property, Johnny?’

  ‘No, sir. ‘Fraid not, sir.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Been moving around. Not really settled enough, sir.’

  ‘This is good property, here. Better down the road. We go to view property.’

  ‘Right, sir.’

  ‘You know, Johnny, it is always better to buy than to rent.’

  ‘I’m sure I’ll get round to it, sir.’

 
; There were digits spinning in his mind. He estimated what a half-decent apartment cost in central London, and how far beyond the reach it was of a police constable – with the capital city’s allowance – who had to repay into an SCD10 bank account every pound, every damn penny, he was paid by the family. He had no place of his own. He was rootless. He flitted between bed-sits and mini-flats that were, most likely, either in a basement without a view or under the eaves in an attic conversion with a view of chimneys and TV aerials. The nearest Johnny Carrick had to home ground was the desk in the Pimlico building that had been allocated him after coming off the importation case and before moving on to the Josef Goldmann investigation. In none of the properties where he had lived since joining SCD10 had there been anything personal to him. He did not do family photographs, or holiday baubles, but lived on sanitized territory, could close a door behind him and feel neither loss nor emptiness. It was right to be bland, noncommittal, with answers. Every detail given, if a part of a legend, offered hostages to fortune and could be checked: the instructors preached that criminals survived on a diet of suspicion. Carrick sensed that the time had come when he would be challenged to maintain his postured identity. He wrapped the duty of the job, like an enveloping cloak, tighter round him. He peered out through the car windows, tilted his head to see into the driver’s mirror and played the part of the bodyguard – had reason to. A man had been close enough to fire two shots, point-blank, and— He saw a bridge ahead, built from heavy steel girders.

  Now his Bossman spoke softly into Viktor’s ear, in Russian. The car was driven into a parking area. Brakes on, a smooth stop. Two lakes here came into a narrow channel that the bridge spanned. At the far side he could see houses half hidden by trees not yet in leaf. At their side, behind them, was a renovated palace.

  His Bossman said, as Carrick opened the door for him, ‘Now we will meet Reuven, an associate in business of mine – stay close – and then he shows me property which I may invest in.’

  ‘I’ll be close, sir.’

  They walked. There was a pavement on each side of the bridge and heavy traffic surged past. He had noted that for part of the journey out from central Berlin, Viktor had driven fast, then glanced at his watch face and slowed for, maybe, five kilometres, as if he were ahead of schedule. They crossed the bridge, and when Carrick looked out over the water he saw small boats with raised sails, swans, grebes and coots. He thought the place pretty and calm.

  Two men approached, both leather-coated, one to the knees, the other to the hips. Both had short-cut hair and hard faces. Carrick, his Bossman and Viktor walked towards them. Carrick was more than halfway across the bridge when he thought of the photograph he had been shown in the narrowboat, of the near-silent movement of a ferret’s pads in a dark, stinking tunnel, and of the cowering rabbits trapped in a cul-de-sac of their warren. He recognized Reuven Weissberg from the photograph that the younger man, Delta, had produced from the file. He seemed to hear every word, and the inflections, of the older man, Golf. Reuven Weissberg wore the shorter leather coat, which was older and frayed, and Carrick assumed it a less prized possession than that of the man standing a couple of paces in front. He did not do stereotypes. The prejudices of allocating men and women to pigeon-holes was dangerous to the culture of an undercover, level one. A prejudice, stereotyped, would have made him look for caricature Jewish features. There were none.

  They came off the bridge. Behind the waiting men was a large villa that had decades-old bullet pocks in its walls. Its windows were boarded, and skirting it was a wide path for cyclists and those promenading beside the lake. He saw the villa, the walkers and a cyclist who pulled a mini-trailer in which a child was perched, because it was his role as a bodyguard to scan.

  Over his shoulder, ‘Johnny, you should meet my associate, Reuven Weissberg.’

  The man in the long leather jacket, which had more status and was obviously the more expensive, took a half-pace forward, as if he had heard what the Bossman said.

  So easy … Carrick’s mind raced. He had not done this exercise in role-play during his training. So simple and therefore so easy to make the mistake. He had been shown the photograph of Reuven Weissberg and it was a good likeness, would have been taken by the German police, an organized-crime unit, within the last six months. As his legs went leaden, Carrick absorbed the extent of the trick offered him. If he went a half-stride beyond the long leather coat and greeted the man in the hip-length coat, he demonstrated that he had been shown an identifying photograph.

  Carrick reached out his hand to the man in the long coat, whom he knew was not Weissberg. He tried a brief smile and his heart pounded. He said, ‘I’m Johnny – pleased to meet you, sir.’

  There was laughter, not warm but cold, and no hand was pushed forward.

  His Bossman said, ‘No, that is not Reuven. That is his friend.’

  The one he knew to be Reuven Weissberg now came a step closer. The hand was extended. Carrick flushed, as if he had made an error. There was an exchange, in German, as his hand was held in a vice grip, between Reuven Weissberg and Josef Goldmann. Then Carrick’s hand was freed and the two men hugged. Carrick did not understand what was said.

  His Bossman turned to him. ‘My associate wants to know, Johnny, why I have brought you with me. I said you were here because you had saved my life, and that is a good enough reason.’

  Good enough? Carrick saw that Reuven Weissberg pondered on it, frowned fractionally, then turned to walk. He also saw huge properties, masked by trees, and thought them to be the ones that might be purchased to facilitate laundering, for investment.

  He believed he had passed a test, did not delude himself that it was the last – and felt the sting of vomit in his throat.

  ‘It is the Glienicker bridge,’ Lawson said. ‘Two hundred metres across, and it’s where we did the big prisoner exchanges. Did it when they had someone to trade, and we did. Incredibly exciting, with a choreography all of its own. Two men starting to walk from either end when the second hand of synchronized watches reached the hour, and crossing in the centre – they never seemed to look at each other as they passed. See that building on the other side, young man? That used to be stuffed tight with the East’s security people, a sardine tin of armed men. Took months to set an exchange up, and it could all go down at the last moment. It was the American sector, of course, but Clipper used to bring me here for the theatre of it – and we’d go across there, the Schloss built as a hunting lodge for Prince Karl, the brother of Friedrich Wilhelm the Third, and there was a café and—’

  ‘Don’t tell me, Mr Lawson. You’d have a pot of tea together.’

  ‘Yes, we did – most times.’

  He was staring across the expanse of the bridge, and on the far side was Königstrasse and the wide road on into Potsdam. Lawson felt, almost, joyous, reckoned himself blessed to have been brought here. They had travelled, again, in two vehicles. The woman, codename Charlie, had driven the car carrying himself and Davies, following the minibus, Deadeye at its wheel. They were mob-handed that morning. Deadeye had now pulled off at the approach to the bridge over the Wannsee, and had stayed in the minibus with Bugsy and Shrinks. On either side of the bridge, on the pavements, were Adrian and Dennis, the stalkers. Lawson found it hard, at that distance, and with the bridge’s slight hump, to follow the targets but they’d had a good view of November and Target One crossing, a reasonable glimpse of the meeting, and that had gone well. He was wired, from a transmitter on a harness on his back, a microphone in his sleeve at the wrist and a button for speech in his pocket and a moulded earpiece, to Bugsy.

  Lawson raised his arm and his cufflink brushed his mouth. His finger, in the pocket, held down the button. ‘Golf here. Move off, maintain visual contact. Out.’

  Heard a little chuckle. ‘Best you stay with the trade talk, Golf. We call it eyeball. Will do, out.’

  The sun was on his face. He thought years were propelled off his shoulders: age was shed like a snake’s skin. The
minibus came past and headed on to the bridge.

  Then something was nagging at him. ‘I suppose you had to be pretty high up the pecking order to get a Glienicker swap – assuming he’d been arrested, higher than Foxglove was. What counted for an acceptable swap?’

  ‘If the man in their cells was one of our high fliers or, indeed, if he was one of us.’

  ‘Is November “one of us”?’

  ‘That is a provocative and pointless question.’

  ‘I just wanted to know whether I should keep a couple of beers handy in my kit, and a few teabags … just in case.’

  The car pulled up.

  Lawson said, ‘If you believe that Haystack depends on your presence – the participation of a junior – you delude yourself. I would imagine there is a flight for Heathrow out of Tempelhof every two hours, and I’m sure there are seats available.’

  The young man slipped, sullen, into the back of the car, and Lawson took the front seat. He anticipated now that the pace of events would quicken. Charlie, his cuckoo, drove over the bridge, and at its highest point he could see Adrian and Dennis on different sides of the path to the right, meandering. Ahead of them was the little group with the agent – he thought Luke Davies decent enough but lacking spine and needing to learn, fast, the realities of the trade – and they had stopped in front of a villa that had scaffolding across its façade. The agent stood away to the left, as though isolated.

  Now money had usurped – the talk of money.