Timebomb : A Thriller (9781468300093)

by Seymour, Gerald

  ‘What do you think I am? Some sort of fucking robot?’

  The kids had their sweets, and pushed back out, and again the woman waited on them.

  ‘What did you come here for? What was the excuse used?’

  ‘To buy a tube of mints.’

  ‘Well, buy them, young man.’ Lawson turned to Luke Davies. ‘Go on, buy a pocketful for him. You’re moving on, what’s the destination?’

  ‘Don’t know, haven’t been told,’ his man said. ‘Look, what we have to do is simple enough, we—’

  ‘Whose confidence do you have, and whose enmity?’

  ‘Reuven believes in me – not Viktor and not Mikhail. But if you were close enough to intervene when my kneecap was on the line, you’d have known that, wouldn’t you?’

  He saw the flush in the cheeks and the blaze in the eyes of short-fuse temper. ‘We were close enough …’ He had oiled. Didn’t believe in splashing it liberally, thought the brusque tone better, like that was a short-cut to a slap on the cheeks. ‘Now, are we doing inquests or are we looking forward? Cop on, and get a grip. Should you have a wire on you?’

  ‘A sweep’s just been done on the room, and on me.’

  ‘Understood.’

  ‘What we have to do is this. We need a system of meeting, or connecting, having communication every few hours. And I have to know what I’m expected to learn about. It’s that simple.’

  ‘No, young man.’ Lawson stood his full height – he hadn’t the bulk and weight that had made Clipper Reade formidable – and jabbed his finger repeatedly into the agent’s chest, as if it was an emphasis tool. ‘What is simple is that I make decisions and I exercise authority at all times. As I said, your one job – only job – is to be up against Reuven Weissberg. Later, when you’ve got to where he’s taking you, I may – might – consider a wire on you. Not possible today, but an option for the future. Only a beacon wire. Do the job that’s given you, and only that job. And – it’s exercising me – why is Reuven Weissberg demanding you at his side?’

  ‘He was shot, had a flesh wound. That was in Moscow. When that creep came after Josef Goldmann, and I – well, Goldmann boasts about it. I’m the bloody angel.’

  ‘Is that so? Very fortunate for us …’ His little moment of wry irony was lost on the man. Time pressed, wasn’t there for wasting. ‘And you don’t know where the end of the road is?’

  ‘Do you not listen? No, I do not. Short term is what I know.’

  ‘I doubt we’ve all afternoon to converse. What’s short term?’

  ‘He’s showing me the Old City, don’t know why. We’re going to leave from there. Him and me are walking, then the hoods pick us up, and I don’t know where we go then … Are you really close to me?’

  ‘You couldn’t get a cigarette paper through the gap, believe me.’

  ‘It’s not fucking easy, you know.’ The head hung and the voice muttered.

  Lawson took the seven tubes of mints that Luke Davies had bought, thrust them into his man’s hand. Did the smile, the confident one. ‘Nobody said it was.’

  ‘I’m isolated.’

  ‘Just keep cuddled up with Weissberg.’

  ‘If I lose his patronage, I’m dead.’

  ‘But you won’t, will you?’ He pushed him out. Took his collar, led him to the door, had Davies open it, and did the push, sent him out on to the pavement, saw him half stumble, then regain his balance and walk away. And Lawson saw the bright paper wrapping of the mint tubes in his hand. He counted to ten. ‘I’d have liked to give it longer. Can’t.’

  He went outside, and Davies closed the shop door after them. Their man turned the corner, seemed bowed, and was gone.

  ‘Well, what’s your gripe?’

  Luke Davies said, ‘He’s all but done for. He’s screwed up. There’s not much more left in him.’

  Lawson sniffed. Seemed to him that an entire nation had smoked on that street, and he took the air into his lungs of a thousand smoked cigarettes, smoked cigars and smoked pipes and felt better for it. ‘He’ll do. He’ll last.’

  ‘For how long?’

  ‘Long enough, because it’s near the end. More to the point, young man, will we last the course?’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘You will. It’s us that the pressure’s on now, believe me.’

  They walked back down the pavement, past Katie Jennings, and went towards where the others waited. In front of the hotel, on the far side of the street, he slowed, sauntered and tossed his head back so that he could admire the height and majesty of a modern hotel. In so doing he took the opportunity to see his man stop beside one of the two cars and stand apart from the hoods. Could he have guaranteed it? Not with confidence. Would his man last the course? No alternative existed. The man stood alone, and his shoulders were hunched, and there seemed about him, to Lawson, despair.

  High up and with a crow’s view, Reuven Weissberg had his face pressed hard against the window.

  He saw Carrick join Mikhail and Viktor, saw also the man who watched the cars, saw Mikhail look down sharply at his watch, then Viktor, and saw the slump in Carrick’s back.

  He wanted to believe in the man’s loyalty. He craved the loyalty that had been the possession of Josef Goldmann. He had himself ordered the killing of men protected by bodyguards, and had made the equation that – in the crisis moment – the bodyguards hesitated and looked first for their own safety, then for the survival of the paymaster. Each time he had ordered the killing of protected men, in Perm, Moscow and Berlin, the bodyguards had lived. The blood on the street had not been theirs. And he could well remember the moment, the few seconds, when he had faced the pistol barrel as he came down the bank’s steps, and Mikhail had not thrust forward to stand in the way of the aim. They said, the bodyguards, that they were not ‘bullet-catchers’. Could remember the hammer blow in his upper arm, the pain, losing the ability to stand, and then, only then, Mikhail had reacted. The memory was clear. Mikhail had fired, killed, had had the look of pride, satisfaction, triumph, had picked up the spent cartridge cases from his weapon, then had gone to the man who paid him, knelt and examined the wound. Josef Goldmann told a different story.

  He wanted to believe in Johnny Carrick’s loyalty, but had agreed to one last hurdle being put in the man’s path.

  Reuven Weissberg checked his room a last time, then the anteroom, closed the outer door after him and went down the corridor to the lift. He craved to be able to place trust in a man’s loyalty. He had been to the funerals of many men who had put their safety in the hands of bodyguards; men who had ordered before death three-metre-high gravestones of malachite or serpentine, dead men on whose corpses vodka would be poured and banknotes scattered to see them comfortable in the ‘afterlife’, decaying men whose waxen cheeks had been kissed by living rivals. He didn’t know of an avoritet, alive or dead, who could swear on the loyalty of a bodyguard.

  His grandmother had schooled him in suspicion, but he knew her story of the one man in whom she had laid trust, knew it well.

  It bloomed. It had no right to be there but it was. In the grimness of that place, in its awfulness, it grew.

  How could it have been nurtured there, love? I mean love, not the coupling of dogs when a bitch has her season. I mean tenderness, gentleness, shyness. We thought it was love.

  I didn’t know how long love could last. My father and mother had loved and would have believed it would endure until death took them in old age; they wouldn’t have believed that they would be separated and pushed naked down the Himmelstrasse by men who didn’t acknowledge love. Myself, I didn’t believe in the possibility of love until chance threw me close to Samuel. For us, love was stolen moments. Moments in the food queues that were kept apart by the Ukrainian guards when our eyes met. It might have been when I worked in the sewing room at a bench beside the window and he was taken out on a work party that went by our hut. He would look at the window, and his face would light. It might be when we stood near to each other
in the exercise yard before we were sent to our barracks for the night and we would simply look at each other and have nothing to say. It might have been when we touched hands, his fingers rough and calloused from the forest work and mine bruised black from using needles at the sewing bench.

  Once he brought me a flower. He said that it was an orchid and grew wild in the forest. It was small, delicate, with violet petals. He had carried it from the forest inside the front of his tunic. When he gave it me in the evening it was already without life, but I could imagine it when it grew and flourished. I could have killed him if I had kissed his cheek in gratitude for the orchid. Physical contact between prisoners, male and female, was forbidden. Had I kissed him and been seen from the central watchtower or by the Ukrainians at the gate of Camp 1, he might have been shot, and I might have been … I took the flower into our barracks hut and laid it between the planks of my bunk and the straw palliasse that was my mattress.

  We lived beside death, we walked with death. Our love might survive that day, or next week, we didn’t know. It was clear to us that the old role of the camp was ending, and the transports of those destined for extermination were rarer. None of us believed that we would survive the camp’s closure. It might have been at any hour of any day of any week that we would be taken from our huts, whipped to the Himmelstrasse, terrified, screaming, stripping, then be running down the last stretch of the path to where the doors were open and waiting for us; at the last we would sing, us women, the anthem and demand of God why He had forsaken us.

  Because of my love for Samuel, I was not given more strength. Now I had another to care about, which weakened me.

  I gave trust. By doing so I lost a little precious strength. I hated to do it, give trust. It was dragged from me.

  It was 13 October. I walked one way in the compound and Samuel walked the other. I had seen men slip away from one of the male barracks huts, and among them had been Pechersky, the Russian officer, and Leon Feldhendler … and he told me what I should do the next day. He walked north to south and east to west, and I did circuits that were south to north and west to east, and when we passed he told me a little more.

  I should try to find thick, warm clothes and wear them the next day, 14 October.

  The next day was the first day of Succos, which follows Yom Kippur, the time of Atonement. I was not good in my faith, but in the camp it didn’t matter to me.

  I should beg or steal the heaviest, strongest boots I could find and wear them the next afternoon.

  The holy days of Succos celebrate God’s protection of the Jews who had escaped from captivity in Egypt and wandered for forty days in the desert before coming to the land of Israel.

  The next day, in the afternoon, I should watch for him. I should try to stay close to him. I should follow where he led. Whatever happened, whatever, I should stay near him.

  He broke away. He had done three circuits. I realized the enormity of what he had done, had given me complete trust.

  I made one more circuit. I seemed crushed by the weight of the lights above the fence. It had begun to rain. The drops bounced and glistened in the power of the lights, and some of the drips came from the barbs on the wire at the top of the fence. There was a fence I could see, beyond it was a ditch – which I had not seen – and past the ditch a minefield. Beyond the minefield was the forest. He had sensed that I returned his love, and had trusted me as I had him. He did not know for certain that I wouldn’t go to a capo, one of those who thought collaboration with the barbarian would extend a lifespan, to a Ukrainian or to one of the SS officers. Some would have.

  I was prepared to trust him, him alone.

  To wear extra clothing for warmth, and stronger boots, to watch for him and follow him on the first day of the festival of Succos meant an attempt to escape. I wasn’t an idiot. Idiots didn’t survive at the camp. Was it possible that we – starved and exhausted – could defeat the power of the ‘master race’?

  I didn’t sleep that night. Who would have? I alone in the women’s barracks knew, and I alone had the broken, faded beauty of a flattened and lifeless orchid under my palliasse. The next day, in the afternoon, I would learn what was possible and what was not – and would learn where trust took me.

  The two cars had gone in convoy. Carrick was with Reuven Weissberg, and the man who had polished the bodywork had driven. They had been dropped by a shallow mound of dead winter grass, and the signs said they were on the junction of Ul. Mila and Ul. Zamenhofa.

  The cars pulled away fast, but Carrick had seen the look, keen and hating, of Mikhail, and that of Josef Goldmann, which was expressionless, as if in denial. He couldn’t answer the question bouncing in his mind: why had he been taken into the city to walk with Reuven Weissberg?

  Not for him to talk. For a full minute Reuven Weissberg stood by the mound in silence. Carrick searched for the explanation, but it didn’t come.

  Then Weissberg turned to him. ‘You are not a Jew, Johnny?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Do you have a prejudice against Jews, Johnny?’

  ‘I don’t think so, sir. I hope not.’

  ‘Do you know Jews?’

  ‘No, sir. Before being employed by Mr Goldmann, I didn’t know any.’

  ‘Do you know what happened to the Jews of this country, in this city, here?’

  ‘We did a bit of it at school, sir. That’s all I know.’

  ‘There was a ghetto here for Jews, Johnny.’ Reuven Weissberg spoke quietly, almost with reverence, and Carrick thought it was humility. ‘Jews from all over Warsaw and the near towns were brought here. Nearly half a million Jews were in the ghetto behind walls. They were taken from here to the death camps, those who were not already dead from starvation and epidemics. In April 1943, the Germans decided to clear the ghetto and send the last survivors to the camps. Weapons had been smuggled in, enough to start a resistance, and more were captured … As you are not a Jew, Johnny, you may not be interested, and I will keep the story of this place short. It was called the “ghetto uprising” and it lasted a few days short of a month. Below this place was the last bunker of the resistance – it was known as ZOB, which, loosely, is Jewish Combat Organization – and the leaders committed suicide rather than be taken. The name of the Jewish commander was Mordechai Anieliewicz, but if you are not a Jew you would not have learned of him. Then the ghetto was finished and all the Jews who lived were murdered … but this is where the bunker was, where they fought.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  ‘Why do you thank me?’

  ‘For teaching me, sir, what I didn’t know.’

  They walked back up the street. By the edge of a park where the old leaves of the long-gone autumn were still not swept up, there was a monument of big granite blocks. Set into it was a carved grey façade in stone of near-naked bodies, the women stripped to the waist, the men with bared chests, and some held weapons.

  ‘There are many monuments in this city, Johnny, but they do not bring back the dead.’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Would you despise a man, Johnny, who looks to the past – to what was done?’

  Carrick said, ‘If I was a Jew, sir, and if those things were done to my people, my blood, then I’d not think it right they were forgotten.’

  For a moment, Reuven Weissberg let his hand rest on Carrick’s sleeve. They crossed the street.

  Carrick looked back at the gaunt power of the monument. ‘Sir, did they have no help? Didn’t the Christian Poles help them?’

  ‘The Christians came. They stood behind the perimeter made by the German Army. They wore their Sunday best clothes and they watched the destruction of the ghetto. They lined the street when it was finished to see the Jews, their countrymen, marched away to the trains to go to their deaths. There was no help.’

  Carrick couldn’t read him. There was no expression in his words, their passion withheld. On the skyline were the spires and domes of churches, and he thought it was there that the Old City wou
ld be.

  *

  ‘Where are you going?’

  Molenkov spoke: ‘We go, retired officers, to a military reunion to be held in Minsk.’

  Two of the Customs officials were by the open window. One was bent low to hear Molenkov and the other examined their passports.

  ‘What arm of the military did you serve with?’

  ‘State Security, in the field of national defence. We were both privileged to serve in areas of exceptional importance.’ Molenkov had smiled, then tapped his medals, and the official chuckled.

  ‘And may I assume, esteemed Colonel and esteemed Major, that an unpleasant duty at a reunion such as you will attend might be the taking of drink?’

  Molenkov turned to his friend Yashkin … Behind him, close to the back of the seat was the fucking great lump under the tarpaulin that was worth a life sentence in gaol, and a half-share of a million American dollars, and had in its pit the warmth of a four-kilo perfect sphere of plutonium, Pu-239. He made a face of the utmost gravity. ‘Major Yashkin, will there be occasion in Minsk when we are among colleagues for the consumption of alcohol?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘Never.’ He beamed at the official, shed the gravity.

  Yashkin chipped in: ‘We would never consume alcohol before breakfast, never. But, believe me, we take breakfast early.’

  Laughter pealed around them. Their passports were handed back. Sweat ran on Molenkov’s body. He heard one official mutter to the other, as they were waved forward, ‘Old farts, they’ll be drunk as rats by each mid-morning. Sad bastards.’ Beside him, Yashkin started the Polonez.

  A kilometre ahead was the Belarus Customs shed. Over it the flag hung limp in the rain. Beyond was the horizon, cloud and treetops. Molenkov couldn’t stop his hands shaking and the sweat was now on his forehead, forming silky drips from his nose. He took out his handkerchief and wiped his face, then his neck. He clutched it in his fist, screwed it up, then laid his other hand on the fist but the trembling continued. They were over a white line that was hard to see because many thousands of tyres each day went over it and the paint was nearly obliterated. They went up a slight hill and tucked into a lane as far from the centre of operations as possible.