Timebomb : A Thriller (9781468300093)

by Seymour, Gerald

  The camp was then closed, abandoned, destroyed and made to look like a farm. The huts were taken down. Work parties were brought to Sobibor, shifted more soil into the pit and levelled the ground. By the next summer it was impossible to know where the pit was, where some four hundred Jews were buried.

  Those people who came, whom he saw, did not know where the bodies were.

  As he watched, hidden, the people buried the shells and bombs, with the small amounts of dynamite to help the explosion, and they lit the fuse cords. They blew up the shells and bombs, then searched in the craters for Jews’ bodies.

  When they found corpses, rotting, stinking, they stripped off the clothes and hunted for gold and jewellery that might have been stitched into them. They believed, those people, that all Jews had money and valuables. And they looked in the jaws of the dead for the teeth.

  Even the dead of Sobibor were betrayed.

  You should never forget the betrayal of your people, of your blood. You owe no man, no woman, no child anything.

  After Sobibor, softness was dead, love and kindness with it.

  ‘My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?

  ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.’

  Remember what I have told you, dear Reuven. Remember it well.

  The boat bucked, rocked.

  Reuven Weissberg hung on the rope and launched the kick towards the turned spine of the man he had believed loyal.

  He heard, against the thunder of the water and the moan of the wind, the click that was metal on metal. It carried to him over what remained of the river to be crossed, and he knew that a weapon was armed. A sight would now be focused on him and the cross-hairs would be over his chest.

  He had wanted a clear kick with the maximum impact and the greatest surprise.

  The bastard held on to the rope, had it and rode the flow. The boat shook and the shape of the thing slithered in bilge water along the planks, came to rest against his feet, and he could not make the second kick.

  At that moment what was Reuven Weissberg’s plan? There was none. His life and his power were built on the twin foundations that came from careful planning. Fury consumed him.

  They were twenty metres from the blackness of the far bank. He hung, now, with one hand on the rope, and with the other he groped forward for Johnny Carrick’s throat. If he found the throat of the man who had betrayed him, he would break the neck bones, crush and snap them. He felt flesh but didn’t have a good hold.

  The boat shook and the river water slopped into it and lapped around the cargo.

  A hand tried to free his, but could not.

  Lawson hissed in his ear, ‘Shoot, damn you. Take him out.’

  In the sight, the cross-hairs bounced on two pastel shapes in a washed-out green that were against a background of a harsher green, that of lawn grass after rain. But the shapes had merged. The boat seemed to Deadeye to be marooned out there in the river, but the flow force struggled to break it free and the white water powered round it. He was not there to watch pretty pictures of the wake the boat created or to see the balletic dance of the figures, those shapes. Yes, safety was off. Yes, the lever was on ‘single’ and not automatic. Yes, his right index finger was off the guard and on the trigger. Yes, it rested there gently, without pressure. No, he had no damn target. What made it harder was following the shapes with the water behind and in front of them because the moonlight reflected back up off the surface and flared.

  ‘Can’t separate them.’

  ‘You have to take out Weissberg.’

  It was an old rule for marksmen. He – true for any marksman – could not be ordered by a superior to shoot. His decision. No man, whatever his seniority, made the decision for him. His finger stayed on the trigger bar and the pressure was not applied. They were together. The shapes were one, writhing and moving, heaving and shaking, but indivisible.

  ‘For God’s sake, Deadeye, do it.’

  ‘Fuck off …’ afterthought ‘… sir.’

  Stress mounted in Deadeye. They were locked together, and the dazzle came off the water, spoiling the quality of his view. He held off. Inside the sight, with the cross-hairs, was the range finder, and the digits showed the figure 30. Thirty metres range. The stress surged. He thought it a struggle for life. His mind wobbled, shouldn’t have done, and he saw the man come fast, rat speed, across the pavement – six days before – and seemed to feel the barged weight of him in the moments that he’d fired two blank rounds. He heard the girl, whom Lawson called ‘the little cuckoo’, murmur that if their man went into the water he was gone, lost. Didn’t need to be told it, knew it.

  He couldn’t buck the stress.

  Deadeye waited for the heads to come apart, not the bodies. He thought, from what the sight showed him, that water came into the boat. They each had one hand on the rope and fought with the other, and he saw each of the punches thrown and each of the flailing kicks. He leaned hard against a sapling tree, used it for support, and had the cross-hairs wavering on their heads. At that range, with the image intensifier’s magnification, he could see half of the snarled face of his target. Needed the whole of the damned face.

  Had it, squeezed, went for it.

  Deadeye felt the recoil belt his shoulder joint.

  They flinched. They ducked. Any man with a high-velocity bullet blasting over his head would flinch and duck. The two hands came off the rope.

  Fucking missed. When had he last missed? Top scores always on a range. Didn’t understand. Had missed.

  The rope, without the weight on it, leaped up, seeming to shimmer and shiver, then went slack.

  They had balance for a moment, but briefly.

  Two seconds, or three. The rope was now high above them. Either man, to have caught the rope again, would have had to reach up and leave himself defenceless. If Carrick had done it, stretched his arm towards the rope, his stomach and head would have been open … and the chance was gone. The river took the boat.

  Again, Reuven Weissberg came at him. Fingers gouged at his eyes and a knee came into the pit of his stomach. Carrick gasped. They were rolling.

  They were lost, gone, and he knew it. He fought back, had to. Had to free himself and the water surged round him and he felt it round his legs. They went in.

  Still struggling, hands now on his clothing. Reuven Weissberg’s head was inches from Carrick’s and water was spat from it. Carrick could not have said where his strength came from. Fingers found Reuven Weissberg’s eyes. A little choked gasp of pain. Carrick was free. The great current tugged and the undertow sucked at him.

  He could no longer see Reuven Weissberg or the boat, or what the boat had carried.

  A branch cannoned into his back He snatched it, but it lacked the buoyancy to hold him up. The water went round him.

  Darkness closed on him.

  ‘Who’s going in?’ Lawson faced them.

  In chorus: ‘Waste of time. Can’t swim, never have. Bloody suicide. Nothing lives in that.’

  He did not identify the voices. It seemed clear-cut. A kaleidoscope of sights and thoughts rampaged in him. He was God, the relic of the Good Old Days. Sorry, and all that, Clipper, but I’m stepping out of line. Lawson kicked off his good brogues and heaved down the zip of the waxed coat. He thought of the Spree river, the agent who had been Foxglove and the great open water by the Oberbaumbrücke, and himself waiting in the cold, stamping to keep his feet warm. He loosened his tie, went forward in his stockinged feet, slipped down the bank. No one tried to stop him, funny that. Had they, he would have pushed them away. Seemed to see the searchlights and hear the rattle of gunfire, machine-guns using three- or four-round bursts with tracer. One was using a flashlight and it played over the water’s surface and caught a branch. There might have been the top of a head but it was moving too fast for him to focus on and retain. And Foxglove had screamed, a shrill, piercing call for help. Then his tube had been holed, its buoyancy gone. He’d not seen Foxglove for a full minute before t
he body had tangled in one of the nets that ran down the river. He’d lived with it so damned long, and made a pretence that what happened to an agent was all part of the game – greater good of the greater number. God, Clipper, it’s bloody cold …The water was at his knees and the eddy by the bank drew him out and into the flow. Then his feet lost contact with the bottom. He started to swim, used the combination of breast-stroke and dog-paddle he’d learned at school.

  He was guided by shouts from behind him and by the direction in which the torchbeam was aimed. He might have seen a head bob up, and what was ahead of him might have been the bottom of the little boat or it might have been another of those wretched trees coming down the river.

  I remember what you said, Clipper. ‘An agent is lost and you go find another.’ Good counsel. And you said, ‘Get close and sentimental to an agent and you get to be useless.’ It’s what I am, Clipper, bloody useless. What he had thought might have been the bottom of the boat was indeed a log, and when the swell surge carried him closer to what might have been a head, the torchbeam showed a deflated football.

  He was beyond the reach of the torchbeam. They’d be running along the bank to get ahead of him and light the river again. They would.

  So damn tired, and cold.

  You quit when you were ahead, Clipper. Best thing you could have done … But heh, Clipper, it was there, it was coming. Not any more. They can’t take that away from …

  The water was foul-tasting. It was in his eyes, up his nose and inside his ears. Each time he tried to spit it out, more of the Bug water slopped into Lawson’s mouth.

  He thought himself free.

  He believed the curse lifted.

  The dog sat patient on the floor and watched him. Tadeuz Komiski stepped up on to the seat of the wooden chair and reached for the noose. He felt no fear. Guilt had been purged and a grave would go undisturbed.

  The Crow said, ‘It is time. We leave.’

  Sak asked, ‘What could have happened? Why didn’t they come?’

  ‘Do you think it is easy to fight? Go home. Forget you were ever here. Erase from your mind the image of my face. Ask no questions and you will be safe. Talk of this and you will be dead. They did not come, but the struggle stays alive.’

  Two cars pulled away from a picnic site on the Lüneburger Heide. One would head for Hamburg, and the first flight in the morning would take a school-laboratory technician back to his home in the West Midlands of Britain. The other would be driven to Cologne and, en route, a device for testing a man-portable nuclear weapon for confirmed and heavy plutonium presence would be discarded in a rubbish bin. Before the next evening a deal prepared carefully and secretively with a hawaldar banker would be cancelled. Cranes would beckon that man and the fierceness of the Gulf’s sun would shine on him.

  And later …

  LAWSON, Christopher (late of the Diplomatic Service), Drowned in a boating accident while abroad. Aged 61. Beloved husband of Lavinia and father of Harry. Will be sadly missed by all who knew him. Private funeral, but donations may be made to English Heritage (Church Restoration Fund). A memorial service will follow.

  It was a summer’s day, pleasantly warm. He had thought it necessary to be there. The church was between the Clapham Road and the Lambeth Road and had an association with the VBX building, he was told by an usher. It was not only appropriate but convenient as it was at most a five-minute walk from that awful green and cream and tinted-glass edifice. He had been late to arrive and had squeezed into a pew near to the back, but he’d been noticed, and he’d heard a little murmur run down the nave. He’d been stared at and identified by pointing fingers. There had been a photograph on a table in front of the altar of the man – he’d never known his name until he was handed the order of the service – who had dragooned him on the narrowboat, and a candle had burned beside it. The service had started with a bizarre touch: a mobile phone had rung and its call jingle had been ‘Deutschland Über Alles’ and there had been a ripple of laughter he’d not understood. Then there had been an address from a big cat and a reading by a young man he’d presumed to be Lawson’s son. Two hymns – ‘I Vow to Thee My Country’ and ‘Amazing Grace’ – brief prayers and, after a bare half-hour, they spilled out of the church into the sunshine. There were to be sandwiches and drinks in the hall adjoining it, but people seemed reluctant to wander there and milled around. He realized then that two confused queues had formed. One waited to shake the widow’s hand, and her son’s, but the second was near to him. It was as though his queue waited for a man of importance to break the ice.

  That man came. ‘You’re Johnny Carrick. I’m Pettigrew, the director. Most in there would have had to swallow their bile for the length of the proceedings. Christopher Lawson was cordially detested by the huge majority of his colleagues, but not by me. Without him, this city or another would be in dire danger. A few hours before he died he spoke on his phone to me and praised you to the hilt. I’ll miss him, not that others will. Anyway, well done. Haystack was one of our better efforts. You didn’t see him in the water, did you? No, I didn’t think you would have. Must press on.’

  He recognized the next in line, the young man who had been with Lawson on the narrowboat and whom he had seen under the wall of Warsaw’s old quarter, holding Katie Jennings tightly.

  ‘I’m Luke Davies. When you made it to the bank, it was me who dragged you out of that bloody river. Sorry and all that about the other side of the coin. I suppose you’ve realized Katie and I are together, and she’s transferred out of that unit you were with. I think it’s the sort of thing that happens in a stress situation – it was, you know, stressful for us. Anyway, the best of luck. I suppose at the end of the day it was a good result. Not that it’ll matter to you but I’ve been promoted on the back of it. Keep safe.’

  The next in line had a tangled mess of hair and a cheerful smile.

  ‘I had the job of pumping your chest, getting all that sewer water from the Bug out of your lungs. Remember, the psychologist, Shrinks? Did you act on my advice, get the counselling bit in? Very important for someone who’s been exposed to the syndrome, as you have. Did you?’

  He shook his head. Yes, he remembered being dragged up the bank and having his chest beaten, and then he’d been left while they’d scoured the river’s edge. He looked over the man’s shoulder, like people did at parties when they were searching for a more interesting guest. He was rewarded.

  ‘Hello, I’m Giles Banham. I was running the crisis desk that night, and was short-handed because we didn’t actually believe it was real. Anyway … Look, this is confidential, Official Secrets and that guff, but you’ve the right to know. Josef Goldmann came fast back to London, then quickly did the flit. We think he’s in Israel, and the word is that his family hate it, and that he’s chucked a pretty considerable bung at the government, and they’ll give him citizenship and protection. The thugs, the two of them, ended up in northern Cyprus and are training the locals in security. Extradition isn’t done from there. Reuven Weissberg made it out of the river, back to Berlin. There’s CCTV of him at his apartment, going in and still looking like a semi-drowned rodent. He was there half an hour and exited with his grandmother – bizarre, but all they had was basic hand baggage, and what looked like a picture wrapped in newspaper. Must have been something important. There was a report that they’d showed up in Moldova, and another that said their refuge was Paraguay, but we don’t have confirmation. The two old men you met on the Bug’s far side we haven’t heard of. The good thing out of it all is, when it suits us, we’ll shove a sanitized part of the file to the FSB, just to cause some keen embarrassment. All of them – Weissberg, Goldmann and the thugs – will spend the rest of their days looking over their shoulders, and being pretty damn careful what they drink and eat. We’ll leave them for a bit in their new homes, then exert some civilized pressure. I expect they’ll turn and answers to our questions will be provided. We’re short of who was the purchaser, who the device would ultimately have
been sold to, but we’ll get there, believe me.’

  He recalled them all. He saw the hostility of Viktor, the malice of Mikhail. He could hear the respect and gratitude of Josef and Esther Goldmann. He could feel the bear-hug, before the anger, and the warmth of Reuven Weissberg. He could picture the painting of a forest’s trees. An older man with wispy grey hair that had been allowed to grow beyond tidiness came forward.

  ‘Good to meet you, Mr Carrick. I don’t have a name, not one that you need, anyway. In a quiet corner, I do threat analysis. Excessive rainfall this spring in central Ukraine, floodplains rising and river-banks bursting, but all manner of silt and filth carried down the main arteries. We think, from your description of it, that the weapon was in the RA series, man-portable and dating from the seventies – not big but giving a useful bang for the buck, enough to destroy the heart of an urban mass, a deep-buried command post or a missile silo, to demolish a strategic bridge – and we think, also, it went down into the Bug, would have been tumbled along the bed then snagged. Probably covered within an hour and well buried by the following morning. By the end of the week it would have been under four or five feet of muck. The chance of it going on downstream and eventually into the Vistula or even the Baltic is – we estimate – remote. Best place for it, buried and forgotten. It could not of itself have exploded. It would have needed a precursor agent, commercial or military dynamite, to be activated. Then it would have contaminated the centre of a city, New York, Los Angeles, Paris, Berlin or – most probably – London. One of those cities, spattered with plutonium, would have been poisoned for all time. No centre of population could survive such an attack. So, we won this time but in a difficult world we have to win every time. Good to have met you.’

  He had not seen him before, not in the church or in the garden between the door and the street gate. He was bent, his weight was suspended over two hospital sticks, and the clothes hung loose on him. Must have been a big man once but was shrunken now.