by John Sweeney
Joe held his tongue.
‘I’m right in thinking that you, Mr Tiplady, say you are and have only ever been Irish – and you, Ekaterina, are pure Russian, through and through?’
They both nodded. Lightfoot clucked his tongue. ‘Liar, liar, pants on fire.’
‘Ekaterina, it is correct to say that although a Russian-passport holder, you were born in Grozny and that you aren’t Russian but Chechen. That is the ethnic minority most feared by the Russian authorities. Is that correct?’
She nodded.
‘And you, Mr Tiplady, were born in Belfast, which whether you like it or not, was and is part of the United Kingdom.’
‘Screw you.’
‘No, screw you. And, in particular, screw you because you have no idea what trouble you are in and how much of my precious time I am spending trying to stop some people above my head, who should know better, sending you back to the people who are trying to kill you. The fact that you were born in Belfast helps me to help you. If you weren’t, then as a servant of Her Majesty’s Government I can’t do much to help you. And screw you twice, Mr Tiplady. Please remember that I work for Her Majesty’s Government and I will do what I am told to. But, speaking personally, I gather your family was heavily connected with the Irish Republican Army, and my best friend in the army was murdered by that organisation. So let’s not mistake working together for anything more than that. Do we understand each other?’
‘We do,’ said Joe.
‘From now, if I ask you a question you tell me the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Immediately. Listen, there are people in my office who are asking me what on earth I am doing helping a Russian tart and an IRA man. Do you understand the thinness of the ice you’ve placed yourself on?’
‘I’m not with the Rah,’ said Joe, using the Belfast street slang for the Provisional IRA. ‘They killed my father. And Katya here wants out. That’s why she’s left the killer. We didn’t want any of this. You’re blaming us for trouble caused by someone else. We haven’t killed anyone.’
That wasn’t, in Joe’s case, strictly accurate. But now wasn’t the time to go into what he did in the mountains north of Pyongyang.
Lightfoot didn’t register any emotion on his face.
‘I must go now. Any questions?’
‘Can you get my dog back?’ asked Joe.
Lightfoot’s sunless face became even less happy.
‘If I’m to stay here, I need to look after my dog,’ Joe said.
‘So you were lying all along!’ hissed Katya. ‘You knew where the dog was.’
‘No,’ replied Joe. ‘Not for certain. I had an idea, that’s all.’
‘Liar!’
‘No, not liar.’
‘Listen, you two,’ said Lightfoot, even more sourly than usual, ‘any more of this crap and I’ll send you to Moscow by parcel post.’ He turned to Joe. ‘Is there no one else who can look after it?’
‘No.’
‘Is it savage, a pit bull or something?’
‘Reilly?’ It was hard to offend Joe, but Lightfoot’s remark came close to it. ‘He’s a whippie-poo.’
‘Very well.’ Lightfoot took down Joe’s address and the details of Reilly’s most likely current abode, at the back of his flat, with the woman with tin hair who fed him sausages.
Lightfoot said, ‘This isn’t over for you. Not by a long chalk. For the time being, you’re pretty safe here.’
‘And where is here? Where are we exactly?’ asked Joe, again petulant.
‘You’re in a safe house.’
Outside, boots slammed down on cobbles, orders barked and obeyed.
Joe walked up to the shutters and pulled them open to look out on a Norman tower, from which was flying a flag divided into four quarters with lots of lions on it. He let out a soft, low whistle.
‘They said that I should put you in a safe house,’ continued Lightfoot. ‘I used my initiative. This is the safest house in the whole of England. Welcome to Windsor Castle.’
ROSTOV, SOUTHERN RUSSIA
Snowflakes twisted down onto the gravestones of the heroic and unheroic Soviet dead, thick and plump and blue-black crystals. The cemetery stood on a bluff of land overlooking an aluminium smelter, all five square miles of it. During the Great Patriotic Aluminium War, as the wits called the infighting over the factory in the nineties, more than a hundred people – managers, accountants, security men – had been murdered, until the smaller gangsters gave way to a gangster so big that no one dare call him one.
Much of the smelter was now a functionless ruin of metal pipes and brick chimneys and half-collapsed concrete from the Brezhnev era that no one had bothered to bring back to life or knock down for good. It lived on as a mirthless satire on Soviet industry, and on the dead men who’d bothered to kill and be killed for it. But the smokestacks of a third of the smelter still spat out greasy black columns, which knitted into a fresh flurry of snow to fall on those who had gone before.
The dead wouldn’t complain. And the quick? Well, the environmental regulator had mouths to feed – his wife, his children, his mistress, that nark of a local journalist who was blackmailing him – and the money the smelter bosses had to pay him was a trifle of what it would cost to clean up the chimneys, so when it snowed, it snowed black. Bleak wasn’t the word for it.
The gravedigger had a wall eye that, as he leaned on his spade and shook his head, wobbled slightly in its socket.
‘Once buried, job done.’
‘It’s taken me a whole week to find this place where they say she was buried.’
One of the neighbours in the block of flats near Babushkinskaya station in Moscow, a schoolteacher, had whispered to Gennady through a half-closed door that she had bumped into Iryna in the lift shortly before she disappeared. Iryna was carrying a suitcase. The neighbour had asked where she was off to and Iryna had told her Rostov, a city in the south of Russia, close to the border with Ukraine.
Gennady had asked the neighbour: ‘Who cleaned out her flat?’
‘I don’t know. Nothing, I saw nothing,’ she said, and started to pull the door shut.
‘Was it the Cheka?’
She said nothing, but just before she slammed the door she nodded, twice.
The gravedigger was promising to be even less obliging.
‘Who is it you’re after again?’ he asked.
‘Iryna Dozhd.’
‘Well, here she is.’
The gravestone was charcoal grey, the top slanted diagonally in the old Soviet fashion, to distance the graves of the Modern Man from the old Christian tradition. Iryna’s name was plainly written on the stone, that and her date of birth and date of death. Nothing more.
‘Did you bury her?’
‘Yes. Well, I dug the hole, my mate and I lowered the coffin. Dunno what’s in the coffin, do I?’
‘Who came?’
The gravedigger grew still. He was beginning to smell trouble.
‘What’s it to you?’
‘She was my daughter. No one told me about the funeral. I want to make sure it’s her.’
‘Nothing doing.’
The gravedigger had never seen such a fat fist of roubles before in all his life. And there was something about the man – his eyes seemed to be laughing at him, at the world – something tough about him as well, that he wasn’t afraid of the authorities. He’d led men once, you could tell.
‘If the boss finds out, my head will be on the chopping board.’
‘Does the boss come out in the snow?’ Gennady asked.
‘No.’
‘Better get going then.’
It took an hour and a half. The earth had not quite frozen solid but it had the texture of half-set concrete. It took an age for the two of them to get two ropes underneath the wooden coffin and then struggle to get the thing up onto the black slushy earth. The gravedigger took a crowbar to the coffin and popped open the lid.
‘Well, take a look.’
Gennady found
himself staring at the corpse of an old woman, the flesh mottled, blue-black with necrosis, but there was a startling bright blue about her lips and nose.
‘So?’ asked the gravedigger, curious.
‘This isn’t Iryna. I don’t know who she is but I know enough about the dead to know that this old lady didn’t die naturally. Poison, looks like. We’d better call the police.’
‘Ah,’ said the gravedigger. ‘Well, you asked me before, who came to the funeral, and I didn’t say.’
‘Well, who was it then?’
‘The police.’
Gennady laughed to himself, a joke but not a funny one.
‘Why bury the wrong woman?’ Gennady said. ‘Cremation would have been smarter.’
‘Ah,’ said the gravedigger. It was clearly his favourite expression.
‘Ah?’
‘Crem isn’t working. The furnace has broken, they’re waiting for a new boiler. They paid for a new one but the company turned out to be a shell, so they wasted hundreds of thousands of roubles on nothing.’
‘Anyone else at the funeral, apart from the cops?’
‘Fat bloke, stank of perfume, nice suit. When he stared at you, he gave you the creeps. Spoke funny, too. Squeaked.’
‘Oh,’ said Gennady. ‘There’s just one more thing.’
The gravedigger listened to his request, then walked to his lean-to shed by the entrance of the cemetery where he kept his wood saw and a bucket.
MOSCOW
Wishy-washy sleet – not proper snow – was falling on the square outside, falling on the stupid lump of stone the Democrats had placed when they were in their pomp back in 1991, when the coup against Gorbachev had failed so ignominiously and Grozhov had found himself on the run. He’d buried himself in the backstreets of Havana for a couple of years, until the political weather changed again.
Back in the day, the view from his office in the Lubyanka was of ‘Iron Felix’, all fifteen tons of it. It had been erected in 1958, to honour Lenin’s great Chekist. The Democrats said that Felix had killed – or, more correctly, supervised the killing of – hundreds of thousands. Hmm, thought Grozhov, the old country had balls under Lenin and Stalin. The West was afraid of us. Then there was all that rubbish about reform and democracy. Say what you like about Zoba – under him, Russia is strong again.
There had been a grave security breach. Grozhov had forgotten the name of the old Roman who spouted it, but ‘quis custodiet ipsos custodes?’ Who watches the watchmen; who guards the guards? They were always the weakest link, the soft underbelly the enemy probed.
Grozhov had known there was a leak in the leader’s personal security network, but whoever it was had been subtle and watchful. The odd snippet of intelligence about Zoba had appeared here and there, trivial stuff mostly but nevertheless embarrassing to Russia, to the cause of the great nation. The German intelligence service, the BND, had hoovered up the most. And then the leaking had got far more dangerous.
Grozhov had pulled out all the files and pored over them for two months, sitting on a hard chair, thinking, thinking, thinking. It had come to him at four o’clock in the morning, perhaps the most fruitful time for secret policemen, ancient and modern. The leak was real, but none of the information came from the Kremlin. It was somewhere else: not the seaside villa in Sochi, not the dacha near Moscow, not the other dacha by the lake. No, the leak came from Moonglade.
In their frenzy to hunt down the guilty, his people had made some understandable mistakes. They’d brought in a cleaning woman at Moonglade with a suspicious, Muslim background. One of his people had come up with a clever trick. They’d found out she had a beloved cat, Kiska. They seized it, and to extract a confession out of her they poured acid in one of its eyes, then the other, in front of her. The woman turned out to be innocent, but she made such a row about her Kiska’s torture that she had been turned over to the medical authorities for psychiatric care.
The lack of substantive results continued. And then Grozhov had returned to his analysis and reflected that perhaps the most dangerous leak came from someone who was not permanently based at Moonglade but visited it on official business. No drivers because, obviously, there were no roads. But the helicopter crews? The pilots?
Grozhov had arranged for an agent operating undercover as a BND scout to sound out the prime suspect. The traitor bit the worm and then he was on Grozhov’s hook. He’d been arrested, brought back to the Lubyanka and cracked wide open in the space of a few hours. Gibbering for it to end, he begged, ‘Please kill me, please kill me,’ over and over again. But Grozhov wanted to know everything, so some of the best doctors in the Lubyanka’s pay had kept him alive until the canary was all sung out. The pilot had secretly videoed the packages being flown to Moonglade.
‘Who did you give the film to?’ By this time, the pilot was prickless, eyeless, pretty much fingerless, his body a porridge of blood and broken bone.
‘Who?’ asked Grozhov. ‘Who did you give the film to? I want the full name.’
‘Anatoly Mikhailovich Reikhman.’
The name fell on Grozhov’s ears like a cosh. He had created little Anatoly. He had not been the first but he was the greatest of all of Grozhov’s operatives, and now he had betrayed him. Grozhov had knowledge enough of what the Americans, the British and the Germans knew. Thus far, he knew the film had not yet left Reikhman’s control. The secret remained safe, for the time being. The fool might have been using the footage simply as an insurance policy, as Grozhov had long suspected. For that small mercy, well, thanks. But Grozhov had to get all the film back. No one must ever know about the packages.
He picked up his mobile and called Reikhman. There had been some trouble in London, some neutrals dead, but so far Anatoly had kept ahead of the authorities there.
‘Anatoly?’
‘Grozhov?’
‘Come home, my boy. We need to talk to you. My office has made the arrangements.’
There was a long pause, a crackle on the line. Sometimes that happened, sometimes it didn’t.
‘Anatoly, come home. Uncle still loves you.’
Grozhov killed the call and his internal phone blinked. Someone was calling him from the lower basement.
‘The doctors have brought the pilot round. He’s conscious but we don’t know for how much longer.’
‘Good. I’ll be down in a moment.’
He opened his office drawer, took out his 9mm Tokarev and gently placed a fresh clip into it. Grozhov preferred to take care of the final business personally.
WINDSOR CASTLE
The room was no ordinary prison cell. All but circular, seven-eighths of a tower, slit windows overlooked the inner keep of the castle, the walls were decorated with Victorian paintings of men in red uniforms and large moustaches dying in a sporting fashion in various bits of the world. There was a small table, and a low ancient sofa on which Joe and Katya sat. They ignored the small television in the corner, preferring to watch all – well, some – of the Queen’s horses and some of the Queen’s men go by. The sun had got a little stronger, casting a pearly, translucent light on the castle, adding to the illusion that they had somehow been transported in a time machine back a century or two, to an age when horses, not drones, made war.
A polite, diffident knock on the door caused Joe to stand up from the sofa to open it. Lightfoot walked in bearing a silver tray, on it a silver teapot, Royal Doulton cups and saucers and some scones, complete with two pots, one full of cream and one full of strawberry jam. He did so with an air of hating every second of it, to demonstrate that he was not and never would be one of nature’s butlers.
‘Why did you lock the door?’ asked Joe.
Lightfoot ignored him and placed the tray on the table.
‘The door was locked. That makes us prisoners,’ Joe repeated.
‘Ekaterina, could you be mother?’ said Lightfoot and Joe gave up, watching Katya pour the tea first, then the milk, the proper way, and hand out the plates for the scones, cream and ja
m. Joe shoved a mouthful of scone into his mouth. It was the first proper bit of food he’d had for what felt like days and he was ravenously hungry. Katya delicately dissected her scone into quarters, and had raised one quarter to her mouth and paused to study the appetite of the Irishman as if he were an ape of moderate interest when there was a tap-tap on the door.
Lightfoot said, ‘Come in.’
Joe moved to stand up to greet whoever it was, but his big feet got trapped underneath the chintzy table and he was in mid-crouch, his balance awry, when Reilly used the tea service on the table as a launching pad to greet his master, hitting him in the centre of his chest at full power. Man and dog fell like a great spine of timber over the back of the low sofa, Joe’s legs sending the table, teacups, scones, saucers, and pots of cream and jam flying.
‘Reilly. Fool of a dog!’ roared Joe as, tail flicking this way and that madly, Reilly stood triumphantly on his chest, licking his face. ‘Get off me!’
Reilly wasn’t moving.
‘Jesus, Mary. Reilly, you stupid dog, oh, I’m so sorry. Reilly. Reilly. Oh no . . .’
Joe pushed Reilly, still lick-lick-licking his face, aside and said to Lightfoot, ‘I must apologise for my dog.’
Lightfoot was about to say something when his mobile chirruped into life. He took the call, mouthed an apology to Joe and Katya, and walked out of the room. In a few moments they saw him down by the keep at ground level, walking this way and that, his face animated. It was obviously a difficult conversation. Joe stood with his face pressed against the window, intent on every word.
‘What are you doing? You can’t hear him,’ said Katya.
‘I work with difficult young adults. Some of them – some are deaf.’
‘So?’
‘The silly Irishman can lip-read.’
‘What’s he saying?’
‘Shh. Let me concentrate . . .’
Joe stood still, intent on the figure below.