Cold

by John Sweeney

  Two hours later, Lightfoot left the club and headed for Hyde Park. He needed fresh air to clear his head. His RUC contact wasn’t completely certain, but his evidence tended to confirm Lightfoot’s instinct, that there was far more to the quiet Irishman than he had suspected on first contact. Lightfoot couldn’t do the easy thing and ask his masters just exactly who it was he was supposed to be babysitting because his security clearance was only so high. Hence the private chat with the RUC man. The word in West Belfast was, he’d told Lightfoot, that Tiplady and chums had been to some kind of terrorist Eton, probably in Libya. Not bad for a Paddy, he thought, and ruefully touched the side of his head where Joe had hit him with the tea tray.

  Lightfoot was walking parallel with Rotten Row, enjoying the spectacle of a fine black stallion at gallop, when his phone rang. The interruption was not entirely welcome.

  ‘My name is Crone and I’m told on good authority that you have screwed up a deal that was very important to the safety and security of the people of the United States of America. Is that correct, Mr Lightfoot?’

  ‘That’s Mr Jed Crone of the Central Intelligence Agency?’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Yes, I’d heard that you were cross. In fact, it seems a lot of people are. I’m most terribly sorry and it won’t happen again.’

  ‘Are you screwing with me?’

  ‘What answer would you like me to give to that question, Mr Crone?’

  ‘OK, answer this – the Irish terrorist, the Russian hooker, where are they?’

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m not sure who you mean.’

  ‘I mean Tiplady, Koremedova.’

  ‘Oh, Mr Tiplady and Ms Koremedova.’ They had both hit him hard on the head; still, they’d had their reasons. It amused him not to reflect that in this conversation.

  ‘Where are they?’

  ‘I’m terribly sorry to say this, Mr Crone, but I don’t know exactly.’

  ‘What do you mean, you don’t know exactly?’

  ‘I mean I don’t know exactly. Mr Crone, may I speak frankly?’

  The line went silent. Three thousand miles away in Langley, something inside Crone’s head throbbed unpleasantly.

  ‘You may.’

  ‘I am naturally concerned that the Central Intelligence Agency is displeased with me. But then it is an organ of the United States, and not every judgement of that country has been for the best. Please note it was created in Anno Domini 1776. I would point out to you that my local pub, The Bear and Ragged Staff, is two centuries older than your country, and if that’s a problem for you I don’t care, and nor does my boss. And if I knew where Mr Tiplady and Ms Koremedova were – and who knows, I might have a bit of a clue – I wouldn’t tell you. It is true that Her Majesty’s Government has agreed an arrangement with you. However, not everything that Her Majesty’s Government does is necessarily entirely right in the judgement of Her Majesty. And, Mr Crone, I don’t work for it. I work for her.’

  A sound crossed the Atlantic, probably some form of telephonic burp, but it may have been a gulp.

  NOVO-DZERZHINSKY

  Yellow Face had real talent. She’d drawn the police officer from memory, but from behind the mask of uniform and peaked hat his character – a knobbly, pobbly-nosed face and kind eyes – timidly peeped out.

  Gennady held the drawing to the light. ‘This is a Rembrandt.’

  Yellow Face grinned. A police car prowled by but in an old black Volga, driven by a lost generation of the poor, Gennady and Iryna were all but invisible. She tapped the window with a bile-yellow knuckle.

  ‘Why do you drive this junk?’

  ‘I am a Soviet nostalgic.’

  That earned a snort of derision.

  ‘Yeah, well, I am an old man. True, a lot of it was shit.’

  ‘It was all shit.’

  ‘And now? The gangsters who did this to you? In the old days, they would have been squashed like bugs.’

  She shrugged. ‘Maybe you’re right. I’d better go. They pretend to try to cure me every now and then.’

  ‘Iryna?’ His eyes pricked a bit.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Iryna, take care. I’m sorry . . . my daughter, she was called Iryna too. It gets to me at strange moments.’ He dabbed away the tear with the back of his hand. ‘Iryna, can I ask you, how long have you got?’

  ‘They said a year – six months ago. Kidney dialysis is too expensive and even the good doctors, the ones who don’t charge too much, say it won’t help because the damage to my liver and kidneys is too severe. Three of my friends, all Yellow Faces, died last month. The winter is the worst for us. Good luck with the cops today.’ She tapped a finger on her drawing. ‘Find him.’

  ‘I’ll do my best.’

  ‘If you have no luck, I have a friend, he comes to the hospital every now and then. He knows all the cops – the good ones, but better, he knows the bent ones.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘He’s on krokodil.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘You don’t want to know. Call me if you have no luck.’

  Gennady spent the rest of the day on the other side of the street from the main Novo-Dzerzhinsky police station, just down the road from the old Soviet local party committee building that was now a BMW showroom. That’s progress, or not.

  Watching the human flotsam and jetsam go in and out of the cop shop was kind of fascinating, if you had nothing else to do. Gennady hadn’t. A few, a very few of the cops were busy, purposeful, but most seemed to be idling away their lives and making other people’s lives duller, too. Ordinary people went in and out, some grieving, wearing black, others bored, distracted. Gennady theorised that they were paying parking tickets or dealing with the irritating, bureaucratic fiddly bits of their lives. The dead weight of authority for authority’s sake throbbed from the building, as dull and miserable as a dentist’s drill.

  Around three o’clock, a big Audi with blacked-out windows parked ostentatiously, directly in front of the police station. Two men got out: an inspector general – at least that was the rank the scrambled egg on his epaulettes suggested to Gennady – and a creepy, weaselly kind of guy.

  The Audi was followed by a police Lada. Two lower-ranking cops with hard faces guarded a dark-haired, swarthy-faced man, his hands cuffed behind his back. Chechen or Ingush – ‘blacks’, they called them – from the Muslim republics in Russia’s deep south. In the army, Gennady had known them to be great fighters, good soldiers, good people. Now they were terrorists. Well, not all of them.

  The pavement was rough, and as the man was being led into the side entrance of the police station, he tripped and fell face forwards onto the concrete. With his arms handcuffed behind his back, he couldn’t save himself and ended up with a bloodied mouth. The two cops picked him up, but the chief cop and the weasel treated their officers’ negligence as a hilarious joke, making a great comedy show of the poor man’s misfortune. Gennady wanted to get out of the Volga and give all of them a good kicking, but then he remembered what he was doing and why, and sat tight.

  There was still no sign of the kind-faced fat cop Yellow Face had drawn for him.

  At four o’clock it fell dark and he’d had enough. He dialled Yellow Face, told her he’d had no luck – he needed to see her crocodile friend.

  ‘It’s krokodil. He’s not nice to look at.’

  ‘Listen, kid, I was in the army.’

  ‘So I warned you, that’s all.’ She gave him an address, in a block of flats on the edge of Novo-Dzerzhinsky, and a name: Sergei.

  The flat was on the eleventh floor. The lift didn’t work, didn’t look as though it had worked since Laika circled the planet in her Sputnik, back in 1957. Gennady had read in the papers recently that, far from dying at the end of her mission after six days in space, the little dog rescued from the streets of Moscow had, because of a failure in the rocket’s cooling system, been boiled alive in a few hours.

  On the eleventh floor the lights were dead, the bloc
k cold, unheated, the electricity off. Gennady knocked on a metal door that he worked out by a process of deduction must be Sergei’s flat. No answer. He pounded on the door, putting his weight behind it. He heard a soft moan, then the noise of two long bolts being withdrawn. The metal door swung inwards, and the first thing he could see was a candle, fluttering slightly in the wash of air caused by the open door.

  ‘Come in’ – a young man’s voice: soft, well spoken, sardonic – ‘and bolt the door behind you.’

  Gennady entered the flat, closed the door and slammed home the two bolts. With his eyes now adjusted to the gloom, he turned around and saw what was holding the candle clearly for the first time.

  ‘Fucking hell.’ Gennady couldn’t help himself. This creature in front of him was one of the worst things he’d ever seen, worse than some things in Afghanistan, far worse than anything he’d seen in a horror film. And what made it all the more sick was that it – he – was real. Perhaps he was just getting too old.

  ‘They call this krokodil,’ said the voice. ‘Perhaps it’s named after one of the precursors of the drug, alpha-chlorocodide. The correct chemical term is desomorphine.’ When he said the ‘s’ sound, his voice had a marked lisp, on account of what had happened to his face. ‘It’s cheap. You cook codeine with something else – paint thinners, lighter fluid, the tips of matches – and you end up with a high, not so long, but ten times as good as heroin, for a twentieth of the price. The downside, well, you can see.’

  The flesh around the right side of his head, from just below the eye socket to his mouth down to his neck, had been eaten away, exposing to view the red string of muscle tendons and blood vessels. The border zone between rotting skin and healthy flesh was flaky, scabrous and a foul blue-green. Sergei lowered the candle onto a table and slumped into a chair. Gennady could see that he was wearing shorts and that one leg, his right, had rotted away up to the knee, leaving a gangrenous black edge, like a burnt piece of wood left over from a fire.

  ‘This is legal?’

  ‘Not any more. They’ve made the sale of codeine over the counter more tricky these days. But this is what you get when the authorities don’t use their brains when they come to think about a drugs policy. Some people say there are millions of us, victims of krokodil. No one knows . . .’

  ‘ . . . because no one is counting.’ Gennady completed the sentence. Some of his men in Afghanistan had got wrecked on heroin. It was utterly depressing to see them throw away their lives on something so corrosively addictive, but this, krokodil, was far, far worse.

  ‘Iryna said you’ve come to me to help identify a police officer. I know pretty much all of them. I’ve been busted by every single one of them. Of course, they provide “the roof”, the cover for the main dealers in town. The Chief – well, he’s the main dealer.’

  ‘Sergei, forgive me, what did you use to do, before this?’

  ‘Me? I was a musician. I played the sax.’

  Not any more, not with half his mouth gone.

  Gennady handed him Yellow Face’s drawing of the sympathetic policeman. Sergei smiled. ‘This one’s not so bad. He didn’t hit me, or demand a bribe. Called the police surgeon, wrote a report. He’s OK.’

  ‘Do you know his name, Sergei?’

  ‘Yes, of course. Sergeant Leonid Leonidovich Oblamov.’

  ‘Thank you very much.’ Gennady paused for a moment. ‘Sergei, can I ask, why are you helping me?’

  ‘In Novo-Dzerzhinsky, five of my friends have died in the last two months because of this thing, but that lowlife of a pathologist, the one with the frizzy grey hair, he always writes us up “Death due to respiratory infection”. So no krokodil in our town. But everyone now knows that last night the crazy general who was in Afghanistan beat seven shades of shit out of him.’

  ‘I knocked him off his chair. That’s all.’

  Sergei shook his head. ‘To me, you’re sounding like Mick Jagger saying, “I sing the odd song.”’ He turned his attention back to Iryna’s drawing. ‘Oblamov is a curious guy,’ he said. ‘I think . . . I think he doesn’t like being a cop any more but doesn’t know how to get out of it. He’s ashamed’ – the hiss from Sergei’s wreck of a palate was so pronounced, the ‘s’-sounds sounded like a cartoon snake – ‘of being a cop these days. He’s mostly a traffic cop, lives and works out in the countryside. If you take the B road due north from here and drive twelve miles, you’ll find him. He stands by a little river, just before his home village. If you’re local and he knows you, he won’t bother you. If you’re driving a fancy car, you’ll be busted.’

  ‘I drive a Volga.’

  ‘Very patriotic.’

  ‘I haven’t come all this way to be mocked.’ And Sergei’s face – what was left of it – cracked into what might, once, have been called a smile.

  MOSCOW

  In his office on Lubyanka Square, Grozhov sat hunched over his laptop, watching images that both fascinated and repelled him. Click, flicker, die; flicker, click, die. He killed the machine and opened the first of a dozen folders stacked in his in tray. Thanks to the Americans and their clever way with algorithms, the full majesty of the Russian secret service in the twenty-first century had been reduced to this: for pleasure, he switched on the computer; for business, he switched it off and went back three decades to read typed memoranda. Read, sign his initials with a fountain pen for action, place to one side for inaction. The positive? You can’t put a stack of paper on a flash drive. You can’t hack a fountain pen.

  Grave, intelligent, he consumed the paperwork rapidly, pausing here and there, reaching for a file he’d already read, using his phenomenal intellect to find the key element to build up a patchwork quilt of comprehension, the result being that he would understand more about the other side than they would ever know themselves.

  The sky grew darker and darker as Grozhov worked through the consequences of any action, three, four moves ahead, like the chess grandmaster he perhaps should have been. Pursing his lips, he reached out for the office phone on his desk and dialled a number.

  A voice said, ‘This is Weaver.’

  Grozhov spoke in Russian, knowing that his counterpart was fluent. ‘If you want your traitor, why did you send us two dolls and a toy? Please don’t take us for fools.’

  ‘Something went wrong on our side,’ Weaver said. ‘Not everything works smoothly when you franchise out work to the British, and for that I apologise. But I have a question for you. Was Reikhman running a freelance operation? We’re picking up conflicting information.’

  That was code for the NSA and their horrible satellites, listening to everything, hoovering up a chance remark here, a foolish and indiscreet text there. Too much gabbling, mused Grozhov.

  ‘My associate has been acting without the blessing of the highest authority. He is being withdrawn to Moscow for . . .’ Grozhov hesitated, searching for the correct euphemism, ‘ . . . consultations. But no matter. The essentials of the deal remain. We like this deal and we want the trade. But do we understand the situation correctly if I were to say you can fix your internal problem?’

  Weaver explained the nature of the difficulty and concluded: ‘We can’t.’

  Grozhov replied, ‘But we can.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘At our own convenience. Consider it a cash-down payment in advance. And the big deal, same time tomorrow?’

  ‘Deal,’ said Weaver.

  Grozhov killed the call and dialled again, speaking briefly, again in Russian: ‘Seven Down.’ It was a crossword clue, only the person on the other end of the phone wasn’t doing a crossword.

  WINDSOR GREAT PARK

  Stirring his freshly poured cup of Darjeeling with a silver teaspoon hallmarked with the letters ‘GR’, Lightfoot sat in the parlour of the now-empty lodge and pondered that the teaspoon would have been cast sometime in the eighteenth century. He was waiting for sunset before enjoying a proper drink. His late father had said that it was morally wrong to drink alcohol while the sun w
as up, and morally wrong not to once it had set.

  In the park, the sun had emerged from behind a wall of grey cloud and was bathing the bronze statue of George III in a last blast of sunshine before the day was done. Legend had it that the statue was hollow, and just before completion, the workmen who had erected it had held a banquet inside, toasting the king with a firkin of ale.

  George III had been a fool of a king, mad, despised, inadequate. He’d lost the Americas. Well, not a complete fool then, and Lightfoot smiled to himself, knowing in his heart that what he had both done and not done had been dangerous, very dangerous. He wondered how his two young ducklings were getting on. Had they turned into swans? They had to make their own way. He’d helped them, a little, but the odds were stacked against them.

  And then Lightfoot returned to the puzzle that had been troubling him for days. Why would the other side throw away its single best propaganda asset of the twenty-first century, a CIA whistle-blower, singing like a canary about how much the NSA spies on its own people, for a London Irish social worker, albeit one with a secret past, and a Russian – no, a Chechen woman? He picked up the cup and took a sip. A rook for two pawns. It made no sense.

  ‘Gosh, golly, gosh!’ he said aloud. It was, once one thought about it, extraordinarily simple. They had been barking up the wrong tree – he mentally forgave himself the awful pun – the whole time. Lightfoot reached for his mobile to call his connection at MI6, but at that moment his phone bleeped.

  It was a video message from an unknown party. The video was fuzzy to begin with and took a while to load, showing a circle whirring around within itself. Eventually the image cleared, and he realised he was looking at an elderly woman, sitting alone in her kitchen in Shropshire, through the cross hairs of a sniper rifle. A second clip showed a startlingly handsome private in the Scots Guards, standing on parade outside Horse Guards Parade, again through cross hairs. It was raining in Shropshire, sunny in London. Both clips were in real time.