Arkhangel : A Novel (2020)

by Brabazon, James

  I did know this: MI6 was in turmoil. The same thoughts came back to me that had spun around my head as I pivoted upside down in the ship’s hold: no one was above suspicion. That was the truth of it. The fact that Frank had kept Whitehall out of the loop was proof, if ever it was needed, that the men in charge – and men, to a man, they were – ran their own shows, for their own reasons. And even if the bad apple could be singled out, the rot rarely stopped where you could see it. I’d always been too focused on the job in hand, too occupied with tactics to consider strategy, let alone embroil myself in intrigue. If MI6 was rotten, I had no idea how far the contagion might have spread – if indeed it had at all.

  Sure, the chairs around the national security poker table at Vauxhall Cross were rearranged every so often. And when the music stopped, some of those men in charge were amazed to discover they no longer had a seat at the game – even, recently ‘C’ himself, the Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service. But when the stakes are as high as national survival, shuffling the players doesn’t clean up the game if men like Frank make sure the hands are only ever dealt from a stacked deck. Do what thou wilt had become the whole of their law, as it had mine when I ran to Doc.

  I reread the story in the paper I’d picked up in Ashford. It was illuminating, in so far as it was inaccurate in almost every detail. You could always rely on journalists to get everything wrong. Which was nothing if not alarming, given that MI6, MI5 and GCHQ counted on them for an astonishing amount of their information. The piece asked the usual simplistic questions. ‘Are the Troubles going to blow up again?’ (Answer: ‘It’s Ireland; you never can tell.’) And, ‘Is this the work of a dissident lone wolf?’ (Answer: ‘It’s Ireland; you never can tell.’) Over the following eight hundred words the reporter supposed the attack part of an obscure Irish Republican feud – which, because it wasn’t, rendered the entire write-up extravagantly absurd. The article attributed the release of my name and photograph to unnamed ‘security sources’, while simultaneously stating that ‘British and Irish intelligence services had declined to comment’.

  I bet they had.

  But I did learn something from the newspapers: Doc Levy had lied to me. Rachel was not in London. She was in Tel Aviv. I didn’t blame him. He must have been desperate to keep his daughter out of the messed-up world of Max McLean. And fair play to him. Hitmen don’t take lovers; they take hostages. My copy of The New York Times cited a story originally run by the Israeli paper Haaretz. The combined reporting tentatively connected the ‘firebombing’ of Chappie Connor’s cottage with another violent attack the following day: the shootout at Doc’s. While no named deaths were attributed to the former, the latter was illustrated with an old photo of Jacob Levy from his army days. It was illuminated, too, by a quote from ‘his daughter Rachel, 44, the Azriel Jacobs research fellow at the Kolymsky School of Computer Sciences at Tel Aviv University’ – who, the report said, had ‘made aliyah to Israel in 1991’. She praised the Irish authorities for attempting to apprehend the attacker and hoped that ‘the coward who murdered her father’ would meet a similar fate. After the inquest, his body would be flown to Israel for burial.

  I folded the pages and massaged my temples.

  Fuck.

  Twenty-seven years, and the first words I heard from Rachel were that she wished me dead. The waiter set the ham, egg and cheese sandwich down wordlessly on the crumpled paper. My appetite had dissolved into the newsprint. I forced myself to eat.

  Maybe one day the Pyrenees, or wherever those mountains on the horizon turned out to be, would be an option – but not now. On the station platform in England I’d decided what to do, but didn’t know how to do it. Now the world had shifted on its axis. Not only was Rachel plausibly in danger because of me, but in all likelihood she’d believe she was in danger from me.

  Getting into Israel on a hot passport to convince her otherwise was not possible. Nor was buying a clean one from the mafia in nearby Montreuil. I had three hundred euros left, not three thousand, and the gangsters in the banlieue didn’t give credit. Jack Nazzar had been my last lifeline in the UK: there was no one left in Britain or Ireland I could call on for a favour, not even in UKN – which was impenetrable, and purposefully so.

  UKN personnel had half a dozen aliases to choose from – all backed up, where necessary, by social media profiles, school reports, employment references, criminal records … whatever it took to create a robust, three-dimensional, deniable avatar. Each avatar was firewalled from the others, and from the operator’s real identity. Although MI6 and the Special Forces mob all knew me as ‘Max McLean’, I had no official documents issued in that name. And in my case, it was a double bluff: ‘Max McLean’ was, itself, an invention – but my own, not UKN’s.

  The real identities of UKN operators at Raven Hill were a mystery even to Colonel Ellard. Only Frank knew who we were. He hand-picked potential recruits. No one was told what they were training for until they passed – and less than one per cent did. Some of the failures went to MI6, most went to pieces. Anyone selected for UKN went out into the world to join the unsung Three Hundred who stood alone at whichever Hot Gates Commander Frank Knight sent us to.

  And there was no commander more loyal than Frank. He was accountable directly to the Crown. And his job was to watch the watchmen. Under him we formed an analogue, off-grid failsafe – an impenetrable fifth column carrying out discreet, deniable operations abroad, and a supposedly incorruptible praetorian guard keeping a weather eye on the security services at home. We might have enjoyed overwatch from the Wing and briefings by MI6, but we were fundamentally separate from them – civilians, not soldiers, who had no existence outside the frame of a passport photo. We could be captured, tortured and broken and all we could give anyone was the handful of magic beans that were Frank’s name, rank and tailor.

  Everyone except me.

  Although I didn’t know a single other UKN operative’s true identity – or even if ‘Frank’ was Knight’s real name – I knew enough to unmask him. Over the years I’d become embedded at Raven Hill, groomed to take over the barracks from Colonel Ellard. I knew where the bodies were buried. Maybe Frank figured that, sooner or later, I’d turn my hand to grave digging. Maybe releasing my photo was his way of breaking my shovel.

  Fucking maybes.

  The photograph in The Times had been taken for an as yet unused British passport issued in the name of Gordon Sim – a fictional car mechanic from south London. Suspect, the caption underneath the picture read: Irish Police want to question Max McLean, a British citizen named in connection with the attack.

  Looking at it made me feel sick.

  Whoever released the photo knew how to link it to me, personally. To do that, they’d have needed to know my name, my assigned alias, recognize my face, have the security clearance to access the server the image was stored on and the motive to go public with it all in the press. That specific photograph captioned with the name of Max McLean narrowed down the usual suspects to a line-up of one.

  Only Commander Frank Knight knew that Gordon Sim was one of my covers; and only he knew where to look for him: on the servers at Her Majesty’s Passport Office. That was the sole place where any trace of Gordon Sim could be found. Mr Sim was just another innocuous citizen, his details filed alongside those of millions upon millions of other innocuous citizens. There was nowhere else to look. But now, short of announcing my arrival from the top of the Eiffel Tower, I was about as exposed as it was possible to be.

  I wiped up the last of the egg yolk with the last of the fried bread and swallowed it down with the last of the coffee. I left the price of the meal on the table and found the blue-tiled pissoir at the back of the bistrot and washed my face. Outside, I got rid of The Times, dropping my printed paper face into the trash, and bought a cheap tan overcoat and a box of Marlboro Reds from the row of shops opposite. Then I struck out into the city with Chappie Connor’s hundred-dollar bill burning a hole in my pocket.

  I turned right
, off the square and on to Boulevard de Magenta for three hundred metres, before bearing right again on Boulevard de Strasbourg. From there it was a half-hour straight shot south to the Île de la Cité and the cathedral of Notre-Dame. It was eleven a.m. I walked against the flow of the traffic. I kept my head down and clung to the scant protection afforded by shop awnings and the tangled cover of winter-bare trees from the prying eyes of CCTV cameras.

  Low on the skyline to my left the sun broke free of the clouds on the horizon, picking out the ivory buildings on the west side of the boulevard with long shafts of mellow winter light. But as I walked on, the long perspective of the street gave the impression that the walls were closing in. Rising up on either side of the road like an urban canyon, the monumental architecture was purposefully wide enough to carry cannon and cavalry to the heart of the city in case of rebellion. Getaway drivers in Paris needed to know their shit. The cops could lock down the centre in minutes.

  But there were no revolutionaries on the march that morning, just an endless parade of people braced against the chill. Aimless tourists in Gore-Tex meandering across black and white striped crosswalks; haughty women in belted coats; men sporting trimmed beards and half-smiles. And me. On the outside I was just on the right side of ignorable. But inside, my bullet wounds chafed, my ankles burned from the rope that had held me up two days before, and the scratches I’d sustained on the beach shed their scabs under my clothes. Above all, though, I felt sick to my stomach: ‘coward’ was a bitter pill to swallow.

  I continued to wind my way south, past the Pompidou Centre and deeper into the heart of the city. It felt safer turning on to the little streets but I had no idea who, if anyone, was tracking me – or how. The Pont Notre-Dame carried me over the Seine, and before I knew it the twin towers of the cathedral reared up above me. I stood and stared at the famous edifice, at the massive rose window, at the angels and demons beneath whose wings the city spread. Statues of the damned and the saved stood sealed in their stone fates above the west door, presided over by an Eternal King who’d encouraged his followers to turn the other cheek and then thrashed the money-changers in the Temple with a whip.

  I lit a Marlboro and dragged on it, hard. I hadn’t walked here by accident. When I was fifteen, my father and I had explored what felt like every inch of those streets. I dived with him into the underground soul of the City of Light, flexing my French, learning how to drink and how to smoke. It was the last trip we made together before I was told that his plane had come down over the African savannah. The avenues and cobbled lanes were etched into my memory. Twenty-five years later I’d been operational there, protecting an asset – and buying myself some credit in the process.

  Beneath my feet was Point Zéro – a stone disc set with a metal sun-like compass from which all distances in France were measured, the point to which all roads led. Fifteen minutes’ walk across the Pont de l’Archevêché and into the Latin Quarter and I’d find my way to Rue Rollin. I wasn’t supposed to know the address, much less who lived there. But there were a lot of things I wasn’t supposed to know. I wasn’t sure precisely how I was going to get to Rachel. But I knew which way to turn. I crushed out the half-smoked cigarette under the sole of my shoe and turned my back on the church.

  It was time to sell my cloak and buy a sword.

  11

  ‘Max McLean? Are you out of your fucking mind?’

  Sergei Lukov was a bad Bulgarian. Five-eight, a hundred and forty pounds, trussed up in an old leather jacket as black as his heart. He must have been pushing sixty but looked a decade younger – his face all angles and suntan, eyes gleaming like two black marbles. He sized me up, and his expression turned from incredulity to horror. I looked, and felt, awful. I gave him a tight-lipped smile and shrugged, showing him my empty palms. It was inconceivable he didn’t know my picture was in the papers. He shook his head.

  ‘OK. Come in.’

  He stepped behind the street door, which he’d opened just enough that I could squeeze past without revealing him to the world outside.

  ‘Quickly. This way. Barzo!’

  I didn’t speak. He ushered me through into his apartment on the left-hand side of a little courtyard area around which other flats were arranged.

  The door to the apartment closed behind him. For a brief instant we were sealed in darkness. And then, one flash at a time, a strip light overhead sputtered to life, revealing the room in fluorescent bursts. The apartment was tiny – a fifteen-foot square, freezing cold pied-à-terre in which a round table, a sofa and bar jostled for space with a kitchenette. A mezzanine spread out above a third of the floor space; beneath it a shower and toilet. The cistern rushed with water. There were no windows, and the room smelled of shit. We turned to face each other. His right hand hadn’t left his jacket pocket. Both of mine had remained in the clear.

  ‘So? You are not here to kill me, because Sergei would already be buried in Père Lachaise. No?’ His accent rang with all the charm of a Russian–Bulgarian car crash colliding somewhere in the Balkans. Abrupt. Sparse. Swerving always between murderous and mischievous. ‘And besides, Sergei would have known that you were coming. Da?’

  ‘Sergei knows everything.’ I said. ‘That’s why I’m here.’

  ‘Yes. Good. Maybe. So, if we are not killing each other, Sergei will take his jacket off. OK?’

  ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Make yourself at home.’ He snorted and purposefully turned his narrow back on me while he hung the jacket from a brass hook by the front door. I didn’t move. ‘Trust me,’ I said. ‘I’m here to do business. Just business. OK?’ He turned around, a Makarov pistol clutched in his fist. The muzzle pointed at my chest. There were only five feet between us. I moved my hands up, slowly, palms out. ‘But if you’re going to kill me, you’d better do it right, and do it right now.’

  Lukov burst instantly into a deep peal of laughter, weirdly resonant given his weasel frame. He flicked the barrel up and held the pistol side-on, unthreatening, grinning widely. He paused, and then jerked his hands as a boxer might if feinting a punch, and then laughed again.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Just business,’ and tucked the semi-automatic into his jeans, under the hem of a thickly knitted sweater. ‘You are lucky to find Sergei. He has an appointment. A beautiful woman.’ He cupped his hands, and held them up in front of his chest. ‘Like dini. How do you say?’ He scratched his chin. ‘Watermelons!’

  Everyone has a weakness. Lukov’s was women. Enslaved to his cock – to which he proved himself a devoted and unaccountably successful servant – he was an internationally notorious skirt-chaser. He roared with laughter again and then as quickly as it flared up his face dropped.

  ‘Are you buying, or selling?’ I went to answer but he cut me off. ‘And don’t think Sergei is going to be cheap. You, here – this is a problem, my friend. A big fucking problem. You understand?’

  I told him I did and lowered my hands, looking around for somewhere to sit. He pointed to the table and I drew up a chair. I sat down and folded the tan overcoat I’d bought on the way tightly across my chest. Lukov reached up to a cupboard over the sink and produced a bottle and two little Duralex glasses, into each of which he poured an ounce or so of clear liquid.

  ‘Rakia,’ he said. ‘For the cold.’ I hesitated. ‘Relax,’ he smiled. ‘Guaranteed one hundred per cent Bulgarian grape poison.’ We lifted our glasses and banged the rims together loudly. Lukov looked me straight in the eye. ‘Nazdrave.’

  ‘Sláinte,’ I replied, holding his stare.

  I took the grappa at a gulp and clenched my throat before breathing out. My guts burned. Lukov sat down and lit a Gauloise and then pushed the packet and a lighter towards me. I lit one too, and held the smoke down. It tasted good. We both exhaled into the room. The tobacco smoke smothered the tang of shit, the grappa, the biting cold.

  ‘Selling,’ I said.

  ‘Bad luck for you,’ he smiled. ‘Buyer’s market. Seems like everyone has something to sell these days.’ I t
ook another drag on the Gauloise and he fixed his marble eyes on me through the smoke. No smiles now. We stared at each other for a moment over the empty glasses. ‘What are you offering?’

  I dropped my cigarette into the ashtray. Then, slowly, so as not to incite his trigger finger, I removed the hundred-dollar bill from my ticket pocket, careful all the while to keep his gaze. I unfolded the note and placed it face up on the table between us.

  ‘Benjamin Franklin,’ I replied.

  The laughter erupted again. Lukov’s face warped into a mass of unshaven creases. His body rocked; his left hand slammed the table like a tag-wrestler desperate to climb out of the ring. But his right hand never strayed more than a second from the pistol in his belt. It was a talent of his that you never knew if he was genuinely amused or just hamming it up; likewise, his bouts of gravity were equally inscrutable. But Lukov’s real talent was not as an actor, but as a broker.

  Neither buying nor selling anything personally, he was merely a key – albeit an expensive one – who unlocked the doors through which clients that could otherwise never be seen to meet could do business: the Americans and the Russians; the Russians and the Chinese; the Chinese and the Iranians; the Iranians and the Saudis; the Saudis and the Israelis; the Israelis and the North Koreans; the North Koreans and the Americans. The list was infinite; the cycle unending.

  His stock in trade was not intelligence but information. What other people did with it, how they assessed it, categorized it, classified it, was apparently of no interest to him. Whether he took pleasure in pimping his wares, thrills from driving up or down the price, remained unclear. What was clear was that he took ten per cent of every transaction, in cryptocurrency, in advance. A multi-millionaire who lived and laughed like a hyena, he was, in his soul, a mirthless motherfucker, both loved and loathed by Vauxhall Cross, Langley and Moscow in turn. Though they all despised him, they all protected him, for the simple reason that they all needed him.