A Spy's Life (38 page)

‘Well, it doesn’t matter. I can tell you that he left Stockholm and moved to London. He had a girlfriend there.’

‘We did not know that but, as you say, it doesn’t matter now. All that matters is that my daughter sees him.’

‘No,’ said Eva from the window. ‘I want to know everything. I have to hear the worse things now.’

Harland could not help noticing her beauty.

‘How much do you really need to hear now?’

‘Everything.’

Harland had no intention of telling her everything.

‘Look, this is going to be very distressing. Why don’t you take it one step at a time. We’ll get the flights to Britain and we can talk on the way.’

‘No!’ she shouted. ‘Tell me everything now.’

‘Tell her,’ said Hanna.

‘Tell me, Bobby.’ It was the first time she had addressed him by his first name.

‘Well …’ He paused and inhaled. ‘I think there are very good reasons to believe that Oleg Kochalyin was responsible for the shooting.’

‘That’s impossible,’ said Eva contemptuously.

Hanna studied Harland.

‘Why do you say these things? Oleg would not hurt Tomas. They were close. For most of his life, Tomas knew Oleg as his father, and he was a good father to him. They saw each other after my daughter’s divorce.’

‘When was the divorce?’

‘Nineteen eighty-eight,’ said the old lady. ‘It was amicable. Oleg took care of us. Irina and he still have an affection for each other, you see. This is why you are wrong.’

Harland wasn’t going to pursue it.

‘Look, I think you need time by yourselves. This is a terrible thing to happen. You will want to discuss what you’re going to do without me being here. I’ll go back to the hotel and wait to hear from you.’ He pulled a sheet of notepaper from the folder that he’d been carrying and placed it on the coffee table. ‘The telephone and room number is on this.’

He left the building. It occurred to him that he had eaten little in the last twenty-four hours, so he decided to find breakfast before returning to the hotel. He also wanted time to gather his thoughts before talking to Zikmund. Seeing Eva again had thrown him, though he barely dwelled on this because to do so would be to put his desire above her distress. He felt deeply for her, and it didn’t matter that she had been cold and suspicious with him. That was natural. He knew he’d been the same with Tomas.

Half an hour later he went back to the hotel. As he climbed the narrow stairs to the third floor two men brushed past him. He thought nothing about it until he reached his room and found the door unlocked. He called out, then pushed the door open.

Zikmund was lying in bed in much the same position as he had left him a couple of hours before. He had been shot in the head.

22

ESCAPE

His first instinct was to leave the room immediately. The two men were bound to return once they realised that they’d passed an elevator inspector on the stairs of a hotel that possessed no elevator. But Harland was held to the spot. He looked down at the two small-calibre bullet wounds about two inches apart at Zikmund’s temple and reflected bitterly on the waste. He had come to like the man, his decency and humour, and felt he owed it to him to stay and see that his body was treated with respect. But he couldn’t.

He looked around the room. The contents of his bag had been tipped on to the floor. He swept everything back, knowing that there was nothing to reveal his false identity, and slung it over his shoulder. He felt in Zikmund’s jacket pockets and removed the keys to the hire car. Then he left, without looking at Zikmund again, and hurried downstairs. He was still wearing the jacket that had saved his life when he sprinted across the road and burst through the entrance of Eva’s building. The doorman, by now suspicious of his comings and goings, shouted something after him. Harland took no notice and bounded up the stairs to the second floor. Eva opened the door to his hammering and stared blankly at him. She had changed out of the exercise gear and now wore black trousers and a grey rollneck sweater. She looked composed – remote. He pushed past her, slamming the door behind him.

‘The man who helped me find you has just been murdered. His body is in the hotel room over the street. He was asleep in bed when they shot him at close range with a silencer. The killing was ordered by the same man who shot Tomas.’

Eva looked at him and then at her mother who was still sitting in the same place on one of the sofas.

The lack of reaction annoyed him.

‘Did you hear me? Kochalyin has killed again.’

The old lady was the first to speak.

‘You have no proof, Mr Harland, that Oleg is responsible for the death of your friend.’

‘No, I don’t, but I do possess proof that he is a psychopathic murderer. It’s the same proof that your son – our son – released to the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague. This proof is so dangerous to Kochalyin that he has been prepared to cause the death of twenty-three people to suppress it. That figure includes a young woman named Felicity – Tomas’s girlfriend. She was tortured to betray his whereabouts, then executed, like my friend. This toll includes many people who had never heard of Oleg Kochalyin – the passengers of two planes in New York, one of which he sabotaged. Then there was a young policeman in London who was mown down on the same evening as Tomas. His companion, by the way, is disabled for life.’ He paused for breath. ‘And Tomas? I’ll be brutally frank about his prospects. Tomas will never move again. He will not speak again. He will never feed himself again. He is a prisoner of his own body.’

He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket. ‘And the proof, that it was worth inflicting so much pain for? It’s these pictures of Oleg Kochalyin, also known as the war criminal Viktor Lipnik.’ He unfolded the print of the video still and placed it on the coffee table. ‘This shows Kochalyin supervising the burial of victims of a mass execution in Bosnia. As you can see, Tomas is in the background. It’s clear that he was made to witness this disgusting event when he was not yet twenty years old – by a man who you apparently regarded as the perfect father figure.’ He looked down at Hanna. ‘Forgive me,’ he said harshly, ‘that wasn’t quite how you put it, but it’s clear that from the moment you welcomed Kochalyin into Prague in 1968 with that basket of food, you have never ceased to trust him. I don’t know whether you knew his true nature, but you must have had some idea when Tomas came back from his little trip in 1995.’

‘We did know something had happened,’ said Hanna. ‘But he would not tell us about it.’ She was shaken.

‘And you didn’t press him?’ Harland demanded. He turned to Eva. ‘What did you think you were doing?’ he said, jabbing at the photograph. ‘How did you let Kochalyin take him to Bosnia?’

Eva shook her head. She looked as if she couldn’t take any more.

Her mother spoke. ‘You don’t understand. Tomas had a drug problem. Heroin. Oleg paid for the clinic in Austria where he was taken off the drugs. Oleg was attached to the boy and Tomas listened to him. When he said he would take him on business to Belgrade, we thought it would be good for Tomas. We knew he was going into Yugoslavia, but we thought it was Belgrade.’

‘And he told you nothing afterwards. No hint?’

She lowered her eyes.

‘Did you know that your KGB friend was supplying weapons and fuel to the Yugoslavs? Did you know he was laundering their money and stealing a good bit on the way?’ He threw his arms out wide, indicating the room. ‘Eva, for Christ’s sake, where do you think all this comes from?’

‘My name is Irina.’

‘Not to me, it isn’t.’

The old lady looked at her daughter. ‘Tomas
did
say he had seen something terrible and we did think he had come back a very changed person. He would not talk.’ She looked up at Harland. ‘But you know he still went to see Oleg long after these events.’

‘That’s because he was gathering as much evidence as he could against Kochalyin,’ said Harland. He placed the second picture on the table. ‘This was taken on or after the twenty-ninth of May 1998 – probably by Tomas. It proves that Kochalyin – that is to say Lipnik – was alive after the staged assassination in Bosnia. Tomas certainly knew what he was doing. This photograph is in many ways more important than the first one.’

Both women looked at the picture.

Harland waited, then said, ‘When did you tell him about me?’

‘Two years ago,’ Eva said, without raising her head.

‘And he reacted by breaking off relations with you – is that right?’

She hesitated.

‘We didn’t see him, but he wrote to say that he had made a new life in Stockholm. He told me he’d done well and made some money for himself from an Internet company. He said he needed to get his life straightened out. He didn’t send his address and I didn’t try to find him.’ She paused and moved to her mother’s side. ‘Of course we were anxious for him, Bobby, but what could we do? I knew he needed time to himself to sort out his problems. All I cared about was that he wasn’t using drugs again.’

Harland watched her, partly absorbed by her face, and partly wondering at the compromises she’d made in marrying Kochalyin. Maybe they weren’t compromises. Perhaps that was what she had wanted all along.

‘I understand you’ve had your problems,’ he said.

‘Do you have children?’ she asked abruptly. ‘I mean other children. No? Well, how could you know about these things?’

‘Well, maybe that’s true, but I do know our son is lying in hospital and that I’m going back to Britain. You can come with me, or you can go separately. Either way, I’m leaving now.’ He picked up the photographs. ‘These have made me a marked man. And it’s only a matter of time before Zikmund’s body is discovered and descriptions of me are provided by the hotel staff.’

The phone rang. Eva moved to answer it but changed her mind.

‘It’s on the machine,’ she said. The bell continued to sound. She cocked her head as it stopped and a recorded message played. A man spoke in Czech – a gravelly, controlled voice that did not hesitate. After a few short sentences he hung up without giving a name.

Eva looked at him to see if Harland had guessed.

He had. ‘That was Kochalyin. What did he want?’

‘He asks me to call him. There’s something he wants to talk to me about. It’s not important.’

‘But he didn’t leave a number, did he? That means you must be in regular contact.’

‘I have a number where I can get him when I need to.’

‘How often is that?’

She shrugged.

‘A few times a year. A message is passed on and he calls me back.’

‘And what do you talk about?’

‘Nothing – financial arrangements. He has bills to pay for us.’

‘And?’

‘And he has sometimes made attempts to find Tomas. I didn’t ask him to, but he has done this anyway. He says he does it to – how do you say? – to put my mind at rest.’

‘And he calls to find out if you’ve heard from him?’

She nodded.

‘Well, I’m sure he was very concerned,’ said Harland. ‘But fortunately Tomas hid himself well. He got himself another identity. He has been living under the name Lars Edberg.’

Eva let out a weary, wry laugh.

‘What?’ It was at that precise moment when he became aware of something reaching deep inside him and snatching at his guts.

‘The family trait,’ she said. ‘We’ve all pretended to be other people.’

Harland didn’t respond. Now he knew what it was. That voice on the answering machine – he’d heard it before. It was in the villa. On the first day they’d tied him to a chair and left him blindfolded in the old air of the cellar. He was there for an hour or more in complete darkness and silence. And he’d thought he was alone, which is why he let out the sighs and self-recriminations that a person only voices when he knows he is by himself and facing death. Then the man spoke – the cracked smoker’s voice he’d just heard. He was shockingly close and Harland had instantly understood that he’d been there, sitting beside him the entire time, watching his fear.

There was no conversation during that first session. But there was pain, a sudden, swift statement of the man’s power. The first blow was to his groin. There were many more. He thought perhaps that it was a club or baseball bat, but it might just as easily have been the toe-cap of a heavy boot.

In some ways Harland was not surprised. All along he had wondered about the connection between the Russian in the villa and the elusive Kochalyin. He looked at Eva. Did she know about this? And what about the old lady who had made the first contact with the young tank officer, who had brought him into her home and practically offered her daughter up to him?

‘How did you get here?’ asked Eva.

‘By car. We were followed. They know the car. They’re probably watching it. But I have the keys and if there’s no other way to leave I will try to use it.’

‘Were you registered under your own name at the hotel?’

‘No. Zikmund took the room in his name and showed his ID. They didn’t see mine.’

‘But the people who killed him must know who you are.’

‘Of course. And they know I came to see you, which is why you just got that call. It is also probably true that they would very much prefer it if you didn’t learn about the evidence against him. You must know a lot about Kochalyin’s background which he would hate to see combined with the material I have. Everything you know will add to the case against him – for example, the dates of his business trip with Tomas in 1995. Soon, Eva, there’ll be a point when Oleg Kochalyin will have to decide what to do about you. It may be that this man is still obsessed with you.’ He paused, sat down on the arm of a sofa and removed the inspector’s jacket. ‘But how long is that likely to last now? It has only just occurred to me that while you didn’t know what had happened to Tomas, you were no threat. But now he suspects that you’ve learned about the shooting and the reasons for it and about the other barbarities, he will come to see you as a danger to him.’

‘He never will see her like that,’ said Hanna.

‘You seem very confident.’

‘I am. She is the only person that man has ever loved. He could not harm her.’