Cold (25 page)

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 block 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

I
n 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

S
tirring 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 was 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.

His phone beeped with a text message:
Where are the Irish and the Russian? Text us. Or your mother and boyfriend die. You have one minute. The boyfriend first.

They would, of course, be watching him. Lightfoot picked up a remote and suddenly the house was full of Maria Callas singing
Madame Butterfly
.

Walking quickly but not running – stiff upper lip and all that – he went to the kitchen. He felt he didn’t have time to find himself a proper glass but, curse his shaking hands, reached out for a mug and poured himself a slug of Ardbeg, the best, peatiest Scotch whisky in the whole of creation. No ice. Ice was for second-hand-car salesmen.

He lifted up a tartan knitted tea cosy, under which he routinely hid his father’s service revolver, walked back to the sitting room and sat down in an armchair. The second hand on his watch told him forty-three seconds to go. He swirled the Ardbeg in the mug, savoured its aroma, glanced at his watch again, closed his eyes and listened to Maria’s heavenly voice. Half a minute.
Better not dally too long
, he thought, said ‘Cheers, everyone’ to Maria, to the empty room, swigged the Scotch and uttered a final
aah
of pleasure as he drained the Ardbeg. Then Lightfoot placed the revolver’s muzzle to his temple and blew his brains out, smearing blood, bone and grey matter on an oil painting of Wellington’s defeat of the French at the Battle of Salamanca. He’d always hated it.