Cold (4 page)

Pyotr’s body threshed around in a spasm of agony; the chair splintered into pieces and he fell, writhing, his hands still handcuffed behind his back. Konstantin dared to steal a look at the half-naked, half-burnt thing on the floor. The eye sockets of the gas mask were filling up from the inside. The old man was drowning – drowning in his own snot and vomit.

Iryna retched into the sink.

After a while, Reikhman switched off the camera and returned it to the aluminium case.

He locked the case, picked it up, nodded to Iryna and Konstantin and walked out. Over his shoulder he said, ‘Burn this dump. I’ll be in the car.’

SOUTH LONDON

 J
oe woke up to discover on the pillow next to him – where his lover had once laid her beautiful head of hair, thick and blonde and lustrous – a large lamb bone, licked clean.

‘Stupid dog.’

He kicked the bed sheets to locate the perpetrator, whose natural place was snoozing at his feet.

No dog.

Joe whistled: one long note, one short. Normally he would hear the scratchy pattering of Reilly’s claws upon floorboards, but there was no response. He whistled again. Nothing.

Joe remembered Wolf Eyes and the weird twins following him in Richmond Park and began to worry. He padded downstairs in his pyjamas, put the kettle on and made himself a cup of tea. Out of the back window of his tiny kitchen he could see his back garden, which Reilly could get to through a dog flap in the back door. The fence was solid, the back gate locked. How on earth? His pushbike was leaning against the fence. Beside it, an upturned flowerpot. A clever dog could use the pot to stand on the saddle and springboard from that to gain the roof of the shed. But Reilly was unutterably stupid.

Joe threw some clothes on and went to investigate. The snow had gone as suddenly as it had arrived, replaced by a steady, depressing and very English drizzle.

By standing on the flowerpot he could see the house on the other side of the fence was a 1950s brick build, not Edwardian. A Luftwaffe bomb must have flattened the previous home, leaving a gap like a missing tooth until it was repaired with a filling of modern brick. He walked round the block and found the brick house, its tiny front garden dominated by an imitation wishing well, guarded by a garden gnome, all constructed to conceal a drain cover. After a long pause and a lot of shuffling, the door opened to reveal an elderly space alien, its hair enrobed in silver foil, wearing a coat-length dressing gown of neon pink. Only its tartan slippers were of this earth. The creature clocked Joe’s wonderment.

‘I’m dyeing me ’air.’ Vowels marbled in Cockney. ‘No law aginst it. What you want?’

Joe was matter of fact: ‘Have you seen my dog? A small black dog?’

Reilly answered the question by bounding out from behind the woman and, standing up on hind legs, giving Joe’s hands a good licking, tail wagging.

‘Oh, so ’e’s your dog, is ’e?’ she said. ‘’E’s very thin.’

‘He’s half whippet. They’re running dogs and always thin.’

‘You should feed a dog like that.’

‘I do feed him.’

‘I’ve cooked ’im four sausages and ’e’s wolfed the lot.’

The mystery of Reilly’s disappearing trick was solved. ‘Well, thank you very much. But we ought to be getting on.’

She looked at him hard. ‘You’re a tinker with that accent,’ she said. ‘They don’t look after their animals proper.’

‘I’m Irish.’

‘Half-starved, poor doggy.’

‘I cooked a leg of lamb yesterday. He ate more of it than me.’

‘And ’e’s all nerves, too. He shivers. Should be ashamed of yourself. Bloody tinkers.’

Joe could feel a cold rage build within him.

‘We must be going,’ he said quietly. ‘Thanks for looking after him.’

‘Bloody tinkers!’ she shouted, and slammed the door shut.

Joe’s hands were trembling. One more piece of bigotry from her and he would have ripped the head off her garden gnome with his teeth. ‘Biting frightens the enemy’ had been one of Mr Chong’s favourite sayings. But this old biddy with the tin hair, she wasn’t the enemy. He knew whatever was eating at him – Vanessa running off with the banker, his job going down the pan, the fact that he had no choice but to run, again – wasn’t her fault. For the thousandth time, he told himself that he had to control his anger.

He took Reilly’s lead out of his coat, snapped the hook onto a ring on the collar, and led him to his Transit van and opened the door. Reilly leapt up onto the passenger seat, coiled himself into a fossil and fell asleep.

Rubber on drizzle, the windscreen wipers flicking this way and that, drizzle on rubber. The radio proffered a song of unrelenting happiness; South London, all concrete and asphalt, seemed anything but. Easing off the main road, Joe went under a concrete arch on stilts into the vast car park of the Scandinavian furniture megastore and parked. Reilly’s black eyes studied him, his ears sticking out – a silent, sardonic, doggy plea for his master not to split the pack.

‘Sorry, pal.’ The dog let out a little sigh and buried his snout in his tail, an expression of grumpy fed-upness that seemed spookily human. Joe clicked the van door shut apologetically, locked it and headed into the store.

Off work, pending the inquiry, Joe had decided to put up some shelves in the spare room of his flat. Vanessa had always nagged at him to do it; now that she had left him for good, the thought that he was finally submitting to her long-expressed wish half amused him. The shelving necessary for the job was in stock in general, but not in particular. A simple chore that should have taken no more than ten minutes grew longer and longer. Absence of evidence was not evidence of absence. He backtracked from the warehousey bit into the store again, double-checked the aisle, location and product number, then marched forwards again, found the exact location. Nothing. He took out his mobile phone and captured where the shelving should have been. Joe showed it to one of the store workers – a big man with an edge of incivility about him – who grunted.

‘Can you not find this?’ Joe’s voice was cold with a kind of controlled anger.

‘No,’ said the worker. ‘Don’t snap at me, mate, or I’ll sort you out.’

Joe clenched his fists tightly but did nothing. The man waited a beat, then called him a ‘pussy’.

Joe walked off, found an empty aisle and closed his eyes.

He was back in the hut they slept in at the terrorist training camp, in the mountains north-east of the capital. At five thirty in the morning, the very first thing he saw when the lights came on were the twin photographs of God the Father, the fat one with the Doris Day smile, and God the Son, the weird-looking Elvis impersonator with the bouffant hair and elevator shoes. Then getting dressed, and the six-mile run round the camp in the dark, knowing that whoever came last would spend the day in the pit and they all knew it would be Donnelly, again, and that Donnelly couldn’t, wouldn’t be able to take it. The pit was twenty feet deep, and so cold it made your bones creak.

At the end of the run, Donnelly – flabby, whey-faced – was last, again.

‘The pit for you,’ said Chong, his stare impenetrable, his lack of humanity all too easy to read. Declan Donnelly was their brigade commander and had been a lion in West Belfast. Donnelly started to weep.

‘No pit today,’ said Joe.

‘Pit for you, too. All day, all night,’ said Chong.

‘I said, no pit today.’

The others looked on, dry mouthed, fearful where this would end up. Joe was the bigger man, sure, but Chong was a lord of killing. The only sound was that of the breeze, coming down from the mountain tops, stirring through the pine forest.

Chong moved towards him, angled his right hand and made to chop hard on Joe’s throat, but Joe put up his left hand and blocked him, and the combat started. The pit was on the far side of the camp grounds, a mile or so away from the huts and the other guards, who were out of sight.

Chong recovered quickly and danced behind Joe’s back. Twisting suddenly, he caught Joe in an armlock and now his thumbs were edging towards Joe’s eyeballs. Joe gripped Chong’s wrists, but the master was too strong for him. Through clouds of mist, the sun was finally clearing the Rangrim Mountains to the east, the darkness ebbing into a dawn sky the hue of spilt blood.

Joe could feel Chong’s fingers pressing against his eye sockets. He would be blind in five seconds, dead in ten. Sightless, but using the light of the rising sun to guide him, he charged straight ahead, carrying Chong on his back, and leapt into the pit. As he fell, he kicked outwards against the far wall of the pit, so that Chong landed first, with the entire heft of Joe’s body on top of him. The pressure on Joe’s eyeballs stopped.

Winded, Joe rolled off Chong, who lay on the floor of the pit. Chong had been knocked out, but was still very much alive. When he came round, Joe knew, Chong would kill him, and Donnelly too, and anyone else who stood up to him. So Joe broke his neck and waited, shivering in the pit, until he was certain Chong was dead.

His friends used the ladder left close to the pit to get him out.

Donnelly told the others, ‘If any one of you breathes a word of what happened here, I will have you shot. This was an accident. Chong overbalanced and fell in the pit. That is what we all saw. We’re going home, boys. We’ve had enough of this place. We’re leaving North Korea.’

The others nodded, one by one.

‘One more thing,’ said Donnelly. ‘Joseph Tiplady, you’re a fecking idiot and the maddest, bravest man I’ve ever met, and I owe you my life.’

When the time came for them to leave the camp for good, Roxy was standing where he knew she would be, in their secret place, on a small bluff in the pine trees, holding hands with her two half-American, golden-haired boys. They couldn’t say goodbye. Only she knew that Chong wasn’t the first man Joe had killed in North Korea. It was a secret between them never to be thought, let alone told. He knew that they would never, ever, let her leave.

Joe surfaced from his reflection. He decided to give up on the store and go home. Fed up with himself for the waste of time, Joe headed past the queues of people buying flat-pack sofas and pot plants and cheap plastic trays, and the great glass doors parted and he was out in the drizzle once more. The van was exactly where he had left it.

Only Reilly wasn’t in it.

SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH

T
he prickly, mock-Gothic porcupine of the temple was smaller than the cheese-grater office blocks that cluttered the sky, but even so, its spirit dominated the centre of Salt Lake City. In the middle of a barren desert, Zeke’s people had written this city in stone, and here he was casting doubt on what had empowered that achievement. Still, here he was.

The Strengthening Church Members Committee was housed in the church’s main administration building, an anonymous concrete ziggurat. Zeke was ushered into a lift that took him up to the seventeenth floor, where he was shown by a stone-faced man into a waiting room with a fine panoramic view of the Rockies. The room was overheated and stuffy, the atmosphere oppressive. Zeke sat down and stared into space. The combination of his fear of what was to come, the heat, the mountains, took him back to that other time when he almost gave up on life.

The stink from his skin burning – it must have been forty degrees outside, up the stairs from the basement garage where they were working on him – the acrid, metallic tang of electricity. But worst of all an emetic blend of sickly sweat and a powerful perfume, some kind of lavender. Back then, in 1986, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan wasn’t going so well and it was not a good time to be an American in Kabul. The KGB had caught him at a safe house. He had been betrayed – but by who? He was not quite sure.

‘Tell me, why are you in Kabul? Who did you come to see? Just answer a few questions and it will stop.’ The voice of his interrogator: high-pitched, wheedling. They hadn’t bothered to blindfold him. He couldn’t make the man out clearly because of the spotlight raging in his eyeballs, but he could tell he was fat – very fat – and his lavender aftershave couldn’t hide his stink. The fat man had a Tbilisi accent. So a Georgian – like Beria, like Stalin.

The pain was becoming too much for him to bear.

Cover stories, they’d told him at Langley, were like the skin of an onion. You unpeeled each layer, one by one. His first layer was that he was a radical Canadian journalist, intent on exposing American imperialism; the second was that he was a geologist, wanting to stake a claim on a natural gas reservoir under the Hindu Kush. Both were so thin, he could no longer sustain them.

His third cover was that he was a freelance arms dealer, selling the
mujahedin
Stingers, surface-to-air missiles that the Soviet choppers couldn’t escape. That begged the question: why take the risk of coming to the heart of the enemy capital if he could discuss everything in the safety of Peshawar in Pakistan? Electricity arced up from his penis through his spine, causing his torso to judder uncontrollably.

Zeke’s true mission had been to figure out why a full three-quarters of the dollars spent on covert military aid to the rebels wasn’t ending up in Afghanistan at all. Rogue elements of the ISI, the Pakistani intelligence service, were siphoning off millions of dollars and pocketing them. If Zeke was right, then the CIA was being conned, big time.