Mazurka

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PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF CAMPBELL ARMSTRONG

“Campbell Armstrong is thriller writing's best-kept secret.” —
The Sunday Times

“Armstrong is among the most intriguing of blockbuster writers … near to unputdownable.” —
GQ

“While touching on suspense with a skill to please hard-core thriller addicts, he manages to please people who … warm to readable novels of substance.” —
Daily Mail

“Armstrong's skill is not just an eye for a criminally good tale but a passion for the people that will populate it.” —
The Scotsman

“Subtle and marvelous … This is a dazzling book.”
—The Daily Telegraph
on
Agents of Darkness

“A consummate psychological thriller … Without doubt, Armstrong is now in the front rank of thriller writers.” —
Books
on
Heat

“Armstrong has outdone both Frederick Forsyth and Ken Follett.” —James Patterson on
Jig

“A full throttle adventure thriller.”
—The Guardian
on
Mambo

“A wonderful puzzle that keeps us guessing right to the end.” —
Publishers Weekly
on
Mazurka

Mazurka

A Frank Pagan Novel

Campbell Armstrong

For the children – Iain, Stephen, Keiron and Leda

You must take a good look at reality and understand that in future small nations will have to disappear … The Baltic nations will have to join the glorious family of the Soviet Union.

– V. M. Molotov,

Soviet Foreign Minister to V. Kreve-Mickevicius,

Deputy Prime Minister of Lithuania, July 1940

The fate of the three Baltic states is unique in human history. Nowhere else in the world are former parliamentary democracies occupied, annexed and colonised by a conquering power.

–
The Copenhagen Manifesto
, July 1985

The established habits and ideas are disintegrating before our eyes. The disappearance of something customary provokes protest. Conservatism does not want to give way but all this can and must be overcome …

– Mikhail Gorbachev,
Perestroika

Mazurka (n.) A Slavic dance in triple measure.

1

Edinburgh, Scotland

There were too many things wrong with Edinburgh in late August. The crowds that filled Princes Street and spilled over into the old thoroughfares leading up to the Castle, which floated in the drizzling mist like a great galleon, gave Jacob Kiviranna a sense of claustrophobia. He was distressed by crowds, especially those that consisted mainly of American and Japanese tourists, restless as magpies, searching for quaint bargains in stores with none to offer. And then there was the weather, which was wet and joyless. It had been raining in a slow, merciless way ever since he'd arrived in the city the day before and checked into a small hotel behind Hanover Street – and now he couldn't rid himself of the feeling that his lungs were waterlogged.

He looked at his watch, an old Timex, and saw he had thirty minutes until the train arrived at Waverley Station. He moved along Rose Street, Edinburgh's famous street of bars, passing open doorways through which he could see flocks of hurried drinkers. He stepped inside one of the pubs, sat on a stool at the far end of the counter – a solitary spot – and ordered gin.

In the mirror behind the bar he gazed at his reflection. The eyes were deeply set and bright and somehow made people uneasy when they looked into them. The few acquaintances Jacob Kiviranna had made in his lifetime – other than analysts and therapists – had invariably found pretexts for drifting out of his orbit and slipping from sight. There was an intensity about him, an other-worldliness, that deterred friendships. Even as he sat now in the bar his lips moved almost imperceptibly in the way of people who have lived lives of extreme loneliness and who converse, if at all, with the voices they hear in their own skulls.

Stitched to the left shoulder of his khaki combat jacket was a Disneyland legend, the face of Mickey Mouse. On the right sleeve was a small American flag. Kiviranna's ponytail was held tightly in place with a brown rubber band. He wore a wispy beard and looked like a superannuated hippie, a relic of another place and time. To a casual onlooker, he might have seemed like a raddled casualty of the drug culture, somebody who had taken one trip too many and hadn't quite managed to make it back and who now lived, poor soul, in a crazy world of his own making. And yet there was something more to Kiviranna than just this impression of being out of touch. There was something purposeful in his air of vague bewilderment, the kind of look aspirant saints carried back with them from the wilderness.

He sipped his drink, looked once again at his watch. If British Rail obeyed its own inscrutable timetables there were now twenty-five minutes until the train arrived on platform three at Waverley Station. He reached inside the pocket of his jacket and touched the gun. It was an Argentinian nine-shot Bersa 225. When he'd handled it in his hotel room this morning, he'd liked the icy blue finish of the pistol, the silken, almost fleshy sensation.

Twenty minutes. He left the bar without finishing his drink. It was a mere ten minutes to Waverley Station, hardly any distance at all, but he'd stroll there slowly.

On Princes Street he stared up at the Castle. It reminded him now of a natural artifact, something hacked by nature out of wind and rock and still in some weird process of change. Along the gardens of Princes Street flags fluttered bleakly. Posters advertising this or that Festival event were limp and soggy and indifferent. Avant-garde plays. Mime shows. Mozart. Pipe and drum bands.

Ahead, Kiviranna saw the entrance to the station. He paused, jostled on all sides by people with umbrellas and shopping bags. A group of boys wearing the green and white scarves of a local soccer team went banging past him, singing something unintelligible and irritating. He put his hand against the outline of the gun as he moved closer to the station. There was a familiar pain that had come out of nowhere to take root deep in his head.

He heard the shunting of a locomotive and the shouts of newspaper vendors and the screeching brakes of maroon double-decker buses. For the first time now he felt a sudden fluttering of nerves, something that moved around his heart and made him cold. Something that had nothing to do with the external weather. He adjusted his backpack, stopped to look at the headline on one of the local newspapers, then he moved on.

He took a thin guidebook out of his jeans, pretended to examine it, flipping through the pages but seeing little.

Edinburgh has always been known as the Athens of the North
.

The print seemed to slither in front of his eyes. The words might have turned to grey liquid. He put the guidebook away. He went down the steps that led to Waverley Station. He touched the gun once more, a small reassuring gesture. He wiped slicks of rain from his face, ran one hand through his damp beard. And there it was again, that sense of nervousness, of a tremor going through his heart, like some extra pulse added to the rhythms of his body. He'd have to bring that under control. He couldn't afford any rebellion inside himself.

He entered the station, a place of enormous confusion, late trains, loudspeaker announcements, stacks of luggage, discarded newspapers. Porters stood around like impatient gravediggers awaiting the end of a eulogy they'd heard a million times before. Kiviranna wandered through the huge station, scanning the platforms. The loudspeaker announcements bewildered him. Strange place names were uttered in strange accents.
Inverkeithing
.
Kirkcaldy. Kinghorn
. He studied the arrivals and departures board.

The pain in his head pulsated now and his jawbone felt locked. He hated the sensation because sometimes in the past it had given rise to the irrational fear, the suffocating fear, that his mouth would one day close and never open again.
Anxiety, Jake, sheer anxiety
. All the shrinks he'd ever encountered in institutions had told him that. And they gave him drugs with mellow names to assuage his fears, and sometimes they worked, sometimes not, and when they failed he'd sit for long, insomniac hours on the edge of his bed, wrapped in a blanket, shivering, imagining all manner of terrible things, hearing all kinds of weird sounds float up from the hostile street below the window of his apartment.

He moved to the gate of platform three. A ticket inspector glanced at him, then looked away. Another Yank. One of the impoverished ones. A middle-aged student doing Europe in five and a half days. The inspector had seen them all in his time. He'd seen fellows who looked exactly like Jacob Kiviranna, ‘beatniks' – which was how the ticket inspector thought of them – coming from Amsterdam with marijuana in their shoes, shifty-eyed scruffs who muttered to themselves.

Kiviranna looked along the platform, which was stacked with mail sacks and trunks. He went to a newspaper stand where he browsed for a time. Then he wandered round the concourse of the station and studied the arrivals board again. Seven minutes. Seven minutes that were going to be very slow ones. Seven minutes before he could dispose of the evil that was presently sliding over slick railroad tracks toward Edinburgh.

Despite a bitch of a hangover, Frank Pagan was enjoying the task of escorting Aleksis Romanenko to Scotland. Normally Pagan had no real fondness for trains, for the musty compartments which, even in first class, were extremely uncomfortable. And views from carriage windows were less than breathtaking – the backs of granite houses and sorry little gardens and ramshackle greenhouses. Now and then a face in a rainy window gazed at the passing train as if such an event were the week's highlight.