Ragnarok 03 - Resonance (14 page)

I'll do my best, Dad.

To be half the man his father was: still his only real ambition, more than enough for a lifetime's work. Now, though, he was in realspace, with more immediate tasks to attend to.

‘Vachss Station Control to Pilot. Are you status green?'

He wiped the back of his hand across his face.

‘Pilot to Vachss Station Control. Status green, and commencing approach now, if you're willing.'

‘Approach approved. We'll pour some daistral ready, Pilot.'

Roger smiled.

‘I'll hold you to that.'

He immersed himself back in wonderful conjunction with his ship, and together, slowly, they moved towards the orbital, concentrating on the work, fulfilled by it. Worrying about Jed Goran and the legal niceties could wait: just manoeuvring to a docking-port was enough to occupy ship-and-Roger.

Call it Zen and the art of Piloting.

‘Contact made, Pilot. Welcome to Vachss Station.'

‘Thank you, Control.'

He sighed as he slipped out of conjunction trance.

Time to deal with people.

TWENTY-TWO

EARTH, 1956 AD

His daughter's outburst kept coming back to him: ‘You're a monster.'

Not yet seventeen, yet so sure of herself, so willing to judge him.

Though she barely suspected the things he had done.

‘
Du bist ein Ungeheuer
,' had been Ursula's exact words, and while she was in fact his stepdaughter and he was in truth a psychopath, according to the diagnostics described in KGB-approved psychology texts, Dmitri Shtemenko was hurt by her accusation. At least to the extent that he understood how words might wound an ordinary person.

‘I haven't killed anyone for years,' he had told her.

It had been the wrong thing to say, but he had been distracted by the details of Ilse's funeral, the senior colleagues he would have to talk to and the opportunities that might be presented. Such tactical thinking separated him from the weak-minded, and he was normally efficient in hiding it; at the same time, he did have regret at Ilse's passing.

There would be a certain emptiness in his life, at least until he filled it.

It was in going through her mother's things, poking around the old shambling house they lived in – surrounded by fields, far from the tenements of the proles – that Ursula had stumbled upon the trail to the garden shed, the boxes buried beneath unused spades and forks, and sprung open the box containing finger bones. Another girl – he still could not think of her as a woman – might not have recognised the withered human digits, but Ursula was interested in both painting and
biology, anatomy the intersection of the disciplines, and knew exactly what they were.

He should have denied ownership, of course.

Once before, during the Great Patriotic War, he had thrown away his little souvenirs before setting sail for Japan. For a long time he had felt little need to indulge himself, forcing himself to leave all evidence behind on those occasions when he gave in to overwhelming urge. Eventually, though, he had felt settled enough to return occasionally to his old ways.

‘Give the box to me,' he had commanded. ‘And say nothing of this. Do you understand, Ursula?'

Trembling, so that the box rattled as if containing dice, she handed it over.

‘I understand.'

Cold loathing, so very adult, coated her voice. She was mature enough to understand what happened to anyone who crossed a KGB colonel; and a colonel with his proven homicidal background was even more dangerous than the rest. He felt a hint of paternal pride in her ability to assess risk during fraught times.

Alone now in his bare study, he opened another box on his desktop. Ursula had seen inside this one also, but had failed to sense anything special about the metal shard. As for Dmitri, he felt the stuff was strange, but possessed no means to analyse it further.

There had been other remnants for the research team to keep, and make sense of if they could. Somehow he thought they would fail.

For Dmitri, it was victory enough that he had brought it back from Siberia without his superiors' knowledge. Metallurgical analysis did not excite him. The only person he had showed it to was young Daniela at work: she was twenty-one years old, lean and angular with a cruel face that excited him to look at. He had not yet taken her as a lover, Lieutenant Daniela Weissmann, but he thought it would happen soon.

But his third and real treasure . . . That was in the loft, and
he was never sure what had called him to it, two years ago. People had been excited about the archaeological find in London, yet no else had sensed the presence of the buried crystal inside damp clay. Call it a gift of the darkness – except that no stirrings in his head accompanied his digging the thing out.

No commands from the darkness at all.

Perhaps his sensitivity to the crystal had simply been a side effect, nothing intentional or useful, of the dark power that corrupted him.

He remembered the thrill of sneaking past the guards, going down into the dig beneath the City, wondering what he was doing there. With his shielded torch, he had his own private viewing of a stone mask dating back to Londinium; but it was a blank wall of wet clay, the edge of one of the excavation pits, that had drawn him. Then the digging with fingers by torchlight, the slick-yet-sticky feel of the stuff, and the glint of crystal when he found it.

Crystal, shaped like a spearhead, and buried for centuries in London mud.

So precious, and yet he would never sell it.

Nor tell his KGB masters what he had found.

Of course, he had been in London for operational reasons. Going across to the West had kept him on edge; perhaps stealing an unsuspected archaeological find had been less dangerous than giving in to his other desires. A police manhunt might have made things awkward.

And what about Ursula?

He really did not want to think of her as a woman.

She is a problem, though, is she not?

Not as another potential victim.

Or would her screams be all the sweeter for their overtones of innocence betrayed?

Berlin, at least the Allied sectors, formed an island of western freedom in a Communist sea. But once there, for all the
dangers if discovered and the recent tightening of access controls, it was relatively easy for Gavriela, with all the assets available to SIS, to slip into the Russian Sector.

Living in London, so different from the rest of Britain, made it natural to adopt the tough-humoured Berlinerisch attitude, and lose the hard
g
in words like Inge. Coats were even drabber than in England (Paris, on her holiday, had been a revelation), so she had dressed for the part, as had the two men forming her protective escort.

It was the 23rd of November, and freezing fog was everywhere.

The contact who met them at the safe house in Treptow, inside the Russian Sector and close to the black-looking waters of the Spree, was a grey-haired dour man who said: ‘She's a schoolgirl, didn't you know? Not exactly prime defector material.'

‘So what?' said Gavriela, a hard-edged
Ja, und?
‘It's not her we're interested in.'

‘Got it.' His expression was one of grim camaraderie. ‘She does a good job of hiding how scared she is.'

‘Good.' Meaning both things: the fear and not showing it.

Likewise Gavriela's own fear, that things would go to hell and Carl would end up living with Rosie and Jack in Abing-don. But she pushed those thoughts aside as she climbed the bare wooden stairs, and entered a room whose floor was covered in cracked green lino, older but not so different from her kitchen back home.

Ursula was sitting on a plain wooden chair at a card table, wearing a grey cardigan and skirt, looking pale. The resem-blance to Erik at that age sent a dagger into Gavriela.

‘Who are you, please?' asked Ursula formally:
Wer sind Sie, bitte?

Gavriela was not a field agent. If she had been, her answer would have been a conscious choice. ‘I'm your aunt,' she said in German. ‘Gavriela Wolf. I loved your mother Ilse like a sister.'

‘You died—' Ursula stopped.

‘So you do know that Erik was your father,' said Gavriela. ‘Your real father.'

‘Mother told me' – with a dry eyed blink – ‘to stop me cutting myself. Knowing I'm not doomed to inherit his . . . obsessions. There's a reason I wear long sleeves.'

Gavriela wanted to reach out and hug her, but it was too soon, far too soon.

‘It must have been hard, given your stepfather's profession.'

Caution now, sounding out the girl's political worldview.

My niece!

‘It's not his job that's the problem,' said Ursula. ‘The things he's— Never mind.'

Gavriela swallowed. ‘He . . . hurt you?'

‘Oh, no! Not the way you . . . No.'

So Dmitri's victims remained outside the family at least. Plus, Ursula separated her stepfather's actions from his job, implying violence that even the KGB would not sanction. But this would be guesswork on the girl's part, nothing more.

Still, it was dangerous ground to cover so soon, so Gavriela broke the conversation, taking a chair and placing it opposite Ursula. She sat down, neither too far back – which might convey coldness – nor close enough to intimidate.

Being careful.

‘The war ruined everything,' said Gavriela. ‘I believe Erik died, but I lost all traces of Ilse. And you . . . I didn't know you existed.'

‘I contacted the British. I don't understand why you are here.'

The thing was not to think of this as conducting an interrogation, although there were dangers in two-way information exchange – Gavriela felt exposed enough just being on the wrong side of the Curtain. The intent was for Ursula to help them willingly.

‘In 1940 I reached England,' said Gavriela. ‘I've lived there ever since. Because of my war work, the Secret Intelligence
Service knew how to contact me.' She switched to English: ‘I'm really British these days. And I use a different name, but let's stick to Gavriela for now.'

That was a little colloquial, but Ursula seemed to understand.

‘Do you know how many people died in Hungary?' she asked, also in English. ‘Forty thousand.'

‘I know,' said Gavriela.

‘But my stepfather says' – in German once more – ‘that if it weren't for Britain throwing its weight around over Suez, the Kremlin would not have had to react so hard. They have to show strength, he says.'

All Gavriela knew was that the PM was in Jamaica to ‘rest', his health shattered by the crisis, having backed down following explicit threats from Washington and Moscow, including a Soviet promise of nuclear missiles destroying London if the British army, currently twenty-three miles from Suez, did not depart. Meanwhile, in the Commons, Macmillan had told backbenchers of Britain's new place in the world: Greece to the United States' Rome.

‘And what do you think, Ursula?'

The girl –
my niece
– clasped her hands over her belly.

‘I don't know any more.' She sounded old. ‘But I can't help you kill him'

So she understood that she was of interest to British intelligence only as a way of getting to Colonel Dmitri Shtemenko

‘We don't want him dead, Ursula.'

It seemed safe to promise that much.

Five days after the extraction of Ursula from the East, Gavriela faced the real challenge.

Getting Ursula into the British Sector had been only stage one, but after that she wore an RAF uniform and carried official documentation, journeying aboard a military lorry on one of the three authorised roads to West Germany. Still, Gavriela had been nervous. When the
package received
signal finally came in, Gavriela had gone for a walk around the Kleine
Tiergarten in falling snow, where wind and cold were sufficient explanation for the tears in her eyes.

Now Gavriela was making the journey from Ku-Damm to Alt-Moabit on foot, while two armed officers in heavy over-coats trailed her, and four more were already in place around the café where Dmitri was due to appear. In one sense, it was a show of strength on both their parts: Dmitri had chosen the area, demonstrating that he, too, could cross between sectors via clandestine means.

Gavriela was not party to the operational details, but some-how messages had moved both ways between her and Dmitri, requesting and agreeing to a rendezvous.

Much of the cityscape she walked through was ruins. The major difference between now and a decade ago was that the rubble had been stacked and sorted, even cleaned, to produce an urban paradox: a tidy catastrophe. Cities like Frankfurt and Munich were revitalised, but sad old Berlin had only one thing to show for the new freedom in the western sectors: rich department stores amid the ruins, especially on the Kurfürsten-Damm, with a dazzling array of goods on offer in their bright interiors.
See what you'll get
, they whispered to East Berliners,
if you overthrow your Communist masters
.

In the café, a large radio was playing ‘Hound Dog', and Dmitri was sitting behind a table at the rear with his legs crossed – a posture that reminded her of Rupert – and a cup of thick Turkish coffee in front of him. There were no genuine customers, and according to the sign on the door she had entered through, the place was closed.

The bulky owner fetched a coffee for Gavriela and placed it on the table, then moved back behind the counter where his weapons would be at hand. An SIS man stood with coat unbuttoned, watching. One of his colleagues would be up-stairs, two more outside at the rear. The pair who had followed Gavriela remained on the street.

‘I'm very impressed,' said Dmitri, giving no sign that almost three decades separated today from their only other meeting,
hiding in the loft above a school assembly hall. Afterwards, he had saved them both from SA attackers in a churchyard, then escorted her home.

Where he first saw Ilse, at that time engaged to Erik.

‘Precautions seemed in order,' said Gavriela. ‘Danger seems to follow you around.'

‘Oh, no. I mean I'm impressed with your callous manipulation of a vulnerable schoolgirl, your own niece, in order to serve your political masters.'

Gavriela controlled her breathing.

Keep balanced
.

‘Don't think I'm impressed with you, Colonel.'

Surrounding Dmitri, flickers of darkness, like licking tongues, came into existence and disappeared like short-lived particle-antiparticle pairs.

‘May I?' He pointed at a cloth-wrapped bundle. ‘Your people have already checked it.'

She looked at the man behind the counter, then said: ‘OK.'

What Dmitri unwrapped was a shard of metal, nothing more. ‘I was stationed in Siberia after the war, until I proved myself.'

Because initially he had remained in hiding, here in Berlin. SIS found out because he had been forced to use an old cover identity, which rang alarm bells during routine denazification procedures. Returning to Moscow, he must have faced some difficult times before his rehabilitation and reinstatement within the KGB.