SEVERANCE KILL (3 page)

From the way he raised a warning but friendly finger, Calvary knew a waiter had been approaching and had been put off. Llewellyn steepled his fingers and rested his long chin on the tips.

He said, sadly: ‘And I’m afraid the same applies if you fail.’

*

A northeasterly storm had slowed the flight and it took close to two and a half hours. By the halfway point, Calvary was managing to think more about the job itself than about Llewellyn. Fuelled by coffee, he absorbed the details of the street map in the Prague guidebook he’d bought at Gatwick, specifically the area surrounding the flat where Gaines lived. He didn’t get the same feel for the district as he would actually walking the streets, but you could never be too prepared. At the same time he went over what Llewellyn had told him about Gaines’s daily routine. Clearly the man had been under surveillance for some time.

And clearly he was a man of habit. The eight-thirty a.m. walk to the local supermarket for the newspaper was followed by a trip to the bakery a few blocks away. Gaines would disappear back into his flat until late afternoon or early evening, when he’d emerge again and catch a series of trams to various places of interest, chiefly museums and libraries. If he was near the river he’d sometimes take supper overlooking the water, followed by a lengthy walk criss-crossing the bridges. Most of his evenings were spent alone. The rest were taken up with formal dinners when he was sometimes invited to speak. He’d lived on his own since the death of his wife three years earlier and had no children.

By the time he disembarked and strode through the customs channel at Prague’s Ruzyne Airport, Calvary had worked out how he was going to do it.

THREE

‘Two years at most, Darya Yaroslavovna. Then you’ll have to start hauling your arse outside.’

Krupina flipped a hand, sending eddies through the fug. ‘The way you go on, these will have killed me by then anyway.’ She favoured
Belomorkanal
cigarettes, Stalin-era stalwarts. Couldn’t get on with the local Czech brands or even the American imports she saw everywhere.

Tamarkin had been referring to the proposed ban on indoor workplace smoking in the Czech Republic, scheduled to come into force in a couple of years’ time. She peered at him where he was lounging in the doorway, tie loosened and top button undone. She sometimes wondered if permitting such familiarity in her staff was wise.

The offices were on the third floor of a run-down suite a few streets away from Wenceslas Square, the shabbiness offset by the favourable location. There was no company title above the buzzer in the street, nor any logo on the glass door on the third floor apart from the ghost of a stencil that once announced the name of a State law firm. Beyond the glass door were a tiny lobby with an empty reception desk, a shared open plan area where Tamarkin and his four colleagues worked, and the inner sanctum, Krupina’s own office.

Her desk and shelves were crammed with so much paper the room looked like a throwback to the pre-digital age. A four-year-old desktop computer was the only concession to modernity. Balanced  atop a mound of yellowing documents and newspaper clippings was a tarnished ashtray riddled with butts like a chunk of maggoty steak, the whole arrangement screaming
fire hazard
even to Krupina herself.

‘What do you want?’ she said.

‘Mail.’ He held up a sealed manila packet.

She sat up behind her desk. The office never received mail except in a diplomatic bag through the Embassy. When it came it was always significant, because it meant the message was too important to have been sent even by encrypted email.

He stood with the packet raised, enjoying the moment. She held up the back of her hand, waggled her fingers. Arrogant little
ublyudok
.

‘Give.’

She took it and reached for a paper knife. When he didn’t move from the doorway she said, without looking up, ‘Double liver sausage with tomato and onions on rye. Sauerkraut on the side, and for God’s sake leave off the dumplings.’

He muttered something as the door banged shut. It sounded like
crone
.

Krupina slit open the duct tape and wrestled with the packaging, her stubby fingers annoying her. The fat bubble-wrapped envelope contained a single sheet of A5 paper.

The letterhead was that of the President’s office.

Her habit was to scan a document rapidly, her vision blurring down the page, feeling for anything that might jump out. Subsequent careful reading would provide the topsoil, but the essence was in the first impression.

Her skim gave her one word, occurring twice and in capitals.

TALPA.

The Linnaean term for the genus
mole
.

Krupina reached over and slammed the window sash closed. She pulled her jacket lapels across her chest. Suddenly, it felt colder.

*

Darya Yaroslavovna Krupina had, in her opinion, been born at precisely the wrong time in history.

It was an opinion she kept to herself, because she feared boring people more than almost anything else. She’d been born too late to be able to make a significant contribution to her motherland’s place in history, but too early not to give a damn.

She’d been a late arrival, her conception taking place when her mother was forty-three, just after her parents had given up all hope. As was often the case. Her Leningrad childhood had been unremarkable, her university years by contrast sensational. She had graduated joint first in her class and her honours degree in political science had been celebrated, embarrassingly, by her father, a legless survivor of the Stalingrad campaign, with a cripplingly expensive bash for forty people at the Pribaltiyskaya, Leningrad’s most splendid hotel.

They had been heady times. Comrade Gorbachev had recently become Party secretary, his approach to leadership bringing a new self respect and confidence to the body politic. Darya was a Party member and her entry into the junior ranks of the KGB had been straightforward. By the autumn of 1989 she was twenty-six years old, a rising star in the field of human intelligence and with a degree of expertise in signals intelligence as well. The world was loosening up, the West was encouraging more dialogue with the socialist nations. Socialism had a foot in the door.

The next six months sent her reeling. Left her wandering in a void. One by one, Moscow’s allies capitulated, dropping all pretence of idealism and morality and damned
guts
. By the spring of 1990 the only holdouts were basket-case countries like Albania.

She stayed on. She was
kept
on, which was a sort of validation, she supposed. The KGB became the FSK, then split into the FSB, concerned with domestic security, and the SVR, the foreign operations agency. Boris Yeltsin’s star waxed and waned. Darya Krupina did her job faithfully, switching her attention to the
nouveau riche
gangster scum of Moscow and St Petersburg (the name sounded so wrong to her, compared with Leningrad) and gathering enough evidence on some of them to have the bloodsucking ghouls put away for life.

At the end of the decade Yeltsin stood down. The new president changed everything. It wasn’t quite like the Gorbachev days. The sense of purpose was less well defined. And she was thirty-seven, not twenty-two. Ageing leached zest from one’s life, there was no avoiding it.

Still, there was much to be celebrated about the new direction. Mother Russia was no longer ruled by a buffoon. She had oil, and gas. Lots of gas. The West, Europe especially, was nervous. Not scared pantsless, but on edge.

Krupina’s father had died at the age of eighty seven, six years earlier. On the mattress under the summer heat in the Petersburg apartment, he’d pulled his only daughter’s lank greying head close and whispered, ‘Look, Dascha.’ And he’d yanked up his pyjama legs and pointed at the fishbelly-pallid scars of his leg stumps and hissed:
‘The scars of a life lived well. If you can do this for your country, you can die having lived.’

He’d punctuated the melodrama with a cackle which, over the years, Darya Krupina had analysed for traces of bitterness. She’d concluded that there were none, that Yaroslav Petrovich Krupin had been genuinely proud to concede his legs for the glory of Russia.

And what had she done, Darya Yaroslavovna Krupina? Apart from graduating like a supernova in 1985, more than a quarter century ago, in another world? After eight years’ service in the FSB, she’d been transferred to the overseas arena, under the SVR. She’d carried out one major job in Western Europe. For her own protection, she was told, she’d subsequently been farmed out to the SVR’s clandestine – unofficial, illegal, non-embassy – desk, in Prague, the capital of a country that had once been one of Soviet Russia’s most robust allies but was now a member of the enemy alliance. She was, oh joy of joys, the head of that desk. There was no Embassy support. The Embassy FSB and SVR staff despised her, tried to pretend she and her people didn’t exist. She was left with the crappy jobs, the nasty ones, the operations that the Kremlin could deny if they went wrong.

But she had her little crew. She had her boys, Gleb and Arkady, and young Yevgenia, and Lev and Oleg, the two older stalwarts whom she couldn’t exactly call boys but for whom she felt great affection nonetheless. She had an office of her own, and cigarettes. If purpose was missing from her life, had she any right to complain?

But purpose had just landed on her lap.

*

She fingered the letter, probing the expensive paper as though it were supple leather whose texture was to be savoured. She reread the words.

TALPA. The Mole. The British mole, the one they’d never been able to find. Deep in the heart of the Kremlin. In its soul. So deep that its influence had directed the course of history in the last twenty years.

The Kremlin’s priority target.

And somebody here in Prague knew who it was.

Krupina looked across at the ikon nailed to the wall. She was an unbeliever but her mother had been devout, discreetly so until her death in 1978 when she’d pressed the tacky crucifix into the teenage Darya’s palm and rasped: ‘Rebirth.’

Krupina lit a fresh cigarette and bounced a stream of smoke off the grey, grimy window. Forty nine years old, and deathbed life lessons from her parents all of a sudden meant something.

She picked up her mobile phone, took a moment to work out the buttons.

He answered on the second ring. ‘Tamarkin.’

‘Get in here.’

‘I’m out buying your sandwich –’

‘Just get back in here, for Christ’s sake.’

*

Bartos Blažek’s nieces called him Uncle K without knowing why. Certain family members, and people of his inner circle who weren’t blood, called him the Kodiak. It was his size, of course, but also his
beariness
. He liked the idea. Hugeness, strength, cuddliness and power, combined. And, yes, he was hairy. Not so much on his head, any more. But his arms, his chest and back and legs, were pelted. He was proud.

Magda had, as usual, organised matters with the skill of the born hostess. The twins squealed and squirmed between the legs of tables and adult guests, dirtying their party clothes within minutes. The handful of school friends giggled, their initial shyness loosening. Their parents either remained frozen to the walls in awe or mingled, chattering too blatantly. Nobody approached Bartos apart from Magda, who squeezed close to him after the drinks had started flowing, rubbing her hip against his. He smiled down at her – she was tall, at five ten, but half a foot shorter than him – and planted a kiss on the side of her mouth.

‘Excellent.’

He doubled over as Karel, the elder of the twins by ten minutes, barrelled headfirst into his gut. Helena dashed to join in, and held her hands up to her father’s face, trying to get the fingers right.

‘No, that’s nine. Yes –
eight’s
right. Eight years old.’

Bartos knuckled his son’s head and ruffled his daughter’s. He squatted and squeezed each of the twins’ faces against one of his stubbled cheeks. They shrieked and recoiled.

Over their black heads he gazed at his firstborn son, Janos, leaning against the wall across the room. Dressed in one of his trademark skinny Italian suits, he was laughing from the side of his mouth at some inanity his current girlfriend was spewing into his right ear. In his left hand he clasped a balloon of brandy. Bartos thought he could see white grains on the boy’s left nostril.

His eyes were angled across the room, raised halfway.

Bartos turned his head, following Janos’s sightline.

Janos was staring at Magda’s breasts.

Bartos looked back at Janos and at the same instant Janos shifted his gaze to Bartos crouching at his children. For a second Janos’s eyes flickered with primitive embarrassment. With guilt. Then, a flicker of fear kindled into a blaze.

He raised his glass in Bartos’s direction and bared his teeth in what Bartos had heard the Americans call a
shit-eating grin
.

Bartos watched him. Didn’t smile.

Someone was tapping at his shoulder and he brushed at it. Magda’s voice roused him and he turned his head. She handed him the phone.

He listened.

‘On my way,’ he said.

Bartos clasped his twins close, stood and murmured in his wife’s ear, felt her nod as he pulled her to him and kissed her hair. Then he left, not looking back. He felt Janos’s terror cast after him like a fishing net.

*

The young man – boy, really – was trussed to a flimsy wooden chair at the back of the warehouse, between the standing shapes of two of Bartos’s men. The falling evening light through the window picked out his juddering silhouette. Bartos could smell the boy’s shit from the door.

As Bartos stepped forward a high jabbering started up. One of his men put a hand on the boy’s shoulder, not roughly. Close up, Bartos could see he’d been slapped around a little: lip scabbed, one eye swollen closed.

Bartos dropped to his haunches, one knee cracking, in front of the boy. The jabbering had segued into a low keening.

‘What’s your name, son?’

The boy began to blubber and one of the men backhanded him across the temple, the other grabbing the chair before it could tip over. Bartos frowned and shook his head at the man.

‘What’s your name?’

‘K-k-k-k –’

‘A little louder?’

‘K-Kaspar. Sir.’

‘I’m Bartos, Kaspar. You seem a nice enough guy. Sorry to meet you in these circumstances.’

Bartos frowned at the ground for a moment, then looked up at the boy. ‘You know why you’re here, of course.’