The Waiting Time (34 page)

He heard the chambermaid’s trolley in the corridor and the knock at the door. He held his hand over the telephone and shouted at her that she should come back later. His bitter temper brought the sweat to his forehead.

‘No, I am not coming home, Mr Fleming. In case you had forgotten, Mr Fleming, the matter of agreed policy is as important now as it was before Mrs bloody Olive bloody Harris inserted her unwanted nose into my mission. And I hope, Mr Fleming, that you will make my views known to the ADD with clarity, and tell him there is blood spilt here and that there will be more spilt before it’s over. Good day, Mr Fleming.’

Albert Perkins so rarely lost his temper. He had never before spoken with such vehemence to a man of seniority. If Corporal Barnes and Mantle did not succeed, he would be crucified for what he had said to his senior, and out on his arse from the front doors of Vauxhall Bridge Cross. He sat alone on his bed and the radio played jazz music. He sat quietly.

The wooden cross was at the back of the churchyard, where the grass was longest and the weeds thickest.

The legend had been written in black paint, flaked, across the arm of the cross: Artur Schwarz 1937—1995. It was the only grave in the cemetery over which there was no headstone. Josh thought the man had lived his last years alone and died alone and now rested alone. He stood by the cross.

‘Have you seen enough?’ she called.

‘Yes.’

‘It’s like he cheated us.’

‘Yes.’

The car was where he had been told it would be.

He had driven at the speed of a lunatic, taking the fast road out of Rostock, through Ribnitz-Damgarten, and the needle had showed that his speed had reached 180 kilometres per hour. He had gone on the grass to pass a lorry and had swerved savagely to avoid an oncoming van. He had gone on the paving to pass a pick-up puffing a trailerload of pigs.

They were walking to the car. He saw her. She was with an older man. He saw the mud that was smeared and spattered over her legs and across the front of her coat. He had no plan. The Makharov pistol was out of his belt under his thighs on the seat. Dieter Krause had reached the rank of
Hauptman,
and if the regime had survived, in another year, he would have expected promotion to the rank of major, it would have been expected of him that he could act without a plan.

He drove past them, braking.

The man led. He was a big man, a man older than himself, with a short, old-fashioned, military haircut, and the hair was dark but peppered with grey. The man’s head was down, as if despairing, and his clothes, too, were mud-smeared and spattered. He drove on up the main street of Swarkow, then turned in front of the village’s small school. He had a clear view of them. She seemed to him more substantial than he remembered her, but that would be because she wore the heavy coat.

She could destroy, with the man beside her, everything he had built. She could put him into the cells of the Moabit gaol. She could humiliate him. She could turn his Christina from him. She was, with the man, the head of the beast. He watched. There was only one way out of the vi
ll
age of Swarkow, and he could recall the detail of the road.

They were cleaning their shoes against the wheels of the car and the man tried to scrape the mud from his trousers. He reached into his pocket. Dieter Krause saw him toss the car keys to the young woman.

She sang as she drove. Josh sat and sulked.

The road was straight, fast, and she drove easily. He glanced at the vanity mirror in the sun visor and saw the big BMW closing on them.

Beside the road, straight ahead, against the fields of yellow weed grass, was the narrow ribbon of the river. Between the river and the road was the line of poplar trees. He touched her arm, gestured with his hand that she should slow, pointed to her mirror. She should slow to let the big BMW pass them. They had reached the line of the poplar trees. Beyond the trees were the steep, snow-flecked banks of the river of dark, listless, flowing water. She was slowing. He checked the mirror again. It was filled with the black shape of the BMW’s bonnet.

Suddenly, the scream of the impact behind them. He was jolted forward. The belt held him, but his head whipped towards the dash. He had his arms out in front of him, trying to cushion the blow. The small hire car was tossed ahead. Josh gasped. In the mirror, the BMW had slowed, slid back, now came again. There was nothing he could tell her. First rule of military command: a subordinate is given authority, a subordinate cannot be second- guessed, a subordinate must be left to sort the shit. She clung to the wheel. He saw the whiteness of her fists as she hung on to it and fought to keep them on the road.

He could not help her.

The BMW, again, filled the mirror. He braced. She was braking. The trunks of the high poplar trees were beside his window, then the darkness of the water, then the steepness of the banks . . . Christ, this was where it ended. She stamped on the accelerator a moment before the second collision, deflected the blow. He thought she’d lost control. The road was wetgreased. The trunks of the poplars were white where the sleet was frozen to them. He thought it was where it ended, going off a treacherous road and into the trunk of a poplar and into the dark water of a river.

She held the road.

The BMW came again
for
them.

It was alongside them, edging past. There was the tear of the metal of the BMW against the door of their car. He saw the face of Dieter Krause. There was no anger on it, no hatred, but the calmness of a man who follows an instruction. The weight of the BMW, shrieking against them, forced them towards the side of the road, towards the trunks of the poplars and the steepness of the river’s banks. She fought to hold the wheel steady. It was unequal. The weight and power of the BMW were driving them towards the line of trees, towards the river. He thought it was all for goddamn nothing, another road-accident statistic .

She seemed to stand in her seat as she drove down the brake pedal.

The BMW was past them.

‘Get your coat off.’

She drove behind him. Krause braked. She braked.

‘Get your bloody coat off.’

He struggled out of it. It was habit, but he stripped the contents from the pockets. She snatched it from him and wound down, furiously, her window.

He did not understand her. She went after the BMW.

She squeezed level with the big car, half on the road and half on the verge. The door beside Josh scraped a tree. The cars were locked together. She threw his coat from the window. The coat, ripped open by the wind, spread right across the windscreen of the BMW. He heard the squeal of the brakes. He could not see the face of Dieter Krause. He could imagine the panic of the darkness and the obliterated vision.

They were past. They were clear.

He turned.

He saw the BMW, going slowly, lurching under the power of the brakes, slide between the trunks of the poplar trees and topple without dignity down the steep bank of the river.

She drove on.

He was incoherent. ‘That was fantastic . . . fantastic and incredible . . . Christ, I thought . . . I didn’t believe . . . Dead, I thought we were dead. . . for nothing, all for nothing, I thought...’

‘We are going to Warnemunde, Josh. Not tomorrow, now.’

‘Ribnitz-Damgarten, that’s first. Go to Ribnitz-Damgarten, then go to Warnemunde. You were incredible.’

‘Will you tell your wife?’

He had thought she slept when he held her hand and kissed it, when he had talked of Libby. She laughed and there was the bright light on her face.

She came on the early flight from London. The documentation for her visa, to be inspected by the passport officials at Sheremetyevo-ll, described her as a publicity officer for the British Council. Mrs Olive Harris was known in Moscow, where it mattered, in the Lubyanka building, as a senior officer of the Secret Intelligence Service. The British Council cover was merely to see her without hindrance through tedious scrutiny at the passport desk. She was quite fond of the city. In the early 1970s, she had spent four years of her career in Moscow. She gazed from the window of the second secretary (consular)’s car at the first familiar landmark, the tank traps of rusted steel marking the furthest point of the panzer advance on the city, and they eased onto the St Petersburg Highway and went at speed towards the Circular Road. There were good memories for her.

‘I expect it’s all pretty different, Mrs Harris.’

She detested, when she was quiet, to have the quiet broken.

‘All pretty different from your day, Mrs Harris. I’m right, that was a while back?’

She asked the sharp question. ‘Is he under surveillance?’

‘I checked this morning, as you instructed. There was a car up the road from his apartment. When exactly, Mrs Harris, were you here?’

She said quietly, ‘I had an early start this morning. I am quite tired.’

Mrs Olive Harris, intent on the destruction of a target of consequence, laid her head back in the Rover, let the station chief chauffeur her into the city. She was pleased to hear the surveillance was in position because that would give the matter a much greater authenticity than if it had been necessary to take their own photographs. Her plan, as she had conceived it, did not trouble her. This was the city where she had cut her working teeth and learned, as a colleague had so eloquently put it, to be as hard as barbed wire. She was seldom other than at ease with herself.

The first Aeroflot link of the day from Berlin had brought the three video-cassettes, hand-held by courier, to Sheremetyevo-ll. The courier inside the customs area had handed the package, with an attached explanatory letter, to an official of the counterespionage section of the renamed but former KGB. It had been driven into the city and delivered to an office high in the yellow- walled, handsome Lubyanka building.

Three men watched the video-cassettes, settled in their chairs, sipping their coffee. Each, in turn, had read the attached letter from Berlin. The videos concerned Colonel Pyotr Rykov, who served on the minister’s staff at Defence, and Frau Eva Krause who was the wife of a former officer in the Staatssicherheitsdienst now collaborating with the BfV in Cologne. The videos had been delivered to the embassy late the previous evening by a man, identified from the security cameras as a former personal assistant to minister for state security Mielke. The man was not at his home address early that morning and therefore it had proved impossible to learn his motivation for providing the cassettes.

The snowstorm slipped from the screen. Monochrome pictures flickering then steadying. . She stripped. She groped for him as he dropped his trousers . . The room was filled with their raucous, bellowing laughter. All day, and into the evening, long after brandy had replaced the coffee, they would watch the cassettes and know that the career of Colonel Pyotr Rykov was damaged.

He had in front of him a facsimile message, For His Eyes Only, from the police chief of Rostock. The message that had arrived on the desk of the senior official in Cologne, brief, reported the death at Peenemunde of a former official of the
Rathaus
at Rerik, by hanging, and a British man and woman had been asking for him.

The senior official telephoned Raub across the city at his home. The world of the senior official closed on him. In two days, he checked the wall clock in his room, less a few hours, he would be airborne with his
Direktor,
with colleagues, with Raub and Goldstein, with the man they regarded as a jewel.

The senior official telephoned Goldstein, in Berlin, at his apartment.

He saw the face of Pyotr Rykov enlarged on a screen. He saw an audience of eminent and influential Americans rising to their feet to applaud, and saw the handshakes and the backslapping for his work. He saw opened doors at the Pentagon and at Langley. He saw the livid lines of the scratch scars on the face of Dieter Krause. His world closed on him, in darkness.

They passed the big airbase. There was little to see of the base the Soviets had used, from which they had flown the MiG-29s. Josh had read in the last year an assessment of the MiG-29’s performance by the Luftwaffe, who had inherited a former DDR squadron. What had been designated by NATO as ‘Fulcrum’ was damned as unstable in advanced air combat, with poor navigation and lacking the required look down-shoot down capability. A bit bloody late — nine years late in the making of the assessment. Everything was history. It was history that the British had allocated fifteen billion pounds sterling to the development of the Eurofighter as a counter to ‘Fulcrum’, and history that the MiG-29s had flown, from Ribnitz-Damgarten, mock attacks against the missile and radar base at Wustrow. And that was the reason Operation Catwalk had been launched, and Traveller had been sent through the Wall with the gear, and the boy had been pushed towards the coastline of the peninsula at Wustrow. History, pure and simple, had killed the boy, and history lingered to the present. He told her where to turn and where to stop.

She braked. She parked. She switched off the engine. She quizzed him with her eyes.

He pointed.

She looked at the door of the police station.

She frowned, not understanding.

‘It’s because, Tracy, I believe I’m beaten. I’m beaten because I believe I have the responsibility for two men’s deaths. Today he escaped us, he was so bloody lucky. Being dead already made it his lucky day. I cannot fight against a criminal conspiracy on this scale. I can’t.’