Vagabond (23 page)

‘Of course.’

She was alone and lonely. Frankie McKinney hadn’t anticipated that. She was dressed and ready but had nowhere to go for two more hours. She felt like a wallflower at a dance for teenagers in a community centre. He’d sounded distant. There had been no enthusiasm in his voice but she lacked the street-level tradecraft to know whether it was basic procedure or meant crisis. It would be good in the evening when the Big Man came. She lay on her bed. She had an idea of how he would be: inspirational. When they went to the place where there would be test-firings, she would ask if she could go first, charge the adrenalin, see the flash as the cartridge case was ejected. Or better: shoot the launcher. Then she would meet the Russians who were far beyond her understanding. Two hours to kill.

On the hill among the beech trees, Timofey Simonov was content. His dogs had picked up the scent of deer and were quartering as the autumn leaves fell around them.

He had an agenda of sorts to go with his walk, matters he should consider. The
future
: the call from his friend, the meeting that would be arranged for the next evening, the journey for collection, then the test-firings and Milovice, the camp that had been his home. It would be good to be with his friend because he had no others.

He loved the dogs, but nothing else. The
present
: he could take satisfaction, as he walked on the dried leaves, that the hood in Yekaterinburg had spent the night strapped into the chair, his feet tight in the concrete. About now he would be moved. His disposal would take place in daylight, seen by many. Because it would be witnessed, other young men with ambition would step back from interference in the existing order, and the booths from which narcotics were sold would not be trashed. He did not think that the sniper would shoot that day in the London suburb because his computer had told him the weather was bad in that area. If it rained the man would not step outside, would not offer a target. An invitation had come that morning by email. His company was requested at a dinner on Saturday at the Grand Hotel Pupp: the charitable cause was repairs to the roof of the main Russian Orthodox church. He might go or he might send the brigadier with a cheque. The present was calm.

The
past
: that was where he spent many of his waking hours. He was with his father and mother at Perm 35. His childhood, with so little company of his own age, had shaped him. When the leaves or needles fell in the forests surrounding the barbed-wire fences, winter was approaching, the season most feared when snow settled on the fences and gates, and the watch towers where the guards shivered. The life expectancy of young men existing in the tundra communities was as little as thirty-five, and when they died many of them had already suffered a crude castration from drinking home-brewed alcohol in the depths of winter, then needing to piss, going outside and exposing their genitals to the ravages of frostbite. Amputation was required. His home was in the heart of a gulag for criminals, for those designated insane, and for men convicted under Article 70, which took in the failed escapers from the Union and the dissidents. Sometimes, not often, a dignitary would come from Moscow – a thousand miles away and a four-hour drive from the airport. At this time of year the first snow would have fallen and the chill was gathering strength; half-frozen men would have splashed paint on everything static in the camp. He had been educated among the younger prisoners. For three years, Timofey’s best friend had been Mikhail, who wanted to be a musician and had mauve-dyed hair. They had studied mathematics. Others had learned chemistry and engineering. More of the criminals had worked at his parents’ home, cleaning, washing, cooking. They tended the small garden in summer and were trusted prisoners. Some had talked to him, out of his father’s and mother’s hearing, of the criminal underworld, and others had told stories of
samizdat
, hidden printing presses and smuggled manuscripts. He had grown up without loyalty, either to the state or to his family, with the lesson dinned into him that the greatest crime was to be caught. His response had been to join Military Intelligence; its motto ‘Greatness of Motherland in your glorious deeds’. He had turned his back on the wire, the convicts and his parents, and had ridden in a bus down the one-way road to Perm and the outside world. He often brooded on the past when he was walking his dogs.

Sunlight dappled the leaves. He had made a near-perfect life for himself.

Tension crackled. Its source, Danny understood, was Matthew Bentinick. They sat at an outside table, and the pipe was lit.

It had not mattered to Danny, inside the sealed compound at Gough, that matters were kept from him. Some saw it as an insult to their integrity – as if trust was withheld. It was obvious to him that confidentiality existed between Bentinick and the Czech policeman. In the unit there had been demarcation lines between teams. The names of agents were not shared, and biographies were not gossiped over in the bar: the talk spread only when a man was found in a ditch and a country lane was sealed.

Bentinick’s coffee was cold, and the biscuit in the saucer uneaten. He stared out at the fast traffic on the riverside road, the bridges and the castle on the hill. There was no small-talk, but there never had been with him. Danny had drunk his coffee. The Czech had bought mineral water and was sipping it.

Bentinick’s face was screwed up and the lines at his mouth were deep, as were those on his forehead. He didn’t blink. A hand came up and the thin white fingers drove through his hair. All those years before, in the operations room and in the building that doubled as canteen and bar, in good times and bad, Danny had not seen stress build in the man who had commanded him – and still did. Standards were adhered to – had been then, were now: the shirt was clean, the chin close shaven, the tie centrally knotted and the shoes polished. Emotion, not hidden this time, gripped the man. The quiet between them was broken.

The cold coffee was drained, the mark of a man to whom waste was abhorrent. Danny could not guess at the demons – he had had his own, had struggled in confronting them.

The lines on the face cleared, as if Bentinick had wiped them away. He said, bright, brusque, ‘Karol, time for you to do back-up. Get behind Miss Gabrielle. We’ll be fine. But my friend is short of some history and maybe needs another cup of coffee. Thank you, Karol.’

The Czech stood, bobbed his head and was gone. Danny Curnow recognised qualities that he had once had, which the policeman had shown: there for a moment, on the pavement and his back to them, then gone. Seen but not noticed, merging and lost. It was a skill few possessed. Danny appreciated the art-form, respected the man, and had no idea why they had spent most of the night tramping pavements in the cold and visiting sites of barbarism. He wondered why they had skipped the Church of St Cyril and St Methodius, and whether Matthew Bentinick had manipulated it.

He had much to learn. He bought more coffee. The pipe smoke billowed.

Dusty parked the bus. He’d rung Caen before they’d left and spoken to Lisette, said that he would be back on Saturday, in the early evening, but still didn’t know when Danny might appear. Dusty worried for him. There would have been an accumulation of guilt, well hidden at the start but later rearing. He could remember each of the losses, and Danny had seemed not to care. Life had gone on in Gough, in their inner compound. Joseph, from Armagh City, needing to better himself, had been a big one. The idiot had wanted to be a businessman and required capital to buy a shop window. Maybe the limit of his ambition had been to join the Chamber of Commerce, if they’d admitted Taigs. He’d wanted to be an estate agent. Few Catholics in Armagh City could buy and sell, but they could rent. He’d been set up in business. Nice enough guy, pretty wife and three wee kids he adored. He liked, he’d told Danny, to get up in the morning when half the street was still in bed, put on a laundered shirt, knot his tie, and go to open the agency door. Property was always brilliant. He had empty houses that the active-service units could use for briefings and as hideaways. A familiar story, a well-travelled road. Nothing too serious, but lives would have been saved and killing weapons put under surveillance. He was a cheerful man and wore his worries, apparently, easily. Used to bring the kids to meetings: the handlers and back-up people started to take sweets for them. Great kids. But he was a useless businessman and the FRU had to decide whether it was worth pumping in more cash. There’d have been a meeting about it and a balance sheet would have been on the table.
Income
: the intelligence they gained from him.
Outgoings
: what he cost. He would be cut adrift. The decision was taken and Danny Curnow had not objected.

What would happen to him? Well, the agency would close, leaving a trail of debts, and he’d have to start again. There was a scheduled meeting that evening, in the back of a pub off the road between Aughnacloy and Ballygawley. The team had stocked up with sweets for the kids, and Danny would have been the bad-news messenger – but the tout hadn’t showed. He didn’t show for a week. When he did, he was in a ditch, no shoes or socks, trussed like a Christmas bird, his teeth out, body covered with bruises. His life had been ended by a single shot, .38 calibre. As Captain Bentinick had remarked, ‘I think we’ll find he just had bad luck.’

Too right. Volunteers had used a house. They’d had a coffee grinder that reduced fertiliser nitrates, for explosives, from granules to powder. It had blown a fuse and burned out the wall plug. One had been a fairly competent electrician. He had unscrewed the plug and found the hidden microphone. Bad luck. The kids had been at the funeral, close to their mother; not many others had turned out. The local TV always featured touts’ funerals. That night everyone in the ops room had watched the news. Captain Bentinick and Vagabond had put on a class act of stiff upper lip, pretending to be unmoved. Three great wee kids.

Dusty waited for the tour party.

Too many men had been on the beach at Dunkirk and were now in the cemeteries. The guides liked the cattle byre at Wormout. It was Danny Curnow’s place. He’d have been off to the side, listening carefully but not intervening. A simple story, and the guides would get it right because of the ample documentation. The group would have been cheerful, with initial alliances forming, when the coach left Dunkirk. Then they’d be hit. They’d be gathered together in a close group, then told that sixty British soldiers, overwhelmed on the perimeter line defending the beach evacuation, had been taken into the square, lined up, had faced a machine-gun on a tripod and been mown down. It would get worse and nerves were shredded. The fighting was brutal: a British officer threatened other officers with death – he’d shoot them – if they broke. He was as good as his word. The order on that sector was ‘Tell your men, with their backs to the wall, that the division stands firm.’ The integrity of the beaches and dunes was maintained long enough for the evacuation to take place. They would take a country road out of Wormout for a mile, then a turning to the left up a lane, and go on foot along a track to a place named La Plaine au Bois and a hut – in good repair because, as a monument, it needed to survive. The hut was open at one end but had no windows. It was fifteen feet square.

Around a hundred men, mostly from the Warwickshire Regiment, had been herded in there by their captors: their resistance had become hopeless through exhaustion and lack of medical treatment for the wounded. Also, they had run out of ammunition. They were shot, five at a time, then grenades were thrown at them. A private, Bert Evans, only nineteen, survived and lay for a few minutes hidden by bodies. He and a captain, Lynn-Allen, crawled out and tried to get to the cover of trees down a hedgerow. They were spotted and fired on. The officer died – but, extraordinarily, Evans lived. He was found by French farmers and taken to a civilian hospital, then to a POW camp.

The troops who carried out the killings were from the Liebstandarte SS, and their commanding officer was Captain Wilhelm Mohnke. It wasn’t until 1945 that Private Evans was able to tell the story of the butchery, after his release from the camp. At the end of the fighting Mohnke was a general, and spent ten years as a prisoner in the Soviet Union, then came back to Hamburg. He was never prosecuted: a wall of silence in the SS unit protected him. He lived for sixty-one years after those men had died in the little hut.

Everyone would be quiet, shocked, upset. It would seem impossible for an act of such barbarity to have taken place in a scene so tranquil. They would go back to the minibus, numbed. It was a good place, on a Tuesday morning, for Danny Curnow.

He walked. It was a wide street, the best sort. She was a hundred yards behind him on the far pavement. It was the sort of street that Gaby Davies’s instructors used for recruit training. She did not have to be close to her agent but could observe him. Years ago, at Essex, she had been a historian, with an American bias, but at school she had loved modern European history. She was following Ralph Exton on his way to his meeting with the girl. She had the little compact camera in her bag and a fag in her fingers. There had been a teacher at school who had done the Second World War with them – she remembered a Churchill quote:
Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But, it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning
. Appropriate. Her agent was walking across the city to rendezvous with the opposition’s paymaster and bag-carrier. The building blocks were in position, and in two or three days, it would climax. She allowed a little excitement to well. For Christ’s sake, why did they do it, if not for the buzz? What were they there for, on the floors of Thames House? Not Crown and country, or Keeping Our Streets Safe. It was about the raw pleasure of seeing a mission move on from the
end of the beginning
.