Timebomb : A Thriller (9781468300093) Read online

  Before they had left, Colonel (Ret’d) Igor Molenkov had walked down the track in front of their homes, found the best place for a mobile transmission and used the phone Viktor had given him to call a pre-programmed number and say the word three times: ‘Da …da … da.’

  The car drove along the side road towards the city of Murom.

  Molenkov reflected: what had the old fool hunched over the wheel beside him led him into? Wrong, sadly wrong. There were two old fools in the Polonez. Two men of equal guilt, two men who had stepped across a threshold and now travelled in the world of extreme criminality, two men who … He was thrown forward and his hands went up to protect his head before it hit the windscreen.

  They had stopped. He saw Yashkin’s yellow teeth bite at a bloodless lower lip. ‘Why have we stopped?’

  ‘A puncture.’

  ‘I don’t believe it.’

  ‘Rear left. Didn’t you feel the bumping as it went down?’

  ‘Have we a spare?’

  ‘Bald, old, yes. I can’t afford new tyres.’

  ‘And if the spare is holed?’

  He saw Yashkin shrug. They were beside a wide lake. From the map left on his seat, Colonel (Ret’d) Igor Molenkov estimated they had covered no more than forty-eight kilometres , and now they had a holed tyre to be replaced with a bald one, and a further 1552 kilometres before they reached their destination. He could have sworn, cursed or stamped.

  They hung on each other’s necks, and their laughter pealed out.

  *

  There are great white spheres on a Yorkshire moor. There are antennae on the summits of a mountain range running across Cyprus. There are huge tilted dishes on the roofs of the buildings on the edge of the town of Cheltenham. Spread across the United Kingdom, and behind the perimeter fences of a sovereign military base on a Mediterranean island, there are vast computers, some manned by British technicians and some by American personnel from the National Security Agency.

  Each day they suck down many millions of phone, fax and email messages from around the northern hemisphere. The majority, of course, are discarded – regarded as of no importance. A tiny minority are stored and transmitted to the desks of analysts at GCHQ, who work below the dishes, in that Gloucestershire town. Triggers determine what reaches the eyes of the analysts. Programmed words, phrases, spoken in a mêlée of languages, will activate a trigger. Specific numbers will attract a trigger if those numbers have been gobbled into the computers’ memories. And locations … Nominated locations are monitored. If a location registers in the computers, the memory will search back for matches and a trail is established. The men and women who sit in darkened rooms and stare at screens are unlikely to understand the significance of what the triggers throw up. They are a filter, unsung and anonymous.

  The city of Sarov, in the Nizhny Novgorod oblast of the Russian Federation, trips a trigger. Calls into and out of the city that cross international frontiers are noted, and the location of the receiver or transmitter can be narrowed to a square with a precision of less than a hundred metres.

  The calls in question came to the screen of a young woman, a graduate of Russian studies, working on the third floor of the central building at GCHQ in D Wing. Four days before there had been a mobile-telephone connection to another mobile telephone in Sarov, duration eight seconds, from a residential street in the London district of Knightsbridge. That morning, a call was placed from Sarov and answered at the dockside in the East Anglian port town of Harwich, duration four seconds. The same mobile phone from Harwich had then called from the Essex town of Colchester to a location adjacent to the Polish-Belarussian border.

  The young woman could not have been aware of the significance of what she learned – priorities were beyond her remit. But she typed in a code on her keyboard, opened a secure electronic link, transmitted the details of the calls and included as an attachment satellite pictures. They showed an unmade road or track in Sarov, running east to west, that was flanked to the north by trees and to the south by small detached single-storey homes. Another showed the car park at Harwich, another identified an industrial park on the outskirts of Colchester, and another a Knightsbridge street. There was a final image of a forest of pines and birches where a wide circle filled the only cleared space, to the right side of the picture, and a railway track ran close to it … It was all so easy.

  She left her desk and went to the coffee machine.

  A spider’s web of trails had been made.

  If, if, the call to Sarov had been answered as few as twenty-five kilometres from the city, the triggers would not have reacted … Mistakes had been made. The young woman’s messages and attachments were now inside a building in London of monstrous ugliness on the south side of the river Thames, VBX to all who worked there.

  The trees moved with the wind. The pines had been planted in regimented lines and filled rectangular shapes, apparently the work of a woodsman with a character of parade-ground orderliness, and they grew ram-rod straight. Among them, making a defiant chaos, were wild birches that lacked the strength of the pines, and were forced to grow tall and too fast if they were to find natural light. They were spindly and many had been bent almost double by the winter snow. The canopies of the pines wavered, moved with that wind, but they were planted sufficiently close to diminish the daylight on the floor of needles. Reuven Weissberg sat quietly among the trees, awaiting the call.

  A light rain fell, but the wind was from the east, from across the river, and the tight canopies deflected the dribbling water. Little cascades came down among the birches, but where he sat his head and the shoulders of his jacket stayed dry. It was a small matter to him whether he was soaked, merely damp or dry, and his mind was far from considerations of his personal comfort. His thoughts were of what had happened here more than six decades ago, and the stories he had been told, which he knew by heart. He heard the bright songs of small birds, and the cry of an owl … That was no surprise to him because the place had long been known – before the events that had made the stories he could recite – as the Forest of the Owls. The surprise was only that the owl had called, perhaps to its mate, during the day, in the morning. That small birds sang was a surprise too. It was said, he had been told, that birds did not come, refused to nest and breed in a place with a history such as this. They flew between the lower branches of the birches, perched precariously and called for company, then flew again; he watched them. It was strange to him that they should show such joy here, as if they had no sense of where they were, did not understand that the misery of mass death haunted this place.

  Behind him, a mobile phone had rung, had been answered. Then the silence had cloaked him and the trees again.

  In that quiet, he could imagine. Not imagine Mikhail, who was fifty metres clear of him and would be standing against the trunk of the broadest pine he could find, a pile of littered cigarette stubs at his feet. Or imagine the screams and struggles of the Albanian Mikhail would bring to the warehouse the next afternoon. Or imagine the consequences of the call that Mikhail had taken.

  He seemed to see them, figments of his thoughts that came to life. They were in flight. The heroism of some and the panic of many had shaped his existence. He was their creature. Figures drifted, either fast or painfully slowly, between the steady trunks of the pines and the wavering stems of the birches. They were clear in his eyes. He thought he could have reached out, touched them. The sight of them was agony to him. In the peace around him, he could hear also the guns, the dogs and the sirens.

  This was Reuven Weissberg’s heritage, here, in the Forest of the Owls. He did not know that a satellite photograph of this mess of farmed and wild trees had been sent as part of an attachment to a building known as VBX, and that the photograph had picked out a grey-white shallow mound. Such a mound was in front of him, perhaps eighty metres across, but near-hidden from his view by the pines and birches. To him, a story that has a beginning is only of value if it has an end. He knew that story from its start
to its finish.

  He had been told it so many times. It was the blood that ran in his veins. He was the child of that story, knew each word, each line and each episode. As a small boy he had wept on his grandmother’s shoulder as she had told it to him.

  Now he told it to himself, as she would have done, from the beginning. The trees rustled above him, the rain fell and the birds sang. It was Anna’s story, and in his lifetime he would never be free of it, or want to be.

  It was early in the morning of a summer day in 1942 that we were ordered to be ready to move from Wlodawa. Most of our people had already been taken in the previous four months, but we did not know where they had gone. We no longer had access to our homes, but had been made to live inside and around the synagogue. That area was fenced off and we were separated from the Polish people – already I had learned that we were Jews, were different, were subhuman.

  I did not know where we were going … If there were any among us who did, they did not share it. I believed everything I was told. We were told that we could bring one bag with us, and in the last hour before our departure each of us – young and old, man and woman – filled a bag or a case, and some of the older men sewed gold coins into the linings of their overcoats and some of the older women stiched diamonds or other jewels from bracelets, necklaces and brooches into slits they had made in their clothing.

  Always there was little food at the synagogue, and that morning I do not remember whether we ate. I think we started off hungry. Yes, hungry and already tired.

  When we were formed up and counted, about a hundred of us, the officer said that we were going to walk to a transit camp. There, selections would be made, and then we would move to new homes in the east – in the Ukraine part of Russia. We walked, and left behind our synagogue. As we went through the town we passed the houses where some of our people had lived. Washed sheets hung from windows and the doors on to the street were open, and we realized that our homes had been occupied by Polish people while we had been kept at the synagogue.

  I walked near the back of our group. I was with my father and mother, my two younger brothers and my elder sister, with my father’s parents, my mother’s father, three uncles and two aunts. We wore the best clothes we still had. At the front of us was an officer on a horse. I remember it – a white horse. Alongside us were Ukrainian soldiers who walked, but there were Germans at the back on horses. We crossed the bridge over the Wlodawka, near to where it flows into the Bug river, and then we came to the village of Orchowek. The reaction of the villagers, as we passed them, was a great shock to me … but for many months we had been confined inside the wood fences around the synagogue, and it was nearly two years since I had seen Polish people.

  People were lined on either side of the road, as if they had been warned that we were coming. They abused us, threw mud and rocks at us, spat on us. When I was a child, before the war had started, before we were sent to the synagogue, I had worked often when there was no school in my father’s shop where he repaired clocks and watches. Among those on the side of the road, I recognized some who had come to my father’s shop. They had thanked him for the work he had done, or had begged him to accept late payment. I did not understand why now they hated us. A bucket of waste and urine was hurled at my father. Some of it splashed the silk scarf I had been given for my eighteenth birthday, two weeks before. I looked at the Germans on their horses, hoping they would give us protection, but they were laughing.

  Beyond Orchowek, where the road goes east and towards Sobibor village, the officer on the white horse led us on to a forest track close to the railway line, the one that goes south to Chelm. I remember also that in the late summer of 1942 it had rained heavily. The track we were now on was a river of mud. I was one of many women and girls who had worn their best shoes and one of many who lost a shoe and had to walk barefoot through big puddles.

  There were older people who could not keep up with the pace of the white horse, so those who were younger and stronger carried them or supported them, but the bags of the infirm and weak were left beside the track. I helped my father’s parents, and my younger brothers helped my mother’s father, while my elder sister – it was hard for her because she had had polio and walked with difficulty herself – helped my two aunts. If the speed of our march dropped, we were shouted at by the Germans, and a few of our men were hit with whips.

  A train came past, and our guards waved to the crew. The engine pulled many closed cars. I thought they were for animals and had not been cleaned because the smell was disgusting, like a place for pigs. It stayed in the forest after the train had gone on towards Wlodawa. I said to my father that I hoped we would have a different train when we went to the east: it was intended to be funny, but my father did not laugh. Usually it was easy to make him laugh, even when we were kept in the synagogue.

  And we were there.

  I think we had been walking for two hours on the forest track when we came to the place. The officer on the white horse was shouting orders, the Ukrainians were pushing us together, close, using their rifles. I thought we had arrived at the transit camp. It was huge, but so quiet. As far as I could see there was fencing, but it was strange because the branches of fir trees had been woven into the wire strands, and I couldn’t see what was on the far side, except the roofs of some buildings and a great high watchtower. At the corners of the fencing and by a gate there were more towers on stilts with guards in them and machine-guns, and I saw that the barrel of one of those guns followed us. What threat were we – old men and old women, girls and children? How could we hurt soldiers?

  I was so innocent. Perhaps I should thank God for my innocence.

  We were lined up outside a gate. We were in twenty ranks, five in each rank. Women to the front, with the children, men at the back. I saw my mother leave my father’s side and she tried to kiss his cheek, but a Ukrainian put his rifle between them and forced her back. I saw my father shrug, and his lips moved as if to mouth a word, but I did not hear it … and it happened very suddenly.

  The officer on the white horse surveyed us, as if he was a kaiser or an emperor, and he pointed to me with his whip. A guard moved forward, grabbed my shoulder and dragged me out. Why? Why me? I was eighteen and my elder sister had said enviously that I was beautiful, that my hair had the sheen of a raven’s feathers. I had heard men in the synagogue speak of me and praise the shape of my body – but my mother had not spoken to me of such things. I, I alone, was taken out of the group.

  I was led to another gate. I thought then it was a more important gate, the main gate, and I stopped, twisted and tried to look back, tried to see my parents, my younger brothers, my elder sister, my father’s parents, my mother’s father, my aunts and uncles. But I was kicked hard in the back of my legs, a boot against the skin. I never saw them.

  I was brought through a maze of paths and on either side of them were the fences with the fir branches slotted on them. Then I became aware of sounds – the shuffling movement of men at the end of their strength, low, muttering voices, hacking coughs and sharply issued orders. More gates opened ahead of me, and I was escorted through. Then they closed behind me. There was the smell, and the men who shuffled, the women who coughed, the Germans who strutted with whips or guns did not seem to notice the overwhelming stench around them, of decay and burning … did not seem aware of it.

  Inside a compound, I was met by a Jewess. She led me towards a long, low, wooden hut. She told me she was a capo, that I should obey her at all times. I heard then a new sound. Shots were fired, individual shots and many together. I asked the capo who was shooting and why, but she did not answer.

  Later, at the end of the afternoon, I learned that I was in Camp 1, that in the morning I would be given work. The sinking sunlight was then obscured and the compound darkened by a black cloud of smoke that was carried from beyond the woven fences. The pall hung over me, and fine ash coated my hair and face.

  I did not understand and was blessed briefly with igno
rance The innocent do not know evil. But innocence cannot last, cannot continue to protect against evil.

  ‘You going to be all right tonight, Corp?’

  ‘Not a problem, Sarge.’

  ‘Don’t want me to hold your hand?’

  ‘Can manage without.’

  It was their banter, to use the old ranks of their army service. Simon Rawlings had been a Parachute Regiment sergeant when he had come out to try his hand in the civilian workplace, with a Military Medal on his record, and Carrick had been a corporal. Each would have said that any man, at his peril, ignored the value of an old, proven friendship. Their friendship had been combat-tested on the streets of Iraq: when the bomb had detonated, catapulting the Land Rover off the banked-up roadway, when Corporal Carrick had been wounded, bad, in the leg and bleeding, close to unconscious, Sergeant Rawlings had been two vehicles behind in the patrol. He had taken the decisive actions, had staunched the casualty’s injuries and organized the defence of the ambush site, had sanitized a perimeter big enough to accept an evacuation helicopter, had seen his corporal lifted off to the trauma theatre of the hospital at the base out in the desert from Basra. Sergeant Rawlings had come to visit him while he had waited for shipment out and treatment back in UK. ‘I tell you what, Corp, I don’t think you’ll be doing too many more jumps, or wearing that pretty beret much longer … Nor me. I’m thinking it’s time to ease into the slow lane. Had an offer last leave of bodyguard work – plenty of holes to be filled by Special Forces, marines and Paras, and you don’t get your butt shot off or your leg mashed. Keep in touch, and I hope it mends.’ He’d been given a scrap of paper with Rawlings’s number on it, and he’d been flown home. The leg had looked worse in the devastated Land Rover than after it had been cleaned. Skill from surgeons and physios had put him back on his feet, crutches and shaky at first, but then he’d walked, the torn muscles had knitted and the bones had fused, leaving him with only a slight limp.