Timebomb : A Thriller (9781468300093) Read online

  Two years later, Reuven Weissberg had returned to Perm – harder, fitter, leaner – and Josef Goldmann’s roof was once more in place. He owed everything to the man. In the shadow of the krysha, they had climbed together. Goldmann owed Weissberg his town house in Knightsbridge, his villa outside Albufeira on the Algarve coast, his penthouse in Cannes, where the motor yacht was moored, and his stature as a multi-millionaire who required bodyguards for his and his family’s protection.

  He dressed. In the adjacent room, his wife slipped over her head the little black dress that had been delivered that afternoon. They were due in the early evening at a reception for the launch of a new collection at a Cork Street gallery, and probably he would bid in the auction for a watercolour landscape, go to a quarter of a million and be applauded for his generosity – because half of the work’s fee would go to a charity. Esther came to him. He smelled the scent on her, kissed her shoulder and made to fasten the clasp of her necklace. But his fingers – normally so certain – fumbled with the clasp because his mind was distracted, and he heard his wife’s brittle intake of breath when he pinched her nape. Why?

  Because Viktor, on family business, had travelled to Sarov two months before. Because an offer of an item to be sold had been made. Because, via a courier, Josef Goldmann had told Reuven Weissberg of the item that was for sale, and a price had been agreed. Because a purchaser had been found for it, and the process of the sale was in place. Because the item was beyond the limits of anything ever handled before. Because he and his colleague could make vast sums, even though neither had need of money. Because money was power, was confirmation of power.

  Because two old men had set off, that morning, on a journey.

  He could not see the reddened pinch mark at the back of Esther’s neck. He said they would take Viktor and Grigori to such a public place as a gallery on Cork Street, and that Johnny would stay at home with the children.

  ‘Is Simon not coming?’ she asked.

  ‘He’s off duty tonight. It’s not a problem … Johnny’s all right for the children.’

  ‘They like him. I like him.’

  He said, as if it were of no importance, ‘Simon is best for us. Johnny will do the children.’

  Offered the item, Reuven Weissberg had snatched at it, as if the risk didn’t concern him. Perhaps, today, Josef Goldmann saw too little of his protector and was too far distanced from the aura of confidence Weissberg provided. The deal terrified him.

  Esther frowned. ‘Are you all right, Josef?’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Is it because Simon has to have a night off? He’s—’

  He spat, ‘Forget Simon, forget Johnny, think only of looking pretty tonight. Do what you do well, and I’ll do what I do well.’

  *

  ‘You don’t bust your balls when there’s no need, Christopher. Sit and scratch them, let the world go by. Then when the need comes out of a clear sky, you go after it and get frantic.’

  The sayings of Clipper Reade, if written down, would have made a Bible for Lawson, but he had had no need to write them down because he remembered them, each emphasis and inflection.

  He had gone after it, was frantic. And Lucy with him. Sarov, its importance, was not a problem; he knew all about Sarov. Any veteran, laced with Cold War experience, and any desk officer in Non-Proliferation was familiar with it. His screen and hers had pumped up a map of Knightsbridge, a particular street and a particular trio of properties. Number twelve was the workplace of a practice of architects with studios below and the senior partner occupying the top floor. Number fourteen was leasehold, forty-nine years to run, in the name of Josef Shlomo Goldmann and lived in by his family and staff. Number sixteen was a freehold property in the name of a charitable trust that aided ‘gentlewomen’ who had fallen on ‘hard times’. Lucy had led with the matching of mobile-telephone calls into one of those terraced, fat-cat houses, and the links splayed out to Sarov and to the forest wilderness by the Bug river. He knew about the Bug river, knew almost everything about where the Red Army had been in former times. He had gone past her, as if he had his chest out and the tape loomed, and had identified the ownership of the three.

  Clipper Reade had said, ‘Better believe me, Christopher. You may get, in this business, a small window that’s ajar. It’s criminal not to jump through it. Windows, my experience, slam shut if you’re too finicky to take the opportunity of advantage. Don’t call for a committee to sit – just jump.’

  He doubted, profoundly, that a firm of architects had links to Sarov or to a marshy and forgotten corner of eastern Poland; beside him, Lucy had scratched out the charitable organization from the list of three. She had been with him since 1980. If he had been sacked when he’d refused to work any longer on Middle East associated desks, she would have left on that same Friday evening. She lived in a tiny apartment across the river in Victoria and spent her evenings in the company of a long-haired blue Norwegian Forest cat. She did not ask a question when she knew the answer, did not speak unless to make a necessary contribution: she was rewarded. Christopher Lawson had never barked at her, and he had never criticized her work or contradicted her opinions. On other desks it was suggested by some that he shagged her, but a more general opinion was that she loved only her cat and he loved only his work … yet they were soul-mates.

  Lawson went now for the liaison officer from ‘that shambles across the river’ to demand from the Box 500 building on the north side of the Thames a detailed breakdown of the occupants of number fourteen – Josef Shlomo Goldmann and everyone living under his roof – and he snarled into the phone that he wanted it ‘yesterday’ and would not accept delay. Lucy tracked, with greater politeness, to a source in Special Branch at Scotland Yard. She had never remonstrated with Lawson for his rudeness to others, and those who had felt the whip of his tongue, then seen him speak with her were astonished to find him capable of minimal pleasantries.

  Clipper Reade had said, in the dry drawl of a broad Texan accent, ‘Things that matter don’t hang about and wait for you, Christopher. Sort of float by you, maybe gossamer, like a butterfly on the wing. You have to snatch or the moment’s gone and it does not – believe me – return. Snatch and hold hard.’

  Twenty-six years of Christopher Lawson’s career had slid by since he had last been with the American, learning and listening. Special Branch came back to Lucy before the Security Service liaison. She scribbled a list of names and he grabbed it from her. He read the names of Joseph Shlomo Goldmann, Esther Goldmann and her children, then the retinue, Viktor and Grigori, a woman whose occupation was given as ‘housekeeper’, Simon Rawlings and Jonathan Carrick. He told her he wanted more on all of them, and that he was off to the upper-floor suite of the director general.

  She would have known he had no appointment, but on that afternoon of the week the director general always hosted a meeting of political figures who concerned themselves with the intricacies of intelligence-gathering and were allies.

  Clipper Reade had said, ‘At first sight, Christopher, the skeins don’t seem to have a shape and make patterns. But it’s the art of our trade to give them shape. Men and women now are coming into view, and some don’t know each other and some do. Some are connected and some have never met. You watch those skeins and the tangle they make until the patterns unravel the chaos. Then you have success. You have an open mind but you go where the skeins take you, however dense that chaos.’

  On the upper floor, in an outer office of the suite – politicians left to sip coffee and nibble biscuits – he clattered through the situation to the director general at machine-gun speed. ‘It’s because of Sarov, Francis. I cannot ignore anything involving that place. Ask me where I’m currently heading and I’ll respond that I haven’t the faintest idea, but Sarov is not something I ignore. I don’t know yet who I’m dealing with, but I expect to very soon, by the end of the day. I have the feeling that once the chatter starts there may not be much time. Trust me, anything to do with Sarov me
ans the involvement of serious people.’

  From far back in the trees he watched the house. He waited for a man to show himself. But for a dog, the house was empty.

  Darkness had gathered around him and the canopies of the pines were inadequate as cover in the heavy rain. Incessantly, water dripped from on high on to Reuven Weissberg’s hair and shoulders, protected by his thick leather jacket. Only rarely did he wipe the rainwater from his face. More often he reached inside his coat and under his shirt to scratch a small indent in his upper arm where there was dark scar tissue.

  He knew the man was named Tadeuz Komiski, knew that he was now seventy-one, knew that he had been born in that house. A priest, a schoolteacher and a social worker had given him that information. He knew the story because his grandmother had told it to him, and he had hoped that evening to be told what he wished to know … He doubted that information would be gained by conversation – more likely in the aftermath of a beating or the extraction of fingernails or the placing of a lit cheroot cigar on the testicles. But the house was empty.

  Behind him, Mikhail would be waiting, arms folded, never impatient. Reuven Weissberg stared at the house and his eyes were long accustomed to the gloom. If it had not been built in a clearing, with a patch for vegetables at the front, if it had been surrounded by pines and birches, he would not have been able to see it. He could, just, make out its silhouette. There was no lamp lit inside. Light, had it been there, would have peeped from cracks round the door or windows. No fire had been started or he would have seen the smoke spill from the brick chimney-stack. He looked past a small flat-top lorry from whose body the engine had been removed, and past a stable block where the doors hung off their hinges. It was a place, he thought, that had once been cared for but now decayed. He sensed already that he had stayed too long.

  The dog inside knew he was there.

  How it knew, Reuven Weissberg could not have said.

  From the the pitch of the barking, he had identified it as a big dog, and reckoned it would have to be slaughtered if he were to get past and ask the question he wished to put to Tadeuz Komiski. He would think nothing of shooting a dog. Neither would Mikhail. It was the fourth time he had come for Komiski and he had never found him – but he would.

  Reuven Weissberg had come to the forest to locate a grave. There was a monument half a kilometre away through the trees, along a track made by the woodmen’s lorries, a circular and precise mound of ashes. It could have been said to be a grave. In the trees there were the mass graves that might hold a thousand skeletons or a hundred; they were buried deep under layers of pine needles and composted birch leaves. No stone or indentation marked their resting-place. He had come, again as on those times before, to learn of the place where one corpse was buried, and Tadeuz Komiski would tell him. But the man did not come.

  An owl called, as it would have done on the night that a grave was filled.

  He was far away but Tadeuz Komiski’s sight was as keen as it had been during his childhood.

  There were deer in the forest and wild boar, and sometimes the small and protected pack of wolves strayed over from the national park that straddled the marshes west of the Lublin road. He heard the cry of the short-eared owl that hunted close to his home. The deer, the boar, the wolf and the owl had no better sight than Tadeuz Komiski, nor the lesser-spotted eagle that would now be perched close to its high nest in a pine.

  All through that day and that evening, he had watched the man in the heavy leather jacket. All of his life, from the age of six, he had known that a man would come, sit and watch … It was because of what his father had done that he knew a man would come. He did not dare go back to his house in the clearing where his dog had not been fed. The dog had told him that the man had moved in the late afternoon from a place close to the monument and had taken a new position, seated, close to the house. Throughout his life he had carried the burden of knowing that a man would come – the thought had been easier to bear when he was younger. He could not remember now whether it was the third or fourth time that he had seen the man, sitting in the forest, so patient, and whether it was three or four years since he had first seen him.

  Every summer visitors came. They walked on the weed-free raked path from the parking area, past where the foundations of the tower were to the mound of ashes. They circled it, paused by the monument and sometimes laid sprigs of flowers there. A few walked a little way into the forest, on the woodsmen’s tracks, and paused, heard the birdsong and gazed round, seeming frightened at the density of the trees. Then they hurried away.

  He was now seventy-one. His father, who had made the burden for his life, had been dead more than forty years, and his mother a year longer; both had breathed a last gasping cry in the wooden house that the man watched. Perhaps he should have burned it to the ground, put petrol in it and razed it. It was cursed. He had married Maria in 1964, and she had died eleven months later in childbirth, in the same bed in which his father and mother had died. His wife was buried, the stillborn baby with her, in a crudely cut pine coffin in the churchyard at Orchowek. If he stood beside the stone he could see over a low wall to the trees that lined the banks of the Bug river and the cemetary but it was many years since he had been there. Because of what his father had done, the house was cursed. The curse had killed his mother, his wife and the girl-child who had never lived. The curse had remained alive.

  For the evil done by his father a punishment had been handed down to him. It was never out of the mind of Tadeuz Komiski. And he was responsible. It was him, the six-year-old, who had run back to the house, fleet-footed, and told his father what he had seen. And perhaps then his father had not believed him because he had hesitated, but his mother had spoken of the reward on offer. He had led his father back into the forest, and the evil was done in the hope of gaining that reward: two kilos of sugar. That day the curse had been set in place as the rain fell softly in the forest.

  He could see the shape of the man’s shoulders, and if he moved his head there was a suspicion of his pale skin colour. The man never coughed, never fidgeted, except to scratch one place on his arm below the right shoulder – but insects from the forest floor would by now have found him and would be crawling over him. He never stretched or cracked his finger joints. Earlier, he had seen him walk slowly, carefully, weighing his steps, on the needle and compost carpet, and Tadeuz Komiski believed he searched for the grave that was the mark of the evil done and the cause of the curse … And his father had never been given the reward.

  Behind the man, sitting against the tree trunk, there was another. Two hundred metres back towards the monument, another watched and listened but lit cigarettes.

  Only the owl shouted and only the rain fell, and he waited for them to leave. But the lesson of the curse told Tadeuz Komiski that if they left he would still find no peace – they would return. He thought the grave cried to them … The curse had maddened him, made hallucinations … What he had done at the age of six had destroyed his life.

  Now they moved on.

  ‘Your car, Major, is like the story of our lives.’

  ‘Our lives, Colonel, are shit. I accept it, my car’s the same.’

  ‘A broken car and broken lives – agreed. Both shit.’

  ‘When I first took possession of a Polonez, in 1986, I thought it an accolade, like the award of a medal. A car driven by a man of importance, a mark of personal success. Four cylinders, 1500cc version, top-of-the-range, four-speed transmission, the quality of Fiat technology. When I first had it, and drove through the main gate each morning – forgive me the indulgence, my friend – I was proud to be the owner of such a vehicle.’

  ‘It’s still a piece of shit.’

  They had lost four hours, and it was only the first day of the journey.

  Halfway up, the punctured tyre not yet clear of the road, the jack had collapsed, corroded by the same rust that afflicted the coachwork and doors. The car had subsided on to the flat rear left tyre. Molenkov had dr
agged the jack clear, Yashkin had hurled it into the lake and it had disappeared into a reed bed. They had sat together beside the tilted Polonez, on the spare tyre, and had waited for help. Each vehicle that came they greeted with shouts, waved arms and pleas for help. The first four had ignored them. The fifth was a van, and had stopped, but the driver had commented immediately on the weight the Polonez carried under the tarpaulin and the bags, and had seemed curious to know what two old fools carried that was so heavy; they’d sent him on his way. It was nearly dark when a saloon car had pulled up behind them. A schoolteacher, with a life history to be told but also a jack that fitted the Polonez. By the time they knew his name, and where he taught, the names of his wife and children, the success of his pupils at indoor soccer and his hobbies, the spare was in place. They’d waved him on his way, both exhausted from the effort of listening … and four hours had been lost.

  ‘There are winners in this world and losers, Igor, and …’

  ‘A profound psychological analysis of the state of society, Oleg, and of the quality I would expect from a retired political officer. A zampolit would be expected to demonstrate such insights.’

  ‘You sarcastic bastard – and it was your tyre that was shit, and your car. I would have said that winners and losers have little contact in our state today. A very few win, a great many lose … We’re in a particularly rare situation. We’ve been losers, dismissed from our work after years of dedicated service, the victims of total disrespect. Our pensions are at best erratic and at worst unpaid, shit identical to your car. But we leap a chasm to a new world, to that of the winners. Doesn’t that cheer you? It should.’