His sarge had turned, had bent and trapped the one dropped note and it went into a pocket. Then he hitched the bin-bag on to his shoulder and stood straight. ‘Don’t worry about me. I’m not going to make trouble and I won’t be looking for a reference. You won’t hear of me and I’ll have forgotten you. Go steady, guys — and don’t trip in your own shit.’
Carrick thought it well done, but there was a month’s money in the envelope and it was clever to let the steam fly, then walk. His sarge went off the bottom step and never looked back. Carrick edged towards the door, watched him go. His sarge had most likely saved his life, and had later remembered a friend and had tried to help with work. Now he was gone. He heard the shout of his Bossman from behind him, up the stairs: ‘In five minutes I am ready to go, Johnny.’
Viktor pushed the door shut, and Carrick lost sight of the lone man, bag on his back, walking away with a sort of hard-won dignity.
At least he was soothed by Johnny’s smooth driving. He could be a nervous passenger in the back of the Audi if the car wove through traffic and accelerated past obstacles. Simon Rawlings attacked the road ahead, not Johnny. Josef Goldmann had more on his mind, and his progress towards the City was far back in his thoughts.
The image of Reuven Weissberg overwhelmed him. He could not back out. He saw himself as having little more importance in the schemes of the master, the leader, than any of the men who had the rank of brigadir in Perm or boevik in Moscow. He was a junior, a handler of money. His opinions were not asked for and his loyalty was assumed to be automatically given. They were on new territory here, faced new dangers, moved in new circles, but no exit route presented itself. The next day, when he travelled with Viktor, the quagmire under his feet would be deeper, more cloying … He realized it, he shivered, and the papers he tried to read quivered in his hands. He shook his head sharply, an attempt to break the image’s hold.
Josef Goldmann said, ‘You drive well, Johnny. You are very relaxing.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘If it’s not too much trouble, could you tell me, please, what we are doing here, and why?’
‘You’d best stand, not wave a flag or make yourself conspicuous, and observe.’
He didn’t do Davies the courtesy of turning to face him, but spoke from the side of his mouth and stared down the street at the entrance to the building. Christopher Lawson had long believed that courtesies and explanations were usually a waste of breath.
‘What am I supposed to observe?’
‘It will all, I hope, become apparent — and chattering will not accelerate it.’
Pretty much the same thing had been said to Lawson, all those years ago, when he was new in the company of Clipper Reade. Waiting on a dark night, a breeze rippling the surface of the Landwehr canal, the floodlights on the Wall. A hissed flood of questions asked, the second time he had been out with the heavy-built American, and the sharp rejoinder that silence was a better virtue than blather. ‘More valuable in this trade to keep quiet, watch, wait and observe, Christopher, than make useless talk.’ Chastened by the reprimand, he had stayed silent and watched the water, had heard ducks and radios playing beyond the Wall’s height. The name ‘Clipper’ was already in place when he’d met the Texan on his first posting abroad to the British headquarters at the old Olympic park. ‘Clipper’ was a British accolade: had come from the UK’s station chief in Berlin at a meeting when, apparently, the American had downed four mugs of tea, then asked for another pot to be brought him, and an hour later another. The station chief had remarked, drily, the story said, that they’d have to run a particular tea-clipper up the Spree river to satisfy the guest’s needs; then five minutes had been lost in descriptions of nineteenth-century trading vessels. It had stuck: from then, Charlton A. Reade Jnr was Clipper Reade. The name had had legs and had been accepted by the Americans out at their place in the Grunewald forest. He was Clipper Reade to all who met him, and his trademark was a vacuum flask in the leather bag he carried on his shoulder, which had hot water in it, a little plastic box of teabags and a Bakelite mug. The last time they’d met, Lawson had given him a present, gift wrapped, that he’d had sent from the shop at the museum in Greenwich, and he’d watched as it was opened, paper discarded, a cardboard container pulled apart and the mug with the tea-clipper on it, under full sail, had been revealed. Clipper Reade had smiled grimly at his protégé and his voice had had the pitch of pebbles under a boot, ‘Don’t ever get sentimental about friendships. Don’t. Be your own man, and fuck the rest of them.’ Most of his professional life had been governed by the teachings of Clipper Reade, an icon of the Agency.
‘Right, I’m watching and observing and—’
‘And you’re talking, which you shouldn’t be. You may scratch your bum or pick your nose if you have to, but don’t talk. Just wait and watch.’
A man in a heavy windcheater, black, without a distinguishing logo, idled past them. Lawson had no eye contact with him, had no need to … and he doubted that Davies had noticed him.
It was one of those City streets that the sun rarely penetrated. Too narrow, with too many high buildings lining it, this street had a built-in greyness. The old stonework on either side was stained dark from a near-century of fuel emissions. And it was empty. Wouldn’t be empty in three-quarters of an hour when the City workers spilled out of the doors, came to smoke or buy a sandwich or elbow into the wine bars, but the time for the exodus had not yet come.
Damn all to watch and precious nothing to observe. Yes, there was the newspaper-seller with his small portable stall, and a van had drawn up, dumped an early-edition bundle on the pavement, then sped off, and a man in a black anorak, who wore a fleece under it and had its hood up, had bought a copy and was now leaning against a wall, studying the pages intently — wouldn’t have been the stock-market indices but the dogs running that night at Catford or the horses that afternoon, wherever … But his attention was on a dark doorway that hardly showed in the street’s shadow and which was on the far side from the newspaper stall and the guy who examined runners. A commissionaire, in uniform, with old medal ribbons, had come out of that door briefly and smoked half of a rolled fag, then pinched it out, replaced what was left in a tin box and retreated back inside.
Luke Davies — because the awkward, rude bastard had starved him of information — did not know how long he would be left stuck on the pavement like a scarecrow in a field. Another three-quarters of an hour and the workers would be flushed out of the buildings, and he reckoned it a fair chance that a hand would clamp on his shoulder and he’d hear, ‘Hello, Luke, how’re you doing?’ and he’d be confronted with someone who had been at East European and Slavonic Studies or had sat the civil-service entry papers with him or the Foreign and Commonwealth exam. ‘Did you stay in? I didn’t. This is where the money is. Afraid the money was where I went — but good to see you.’ At least there would be no one from school. A comprehensive sink school in Sheffield did not supply ambitious recruits to the City, and those of his year were on building sites, driving white vans, or squaddies in some God-forsaken desert. If money had been Luke Davies’s target he would not have been a civil servant, a junior officer in the Secret Intelligence Service and living in Camden Town in what was little more than a student bed-sit. He shared a terrace house with two teachers, a junior at Revenue & Customs, a trainee Tesco manager and a guy from the Probation Service, and didn’t see much of them. He heard a sharp hiss of breath behind him. God’s.