‘Only for a few days,’ he said, shrugged, and ate.
It had been the start of a day like any other. He had bicycled from the hostel to his workbench. Before going to the centrifuge unit, he had been enjoying a mug of coffee and light gossip with colleagues, and a call had come for him to go, immediately, to the headquarters/ administration block. He was given a room number to ask for. There had been three men. He had recognized Summers, who was CSO for the Aldermaston complex: everyone knew the chief security officer who obstinately smoked a big pipe when he was outside a building. Another was introduced as a sergeant in Special Branch. The third man was not introduced by name or occupation — Sak now believed him to be from the Security Service — and in front of him was the folder with Sak’s personal file. There was little preamble. Summers had awkwardly revolved the bowl of his filled but unlit pipe, and had spoken.
‘This is not easy for any of us — for you or me. You understand that the world was turned upside-down in New York four months ago. The aircraft into the Towers, and all that, altered perspectives. We have gone with painstaking care through your record and note family links with the Tribal Areas of Pakistan. We are making no accusations concerning your loyalty to all of us at Aldermaston, nor is there a criticism of your work. However, security and the safety of the nation demand, in these difficult times, that we make hard decisions. You will be “let go”. This is not a dismissal, you are not sacked, but your clearance to work here is, with effect today, withdrawn. In conditions of confidentiality, your union has been informed that your employment is terminated, and I have their guarantee that they will not, repeat not, support legal action by you against us. You have been with us for five years, but you will receive six months salary in lieu of notice, which I consider generous, but it will be in staggered payments. Should you, in the vernacular, “go public” on this matter the payments will be halted. Also, don’t take this as a threat, we would counter any public statement you made with accusations concerning the quality of your work and your fitness to be employed here. You are a casualty of this war. Your family in Pakistan ensure that. I am very sorry but that is the situation, and no appeal procedure exists. I wish you well in finding other work that does not involve nuclear weapons and materials. Do you have any questions?’
He had had none.
A cousin of his father, living in West Bromwich, would do the redecoration of Room 2, it was decided, in the summer when the guesthouse business was slackest. A new shower unit, an upgrading, would be fitted in the bathroom outside Room 3, by a nephew of his father who lived in Brierley Hill. To his parents these were matters of importance weightier than Sak’s travelling to Europe on school business.
It was the last boat of the day. They had walked all afternoon on the streets of the new Berlin, Lawson’s voice dripping in Davies’s ear. On looking out at a panorama of huge glass-and-concrete constructions that seemed to trumpet corporate wealth: ‘It is a mirage of affluence and the comfort zone does not exist. Grand façades, but not backed by reality. An attempt to plaster over the history of this city, but it cannot — not while the grandfathers still live. It’s skin deep, and society is raddled with high-level corruption.’ Going past the designer benches in public parks and seeing the drunks, destitutes and druggies sprawled out on them: ‘The money’s run out. The economic miracle was a mirage and is no longer even pretended. This city is a place where the rats with the sharpest claws and the biggest teeth survive. Do you see charm? Anything attractive? This city is a sack where rats fight — and it’s where Clipper taught me my trade. There were rats here then, and little is different now.’
It was a big pleasure-boat. It was raining hard now and the open seats on the deck were empty. They sat in the lounge cabin, and only one other couple — talking French but more interested in kissing than the sights — was there. Three girls lounged at the bar, but Lawson had waved them away when they had offered coffee or drinks. Luke Davies endured it, and did not know the journey’s purpose.
They had walked past the great buildings, re-created, of the war where Bormann and Speer, Hess and von Ribbentrop had had their offices, where the Gestapo had been — and their sunken holding cells: ‘The past dominates, cannot be escaped from. Know the past and you can fight the modern danger. Ignore the past and you’re defenceless.’ And past a building where a sign indicated there was a Stasi museum, and outside it bronze statues of a uniformed man from the Democratic Republic’s security police, and civilian workers who symbolized the network of informers used by the regime: ‘The mentality still lives. The mentality was bugs and microphones, friend denouncing friend, a daughter betraying a father. The mentality is now pushed further to the east, beyond the Bug. It is alive in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. The men who bred it still have their desks in Warsaw, Budapest and Prague. That’s why we don’t share. Here, they even collected smells. In glass jars, hermetically sealed — the sort of jars your mother would have used to store beetroot in vinegar — there were handkerchiefs, socks and underwear for a dog to track. A jar stored in the basement of Normannenstrasse held a crushed cigar end. Clipper Reade’s.’
They had walked past a section of the Wall. Seventeen years since it had been breached, and the Cold War, the war of the gods, had been wound down. Yes, certain of it, in Luke Davies’s book, but not Lawson’s … ‘They regret now that they took down so much of it. Should have left it up. A good, clear, understandable world then, not the confused quagmire we now thrash around in. Look at the end of this section, how narrow it is, just the width of a concrete block, but it defined cultures as clearly as if it had been a chasm a mile wide. It’s where I was with Clipper Reade. I yearn for those days again when ideology was the battleground, not this damn faith business.’ They had gone to the boarding point for the boat trip at the Potsdamerplatz, had waited by the pontoon. He had thought Lawson mad, certifiable. At least they had a shrink with them. He would broach it with the guy.
The voice over the loudspeakers urged him to look forward. Now Lawson reacted. He had been slumped in the plastic chair, not peering out of the windows on which the rain dribbled. He jerked upright, light in his eyes.
The voice spoke of the approaching Oberbaumbrücke, completed in 1896, the finest bridge construction in nineteenth-century Berlin and …
Lawson said, ‘This is why I brought you. You needed to feel the width of the river, not just to stand on a bank and look across. We were on the left side, Clipper and I, and Foxglove was on the right where the Wall was. He worked in the east sector’s central telephone exchange. It was always difficult to debrief him, and the tractor-salesman cover was getting thin — about six weeks before Clipper was blown in Budapest. He was useful, and we used exchange students, military people who had the right of access to East Berlin and tourists — anyone with a visa — to bring back tapes, logs and lists of ministry numbers, but he wasn’t important enough for us to mount a full-dress exfiltration operation. You see, he was of no use to us afterwards, only when he was in place. Foxglove was a good agent, but not priceless, and his shelf life was gone.’
The bridge was misted by the low cloud and the rain dropping from it. Luke Davies’s head was at the window. It had seven low arches of brick with stone facings. A U-bahn train was crossing its top deck, but a lower one seemed empty. There were twin towers in the centre and they straddled the central arch, which their boat headed for. The voice said that the Oberbaumbrücke had been dynamited in 1945 to prevent Soviet troops using it, then rebuilt after Berlin was joined again; the central arch was from the design of a Spanish architect.