‘… and I understand we’ve had contact with you concerning a mafiya player, Russian, named Josef Goldmann and living in London. Don’t get me wrong, anything involving dear Christopher Lawson must be of the greatest importance to national security, and of course he has Pettigrew’s full backing, but the name “Haystack” must tell us something. You know, needles and that. My impression is that haystacks are seldom successfully searched …’
This was a colleague talking. Mistrust between VBX on the south side of the river and Thames House on the north bank was legendary. To SIS, the men and women of her Service were plodding bureaucrats who were fit for not much more than washing dishes; to her Service, SIS were arrogant pedants with a consistent but not admitted record of under-achievement. So, little of value was exchanged at the weekly sessions. They were, that week, on VBX territory — well, not actually inside that citadel of appalling architectural ugliness but in an anteroom off the building’s main lobby. The meetings were a leftover, a knee-jerk, from the catastrophe of the seven-seven explosions in the capital, when it had been convenient for both parties to blame the other for non-cooperation as an excuse for the failure to identify four suicide attackers.
‘What I can say of Haystack’s pedigree is that we’re not trumpeting this with allies and friends, and you may draw your own conclusions. Anyway, that’s Haystack, and that concludes what we have. Of much greater importance are Sapphire and Nineveh. I’m sure you’d like to take coffee with us before going back over the river.’
Operation Sapphire involved the movement of small-arms weapons from the Balkans into the UK, and Operation Nineveh followed the killing of a Manchester-reared Muslim by American troops in a gunfight in southern Baghdad. The meeting broke up. A series of thoughts flooded her. The man she had met in the tipping rain at the end of the bridge, his responses of brusque courtesy, his compliments on her briefing, and what she had asked him: Imminent danger? … Where are we on a scale of one to ten, Mr Lawson? And gazing into those eyes, seeing nothing manic in them, listening to his answer, hearing nothing blurted in it: A scale of one to ten? Probably between twelve and thirteen. She had believed him — utterly, totally. And he was rubbished by his own.
She went to the side table where a coffee percolator bubbled. She poured herself a cupful.
From behind her, ‘Haven’t seen you here before — hope you didn’t find it too crushingly dull.’
She said that, in fact, she had found it interesting and informative — and that her superior was in hospital for surgery so she had been pressed into service.
‘Good to come mob-handed, and I noticed you took a shorthand note, as we did, so there can’t be any misunderstandings on who said what and when. That’s the damn scene today, inquests and blame passing. I’m Tony, and you are?’
She said she was Alison, and that she had found the report on Haystack particularly interesting and informative.
‘Ah, the missing needle.’
She said she had ferried information on Josef Goldmann across the river, and had met Mr Lawson.
‘And what did you think of dear Christopher Lawson, the originator of Haystack?’
She shrugged, and said she was only a courier.
‘Well, Alison, you might just be one of life’s favoured fortunates. Christopher Lawson is a shit — an alpha-grade, gold-medal shit. In this building, from top to bottom, he is cordially detested. Delights in putting people down, belittling them where it hurts most, which is in front of their peers, gets some sort of perverse pleasure from serving up humiliation.’
She saw the colour rise in his cheeks when he remembered what Christopher Lawson had visited on him.
‘I was late, easy enough mistake. My first trip to Berlin — anyone could have made it. The rendezvous with an agent was for fourteen hundred hours in a café in the Moabit district. I had it in my mind that it was for four o’clock, not fourteen hundred. Of course, at four o’clock the agent had stopped waiting. He treated it, fucking Lawson did, as if I’d farted at a Palace reception, bawled me out in front of all the section, was just vicious. The next morning he presented me with a gift-wrapped package. I had to open it, everyone watching, and it was a Mickey Mouse wristwatch, and he said, “When the little hand points to Mickey’s left ear it’s fourteen hundred.” Never let me forget it. Every damn time he came into the section he’d remind me … People don’t matter to him. He uses them.’
She didn’t recognize from this the man at the end of the bridge … and she thought of the water running on the plastic sheeting protecting a photograph, and what she had said: This one’s as interesting as it gets. Jonathan Carrick … he’s a phoney … personal records … erased and replaced … what they do for policemen, those going undercover. And words just told her that had chilled her: People don’t matter to him. He uses them. Two faces bounced in her mind, the one older, features shielded from the elements by the brim of a trilby hat, and the other quiet and unremarkable, but with a determined and almost bloody-minded jut to the jaw, but with the rainwater washing little streams over it. She had wanted to please so had offered the name and detail of Jonathan Carrick.
She and her colleague were let out through Security and walked up on to the bridge. She glanced down, saw the place where photographs had been shown. She blinked, was responsible, had given the name of Jonathan Carrick … God.
He looked around him. The overhead lighting was from low-wattage bulbs, and the furniture was heavy, dark wood. The doors ahead and behind him were painted a deep brown matt. It seemed a place of shadows.
At the door, Mikhail had hugged Viktor perfunctorily. Inside the hall, his Bossman had bear-hugged Reuven Weissberg. At the entrance to the kitchen, his Bossman had kissed the cheeks of a frail elderly lady, who was dressed in black and who would have merged into the gloom but for the brilliance of her short-cropped white hair. Then he was introduced to her.
He held her hand formally, loosely, as if frightened he might hurt someone so fragile, but her response was to grip him and he thought of her fingers as bent wire lengths that were tight on his hand. She did not speak to him but looked up into his eyes. He saw great depth and could not plumb it. He thought she stripped him, and all the while she held his hand he was aware that, from behind his shoulders, his Bossman and Reuven Weissberg spoke to her in tandem. He assumed his presence was explained. Was she satisfied with what she was told? He couldn’t say, but his hand was released.
She beckoned him. He followed. She led him into a kitchen. Again, the lights were dulled. He thought it was a modern kitchen with the best work surfaces and a touch-button cooker, but an old, chipped, stained table and two scraped chairs with unravelling raffia seats competed with the smart units. On the cooker, water riffled at simmering point in dented saucepans. Carrick reckoned an old life had been inserted into a luxury modern apartment. On the table a single place was laid, but on a unit there was a pile of plates, all faded and each with broken edges. She pointed to the chair.
Carrick sat.
The woman had brought with her the baggage of her life. He understood that. The Bossman had told him, as they had crossed Berlin in the car, that she was the grandmother of Reuven Weissberg. He could see the night panorama of inner Berlin from the kitchen window. It was an apartment — he grinned to himself and nothing of it crossed his mouth — that a woman would die for and a man would kill for. But what he had seen was furniture and a kitchen that a charity shop, back home, wouldn’t have accepted. It was gear that would have gone unsold at a car-boot job. He had seen the deference with which his Bossman treated Reuven Weissberg; stood to reason that Reuven Weissberg was bigger, higher up the damn ladder, than his man.