His screams rose, were incoherent. He mixed the English language with his own. ‘Who controls you? Police or Intelligence? How are you to contact your control? The attack on Goldmann was bogus, do you not admit that? What is the briefing of your control? What do they want? Is the target Goldmann or is it Reuven Weissberg? Do they know of the delivery? Is it the washing of cash or the delivery?’
The response, repeated: ‘I have answered that … have answered that …’ Silence when the questions were in Russian.
His hand shook, and the drill tip wavered a few centimetres from the trouser over the kneecap. He couldn’t make the fear. His arm stiffened. It was what Viktor had told him, and it had not before seemed important. Mikhail clutched at straws, was drowning.
‘You left outside your room, for laundry, sodden clothing. Why were you out in the night, in the rain? Did you meet your control in the night?’
He saw his man flinch. At last …
He hit again, and the drill tip spun not five centimetres from the kneecap. ‘It rained. You were out. You met your control.’
There was a surge of breath. Mikhail held the drill steady, let it race. He waited for the confession, and the smile spilled at his mouth.
He heard, ‘Reuven Weissberg, your employer — arsehole — has a bullet wound in the arm. I saw it. Where were you? Fucking a whore or with a hand down a kid’s trousers? Where were you, arsehole, when Mr Weissberg was shot?’
He was about to drive the drill tip into the trouser covering the kneecap. The voice behind him was a murmur. ‘Enough.’
He stopped. Mikhail let his finger slide off the trigger and the power died. He would never disobey an instruction from Reuven Weissberg. Weissberg was the only man he feared and he was at the point of success, but he would not disobey an order. He let the cordless drill slip from his fingers. It bounced on the concrete and splashed in a puddle of rainwater.
The voice behind him said, ‘Free him.’
Beside Reuven Weissberg, shaking and sobbing, was Josef Goldmann.
As Mikhail bent to loose the man, their eyes met. He thought the man’s eyes laughed at him.
He was in the minibus.
It should have been the time that Shrinks exuded authority and competence, was listened to. He sat hunched and stayed silent.
A full half-hour earlier he had slid back the minibus door, gone to the car and said to Lawson that, in his considered opinion, their man was in extreme danger and, following the description given him of the night’s events, was in no realistically fit state to defend his cover. Lawson had responded, ‘When I want your contribution I’ll ask for it, and right now I do not,’ then pulled his door shut. The younger man, Davies, had rolled his eyes and shrugged, and Shrinks had returned to the minibus.
He had not worked with Lawson before. A little of a fearsome reputation had reached him, but he had dismissed that as jealousy — there was enough of that at VBX — but he had been on the team long enough to believe each last syllable of the drip of criticism addressed to Christopher Lawson. Small mercies, but at least the man was an interesting subject. ‘Interesting’, but not the centre of his attention.
His focus was on November. From the far end of the long approach to the warehouse yard gate he had seen the cars drive in. Then he had had Deadeye’s binoculars passed abruptly to him, and there had been a flash sight of November’s head, front passenger seat, blurred, then gone. Precious little to work from, and the features had been expressionless, but he’d seen wide-open eyes and the pallor that stress brought. He had gone to the car, to Lawson, to tell him that the agent was defenceless and critically vulnerable, and his cheeks had flushed at the blatant rejection. Where would his advice have led, had it been accepted? Obvious. To go in and get the man clear — he had heard, faint but clear above the cries of wheeling gulls, the sounds of a chain-saw. Lawson, that ‘interesting subject’, had shown no hesitation and not a modicum of doubt in dismissing him. God, if he ever had that man, with certainties by the bucketful, on a couch … His own science, that of forensic psychology, was inexact and men who apparently harboured no doubts had always fascinated him.
Shrinks — he hated the name but it had stuck — worked two days a week at VBX and had been allocated a cubbyhole on the second floor in the Medical Section; the other three days he spent at University College Hospital in old Bloomsbury where he was attached to the Department of Psychiatry. Most of his colleagues at UCH treated varying degrees of mental illness, but he researched all aspects of human behaviour — and at VBX he sat in on selection of recruits panels, had influence in the planning of courses and monitored the progress of the younger officers. Normally he was listened to and what he said was used and seemed valued; this was the first time he had been ignored, then rejected, when he had stepped out to let his opinion be known.
The ambition of this big, shambling man — a couple of months short of his thirty-sixth birthday — was to be taken on at VBX full time. The secrecy and need-to-know culture appealed to him. The building burgeoned with excitement. He was, and had no problem admitting it, an enthusiast, and the two days a week when he jogged across the bridge and flashed his card at Security, then fed it into the machine at the entry barrier and went inside, gave him the greatest happiness he knew. Had to be careful in expressing that. He lived with Petra, a wood sculptor, in a housing-association one-bedroom flat in Islington. He could not blather on to her about his greatest happiness being at work … Petra, hacking away at wood with chisel and hammer in her council-sponsored studio, did not know where he was. The secrecy of the life, up to the time he sat cramped in the minibus and with the pain in his constricted knees, had thrilled him.
That ambition, he believed, was now threatened.
He wondered, even at that distance and through the crumbling brickwork of the building far ahead, if he would hear a scream of terror, of agony.
If he were to return to VBX having been an integral part of a team that had lost its most valuable asset, its agent on the ground, his ambition would crumble. He needed the operation to succeed. He had long hair that fell to his shirt collar and his fingers worked in it. The girl bit her fingernails, Bugsy stared fixedly ahead, and Deadeye hummed the same damn tune again and again. Then he saw the receiver light wink on Dennis’s lap.
The minibus was in fast reverse, and when Shrinks looked out through the back window he had a view of the car turning the corner.
‘Don’t mind me,’ Shrinks said, and the tension had reached him. ‘What’s happening?’
‘Adrian’s found a vantage-point where we may get an eyeball,’ Dennis said.
He thought they would see a weighted bundle carried out of the building, two or three men taking the strain. He realized he knew so little of the trade of VBX. It was simple and straightforward to sit in on selection boards and have young men and young women recite their CVs and all the dubious reasons they had concocted for joining the Service. But this was different: he had seen, just a flash of it, the face of a man taken to the limits and knowing it.