There was much that Shrinks could have said, had he been asked … Could have said that an agent working beyond the reach of backup must possess supreme motivation, not that of a crusading knight fighting criminality, but have the self-induced need for success, and syringefuls of it. Could have said that a degree of stress was beneficial to the agent, that lack of stress was a road to complacency, but the stress levels the far side of the brick walls were beyond his experience as a psychologist. He liked to say, when a candidate had gone from the interview room and before the next was called forward, that he looked for ‘an organized mind’.
They were at the door of a derelict three-storey building, ancient bullet holes on the rendering. There was a gap in the doorway, where a nailed barrier had been prised back. Shrinks thought he would get a grandstand bloody view of a body being removed for disposal.
No one helped him, nor would he have asked for help.
There was an aged staircase with one in two, or two in three, of the wood steps missing. Those that were in place creaked and protested at their weight. At the biggest gaps Lawson sank to his knees, crawled and straddled the spaces, but no one looked back to see if he was able to bloody compete. On the first floor of the building — once an apartment block — there was a doorway and a distant window, bird shit on the floorboards. Trouble was that the bird shit lay on the boards that remained, and there were not too many of those. He hesitated in the doorway. Adrian was at the window. Davies and the cuckoo girl, Charlie, were halfway across the room and walked on the beam that had once supported the boards, not much more, damn the thing, than a couple of inches across. Davies had gone first and had good balance, held his arm out behind him and her fingers rested on his. She matched his steps. The drop between the boards and the beams to the ground floor would have been twenty-five feet. As if they had tossed for it and the loser went first, Bugsy stepped on to the beam and Shrinks had an arm out, held tight to the shoulder in front of him and might have had his eyes half closed. They could not back off, he knew it, because he was behind them. He waited his turn. Perhaps squatters had been in the building. His turn had come. Water came down, heavy and continuous, missed the beam by less than half a foot, and went on down. He could hear its patter far below. The beam shook as Bugsy and Shrinks joined Adrian, Davies and the girl on the one board under the window. Lawson went across. They were not looking at him. At the final stride, no hand reached out. He controlled his breathing.
He inserted himself beside Adrian. There was a clear view out across a bombsite not yet developed, the roadway that went nowhere, the building of weathered brick and the small doorway set in it. He saw the cars parked there, and the man who watched the gate.
The rain had come on heavier.
Then Davies said, ‘Well, Mr Lawson, here we all are with a Grand Circle view. What’s going to be the show? Tragedy or a comedy with a bag of laughs? Me, I’m banking on tragedy. I think it’s pretty well known that Russian organized crime gets about as vicious as any — unless it’s the Albanians on a red-letter day. You could — damn you, Mr Lawson — have picked that poor bastard up out of the gutter last night, when he was down and beaten, and called time on all this, blown the whistle. Not your way, was it? Gave him a verbal kicking and sent him back into that snakepit. I suppose you followed the edicts, as handed down on bloody tablets, of the peerless Clipper Reade … Well, look where it’s dumped our man.’
He remembered it well, Clipper’s story of the meeting on a park bench at the south side of the city of Gdansk, underneath the ramparts of the fortress built by Napoleon. With Clipper had been the young Pole, just past his twenty-first birthday, who worked in the division of the railways that cleared the tracks for military traffic. The kid had been buckling, and was refusing to continue supplying information on the timetables and content of the traffic that rolled at dead of night. Clipper had lashed him with his Texan tongue. Had achieved two more dead-letter drops. The second had listed the passing through the Gdansk junction yard of twenty-four MAZ-543 launch vehicles, with Scud-B missiles mounted, all loaded on flatbed stock. Scud-B had high explosive and chemical and nuclear warhead capability, and it was Clipper’s biggest success story in 1978 that he had identified the shipment coming through the junction yard at Gdansk and on to Polish territory. After that dead-letter drop, no more. The kid had been correct in his assessments that time was running short for him. Arrested, tried in camera. An American diplomat expelled from Warsaw, and a tit-for-tat reaction in Washington. Clipper Reade long gone from the scene, selling tractor spare parts somewhere else, and the kid with the timetables had gone off the radar — maybe beaten to death, maybe hanged, maybe executed by pistol shot, but he had not coughed a description of the big American from the Agency. Clipper had said he’d quite liked the kid, that he was decent, honourable and probably a patriot, but that his life — ‘Because we don’t ever go squeamish, Christopher’ — was fair exchange for knowing that Scud-Bs, with nuclear capability, had gone through the junction yard at Gdansk. The night the courier — a Canadian exchange student — had brought back that information, collected from the dead-letter drop, Clipper Reade and Lawson had killed two bottles of German sparkling wine with chasers of Earl Grey from the pot.
‘What you did should lie on your conscience.’ The hissed whisper was in Lawson’s ear. ‘You sent him back … Where he is, that’s the sort of place those bastards take a man they suspect. It’ll be their damn abattoir. Feel good about that, Mr Lawson, do you?’
He was nudged. Adrian passed him pocket binoculars. It took him a moment to get the focus right, and voices were in his ears.
Adrian’s murmur: ‘That is unbelievable. Incredible.’
‘Never, never would I have reckoned it,’ Davies mouthed.
Shrinks’s voice, breathy: ‘It’s the Stockholm thing. It’s that syndrome … but I couldn’t have predicted it. Only you could, Mr Lawson.’
He had the sharpness of the image. Josef Goldmann seemed to run in front of the group as if he needed to be gone from the place and was scarred by it. The lenses raked over the two hoods, Viktor and Mikhail, who hung back. There was frustrated fury on their faces and their feet seemed to stamp as they walked; Lawson felt the chuckle in his throat. His man, November, lifted out of an office doorway in the night, came with a weak, loose step towards the car, and was supported by Reuven Weissberg, who had his arm round November’s back and his fist gripping November’s coat. He had the focus clear now. Reuven Weissberg reached up with his other hand and, as if they were friends, pinched November’s cheek. November would have fallen if Reuven Weissberg’s arm had not held him up. Lawson knew what Stockholm syndrome was, and had aimed to create it.
Adrian said, ‘It’s a triumph, Mr Lawson — and we need to move fast.’
They ran to the stairs and were going down, skipping over the gaps where the steps had been taken out. Bugsy and Shrinks helped each other. None of them looked back. Lawson started after them. Bloody well past sixty-one years, bloody near pensionable. Was wobbling on the beam. Should not look down. Heard the clatter of them on the steps. Felt himself going, but Lawson did not cry out, then seemed to see the face of Lavinia, his wife, and Harry, his son. They looked away … Had hooked his right leg over the damn beam and had a hold of it with his left hand. Was suspended. Could look down and see them all crossing the lobby, going quick, not looking up. Thought the left arm was about ready to come out of its socket. Then he’d fall. The angles of the beam were sharp enough to cut off his right leg at the knee, and then he’d fall. Took the strain. Pulled himself up. Was astride the beam, and panted. Crawled along it, and came to the doorway. His fingers clawed on the wall and he stood, went down the steps and crossed the hall. Funny that, first time since he’d reached Berlin that he’d thought of his wife and son.