Mikhail drove fast into the Berlin night, and headed east.
Chapter 12
They came into Warsaw at dawn. The horizon ahead, to the east, had no brightness, only degrees of grey. It was a landscape of greyness. Merging the land and the sky, a carpet of smog hung in the air. Carrick had not been told why he had been scalped from Josef Goldmann’s car to Reuven Weissberg’s.
He had not been questioned during the six hours on the road. Mikhail said nothing to him, spoke only — occasionally — to Reuven in Russian. Carrick found the silence unsettling. The radio was on softly, but only to catch road reports. The long quiet times were difficult for Carrick because the motion of the car and the warmth of its interior lulled him. He had decided he had been taken from his paymaster, Josef Goldmann, his Bossman, as a gesture of supremacy. Simple stuff. Someone else had something that was wanted, desirable and valued, and it was the mark of Reuven Weissberg that an alpha dog could take what it chose to.
Well past Poznan, with the signs showing for Warsaw, he had decided his assessment was flawed.
When he was stalking Jed and Baz, or Wayne, he had seen the greed that ruled them, the need for the pecking order to be displayed and worn, as uniformed officers hankered after their rank badges. Greed was the biggest factor in criminals’ lives. Either side of Poznan and in the quiet of the car, he had been applying ill-founded stereotypes, had stuck labels on his image of Reuven Weissberg, which had drifted away as the kilometres were swallowed. More to this man … No sign of a mistress, but the grandmother who displayed authority over him was there. No indication of affluence in the apartment, just heavy old furniture that would have filled up the back of a junk store in London or Bristol. No top-of-the-range car, and the big Audi that Mikhail drove had gone past a hundred thousand kilometres on the clock. The clothes weren’t Armani and the hair wasn’t styled. Would have walked past him on the street and not noticed him.
Wrong. Carrick would have noticed him, had he looked into Reuven Weissberg’s eyes.
Coming into the suburbs of Warsaw, Carrick’s thoughts took new turns. Behind him, Weissberg had discarded the big leather jacket with the scuffed elbows and frayed cuffs and it lay on the spare seat beside him. He wore a clean, ironed shirt with short sleeves. The leather jacket had been shrugged off outside the Berlin hotel when it had been demanded that Carrick walk away from Josef Goldmann. Then Carrick had held open the car door, and as Reuven Weissberg had dropped into the seat, the right sleeve had worked up. Again, Carrick had seen the closed hole where a bullet had punctured the flesh.
Now, as Mikhail took the car up on to a main route flyover, Carrick believed he understood. When they had tested him, pushed him to the limit, and he had exploded with the yell of accusation about a gunshot and lack of protection, then — like a thunderclap — a mood had changed.
About protection … about the boasts of Josef Goldmann that he was protected by a guy who would risk his own life to earn his corn, about protection in a world of acute and extreme danger. It had been almost enough to make Carrick laugh out loud. But he did not … He could have laughed because a criminal feared for his own safety and had taken possession of his associate’s bodyguard, as if that bodyguard was a flak jacket, proven against small-arms fire … All about protection. As a child, Carrick had been taken by his grandfather into the Cairngorm mountains to the south of the Spey’s mouth when autumn turned the high slopes golden. They had gone, then, to lofty viewpoints, with binoculars and a telescope on a tripod, and his grandfather had searched the range for stags and hinds. The season of the rut, when the king stag mated with his hinds, fascinated his grandfather and bored the child Carrick near to death — unless there was combat.
Younger stags approached the king, and there was the bellowed defiance of the big old boy who controlled the herd. Some pretenders plucked courage and came to fight — horns locked, wounds made, blood seeping. Rare, but he had seen it, a pretender usurped the big old boy, sent him from the field where the hinds grazed. At the sight of the one-time king creeping away, injured and desolate, his grandfather always let rip squeals of excitement and thought his grandchild should ape him.
They said, on the courses he had done and in the office when time was idled, that the fear of every major criminal — at level three, into organized crime with international links — was that a young gun would topple him. They did not, of course, retire and slip away to the villa with the pool and the patio, milk the building-society account and allow an old world to drift away. They tried to stay the course and hang on to power, authority. They ended up, damn near the lot of them, in handcuffs because of the one ‘final’ big-shot deal, or dead in the gutter from a contract man’s weapon, with blood coming off the pavement and heading for the drain. Carrick remembered the strength of Reuven Weissberg’s grip on his sleeve and the way he had been held up when they had left the warehouse.
The car swung off the flyover and came down a slip road, then swerved across traffic lanes. They came to a hotel whose floors reached, almost, to the cloud base. Porters hurried forward but Mikhail waved them away. He did his own parking and they carried their own bags inside. Only Mikhail went to the desk to check in and collect the key cards. Carrick noted it. He did not have to give a signature. Neither did Reuven Weissberg, nor Mikhail. They waited a few minutes, not many, then Viktor came with Josef Goldmann.
Funny thing, but Johnny Carrick had never thought of Josef Goldmann — in the months he had been with him — as anything other than a target, and he sensed that Goldmann was small fry and insignificant in comparison with Weissberg. And he had never thought of Reuven Weissberg — in the two days since he had met him — as a true target.
He was told he should rest because it was the last day and the last night that there would be time to sleep. Difficult, standing in front of a lift, then entering it, feeling its surge up through forty-something floors, to remember that he was an undercover with SCD10, but on secondment, and that a matter of national security involved him … Too damn difficult to comprehend.
He stood at the plate-glass window as the rain ran on it and stared out. He said quietly, ‘I wonder if, at the end of it, they’ll have the balls?’
Viktor shrugged. ‘It was their proposition. If they hadn’t talked of it, how would I have known of it?’
Reuven grimaced. ‘We have to believe they’ll be there.’
‘They made the approach.’
‘Old men, both. Each kilometre takes them further from what they know.’
Viktor now smacked his fist into the palm of his hand. ‘Me, I take responsibility.’
‘You believe in them.’
‘Yes.’
His room faced the Palace of Culture, the Stalin monument to domination, and his window was level with an aspect of its upper structure. For a moment, Reuven Weissberg’s tongue wiped his lower lip, darting and hasty. ‘Should we have agreed it?’
He saw puzzlement scud over Viktor’s features. ‘You can’t hesitate now. I say that with respect, but you cannot. The deal is done. Not only us, and the old men. Others, too, are travelling. It’s not possible to withdraw.’
Turning, the smile at his mouth and the brightness in his eyes, Reuven Weissberg said, ‘If you say that the old men have the balls and will reach the place you agreed with them, I’ll be there. And I’ll honour the sale onwards. Do you understand the past?’