Molenkov said, ‘An engineer in explosives was reported to me for saying at a party that our warheads were technically a decade behind those of the Americans at Los Alamos, and that we didn’t service them often enough because we lacked the financial resources to do the work, and many would fail to detonate if fired. He was brought to me. I berated him for “negativity” and “defeatism” and for “spreading lies” and “disloyalty to the state”. He cringed in front of me. I could barely hear his response because he squealed in fear. I think he believed he was headed for the gulag. I had been twice to his apartment as a guest. My wife was the friend of his wife. To have pursued him would have meant more trouble than it was worth — reports to be written and sent to Moscow, investigations, inquests as to the effectiveness of my work. When I told him to go home, and not to be such an imbecile again, he fainted. I shan’t tell you his name, but he was one of the brightest stars of Arzamas-16 and to have lost him would have created a void hard to fill. He was carried out of my office. That was the uniform.’
Yashkin braked, waited, then nudged forward again. ‘Did you ever see him again after you’d been dismissed, and no longer wore the uniform?’
Molenkov said, ‘I was passing the museum. It was three years ago. I’m older than when he knew me, and my clothes were those of a vagrant but he would have known me. A face doesn’t alter whatever circumstances affect the body. He walked right past me and looked through me. He would have thought himself as of the élite and me as a functionary. I wasn’t wearing the uniform.’
‘I saw that NCO, and definitely he saw me. He was with his children, parking his car outside the cinema. I wore that old coat — the one from the street market with the moths — but he knew me. How do I know he knew me?’
‘How do you know he knew you?’
‘Because he spat at my feet because I wasn’t wearing the uniform.’
Without thinking, Yashkin chopped the heel of his hand hard on to the steering-wheel. The shock went from his wrist to his elbow and then his shoulder joint. But he felt no pain. Yashkin said, ‘We owe them nothing, nothing. Be certain of it.’
Nodding fierce agreement, Molenkov began to pick fluff from the material of the tunic above where his medals were pinned.
In their finery of former days, they stayed locked in the queue and, metre by metre, were taken forward, at snail’s pace, to the Customs point where they might be confronted by a vehicle search. Silence fell, as if talking were no longer valuable. They were alone and sealed in the car, their attention directed at what lay immediately ahead, not a wider world.
She was one of those who was rarely remembered. If she was remembered, she was easily forgotten. Not recognized as skills by her line managers, her characteristics had helped to create a rather dogged individual, with the trait of persistence.
The problem gnawed in the mind of the liaison officer, Alison. It had been with her for close to two days and nights. It was the matter of Haystack, the name of Johnny Carrick and the sense of responsibility she felt that had distracted her. She could have taken a blank sheet of paper, drawn a vertical line down it from top to bottom. She could have written on the left side: ‘Imminent danger? … Where are we on a scale of one to ten, Mr Lawson?’ And written underneath it: ‘A scale of one to ten? Probably between twelve and thirteen.’ If the gaunt, brusque Christopher Lawson was to be believed, and national catastrophe loomed, she had been morally and operationally correct in divulging the name of Johnny Carrick, an undercover of SCD10. It was the sort of difficulty she had not faced before, but she had no inclination to head off towards her line manager’s office and unburden herself while still existing in such ignorance. It had come to her, what she should do, at around four o’clock that morning, and about damn time too.
The power of the computer she was linked to from her workstation was immense. From it she could enter bank records, credit-card transactions, driving-licence details, telephone-usage printouts, pension schemes, electoral registers, marriage and birth certificates. She could open a man or woman’s life, split it wide and examine it.
She might, later, have to justify such an intrusion, but that was a minor concern. Information spewed on to her screen. Him, a wife, a son, an address … and she felt the chance to shift a minimum of that burden from her shoulders.
She had driven without stopping. The big car with the big engine had eaten the miles between the eastern outskirts of Berlin and the western approach flyover into Warsaw.
For Katie Jennings, the long drive was like fulfilment. She was in her thirty-second year, had been brought up in a Worcestershire village under the bleak spine of the Malvern Hills. Her father had been a Water Board engineer and her mother had taught at junior level; they were now adrift, had packed in their jobs before retirement age and spent half of the year scraping the hull and painting the interior of the Summer Queen, the other half navigating the canals of southern and western England; they had achieved a sort of freedom, and she hadn’t.
She had thought, once, that joining the Metropolitan Police, aged nineteen, would provide the independence and drive she yearned for — which she recognized her parents now had — and had grown disillusioned. The first flushes of excitement had faded. And then she had thought, four years before, that the transfer into SCD10 would give her the adrenaline surge — and it had at first. She had done King’s Cross where the ‘toms’ paraded and had known that back-up was reassuringly close. She had done the trips to the Spanish island, where her job was to sit with the big players’ women and pick up the little morsels they offered in their asinine conversations, and then she had been pulled inside the Pimlico office. There, she did the filing, made the tea and kept the diaries for Rob and George. Katie Jennings did not know whether she was relegated to office duties because of a personal failure or, a simpler explanation, because she was convenient and it was comfortable to have her in the building. She knew the way the system worked and, most probably, Rob and George dreaded the day she moved on and they’d have to find the next sucker who understood the work, made good tea and coffee, and knew what fillings they liked in their sandwiches. She had become professional in the quality of her moans, not that she showed them.
It was late afternoon when she brought them into the city.
Part of the stereotype of the ‘little woman’ was that she should have a fling with Johnny Carrick. The star, the guy who was trusted and worked at the edge, had no attachments. If she slept with him she wasn’t a marriage-wrecker. That, too, had seemed a route to excitement, but no longer. He didn’t do it well any more, was too tired, too frazzled or too stressed, and the sessions on the bunk bed in the Summer Queen had been of consistently poorer value to her. Bloody hell. It was what she thought about as she drove through the Warsaw suburbs below the flyover. She had seen Carrick come out of the warehouse, leaning for support on and half carried by Reuven Weissberg, their top target. What it added up to: the trusted stellar guy, Johnny Carrick, had lost his lustre. Was that pretty bloody cruel?
Luke Davies, beside her, had not talked much, had not dug for her life story, had not done the superior bit and had not been clever with her.
She’d thought — on the stretch beyond Poznan and hammering past the magnificence of the domed churches and the hideous concrete towers of apartments — hard, of a childhood image back in the village under the long range of hills. It was not part of her job description that she should shag Johnny Carrick, in the hope of keeping him on the road for undercover work.