‘Yes, Mr Lawson. What I wanted to contribute is about the body language of the agent. He demonstrates the characteristics of pure Stockholm syndrome.’
‘Get to the point.’
‘Of course, Mr Lawson. We talk about a universal strategy for victims of personal abuse. Could be hostages, battered women, incest victims or procured prostitutes. In all cases, the victims ingratiate themselves with their abuser. The victim believes absolutely in an actual or perceived threat to his or her personal safety — that’s what we call a “precursor” to the syndrome. A second precursor is the relief if a gesture of kindness, mercy, is made by the abuser to the victim — could be as little as a smile or a gentle word. The third common precursor involves the circumstance in which the victim exists — in isolation from any normal, familiar environment, cut off from contact with the outside world. Our last precursor is the victim’s belief that he or she cannot walk away, escape. All of those factors now exist for November. We have threat, we have humanity and isolation, and we have the inability to turn his back, walk off down the street towards sunlit uplands. Put bluntly, Mr Lawson, your man regards Reuven Weissberg as a more important figure in his life than you.’
The girl, Katie Jennings, drove the minibus off the square. Lawson liked what he was told, but wouldn’t show it.
‘He is, of course, Mr Lawson, a highly trained and motivated officer. I venture to suggest that nothing in the agent’s training would have prepared him for this situation. Stress factors for him will be high. Motivation will have been weakened by the factor of his being outside a net of regular contact with us. We should—’
‘Summarize — without waffle.’
‘I’ll try, Mr Lawson. Your agent has colluded with his abuser, and that is a classic symptom of the syndrome. I would suggest that his perspective on events ahead of him is not that of a serving police officer. His perspective is that of his abuser. The victim becomes, we’ve found, hyper-vigilant to the abuser’s needs.’
‘And you’re getting all that from the body language, with your viewpoint ranged from a hundred yards plus away?’ Lawson snorted sarcasm.
‘I am. The agent cannot now divorce himself from the target — a battered wife remains with a violent husband. The agent’s greatest fear is of losing the only positive relationship left him. He’s in denial of reality. It’s that simple.’
Lawson reckoned Shrinks was frightened of him. Looking into the minibus front mirror, he could see that the girl wore an expression of suppressed anger, and that young Davies, beside her, fought to hold his silence. Probably both detested him. He had the back seat to himself, and the jump seats behind him were taken by Bugsy, Deadeye, Shrinks and their luggage. He stretched his legs. They were out of the square, plunging down the hill and away from the modernized prettiness of the old town into the more recent concrete shapes of Chelm.
Lawson said, ‘Yes, very helpful. Do you want a mention in dispatches?’
‘Just trying to do my job, Mr Lawson. Getting nearer, isn’t it, whatever the conclusion will be? And that’s piling the stress on him. Difficult thing to handle in his circumstances, acute stress.’
‘Everyone, Shrinks, will be feeling the stress in the coming hours,’ Lawson said cheerfully. ‘I guarantee that stress, like piano wires pulled to break-point, will play a part in the actions of everyone involved.’
He licked his lips. Molenkov couldn’t help himself. ‘Yashkin, where we are now, is it inside the Chernobyl area?’
‘You know as much as I do.’
Their leg for the day was from Gomel to Pinsk. It would be one of the longest. On the map, Molenkov had reckoned, it was around three hundred and sixty-five kilometres. They had not rejoined the M13, and Molenkov had guided Yashkin to the side roads going south. They were on a single-carriageway road, and had crossed a long, narrow bridge over the Pripat river, were among a wilderness of uncultivated fields, sparse forestry and stagnant lakes. Where there had been villages there were only slight indications of habitation. The meltdown at the nuclear reactor on the outskirts of Chernobyl had occurred two years after the death of his wife and a year before the death of his son.
‘I know little of Chernobyl, only that the country to the north was contaminated, that there is a considerable exclusion zone, that the poison will stay for many hundreds of years and—’
Yashkin snapped, ‘And the level of radiation at Chernobyl, which is due south of us, is on average measured at 1.21 milliroentgens, and that’s a hundred times more than the natural level of radiation.’
‘Then you know something.’
‘I know that thyroid cancer is up for those who lived inside the zone by more than two thousand per cent, congenital birth deformities are up by two hundred and fifty per cent, and leukaemia has doubled. There was fall-out here. It came down in rain. I talked once with a “colleague”, an oaf from Belarus, at a conference I attended. He said that Russian territory was not affected because our air force seeded rain clouds that would have blown over Russia, used chemicals to induce premature rainfall, and prevented the radionuclides from coming down on our territory but instead on Belarus. Is that enough?’
Molenkov pursed his lips and a frown slashed his forehead. Thoughts cavorted in his mind. He could see little from the side window because the rain was beating on the Polonez’s roof, coming from the south, then flowed in rivers down the glass. The wipers on the windscreen hummed on full power. He watched the slow flight of a stork, the big wings flapping lethargically, as it traversed the road and stayed low.
Molenkov asked, ‘It reached this far, yes?’
‘What reached this far?’
‘Don’t mock me, Yashkin. Did the poison reach this far?’
‘It did.’
‘And will it last for ever, for all the horizons of time that you and I can think of?’
‘Watch the map.’
Molenkov breathed in hard. He thought of what he wished to say, how to express it. His friend of many years, his neighbour, his confidant, his partner in the enterprise, kept his eyes on the road, didn’t look at him and wouldn’t help him.
He said, ‘We worked at the place where weapons were made. The weapons, if ever used, would have spread the same poison, left the same disease in the air, in the ground. Am I correct?’
‘Wrong. We had mutually assured destruction. With MAD there was no question of the weapons being used. The safeguard against nuclear war was that they had them and we had them. It couldn’t have happened. It would have been national suicide for us and them.’
It had formed in his mind, what he would say and the action he would take. Molenkov could not have said why he had lingered so long. He took another surging, gulping breath. In his mind, pictured there, was the device in the back of the car, covered by the tarpaulin. He could have reached back, twisted, ignored the pain in his pelvis and touched it. If his hand had been able to go under the tarpaulin and under the webbing cover of the thing, and if he’d had a screwdriver and had unfastened the casing, he could have touched it and felt its living, breathing, hideous warmth. He did not reach behind him, but he pictured it. ‘What we carry, what we intend to sell, will do the same.’
‘You’re talking shit, Molenkov.’
‘It’ll make the poison.’
‘What do you want, Molenkov?’
‘I want no part of it.’
‘See if I care.’
‘Do you want a part of it?’
‘You’re too late to ask that.’
‘Stop the car, Yashkin.’
A hand didn’t come off the wheel, didn’t go to the gear lever and change down. The Polonez did not slow. The brake pedal was not pressed. Yashkin kept the car at his steady speed, fifty kilometres per hour.