He reached inside the shirt and started to thread the straps of the harness across the agent’s spine and over his shoulder.
‘You fired twice, you tried to kill …’
‘Easy. You gave me a bloody great kick in the goolies. Not black still, but bloody yellow.’
‘You fired twice. It was to murder—’
‘You know nothing, mate.’
‘Two bloody shots. I know about that.’
Deadeye grinned. God, the agent was an innocent. He shifted him, worked the straps round the spine, then tightened them for the Velcro to grip. And when the agent shifted, Deadeye saw the pancake in the belt, and the butt of a handgun. God, the agent was an innocent and had gone native. Didn’t think Mr Lawson would like hearing that November had packed a weapon provided by the bad guys, wouldn’t like that at all.
‘That’s it, nice and steady, just fastening it up. You’ve led the surveillance a fair old dance. They can’t keep it up, have to kip, so we need the tag on you. Very nice, good fit.’
He eased his hands back. Didn’t like the handgun, and Mr Lawson wouldn’t … The harness was close to the agent’s vest, and he smelled — and Deadeye smelled. Probably they both smelled equal to well-hung ducks, or like the badgers’ carcasses that were tossed into the ditches alongside roads. He saw anger build in the eyes.
Wasn’t for Deadeye to button up the shirt and refasten the jacket. ‘So, mate, that’s it. Oh, so’s you know, we’re all with you. It’s a good job you’re doing. Keep at it, mate.’
The hiss in the voice. ‘You tried to kill my boss. You fired twice. He was dead if I hadn’t intervened. I could have taken a bullet. I was unarmed, my boss was — I reckoned it rivals, hoods, mafiya, not my people. Two men, defenceless … That makes you a right bloody coward.’
‘Dead? Ooh, yes. Coward? Right you are, mate. Great imagination.’ Those who knew him, had worked with him, didn’t regard Deadeye as chatty, thought of him as a man of few words, usually necessary ones. Not just Adrian and Dennis who were tired. Deadeye was too. Hadn’t slept properly in four nights, hadn’t slept at all in the last forty-something hours, and was pretty much at the end of his tether.
‘Imagination? The weapon discharged twice.’
Deadeye had the agent’s shoulder in his fist. ‘That was blanks. Didn’t you know that? Thought you were a paratrooper. There was nothing real. Only thing real was the kick in my goolies, and the bruises. The worst the blanks could have done was singe you. It was to push you, give you the shove into their arms. It worked, just as the guv’nor said it would. Don’t call me a coward.’
The agent stared at him and it was like the light died in those eyes, and the anger.
Deadeye had the receiver box in his hand and a green light flashed. Had he tweaked the volume he would have had a constant bleep. Good signal, strong.
He was gone.
On hands and knees for the first fifty yards, bent low for the next hundred, fast on his toes and the balls of his feet till he reached the car. They were both snoring gently. Deadeye put the receiver on to the grille on the dashboard, beside the satnav. He crawled into the back, eased a bit of space for himself from Dennis but didn’t wake him. He closed his eyes and let his head drop. The bleep was good, comforting.
Yashkin had set himself a target, a challenging one.
The target of Major (Ret’d) Oleg Yashkin was to find, that evening, entertainment in the Belarus city of Pinsk that would change the mood, ease the melancholy, of Colonel (Ret’d) Igor Molenkov.
The light had dropped and the rain had not lifted when Yashkin drove the Polonez into the inner streets of the city. His first impression: Pinsk was a pit. He said, with bogus cheerfulness, ‘I reckon it looks a fine place.’
‘You must be blind,’ Molenkov growled. ‘It’s a shit-hole.’
‘A fine place, and one where we’ll find a meal, a bar, somewhere to sleep for three, four hours before we move on.’
‘You think, here, we’ll find a good meal without cockroaches in the kitchens, a good bar where the glasses have been decently washed that’s not for whores to work in? You’re optimistic. What do we know of Pinsk?’
‘A definition of optimism: “Whatever is, is right.” I was told that by Poliakoff, the academician in theoretical physics in my time. It was how he coped with the regime, pressures, then the scaling down in resources. The quotation is from the German philosopher, Leibniz.’
‘It’s shit. I repeat, what do we know of Pinsk?’
Yashkin could have told him what he’d read in the guidebook when he’d planned the legs of the journey. Pinsk was on the confluence of the Pina and Pripat rivers, had been a Slavic centre in the eleventh century, sacked by Cossack marauders and the captured wounded buried alive. A canal linking the city to the Vistula river and the Baltic Sea was in disrepair, but it had the church of St Barbara and the Franciscan monastery … but he didn’t know where they could eat and drink.
‘I know nothing, except that we must eat something, then sleep a little and move on.’
‘Yes, yes,’ Molenkov said heavily. ‘And after that we must make our delivery.’
Yashkin found a parking place at the edge of the old town. It was dark, poorly lit. In front of him was the start of what he presumed would be a network of narrow streets. He saw few cars — and those that were there sped past — and fewer pedestrians, who were hurrying as if anxious to be elsewhere. He looked for neon signs advertising food and drink, and a hotel that would have secure lockup garaging, and saw only shadows. The schedule, to be kept to, allowed for a meal, a drink or three, a short sleep, then the last section of the drive west. The rendezvous point from the code message was now — Yashkin estimated — a mere hundred and thirty-five kilometres ahead. He stepped out of the car, went to the back and unlocked the tail hatch.
He gazed at the bulk of the tarpaulin. He reached inside, past their bags, wriggled his hand under it and let it lie on the canvas coating of the Zhukov. He was smiling to himself. Had he expected to feel its warmth? Of course not. Was he certain he hadn’t expected to register on his fingertips the evidence that it lived? Well … no, not certain. He understood and was tolerant of the doubts, hesitations, confusions that battled in Molenkov’s mind. Molenkov had not lived with the beast for the past fifteen years — it had not been in his garden, under lettuces and carrots, cabbages and potatoes in summer and under the winter snow, it had never been on a cart pushed by conscripts under Molenkov’s control, going through the security of the main gate at Arzamas-16. He took his hand from the roughness of the canvas, strewed sheets of newspaper over the uniforms to hide them, then slammed the hatch. He locked the Polonez, walked round the car and tested each door, satisfied himself that the vehicle was secure and offered no target of opportunity to thieves.
Molenkov was up the street and called, ‘Yashkin, up here, on the left. I think there may be a place.’
Yashkin wondered if they could eat fish there, or whether Pinsk was too near to the zone of Chernobyl and that part of the Pripat river. He would like some fish — carp or bream, but a pike would be best, with herbs … A dream. Yashkin would eat anything, and wash away the taste with beer — was there a local brew? Food occupied him, and drink. He felt the acute stiffness in his hips and lower back from that long leg, and the legs he had driven in the previous days. He did not look around, was not alert, had no suspicions. The street was empty except for Molenkov and a distant light in garish red and green. He did not ask himself why it was empty and what district of Pinsk he had come to.
He remembered. Now Yashkin remembered what the book had said in the library reading room in Sarov. Beer was indeed brewed in Belarus — three beers. Now he could recall the names of only two: Lidskoe and Krynitsa. He struggled to remember the third, and he was ten paces from Molenkov.