They had driven away.
It was now four hours since the petrol had swamped Molenkov’s mouth, and the taste had not lessened. More had gone into the cuts in his lips and the abrasions on his chin.
Yashkin said, ‘I hope we have enough. This town is—’
‘Not another fucking history lesson.’
Yashkin grimaced. ‘Kobrin is a frontier town. The frontier zone of a pitiful country, such as Belarus is, will be heavily policed. There will be State Security men as close to each other as the mosquitoes around the Pripet marshes on a summer evening. We cannot “borrow” fuel here, and we have no money to buy it. If we beg we draw attention to ourselves. We can only hope we have enough.’
‘Suppose we get to the Bug and deliver. How do we move on to wherever?’
‘You are an idiot, Molenkov.’
‘Tell me.’
Yashkin laughed. ‘We buy the fuel station. We have a million American dollars. We can buy—’
‘Do we have sufficient to get to the Bug?’ Molenkov refused to laugh.
He saw the smile stripped from Yashkin’s face. The lips pursed, and the frown cut deeper. ‘I don’t know. Could we fail for a shortage of one litre of fuel? How far into the last litre are we? The gauge won’t tell us.’
They drove on slowly, to conserve what fuel remained, and Molenkov did not look at the road ahead but at the needle that was steady at the bottom of the red area.
On the map, ahead of them, only the village of Malorita was marked, then the open space of forest, wilderness and marshland, the blue line of the Bug river.
Molenkov asked, ‘Will you allow an idiot one more question? We’re late. We lost the schedule searching for fuel in Pinsk. Will they wait for us?’
‘Yes, they will. You worry too much, Molenkov.’
Molenkov heard the reassurance, the confidence, and didn’t know whether his friend lied. He thought of them, together, on the bank of the Bug, flashing their torches in the evening dusk — being where they should have been in the last hour before dawn — and not seeing a light on the far side. It might be that his friend lied, and that no one would be there because they had lost time.
The call came.
Lawson fumbled through his pockets, found the damned thing. Only a handful of people had that number — Lucy, of course, and an assistant director, Lavinia, who had been given it years before but had probably lost it by now or shredded the paper it was jotted on, an engineer in the speciality workshops that did the gizmos, a couple more who were scattered in that building by the Thames, and the director general. It had been Clipper’s joke, the ringing tones were of the anthem ‘Deutschland Über Alles’, but there was much of Clipper Reade’s that Lawson had made his own.
The chimes rang through the forest. He saw the astonishment spreading as he came clear of the minibus and the call tune continued. Must have woken the surveillance people, and Shrinks had the look of one who thought that this was a man around whom a serious case study could be built, but his young man, Luke Davies, eyed him as if the gesture of the anthem was not amusing but pathetic. Did it matter to Christopher Lawson? It did not. Did it matter that a bug had not moved in hours, not even by a few metres, and that the sun was climbing above the forest? It did. He pressed the ‘connect’ button.
‘Yes.’
‘Christopher?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s Francis — are we on “secure”?’
‘Yes.’
His tone was brusque. Even a contact from the director general was treated as an intrusion. The voice was distant, tinny when filtered through the encryption and scrambler chip built into the phone. Of course they were on secure speech. He listened. ‘I’ve been off base for the last twenty-four hours, but I understand you haven’t called through. Where do we stand?’
‘Our position is satisfactory. Where do we stand? Specifically, we are in a forest area, quite close to the Bug river. We are south of Wlodawa and—’
He heard the impatience. No one else he knew would have employed pedantry with the director general. ‘Do we have a close surveillance aspect on our targets? What I mean is — damn it, Christopher, in words of one syllable — have we control? Are they, the targets, buttoned down?’
‘Yes.’ Lawson had not hesitated. He spoke firmly.
‘Do you still believe the situation on which you briefed me?’
‘Yes.’
‘You have the crossing-point under surveillance, and the manpower to take action?’
‘To both, yes.’
‘Is it soon?’
‘Within the next several hours is my estimate.’
‘Should you have more bodies, additional back-up?’
‘No.’
‘Christopher, I’m saying this once, not again, and believe me, the image of failure runs in my mind — it’s an apocalypse. Failure is not acceptable. I’m asking whether you should have the cavalry with you, Christopher.’
‘Nice offer — no, thank you.’
‘I can lift a telephone. I can get a battalion of Polish troops there, wherever it is, within an hour, two at the most. I can get that area made so secure that a rabbit—’
‘We’re well placed, Francis, and the cavalry is not required — for reasons we discussed, and agreed, in your office. I have the resources I need.’
‘To put my mind at rest, you confirm that you have control?’
‘Tight control, Francis. It was all predictable and there are no surprises.’
‘And the agent? How is he performing?’
He told his director general, very frankly, of his assessment of the agent. He was staring across the camping area and could see up the track and almost to the road, and he looked for the car that would bring back Bugsy and Deadeye, and thought he knew what they would bring and what they would report. ‘I really should be getting on with things, Francis, so if you’ll excuse me …’
He ended the call.
The previous evening, Tadeuz Komiski had convinced himself — without effort — that the persistence of the rain excused him from going and looking for wood for the priest to burn in his home. Wet wood, however well seasoned, would merely smoke out the man’s living room. But that morning the sun was out and his excuse was no longer valid.
Because of the expense of refilling it, he would not waste what fuel he had in his tractor’s tank. He would go early into the forest and check where there were branches brought down by the weight of the rain and the strength of the wind, those that had already died, and he would look for the heaps where the forestry men had stacked timbers that were too thin, too split or too knotted to serve as good pit props. When, if, he found sufficient wood he would walk back to his home and collect his tractor. Komiski told himself that it was only because Father Jerzy had asked for wood that he would look for it, he would have done it for no one else.
He did not take the dog, or the shotgun, but he had hitched on his shoulder the short bow-saw with its razor teeth.
He did not use the tracks that were rutted from the woodsmen’s vehicles, but he went as a wraith among the trees. Maybe it was the tiredness, maybe it was because he had not eaten — neither had his dog — since the priest had left the pie, maybe it was from the sense of freedom after closing the door of the house behind him, but he had not worked out with any precision what route he would take on his way to look for wood that was not too sodden to be burned.