High on the sand, below the water tower, was the wreck of a fishing-boat. It would have been seven metres long and two wide, and half a century before it would have held thirty or forty escapers. It had been caught on the beach by a strafing aircraft, and cannon shells had holed it. Perhaps his grandmother had been close, hiding in the pine trees and pressed down on the needle-strewn ground when the aircraft had come over on its low pass and destroyed her final hope. Viktor always ran as far as the wreck on the sand, and never further. There he would rest for three minutes, timed on the stop-watch dial of his wristwatch, a routine set in stone.
It was his cry for help. In the face of the wind his back rested against the old plank timbers of the fishing-boat. From the dunes, as they smoked their cigarettes, his watchers might see the top of his head. If he had been in the lee of the wind, sheltered, they would have been able to see him, and what he did. He reached into the pocket of his shorts and took out the piece of chalk. Near to the bow, where once the name of the boat and its number would have been painted, close to a shell-hole, he made two short crosses, and underneath the crosses he wrote the letters Y and F. He did not know how his friends would answer his cry. He pushed himself up, his three minutes gone.
He was a traitor. He imagined the unpitying, feral eyes of the men on the dunes before they turned to scurry back to the van and the saloon car.
He was a traitor for two reasons. The learning of the life and death of his father and of his grandmother had tipped him into the chasm and down in freefall to treachery. If he had been told only of his father he might not have taken the big step, crossed that line. Within a few months of his mother telling him of his grandmother's life and death, Viktor had walked the trawler's gangplank in Murmansk. It was fitting he should now be posted to Kaliningrad.
His grandmother was Helga Schmidt, the daughter of Wilhelm and Anneliese, who had had a prosperous prewar grain-export business in the east Prussian city of Konigsberg. Wilhelm died in the air raids of August 1944 when the old town and his warehouses were bombed with incendiaries.
Helga and Anneliese had not believed until it was too late that the Reich could disintegrate. Then, daughter and mother had fled in a final crocodile of refugees from Konigsberg the day before the Red Army surrounded the city. They had reached Pillau, walked there, but the last ships had gone. The army garrison at Pillau had fought on for two weeks after the final surrender of Konigsberg by General Otto Lasch.
Pillau had fallen when no ammunition remained to defend it, and the women had stood behind white flags and faced the Red Army.
Anneliese had been bayoneted. She had not survived long enough to see what happened to her daughter — which was God's small mercy.
The victorious troops were from Central Asia, but their officers were ethnic Russians. The officers chose the prettiest, and Helga was among them. Helga Schmidt was raped by a battalion's officer, then by the NCOs, then by those of the troops still able to achieve erections — it was what happened in dark days at the end of a war of brutality. When they were all flaccid, spent, satiated, she was left.
The girl, impregnated, was shipped back to the city, now called Kaliningrad, and existed there as a gypsy waif. She kept herself alive through her love for an unborn child. Starved, half frozen, living in the bomb ruins, Helga survived her pregnancy, but was too weak to feed her boy baby, born on 25 January 1946.
Helga Schmidt wrote down what had happened to her, wrapped her son in the thickest rags she could find, with the paper that told her history, and left him on a snow-covered step at a side door to the city orphanage. The same day she had given up her baby, she hanged herself from a beam in the cathedral's ruins, having used the torn strips of her skirt as a noose.
The baby, adopted by a Russian family, was named Pyotr. The family, farmers from the east and resettled on formerly German property in Kaliningrad, had the name of Archenko.
Pyotr Archenko was only twenty years old when he married his childhood sweetheart, Irina, whose stomach bulged at the ceremony. Their only son was given the name of Viktor. On her deathbed, Irina's mother-in-law had shown her the faded, creased sheet of paper on which Helga Schmidt had written her testament. In turn, on her own deathbed, Irina had allowed Viktor to read it, then had taken it back from him and had held it over a candle until it had burned and her fingers had blistered.
The story, and that of the death of his father, had bred betrayal.
Viktor had done what his handlers had told him to, and he ran back along the beach. The gloom of the dawn had gone and the sun now edged over the tips of the pine trees. On the return leg he ran more loosely. He never looked at the dunes to see whether the men watched him. That he lived was because of his grandmother's strength and that was a small but solid comfort to him. Would they hear his cry, and would they answer it? He did not know.
In the night the battery on the alarm clock had failed. The bleeper hadn't sounded.
Locke woke, glanced at the clock's digital face, was turning over to go back to sleep when he saw the first glimmer of daylight through the thin curtains. He looked at his watch and surged out of his cold bed.
For a week now the bed had harboured an icy chill in Danuta's absence. He shaved in the shower and dressed while he was still wet. A best shirt and a best tie, his best suit and his best shoes were snatched from the wardrobe and from the drawers and he dripped pools of water on to the carpet. As he closed his front door for the charge down the stairwell, the lights were still blazing behind him, but he didn't have time to go back and switch them off.
He ran for his car. He had not filled the tank since yesterday's drive to and from Braniewo and the needle flickered in the red segment of the dial. He prayed he had enough petrol to get him to Okecie. If he was caught in the city's early rush-hour gridlocks he would miss the flight. He had the protection of diplomatic plates but that would not stop a policeman waving him down with a luminous baton, for amusement. He was still on the wide Al Jerozolimskie, had not yet reached the Zawisky roundabout, when he made his first clear-cut decision of the day. He would drive straight past any policeman who tried to stop him — and bugger the consequences.
An hour after sending the signal, and a quarter of an hour after he had come back to the apartment after sitting with a coffee for twenty minutes at the Sklep z Kawq Pozegnanie z Afrykq — she hadn't been there. His mobile had rung. Libby Weedon. He was summoned to London, first flight in the morning with LOT, the national carrier. 'Don't miss it, you're in with the big girls,' and she'd hung up. Libby Weedon, clever lady, had distanced herself from Ferret, and left him, the young man on his first Service posting abroad, to do the driving and the collection from the dead drops. What could he bloody well tell the 'big girls'? No detail was more telling than the three words of his signaclass="underline" ferret: no show.
He broke most of Poland's traffic laws on the way to Okecie, and beat the early traffic. He was close to the airport when he remembered that he was due to meet a speech writer of the KPN party for lunch. He fumbled with his mobile and left a message on Libby Weedon's voicemail asking for the duty secretary to ring with apologies. The needle banged on the dial's 'empty' segment, but the tank held out and he made it to the airport. He was the last one onto the flight.
Gabriel Locke's upbringing had been on the southern tip of west Wales. His parents still ran a 150-acre dairy farm on fields that were edged by cliffs that fell to violent seas. It was a harsh place and made for a hard and uncertain existence. Their lives were dominated by the extremes of weather, the coldness of the impersonal banks, the milk quotas, the per-litre price, the ever-increasing callout fee charged by veterinary surgeons, and most recently by the scourge of foot-and mouth disease. They survived on the edge of poverty, reduced to hoarding pounds, squirrelling away the silver coins, putting the pence in jars before collecting enough to dump them on the counter of the village shop and the post office. He had wanted none of it. He was one of the few from his comprehensive-school class who had bettered himself and broken free. He had thought he would never suffer as he believed they did. He rarely phoned home, only sent anodyne messages on occasional postcards. He wanted structure and certainty to his life and it was ridiculous to him that — in this new millennium — a storm, or a Whitehall bureaucrat's decision, or a virus could tip the difference between minimal financial survival and bankruptcy. Yet for the first time in his adult life, going down the pier and seeing the force of the wind scudding across the tarmac, he felt unsure as to what the future held.