Blackstone and the Endgame (15 page)

‘And what was distracting you?'

‘I was thinking that, for the general good, it is sometimes necessary to destroy the things we love – and that there are even occasions when one of those things we must destroy is ourselves.'

‘It's a little late at night for riddles,' Blackstone said.

But he could tell that Vladimir was not really listening.

‘I have no desire to destroy myself unnecessarily, Sam,' the Russian continued, ‘and that is why I have been considering just how
finely
I could split a hair.'

I
t seemed to Patterson as if all the clocks in London were conspiring to remind him of how little time he had to accomplish his almost impossible task.

‘Bong!' said the clock in his local church tower, as he left home that morning.
Only six days and twenty-two hours left.

‘Bong!' said Big Ben, as he passed the Palace of Westminster.
Another hour gone, and you're still no closer to finding Max.

And now this caretaker – this insignificant little runt in charge of the small government warehouse in Wapping – was wasting even more of his precious time by refusing to let him go inside.

‘They're only dusty old records,' he told the man. ‘Nobody gives a tuppenny damn about them.'

‘If nobody gives a tuppenny damn then why are
you
interested in them?' the caretaker countered.

It was a fair point, Patterson agreed silently, but he couldn't help wishing that the cantankerous bugger hadn't been bright enough to make it.

If only he had his warrant card, he thought. A warrant card was the magic key that opened most doors.

But he didn't have his warrant card. It had been taken from him when he was arrested – and since no one at the Yard believed that there was even the remotest possibility it would ever be given back to him, it had probably already been destroyed.

‘We wouldn't be more than a half an hour, would we?' Patterson said, looking for support from Ellie Carr, who had insisted on accompanying him.

‘You've got to have an official pink form,' the caretaker said stubbornly. ‘You can't get in the warehouse without an official pink form. And don't you try offering me any money,' he added, seeing Patterson's hand reaching in the general direction of his wallet, ‘because that won't work.'

‘For Gawd's sake, mister, give us a break!' said Ellie Carr, lapsing into the cockney that she had once spoken naturally, but now only resurrected for her own amusement.

‘Give you a break?' the caretaker repeated.

‘We 'aven't been entirely honest wiv you, mister,' Ellie said. ‘Me an' my friend here …' She looked up at Patterson. ‘What did you say your name was, dearie?'

‘Archie,' Patterson said.

‘Me and my friend Archie just want a bit of time alone together,' Ellie continued. ‘And since he don't have the money for a hotel, we're just looking for somewhere what's nice and dry.'

‘I didn't realize that you were on the game,' the caretaker said, surprised. ‘I'd never have guessed.'

‘Yeah, well, I try not to look too obvious,' Ellie told him. ‘But you do see my problem, don't ya?'

‘You could always go to the park,' the caretaker suggested. ‘It's not that far from here.'

‘Go to the park!' Ellie repeated. ‘In this weather! It's cold enough to freeze the tits off me – and the balls off him.' She paused for a moment. ‘Look, a girl's got to make a livin', ain't she? And if you was to let us go inside, I might be willing to provide the same service for you as I'm about to provide for Arnold here.'

‘Archie,' Patterson said.

‘Archie,' Ellie corrected herself. ‘Same service – only, in your case, it'll be for free.'

The caretaker licked his lips, which were cracked and covered with a white slime.

‘How long would you need?' he asked.

‘Well, now you're asking somefink,' Ellie said. ‘Some of my gentlemen friends are in and out again in no time at all – you'd fink they was competing in a speed championship – but there's others what need a lot of encouragement before they can perform, and I ravver fink –' she lowered her voice – ‘that Albert here might be one of the second kind.'

‘Archie,' Patterson said.

‘Anyway, what do you care how long it takes, as long as you get your share in the end?' Ellie wondered.

The caretaker licked his lips again. ‘If I let you in, you will be careful not to mess the place up, won't you?' he asked.

‘We'll treat it like it was our own home,' Ellie promised.

‘There are times when you make me so angry that I almost hate you,'
Tanya had said to Vladimir, and that had sent him into a mood from which he had still not recovered the following morning.

In fact, he barely spoke at the breakfast table, and it was only as he was about to leave the apartment that he said, ‘By the way, you should not make any plans for tomorrow, because Tanya wants you to go with her to one of the mills on the other side of the river.'

‘She
wants
me to go with her?' Blackstone said questioningly.

‘Or, if you prefer it, I have instructed her to take you with her as a bodyguard,' Vladimir amended.

‘Why would she need a bodyguard?'

‘She will need one because, tomorrow, she will not be Tanya the government agent. Instead, she will be Natasha the revolutionary.'

‘I don't understand,' Blackstone admitted.

‘This is a country that is largely indifferent to the loss of human life on a grand scale,' Vladimir said, ‘which makes it all the stranger that it should be so unreasonably tolerant of its revolutionaries.'

‘You're still not making sense,' Blackstone said.

Vladimir sighed. ‘No, I don't suppose I am,' he admitted. ‘Listen and learn. From Russia's viewpoint, the most dangerous revolutionary alive today is a man called Lenin. He is beyond our reach at the moment because he is living in Switzerland, but once – in 1895 – the authorities did get their hands on him. And what did they do with him? Did they lock him up and throw away the key? No! Instead, they sent him into exile in Siberia – for
three years
.'

‘I have to admit that doesn't seem like a particularly harsh penalty,' Blackstone replied.

‘It was softer than you could ever imagine,' Vladimir said. ‘When you think of men being exiled to Siberia, do you picture them being taken there in chains and under guard?'

‘Well, yes, I suppose I do.'

‘If you are a peasant, sentenced to
katorga
– which means hard labour – then that
is
what happens to you. But if you are middle class – and Lenin's father was an inspector of schools – you are meted out much gentler treatment. Lenin was not taken to Siberia – he was told to make his own way there. And from what I've heard, he had a pleasant time during his exile – he even went duck shooting a few times.'

‘And what has this got to do with Tanya?' Blackstone asked.

‘The point is that in this country we do not
eliminate
the revolutionary groups – we
watch
them. And, more importantly, we
infiltrate
them. But, of course, if our agents are to gather important information on the revolutionaries, they must give them information on us in return.'

‘Is the information that your agents give to the revolutionary groups genuine information?'

‘Yes – for the agents to be credible in the eyes of the revolutionaries, the information they supply
must
be genuine.'

‘That's insane,' Blackstone said.

Vladimir laughed bitterly. ‘You have no idea quite how insane it is,' he said. ‘We once had an agent named Evno Azef, who rose to a high level in the Social Revolutionary Party. Based on the information he gave us, we were able to arrest the head of the Combat Organization, which was the military wing of the SRP, responsible for bank robberies and general acts of terrorism.'

‘So that operation was a great success,' Blackstone said.

‘Indeed, it was,' Vladimir agreed. ‘But, of course, it left a vacancy at the top of the Combat Organization, and Azef – our agent – was appointed to the post.'

‘And, as head of the Combat Organization, he had to pretend to be involved in terrorist activities?' Blackstone guessed.

‘You have still not got the idea, have you?' Vladimir asked. ‘He couldn't
pretend
to be involved in terrorist activities – he actually had to
be
involved in them. We know now – though we did not know it then – that he not only helped to plan the assassination of Grand Duke Sergei, the Governor-General of Moscow, but that he was behind the murder of Plehve, the Minister of the Interior, who was – strictly speaking – his boss. Naturally, the revolutionaries thought he was wonderful and trusted him completely, so the information he was able to feed us on them was absolutely first-class.'

‘So, ultimately, you gained more from having him as your agent than you lost?'

Vladimir shrugged. ‘I would say so, but I have no doubt that Grand Duke Sergei and Minister Plehve would disagree with me.' He paused. ‘At any rate, you now understand what Tanya is doing when she becomes Natasha, and why she needs a bodyguard.'

Ever since Vladimir had decided, back in London, that he could find a use for Blackstone – and thus offered him passage to Russia – Blackstone had been waiting to find out what that use would be. But this wasn't it, he decided. Being Tanya's bodyguard just wasn't a big enough job – an important enough job – to justify all Vladimir's efforts.

‘Why couldn't one of your men be Tanya's bodyguard?' he asked suspiciously.

‘There is a chance that one of my men will be recognized by the revolutionaries,' Vladimir replied. ‘You, on the other hand, are new to Petersburg. Tanya will tell everybody that you are a comrade from England – perhaps a member of a radical group which once tried to assassinate the prime minister – and they will believe it, because you look as if you could be such a man.'

Blackstone shook his head in disbelief.

‘You're just filling in my time until you need me for the big job, aren't you?' he asked.

A wisp of a smile crossed Vladimir's lips.

‘Perhaps,' he said.

Ellie Carr looked around the warehouse, which was rectangular and about the size of a small chapel. The place was positively crammed with shelving, and on each shelf sat a stack of documents covered with two years' accumulated dust.

‘Well, now I've used all my feminine wiles to get us inside, would you mind telling me why we're here?' she said to Patterson.

‘When the government declared war on Germany, one of the first things it did was round up all the Germans living in Britain,' Patterson replied, walking over to the nearest shelf and picking up a file. ‘There were thousands of Germans in London alone. There were shopkeepers, printers and lawyers, maids and mechanics – think of any job or trade, and the chances are you'd find a few Germans who were involved in it.'

‘I can believe that,' Ellie said, recalling the number of Germans she'd come across over the years.

Patterson put down the file and moved to another shelf.

‘Some of the Germans – especially the older ones – were deported straight away,' he continued, ‘but the government didn't want the younger men going back to the fatherland, because the chances were that they'd join the army as soon as they got home. So what they did was they locked them in prison camps on the Isle of Wight or the Isle of Man. If the men who'd been arrested had young families, those families were allowed to stay – if they wanted to, and if they could afford to – but, otherwise, it was a clean sweep.'

‘I know you enjoy spinning a yarn, but I wish you'd get to the point,' Ellie Carr said.

‘So last night, when Mr Hartington was talking about paper trails, I started wondering what had happened to all the records that those Germans had left behind them.'

‘Records? What kind of records?'

‘All kinds of records. The Germans are buggers for keeping them. As far as they're concerned, if it's not written down, it hasn't happened – so there had to be mountains of the bloody things. Anyway, I got on the phone to a few blokes I know, to see if I could find out what had happened to them.'

Ellie smiled. One of the things that Sam Blackstone most valued in his sergeant was that he knew ‘a few blokes'. In fact, Archie seemed to know
hundreds
of blokes, from newspaper editors to street sweepers, from jockeys and prize fighters to the butlers at some of the grandest houses in the country.

‘And I take it that one of these blokes was some help,' she said.

‘He was a lot of help,' Archie confirmed. ‘He told me that the government had no idea what to do with all that paperwork, which all looked harmless enough, and they were about to burn it when some bright spark in the Ministry of War pointed out that the Germans were a tricky lot, and some of the documents might contain secret codes hidden in them, which could help the war effort. That was complete and utter rubbish, of course, but war fever had reached such a pitch that people were kicking dachshunds in the street – just because they happened to be German – so there was no limit to the idiocy.'

‘I saw a man kick a dachshund once,' Ellie Carr said. ‘He was a big man, and it was such a little dog.'

‘And what did you do?'

‘I thought of trying to discuss the matter with him in a logical way, but I could see that would never work, so I showed my disapproval through a more physical manifestation.'

‘You hit a
big
man?' Patterson asked, surprised – although he told himself he should never be surprised at anything Ellie did.