The Oktober Projekt (30 page)

If only everything about Lubov and his treasure was so simple
and neat, thought Nick as Parfrey slumped back, her energy exhausted. He stared
blankly through French doors to a strip of lawn running at a curious angle;
next to it a greenhouse still thawing from the night’s frost, a compost heap
rising wildly by its side. Dumped beside it a cast iron roller eaten with rust;
across its splintered handles someone had strung a ‘My Other Car’s A Roller’
sign for a bit of a laugh. Turning his attention back into the room, Nick
noticed prints of bible classes hung in sad groups forever waiting to be
converted, all their eyes fixed accusingly on him from the facing wall. And by
the door on a rosewood table, an engraved panorama of Hong Kong taken at night
had slipped and gouged into the veneer.

‘That’s why I didn’t fully brief you,’ she said drawing on an
inner reserve, her expression animated, her eyes alight with a strange passion.
‘Lubov had to be prevented from passing on his sample of gold.’

‘And so you just gave all this to your handler?’ Nick proposed.
In an adjoining garden a fire clouded the air with spirals of damp wood smoke.

‘Poor Lubov. He must have been scared out of his wits when his
GRU superiors launched a track and terminate operation inside the Defence
Ministry,’ she said, rhythmical rocking in her chair.

And some more, thought Nick. ‘So you had no concern that Foula
and me were walking into a trap?’ Nick wanted to know. ‘Jo Lister’s murder
meant nothing to you either?’ Nick pushed her as close to the facts that he
dared to go; not prepared to reveal how much he knew about Lubov’s concerns.

‘There were always going to be casualties.’

A sense of urgency had become apparent in both of them. It
brought Nick to the edge of his chair, and as a paradox drove Parfrey deeper
into hers; as if the weight of questions had become physically too much for
her.

‘Jo, your wife, Alistair, the others, I never wanted any of
that.’

‘But none of them deserved to die, did they?’ Nick curtly
reminded her.

‘No,’ Parfrey agreed, ‘Jo probably suspected that I’d sabotaged
the collection, she was killed because she would eventually link me to blowing
Operation Salvage.’

‘Did you get a bonus?’

Nick’s accusation had awoken something deep in her and she
stared at Nick with a real hatred. ‘I just did what I believed was necessary to
protect myself. I never thought they’d come after your wife.’

‘But they did,’ Nick said, calling for Lumb.

In the hall Nick leant wearily against an anaglypta papered
wall, massaging his neck as Rossan strode along to join him.

‘Do you believe her?’

‘It’s all bollocks,’ said Nick.

‘So why is she doing it?’ Rossan asked.

‘To protect someone she cares for, someone she suspects is
Moscow’s source, someone she told about Lubov and his Oktober gold. Though I
don’t think she knew then they were working for Moscow.’

‘And we do what?’

‘Move her to a safe house, get her some medical attention,
sweat her until she changes her story.’

‘I’ll call ahead,’ Rossan promised. ‘Better let her parents
know that’s she’s coming with us.’

Finally after a long hour of inertia they were ready to leave,
Nick nodding Parfrey out with Lumb and Montford on either arm. Nick even walked
them down the hall, escorting them through the door to the end of the path
where Danny would cross them to the car. Nick had barely closed the door when
he heard the scream and knew it came from Lumb. He ran followed by Rossan, but
they were already too late.

Afterwards he replayed the scene numerous times in his mind,
picturing how he found Lumb tucked into a privet hedge, her hands clamped firmly
over her eyes, screaming. In the road, Parfrey under the front wheels of a milk
tanker as Danny knelt by her. Montford sitting crumpled on the pavement,
repeated how hand in hand they had started to cross when he believed Parfrey
had stumbled. Except she’d broken free, deliberately running into the path of
the tanker. Nick had to slap Lumb three times to stem the screams. Leading her
roughly back by the hand, he forced her smartly into the bungalow and by the
time he had calmed her, the sirens no longer came from the television, but were
very close and very real. Rossan organising and commanding had control of the
scene, a role he took extremely seriously as he rehearsed his words before
going into see Parfrey’s parents.

As the front room door opened behind Nick, a gale of hysterical
laughter rushed out from the television, followed by studio cheers and a ripple
of glitzy music. A retired afternoon on the coast he thought; time to unwind,
forget the week gone and
the one to come;
forget who we are and how many lives we’ve
ruined.

Fourteen

Antiques and Dirty Work

Hamburg, December

Nick
flew out of Heathrow using a passport in the workname of Ingol on a
late afternoon flight. Before checking in he dawdled with the well-timed
patience of a seasoned fieldman, lingering in concourse shops with no intention
of buying a thing, paying more attention to his back than making a purchase.
From Stockholm he flew to Germany using a different name, aware how far the
stakes had been raised.

At Kiel-Holtenau airport he entered a Germany of a different
age; a former military base, a home to flying schools, clubs and small planes,
it was still adapting to the novelty of commercial flights. Nick headed into
its Balkan restaurant the furniture laden with wax and middle-aged waitresses
buttoned up in black. He sat at a table overlooking the runway ordering beer
and schnapps, settling back, unhurried, as though awaiting a friend. He had a
perfect view of the door but let his attention drift to a panoramic window. Out
on the runways planes taxied along tarmac belts ringed by conifers,
disappearing in a dull roar into the charcoal sky. In defiant bits the last of
the day fled through the trees without a fight, the runway lights glittering
like gold bars. He remained for another thirty minutes, his gaze not far from
the door. I’m getting soft Nick told himself, you’ve proved you’re unmarked so
move.

Which he did.

Onto a train to Hamburg and into a taxi smelling of stale
leather that let him down on ABC-Straße the temperature low, the freezing air
leaving a salty smear on his skin. He traversed through a late crowd of
drinkers their breaths billowing behind them in white trails, the cold gripping
his bones cutting right through the glow of the schnapps, and he shook at its
bite. Soon it would snow he decided.

Petra’s antiques shop was on Speckstraße and charged New York
prices for common junk. Its window display held liberated tat like lacquered
tables and poor canvases covered by heavy second coats of oil, alongside ships
in dusty bottles, pitchers and basins pilfered from Baltic wrecks. The door had
a night bell set on the lintel and it brought Petra Speyer to answer its call,
taking him in like an orphan, making a fuss of him, determined to appear
elated.

‘Nick this is good, but my God, look at you. When was the last
time you slept? I got your message, and of course, I haven’t mentioned your
arrival to anyone. Fantastic.’

She kissed him; left cheek, right cheek. ‘Hello Petra.’

‘Come through, come on, let’s get you warm,’ she said, taking
him by the hand into a corner of the shop. ‘Sit, sit, tell me all the news.
Coffee? Of course you must drink.’ When she smiled her whole face burned with
the effort, and her auburn hair layered short and cut in from underneath gave
Petra a youthful charm.

 
She made coffee
adding whisky to it and when the coffee ran out, they set about drinking the
whisky neat under the coral globe of a desk lamp giving them both a rosy glow.
In her youth Speyer had tried her hand at modelling, once quite seriously tempted
towards following it as a career. Carrying her beauty into middle age it had
become something of a talisman against the onslaught of age, and only recently
had it begun showing the fragile signs of wear. Now Nick could see the scars
from laughter run into her gentle face, the deeper creases in the corner of
each eye, a chilling blue that endlessly quizzed him.

‘Jack did ask me to let him know if you turned up,’ she
announced after they had exhausted the small talk.

‘Did he?’

‘Jack’s fishing, up to no good,’ she decided. Petra, a Service
resident for a good few years, used the Hamburg shop as cover for a ragtag
network in the port that mostly brought in useless gossip that occasionally led
to a valuable truth. When she inherited Jack Balgrey as her official arm, Petra
somehow lost her enthusiasm. Jack, her support, working out of the office of
Venlag & Co. GmbH, a one-man company wholly owned by the Service as its
Hamburg base, purportedly dealing with imports and exports as well as property
management, though its core business was spying.

‘It’s better Jack doesn’t know I’m in Hamburg,’ said Nick,
pouring them both another generous glass.

‘What do I need to know?’

So Nick laid out a story, Speyer dipped forward her elbows on
her knees barely moving, dissolving everything with long blinks and brief nods.
Afterwards she sat back lighting a cigarette, expelling the smoke in a sharp
plume up at the ceiling where it fanned slowly out winding through cheap parrot
cages and ships’ lamps held aloft by wire. A clock rounded the hour, its
delicate strokes of brass cymbals floating into the dusty vaporous light. ‘You
need to be kept in the clear, Harry Bransk will do all the legwork,’ he
concluded.

She considered him through the smoke; a lengthy sideways
glance, shrewd and uneven. ‘Bransk is trouble, he’s not somebody that I would
trust,’ she said, not even able to look at Nick.

‘I need him,’ he said, his hands clamped tight round his glass.

Her two-piece business suit showed off her legs and she
consciously smoothed down the hem over dark blue tights. She stubbed out the
cigarette in an ashtray belonging to a shipping line, its colours hauled round
the edge in limp pennants.
 

‘You better watch your back.’

‘He’s made all the connections once before.’

‘He’s slime.’ She spread out her pretty hands, their smooth
palms to Nick in an appeal.
 

‘I need somewhere to stay,’ he said, wandering through
overpriced vases and brass plant holders that would always stain green. ‘Until
I find a local base.’

‘Why not a month, a year, forever? Then you help me sell all
this trash?’ she laughed, straining at the effort.
 

Resigned, persuaded, numbed by his silent eyes, Petra led him
through to the back of the shop, to a stockroom piled high with tea chests full
of Dresden porcelain packed in bubble wrap for shipment, and a fake Baroque
writing table with cabriole legs already sold to a Japanese dealer. The last
clear space taken by a folding bed with a sleeping bag, pillow and blanket
arranged neatly. Ready, she told him, for the nights she didn’t go home because
there was a story to be bought, or if someone needed shelter, or for the nights
she quarrelled with Hans, her sometimes husband. She showed him the toilet, the
knack of flushing it on the third go, also the temperamental kettle, store of
coffee, tea and dried milk on a stockroom shelf. Then she handed him the keys
and set off for a meeting with another bored agent, an elderly captain from
Rostock, who never had anything to offer but a promise of marriage that Petra
always politely declined.

• • •

Harry Bransk impatiently silenced the
car radio, his progress along Altsädter Straße on this bitter December night
frustrated by a lane light dangling off a wire like a Christmas lantern. He
mouthed a long silent curse at the chaos around him, at the salt air carrying
the fresh scent of approaching snow, at being rudely summoned by Nick Torr. The
green light gave the all clear across Mohlenhofstraße and leaving his disgust
in the rising clouds of fumes, he eased back the clutch sending the Audi
forward. He had memories of countless drives such as this, dying a hundred
times during them, waiting for the move that would never be your own, the one
mistake that you could never predict. Now once again he became lost in his old
habits, routines that made sleep a sanctuary.

He took in the city from the window, his heavy rutted Slavic
face worn down by disappointment counted off the turnings. For Harry Bransk’s
life consisted of several wrong turnings, all of them singularly painful and in
one form or another removing him further from the crumbling shell of a Yugoslav
village outside Maribor, where all those lives ago he had begun his
apprenticeship to the secret world. An inauspicious start as it was, running
messages across the Austrian border, it nevertheless prepared him for a life of
deceit and treachery, of not having a shadow to call your own.
 

Through his mirror he watched for any signs of being followed,
but so many thoughts clouded his mind that he had trouble concentrating. A car
broken down in front had brought the traffic to a slow line creeping by the old
Elbe tunnel, the urgency made him burn. His hands slipped on the steering
wheel, he wanted to break from the queue to make up lost time, but he did
nothing to attract attention. On the move again and the St. Pauli landing
stages slipped past, bold against the river, stark like scaffolds, then the
orange flashes of the breakdown truck were behind him.

Slowly it began to snow, as if the weather like his concern had
made the same tortuous journey from Helsinki that served as a second home to
Harry. He drove on, slowing down for the side roads, into a night drained of
colour, washed down the gutters along with the swimming headlights. He swung
into a street shuttered and deserted, kept going until he was under the tanks
of a petrol dock blotting out the sky. And beside the swollen quays, just as he
knew he’d find it, a marine bunkering yard stained with the rotten fingers of
decline. He steered close to bitumen pipes running the length of a concrete
pier. At its end a line of sheds, their timber walls buckled and cracked,
window frames lying over squares of shattered glass. Turning off the engine he
let down the window.
 

He heard the whine of generators and pumps feeding a ship down
river, he heard the rapid tattoo of dripping snow on oil drums as it swept off
the corrugated roofs and burst gutters. He heard the voice that trampled across
the years, following him as it always did from a café down an uneven cobbled
court in Vienna, sometime home to curious travellers, artists, pimps and
whores. Where one fine summer evening Harry Bransk had first met Nick Torr.

‘You’re late, Harry,’ observed Nick from the darkness of a
doorway.

With the car at his back Bransk moved cautiously forward, the
old world his again and with it came the unknown; the promises made to be
broken, the lies to keep you alive.

‘Hey, Nick, just like old times, huh,’ said Bransk, watching
Nick step into the fuzzy light hanging in place of a door.

‘Is it?’ Nick answered, his voice sharp. Harry Bransk a fixer,
a dealer, the purveyor of dreams, and as some claimed, an associate of the
Devil himself. Bransk had a sturdy body, its muscles toned by a rigid fitness
regime, and it was topped by a street fighter’s face marred in many skirmishes,
while his eyes having grown too wise told of many victories. A face that served
as a commodity for whoever paid the highest dollar it said, and Nick knew that
Bransk always came with an unseen price. Harry also had an elegance about him
that manifested itself in his taste for expensive clothes, but he wore them
like rags.

‘So what brings you to my neck of the woods?’ Harry asked.

Nick held up his hand, his palm flat to Bransk in a warning to
step no closer, keeping Harry out in the open.

‘I’ve heard it told from a mutual friend that you’ve been
fixing things for an acquaintance in London.’

‘I’ve let this person down in some way? The service I provided
is not what they wanted? Tell me Nick? We have no secrets you and me. Or you
finally come to pay what I’m owed, that it? Come to tell me the good days are
over?’ Harry’s smile was a thin sharp slit worn carefully, an experienced
street merchant who rarely squandered anything.

‘A mutual friend came to see you Harry,’ said Nick as Bransk
listened patiently. ‘Wanted to buy an introduction for one of my officers,
though unfortunately this officer met with an accident and could not continue.’

‘That’s a pity,’ Harry replied. ‘Not many people recover from
having their face blown off, huh. Real mess so I heard,’ Harry added with a
measure of caution, aware that old friends have a habit of becoming
deadly.
 

‘Thing is, Harry, I think that someone sold my officer out,
struck a different deal. I’m not saying it was you, but you’re sort of
connected to it all, Harry. This makes me nervous, gets me thinking maybe
Harry’s made one deal he shouldn’t?’

‘It’s regrettable, Nick, too bad huh, if that’s your opinion,’
said Harry, a man used to dealing with disappointment. ‘You here to pull the
trigger, Nick? Because I have to tell you, okay, you got this all wrong.’

‘How wrong Harry?’
 

‘Some people do not have our understanding, okay. Making
arrangements, okay, let’s start there. The people I deal with, they’re not
always pleasant okay, they behave erratically. They make demands but never see
the cost. I am in business, okay, I have to think of costs all the time. This
is going to affect me badly, Nick.’ He tried a smile but it perished on his
lips. ‘I’m taking a rough ride on all sides, Nick. Now this. It doesn’t make me
happy that you’re expecting me to take all the blame.’

‘It’s a bad world, Harry and we’ve all got to take care.’

‘True, very true,’ he said, deeply pained, ‘Our mutual friend
from London, not your officer, okay, the one who came to see me first, I can
just about remember his request.’

 
‘I like you more
when you cooperate, Harry.’

‘So we got the makings of an agreement,’ proposed Harry. ‘Okay,
so now we need an arrangement, Nick, you know how these things work.’

‘I want what you provided previously, Harry, in good faith
before I put any money on the drum.’

‘Come on Nick, I am caught in the middle, here. Why let
misunderstandings divide warriors like us when the enemy never could? Tell me,
Nick, why are you still involved with all this craziness?’