Vagabond (40 page)

A good measure of gin, and it would be only for him because Russians did not drink gin. A refresher of whisky for his host.

A wide smile. ‘So, Ralph, how is your “royal” village?’

‘Never better.’

‘You see her often, your neighbour who is the future tsarina?’

‘I see the duchess often enough.’

‘As I remember you telling me.’

They egged each other on.

‘What is the price, Ralph, of “royal bullshit” this summer?’

‘Interesting that you should ask, Timofey. I can do you a nice load of it, royal to the core and straight out the back end of the palace horses.’

They toasted each other. Then, as if a courtesy had been forgotten, they shook hands. Funny – the room was overheated and already Ralph Exton was sweating, but his friend’s hand was cold. A calculation: Timofey Simonov had no warmth left in him, all squeezed out.

‘You look well, Ralph.’

‘Thank you. So do you.’

A pause. Silence between them. The room was quiet enough for him to hear a trapped fly. He thought of a man sitting in hardening cement, and another man waiting for the rain to stop so that he could walk into the middle of a garden, and of yet another man going into a DIY store and asking for a mastic sealant gun.

‘Why did you come to me, friend, to ask my help?’

He lied: ‘Just thought, Timofey, it was a nice little deal, something that might be fun for both of us.’

He had to look straight into the eyes when he lied and not flinch – the brigadier was by the door. Ralph was good at looking into the eyes of any man he lied to. And the business of ‘escape’, would keep until later when the serious drinking was over. He was waved to a seat.

They were at the back of the house on a bank beyond the track where they had sufficient height to see over the wooden fencing into the yard area, then down to the kitchen and the dining area. Karol Pilar’s camera had a high-enough quality lens – better than FRU had been issued with at Gough two decades earlier – with a high-definition capability. The view was of Timofey Simonov at the side of the table and the back of Ralph Exton’s head. Matthew Bentinick’s instruction had been that evidence should be gathered. They had to get an image of Exton, full face or profile, and Timofey Simonov with him. That was a basic requirement, proof of conspiracy: the more important objective, not this time but soon, would be the personalities and the weapons, same camera frame. This was the start, and would whet jurors’ and jurists’ interest. They waited, shivering, and couldn’t smoke. They had pictures of Simonov in profile and the back of Exton’s scalp, but nothing that would be admissible in court.

‘Does it matter?’

‘I’m told it does,’ Danny whispered back.

The dogs didn’t bark.

The brigadier served dinner to his employer and his employer’s friend.

They growled, but almost in silence.

Would he be wanted again? He would not. They had fruit and cheese on a sideboard, brandy and port. He ducked his head in respect to Timofey Simonov and ignored Ralph Exton, then took the plates and dishes on a trolley to the service lift outside the dining area, closing the door behind him.

The dogs padded downstairs, to the kitchen door. He let them through, and they scurried to the outside door. He crossed the utility area. They were fine dogs – some European police forces used them for their intelligence and their noses. It would not have been a fox that had disturbed them: the hackles were raised at the base of their necks – they would have yelped in excitement for a fox. He could barely hear the growl, but the curled lips and bared teeth showed him the dogs’ suspicion.

He went to the cupboard on the landing, near to the front door, where he stowed his pistol – he had put it back when he had returned from Prague. He had driven many kilometres that day. The long journey, with the detour across two borders, to
Č
eský Krumlov, and the return to Karlovy Vary, then to Prague and back. His eyes ached. Tiredness caught him – as did his loathing of the man who claimed his employer’s friendship – and the dogs warned him.

He shut the dogs into the kitchen, went out through the front door and down the steps. The pistol was in the pocket of his windcheater, and a power torch was in his hand – it was long enough to double as a club. He went up the street, then disappeared into the darkness of the alleyway, which led to a footpath behind the house. He moved warily, with care.

He was back and the Czech was forward. It had never had been Danny Curnow’s way to allow another man to be on the ground, alone, doing work in his name. He was exhausted but he was there and would stay. Danny was among trees high on the bank and the path was below them. Karol Pilar had the camera. They needed a single image: two recognisable faces in the same frame. There would be a moment when the Russian and the agent stood up. Then the shutter would clatter and they could get the hell out.

It was cold and there was an owl about. Karol Pilar had a frog in his throat, the dreaded tickle of close surveillance. Little suppressed coughs.

Wood, a dry twig, snapped.

For half of his adult life, Danny had been away from surveillance and being alerted by snapped twigs. He was very still. There was no moon, and the lights from the house and those at either side did not reach beyond the fences. The path and the bank were dark. He strained to hear and see. He thought he knew where Karol Pilar was and the camera would be up to his face, lens focused, ready for the moment: two faces, same frame.

A softer, less intelligible sound.

Old habits and skills slipped back. The softer sound would be the pushing aside of a crisp leaf. He remembered the cat that had spent time with the old marine: the man and the boy used to watch it hunt in the undergrowth, once the bungalow’s garden, moving with such stealth and weighing each move of a paw, understanding the significance of the noise made when a leaf moved or a twig cracked. Danny knew when a stranger came forward – unlikely in innocence – and probably brought danger. Karol Pilar’s attempt to smother his cough was a thunderclap in comparison with the stick and the leaf.

His eyes had found the light’s level and had made the compensation equations. It was a shadow, almost black on black. It had the frog in the throat to guide it. He could identify an object in a hand, and a shiny surface. He reckoned he heard the click of the camera. The shape passed in front of him and moved steadily towards the cough. Danny didn’t know when to break cover. It was hard to steady his breathing, and he had no weapon. He heard a sharp oath, nothing he understood – and chaos broke.

A shout – it might have been Russian, not Czech – and surprise was lost. Two men grappled, black movement against black background. He could barely see. Danny launched himself. The mind worked well. It was the moment when an operation subsided into failure or came through. Failure was unthinkable – always had been. He went forward towards the squirming mass ahead of him. The torch came on – it threw light but had been dropped. The target between the two men, visible at the rim of the light pool, was the pistol. Danny reached them. Decision time. Which of them to belt when he intervened? The pistol was held high, the barrel pointing up, towards the slope of the woods. One man tried to drag his arm down so that the weapon was levelled while the other sought to keep the thing high. He realised Karol Pilar was the smaller and hit the higher shoulder with a chopping blow. The sort of blow the instructors taught, and that recruits reckoned was a waste of energy. He used the heel of his hand and heard the yelp. The fingers must have opened and the pistol fell. It hit the ground and bounced once, then rested in the torch’s beam. Danny lashed at it, caught it on his toecap and it spun away.

Combat of a sort.

The torch showed a face he recognised. He kicked hard, punched, used his fingers and nails and, once, his teeth. Nothing more came back.

All done so quietly. No flashlights from the houses, no shouts, no dogs set free.

It was finished. The fight had gone out of him.

Danny eased himself up. The torchbeam showed a bloodied face. Karol Pilar knelt over the victim, stripped off a wristwatch and went through pockets until he found a wallet. He snapped it open, peeled out banknotes, and threw it down. He stayed on his hands and knees – his victim’s eyes were tight shut – to pick up minute fragments of glass.

They ran as if for their lives. They left the torch behind, the pistol and the man who moaned and was long past an age for street scraps. They were gasping when they reached the car. The camera’s lens was broken and the back screen was fractured. The light came on in the car. They were wrecked: faces bloodied, hands scraped, clothes torn.

‘Are you happy?’

‘I am if you have the picture, Karol.’

They heard nothing, saw nothing and knew nothing. Timofey Simonov kept the brandy coming, and Ralph Exton kept the level in his glass sliding down.

Voices slurred. Old anecdotes renewed: the story of the arrival at the airfield at Ostend was told twice, but the right moment to ask about slipping away and a changed identity was elusive. The night settled on them. The schedule was decided.

Ralph was content to slip into the booze haze and thought himself safe from the handlers who persecuted him. In the morning he would raise the matter of how to disappear.

Interesting, but half a dozen times, Timofey Simonov had left the table to gaze at the screen of a laptop. It was not locked onto the indices of the Far East markets, or the closing prices in New York, but to the meteorological assessments of the coming day’s weather conditions to the south-west of London. They showed a likely break in persistent rain, but not till the afternoon, and the forecast was the same each time he checked it. Interesting. He would have liked to trust Gaby Davies, but did not.

They drank, and for both it was a way to forget. The house was quiet.

In the car, Danny Curnow thought the Czech had been hurt worse than himself but Pilar drove.

The road was dark, empty.

There had been two pauses on the way to where the car was parked. The first was at a rubbish bin beside a pizza place. From a glimpse, Danny thought that the Rolex watch was worth three or four thousand sterling, far out of the price range of almost all of the tourists who came to the battlefields. It went into the bin and Pilar thrust his hand in after it and disturbed the contents so that it was not on the top. The second stop was at the big church facing onto the river and a charity box for the starving of East Africa. Close to four hundred euros went through the slot, all that had been taken from the wallet. Danny could have clapped. Good thinking to ‘steal’ a watch and empty a wallet because that was what a mugger did. It was not the behaviour of a trapped intelligence-gathering team.

They were well out of the town when they reached a fuel station. Pilar went first, a lightweight scarf covering most of his face. He didn’t use the pumps or go into the shop but used the toilets. When he came back his face was wet from washing. They were beyond the range of the cameras for long enough to allow Danny to follow him. He cleaned the dirt and blood off his face. It would be a long day when morning came. A hard day.

He could be thankful. There was a damaged camera on the floor between his feet, but most of the detritus was in his pocket. It would never take another picture. No problem. Mission successfully carried out: there was – he had been assured of it – a good image on the memory tab. They passed the sign for Lidice. He remembered the children fashioned in bronze, the open spaces where a village had been. It had been about taking responsibility, living with it, and about ensuring that an enemy could never feel safe – wherever they hid.

The lights of the airport were ahead. He would be a changed man before he was there and knew it. He couldn’t flee from it. He no longer felt either clever and competent or in control. He was on the treadmill, as he had been before. It spun under his feet and he was running so that he didn’t fall. The pace was increasing, and wouldn’t slow until the end.

Chapter 13

‘You had a fight with a door?’ she asked, and rolled her eyes.

He didn’t answer her.

Gaby Davies amplified it: ‘Did it have big fists and hob-nailed boots? Did it win?’

They had met outside her hotel, walked fast towards the south of the city and tracked along the river. She had come out onto the pavement a minute before the rendezvous time and he had been there. He would be, she reckoned, the sort of man who was never late, had never missed a train or an appointment.