A Spy's Life (49 page)

Teckman took over the narrative. ‘By that stage we had begun to sift through the information that Irina here had given us. We were comparing it with some of the things we’d seen in the transmissions. Suffice it to say there was an overlap. The information came from the same route. That was when Walter put all the pieces in place.’

‘At what stage exactly did you know that Tomas was our son?’

‘Some time in the middle of last week.’

‘By which time I’d left for Prague.’

‘Yes. We knew you would break the news to Irina and bring her back here.’

‘And you were following us?’

‘We have limited resources in the Czech Republic,’ said Teckman. ‘We caught up with you in Karlsbad and followed you to Dresden. Then we lost you. There was some confusion at the station. We were worried because our two men knew Kochalyin’s people were following you too.’

‘And here?’ asked Harland belligerently. ‘Here in Britain?’

‘We’ve had you covered the whole time,’ replied Teckman. ‘The fact that Cuth Avocet put you up in the old building greatly aided us.’

‘And the phones? Have you been tapping our calls?’

‘No,’ said Teckman. ‘Our chief concern has been to see if Kochalyin would follow you here, in which case we would certainly have had a word with him.’ He gave a bleak, deadly smile. ‘His people are here, but he hasn’t graced us with his presence, which doesn’t surprise me in the least. It’s far too dangerous. The reason you are still alive, I suspect, is because Walter has had you watched since The Bird’s driver picked you up on the Kent coast. As to the phones, no, we haven’t been listening. Besides, with the Harp-Avocet operation in full flow every day it would be difficult to pinpoint the calls.’

A flat lie, thought Harland. They were bound to have tapped into the phone lines. It explained why they had approached him now. They must have read every word of his report to Jaidi – they’d been forced to make their move and had produced Eva in a desperate attempt to stop him adding anything. He must also assume that they knew about the calls he’d made to Clark, the websites he’d visited while reading up on wake-vortex and the contents of his e-mails to Tomas and to Professor Norman Reeve.

‘And The Bird and Macy? Were they in on all this?’

‘We informed them this afternoon that you were in danger and that we were shadowing your movements,’ said Vigo. ‘They had suspected something. Their driver spotted a couple of our fellows in the course of the week.’

Teckman was winding a strand of cotton round a loose button on his jacket. Harland knew the distraction meant the head of SIS was concentrating very hard on his responses.

He would react accordingly. ‘So it seems you’ve got us pretty much trussed up,’ he said with a hint of resignation in his voice.

‘I wouldn’t put it like that,’ said Teckman amenably. He looked up from the button. ‘We just don’t want any more killings on our patch. We want this business with Kochalyin to take its natural course, and I do promise you that it
will
take its natural course. That’s why I’ve been anxious to point out that we’re advancing on a unified front.’

‘So what do we do now?’

‘You carry on as you have been, while we watch your back for you. I don’t know how long this business will go on, but at some stage we will know when to make alternative arrangements for your safety. It will be clear to Kochalyin that he can no longer rely on Irina. After Tomas was shot he must have known that this would eventually happen, although of course he well appreciated that she didn’t know where Tomas was and moreover she was unlikely to hear of the shooting for some time. So clearly Irina is a priority target for him but he also knows she will be well protected. My guess is that he will make a move later on, once he has settled other accounts. He will seek to eliminate her and possibly her mother. Oh, by the way, Irina, I should mention that we’ve found Hanna the accommodation I was talking about in Switzerland.’

He paused and placed his hands together on the table.

‘So, to conclude, for the moment I think you should remain in Century House, where we can keep a close eye on you. You should continue to visit your son in hospital, where we can also make sure you are undisturbed.’ He looked at Harland. ‘In the meantime, I would very much like your assurance that you will not add to the report. What you have already said on this affair surely discharges your obligations. I don’t want any gestures, Bobby, no desperate resolve. Just keep a low profile. Is that understood?’

Harland gave a brief nod. There was no mistaking the instruction, and there was little point in letting the Director know that he had no intention of obeying it.

‘So I think that wraps up our business,’ said Teckman, clasping his knees and pushing up from the chair. ‘We’ll be in touch. If you need anything, you can phone Walter.’ He moved to the door. ‘I’m glad we’ve had this talk. I can’t tell you how important it is to know we’re working on the same side.’

Tomas hadn’t seen his mother leave because he was dozing. He had worked steadily for two hours and then fallen asleep while she was with him. When he awoke, he noticed a very sharp pain which sprang from beneath his ribs every five or six breaths. He would have liked to have held his breath to see if the pain still came, but the machine took the option away. It commanded his lungs to inflate at regular intervals. He was forced to breathe – whether he wanted to or not.

There was another feeling that he hadn’t encountered before, a general enervation which, on thinking about it, he likened to his body being drained of blood. This thought came from his paranoia. He was haunted by the idea that he was being kept alive for medical experimentation, involuntary blood transfusions, even organ donation. How could he tell whether he still had both kidneys? Did they have plans for his eyes – his heart, his liver? And his hands? Would the doctors take his hands from him and sew them on to someone’s arms, fusing the nerves to another man’s impulses? Or why not a woman’s? Flick always said his hands were delicately made. They were sensitive, she said – artistic. She didn’t know they were a killer’s hands.

Nothing like this had gone through his mind when he was being taken off heroin. The sweats and arthritic fever of cold turkey were a picnic compared to this. Now, once his mind had got hold of a thought it seemed to take pleasure in supplying innumerable permutations of a particular horror. He had become fixated on what he regarded as the certain distribution of his body parts. Perhaps the intended recipients had already been matched with him and were waiting in beds around the hospital, longing for him to die and give them new life.

He sank a little more into himself. The pain was getting worse. Was this it? Was his heart giving notice of expiration?

He opened his eyes again and saw that the white ball light was quivering in front of him. The computer was on and the electrodes were still conveying the blistering heat of his panic to the screen, making the light bob like a fishing float. He decided to continue with his work. Practically everything had been completed because his mother had very quickly grasped how to help him. It had given him a thrill working with her and for a few moments that afternoon he had forgotten where he was – and how he was.

He logged off to still the ball of light and struggled to put some thought to the problem his father had set him in the morning. There wasn’t much to go on – the lights and heating in the plane had failed, then a little time later the plane had crashed. This might indicate a virus at work, but it would be a pretty crude one to knock out the lights needlessly. Maybe he was barking up the wrong tree. Perhaps the lights going out was only relevant in as much as it had forced Griswald to open up his computer and use the glow from the screen to see what he was doing. They had asked about the angle of the computer and where Griswald had held it in relation to the phone in his right-hand pocket. What could be the point of that?

He let his mind drift, hoping that something would occur to him. Five minutes later a glimmer of a solution came to him, but just at that moment he was racked with a particularly violent pain in his chest. The nurse hadn’t noticed and neither had she bothered to ask how he was. He wished she’d give him something.

He thought again. That was it! The reason they wanted to know how the laptop had been held was because they believed it had shielded the phone. They wanted to know how it still came to be functioning in Griswald’s pocket after the crash. Shielded from what? Not the impact of the crash, surely? Then he realised what the investigators were being so cautious about. He had heard of such things and, more important, he knew that Kochalyin was familiar with the device.

As he tried to remember exactly what was involved, the pain returned and filled his chest. He was sure that he was running a fever, his eyes were stinging. There was a clamminess – hot and cold in the same moment. He knew this was the beginning of the end. He’d be going down that stairway and not coming back.

But he wasn’t going yet. He still had things to do. He rallied himself. Yes! He remembered. Back in ’97 – or was it ’98? – Oleg had seen a man from a weapons research establishment in the Ukraine. God knows how he knew about the place – probably something to do with his past. The man came to him to explain the technology and, later that week, Oleg had sounded Tomas out about the production of such a device because he knew he was interested in radio frequencies. Tomas had been genuinely intrigued by the simplicity of the device.

He summoned all his will and laboriously went through the process of an Internet search. He read for over an hour then copied the relevant parts into an e-mail and addressed it to Harland. A second copy he placed on his hard disk for use later. Harland was right, he thought. It had been a logical problem and he was glad he had been able to crack it for him.

The pain was still with him and the fever was taking hold, but he had to get this one other thing out of the way. He prepared to concentrate for the last time that evening and visited his personal archive – a virtual locker which he had set up after Mortz sent him the package – and began selecting the coded information. Most of it had been used before, but there were one or two items that hadn’t. He placed them in five separate files, attached the virus that his mother and he had worked up over the last couple of days, and began making calls to the numbers his mother had pinned to the laptop for him. Half an hour later everything had been sent.

But that wasn’t quite the end of his work. He went back to the archive and withdrew everything – coded and uncoded material – and placed it on the old Czech website he had set up five or six years before –
www.rt.robota.cz
. For good measure he added the material he’d found for Harland.

29

DNR

‘So that’s all of it?’ he asked. ‘No more surprises?’

She shook her head, took two rapid puffs from a cigarette and inexpertly tried to stub it out.

‘No,’ she said. ‘There are no more surprises, Bobby.’

She was sitting on the sofa with her legs folded under her. Harland had taken himself to the north window and was looking out towards the Houses of Parliament. They’d been through it all: how Vigo made contact with her; how he met her once in Hanover and how she subsequently communicated what she learned of Kochalyin’s affairs through e-mail. It all seemed an extremely unlikely story.

He left the window and went to the fridge. There were a couple of bottles of white wine in the door. He withdrew the Chablis, pulled the cork and poured two glasses. He raised his glass to The Bird for putting it there and handed her the other glass.

‘Vigo put up quite a case for my arrest and prosecution,’ he said conversationally.

‘I had nothing to do with that. I knew nothing about them going into the archive in Prague.’

‘You know, seeing that picture of us made me feel very old.’

‘You haven’t changed much, Bobby. A little heavier and not so much hair. But you’re the same man.’

‘I ache all the time,’ he said, smiling. ‘I feel my age and I look it. But you, you’ve kept in terrific shape. It must be the bloody yoga.’

She returned his smile.

‘Did you ever see the picture?’

‘No, of course not. You have to believe me. I had nothing to do with that. But I knew that it existed, of course, because Oleg told me about it.’

‘I do believe you.’

‘Nor the tape recording. I would never have done that to you, Bobby – set you up like that.’

He looked at her hard. She was very beautiful. He believed her. ‘I know that too. You see, there was never a tape of us talking. Kapek threatened me with it, but that was just bluff – something he pulled out of the hat on the spur of the moment and then boasted about in his report to Kochalyin. Maybe he told him personally. I don’t know.’

‘There was no tape recording?’

‘No, just the picture of us.’

‘I must have misunderstood.’

‘Yes, you probably did. But your mentioning the tape is interesting because it indicates that at some stage Vigo and his friends were told there was one.’

‘I didn’t tell them.’

‘I wonder where they got the idea?’

‘I don’t know.’ She seemed genuinely perplexed.

‘Who told you there was a tape – Kochalyin?’

‘I can’t remember – I have believed this for years. Oleg wasn’t concerned with the operation in Rome. But he had access to the information. So maybe it was him. Why are you interested?’

‘Because it means one of two things.’ He put his glass down on the table and sat down opposite her. ‘One solution is that they had another source to help compile the dossier about me before Christmas. But who could have helped them in that short time? Not Kochalyin, for obvious reasons. Not Kapek because he knew there was no tape, and anyway no one knows where he is, and not you because Vigo didn’t want to alert you to the fact that he was putting something together on me. Of course, there is another solution. Perhaps they already knew about the supposed tape. Perhaps they already had it on file and dug it out for the interview with me. You see what I’m saying?’