The Waiting Time (40 page)

He stood by the window with the darkness of the living room behind him. His driver, his old friend who should have been at Moscow Military, had told him that he should be careful. He had said, his reply defiant, that the minister was the guarantee of his security.

Pyotr Rykov did not know that the brass plate bearing his name had been unscrewed from the door of the office next to the suite of the minister. He did not know that three video-cassettes had been watched in full in the Lubyanka, or that the number of his laminated ID card had been given to the guards at the four doors of the ministry with instructions that he be refused entry. He did not know the name of Olive Harris, or of her plan. . . He looked down onto the surveillance car . . . Pyotr Rykov did not recognize the moment he had not been careful and had made the mistake. He could not recall that moment.

Away up the channel the sea spray burst on the breakwater.

The rotating lamp, millions of units of candlepower, caught the spray and lost it. The light moved on, thrusting out over the whiteness of the seascape, before bouncing back from the mist of low cloud, turning again. A small boat was paddled up the calm water of the channel towards the thunder rumble at the breakwater and the moving lamp of the lighthouse. The boat had been taken from the inner harbour. Cold, trembling fingers had freed the boat from the iron ring on the quay wall.

It was a vicious night. Darkened houses and shops beyond the quay on the one side of the channel, darkened boats and stalls and the darkened fish-gutting shed on the other. Not a night, in the small bad hours, for man or beast to be out. Not a fisherman yet out of his bed, not a cat moving from the warmth of a kitchen.

The swell was with the small boat when it came level with the length of the breakwater. The lamp of the lighthouse found the small boat and discarded it. It lurched hard against the rocks of the breakwater’s base, was lifted and fell.

A scrambled crawl over the wet grease on the rocks, and the mooring rope of the small boat was tied, the same trembling, cold, wet fingers, to a post on the breakwater’s low rail.

Olive Harris slept.

She slept untroubled, and did not dream. The pill, taken with a half-glass of water, ensured that she slept free of troublesome images. She didn’t see the faces of those who were, to her, irrelevant and a sideshow, nor did she see the face of the man she had described as a target of consequence.

It was important for her, in the small strange bed on the top floor of the embassy block, to sleep well because the morning would bring the start of a long day, unpredictable and dangerous but with the potential of high reward.

There was a clear printed sign in the police car. It forbade the smoking of cigarette, cigar or pipe tobacco.

Sometimes, on the night shift, when they were parked up and waiting for a call on the radio, if he was with a friend, the policeman could wind down the windows and smoke in the car. Not with her, not with the bitch fresh out of the training school at Dummerstorf-Waldeck. She sat in the driver’s seat and pecked a plastic spoon into a carton of yoghurt, and he stood outside the car in the shadow beneath the block on Plater Strasse, and smoked a Dutch-made cigarillo. The wind brought the sleet shower off the Unterwarnow and across the Am Strande, funnelled it up the narrow road and gusted it into Plater Strasse. He cupped the cigarillo in his hand. He sheltered in the doorway of a shuttered restaurant. His arm was tugged. He had been watching her in the car, finishing the goddamn yoghurt, starting on the cholesterol-free sandwich filled with low-fat cheese and tomato. What she needed was a good smoke and a good drink and a good sausage and a good fuck. The recruits today were shit...

A street map was held in front of him. There was no light nearby. He shone his torch on the map and tried to hold it and his cigarillo and the map that blew in the wet wind. He strained to find the road he was asked for. The sleet came onto his spectacles. The knee came into his testicles. He gasped. The breath spurted from his throat. He was jack-knifed by the pain, head going down towards his knees, spectacles flying towards the paving. A hand chopped down on the back of his exposed neck, the hard heel of a hand. He was in the shadow behind the car, and the bitch ate her sandwich. He sagged to his knees and clutched at his stomach, fell. Hands tore at the pistol holster on his belt, ripped at the pouch for the handcuffs and their key. The sick pain squeezed his eyes shut. He heard the brush whisper of feet receding, running.

He crawled, gasping, heaving, towards the door of the police car where she ate her sandwich.

He had drunk the whisky, Scotch and Irish, from the room’s cocktail cupboard and now he opened the bourbon miniature.

It was always a long night for Albert Perkins before an operation was launched the following day. After the Jack Daniel’s there was gin, which he detested, and vodka, which he thought of as a woman’s drink, but he would not take out the champagne quarter-bottle, not when the result of the mission was undecided.

He had rung home four times, first at ten o’clock and then again on each hour. She should have been back by midnight. Certainly, by one o’clock she should have been home to complain that she was asleep and that he had woken her. He had not rung again after one o’clock. The ice was finished. It was always in hotel bedrooms, with the ice finished and the whisky, that he spent the nights before an operation went to its end.

The missions that mattered were those in which men such as Albert Perkins were powerless to intervene in the last crucial hours. They didn’t accept that powerlessness, those back home, those who commanded from the bunkers of the old Century House or the new Vauxhall Bridge Cross; of course they did not accept limit on their omnipotence. Albert Perkins knew it. He had once before, unusually consumed by his own frailty, drunk himself to oblivion on the night before the crucial hours.

There was a hotel at Luchow, south east on Route 216 from Luneburg, and across the minefields, fences and past the watch- towers was Salzwedel. It had taken eight months of Albert Perkins’s life, and a quarter of a million DMs, to get to the point where he had drunk a hotel cabinet dry and waited for a man to come through the checkpoint on the Luchow to Salzwedel road. The summer of ‘85, the trees along the road pretty on both sides of the minefields and the fences, the fields yellow with ripe crops either side of the watch-towers. No power, no influence. In his binoculars he had seen the car stopped at their checkpoint. All so dreary and mute through the magnification of the binoculars, a man taken out of a car and escorted into a building and then driven away until the car that carried him was lost among the fields and trees behind the minefields, the fences, the watch- towers. Nothing he could have done to intervene on the side of the NationalVolksArmee officer bringing over the Soviet battle order, defensive strategy.

He let the miniature bottle, the Jack Daniel’s, slip through his fingers and fall to the carpet. There was no tonic and no ice. He made a mix of orange juice and gin.

There were no minefields in Rostock, no death strips, no fences, no watch-towers and no dogs, but eating him was the same sensation of helplessness, of impotence, he had known too well. In three, four hours it would be dawn. With the dawn would come the start, the ticking clock, of the critical hours, and he would not be able to intervene. He reached, groped with a wavering hand, for the miniature of vodka, and he heard beyond the window the howl of police sirens in the night.

The great mouth of the hippopotamus crunched on the man, and he screamed. The scream filled his mind. He crabbed with his knees and the blankets would have slipped, and the cold would have settled on him. The scream.. . Josh woke.

He heard the scream of a siren going by the
pension.

He shook, tried to scrape from his mind the intensity of the dream. Another siren was blasting further in the distance, and another coming closer. He glanced down at his watch, at the luminous markings, past three o’clock, and he looked across at her to see if she slept. He could see the shape of her in the bed, couldn’t hear her breathing, could hear only the sirens, as though they were cats chorusing. He settled. He turned his back to the window and her bed, and pulled the blankets close around him.

He shivered.

The draught blew on his back. Josh, so slowly, so carefully, turned over again and saw that the curtain, beyond the silhouette shape of her in the bed, blustered out into the room. Behind the curtain was the grinding sound of the window being forced upwards.

He tensed. He was naked under the blankets.

The curtains parted. It was hard for him to see. The leg edged between the curtains. He strained to see better. The window was half a dozen feet from the bed. The second leg came through the curtains, and Josh saw the bulk of the body looming above the bed where she slept, still, silent. The body shape, big against the curtain, moved towards the bed.

He had no weapon. Of course they’d found the fucking place. They’d had enough bloody days to find it.

He coiled his strength.

He erupted off his mattress.

The blankets caught in his legs and he thrashed them clear. He went over the bed, over her, groped for the shape. Waiting for the blow with a cosh or the flash hammer of a shot. Scrabbling to get his fingers into the bastard.

They were down.

They were beside the bed. Trying to get at the throat. He found the throat.

The gasped voice: ‘For fuck’s sake . . . Josh . . . leave it, leave it out...’

He was frozen rigid.

The coughing voice: ‘Christ, Josh. . . pack it. . . daft bugger, get off me!’

He knelt above her. He sighed into his lungs great draughts of chill air. He loosed his hands and they shook: he could not control them. He could have wept. She came from under him, wriggled clear of him. She crawled towards the bed and reached for the light switch. He knelt in his nakedness. She slammed down the window and fastened it. He saw the shape in the bed, a bolster and a pillow. She was dressed for the cold of the night and she rubbed gloved hands on her throat. He felt a great and savage bitterness. He stood, naked, in front of her, and he trembled.

‘You stupid bloody woman. I could have killed you. One punch, one kick, you were dead.’

There was a small gleam of wonderment on her face. Her face was bright flushed from the night wind, the sleet water sparked in her hair, and her eyes were wide in awe. ‘You’d have killed for me, Josh? For me?’

‘Where the hell have you been?’

‘For me?’

The anger coursed through him. ‘I make the decisions. I make the plans. When I work with an amateur, when my security is on the line, I take the responsibility.’

‘You’re quite funny when you’re angry, Josh. I’m trying not to laugh, Josh, you’re really funny.’

He turned away from her, to the mattress on the floor, scooped up a blanket and wrapped it around him. He felt shy, ridiculous.

She said, matter-of-fact, ‘You didn’t seem to have a plan.’

He said, empty, ‘I would have done, just needed time.’

‘Are you firearms trained?’

He spun. She was reaching into her pocket. She handed him the holster inside which the pistol was fastened. He heard the sirens out in the night, crossing the streets of the city. The policeman’s name was stamped on the black leather of the holster, and there was an index number. The sirens came and went, growing in fury pitch and diminishing. It was a Walther PPK. He knew the weapon from far back. It was scarred, scratched, might have been twenty years old. It was probably used twice a year on a firing range. It would shoot with accuracy to thirty metres; a marksman would stop a man at thirty metres. He had not seen a Walther PPK for close to twenty years, when he had been at Osnabruck, when this weapon would have been new. He checked the safety catch. He slid the full magazine from the stock of the weapon. He did not expect that a bullet would be in the breech, but it was his training to check. There was the harsh metallic scrape in the room as he cocked it, aimed it down into his mattress and squeezed the trigger. He held the pistol loosely in his hand. He said, flat, ‘Yes, I can handle firearms.’

She sat on her bed. ‘I used to do guard duty, every twelve days, and we had firing practice. I was fine with automatic rifles, piece of cake. Pistols were different, bloody difficult. Did you ever shoot a man, Josh?’

He said, quiet, ‘Once, shot at a kid, in Aden, not old enough to be a man.’

‘Did you hit him, Josh?’

‘I claimed a kill.’

He had thought that the handling of weapons was back in the dustbin time of his life thirty years ago. That day he was a young man and riding in a Saracen armoured personnel carrier from his billet to the Mansoura gaol where they did the interrogations. That day the Crown had put a firearm in his hand and given him licence to shoot to kill. He had seen the kid dart from the shadows of an alley, and he might have been about to throw an orange, or a stone, or an RG-4 grenade. Two machine guns hammering but their target was the sniper in the minaret of the mosque. He had seen the kid through the firing slit. He was crouched, sweating, in the cavern heat behind the armour plate. He had shot at the kid, twenty paces range, from the lumbering movement of the Saracen, and he had seen the kid go down. Might have ducked, might have been hit. He claimed the hit anyway. In the evening his warrant officer had bought him a can of lager, and the rest of the I Corps people had squirmed envy. Just another gollie kid dead and claimed, and they’d all got pissed up that night. . And until she had put the pistol into his hand he had thought that shooting to kill was in his past.