Gerald Seymour Read online

  When he had scanned them he had seen nothing to make him wary. He had made his careful half-moon arc across the cobbled courtyard of the Middle Castle, had then waited for a party of schoolchildren to move on from the bench, and had sat down. He had chewed a peppermint, then leaned forward and run his right hand along the bottom of the bench's slats. There had been nothing there.

  Had he made a mistake?

  Locke—he was Daffyd to his parents, but had used his second name, Gabriel, from the time he'd left home—had been to the castle at Malbork twice before. He had come up from Warsaw in the third week of July and in the third week of May. On both days the courtyard had also been filled with Germans—with the same bright laughter, the same adoration of this medieval heap of redbrick-built Teutonic splendour. He had slipped his hand under the close-set slats and had felt the package fastened there with chewing-gum. After discreetly pocketing it, he had walked off, like any tourist, to resume his tour. At Malbork, on the Nogat river, to the south-east of Gdansk, the religious order of the Knights of the Cross had constructed the largest castle in Europe. Locke, always the careful man, did not believe in unnecessary risk-taking. His belief and care in preparation—the reason he had sailed through the induction tests laid in front of him by the Service—had dictated that he should read the abbreviated history of the castle, which he was tasked to visit every two months to collect from the dead drop. It was the first time there was nothing for him to retrieve.

  The Germans, in their noisy phalanx, were advancing towards him, led by the siren calls of the guides, drawn to four larger-than-life statues fashioned in bronze. The statues were representations of four of the warlords who had ruled the surrounding countryside six hundred years before. He glanced up at the sheened faces of the armour-clad men. Hermann von Salza, Siegfried von Feuchtwangen, Winrich von Kniprode and Markgraf Albrecht stood on an extended plinth of marble, each with his own pedestal; they wore chainmail under long tunics, they had close-fitting helmets, and double-bladed swords hung from broad belts. Von Feuchtwangen—for all the sternness of the visage the sculptor had given him—suffered the handicap of having lost, to recent pillage, his right hand, sliced off at the wrist. They were all men of brutal appearance, and on his three visits Locke had reflected that they would have meted out brutal treatment to any spy who threatened them.

  But Gabriel Locke had not made a mistake.

  It was the correct day of the third week in September. It was the correct location, as laid down by the previous communication. It was the only bench. There was no margin of error. His eyes searched the four high walls of the courtyard as he looked for a watcher, a man or a woman, but there was none that he could identify. He steeled himself, bent forward and tried to make the movement seem casual. His right hand snaked under the slats to feel for the package. It wasn't there. He wriggled further along the bench and all the time his fingers probed for it. The tourists advanced. The guide had stopped her chatter and eyed him. He felt a flush on his face, and a bead of sweat, brought on by embarrassment. Then his fingers had reached the far end of the underneath of the bench seat. Two ladies, heavy and supported by medical sticks, lurched closer to him. Still nothing. They dropped down beside him and he was squeezed to the extremity of the bench. He smiled at them, and was ignored, then stood up. He had no more business on the bench. His instinct was to kneel, or lie down full length on the grit in front of it and peer under the slats, but that would have been ridiculous and unnecessary.

  He could not escape the conclusion: the dead drop had not been serviced.

  Locke stepped two paces forward and his place was immediately taken by an old man whose left trouser leg was folded up at the knee where the amputation had been made and who took the weight on a wooden crutch. He hesitated. In his short, bright career he had not before known failure. Debatable, of course, whether the failure was his…No reason for him to blame himself…He had done nothing wrong. This was, in his opinion, the stuff of dinosaurs. In the third year of the new millennium it was pathetic that he should be required to drive every two months from Warsaw to Malbork Castle and scuffle like an idiot under a bench to collect a package On the other occasions he had been here, after he had pocketed the package he had trailed round the treasures of the castle and visited the Amber Collection of caskets and wine cups, cutlery and jewellery made by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century craftsmen, and the Porcelain Collection from the workshops of Korzec and Baranowka, and the Weapons Collection. He had wandered through the Grand Master's Palace and the cloister corridors of the High Castle, and marvelled at the skill of the reconstruction of the castle after the Red Army's shelling at the end of the last war, and he'd treated himself to light lunches before hitting the road.

  He walked away, and anger burned in him.

  Locke had never met the agent, Codename Ferret. Too junior to be taken inside the loop, he did not know his name nor had he been shown a photograph. He was merely a courier. Being outside the need-to-know circle, he was expressly forbidden to open the package once he had made the pickup and was required to deliver it, still sealed, to his Station Chief at the embassy. It was a small consolation that his Station Chief—Ms Libby Weedon—was also denied access to the material that he had twice brought back. The papers, whatever they contained, went to London in the bag that was fastened by handcuff and chain to a messenger's wrist. He was a child of the computerized age and it was, to him, as obvious as the inevitability of night following day that material should be transmitted electronically having been suitably encoded. Only rarely in his six years as a member of the Service, which he had joined with such pride, had he been obliged to work the Neanderthal procedures of the few old warriors still existing at Vauxhall Bridge Cross. His day was wasted. He assumed that Codename Ferret was either in a meeting, had a head cold, or was in a warm apartment and had gotten his leg over. For a young man, when his Welsh temper was roused, Gabriel Locke was short of charity.

  There was a fallback. The sparse file of papers available to him in the Service's quarters at the embassy dictated that if the Malbork Castle dead drop was not utilized another location should be checked seven days later.

  As he drove out of the town, over the bridge above the Nogat river, he had no idea of the consequences to many people of his wasted journey.

  There was little protection from the autumn cold when the wind knifed from Beinn Odhar Mhor and cut south along the small stream's gully that dropped down to Loch Shiel. The Highlands' mountain wind fell fiercely at that time of year, but the artist did not feel it. The autumn was the best time for Billy Smith because the wind and heavy rainclouds conjured the threatening skyscapes with their pillars of light. Dark, scudding cloud and shafts of low sun thrown down made the vistas that he sought out. Huddled between yellow lichen-coated boulders above the tree line, his view was of white caps on the loch, then the rock-scarred cliffs of Sgurr Ghiubhsachain and up to the black purple of the clouds above. He was not among the boulders for warmth but to protect himself from the wind's buffeting as he painted. His paper was held by steel chrome clips to a legless Formica table top, his paints were on a palette beside his left elbow, and at his right side was a jar once long ago filled with coffee but now holding the water he had taken from the loch before he had climbed to the vantage-point. He never worked from memory, always climbed as if it were important to him to experience the power of the elements that raked this wilderness. He worked methodically, would be there till dusk, or until he could no longer see the paper, and then he would come down the steep, precarious slope, easily and with confidence, and go to the little tin-roofed hut that was his home.

  It was a good restaurant, as good as any in that south-coastal town. The season was over and the visitors remaining were eking out their pensions and would not have patronized the one he had chosen. With the summer gone, the town's traders and this restaurant's owner were able to evaluate their successes and failings of the last five months, and they had not been well treated by the weather. F
or that reason, each time Hamilton Protheroe raised his hand he was given immediate and undivided attention. Champagne had been drunk while they sat on stools at the bar and chose the Italian-style dishes, and a Chianti bottle was now nearly empty on the table. He was a con-man. He deceived older ladies, widows and divorced. He made them laugh and smile, and sometimes bedded them after lunch, and when he had had use of their credit cards and their cheque books, he slid away and out of their lives, and moved on to the next town with a new name but the same flattering, winning ways. He would lock away his wheelbarrow and tools, switch on the headlight of his bicycle, then pedal away down the road to the farmhouse and his room. He did not need company; he was content.

  He wheeled the trolley back down the corridor along which, a few minutes earlier, it had been stampeded when en route from the ambulance reception bay to A&E. The hospital was less than a dozen miles from the M6 motorway and received more than its share of road accident victims. The casualty who had been on the trolley Colin Wicks now pushed—a young man in a good suit, what was left of it, and a white shirt made revolting with his blood—had looked, as he was wheeled in by the shouting, running team, to have little future. Wicks pushed the trolley down the corridor and out through swing doors into the dropping gloom, unravelled the hose, turned on the tap and drove the gore from the trolley's cradle. It was always him who did it, hosed down the trolleys, because the others on the shift were too squeamish for that work. It upset them, but not him. When the cradle was cleaned he would take disinfectant and a stiff brush and would scour its canvas surface; he would let it dry in the evening air, then wheel it back to the ambulance bay, and it would be there for the next victim who had been impatient or tired or had drunk too much or had simply been unlucky. The last of the water cascaded off the trolley and down to the drain at his feet. As he bent to turn off the tap, he saw the flash in the water and knelt to retrieve it, a cufflink. It would have been given to the casualty by a grandfather, a father, or a lover. He used his own handkerchief to dry it, and examined it to make certain that no blood was left staining it. He would take it back to A&E and give it to a nurse. He didn't feel good about finding it, or bad about the condition of the young man who had worn it in his cuff. In his life, he was long past feeling emotions.

  None of them—Billy, Ham, Lofty or Wickso—knew of the consequences that would follow from the empty space under a faraway castle's bench.

  Locke pressed the key. Electronically, the signal was sent—ferret: no show. His finger hovered, and in that macrosecond the signal, in cypher, travelled from the Service's suite of rooms in the embassy on Warsaw's Al Roz street, near to the Park Ujazdowski, and hurtled across the air space of western Europe until it was sucked down by the dishes and antennae on the roof of Vauxhall Bridge Cross overlooking the Thames.

  He went through the procedure of shutting down the secure computer. A few years back, in the days before Gabriel Locke had been accepted into the Secret Intelligence Service, there would have been a technician to handle the transmission. In those days, those years, the officers of the Service would not have been trusted to write, encode, and transmit their messages from the field. He understood the way the computers worked and what they could do for him. He had even written a paper, passed on by his Station Chief for consideration by Administration, on how the computers could be upgraded at a minimal cost. To Locke it was pitiful that older inadequate men could not master the new technology.

  The signal was sent. He closed the door to the cypher room behind him, checked the double lock was engaged, and went through to the outer room where the two girls, Amanda and Christine, had their desks.

  Libby Weedon's door was open. He was sidling past it, hoping not to be noticed, but her voice, deep and with the clarity of a broadcaster, snatched at him. He was summoned inside. He was told he looked 'pissed off, and then she smiled in her prim, severe way and told him it was not his fault that Ferret hadn't travelled…of course it was not his fault…and she reminded him not to forget George, who would be waiting out in the second-floor lobby…of course he wouldn't…and she pointedly mentioned the ambassador's reception later that evening. She glanced up at him from her screen and a little of the severity was replaced by a tinge of coyness. He knew Libby Weedon was in her forty-third year, and that there was no sign of any romantic entanglement in her life. Well, she fancied him. Drunk, or across lit candles at dinner, or sweating after a workout in the embassy's basement gymnasium, he thought she might have pushed the 'fancying' further. He repeated that he wouldn't forget George, and had not forgotten that there was a three-line whip on the ambassador's drinks party. She was heavy in the hips and the chest, but she had good skin and her throat wasn't lined—she was as old as his aunts, who lived marooned lives on the west Wales coast. He thought she was lonely and had only her work for comfort. Outside, in the open-plan area, he grinned, winked, and gave a little wave to Amanda and Christine. He took his heavy coat and slipped out. In the corridor he pressed the code into the console on the wall and pushed open the door of inch-thick steel bars that separated the Service's quarters from the rest of the embassy offices, and with his heel slammed it shut after him.

  Across the lobby, on a thinly-upholstered bench, George waited. A heavy-set man, balding and with the jowl to go with his fifty-nine years, George was the punctual one: a wristwatch could have been set by his movements. Long ago, and he'd told Locke most of his life story on the two previous occasions they'd met, he'd been a detective sergeant in the Metropolitan Police, but on retirement eleven years earlier he had decided to augment his pension with paid travel. He was a courier for the Service. Not a week went by when he wasn't in the air. Long-haul or short, it barely mattered to him. On the flights of the national carrier, George went business class; the front row of the section and the seat beside him were always unfilled, even if it meant turning away paying passengers. Libby Weedon had said that a hostile counterintelligence service would know from George's arrival and departure from their capital city that the Service were running an operation on their territory. For all his weight the courier would have been hard to spot in a crowd and he dressed down in street-market jeans, a well-used shirt with a quiet tie poking up above his pullover, and a faded green anorak. To Locke, he was another example of the old world still inhabited by a part of the Service. On his knee was a battered briefcase, scratched and well-used, like any businessman's, except that its fastening lock was reinforced with a discreet padlock and a fine chain hung between the handle and George's wrist, where it disappeared under the cuff of his anorak. At the sight of him, George flipped open the briefcase, making ready to receive the package, then withdrew a little pad of docket sheets from the inside pocket of the anorak.

  Locke said curtly, 'Sorry, George, nothing for you.'

  'Beg your pardon, Mr Locke?'

  'As I said, George, I've nothing for you.'

  That should have been simple enough, but a fog of puzzlement hazed the courier's forehead, and his eyes closed sharply, then opened again. 'Oh, I see, nothing—nothing for me.'

  'That's right.'

  George stood, and the frown gouged his brow deeper. 'Well, that's a turn-up…Every two months I've been coming, sixteen trips, and never gone away empty-handed.' His eyes screwed as if in suspicion. 'You absolutely sure, Mr Locke?'

  The query annoyed Locke. Patronizingly, he rolled his eyes to the ceiling light. 'Yes, I am sure, George. I think I would know whether I had a package for you, or not. I have today driven halfway across this bloody country and back—so give me the credit for knowing whether or not I have anything for you.'

  George murmured understated criticism, 'There was always something for me when Mr Mowbray was here.'

  'Mr Mowbray is not here, and has not been here for many months,' Locke said evenly. 'I expect I'll see you in a week's time, but you'll have it confirmed.'

  The handcuff was unlocked, taken off the wrist and, with the chain, was dropped into the briefcase. George scowled. 'Yes, may
be, in a week…if nothing's happened—or gone belly-up.'

  'I'm sure it hasn't,' Locke said quickly.

  He followed George down the flights of stairs, through the main doors, and waved desultorily to him as the courier climbed, still frowning, into the embassy car. He realized that he, too, was merely a courier. They were equally ignorant of Ferret. 'Gone belly-up'? What could have gone belly-up? Nothing ever went belly-up with Ferret.

  Locke drove into the centre. Danuta would be waiting for him. Their favourite trysting place, at the end of his working day, was where they could get the best coffee in the city. The little bar had a daft long name, Sklep z Kawq Pozegnanie z Afrykq, but the coffee choice was unrivalled in the city, thirty different varieties, and better than any place he knew in London. With Danuta, sitting opposite her and holding her long and elegantly thin fingers, and sipping the caffè latte in the big bowl cups, he could lose the day's irritation. Danuta designed websites, was as in love with the new world as he was. They were together, a fact known only to Libby Weedon. They would drink coffee and discuss her day before he went to the chore of the ambassador's party. Then he would go back to his apartment where Danuta would be waiting for him—and the fact that an agent had not filled a dead drop would be erased from his mind.

  She was tied up at the quayside. Heavy hawsers held her fast. Once she had offloaded her cargo of lemons, brought from Palermo on the Italian island of Sicily, she would sail again on the midnight tide from her costly moorings at the port of Bilbao. Out in the Bay of Biscay she would ride out the storms that were forecast and would wait for the agents to find her another cargo. She might wait, tossed and forgotten, for several days because she was a vessel with the mark of death on her, for whom the breaker's yard beckoned, as suitable work was hard to come by.