Authors: Gerald Seymour
The dogs would have worshipped him, were close at his heel and came to his knee if he flicked a finger. He gazed around him. Danny understood. It was the man’s home, as the house in Caen was his. He wouldn’t have travelled. He had read the file on the flight between Northolt and Aldergrove and there was no mention of trips abroad. It was clear to Danny why the man must go to Prague: they’d put an RPG launcher in his hand – capable of destroying an armoured police vehicle – a sniper rifle, a box of military detonators, with Semtex or American equivalents, and he would test-fire and test-explode, then give the gear a clean bill of health. He sensed the unease in the walk to the open gate where the farm track met the lane.
‘The first file reference to him has him aged nearly four. He kicked a detective on the kneecap and fractured it. They’d come to take his father. The detective had to take three months’ sick leave – that’s why it’s entered. About a year later they came again for his father and he threw a plate at a woman officer, breaking her glasses and splitting her forehead. That’s in the file too. It’s said he was traumatised by the death of his father – I don’t wish to pry, Mr Curnow, but I assume you played a part in that. Teachers suggested he needed counselling because he was so introverted. Everything changed when he was thirteen. A man was bludgeoned to death a couple of miles from here, and local word was that he’d informed on the mission Padraig Riordan had gone out on. The file’s interesting here. There’s a big red star at the side of that entry and someone has written ‘Is that really so – dear oh dear?’ and initialled it MB. Anyway, the boy changed. Fair at school but a potential star in Gaelic football, and school staff were saying he’d turned a corner. Too much to hope for.’
The child came out. Danny saw the love. The boy jumped awkwardly but the man caught him easily and swung him high. A little shriek of excitement reached Danny. Those years before it had been hatred. He reflected: most intelligence people were never privy to anything personal in the targets’ lives. They saw them, fleetingly, in balaclavas and combats, with an AK assault job, or brought from a prison wagon to a courthouse, heads ducked, or in a car park when information came one way and banknotes went the other. Or they saw them dead in a ditch with their shoes off, burns on their skin, and a plastic bag bulging over their heads with bone and brain. Few saw them as Danny did now, and that was what he had run away from.
‘That part of the mountain never bought into the peace. Another man articulated what they felt: “Did we have all those men killed and all those men locked away in the gaols, their youth lost, so that a few could parade in government and boast that they’d achieved power sharing?” Malachy Riordan had come under the influence of an activist, Brendan Murphy, a sort of surrogate father. He packed in the sport. He became a part-time haulage contractor, mostly trans-border smuggling, and a part-time guerrilla fighter. Forgive me, Danny, but I don’t make the judgements that require me to call them terrorists because we’ll likely end up negotiating with them one day, as we did fifteen years ago with the Provos. It’s as if this lot believe they alone carry the sacred flame, nationalism, and the former crowd are turncoats and traitors. He’s blown up a courthouse, he’s knocked the back off a local-government office, he’s wounded a detective with a Dragunov. We’ve been waiting for a mistake, but it hasn’t come yet. He’s good at what he does, and behind him is Bridie, his wife.’
The father put his son down, held his hand, then let go.
Sebastian murmured, ‘Apologies for not bringing a flask . . . Maybe going off the mountain, off Altmore, is his mistake, being somewhere his reputation hasn’t reached, among people he won’t easily impress.’
Had he been preparing to address a seminar of recruits that afternoon, Matthew Bentinick might have observed that ‘The controller should always be aware that personalities, characters, individuals, never heard of before in relation to the mission, will spring to prominence. The presence in the scenario of some will be mildly welcome and others will be intrusive and a damn nuisance, may even put the show in jeopardy. Be aware. You may consider your planning has been faultless and dedicated, but things happen, events that cannot be foreseen. People will aid, obstruct and surprise. Ignore their interventions and you will fail.’ He did not, however, do recruits’ seminars, was sparing with advice to anyone, and among the remotest men in the building. He believed that ‘Strangers will always slip into the spotlight, usually as a damn nuisance.’
No knock. She came in and kicked the door shut with her heel. ‘Is the big picture in focus?’
‘I think so.’
‘Who has it?’
‘I do and you – the whole picture. Vagabond has most of it. The young woman will have the small-screen picture, which is adequate for her. The boss on the top floor, not a lot. He can’t worry about what he doesn’t know.’
‘There’ll be a local boy.’
‘Comes with a good pedigree. He’ll know it all. You were right. Vagabond came without a bleat.’
‘I usually am.’
And she was gone. His eyes beaded on the file.
His employer, Timofey Simonov, was up the hill behind the villa walking the dogs. He thought Simonov, who had been a captain, with little prospect of promotion – and was now a multi-millionaire – cared more for his dogs than for him. The former brigadier, who had seemed to be fast-tracked towards full general, was now a manservant ranked below the Weimaraners. He couldn’t kick them because they would betray him. He ran a vacuum cleaner over the rugs in the first-floor salon. It was a fine morning.
Why the sour mood?
He had sat in the church through the concert. At the end, Simonov had networked with others prominent in the town’s Russian community and from the embassy: the brigadier was not an equal and had been sent to the car to wait. He could remember hearing of the collapse of the regime and the dismissal of scores of intelligence-gathering officers, and realising that a world had ended. He had knelt in his office on his Afghan prayer mat and wept. It was of the finest workmanship, from the bazaar in Herat, prize booty from his service there. He had sobbed: he was no different from a conscript kid in a forward fire position with the savages closing in. He had survived that war and had gone as a star to Milovice, senior on the Central Command staff, but had been a casualty of the peace. He had felt hands on him and heard a soothing voice. His head had been against a uniformed chest, that of the junior captain, Timofey Simonov. He’d nowhere else to turn. Now he could have left him, had the resources, but the villa in Karlovy Vary was his true home. His wife lived in an apartment close to the embassy in Prague and they had two children at the school there, but his home was with his employer.
He not only kept the house clean, waited in the car, as a chauffeur should, and dried the dogs when they came in from running among the beeches on the hill: he had responsibility for day-to-day matters affecting Timofey Simonov, such as deciding when the Englishman would be permitted to visit them, when the ‘cargo’ might be examined and where . . . Also, other matters: in Yekaterinburg, a man had risen too fast and had forgotten to pay respect. Within the next hour he would be taken off the street, or his car rammed, or his apartment entered. A garage waited, with a cut-down oil drum, and dry cement, water, a chair and some rope. The brigadier had learned the ways of the gangs when they feuded. And, because of the arrangements he had made, a marksman – a Bosnian Serb – would that morning be taking delivery of a Rangemaster calibre .338 rifle with a killing range, in the hands of an expert, of up to 1500 metres. It had been tested in some fly-blown sheikhdom or emirate in the Gulf, and had disappeared. Then, from a land of corruption and camel shit, it had become available and had been taken into the United Kingdom. That morning, it would be in the marksman’s hands. The brigadier had made the arrangements and found the man who would fire the shot. The captain had negotiated the contract by
siloviki
figures in Moscow: a former official in the tax office now had the life expectancy of a tethered goat in a tiger reserve.
The brigadier, Nikolai Denisov, could moan in his head about his life as a virtual servant. It was a reversal of roles on an epic scale. In public, his fall from high rank was not mentioned: he existed with it. That day he wore a floral apron. But he would organise killings and would kill himself to protect the man who fed him.
He saw nothing that interested him. He was thirty-four, had a middle-ranking job and earned a middle-scale salary in public service. The life of Karol Pilar ticked over.
He heard nothing that enlivened him. That morning the sun shone. He was already tired. Before dawn, his alarm had gone off in the studio apartment where he lived, courtesy of an uncle. It had been converted from the roof space of the once grand house in the middle-class Prague suburb of Vinohrady, said to have been designed in the style of Paris. He had dragged on the first fag of the day as he looked out of the window and saw the statue of Svatopluk
C
ˇ
ech, a writer, who had died at least a hundred years ago. He had been on the road before half past six.
The files put in front of him on the first floor of the principal police station in Karlovy Vary, on Krymska, had told him nothing. Karol Pilar was probably of average ability, was certainly of average height and average build. He stood out among his many colleagues for his commitment to his work. He was a dedicated detective, who took obfuscation and obstruction with dogged calm. He was not a uniformed policeman who battered down doors and carried a high-grade machine pistol. A detective, plain clothes, he struggled to make an impression on the organised-crime desk from an office in the centre of the capital. His speciality involved the gangs originating in Russia: they would likely still have connections to the Solntsevo people in Moscow and the Tambovskaya group from St Petersburg, but there were also links to government and to personalities with influence in the Kremlin, close to the seats of power. His department, UOOZ, mostly hunted down small-time criminals involved in drugs, prostitution, stolen cards and the trafficking of children from the east towards Germany. Occasionally it looked for Mafia leaders who had taken residence in his country – and there lay the difficulties. He had seen the files, spoken to local officers and learned nothing that justified his early start and the drive from Prague. He was walking up the hill on Jiriho, and round the next bend he would see Timofey Simonov’s home. He could devote one week in four to matters affecting the Russian community that had bought up the best properties in Karlovy Vary, and one day each month to maintaining a view on the affairs of the former GRU officer. There were difficulties. The town was said to be a fiefdom of Russian Mafia money, and Russian control of the country’s economy grew each day. Russian piped gas provided three-quarters of the energy needed to keep people from freezing in winter, at a carefully negotiated price. Russian bids were about to succeed for the construction of nuclear reactors worth twenty billion euros. The force of Russian espionage agents based at the embassy wasn’t there for cocktail-circuit gossip but to influence government policy and for a back-door access to the secrets of NATO and the European Union. That business was far above the level of Karol Pilar and his pay grade. Somewhere at that level Timofey Simonov lived quietly, apparently without criminal contacts, but he was worth one day each month of the young detective’s time. The chance of a major investigation, which might ruffle far-away feathers and cause inconvenience, was remote.
The sun was warm on his face. The street was clean, swept of fallen leaves. There was no litter on the pavement. The villas on either side of the road were Russian owned or rented: a month’s rent might add up to Karol Pilar’s annual salary. They had bought judges, local officials, politicians, even senior policemen. To them the town was a ‘safe-house’.
When he came to Karlovy Vary, he walked up that hill for a simple reason: the file reported Timofey Simonov as a former captain in Military Intelligence, with a small pension, yet he lived in a house that would have been priced at four or five million euros by any of the town estate agents negotiating with Russians. Where had the money come from? Organised crime – arms sales in Africa, drugs sales in Russia, sex sales in the old Europe of the West, and the sale of services to the regime currently holding power in Moscow. A considerable target.
But a target that was presently ‘untouchable’. There was a little garden opposite. Later he would shop in the souvenir stores for Jana, his girlfriend – something pretty but cheap – and he would talk to the people he paid for information. There was one in the telephone exchange, another in the town’s main hospital, and a Customs man at the airport. He sat in the garden. Most of the colleagues of his own age, who had inklings of ambition, had resigned and either gone abroad to work in security or had joined private consultancies. He had stayed on, plodded forward. There was a new memorial in the garden, dedicated to Anna Politkovskaya, journalist and human-rights activist – she had been assassinated eight years ago. With her investigative writing, she had been a thorn in the arse of those inside the Kremlin. A grim irony had sited her memorial in this Russian enclave. He saw the man.