‘I know what the linkage is.’
Feebly, ‘I thought it might help.’
‘How can it help me to understand what I already know? Do you think we’re children and idiots? Waste of time. What’s not a waste of time is that we have a name. I had it last night, and for the agent, but the DG’s sanctioned it. You know, there are some people here, modernists and work-makers, who sit on a committee that thinks up operational codenames. True. You can’t credit it. All damn Greek stuff, mythology and that self-serving military nonsense, “Shock and Awe”. The DG, and I’m not arguing, said I was thin on facts, and that if I was right I’d be looking for a …’
He paused theatrically.
Davies said, ‘You’d be looking for a needle …’
‘So we have an “N”, which is tidy. The agent is the needle, is the “N”, is November. Where is the needle?’
‘In a bloody haystack.’
‘Language, please.’ He was chastised but then — rarer than winter sunshine in Sheffield — God smiled. ‘That’s our operational title.’
And Lawson reached across him, almost elbowed him, took up a thick marker pen from a tray in front of the woman, and scrawled across the face of the cardboard file Davies was reading the one word ‘HAYSTACK’. Then he seemed to do a little jig, one foot to the other, as if the name excited him, as if, with it, they were launched.
Luke Davies asked, so softly: ‘Will it be that difficult to find, even with November, a “needle in a haystack”? Will it?’
Lawson said, ‘Yes, it will be that difficult, if it exists.’
Nothing said between them for four hours.
It irritated Yashkin. He was better able to concentrate on the road, but the quiet of his passenger, the navigator, annoyed him. And nothing said when they were at a road junction, only a gesture of the hand — right or left or straight ahead. On each hour, he steadied himself to ask the direct question. He had put it, he thought, with sufficient force beside the river at Murom, and had not been answered.
He was tired, had driven more than three hundred kilometres, always on the back roads. He was hungry, had eaten nothing cooked, only a sliced-meat sandwich from a stall in a village. He was thirsty, only one coffee in the middle of the day. He was a security officer by training, not a zampolit, but Oleg Yashkin, retired major of the 12th Directorate, had the talent to realize that the question must be confronted. The retired political officer must answer it.
A signpost showed up in the gloom: twenty more kilometres to Kolomna. Better it was settled now, dealt with. Yashkin thought the political officer would have been more skilled in probing for an answer, more polished, able to extract a tooth without pain. Too little time left on that day’s leg for it to be put off any longer.
‘I have to know it, your answer … Do you regret it?’
‘Honestly?’
‘Yes. Do you regret what we’ve done?’
‘A little, yes. When you talked about it, described it, I thought then, does this thing, the Zhukov, which you sleep against, which you say has warmth, does it work? Is it effective? No, no, another time, not now. Some of me regrets it.’
Yashkin said, ‘In half an hour we’ll be in Kolomna. In Kolomna there are trains and buses. You can go home. There, you can lean over the fence, near to where the hole was excavated, and you can tell Mother that her man is crazy, a lunatic, without a brain in his head.’
‘And you?’
‘I’ll go on alone to the Bug. I’ll stop when I’m at the river.’
‘Why?’
Yashkin said, ‘I can tell you each word used at my dismissal. I can tell you about each minute I spent in my office on my last day, and each step of my last walk from my office to the car, with no gratitude offered me. I can tell you about near-starvation through winters when my pension was not paid, the hunger, and about driving drunks, addicts, those diseased creatures in my car, of scavenging for charity rates in the market, and of selling for a pittance what little Mother and I had that was precious to us. Whatever happens, I’ll go on to the Bug river.’
‘Fuck you again, Yashkin. Alone, you wouldn’t find it.’
‘I would — and when you’ve gone, I will find it.’
‘I doubt — fuck you again and again — you’d find Belarus. I see you driving in circles inside Ukraine, or perhaps still inside our glorious country. I couldn’t.’
‘A political officer may speak in riddles, but a security officer hasn’t the education to understand. What does “I couldn’t” mean?’
‘I couldn’t, Yashkin — you are my friend and a fucking idiot — leave you to get lost, which you would. Without me, my knowledge of the maps, you’re lost.’
‘Where, then, is regret?’
The voice beside him dropped, was a whisper, a murmur, and he had to lean towards the other man to hear. ‘I don’t ask, “Does it work?” because then I increase the guilt for what I’m doing, what you’re doing … Perhaps I believe it doesn’t work, is harmless and of value only as a relic, which mitigates the guilt. And it isn’t entirely to avenge myself, for what was done to you and me … It’s the money. I’ve dreamed of that money. I spend it again and again. Should I feel shame? I don’t … It’s for the money. Fuck! We should have turned right.’
‘Molenkov, you talk too much.’
‘I’ve forgotten the regret.’
‘You talk too much so you missed the turning.’
The Polonez was reversed, then put into a three-point turn. The back wheels went up off the roadway, and a stone wedged under the chassis. The weight of the Zhukov was responsible, but Yashkin revved hard and cleared it.
He was coming into the town of Kolomna, and his eyelids flickered with exhaustion. To stay awake he had to talk.
‘I read about this town. A population of one hundred and fifty thousand, at the last census, is resident here. The town was founded in the year 1177 and had strategic significance because the Moskva and Oka rivers merge there. It is important today as a rail junction.’
He yawned, his eyes closed and he felt the wheel go before he righted the Polonez. Traffic flowed round him and oncoming lights dazzled him.
‘It matters not a fuck to me.’
At that moment, Yashkin was about to explain his need to talk — so tired, the strain caused by his belief that his friend regretted participating in the venture, or was a coward, or was afflicted by moral doubt, whichever was worse — and relief flooded him because, together, they would reach the Bug. There was a road junction as they approached the main bridge and too many headlights bouncing in his eyes.
He hit the car in front, a BMW 3 series, shining and new. The old rusted bumper of the Polonez hit a glancing blow to the metallic silver BMW. Glass spewed out from the tail-lights. Brakes screamed. A young man in a black leather jacket — the damned uniform of trouble — climbed out, saw the wreckage and his fist clenched.
Yashkin did not hesitate. From driving on minor roads all that day and the one before, mud would be plastered over his registration plates. He swung out. He thought he missed the young man by no more than half a metre, and he heard a fist thumped on the roof of the Polonez. As he turned, he saw that Molenkov gave the young man a finger. He sped off, drove like a madman in the traffic. He stopped as soon as he believed it safe, got out and bent to examine the plates. He reckoned it possible to read them, difficult but possible. Would the collision be reported to the police? Would they respond and look for a red Polonez that had left the scene of an accident?
They went through Kolomna, and on the far side of the citadel they found a decaying roadhouse, with the virtue of secure parking at the rear, and booked a room.