They had chosen to drive on side roads, and the potholes shook him. Because of the weight at the back of the Polonez, the car jerked with each pitch of the wheels.
But his anger had found a valve through which to escape. It had put him where he now sat, in a weighted-down Polonez whose engine and bodywork were a virtual wreck. His wife was now twenty-four years in her grave. Their son, Sasha, had burned to death in an ambushed tank a few kilometres short of the Salang Pass, one of the countless casualties of the failed Afghanistan campaign … His son had been the idol of his brother’s boy, Viktor. He, Colonel Igor Molenkov, had fast-tracked his nephew’s application to enter the ranks of the Committee of State Security. Viktor had left the KGB after only two years’ service, and gone to work in the flourishing new industry of ‘security’, had worked with a criminal gang in the city of Perm, gone abroad, then come back in the last days of that year’s February to visit him; decent of him to do that. That visit had begun it all. Dinner cooked in his neighbour’s house by his neighbour’s wife, ‘Mother’: grilled chicken, potatoes grown the previous summer, cabbage stored for six months, and a bottle of vinegar-like wine from Sochi. Hints dropped of the rewards of protection, of the ‘roof’ for which businessmen paid willingly and heavily or saw their trading opportunities collapse in bankruptcy. A small envelope left on the table when his nephew had driven away in his silver BMW, as if they needed and were deserving not only of thanks but of charity.
And then they had talked. ‘Mother’ away to her bed. The dregs of the bottle were there to be drunk. His neighbour’s confession. Knowing he was the first to be told of a grave dug in the vegetable patch. Looking, as if he needed confirmation, out of the kitchen window and seeing the snow lying smooth on the shaped mound. Shrugging into their coats and stumbling away down icy roads to the hotel where Viktor had stayed the night. Waking him, watching the dismissal of the girl, and waiting for her to dress and leave. Telling him what was buried and offering it for sale, and seeing the wariness on his neighbour’s face give way to growing excitement. Telling him their price. Past four in the morning, they had emerged from the room with a new mobile phone each, instructions on what message would reach them, and what message they should send back. The girl had been waiting downstairs in the lobby. As soon as they had passed her she had run to the stairs, her short skirt bouncing on her arse as she had gone back up.
In time, a message had come.
Together, in the dark before the dawn, they had dug rain-saturated earth from the mound, then pushed aside strips of soil-coated lead, then lifted up — struggling, cursing — the drum still wrapped in rubbish bags. The plastic torn away, they had gazed at the warhead, so clean when exposed to the torchlight that he had been able to read the batch number stencilled on it. He had felt fear at handling it, but not his neighbour. Clean plastic had been put over it and tied with string. They had carried it — a desperate weight — round the side of the house and dumped it in the boot of the Polonez, which had sagged on its rear wheels. They had laid a tarpaulin over it. They had stowed inside their own bags and — a small gesture, but demanded by Molenkov — hung their old dress uniforms across the back doors.
Before they had left, Colonel (Ret’d) Igor Molenkov had walked down the track in front of their homes, found the best place for a mobile transmission and used the phone Viktor had given him to call a pre-programmed number and say the word three times: ‘Da …da … da.’
The car drove along the side road towards the city of Murom.
Molenkov reflected: what had the old fool hunched over the wheel beside him led him into? Wrong, sadly wrong. There were two old fools in the Polonez. Two men of equal guilt, two men who had stepped across a threshold and now travelled in the world of extreme criminality, two men who … He was thrown forward and his hands went up to protect his head before it hit the windscreen.
They had stopped. He saw Yashkin’s yellow teeth bite at a bloodless lower lip. ‘Why have we stopped?’
‘A puncture.’
‘I don’t believe it.’
‘Rear left. Didn’t you feel the bumping as it went down?’
‘Have we a spare?’
‘Bald, old, yes. I can’t afford new tyres.’
‘And if the spare is holed?’
He saw Yashkin shrug. They were beside a wide lake. From the map left on his seat, Colonel (Ret’d) Igor Molenkov estimated they had covered no more than forty-eight kilometres, and now they had a holed tyre to be replaced with a bald one, and a further 1552 kilometres before they reached their destination. He could have sworn, cursed or stamped.
They hung on each other’s necks, and their laughter pealed out.
There are great white spheres on a Yorkshire moor. There are antennae on the summits of a mountain range running across Cyprus. There are huge tilted dishes on the roofs of the buildings on the edge of the town of Cheltenham. Spread across the United Kingdom, and behind the perimeter fences of a sovereign military base on a Mediterranean island, there are vast computers, some manned by British technicians and some by American personnel from the National Security Agency.
Each day they suck down many millions of phone, fax and email messages from around the northern hemisphere. The majority, of course, are discarded — regarded as of no importance. A tiny minority are stored and transmitted to the desks of analysts at GCHQ, who work below the dishes, in that Gloucestershire town. Triggers determine what reaches the eyes of the analysts. Programmed words, phrases, spoken in a mêlée of languages, will activate a trigger. Specific numbers will attract a trigger if those numbers have been gobbled into the computers’ memories. And locations … Nominated locations are monitored. If a location registers in the computers, the memory will search back for matches and a trail is established. The men and women who sit in darkened rooms and stare at screens are unlikely to understand the significance of what the triggers throw up. They are a filter, unsung and anonymous.
The city of Sarov, in the Nizhny Novgorod oblast of the Russian Federation, trips a trigger. Calls into and out of the city that cross international frontiers are noted, and the location of the receiver or transmitter can be narrowed to a square with a precision of less than a hundred metres.
The calls in question came to the screen of a young woman, a graduate of Russian studies, working on the third floor of the central building at GCHQ in D Wing. Four days before there had been a mobile-telephone connection to another mobile telephone in Sarov, duration eight seconds, from a residential street in the London district of Knightsbridge. That morning, a call was placed from Sarov and answered at the dockside in the East Anglian port town of Harwich, duration four seconds. The same mobile phone from Harwich had then called from the Essex town of Colchester to a location adjacent to the Polish-Belarussian border.
The young woman could not have been aware of the significance of what she learned — priorities were beyond her remit. But she typed in a code on her keyboard, opened a secure electronic link, transmitted the details of the calls and included as an attachment satellite pictures. They showed an unmade road or track in Sarov, running east to west, that was flanked to the north by trees and to the south by small detached single-storey homes. Another showed the car park at Harwich, another identified an industrial park on the outskirts of Colchester, and another a Knightsbridge street. There was a final image of a forest of pines and birches where a wide circle filled the only cleared space, to the right side of the picture, and a railway track ran close to it … It was all so easy.