Lawson had returned, chewing chocolate, and didn’t offer him a piece. Shrinks and Bugsy were in the minibus.
‘What, in your wisdom, have you decided?’
Damned if he was going to lie down. He wasn’t a bloody mongrel with a stomach for scratching. ‘This is where it will happen, if anything happens.’
‘That’s your considered opinion?’
‘It is. I don’t have, Mr Lawson, the rank or the authority to countermand you — if I did, I would — so I have to plan on the basis that we don’t have the help of the Polish agencies. Personally, I would think it could only be beneficial to be alongside the Agencja Bezpieczenstwa Wewnetrznego in this situation.’
It rather pleased Luke Davies that he could reel off the name of the Polish counter-intelligence set-up, not have to rely on the initials, but Lawson gave him no encouragement, was impassive.
‘Yes, the ABW would give us additional surveillance capacity, and firepower, and would enable the area to be sanitized. The way you’re doing it, Mr Lawson, we could be in place, we could have an eyeball, and a hundred and one unforeseens could create a foul-up and we’ve lost it, whatever it is. Don’t, please, have any misplaced ideas of me thrusting myself forward and taking flak when it’s your responsibility. Then you’ll be on your own and I’ll be cheering from the sidelines. Don’t say I haven’t fronted up with you, Mr Lawson.’
‘Put it all in your report at the end, young man, and I’m sure it’ll receive due attention.’
He saw Lawson walk away and the fist crumpled the chocolate wrapper. The paper was taken to an overflowing bin and laid on top of the rubbish. Lawson had walked through what was almost a dense carpet of cigarette packets, dog ends, empty crisps bags and other junk. Davies thought it the gesture of pomposity. His temper was rising, and his inability to rouse reaction hurt him.
‘And another thing. I heard what Shrinks said. He talked about the syndrome. I spoke to him about it. A victim of the syndrome will need aftercare, maybe hospitalization and certainly counselling. He will be traumatized and potentially scarred. It’s down to you, Mr Lawson. You’ve thrown our man, November, into the arms of a psychopathic criminal. That, too, will be in my report.’
‘It’ll be a weighty volume.’
He could have hit the man. Luke Davies could have clenched his fist, swung it back and punched his full weight quite happily and he was breathing hard, towards hyperventilation. No, no, damned if he’d lose his career for this priggish, vain old man.
He heard Lawson say to Bugsy, at the driver’s window of the minibus, ‘I think young Davies has concluded his comprehensive reconnaissance, so it’ll be safe to leave this place. It’s totally irrelevant as a location, but he’s been humoured.’
The engine started. Lawson had taken his place on the wide back seat. A door was left open for Davies. He stamped to it. He didn’t understand where, if not here, a contraband package of the size of a warhead — if it existed — could be brought across.
Mikhail had a GPS wedged between his legs. It bucked when his feet moved on the pedals. With gum, he had stuck a scrap of paper on to the dashboard at the base of the wheel, but the characters scrawled on it were in Cyrillic. Carrick couldn’t read them. They were off the main road.
The track was deep-rutted, sandy soil. Trees pressed close to it, broken only occasionally by small fields in which the grass had no goodness. Carrick thought the snow had thawed only days earlier. Small houses were in the trees or at the fields’ edges, and there was a cross of white-painted stone with its arms broken off. The wide nests of storks were on high poles.
He had seen lakes on the left side, wide and rippled by the wind. Reuven Weissberg had not spoken. Neither had Mikhail.
Carrick could see a wide expanse of water through ranks of birch trees that sloped down to it. Mikhail passed the GPS back over his shoulder, then the paper with the numbers. Carrick understood. The numbers were longitude and latitude co-ordinates, and now they matched the GPS reading. An oath was spat behind him. Doors snapped open.
They tripped down the slope, swerving between the trees, and reached the water’s edge. Carrick was not called and hung back. Josef Goldmann and Viktor came to him. Carrick swung to face them and saw Josef Goldmann shake his head slowly and sadly, as if it was a moment of defeat, and Viktor grimaced as if to indicate that the problem was not his, or the solving of it. The water stretched away, and Carrick saw the tops of fence posts jutting up, and on the far side of the water a dense tree line and in it a place of bright colour. He squinted to see the source better. There was a red post. He understood more.
He understood about rain, about floodwater rising over fields, about frontier markers, about co-ordinates given for a meeting-place.
Carrick would go to Reuven Weissberg when he was called, not otherwise. Understood that they had not taken cognizance of the flood-waters rising in Ukraine and filling the Bug river far beyond its capacity. He heard Reuven Weissberg’s howl. The volleys of his swearing seemed to bounce away over the water as if flat stones were thrown and skipped. Beside Carrick, in his good coat, Josef Goldmann sat on wet sand and leaves, and held his head in his hands.
Carrick walked away, stepped carefully over the loose, sodden ground, and took a place among the trees. He’d thought that the banks were steeper less than a quarter of a mile from where he was, and that where the banks were steeper the river was deeper, faster and better confined.
Storks came upstream, flew prettily with a slow wingbeat, but they veered off when confronted with the oaths, blasphemies, obscenities of Reuven Weissberg.
He had a large-scale map of the place. The Crow had driven his hire car south-east from Hamburg and he was out in the depths of the Lüneburger Heide. The instructions given him had guided him to a point north of the town of Münster and west of Ebstorf. He turned into a car park.
There were the skeleton frames of swings and kids’ slides ahead of him, and near the entrance to the car park was a wooden-faced toilet block. Just beyond the gravel-stopping area a rail prevented vehicles going further. One car was there, its interior light on, engine running, fumes billowing from its exhaust, but the toilets were padlocked and the play area was deserted.
His headlights moved on the swings and slides, the toilet block, flitted over the expanse of gorse and bracken and caught the bare branches of birches at the end of their reach. Then they came to rest on the other car. The Crow’s lights had no power because the late afternoon was not yet evening, and he had only a marginal glimpse of the man in the driving seat. He thought he was young, cleanshaven, with neatly cut hair, but it was only an impression. He came to a stop about twenty-five metres from the other car but on the same side of the parking area, and switched off his engine.
The quiet fell on him.
He knew little of quiet. The greater part of the Crow’s life was lived among the deafening action of major construction sites. To be heard above the roar of dumper trucks, excavators, bulldozers, pile hammers driving down foundation columns, it was usual for him to shout and for that harsh voice to resonate; his voice was heard throughout the big building developments of the Gulf. When he went to Pakistan, to the crowded towns and cities of the North-West Frontier, it was his habit to hold his meetings and exchange information in the noisiest, most crowded bazaars. He was at home in noise, bustle and confusion. He moved on the car seat to ease a slight stiffness, and the squeak of the springs rang in the interior. So quiet … He wound down the window. More quiet flooded round him.