Coming through the entry gate to the Middle Castle were the German tourists. He estimated there were more than a hundred. He'd seen their two coaches stop in the car park near the river and he'd studied them for a few moments, before walking ahead of them towards the gate of perfect arched symmetry with the wooden portcullis over it. His training was to observe. It had been dinned into him on the IONEC course that he should always approach a dead drop with extreme caution, and should never go close to it before guaranteeing to himself that he was not watched. The Germans were elderly, boisterous, wore bright clothes and were festooned with cameras. What was now Poland, and what had been East Prussia more than half a century before, was popular, these days, as a destination for a retired generation of Germans from the West: it was about heritage, and visiting a place where they had been born, or where their parents had lived, and it was about cost.
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.