As she dressed, she paraded herself in front of the window.
Did the bloody bedspread, the bloody sheets and the bloody pillowcases matter? He had screwed up and didn't care enough to rescue himself. In the morning he would tell his Station Chief, trying to be casual and offhand, that his relationship with a Polish national was over.
Danuta never spoke. She looked around her, as if she had forgotten something, then went briskly to the dressing-table, picked up the small wood photograph frame, slid out the photograph of herself, tore it into small pieces and let them flutter on to the carpet. He heard her quietly close the apartment's front door. In any of those long moments after she'd risen from the bed he could have called her back and apologized. He could have said that he'd had a bloody awful day, but he hadn't. He was left alone in the silence of the room.
It was the fault of Ferret. A dead drop had not been serviced.
After he had showered and stripped the bed, he lay on it again and tried to sleep. He did not have the experience to know what older men and women in the Service could have told him, that crises rarely broke with a thunderclap demanding attention. The veterans would have said that crises dribbled into the consciousness of the officers of the Service, came hesitantly and without prior notice, then incubated at leisure like a tumour. He tossed but could not find sleep.
'I've come for the package — from Warsaw station.'
The older man behind the desk blinked, as if woken by her arrival. Behind him was a closed steel door and behind the door were the racks on which were laid the packages brought to the building by couriers from abroad.
She showed her ID card, the one she had used to swipe her way through the security check on the main door. Because she thought he had been asleep and needed it spelled out, she said, 'Alice North, 48 RD 21. There'll be a package for me, out of Warsaw.'
The clerk at this small unit off the wide atrium lobby area on the ground floor balefully shook his head. 'I've had nothing.'
'From Warsaw, George would have brought it in. It'll have my name on it.'
'George hasn't been…'
She interrupted, 'George would have brought it in two hours ago, could have been two and a half hours. Were you on supper break?'
'Just had sandwiches. I know George. I've been here all evening, not seen George, he's not called by. Fact is, I haven't seen George for five days. Can't help you, Miss North.'
'Look, I don't want to make a fuss, but George flew this morning to Warsaw where he will have collected a package addressed to me, and he will have delivered it, at least an hour and a half ago.'
'He's not been here.'
'George has to have been here, and left a package, addressed to me.'
The clerk grinned comfortingly. 'Perhaps, Miss North, George's flight's late. The new security, you know.'
'I checked on my mobile, the flight was on time. Could you, please, go and look? I'm sure you'll find it.'
First the clerk pushed his ledger book towards her, then turned it so that she could read the open page. There was no entry that was relevant to her. George's name was not listed. But the clerk pushed himself up heavily from his chair, sighed as if it were his fate to be the victim of bullying young women, and shuffled to the steel door. He opened it and disappeared inside.
Alice eased her weight from left foot to right foot, then reversed it. If this had not been a dead-drop date at Malbork Castle, she would still have been down at Fort Monkton: the rest of them on the refresher course had stayed the night and would not reappear until mid-morning the following day. On the three-day course, with eleven others, she had done sessions with the instructors to refresh her memory of the techniques of property entry, anti-terrorist ambush-driving tactics, and self defence — from which her hips and the bones at the base of her spine still ached. She had been on Ferret since the start, and had collected every dead-drop communication received since that day. She knew him…
The clerk emerged. 'Like I told you — but you wouldn't listen, Miss North — there's no package come in here from Warsaw tonight. I've nothing for you.'
She clattered away on her low shoes, and took a lift to the fourth floor. In a corner of East European Controllerate was her cubbyhole, adjacent to the ever-diminishing team doing Russia Desk. She'd been insinuated into that hole eight years earlier after the move from Century House to the magnificence of the present building, when Russia Desk was still the priority focus of the Service. She thought it was now little more than the equivalent of a once-patronized seaside resort where few with ambition wished to holiday. It was near to midnight. She sat in front of her computer for a full two minutes before switching it on.
Alice North was a gentle girl. In the thirty four years of her life she had never been confronted with the need to practise the violence of either the driving course or the self-defence training. She had a premonition and it frightened her. Rupert Mowbray was no longer in place to soothe the fear. She tapped in her password and entered the ATHS labyrinth. She was cleared for access to that part of the Automatic Telegram Handling System which covered the agent whose package she had come back to London to open. She rocked on her low swivel chair.
ferret: no show.
As she drove home across London, through the City and out into the Docklands developments, Alice told herself each of twenty reasons why the dead drop had not been met. Her maisonette overlooked the dark Thames waters but reflections played on the eddies. To Alice, it was normally secure, comfortable and warm. She thought of him, why he had not travelled to Malbork, and she felt a chill she could not escape. Her fingers found the pendant stone, polished amber, that hung at her neck from a light gold chain. She held it.
In his bed, hearing the chimes of the hours passing from the tower of the cathedral in the old town, unable to sleep, Gabriel Locke made a note in his mind that first thing at the embassy he must cancel his journey to Krakow for the conference of the security police. In a week's time he would not be in Krakow but on the road to the northeast again and going to Braniewo's street-market, which was the fall-back dead drop if Malbork Castle failed.
He lay alone and cold on the bare mattress of the bed.
…Chapter Two
Q. Which Russian military base is a front-line fortress confronting NATO?
A. Kaliningrad.
From the window of his office, on a clear day, it was possible to see the spire of the Holy Cross cathedral across the lagoon at Braniewo. The window was in the highest office building of the naval base, once German, once Soviet, now Russian, outside Kaliningrad. The Soviets and Russians had erased the German name, Pillau, and called the base Baltiysk, and it was home to the Baltic Fleet. The buildings had been reconstructed in old German style after being flattened by artillery and air attack. They were spaciously laid out, and that window overlooked a wide parade-ground. Beyond the building were the quays, dry docks and moorings of the fleet's warships. Standing at the window with his binoculars, made in Leipzig and with 10x42 power, he could close that gap of thirty-seven kilometres and note the brick texture of the spire. But the thirty-seven kilometres from his office to the spire that dominated the street-market in Braniewo was a delusion, a distance that mocked him. Only a gull could have travelled there directly from his office in the naval base at Baltiysk in the Kaliningrad oblast. He could not. The shallow lagoon was covered by military radar, patrolled by fast craft, under constant and vigorous observation.
His journey, from his office to Braniewo, would cover 121 kilometres. Between him and the street-market under the cathedral's spire was the border post, and at the border post, on his side, were fences, dogs, guns and suspicion.