Vagabond (11 page)

It was a fine building, he thought. The organising committee had tried to attract a wider audience than the Russian community in exile. The town dignitaries were present. Local officials did not bow and scrape to him, as they would have in the privacy of their office, and the ambassador did not envelop him in a hug. The desk chief acknowledged him only with a raised eyebrow.

His mobile rang. Voices stilled, chairs scraped and heads were twisted. Many eyes were on him. He looked behind and sideways but the phone rang persistently. A man in Yekaterinburg had shown no respect, and a man in a gated estate south-west of London had shown no restraint. He took the phone from his pocket. The caller introduced himself and told him when his visitor would arrive. He cut the call short and switched off the phone.

Early expectations had failed. Timofey Simonov had been near destitute. He had begun to wonder for how much longer he could support the deadweight of the former brigadier. He had no friends and nowhere to live. He was in a bad bar among the girls’ streets in Amsterdam, nursing a beer. His brigadier was behind him and they had nothing. The chance to buy cannabis had slipped away and they had lost their money in a scam, caught out by a confidence trickster. Gloom and misery. Then he and the brigadier had been bought drinks. The conversation had begun and opportunities had been bounced. Timofey Simonov had explained the depth of his problem.

If the police had stopped Ralph Exton’s Opel hire car that night, his licence would have gone and probably a fortnight of his liberty. The drive, drunken and meandering, had been across the Dutch frontier into Belgium and on to Ostende. There was an airport outside the town, filled with old Antonovs and Ilyushins, more battered and fragile even than when they had been at the core of the transport fleet at Milovice. Ralph Exton had marched him, swaying a little, to a complex of Portakabins, had found a man, Vladdy, and had done the big talk: he had brought his Russian friends, he said, men of talent and intelligence, whom Mr Vik could use; they were at Mr Vik’s disposal.

To this day, years later, he could not have said what relationship existed between Ralph Exton and Mr Vik, who ran an airline of planes held together with sticking tape and glue. It had the protection of government and took crateloads of weapons from Burgas on Bulgaria’s Black Sea coast to any of the small, but promising, bush wars of central Africa. Some chemistry had existed between the two men, and it had given Timofey Simonov the break he had craved. For years Timofey had been on the periphery of Mr Vik’s operations, meeting intelligence people, who needed covert work done. When Mr Vik had gone down, stung by the Americans in Asia and extradited to New York, Timofey Simonov had slipped back into the shadows.

Now he had an empire, founded on an alcohol-fuelled night and the generosity of Ralph Exton. Maybe the first true friend he had had. There was applause. The orchestra were in and so was the choir. The conductor beamed at his audience.

A year later, when he had been building a network of his own in weapons and the materials of war, well thought of by his new patron, Mr Vik, Timofey Simonov had met up with his benefactor. He had bought expensive champagne for Ralph Exton, and had thanked him for providing him with his first step up. He had asked how well Ralph Exton had known the Russian with the aircraft going in and out of Africa. ‘Never met him, actually. Just thought, Timmy, from what I’d heard, that he might be right for you – and he was . . . You make your own luck, that’s what I always say. You did. Glad I could be of assistance.’

As the lights dimmed, Timofey Simonov might have reflected that life had been kind to him. He had friendship and the security that residence in Karlovy Vary brought. He applauded. He was at peace and thought any danger points were well covered.

It was what they always did on the last night, Sunday, before setting off on a Sword Tours journey to the battlefields and beaches. He could imagine it. Bags were by the front door. A last phone call had been made to the taxi company to confirm a pick-up in the morning. Some would have put histories of the campaigns in their hand luggage and others would have iPads to second-guess the guide. A few were lonely and would look to form friendships. All were anxious to touch the awesome battles fought on that Channel coast. It was likely that all had heard of the driver who would be beside their guide, that his knowledge was encyclopedic. Last checks: papers cancelled, neighbours warned of absence.

He stood in the doorway. Curnow was at a table, alone, with an empty plate and glass in front of him. He studied the man’s profile. The features were the same but he had seldom seen ‘Call-sign Vagabond’ calm, untroubled.

‘Hello, Vagabond. You’re looking well. I never liked the “Desperate” tag – rather demeaning to a man of your qualities. How about, when you’ve paid, we go for a walk somewhere quiet, and I can tell you why I’ve come and why I’m taking you back? Come on, Vagabond. I’ve an aircraft out there, idling. Let’s move.’

They walked on the open beach, the wind fierce. The moon showed the curl of the waves where they broke on the sand. There were lights on cargo ships out to sea, anchored while they waited for space under the cranes.

Bentinick had said, at the start, ‘I don’t want stories about the beach and what it was like, no statistics on how many drowned and how many were shot by their officers for discipline breakdown. I don’t want anything about little boats ploughing up the Thames, then taking to the open sea either. Next week, or the week after, you’ll be back in your zone. Now, though, I’m taking you back.’

‘I quit.’

‘You did, which was, to me, a severe embarrassment. I lost bets in the mess that night – said you’d be in the canteen next morning for breakfast and coming to the briefing group. You always were an obstinate beggar, never really an army man. But you, Vagabond, were the best agent handler we knew. Better than any before and any since.’

‘I walked out on you.’

‘Indeed you did, a long time ago. Made your point, water under the bridge. Remember Jocelyn?’

‘Hard, brilliant, liaison with the Box.’

‘You were her shout this afternoon. The best, she said, and I didn’t argue. The Al Qaeda teams are sacrosanct and the Belfast crowd are running around in circles because there are new people to target and they don’t have the toughness that you—’

‘I quit.’

‘Don’t interrupt, Vagabond. We’re running a Joe, speaks nicely and pretty plausible. The downside for him is that I can snap my fingers and he goes to gaol for ten years or more. The upside is that as long as he works for me he stays on the outside. Trouble is, like so many of them after they’ve cleared the first few hurdles, he’s started to flex himself a bit and that breeds arrogance. Know what I mean, Vagabond?’

Bentinick had his arm locked into Danny Curnow’s. Twice a pair of men sped past on sail craft with headlights spearing the sand, and a lone runner jogged at the surf line. Sometimes they wandered closer to the sea and the water slopped against his trainers.

‘If I’d known you were coming, I’d have told you not to bother.’

‘Vagabond, you should be down on bended knee thanking me for thinking of you.’

‘You can go back with an empty seat beside you. You remember what we did. With hindsight, what did we achieve?’

‘A poor argument, Vagabond. It was necessary, and we did it well. And, sometimes, like a wheel goes round, things have to be done again. I didn’t come here for the sake of my health. Can we go?’

The sea was in his nose, and old memories stirred. He remembered how it had been and the guilt caught at him. The dead cried out, and the wind ripped at his clothes. It would be a turbulent flight back.

Danny Curnow wrenched free of Matthew Bentinick’s grip on his arm and they went towards the dunes. He set a fierce pace. There had been no chance that he would refuse once he had heard the voice in the bistro, a siren calling.

Chapter 4

The house did not seem to have been painted, but there were new window frames: plastic. The front door had changed, too; it had been green and was now blue. The fire had been lit and peat smoke issued from the back chimney. The garden was the same, except that the few trees were taller and the shrubs thicker. The beds were not a wilderness and the grass had been mown but the cuttings not picked up – they lay in yellowed lines.

Danny Curnow used small but effective binoculars from the vantage-point. The young man, Sebastian, was wedged close to him.

On that morning in spring, there had been no foliage on the trees and the view was unrestricted to the front, back and left side of the house. He could see the barns but now they were part obstructed by conifers – perhaps planted fifteen years ago – and a pair of oak trees. He remembered the green tractor, thought it had been a Massey, but now it stood abandoned, and rusted. A jungle of nettles grew round and through it. His eyes raked over the magnified images: a child’s plastic pedal car, dumped on the lawn and broken, a kid’s bicycle with stabilisers on the back wheels, a small football goal. There was a line beyond the back door, strung between an apple tree with fruit on it and an iron pole. A family’s washing was pegged to it. A man’s underwear and a woman’s – functional – his shirts and her blouses, jeans for both of them, a boy’s pants and vests, small socks, T-shirts, trousers and sports gear in the colours of a Gaelic club. There hadn’t been washing twenty-five years before, when the dawn had come up and he had last been there.

There would have been rain the night before and prolonged showers through the morning, but in the afternoon it had cleared. The night had been cold, no frost but a chill in the air and a wind. When they’d arrived in the hedgerow, it had blustered in the trees and had bent the nettles. The hole hadn’t dried out. He had been in water then, and was now.

A God-awful journey, no sleep. Danny Curnow knew that a Joe had been up the hill less than twenty-four hours before, that fog had left him with no adequate protection and that he had passed a detailed interrogation. He knew, too, that an arms purchase was in the air, that the principals would be on the move before nightfall and that Matthew Bentinick had put the reaction in place. Danny doubted that others at Five could have moved so fast, avoiding a string of administrative committee meetings, assessments and delays. He knew, as well, that no one other than Matthew Bentinick could have pulled him out of the bistro on the square. A phone call had been made. Cash had been left in the glove box of the Sword Tours minibus. A hotel room had been cleared. The aircraft had taken them across the Channel to Northolt. There had been a brusque farewell from Bentinick, as if his mind was still locked in a time when he had held a commission and was addressing Sergeant Curnow, who was lucky enough to be attached to FRU. He was told when they would meet up. Another take-off, and another tossing flight across open sea. The pilot had been short of conversation and anxious to keep to the schedule. Daylight mattered, avoiding it.

Sheep could have used the hide that Dusty had dug out for Desperate all those years before. They had camouflaged it well when they’d slipped away, been gone before the priest had left and after the Riordan woman, newly widowed, had come out, gathered her boy into her arms and carried him inside, still howling. The sticks under the grass sods would have collapsed on a winter’s day, when rain cascaded down from the upper field, and the indent would have been exposed. Sheep would have found it, or inquisitive cattle. It was a good place and gave them cover. He had led and Sebastian had followed. There had been a police team three-quarters of a mile back, probably using the same turn-off into a stand of trees that had hidden a close reaction force of Fusiliers a quarter of a century before. He had moved towards the hide with confidence.

The aircraft had landed at Aldergrove. It had been directed by the Tower to the old military area. In his day there would have been Hercules transports there, wing to wing, executive jets for ferrying generals, and helicopters in neat rows. Only a few helicopters remained under the floodlights. No formalities. Sebastian, from Five, had met him. He was based at the new complex out at the Palace Barracks north-east of the city: there was an orange glow to locate Belfast. Danny had been there so many times: had lived and breathed it and spoken its language. He was watched from the shadows by handling staff, as if a stranger coming under cover of darkness, not through Arrivals, heralded danger. The car was a Ford, with rust, dents and mud along its sides. He smiled coldly to himself when he stood beside it and waited for the doors to be unlocked. They could screw up the outside of a car but not the tyres: good tread and expensive rubber. He didn’t doubt that the engine would be fine-tuned and that the car could shift if it had to. The young man had grinned, passed the fags, eased a Glock 9mm pistol from a rucksack on the back seat, checked the magazine and the safety, then laid it between his legs.

He had driven out of the airport and headed south towards Lurgan. Then they’d hit the motorway and gone towards Dungannon. It had not entered Danny Curnow’s mind that he should refuse Matthew Bentinick. There had been alcoholics in the Green Slime ranks, who had drunk themselves half insensible in the Intelligence Corps’ bars and in the ‘safe’ hotels: their commanders had sent them to shrinks. Most returned to duty as supposed new men. They had kept off the juice and been held up as warriors of will-power. Didn’t matter how long they’d been dry, there was always one night – a Dear John letter or a bawling-out from a sergeant when they’d have ‘just one . . .’ and that was it. He had come back, hadn’t fought it, and in the night they had seen the two unmarked cars, which would have been armoured, in the market square near to the library. They’d responded to the flash of headlights from the Ford, had tucked in behind and they’d all gone fast out of the centre of Dungannon. They’d headed for the high ground and Sebastian had used a sat-nav that took them to the trees and the track.