I clambered to my feet, my chest heaving and my head numb from being underwater, and screamed out at Yuri. He looked up at me and I thought I saw him smile.
‘What do you have in your hand?’ he shouted out at me. I looked down and realized that my fist was still clenched around the scrap of material I’d salvaged.
‘Let her go!’ I yelled again.
He held out his free hand. ‘I would like you to bring me whatever you found down there. Or I will kill your girlfriend. Don’t make me wait too long.’
I could hear Sarah sobbing, and saw a stream of saliva dripping from her mouth. Christ knew what he had put her through in the last few hours, and indeed in the last few months. I should never have brought her with me in the first place – I should have found a way of getting her to safety in Italy, and none of this would have happened. Her life now hung in the balance, and the tiny strip of canvas in my hand was all the leverage I had. But I couldn’t give this to Yuri, because many more lives hung in the balance. Millions of lives, in London, Washington, Moscow…
‘One last chance!’ he called out. ‘Come over here and give it to me.’
‘I’m sorry, Sarah,’ I said, and the tears came, finally – the tears for all the people I’d done this to.
Yuri fired, and I screamed as I saw the recoil and the impact. Part of me felt that if I made a lot of noise myself I could cancel out the sound of the shot and it wouldn’t have really happened.
Sarah fell forwards, her body splaying out and the blood spreading across the ice. Yuri lifted his gun and turned to me, preparing to shoot, but there was a burst of noise behind me and I turned to see Sasha breaking through the surface of the water.
Yuri’s hand froze in mid-air.
‘Are you all right, son?’ he shouted, and he began to walk over the ice towards us. Sasha grabbed hold of the rocks and climbed ashore, gasping for air as I had done. I stumbled towards him and put out a hand to lift him up. He looked at me with shock, and as he came level with me I grabbed him with my other hand and passed him the fragment of the label.
He looked down at it, then peered at me, his eyes scanning my face. His expression turned from puzzlement to horror and then to slow realization. He looked up at his colleague, who was coming down to meet him. ‘Get the radio!’ he shouted. And then, to Yuri, who was now just a few feet away: ‘Don’t shoot him, Father – he was telling the truth. There was mustard gas down there. Look.’ He opened his hand to show him the fragment. ‘We must tell Moscow at once and make sure they cancel the command.’
Yuri stopped walking and stared down at his son. ‘You fool!’ he said. ‘It makes no difference if there was mustard gas down there – the British have taken it and used it against us.’
‘It’s over, Yuri,’ I said. ‘You may be able to pull the wool over Sasha’s eyes, but you can’t pull it over mine. I’m no longer the boy you met in Germany in 1945.’
He turned to me and sneered, his face creasing so that his eyes nearly disappeared in the wrinkles. ‘That wasn’t the first time we met, comrade. For a while I was even afraid you might remember it. I’ve been told I have a memorable face. But you never made the connection. Then again, you have missed rather a lot of connections.’
‘What the hell are you talking about?’
He looked out across the water, sniffing the sea air. ‘I’m talking about New Year’s Eve, 1939, in the Shepherd’s Hotel, Cairo. You were fourteen. Your father introduced us, very briefly, and I asked you about school. And you were so pleased with yourself, because you were just about to enter a new one. Do you remember now?’
I remembered. It had been a wild party, one of the last before the war, and in some ways my induction into the adult world: I’d smoked my first cigarette and drunk my first cocktail that night, marvelling at the beautiful women in their evening gowns and the men chasing them around. I had danced in a heaving line to ‘Auld Lang Syne’ and nearly been crushed during the countdown as the crowd had roared in the new year, followed by the flags waving, the confetti and everyone embracing each other in the hot sticky Egyptian night. And yes, at one point in the evening Father had introduced me to a funny little Russian who had leaned over and asked me about school, and I had proudly told him I was going to Winchester next term.
The funny little Russian didn’t seem so funny now.
‘So you knew my father in Cairo,’ I said.
‘Yes. That was where we met, in fact, and where I recruited both him and Colin Templeton. It’s a strange thing: I had hoped your father might become Chief of the Service one day, but in the end it was Templeton who did. But Colin was in the Army back then – how could I have guessed that things would turn out the way they did? Life has a strange way of working out sometimes, doesn’t it?’
Templeton a traitor. ‘Why?’ I said, my mouth trying to catch up with all the thoughts swirling around my brain. ‘Why?’
He tugged at his goatee as though I’d set him a mathematical puzzle. ‘Why did they decide to serve us, you mean? Well, as you are no longer a boy and we are now so close to the endgame, perhaps it’s time you learned the truth. Which is that they had no choice.’
‘I don’t understand,’ I said. And I wasn’t sure I wanted to.
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘have you still not joined the dots? I photographed them, you see. I kept the negatives and persuaded both of them to serve as my agents, or their wives and superiors would receive copies of them, and they would be ruined. But I did it separately with each of them, you see. That was the genius of it! Neither knew I had recruited the other. Well, not at first. Your father eventually found out what I’d done, in Germany, shortly before I shot him.’
‘You’re saying he and Templeton…’
‘Yes.’
I stared at him, anger rising from my stomach to my chest, making it hard for me to breathe. Father had always been a man’s man: a record-breaking racing driver, a decorated commando. He had loathed ‘queers’, and that had been part of the reason I’d loathed him. But now I saw that this was precisely the cover he would have used if Yuri were telling the truth. Another thought struck me: Mother. Had he used her political views as a pretext to get her locked way, so that he could continue with his secret life?
No. It was unthinkable.
‘You’re lying,’ I said. ‘For some sick reason, you’re lying.’
Yuri tilted his head to one side, amusement at my distress glinting in those evil little eyes. ‘I’m afraid not, Paul. It’s the truth, although they both did everything in their power to hide it from the rest of the world. You should know that many men suffer from this affliction, even those with families and children. Knowledge of this fact has served me well in my career, and that of several of my colleagues, for that matter. Burgess was always shameless about his disease, almost proud of it, but others have not been. I have found that men with secrets can be easily manipulated. Homosexuals also often make for excellent agents, because they have already spent years deceiving everyone they know – a lifetime of training, if you will. And your father and Templeton were not just casual lovers – they believed they were in love with each other, if you can imagine such a thing! Why do you think Templeton kept you so close to him after your father died, and nurtured your career as he did? You were his lover’s son. No doubt you reminded him of your father. Perhaps he even imagined…’
I lunged at him, but he took a step back and I stumbled and fell onto the ice, exhausted and defeated. Yuri raised his arm and aimed the pistol at me.
‘I think it is time to finish this.’
‘Do it, then,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t matter now, because we’re all going to die anyway. But that’s what you want, isn’t it? Because you arranged the attacks on the bases. I wonder if you will be able to explain it to your son when the fallout appears and his skin starts peeling away.’
Sasha stared at me in disbelief and Yuri laughed.
‘He’s lying, my son,’ he said calmly. ‘He’s just a sad little traitor trying to save his own skin. Why would I initiate an attack on our own country? It would be suicide. Do I strike you as suicidal?’ He stretched out an arm at the absurdity of the idea.
‘It’s certainly suicide now,’ I said, ‘because the Americans will retaliate and the fallout will reach here. But it wasn’t suicide when you thought of this plan, because you and all your cronies would be safe in the bunkers beneath Moscow. I think you’re so deluded you believe nuclear war is worth it.’
‘And I think your mind has gone…’
‘No,’ I said. ‘You’ve told me some truths, and now it’s time for your son to hear the truth about you. You planned this. I know it, because I worked in the West and nobody there is insane enough to try to start a nuclear war. But you are. I think you’ve calculated that even though both sides will be severely damaged, in the end the Soviet Union is so enormous that it will absorb the losses and continue, whereas the West will be destroyed for hundreds of years, a radioactive desert.’
He didn’t say anything, and I watched as Sasha registered the hesitation, and in that moment saw the truth. I almost felt sorry for him.
‘Father?’ he said, and Yuri turned to him. He must have seen that he was disbelieved, because he gave a rueful smile.
‘Yes, Sasha,’ he said, ‘this is true.’ He lifted his chin. ‘But I offer no apologies – we will rise again from this.’ He turned back to me. ‘You were the trigger for it,’ he said. ‘I sent you here in 1945 to find this U-boat, remember? It’s something I have thought about for many years.’
He’d sent me here? Had he? I thought back to my dossier, and what Yuri had written about my time in Helsinki. ‘His performance so far has been exemplary…’ Of course. I hadn’t been trying to beat the Russians to the U-boat at all, but the British. Templeton had seen the signals from SOE in Stockholm about a U-boat captain being washed ashore in the Åland archipelago, and he had reported it to Moscow. Yuri had told him they wanted to get to the body before the British, and so Templeton had sent me out here armed with a Browning and warned about possible undercover Russian agents getting in my way. Jasper Smythe had been just who he had claimed to be, a British agent, and I’d killed him thinking he was a Russian.
‘What was the idea of sending me here?’ I asked ‘Was it a trial run – something like that?’
He gave a shallow smile. ‘Something like that. But I also very much wanted to get hold of the mustard gas, so I wasn’t pleased at all that you failed in that part of the mission. I came here myself and questioned the local policeman at length to try to discover where exactly you had gone. He knew very little, unfortunately. But yes, I was interested in you because you were the son of an agent I had recruited five years earlier, and you seemed to have promise.’
Promise.
‘So after my operation here, you decided to set up my recruitment in Germany, using Father and the honey trap with Anna.’
‘Yes. But I had no idea at the time that it would work so well. You and your precious Anna! All these years later, and the woman is dead after trying to murder you, but you still can’t stop talking about her. Isn’t it amazing what we will do for love? Or what we think is love, anyway.’
I didn’t reply to that. Not twenty yards away, Sarah was lying on the ice. But I had to stay calm with this bastard, for all our sakes.
‘So what did you do next?’ I asked, keeping my voice level with great effort. ‘How did you find out where the U-boat was?’
‘When Templeton told me you’d left the canisters behind, I was furious. But I decided there must still be a way of getting in.’
‘So then you came back to get the canisters,’ I said. I needed to know it all now.
‘No, not then. Events overtook me, and I had other things to attend to. I set up the operation to recruit you in Germany, and that took a lot of time. But I knew that the mustard gas here wasn’t going to go anywhere, and I kept it in the back of my mind to use at a later date. The existence of this weapon is just one of many secrets I have held in reserve over the years, to use when the time was right. The war came to a triumphant end and other things happened. I was decorated, and promoted, and moved departments. But I never forgot that there was a U-boat out here with a new form of mustard gas buried in it. And I thought of it again a few weeks ago, when Nixon made it clear to our ambassador in Washington that he was considering nuclear war against us. I thought he was playing games, and I knew that whatever he did, short of a nuclear strike itself, certain men close to Brezhnev would feel the same way.’
‘So you decided to make the game seem more real by attacking two of your own naval bases.’
He nodded. ‘In effect. When the Americans started moving ships in the Gulf of Aden, I realized they were planning something to try to scare us. I decided to play along. I sent a couple of my men out here to get the canisters, and then they released them towards the Estonian islands. I reported it as an attack, and made sure that this was taken seriously. We sent special troops to investigate. Then Nixon sent his B-52s into the air, armed with nuclear weapons, and I realized the opportunity had finally come.’
‘How did you know they weren’t planning a real attack?’
‘They had left several of their nuclear submarines in port, where they could be attacked easily – presumably because they wanted us to receive the signal that they were raising their nuclear alert, but couldn’t risk doing it publicly because their citizens might panic and force a genuine crisis. The Americans’ actions alone would never have been enough to persuade Brezhnev to initiate a strike. But I presented the evidence in a certain way. Nixon’s threats to our ambassador, coupled with the activity of his navy, then this despicable chemical attack on our bases,’ – he smiled gently – ‘and now nuclear-armed bombers heading for our airspace… I persuaded Brezhnev to summon everyone to the bunker and informed them that as result of all this I thought we were about to be attacked by the West. Andropov and a few of the others were sceptical, as I’d suspected they would be. So I had you fetched from your cell. You performed beautifully, I must say, once again exceeding my expectations. You told us all about your operation here, confirming for everyone in the room that the chemical weapon originated from the West, just as I had argued. Brezhnev had no choice but to put us on a war footing. If he hasn’t heard from me within the next ten minutes, he will launch a tactical strike against the United States and other countries, Britain, naturally, included.’
‘And the Americans and the British will retaliate. Many Soviet citizens will die as a result, first in the blast, and then from the fallout.’
He didn’t even flinch as I said it, just nodded his head. ‘It is worth sacrificing the few for the many.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m familiar with that line of thinking.’ I thought of Nigeria, where he had planned the assassination of one man in order to gain control of the country. And of Italy, where he had been content to watch many more killed in terrorist attacks. ‘But this is different, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘You’re going to sacrifice millions of people today, not just a few. The British have forty-eight Soviet cities as their initial targets. I suspect the Americans have the same, or more.’
‘Everything is relative,’ he said. ‘It is still a few compared to the many. The Soviet Union has two hundred and forty million citizens. A full-scale nuclear war may kill ten or even twenty million of them, but just think of the future after that. We will grow greater, and stronger. We will be in control, finally, not the West. We will never have another chance like this, not now that we have agreed to this insane idea to reduce our weapons. That will help the Americans, not us. The time for us to strike is now. Out of the horror will come a new dawn.’
His words echoed in the wind as it blasted around the island.
I turned to Sasha.
‘So now you know,’ I said. ‘This isn’t a choice between me and your father, or even between East and West. This is a choice between your father and the survival of our species for hundreds of years.’
Sasha slowly raised his pistol. He pointed it at my head, but then turned on his heels and aimed it towards his father.
Yuri’s eyes darted towards him, but his face showed no other sign of distress.
‘Put that away, Sasha,’ he said, a little too casually. ‘This man is a foreign agent, and he cannot be trusted. There are things you know nothing about, and cannot comprehend. Have faith in me – I am your father, but I am also your commanding officer. We will die here together, like men, for the greater glory of the Motherland.’
Sasha kept his gun hand steady. ‘So this was your plan?’ he said, his voice thick with suppressed rage. ‘To cut off most of our limbs in the hope we will grow a few back faster than our enemy?’
‘I told you to put the pistol down.’ Yuri’s voice had also turned colder. ‘There is nothing you can do about this now, and there is nothing to fear.’
‘But what about me, Father? How did I fit into your plan? Because it wasn’t always for us to die out here together for the glory of the Motherland, was it? It was for you to be safely underground with the others. So what about me? You planned to leave me outside to die?’
As Sasha lifted the pistol, Yuri’s eyes dulled for a moment as he realized he had lost, and then the bullet penetrated his forehead, the sound of the shot only reaching my ears after I’d seen its impact. Yuri stood there for a moment as though nothing had happened, and then his knees crumpled as if they were made of paper and he toppled onto the ice. In the same moment, Sasha swivelled and aimed his gun at me. I threw myself towards the ground, but I was too slow and the shot caught me somewhere in the stomach.
The back of my head hit the ice and I wondered why I couldn’t feel any pain, and then it came, spreading through me like fire, and I felt the throb of the ice below me, or perhaps it was the throb of pain, they had merged, and I waited for the darkness. So this was where it ended – in the cold and the ice of this tiny island. My eyes were still open. Although my vision was blurring, I could see two figures in front of me – Sasha and the other one – and the case between them, open now, and inside a small black unit. After some time, I heard the familiar bursts of static and then Sasha’s voice.
‘Moscow, this is Rook. Moscow, this is Rook. Do you read me?’
‘Rook, this is Moscow. We read you. Four minutes to zero hour. Okay to proceed?’
‘No, stand down from preliminary command, Moscow. I repeat, urgent, stand down from preliminary command. Event 12 is an accident, and I have the evidence for it. Do you read me?’
‘Rook, we read you. Please give details.’
‘Moscow, I am at the source of the accident. The Englishman was correct. I have evidence of the canisters in my hand and can see the chemical in the water. Raven has been killed in the line of duty, serving the Motherland with honour, but he confirmed this to me personally before he died. Event 12 is an accident. Please acknowledge this.’
Seagulls shrieked in the distance, and time stretched out. How long had it been? A minute? Two? I didn’t dare count the seconds.
And then it finally came: ‘Rook, message received. Preliminary command has now been stood down.’
I closed my eyes. I could hear the faint echo of my teeth chattering deep in my skull and the waves lapping against nearby rocks, again and again, as they had done for eons and would now do for eons more, all being well. Yes, but what was an eon, really? I twisted my head towards the sound and prised my eyes open a fraction. I was rewarded with the view of a wave churning into an eddy of water, swirling around and then releasing and starting again, the pattern of the sea in miniature, the pattern of life, perhaps, each time different, each wave lasting such a very short amount of time. I watched, fascinated, as the foam formed on the tip of the wave, and then broke and was subsumed into the darkness of the water, never to be seen again. I was like that foam, and so was everything else.
‘Let’s go,’ said Sasha, somewhere far above me. ‘It’s over.’
‘And the traitor?’ asked the other man. I closed my eyes again, and held my breath. Fingers reached around my neck, and I braced myself for the final struggle. But he was checking my pulse.
‘I can’t feel anything, sir. Shall I dispose of the body?’
‘No,’ said Sasha, the man who had been my companion on so many occasions in the pubs and parks of London. ‘The birds can feast on he and his girlfriend. But help me load my father into the helicopter. I will debrief you in the air.’
I had a sudden vision of a field, and palm trees, and then a glimpse of a driveway in the night and Templeton in slippers peering out from his door. The boots began to crunch away from me, and then there was the sound of the helicopter’s engine and the rotors starting up and the wind howling as they took off, the noise cutting through the air until finally it had faded and there was no sound left but the lapping of the waves and a refrain running around and around in my mind.
Timor mortis conturbat me. Timor mortis conturbat me…