Mr Jones was abandoned in the deserted corridor, hands folded across his stomach, skirted by passing nurses and doctors. A bloody shame for old Demyonov, he thought.
Even a bloody Russian would look forward to going home, wouldn't he, even if it meant traipsing back to Moscow?
Funny thing was that he wasn't a bad chap, and they'd miss him at the Scrubs whether he went out in a box or with a one-way airline ticket.
From his tunic pocket Mr Jones took a set of clippers and started to tidy his nails. There would be a few minutes before the storm broke.
He walked from East Acton Underground station through the estate of Council homes, where the walls were daubed with tribal soccer slogans and teenagers fumbled in the entries to the garages with their girl-friends' zippers.
Past the prison with its floodlit walls topped with barbed wire coils, past the twin towers of the gate house, past the surveillance cameras. His hands were deep in his overcoat pockets, and in the rush out of his home he had forgotten the scarf that was a month-old Christmas present. He had been lucky with his connections, had caught the trains quickly.
God alone knew how he was going to get back to Century, but Alan Millet's wife always took the car on a Saturday night to her bridge session. He'd have to go back into Century, after a thing like this it would be expected of him.
Of course, all the business could have been managed at the end of a telephone, but that wasn't the way of the Service.
Not that Alan Millet could complain. Holly was his man, and once, long ago, Holly had been his pride.
The lights of the hospital blazed down on him as he turned off the pavement and threaded his way through the car park.
The Medical Block had a certain venerable charm, and the warmth cascaded around him. He was stopped by a porter. What was his business? Coronary Care, first floor, he was expected. Alan Millet ignored the uncertain statement that visitors were not permitted this late at night. In his wallet he carried the authority of a polaroid- printed identity card that governs entry to Century House. He hesitated for a moment at the top of the stairs, looked both ways down the corridor, and saw the upright figure of a uniformed prison officer.
He nodded a courtesy greeting and pushed his way through the doors. He saw two occupied beds and, from the pillows, pairs of concerned eyes peered at him. They were the living, they could resent the circus arrival that had been summoned to the curtained laager in the far corner. There was a trolley beside the semi-concealed bed, its top stretcher surface empty. A nurse was detaching electrodes from their cables, another was writing her notes busily. Two young doctors stood close to each other, their eyes hollowed by tiredness. A pair of West Indian porters, expressionless, wheeled the trolley away across the open-plan unit and out through the door.
'Doubtfire, Home Office.' A sharp voice behind Millet.
'You're a bit late, old chap.'
'Millet…' he paused,'… Foreign and Commonwealth.
What's happened to him.'
'Just gone on the trolley. There's a box underneath the top, they put them in there, doesn't upset people that way.
About twenty minutes ago they gave up. Not a chance, everything done that could have been, he had the red carpet.'
'They said he hadn't long when they called me at home. I suppose I was sort of hoping… they're sometimes wrong.'
'Good riddance. What'll he get, Hero of the bloody Soviet Union?'
A nursing Sister approached the two men. The message was bright in her eyes. This was an operational area.
Doubtfire had a car and driver. Night Duty Officer for the Home Office, a travelling fire brigade. He was returning to his cubbyhole in Whitehall and the telephone that he prayed would stay silent, and a thermos of instant coffee. Millet was thankful to accept a lift. In the back of the car they talked in desultory fashion. Two practised civil servants, uncertain of the other's role and standing, and cautious of confidences. Millet was dropped in Great Charles Street at the entrance to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, which left him a long walk along the river to Century House.
The wind whipped at Alan Millet's legs as he hurried along the empty pavements. The sleet pecked at the skin of his cheeks, fluttered his close-cut hair. He was obsessed with a man called Michael Holly. A tall man, alive with enthusiasm, totally self-contained. Memories more than a year old. He supposed that every desker felt a stifling involvement with his field man. Like the first whore of a man's life, never forgotten, never to be escaped from. There was a pub across the river, where he had taken Holly – he always called himself that, never bothered with his given name – where they had sipped their drinks and nibbled at the tired bread and ham, where Holly had asked the expected question. What happens if
…? No problem, Alan Millet had said, no problem there. The ransom money's under lock and key in the Scrubs, and a bloody good laugh he'd had as he said it. Nothing for Holly to worry himself with, and of course it wouldn't come to that anyway. A bloody good laugh… The street lights picked out the man who stood against the river parapet, and who stared down at the ruffled water. Must have been the antibiotics he had been taking to stifle the influenza bug, must have been that which had loosened his tongue. A field man should never have been given a guarantee.
But Millet had offered Holly a promise.
It won't happen, of course… but there's a man in a cell at Wormwood Scrubs. Of course it won't happen… but if it did, well, there'd just have to be a swap.
Bloody marvellous, wasn't it? And all the spadework done through Belgrade, all the ribbons tied. All ready for the flight to Berlin, and the only haggle was over which crossing-point, what time, which day.
Michael Holly for Oleg Demyonov. Them happy and us happy.
But now a man lay in the mortuary of the Hammersmith hospital and Alan Millet's promise was a worthless thing.
Chapter 2
His weapon against the rusty binding of the bolt was a fifty kopeck coin.
For more than an hour he had crouched on the floor, bracing himself as the speed changes of the train and the unevenness of the track destroyed the momentum of his painstaking work. With the milled edge of the coin he chipped at the red-brown crust that had formed between the lower lip of the cap of the bolt and the metal sheet plate of the carriage flooring. He had something to show for his effort. A tiny pile of dust debris was collected beside his knee, and some had stained the material of his grey trousers.
Those who had known Michael Holly at his home in the south-east of England, or had shared office and canteen space with him at the factory on the Kent fringes of London, might not now have recognized their man. A year in the gaols had left its mark. The full flesh of his cheeks and chin had been scalped back to the bone. A bright confidence at his eyes had been replaced by something harsher. Clothes that had hung well now fell shapelessly like charity hand-outs. A ruddiness in his face had given way to a pallor that was unmistakably the work of the cells. His full dark hair had been cropped in the barber's chair of the holding prison to a brush without lustre.
This was an old carriage, but still well capable of performing the task set for it when it had first joined the rolling-stock in the year that Holly had been born. It had carried many on this journey. It had brought them in their hundreds, in their thousands, in their tens of thousands along this track. It was a carriage of the prison train that ran twice weekly from the capital city to the interior depths of the Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic of Mordovia. On the floor, in the filth and the watery amber half-light, he scraped at the bolt that had felt the boots and slippers and sandals of the prisoners who had encompassed his life time.
Not easy to prise at the rim of the bolt, because this was a purpose-built carriage. No ordinary carriage, not subject to any hasty conversion to ensure its usefulness, but out of the railway factory yards of Leningrad and
