‘Or a safe place. One or the other, depending how quickly arrangements can be made for you all to be brought to England. If, on the strength of the information you have so far given us, I can persuade my apparatchiks to take the rest on trust – particularly the information you are about to obtain in Berne – we shall fly you and your family to London on Wednesday night by special plane. That’s a promise. Witnessed by the Professor here. If not, we shall put you and your family in a safe place and look after you until my Number One says “come to England”. That’s the truth of the situation as best I understand it. Perry, you can confirm that.’
‘I can.’
‘At the second signing in Berne, how will you record the new information that you will receive?’
‘I got no problem. First I be alone with bank manager. I gotta right. Maybe I tell him, make me copies of this shit. I need copies before I sign it over. He’s my friend. If he don’t do it, whatta fuck? I got good memory.’
‘As soon as Dick gets you out of the Bellevue Palace Hotel, he’ll give you a recorder and you record everything you’ve seen and heard.’
‘No goddam frontiers.’
‘You’ll cross no frontiers until you come to England. I promise you that too. Perry, you heard me.’
Perry has heard him, but for a moment nonetheless he remains lost in thought, long fingers bunched to his brow as he stares sightlessly ahead of him.
‘Tom tells the truth, Dima,’ he concedes at last. ‘He’s given me his promise too. I believe him.’
14
Luke picked up Gail and Perry from Zurich-Kloten Airport at four o’clock on the following afternoon, Tuesday, after they had spent an uneasy night in the flat in Primrose Hill, both wakeful, each worried about different things: Gail mostly about Natasha – why the sudden silence? – but also about the little girls. Perry about Dima and the unsettling thought that Hector would henceforth be directing operations from London, and Luke would have command and control in the field with back-up from Ollie and, by default, himself.
From the airport, Luke drove them to an ancient village Gasthof in a valley a few miles to the west of Berne’s city centre. The Gasthof was charming. The valley, once idyllic, was a depressing development of characterless apartment blocks, neon signs, pylons and a porno shop. Luke waited for Perry and Gail to check in, then sat with them over a beer in a quiet corner of the Gaststube. Soon they were joined by Ollie, not in a beret any more, but a broad-brimmed black fedora hat which he wore rakishly over one eye, but otherwise his irrepressible self.
Luke quietly delivered himself of the latest news. His manner towards Gail was taut and distant, the very opposite of flirtatious. Hector’s preferred option, he informed the gathering, was a non-starter. After taking soundings in London – he did not mention Matlock in front of Perry and Gail – Hector saw no chance of obtaining clearance to fly Dima and family to England immediately after tomorrow’s signing, and had therefore set in motion his fall-back, namely a safe house within Switzerland’s borders until he got the green light. Hector and Luke had thought long and hard about where this should be, and concluded that, given the family’s complexity, remote was not synonymous with secret.
‘And Ollie, I believe that is also your opinion?’
‘Completely and totally, Luke,’ said Ollie, in his not-quite-right foreign-flavoured cockney.
Switzerland was enjoying an early summer, Luke went on. Better then, on the Maoist principle, to take cover among the many than stick out like sore thumbs in a hamlet where every unknown face is an object of scrutiny – all the more so if the face happens to be that of a bald, imperious Russian accompanied by two small girls, two boisterous teenage boys, a ravishingly beautiful teenaged daughter and a semi-detached wife.
Neither did distance offer any protection in the view of the barefoot planners: quite the reverse, since the small airport at Berne-Belp was ideally suited to discreet departure by private plane.
After Luke, it was Ollie’s turn, and Ollie, like Luke, was in his element, his style of reporting sparse and careful. Having examined a number of possibilities, he said, he had settled on a built-for-rent modern chalet on the outer slopes of the popular tourist village of Wengen in the Lauterbrunnen valley, sixty minutes’ drive and a fifteen-minute train journey from where they were now sitting.
‘And frankly, if
The efficient Luke then handed each of them a piece of plain card bearing the chalet’s name and address and its landline number for essential and innocuous calls to be made in the event of a problem with mobiles, though Ollie reported that in the village itself reception was immaculate.
‘So how long are the Dimas going to be stuck up there?’ Perry asked, in his role as prisoners’ friend.
He hadn’t really expected an informative answer, but Luke was surprisingly forthcoming – certainly more than Hector would have been in similar circumstances. There were a bunch of Whitehall hoops that had to be gone through, Luke explained: Immigration, the Justice Ministry, the Home Office, to name but three. Hector’s current efforts were directed at bypassing as many of them as he could until after Dima and family were safely housed in England:
‘My ballpark estimate would be three to four days. Less if we’re lucky, longer if we’re not. After that, the logistics begin to fur up a bit.’
Luke blushed, then laughed along with them, then strove to explain. Ops like this one – not that any two were ever the same – had constantly to be revised, he said. From the moment Dima dropped out of circulation – as of midday tomorrow, therefore, God willing – there would be some sort of hue and cry for him, though what sort was anyone’s guess:
‘I simply mean, Gail, that from midday tomorrow on, the clock’s ticking, and we have to be ready to adapt at short notice according to need. We can do that. We’re in the business. It’s what we’re paid for.’
Urging the three of them to get an early night and call him at any hour if they felt the least need, Luke then returned to Berne.
‘And if you’re talking to the hotel switchboard, just remember I’m John Brabazon,’ he reminded them, with a tight smile.
Alone in his bedroom on the first floor of Berne’s resplendent Bellevue Palace Hotel with the River Aare running beneath his window and the far peaks of the Bernese Oberland black against the orange sky, Luke tried to reach Hector and heard his encrypted voice telling him to
He had a second number to dial in emergency, but there being no emergency he knew of, he left a cheery message to the effect that the roof was thus far holding, Milton and Doolittle were at their posts and in good heart, and Harry was doing sterling work, and give his love to Yvonne. He then took a long shower and put on his best suit before going downstairs to begin his reconnaissance of the hotel. His feelings of liberation were if anything more pronounced than at the Club des Rois. He was barefoot Luke, riding a cloud: no last-minute panic instructions from the fourth floor, no unmanageable overload of watchers, listeners, overflying helicopters and all the other questionable trappings of the modern secret operation; and no cocaine-driven warlord to chain him up in a jungle stockade. Just barefoot Luke and his little band of loyal troops – one of whom he was as usual in love with – and Hector in London fighting the good fight and ready to back him to the hilt:
‘If in doubt,
Something had stirred in Luke at that moment: a mystical sense of bonding, of kinship with Hector that went beyond the collegial.
