The Waiting Time Read online

  GERALD

  SEYMOUR

  The Waiting Time

  BANTAM PRESS

  LONDON · NEW YORK · TORONTO · SYDNEY · AIJCKLAND

  Once a reporter for Independent Television News, Gerald Seymour has lived in the West Country near Bath for the last thirteen years.

  His previous bestselling novels include, among others,

  Harry’s Game, The Glory Boys, Red Fox, Field of Blood, The Journeyman Tailor, The Heart of Danger,

  and,

  most recently, Killing Ground.

  Also by Gerald Seymour

  Harrys Game

  The Glory Boys

  Kingfisher

  Red Fox

  The Contract

  Archangel

  In Honour Bound Field of Blood

  A Song in the Morning At Close Quarters

  Home Run

  Condition Black

  The Journeyman Tailor The Fighting Man

  The Heart of Danger Killing Ground

  TRANS WORLD PUBLISHERS LTD

  61—63 Uxbridge Road, London W5 5SA

  TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS (AUSTRALIA) PTY LTD 15—25 Helles Avenue, Moorebank, NSW 2170

  TRANS WORLD PUBLISHERS (NZ) LTD

  3 William Pickering Drive, Albany, Auckland

  Published 1998 by Bantam Press

  a division of Transworld Publishers Ltd

  Copyright © Gerald Seymour 1998

  The right of Gerald Seymour to be identified

  as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright Designs and

  Patents Act 1988.

  All of the characters in this book

  are fictitious, and any resemblance

  to actual persons, living or dead,

  is purely coincidental.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBNs 0593 042115 (hb)

  0593 042492 (pb)

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means,

  electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording,

  or otherwise, without the prior permission of

  the publishers.

  Typeset in llpt Palatino by Kestrel Data, Exeter, Devon. Printed in Great Britain by Mackays of Chatham Plc, Chatham, Kent.

  To Gillian, Nicholas and James

  Prologue

  He opened the door and carried the thin plastic rubbish bag to the front gate. The cat followed him and he heard, carried by the wind from the north, the first shot.

  The aircraft had been over a minute or so earlier and he had seen its navigation lights and flamed exhausts through the window - the house had shaken below the flight path.

  He dumped the plastic bag on the far side of the gate, on the paving. The cat howled because it could not scratch a hole in the frozen ground, and he heard the burst of automatic firing, sharp but distant in the night air.

  The pastor shivered. He should have put on a coat because the bitter wind brought a chill to his shoulders and the small of his back. He heard more shots from behind the house, and the singing of the wind in the wires, against the roof of the house and around the squat brick tower of the church across the road. She called to him from inside. Why had he left the door open? Why did he let the cold into the house? The cat bolted for the open door. He heard more shots and saw, above the sharp-angled roof of the house, a flare merge with the low cloud. He went inside, pushed the door shut and banged his hands across his arms and

  chest to warm himself. Far away, in the long distance, a siren shrieked. He went into the living room, off the hallway. The cat was already on her lap, and he told her that there was shooting at the base, there must be a night exercise. She did not look up from her knitting: she was making a small cardigan for the newest grandchild and her forehead was furrowed with concentration. She murmured with concern that it was a bad night for the young soldiers to be out.

  The pastor sat at the table in the living room and worked at his address for the coming Sunday. He wrote his notes, turned the pages of his Bible. She put her knitting under the chair, and said she was going to bed. The cat lay on the threadbare carpet in front of the low, open fire. The radio played Beethoven softly, a concert performed by an orchestra from Prague. He heard her go up the creaking stairs. Where he came from, south of Leipzig and east of Erfurt, a bishop had said that it was more important to obey God than human beings. Simple for a man of his status to make such a statement, hard for a humble pastor. The quiet was around him. He had been thirty-six years a pastor in the Evangelist Church and censorship came easy to him: he had nothing bold to say, he lived within the walls of the system, and it was his delight every November to come with his wife from the small industrial town between Leipzig and Erfurt to the wild winds and storms of the Baltic coast. He came for three weeks to free the resident pastor for conferences and seminars, and he intended to move here when he reached the retirement age, to live his last years beside the seashore, if permission was given. He made the notes for his Sunday address. He would do nothing, in his preaching and in his conduct, to threaten the granting of that permission. He knew exactly when his retirement was due:

  in three days he would have twenty more months to serve.

  That night of the week, whatever the weather conditions, the aircraft came low and thundering over the base and then over the pastor’s house, but he had never before heard shots at night. He listened for more shooting and heard nothing. He switched off the radio, crouched in front of the fire and stroked the cat fondly. He drained the last of the coffee from the cup and took it to the kitchen at the back of the house. He stood at the sink and rinsed the cup, the water icy on his hands. He heard the clatter of a machine gun, then the siren again, and more single shots.

  Slowly the pastor climbed the stairs. His wife grunted in her sleep. The bedroom was in darkness. He went to the bathroom to wash his face and under his armpits, and to brush his teeth. The tap water ran and he undid the buttons of his shirt.

  No curtains hung over the bathroom window at the back of the house, and in daylight there was a fine view from here, the best view from the house. From the bathroom window he could see the dull-lit and empty square, around which were built two storey concrete apartments. He could see the narrow road that sloped down to the shoreline and the older homes that fronted onto the road. He could see the wind-stripped trees that formed a wall between the community and the beach, and the old piers. The water beyond was white-flecked and the foam of a boat’s wake cut at the water. The local people called the water the Salzhaff, and he gazed across it to the dark shape of the peninsula. He had never been there: it was closed to the local people. The peninsula was a military camp.

  A wavering light climbed. It was engulfed by the cloud. A flare burst, was muffled by the cloud, then fell in brilliance over the water. Before it splashed down, another had soared, burst, and another. No longer the darkness over the Salzhaff. It was a panorama laid out for his entertainment. The tap water gurgled down the drain, ignored.

  He saw the small fishing boat bucking across the water, He saw the cascade of the flares. He saw the ripple lines of the tracer bullets as they swept out from the shoreline, red tracks dying in the water, seeming to hunt and probe for a target.

  Then he should have turned off the tap, forgotten about washing his face and his armpits and about brushing his teeth. He should have gone out of the bathroom, crossed the landing and closed the door of the bedroom behind him. He should have turned his back on the brilliance of the flares over the water of the Salzhaff, and the lines of the tracers, and the wake of the fishing boat closing on that place in the water where
the bullets died. He should have gone to the bedroom where his wife slept and buried his eyes and his ears in the hardness of the pillows.

  The water ran into the basin. He leaned over it and opened the window that he might see better. The cold of the night was as nothing to him. He understood. It was no exercise. It was not training for the young soldiers of the base. He watched.

  The tracer lines lazily converged from four, five points on the peninsula. They locked together where they died. The fishing boat veered towards that point. An amplified shout, tin-toned through a microphone, was brought to him on the wind gust from the peninsula. The tracer lines were cut, as if in response, their life gone. A small spotlight beamed from the fishing boat onto the Salzhaff.

  His eyes were old and wearied. He dragged his spectacles from his nose and wiped them hard on his shirt-tail. Now he could see more clearly. The cone from the searchlight caught, held, lost, caught again and held again at a bobbing shape in the water. He saw the fishing boat circle the shape and then stop, riding idly in the water. He saw the shape pulled on board. The boat swung and headed back towards the piers. They were on the edge of the town, distanced by the water of the Salzhaff from the peninsula and the military base . . . It was another moment at which the pastor could have closed the window, turned off the tap, gone to the bedroom and settled beside his wife. He would have seen nothing and known nothing. . . The fishing boat came fast towards the shore, streaming a wake behind it, its engine churning.

  He saw a man jump from the boat onto the planking of the central pier, take a rope that was thrown to him and make it secure against the pier’s piles. Five men were standing forward of the wheelhouse and they looked down from their circle, fishermen who had made a trophy catch, and he heard a faint ripple, when the wind surged, as if they laughed. They stood in front of the white light of the wheelhouse lamp and their shadows were thrown across the pier and the beach.

  The pastor watched.

  They bent, all together. They lifted up their trophy catch. They gripped a young man by his clothes and by his hair. His body was slight, and he seemed to shudder as if a great pain ran in him. They dragged him over the pier towards the shoreline where the beach was piled with dried-out seaweed left behind by the last storm. The clock on the church tower struck the hour. There were two cars on the road at the end of the pier. Their interior lights were on and their doors sagged open. The clock on the church tower chimed shrill in the night. The four men pulled the young man towards the cars, and a fifth, who was tall and walked with authority, came behind and gestured instructions. The young man seemed hurt, or maybe it was exhaustion from the time he had spent in the water, but his feet flapped on the planks, and if they had not held him it seemed that he would have fallen. The clock on the church tower was silent, past ten. They were at the end of the pier, they were near to the cars.

  The pastor saw it clearly . . . So much better if he had seen nothing, known nothing...

  Chapter One

  They trailed behind.

  The Colonel led, and congratulated and complimented the star attraction. The minders walked alongside their man, smug with satisfaction.

  Perry Johnson let them go ahead, Ben Christie stayed with his major. The evening rain blustered against them. He knew the old boy was about to launch, felt sort of sorry for him, stayed with him to offer a shoulder and an ear. It had gone well, standing ovation. Only a taster, though, and the Americans were bigger players — they’d get more when the man went to Washington. But, for all that, it was a taster, Ben could recognize quality material, the like of which seldom came their way, and it was German. The three warrant officers and the two sergeants, who had attended the briefing, held umbrellas over the guest and the Colonel, the Brigadier and the civil servants who were down from London. It was ritual to take an honoured visitor to the officers’ mess at the end of the day.

  They weren’t twenty-five paces from B block, not even within two hundred yards of the mess, before poor old Perry, the dinosaur, began to flush it out of his system.

  ‘Look at him, so damn full of himself. Forget the past, all cuddle up together . . . I’d trust him as far as I could kick him They were insidious, they were revolting. I used to lie awake at night when I was in Berlin, couldn’t damn sleep because of them. Pushing, probing, testing us, every day, every week, every month. Had their creatures down at the gate at Brigade to photograph us going in and out, take our number-plates. Used to pay the refuse people to drop off camp rubbish then cart it to Left Luggage at the S-Bahn, and they’d take it back through the Wall, sift every last scrap of paper we threw out, notepaper headings, telephone numbers, signatures and rank. Had to employ West Berliners, German nationals, some very decent people, but imperative that we regarded them all as potential corrupted traitors, good women in Library or just cleaning your quarters, had to treat each of them as filth. Throwing “defectors” at us, dropping “refugees” into our laps, hoping to twist us up, bugger us about. Met some fine and courageous people but had to treat them like lying shit. Used to go across, guaranteed access under the Four Power Agreement, they’d watch you. You were alone, out of your car, dark, four thugs on you and a beating you’d remember a month . . . Cold bastards. I tell you, I like moral people, I can cope with immoral people if I have to. What I find evil is “amorality”, no standards and no principles, that was them. You work up against the Stasi and you get to suspect the man, German or British, who sits next to you in the mess, in the canteen. Perpetually on guard . . . but it doesn’t matter now because we’re all bloody chums . . . You didn’t get to Germany in the good old days — Belfast, wasn’t it? Nothing wrong with Belfast, but the heartbeat of the Corps was Germany. ‘Straightforward enough life, whether in the Zone or Berlin — us confronting an enemy. The threat, of course, was the Soviet military, but the real enemy was the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, shorthand was Stasi. Stasi were the secret police of the former DDR. They came out of the heritage of the Gestapo and out of the training camps of the KGB. In intelligence-gathering, in counter-espionage, they were brilliant and ruthless. They ran the Bonn government ragged, they gave us a hell of a headache. They were the cream. . . Don’t think I’m sentimental. They didn’t play by our rules, nothing Queensberry. Their rules were intimidation, corruption, fear, the manipulation of the individual, the destruction of the human personality. Turn a man against his friend, a woman against her husband, a child against parents, no scruples. They bred psychological terror, their speciality, and if that failed they fell back on the familiar thuggery of basement torture, isolation cells and killings. That the clapped-out, no-hope East Germany survived for more than two summers was because of the Stasi. They kept that regime of geriatrics on its feet for forty-five years. .

  ‘Led you a bit of a dance, did they, Perry?’

  ‘Don’t short-change me, young man. . . It sticks in my throat, a bone in the gullet, socializing with “new” friends. There’s a generation in Germany that’s been scarred by the Stasi. There’s blood on their hands. What do I sound like? An emotional old fart? Probably am . . . So, the Wall came tumbling down and a hundred thousand full-time Stasi just disappeared off the face of the earth, bar a very few. A few had something to offer the arisen greater German empire. Counter-espionage in Rostock, in bed with the Soviet military. Of course this bastard has something to offer.’

  They followed the group into the mess. The warrant officers and sergeants peeled away from forbidden territory. From the end of the wide corridor, came the baying of laughter and voices spilling from the bar. They shook their coats. Not like the mess of the cavalry or artillery or the engineers, no battle paintings, no hanging portraits of men decorated for bravery, nothing to identify past success. The Colonel, the guest and the guest’s minders had gone towards the window, with the Brigadier from London and the civil servants.

  A big voice: ‘Perry, be a good chap, tunnel through that lot. I know what we want.’

  Perry Johnson, poor bugger, pleased t
hat ridiculous name was used, went to his colonel, took the drinks order, looked helplessly at the crowd competing for the single bar steward. He copped out, came to Ben Christie. ‘It’s like a bloody bingo night. Why’s there only one chap on? Get Barnes down here.’

  Christie turned and hurried for the door. He heard Perry call out that reinforcements were on the way, stupid bugger.

  He ran in the rain past F and H blocks, past the dreary little Portakabins. He ran down the corridor to G/3/29.

  She was at her desk. It was cleared. There was a neat pile of letters to be signed, there was a note of telephone calls incoming and outgoing. His dog was sitting beside her knee with the wrapping paper of a biscuit packet under its paws.

  ‘All right, Corporal? No crises? Went on a bit...’

  She shrugged, not her business if it went on all night. Why should there be crises?

  ‘Please, they’re short of bodies in the mess. Major Johnson would be very grateful...’

  She was expressionless. ‘Been waiting for you, thought you might.’

  ‘Nelson been good? Sorry...’

  She was standing, gathering her coat off the hook, then smoothing her hair. ‘Stay there, big boy. Course he’s been good.’

  She locked the outer door, went after him.

  ‘Sorry. . . How did you know that we’d want you?’

  They were out into the evening rain.

  She said flatly, ‘Administration’s got the audit team in, they’re mob-handed. There’s Major Walsh’s leaving bash — free drinks bring them out of their holes. The mess corporal, the spotty one, he’s got flu. Penny’s on holiday...’

  He grinned. ‘Be a black day, the darkest, Corporal, if promotion ever claimed you.’

  ‘Just try to do my job. How did it go?’

  The beginning of her day had followed the same precise routine as every working morning. It was sixteen minutes past seven when Corporal Tracy Barnes had unlocked the outer door to building G/3, gone down the empty corridor and used a second key to let herself into Room 29. She was always in G/3/29 before twenty past seven. The rest of them, Major Johnson, Captain Christie, the warrant officers, sergeants and clerks, would drift into G/3 before nine. She valued that time to herself: she always said it gave her the chance to get on top of each day.