Marine I SBS Read online

  Constantine looked at Hanson. ‘And then last year there was the business of the plutonium the Iraqis tried to buy from a Soviet military establishment. The Germans foiled that particular deal, but who knows how many have gone through, both before and since. Add to that the assassination of one defecting nuclear scientist in 1992 and the disappearance of another this month, and . . . well, there’s no doubt in my mind that the Iraqi nuclear programme is still underway, that the necessary raw materials are being either stolen or secretly purchased, and that a weapons design group is hard at work. How advanced they are is impossible to say. Though of course Abas Naji might have been able to tell us.’

  ‘Thank you, David,’ Clarke said. ‘As you say, the possibilities are horrendous, but I don’t think we should trap ourselves in worst-case scenarios – this problem has already been with us for several years. The question is, how do we proceed from here? The Iraqis are pushing hard for an end to sanctions, and I think I can safely say that the government is leaning in that direction – there’s a lot of pressure from industry, a lot of reconstruction contracts which the UK could fill. And if we can pull Saddam back into the international community – give him something to lose, so to speak – then he is less likely to think about using weapons of any sort.’ He looked round the table, as if defying anyone to disagree with him.

  ‘Without disputing a word of that,’ Hanson said, ‘I think we must make every effort to give Abas Naji what amounts to a posthumous vetting, and exert as much pressure as is necessary to persuade the Iraqis to open the Falluja site for inspection.’

  ‘Seconded,’ the American said. ‘The thought of that bastard with even one bomb gives me the shivers.’

  ‘That goes without saying,’ Clark agreed. ‘But for the moment can we assume that the disappearance of this man and the information he sent to the Sunday Times are insufficient reason for rethinking our current policy? If a UN team discovers a crate full of nuclear Exocets at this place, then of course we shall have to reconsider . . .’

  There were murmurs of agreement, some more reluctant than others.

  In other words, Constantine thought as he emerged into the thin sunshine, it would be business as usual, right up to the moment they found Saddam knee-deep in nuclear weapons. And of course the point of his own little speech had been that the Iraqis would not be caught so easily. When the site at Falluja was eventually inspected it would prove as innocent as a new-born babe, because by that time the lost centrifuges would be happily spinning in a new location.

  Over the next few days Constantine followed the unfolding story courtesy of The Times, The World at One and Newsnight. Against all his expectations the Iraqis wasted little more time in allowing access to the Falluja facility, and the resulting photographs and video footage of the wind-blown shell offered convincing proof that Abas Naji’s document was a forgery. Those in favour of dropping sanctions against Iraq were given fresh heart, and those who continued to advise caution were given less credence. Abas Naji, it seemed, had not only run out on his wife; he had also fabricated evidence to finance a playboy lifestyle in the West. The same tabloid editorial wondered out loud whether he and his mistress, realizing the game was up, had simply gone into hiding until the hue and cry died down.

  The one problem Constantine had with this version of events was that he had actually known the Iraqi. He simply couldn’t bring together this conniving schemer with the young scientist he had met at the conference twenty years before. And it irked him.

  All his life he had been a man who loved puzzles. He had originally gone in for science because the universe seemed to offer the greatest mystery of all, and it was only in middle age that he had come to suspect human behaviour had the better claim. Now, as the February days dragged slowly by, he sat in his cottage outside Cambridge, listening to the big-band jazz he loved and wondering about the behaviour of Abas Naji.

  A week to the day after the Whitehall meeting he telephoned the Sunday Times journalist who had been the Iraqi’s contact, explained who he was, and asked for an off-the-record conversation. Sommersby, suitably intrigued, immediately invited him round to the flat in Hackney. Armed with glasses of Sémillon Blanc, the two men listened to the tape of his telephone conversation with the woman who had claimed to be Abas Naji’s wife.

  One question immediately came to Constantine: hadn’t Sommersby been at all surprised that an Iraqi secretary should speak such good English?

  Sommersby hadn’t been at the time, but now that Constantine mentioned it . . . He poured another glass of wine and told the other man about the discrepancy between Abas Naji’s mention of a new location and the reference in the posted pages to the reopening of an old facility. They both listened to the tapes Sommersby had made of his two conversations with the scientist, and Constantine thought he recognized more than just the man’s voice. There was certainly nothing to suggest that his personality had been transformed over the previous twenty years.

  But without such a change, it just didn’t make sense.

  On the train back to Cambridge Constantine tried fitting together the pieces of an alternative explanation. If the woman on the phone had been neither his wife nor his mistress, then what had been the purpose of her call? The answer was simple – to establish false times for both Abas Naji’s disappearance and his posting of the papers. Why? That was simple too. If she was lying about the times it could only be because the enemy had got to Abas Naji before he posted the papers. In which case the papers were indeed forgeries, but not forgeries of Abas Naji’s making.

  There was a new facility somewhere, and the whole Falluja business was just a smokescreen.

  The Iraqis would be cock-a-hoop, he thought – except for one thing. They had lost a valuable scientist – probably the best they had in that field. As he stared out through the window at the rapidly darkening countryside it occurred to him that they would be needing a replacement.

  4

  Raisa Karayeva wound down the Lada’s window and let the evening breeze tug at her hair. On the shoreline below the picnic area the heads of the donkey derricks were nodding like the delegates at a Party conference; out to sea a distant tanker’s horn softly boomed. High clouds were hurrying out across the sea.

  She looked at her watch again, and found she had been waiting for more than a hour. He had never been this late before. In fact it seemed highly probable that he was standing her up for the first time.

  The sensible thing would be to go home, to leave the picnic area before another vehicle, official or otherwise, drove in and parked beside her. But she stayed, watching night fall across the Caspian, remembering all the other secret assignations they had shared over the previous two years.

  In the first few months they had rarely met twice in the same place. In summer they would leave their cars in the trees by the side of a mountain road and walk until they found a suitable trysting place; in the winter they would snuggle in the back seat of his Volga. But over the past year it had become increasingly unsafe to travel more than about fifteen kilometres from the city, for there seemed to be checkpoints everywhere, some of them manned by the army or police, others simply set up on a freelance basis by criminals or refugees from one of the local wars. The latter posed a greater threat to life, limb and honour, but a run-in with the former was always a risky business these days, and carried the additional risk of publicizing their relationship. Over the past few months they had met regularly at this spot, which was as little frequented in winter as it was crowded in the summer.

  The horn boomed again in the distance, a mournful sound. The ship was invisible now, cloaked by the darkness. She spent her days alone with this sea, working at the Caspian Research Institute, which was attached to Baku University, pondering the thousand-year-old riddle of the sea’s changing size. It was shrinking now, and there were obvious explanations for that, but it had also shrunk before, and then expanded once again, for reasons that remained unknown. And until they were known, all the various pollute
rs and water thieves in the five states which now bordered that sea could claim that since no one really understood the processes at work they might as well carry on with business as usual.

  She spent her days alone with the sea, and now, it seemed, her evenings as well. He wasn’t coming.

  She smiled ruefully in the dark. His non-appearance was ironic, in that she had planned to end the affair that evening. It was going nowhere, and it never would. She liked him, liked his body with hers, enjoyed his mind. She could even have let herself love him if there was any chance of reciprocation, regardless of the thirty-year difference in their ages.

  She smiled again. She did love him, but not enough to put her life on permanent hold.

  And yet there was someone inside her who was glad he hadn’t come. That someone was frightened of casting herself adrift, of being as alone in reality as almost everyone assumed she already was. ‘Be strong,’ Aida had told her; and she would be, but it wasn’t going to be easy. Tamarlan had given her emotions a focus, her life a centre. She had no family to fall back on – only one good friend. And if there was ever a good time and place to be alone, this wasn’t it.

  The darkness was almost complete now, and on the maze of wooden piers which stretched out to sea the drill-head flames looked like lighted candles on a giant birthday cake. Raisa turned on the car light and examined her face, her half-Armenian face.

  On their visits to Yerevan in years gone by, her father’s family had always insisted that she had inherited her Armenian grandmother’s looks, but Raisa herself had never been able to see the resemblance. Perhaps there was a hint of mountain pallor in her skin colour, but the tumbling black hair could have come from either side of her family, and the deep-brown eyes were her Azeri father’s. During the last seven years most of the Armenians in Baku had been forced out – some had been lynched by their former neighbours – but she had never been challenged, either by friend or foe. She didn’t look Armenian enough, and she moved in the kind of circles, both social and geographical, which were generally considered safe. If she were to wander through one of the industrial suburbs or one of the shanty towns full of Azeri refugees from Nagorno-Karabakh, it might well be a different matter, but then such areas had always been dangerous for single women. Even seventy years into the Soviet era wife-stealing had been far from a lost art in the Socialist State Republic of Azerbaijan. And now that the nation was busy rediscovering its Islamic roots such practices seemed bathed in a nostalgic glow.

  She had been there long enough, she decided, and reached for the ignition key. The Lada which her father had treated so lovingly until his death three years before still responded in kind. She turned it away from the dark sea and on to the road which wound round the Aspheron Peninsula.

  Ten minutes later she was driving down the long slope into Baku. It wasn’t yet warm enough for people to spend the evenings outside, and the streets seemed mostly deserted, with only the occasional tavern door offering a glimpse of light, sound and smoke. She parked the Lada in its garage and walked up the cobbled street to the flat which had once housed her family, and where she now lived alone. The smell of fresh bread still hung in the air beside the baker’s on the corner, despite the fresh breeze which was ruffling the acacias.

  She let herself in, turned on the light and stood for a moment with her back to the door. Then she shook her head impatiently and went to find something to eat. As a can of soup warmed up on the stove she watered the plants which framed the arched window and wondered if he would phone.

  She ate the soup in front of the TV – one of the American shows which seemed to be on more and more often. The dubbing was so bad it was almost comic, but she doubted there was much in the way of depth to be lost. She poured herself a glass of vodka and wondered why he hadn’t turned up.

  Perhaps his son was visiting, and he hadn’t been able to get hold of her in time. But he could still have called – he had no idea she was calling the whole thing off.

  She thought about ringing him. She could always hang up if his son answered, or his wife. Even if he answered she could just put the phone down. At least she would know he was OK. Not that there was any reason why he shouldn’t be – it just wasn’t like him to stand her up like that.

  She took another jolt of the vodka, reached for the phone and dialled the number she had never used, yet knew by heart. It rang once, twice, three times . . . She realized she was holding her breath, and let it out. Four times, five. It kept ringing and ringing. After twenty, she put down the phone.

  The following morning she drove to work by a roundabout route. She had been to see the Shadmanov house once before, near the beginning of the affair, but had never admitted as much to Tamarlan. She hadn’t been able to explain to herself why she wanted to see the house, let alone explain it to him. And as luck would have it she had driven past just as Tamarlan’s wife was climbing out of a taxi with a bag of shopping, looking a lot younger than her forty-five years and a lot more beautiful than Raisa had expected. The whole business – her own curiosity, the reality of his actual home, Farida Shadmanova’s corporeal existence – had left her depressed for days.

  This time, though, there was no one emerging from a taxi, and no sign of Tamarlan’s Volga. She thought the house itself had an unoccupied look, but that might be just her imagination. Still, she didn’t dare stop to take a closer look.

  At the Research Institute she spent the morning on the annual hydrographical estimates. It had been a dry winter in the Urals and the Volga’s rate of flow was down, which didn’t augur well for the Caspian. Moscow’s old plans to divert Arctic-bound water south were still on the drawing-board, but now that the Soviet Union was rather less than a fond memory the Russians were unlikely to make a present of their surplus water to Azerbaijan and the other Caspian states. The government in Baku would be needing all the money it could squeeze out of the Western oil company reps who were installed in the city’s best hotels.

  But what did they care if the sea died? In fact they would welcome such a development – it would make for easier drilling.

  Raisa shut down the computer, walked across to the university’s faculty canteen, and unenthusiastically devoured a cheese roll and an apple while she waited for Aida’s class to finish. There was no sign of Tamarlan, but then he rarely used the canteen.

  Aida Usubova arrived about fifteen minutes later, waved to Raisa and joined the queue. They had been friends for several years now, though Raisa sometimes wondered why Aida bothered with her. The younger woman, with her short, dark hair and mischievous face, was much more of an extrovert than Raisa, and much more inclined to take risks, both socially and politically. If Azerbaijan was headed for an Islamic state, then it wouldn’t be because of any failure to express opposition on Aida’s part.

  She put down her tray and grabbed a seat. ‘Well, did you tell him?’ she asked. Aida was the only one of her friends who knew about Raisa’s affair with Tamarlan.

  ‘He didn’t turn up.’

  ‘What? Why not?’

  ‘I don’t know. He’s . . .’

  ‘Have you called him this morning?’

  ‘No . . .’

  Aida noticed the look in Raisa’s eyes. ‘What is it?’

  Raisa told her about the empty-looking house.

  Aida was not impressed. ‘There could be any number of explanations for that. Look, if you don’t want to call him, I will. Or I’ll call his secretary anyway. I can say I’m collecting signatures for some campaign or other. If he’s there, fine. If he isn’t, I’ll ask when he’s coming in. OK?’

  Raisa smiled. ‘Thanks,’ she said.

  She had been back in her office only a few minutes when Aida called, and the change in her friend’s tone was immediately noticeable. ‘I got his secretary, and she told me he’s on sabbatical, as of yesterday. She sounded as surprised as I felt. I mean, no one starts a sabbatical in the middle of the year, do they?’

  ‘Did she say where?’ Raisa asked.

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p; ‘That was the other thing – she didn’t know for certain. She said Moscow, but when I asked for the address she said she didn’t have one. And when I pushed a bit, she clammed up completely.’

  ‘Oh,’ Raisa said. She felt more surprised than anything, but there was a sense of emptiness too.

  ‘Still, I suppose the fates are trying to tell you something,’ Aida went on, her spirits obviously recovering.

  ‘What . . . ?’

  ‘You were going to give him up, remember?’

  ‘Yes, I know, but . . . Yes, you’re right.’

  After putting the phone down Raisa sat staring out of the window at the familiar view: the city on its hills, the curved bay, the artificial islands with their oil rigs. It didn’t feel right that it should end like this. In fact, it didn’t feel right, full stop. She supposed it was absurd, her worrying about someone whom she’d been about to see for the last time. But she was.

  She got up and started pacing. There didn’t seem to be anything she could do without revealing their affair, and even if she did reveal it she wasn’t family, so no one would have to answer her questions.

  She had to talk to someone, and there was only one real possibility. Like Tamarlan, Arif Akhundov was a professor at the university, and the two men spent most of their summer weekends hiking together in the mountains. As far as she had been able to tell, he was Tamarlan’s only real friend. She didn’t know if he knew about her.

  After three days of internal debate she finally phoned him on the Sunday evening. She had no rational grounds for concern, she told herself as the ringing tone started – just an underlying sense of ‘wrongness’ which she couldn’t quite shake.

  ‘Hello?’ a male voice said, as if its owner was surprised to be receiving a call.

  She took a deep breath. ‘My name is Raisa Karayeva,’ she began. It obviously rang no bells. ‘I am a friend of Tamarlan Shadmanov,’ she went on. ‘A close friend,’ she added, wincing at the cliché.