‘Fuck,’ the leader cursed, now struggling to hold the crate on his own. He willed himself to be calm. Everything had turned to shit, but that was nothing new in his world. The key was to keep a lid on it and to get the fuck out before things got worse. He shouted an order to the armourer. ‘Make sure of that bastard and get back to help me with this.’ But before the man was halfway to the cellar door he took another glance at his watch. They had just over one minute before the lights came back on. The clock was ticking, their timings out. ‘Belay that. He’s dead or close enough. We need to move now.’
Abandoning their comrade’s body they struggled up the stairs and through the museum. The others were waiting in the van as the leader and the armourer pushed the packing case into the rear. They didn’t ask where the third man was, they didn’t have to.
‘Drive,’ the leader shouted into his throat mike.
Inside the cellar Dimitriy was only vaguely aware of his terrible wounds. His world came and went in alternating waves of trauma-induced shock and agonizing pain. He still had eyes though, and his conscious mind identified a sight that had been common enough in the Russian-occupied rear area of Afghanistan. The object in front of him was certainly a TM-57 anti-tank mine. Normally it would take the weight of a large vehicle to detonate it, but he noted the wire leading from it to the contraption in the centre of the floor. He knew the damage it would do. Dimitriy began to claw his way towards the trigger mechanism.
When the assault team reached the outskirts of the city, the leader ordered the driver to stop the van. He nodded to the armourer, and the bomb maker retrieved a mobile phone from the breast pocket of his overall. By now the men had removed their masks and they leaned forward in anticipation as the armourer punched in the number. When the signal reached the phone it would complete a circuit which would mix the two explosive liquids and send an electric charge to the anti-tank mines.
Dimitriy studied the mechanism with the bemused concentration of a drunk man peering at a keyhole. He was lying in a pool of his own blood and his vision had begun to fade. He knew he hadn’t got long. He looked at the mobile phone. It was of a type more familiar to his son, but some instinct told him to remove the battery. He reached out towards it. Maybe now they would give him a raise.
The leader opened the van door and listened for the familiar muted thunder of the explosion. After two or three anxious minutes he turned accusingly to the armourer.
‘I can go back . . .’ the man offered.
The leader shook his head. The helicopter would be at the rendezvous and they could be in Finland and home free within the hour. He banged on the partition between the rear and the driver’s seat and the van took off.
‘We’ve got what we came for.’
IV
IN HIS OLD Bond Street office, four storeys above the well-heeled shoppers who could afford to buy from the expensive shops he walked past every day, Jamie cleared a space for the maroon pay book and the journal among the auction catalogues and art history books piled haphazardly on the desk.
He hesitated, torn between the fascination of the journal’s ruled pages and the pay book, which he knew would give him an immediate insight into the grandfather he had never truly known. The journal must once have been an expensive purchase and was of a type he guessed had been used to record the meetings of exclusive gentlemen’s dining clubs. It was three-quarters of an inch thick, A5-sized and bound in what had once been fine quality blue leather, now scuffed and faded with age. There had been a clasp to hold it shut, but that had long since disappeared and the book was now held closed by a piece of tightly knotted silver cord. The pages appeared well-thumbed, but something told him it hadn’t been opened for many years.
Reluctantly, he laid it aside and opened the little maroon pay book.
The first page came as a surprise. Jamie knew that most soldiers who served in the Second World War had been volunteers or conscripts, civilians in uniform who reluctantly stepped forward to serve their country against the Nazis. He had expected his grandfather to be one of them, but Matthew George Sinclair had signed up with the Royal Berkshire Regiment on August 17 1937 at the age of nineteen. The pay book recorded his height as 6 feet, his chest expansion as 40 inches and his weight as a 180 pounds. His appearance was described as – eyes: green; hair: dark; no distinguishing marks. Jamie felt a slight shiver as he recognized himself in his second year at university as a member of the Officer’s Training Corps. On graduation, he’d had an offer from the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst and he had almost completed the selection process before his mind had rebelled against the lifetime of discipline he was letting himself in for.