The Reluctant Contact Read online

  Contents

  Also by Stephen Burke

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Acknowledgements

  Also by Stephen Burke

  The Good Italian

  About the Author

  Stephen Burke was born in Dublin, Ireland. His first novel, The Good Italian, was shortlisted for the Historical Writers Assocation Debut Crown award and the Romantic Novelists Association Historical Fiction prize. He is also a screenwriter and a director.

  THE RELUCTANT CONTACT

  Stephen Burke

  www.hodder.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © Stephen Burke 2017

  The right of Stephen Burke to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  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 without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  Ebook ISBN 978 1 848 54921 0

  Hardback ISBN 978 1 848 54919 7

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  www.hodder.co.uk

  For Nuala Burke

  Chapter 1

  LUMPS OF ICE bobbed from side to side, disturbed by the swell from the boat. Within weeks this would all be ice, and the Billefjorden would be frozen solid for the whole winter. Then there would be no easy way in or out of here, except by helicopter. This was Yuri’s favourite time of year. Others found it claustrophobic living up here, trapped in an icebox. But Yuri enjoyed being cut off from the rest of the world. It was peaceful. The only things that existed were what he could see around him. The chances of unwelcome surprises were slim.

  He let the clean, glacial air enter his lungs slowly, savouring it. He felt alive, and renewed, after his trip back to Moscow. That was the city of his birth, but he returned there only when he had no choice.

  Around him on the wooden deck were fifty burly miners, mostly Ukrainians and Belarusians. They had landed that morning at Longyearbyen airport on Spitsbergen, the largest island in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard. Numbering a hundred odd, they had split in two, with half making the journey south to Barentsburg, the other Soviet outpost here.

  This would be the first time in Pyramiden for all of the men around him now, day one of a much sought-after two-year contract. Yuri was on his sixth, and if he had his way, there would be a seventh and an eighth. Pyramiden was his adopted home, one that he would not leave willingly.

  There had been a flurry of excitement among the travellers a while back when they had sailed past a herd of walrus dining on a bearded seal, their long ivory tusks creating a bloody mess as they tore into their victim’s blubbery flesh. Now the men smoked and chatted, and stamped their feet to keep warm. One passed around a metal flask of vodka to grateful hands.

  They were all big men, made larger by their thick overcoats and cheap fur hats. There was something about their eyes, Yuri noticed. Spending so much time working underground, they might be expected to have narrow, beady eyes. Instead, for the most part, they shone wide and bright, with colours more vivid than the average surface dweller. Stunning emeralds and opals set in rugged, dark faces that could never be completely scrubbed clean of the black coal dust.

  Yuri avoided going down into the lifeless darkness of the mine shaft as much as possible. As chief engineer for the whole town, he had more than enough work to do above ground to occupy his time. If something needed fixing below, in the bowels of the mountain, he would nominate his assistant, Semyon. The little Latvian weasel had been with him a year now. Previously, all of his assistants had been incompetents, content to do whatever they were told. Semyon, unfortunately, was smart, with notions above his station in life, which did not include being subordinate to Yuri for very long. However, Yuri had designed and built most of the systems in Pyramiden, and he was not about to share all of his secrets with anyone. As intricate and idiosyncratic as his systems were, he was still wary of being away, even for short periods. His greatest fear was that some day, someone would realise they could get by just fine without him.

  Yuri felt a faint shift in the wind. Then everyone looked up as a large flock of black and white dovekies appeared from nowhere and whizzed by, just above their heads. One group of miners parted and Yuri saw a young woman sitting on her own on a bench. Pale. Twenty-five, or thereabouts. Not beautiful, but not ugly either. Foreign, he guessed. Proper foreign, not one of the skinny blondes from the Balkans. Her clothes were bright, in garish colours: an orange bubble coat, a striped woollen hat with hanging bobbles, as if she were going skiing. She was looking around, taking everything in. He felt her nervous excitement. She turned in his direction and their eyes locked for a moment. She smiled briefly before their view of each other was blocked once more.

  The town came into view as the inlet reached a dead end. On one side stood the sprawling mine, nestled below Pyramiden mountain. On the opposite shore, across the fjord, was the Nordenskjold glacier, stationary to the naked eye, as it caressed the water’s edge. Some of the miners pointed to an opening halfway up the mountainside. The entrance to the underworld into which they would descend each day.

  Good luck with that, thought Yuri; rather you than me.

  The mine was linked to the ground by a railway enclosed in a wooden tunnel, which brought the miners up and the coal down. Several times a year, a ship arrived from Russia to haul away the fruits of their labour.

  Long before the boat reached the jetty, Yuri spotted his assistant standing beside Timur, the resident secret service agent. Timur was always easy to pick out, with his tightly cropped red hair and military bearing. Semyon, in contrast, was a slight man with oversized glasses and a mop of unkempt black curls. The two of them were waiting for him, no doubt. Trouble.

  Theoretically, Timur was here to monitor NATO activity in this part of the Arctic Circle. In practice, he spent his days looking for ways to make the other residents’ lives miserable. He and Semyon made a fine pair.

  As the boat crew tied up the mooring ropes, Yuri stepped on to land and immediately went on the offensive.

  ‘What have you done now?’ he barked at Semyon as the two of them made a beeline for him.

  Timur gave him one of his cold stares that gave the impression of being able to discern lies from truth. ‘Semyon has made a serious accusation against you, Yuri, of sabotage.’

  Some of the new miners, overhearing, turned their heads. The
foreign girl looked over too. So, she speaks Russian, Yuri thought. Sabotage was the dirtiest word in the whole of the USSR, worse than capitalism, and it got the convenient blame for a litany of problems that were usually just the result of incompetence and inefficiency. Yuri feigned an outraged expression for his audience.

  ‘What is it I’m supposed to have done now?’

  Timur turned to Semyon for the answer.

  ‘I don’t know what he did exactly, but he did something.’

  Yuri threw his eyes up to heaven. ‘I tell you, I go away for one week, to bury my dear departed brother, and this place falls apart.’

  ‘He did it,’ said Semyon, ‘I know he did.’

  ‘Did what exactly?’ asked Yuri. ‘Would someone like to let me in on this little joke?’

  ‘The heating to the executive block is out,’ replied Semyon. ‘But you knew that already.’

  ‘You mean to say it’s broken and you don’t know how to fix it. Correct? How long has it been out?’

  ‘Three nights,’ said Timur.

  ‘Ooh, I bet the execs aren’t happy about that,’ said Yuri, with a grin.

  ‘No, we’re not,’ said Timur. ‘My balls have nearly fallen off. If they get any harder we can play snooker with them.’

  ‘It’s a good thing I came back when I did then. Come on, let’s get to work so I can fix whatever it is. You’ll really have to pay more attention, Semyon, if you’re to replace me one day.’

  Yuri started to walk away, but checked over his shoulder as Semyon turned to Timur for support. The secret service man just shrugged, leaving Semyon no choice except to traipse after him.

  ‘What happened to your brother?’ Timur shouted after them.

  ‘He drank himself to death,’ replied Yuri.

  Timur nodded as if this was nothing unusual.

  At forty-five, Yuri had lived through the craziness of Stalin, the slightly tamer craziness of Khrushchev, and now the ‘big sleep’ of Brezhnev. Of the three, he reckoned this was definitely the best time to be alive. Brezhnev understood what the people wanted. An end to high-pressure production quotas at work, and lots of cheap vodka. He delivered both.

  The threat of war with the Americans was at an all-time low. The burning question of the day was whether Brezhnev really was the most boring man alive; or if, in fact, he was alive at all and not a mannequin as some suggested. There was also some heated bar-room debate on how many more self-awarded medals he would be able to fit on his bloated chest. However, despite the new stability in the country, for Yuri the old gulag-avoidance rules still applied.

  Don’t trust anyone.

  Keep your head down.

  Look after number one.

  For the whole afternoon, Semyon followed Yuri around like a jittery hen as he attempted to decipher the problem. They rechecked the furnace, the pumps, dozens of pipe intersections and the exec block itself. After four hours Yuri threw his hands up and admitted that he was as clueless as Semyon had been. Everything seemed to be functioning, yet the hot water stubbornly refused to arrive in the executive apartment building. Semyon grudgingly parked his sabotage accusations and offered a few suggestions. Yuri humoured him by trying them out, but none delivered the desired solution.

  ‘We’ll have to tackle it again in the morning,’ said Yuri, as the night-time freeze made continuing their outdoor work impossible.

  ‘But that’ll be four nights in a row!’ protested Semyon. ‘We’ll get into deep shit. I’m already in the bad books.’

  ‘Look, don’t worry about them,’ said Yuri. ‘They’ve survived this long, and a little dose of hardship will do them good. Besides, they can pin all the blame on me now.’

  Semyon was satisfied with the last part.

  The heating system was Yuri’s masterpiece. A thing of beauty. A quarter of the coal they dug out of the mountain went into Pyramiden’s furnace, which heated the water, which was then pumped around the whole town through miles of piping. Outside, they ran above ground under wooden walkways, which were kept snow-free as a result. He liked to think of the power plant as Pyramiden’s heart. The pipes were the blood vessels, keeping the organs, the living quarters and their occupants alive. Heating was no joke up here, eight hundred miles from the North Pole. Without Yuri, the 1,000 inhabitants would all freeze to death. Soviets prided themselves on being able to tame nature, enabling them to live and work wherever they pleased. Pyramiden was proof they could.

  Yuri dined with the other workers in the canteen in the Cultural Palace, waited on by robust Ukrainian women. The menu for tonight was cabbage rolls stuffed with rice and meat. Semyon sat at another table, as always. They were not friends, would never be, and neither of them had the slightest problem with that. Yuri looked around the room. Apart from the miners, there were clerical staff from the office, cooks and cleaners, farmers for the livestock and greenhouses, a doctor and a couple of nurses from the hospital, teachers from the kindergarten and school, and two dozen kids of varying ages, from toddlers to teens.

  The room itself was the grandest mine canteen in the whole of the Soviet Union. One entire wall was covered with a mosaic depicting an Arctic scene with snow-covered mountains and polar bears. Yuri never understood why they had decided to put it there. Wasn’t the whole idea to keep the cold on the outside? If anyone wished to be reminded of an Arctic vista, they need look no further than the nearest window. The Kremlin had its own reasons for pumping millions of rubles into this place. It was their little patch of the west, and it was designed to give any foreign visitor a glamorous – and entirely false – impression of what daily life was like behind the iron curtain. Whoever heard of a mine with chandeliers in its workers’ canteen? And a plush cinema. And a heated swimming pool. And a Yuri Gagarin sports centre. And a library with sixty thousand books. All for miners!

  When word got out about the relative luxury that was on offer here, Pyramiden was inundated with eager transfer requests from every mine from Siberia to Chechnya. There were downsides of course. The isolation. The bitter cold. The three winter months of 24-hour darkness. And the same faces to look at every day for two years. All of these were positives for Yuri. Especially the two-year contracts the others were on. It meant he could begin a relationship with a woman, usually a waitress or one of the clerical staff, knowing that she would be leaving in a maximum of twenty-four months. If a romance wasn’t working out, no problem. Why bother going through the hassle of a break-up, when her departure boat was already booked? And the same fjord that had brought her would take her away again, with no tears shed. He had an aversion to hurting, because it made him feel guilty, and to being hurt.

  Right now he was single, but on the lookout.

  Across the room, he spotted that young foreigner again. English. Some sort of a space student he had heard. Catherine. Pyramiden being so small, everyone already knew something about her, or thought they did. For Yuri, foreign equalled exotic; however, she was not his type. She was too young, obviously. Just over half his age. But that wasn’t it. When he looked at her there was no spark.

  One of the more surprising things he found about getting older was the range of possibilities it opened up. When he was twenty, he was attracted to a narrow age group. But now, in middle age, he found himself drawn to all sorts of women from twenty to fifty. Thirty years of choice.

  At another table, he noticed Anya. One of the school teachers. Late forties. Straight, dark hair to her shoulders. Delicate chin. Brown eyes. Beautiful. She had been here a few months already and Yuri had his eye on her. If he had to pick from the bunch, she’d be the one, though she hadn’t shown even the slightest interest in him so far. To date, the sum total of their conversations numbered zero. She had given him a monosyllabic greeting on three occasions. But he wasn’t disheartened, yet. Winter here was long.

  After dinner, he made his way down through the main square, past Lenin’s bust as it gazed sternly across the fjord. His apartment block was for the single men, and was nicknamed London. The
block for families was aptly called the Crazy House. The one for single women was called Paris, perhaps because everyone dreamed of going there, one day. That’s where Anya was, and Catherine now too. Yuri would never get to visit the real Paris. Foreign travel was not for a worker at his level. But he knew the Arctic Paris well.

  Inside his modest apartment, he finally got to wash and put on some clean clothes. In common with other residents, he had decorated his quarters with whatever could be recycled. Strings of coloured beads made from plastic wiring, pictures cut from magazines and framed. None of the apartments had kitchens, since they all ate together in the canteen, and food was free. They did have fridges, metal boxes attached to the outside of the windows. No electricity required. Yuri reached into his and pulled out a half-full bottle of vodka. He poured himself a glass, drank it down in one gulp and then lay on his narrow single bed, fully clothed. He set his alarm clock for two in the morning, and closed his eyes.

  An image of his brother intruded into his head, from when he was six and Yuri was eight. Both of them with shaven heads after their mother had found lice. His brother looked up at him, confident of his protection and guidance, as they played war with the other kids in the neighbourhood. That was before their innocent world collapsed, and they had to play the game for real.

  He was in a deep sleep when the beeping roused him. He got up, put on his warmest coat and hat and walked silently down the unlit corridor.

  There was no one about as he stepped outside, in minus twenty degrees. Everyone else had more sense. They were all tucked up in their warm beds, apart from the execs with their unresolved problem.

  Moonlight bounced off the fresh pristine snow, so he did not need a flashlight to find his destination. When he reached the correct section of the walkway he stopped and stood still for a good two minutes, waiting and listening for any followers. Satisfied, he jumped down to the frozen ground and crawled under the walkway, out of sight. He turned on his flashlight and pulled out a wrench from inside his coat. Working quickly, he began to remove the section of pipe he had sabotaged the night before his departure for his brother’s funeral. A bit of insurance, to remind them how indispensable he was. Once he had dismantled the pipe, he removed the faulty valve he had added to the system and replaced it with a new one. Then he reconnected the lot and immediately heard the hot water flowing freely once more.