13

Zavidovo, the Soviet Union

Because it was a beautiful dawn the Yakut nurse – a firm believer in the benefits of early rising and crisp air, even if the patient was terminal – had helped Vladimir Greshko into a wheelchair and pushed him out into the garden, where he sat in the shade of a very old oak, surrounded by pines and wildflowers and all the rest of what he considered nature’s repetitive graffiti. It was, for him, a bucolic nightmare. Despite his rustic origins and the sentimentality he often felt for the land, he had become a city person, somebody made nervous by the racket of birds.

He watched the nurse go back inside the cottage and he glowered at her. To have been detached from his tube, disgusting as the thing was, was like being yanked from an umbilical cord. Twenty minutes, the Yakut bitch had said. Twenty minutes, no more, as if she were bestowing a precious gift on him.

The trouble with nature, Greshko reflected, was its unsanitary condition. Little things chewed on even smaller things. Ants scurried off with disgusting larvae in their jaws. Wild animals and birds crapped where they felt like it. He loved the tundra, those great prairies with their romantic isolation and impenetrable mystery, but when it came to thick trees and the awful green density of this place, he experienced a suffocating claustrophobia.

He closed his eyes, opening them only when he heard the sound of an automobile approaching from the distance. He turned his face to the pathway that led to the cottage, peering through the twisted posts of the old wooden fence. His first thought was that Volovich was coming to say he’d received news from Viktor, but when he made out the shape of the Zil – unmistakable! – he knew his visitor was General Olsky.

He saw Olsky get out of the long black car and come through a space in the fence, where a bramble bush snagged the sleeve of his well-tailored suit. Greshko stared at the bald head as it ducked under the thorns. And then Olsky was crossing the thick grass to the wheelchair in short springing steps. He wore this morning amber-tinted sunglasses, a horrible Western affectation as far as Greshko was concerned. They caught the dawn sunlight and glinted as if two copper coins had been pressed into his eye sockets.

Olsky asked, “How are you today, Vladimir?”

“Unchanged, Stefan. You find me as you found me when you were last here. Two visits in as many days! I feel very honoured.”

Olsky circled the wheelchair, pausing immediately behind Greshko. As a technique, Greshko thought it ludicrous. Was he supposed to twist his head round in order to see the little shit? Was this meant to place him at a disadvantage? Greshko wanted to laugh. When it came to technique, when it came to the body language of interviews, he’d written the book.

“Let’s walk, Vladimir,” Olsky said. “I’ll push you.”

“As you wish.”

Olsky shoved the chair over the thick grass, a shade too quickly perhaps, as if he meant to unnerve Greshko. Olsky wheeled him towards the pines, where the ground was rougher and the chair shook. Then Olsky stopped, catching his breath and sitting down with his back to the trunk of a pine. He snapped a stalk of long grass and placed it against his teeth.

“Do you like it here?” Olsky asked.

“This green prison? What do you think?”

“I can imagine worse places, Vladimir.”

“I suppose you can.”

Olsky stared in the direction of the small house. “You’ve got a decent place to live. Your own medical attendant. It could be a whole lot worse. At least the sun is shining and the weather’s warm.”

Greshko smiled. Just under the surface of Olsky’s words, he could hear it – a quietly implied threat, a hint of how the last days of the old man’s life could be made utterly dreadful by removing him from this place and sending him in some cramped railroad carriage to the distant north. Am I supposed to be scared shitless? Am I meant to nod my head and drool with gratitude? “Why don’t you come to the point, Stefan? Dying men don’t have time for circumspection.”

Olsky was quiet a moment. “Where is Colonel Epishev?”

Epishev, of course. Greshko said, “I assume he’s at his desk. Unless you’ve misplaced him, of course. Which would be damnably careless of you.”

Olsky took off his glasses. “Where have you sent him?”

“Sent him? You forget, General, I have absolutely no power in the organs these days.”

“He came here. I have that on good authority. He came here with Lieutenant Volovich. I can only assume you issued instructions to him.”

Olsky watched a woodpecker as it fastened itself on to a pine trunk and rapped its beak with sublime ferocity of purpose. Rap rap rap. Epishev and Volovich had been spotted coming here. Ah, the risks one ran! The trees had ears and eyes and every goddam blade of grass was a potential microphone.

“I receive so many drugs, Stefan. I sleep a lot. Sometimes I have no idea of time. Sometimes people come to see me and I don’t remember them ever having visited. And so many people come, I have more friends than I can count.”

“I want an answer, Vladimir. Why did Epishev and Volovich come here? And where have you sent Viktor?”

Greshko wondered if somehow. Volovich had been made to talk. But if Dimitri had confessed, then Olsky wouldn’t be here asking these questions. Things would be different if Olsky really knew anything. Things would be rather more straightforward, perhaps even a little brutal. Greshko would have been removed from this place without ceremony. Besides, why should Volovich admit anything that might incriminate himself? The man might be nothing more than Epishev’s toady, but he was surely no fool when it came to survival.

Olsky replaced his glasses. “Are you denying you were visited by Epishev and Volovich?”

Greshko smiled in spite of the sudden pain that knifed through his abdomen. Pain like this, you were never prepared for it, it went through your nerve-endings like a dagger through old papers. “How can I deny something I can’t remember?”

Olsky felt oddly tense in the old man’s presence, even though he knew he had no need to. Sabina was forever reminding him of his own new authority – Sweet Jesus, you are the Chairman of the KGB, you don’t need to be in awe of anyone, my love. And of course she was right. But there was something in Greshko’s demeanour, a quality connected to Greshko’s history, the sense of the man’s legend that now and then unnerved Olsky. Greshko had walked the same stages, stood on the same platforms as Stalin and Khrushchev and Bulganin and Malenkov, the luminaries of modern Soviet history. Greshko had been at the centre of things for so many years that his absence created a vacuum which, for most Soviet citizens accustomed to seeing his face on state occasions, was almost unnatural – as if the moon had failed to wax.

“First you lose some computer data,” Greshko said. “Then you lose one of your Colonels. If I was running the organs –”

“But you’re not, General –”

“When I did, General, I controlled everything, the tasks of my key personnel, the access codes to the computers, nothing ever slipped away from me.” With some effort, Greshko raised his voice. “I knew where everything and everybody was, day and goddam night, I lived the organs, General, twenty-five hours a day, eight days a goddam week. Don’t come here and make accusations that I gave an order to Epishev! You know I don’t have that much power these days,” and here the old man snapped his fingers. “If I did, by God you’d see some iron in the backbone of this country!”

Olsky stood in silence for a time. He had cards to play, but he wanted his timing to be correct. He was prepared to let Greshko rant for a while. He watched globules of white saliva appear on the old man’s lips. Then Greshko yielded to a prolonged fit of coughing, doubling over in his wheelchair, wiping his sleeve across his lips. His skeleton seemed to rattle. Olsky, noticing how crystalline mucus clung to the material of the old man’s sweater, turned his face away for a moment. The paroxysm passed and Greshko, white-faced, was silent.

Olsky wandered some feet from the wheelchair. With his back to Greshko, he said, “A man called Yevenko was arrested yesterday, General.”

Greshko, whose chest felt raw, his lungs on fire, closed his eyes. He had the impression of a thousand wasps buzzing through his brain. Yevenko, he thought.

“More commonly known as the Printer,” Olsky said. “A criminal type whose speciality is forged papers, passports, and even the occasional rouble. He was arrested on suspicion of currency irregularities. It was a routine kind of arrest, but it had an interesting aspect to it. The Printer, it seems, had a story to tell about recently being called upon to make a West German passport for a man known as Grunwald.”

Greshko was sarcastic. “Fascinating. Tell me more.”

“Grunwald, according to the Printer, is in reality our comrade Epishev.”

“Really,” Greshko remarked. He showed absolutely no emotion on his face. “And you take the word of this criminal?”

“He was in a tight spot. He was ready to barter. People like him usually tell the truth when they face the prospect of lengthy incarceration.”

Greshko wheeled his chair a couple of feet. “Let’s suppose for just a moment this criminal is telling the truth – although, as you may be aware, General, criminals rarely do. Viktor might have needed a forged passport in the normal line of duty. He works in some very grey areas, after all. He infiltrates underground groups, he may need false ID, a cover of some kind.”

“It’s possible.” Olsky paused. “I’m reliably informed that the man using this passport left the Soviet Union on an Aeroflot flight to East Berlin. He then caught a connecting flight to London.”

“London? Why would Viktor travel to London?” Greshko asked. “This is all very thin, General. What evidence do you have that the man called Grunwald is Epishev in any case?”

Olsky said, “The photograph in the forged passport was Epishev’s. The Printer assured us of that.”

“And you believed him?” Greshko infused scepticism into his voice, the tone of the experienced old master contemptuous of the apprentice’s naivety.

Olsky didn’t reply to this question. “Did you send Viktor to London, Vladimir?”

“Why would I send him there? Why would I send him anywhere, for God’s sake? Besides, I couldn’t send him abroad, he’d need clearance from a superior officer.”

Olsky, who knew Epishev had the authority to go in and out of the Soviet Union at will, a clearance given him by Greshko years ago, glanced through the trees for a time. There was something just a little pathetic in backing Greshko into a corner. Something almost sad, although that was an emotion Olsky couldn’t afford to feel. He wondered why he wasn’t savouring this moment. “Comrade General, when I visited you before I mentioned missing computer data relating to a man called Aleksis Romanenko.”

Greshko, like some old parrot, cocked his head and listened. What now? What links was this upstart Olsky trying to make?

Olsky said, “I mentioned that the data had been deliberately removed. But in this particular instance we had a stroke of quite extraordinary good fortune.”

“Good fortune?” Greshko asked. There was a lump, like stone, in his throat.

“Indeed. We were able to reproduce the missing data from some back-ups that a clerk took the precaution to make.”

“Back-ups?” Greshko asked. He hadn’t thought of this possibility. He hadn’t imagined any clerk conscientious enough to make a goddam duplicate of the data.

Olsky went on, “It’s fascinating material. It appears Romanenko had well-developed ties with a subversive organisation both inside and outside the Soviet Union known as the Brotherhood of the Forest. I must make the assumption, Vladimir, that since this data existed when you were Chairman of the organs, you must have known of it.”

“I never heard of it. It means nothing to me.” Greshko leaned forward in his chair. The damned pain went through him again, making it difficult to concentrate. His eyes watered and he gasped quietly. Back-ups. Duplicates. He wondered which wretched clerk was responsible for such a thing. It was his own damned fault because he’d never really understood the intricate ways of the new computer system, he’d always been puzzled by it and overawed, and like any man terrorised by a new technology he’d failed to grasp its potential.

“Come,” Olsky said. “A traitor like Romanenko, a man in a high position – and you never knew about him? You with your omniscient knowledge of the organs? Really, General. How can I believe you?”

Greshko spoke quietly, giving the distinct impression of a man surprised by nothing. “Obviously some useless clerk, some slipshod moron, forgot to bring the material to my attention. Or perhaps during the changeover to the present computer system, the data was overlooked.”

Olsky laughed quietly in disbelief. “But you never overlooked anything, General, did you? And surely you didn’t employ morons?”

Greshko listened to the woodpecker again. Rap rap rap. The sharp beak of the creature might have been poking at the timbers of his own brain just then. He became silent in the manner of a man who has unexpectedly just lost a piece in a game of chess, a knight trapped and seized, a bishop ruthlessly snared.

Olsky said, “On the day Romanenko was shot, Epishev came to visit you. Early next morning he vanished using a fake passport. He went to London. Why the sudden rush to visit England? An overwhelming yearning to see Westminister Abbey, General? Or is there some other reason he needs to be there in the wake of Romanenko’s murder? And now here’s a brand new element – the former Chairman of the KGB, the all-seeing General Greshko, admits he knew nothing of Romanenko’s subversion! And asks me to believe this story.” Olsky raised a finger to his lips and spoke in a mock whisper filled with comic astonishment. “Or could it be that General Greshko had a good reason of his own to leave Aleksis Romanenko in position as a high Party official? Is that it?”

Greshko waved a hand in the air. “You’re full of hot air, Olsky. It’s a wonder you aren’t floating away over the damned trees.”

“I ask myself. Was General Greshko involved with Romanenko in a subversive scheme? Is it that simple? Is this a deeper echo of the sounds of conspiracy I keep hearing?”

“I’d be very careful if I were you, Stefan.”

Greshko saw the Yakut woman come out of the house and approach the wheelchair. She was carrying a tray of medication. He was relieved to see her.

Olsky looked at the nurse as she came striding across the grass. Then he tapped the face of his wristwatch, as if he’d just remembered an appointment. “I’ll keep in touch, of course, Vladimir. I know you’re interested in the outcome of my investigations.” And then he turned and moved toward the parked Zil, sliding through the fence and deftly avoiding the bramble bush that had snagged him before. Greshko watched him step into the large car, then heard the sound of the engine turning over.

“Pill time, General,” the nurse said.

Greshko observed the car as it vanished between trees, leaving only a vibration behind. He felt the nurse stick a capsule into his mouth. He swallowed it, listening to the Zil until it became indistinguishable from the drone of insects. Back-ups, he thought. The need for duplicates that sometimes obsessed the petty clerical mind. So be it. He squeezed his eyes shut tightly and concentrated, tracking things through his mind, wondering what his next step would be if he were General Smartass Olsky. What would you do next, Stefan? The answer came back at once. I would put the squeeze on Volovich. I’d twist Volovich like a damp rag until he told me everything he knows. The question was how much Volovich knew. He hadn’t been told the precise extent of the Brotherhood’s plan, but he certainly knew enough to cause enormous trouble.

Greshko glared into the sun as if he might stare it down. Back-ups and duplicates, by God! Well, he had a back-up of his own which, like a palmed card, he’d play when the time was ripe. And that ripeness, he felt, was upon him.

He smiled at the nurse and she regarded him in a wary manner. “Why are you smiling?” she asked.

“Why not?”

“You want something. That’s when you smile, General. When you need me.”

Greshko shrugged, turning his face from the sun, which was the colour now of a blood orange. “Perhaps,” was his response to the Yakut woman.

Tallinn, Estonia

Colonel Yevgenni Uvarov disembarked from the launch in Tallinn harbour just after daylight and walked until he reached the Mermaid monument, where he sat on an empty bench beside a clump of shrubbery. He pretended to be interested in the monument, gazing up at the winged woman that stood atop a stone structure, but he couldn’t concentrate on it. He read on a plaque that the statue had been erected in memory of the crew of the Russalka, which sank in the Gulf of Finland in 1893, but every so often he’d turn and look away, back across the shore to the harbour, where the tall stacks and funnels of ships looked dense and tangled in the dawn sky.

He was unable to still the nervousness he felt. He got up, walked round the green wooden bench, scanned the shoreline, fidgeted. Since he’d taken the phonecall last night on Saaremaa Island he’d been living as if at some distance from himself. He hadn’t slept. The idea of sleep was foreign to him. He hadn’t eaten breakfast, not even a simple cup of tea. He’d risen in that strangely chill dark just before sunrise and gone down to the fast launch that went back and forth between the island and Tallinn, ferrying mail and supplies, and he’d stepped on board and nobody had asked him any questions even though he’d waited for the captain of the vessel to approach him for ID papers or an official pass. He calculated he could be gone for only six or seven hours before he was missed from the radar base – although in reality his absence might be noticed at any time, especially if there were some unforeseen emergency. But he thought he’d covered himself as well as he possibly could, by informing his adjutant – perhaps the laziest man in the whole command – that he had to travel on unspecified official business to Kuressaare on the southern part of the island.

He stared at the sea, waited, wondered if he’d done the right thing by coming here, or if he’d just walked into a trap that would cost him his life. He could imagine it – discovery, the disgrace of a court-martial, public humiliation, a death sentence. And what would happen to his wife and children then? Branded, destined to a terrible life, a world in which doors would be dosed to them.

Uvarov returned to the bench, sat, waited, smoked a cigarette. The man on the telephone had mentioned Aleksis’s name and the importance of meeting – but he hadn’t identified himself, and now Uvarov, whose heart would not stop kicking against his ribs, wished he’d never met the man known as Aleksis, that he’d never accepted the US passports and the enormous sum of money, but Aleksis had been persuasive, and convincing, and finally impossible to refuse, with his enchanting pictures of life in a free world, a future for the children, a place where a man might advance through his own merits – Aleksis had painted a portrait of a desirable place that Uvarov’s wife Valentina lusted after. Freedom, Yevgenni. A new life. To bring up our children as we choose, Yevgenni. The risks are worth it.

Uvarov heard the sound of a car door slam nearby. He stared at the statue, couldn’t sit still. He heard footsteps on the cobblestones and he raised his face just as a man came into view.

The voice on the telephone had said, I read Sovietskaya Estonia. I always carry a copy with me.

Uvarov saw Sovietskaya Estonia folded under the man’s arm, looked away at once, sucked the sea air into his lungs, felt his eyes smart and begin to water. The man came to the bench, sat down, tapped Uvarov’s wrist with the rolled-up newspaper. The Colonel felt a fist close inside his stomach as he looked at the newcomer – who was perhaps in his late forties and wore a thick moustache that covered his upper lip. He was dressed in the uniform of a Major in the KGB, a fact that caused Uvarov to grip the bench tightly.

“Don’t believe everything you see, Colonel,” the man said. “The uniform is borrowed.”

Uvarov pressed his palm to his mouth. The man smiled and reassuringly touched the back of Uvarov’s hand. “You don’t look so good, Colonel. Let’s walk some colour back into your face.”

Uvarov rose. The man took him by the arm and they strolled round the monument in the direction of Kadriorg Park. The sun, low over the harbour, cast all manner of strange shadows between the anchored ships.

“Learn to relax, Yevgenni.”

Uvarov stopped moving. He stood under a tree, lit another cigarette, tried very hard to smile. Relax, he thought. Tell me how. Show me!

“Call me Marcus.”

“Marcus,” Uvarov said.

“You suspect a trap. Ask yourself this, my friend. If this were a trap, would I appear in this particular uniform? I’d be in civilian clothes, trying to put you at your ease, wouldn’t I? I’d be trying to lull you, no?”

Uvarov made a feeble gesture and the man named Marcus, whose expression was one of weary strength, smiled. “You all suspect you’re about to be arrested. Each and every one of you feels the same when I make contact.”

Uvarov looked back in the direction of the harbour. A pall of black smoke rose from the funnel of a ship, spiralling slowly upward like a funereal scarf. Each and every one of us, he thought. “How many are involved?” he asked.

“In the armed services of the Soviet Union, less than a score, perhaps less than a dozen,” Marcus answered in an enigmatic way. “Outside the services, the number is impossible to estimate. Patriots come and go, Yevgenni. One day you can count thousands, another day hundreds. Mercenaries on the other hand tend to remain stable.”

“You’re vague,” Uvarov said. He didn’t like to think of himself as a mercenary. He was going through this nightmare for his family’s sake, not because he wanted to accumulate riches in the West.

“I need to be.” Marcus looked toward the dark smoke now. He had a face that was pocked and pitted, the result of some childhood disease. It gave him a seasoned appearance, a toughness.

“Why are you making contact? Where is Aleksis?” Uvarov asked.

“Aleksis’s part is over, my friend.”

Uvarov clutched the man’s wrist. “My family –”

“In wonderful health, Yevgenni.”

“You’re sure?”

Marcus stroked his moustache. “They long to be with you. They long for freedom.”

Uvarov felt his anxiety fade, but only a little. He took a handkerchief out of his coat pocket and blew his nose because the mention of his family had choked him and he felt like crying. Marcus, in a gesture of kindness, placed a hand on Uvarov’s shoulder.

“Soon, Yevgenni. Very soon,” Marcus said. “Now listen to me carefully. I could not give you your final instructions over the telephone, for obvious reasons. As soon as you have performed the function Aleksis hired you for, a small launch will be waiting for you at the jetty that services your installation. It will look like any ordinary military launch except for this one fact – the vessel will not be flying a flag. It will wait for exactly five minutes, no longer. When you get on board, you’ll be taken to Hango in Finland.”

“And my family?”

“Your family will be in Helsinki many hours before you arrive in Hango. They’ll be safe. I promise you.”

“They’re travelling alone?”

“Of course. But they have passports. They’ll leave Russia through Leningrad.”

Somehow Uvarov had expected different arrangements, that he’d be going with his wife and children when the time came, but that was fantasy. Obviously, if he wanted to join his family he’d have to go through with Aleksis’s task – otherwise, he’d be stranded in Soviet territory while his family was safe in Finland.

“What if something goes wrong?” he asked.

Marcus crossed his fingers and held his hand in front of Uvarov’s face. “If we perform our tasks efficiently, nothing can possibly go wrong.”

“If is the strangest word in the language,” Uvarov said.

Marcus moved a couple of feet away. “Keep your nerve. Don’t lose it.”

Uvarov wanted to detain Marcus now, because he found comfort in the notion of a fellow conspirator. But he couldn’t think of anything else to say.

“In Helsinki, my friend. Your wife and children. And a further fifty thousand American dollars.” The man known as Marcus walked between the trees and didn’t look back.

Uvarov watched him go. If, the Colonel thought. If everything went according to plan. If all the nameless conspirators Marcus had mentioned played their roles and adhered to the timetable. If. How many other Army personnel were involved apart from himself? Less than twenty, perhaps less than a dozen, according to Marcus. A small number of men. The smaller the number, the less chance of something going wrong.

Uvarov was slightly cheered by this thought.

The man called Marcus walked to the place where he’d parked his car, an inconspicuous black Moskvich. He took a dark overcoat from the back seat and wore it over the KGB uniform, then he sat behind the wheel. Marcus, whose real name was Anton Sepp, formerly a sergeant in the Soviet Army in Afghanistan, looked back at the figure of Yevgenni Uvarov as he drove away from Tallinn harbour. Then he headed through the streets of the city, passing along Toompea Street in the medieval part of Tallinn, where a network of narrow alleys ran between crooked houses. Already there were a few early tourists moving listlessly, the ubiquitous Japanese with their cameras, a couple of Americans – you could always tell the Americans from the cut of their clothes and the slightly condescending looks on their faces as they studied quaintness – and a few Finns who came for riotous weekends of vodka drinking. The tourists would rummage in the souvenir and craft shops or they’d walk to the foreign currency stores on Tehnika or Gagarini Streets. They’d wander the museums and at night, sated by history, they’d sit through a Western-style cabaret of forced cheerfulness in the basement of the Viru Hotel.

Marcus was happy to drive out of the city, past blocks of new high-rise apartments, which were surrounded by mountains of cement and sand and the occasional thin tree. These were depressing areas, and boring – the more so when you contrasted them with the rich medieval architecture of old Tallinn – and yet people were expected to live their lives in such prefabricated tedium. He kept driving until the city was behind him and the sun was rising over the landscape and the countryside around him was rich and green. He turned the car off the highway about thirty-five miles from Tallinn and drove down a narrow track between pine trees. On either side of the track, obscured by thickets of trunks, dark green meadows stretched out and the surface of a narrow lake was visible. The car rocked and swayed over ruts for three or four miles, then the pathway twisted and an old farmhouse came in view.

Whitewalled, shuttered, it appeared at first sight to have been abandoned. But fresh tyre-tracks in the forecourt suggested recent activity and, under a tarpaulin that had been hung across a roofless outbuilding, were three vehicles – a grey Volvo station-wagon, a small Zaporozhet, and a Soviet Army truck that only a day before had been in Riga in Latvia.

Marcus parked the Moskvich, entered the house, stooping as he did so because the ceiling had been built at a time when human beings were smaller. The room in which he stood was furnished only with a table and four roughly-carpentered chairs. Marcus removed his overcoat. He heard the click of a magazine being inserted into an automatic rifle, a slight echo from another room. A figure appeared in a doorway, a young man with an M-16 rifle held in the firing position.

“Relax, boy.” Marcus smiled, sat at the kitchen table, rolled a cigarette from a leather tobacco pouch. He was tired and it showed on his face. He smoked, watched the young man approach the table, saw the automatic weapon being propped very carefully against the leg of a chair.

The young man drummed his fingertips on the table. It was less a sign of nerves than it was of restlessness. He was ready to go into action. He’d dreamed of nothing else for a long time now. Marcus watched the young man, and his thoughts drifted to Aleksis Romanenko. When tasks had been allocated, functions delegated, Aleksis’s role had been to make certain that those members of the Soviet armed forces he’d recruited wouldn’t fail at the last minute, and that their escape routes were firmly in place. This role had suited Aleksis because it involved travel – both in the Baltic and in Russia itself – and as a ranking official he could go almost anywhere without question. Now, with Aleksis dead – gunned down, or so it was rumoured: hard news was a precious commodity – Marcus had been obliged to assume Aleksis’s part, like an understudy stepping in at the last moment. Marcus, a deserter from Afghanistan, didn’t have freedom of movement. As a fugitive, his style was cramped. His original role had been to make sure the weapons smuggled into Latvia from the United States were distributed between the Baltic countries, and that the various groups would move in unison when the hour came. But now he was exhausted at having to play Aleksis’s nerve-racking part.

Thirty-four hours. He sat back in his chair, enjoyed the cigarette, gazed at the young man, whose rather innocent face concealed a certain ferocity, a dark purpose. The boy, who called himself Anarhist, meaning Anarchist, had spent two years in the Soviet Army in Chabarovsk on the Chinese border and a further two years in a military prison for distributing pamphlets of a nationalist nature, calling for freedom for all the nationalities – the Baits, the Georgians, the Armenians, the Kazakhs, the scores of other races – harnessed by the Russians. There were hundreds like this boy throughout the Baltic, brave and determined and patriotic, and many of them were waiting for the moment.

Marcus crushed his cigarette out. He thought of the trips he had already made – to Riga, Haapsalu on the Baltic coast, Moscow itself – and the final arrangements he had concluded with the people Aleksis had bought. They were all like Uvarov, scared and yet mildly defiant, ambitious to leave a country and a military system that both terrified and stultified. And they were all impatient men too, filled with the belief that the Soviet system was changing but at an intolerably slow pace which couldn’t satisfy their needs. A few had indisputably genuine philosophical differences with the system. Others had grievances, complaints that the system was unfair, or uncaring, that it didn’t listen to the small if reasonable voices of dissent. Some had grudges that went back years, often to a time before they were born, back to grandparents who’d been purged by Stalin, relatives conjured out of existence by a political programme that could never conceal its inherent barbarism, no matter how much cosmetic surgery was done. Some resented the way their careers had failed to take fire, that their wives were discontented, their homes inadequate, their long separations from family intolerable. A few had material aspirations, their minds filled with pictures from glossy Western magazines. What they all shared was the belief that they were innocent inmates in a drab prison, and that the only light they could see, if one existed at all, was at the end of a very long tunnel. And none of them knew the nature of the plan, although some might have guessed it, but if so they’d repressed the knowledge, blinded themselves to their own conclusions.

Aleksis had chosen these people masterfully. He had tapped into deeply-rooted discontentments, old grudges and fears, and he’d assembled a team of key personnel, keeping them afloat on money, and passports, and promises. He’d also manipulated them through their families, providing passports to wives and children, making sure the families travelled out of Russia the day before the action was scheduled, thus locking the husbands firmly into the plan. It was, Marcus had often thought, a scheme of quite extraordinary insight, and he could only marvel at the patience with which Aleksis had put it together, the energy involved, the charm and persuasion needed, the clandestine meetings conducted in an atmosphere of fear and distrust and uncertainty.

He rolled another cigarette. A third person stepped into the room now, a girl of about twenty with short yellow hair and light blue eyes. She had just awakened from sleep and she looked bleary. She wore an old American combat jacket, khaki pants, a black t-shirt. Her feet were bare. She sat down at the table and put her feet up on the rough wooden surface, rubbing her eyes as she did so. She was hardly more than a child, Marcus thought, but she had already spent eighteen months in a psychiatric hospital for her role in editing and distributing an underground newspaper critical of Russification. She’d been given electric-shock treatments, the only permanent effect of which had been to leave her with a rather attractive laziness in one eye. Marcus knew her only as Erma. There was an intimacy between them, something that wasn’t fully realised as yet, but it was the kind of closeness developed between people with a common cause.

She rolled a cigarette from Marcus’s leather pouch, smoked in silence for a time. She was impatient, and anxious. Her spell in the so-called psychiatric hospital hadn’t instilled patience into her. Marcus reached out and laid his hand over the girl’s.

“You can’t hurry time,” Marcus said.

The girl stared at him, as if his truism were beneath her dignity. Tucked in the belt of her pants was a Colt automatic. She let her hand drift over the butt of the pistol. Marcus felt it then – the youthful eagerness of this girl, the desire that was in her to fight, something she could barely restrain.

“I had a dream,” she said.

“Bad or good?”

“I dreamed the time came and all the streets were empty.”

The boy, Anarhist, made a snorting sound. “Dreams don’t mean anything,” he said.

Marcus stood up, stretched his arms. He would go upstairs now, and try to nap, to settle his mind down in that place where it lay perfectly still. But lately he’d been having a difficult time sleeping. He’d shut his eyes and try to make himself comfortable but then the images would come back in at him the way they always did. He’d be standing on dry, rocky terrain under a terrible yellow sun, his mouth filled with dust and his eyes stinging. Three Afghans kneeled some yards away, their faces turned from him, their hands tethered behind their backs. Marcus noticed – a detail that never escaped him, no matter how many times he played this dreadful movie in his head – how the ropes cut into the skin of the bound men. He blinked his eyes as the wind blew over the rocks and his nostrils filled with dust and somebody on the edge of his vision thrust a revolver into his hand, which he took, understanding what he had to do with it. The wind flapped the headgear the Afghans wore and in the distance was the noise of rockets screaming. Shoot, somebody said. And Marcus raised the revolver and fired into the heads of the three men, who fell forward into the dust even as the wind, whistling through the cavities of rocks, still made their clothing flap against their bodies. The same memory, always the same bloody memory, images of a pain he couldn’t exorcise. He’d been involved in other things in Afghanistan – the shelling of villages, blowing up bridges and highways, direct combat – but they didn’t match the execution of the three guerillas, neither in shame nor in terror.

He climbed upstairs in the old farmhouse, hating his own recollections, but hating the Russians more for having created them in the first place.

London

V.G. Epishev, who operated on the principle that a man in constant motion left a confusion of trails, had checked into a hotel in Earl’s Court, a few streets behind the underground station. It was not a great hotel, but it had the merit of obscurity, located as it was at the end of a warren of narrow thoroughfares. He had a room on the top floor, one of the very few rooms in the establishment with its own telephone. It’s extra, you know, the woman at the desk told him, as if she were pleased by his little touch of extravagance and proud that her hotel could provide the opportunity. But it’s ever such a convenience, dear.

Epishev lay on the bed, turned his face to the window. It wasn’t quite light outside yet. He thought of making a call to Dimitri Volovich, but what did he have to report so far? The prospect of going through the rigmarole of raising the international operator, then being put through to East Berlin, and from there patched to Volovich in Moscow only to speak in terse, uninformative phrases, had no appeal. Greshko could wait. What choice did he have anyway? There was something enjoyable in the idea of exercising a little power over the old man, of being Greshko’s eyes and ears, his brain, in a foreign country. And Epishev was determined to savour the novelty of the feeling.

Besides, he’d been struck once or twice lately by the suspicion that this whole project, this undertaking that had forced him to travel hundreds of miles and had involved him in murder, was less a patriotic task than it was the construction of an epitaph for a sick old man who wanted to be remembered as the saviour of Russia. Perhaps it wasn’t the well-being of the nation that primarily interested Greshko, perhaps it was more the prospect of some gratifying words on his tombstone that compelled Vladimir Greshko to sit in Zavidovo like some conniving spider.

Epishev got up, performed some routine exercises, toe-touching, then some brisk sit-ups. He went to the window, opened it, breathed deeply. When the telephone rang, he picked it up on the second ring, understanding it could only be Alexei Malik, since he’d told nobody else of his whereabouts.

“I’m in the lobby,” Malik said.

Epishev hung up. He walked down the six flights of stairs to the foyer, which was a threadbare square of a room that smelled of very old carpet and dusty curtains. The desk was unmanned, the foyer empty save for Malik, who stood close to a curtained window. Epishev crossed the floor, noticing a red double-decker bus clatter past in the street. The hotel was shaken a moment by vibrations.

“Let’s walk,” Malik said. He moved to the door, held it open for Epishev. Outside, there was a slash of milky light in the sky over Earl’s Court. Both men moved in silence through the streets, pausing in front of a newsagent’s shop which displayed bold headlines concerning the violent slaying of two policemen. Malik paused to survey the tabloids, shaking his head as he read.

“The English don’t like it when their policemen are killed, Viktor,” he said. “It touches something raw in the British psyche.”

Epishev said nothing. He had no interest in Malik’s perceptions of British society. He walked away from the newspaper display, the headlines that shrieked about the murder of policemen and the deterioration of law and order throughout the island in general and how gun-control laws had to have every remaining loophole closed.

Malik fell into step beside him. “I had a meeting with two men from British intelligence, Viktor,” Malik said. “They called me at the Embassy, insisted on an urgent conference.”

“And?”

“Your name came up several times. They seem to think you’re responsible for the killings.”

“Preposterous,” Epishev said.

“As you say.” Malik looked up at the sky in the manner of a man who thinks he feels rain in the air. “I denied all knowledge of your existence, Viktor. What could I possibly know about KGB personnel in any case?”

Epishev stopped on the corner of Earl’s Court Road. He saw people plunging into the underground station, workers heading towards their places of employment in the half-dark. He turned to look at Malik. “You want to know how they came up with my name, of course.”

“I’m curious,” Malik said. “Did they pull it out of a hat like a rabbit? Did they conjure it out of nowhere?”

“British intelligence is hardly known for its powers of extrasensory perception, Alexei.” Epishev, who didn’t like the idea of standing on a main road, moved in the direction of the side-streets again. “The explanation is very simple,” and he told Malik about Kristina Vaska, about how she’d recognised him outside Pagan’s apartment.

Malik and Epishev turned into a quiet street of trees. From somewhere nearby there was the rumble of an underground train, breaking the silence.

“It’s unfortunate,” Malik said eventually. “Mistaken identity, of course. Besides, how could this woman recognise you after all this time? When the men from British intelligence come back, and they’re bound to, I’ll tell them I made further inquiries and that the only KGB operative by the name of Viktor Epishev is enjoying his retirement in the Crimea, or something to that effect. Therefore, you couldn’t possibly be in England.”

“That’s only going to work so long as they don’t start making some inquiries of their own through their network in Moscow. If word gets back to the Chairman that I might be in London …” Epishev had no need to finish this sentence. He was conscious of how fragile everything was.

“I shall be completely convincing, Viktor.”

Epishev was impatient suddenly. He hadn’t accomplished what he’d come all this way to do. He hadn’t ensured the security of the Baltic plan. And now there was the disturbing connection between Pagan and Kristina Vaska. He felt exposed, endangered, saddled with complexities he didn’t need. His memory of the gunplay in the street last night didn’t help his mood much either. Pagan had moved too quickly, squeezing under the car with such alacrity that Epishev hadn’t had time for accuracy. It was a good thing to learn for future reference that Pagan’s instinct for survival was extremely sharp. It was something to take into account.

Malik looked at his wristwatch. “I need some breakfast. Let’s go somewhere for coffee.” He clasped Epishev by the elbow and steered him gently back in the direction of Earl’s Court Road. Epishev went with reluctance, following Malik into a coffee-bar a few blocks from the underground station, a busy, smoke-filled room run by Turks.

“Why this place?” Epishev asked. He was uncomfortable in this crowded room.

“There’s somebody I want you to meet,” Malik said.

Feeling vaguely alarmed, Epishev asked, “Meet? Meet who?”

Malik spotted an unoccupied table and headed towards it, drawing Epishev with him. Epishev asked his question again, but Malik was already gazing at the menu, a grease-stained, typewritten sheet, and seemed not to have heard.

“Who?” Epishev asked a third time.

“A friend,” Malik replied. “Do you want coffee? Toast? Eggs?”

“Friends should have names,” Epishev said with some anger in his voice. “I don’t like being introduced to people without warning, Alexei. I don’t like having things sprung on me.”

Malik shook his head in vigorous denial of any underhand behaviour. “I’m talking about an ally, Viktor. An important one.”

Epishev was about to say something when Malik stood up and waved an arm in greeting. Epishev turned his face towards the door, seeing the newcomer step in. The man, who wore thick glasses and a lightweight suit, smiled at Malik and came across the room, threading through the clutter of tables and the harried waitresses balancing trays with the agility of circus performers. The man reached the table and pulled up a chair. He shook Malik’s hand. Epishev, displeased by what he perceived as subterfuge on Alexei’s part, unhappy at the notion that Malik was bringing in an unknown third party, absorbed only a brief impression of the stranger before turning his face to the side.

“Viktor,” Malik said.

Epishev looked at the newcomer again. He saw round, rather flabby features, a button-down shirt, a seersucker jacket of pin-striped design, a crewcut.

“Viktor, I want you to meet a very good friend of ours.”

The newcomer smiled warmly. “Gunther,” the man said. “Ted Gunther.”

There was a long silence during which Epishev studied the American’s face. There was a certain kind of face which Epishev didn’t care for. And Gunther had it – a face as obvious as an open sandwich.

“I think it’s time to clarify things,” Ted Gunther said, and he rubbed his hands in the congenially cautious manner of a diplomat about to do some business in detente. “The last thing we want is misunderstandings, right?”

Epishev, still staring at the American, said nothing.

Brighton Beach, Brooklyn

It was dark and the moon was rising on the ocean when Frank Pagan and Max Klein stepped on to the boardwalk at Brighton Beach. The night, hot and close, filled with smells of sweat and the collected suntan lotion of the day and fried foodstuffs, crowded Pagan like some great damp creature risen up from the water. Both men walked slowly to the end of the boardwalk, drifting through the crowds, the roller-skaters and skateboarders, the cyclists, the old couples moving arm-in-arm, the kids popping beercans and jousting for the attention of girls with hairdos fashioned by stylists from other planetary systems – seething activity, clammy heat, the ocean almost motionless. Pagan, sweating, leaned against the handrail and looked out at the water.

“Welcome to Brighton Beach,” Klein said, and he waved a hand at the sky, as if the very constellations were a part of Brooklyn.

Pagan studied the storefronts that lined one side of the boardwalk. Here and there a vendor sold soda and hot-dogs, but what really intrigued Pagan were those places that seemed to serve as social clubs, establishments without signs. You could see through open doorways into cavernous rooms where men, mainly old, played cards or studied chessboards. Slavic music drifted out into the darkness, oddly nostalgic, even sorrowful. Though he couldn’t understand a word of what was being sung, Pagan found the sound touching anyhow.

Klein said, “These places used to be stores. Some sold tourist trinkets, others greasy foods. But they gradually got taken over by emigrant societies. Mainly the Russians, although you sometimes find Ukrainians or Moldavians or Latvians – you’ve got to be careful with the distinctions, Frank. Come here some Sundays it’s like Babel, guys talking in Russian or Latvian or Georgian. You name it. Odessa Beach, USA.”

Pagan started to walk. Klein, nimble in his open sandals, kept up with him. Now and then, like a nautical blessing given in a miserly way, a faint breeze would come up from the ocean and blow aside the humidity for a moment, then the swamplike dark would reassemble itself. Pagan paused in the open door of a clubhouse and saw a middle-aged man in a loose-fitting suit dance with a large woman who wore pink-framed glasses and had her yellow hair up in a beehive. The music was big-band stuff that might have been recorded in the early 1950s.

Klein said, “The people that come to America from the Soviet Union tend to keep to themselves. It’s almost a force of habit with them, Frank. They come from countries where everybody was a snoop. Even your next-door neighbour was a potential informer for the KGB. What I’m saying is you can’t just walk around here asking questions. If some Baits have organised themselves into a fraternity with a sinister purpose, which is what you tell me, they’re not going to be shouting it from the rooftops.”

Pagan moved out of the doorway. “Rose Alexander mentioned an old shop.”

“Take your pick,” Klein remarked. He gestured with a hand, indicating three or four stores that hadn’t been occupied in a long time. Some had windows protected by metal grilles, others padlocked doors, one had a faded To Rent sign with a realtor’s name bleached by the sunlight. Pagan had a sense of decline here, of an age that had passed, a world receding. There must have been dignity here once, but it had been reduced to the kind of seediness he associated with decrepit English seaside resorts.

He walked a little way, trying to imagine Kiviranna coming along these same slats of wood. It would be dark, and Kiviranna’s contact would be waiting for him in the shadows, perhaps inside one of the vacant shops, and Jake would move along the boardwalk in a stealthy manner, taking care that nobody saw him. Pagan conjured up these tiny pictures, almost as if he were forcing himself to see the ghost of Kiviranna appear before him now, leaving a spectral trail for him to follow. He tried to eavesdrop an old conversation. The man’s name is Romanenko. You have to kill him. This is the key to the place where you’ll find the gun.

Would Jake have asked why Romanenko had to be killed? Would he have bothered with a mere detail like that? Suppose he had? What would his contact have answered? He’s carrying something that can’t reach its destination, Jake. That’s all you need to know. And Jake might have nodded his head, absorbed the information. But it probably hadn’t happened that way at all. Jake’s connection would only have to say that the world would be a better place if a treacherous Commie like Romanenko was taken out of it and that would be enough for Kiviranna. Pagan walked to the handrail, leaned there, gazed out over the dark water for a time, seeing the moon that sent a column of shivering silver across the sluggish tide. Then he turned back to the empty stores whose dark windows suggested rich mysteries.

“I suppose it wouldn’t be difficult to track the owners of these places down,” he said to Klein.

Klein guessed it would be a matter of public record. It would take maybe a phonecall or two, a little legwork. Pagan wanted to know how quickly this could be accomplished and Klein, wondering at the Englishman’s dedication, his apparent immunity to jet-lag, figured it might be done first thing in the morning when people with regular jobs were at their desks. There was a hint of sarcasm in Klein’s speech, nothing objectionable, enough to make Pagan smile to himself.

He continued to stare at the windows. Some had faded signs inscribed on glass, old lettering barely legible in the thin light from the lamps that burned along the boardwalk. Roo beers. H t dogs. C t on candy – like half-finished answers in an elaborate crossword puzzle, or words in an alphabet designed to be read only by initiates. Frank Pagan, feeling fatigue creep through him at last, glanced once more at the moon, thought about Kristina Vaska – in whose half of the world this moon would already be fading – then he asked Klein to drive him to his hotel.

They walked back to the place where Klein had parked the Dodge. Once again, either on account of fatigue or darkness, neither man noticed the car that travelled behind them all the way back to Manhattan. It was not this time the pea-green Buick, which had been replaced by a navy blue 1983 Ford Escort, a car unremarkable in every way, and just as anonymous as its predecessor. The pea-green Buick had gone in another direction, back to the apartment building in which Rose Alexander lived.

London

The moon that had taken Frank Pagan’s attention had disappeared completely from the sky when Kristina Vaska woke in her hotel in Kensington. She rose at once, went inside the small bathroom, splashed cold water across her face, brushed her teeth. She dressed, packed her suitcase, then she sat for a time on the edge of the narrow bed. She had three hours until her plane left Heathrow. She checked her ticket to be absolutely sure, then put it back in her wallet. She remained motionless on the bed. A morning newspaper had been shoved under the door of her room, one of the hotel’s little courtesies, but she couldn’t bring herself to pick it up. From where she sat she could read the headline, or at least that half of it which hadn’t been folded.

TWO POLICEMEN SHOT IN

That was all she could make out. She turned her face away.

Those men were dead because Frank Pagan had asked them to protect her. It was a world of blood in which men kept dying.

She found it an unbearable thought to get around, an obstacle in the dead centre of her brain. She got up, covered her face with her hands in such a way that an observer might have imagined her to be weeping – but she wasn’t, even if she felt like it. She picked up the phone on the bedside table, dialled the hotel operator, asked to be connected with Mrs Evi Vaska at a number in upstate New York. While she waited Kristina imagined the antique phone in her mother’s tiny downstairs living-room, the room she called the parlour, she pictured Evi Vaska in her white makeup moving through the small boxlike rooms and down the crooked stairs of the old house, past the shelves of fragile china figures, all the glass reindeer, the crystal ducks, the porcelain gnomes and elves that crowded the little house and that always seemed to be growing in number, as if they bred in the dark. Kristina imagined she heard the lacy gown Evi always wore whispering on the steps as she moved. From her house in the foothills of the Adirondacks, Evi Vaska wrote impassioned letters to Congressmen and Senators and British Members of Parliament concerning Norbert Vaska’s incarceration, conducting a relentless campaign she thought would win her husband’s freedom.

Relentless, Kristina thought. And doomed.

“Hello?” Evi Vaska’s voice was distant.

For a second Kristina was tempted to hang up without saying anything. She hesitated. “Mother.”

“Kristina!” Evi Vaska’s voice became breathlessly excited. “Are you still in England?”

“Yes,” Kristina said. She pictured the house, the hundreds of miniature figures that rendered the place even more claustrophobic than it was, with its narrow passageways and cramped staircase and low ceilings. Even the garden, a wild green riot, pressed in upon the house as if to isolate it before finally consuming it. Kristina had the thought that the house and its garden were like her mother’s mind, a place of lifeless figures and disarray.

“Is there news, Kristina?”

“We’ll talk when I come home, mother. I’ll drive up to see you and we’ll sit down together and we’ll talk.”

Kristina pictured her mother’s flour-coloured face, the black eye makeup, the deep red lipstick, the dyed yellow hair that lay upon her shoulders like the broken strings of a harpsichord. “In other words there’s nothing, is that what you’re saying, Kristina?”

“That’s not what I’m saying, mother. Look, I’m flying back today. At the weekend I’ll drive up to you. I’ll come up to the Adirondacks.” She tried to keep impatience and exasperation out of her voice, but she wished she hadn’t called in the first place. She sighed. She didn’t have the heart for this talk. She didn’t have the heart for any of it.

“You didn’t see Aleksis? Is that what you’re trying to tell me, Kristina? So there’s no news of your father? Is this what you’re keeping from me?”

Kristina Vaska put the receiver down. She walked to the window, pressed her forehead upon the glass, looked down at the street below. She felt as if she were a victim suddenly, a casualty of history, wounded by forces from the past – forces that had killed some people and driven others, like Evi Vaska who sat in a world of her own creation, totally out of her mind. And her eyes watered, but she didn’t weep, no matter how tight the constriction at the back of her throat or the ache around her heart. She was beyond tears. She needed dignity, which came through retribution rather than grief.