18

Glen Cove, Long Island

Without waiting to answer awkward questions from investigators, Frank Pagan, sickened by the stench of fire that clung to him, had walked away from the burning Ford and moved through narrow streets, following the general directions the cashier had given him. These were impressive streets where branches of old trees interlocked overhead, creating barriers against the sky. The houses here were large, built on enormous green lots. These were streets in which money didn’t speak, it hummed tastefully. Pagan paused when he reached the corner of Brentwood Drive, where the greenery was even more dense and the houses virtually invisible behind crowded stands of trees and thick hedges.

There was something secretive about the street, the impenetrable shadows, the way the houses were concealed from view. People here wanted to live private lives, and so they’d created their own wilderness in the suburbs of Long Island. A pedestrian in this place stood a pretty good chance of being arrested, because it was the kind of area where walking was something only criminals and cranks ever did.

He looked at the driveways of homes as he passed them. Numbers were so discreetly displayed you had to search for them among shrubbery. He found number fourteen. A hedgerow grew around the property and a gravel driveway disappeared among foliage. The only part of the house that could be seen was the red-tiled roof. Pagan took a few steps along the driveway, which curved suddenly and the house came in view, an ornate turreted construction set just beyond a well-kept lawn. A green awning hung above the columned porch. There were no cars in the driveway, no signs of life. He glanced at the windows, noticed nothing, no face behind glass, no curtain shivering.

He walked up on to the porch. The doorbell was one of those old-fashioned brass affairs that you pulled toward you. He could hear the bell echo within the house, but nobody came to answer. He moved slowly around the back of the house where an impressive rose garden was located. The flowers grew in lavish, meticulous beds.

Pagan looked through the glass walls of a sun room, which had been added to the original structure. But he saw nothing, only the vague outlines of furniture. Then he stared across the rose beds for a time, where there was a white-latticed gazebo draped by willows, and beyond that a thick stand of oleander. None of the surrounding houses was visible because of the dense foliage, which gave this particular dwelling a sense of isolation, of loneliness – as if nobody had ever lived here.

Some of this isolation touched him. He had an urge to sit down and sleep and withdraw, making himself numb to the death of Max Klein, numb to the question that had begun to nag at him ever since he’d strolled away from the gas-station – how had Epishev known he was in the United States?

Maybe it was no great mystery. He imagined how it might have happened that Epishev came across his information. John Downey, for instance, who was known to have connections in Fleet Street, and who was often the so-called ‘reliable source’ in newspaper stories about the Yard, might have run into an intrepid reporter anxious to get some eyewitness details about events in Edinburgh – and Downey, after a few of the Newcastle Brown Ales he so enjoyed, might have let slip the fact that Frank Pagan was off on some junket to New York City. As soon as the scribbler had his information, it would then travel along the Street, passed from the mouth of one crime reporter to the next, from one pub to another, where sooner or later the item would reach the ears of one of those accredited, if vaguely shadowy, journalists who gathered information for the Soviet press. From there it was a cinch that the knowledge of Pagan’s trip would find its way back, sooner or later, to a source at the Soviet Embassy. A whisper in the ear of Epishev, and there it was …

Pagan could imagine this sequence, which was less one of malicious exposure than of bloody careless talk loosely bruited about in places where cops and reporters met to sink a few jars.

Epishev, Pagan thought. Everywhere Uncle Viktor went there was death in the vicinity. Everything he touched shrivelled and turned black. It was quite a knack to go through life laying things to waste all around you.

His head still filled with the memory of flames, Pagan peered once again through the glass walls of the sun-room. Then he tried the door, which yielded. Whoever owned this house, whoever Mikhail Kiss might be, he clearly felt he had nothing to fear from burglars, that the quiet authority, the rich seclusion of the street, was enough of a deterrent in itself. Pagan pushed the door, entered the room quietly, stood motionless. There was a strong smell of cut flowers in the air.

He stepped out into the hallway. To his left a flight of stairs rose up into darkness. Ahead of him, across the entranceway, were other rooms. Doors lay open and the half-darkened surfaces of wooden furniture gleamed quietly. The silence here was deep and impressive and the dying sunlight that managed to find its way inside rooms, squeezing through drawn-down blinds, was slightly unreal, like light from another planet.

Pagan went to the foot of the stairs, looked up a moment, then walked inside the room just ahead of him, a dining-room with an oval table and rather spare contemporary prints on the walls, a room with a certain sterile quality that suggested meals were never actually eaten here, nobody sat down to dine. It reminded Pagan of a window display in a furniture shop. Unlike the home of Carl Sundbach, with its clutter and disorder and a sense of an unarranged life being lived in its rooms, the house of Mikhail Kiss was imbued with absences and silences.

Pagan entered another room, a sitting-room, expensively done, white leather sofa, matching chairs, chrome, and again the same spacious emptiness. He walked to the stairs, climbed quietly, reached the landing. Two bedrooms, an office, a bathroom. The first bedroom was large and uninteresting, the bed made up, a book open and face down on the bedside table, an easy chair under the bay window. Pagan glanced at the book, which was in a language he didn’t understand, then he noticed a photograph of a woman on the mantelpiece across the room. He didn’t pick up the framed picture. The woman wore her hair in the style of the late 1930s. It was a good face, probably beautiful if you liked the gaunt, rather haunted look. Written on the picture, and barely legible, was an inscription – again in a language Pagan couldn’t read – and the signature Ingrida, 1938. For a reason he couldn’t begin to explain, Pagan was touched by a momentary sadness, perhaps caused by the look in the woman’s eyes, or the sense he suddenly had that he was gazing upon a picture of the dead. Why did some photographs create the impression that the subject of the picture was dead?

He stepped out of the bedroom, then into the adjoining one. A narrow room, a single bed, prints depicting a variety of aircraft, and trophies – shelves of silver cups and medallions and plaques, awards decorated by miniature figures, a boxer, a runner, a javelin-thrower. It was quite a collection. Pagan picked up a statue of a boxer and read To Andres Kiss, First Prize in the Junior Boys Section, Long Island Boxing Association, 1969. All the awards here were to the same Andres Kiss, and there were scores of them, attesting to a disciplined, athletic life, an achiever’s life, the kind of existence defined by very definite goals. Did Andres ever have time for fucking around? Pagan wondered. Presumably not, if he spent all his adolescent years training for competitions and winning trophies.

Andres Kiss. Was he Mikhail’s son? Pagan replaced the trophy, crossed the room, looking for photographs of the boy wonder. Trophies galore, but no pictures, no casual snapshots. He looked at the posters of aircraft. They were all US and British fighter planes from World War II. So Andres liked athletics and aeroplanes – what did this tell you, Holmes?

Pagan went to the window, looked out across the garden at the back of the house, seeing how darkness, almost complete now, robbed the roses of their colours. He let the curtain fall back in place and was about to turn out of Andres Kiss’s room when he noticed some framed papers on the wall above the bed. He had to turn on the bedside lamp to read them. Interesting stuff. A certificate issued by the United States Air Force to Captain Andres Kiss on the occasion of his promotion. An award from the USAF to Captain Andres Kiss for compiling one thousand hours of flying time. An honourable discharge to Major Kiss, dated September 1985. So young Andres went from being a juvenile terror in the boxing-ring to a wizard of the airways, a high-flyer. Pagan turned off the bedside lamp and stepped out of the bedroom to the darkened landing.

He was about to go inside the room that was clearly an office when he heard the front door opening and the sound of a key being tugged out of a lock, then the chink-chink of a chain in the palm of a hand. Frank Pagan stood very still at the top of the stairs, watching as a light was turned on in the hallway, illuminating the big man who stood in full view for only a moment before he stepped out of Pagan’s vision.

Pagan held his breath. He heard water running inside a glass, then the rattle of ice-cubes, the sound of liquid being stirred. He descended slowly, quietly, watching the square of yellow light falling out of the kitchen and into the hallway. The big man’s shadow appeared briefly, then was gone, and a door closed somewhere. The sun-room, Pagan thought. He makes himself a drink, takes it to the sun-room, sits down, relaxes.

Pagan reached the foot of the stairs, where he paused. Through an open door he could see the man sitting on a wicker sofa, his legs crossed, his head tilted back, a drink held slackly in one hand. Pagan, taking his gun from its holster, moved into the doorway that led to the glass-walled room.

The man stared at him in surprise. Ice-cubes made faint knocking sounds inside his glass.

“Don’t bother to get up,” Pagan said. It was the man in the photograph, the one who’d been snapped beside Romanenko and Sundbach. Altered by time, his hair white, his body rearranged by the years, but it was undeniably the same man.

“Mikhail Kiss?” Pagan asked.

“Who wants to know?”

Pagan flashed his ID in front of the man’s face. Mikhail Kiss, who had looked alarmed, seemed to relax now, reassured by Pagan’s identity card.

“I thought you were, I don’t know, a burglar,” he said. “I’m Kiss.”

“You left your side door open, Mr Kiss.”

Mikhail Kiss stood up, sipped his drink, smiled. “I grow careless with age, Mr Pagan. Do me a small favour. Put the gun away.”

Pagan returned the Bernardelli to his holster. “A precaution,” he said.

“Sure. I might have pulled a gun and fired on you. After all, we live in an age of guns,” Kiss remarked, still smiling, running one large hand through his white hair.

Pagan glanced a moment through the glass walls, seeing the ghostly shape of the gazebo out there in the darkness. Then he turned to look back at Mikhail Kiss, who seemed completely at ease now, and hostlike, as if he were wondering what kind of treats he could find to force upon his visitor.

Pagan had an uncomfortable moment suddenly, a light-headed sensation, a flashback to the sight of Max Klein in the burning car, and he wondered if this image was going to recur, if it was going to come into his head when he didn’t want it, or enter his sleep when he didn’t need nightmares. He pushed the picture from his mind and looked at Kiss, wondering if the big man had noticed his discomfort.

“You’ve come a long way,” Kiss said. “What can I possibly do for a man from Scotland Yard?”

Pagan needed to sit down. He moved to one of the wicker chairs. He studied Kiss’s face, thinking it was good-natured, and cheerful, the face of a man who doesn’t come to subterfuge easily. Where to begin? Where to make the first incision? Start with the car. Start with something simple. Go slowly at first.

“I’m trying to trace the driver of a certain Jaguar,” Pagan said.

“A Jaguar?” Mikhail Kiss asked.

“The car was leased to a company called Rikkad, of which you’re the financial Vice President.”

“Rikkad,” and Kiss looked like a man ransacking his memory, a man who hears a faint bell ring at the end of a long corridor.

“Rikkad is one of your business ventures with Carl Sundbach,” Pagan said in the manner of a theatrical prompter. There was an act going on here, and Kiss had slipped into some kind of amnesiac role, but Pagan wasn’t in the mood to be a gullible onlooker in the balcony.

Mikhail Kiss drained his scotch, set his empty glass down. “We’ve had so many business ventures, sometimes I forget,” he said. Why in the name of God was an English cop interested in the Jaguar? Only Andres ever drove it, and he’d returned it to the offices of the leasing company late that afternoon, so why was Pagan asking questions about it?

“But you remember now,” Pagan said. “And you remember the Jaguar.”

“Yes, of course, it comes back to me.”

“Did you drive it?”

Mikhail Kiss shook his head. “Too sporty for me, Mr Pagan.”

“Who used it then?”

“My nephew mostly. Andres Kiss.”

Pagan sat back in his chair, and the wicker creaked under his weight. Andres Kiss, Superboy. “I’d like to talk to him.”

“Unfortunately, that isn’t going to be possible.”

“Why not?”

“He just left on vacation.”

“When?”

“Tonight,” Kiss said.

“Where did he go?”

Mikhail Kiss shrugged. “Europe,” he answered.

That, Pagan thought, was fucking useful information. “Where exactly?” he asked.

“He said he was touring. You know the young, Mr Pagan. They don’t make plans.”

“He flew, did he?”

Mikhail Kiss nodded. He had a tight, claustrophobic feeling, and it made his chest ache. What did an English policeman want with Andres, for Christ’s sake?

“Where did he fly to?” Pagan asked.

Kiss laughed. “I’m only the boy’s uncle, Mr Pagan. He tells me nothing.” He lit a cigarette. “Why are you asking these questions about Andres?”

Pagan didn’t answer at once. He liked the silence, the way it built, the suspense that lay at the heart of quietness. He got out of the wicker chair and looked across the darkened gardens. The gazebo was no longer visible, the sky moonless.

“Carl Sundbach was murdered this afternoon,” Pagan said, and he turned to look at Mikhail Kiss’s reaction.

Kiss was waxy suddenly, and pale. “Murdered?”

Pagan nodded. It was obvious that Kiss, unless he was more talented an actor than Pagan imagined, hadn’t heard this news before.

“And you suspect my nephew? Is that why you’re here?” Kiss asked. He had to fight the blackness that was inside him now, the sense of inner control receding, the wave of nausea that rolled through him. He remembered the unexpected way Andres had gone out, the moodiness of the boy later at the airport, he remembered aloofness and ice.

Pagan said, “A young man drove a Jaguar to Sundbach’s street. He parked it, went up to Sundbach’s apartment. Twenty minutes later Sundbach was found murdered. The young man and the Jaguar had gone.”

Kiss asked his question again. And you suspect my nephew?

“Yes,” Pagan said.

“Why would he kill Sundbach, for God’s sake?”

Pagan had a small enjoyable moment, like the kind a conjurer might savour before pulling a multitude of things out of a hat he has shown the audience to be empty. Silks, rabbits, doves, pineapples, an unexpected world.

“My guess is he learned that Sundbach had arranged the murder of Aleksis Romanenko,” and here Pagan took one of the photographs from his pocket and tossed it into Kiss’s lap. It was done with flair and great aplomb and the timing was a joy. Three faces stared up from the photograph – Sundbach, Romanenko and Mikhail Kiss, three young warriors fighting on behalf of a lost cause.

Kiss shut his eyes and laid one hand over the picture and he thought You old fool, Carl. Of course there had been pictures, and he remembered the bravado of the day when they’d been taken, and how they’d gone out that morning – four of them, the nucleus of the group – and ambushed a Russian patrol, a successful enterprise, and how Sundbach, who was never without his pre-war Kodak, had insisted on photographs. Souvenirs, he’d said. Mälestusesemed, things of remembrance. Something to show our grandchildren, he’d said. Now, after all this time, the pictures, which Kiss had told him several times to destroy, had resurfaced and a prying Englishman had seen them. It was strange, almost mystical, the way the past clung to the present. And it was there in the old photo, a connection that couldn’t be denied.

Mikhail Kiss looked down at the picture. He could smell the dampness of the forest, he could feel the wet earth against his face as he lay in a hollow while the tiblad patrolled nearby. Now what was this Englishman telling him? what nonsense was this about Sundbach arranging the death of Romanenko? and Andres killing old Carl?

“I think you’re mistaken, Mr Pagan. I can’t believe Sundbach would have anything to do with the death of Romanenko.”

Pagan, glad that Kiss wasn’t going to dispute the authenticity of the photograph and deny it was his own younger image there, reached down, picked the photograph up, looked at it. “Quite the opposite. I think there’s a strong possibility Sundbach arranged it because he discovered Romanenko was controlled by a certain faction within the KGB.”

“Controlled by the KGB? You’re out of your mind.”

“I don’t think there’s any doubt, Kiss. The KGB knew what Aleksis was carrying to Edinburgh, but they didn’t stop him leaving the Soviet Union. And you want to know why they didn’t? Because they want the Brotherhood’s plan to work.”

The Brotherhood. Mikhail Kiss, who had a stricken look on his face, walked quickly into the kitchen. Pagan followed, watching the big man make himself a second drink. Ice-cubes slid from his hand and fell to the tiled floor and cracked like glass. Kiss kicked the broken cubes aside and looked at Frank Pagan and wondered how this Englishman had heard about the Brotherhood. He sipped his drink and tried to remain calm. He said, “I think you’ve made a grave error. Especially in your suspicion about Andres.”

Pagan admired Kiss’s control, even though he sensed it was superficial. The man’s manner was cool, smooth, and there was something of perplexed innocence in his expression.

Pagan said, “I suppose I could always put the matter beyond any doubt by looking at a picture of your nephew. Do you have a photo?”

Mikhail Kiss stared at the Englishman, who had one of those faces that can be deceptive, a mask drawn across true feelings. But Kiss saw it in Frank Pagan’s eyes, a core of conviction that what the Englishman was saying was the truth. Kiss turned away, fighting a chill he felt. He heard himself ask how Carl had been murdered, and Pagan replied with the single word strangulation and Kiss remembered the cut on Andres’s forehead, which perhaps Carl, the old fighter, the vöitleja, had managed to inflict at the end of his life. Something dark raced across Kiss’s heart when he thought of this boy he’d raised, this killer of old men. He shut his eyes tightly. He wondered if he could deny the boy’s existence, if he could deny the very thing he’d created.

“I don’t have a photograph,” he said.

“I didn’t think you would.” Pagan poured himself a glass of water from the faucet and drank it quickly. He could still taste smoke in his mouth. “What is the Brotherhood’s plan, Mikhail?”

Kiss turned to the Englishman. “Plan? What plan?”

“The one the KGB seems to like,” Pagan replied. “The one the KGB has found some use for.”

Mikhail Kiss shook his head. There were edges here, boundaries he couldn’t chart, as if the landscape Pagan described were too chaotic to grasp. There was no way in the world that the KGB could have controlled Romanenko. There was no way the KGB would encourage the scheme. They’d destroy it, not use it. Everyone connected with it, himself included, would have been disposed of in some way.

“When you talk about the Brotherhood, you seem to ascribe to it a sinister quality it doesn’t have. I admit we’re a group of loosely-organised patriots who regret the seizure of our country – but we’re not planning anything, you understand. And if we did, it wouldn’t be anything the KGB would approve of, I can tell you.”

Pagan folded his arms, leaned against the sink. There was a flatness in the way Kiss talked, a lack of vigour. It was as if his understanding of his nephew’s crime had diminished him in an important way, and now he was simply going through the motions of concealing the Brotherhood’s scheme.

“Too many people have died,” Pagan said. “Too many people have died for me to buy your bullshit. Is it terrorism? Is it political assassination? What the hell is it?”

Mikhail Kiss walked out of the kitchen and back into the sun-room, the glass walls of which were pitch black now. Pagan followed him, frustrated by the big man’s evasiveness. What was he supposed to do? Pull a gun and force Kiss to tell the truth? Pagan had the distinct feeling that guns wouldn’t convince Mikhail Kiss to do anything he didn’t want to do.

“How do you feel, Kiss, about the fact that your plan is being put to use by the KGB? How do you feel about serving up something useful for your enemies?”

Mikhail Kiss sat down, looked sadly at Frank Pagan. “Please, Mr Pagan. No more. No more questions. I’m tired now.”

Goading wasn’t much of a strategy either, Pagan decided. He moved a little closer to Kiss and said, “Romanenko is dead. Carl Sundbach is dead. Two London policemen are dead. A young English diplomat was killed. And tonight a New York cop was burned to death inside his car. This plan of yours is running up quite a total, Kiss. Somebody gets in the way of it and whoops – the fucking KGB makes sure they’re not around to do any more interference. You make a great team. The Brotherhood and the KGB.”

Kiss said nothing. He wasn’t really listening to Pagan. He was thinking of Andres Kiss killing Carl Sundbach. He was trying to imagine that, seeing pictures, Sundbach perhaps rolling on the floor while Andres tied the cord tighter and tighter still, the old man struggling, fighting, gasping at the end of it all.

Pagan brought his face close to Kiss’s ear. “Is Andres part of it, Mikhail? I understand he’s a hot-shot flyer. Is he part of the scheme? Is he going to fly a plane for you? Is that it? A bomb, Mikhail? Is he going to drop a bomb?”

“For God’s sake.”

Pagan was trying to come in from all angles here, as if this buckshot approach might confuse Kiss, might draw an answer out of him that he didn’t want to give, but Kiss was too quick for this tactic.

Kiss rose from his chair, brushing Pagan aside. “You bark up the wrong tree, Pagan. Go home. Go back to London. Let it be. It doesn’t concern you. Countries you know nothing about, countries occupied by the Soviets, why should you interfere with them? The British had their chance in the 1940s, Pagan, and sold the Baltic cheaply to Stalin. I’m telling you now, it’s too late to sit up and take a fresh interest in my people. Forget it. Go home. Leave it to people who care, people who understand. What the hell do you understand about it? Mind your own damned business.”

“It’s become my fucking business, Kiss!”

Kiss stepped into the hallway, and Pagan went after him. There, under the hall light, Mikhail Kiss stopped moving, and stood very still. Pagan, surprised to the point of silence, felt an odd tension at the back of his throat.

She was standing by the front door. She wore a plain white t-shirt and blue jeans and her shoulderbag hung at her side. There was very little make-up on her face. When she smiled at Pagan she did so in a thin way, and he thought she looked beautiful, but in some way changed, except he couldn’t define it.

“Frank Pagan’s right,” Kristina Vaska said. “This whole thing has become his business, Mr Kiss.”

Moscow

General Olsky went to the window of his office and parted the slats of the blind, seeing a strange red sun in the morning sky which, in a theatrical manner, lit the old women sweeping the street below, so that they had the appearance of a Greek chorus keeping itself busy. Then he closed the slats and turned to look at Deputy Minister Tikunov, who sat on the other side of the desk.

Ever since the meeting with the General Secretary, Olsky had despatched hundreds of additional agents into the field, in Moscow and Leningrad and Kiev. He’d ordered them to enter the offices of the Defence Ministry and examine the files of personnel deployed in sensitive positions at radar installations, which he considered a logical place to start if Greshko’s scheme involved the flight of a plane into Soviet airspace. It wasn’t a decision Olsky had taken lightly, and it infuriated Tikunov.

Tikunov, Deputy Minister of Defence, was also Commander-in-Chief of the Soviet Air Defence Forces. He was a squat man who bore an uncanny resemblance to the late Nikita Khrushchev. To Tikunov’s way of thinking, the KGB had too much influence, both in civilian and military life, and he frequently found himself hoping that if genuine reforms were to be made in the Soviet Union they would first of all be applied to the kind of authority commanded by the organs of State Security.

Tikunov said, “I assume, comrade General, you can explain the swarms of your men in my headquarters? I assume you can explain the nature of your business?”

Olsky regarded Tikunov’s large red face, a peasant face given to Slavic volatility, extremes of emotion not easily hidden. His face was an accurate barometer of his feelings at all times. Olsky didn’t feel obliged to give an immediate explanation. There were delicate and rather ambiguous questions of rank at issue here, and Olsky was conscious of the fact that Tikunov had been Commander-in-Chief of Air Defences for a longer time than he, Olsky, had run the KGB. Olsky, though, was a candidate member of the Politburo, and closer to the General Secretary than Tikunov, which compensated for the matter of longevity.

“I’m operating with the full authority of the General Secretary,” Olsky said, which was stretching a truth slightly. The General Secretary had simply said Deal with it as you think fit, Stefan.

Deputy Minister Tikunov wondered if he should ask to see some kind of written authorisation. He had every right to do so, of course, but the Chairman of the KGB, no matter who occupied the position, was never a man one questioned lightly. And so he hesitated a moment, considering his options and trying to bring his temper under control.

“Let me ask you a question, Minister,” Olsky said. “How difficult is it these days for an aeroplane to penetrate our airspace undetected, Minister?”

“What the hell kind of question is that?” Tikunov asked.

“A simple one.”

Tikunov bristled a little. He hadn’t come here to discuss hypothetical matters with the Chairman of the KGB. He simply wanted all those bloody snoops, those supercilious upstarts, those fucking gangsters, out of his buildings and out of his domain. “It’s possible. Hardly likely.”

“In what circumstances is it possible, Minister?”

Tikunov raised a hand and counted on his fingers. “One, if the plane flies beneath our radar. And two, if the radar is malfunctioning. In the former circumstances visual contact would be made sooner or later.”

“Are any of your radar installations malfunctioning?”

“To my knowledge, absolutely not. If such a thing happened I’d know about it.”

“Automatically?”

Tikunov nodded. He wondered where this was leading. He had the feeling he’d allowed Olsky to take control, and he didn’t like it.

“Are there circumstances, aside from malfunctions, when a radar installation would be inoperative?” Olsky asked.

“During routine maintenance, of course.”

“And is there any such maintenance presently going on?”

“There’s nothing scheduled.”

“Could maintenance take place without your knowledge?”

“Hardly. Only the smallest of jobs could be done without my permission. Anything that affected the grid as a whole would need my approval.”

“Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that certain men under your command decided to render radar inoperable and didn’t want you to know? Is that possible?”

Tikunov, who liked to think he treated his officers with respect and believed he was respected by them in turn, was shocked by the suggestion. “I’d have such men shot, General. Are you questioning the loyalty of my officers?”

Olsky nodded. “I think there’s a possibility your system may have been tampered with, Minister.”

“Unthinkable,” Tikunov said.

“To you, perhaps. But I insist you check the status of all the radar installations in the Baltic sector.”

Tikunov felt he had to assert himself here. This whole conversation had begun to sound like an extended personal insult to him. “I’ll be perfectly happy to check the status of my radar and investigate possible disloyalty among my officers – just as soon as you show me a written order from the General Secretary, Comrade Chairman.” Tikunov, his face growing more red, his cheeks quivering, was adamant. What he really despised about the KGB was the way they eroded one’s sphere of influence. They could strut in and take over your whole life. “I’d also like to get a grasp on the reason behind your questions, General. Do you know something I don’t know? Have you heard of an unauthorised plane intending to violate Soviet airspace?”

Olsky moved round his office in a restless way. “I’ve received information that leads me to believe an aircraft is planning an attack on the Soviet Union.”

“What kind of aircraft?”

“I don’t know.”

“Perhaps you know where it might be coming from?” Tikunov asked in what he thought was the tone of voice used to humour people, but it was a clumsy effort made by a humourless man.

Olsky shook his head.

“By God, General, you’re an encyclopaedia of information,” Tikunov said. “Just the same you think you have enough to send your agents into my province and cause all kinds of mischief. Where did you get this so-called information from anyhow?”

“I can’t answer that,” Olsky said. “And you know better than to ask.”

“The only possible enemy aircraft in this region capable of delivering any kind of strike against us would be from NATO,” Tikunov said. “Are you saying that we can expect a plane from NATO to attack us? One plane? One little plane, General?”

“I’m not saying that,” Olsky answered.

“Then what the hell are you saying, Olsky?”

Olsky wished he had answers to Tikunov’s questions, but all he had to go on was Volovich’s vague information, and that wasn’t enough. A plane, but what kind of plane? and from where? He picked up a pencil and tapped the surface of his desk with it, conscious of how he might have appeared to Tikunov – as a man coming apart slowly under the pressures of office.

“I can’t take chances, Minister,” he said. “Which is why I ordered my men to search the quarters of every member of your staff in any kind of sensitive position, and not only in Moscow.”

Tikunov spluttered and his red hands – which despite their colour suggested iciness – became welded together. “I’m goddamned appalled, General! First your thugs ransack my personnel files and tamper with my computers –”

“Hardly thugs, Minister,” Olsky said. “They know what they’re looking for. They’re interested only in those officers whose positions might allow them to interfere with radar operations –”

Tikunov ignored this. “Then I find they’ve been given carte blanche to rummage through the accommodations of my officers. The whole situation’s gone beyond intolerable.” He walked to the door and made a gesture of exasperation. “I’ll communicate my displeasure to the General Secretary at once, of course.”

“Your prerogative,” Olsky said. “But I still suggest you check the status of your installations before you start making angry phonecalls, Minister.”

“Don’t tell me what to do, General,” Tikunov said. “I quite understand that the business of the KGB is other people’s business, but keep your nose as far out of mine as humanly possible.”

Olsky watched the Deputy Minister slam the door as he rushed from the office. After a few moments, Colonel Chebrikov came into the room, carrying some papers in his hand.

“There’s something here that will interest you, sir,” the Colonel said. “Three KGB officers were found murdered twenty miles from Tallinn.”

“Murdered?” Olsky slumped back in his chair. It was going to be one of those days, he thought, when bad news creates a force all its own, and keeps rolling, accumulating more and more unfortunate items like some great black snowball turning to an avalanche.

“They were apparently suspicious of an abandoned farmhouse about twenty miles from the city, and they went to investigate – acting under your general orders to locate dissidents and apprehend them. The farmhouse, it seems, was used by itinerants from time to time. When the officers didn’t re-establish contact with Tallinn HQ, a search of the area was made. All three of them were found wrapped in tarpaulin and stuffed inside an old well. They’d been shot. The farmhouse had recently been occupied – signs of food, a couple of sleeping-bags. A vehicle was left behind, an old Moskvich. The ownership hasn’t been traced.”

Olsky leaned across his desk. “Could there be a connection? Could there be some kind of link between the assassins and this alleged conspiracy?”

“Perhaps, General. On the other hand, you always find extremists in the Baltic countries. They come with the territory. Every now and then we pick somebody up because he’s been distributing anti-social documents and we find he’s got an old gun tucked away someplace. A war souvenir, usually. Maybe the occupants of the farmhouse come into that category, loonies who happened to have guns. They’re not necessarily linked with a major conspiracy.”

Not necessarily. It was the kind of vague response Olsky didn’t want to hear. He needed definite information, hard facts. He was suddenly restless. There was an architecture to all of this, a blueprint he couldn’t read, a design he couldn’t grasp, a logic that eluded him. A plan, a widespread plan, something carefully contrived, years in the making, years of patience and the kind of singleminded determination that is the legitimate child of obsessive hatred. The Baits hated the Russians – a fact of life, something that didn’t diminish with each new generation of Baits, no matter how many Lithuanian children were pressured into joining the Komsomol or how many young Latvians were members of the Party or how many youthful Estonians learned Russian in schools. The hatred went on and on, seemingly without end. Olsky, who would gladly have found some suitable accommodation with the nationalists in the Baltic if the choice had been his to make, was depressed. Three dead officers in Estonia, a terrorist conspiracy within the Soviet Union, Viktor Epishev in the United States, Greshko cruising Moscow in the hours of darkness and spreading rumours – these things impinged upon him all at once, creating a knot in his brain.

And then there was Dimitri Volovich.

Poughkeepsie, New York

The airfield had once belonged to a private flying club that had gone bankrupt, amid rumours of embezzlement and some public scandal, a few years ago. Now the hangar doors flapped in the breeze and the perimeter fence had rusted and kids sometimes played baseball on the old runway. The runway was cracked and weeds came up through the concrete here and there, irregularities that caused the single prop Cessna to bounce and shudder as it came down to land.

Iverson, feeling a slight chill creep through the dark, drew up the collar of his lightweight overcoat and glanced at Epishev as the plane bumped and taxied toward the place where they stood.

“Unseasonable cold,” Iverson remarked.

Epishev said nothing. He gazed at the plane, which was smaller than he’d expected. He’d arrived first-class and now, with his work done, he was leaving through the back door, being flown from Poughkeepsie – which was God knows where – to Canada, and then back to the Soviet Union. He would have preferred to depart in more comfort, as befitted a man who had completed an important task.

Iverson saw the little craft come shivering toward them and he reached out, touching the back of Epishev’s arm.

“You did very well,” he said. “My people are pleased. I hear General Greshko is delighted.”

Epishev listened to the dark wind make rustling sounds as it slithered through the broken fence. A light went on in the cockpit of the Cessna and the silhouette of the pilot became visible.

“Who flies the plane?” Epishev asked.

“One of our own pilots,” Iverson answered.

“Is he good?”

“Are you nervous, Colonel?”

“Small planes …” Epishev didn’t finish his sentence. The plane, which bore a false registration number, was moving nearer.

“He’s a good man,” Gary Iverson said. “The best.”

The Cessna had come to a stop now. Epishev took a step towards it, hearing the propeller turn slowly. He was unhappy with this. The small airfield, the ridiculous plane, the way he was leaving the United States. He felt he deserved better.

“You’ll be comfortable, Colonel,” Iverson said. “I promise you that.” He took a small flask from his pocket and poured a shot into the silver cap, which he passed to Epishev. “A short toast to the friendship between our countries, Colonel. To cooperation.”

Iverson raised the flask to his lips.

“What are we drinking?” Epishev asked.

“What else? Vodka.”

Epishev tossed the shot back, returning the cap to Iverson, who immediately stuck it back on the flask.

“The girl,” Epishev said. “What will you do with the girl?”

“Our general feeling is that without Frank Pagan she’s been rendered ineffective.”

“That’s all? You see no danger?”

“She’ll be kept under surveillance for a while,” Iverson said. Now that the toast had been drunk, he was impatient to be gone from this dreary place. “But she’s no danger to our plan now.”

Epishev shrugged, then walked toward the Cessna and climbed up into the cockpit. He waved at Iverson, who returned the gesture, even if Epishev couldn’t see it in the darkness. The plane made a circle, bouncing back onto the runway, and then it was racing along, up and down, wobbling, finally rising just before the runway ended. Up and up, slow and noisy, vanishing into the blackness. Iverson watched until the wing-lights were no longer visible, and then he walked to his car.

He used the car telephone to make a connection with the house in Fredericksburg. When Galbraith came on the line, Iverson said, “He’s gone, sir.”

“He drank the toast, I trust?”

“Of course.”

“I think it’s better like that, don’t you? Are you going to spend the night in New York? Or are you headed back down here?”

“I’ll stay in the city,” Iverson said. “I’m tired.”

“Sleep well, Gary.”

Galbraith hung up. Iverson replaced the telephone and sat in the darkness of the abandoned airfield and thought he could still hear the distant thrumming of the small plane. He turned the key in the ignition, looked at the dashboard clock.

Approximately thirty minutes from now the tasteless sedative in the vodka would send Epishev into a sound sleep. The pilot would parachute from the Cessna at a prearranged spot close to the town of Troy, and the craft, with the comatose Epishev on board, would crash in the Adirondacks, quite possibly in the sparsely-populated region beyond Lake Luzerne, where it might lie undiscovered for many years.

Without a trace, Iverson thought. And he was filled with renewed admiration for Galbraith, who had seen this whole scheme in one flash in the yellow house in Virginia Beach, one blinding insight, the way a grandmaster will see checkmating possibilities twelve devious moves ahead. Use outside talent whenever you possibly can, Gary. Just make sure it never gossips about you. People who tell you a dog is man’s best friend are wrong. Man’s best friend is silence.