20

Mossheim, Norway

Andres Kiss thought the plane looked beautiful on the ramp. He approached the craft with the awe of a man who is as close to perfection as he is ever going to get in his lifetime. There was a magnificent austerity about the F-16 B, its vicious potential concealed in smooth, aerodynamic lines. If you narrowed your eyes and looked at the plane sideways, you might think it a sharp-beaked hawk. Andres, who wore a fire-retardant Nomex suit, a G-suit, and a survival vest, strolled round the aircraft, almost hesitant to go up the ladder and into the cockpit, as if he wanted to prolong the joy of anticipation.

He sniffed the sweet morning air into his lungs. It had been three years, three long years, since he’d been in this place. Three years since he’d flown an F-16 on missions in the Baltic, when his squadron, based at Luke Air Force Base in Arizona, had been deployed by NATO to participate in routine tactical manoeuvres.

The man who had picked him up in Oslo stood with the shadow of a wing falling across his face. He appeared very anxious to Kiss, in a hurry to get the bird off the ground. Andres, on the other hand, felt no such urgency. He’d climb into the plane, and he’d put on the helmet, attach the harness, and go through all the necessary steps before takeoff, all those logical little moves you made prior to flight. Andres adored the checklist, the jargon, the sense of belonging to an elite group of men who knew how these birds worked. When he spoke the secret language of flyers, he felt eloquent. It was as if he were a member of a select freemasonry, privy to all kinds of arcane information.

“Here,” and the man handed Andres a set of charts.

Andres Kiss took them, studied them briefly. The flight plan, but he knew it already. Besides, it wasn’t a directive he intended to follow. Not all the way. Only up to the point where he would digress radically from it.

“Let’s move,” the man said.

Andres was still unhurried. He stared across the runway, seeing other planes sitting motionless here and there on the base, each casting elongated shadows. He saw the barbed-wire fence beyond the hangars, and the security checkpoint, through which he and his companion had passed without any difficulty. It was a good feeling, Andres reflected, to know that Iverson’s promises had all been kept, that his part in the scheme was working perfectly.

He followed the other man around the plane, wondering how much his companion knew, if he was part of the whole tapestry or simply somebody following an order that had come down from Iverson in the United States, an unquestionable command that, although irregular, he had to execute.

They moved together to the forward fuselage on the lefthand side of the plane, checking the canopy, the external jettison handles, the Side Winder missile on the leftwing tip. They went next to the nose wheel, and circled to the righthand side of the craft and the outboard station on the wing that housed the second Side Winder. Andres Kiss looked automatically for leaks, for any kind of fluids that might have dripped from the craft, but he saw none. Then the fusing of the Mark 82 bombs was checked on the underside of the plane. After that it was time to go to the cockpit. Andres felt the first little shiver of the day, a slight tremor of anticipation.

He climbed the ladder and squeezed himself inside the cockpit. He stared at the instrument panel, the radar display panel, the vertical velocity indicator, the airspeed mach indicator, the autopilot switch. On the left console was the G-suit hose connection, the fuel master switch, the throttle. On the right was the oxygen and communications hook-up, the oxygen regulator panel, the stick. Andres stared at the dials with an expression of intensity. There were so many of them, each dedicated to the perfect functions of the craft, each related to the other in a sequence of irrefutable logic, and he knew them all, and they made him feel comfortable.

The other man, who had given Andres no name but who was obviously employed at this base in the capacity of crew chief, reached inside the cockpit and attached the fittings that linked Andres to the ejection system. Then, still working in silence, he plugged Andres into the oxygen system and handed him his helmet, which Andres put on.

Cockpit check. Andres studied all the switches to make sure they were in the off position. Verify fuel master on guard down. Engine feed knob normal. External power unit switch normal. Fuel control in primary position. Throttle off. Brakes locked. Landing gear handle down. Master armament switch off. Air source knob normal. Andres went through this procedure, realising that what had been missing from his life was this sense of well-defined purpose – and now here he was following all the old rules rigorously.

The other man climbed down the ladder from the cockpit. He didn’t give Andres the customary thumbs up OK sign, as if he wanted no further part in the whole affair. Andres looked down at him, still smiling. He turned the main power switch to battery. The batteries discharged, the invertor output was good. Everything was fine.

Andres spoke to clearance delivery in the control tower. “Mossheim Clearance. Louisiana Alpha 07, IFR Round Robin, clearance on request.”

There was a brief pause before Andres heard the response. “Louisiana Alpha 07 Mossheim Clearance, clearance on request. Forty-five past the hour. Stand by this frequency.”

“Louisiana Alpha 07, roger.” Andres placed the jet fuel switch to Start 1. He checked the back-up fuel control caution light, which registered OFF. Then he stared at the RPM gauge. Throttle advance to idle. The hydraulic oil pressure lights went off, and RPM stabilised at normal ground idle. Functioning, Andres thought. Everything in position. The sweet integrity of the plane.

The voice in the tower said, “07 you are cleared by the Mossheim One departure direct to the Stockholm 140 at 50 climb and maintain flight level 250, squawk 2545, departure control frequency will be 345.5.”

Andres repeated this and the voice in the tower said, “Read back correct. Contact ground for taxi.”

Andres contacted ground control and was told to taxi to runway 03. He felt the rumble of the craft vibrate through him as he looked from the cockpit and gave the wheels out signal. The man on the ramp alongside the craft hurriedly removed the chocks and Andres increased the throttle slightly and released the parking brake. He taxied to the arming area, conscious of the muted power of the plane, the way its ferocity was held momentarily in check. In the arming area he let his hands hang from the cockpit as the ordnance crew chief attached a variety of electrical leads to the bombs, the missiles and the 20-millimetre cannon, which made the weaponry operational. The ordnance chief gave the thumbs-up sign, indicating proper configuration.

Andres thought, Let’s go. Let’s just fucking go.

He taxied to the edge of runway 03, where he initiated the automatic on-board test system, which checked fifty-seven separate functions of the craft. It was all beautiful. He checked the flaps. Normal. Trim centre, both ailerons, horizontal trim and rudder. Fuel control in the primary position. Speed brakes closed, canopy closed. He checked the harness, the attachment of the G-suit to the console. Verified that external fuel tanks were feeding the main tanks. Ejection safety lever, oil pressure, warning and caution lights.

“Mossheim Tower, Louisiana Alpha 07 takeoff one with clearance.”

“Louisiana Alpha 07, Mossheim Tower, taxi into position and hold runway 03 right.”

The moment, Andres thought. The final check. “Roger. Posit and hold.” He verified engine oil-pressure and saw that the generator lights were out. Ready to go.

“Louisiana Alpha 07, Mossheim Tower cleared for takeoff, runway 03 right contact departure.”

Andres accelerated the engine through 80% and released the brakes. The aircraft accelerated to one hundred and fifty knots and he eased back on the side stick to establish an 8 to 12 degree takeoff attitude. At approximately one hundred and fifty-six knots, the plane was airborne. It was a rush, a great surge of adrenaline. Andres felt his stomach tighten and his heart leap. He was home at last.

He said, “Mossheim Departure, Louisiana Alpha 07 airborne, passing 7,000 feet for flight level 250.”

The message came back, “Roger 07, Mossheim Departure, right turn now direct to Stockholm. Maintain flight level 250.” The F-16 was climbing at a speed of 10,000 feet a minute. Andres Kiss, in complete control of the craft and himself – if indeed there was any distinction between the two at this moment – looked down on a diminishing landscape turning yellow in the early afternoon sun. So far as anyone on the ground was concerned, this flight was just another exercise carried out by an American fighter plane attached to NATO. Routine, simple – drop a few bombs and fire the cannons at targets on the uninhabited little Baltic island that was used for target practice, then return to base. That’s what all the paperwork would say.

Andres, climbing still, soaring, knew otherwise. This exercise was in no way routine. When he reached Russian territorial waters, when he arrived at the place where he could go no further without violating Soviet airspace, he wasn’t going to turn back. Nor had he any intention of squandering his weapons on some uninhabited little island. No way.

Glen Cove, Long Island

The speech of the police inspector in Oslo had a curious kind of formality to it, as if he’d learned the English language from teachers in tuxedos. He apologised profusely, perhaps with more politeness than the situation warranted, saying that Andres Kiss had been picked up at the airport by a man in a Volvo, prior to the arrival of the Oslo police, and taken elsewhere. And, according to a reliable female eyewitness taken by Kiss’s striking good looks and thinking him a rock star, the car that had picked Kiss up was registered to a certain Flight Sergeant at Mossheim Air Base, which was a North Atlantic Treaty Organisation base – and, perhaps Mr Pagan would understand, the Oslo police had no real desire to enter the base unless Norwegian security was ‘indisputably’ at stake. There were, ah yes, ah-hum, political considerations involved as well, and surely Mr Pagan would also understand that much too. Frank Pagan thanked the inspector and hung up.

He went inside Andres Kiss’s bedroom and looked at the world atlas. He found a map of Norway and Sweden, discovered Mossheim about twenty miles from Oslo, close to the Swedish border – and two hundred miles from the Swedish border was the Baltic Sea.

He closed the atlas, thinking it was no distance at all from Norway to the Baltic, and from there to the coast of the Soviet Union. In the kind of plane Andres Kiss was presumably accustomed to flying it was a distance that could be covered in thirty minutes. Another thirty minutes across the Baltic, and you were practically in Leningrad. If you chose to enter the Baltic through Latvia, then it was only a matter of about an hour’s flying time until you reached Moscow from Riga.

Pagan went back to the office. Mikhail Kiss was looking out of the window, his back to the room. Below, in the early light of day, the roses had begun to assume their colours again, bold, almost defiant in the dawn.

“Are you going to tell me?” Pagan asked. “Or am I going to have to guess?”

Mikhail Kiss turned. It was hard to see him in the softly-lit room because the sun hadn’t yet penetrated it. “What do you think, Pagan?”

“Life would be easier if you told me,” Pagan said.

Kiss was quiet a moment. “I put it all together from nothing. It would only be fair to see you reconstruct it from nothing.”

Pagan shut his eyes, rubbed the lids. “Andres is going to fly a plane from Mossheim. He’s going to enter Soviet airspace somehow. Then, presumably, he’ll deliver some kind of bomb or rocket. Is that close enough?”

Kiss smiled. “You expect an answer to that?”

Pagan went on, “My guess is that he’s going to strike a symbolic target, something that’s going to displease the Soviets no end. I think he’s more interested in damaging Soviet prestige than anything else.”

Soviet prestige, Kiss thought. He was thinking now of the fighters waiting in the Baltic cities, the men and women ready to rise up and do battle. He smiled. “You’re still cold, Pagan.” And he remembered Pagan’s story about how Romanenko had been used by the KGB, which now struck him as a preposterous bluff on the Englishman’s part, a ploy to lure Kiss’s secrets out of him. Well, if Pagan could play games, then so could he!

“You wouldn’t tell me if I was warm anyway,” Pagan said. He gazed across the room at Kristina Vaska, who sat huddled and shivering, because there was a chill in the air at this time of day. She was pale and tired, as if all her energy had evaporated during that one moment of fury against Kiss. But it was more than a moment, Pagan thought. She’d carried it with her for years.

“How does he get an aeroplane? How does he manage to do that? Does he steal one?” Pagan asked these questions in the manner of a man thinking aloud. “How does he get inside a NATO base and steal a bloody plane, for Christ’s sake?”

Mikhail Kiss shook his head. “You work it out, Pagan.”

“Inside help is the only way.”

“You’re sure of that?”

“I’m not sure of anything. Especially the target.”

“Maybe there’s no target,” Kiss said.

Pagan sat behind the desk, shut his eyes. He’d forgotten the last time he’d slept, the last time he’d lain down – and then it came back to him. It must have been the hours spent with Kristina.

He said, “No more games, Kiss. No more guessing games.”

“You’re out of stamina, Pagan?”

“I’ve got stamina,” Pagan said. “At least enough to make another phonecall.”

“You’ve already called half the civilised world,” Kiss said. “Where this time? What’s left?”

Frank Pagan reached for the receiver and called Directory Assistance. Without taking his eyes from Mikhail Kiss’s face, he asked for the number of the Pentagon.

The Baltic

Andres Kiss, who had refuelled in the air over Gotland Island, a tricky manoeuvre he handled deftly, looked down on the grey-green waters of the Baltic. The F-16 carried 13,500 pounds of fuel, and he’d need every last pound of it if he was to get in and out again according to plan. As soon as he’d disengaged the F-16 from the airborne tanker, and seen the amber disconnect light on his panel, he suddenly pulled the nose of his aircraft up, simulating an out-of-control situation.

The plan called for him to broadcast an emergency message, which he now did. “Mayday, Mayday, LA Alpha 07, I’ve got a fire light.” And he continued his rapid rate of descent, plummeting to 10,000 feet, then 5,000, then 2,000. Down and down, rolling, swooping through cloud banks and seeing vapours disperse as he plunged.

“LA Alpha 07, state your position.”

Andres Kiss didn’t reply to the voice in his headphones.

The request came again, and Andres ignored it a second time. He turned off the IFF switch, which would indicate to any radar probe that he’d hit the water below and was beyond any possibility of communication. Radar operators would assume that the emergency bleeper hadn’t gone off because he hadn’t ejected before the craft struck water.

So far, Andres thought, so good.

The plane was now about a hundred and twenty miles from the city of Riga in Latvia and travelling at six miles a minute. He kept descending, stabilising the craft when he was a mere hundred feet above the surface of the Baltic in Russian territorial waters. He could feel the effect of the water, a series of vibrations that disturbed the flight path of the craft. Using the Inertial Navigation Set, he flew east. As a back-up he had charts which would allow him to make visual verification of the information provided by the INS.

The island of Saaremaa, which the Soviets had seized from Estonia, loomed up to his left. A faint early morning haze hung around it. Andres Kiss thought of Mikhail now, and wondered what he was doing at this precise moment. He might be sitting in his sun-room, looking out into the garden. Or he might be pacing nervously, counting down the minutes.

Andres smiled, glanced down at the water, watched spray churn up from the surface. At this height he was flying below the point at which he might be picked up by the Soviet radar – provided the radar systems were operating. If the plan was running smoothly, they would not be. By flying this low, Andres wasn’t taking any chances. If something had gone wrong inside the Soviet Union and the air defence systems were functioning normally, he’d still evade detection by radar.

Sun burned on the water, broken by the disturbed surface into millions of little sparkling lights. Andres checked the instrument panels again. He was travelling at three hundred and sixty knots per hour, a speed that conserved fuel. He was already far beyond the reach of any NATO aircraft that might have picked up his mayday signal. It was about ten minutes now to the Soviet mainland. Ten minutes through the Gulf of Riga – and then on, inevitably, towards Moscow.

Fredericksburg, Virginia

Galbraith had one of those numb moments of bewilderment, a time in which all brain activity seems suspended. What he was hearing made no immediate sense to him and might have been uttered in a foreign tongue. He opened his eyes – he’d been snoozing, dreaming of tropical places, sand dunes and palms and free-flying parrots and great date clusters – and heard the sound of Gary Iverson’s voice coming through the telephone speaker on the bedside table.

“Name of God,” Galbraith muttered sleepily. “Tell me again.”

Iverson repeated what he’d said a moment ago, when Galbraith had first been stirred from his all-consuming slumber by the buzzing telephone.

“Fucking Epishev,” Galbraith said, tossing back the bed covers. “God damn his soul.”

“He erred, sir,” Iverson said, his voice made hollow by the echo in the speaker. “He must have assumed there were two men in the car. But the man who used Mikhail Kiss’s telephone to reach the Pentagon was Frank Pagan –”

“Assume! We assume nothing in this business, Gary,” and Galbraith, stark naked, stepped out of bed. “We never assume. Assume is not in our vocabulary. Assume is a word for goddam politicians and priests. Assume is a word for people who have faith in things that cannot be seen, Gary. For example, you assumed Andres Kiss would obey Mikhail and leave Carl Sundbach untouched, did you not?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You see my point.” Galbraith, breathing hard and vowing anew to diet, climbed into a vast pair of pants with a waist wide enough to encompass two, perhaps three, slender adults. “What will we do now, Gary? What will we do?”

“A dark deed,” Iverson suggested quietly.

“It’s a frightful thought,” Galbraith replied, though without much conviction. “There has been a traditional alliance, Gary, which I don’t have to point out to you, between our two nations and their law-enforcement agencies. There has been shared information, even if in recent years there has been a falling-out between clandestine services in the two countries. Nobody trusts the Brits, do they? Well-intentioned men whose security has had the integrity of a colander. Nevertheless, Gary, the idea of my agency doing a dark deed on Frank Pagan …” Here Galbraith pulled on a tent-like white shirt. “I think I’ll speak with this tenacious fellow and see if I can make him see sense, and if I can’t do that, then perhaps – Well, I daresay the Clowns can have him, but only if they dine with discretion. We can’t leave the man free to walk about, can we?”

“No,” Iverson said. “We can’t do that.”

Galbraith, looking sorrowful, forced his feet into a pair of black leather pumps. He was hugely unhappy that Epishev had failed, because the onus was squarely back on him, and he didn’t like that at all. He stood up, stamped his feet inside his shoes, and suddenly remembered the mention of something in the dossier he had on Colonel Epishev. Of course, the silly bastard was far-sighted and had to wear glasses, which he was seemingly too vain to do! Idiot vanity! Galbraith thought. If Epishev had worn his glasses as he was supposed to, then perhaps Frank Pagan wouldn’t be around right now, doing damage, threatening the outcome of White Light.

Iverson said, “I took the liberty of arranging to meet Pagan at Grand Central Station, sir, an hour from now.”

Galbraith thought of the fast chopper that would hurl him through space at a speed of some two hundred miles an hour. He hated the deafening roar of the blades and the headache that always gripped him and the miserable sense of being tossed around in midair. But he knew of no faster way to Manhattan from Fredericksburg. His flying time would be approximately one hour and twenty minutes.

“I’ll be there as quickly as I can,” he said.

Moscow

General Olsky handled the contents of the envelope as if they were fish that might or might not be dead. What he had in his hand were three American passports and fifty thousand American dollars. He flicked one of the passports open, stared inside it, then set it down. He tossed the bundle of money on to his desk in a dismissive fashion. He looked at Colonel Chebrikov.

“The woman actually denies knowing how the passports and the money came to be hidden under her floorboards?” Olsky asked.

“Yes,” said the Colonel.

“Even after it was pointed out to her that the passports bear photographs of herself and her two children?”

“She claims it’s a malicious practical joke, General.”

“I don’t see the joke at all,” Olsky remarked. “Perhaps Mrs Uvarova has a strange sense of humour. What about her husband, Colonel?”

“He’s going to be brought in for questioning, General.”

“Has Deputy Minister Tikunov been informed that the family of one of his ‘trusted’ officers has foreign money and foreign passports in its possession?”

Chebrikov said, “I imagined you’d prefer to make that call yourself, General.”

Olsky smiled. “How right you are,” he said.

New York City

It was five-thirty a.m. when Frank Pagan entered Grand Central Station. When he’d finally reached the Pentagon by telephone and had been put through to a duty officer there, he’d been told to hang up and wait. Somebody would call him back. What Pagan detected in this procedure was the kind of paranoia patented by the military mind. Ten minutes later, the telephone had rung in the kitchen of Mikhail Kiss’s house and a voice that did not belong to the first duty officer asked Pagan for details.

It wasn’t a situation in which details were exactly plentiful and Pagan’s narrative, he realised, had about it a demented tone. Was he being relegated to that category of nuts who call the Pentagon or the CIA in Langley with schizoid tales to tell of dark plots? Was he just another lonely loony calling to hear himself speak?

Apparently he was taken with some seriousness, enough at least for the listener to suggest a rendezvous in a mutually suitable place, which turned out to be, at the suggestion of the listener, Grand Central Station. It wasn’t altogether convenient to drive from Glen Cove back to Manhattan, but Pagan – forced by old habits – broke the speed limit all the way, using Kiss’s large Mercedes instead of Kristina Vaska’s Pacer, which reminded him of a fishbowl equipped with wheels. Whether Kristina was still in Glen Cove, or whether she’d gone by now, Pagan had no way of knowing. She’d wanted to come with him to Grand Central, an offer he flatly refused. He kept insisting, for his own benefit, that he didn’t give a damn anyhow. Seal it and bury it, he told himself. Inter the whole bastard thing. Put it in a coffin and deep-six it.

He moved across the concourse, seeing a sparse gathering of early morning travellers, a couple of derelicts, a few drunks wondering what fibs to tell their wives who’d been waiting up all night in the suburbs. He’d been told to look for a man carrying a copy of The Cleveland Plain Dealer, a clandestine touch he found amusing. He stood outside a shuttered news-stand, which was the appointed place, and there he waited.

He gazed across the station, impatiently tapping a foot on the ground. He thought, It began in a railway station and it may end in one, among the litter and the discarded tickets and muffled voices out of loudspeakers and the air that’s dry and hard to breathe. And then he was thinking of Edinburgh and a trail that had begun with the assassination of Romanenko. But it had begun long before that in a forgotten guerilla war in countries which, to all intents and purposes, had been erased forever from the minds of mapmakers.

He moved along the front of the news-stand, hearing the shunting of a locomotive nearby. Then he saw his contact, a tall stiff-backed man with a copy of The Plain Dealer held against his side. Pagan stepped forward to greet him. The man looked at Pagan, smiled. He had a pleasantly bland face and fair hair that was cut very short across his skull.

“Frank Pagan?”

Pagan nodded. The man, who had very pale blue eyes, studied Pagan’s face a moment, as if he were searching for visible signs of lunacy. The man started to walk, and Pagan followed, thinking it apt that no name had been given, no handshake, no rank, no affiliation. Secrecy was a way of life in military circles. And when it was impossible to keep something secret, you did the next best thing, you stifled it in incomprehensible jargon.

They walked together towards a bar, which was dosed. The man peered through the windows and said, “Your story’s fascinating.”

“I’m happy you think so,” Pagan said.

“Goddam fascinating.” The man turned and clapped one firm hand on Pagan’s shoulder. “And unfortunately vague. A plane flies out of Norway. What kind of plane? And who authorised it to fly? Or was the plane stolen? You got any idea how difficult it is to steal a military aircraft? It’s all pretty damn thin, but it gets worse, doesn’t it? You don’t know the specific target, you don’t know the nature of the alleged strike. Boil it down, Frank – mind if I call you that? – and you’re not left with much, are you? Just a few guesses, basically. And to be perfectly candid, if you hadn’t been affiliated with Scotland Yard – I checked you out, by the way – your story would be in the slush pile already. NFA – no further action.”

Pagan wondered if he was supposed to have documentary evidence of his story, if it had to be suitably notarised. He said, “It shouldn’t be beyond your resources to find out if a plane has been stolen from the base at Mossheim.”

The man shrugged. “There are always NATO exercises around the Baltic, and they involve scores of aircraft. It’s not as simple as you might imagine to locate one particular craft, especially since we don’t know exactly what we’re looking for.”

Pagan was disappointed by the man’s lack of enthusiasm. He struggled to be patient and calm. “I understand it might be difficult, but in the circumstances don’t you think you should be making some kind of bloody effort? Don’t you have a computer tracking system?”

The man’s smile seemed an immutable thing, living a separate life from his face. “Don’t get me wrong, Frank. I’m not going to dismiss your story. I’ll look into it. I promise you that. But it’s going to take a little time.”

“Look, I have a feeling we don’t have time. This character Andres Kiss is already on the base at Mossheim. He might even have flown by this time –”

“Frank, Frank, Frank. We checked Andres Kiss out and he used to be a USAF Major, just as you said. But why do you make the assumption he’s gone to Mossheim to steal a plane, for heaven’s sake? Some of his old squadron members are based there right now, the guy could be paying a visit, a vacation. It doesn’t have to be anything nefarious. Like I said, Frank, if you had just a little documentary evidence, well, it would make a hell of a difference.”

Pagan said, “I’m beginning to get the impression that my narrative isn’t quite setting you on fire. If I were a suspicious man, I’d say you weren’t exactly interested in it.”

“Of course I’m interested in it,” the man said.

“Then why aren’t you doing something about it?”

The man laid his hand on Pagan’s shoulder again. “Here’s what I suggest, Frank. You trot on back to your hotel and leave it all to me. Don’t worry about a thing. It’s in good hands.”

“I’m not about to trot anywhere,” Pagan said. Especially not at the suggestion of someone as patronising as you, Blue Eyes, he thought. There was an insincere quality to this nameless man, and Pagan didn’t like it, didn’t trust it. He didn’t like the way he was being stalled either.

“Jesus, you’re a hard man to convince, Frank. You imagine I’m going to ignore the whole goddam thing? You imagine I don’t believe you? I’ll take the appropriate steps, I promise you that.”

“When?”

“Frank, let me give you the simple ABCs of it. This is a military matter. We’re all goddam grateful you brought it to our attention, believe me. But it’s out of your hands now.”

“I don’t think so,” Pagan said, and he stared at a row of phonebooths a hundred yards away. What was the time in London? he wondered. Martin Burr would be at his desk and if Pagan couldn’t get this supercilious bozo to do something quickly, he’d cheerfully call the Commissioner, who would most certainly contact the NATO command in Europe. But why in the name of Christ was there such reluctance here?

He said, “If you don’t want to follow up on my story – and I mean now, sunshine – I’ll make a phonecall to somebody who will. That way, if I’m completely off the wall, if I’m suffering from a brainstorm, then at least I’ll have the benefit of relief.”

The man followed Pagan’s line of vision in the direction of the phones. “I wouldn’t,” he said, and the smile finally was gone.

“Give me a damn good reason not to,” Pagan said.

“We’ve got a communications problem here, Frank, and it bothers me. What I’m trying to say is that as far as you’re concerned, those phones are off limits.”

“Off limits?”

“Precisely.”

“If I want to make a call, you stop me, is that it?”

The man said nothing.

Pagan briefly closed his eyes, hearing the sound of something he should have caught minutes ago, something that echoed in his head and throbbed. Realisation, a cold dawning, the noise of a frozen penny dropping inside his brain. He looked into the man’s face, which had all the animation of a stiff mask.

“You want it to fly,” Pagan said quietly. “You want the fucking plane to make it!”

The man continued to be silent.

Pagan could still hear the coin tumbling down the chutes of his mind, gathering momentum as it moved, and he was reminded of a game he used to play at carnivals as a kid, when you stuck a penny in a slot and watched it roll towards a variety of possible destinations – some of which returned your coin, most of which kept it. Christ, what had he stumbled into? Where was the rolling coin destined to go? You call the Pentagon, you report the possibility of a stolen plane, an impending disaster, and the duty officer turns you over to Blue Eyes, who’s seemingly in no great hurry to prevent destruction. What the hell was going on here?

“Let me see if I can guess it,” Pagan said. “Are you and Andres Kiss working together? Is that it? With a little help from some friends inside the Pentagon? Am I right? Is it some kind of elaborate military conspiracy?”

The man shook his head. “That’s too simple, Frank. There’s no military conspiracy. There’s no vast involvement at the Pentagon.”

“What is it then? Just a chosen few? A helping hand here, a little support there? Why don’t you spell it out for me, friend?”

“I want you to meet somebody, Frank. Somebody who can give you a better perspective on this whole matter. He’s waiting outside. He doesn’t like public places.”

Pagan hesitantly followed as the man began to walk across the concourse in the direction of the exit. Outside the station a long black limousine was parked in defiance of No Parking signs. Pagan understood he was to move towards it. The back door was opened from inside. Pagan hesitated.

Blue Eyes said, “You’ll be fine, Frank. Go ahead.”

Pagan looked inside the car. A fat man, his face in shade, occupied most of the back seat. There were two televisions, a couple of phones, decanters of scotch and sherry.

“Go ahead,” Blue Eyes said again.

Pagan concentrated on the fat man’s face, the eyes that were hardly more than two very narrow gashes, the cheeks that appeared to be stuffed with food – as if the man were a hibernating animal preparing himself for the long sleep of winter.

“Frank Pagan,” the fat man said, and patted the space on the seat alongside him. “I’ve been looking forward to meeting you. But we can hardly talk like reasonable men if you insist on standing in the street, while I sit in the comfort of this car. What’s it to be?”

“You step out,” Pagan said.

“Humbug. It’s more comfortable in here.”

Pagan shook his head. The fat man sighed and emerged from the limousine, looking just a little testy but forcing a smile anyhow. Blue Eyes moved some distance away, browsing through newspapers at a news-stand.

“Stubborn, Pagan,” the fat man said.

“So I’ve been told.”

They walked a few paces. The fat man asked, “How is Scotland Yard?”

“Is this going to be small talk? I already told your man out there that I had a situation I thought should be checked out. He appeared completely reluctant.”

“He’s a good man. Don’t be hard on him. He takes orders well.”

“From you?”

The fat man nodded. “I understand you want to stop a certain plane flying to the Soviet Union, Frank.”

“I had a notion,” Pagan said. He was suddenly very impatient.

“Question, Frank. How much do you know? How much have you glued together?”

Pagan studied the man’s face. He had a small mouth and rather tiny teeth. Pagan thought for a moment before he said, “Why should I tell you what I know? I don’t even know who you are, for Christ’s sake.”

“My dear fellow, I’m a great fan of Scotland Yard. You and I, old man, we’re on the same team. Nobody’s going to hurt you, Frank. We’re friends here. My affiliation is a wee bit difficult to explain.”

“I bet it is.”

“National security.”

“Whose national security?”

“The whole Western world, Frank. I’m not speaking only of our own backyard, my friend.”

Pagan started to move away. He was tired of obfuscation, weary of allusion, sick to his heart with mystification. All he wanted to do was to go back inside the station and call the Commissioner. The fat man caught the sleeve of his jacket and held it.

“Don’t rush away, Frank. Tell me what you know. Besides, you’ve got nothing to worry about, have you? You’re armed. I’m not. I’ve read your dossier and I know you carry a Bernardelli in a rear holster. And I wouldn’t be seen dead near a gun. All I’m interested in is your version of the situation.”

Pagan assembled his thoughts, which raced here and there like doomed summer butterflies eluding a net. He said, “The KGB found some use for a group of Baltic freedom fighters. At least certain factions in the KGB and their friends did. The Baits don’t seem to have a clue they’re being used by the very people they despise most. I assume the KGB motive is related to a power-struggle inside the Soviet Union – old against new. That’s my best guess. I can’t see any other reason for the support of the Baits. But now I get the distinct impression from your friend over there that there’s more to this than I imagined. Now it appears that the Baits aren’t only getting help from the Soviets, they’re also getting assistance from certain Americans as well, some of whom have military connections.”

The fat man shrugged. His small eyes were very bright and hard like two polished brown stones. He appeared to be just a little amused now.

Pagan said, “American and Soviet collusion. It explains some things. Such as how Epishev knew I’d come to the United States. The Americans told him. How Andres Kiss could steal a NATO plane and fly it inside Soviet territory. The Americans could provide the aircraft, the Soviets the means of entry.”

“Ingenious,” said the fat man. He pressed his chubby fingers to his mouth.

“What I don’t entirely understand is American involvement,” Pagan remarked.

“Think about it, Frank,” the fat man said. “I’m sure it’s on the tip of your tongue.”

Pagan was quiet a moment. Traffic chugged past the entrance to the station, taxicabs honking at the black limousine that impeded their movement. Pagan observed that the limo wasn’t equipped with the usual licence plates. Instead, it had the kind of temporary plates used by car dealers.

He said, “My best bet would be that some Americans would like to see the new Soviet regime replaced. I’m naive enough to wonder why.”

“Replaced is understatement. Try removed and forgotten, Frank. Buried with all its manifestos of good intentions. Interred with all its spurious nonsense about democracy and freedom. That’s closer to the mark. It’s a matter of protecting our civilisation, for want of a better word.”

“So Andres Kiss flies an aeroplane inside the Soviet Union and that act of terrorism protects our civilisation?” Pagan asked.

The fat man grinned and his eyes vanished off the planet of his face. “You know, Frank, some of us long for the old days when we knew who the Russians were. We had a set of rules, and we could get along with the Soviets because they were predictable. We understood how they operated. We knew their level of incompetence. Government by geriatrics. What do old men love more than anything else, Frank? I’ll tell you. They adore the status fucking quo, that’s what. But all these goddam changes have upset things more than a little. When the old farts started dying off, we always assumed other old farts would take their places. We thought the Soviets had an endless supply of old farts. We didn’t see a new breed rising, did we? We didn’t think ahead. Now we don’t know where they stand these days. And worse than that, we don’t know where we stand either.”

Pagan said nothing. He felt restless. Was the fat man trying to stall him? Detecting Pagan’s restlessness, the fat man raised his voice.

“When they talk about reforms, and how they’re going to change the Soviet Union from top to bottom, that really troubles me. Ye gods! who knows what they’re going to release? Vast reservoirs of untapped talent lying around, skills that have gone unused because nobody gave a fiddler’s fuck about a system that disregarded basic human rights. But give people a sense of dignity, give them some comforts, make them think they’re really important, and we might see a goddam Russian renaissance in technology, science, energy. And then what?”

The fat man took a handkerchief out now and blew his nose in short, trumpeting sounds. “The big question is, can this fragile globe stand a really powerful Russia? Will the old power pendulum swing over to the red zone? What kind of world would it be if the Russians dominated it? I get chills up and down my spine. You see, I liked things the way they were, Frank. I think what we’re doing can help us keep the upper hand. We’re not discussing some lunatic right-wing bullshit here, Frank. Let’s just say a few people, with different motives but a common goal, put their resources together. Certain Americans don’t like this new Russia. More importantly, a good number of Russians don’t like it either. Change, they say. Screw change. We want things the way they were. Let’s have it back the way it used to be. What a nice coincidence, don’t you think? Here’s something the Americans and the Soviets can get together on finally. A joint Soviet-American venture to destroy all this unwanted newness in Soviet society. A collaboration, Frank, between ourselves and some sympathetic Russians. Fraternity and cooperation.”

“With the Baits playing the fools,” Pagan said.

“That’s your choice of description, Frank.”

“When you say ourselves, who are you referring to?”

The fat man fell silent now. Pagan knew his question was going to go unanswered. The fat man was something within something within something, connected to the US government, but tucked away, and well-hidden, and finally beyond the pale of the federal bureaucracy.

“And this plane?”

“It’s going to cause a commotion, Frank. And we’re gambling that it will bring down the present Politburo – leaving a nice empty space for some reliable old faces.”

“If I might use an Americanism – the whole thing sucks.”

“Pray tell.”

“It’s a volatile plan. You don’t know the precise consequences of it. If you attack the Soviet Union, if a NATO plane violates Soviet airspace and drops a bomb – how can you tell there won’t be retaliation of some kind? Even if that doesn’t happen, I don’t like the idea of people needlessly dying, which I imagine will happen if this plane flies.”

“Needlessly, Frank?”

“I don’t want to argue with you. Your outlook’s unreal. The world changes, and you can’t stop it. You can’t interfere.”

“Oh dear,” the fat man said. “I thought you might reach a more balanced judgement than that, which is why I gave you the benefit of this nice little chat. Think again, Frank. I do wish you’d keep in mind the fact that an arthritic Russia is a containable one. Anything else is, well, a little too unpredictable.”

Pagan shook his head. There was nothing in the world so astonishing to him as the compulsion of organisations and fraternities and secret societies that think they can alter history, nothing that reduced him quite so quickly to speechlessness. Partly it was the conceit of it all, the terrible arrogance. Partly it was the desperation of these men, and their obsessions, which lay beyond reason. For Kiss and Romanenko it had been vengeance. For the fat man and his Russian cronies it was nothing less ambitious than trying to preserve a Russia to which they’d become complacently attached for their own reasons. Anything new, anything that might bring about a different Soviet Union, even a progressive one – God help us all – was not remotely acceptable.

“You think you can get away with it?” Pagan asked.

“Get away with it? We can get away with anything. Shuffling paperwork so that a plane can be taken without authority – by a former pilot who’s utterly deranged, of course, as all the records will show – that’s child’s play. Don’t worry about us.”

Pagan was quiet a moment. “I don’t walk away from here, do I?”

“Frank, really. Step out of my life. I never met you. You never met me. And you never will again. Simple. I love Scotland Yard, and I wouldn’t dream of harming one of its people. But I do wish you’d stay a little longer and chat some more with me. I’d like to talk about more pleasant things. London, for example. Tea at the Ritz. Dinner at the Connaught. The South Coast. I have so many fond memories. There’s a small town in the West Country, Bideford, and I recall –”

“Some other time,” Pagan said.

The fat man smiled, looked at his watch. Then he shrugged. “Goodbye …” He snapped his fingers in frustration. “Christ, I’ve already forgotten your name.”

Pagan stepped away from the man. He felt tense, dehydrated. The fat man returned to the big black car, stepped inside along with Blue Eyes. The car pulled away, vanished. Pagan moved back in the direction of the station entrance. Back to the telephones.

But he knew he wasn’t going to be allowed. He wasn’t going to make it that far. He sensed it. Even the morning air around him was charged suddenly with the electricity of fear. He moved slowly towards the station, passing under the shadows of the building, turning his face from side to side, seeing nothing, but knowing, just knowing that somebody was about to prevent him from reaching the phones.

He didn’t see the sniper on the roof of the station. He didn’t know he was being closely observed through a telescopic lens by a sharpshooter, a former Marine champion, who held a Weatherby auto rifle. Pagan only knew that as he walked towards the entrance he was exposed and vulnerable, but at the same time didn’t want to break into a run, he wanted to look totally calm. Halfway towards the station entrance he paused, looked from left to right, saw nothing unusual, nothing concealed in shadows, nobody seated in parked cars. Just the same, he still knew.

He kept moving. He didn’t see the glint of the rifle as the early sun struck the walnut stock, or the way the sharpshooter took out a pair of dark glasses and pulled them over his eyes. Pagan had to stop because several cars blocked his way into the station. But he didn’t think to look up, he was concentrating on the station entrance, the idea of making it as far as the telephones. When the traffic passed, he stepped off the pavement. He had perhaps fifty yards to go. He hurried now for the first time, unaware of the fact he was trapped in the dead centre of a lens, a moving target neatly bisected by crosslines.

And then something, an inexplicable impulse, made him raise his face and look up, and he saw the way the sunlight caught the weapon, although for a second he wasn’t absolutely sure of what it was that glinted high above him, and he thought of a bird carrying a piece of silverfoil, or a sliver of broken glass. When he understood what it was he knew the realisation had come a little too late for him.

He barely heard the voice from behind.

“Frank!”

He did the only thing he could think of. He threw himself forward, hearing the noise of a gun, realising it was too loud to have come from the roof, that it originated from a point just behind him. It was followed by a second shot, then a third, and the sound echoed around him. He raised his face and gazed up at the roof, but the gunman was gone, scrambling out of view, leaving behind him only an expensively modified weapon that bore no registration number, no marks of ownership, and no clue to the identity of the person who’d altered the weapon.

Pagan rose slowly to his feet, aware of cars crowding around him, irate drivers, delayed commuters, the screaming of horns. And there, standing alongside her idiotic little car, her Pacer, stood Kristina Vaska, looking very solemn and quite lovely in a pale, tired way, one hand on her hip, the other wrapped loosely around her pistol, a tiny smile on her face – enigmatic, and quite unfamiliar to Pagan, but nevertheless at that moment the most welcome gesture he’d ever received from another human being.

He returned the smile and then he went inside the station and walked towards the telephones.

Moscow

Deputy Minister Tikunov, who hated to admit he was ever wrong about anything, and who thought crow the most disgusting taste a man could carry in his mouth, spoke into the telephone. “It appears that your information is genuine, General. An F-16 was stolen from a NATO base in Norway. It’s heading for Russia.”

“Stolen?” Olsky asked.

“That’s the official NATO statement. I’ve just had their Commander on the line from Brussels.”

“Then do what you have to do,” Olsky said. “But do it quickly.”

Tikunov flicked a switch on a communications console on his desk. He ordered a top priority check of every radar installation between Moscow and the Baltic. He also ordered squadrons of MIG-29s and MIG-25 Foxbats to fly immediately on a seek and destroy mission.