For once the kitchen cabinet was not in attendance; Sir Richard Bryant and Royston were quite alone. C sat with his hands folded on the bare desk, never once removing his steady gaze from Royston’s face. The London Station Chief could hardly lift his head from lack of sleep. They were nearly at the end of a long, wearisome conversation.
‘Have you any idea of the damage that man can do, has already done?’
In view of what had gone before Royston correctly assumed this to be a rhetorical question.
‘The woman Bradfield, dead. Why? Because Kyril, as he persists in calling himself, led an executioner straight to her. Why was there an executioner in the first place? Because Kyril is carrying one of the most dangerous secrets to run loose from the Kremlin since the last World War. The executioner, dead; mutilated to death in a particularly gruesome fashion. The suburbs of south London are being turned into a Mafia’s playground and I am under pressure to frame proposals for dealing with the situation.’
If C waited for constructive suggestions from Royston, he waited in vain. Certain aspects of ‘the situation’ Royston found highly attractive. Sikarov’s death, for example. When first he learned of Sikarov’s arrival in the UK he nearly panicked, reasoning that A2 had been ordered to liquidate him before Kyril could reveal his treachery to his employers. Even now that the picture was clearer the memory of Sikarov’s gruesome mutilations did not appal.
‘Also, I want from you a written appreciation of the events of the past two days. In a form fit for presentation…’ C jerked his thumb to the north, in the vague direction of Whitehall.
‘Appreciation?’
‘It should not be difficult. The basics are reasonably clear, are they not? A defector on the run looks to a former mistress for shelter. A KGB killer, sent to destroy the defector before he talks, murders the mistress and is himself killed, doubtless as an act of revenge. That’s all you need say. Nothing about who sent the killer, or why. No mention of Nidus. No hint that the killer was sent to stop Kyril falling into their hands, rather than ours. But there is one thing you can say. You can make the point that if only Five had been good enough to let us know of Sikarov’s arrival a little earlier, none of this need have happened. Use red ink and underline it. As for Kyril…’
C unclasped his hands and spread them wide.
‘Get everyone out on the streets looking for him. I want his description circulated to every police station in the land. I want every known A2 operative’s description put on the wire. I want you where I can contact you twenty-four hours a day. Above all, I want this matter cleared up and I want it soon.’
Royston raised his haggard face and looked across the desk at C.
‘Anything else?’
‘One thing. The CIA are proving tiresome.’
‘What?’
‘Somehow they have found out about what they are pleased to call our “temporary local difficulty” over Kyril. Apparently they tried to kidnap him in Brussels and if we’re not careful they may try the same thing again over here. Try to find out how much they know about Kyril and why they tried to snatch him in Belgium. Go and see Gulland. Stall him. We need time and I don’t want any solicitous offers or American help in finding Bucharensky, thank you.’
Suddenly Royston wanted a drink more than anything in the world. Joe Gulland kept a bottle of Glenlivet in his room at Grosvenor Square. He placed his hands on the lip of C’s desk and levered himself out of his seat.
‘Right,’ he said.
Less than an hour later he was sitting comfortably in a deep, leather-covered armchair, savouring the single-malt Scotch his host had just given him. A tiny pulse of life was beginning to beat inside him.
His feelings about Grosvenor Square were mixed, rather like those of poor relatives obliged to visit their better-off kin for a family reunion. It was on the whole pleasant to relish the good things of life while counting up the number of export licences the British government must have refused in order to furnish this room. The centre-piece was a large rosewood table. Royston had seen one very like it in a shop near his house in Sheen. It cost £3500.
His eyes returned to Joe Gulland, mixing himself a Bourbon-and-branch at the drinks tray. Rather a well-stocked tray, thought Royston as he remembered his own, pitifully limited supply of Amontillado sherry.
‘There you go.’
He raised his glass politely in response to the informal toast, and drank.
Gulland was his chief liaison with ‘the Cousins’ at their London office. That made him reasonably senior, though like Royston himself his precise ranking was never disclosed to allies. The two men had known each other for five years, had visited each other’s homes and were, in so far as the term has meaning in this context, friends.
Gulland took off his jacket to reveal a couple of Oxford blue stains under the arms of his Cambridge blue shirt, and loosened his tie.
‘I sure as hell am glad we were able to meet like this, Mike.’ Gulland swung his legs over the arm of his chair and smiled to reveal several gold fillings. ‘Tell you the truth, things have been a little difficult right now. This Russky they been burning up the wires over. Cigarette?’
‘Please.’
Gulland went through the long process of selecting a Kent from the packet on the occasional table by his side, lighting it, inhaling, flicking some ash into the brass saucer, and sending a compact column of smoke on its way to the ceiling. If he had hoped to provoke Royston into making a hasty response, he was disappointed. He would dearly have liked to know what was going through the Englishman’s mind at that moment. Royston was thinking that fat men shouldn’t smoke, and they certainly oughtn’t to drink as much as Gulland.
‘We were kind of wondering whether you’d be interested in going into joint venture over this, Mike. As I see it, we have better facilities for debriefing this man, and that’s a fact.’
‘This man…?’
Royston held out his glass. He waited until Gulland was busy at the drinks tray before he spoke again.
‘I’m sorry, Joe, I’m not quite with you. Which man are we talking about?’
Gulland turned away from the table with Royston’s drink in his hand and a glassy smile on his face.
‘Bucharensky. You got him, right?’
‘No,’ said Royston. ‘We don’t.’
‘Aw, come on now…’
‘We are expecting a man of that name,’ Royston explained politely. ‘We would like to interview him.’
‘Yeah,’ said Gulland. ‘And we all know why, don’t we.’
Such goodwill as had existed at the start of the meeting was now somewhere up by the ceiling with the dead smoke from their cigarettes.
‘Why?’
‘Because he knows the name of your precious damn source in Moscow.’
Royston was too tired to feign lack of concern. The shock must have been written all over his face, for Gulland went on, ‘Don’t act so surprised. It had to get back to us in the end. For years we’ve known you were sitting on something good but we played along, pretending to swallow it when you fed us some crap about what some guy said to some other guy in a brothel. Well now we know, see? That’s what finally convinced us that Bucharensky’s genuine. We have our source in Moscow too, and the word has gone out from Dzerzhinzky Square: Kyril left behind a diary which says he carries the name of a traitor. Right?’
Royston gave the matter some thought and decided to come clean. ‘An officer in the rank of general,’ he said curtly. ‘We’ve had him for years. C is the only person who knows his name.’
Gulland nodded. ‘Okay,’ he said sourly. ‘We can argue about that later when this shit’s been cleared from off the front porch. What are you doing about it?’
Royston shrugged and said nothing.
‘Why not let us give you a little help, Mike? We can do it.’
‘Sure you can. Just like you did in Brussels… oh yes, Joe, we know about that. We wondered what the hell you were up to and now we know. A “covert operation”; everything left nice and clean and sanitised… and the next thing we hear, Bucharensky’s living in New Mexico under an assumed name. We’ll let you know whatever we get out of Kyril. It’s the usual arrangement, Joe. Don’t you trust us?’
‘Not overly. He’s here, in England. You snap your fingers and where does that leave us? An accident, you’ll say, how unfortunate. He tripped in the can, broke his prick and bled to death.’
Royston was about to reply when the phone rang. Gulland snatched it up.
‘Who? Yeah… put him on.’
He handed the instrument to Royston at arm’s length as if wary of contamination. Royston raised his eyebrows and held the receiver to his ear.
‘Royston,’ he heard a voice say. ‘I want to see you. Now.’