Kenneth de Vere Aubrey settled into the somnolent, contemplative mood that he usually enjoyed in the Public Gallery of the House of Commons. And he grew older, he was aware that the sounds that rose from the floor of the House, especially those made, as now, by a poorly attended Question Time, threw his awareness back upon himself. He had almost entirely lost an earlier, youthful sense of the business of the world being done there. The Chamber had become a club.
He had reported to the Foreign Secretary, after lunch, on the security procedures to be put into effect, by the SIS in cooperation with the CIA and the Finnish Intelligence Bureau, for the culminatory stages of the Helsinki Conference on Mutual Balanced Arms Reductions, one week hence. The Foreign Secretary himself would head the team of British observers at the treaty signing; the United States' partners in NATO would be signatories only to the second, and supplementary stage, of the conference, to be held in Belgrade in the autumn.
An Opposition speaker was on his feet, requiring a junior minister at the Foreign Office to explain what assurance the government, and the President of the United States, had been given as to the sincerity of the Soviet Union with regard to arms reductions — a late, and rather naive, attempt to stir doubt; or perhaps to draw attention to the speaker. There were a few half-hearted murmurs of derision from the government back benches. The Front Benches on both sides of the House were conspicuously bare.
Aubrey came to the House more often in these last days of his employment with the SIS than he had done in earlier years. It irked him that he could not precisely explain his motives; but it was tolerably warm. An obscure sense of desire for legitimacy nagged him, as it often did. Perhaps he was disillusioned after sitting below the salt for so long — enter Third Murderer, he thought. Here, at least, it was tolerably above board — at least, it gave that illusion. Perhaps that was also the reason he spent less and less time with the operational side of the service, and preferred administration and oversight of intelligence gathering.
Perhaps he was growing senile, and ought to begin attending the Upper House. He shifted in his seat, and cursed the ailing circulation that so swiftly made him cold and cramped when still. And, aware of the physical, he thought of other men of stronger sensual passions than himself; their horror at the growing inoperancy of limbs, their sense of desire unabated, but more futile and humiliating with the onset of age.
They had spoken no word of retirement to him as yet; for which he was grateful. If anything clouded his general self-possession, his satisfaction with his lot, it was the idea that one day the neat, uncluttered flat in Sussex Gardens would become a bare, unfurnished cupboard to be inhabited, with growing dissatisfaction, for the long hours of endless, successive days.
He wondered how cold it was in Finland, and whether to delegate the organisation to one of his senior assistants — perhaps even to Davenhill, whose standing with the Minister, though not immutable, was at that moment satisfactory. And it would do the young man good.
Then he saw Davenhill, still in his leather topcoat, looking around at the Gallery, and Aubrey sensed that he was looking for him. Snow had turned to gleaming wetness on his hair and shoulders in the lights of the Chamber. He did not feel irritation — perhaps something about the younger man's attitude, an eagerness of body and face, intrigued Aubrey. He felt a swift pluck like mild indigestion at his stomach, and smiled. Then Davenhill saw him, and waved the newspaper in his hand, stepping immediately down the aisle to him.
'… The facilities for mutual inspection, by satellite and by military delegations, written into the terms of the Treaty, are surely all the Honourable Member could require, even for his satisfaction…' — the junior minister droned, raising two languid supporting breaths, and a mutter of denigration. Davenhill, who was looking extremely serious as he sat down, could not forbear to smile.
'Dear, dear — standards down again, I see. I don't know why you come here, Kenneth.'
'And to what do I owe the pleasure of your company?' Aubrey asked drily. 'To answer your remarks — I come because I find it all so reassuring. Don't you?'
'No initiations of mortality, then?'
'None at all. An abiding somnolence — I'm sure the map is still mostly pink, you know.' He studied Davenhill carefully for a moment, then added: 'What is it?'
'Folley…'
'What about Folley?' Aubrey found it suddenly difficult to control his interest; perhaps even panic — and knew that he was getting old.
'No contact.'
'What?' Something had been disturbing his calm — now he knew what it was. There had been an edge of concern that Folley had not reported in by the time he left his office to come to the House. He should have done — should have been picked up. 'What does Waterford think?'
'I've got him waiting downstairs — will you speak to him?'
'Yes, I must. Come.'
Aubrey cast one swift glance down at the floor of the House, then turned and made his way out of the Public Gallery.
Waterford was waiting for them near the Members' Entrance. Again, Aubrey was struck by his bearing; despite the military officer's civilian overcoat and the trilby hat, he still appeared like a prizefighter masquerading as a retired soldier, so looming was his presence, so marked his features by extreme experiences. He was a rogue operator — which was why he and Davenhill had chosen him. Waterford merely nodded to Aubrey as the little man gestured them through the doors out into New Palace Yard. The commissionaire saluted Aubrey as they passed.
Aubrey put on his bowler hat, and turned up the collar of his dark overcoat. It was still snowing, and beginning to lie. Davenhill belted the leather topcoat. The lamps in the Yard were great, faded billows of light; their footsteps were muffled by the thin layer of settled snow.
They patrolled the Yard once. Aubrey became irritated with their silence, the sense of them as machines who would not speak with his command.
'Well? Waterford — what's happened to him?'
'He's dead — or caught.'
'How can you know that?' Aubrey felt himself protesting too strongly; but an obscure sense of danger, threat, which placed what might have happened against the polite remarks inside the Commons in a chilly perspective. 'Weather?'
'Nothing to kill him off.'
'Delay?'
'He was to report if he needed more time.'
'Unless it would endanger him to do so — the helicopter is going back again tonight, isn't it?'
'Yes, it is,' Davenhill said, speaking for the first time. 'But — shouldn't we have a contingency plan?'
Aubrey was suddenly reluctant. His mind kept placing what he was being told, and what was surmised, in the blackest contrasts with the report he had made to the Foreign Secretary that afternoon — even to his recent conversations with Buckholz, Deputy Director of the CIA, talks with the Finns — he realised he was shivering; not with cold, not for Folley, not for any specific thing. But at a vague, oppressive sense that he had, simply had, to consider the Helsinki Conference in direct relation to the possible disappearance of Folley, and the certain disappearance of Brunton, and one test roll of unproven infrared film.
'What's the matter, Kenneth? You look absolutely awful.'
Davenhill touched his elbow, and Aubrey straightened, and said:
'Contingency plan. Very well. There is only one — no time to brief anyone new, get them trained — you two will have to go.'
'What?' Davenhill was aghast; squinted nervously up at Waterford's bulk.
Waterford merely nodded, then said, 'With him? That's a risk.'
'Kenneth — I'm not a field-agent. How the devil can I go?'
'You can — and will. Don't you see — if Folley is lost to us, then we may be dealing with something very serious indeed — so serious that the protocol of sending a Foreign Office Special Adviser no longer applies! You will prepare yourselves to leave tonight — unless we receive a report from Folley after the helicopter's second trip across Finland.'
He stood looking at the two of them, then looked up at the facade of Westminster Hall. He could see only dimly through the slanting snow the statues of English kings ranged along the building. And the lights seemed distant, too. He shivered again. He looked at Waterford, and added:
'Very well. If Folley is missing, I will admit the feasibility of your hypothesis. The Russians are in Finland, and probably in force. It will be up to you to prove it!'
The car had left the road at the northern end of the Ustinsky Bridge, smashed through the thin layer of ice on the northern bank of the Moskva, and sunk beneath the dark water, early that morning. Only at noon was the lifting operation got under way, two bright red mobile cranes manoeuvred into position on the Kotelnicheskaia Quay, when Vorontsyev's office obtained a priority order signed by Deputy Chairman Kapustin. The frogmen could work only minimal shifts in the freezing dark below the surface, and the work proceeded with painful slowness under the titular direction of Police Inspector Tortyev, who was KGB, but who had been reluctantly forced to accept the authority of Alevtina, to the policeman a much too-young junior officer in the SID. But he was not prepared to argue with her signed authority; he satisfied his sense of inferiority and truculent envy of the girl's position with pleasure that she at least kept out of the way, mostly in her car, or near the tea-wagon that was also doling out generous measures of vodka to divers coming off shift.
The girl sensed Tortyev's sullen hostility, and the surprise of the other policemen, and enjoyed the reactions she created. She was aware of herself as a diminutive figure in fur coat and hat, and long boots, as if she were a fashion model posed against some unexpected industrial background. And, since she rarely doubted her abilities or her instincts, she knew that no mere drunk had crashed a black Zil saloon into the Moskva, despite the impressions of the only witness, a policeman on foot patrol along the quays, looking for dossers or black marketeers and the like. She knew that Vrubel was in that car, and that he had been put there dead. Even if the policeman who had seen it had seen only one man, being below the level of the bridge, on the Quay, he had heard the car start up, and accelerate. Alevtina knew they would find a jammed accelerator when they got the black saloon out of the river.
The late afternoon was bitterly cold. She wanted more strong tea, but sensed that Tortyev, briefing the crane operators near the tea-wagon, would misinterpret any movement on her part, and instead lit another cigarette. The car's ashtray was almost full of stubs. Long English filter-tips; she never smoked Russian tobacco. Major Vorontsyev was recovering in hospital, they said: if they got the car up soon, then she would report to him personally later hi the evening. She did, she decided, believe the doctors, and her smirking colleagues who well knew her concern for their chief, when they said he was all right; but she would like to see for herself.
She was half-way through the cigarette when Tortyev came towards her car, opened the door, and slid into the passenger seat, rubbing his gloved hands together, and blowing ostentatiously with the cold.
'It's ready. The divers have rigged up the lifting gear, at last. They can't see a body inside…'
'What?' she said sharply. 'The doors are open?'
'No. Neither doors nor windows. He has to be in there — if there was anyone in there.'
Alevtina smiled in a superior way, exhaling smoke which rolled under the roof of the car. 'Just wait and see, Inspector. There's someone in there.'
'I hope you're fucking right — otherwise it'll have been a very expensive piece of salvage work, won't it?'
Alevtina continued to smile broadly, understanding the motive behind the obscenity. Doubtless Tortyev had already imagined what she would be like in bed, and come to the conclusion either that she was the same as any other tart with SID knickers off, or a cold fish who worshipped her work and was frightened of men. The conventional grooves in most of the male minds around her in the KGB amused her. Women were spy-bait, or secretaries; not much more to most of the officers she knew. She had been accepted by the rest of Vorontsyev's team, after an initial period of sexual innuendo and proposition, as a police officer. It was all she asked; she knew that Vorontsyev respected her abilities, and that was a bonus.
'Let's go and have a look, then, shall we?' she said, reclaiming the initiative and getting out of the car. Tortyev slammed his door when he, too, got out. Alevtina shivered, despite the coat and fur hat, and thrust her hands into her pockets. She walked down almost to the shelving stonework of the edge of the Quay, and looked up at the mobile crane, its head dipped out over the river like some African bird drinking. Tortyev, standing beside her but a few feet away, raised his hand, and shouted an order. The crane-driver raised his thumb, and then put the crane into gear. The second crane had withdrawn, as if ousted in some rivalry between the two machines.
The black saloon, roof first like the back of a whale, came up out of the water, swayed and hovered above the river, water streaming from panels and underbody, mud thick on the wheels and sills, then the crane traversed, and for a moment the dripping car hung over the girl, soaking her. Someone laughed — not Tortyev though it was doubtless his idea — as her coat was soaked. Then the car was lowered on to the Quay behind her. She stood furiously still, her back to the policemen and their sniggers and grins, not even taking her hands from her pockets. She dipped her head, and filthy river-water dripped from her hat into the pool around her feet.
'Get a torch, then!' she heard Tortyev snap at someone, and the sound satisfied her, she would wait — after all, she knew. She heard the blow-torch start up, sizzle for a little while, then a rending of metal as the door was heaved open. She listened to the sounds of men scrabbling with something in the interior of the car, waited still, then turned on her heel even as Tortyev was starting to come to her, strode up to the car, and looked once at the white dead face staring sightlessly through the windscreen of the car. The body had been reseated upright in the driver's seat. She recognised the face — it was still sufficiently similar to the one in the photographs in her car.
'It's him. Have him taken to the morgue, Inspector.' The doctors told him almost as soon as he came round that he would not have frozen to death, wrapped in his topcoat as he was; he was told in the same neutral tones that they used to inform him that there were no broken bones; only a badly-sprained left wrist and multiple bruising. The deafness had worn off slowly, although they diagnosed one perforated eardrum, and the buzzing in his head and the dizzy sickness both left him during the afternoon. By the evening, he could sit up in bed in the private room of the small hospital in a rural suburb of Moscow — an aristocratic house in the old days — and consider his good fortune.
The bomber had not wired for instantaneous explosion presumably for his own safety when arranging the body on the bed. It was a ridiculous way to have avoided death; he could still feel as a sensation in his fingertips, the delicate cold wire, the strand that had linked him for a moment with death.
As the hours passed, he found his attention returning to the minutes of his occupancy of that cold, small bedroom at the dacha, and the face of the Ossipov-substitute. He had been found, face-down in the slush, by a senior member of the Central Committee Secretariat, who was cohabiting in his dacha with a woman not his wife. Vorontsyev retained a dim impression of a man in pyjamas and Wellingtons and a silk dressing-gown round his shivering form — before he had passed out again from the pain of being turned over.
Why? Why such — extreme measures? What was he so close to that a bomb had to be used to stop him? Vrubel — they would not see him again, unless he re-emerged in the last condition of the Ossipov-substitute. According to his wife's statement, Vrubel had made two telephone calls before leaving her flat. She had overheard neither call. How many men would it have taken to organise the operation that quickly? A lot — trained, expert men. The ruined dacha belonged to an unimpeachable member of the Council of Ministers. It was impossible that he should be involved. He was not even in Moscow at the time, but at a trade conference in Leipzig.
Vorontsyev lit one of the cigarettes at his bedside, coughing on the raw smoke. Then he lay staring up at the ceiling for a long time. Thought became, gradually, suspended; he almost dozed. Cigarette after cigarette disappeared from the packet, and the most conscious thing he seemed to do was to stub each butt in the metal ashtray advertising some awful beer.
It was late in the evening when he received a visitor — Deputy Chairman Kapustin. The bulky man with the broad, expressionless face settled himself on a chair at the bedside without enquiring after Vorontsyev's health. Vorontsyev tried to sit more upright; Kapustin seemed not to notice his efforts.
'I want to discuss your — accident, Major,' he said. Vorontsyev sensed the pressures of other voices, issued orders. Perhaps even from Andropov? He felt a quickening of thought, almost in the blood. 'I have to be completely frank with you,' he added as if he disliked the idea, and wished to disown it.
'Yes, Deputy?'
'From the report you dictated this morning, it is clear that you have stirred up something rather nasty, and far-reaching. Though you can have no idea what it is.' The final phrase was heavy with seniority. Vorontsyev could not like Kapustin, but was too intrigued by what he might learn to resent the man's proximity. Yes, he decided, he was nattered by the promise of revelations, of being fully informed.
'Your investigations,' Kapustin continued, his homburg hat still balanced on his knee, but the fur-collared coat now unbuttoned, 'were intended to add to our knowledge of the movements and contacts of senior army officers. This surveillance was ordered by…' He paused, as if forcing himself to overcome the habits of years, ingrained, then he managed to say: 'By the First Secretary and the Chairman, in joint consultation. Similar surveillance has, as you are aware, been carried out during the past year on a number of generals and military district commanders. What you in your section of SID do not know is that similar surveillance has been applied to senior members of the Politburo, the Praesidium, the Supreme Soviet, and the Central Committee Secretariat..'
Vorontsyev was shaken. He said, 'All with the same — suspicion in mind, Deputy?'
Kapustin nodded. Vorontsyev lit another cigarette, and saw that his hand was trembling with excitement. Whatever was going on, it was huge, out of all proportion to the small sliver of the totality that he had glimpsed, that had embedded itself in his flesh as surely as if it had been a splinter of wood from the ruined dacha. The compartmentalisation of all the security organs of the state extended even to the SID. He had had no idea that perhaps half the force was working on the same operation as himself and his team.
Kapustin said, 'You talked with Vrubel — what impression did you get of him? Did he know who you were?'
Vorontsyev, because his mind raced to the possibilities., ignored his private humiliation, so much so that he said immediately, 'He found me comical as a cuckolded husband.. ' Kapustin remained silent. 'But he was cocky, and not just with sex…' Vorontsyev concentrated, seeing the man's face, hearing his voice. 'He knew who I was, and that if I wished, I could make trouble just because he was having my wife. But he didn't seem to care. It seemed to make him more confident.'
'What do you conclude from this, Major?'
'I don't know. At the time I suspected something — some secret knowledge or power that made him — immune?' Kapustin's eyes lit up. He said. 'Exactly! that is what I suspected from your report. A great pity that you did not take other men with you…' He waved aside protest, and went on: 'Whoever is behind this, they are suitably ruthless. One must admire them for it, if for nothing else.'
'What do we know, Deputy? So far?
'Mm. I am permitted to tell you — ordered, in fact. The earliest clue was a tapped telephone call from the Bureau of Political Administration of the Army; a senior member of that department of the Secretariat who was about to retire, due to inoperable cancer. Perhaps he made a slip just because he was old, or ill — or confident. He used a phone that he would not know was tapped, but he might well have suspected it. His name was Fedakhin. He talked in what was obviously code, and he mentioned two strange things. He referred to Group 1917, and later in the conversation — that was his call-sign, we think — he referred to Finland Station. He was responsible for that area of the border, and the north-western military district. Apparently, this Finland Station was proceeding well, and he could look forward to retiring a happy man — to await the great day, as he put it.'
'Vrubel referred to nothing like that,' Vorontsyev murmured unhelpfully.
'I didn't suppose he had,' Kapustin observed. 'But what do you think the terms might mean, eh, Major?'
Vorontsyev wrinkled his brow, looked at the Deputy, and said, 'I can't think what they might mean — I know what they do mean, the date of the Revolution, and the destination of the train from Switzerland…' His mouth dropped open. 'You don't think…?
'I think nothing. Chairman Andropov's thoughts are what I convey to you.' There was a solemn emphasis in the words. 'Revolution? Seems hard to believe doesn't it?' There was a bright glint of perspiration on Kapustin's forehead, above the heavy creases of age and office. 'I would prefer not to think — but I have to, and so do you.'
'Very well, Comrade Deputy.' Vorontsyev felt that the situation required formality. 'What happened to the man Fedakhin?'
'He died. Apparently the disease was more advanced than was diagnosed. We put maximum surveillance on him, but to little or no effect. It appears that somebody was suspicious — no one went near him again.'
'But — his contacts before. How much do we know about them?'
Both men seemed to accept the collusion that the situation forced upon them. Both relaxed into the tense informality of their common business. Kapustin said, 'Not very much. Typical party background — kept his nose clean. Ready to change sides and loyalties when Kruschev was swept away, had never identified himself with that regime, except when he had to. A second world war soldier, political indoctrination — then returned to his duties in the Secretariat. Clean record — until this chance telephone intercept.' Kapustin shrugged.
'Family?'
'Know nothing.'
Vorontsyev persisted, as if Tie were interrogating the Deputy. Kapustin, hotter still it seemed in the airless room, aquiesced; as if it were easier for him to be questioned than to volunteer a briefing to a subordinate — and one in a hospital bed, at that.
'What else is there, Comrade Deputy?' Vorontsyev did not question his own eagerness — whether revenge, or in the burial of private worlds.
'Not very much. For the expenditure of so much effort, very little indeed. We have a dossier…' He patted the briefcase that rested by the chair, and to which he had not referred since his arrival. 'Of all movements and contacts of officers and bureaucrats under surveillance during the last year. All the teams are going through them, as you did with Ossipov, checking for some new lead, or some connection.'
'The — suspects? Are they confirmed, or not?'
'No. They are — everyone who might possess the power or the influence was put under surveillance. Automatically.'
Tower for what?' Vorontsyev asked after a while.
'Revolution. That is the broad picture. The assumption that a revolution is being planned…'
'Ridiculous!' was Vorontsyev's first reaction. Then he stopped short, abashed at his indiscretion.
Instead of anger, Kapustin said, 'I might agree with you, Major. If I knew as little as you do. But — fantastic as it is, I have to consider the possibility. So do you.'
'But — why? And how? With the Committee for State Security so effective. It would need cooperation — converts — in the Politburo, the High Command, the Praesidium, the Secretariat, the KGB itself.'
'I quite agree. As to why, I don't know. As to how — it could take ten years to plan, and execute. And it would need the army — and the navy, too, perhaps. Certainly elements in ah1 the organs of government and control in the state. It would be — huge.'
'I can't believe it!'
'Perhaps not. But — something is going on. Generals don't have to have substitutes in order to visit prostitutes, of either sex. And the substitutes don't get killed on the merest suspicion that discovery may be just around the corner! Think of that when you're reading these files…' Again he tapped the briefcase with a hand that was backed with dark, curling hair — dark as the hair that curled from his wide nostrils. 'And think of this, too. If it would take say ten years — and it is happening — where are we in their timetable, at the present moment?'
Folley watched the guards carefully; it had become a habit so to do, as automatic as glancing in a driving-mirror at precise intervals. There was no possibility of escape connected with it.
The two young Red Army soldiers, a corporal and a senior private, seemed content with his company. During the hours of the short day, they seemed comfortable, even approachable — as if they had received no orders against fraternisation. Folley realised that it was an illusory state, and it was designed to make him less troublesome to his guards.
The small tent was cold, but he was still warmly clad in his winter combat clothing, boots and mittens — the Finnish uniform beneath it they had disbelieved, especially when his command of the language had been discovered to be rudimentary by a Senior Lieutenant who interrogated him in Finnish; but they had allowed him to keep it, and his supposed identity. Except for the papers, which had disappeared. They had spoken to him in English after that. His silence was a tacit admission. He had not answered their questions, but they knew his nationality. He had to ask for the toilet, for food and drink, in English, before they would respond. Yet still they had not beaten him.
The three of them sat round the oil-stove, feeling its warmth on their faces, the fronts of their legs. In the hours that he had been held in the camp, they had done little else. They had allowed him to exercise, of course.
They had interrogated him, but not physically. He had told them nothing; though he was evidence by his solitariness of the level of suspicion that had despatched him to Finnish Lapland.
They did not take him seriously. That was his impression of the regimental commanders, colonels both; and the impression given by the small, neat, precise man with the one large silver star of a major-general on his shoulder-boards. He had met the General only once, when he had been taken to be questioned in the wooden hut erected to serve as headquarters for senior officers.
During the night of his pursuit, another regiment had arrived; this time a Motor Rifle Regiment, comprising a tank battalion of forty older T-62 tanks, a battle recce company, three motor rifle battalions, whose vehicles were mainly BMP and BTR-60 armoured personnel carriers; field artillery and anti-aircraft batteries; the medics and technical support group. And a chemical platoon and its vehicles.
Folley had been unnerved by this latter more than the assembled firepower and personnel; it was the most real of the sights, the most vivid in imagination. For many hours afterwards, he was not sure that he had seen it. He tried to persuade himself that it was not the case; he had pieced together the skeleton of the major rifle regiment from the vehicles he had seen, and the men; and within that context, he knew he had caught a glimpse of the vivid yellow vehicles of the chemical platoon.
No one had explained the presence of the Russian armour in the forest south-east of Ivalo. And there was a comfort in ignorance — until what he knew of current war games, the conversation of a friend on the War Studies Team at Cranwell, and his own tactical sense, pressed upon him the conviction that he was amid only one spearhead. There had to be others, concealed on either or both sides of the Soviet border, along its length with Finland.
And the main armoured strike would be to the north, along the single main road to Kirkenes, into northern Norway. And that strike would be preceded by chemical attack; that much he could be certain of.
The Finnmark, therefore, was the target.
Russia was going to war in Scandinavia. It was a simple, brute fact.
Sitting there, watching the two guards, he sensed that he was still numbed by the fact; he had no urgent desire to return to Tromso, then to MOD, with the knowledge of what he knew. He felt himself strangely identified with what was happening here, in this place. As if the events were those of a nightmare, and he could not quite believe in it; nor escape it. The nightmare was so real, but confined to these acres of forest and camouflaged vehicles and disciplined men, that he could not see beyond it. It was easier, much, simply to sit, to wait out the hours of daylight, sleep out the night; perform his bodily functions — exercise, urinate, defecate, and adopt the subdued, waiting tension of the camp.
He had heard how hijacked airline passengers identified with their captors, came to hate those outside who tried to help them. It had happened to him. He was almost one of these soldiers now — who questioned nothing, who simply followed orders, and left the niceties of Armageddon to their superior officers.
He guessed that this force was intended to take Ivalo, and its airfield, or perhaps to strike across the north of Finnish Lapland into Norway. All that he had ever understood of Soviet tactics was that some land of airborne assault would have to be made on selected targets — to hold them until armoured columns arrived. Perhaps, he wondered, these men were to hold Ivalo as a forward airfield for transports which would lift men into Norway.
Now, when he spoke to the guards, it was if no distinction of loyalties divided them. They were men in uniform; circumstances had thrown them together. He said. 'Can we walk for ' little?'
One of the two men spoke reasonable English — the corporal. He nodded, and replied, 'I think so. A little stroll, yes?'
'Yes.'
It was the end of the short afternoon; the weather was grey now, threatening snow. All around them, the scene had a smoky and indistinct quality. Men's breath smoked around their heads, like white scarves. Vehicles, dusted with snow, under camouflage netting, were still, unthreatening. Folley was pleased with the peace of the scene — its painted stillness. It accommodated him and it did not threaten his mood. Men Bill looked at him, between and slightly ahead of his guards; their stares disturbed him, but only a little. Already, it seemed, they were used to him.
He crunched through the deep snow, rutted with tracks and prints. There was little to explain, it seemed. He was merely there. A random thought of their initial anger at the deaths he had caused disturbed him now, as if he had been accused of some unkindness — or a different colour of skin pointed out.
He watched the Senior Sergeant approach almost with indifference. The man halted in front of him, his square face framed by the hood of the winter combat outfit, star just visible on the fur cap, and spoke in Russian to the two guards. Folley was able to distinguish only the military ranks referred to, and assumed that he was to be taken before the General again. The sergeant preceded them, his boots crunching heavily in the rutted snow over which heavy vehicles had crossed and recrossed.
They passed perhaps only fifteen or twenty of the hundred and sixty tanks, and a handful of the armoured personnel carriers before they mounted the steps to the wooden command hut, a low, single-storey barrack of a building erected by the crew of one of the workshop vehicles. There were command trailers, of course, just as in his own army — but this general had chosen something closer to a house. He struggled with the idea that this had a meaning, something to do with a lack of urgency. But he dismissed the idea as they passed into the outer office.
The guards snapped to attention in front of the lieutenant. Folley did so too; erect, face front, eyes above the officer's head, staring at the fugged window behind him, its rime of frost on the outside thickened by the closing circles of mist inside. There was an efficient stove in the room.
The lieutenant waved the guards away. After they had gone out, he stood up and offered Folley a cigarette.
'Lieutenant?' he asked, holding out the cigarette-case. Folley shook his head, and the young man added: 'They are not as bad as your propaganda makes out, you know.' Folley was forced to smile, hardly on his guard, hardly sensing that he was being deliberately put at his ease.
He stood there for some time, while the lieutenant walked round him, as if inspecting his kit. Folley had the sense of basic training again, or returning to that when he joined SAS. It was uncomfortable because it reminded him that they were on opposing sides. The atmosphere began to menace him in its silence.
'How much do they know, Lieutenant?' the Russian asked, his English accented but assured. There was something in the tone that made Folley take note. Looking at the man properly for the first time Folley saw that he was not wearing the motor rifle or armoured flashes on his shoulder boards or collar tabs. This was something new. The truth was slow in revealing itself, so retreated had his brain become from the realities of his situation.
'I — my name is…' He began it automatically, the eyes expressionless and the voice mechanical. The Russian officer hit him in the stomach, and as he fell against the wall of the office, it appeared that this was the signal to two other men, two NCOs, who came in from the inner office. Folley, surprised, looked up at them. The two men were looking at their officer, who was perched on the desk, smoking. As the truth seeped into the front of his mind, as from behind an almost watertight door, Folley began to laugh at the melodramatic posture of the officer. Like something out of an old film.
The taller of the two NCOs kicked him in the thigh as he sat there, and he rolled away, into the flying boot of the other man who had got on to his other side. The blow caught him in the side of the head, and the pain screamed in his temple and his neck.
The Lieutenant, who was from the GRU, Military Intelligence, like his two NCOs, watched dispassionately as the beating began.
Galakhov disliked botched or hurried work. The death of Vrubel, whom he had been forced to execute immediately upon Kutuzov's orders, had been such a performance. No difficulty — but too much haste. Just as in the case of the mirror above the washbasin into which he now stared; almost coming away from the wall because someone had not bothered to do the job of mounting it properly. The screws were pulling out of the plaster. His tongue clicked against the roof of his mouth in disapproval. He studied himself critically. Fur hat, sheepskin coat, English shoes, leather briefcase, battered suitcase behind him on the chequered floor. Yes, it would do. He signified acceptance as if to a tailor, nodding at his reflection. He glazed his stare — better. Something about his eyes — Vrubel had seen it, hadn't wanted to come with him, had had to be cajoled into not suspecting. The killing itself had been easy; and the dumping in the Moskva of Vrubel and his car — well, perhaps that was bravado, or irritation with Kutuzov for the way in which the old man presumed his services were acquired only by a nod, or a command, like turning on a tap. Let the KGB find the body, and start searching for the killer.
He turned, picked up his suitcase, and left the washroom in the principal Departure Lounge of Cheremetievo Airport. As he passed out into the fuggier warmth of the lounge, he heard his flight being called, as he had known he would. A charter flight to London, with the last of the winter season tourists to Moscow. On it, he would be unremarked. His English was excellent, his papers good.
He clicked his fingers — the duty-free shop. He should have a polythene bag, and some cartons of cigarettes or a bottle of spirits. Tourists' last roubles, which they could not export, disappeared satisfactorily in the duty-free shop.
As he passed the main stairs to the restaurants and the Diplomatic Lounge, he glanced up at the two heavy KGB men at the top of the flight. He smiled, not at them, but at the knowledge that First Secretary Khamovkhin was leaving from Cheremetievo later that evening in his Tupolev Tu- I44, for Helsinki.
Galakhov intended to arrive in Helsinki later the next day, as part of the drafted security staff surrounding the Soviet leader. Without pausing in his stride, he continued towards the duty-free shop.
Feodor Khamovkhin sat in a corner of the Diplomatic Lounge, and tried to arrange his limbs in a relaxed position. He felt nervous, and his arms and legs seemed to have some kind of cramp, so that it was difficult to sit still, not to be restless. He saw Andropov watching him as he chatted to some of the party that had assembled either to fly with Khamovkhin to Helsinki, or to be present at his departure. Most of the Politburo were there — one of them at least not sorry to see him go.
He tried to press down on the thoughts, as if replacing the lid on a foul-smelling dustbin. But there seemed to be no pressure in his mind, which could contain the suspicions. There they were, rings and lumps of dark coats, eddies of laughter or talk. All little men — no, some better than others — all part of the system, the same system as himself, all knowing the facts, none of them blind..
He stirred in his seat again, the restlessness of impotent fury irresistible. Andropov, as if recognising a danger signal, excused himself from his conversation with Gorochenko, the Deputy Foreign Minister, and crossed to him. He waved the two security men to further seats as he sat down.
'Relax, Feodor,' he murmured. 'You look far too nervous to be leaving for a State Visit which will culminate in your greatest political triumph.'
Khamovkhin looked at him suspiciously. 'Your humour is rather acid tonight, Yuri.'
'Perhaps my own nervous reaction to the situation?'
'Nothing will happen here…?' The thought had occupied the vocal chords almost before he was aware of it. He hadn't thought it before! 'Sorry.'
'Nothing, Feodor. I picked up these men, just as I have selected the security staff who will accompany you. I give you my word — as far as I can be sure, and I have been thorough — that the men who will guard you can be trusted. Wherever I have had to draft them in from.'
Khamovkhin patted Andropov's thigh, a gesture the Chairman seemed to dislike.
'Thank you, Yuri.' Then he looked up into Andropov's ascetic, emotionless face.' You are in effective charge now. It's your job — to find these people.'
'It always was, Feodor,' Andropov replied sharply. 'I know what is at stake here. But I can't move until I know!' Some in
reserve broke in Andropov suddenly. For so many years he had been unconcerned with power; his power had been evident, and unchallenged. Now, he was impotent, and looking into a mirror of impotence in the face of Khamovkhin. It was a precise, but visionary, moment, which he loathed. 'I have to know,' he added more calmly. 'So, I have to keep my nerve, eh, Feodor. Perhaps it's a good thing that you won't be here — mm?'
Khamovkhin's face darkened, as if bruised by the stinging remark. Then, strangely, he nodded. 'Perhaps, perhaps. You play a better game of knife-edges than I do, Yuri. I admit that.'
Andropov bowed his head mockingly. 'I shall need to.'
'Let me know — anything, let me know.'
'Of course. My men will rig the transmitter for you. I will be available — either myself or Kapustin, at any time. Regular reports will be made to you. If it happens, you'll hear it on the news. If not, you'll hear it from me.'
Khamovkhin nodded. Restlessness again — yet some other movement than a cramped stirring seemed appropriate, even necessary. He stood up, and straightened his body. Like someone going out to execution, he thought, then smiled. No, someone bluffing his way across a border. Leaving his friend, but subordinate, to face the firing-squad. As everyone there knew, he had always played a good bluff.
He looked at the little groups of dark coats, and the white or bald heads — very few dark ones, a game of old men — and wondered which one of them it was.
'Which of those bastards is it?' he whispered, and Andropov touched his elbow in a warning gesture. Old men, he thought with contempt that did not entirely disguise self-disgust. Thinking aloud, dribbling while we sleep, creaking when we bend, snapping like old sticks when we break. A stupid, desperate game of old men — ancient, toothless figures who have to wear long underwear all year, and waistcoats and woollens — Politburo, High Command, Central Committee, Secretariat. Full of old men.
'Which of those bastards is it?' he asked again, bending slightly towards Andropov. 'Find him, and kill him — then kill the others.'
Andropov touched his forehead in a mocking salute.