I was in my dressing gown, waiting. It was night, and we were all assembled in Library, waiting anxiously. Moonlight shone through the window onto the ragged armchairs, and I felt like sneezing from the dust of the books. Thousands of others had made their way through this process over the years – so would I, I told myself. We had been woken and brought down here hours ago. I stared down at the pattern of the carpet, which was brown and red with little flecks of white in it, curlicues, like pieces of gristle in a slice of salami, like sea-horses in an ocean of wine, and I tightened the cord of my dressing gown around my body. It was like a rope, the cord, and I pulled it tight, chafing my skin, already raw from the winter night – there was little heating these days. It was a navy-blue dressing gown, bought by Mother at Harrods before the war, with my label sewn inside the collar. Outside I thought I heard the drone of the planes in the night. Somewhere out there, Father was waiting for me to grow up and become a man…
And now the big door opened to reveal Mason, impossibly tall Mason with his great hooded eyes, and he pointed to me.
I stepped forward. He placed the blindfold around my eyes, and I followed him.
I ran through everything in my mind one last time, all the words and facts I had studied obsessively for a fortnight, in the hope that it would soothe my nerves a little.
Mason walked me round the building, took me up one flight of stairs and down another, spun me round, shouted at me from different directions and after a while I stopped trying to figure out where we were going. It didn’t matter. Every so often I reacted too slowly to his instructions and felt a swish against my calves and heat rising through the prickles. He had some sort of a whip with him.
I was being lifted into light. There was a moment of release as the cooler air hit my eyes and forehead, the sweat evaporated, and then a terrific blast of heat. Move, look away. Swish.
‘Whenever you look away from the light, we will use this,’ I heard someone say. He was holding the thing up in front of my face, but everything was a blur.
‘We call it the Cat,’ said the voice, and I recoiled as it brushed against my face. ‘Keep looking at that light.’
Just a lamp, a common or garden lamp. Fix on something else, not on the bulb, or you will damage the retina. Fix just above and to the left and let the light become the background. Then I caught a glimpse of the boy holding the Cat, and realized it was Charles Severn, and I sat up with a jolt, my lungs heaving, sweat pouring off my face.
A nightmare. It had been a nightmare. My Notions test had been fine. I had passed. No bones broken. I was an adult. Severn was dead. A nightmare.
I looked down. A grey blanket and white sheets covered me, but it didn’t feel sturdy enough for a bed: a stretcher, then. I moved to step off it, but found that I was strapped down.
As I took my bearings, questions started to flood through my mind, but before I could order them I was pulled up short by the sound of movement very close by. I looked up to see a young man in the uniform of a carabinieri standing by the edge of the stretcher. He wasn’t wearing a mask, which something told me was a good sign. He was flicking his hand against a catheter tube attached to the stretcher. I followed the line of the tube, and lifted the sheet to see it leading into my wrist.
The man scribbled something down on a board he was holding, and then started walking away from me. I made to call out to him, but then noticed in my peripheral vision that there was something in the place he had been a moment ago. It was another stretcher, and lying on it, her eyes closed peacefully, was Sarah.
‘She’s fine.’
I looked up, startled, to see a man ducking his head down and entering the room. My stomach tightened.
‘Hello, Paul,’ he said.
‘Hello, Sasha,’ I replied.
*
He looked much the same as when I’d last seen him in London – could it really have been only a week ago? – but instead of his usual tweed get-up he was also dressed as a carabinieri. I tried to untwist what this meant. They had donned these uniforms in order to get into the cathedral… so they could take us out again without arousing any suspicions. But the sheer scale of organizing that meant that they must have been following events very closely for some time. And that they had gone to a lot of effort to rescue us. Why?
Something about the ducking movement he had made suddenly alerted me to the rest of the space I was in. Glancing upward, I saw that the roof was rather low, as grey as the blankets, and metal, and I realized I was in the hold of a plane. There was a porthole in the wall, and I looked out of it with a sense of mounting dread.
But… no. There was a stretch of black tarmac. We were still on the ground. We hadn’t taken off yet.
Sasha came over to my stretcher and handed me a glass of water, which I gulped down eagerly.
‘How fine?’ I asked. ‘You have to tell me—’
‘Better than we hoped,’ he said quietly, taking the glass from my hands and placing it on a small trolley at the foot of the stretcher. ‘You have both fully recovered and are no longer contagious. It was a fortuitous escape.’ He paused for a moment, and something about the pause made my stomach lurch. ‘But there are some… consequences to your having been infected.’
‘What the hell do you mean?’
He ran his tongue around his teeth as he considered how to broach it.
‘Sarah has not yet regained her hearing,’ he said, finally. ‘I am afraid she may never do so.’
I looked across at her, sleeping peacefully in her own world, and felt something break deep inside me.
‘But if we had not reached you when we did,’ Sasha was saying, ‘you would both be dead, as might many others. We were monitoring the Italians’ radio communications, and the message about Turin came in very late. But it seems we gave you the antidote just in time. Our doctors tell me that you were within an hour or two of optimal transmission, and that if we had arrived a little later everyone within a few feet of you would have been infected.’
‘Optimal transmission? What about the people in the church, in the procession? How many feet do they need to have been away?’
He tugged gently at the tuft of beard under his lip. ‘We will make discreet inquiries – but, as I say, we feel it was a fortuitous escape.’
He always sounded so reasonable, that was the problem. If you didn’t catch yourself, you could get swept up in it and miss what was really going on.
‘Let her go,’ I said. ‘This isn’t about her.’
He paused and looked at me… sorrowfully? Can sorrow look reasonable?
‘I’m afraid this is not about either of you, Paul,’ he said. ‘It’s about what you know. If we allowed her to go, she would reveal everything – or be forced to reveal it – and the game would be up.’ He smiled, pleased at his mastery of idiomatic English. ‘The same applies to you. I’m afraid the only option is to put a brave face on it. After all, we have just saved both of your lives. Some would be grateful for that.’
I wasn’t sure I was.
‘Why did you save us?’ I asked, making sure to sound resigned to my fate. If I could somehow get down onto the tarmac, perhaps we could reach a border – Switzerland, or Yugoslavia. It depended which airfield they were using. Think of that later. Find a way out of here first.
‘Do you remember the tunnel?’ Sasha was saying, and I had a flash of the Underground, the sniper’s breath against my face as he tried to strangle me.
‘In Berlin, I mean.’
I nodded dully, shaking the memory away. Back in 1955, in collaboration with the Americans, the Service had built a secret underground tunnel between West and East Berlin that intercepted the landlines running from the Soviets’ military and intelligence headquarters in Karlshorst. As a result, they could listen in to a large portion of the East Germans’ communications with the Russians. It was a highly protected operation and I had been far too junior at the time to be indoctrinated into it. But Blake had been given clearance for it and, being the good double he was, had immediately informed Moscow.
‘It was a great reverse, of course,’ Sasha went on, ‘but also an extremely delicate one. It gave us the opportunity to feed disinformation to our adversaries, which would be very useful for furthering other operations. However, if we passed too much disinformation, the British and Americans would soon realize that we knew we were being listened to, and would begin looking for the leak. On the other hand…’
‘. . . If you carried on as normal, you’d be giving away all your secrets.’ I knew the story, and the conclusion to it: they had staged an ‘accidental’ discovery of the tunnel in ’56 and closed it down. The Service had eventually cottoned on to Blake and arrested him, but he’d escaped from prison and defected to Moscow. ‘What does the Berlin Tunnel have to do with this?’ I asked.
Sasha smiled indulgently. ‘I am trying to illustrate how the spirit of compromise can drive an operation, and how other priorities can become factors. With the tunnel, we compromised, continuing to pass important information through it even though we knew we were being listened to. We did this to protect our agent – but we made sure to keep our greatest secrets out of the traffic. Eventually it became too difficult to continue, so we broke it up. There is a similarity with this situation. But I think perhaps this will explain it more easily than I can.’
He leaned over and placed something in my hands. I looked down at it uncomprehendingly. It was a book, titled The Tide of Victory. With a start I realized it was the volume of Churchill’s memoirs that Barnes had been reading. I remembered Severn’s final words: ‘You didn’t read it. You don’t know…’ I opened the book. There didn’t seem anything unusual about it. I flicked through it, until I reached the end. Taped to the inside of the back cover was a small pouch, and inside it I could see a tightly folded bundle of papers. I shook them onto my lap and picked up the first page. I recognized the handwriting at once: it was Osborne’s.
C. – see attached proposal. I initially vetoed but suggest we reconsider in light of this morning’s catastrophe. U. taking next flight to S. with medication. See D. gets it.
W.O.
P.S. – Sort out your wife, for all our sakes.
‘C.’ was Charles Severn. Osborne had inserted this message in Barnes’ book and told him to deliver it to Severn on his arrival in Rome. If I understood the postscript, he hadn’t wanted to risk sending a message in code to the Station due to Severn’s suspicions about Sarah’s loyalty, a matter he wanted Severn to sort out – although precisely how wasn’t clear. ‘D.’ was obviously me, and so I turned to the attached document to see exactly how they had planned for me to get it.
It had the same heading as the other dossier – ‘STAY BEHIND: STRATEGY AND EXECUTION’ – and looked to be in the same typeface. But it had a different date: 29 April 1969, less than a week ago. And it was stamped ‘W16’, which was the Registry number for Porton Down.
Update on Nigerian virus, as requested.
The virus was isolated from acute-phase sera extracted from the blood of patient HANDSOME in a Red Cross clinic in Awo Omamma, Nigeria on Friday, March the 28th. Tests subsequently conducted at that clinic and laboratories here have confirmed that it is an arenavirus, and nearly identical to that found in two missionary nurses in Lassa, near Jos, also in Nigeria, which we isolated and examined in early March. There were also marked similarities to samples taken by the field team in Cameroon in November 1968 (see Annex 1).
This virus, which we have named Lassa Fever, is both potentially fatal and extremely infectious. It appears to be transmitted to humans via exposure to rodents, rodent faeces (transmitted via dust in the air), and possibly human-to-human contact, such as the exchange of bodily fluids. We believe HANDSOME may have contracted the virus either via exposure to rodents or sexual intercourse with ISABELLE DUMONT, who may have contracted it on her travels through the country as a war reporter. However, this cannot be confirmed, as DUMONT was dead before we arrived at the clinic, and we were instructed by you not to search for her body.
Jesus. I thought back to my time in Nigeria. I had slept with Isabelle only once… No wonder Severn had been so worried Sarah might have slept with me – he’d thought I was going to contaminate her with the virus. And I had.
I read on:
Tests on monkeys over a period of several weeks revealed the virus to be very easily transmittable via the exchange of saliva or blood: only a few droplets were needed. It is too early to give accurate figures for morbidity or mortality, but we would estimate it to be very high – possibly higher than other arenaviruses. As outlined in my report of March the 3rd, colleagues at the U.S. Biological Warfare Laboratories have already successfully adapted both Yellow Fever and Rift Valley Fever for warfare use. We felt that, on account of its lethality, virulence and lack of known antidote, Lassa Fever was a promising candidate and we adapted it in a similar manner on April the 23rd.
The adapted strain was so virulent that in some of the cases infection was achieved via the inhalation of respiratory droplets when subjects were over five feet from an infected specimen. Of the nine monkeys we tested, two began exhibiting significant symptoms twenty-four hours after exposure, and died within forty-eight hours. A further two specimens died within the following forty-eight hours. One further specimen began exhibiting symptoms consistent with early stages of the disease on April the 27th, and we administered a strong dose of vaccine. The specimen appeared to recover fully within a matter of hours, although it remains to be seen whether or not there will be any long-term effects.
With such a small, non-human sample size, it is impossible to conclude whether this represents an accurate picture of the transmissibility or mortality rate of the adapted strain in the event of humans being exposed to it. However, we cautiously calculate that the incubation period of this strain is twenty-four hours, and that after that time human cases will reach an optimum level of transmissibility.
We believe that this strain could be packaged within a capsule that, on breakage, would distribute particles across a wide area. Although the estimated mortality rate of this virus is lower than in some of the others we have analysed, even with the adapted strain, the shock value of using it would be significant. Some of the symptoms of the virus, such as fever, headaches and chest pain, are similar to those of pneumonic plague, and we would expect that diagnosis to be widespread initially. This would, of course, result in a certain level of hysteria among the population.
That was putting it mildly. I turned away from the text for a moment and looked up at Sasha, who was picking lint off his jacket. I took a breath and forced myself to read the rest of the report.
However, such a weapon could take years to develop, and would involve on-the-ground help from the Americans, which is undesirable for many reasons known to you. There is, however, an alternative method of carrying the virus that would lead to fewer fatalities than an aerosol-distributing capsule, but that would perhaps create a greater impact. This option could also, we feel, be put into effect within the next few months and with little cost to ourselves. HANDSOME has already been exposed to the original virus, has just woken from unconsciousness in our custody in London, and has been deemed persona non grata. It therefore strikes us that, by chance, we may have the perfect ‘live agent’ with which to test the transmissibility of the new strain…
Next to the phrase ‘within the next few months’, Osborne had scrawled ‘Not fast enough. Stick to S.P.’, which I took to be his vetoing of the operation in favour of shooting me in St Paul’s. I read the rest of the document in a haze: it consisted of a detailed technical description outlining precisely how they would engineer it so that my body would become the carrier of the strain, complete with dosage recommendations and tables comparing mortality rates.
The thing was signed by Urquhart, of course – ‘U.’ in Osborne’s note. His had been the voice in Sardinia I hadn’t recognized as I had emerged from unconsciousness on the operating table: ‘He’s come to.’ Yes, Dr Urquhart, with his tan under his Father Christmas beard, hadn’t been holidaying in Jamaica, soaking up the music – he had been in Nigeria, looking into the disease I had caught and investigating whether or not it could be adapted for use as a biological weapon. The capsules he had foisted on me hadn’t been to suppress my symptoms, but placebos.
It seemed they had improvised more than I had thought. When their plan to kill me in St Paul’s had gone wrong, they hadn’t just let me fly off to Italy. No, they had immediately put into action another operation to kill me – one that would helpfully make me a guinea pig for their future atrocities. Although Osborne had originally vetoed the idea in favour of shooting me at the memorial service, he’d jumped at the chance to put it back on the table. And to make sure I was under a tight leash, he had sent Barnes along as – what? – my warder? Or my nurse? I had a sudden memory of waking in the embassy with him leaning over me. What had he been doing? Checking my pulse?
At any rate, Barnes and Severn had been told to keep an eye on me while Urquhart flew out to the base in Sardinia – ‘S.’ in Osborne’s note – to wait for his guinea pig to arrive. Zimotti had helpfully provided me with a lead to Sardinia. My insistence on going to the meet with Barchetti must have interfered with Severn’s plans, but then I had led him to Pyotr and they had flown me off to Sardinia to inject me and begin their little experiment. In the last few days I had suffered muscle pain, hallucinations, headaches, constriction in my chest and many of the other symptoms I had experienced in Nigeria – but I had been so intent on stopping an imagined bomb that I had written them all off as after-effects of a whipping and some loud pop music. Worse, I hadn’t noticed that the woman next to me had been developing precisely the same symptoms.
I turned to Sasha. ‘How did you get hold of this?’ I asked, pointing to the paperback.
He smiled softly. ‘The butler did it. Despite some superficial precautions, money still talks, and we have a way into the British embassy. We removed it from Severn’s safe just a few minutes before your arrival.’ He took the papers from my lap and carefully folded them back into the pouch of the book. ‘It will be returned soon enough.’
‘After copies have been made, of course.’
‘Of course.’
‘And how am I alive? The document says there’s no antidote.’
‘No known one. Our scientists have been working on adapting this type of virus for several years, just as the Americans and British have been, and we have developed a range of antidotes. As you were already infected with the disease, it seems they only gave you a tiny dose of the new strain. We think they wanted to see what the effect would be in a controlled environment: to observe how transmissible their new strain might be to other humans before they tried it out on a larger scale at a later date…’
My mind jolted back to Sardinia, and my skin crept. They had put me in the same cell as Sarah because they had wanted to see how quickly she would catch the new strain from me. The plan had never been to attack Rome or Turin, but somewhere else entirely. Severn had scribbled ‘4 May’ on the strategy document, but it must have been just a possibility, rather than anything they had yet planned. Once Urquhart was fully satisfied that the new strain could act as effectively as it needed to, they would have injected me anew, then found a football match in Naples or an opera in Venice or whatever suited them, planted me in it and stood back and waited for the crowd to become infected. No doubt they would also have prepared suitable evidence to leak to the press that the carrier of the deadly new plague had been a Soviet agent.
Now I saw why Severn had been so anxious about whether Sarah had slept with me: he had still loved her, and if she had only been near me for a few hours she would have been unlikely to have caught the disease already – the idea was that it took several hours to come into effect. But if we had slept together, the chances would have been far greater that she already had it. It was a monstrously warped kind of love, of course – he had still put her in a cell with me to test how fast the disease could spread without us sleeping together.
Only we had escaped before they had had the chance to find out.
The knife Barnes had pulled on the rooftop in the Vatican hadn’t been a stiletto blade, but a needle. He had been trying to inject me with the vaccine, because my twenty-four hours were nearly up and I had been about to reach my optimum period of transmissibility, or whatever the scientific term for it was. And that explained Severn’s valediction. When he had arrived at the embassy and we were there, he had realized that both the dossier and Barnes’ paperback were missing from his safe, and had presumed that Sarah and I had taken both and so discovered the plan to use me as a weapon. But then I had confused him. Instead of trying to leave the country, either to defect to Moscow or head for London, I had inexplicably raced to the Vatican, and then to Turin. At some stage, he had guessed that I was running too fast to have discovered or read the documents in the back of Barnes’ book, and was still acting on the basis of the strategy dossier and the various Stay Behind documents.
But those documents were still enough to damn them with – if we had reached Haggard or anyone else who hadn’t been involved, the whole thing would have backfired. So they had run after us with needles, in the hope of stopping us before we reached optimal transmission and caused an attack they weren’t able to manage, and to retrieve the documents and kill us before we told anyone about their conspiracy. Severn had told me that I didn’t know what was happening, not out of any sense of remorse, but because he had realized he had failed to stop me and wanted to taunt me with his knowledge of what lay in store. ‘Enjoy her while she lasts. It won’t be long.’
I turned back to Sasha. ‘I take it you have known about this for some time,’ I said. ‘Like the tunnel.’
‘The revival of Stay Behind? Since last year. A British agent in Stockholm revealed it inadvertently to one of our assets.’
That drunkard Collins. The Service should have sacked him years ago.
‘And you’re willing to stand by and let innocent people be killed – and to be blamed for their deaths – just to protect the fact that you know it’s going on?’ As well as being terrible operational logic, I wondered if it wasn’t worse than committing the atrocities in the first place.
‘But it is not we who will be blamed,’ he said. ‘Not exactly. It is British anarchists, the Italian Communist party, and similar groups throughout Western Europe. We support these people sometimes, but they are not our real friends. They are like the information we let through the tunnel – not the most important. We do not want to expose NATO’s actions at this particular moment. If they kill a great many civilians and blame it on others, then we may do so. In the meantime, the more evidence we have pointing to their involvement, the better.’
They ‘may do so’ – he didn’t seem too bothered.
‘How many people count as “a great many”?’ I asked.
He gave me another of his patronizing smiles – he seemed to have an endless supply of them. ‘I think you have misunderstood the strategy of their operation,’ he said. ‘In Italy it is called Gladio, and that is an apt codename, I think. It is named after the gladius, one of the weapons used by the gladiators: a stabbing sword.’ He thrust his fist towards me. ‘The wounds it inflicted often looked horrific, but were not that deep – it was an ineffective weapon if you wanted a quick kill, in fact. But, of course, that was not what the organizers of the fights wanted: they wanted slow kills. Do you know why?’
‘Yes. Because the longer it took for someone to die, the more entertainment there was for the crowd.’
‘Precisely – nobody likes going to a boxing match to see one fighter knocked out in the first ten seconds. And so, too, with Gladio. They are not interested in killing many innocent people – but they want to terrify many people, with a superficial but spectacularly bloody wound.’
‘That’s a pretty poor salve for anyone’s conscience,’ I said. ‘Would you say the same to the families of those who are killed? Or is that why you rescued us? A sudden attack of scruples because the virus would mean more deaths than you could justify?’
‘I am sorry to disappoint you once more, but no. We were worried that you would reach London with the documents. That would have been… unfortunate. Osborne and the others will, of course, wonder how much you discovered, and what you will tell us. But once we have returned all the documents to the safe, there will be no reason to suppose that you discovered anything at all, and we are confident that the strategy will continue.’
He was actually boasting about prolonging the operation. It appeared that, from Moscow’s point of view, the more people who were killed and blamed on proxy groups the better – it would be all the more effective when they held their press conference to reveal that NATO had been behind it. Unlike the Berlin Tunnel, this time they didn’t appear keen to call things off and ‘accidentally’ discover the plot when given the chance.
When Barchetti had told me Arte come Terrore knew about the attack in the dome, he had meant the events in London after all – the ‘in’ had simply been a slip of the tongue, or because he hadn’t known precisely what had happened there. What he had discovered, and what he had been desperate to tell Severn, was that the cell knew that they were going to be blamed for that attack. That meant that they knew about Stay Behind – and so did Moscow. So the whole thing was blown, and Barchetti had needed to warn the Service. When I’d turned up instead of Severn and asked if he thought Arte come Terrore were involved in killing Farraday, he had realized I didn’t know about Stay Behind at all, and that something was therefore desperately wrong with my having been sent to meet him. So he’d fled… And that was why Pyotr had ordered me to kill him: Moscow not only didn’t want the Service to know that they were aware of Stay Behind, but were prepared to kill for it.
A strange sensation ran through me. There hadn’t been any attacks planned for Rome or Turin, but there would still be plans for attacks in Italy and elsewhere. And by killing Barchetti before he got his message to the Service, I had allowed the whole bloody thing to continue, just as London, and Moscow, had wanted.
Unless, of course, I could get out of here.
But how? Something told me they wouldn’t take off until Sasha was seated and belted in and had given the go-ahead, so I tried to stall him some more.
‘Why didn’t you answer my call in London?’ I asked.
He smiled tolerantly. ‘Has that been bothering you? Let me put your mind at rest there, then. I had no idea about the attack in St Paul’s, none at all. My radio man simply had a feeling that the safe house was compromised, and he and his team shut down and moved immediately as a precaution. As soon as I felt we were secure again, I sent Grigori to let you know… But you didn’t seem especially open to hearing the message.’
So my paranoia had got the better of me. It hadn’t been the first time they had moved safe houses – it was good practice to do so every once in a while, in fact. As there had been the risk that they would do so at the same time as I needed to contact them urgently, we had arranged that in such events Sasha would send someone to alert me within twelve hours. And he had done so. But he and his team had happened to move just as someone had taken a pot shot at me, and I had forgotten all about that arrangement and jumped to entirely the wrong conclusion. Perhaps if I had stopped for a moment in that call box in Smithfield and considered that, I might have heeded Toadski’s message in Heathrow, and not taken the flight to Rome, and… but that way madness lay. Whatever I had done, that bastard Osborne would have tried to kill me. It was a miracle he hadn’t succeeded – but at what cost?
I couldn’t look Sasha in the face now, but I had one last question to ask him. ‘This new strain…’ I said. ‘Is it more effective than the ones developed by your scientists?’
He nodded. There was a moment of silence, and then he understood what I was really asking. ‘Yes. The doctors isolated it from you a couple of hours ago.’
I leaned forward to try to hit him, but the strap around my chest held me back.
He stood, and smiled down at me. ‘I wish I could make you see how much I admire you, Paul. I’ve always felt you were a man of high ideals – perhaps too high. Sometimes they must be sacrificed for a greater cause.’
I didn’t have any ideals to speak of, but in the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king – if he’s not hanged by the mob.
‘What greater cause?’ I asked. ‘Communism – or the Motherland?’
‘Both, of course. The second is meaningless without the first. It is true that in this case the interests of the state have perhaps over-ruled strict ideology, because more important things are at stake. But you surprise me – did you really think you and your girlfriend were going to stop this war alone?’
‘She’s not my—’ I stopped myself. It was futile. There was nothing more important at stake than a perpetual cycle of point-scoring, but he would never be able to understand that.
He gave me a thin smile. ‘I think you should sleep now,’ he said. ‘We’ll be leaving soon.’
*
He had left me here, alone with Sarah. Well, why not? We were strapped to our beds in the hold of a plane, about to take off.
But we hadn’t taken off yet.
I started tearing at the strap, but it was no use: it was fixed tight. Panicking, I began clawing away at it in the hope my nails might break the surface. But I knew that wouldn’t help. My eyes raced around the small space desperately looking for something that might help, and trying not to think of how little time I might have. I had to get moving before…
That was it. Movement. The stretcher was on caster wheels, albeit with brakes on each one. But if I could create enough energy to lift them… At the foot of the bed I could see the glass Sasha had handed me earlier resting on the trolley. But how to move myself towards it?
I placed a hand out of the stretcher and tried to reach down to the floor. I was several inches short. That wouldn’t work. So I strained my chest against the belt again, but this time tried to jerk my entire body upwards as I did so. For a moment, the stretcher leapt a fraction of an inch in the air, and as it did I tried to use the momentum by pushing upwards again, and again, until it bounced. Praying that the noise wouldn’t bring anyone running, I started jerking from side to side as well as upwards, and gradually the stretcher began to turn. It was infuriatingly difficult to control, but after a couple of minutes I had managed to move myself so that I was almost horizontal to the trolley, and less than a yard away.
I didn’t think I was going to manage to get within arm’s reach any time soon, so I reached down and removed the catheter from my wrist. Then I reached for the pole containing the intravenous drip bag and tilted it towards me. I quickly unhooked the bag, and then dipped the pole down and took a swipe at the trolley, missing by several inches.
I made it on the fourth attempt, snagging the pole perfectly around one of the trolley’s legs. I pulled it towards me carefully and reached out for the glass. Shielding my face with my arm, I cracked the glass firmly against the side of the trolley, sending shards scurrying across the floor. But several shards had remained in the trolley. I picked out the largest and sawed away furiously with it at the base of the strap. Finally it started to fray, and then it broke away.
Gulping for air and soaking in sweat, I stumbled over to Sarah’s stretcher and performed the same exercise. She woke while I was freeing her and looked up at me in a daze. I gestured for her to follow me, and she nodded. I knew it could be just moments before they started taxiing across the tarmac, after which we would have no chance. Coming out of the hold I saw that one of the doors was just a few feet away. I ran towards it and pushed the button. It shunted open, and a blast of air entered the plane.
I beckoned Sarah on and she reached the door, and then we started racing down the metal stairs until we were on the tarmac. Wind whipped across my face, sending a dull ache through my jaw, and the sweat on my back suddenly felt chilled. We must still be in Turin, or nearby. That was good. France and Switzerland were close. I hoped we were nearer Switzerland: we had to get over the border, find a proper doctor…
I ran across the airfield, my chest burning and my head pounding with the desire to reach safety. We reached a fence, and beyond it was a road, a motorway of some sort. I glanced back for a moment: Sarah was a few yards behind me, but the plane was still sitting there in the darkness, and there was nobody coming for us. We had made it. We were going to be all right.
It was when we reached the road that I slowed down for a moment, and I felt a tug at my sleeve. I turned to see Sarah pulling at it.
‘What is it? Are you hurt?’
I followed the direction of her gaze. In the distance was a line of buildings, shrouded in morning mist. But slowly I realized that many of them were domes.
Onion domes.
It hit me like a kick to the stomach and I knelt down on the tarmac and waited until they came to fetch us.
*
We didn’t have to wait long. There were four or five of them: burly men in suits the same shade of grey as the tarmac. Now I saw that a couple of black Chaika limousines were parked on the other side of the plane, and as they walked us towards them I glanced over at Sarah. She gave me a look of sheer panic in return, and I felt numb inside.
Sasha was waiting for us. He stared right through me, then shook hands with the security men and headed into one of the Chaikas. We were led over to the other one, which had a flag pinned to the front grille. The door was opened, and we climbed into the rear. The interior was bright red – Soviet red – with fold-down seats on the side nearest the driver. The leather was cold against the back of my neck. I looked up and saw a man seated opposite us, wearing a uniform: gold glinted on his epaulettes. He was very old, and deeply tanned. He looked alarmingly reptilian, his eyes glinting through a network of wrinkles that spread like tributaries across the landscape of his face, and for a fraction of a moment I had the thought that it was Auden, the great poet revealed as Moscow’s puppetmaster-in-chief, the final Russian doll in the collection. But it wasn’t Auden, of course: the nose was snubbed, and the eyes were tiny sparks in the crumpled papyrus of skin.
‘Hello, Yuri,’ I said.
‘Greetings,’ he said, and smiled to show a collection of nicotine-stained teeth. ‘But perhaps now you can call me Fedor Fedorovich.’ His eyes flicked over Sarah. ‘So this is the woman.’ The tip of his tongue darted from his mouth and licked at his lips. I shivered inwardly as I remembered his ‘daughter’ in Burgdorf.
‘Are you the maniac behind this idea?’ I said. ‘This…’ I struggled to find a word. ‘. . . game?’
He turned his eyes to me, dipping his head in a mocking bow. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I am not the “maniac” behind the strategy, as you put it, although I have had my input. But I am old now – the new guard do not listen to me as much these days.’ He clasped his hands together. ‘I know that our objectives have not always been clear to you. As I am sure you understand, we cannot always provide agents such as yourself with the full picture, so you could not know where our priorities lay in this operation. I nevertheless congratulate you for your efforts to save our Italian comrades from being wrongfully blamed for the deaths of innocent civilians, even if—’
‘I was more interested in the civilians than your comrades.’
He gazed at me for a moment, then turned his head to look out of the window. ‘Take a word of advice from an old man,’ he said quietly, and his voice was a little colder now, a little stiff: ‘When we arrive, adopt the line I have proposed instead. I think it will help you fit in better.’
He suddenly leaned forward, and I flinched. He smiled at my nerves and lifted a bottle of vodka from a compartment in the door, along with three shot glasses. He thrust a glass each into my and Sarah’s hands, then poured out measures for each of us. ‘I give you a toast,’ he said. ‘You must drink it do dna: to the bottom.’ Then he cried out ‘Mir i druzhba!’ – ‘Peace and friendship!’ – raised his glass and downed the contents, eyeing me carefully over the rim as he did.
I turned and stared out of the window, and saw the domes and spires looming out of the mist ahead. We were approaching Moscow: a new world. It was one I had been heading for since I had sought this man out in 1945, but my reprieve had finally come to a close – I had reached the end of the road, as another Russian had told me not long ago.
I forced myself to look across at Sarah. Her face was as cool and beautiful as the moment I had met her in the British embassy in Rome. But her mind, I knew, was flooded with confusion and fear. I had brought her to this point. Another life lay ahead of us now, and we would have to draw on all our reserves to survive it – and I must find a way to protect her. She met my gaze and stretched out her hand. I clasped her soft, ringless fingers in mine, then raised the glass in my other.
‘Mir i druzhba,’ I said, and as the liquid burned the back of my throat, Fedor Fedorovich’s laughter echoed in my ears.
Among wolves, I thought, howl like a wolf…