We reached the car and I scrambled with the key to unlock the boot. It was tiny. Sarah glanced at me for a moment, then climbed in, rolling herself up into the foetal position.
‘Okay?’
She nodded, her chin against her knee.
‘Hold tight,’ I said.
I shut the door and ran around to the driver’s seat. The temperature was around freezing, so I tried a brief burst of the starter without the accelerator, ready to catch it as soon as it took. It didn’t. I waited a couple of seconds, drumming my hand against the wheel, and tried again. Nothing. A mushroom cloud forming, all because this country couldn’t make cars that started. I gave it another go, craning my neck as I did to look up at the balcony. Gunfire was still coming from inside the flat, but God knew how long it would be before they came running for us. And… yes. Bingo.
I pulled out and roared down the street as fast as the thing would go, the treads of one of the front tyres squealing. I pressed the button on the radio and picked up the militsiya frequency, but the exchange was about a couple of drunkards who were causing trouble near the GUM store, not us. Presumably, the lieutenant at Maclean’s building had finally wondered where we’d got to and called in, and the KGB also knew of his association with Anton. Maclean had grown complacent, careless or both, and had failed to realize he was under surveillance wherever he went, by both the British and the Russians.
The message might not have gone out yet, but this car would be compromised before too long because Yuri would soon figure out why we’d been at Anton’s. The question was whether we could reach the first roadblock before he realized it and got a message to his men to look for anyone in a yellow Moskvitch with this registration. I hoped that the fact they’d stumbled in on two senior British diplomats holding one of their agents and a dissident at gunpoint would give them enough to disentangle for a while.
It had certainly given me a few things to disentangle: Colin Templeton a traitor? It couldn’t be, surely. I told myself to leave it to one side for the time being, and think about it later… if there was a later.
A lifetime of training had taught me to keep my eye on an objective until the job was done, and to suppress feelings of panic, but this was different. We’d escaped Osborne and Yuri, but we were still a hell of a long way from the U-boat. In fact, we were around 700 miles from it in a shitty little Soviet car, with one of us in the boot and only one set of papers. Panic surged through me. The papers. I felt for the pocket of my jacket. Yes, they were still there.
I began heading west, keeping my speed at a reasonable limit so that I didn’t attract any attention, and my eyes peeled for patrol cars and black Volgas. The rain had stopped, but mist was forming and visibility was poor. Dark clouds were pressing down on the city, but I noted them with satisfaction: it usually didn’t get too cold when it was overcast, and the radiator in the car was bust. There was quite a lot of traffic around, and coupled with the mist it was making it heavy going. The street signs were all in Cyrillic, of course, and although my Russian was fluent, my brain was struggling to adjust to it, exacerbated by the shock of seeing Osborne and the pain still throbbing in my hand.
I had to figure out where to head now, and reduce the objective to a series of concrete moves and counter-moves. Counter-moves, because figuring out what the opposition was planning would be crucial if we were going to stay alive much longer. What would I do now in Yuri’s shoes? From the brief flash of uniforms I’d seen in the flat, there had been both GRU and KGB officers there, so I suspected he and Andropov had had it out already, and had now agreed to join forces for both their sakes and to cooperate to their utmost to get us back. If they didn’t recapture us, both their heads would be on the block. The Volgas and the men in the flat would be just the tip of the iceberg: I knew the militsiya had already been scrambled, and we could expect large numbers of GRU and KGB men to have been deployed, as well as the railway police, civilian police volunteers and customs and border guards. If I were stopped for speeding now, it would be the end of the line.
I wiped the sweat from my eyes and braced my shoulders, trying to suppress the fear. What if I couldn’t locate the canisters, or find a way to show them to the Russians? What if I did and they simply didn’t care, or didn’t believe me regardless? What if I were too late? Brezhnev could have cracked under the pressure. The missiles could already be in the air.
There was something emerging in the mist by the side of the road and I peered through the window anxiously. A figure appeared, and I saw flashing lights and a red star on a white helmet.
Roadblock.
*
I removed Anton’s spectacles from my jacket and put them on. It was a miracle he’d managed to take a photograph of me at all, because his lenses were so strong that within seconds my eyes began to throb and it became hard to see anything. I peered over my nose and saw that they had stretched several militsiya cars across the road in two rows to block it. The line of traffic was building up quickly as a result, because every time they let a car through they reversed one of the patrol cars in the first row a little way, let them through, closed the gap and then did the same in the second row. That meant they were taking a couple of minutes to clear each car. And it meant that they were being very thorough indeed.
The question was whether or not they knew about Anton. Bessmertny’s wristwatch read ten past noon. It could be that Yuri and his men were still trying to sort out what had happened in the flat – or it could be that they had got on the radio and told these chaps to look for someone in Anton’s car.
The car in front of me cleared through the set-up, and I was waved forward. One of the men knocked on my window and I rolled it down.
‘Passport, comrade,’ he said. They all looked the same – like schoolboys playing dress-up. This one had cut his chin shaving this morning, or perhaps it was a pimple he’d picked at. I handed him the passport and he took it and opened it.
‘Move your head closer to me,’ he said, and I did, feeling the heat of spotlights. He squinted at me, and then back down at the passport.
‘What is your destination?’ he asked. He had a pistol on his hip, one hand placed on it.
‘Leningrad, officer.’
‘A fine city. And what is the purpose of your visit there?’
There was a faint clunking sound from behind me, and I prayed he hadn’t heard it in the surrounding din. I pushed Anton’s spectacles up my nose – the frames were too large for me and kept slipping down – and tried not to look flustered.
‘I’m visiting family,’ I said.
He frowned. ‘But it says here that you were born in Moscow. What family?’
The strength of the glasses was making me dizzy, and I could feel my pores opening and the sweat starting to bead.
‘My second cousin,’ I said. ‘He moved there last year, and he wants to show me his new flat and introduce me to some of his colleagues.’
‘What does he do?’
‘The same as me – he’s a physicist.’
He flicked through the pages, but I couldn’t make out his expression through the lenses. I felt I might faint but I couldn’t risk closing my eyes. If I looked over the glasses, he might think I was condescending to him so I stared straight ahead, not focusing, trying to shut off the message from my brain to my retinas so they weren’t affected so much. Sirens were circling behind me, and then I heard a burst of static from one of the nearby cars, and a message being delivered through a transmitter. Was it Yuri or Sasha, telling them to stop a yellow Moskvitch with the following registration? I strained my ears but couldn’t hear. Then one of the car doors slammed and I saw another officer approach and tap my man on the shoulder.
He turned, and the officer whispered something in his ear.
There was no way I could make it through two lines of cars. And at the first sign of any attempt, they would shoot.
The officers stepped back from the car. Oh, Christ. Were they about to try the boot?
The first officer stepped forward again, and leaned into my window.
‘Please proceed,’ he said, handing me my passport. ‘My colleagues here will signal the way.’