The Spy in Question, page 8
* * *
Unable to sleep, he got up an hour later and tiptoed into Steven’s room. He put out his hand to the boy’s forehead as he did every night and then felt it a second time just to make sure. This time there was no doubt. Steven was running a high fever.
Chapter 9
12th December
No waiting this time. The questions began even before Perminev could sit down. The anxiety hung there unspoken, the heartbeat of intelligence.
“You have the body?” The voice came from the back of the room. Which one was it?
“Yes, and all the paperwork. The instructions were quite explicit.”
“Good. It was lucky the old lady’s tape came to us as it did. An original idea – a telephone confession.” The voice rose but it wasn’t a question.
“Unfortunately it wasn’t enough. A dissident turns a Party man twenty years ago and the man reaches high office as a traitor. But who is it?”
“With time, Comrade, I feel sure—”
The voice cut him off. “Time is in short supply. The chairman is worried sick about leaks. Now we know his paranoia is justified.”
For a moment no one said anything. Perminev could hear the elderly breathing across the table.
“What about the old woman’s daughter?” The question lashed out at him.
“I am approaching her quietly to try to avoid anyone panicking.”
“Indeed. Don’t forget that so far we have nothing. Maybe the old woman was mad. Maybe she made it all up. We don’t know yet. And nor, it appears, do you. Now leave us.”
When the door had closed the old general leaned back in his chair and yawned. His younger colleague faced him.
“You look tired, Melor. Does the chase begin to wear you out?”
The general swallowed hard and coughed. It was seven o’clock and already there was thick grey stubble on his face. He undid the bottom of his tunic and sighed with relief. In the light from the single desk lamp he cut a bleak figure. A large, squashed nose leaned out from the flat Slavic cheeks. The small eyes were almost closed. It was a moment before he spoke.
“You know, it was simpler in the fifties. And maybe it was more interesting. Now it’s all a question of degree. Does a man betray us in his thoughts or in his deeds? Is he loyal enough? Is he efficient? Maybe he’s not efficient enough. Does that make him a threat? Who can answer such questions?”
The younger officer raised a single eyebrow. He knew the mood, knew the philosophy. Melor Inozemtsev, one of the most ruthless heads of department, was airing his soul, searching for a conscience he didn’t possess.
“How do I know about you, even you, my friend?” Melor went on. “How do I know that you don’t have secret designs on a fur coat from Leningrad or a silk rug from Kazakhstan? And what if you did? I could judge you a criminal today. Tomorrow you might be a hero. This week a fool, next week a genius.” He looked up and the monologue was over. Almost.
“As for our present problem, we must shake the tree a little harder – that is, if we wish to enjoy our retirement. The chairman wants results, we must get them.” He looked down at his desk and toyed with a pencil. “Of course we could try making the British an offer…”
There was an audible gasp from the other side of the room. The general walked across and patted his colleague on the shoulder.
“Don’t worry, my friend, we have seen all this before.”
* * *
“Hullo, James. Good to see you.”
The visits were more frequent, Dawling reflected, and the tone friendlier. The message under his door had prepared him for that. The game was back on again, and they hadn’t forgotten him. They really hadn’t.
He returned the man’s smile. “I do believe we’re going to get some snow soon,” he said. “How’re things in London?”
“Oh, you know. We stumble from one departmental cock-up to another. Nothing changes.”
“You’re so right, Stuart, so right,” Dawling replied.
They were back in the prisoners’ visiting room. London had advised against reusing the warden’s flat. Give him a few conflicting signals, they’d said. Be nice, but make him feel he’s in a real prison. No more gifts. We can’t let him play baby all the bloody time.
But it was Dawling the traitor who sat at the table this time. A more confident Dawling, thought the man. More dangerous somehow. And yet he was in jail. How could he be dangerous?
“Ever play chess, Stuart?” The question came out of the blue.
The man looked surprised. “Can’t say I have.” He thought for a moment. “Played with my dad once on a wet afternoon, but that’s nothing to write home about, is it?”
“But you know the pieces, don’t you? You know how they work?”
“I think so. Why?”
Dawling felt the nerves suddenly. After all this time, he thought. Nerves!
“Well, you know how it is sometimes, you get to the point where you decide to lose a queen to get one. I’ve heard of it happening that way.”
Dawling tried to keep his voice steady. “D’you know if it happens very often? Do people still play that way, you know, queen for a queen?”
The man looked at him curiously. “I expect they do,” he said slowly, “but only after very careful consideration.”
Dawling smiled for the first time that day.
“That’s what I thought you’d say.”
* * *
It was hard watching Sasha. For he passed lightly and easily through the evening crowds. Sometimes, though, he would stop dead in the street, turn and gaze into a shop window or duck down an alley. But he never looked back and they assumed he hadn’t noticed them.
There were two on foot and three in a car acting as backup and radio control. The walkers had the new CIA-style wrist microphones and the transparent plastic earpieces. They didn’t believe they could lose him. The technology was too good.
But they reckoned without Natasha Keramova, a, scatty twenty-year-old from Kiev who wasn’t really watching her niece for she was too busy watching the shops and dreaming of bargains. She didn’t see the child step out into the road and neither did the hundreds of other passers-by on Kalinin Prospekt. But she heard the screech and the scream and for years afterward feared she had heard the thump as well. Although they told her she couldn’t have. But the watchers couldn’t ignore it because they had families as well, and few Russians can turn their back on a child. And so they lost him.
Within eight minutes another car had been called in to patrol and search the area, but they didn’t find him either.
In fact, it took a man who was much more experienced. And as Sasha headed quickly toward Tverskoy Boulevard the figure stepped out from the courtyard and forced him up against the wall, his chin touching the brickwork. The delicate fingers of Sasha’s left hand were twisted back with excruciating force while the man whispered carefully into his ear. He had known his target. There would be no piano playing that night.
Sasha found the pain so great that he couldn’t even shout. And when Perminev released him he sank quietly onto his knees in the snow, whimpering softly, like a stray dog.
* * *
In the hours that followed Sasha travelled the metro from Rechnoy Vokzal in the north to Kakhovskaya in the southeast, losing himself in motion, nausea and pain.
It seemed that his entire life had been spent on the move. He recalled a frightening kaleidoscope of travel as a child. Summer in Moscow, his father’s hurried arrival, his face flushed and fearful, his mother pulling a suitcase from the top of a wardrobe, so little to pack, so little they owned. Money came from the hollow insides of a book, tickets, documents from behind a wooden panel. And the little eight-year-old was dragged out by his parents for the start of an odyssey – destination unknown.
Only later did he understand what had happened. How the little family was handed from town to town, apartment to apartment, by people who said little, kept their faces covered, and moved only by dark. Anxious, frightened people, but held together by a secret link.
They had travelled more miles, more days than the little boy had thought possible. Surely, he had reasoned, they would fall off the edge of the earth and that would be the end of them.
He knew nothing of the more tangible risks. And on the journey his father had said little.
Sometimes they didn’t see their route, hidden as they were in the backs of food trucks or bakery vans, once a government Volga, even a military truck. The arm of the secret network guided them smoothly to the south, skirting the cities, crisscrossing the sleepy hamlets of rural Russia, into Central Asia and Kazakhstan.
Seven months later they were carried on the back of a horse-drawn cart into the ancient city of Tashkent, their clothes changed, their faces red, their hair swept by the wind. The escape line was at an end.
The new life brought with it a new name. Sasha Treshkov became Sasha Levin. His father began working in an asbestos factory. It brought the old man his illness and hastened his death.
But Sasha never heard him complain. Instead his father would rejoice in the musical talent of his son and praise God that life had been good to him.
Later, as the sickness intensified, his thoughts had returned to Moscow. Hesitantly, painfully, he had come to speak of his courier work for the British in a thin high voice that barely carried across a room. It became almost a confession as the soul looked to its future and sought forgiveness for the past.
At times the old man would recite names, even addresses. The discipline left him. The illness unlocked his memory.
There was Potapov and his daughter Zina, Anatol, Nikolayeva and Lena. His father had spoken of their warmth, their passion, their humanity. None were more selfless, he had said, more courageous. And Sasha had promised himself he would find them and join them.
It had not been hard. For his music took him to Moscow at the age of twenty. Zina lived where her father had lived. Nikolayeva had never moved. And the path they showed him led, by care and cunning, by deduction and subterfuge, to a meeting with George Parker. Just as he had planned it.
But tonight’s encounter? That was not in the plan. And yet Sasha had long expected it. For different reasons, certainly. But he had known it would come. He was to get Lena out of Moscow, persuade her to leave, sweet-talk her, cajole her if necessary. Perhaps, Perminev had suggested, she was in danger. Whatever the case, they wanted to talk to her in peace, well away from the crime, away from the police. Understand, little boy?
Sasha had known it was a lie, known it without a doubt in his head. But he knew he’d deliver her. There was no choice. His own operation depended on it.
* * *
The snow and the silence seemed to stretch unbroken for thousands of miles. Russia was locked into its winter.
The car had dropped Kalyagin at the country home of the deputy defence minister. It was getting dark. There were to be drinks, then dinner. But before allowing himself to be ushered inside Kalyagin turned, feeling the snow crisp under his feet, watching his breath swirl up into the birch trees. He tried to picture the miles of impenetrable countryside unaffected by history, older than politics. He shook the snow from his shoes, wondering why the old stoat Afanasyev had invited him, but knowing the answer already.
“Stoat” was a good description. Kalyagin smiled to himself as the minister shuffled toward him, nodding his head at the ground. Amiable, but desperate, he thought.
“How good that you came, my friend.” The minister held out a large sweaty hand. “Welcome to the club – no dancing girls, I’m afraid, no roulette, but a club just the same.” He winked at Kalyagin. “And such special members.”
Nothing had prepared Kalyagin for the wife who got up as he entered the living room. She must have been twenty years younger than Afanasyev, not slim, not perfect, but with the high Slavic cheekbones and the full mouth that engaged the eyes when it smiled. She tilted the blonde head when she spoke.
“I can see we should have invited you much sooner.” She looked him up and down appreciatively.
“It was kind of you to invite me at all.”
“Nonsense. I know we shall get on well together and you will come to see us frequently.”
They sat him uncomfortably between them, and it wasn’t until he was on his fourth vodka that the warning tugged at his brain. What had they told him in Tallinn all those years ago? “The game never stops. Don’t believe you can end it when you’re tired. Close your eyes and you’re dead.”
Kalyagin shook his head clear. He was relieved to be told that dinner was ready.
The dining room had been furnished by Scandinavians. The table and chairs were made of light wood. Kalyagin noted the creaseless white tablecloth, the dark blue napkins. Above him the stained mahogany beams, across the room a wide low fireplace and a circular Italian rug in front of it. The taste was faultless.
* * *
“You should try a little more sauce with the salmon.” The minister’s wife leaned toward Kalyagin with a bowl. As she did so her dress detached itself from her upper arm. He caught sight of a suntan that seemed to stretch forever.
“Thank you, a most exquisite meal.”
“You should not have expected anything else.” The mouth tightened. “My husband is, after all, in charge of the armed forces of the world’s greatest nation.” She threw back her blonde head and looked Kalyagin straight in the eye. “At least,” she added, “in all but name.”
The minister put down his fork noisily on the plate.
“I’m certain Dmitry Ivanovich doesn’t require political re-education or indeed any special pleading.” He cleared his throat and chuckled. “Tonight we promised ourselves we would not speak of politics. And we won’t. My dear Dmitry, a toast of welcome for your first visit to our little… home.” His right hand indicated the panelled walls. They all raised their glasses.
“To your health and success, Dmitry Ivanovich,” echoed his wife. “If there should be anything we can do for you at any time” – she paused – “you have only to say.”
She licked away her smile, dabbing her mouth with a napkin. A single serving lady cleared the dishes. The minister bore down on Kalyagin with a wine bottle.
“Perhaps we should go to my study, finish the wine, and try some cognac,” he said. “And then you can tell me about your family. I hear your father saw service at Stalingrad. Perhaps you know I was there myself.”
Kalyagin rose as directed but Madame Afanasyev remained seated. “Viktor; it is rude of you to lead our guest away so suddenly. Besides, I have not finished my meal.” She picked up her wineglass, holding it to the light, toying with it.
“I’m sorry my dear but—” And suddenly she was standing in front of him, blocking his path.
Kalyagin smiled but knew in that instant that she was not joking.
“I think we should all talk some more in the living room – vmyestye – together.”
“That is not appropriate.” Afanasyev wasn’t smiling. “If I were you, I should go to bed. We shall be talking about battles and wars and I’m sure you would be bored…” He jerked his head suddenly, motioning her to get out of his way. It was an ugly gesture and she didn’t move.
Kalyagin had only a vague inkling of what was coming. He saw the beginning of the movement and gasped in disbelief, for Afanasyev’s hand whipped out from his side, catching his wife flat on her right cheek. The smack reverberated through the room and for a moment there was silence. Then Madame Afanasyev screamed like a child and ran out into the hall. Kalyagin could hear her high heels clattering on the wooden staircase.
The deputy minister turned to face his guest. There was a single bead of sweat on his forehead. “Forgive me for this little scene.” He sounded out of breath. “You are not married but you know what women are like. Occasionally they have to see that a Russian is master in his own house. It does no one any harm.”
* * *
There was little traffic on the roads as the Zil sped back into Moscow. It was 1:30 in the morning and the city dwellers were revelling in private. Kalyagin had been sickened by the minister’s behaviour. And yet, he reflected, it might not have been a spontaneous performance. Afanasyev had been offering an alliance with benefits, making an incentive out of a threat.
And yet the man had rambled wildly, making little sense. The wine and the vodka had taken their toll. The cognac had finished it.
Afanasyev had tried to talk about satellite weapons but forgotten what he wanted to say. Instead he had droned on about the old defence minister hurrying off to his deathbed, promising the world to everyone and leaving his deputy to cope with the mess.
Kalyagin sat back in the seat and tried to doze. He didn’t want to get involved, but it would be difficult to stay out. He knew well enough who had helped him into power, who had become his silent patron so many years ago.
One man had watched his progress through Estonia, accelerated it, and marked him out for a slice of power in the Kremlin. One man, who had come first in the uniform of a lieutenant, then in an old Zhiguli and finally in a staff car with the hammer and sickle on the hood. That same man over all those years. He had known him simply as Viktor. Viktor was shrewd, Viktor was generous, Viktor talked much and expected little in return. Only loyalty, he had said. He had talked quite a bit about loyalty.
And it hadn’t been a surprise to meet Viktor again in Moscow. Of course he hadn’t wanted to talk about their earlier contacts. That’s our little secret, he would say. We’ll keep that to ourselves, won’t we? And they had.
And now he had eaten dinner with him for the first time ever, and Viktor was about to call in his marker.
Kalyagin didn’t remember falling asleep.
* * *
