At last he opened the door a tiny fraction before slipping his fingers around the jamb. There was still no sign of wiring and no noise of alarm. Once in the entrance hall he wasted no time in opening the outside door leading to a small passage between the Armoury and the Grand Palace.
He glanced at his watch. It was six-fifteen precisely. The guard would have been changed at Lenin Mausoleum and the old guard relaxing in the barracks near Spasskaya Gate. It was the quiet hour between the business of afternoon and dinner for Army contingents doing Kremlin duty. Officer staffs must already have left and only those few persons with personal passes would remain. Most of them wore furs and winter boots but wearing his coat in reverse he could pass muster at a distance for any of them. Maya had checked that no delegations were visiting the place, so no parties would be held that night in The Grand Palace, but there was a small caretaker staff at all times and he had no way of discovering their whereabouts. On balance he decided that the bluff of an open approach was worth while. Tucking his trousers inside his socks he then reversed his coat, turning up the collar and pulled his balaclava helmet down over his face. His fur gauntlets helped to cover his case, which he held under his arm, and standing deliberately in the open he lighted one of Sokolnikov’s cigarettes, gripping its stiff cardboard end firmly between his teeth and jutting his jaw forward belligerently as he walked under a lamp post and dropped into the curious waddling gait of so many middle-aged Russian men.
He had a clear passage right to within sight of the south-west corner of the House of the Council of Ministers and was still in the shade of Uspensky Cathedral when a patrol of four young officers matched briskly towards him. He lifted a hand in slovenly salute and grinned broadly as the salute was returned with military precision whilst he continued towards Gusev’s office. Two other soldiers were strolling a hundred yards away and looked round curiously as he knocked loudly on the door. His gun was nuzzling inside his pocket and as the handle turned he stepped briskly forward, pushing the man aside and slamming the door behind him. He recognised Gusev from ADSAD photographs. Smiling, he dug his gun against the man’s chest and spoke quietly in German. ‘Guten Abend, Herr Professor.’
Chapter Fourteen – Our weapons are fantastic
Gusev was a thick-set handsome man in the prime of condition. His German was almost without accent and he was completely self-assured. ‘I learned long ago never to argue with guns. What do you want?’ The Magnum was rock-steady and pointed dead over his heart.
‘Go back to your office. Touch nothing and make no noise.’
The Russian slowly backed along the narrow hall towards a black door near the bottom of a marble staircase and Grant’s instinctive suspicions focussed to needle sharpness. The man’s face was deadpan but there was a glint of triumph in his eyes.
‘Halt.’ He almost whispered the word and then listened intently whilst the Professor stood motionless, his shoulders bunched slightly forwards and his hands dangling loosely in front. There was a faint hum throbbing in the distance, a sensation rather than a noise, and Grant remembered the fantastic security measures which were said to operate within these secret Kremlin offices. The hum reminded him of barrier ray devices and burglar alarms which had once been demonstrated to himself and other agents in London by one of Jonah Lyveden’s backroom boys. He gazed coldly at Gusev’s alertly narrowed eyes and almost stopped breathing.
‘Stalemate,’ said the Russian. ‘If you tell me to switch it off you have no way of knowing whether I raise the alarm instead. Nor do you know of the other tricks which have been arranged for my protection.’
‘The place is monitored?’ This was one of the last things he had expected and cursed himself for forgetting it.
‘Yes.’ The Russian smiled and shrugged his shoulders. ‘The officer on duty will have registered your arrival, and, if he understands German, guards will already be on their way to deal with you.’
‘Then that sounds just too bad for you,’ whispered Grant viciously, ‘because if anyone does arrive I’ll shoot your guts out. So you had better reassure your guardian angel in his own tongue that all is well and let’s both hope that he doesn’t understand German. Say I’m a Czech colleague invited along to give advice about your space-sickness research.’
Gusev’s rigid self-control was beginning to snap. Beads of sweat had broken on his forehead and his fingers were trembling.
‘Get on with it,’ snarled Grant, ‘I won’t warn you again.’
The Russian jumped slightly as Grant raised his gun and pointed it directly in front of his mouth. Deliberately he increased his pressure on the trigger. ‘You’ve got five seconds. Ein. Zwei. Drei. Vier. Fü . . .’ Almost he had felt that the bluff would fail when suddenly the man cracked. A torrent of Russian gabbled out towards the unseen microphones. And then he relaxed as Gusev wiped his forehead and broke into German again.
‘I’ve done my best. You can’t blame me if anyone comes. Everything depends on whether the monitoring officer understands German.’
It was an open bet what had been said but at best Grant guessed that minutes had become important, and before leaving he had to shock the man into opening up his lab, showing his records and handing over a specimen of any bugs which might be in cold storage.
He lowered his bag to the floor and snicked open the catches. ‘If you make the slightest move, Gusev, I’ll drill you through the head. So don’t rely on my attention being distracted.’ He had planned the most gigantic bluff of his career. The same general tactics had worked with Sokolnikov, but with the Professor he would have to do even better.
He opened the concealed compartment with his left hand and drew out two more syringes. ‘Being a doctor you will know all about rabies,’ he said. ‘You may even have seen mad dogs infected with it. Well, one of these syringes holds a pure culture of fixed rabies virus which has been mutated through exposure to cosmic rays and the result is an extra-virulent type of infection for which the only available vaccine of anti-serum is in America.’ Carefully he laid one down on a hall table. ‘But fortunately,’ he continued grimly, ‘there is a full dose of anti-serum here. So I’m going to inoculate you with the live rabies virus and later, if you’ve done everything I ask, you’ll get a second shot and come to no harm.’
Gently he lifted the first syringe with his right hand and dug the barrel of his gun flush against Gusev’s ribs, angling it towards his liver. Working by touch and never once taking his eyes from the man’s face he thrust the needle into the loose skin at the back of his hand and plunged the stuff in.
The idea of taking half a dozen syringes loaded with morphine had been his own. Doses had been graded from an eighth of a grain to two thirds and Gusev had received the smallest of all, enough only to loosen his tongue and lower his guard without sending him to sleep, but as a bluff to throw him into a panic scare, to pass it off as rabies couldn’t be bettered. The man’s face had turned pale and he was running his tongue round lips which seemed to have blenched parchment. When he spoke his voice was quivering with fear and hate. ‘You aren’t human,’ he muttered. ‘To give a man rabies is worse than murder.’
Grant saw him tense his muscles and poise for a desperate spring. ‘Don’t move,’ he whispered, lifting the gun to an inch in front of the man’s face. Their eyes locked in a battle of wills and then Grant sensed the man’s defeat. His eyes had become dull and it almost seemed as though he was going to burst into tears. Carefully he lifted the second syringe and held it up. ‘You only hope of cure, Professor. And you’ll get it if you co-operate and do precisely what I say.’ He dropped it into the bag, closed the snecks and pushed it with the toe of his boot into a corner below the table. ‘Take me to an office where we can talk and later I’ll want all your records covering space-sickness research.’
The man was rubbing his hand where a fleck of blood showed where the needle had struck home and every vestige of self-confidence seemed to have been shattered as, wordlessly, he turned and walked towards the stair
case.
Grant followed at a distance so as to cover the hall below, but at the top turned tight upon his heels into a small room furnished with a red carpet and birch-wood desk, a huge gilded mirror and several deep arm-chairs. The walls were panelled in fumed oak with filing cabinets ranged along two sides.
‘We can talk here without being overheard,’ said the Russian, pointed to one of the deeply cushioned seats. ‘Sit down.’
‘No.’ Grant leaned against one wall, facing the door and commanding the drive outside. ‘But you sit down. I want to remain mobile.’
The Russian was still sweating. ‘Can I have a smoke?’
There was a casket of cigarettes on the desk. Opening the lid Grant threw one across the room. ‘And now business. I know that a new disease appeared in Russia a few weeks after the recovery of your third and fourth astronauts. I also know its symptoms and why you called it space-sickness. My people can pinpoint your quarantine centre near Odessa and we have proof that the bug causing the disease has been isolated. We know you’ve got an immunising toxoid and we also know what you hope to do with it.’
‘Are you a scientist?’ interrupted Gusev.
‘Naturally,’ said Grant curtly, ‘and I’ve come to put you up-to-date about Western advances along the same lines, because from our angle Russia can have a bacteriological war any time she likes. You see, although Soviet agents have been successful in getting information about nuclear research they haven’t stolen one single secret from the bacteriological world.
‘In a nutshell, Britain and America have known for several years about the changes induced within certain organisms following exposure to cosmic radiation. Cultures of various viruses and bacteria were studied after prolonged exposure at immensely high altitudes as far back as 1960 and we have learned a lot since then. In fact we now have five separate strains of infections, each created by exposure of suitable germs to cosmic gamma rays, and because of the resulting mutations different from anything else on earth. Rabies is only one of them, though it is the most deadly.
‘But we also have vast supplies of both immunising toxoids, and anti-serum for treatment of active cases, enough to protect all our peoples. Any of the five bugs can be used for bacteriological campaigns in war and by comparison your own work is relatively unimportant. But I still want certain information and you are going to give it to me. First of all what is the cause of space-sickness and how was it traced?’
Gusev had pulled himself together and hesitated only for a few seconds. ‘You’ll never beat the Soviet Union. We have other weapons even more terrible.’
‘Answer my questions,’ said Grant quietly. ‘What did you use and how did you get on to it?’
The Russian was staring at his hand and at the blob of blood which still oozed through the needle hole. ‘Answer,’ spat Grant, darting across the room and jabbing him violently in the ribs.
The man’s voice was becoming thick and his eyes dull. ‘The disease first appeared in some technicians who were working inside the third capsule. Its outside skin had been sterilised by heat on re-entry into the earth’s atmosphere but they were swabbing every item inside the cabin and had grown heavy cultures of Nitrosomonas Winogradsky from traces of dust on the floor. The illness was later traced to these cultures and in the ordinary course of research programmes we discovered that only Nitrosomonas Winogradsky had been mutated into this new strain of activity. So far as we know no other organism has been altered, but, of course,’ he added coldly, ‘we didn’t deliberately send up samples of bacteria to investigate the possibilities of mutations due to gamma or cosmic radiation in space.’
‘Then more fool you,’ drawled Grant. ‘These were obvious risks and it was an American decision to probe them which caused them to lag behind the Soviet Union in putting men into orbit. But the delay has been worth while, because now we have discovered means of insulating the skin of space-ships and for that reason we are likely to beat you in the long-term race for supremacy in space.’
‘You will never beat us,’ said Gusev heavily. ‘Our weapons are fantastic.’
‘Possibly,’ said Grant. ‘But now I want to see your records. Bring them out and then show me where the space bacteria are kept.’
The Russian stared at him stupidly. ‘Everything is downstairs. Beyond the black door. Nothing up here. Too public.’
‘And how are these bugs stored?’
Gusev grinned evilly and fumbled in a waistcoat. ‘Like this. In glass ampoules. When conditions are favourable they form spores and can be kept alive like that for years.’ He held up the glass towards the light and Grant saw a pinch of dusty brown powder lying against its sides, sinister proof of that strange method of nature which enabled certain bacteria to hibernate indefinitely, only to break out into activity once heat and moisture had been supplied.
Anthrax was one of the best known, but other bugs could do the same sort of thing and if space-sickness was one of them it was easy to understand how countless billions of germs could contaminate a continent to order.
He was staring at the tiny ampoule when a faint grinding noise behind him almost made him vomit and he felt a stunning blow against his right hand as his gun dropped to the floor. There was a cold kiss of steel against the back of his neck and he saw Gusev gaping across the room, his mouth half open in a look of blank astonishment, as a voice came from immediately behind him. ‘One thing I like about these old Kremlin offices, Doctor, is the maze of secret passages built into their walls. This used to be a convent and it is said that this one was used by lovers on their way to visit the nuns.’
Hell’s teeth, thought Grant. Sokolnikov! What in Satan’s name had happened? Where was Maya? His reaction was automatic. He froze, motionless, his right hand dangling limply and his left arm raised in surprise.
The rim of metal bored steadily into the back of his neck like the teeth of a garotte. ‘What a pity you didn’t move, Grant. I was hoping to blow your brains out.’
There was a shuffle of feet behind him and then four plain-clothes men stepped into the room followed by Sokolnikov, now in full uniform. His eyes were bloodshot and his face haggard after eighteen hours of drugging but his manner was bland as ever. Two other men were now covering Grant and the General slipped his gun back into its holster. ‘I seem to have arrived at the nick of time.’
Grant slowly turned his head to the right. There was a wide gap in the panelling, almost five feet high and more than two feet broad leading to a narrow stone passage lit by a single dim electric bulb. A plain-clothes man stood a few feet along the passage, his squat flat face gleaming like a mask in the semi-darkness and the stumpy automatic weapon in his hands pointing viciously towards the entrance. His head was completely bald and looked like some grotesque ping-pong ball with beady doll-like eyes. A mouthful of decaying teeth interrupted by the gleam of stainless steel crowns grinned with expectation and Grant saw the thick stubby fingers tauten upon the trigger.
Sokolnikov was watching him with calm satisfaction and spoke in the relaxed voice of one who knew that he held all the cards.
‘Doctor Grant. Tonight you are going to pay a very heavy bill. You have been inquisitive, which is bad enough. But your attack upon myself was outrageous and nothing can really punish you enough for inoculating me with these atrocious germs. Fortunately, however, one of our leading doctors has already given me a huge dose of toxoid and he tells me that since it was given so soon after being infected there is every chance of my being cured. And he has also given me an immense quantity of anti-serum. This is only in an experimental stage at present but he believes it will be of some value and that all ought to be well. However, it must be obvious to you that no punishment can be adequate. Not even the death which will be arranged before morning. And that, I promise you, will be something quite extra special. But, of course, the girl is as bad as yourself. So she too must die. And you are too intelligent to expect anything else.’
‘Where is she now?’ asked Grant coldly.
> Sokolnikov looked curiously at Gusev. ‘What is wrong with that man?’ He was lolling in his chair, staring stupidly at the tiny vial of spores still in his hand and talking quietly to himself.
Grant decided to bluff to the limit, to confuse the picture until no one knew what had happened. ‘Don’t you know?’ he asked. ‘He’s a drug addict. That’s why we were able to corrupt him.’
‘Drugs!’ The Russian was startled. ‘That is impossible. Nothing has ever been reported.’
‘Why did he work alone here in the evenings then?’ said Grant. ‘Why did he keep everyone else away? It was simply to have a sniff of his favourite tipple. And you ought to know what he did later. Out with a ballet girl four or five nights a week. Gusev was a great fixer. He kidded the lot of you. Worked like hell during the day and then turned to dope and women at night. You thought he was doing research here but it was just a bolt hole where the poor wretch could get into a world of fantasy and escape from all your Marxian hokum.’
‘And who supplied him with dope?’ Sokolnikov had become very quiet and was standing motionless by the table.
‘My agents,’ smiled Grant self-confidently. ‘He used to steal it from hospital, but regulations were tightened up and he nearly went crazy having to do without. He was ripe for plucking when one of my girls sold him some in return for a little information about space-sickness, and after that we kept him going for nearly a year until there wasn’t a thing in his life we didn’t know about.’
‘And what is that glass thing?’
‘The bugs which cause space-sickness dry up under certain conditions. Sort of hibernate when their surroundings are favourable. That makes them easy to store and the brown powder is a collection of several billion spores. Break that capsule, give them some moisture and air and they’ll be ready for anything within twenty-four hours. He was just handing it over to me when you arrived.’
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