‘Of course I remember,’ said Clive.
‘But apparently he never forgot or forgave. And when he discovered that, instead of taking her back to the States to stand trial, I had turned her loose to go back to work for the Nazis, I became persona non grata in Russia. That’s about it. My hands are tied.’
‘You have people in Russia.’
‘Of course we have. So have you. What are you thinking of? Some kind of raid on the Lubianka? Our people would wind up dead, and you’d probably be starting a war.’
Clive sighed. ‘Well, if that’s your attitude, then she’s done. Anna! My God!’
‘Hold on. I’ve an idea.’
‘What?’
‘If you’re right, and Beria’s ambition is a show trial, we have some time.’
‘During which she will be tortured and brainwashed into confessing everything they want her to.’
‘I think attempting to brainwash Anna would be rather counter-productive. As for being tortured . . . she’s survived that before. The same goes for sexual abuse.’
‘You’re a great comfort, Joe. When all of that happened, she wasn’t my wife.’
‘Now you’re being juvenile. Anna is a bigger girl than most, in every respect. Just listen. If you’re going to have a show trial, you have to have the world’s media in attendance; and they don’t turn up overnight. Therefore, the coming trial has to be publicized long before it takes place. Once they start doing that, they’re declaring to the world that they hold the infamous Countess von Widerstand, the last of the great war criminals. And once they do that, you’re not giving away any secrets if you react. I’m sure your people have someone, or even several people, locked up who they can offer to exchange for her.’
‘They do,’ Clive said sombrely. ‘But that’s a non-starter.’
‘Why, in the name of God?’
‘Since the end of the War, the British Government has not wanted to know about Anna. I suppose they feel guilty at having employed her in the first place. It took Billy and me three years to get them to agree to let her slide gently into oblivion in the Bahamas. And they required that to be entirely hushed up. As far as they are concerned, and have told the world, the Countess von Widerstand died in the ruins of Berlin in 1945.’
‘Hold on. Didn’t they employ her in 1949?’
‘Yes, they did. But no one was supposed to know. And like you, they bought her with a guarantee of immunity. But as you know, it carried certain rules. Now she’s broken those rules, firstly by returning here, and secondly, and more important, by committing a double murder, as the tabloids will see it, on British soil. They will probably refuse to admit that it could be Anna at all. They certainly are never going to admit that they have known about her and lied about her all along, and in real terms have been protecting her since the end of the War – as would certainly come out if they offered the Reds an exchange deal. Moscow would see to that.’
‘Shit!’ Joe commented. ‘So where do we go from here?’
‘It’s where you go, Joe. You and your bosses put her in this position. So you and your bosses can bloody well get her out of it.’
*
He hung up, and brooded at the wall. Sounding off at Joe, although it made him feel better, had not really been very helpful. But it was just about impossible to accept that Anna could have gone. Over the all but fifteen years he had known her – ever since that SS ball in October 1938, when she had entered the room on the arm of an officer, in a pale-blue sheath gown which clung to her hips and seemed to have been created around that unforgettable décolletage – he had been fascinated, even though his instincts had warned him that here was trouble.
Everything about her had been compelling. The way she walked, the way she talked, even the way she stood still; and then the way she performed the sexual act. Looking back to March 1939, he was still amazed at himself, even after fourteen years. He had been thirty-eight years old, an experienced man of the world, in the middle of a long-standing affair with his fiery Anglo-Italian mistress, Belinda Hoskin. What is more, he had been a field agent for MI6 for several years and had regarded himself as fully capable of dealing with the worst that could be thrown at him by any enemy organization.
He had encountered Anna again five months after their first meeting. From the beginning, he had no doubt she was a German spy. That she had wormed her way into the very heart of British high society had been a continual irritant to his professional conscience. That he had been unable to prove his theory, or get any of his superiors, even Billy Baxter, to believe him, had been like a cancer, eating at his mind. And suddenly, there she was standing in front of him, on her own turf and therefore apparently invulnerable – and yet at that moment not the utterly, coldly, beautiful sophisticate of the ballroom or the cocktail party but a tormented, frightened, and thus indeed vulnerable eighteen-year-old girl.
How this situation had arisen, how it could have arisen, he had not then known. But the opportunity was there, and he would have been guilty of gross professional negligence had he not grasped it. That it would probably require grasping Anna as well had seemed purely an unexpected bonus. And from the moment he had accepted that invitation to have a cup of coffee in her Berlin apartment he had been utterly lost. To a girl less than half his age!
The memory of her dropping her knickers to show him the fresh weals on the so white flesh of her buttocks was implanted for ever in his brain, still as vivid as any photograph. But then so was the memory of holding all of that velvet flesh naked in his arms. And even that was overladen with the memory of what had happened when, while she was lying apparently sated – even exhausted – in his arms, the bedroom door had opened. Anna had left the bed, but whereas any ordinary woman might have screamed or attempted to cover herself, she had crossed the room in three long strides and dispatched the intruder with a single swinging blow to the neck.
He had been paralysed, by the most tumultuous variety of emotions he had ever experienced: amazement that anyone could act with such speed and unhesitating decision, consternation that for the past half-hour he had allowed himself to surrender, body and soul, to the caresses of what he now realized was a lethal machine, and self-pity that he should have assumed, with careless masculine egotism, that he was seducing an innocent girl! A girl who could think with the speed of light, act with the speed of light, and kill with the speed of light. My God, he had thought, what a weapon we would possess if we could possess Anna!
He had still not understood that of course he was going to possess Anna . . . because from the moment of their meeting on the street Anna had intended to be possessed, professionally as well as physically. It had not been easy. Baxter had been aghast at the proposal, and considered that Clive had handed him a time bomb that was ticking loudly.
In many ways, Baxter had been right. Anna had never rejected any command and always carried out her missions with total integrity – but always using her own agenda. And however upset he may have been by some of the things she had done, even Baxter had warmed to her as much as Clive himself, even if Clive’s warmth had taken a more positive course.
Even that had taken time, always aware that every time they shared a bed he was surrendering to a force that could destroy him before he could blink, a force that was governed by the most terrifying amoral pragmatism. How could he ever forget arriving at a hotel in Geneva, in 1943, for a rendezvous and on entering her bedroom finding himself standing between two dead bodies? They had been Gestapo agents who, suspicious of her activities, had tracked her to Switzerland and had made the mistake of attempting to arrest her. When, mind reeling, he had asked what they were going to do with the bodies, Anna had replied, ‘Leave them there. They won’t object.’
When, gathering that she still wanted to have sex with him, he had tentatively suggested that they could at least move the dead men into the bathroom, she had said, ‘We can’t do that. I always have a bath first thing in the morning.’
*
It had not
been until she had installed herself in the Bahamas that he had seen the loving, domesticated side of her character. The way she adored and cared for her parents, the love she bestowed on her pets, the affectionate loyalty she earned from her staff, had been a revelation – so much so that he had at last surrendered to his growing love and admiration and married her, as she had long wanted. Yet the reservation remained, because it was quite impossible to get inside Anna’s head, to understand what she was thinking or discover any clues as to which was the real Anna. The Anna of the bedroom in Berlin and the bedroom in Geneva? Or the Anna of the cay, helming her boat with careless expertise? He sometimes wondered if she knew herself. Certainly he had no idea how she reconciled her two so separate personalities.
But to think of her in the hands of Beria’s thugs . . . it was unlikely that they would make any mistakes this time. There had been too many in the past twelve years, all of them catastrophic, beginning with that attempt by six NKVD agents to kidnap her in Washington in 1941. They had been successful, but in the two days they had had to wait before they could get her on a ship to Russia, had sought to amuse themselves by tying her to a bed and repeatedly having sex with her. All of which she had borne with her habitual fortitude, and the deadly patience that was one of her principal assets. And sure enough, eventually, on one of the occasions when, by then sure of her absolute subservience, they untied her to go to the toilet, they carelessly left a tommy-gun within her reach. When, in response to her telephone call, he and Joe reached the scene and were surveying the carnage, she had explained with her usual ingenuousness, ‘Do you know, I had never fired a tommy-gun before? It was such fun!’ Things like that were not likely to be forgotten.
He sighed, and watched his door opening, after a gentle tap. ‘They’ve found the ambulance,’ Amy said. ‘Abandoned in the Pool of London.’
He snapped his fingers. ‘I want to know every ship that cleared this morning.’
‘I’ve done that.’ She placed the list in front of him.
‘Good girl.’ He ran his fingers down it. There were six, and one of them . . .
‘That one.’
She leaned over the desk. ‘The Vladimir Rostov, bound for Sevastopol? That’s a Russian ship, isn’t it?’
‘That’s right.’
‘You can’t be sure she’s on it.’
‘I’d bet my last penny she is. What time did the Rostov clear?’
‘Ah . . . six o’clock.’
Clive looked at his watch. ‘And it’s only just ten! She won’t even have left the Thames estuary yet. We can stop her.’
‘Stop a Russian ship?’
‘She’s still in home waters.’
Amy continued to look doubtful, so Clive brushed past her and ran up the stairs to Baxter’s office. ‘We’ve found her.’
‘What? Tremendous. I hope you’re not talking about a body?’
‘No, I am not talking about a body. We know where she is.’
‘Right. Where?’ Baxter was reaching for his telephone.
‘On a ship called the Vladimir Rostov that cleared the Pool of London four hours ago.’
Baxter had picked up the phone. Now he replaced it.
‘A Russian ship?’
‘It is.’
‘And you would like us to stop her on the high seas?’
‘Billy, she cannot have got out of the river yet. Certainly not the estuary.’
‘And you know for certain Anna’s on board?’
‘She has to be. The ambulance has been found abandoned at the London docks. The only Russian ship that has cleared this morning is this one.’
‘But you don’t know. You don’t even know if the Russians were involved at all. I thought you were inclining towards the Americans?’
‘It’s not them. I spoke with Andrews just now, and he was utterly horrified at what I told him.’
‘And you believed him?’
‘Yes, I did. He has as much going for Anna as you or I do.’
‘So, did he admit that she was here working for them?’
‘Yes,’ Clive shouted. ‘Yes, he did. But he didn’t know it was going to be done last night. Billy, every moment we spend yammering that ship is getting further away. She’s still well inside our territorial waters. We have the right to stop her and search her.’
‘And if Anna’s not on board?’
‘Well . . . Oh, for God’s sake, Billy, she must be on it. It’s the only place she can be.’
‘To stop a foreign ship – especially a Russian ship at this moment – and demand the right of search, would require either cast-iron proof that she is carrying something she shouldn’t be, or a Home Office order.’
‘Then get it.’
‘To get that order, the full facts of the case would have to be placed before the Home Secretary. What, precisely, are we going to tell him? That our tame wartime assassin, whose career was officially terminated in 1946, who is still on Scotland Yard’s files in connection with the deaths of those four Russian agents in Scotland, and who we assured the government was going to disappear for ever and never be heard of again, is actually alive and well, and still operating in this country . . . That she has committed a double murder, of two war heroes, and has now, we think, been kidnapped by the Russians . . . And that it is for her sake that we wish him to start an international diplomatic incident. Have I got my facts right?’
‘You are talking about a British citizen who also happens to be my wife.’
‘And who, if we risk what relations we have left with Russia to get her back here, will go on trial for murder and almost certainly be convicted. Is there any point in prolonging her agony?’
Clive straightened slowly. ‘You’ve written her off!’
Baxter sighed. ‘I’ve had to write off agents before, when they have become liabilities. And so have you. Personal feelings cannot be allowed to interfere. So you married the girl. I felt at the time that it was a mistake, but you know I have always bent over backwards to protect her. I was even prepared to go the limit to get her out of this mess into which she has got herself, God alone knows why . . .’
‘She got herself into this mess, Billy, because the CIA offered her the same terms as you did three years ago. One last job, which they reckoned only she could do, and she was out, no questions asked, with a lifelong immunity, not just in the Bahamas, but anywhere in the United States. And what is more, there were no restrictions on where she could go or, indeed, where she could live.’
‘They have the ability to do things differently over there.’
‘Can you blame her for seizing the opportunity?’
Another sigh. ‘No, I can’t. But it went wrong. Just as it would have gone wrong if Fahri or Khouri had managed to get a shot in before they died. You have got to accept that, Clive.’
Clive stared at him for several moments. Then he said, ‘Well, bugger you, Billy. And the whole God-damned department.’ He turned towards the door.
‘Clive,’ Baxter said. ‘If you do something stupid, which might involve this country in a diplomatic bust-up with the Soviet Union, I cannot protect you.’
But Clive had already left the office.
*
Anna became aware of movement, although where it was coming from she couldn’t be sure. She certainly wasn’t moving herself.
She was feeling, in fact, strangely relaxed, and yet dreadfully drowsy, as if she had been awakened earlier than she should. But she was not aware of any discomfort, save for a dull throbbing in her left shoulder.
As for what had happened . . . she remembered entering the hotel and taking the elevator up to her floor, her mind soaring at the thought that her career as an assassin was finished. Also, as always, her mind had been focused on what came next, in this instance the hot bath she would have before leaving for the airport; she had been absolutely freezing.
She was not freezing now; she felt as warm as toast. She moved, slowly, uncertainly; her arms and legs seemed curiously disjointed. But she
was lying beneath a blanket, in a heated room . . . Her eyes flickered across the walls and the porthole . . . She was on a ship! And the slight movement was because the ship was under way. But . . . the movement had changed. Instead of a forward feeling, it was a slight roll, from side to side. The ship had stopped.
But how . . .? Slowly her brain was clearing. She had been speaking with Hamilton . . . in the corridor of the Royal George Hotel, close to her room. Hamilton! And there had been movement behind her. And then . . .? Instinctively she moved her hand to feel her shoulder, and realized that she was naked beneath the blanket.
It didn’t feel as if anything else had been done to her. As if it mattered, against the fact that she was on a ship, at sea, and that she was here because of that meeting with Hamilton. Hamilton . . ., she thought, her brain slowly hardening.
Voices! In the distance, shouting. And one of them . . . Clive! My God, she thought, he’s come to my rescue. Oh. Clive! She put her arms down to push herself up and discovered to her horror that she had not the strength even to raise her own weight.
She fell back, panting, and the cabin door opened. Hamilton! And two more men, dressed as sailors. ‘Hurry,’ he said. He spoke Russian, but it was a language in which Anna had become fluent during the War.
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