by Adam Hall
19 28889198614 15 1555 166 1887.
Ferris hadn’t given me a gamma: I would have needed the matrix and co-ordinates and this way was much faster once I’d plugged in the introductory 8178716. There were ten variations and this was the sixth, indicated by the final numeral, and all I had to do was transpose, reverse and remove blind numbers.
Kirinski. Alexei Kirinski.
I went through them again. The films were to be removed from the camera, and the camera destroyed. A courier would take the films from me at a pretended time, when — re-read: 9198761846, using the sixth variation, not the seventh — at a prescribed time, when I could give him any material I might then have for transmission. The main subject of the orders was the man Kirinski. I was to investigate him and send a report, again by courier. He was a forty-two-year-old engineer and at present lived in Apartment 48 of the Union Building in Gromyko Prospekt, Yelingrad. And that was all.
I thought at first that it looked like a screening for entrapment, but they wouldn’t have mounted an operation the size of Slingshot, involving the USAF and NATO, just for three aerial pictures and a screening job: an agent-in-place could do that with his eyes shut. It could be that London was preparing to bring Kirinski across and wanted to make sure he was clean, or that he’d requested screening as a potential a-i-p, but the same objection applied: Slingshot was a mainline project and the target had to be something bigger than one isolated Russian.
Just before three o’clock I read the orders a fourth time and committed the essentials to memory and burned them, burying the ash. It was now below freezing and I got back into my niche and opened some more food concentrate and nibbled at it slowly: it was the same bloody protein amalgamate they’d given me the last time out and it tasted of fish. I munched some snow for dessert and then struck camp, getting out of the uniform and putting on the polo sweater and slacks. The hunting jacket and hat were some kind of ancient astrakhan and smelt of mothballs, but the fit was perfect and the feeling of chill eased off within a few minutes. The pain in the hip and shoulder was still a nuisance but I could move around well enough; the rib cage only hurt when I took too deep a breath.
I left only the fishing-rod behind, buried deep in a cleft among the boulders. The snow was now driving hard, across the mountainside and visibility was down to less than fifty feet. My tracks would be well covered but that was all: there was no horizon now, and no visual reference for size or distance a sheer drop a few feet in front of me could look like a ledge much farther below, and a smooth area of snow could conceal loose stones and an incipient avalanche.
It took me nearly twenty minutes to find that fishing-rod again and screw it together; then I began moving down the mountain with it, tapping my way like a blind man.
The target area is always a trap.
I went into the railway station at nine o’clock in the morning, waiting until there was a train in and a certain amount of activity going on. The descent from the mountain had taken most of the night and I’d spent an hour on the horse-drawn wagon from the farmstead to the town: they’d found me walking with my bundle and had given me a lift after the woman had insisted on giving me some broth and watching me drink it; she had been very concerned and I’d promised to write when I arrived safely back in Moscow.
The target area is always a trap because your work is clandestine, and by definition you are doing something illegal and will have the whole strength of the local police department against you the moment you make a mistake. Once the police have got control of you the problem escalates and involves counter-intelligence, interrogation and the inevitable consignment to the labour camps or the firing squad. The thing is, of course, not to make that mistake.
This leads you to take precautions from the moment you enter the area, as a matter of routine: precautions even against dangers that can’t possibly exist. That was why, when I pushed my bundle into the parcel lockups at the left side of the booking office, I went across to the far side of the hall and bought a copy of Sovietskaya Kazakh and took up a secure position behind a crate of drilling-bits to watch the consignee from a distance of a hundred feet or so from the big plate-glass window I was using for the mirror. I gave it ten minutes and then left. The station master had the keys to those things but there was absolutely no chance of anyone’s taking an interest in me at this stage: I was merely instilling red-area routine into my movements so that they would become automatic.
I began working as soon as I left the station, checking for tags as an exercise and watching the people on the street, noting their dress, listening to their speech as I queued up in the government store and bought a cheap suitcase and a map of the city: they’d been out of stock at the station. Gromyko Prospekt was two miles away and I made a detour to get me to the only car-hire office marked on the map. Papers galore, of course, and I spread them out on the counter, noting that Credentials had used two different photographs for the social security card and the driver’s licence, and made them as dissimilar as they could. The personal identity propusk had the same photograph as the driver’s licence and their dates were within six months of each other, though I was stated to have been a journalist with the Sovietskaya Rossia for the past four years, covering the southern provinces.
The best vehicle they had was a six-year-old Mercedes 220, which I suppose had filtered down from one of the East German consulates. It had an automatic shift, which the man demonstrated at some length, pointing out its advantages: you could lean one arm out of the window, light a cigarette in safety, or put your arm round your girl-friend while you were driving along.
“That’s fantastic,” I said. “Where are the wiper blades?”
“In the glove compartment.” He showed me. “You want them fitted?”
“I’ll put them on when it starts snowing again.” The spare-parts situation was obviously no better than the last time I’d been in Russia: you’d still lose your wipers if you didn’t watch out.
I paid the deposit and took the car three times round the block to make sure it wasn’t going to break down right away, then checked the map again and drove to Gromyko Prospekt. They’d put some sand down along the main streets but the ice had begun to pack and quite a few Wolgas and Zhigulis were cocked against the kerb with their body work bent in various places. A black Moskwicz came into the mirror three blocks after I’d started out and stayed there for another mile before it turned off at an intersection. Soon afterwards a Chaika limousine came hounding along in the centre lane, slewing from side to side and pulling up outside a red brick building near the main square. There was no indication of what went on inside, which was typical, and I put it down as the Communist Party Headquarters or the local KGB, because of the guards.
By the time I reached the Union Building it had started to snow again, and I drove past the block and made two left turns and got out to fit the wiper blades. I then drove off and made an expanding box search of the streets in the vicinity until I found a hotel. It was a tall narrow building wedged between a market-produce exchange and an employment bureau, and I left the Mercedes and walked round to the rear of the place and checked it out for access, exposure and geometry: single iron fire-escape from the fifth floor to the ground, high double gates to the yard with their hinges rusty and one of them broken away, a parked van with two of the tyres flat and the spare wheel missing, and a row of dustbins below the three barred windows on the left side looking out from the building. The exposure looked all right except for the place on the far side of the street at an angle of thirty degrees and I went across at the first intersection and walked back on the other side and read the official-looking board over the main doors: it was a home for unmarried mothers. I walked back round the block and went up the steps and into the hotel.
Papers, papers.
For two nights. Perhaps for three, but that would depend on the snow.
Andreyev Rashidov, an ex-captain of the Red Army, now journalist. Yelingrad is a fine town, and its people are welcoming. I
am sure I shall be very comfortable here.
One narrow staircase. No lift. Two doors to the rear, three to the side of the entrance hall, the front door being fitted with dead bolts top and bottom, the panels being glass but too narrow to let an average human body through in an emergency. My baggage is in the car. I will bring it in myself. It was a room on the fifth floor, which I had asked for. I like a good view and it isn’t necessary to go down the steps of a fire-escape if you’re in a hurry: using the series of swings they’ve worked out at Norfolk you can reach the ground within three seconds per floor of any given building with ceilings eight feet high.
Roman-style central hearing with grilled vents in the floor, two narrow windows overlooking the rear, a drainpipe running down past the left-hand window but with one of the U-clamps broken away from the brickwork, discount. No telephone.
There is a bell to summon you to the hall, should you receive a caller or a message. You may order simple meals from the State Restaurant across the street and eat them in the parlour on the ground floor, with vodka if you wish. To close the heating you merely slide this shutter, so. The bed is comfortable, as you can observe.
He was a tired stooping man with a habit of holding his head on one side as if he were listening to you with one ear and to something else with the other. The badge in his lapel showed him to be a Party member of the Yelingrad district headquarters, as he explained with an air of faded fervour. I was permitted male guests in my room.
When he had gone I checked for bugs and of course found nothing: this wasn’t Moscow, but a small agricultural-industrial city with a garrison of the military installed on its outskirts at the end of the road that ran seventy miles to the frontier of Sinkiang. Beets, zinc and soldiery: and somewhere not far away a helicopter base I would have to locate — they had been short-range WSK Swidniks and I wanted to know more about them; it was conceivable that London would finally insist on that third photograph.
A little before ten o’clock I left the hotel and drove to the post office near the huge Museum of Folklore and Minerals and telephoned Chechevitsin. The number was reported as being out of order but in Russia this normally means the operator is in the middle of a conversation or didn’t hear the number correctly, and I insisted and finally got a connection.
There was nothing I could tell from Chechevitsin’s voice, which reassured me. He repeated after me that the twelve tungsten drilling-bits had arrived at the freight station and were in order. The consignment number was 3079.I thanked him and hung up. On a scale of one to twelve I was in good physical condition; tungsten indicated that I had read, understood and was following sealed orders; drilling-bits meant that I now had a car and was therefore fully mobile; freight indicated that I was at present totally clear of surveillance and station referred to the films. The consignment number was of course that of the telephone at my hotel. There’s a diminutive ginger-haired clerk in London Cyphers who sits on her thin little bottom all day working out one-time speech codes for specific operations, and although we twig her a lot she does a good enough job and searches out the local scene very thoroughly: as I’d noted this morning at the railway station.
When we twig her too much she says she’s going to give us a birds-egg collection in the code, which would of course mean we’d been blown.
Ten minutes later I left the post office and took the Mercedes to the junction of Gromyko Prospekt and Union Square and parked it under the bare winter trees. There was no kind of surveillance on the Union Building from the front, unless use was being made of a window somewhere within sight of the main entrance; I had no way of finding out. When I drove through the square and round to the rear of the building I again saw no evidence of a watcher. It took me forty minutes to satisfy myself about this because the man on the corner had been walking up and down and blowing into his bare hands until a taxi picked him up. The other man, in charge of the hot-chestnut stand on the south side of the square, had also interested me until I noted that he had been standing with his back to the main entrance while seven people had left the building and three had gone in.
At 10:45 I left the car in the square and walked across at the intersection, going up the steps to the double doors.
There is a specific time during any mission when the executive moves into prescribed hazard. The access phase for Slingshot had been dangerous but only in a general sense: the Soviet security services had become aware that one of their own military aircraft with a foreign pilot aboard was penetrating their domestic airspace with a view to photographing ground installations, and had shot it down. All that Corporal Behrendt could have told them was that it was probably a photo-recce mission. That general danger was now past and at this moment no one in the USSR knew that I was on Soviet soil and engaged in the capacity of an intelligence agent. No one.
I could live, if I had to, in the city of Yelingrad for weeks or longer, walking the streets and sharing the life of the people here and getting in nobody’s way until the time came when I made a mistake. The Finback had disintegrated and the snow had covered the parachute and it was unlikely that any search could be made until the spring. So I was in the clear and my status was neutral: the condition we apply to an executive during the first stripes of his mission until the specific instant arrives when he becomes exposed.
That instant was now. I’d checked for surveillance on the Kirinski apartment and found none; but there could well be a permanent watch mounted at any one of the hundred windows overlooking the entrance to the Union Building, and as I climbed the steps to the double doors I had the familiar nerve-tightening sensation of walking into a spotlight.
Chapter Thirteen: LIOVA
I clumped the snow off my shoes as I walked into the hall and crossed to the iron staircase. The dezhurnaya poked her head out of the closet immediately.
“Look at my floor, comrade. I have to clean it!”
“There is no doormat,” I told her.
She took me in with a quick movement of her head, noting my shoes especially. They were good ones.
There is a mat on the steps,” she said, more in sadness than in anger. To have good shoes like mine you must have either money, power or blat.
“It’s covered in snow.” I began climbing the stairs.
“Whom do you wish to see, comrade?”
I thought this was particularly blatant. It’s the unofficial function of the dezhumayas of all the Russias to observe and inform, should anyone demand the information; but they work under the accepted cover of a concierge and they don’t often poke their noses out of it because they’re unpopular enough as it is.
“What is your name?” I asked her deliberately.
She stiffened at once. “I wished to be of assistance, comrade.”
“That is appreciated. I have official business with a resident.”
She watched me as far as the second floor, through the railings.
The fourth floor was at the top of the building and I went along the passage and stopped at the door marked B and listened for voices. The fanlight was closed and I heard nothing. There was a bell and a visiting card in a bent brass frame: Alexei R. Kirinski, Geological Engineer. This was appropriate cover in a town where there were drilling-bits stacked all over the station but of course it might not be cover alone: we’ve got an agent-in-place in Stockholm with an international reputation as an ornithologist and a man in Cadiz who charges five hundred pesetas an hour for teaching musical voice.
The door opened and a woman stood there.
“Yes?”
The smell of borscht and a wave of heat from the wood stove.
“I would like to see Comrade Kirinski.”
She studied me with large limpid eyes, taking her time and remaining perfectly still, finally throwing the dark curve of hair back from her face and asking:
“Who is it?”
“My name — ”
“Excuse me,” she broke in and turned away quickly: there were sounds of the borscht boiling over. In a
moment she called from the kitchen that I should come in.
Good furniture, Chinese rugs and heavy curtains: the couch didn’t come from the State store, nor did the inlaid cabinet. Of course they might have been left to them by someone, possibly a grandparent
“What name was it?”
She came back, shaking her hair away from her high cheekbones. The camel hair sweater wasn’t from the GUM either, nor the soft suede boots. She too had money, or power, or blat. Or perhaps just Alexei R. Kirinski, Geological Engineer.
“My name is Andreyev Rashidov.”
She waited for me to produce my card, in the manner of the bourgeoisie; but I wasn’t going to do that. Now that I’d seen the jade I wanted to convey an air of discretion.
“Kirinski is not here.”
“I know.” I waited for her to take that in. “But I’d like to see him. Can you make an appointment for me?”
She went on looking at me with this stillness of hers. Her eyes were deep and her mouth was sensual, a down of dark hair shadowing the curved Slav lips; my awareness of her as a female of the species was getting in the way and I’d have to forget it because this place could be a death-trap.
“Is it an official matter?”
That didn’t mean very much: in this country almost every aspect of life is official.
“No.”
There were a dozen pieces, some of them a foot high, one of them a blue-green slab lying below the window, where it caught the light. Beyond it, through the window and through the black boughs of the trees in Union Square I could see the glitter of a headlamp reflector against the snow, and the blurred outline of the car itself. I shouldn’t have left it there, in that particular spot; but there had been no way of knowing which side of the building the apartment was situated. “Have you already met my husband?”
“No. I’m interested in minerals.”
