by John Meaney
Handwritten Cyrillic looks friendlier than print. I filled in my address and so forth, and slid the form back to the clerk in return for a key.
"Room 417."
"Thank you, comrade."
I hefted my bag – no bellboys here – and headed for the red-carpeted stairs, passing the open entrance to a bar. From inside, two prostitutes swept reptilian gazes across me: gauging the size of my wallet and my desperation. No deal.
Another young woman was waiting at the foot of the staircase. Back home we refer to them as Natashas of the Night, but some are too young to joke about. What vodka-fuelled family insanities that had brought them to this place? I passed the Natasha and climbed the stairs.
At the first residential floor was a polished desk, and behind it a stone-faced upravdom gazing at me. As a State-monitored concierge, she would track guest movements on her floor, noting times of arrival and departure in a ledger. Welcome to the workers' paradise.
I turned to the next flight and continued climbing. At the second floor, the upravdom was busy talking to a middle-aged couple. Another pale Natasha noted my presence, blinking as she saw the key in my hand. As I walked on, she moved past me, deliberately.
"Ignatieff," she murmured. "Three-two-six."
Then she was descending the stairs, not looking back.
At the next floor the upravdom's desk was unoccupied, which was unusual. Ignatieff was here. My own room was up another floor, so I carried on, bag in hand – the next floor's upravdom had a basilisk expression – and found 417.
It could be a trap. They could be...
I opened the door.
...waiting.
Nothing.
For a few seconds I shivered, and then it had passed. Self control returned. I dumped my bag and coat on the bed, took another look around. The room would be bugged, along with every other room in the hotel, but so what? This wasn't the danger point.
I went back out.
Calm. Just breathe.
Colonel Ignatieff, KGB, and a Branch 7 asset if Pinchas had played the game correctly. They would keep in regular contact through a dead-letter drop and a chain of clandestine couriers. But none of this was sufficient. Ignatieff wanted a meeting with a katsa, a case officer, in person. In Moscow.
Either Ignatieff was our most brilliant counterstroke against the Komitet Gosudarstvenoi Bezopasnosti, or they were about to deliver their own pièce de resistance, and the name of the menu dish was mine.
The risk is insane.
Hardly the first time.
Get on with it.
The door to 326, and my knock sounded loud and distinct. Around me, every detail of the corridor was clear. The red carpet glowed with an inner light, not from luxurious pile but because the world might end within seconds. There was a fire extinguisher and a window opposite, and it might be possible to smash through the glass and get clear – far enough to use my capsule before they closed in. For this was the heart of Moscow, with nowhere to go.
I could die here.
There was no reply, so I raised my fist to knock again...
Here and now.
"Come inside."
...and lowered it, turned the doorknob, and pushed the door open.
Ignatieff was pale, consumptive-thin, with a long straggling beard and short hair. His eyes were bulbous, maybe with a thyroid infection. He looked more like a mad monk than a KGB colonel, but perhaps that was the idea. His shirt was open at the throat, the detachable collar removed, and his skin glistened with sickly sweat.
"Look." He gestured with his bearded chin toward the window. "Don't our boulevards resemble those of Paris? It's a tribute to deliberate, central planning."
There was no one else in the room. The wardrobe doors had been slid back, showing the empty interior.
"You can check inside the bathroom if you wish," added Ignatieff. "And we can speak freely."
Did he mean that he had dealt with the microphones? Or with the listeners?
"I trust you."
Ignatieff pulled the drapes across. Then he stood still, watching me check the room's interior again. On the bedside table lay a black short-barrelled handgun: a Makarov PM, a 9mm almost identical to the Walther PP series. Zeev had lent me one to practice with a couple of months ago.
"I prefer Stechkins," said Ignatieff, "but they're too bulky. Indiscreet."
"Ruins the cut of your jacket."
Dyenisovitch had used a Stechkin AP to gun down the intruder in Kowary Podgórze. He would have had it inside his jacket as we drove back into the countryside while his eyelids flickered and some part of his mind must have screamed that I was in the passenger seat, an intruder, an enemy; but the signals never reached his consciousness. Here, such games would be doubly dangerous, because Ignatieff knew who I was.
Still, it might help to subtly match his body language...
"There are deadlier weapons in the world," he said, "than guns, don't you think?"
...then shift again, centring my weight, ready to move fast. Had he known I was trying to establish covert rapport? Consciously or not, his psychological radar had twitched, and this was certain: he was either a powerful asset or a dangerous enemy.
Maybe both, in this complicated world.
"Speaking of which," he continued, "how is my old friend Pinchas?"
"Bloody marvellous. Sends his best."
Ignatieff could not have known about Dyenisovitch, about the psychological tour de force I'd pulled off in making myself invisible to the man. No one could know. But Ignatieff's strangely bulbous eyes seemed to imply that he was aware of everything.
"Would you like a drink?" He picked up a bottle of Stolichnaya. "Before I hand over the information?"
"Not for me."
I was supposed to ask: What kind of information? But in a dance, I prefer to lead. Ignatieff smiled, putting the vodka back down.
"There are documents in that drawer." He indicated a desk that was part of the single solid unit that contained the two bunk-like beds, laid end-to-end. Like the sliding doors, these were typical Russian furnishings. "You can fetch them, or I can."
If I were worried about another weapon in the drawer, I'd want to open it myself.
"Go ahead, Colonel. I trust you."
"Very well." He pulled out a pale-green folder and handed it to me. "Read it when you get back to your room. You can see it's not sealed."
"All right."
There was a newspaper on the desktop. Ignatieff picked it up. "Here, you can wrap it in the truth."
"No comment."
The newspaper was Pravda, which as everyone knows means Truth, while the only alternative was the equally state-controlled Izvestiya, or News. The old joke goes, there's no truth in the News, and no news in the Truth. But it's not a joke you tell in public, not even to your neighbour, unless you trust them with your family's lives.
"You can take a peek, see the kind of thing that's inside."
I opened the folder, revealing sheets typed in Russian with photographs stapled in place. Personnel dossiers. The first sheet included a section headed Key Skills, and all the topics related to death.
Someone was training assassins. Elite assassins.
A quick flick through the pages revealed no mention of uranium ore, bomb design, or transport arrangements for putting the bomb in place. Schröder had called this operation a double header, but perhaps he'd meant they were two entirely different missions, which had nothing in common except the fact that I was tasked to do them, and they were on the icy side of the Curtain. But my objective was to find the Black Path cells, wasn't that the point?
"Isn't there something wrong with our profession?" I closed the dossier. "When handgun proficiency scores are on page one of the CV, it says something about our world."
"It is a sad world, my friend. You can read the files properly when you're alone."
Warm tones. At least he hadn't called me comrade.
"Thank you. We appreciate the risk you're taking."
/> "You might want to read the headlines first." Ignatieff turned over the Pravda. "Pick up some background."
Halfway down the page, a medium-sized heading read: PREMIER KRUSCHEV TO RECEIVE PRESIDENT EINSTEIN. And underneath, in smaller Cyrillic type: Four days until historic visit.
Ignatieff was looking at me, his bulbous eyes intense.
"That's very interesting, Colonel. A state visit. I don't think our two countries are ready to become allies."
"In fact, I'm a patriot, Comrade Wolf."
Shit. He'd not only called me comrade, he'd used my real name. Was this a measure of Pinchas's trust in the man? Or had Pinchas betrayed me?
Or Fern.
There had to be a mole in Branch 7, but it couldn't be either of them. Could it?
"Is that why you work for New Jerusalem?" If there were hidden mikes after all, with KGB men poised to burst in, this accusation would be on record.
Ignatieff smiled. He knew what I was doing.
"I mean it," he said. "Just think. Who are the Party's victims? Often Jews, yes, but Russian Jews. It's our own people filling up the gulags."
For a time, Stalin had tried to create a Soviet Jewish state in Siberia. A half-hearted attempt, and for state read ghetto.
"And your national sports are chess and ballet," I said, "and everyone here loves children. I know."
It was tempting to add that Hitler liked dogs. But there was no sense in actively antagonizing the man.
"Some of us love peace, Comrade Wolf, because we've seen what war is like. It's important to make friends, and your president's visit is a brave act. But Chairman Kruschev has many hawks among his long-time friends."
Was this pure distraction, or real information?
"Friends are good, Colonel. Some of ours are strong, which helps."
"If you mean the Americans, perhaps you should think again. New Jerusalem has been in danger since last summer, and if President Einstein didn't know that, my guess is he would stay at home."
There were no hidden mikes. That was suddenly obvious, or Ignatieff would not be talking like this, entrapment operation or no. Because this was dangerous information.
"You're talking about Cuba."
"I'm talking about the concessions Kennedy made to resolve it."
Crap. Fern had practically told me. Guesswork, based on geopolitical knowledge, or certainty? So Kennedy had made a deal with Kruschev underneath the table, and New Jerusalem was the price. That's what Ignatieff was saying.
He's lying.
There probably had been a price, but this wasn't it. Couldn't be.
"Look, Colonel, if you think JFK is going to take a back seat once the Soviet tanks start rolling, then you're very much—"
"Perhaps, Comrade Wolf, we should wait until you've read the files. For now, please, check inside the folder again. Look at the back."
I exhaled.
Calm down.
Tucked beneath the typed sheets was a slip of blue paper. A printed ticket.
"Sleeping Beauty?"
"Tomorrow night," said Ignatieff. "Eight p.m. at the Palace of Congresses. That's in the—"
"I know where it is."
Ignatieff nodded.
"So is that it, Colonel?"
"For now, Comrade Wolf. You'll want to mull over the dossier."
Crap again. He was playing me, trying to get me to act on information contained in the dossier. To decide overnight on some course of action, hence the second meeting, tomorrow at the bloody ballet, for God's sake.
Keep calm.
Easy for you to—
There's danger here. Stay watchful.
Well that made sense, so I breathed out slowly, inhaled, then: "You want to give me a clue, Colonel? Where did these papers come from?"
"A... colleague in the GRU."
"What's wrong? Are military intelligence stepping on KGB toes?"
Inter-service rivalry was as bad here as anywhere. In effect, I was accusing him of getting me to sort out his office politics.
"Don't Mossad cause you problems, Comrade Wolf?"
"Not really."
"Ha." His pale skin was glistening, but this was probably normal for him. "I will deal with this colleague in my own time, because I need him as an ally in certain negotiations over the coming months. Nothing to adversely affect New Jerusalem."
He hadn't said the West, he'd specified New Jerusalem. But this was not the time for me to push.
"If he's your ally, why are you giving me this dossier?"
"It's a Xerox copy."
"We're not an art gallery. We don't insist on originals."
"It's a copy," said Ignatieff, "of documents that he left in a dead-letter drop. The originals were picked up by a courier three hours later."
"Whose courier?"
"Black Path."
This was the connection.
"Shit."
So we in Branch 7 really weren't the only ones with a high-ranking asset inside Soviet intelligence. The Nazis had their own ally inside the KGB's sister service.
This was what Pinchas and Schröder had been afraid of, why they were willing to send me. It didn't explain why Ignatieff wanted me here, because he could have sent a message via the normal clandestine route, at far less risk to either of us. And there was something else that hadn't quite clicked into place.
"When was this, Colonel? When you intercepted the drop?"
"Four months ago."
This was the oddity, the wrong note.
"Why the delay in—?"
"It took me a while to work it out." Ignatieff gave a consumptive smile. "The obvious inference was that Black Path were going to neutralise a threat against them, with my colleague's help."
"You mean kill the GRU assassins."
"Yes, but something happened in Přībram, Czechoslovakia, close to the uranium mines, and that changed everything."
He was talking about Moshe.
"In what way?"
"Someone blew up a van, and the casualties were Black Path. One of them was called Banacek, and his details are in the dossier you're holding."
"So he was infiltrating them."
"That wasn't exactly his specialty. Regardless, it made me check further, and what I found was that the GRU had terminated the programme as inherently unsafe, although personally I would have called it insane."
"What programme, exactly?"
"Read the dossier, Comrade Wolf. The thing is, Banacek wasn't infiltrating Black Path, he was working for them, pure and simple."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes. My – colleague – handed over the same files that you now have. Two of the programme members are anti-Nazi. Black Path would have left them alone. The others have exactly the qualifications that Black Path need."
"So they've recruited all of them, is that what you're saying?"
"I don't know how many they've recruited, and I can't find out without showing my hand. Not through my organization."
The KGB saw Black Path as enemies, but only inside Soviet territory. Anything the Nazis got up to in the West was probably to the KGB's advantage.
"They're human weapons," he added. "Part of a psychological minority in our species, the ones who really ought to be in a gulag."
And the problem with gulags is who should have the power to exile others, but this wasn't the time for argument. If Black Path had recruited GRU-trained assassins, then they were already using them – from the Přībram evidence – in the run-up to detonating an A-bomb. I wasn't sure how the skill-sets matched, but perhaps the Nazis' plans were more complex than we realized. We were still fumbling at the edges of something massive, not knowing its true shape.
Ignatieff was buttoning up his jacket.
"I must go now, Comrade Wolf. Until our next meeting."
Using the Pravda, I rewrapped the dossier.
"Until then, Colonel."
I left first, back itching as if to anticipate a bullet in the spine, but whatever Ignatieff was up to, it involved
more than simply killing me. The evidence for that was clear.
Because I was still alive.
In my own room, a bottle of vodka was waiting on the small wooden desk integrated with the bed. For the Soviet bloc, this was a high-class establishment. I unscrewed the top, sniffed the fumes – not the word most people would use – carried it into the bathroom and poured the lot down the sink. Back in the bedroom I stared at the dossier, still wrapped in the Pravda, but the question was whether there was any truth inside the files. Because Ignatieff might be mounting some intricate game, here in the capital of chess, that involved manipulating a Berlin katsa into doing something off the books and dangerous, while setting up said katsa for a fall, a show trial or backyard execution, take your pick.
I didn't want to play.
The vodka bottle slid out of my awareness, a side effect of the psych technique I'd worked three years ago, laying down a new behaviour pattern, using one of Manny Silverberg's autohypnotic techniques. Perhaps I should have retained the vodka for use as a weapon, but if I were reduced to creating a Molotov cocktail then it would mean the KGB were closing in and everything was finished, so call this an expression of hope.
Opening the dossier brought memories of Leningrad cascading back, carrying me three years into the past and a memory that was beautiful and shameful, something I could never erase although it might be for the best.
Some miles outside Leningrad lies a wide flat cemetery where each plot is the size of a building's foundations, and the plots lie in neat rows along the hard ground. Solemn music plays from speakers mounted on tall poles. A unique and eerie presence fills the icy air. In Russia, World War II is known as the Great Patriotic War, and this is how they suffered: every single family lost someone. Just as I did.
During the Siege of Leningrad, ordinary people went through more than starvation – they endured hell. Plots in this particular cemetery bear no names: instead, they are marked only with a year. Inside each plot lie the remains of one thousand people. And in a tiny building, protected by a glass case, lies the handwritten diary of a schoolgirl who set down her observations of the misery around her until starvation took her too. Queues of solemn people line up to pass by the book as if it were a holy relic, for in this secular yet superstitious culture, that's exactly what it is. Soldiers regularly perform small memorial parades.
