by John Gardner
There was really no reason for Stepakov to add the signature Chushi Pravosudia.
‘And the Kremlin?’ Natkowitz asked.
‘Have replied.’ Stepakov hung his head, once more the sad clown. ‘They have refused. On the same grounds as before. That the man held by Chushi Pravosudia is not the real Vorontsov. It seems as though we will soon be required to produce the man you brought from Florida, Stephanie. It is also clear why they require a British camera crew.’
‘That’s rubbish,’ Bond said angrily. ‘If they have Penderek holed up somewhere, and are going to proceed with some farcical trial, they could use anyone. If all you’ve told us is true, it doesn’t matter a damn what nationality the camera crew is.’
‘Obviously it matters to them.’ Stepakov focused his baleful eyes on Bond. ‘Just as it’s clear they are determined to use you. Just as we are going to use you. I think we should now get our operational logistics together. We will all have to be very precise about what we do.’
They spent the rest of the day going through the nuts and bolts of the operation – telephone codes, hand signals, names and times to make contact should they get the opportunity. There were numerous telephone codes, seemingly innocent sentences and responses – all the safeguards and, sometimes ludicrous, tradecraft which, if used automatically and without thought, could turn individual intelligence agencies into microcosms of villages, where gossips tweak at lace curtains and watch with glee while lovers and petty villains go through sly charades, obvious for all to see. Tradecraft for the sake of tradecraft, an experienced instructor had told Bond years before, eventually becomes a nervous tic.
All the time, Stepakov maintained his people would have them covered. ‘However fast Chushi Pravosudia move with you, we will be there,’ he said. ‘I have all my people back in Moscow and within a hundred miles of the city now, at this very moment. There is nobody left abroad. Even the surveillance crew used to watch Vladi in London is back here. We will not lose you, and you will take us right into the heart of Chushi Pravosudia.’
During the late afternoon, while they were getting their various items of gear together, Bond, dressed in his outdoor cold-weather clothes, excused himself and made for the nearest bathroom.
He checked the place as well as possible, screening himself from any mirrors, examining walls and ceiling for any hint of the pinhole lens of a fibre optic camera. When he was satisfied, he unzipped the inner lining of his parka, found the hidden studs and opened the lining which contained a miniature shortwave transmitter, complete with a tiny tape recorder, all held in place by strong velcro straps. From the lining of the parka’s hood he removed a notebook-size computer, no larger than a deck of cards, and half the thickness of a packet of cigarettes. There was no form of disk drive in the notebook computer. All the programs were stored on tiny chips. There was, however, a space at the back which accommodated a minute tape recorder.
Sliding the minicassette into place, he switched on the battery-powered notebook, then carefully typed in a message, using his fingernails to hit the keys accurately. The tape slowly moved, copying his input. When he completed the message, he rewound the tape, returned the notebook computer to its hiding place and put the tape back into the transmitter, which he set to the required frequency before that was also slipped back into the parka’s lining.
He made a last check, to be sure his finger could reach the concealed transmitter. Then he went back to join the others.
They left at around four thirty, and it was only when they reached the suburbs of Moscow that Bond slid his hand into the parka. He pressed the transmit button as they passed through Vosstanya Square with the barbarous twenty-four-storey building, the Gastronome grocery store, lit but empty, with little on its shelves, the cinema with a dejected line of people waiting for the next performance. The Vosstanya, he remembered, had been one of the great sites for barricades during the Revolution. He wondered how the old comrades of 1905 and 1917 viewed this tawdry, ugly place now.
He was certain the range would be right as the sudden two-second squirt-transmission leaped silently and invisibly into the air, guided straight to the heart of the British Embassy. He wondered what good it would do, and whether anyone really cared.
‘We’re half-an-hour early, what shall I do?’ Lyko asked, sudden panic in his voice as they came up to the Dom Knigi, Moscow’s famous bookshop.
‘Keep on driving, Vladi,’ Nina snapped. She could have been talking to an unresponsive horse.
‘Someone’ll pick us up, if we just drive around aimlessly. I’ll let you out.’
‘Drive!’ she all but shouted. ‘But don’t drive aimlessly. Do what you’ve been taught. Do a couple of blocks to the left, then go west again another two blocks. God, Vladi, hasn’t Bory taught you anything?’
The professor hunched over the wheel and did not speak again until, at just before seven thirty, they drew up in front of the shop.
So, now here they were, Guy, George and Helen, a British camera crew, climbing from Lyko’s car. Thanking him in Russian, laughing among themselves, they waved goodbye as they lugged their backpacks towards the Dom Knigi bookshop where they would purchase a copy of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s classic novel, Crime and Punishment. Bond wondered what irony lay at the heart of that choice by Chushi Pravosudia: the tale of Raskolnikov’s demonic self-will, the murder he commits out of contempt for his fellow men and his redemption through the prostitute, Sonya.
Inside, the shop was warm, though the assistants looked bored, and only half-a-dozen people browsed among the books – two men and four women, dressed well enough in furs. He saw the flash of diamonds on the hand of one woman as she readied forward to take a foreign language espionage novel from the shelves.
The men, he thought, would be the ones to make contact. But the two quiet, studious-looking men took no notice of the trio. One was in his early twenties, the other old with straggling hair and bottle-thick glasses.
They spent almost ten minutes deciding on the copy of Crime and Punishment they would buy, and it took a further fifteen minutes for the listless saleswoman to stir herself, take their money, check the copy and wrap it for them.
So it would be the fall-back, Bond thought. The Arbat restaurant at nine o’clock. They had a lot of time to kill in the cold outside. But, as they left the shop, close together, turning right, looking as though they had a purpose in their walk, three young women closed in upon them from the street. One wore a magnificent fur with the collar turned high, the others had long, waisted coats, also with high collars. They looked like film extras from Anna Karenina. All of them wore fur hats and they giggled as they jostled close. Their black leather boots seemed to send sparks showering from the snow. Three girls out for a good time.
Natkowitz first thought they were high-class whores. Bond saw light-coloured curls peeping from under one of the fur hats. Then, between the giggles, the girl closest to them muttered, ‘Turn right and keep walking until a car reaches us.’ She spoke in English with no trace of an accent. The girls dropped back a little, still laughing and bumping shoulders. For a second, Bond and Nina were separated from Natkowitz, and Nina slid her hand through Bond’s arm, nudging close and whispering, ‘Trust nobody. Please trust none of them, not even Bory. We must talk . . . later.’ Then she just hung on as the long black car pulled up in front of them, doors opening and two men on the pavement barring their way, stopping them gently, urging them to get in. The trio of girls was close behind, crowding in, pushing them into the car, laughing and giggling as though it were a great lark. The car resembled a stretch limo.
‘Come. Fast,’ one of the men, who looked like a tough bouncer for an illegal nightclub, hissed at them in bad English. ‘Fast. You must be fast.’
‘Quickly,’ one of the girls cried, between giggles. ‘Wake up! Quickly! You haven’t got all night!’
‘Listen to the sergeant major,’ another of the girls said, and they all thought this was real wit.
The interior of t
he car smelled of garlic and cheap wine. Bond had hardly seated himself when they pulled away and he felt all reality spinning into a whirl of darkness. The last thing he remembered was Nina Bibikova’s head falling towards his lap.
Professor Vladimir Lyko drove straight on after dropping the three at the bookshop. The snow was not too bad and he peered towards the pavement, looking for the familiar figure he knew would be there. Never had he let him down. When he said he would be at a certain spot, he would inevitably appear, like a genie.
There he was. Lyko would have recognised the walk anywhere. He pulled the car over towards the pavement, leaned across and opened the door for him to get in.
‘There,’ his passenger said brightly. ‘There was no need to worry. Like clockwork, Vladi. I’m like clockwork.’
‘Where do I go?’
‘Keep driving. I’ll show you. I’m your guardian angel, Vladi. You know that, don’t you?’
The little professor nodded energetically as he concentrated on driving, following his friend’s directions. As they neared the Moscow State University buildings, the streets became deserted.
‘Pull over here,’ the guardian angel told him, and Lyko had scarcely put on the handbrake when the bullet took off his face. The car filled with the smell from the pistol and from Lyko’s bodily reaction. There had been no sound, only the light plop from the noise-reduction device on the gun.
Lyko’s guardian angel had performed his last service. He stepped from the car and vanished quickly into the snowy Moscow night.
11
HÔTEL DE LA JUSTICE
Greg Findlay, the SIS resident head of Moscow Station had limited resources at his disposal. While there was a natural tincture of resentment over a former resident, Nigsy Meadows, being attached to the embassy to run Fallen Timbers at his own discretion, Greg was duty bound to give Meadows all possible ‘assistance, succour and help’, as they described it in the textbook jargon. His two juniors, with second secretary cover, did not have need-to-know, so could not be used. Nigsy, however, had pleaded for two of the resident’s four minders. The minders did any dirty work, from the occasional pick-up, to emptying dead-drops, to babysitting, guarding, or even flushing out the competition. Certainly the Cold War was officially over, but you did not abandon regular operations overnight.
Findlay wondered what the Americans were about when he heard reports that certain senators and congressmen actually wanted to disband the CIA. That lunatic measure, he confided in anyone who would listen, was like removing a burglar alarm from your house in Mayfair because the police had caught one thief in Kensington. There were also strange claims being made in much-praised novels about a close co-operation between SIS and KGB. He prayed it was not so. By the shades of Richard Hannay and Bulldog Drummond, this would have been catastrophic folly on a grand scale.
Findlay also had at his disposal four cipher clerks who dealt with routine embassy work as well as performing extramural activities for the SIS resident. This quartet had to be closely involved with Fallen Timbers, and one of them, Wilson Sharp, was there to field the first catch.
Sharp had the swing shift – four to midnight – so had been on duty for less than three hours when the squirt-transmission came in, a few seconds after six thirty-five. There was no surprise when the needles flicked and the warning went off in his headset. He punched the rewind button, started a new tape on the secondary channel on the main receiver and picked up the telephone, all in three fast moves. Nigsy Meadows was in the communications room within seconds, snatching the tape from Sharp’s hand and going down to the electronics bubble to work the decrypt machines. Ten minutes later he had Bond’s signal en clair:
SoJ to lift self, Tackle plus Brutus’s daughter from Dom Knigi, Kalinina Prospect, seven thirty this night. Fallback nine pip emma Arbat restaurant. Switched on. Please track. Block.
Nigsy was shouting for the car and one of the minders for protection should he need it before the decrypt had finished shredding into the burn bag.
Nigsy’s own car was an old Volga he had bought on the black market during his last stint at the Moscow Embassy. He could have used one of the many British cars in the pool – in fact as SIS resident he was allotted a splendid Rover – but Nigsy felt less visible in the Volga. He had spent much of his spare time working on the vehicle, replacing engine parts and making it generally more roadworthy. When they had moved him on to Tel Aviv, Nigsy had put the Volga in mothballs as he knew some day soon he would return.
His priority, after arriving in Moscow, had been to check out the Volga, draw the dodgy equipment that had been shipped in under diplomatic seal, and install it in the vehicle. The Volga came out of the embassy gates just after seven. It was logged by the KGB surveillance team, who still carried out the routine, in spite of the official cancellation of Cold War activities. They immediately fingered the driver as Bolkonsky Two, their identifier for the former resident, together with a member of the British boyevaya gruppa – their own outdated jargon for a combat team used as a hit squad – riding shotgun.
Even in the snow, which came and went like a tide, Nigsy drove just within the speed limit, turning left, then right, doubling back to get on to the Kamenny Bridge. He could see the floodlit gold onion domes of the Kremlin rising up to his right, for the Kamenny Bridge provides one of the best views of the Kremlin. In the far corner of his mind, Meadows thought that this had once been an ancient stone bridge, the very one Dostoyevsky’s character, Raskolnikov, crossed on that sultry July afternoon in the opening chapter of Crime and Punishment. Everyone did a course of Russian literature, among other things, before being posted to the USSR, but Nigsy’s thought could have been put down to some kind of ESP, for he knew nothing of Bond’s task that night, to buy Crime and Punishment at Dom Knigi.
Years previously he had worked with Bond in Switzerland. Together they had set up a snare for a Soviet agent engaged in laundering money for pay-offs to support networks being organised in the United Kingdom. They had become close, and Meadows often thought he had learned more about fieldwork from the six months in Berne than from any other experience. He had an affinity for Bond which had lasted through the years and prided himself that he could read 007 like an ophthalmologist’s chart at two paces.
They reached Kalinina Prospect via Marksa Prospect, skirting the hill topped by the old Pashkov Palace, now the Lenin Library, its circular belvedere just visible through the snow. As they made the first sweep, Meadows saw a grey MVD security van parking about a hundred metres from the bookshop and another one further down the street. They had all the telltale signs of watchers’ vans – the tall, thick aerials and mirror windows at the rear.
He spoke rapidly to the minder, Dave Fletcher, as they drove, telling him what to look for, describing Bond, giving him the possible location in which the agent might be spotted. He circled the area in imprecise patterns, first left, then right, then doubling back and making an approach from a different direction, knowing he could not keep this up for long, as the MVD vans almost certainly had the licence number of the Volga from the embassy watchers. He did not want the vehicle stopped and scrutinised. It bore no CD plates, in direct contravention of standing orders, and he was also carrying highly illegal electronics – a modified Model 300 receiver, originally made by Winkelmann Security Systems of Surrey – adapted for field use by Service electronics wizards in London.
One of the buttons on Bond’s parka contained a micro-transmitter, a strong homing device designed to talk only with this particular receiver, or one of its clones. The bleep came up just as Meadows thought it was time for them to be safe rather than sure. It showed that Bond was somewhere off to the right of them, behind Kalinina Prospect, moving at around thirty kilometres an hour.
‘You read it,’ he told Fletcher. ‘Just tell me which way to go.’
They lost the signal five times over the next half-hour, but on each occasion it came up again, moving faster now and heading out of the city, going east. By nine o
’clock they were out in the countryside, Meadows worrying that they might have problems getting back to the embassy. The snow was thickening, though the signal remained strong. Then, unexpectedly, the track changed, moving very fast indeed, coming towards them as though on a collision course.
Somewhere above the engine noise in the car they both heard the heavy thrum of helicopter motors.
Meadows cursed as he watched helplessly. Within three minutes the signal went out of range, travelling north-west. A couple of hours later, back at the embassy, he checked with Findlay to make certain the ambassador would not wish to know about the operation, and sat down to cipher an ‘eyes only’ to M. All his experience told him that the Scales of Justice almost certainly had Bond out of Russia by now. M’s detailed briefing, delivered in the main by Fanny Farmer in Tel Aviv, had suggested as much. ‘The Old Man doesn’t believe for one moment that these jokers have their main base anywhere near Moscow,’ Farmer had said. ‘His bet is on one of the Scandinavian countries, though it might be even further away.’
If M was on the ball – and when was he not? – Nigsy Meadows thought there would be a flash priority for him to get himself elsewhere first thing in the morning.
James Bond returned to consciousness like a man waking from a perfectly normal doze. There were none of the usual side-effects. No floating to the surface. No dry throat, fuzzed vision or disorientation. He was deeply unconscious one minute and wide awake the next. He smelled wood, and for a second, thought he was back in the relative safety of the dacha. Then his brain leaped again. This was not the same polished scent. This was more like lying in a pine forest. The pleasant odour of the wood enveloped him and he wondered if this was some strange aftereffect of chemicals. He knew they had used some form of drug. He saw the pavement and the car, like a limo, pulling up, heard the giggling of the girls and, clear in his head, a picture of the two young men. He even recalled the glimpse of a female leg, encased in a tight-fitting black leather boot, then Nina’s head slumping onto his lap.
