by John Gardner
‘And the message?’
‘Just tell him, “All I ask is a tall ship.” He should reply, “And a star to steer her by.”’
‘This is your poet, Masefield. I prefer Wordsworth.’ Stepakov’s mouth was fixed in the permanent clownlike smile that was also a look of despair.
If there had been light enough, the Russian might have detected a flush on M’s face. ‘Don’t know much about poetry,’ he growled. ‘Know what I like. Songs of the sea, that sort of thing. Just give Berzin the orders, then tell him what I said. Don’t even mention I said it.’
‘And he will obey the comrade President’s orders, no matter how he feels? Even if he’s allied to a possible military revolt?’
‘I’ve told you, Bory. The chances are high.’
‘You have a secret with him. Obvious. Tell me.’
‘People who live in secret houses should not throw answers. Now, let’s go.’
They watched Stepakov leave with his two bodyguards in a car he had conjured from a trusted secret source which M said could even be a PLO cell in Stockholm. ‘Bory is accepted by the strangest people,’ M told them as they walked back to the elevators. ‘That’s why he plays it so close to the chest. He’s made counterterrorist work into an art form, and he doesn’t just play both sides of the street, he plays the entire neighbourhood.’
Back in the Bernadotte suite he told Tanner to order dinner from room service. ‘Just a light supper for the three of us. Then I’m going back to London.’ He fixed Meadows with bleak eyes, the colour of the North Sea in winter. ‘Nigsy, you’ll go further north. Join a couple of people up there. Chief of Staff will give you the mumbo-jumbo after he’s telephoned London. We’ll pinpoint this Lost Horizon hotel. You can try to run interference for Bond if he makes a break for it. Intuition tells me this isn’t just an internal power struggle or a genuine attempt to shame the government into putting Vorontsov on trial. There’s something more at stake here. Something which could affect all of us. Global, as the strategists say. I’m very unhappy. It feels as dangerous as trying to ride out a hurricane in a ketch.’
They had Ølebrød – that devious beer soup which is a favourite in Stockholm – followed by Janssons frestelse, a wonderfully simple casserole of potato, onion and anchovy, something which suited M’s jaded palate, and while they ate, Nigsy asked about General Berzin. ‘How, sir?’ not expecting an answer.
M filled his mouth with a forkful of the casserole, closing his eyes. It was the nearest Meadows had ever seen him to admitting that the taste of food could be a beautiful experience. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘a literal translation of this dish is Jansson’s temptation. I have a recipe at home, but nobody can make it in London.’
He ate more, washing it down with an aquavit flavoured with rowanberry and a long draught of beer as a chaser.
‘Berzin,’ he said the name and gave a grim smile. ‘You recall Berzin, Chief of Staff?’
‘Like yesterday.’
So, uncharacteristically, M told the story. ‘You remember Savall?’
‘The cipher clerk?’ Meadows knew people who had worked with Stanley Savall at the Moscow Embassy. The rumours were that he was a spy who had committed suicide.
Savall, while in Moscow, had been honey-trapped into a homosexual relationship with one of the KGB’s male prostitutes. The ones they called voron – ravens, the counterpart of their lastochka. In the space of a year they collected massive amounts of audio and photographs. This was in the late sixties. When Savall was posted back to London, the Russian service laid the news on him. They could destroy his life. So Savall agreed to do what was asked of him. Over two years he systematically stole classified information and fed it to his control in London. Then he was caught, in a routine security check. There was no fuss. The Security Service kept it quiet and spirited him off to a safe house where they dried him out. The safe house was a fifteenth-century manor house in Wiltshire, near the ancient city of Bath.
While the British and American Services did not go in for assassination, the Russians had never been shy of it, so the interrogators ringed the old manor house with experienced members of the SAS. They knew that Savall could give them a lot of information regarding KGB operational practices in the UK.
On the third night after they had moved Savall into the house, two members of the SAS stalked and caught a man dug into a skilfully concealed position, giving him a view of the garden area where Savall was allowed to exercise. The man wore a camouflage suit and carried a Dragunov SVD sniper rifle. He would answer no questions, so they passed him on to M who carried out the interrogation himself in the secure rooms underground, below the headquarters overlooking Regent’s Park.
Before he began the inquisition, M had the prisoner’s photograph run through their vast filing system which they called ‘the magic machines’. The machines put a name to the face, so, when he began the first session, M seated himself opposite this hardened, tough young soldier, offered him a cigarette and began to talk. ‘Colonel Berzin,’ he began. ‘I wonder how your wife, Natalie, and your two children, Anatol and Sophie are getting on in your quarters in Kirovograd. I would speculate they won’t be allowed to stay there for long.’ He then gave the colonel a rundown of his entire life history, his training and the present mission. He even guessed, correctly, at how Berzin had come into England, via France and Guernsey. There was no doubt what his mission had been. Then M threw a packet of cigarettes on the table and left Berzin alone for two days.
When he returned, M told the soldier what they intended to do. ‘We’re simply going to send you home. When you arrive back, you can carry on your normal life. But I have to tell you that a full report of your capture, together with a copy of the secret information you have given us in this interrogation, and a tape, will be sent to the GRU.’
‘I have told you nothing,’ Berzin laughed.
‘They’ll only have your word for that.’ M gave him a warm smile which said he loved all mankind. ‘You won’t be leaving for a week or so. In that time we shall put you under drugs and question you.’
‘I know nothing that would interest you. I am a soldier with no access to the greater secrets of the Organs.’
M nodded. ‘Probably, but we’ll have your voice on tape, and from it my technicians can produce amazing confessions. By the time we send the transcript and tape to GRU and KGB, you’ll have told us things you did not even suspect you knew.’
‘I am a soldier,’ Berzin protested again.
‘Then that will be the end of it. You will probably die like a soldier, while your wife and children will be packed off to the Gulag. Good riddance.’
Berzin broke about an hour later. He claimed that he was merely on a training exercise. He had no orders to kill Savall. Then he spilled all he knew about the training and use of Spetsnaz forces – how they would be used in any war and how they were used now as an élite force undertaking difficult military espionage and clandestine operations in the NATO countries.
‘He talked himself dry,’ M told them in the Bernadotte suite. ‘Gave me everything, then said he needed asylum for himself and facilities to get his wife and children out of Russia. We refused.’
M had asked him if he enjoyed his life as a soldier. It was all Berzin had ever wanted. He was also a high achiever who knew, as high achievers always know, that he had a marshal’s baton in his knapsack.
‘We simply told him that we wanted his happiness. He could return to Russia. We would even provide him with photographs showing that he had eliminated Savall. Already we had done a deal with him.’ Savall was to be given a new identity and shipped off to Australia once he answered all the questions. ‘He was pretty spineless,’ M said with disgust.
Before they allowed Berzin to leave, M had spent an evening with him. ‘We will never ask you to spy for us,’ he told the Spetsnaz officer. ‘But there may come a time in the future when you can be of some small service to us. I swear to you that it will never be in time of war, nor will it be agai
nst your country’s interests. If that moment ever comes, someone will be in touch with you.’ He then gave Berzin the code phrases, together with a lurid description of how he, personally, would see that a tape of all their conversations went to the right hands in Moscow if the officer did not do the favour asked.
‘There is a lesson in this,’ the wily old spy said. ‘Keep everything. Never throw anything away. Use every scrap that’s given to you. I imagine the general will come up trumps.’ He smiled gleefully now, and turned immediately to the orders he had for Meadows, letting Bill Tanner do the detailed briefing.
That night James Bond and Nina Bibikova showered together once more, to escape the fibre optic lenses and the invisible ears. ‘I know,’ Bond said, close to her ear. ‘I saw both of them. You knew they’d be here, I presume?’
She nodded fiercely.
‘It’s okay. I am one of the few people who has the whole story. This is why you wanted to be with us? Because they were here?’
‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘But something truly terrible will happen. We must try to find a way to get out. All of us. Pete and my parents as well. Look for any way of escape, James. Please look hard. The Chushi Pravosudia are obviously using actors from various companies throughout the Soviet Union for this charade. My parents were in a theatre company based in Leningrad. That’s where they went after they staged the accident.’
They went on washing each other, going through the ballet they were quickly perfecting. Bond asked if she knew why it had been necessary to use two technicians from England to do the camera work when any Russian team would have done it just as well. She had no idea. ‘I think, however, that we shall all be disposed of as soon as the video is completed. Nobody will be left, but there is more to it than this.’
They slept in each other’s arms that night, rising at dawn, when summoned, to begin another day with the horrors of the past.
More and more witnesses were taped, each with his or her terrible description of life at Sobibór which was run like a sickening mass production factory, the final product being dead Jewish people.
They described how the Germans and their Ukrainian turncoat assistants had meticulously organised the place. It was similar to all the nauseating stories anyone had heard of the Nazi death camps. It was the efficiency that was as distressing as the amoral mass executions. All those who gave evidence were people who had been saved from the gas chambers either by their skills or strength. Some had been tailors or cobblers, working in special areas for the camp staff. Others had escaped by doing the revolting work – the picking over of possessions left by an intake of prisoners, the ‘dentists’ whose job it was to remove gold teeth from the victims and the sanitation squads who cleaned out the cattle trucks in which the doomed were transported to the camp. One old woman told how her entire time at Sobibór had been spent in a shop which specialised in picking the yellow Star of David patches from the discarded clothing of victims.
The witnesses had been trained by experts, so when he was behind the camera, Bond knew, with part of his mind, that they were actors performing as former victims. Yet the achievement of these men and women was so real, so brilliantly good, that as the day wore on, he became deeply depressed and mentally torn by the endless abominable repetitions.
It was late on the second afternoon that he realised some of the actors were appearing more than once – giving evidence, then being freshly made-up to return and perform as a new character with a slightly different story.
Michael Brooks himself came on to the witness stand for a second time towards the end of the day. Ordinarily, Bond would never have recognised him, now an old, bent and quavering man. It was the face behind the mask that Bond saw clearly and this performance was bravura. The old man told of one day at the camp, a day when the camp was visited by the architect of the so-called ‘Final Solution’, the Holocaust – Heinrich Himmler himself. On that day a special train arrived with several hundred Jewish girls from a labour camp in the Lublin district. Himmler watched the whole extermination process from arrival to the end.
‘He gave no sign of remorse,’ the aged Jew, who was Michael Brooks, told the ‘court’. ‘He simply watched each phase with a growing interest. The victims might have been cattle for all the humanity Himmler showed. I was near the party when they left. I spoke some German in those days. Before he got into his car, Himmler said to the commandant, “You’re doing well, but if things go as they should, you’ll get some bottlenecks. That could prove difficult. I will order more chambers to be built. You need to be able to process more. I’ll see to it.” Those were the words he used, “to process more”.’
They wrapped up for the day and Clive came down on to the sound stage floor. ‘They’re expecting some big cheese from Moscow tonight.’ He looked tired, as though he also felt the strain. ‘I’ll be up late in the editing suite. I’ve got permission for you to take a walk outside so that you can get fresh air.’ The effect of the day seemed to have removed his cheery, camp manner. ‘It’s quite cold, and you can’t go far, but I think it might do you good.’
Bond, Nina, Pete Natkowitz and three of the wardrobe people went outside through a door which led directly from the sound stage. They could not speak freely because of the wardrobe trio, and the darkness hit them like a wall, so that it took several minutes for their eyes to adjust. Then the lights around the Hôtel de la Justice came on and Bond realised why he had thought it familiar. From the outside it looked like some large medieval monastery fashioned in wood. He had once seen a drawing of a building just like this one. There was even a hexagonal gate tower, projecting from one side of the building, while the arched windows in perfect rows along the exterior could easily have been the windows to monastic cells.
The place had been built in a great circular clearing cut out of the forest. It must have measured a good half-mile across, and the perimeter where the clearing turned into thick woodland was lined with a high fence of barbed wire. It was lit at intervals by small floodlights, giving all of them the impression that they were at this moment in the awful camp of which they had heard so much during the day.
In the trees behind the perimeter, Bond thought he could sense movement. He saw nothing but experience told him there were armed men hidden in the forest. Nina was probably right. Nobody who worked on this video would be allowed to leave. The Hôtel de la Justice would become their own personal death camp.
As they returned to the door, through which they had been allowed to leave, floodlights came to life on the far side of the building, revealing a circular hard standing marked with a white H. As the dazzling illuminations cleaned the darkness around this area the sound of helicopter engines roared in from above, getting louder until one of the machines dropped neatly from the sky and settled on the pad.
About a dozen men emerged from its body and were met by men in uniform who rose up out of the ground and ran forward to help them. As soon as this group had disembarked, the helicopter took off, to be replaced by a smaller machine from which three men climbed and walked briskly towards another knot of figures who seemed to be a special reception committee. Just before the lights flicked off, Bond saw men exchanging salutes. The leader of the arriving group was tall, silhouetted for a moment. There was something forbiddingly familiar about him, even at this distance. Throughout the night his shape returned again and again to Bond’s mind, but he could not think who the man might be. He was certain of one thing, that should they escape it would not be through the trees, for they were a killing ground.
In the early hours, Nina cried out, coming to the surface from some dreadful nightmare. She clung to Bond as though the spectres from Sobibór were at her heels. ‘James,’ she whispered in terror, her body soaked with sweat, ‘I dreamed we were all there. You understand? All?’
He shushed her, making the noises with which one calms a child.
‘Bory was sending us all to the showers,’ she sobbed. The showers were the gas chambers. The victims were told they h
ad to shower before being given camp uniforms. Inside the showers they were gassed. In the first year or so of Sobibór’s macabre history, they had used primitive methods and the gas had been carbon monoxide produced by a 200-horsepower engine in a shed near the showers. Later they progressed to the lethal Zyklon B, hydrogen cyanide, manufactured in Frankfurt and Hamburg.
There was a different atmosphere about the sound stage when they were taken down on the following morning. For one thing there were more uniforms, extra armed men at the doors and a smarter military ambience which had been missing for the past two days.
Behind the camera, Bond heard Clive speaking into his earphones. Even his usually languid voice had a clipped tone to it. ‘We’re going to do the Judge Advocate General’s opening speech, first,’ he said. ‘I want you to focus on the doors to the right of the tribunal’s stand. They’ll bring the prisoner into the dock. Then the JAG will enter and address the tribunal. I’ll be cutting you between him, the tribunal and the prisoner.’ Then he began speaking to Pete about sound levels.
The prisoner was instantly recognisable, even in the grey, drab, shapeless jacket and pants, even with the shaved head of a convict. Bond had studied his photographs in London and again outside Moscow. He had no doubt that the man they were calling Vorontsov was, in fact, the hapless Joel Penderek from New Jersey. But Penderek behaved like a guilty man. He did not act like someone wrongly accused. His eyes constantly moved around the set which was the courtroom, and his demeanour was that of a man guilty of terrible crimes. The shifting eyes did not hold fear, but a kind of arrogance, as though he were saying, you have caught me, now do your worst.
Then the doors again opened and a tall figure in the uniform of a Red Army general strode into shot. The general looked more like a scientist than a soldier, slim and tall, with an almost ascetic, scholarly face. Clear blue eyes traversed the courtroom from behind heavy rimmed spectacles.
