She was pensive for a time. “Okay. Here’s something. The last night I saw him he asked me to give him a ride. He had to be in a certain place at a certain time. The guy he was meeting had a thing about punctuality. Remember, I wanted him out of my life in a hurry, Mr Pagan. So I said I’d drive him where he had to go. Which is exactly what I did. And that was the last I saw of him.”
“Where did you take him?”
“To the boardwalk at Brighton Beach.” Rose Alexander lit another cigarette, which she held in a hand that fluttered like a small injured bird. It was obvious that any conversation about Kiviranna agitated her.
“Did he say who he was going to meet?”
She shook her head slowly. “He didn’t say. It was just somebody he had to meet on the boardwalk, that’s all.”
Pagan noticed for the first time that she had a collection of freckles around her nose and cheeks. “But no names.”
“No names,” she said.
Pagan looked across the room at Klein, who had an expression on his face of frustration. “Did he give you any kind of impression of the person he was supposed to meet?”
The woman blew a long stream of smoke and for a moment her face was lost to Pagan. She said, “Sorry. I draw a blank. I guess if he told me anything I must have suppressed it. Or else I never really heard it in the first place.”
Pagan was disappointed. He stood very still a moment, looking at a picture on the wall, a sepia-tinted mushroom, a doper’s picture, and rather ominous. “If I need to ask anything more, I’ll be in touch,” he said. “Thanks for your time.”
She smiled in an insipid way. “Yeah, sure.”
Pagan stepped out of the apartment with Klein. Then he started to go down the stairs. He was aware of Rose Alexander watching from the open doorway.
“I just remembered something,” she said, and her voice echoed in the stairwell. “It’s not very much, but you never know.”
Pagan stopped, turned around, climbed back up to the landing. The woman had her hands in the pockets of her jeans and was leaning against the door frame, her hips thrust forward in a way Pagan found mildly provocative, all the more so for the lack of self-consciousness in her manner.
“Like I said, it might not be much, but here it is.” She smiled at Pagan, perhaps a little sadly, as if all she were throwing him was a scrap. “Jake was going to meet the guy in some kind of old shop on the boardwalk. He mentioned that in passing. Maybe it amused him, I don’t know. It just came back to me. I didn’t ask any questions about it, because I didn’t want to know.”
Pagan thanked the woman again. Outside in the street he walked toward Klein’s car. He got in on the passenger side and Klein climbed behind the wheel. Pagan said, “Suddenly I’m overcome by an urge to get some good sea air into my lungs.”
“You got it,” Klein said.
Klein drove the Dodge in the direction of Brighton Beach Avenue and the boardwalk. Neither he nor Pagan noticed the pea-green Buick that moved half a block behind them, a stealthy vehicle, the kind of car nobody ever wanted except for people whose need for total anonymity overwhelmed their desire for attention and their good taste. It followed, always half a block behind, all the way to Brighton Beach.
Fredericksburg, Virginia
Galbraith dined in a moody way alone on the roof, consuming a simple Indian meal prepared for him by the chef of a famous Washington restaurant and sent to Virginia by fast car. He ate spinach rice coloured with saffron, tandoori prawns, cucumber raita and mariel mimosas, those delightful little puff pastries that contain grated coconut, sultanas and cardamom seeds. He pushed his plate away, sat back, belched delicately into his napkin, then gazed across the roof at the satellite dishes. He stared beyond, into the mysterious sky the dishes scanned and analysed. He dropped his napkin on his empty plate, rose, crossed the roof and re-entered the house, climbing down and down into the basement.
His digestive juices made rumbling sounds. The Indian meal lay uneasily inside him. He ought never to have eaten in his present mood. And the spicy food he’d just consumed – well, really, he ought to have known better. He moaned as he settled down before the consoles, which he regarded with impatience.
When Iverson came into the room Galbraith didn’t turn his face to look. He drummed his stubby fingers on his knees in a gesture Gary Iverson took to be one of exasperation. Iverson also knew, from long experience of Galbraith’s behaviour, that the fat man would be the first to speak, that any question on Iverson’s part would be utterly ignored.
Galbraith made a plump little fist, misleadingly cherubic in appearance. He spoke in a very flat tone of voice. “I am an anxious man, Gary. Do you want to know why I’m such an anxious man, Gary?”
Iverson mumbled something meaningless.
Galbraith smacked the coffee-table with his fist and an ashtray jumped. “Where do I begin? Ah, yes, let’s deal with the home front first, shall we? Let’s discuss our own shortcomings. A telephone conversation between Carl Sundbach and Mikhail Kiss was logged here two hours ago. It appears that Sundbach has spotted our man. A man of ours, presumably a professional, has been rumbled by an old fellow whose eyesight isn’t the best and whose reflexes are arguably threadbare – and yet he made our man, Gary.”
Iverson looked up briefly at one of the consoles, absently noticing a NATO message, white letters on a black background, a detailed outline of the next day’s strategic naval manoeuvres.
“Incompetence, Gary,” Galbraith said. “I will not stand for that kind of thing. Now we have Sundbach worrying about who in the name of God is watching him. Do I overreact, Gary? Do I hear you think that? Consider. Sundbach knows he’s under surveillance. He can’t figure out who’s doing the watching. He’s an old guy, maybe he gets scared, what does he do?”
Iverson shook his head.
Galbraith hopped up from the sofa, causing vibrations and making motes of dust rise. “I am dealing in possibilities, Gary, which is what I always do. And here’s one to stick in your throat. Sundbach, a terrified old man, a man with a gun licence, decides to shoot his pursuer. It’s not beyond feasibility, Gary. The mess! One of our operatives dead in the street! I am speaking here of shame, Gary. The involvement of the local police. Homicide detectives. Newspapermen. Horror!”
Iverson considered this scenario unlikely, but didn’t say so. He had seen Galbraith react this way before in situations where he thought the professional reputation of the agency was endangered or where the threat of exposure lurked. He was more than normally sensitive, it seemed, when it came to his beloved White Light project.
There was a silence in the basement. Galbraith, who had the kind of vision that enabled him to see around corners, who had the sort of imagination that allowed him to explore possibilities even as he juggled them, who liked to predict human behaviour as if his brain were a series of actuarial tables or psychological logarithms, returned to the sofa and sat down and his monk’s robe flopped open, revealing enormous hairy white thighs.
“Take that useless surveyor out of the street, Gary, and send in the Clowns.” Clowns was the in-house term for those highly-skilled and expensively-trained employees whose functions within the Agency were many and various, but always clandestine. Sometimes the Clowns were called upon to erect smokescreens or manufacture diversions when such strategies were needed. They staged car wrecks, set alarm bells off, lit fires, fucked up telephone lines, forged documents, tampered with computer networks, pretended to be insurance salesmen or window-cleaners or Swiss bankers or Italian lawyers or whatever role was required in a given situation. When specialised surveillance was needed, when the ordinary watcher in the street had been exposed, the Clowns were the people you sent for. They were inventive men and sometimes just a little arrogant in the way of all specialists. Galbraith had introduced the concept of the Clowns years ago – a budgetary secret concealed under the vague rubric of Miscellaneous – and they’d been useful on many occasions. They prided themselves on the fact that only rarely
had they resorted to real violence. Theirs was a pantomime world, a place of appearances and illusions, flash and noise when needed, or quiet play-acting if that was preferred.
“Did you probe young Andres?” Galbraith asked.
Iverson nodded. “I did.”
“And?”
“He quotes Mikhail. Mikhail trusts Sundbach to behave himself.”
“And Andres goes along with that?”
“To some extent,” Iverson said.
“But not all the way?”
Iverson shrugged. “It’s hard to say. He defers to Mikhail, at least on the surface, but I get the feeling he might do something different if Mikhail wasn’t around.”
“How different? Would he do violence to Carl Sundbach?”
“Maybe. It’s hard to tell with Andres. He’s like a man completely covered in very tight Saranwrap. You look at his face and you think Prince Charming, and then a kind of glaze goes across his eyes and you know you’ve lost him. And you don’t know where he’s gone.”
“I want him to stay out of mischief, Gary. That’s the only thing that matters. He’s got to be on board that plane to Norway at ten o’clock tomorrow night, and it’s too close to the end to have a royal fuck-up now.” Galbraith rubbed his acupuncture stud. It was said to relieve stress, which so far it hadn’t done. “I move now to another matter, perhaps even a little more disconcerting. And that is dear old London, Gary. It appears that Colonel Viktor Epishev of the KGB is running around causing havoc over there, having shot two young policemen on duty. His real target is none other than Frank Pagan, who arrived in New York this very day. (I am having Pagan watched, of course. Let us pray for competence in this instance.) I want to keep Pagan busy diddling round with Kiviranna and out of harm’s way, but I really can’t have Epishev causing all this grief over in London.”
Galbraith paused. He was suddenly conscious of the delicate balance of things, the wheels spinning within wheels, the equilibrium so finely calibrated that even the light touch of a spring breeze might blow it all to kingdom come. He had been given a heavy responsibility, and he was determined to carry it out. The future of mankind, even if mankind were a class among which he found a thousand things despicable, a thousand things grubby, was no small affair. He cleared his throat and surveyed the consoles a moment.
“I really don’t know what Vladimir Greshko thinks he’s up to by sending his man to London,” Galbraith said. “But I believe it’s time we found out. Agree?”
“Yes,” Iverson said.
Galbraith made a steeple of his fingertips and held it under his lower lip in a contemplative gesture. “I love smooth surfaces, Gary. Porcelains. Silks. Certain kinds of stones. Glass. Mirrors. I like surfaces so smooth you can’t feel any kind of seam. What I hate is sandpaper. And what I’m beginning to feel right now is a certain amount of grit forming beneath my fingernails. I don’t like the sensation, Gary.”
Galbraith dropped his hands to his side. “It’s time to make Ted Gunther earn his salary, don’t you think?”
13
Zavidovo, the Soviet Union
Because it was a beautiful dawn the Yakut nurse – a firm believer in the benefits of early rising and crisp air, even if the patient was terminal – had helped Vladimir Greshko into a wheelchair and pushed him out into the garden, where he sat in the shade of a very old oak, surrounded by pines and wildflowers and all the rest of what he considered nature’s repetitive graffiti. It was, for him, a bucolic nightmare. Despite his rustic origins and the sentimentality he often felt for the land, he had become a city person, somebody made nervous by the racket of birds.
He watched the nurse go back inside the cottage and he glowered at her. To have been detached from his tube, disgusting as the thing was, was like being yanked from an umbilical cord. Twenty minutes, the Yakut bitch had said. Twenty minutes, no more, as if she were bestowing a precious gift on him.
The trouble with nature, Greshko reflected, was its unsanitary condition. Little things chewed on even smaller things. Ants scurried off with disgusting larvae in their jaws. Wild animals and birds crapped where they felt like it. He loved the tundra, those great prairies with their romantic isolation and impenetrable mystery, but when it came to thick trees and the awful green density of this place, he experienced a suffocating claustrophobia.
He closed his eyes, opening them only when he heard the sound of an automobile approaching from the distance. He turned his face to the pathway that led to the cottage, peering through the twisted posts of the old wooden fence. His first thought was that Volovich was coming to say he’d received news from Viktor, but when he made out the shape of the Zil – unmistakable! – he knew his visitor was General Olsky.
He saw Olsky get out of the long black car and come through a space in the fence, where a bramble bush snagged the sleeve of his well-tailored suit. Greshko stared at the bald head as it ducked under the thorns. And then Olsky was crossing the thick grass to the wheelchair in short springing steps. He wore this morning amber-tinted sunglasses, a horrible Western affectation as far as Greshko was concerned. They caught the dawn sunlight and glinted as if two copper coins had been pressed into his eye sockets.
Olsky asked, “How are you today, Vladimir?”
“Unchanged, Stefan. You find me as you found me when you were last here. Two visits in as many days! I feel very honoured.”
Olsky circled the wheelchair, pausing immediately behind Greshko. As a technique, Greshko thought it ludicrous. Was he supposed to twist his head round in order to see the little shit? Was this meant to place him at a disadvantage? Greshko wanted to laugh. When it came to technique, when it came to the body language of interviews, he’d written the book.
“Let’s walk, Vladimir,” Olsky said. “I’ll push you.”
“As you wish.”
Olsky shoved the chair over the thick grass, a shade too quickly perhaps, as if he meant to unnerve Greshko. Olsky wheeled him towards the pines, where the ground was rougher and the chair shook. Then Olsky stopped, catching his breath and sitting down with his back to the trunk of a pine. He snapped a stalk of long grass and placed it against his teeth.
“Do you like it here?” Olsky asked.
“This green prison? What do you think?”
“I can imagine worse places, Vladimir.”
“I suppose you can.”
Olsky stared in the direction of the small house. “You’ve got a decent place to live. Your own medical attendant. It could be a whole lot worse. At least the sun is shining and the weather’s warm.”
Greshko smiled. Just under the surface of Olsky’s words, he could hear it – a quietly implied threat, a hint of how the last days of the old man’s life could be made utterly dreadful by removing him from this place and sending him in some cramped railroad carriage to the distant north. Am I supposed to be scared shitless? Am I meant to nod my head and drool with gratitude? “Why don’t you come to the point, Stefan? Dying men don’t have time for circumspection.”
Olsky was quiet a moment. “Where is Colonel Epishev?”
Epishev, of course. Greshko said, “I assume he’s at his desk. Unless you’ve misplaced him, of course. Which would be damnably careless of you.”
Olsky took off his glasses. “Where have you sent him?”
“Sent him? You forget, General, I have absolutely no power in the organs these days.”
“He came here. I have that on good authority. He came here with Lieutenant Volovich. I can only assume you issued instructions to him.”
Olsky watched a woodpecker as it fastened itself on to a pine trunk and rapped its beak with sublime ferocity of purpose. Rap rap rap. Epishev and Volovich had been spotted coming here. Ah, the risks one ran! The trees had ears and eyes and every goddam blade of grass was a potential microphone.
“I receive so many drugs, Stefan. I sleep a lot. Sometimes I have no idea of time. Sometimes people come to see me and I don’t remember them ever having visited. And so many people come, I have m
ore friends than I can count.”
“I want an answer, Vladimir. Why did Epishev and Volovich come here? And where have you sent Viktor?”
Greshko wondered if somehow. Volovich had been made to talk. But if Dimitri had confessed, then Olsky wouldn’t be here asking these questions. Things would be different if Olsky really knew anything. Things would be rather more straightforward, perhaps even a little brutal. Greshko would have been removed from this place without ceremony. Besides, why should Volovich admit anything that might incriminate himself? The man might be nothing more than Epishev’s toady, but he was surely no fool when it came to survival.
Olsky replaced his glasses. “Are you denying you were visited by Epishev and Volovich?”
Greshko smiled in spite of the sudden pain that knifed through his abdomen. Pain like this, you were never prepared for it, it went through your nerve-endings like a dagger through old papers. “How can I deny something I can’t remember?”
Olsky felt oddly tense in the old man’s presence, even though he knew he had no need to. Sabina was forever reminding him of his own new authority – Sweet Jesus, you are the Chairman of the KGB, you don’t need to be in awe of anyone, my love. And of course she was right. But there was something in Greshko’s demeanour, a quality connected to Greshko’s history, the sense of the man’s legend that now and then unnerved Olsky. Greshko had walked the same stages, stood on the same platforms as Stalin and Khrushchev and Bulganin and Malenkov, the luminaries of modern Soviet history. Greshko had been at the centre of things for so many years that his absence created a vacuum which, for most Soviet citizens accustomed to seeing his face on state occasions, was almost unnatural – as if the moon had failed to wax.
“First you lose some computer data,” Greshko said. “Then you lose one of your Colonels. If I was running the organs –”
“But you’re not, General –”
“When I did, General, I controlled everything, the tasks of my key personnel, the access codes to the computers, nothing ever slipped away from me.” With some effort, Greshko raised his voice. “I knew where everything and everybody was, day and goddam night, I lived the organs, General, twenty-five hours a day, eight days a goddam week. Don’t come here and make accusations that I gave an order to Epishev! You know I don’t have that much power these days,” and here the old man snapped his fingers. “If I did, by God you’d see some iron in the backbone of this country!”
Mazurka Page 25
