The Labyrinth Makers

by Anthony Price

  Panin looked at him. 'You did well, Dr Audley,' he said, almost soothingly. 'In fact you did too well. It is ironical, is it not, that when I wanted the boxes to be found I could not find them. But when I did not need them, you found them at once.'

  'You didn't need them?'

  'I never believed they could be found. I wasn't even sure they'd reached England. It was enough that Guriev's people should believe I had found them, and I made all the preparations for that.' Panin paused. 'It seems that I prepared for everything except what actually happened.'

  All for Guriev's people! So Panin also had been too clever: it had not occurred to him that Audley would act on the same stimulus. Irony indeed! Whatever this elaborate scheme of Panin's was, it had failed because there was a self-destructive factor built into it–he had convinced Audley that the boxes existed and could be found.

  So Audley had found them, by following his own incorrect reasoning.

  There was a sharp cracking of wood behind them. Butler was methodically splintering open the metal box's outer wooden cocoon.

  Panin watched Butler sombrely for a moment, and then turned towards Audley again.

  'How long have you known that there was an extra box, Dr Audley? When all the others just accepted it as part of the collection?'

  'You were hunting Forschungsamt files back in '45, and I never could quite convince myself that Schliemann was enough to bring you all this way today. The–the psychology was wrong.' Thank you for that, Theodore Freisler; for tipping the balance. 'So there had to be more to it. There had to be something else.'

  'But you never knew what it was?'

  It would never do to admit just how much he'd been in the dark, and no use denying how much in the dark he still was. But there was still something to play for.

  'I never knew, no. But that doesn't matter now.'

  Panin shrugged.

  'You're missing the point, Professor Panin,' Audley said gently. 'I'm sure all the answers aren't in the box, but you can put that right.'

  The Russian regarded him woodenly.

  'To threaten me, Dr Audley, is mere stupidity. What can you do to me? You cannot hold me. You are not big enough. You can merely inconvenience me by withholding the box from me for a short time.'

  'I wouldn't threaten you, Professor–I'd leave that to Guriev.' Audley smiled. 'I think I'm just big enough to hold you for an hour or two. And small enough to let Guriev loose right now. Then it would be no business of mine what mischief he could organise in a couple of hours. On the other hand, if I knew what I was doing I could very easily sit on Guriev for a day or two and obey my instructions to the letter.'

  It was a crude bluff, but it was the best Audley could manage. Its strength lay in the fact that Panin had not dealt with the British for years and might still believe in their traditional perfidy. Or if there was an element of doubt there, at least, there could be no doubt about the ruthlessness of Guriev's masters, whoever they were.

  'Tukhachevsky,' said Panin. 'Marshal Tukhachevsky.'

  Marshal Tukhachevsky?

  'I would have thought that name would not be unknown to you,' Panin continued. 'But possibly not–it was before your time, and there are many of your generation even in Russia who have never heard of him.'

  That made it a matter of honour, and Audley flogged his memory. Marshal Tukhachevsky: the trial of Marshal Tukhachevsky.

  'The Great Purge of the thirties–the "Yezhovshchina".'

  Panin nodded. ' "The Yezhovshchina", that is right.'

  Millions had been exiled or imprisoned, and untold thousands had died, among them nearly all the old Bolsheviks–Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, Rykov. And the great Marshal Tukhachevsky, the hero of 1920. Russia had seen nothing like it since the days of Ivan the Terrrible.

  'The Army trials,' said Audley. 'He was one of the marshals Stalin liquidated. Yezhov framed him for spying for the Germans. And it was the Nazis who actually supplied the forged evidence.'

  'Very good, Dr Audley–a very fair summary. Except that Tukhachevsky was not merely one of the marshals–he was the greatest Russian soldier of his time. And he didn't die alone, either: he took four hundred senior officers with him, the cream of the Red Army. One cannot blame the Nazis for helping to frame them; they were winning their first battle against us without firing a shot. But tell me, Dr Audley –why would Stalin want his best soldiers branded as traitors?'

  'Tukhachevsky was too popular, I suppose. He was just another rival. It used to be pretty standard Soviet practice, didn't it? From Trotsky onwards.'

  Panin should know that well enough.

  'Discredit, then eliminate.' Panin spoke as though he hadn't heard Audley.

  The forgeries. Heydrich would have been the Nazi boss to organise them, and Heydrich had mixed some of his old Sicherheitsdienst files among the Forschungsamt records –that brought Tukhachevsky and Panin together.

  But if that was in the box the old objection still held: even back in '45 the full details of this scandal would have been a mere embarrassment to Stalin. And today they were utterly valueless. Stalin was dead and discredited; the Party itself could not err; and the ancestors of the KGB had neither honour nor credit to lose.

  'But the Tukhachevsky forgeries don't matter now, Professor. They're just dirty water down the drain.'

  'And the truth behind the forgeries?'

  The truth?'

  'Stalin was a butcher, but he was not a stupid butcher, as the West likes to think. He knew the risk when he ruined his own army.'

  'Professor, you can't tell me that Tukhachevsky and four hundred generals and colonels were all in league with Hitler. It won't wash.'

  'Not in league with Hitler. But in league against Stalin and the Party, Dr Audley.'

  Panin gestured abruptly as though tired of arguing and being forced to explain simple facts–and tired above all of pretending that the real Panin was a grey nonenity on a derelict English airfield.

  'In 1937 there really was an army plot against the Party. Tukhachevsky had no direct part in it–he was like Rommel in 1944. But it was a genuine plot and a very dangerous one. The soldiers planned to reverse the whole collectivisation policy–the Party's cornerstone.'

  He spoke harshly.

  'Stalin had a nose for such things–it is a talent some Georgians have–and he moved first. He knew it was so, but we never uncovered the proof, the full details. It didn't matter then, for it was better that they should be destroyed as traitors than mere party enemies.

  'And then it was discovered that the details did exist. One of the plotters escaped to East Prussia–an air force colonel. He took with him a list of names and details of the take-over plans. The Nazis sent him back, and they sent back some of the details. But they kept the documents.'

  The Russian faced Audley squarely.

  'That's what is in the extra box, Dr Audley: the details of the 1937 Army Plot which everyone believes was just a figment of Stalin's suspicious mind. Everyone except those in the Party and the Army who know the truth beneath the legend. You see, I wasn't the only one looking for those documents back in 1945–which is why I sent them to Moscow with the Schliemann Collection. There were generals then who knew what that box could do–to the Army. It can still do as much, and I've made sure that there are generals who know about it.'

  The Army! Discredit, then eliminate!

  So that was what was at the centre of Panin's labyrinth: the means to discredit the over-mighty Red Army as a political ally. Elimination then wouldn't even be necessary.

  It didn't matter that it was ancient history. An army which could turn against the Party once could do so again: even the breath of such a scandal would open a credibility gap a mile wide between the politicians and the generals in the delicate balance of Kremlin politics. Not even the most ambitious civilians would dare to cross that gap.

  'You'd discredit your own army?'

  'Discredit?' Panin shook his head. 'It would never have come to that. The generals would ha
ve taken the hint, just as they took the bait. This way there would have been retirements, but no disgrace. And no more nonsense about preventive wars in the east.'

  It was true. No general could afford to allow the glorious Red Army's loyalty to the Party to be publicly tarnished. The Tukhachevsky documents were quite simply an incomparable piece of blackmail, and the Army knew it. Guriev's presence was proof of that.

  God! The Army had taken the bait! And so it had been the Army–the GRU–which had followed him to Morrison, and had raided his home, not Panin. For Panin hadn't been in the least interested in what Audley was doing. He had been far too busy creating an illusion and laying a false trait for the GRU to follow. The overtures to the British had simply been part of the illusion–and Audley himself had been irrelevant. A bit player in a farce with far more important actors in it.

  Except that the farce had got out of Panin's hands because of the bit player's stupidity.

  He could almost feel sorry for the GRU, whose trail had been much colder and harder than his own. Indeed, all they had to work with were the clues Panin had carefully doled out to them and Audley's own movements.

  Not for them the luxury of names and addresses. The best they could do was to pick him up at Asham churchyard, follow him and try to overtake him at Guildford. But they had been baulked there by Morrison's weak heart and then betrayed by Mrs Clark's geese, which left them only Panin to follow.

  They had taken all the bad luck, and even so they had nearly pulled it off at the last. Whereas he had had all the undeserved good luck …

  Audley groped for something to offset his feeling of humiliation.

  'But supposing your bluff had been called?'

  'But it was no bluff, Dr Audley. There is no one left alive now except me who saw those documents. Until you discovered that aircraft, they were no more than a memory. Recreating them was no problem–we have far better forgers now than the Nazis ever had.

  'The problem was to create confidence in them. To create confidence in their–what is the word?–their provenance. As a historian you should understand that.'

  'But there's only one way you could really prove that,' Audley grasped at the inconsistency. 'You had to have the Schliemann Collection–and you couldn't forge that!'

  The Russian nodded. 'Of course I needed the collection. But you are forgetting how I lost it and to whom I lost it. A gang of petty black marketeers, Dr Audley–German riff-raff and Ukrainian deserters dressed in Russian uniforms! And what does the world think they did with it, eh? What ought they to have done with it, tell me that?'

  He didn't wait for an answer. 'They ought to have melted it down into crude bars of gold and silver, not to have had the wit to smuggle it out as it was. I tell you, Dr Audley, my fiction was far more believable than your truth!'

  It was damnable, thought Audley–but it was logical: a few bars of gold for the East Germans, and deep regrets for a tragic case of vandalism. That had been Sir Kenneth Allen's guess exactly.

  And all so damnably simple from Panin's point of view, too. In laying a trail of false information and recreating the lost cargo he was independent of events; the more the GRU and the British did, the more they would build up the illusion and baffle each other.

  It was perfect except for that one reasonable but fatal miscalculation …

  And now the consequences of that error had to be faced by both of them.

  'But the collection is of no importance.' Panin calmly relegated Schliemann and Troy to the dustbin of history. 'It is enough that it exists. In fact, if you want it for your British Museum that can be arranged–one museum is the same as another. It is only the documents which concern me. And I do not think your superiors will withhold them from me either, Dr Audley. There are pressures which can be brought to bear, believe me.'

  Again, just like that! First, the carrot–a golden carrot belonging to someone else, casually offered. Then, the stick–and Audley didn't doubt that it was a real stick. It was the matter-of-fact assumption of authority that took his breath away. The man was brutally sure of himself even now.

  Audley walked slowly back towards the others, leaving Panin beside the line of mounds. In a way this was what he always dreamed of having: the power to shift a political balance decisively one way or the other. But he had never imagined that balance would be in the Kremlin. Nor had he expected it to be the reward of false reasoning. Perhaps he'd be able to see the funny side of that one day. But in the meantime he intended to keep the joke to himself.

  The group around the box had split up. Butler and Roskill sat on the grass beside it, each engrossed in a buff-coloured file. Beyond them Sheremetev stood alone and miserable –though not as miserable as Guriev, quarantined by Richardson's Sterling.

  Predictably, the long-haired Jenkins was chatting up Faith, demonstrating his own addition to DECCO.

  Audley paused beside her apologetically.

  'I'm sorry for the theatricals, Faith. I really didn't intend you should be mixed up in them.'

  She smiled. 'It's all right, David. Mr Jenkins has been explaining how he was ready to come to our rescue. But he hasn't told me how you knew there was going to be trouble.'

  It was hardly the time to tell her that he hadn't really known and that he'd been mortally afraid that nothing would happen at all. Or that what had actually happened had utterly crushed his self-esteem.

  He shrugged modestly. 'If there was going to be trouble I wanted to have it here in the open. They all thought they were safe here. They didn't know DECCO was bugged.'

  ' "Jenkins' Ear" we call it,' said Jenkins. 'It transmits a whisper over a mile as clear as a bell.'

  'The only difficulty was bringing the rescue team in without any fuss,' Audley explained. 'And Warren was very helpful there.'

  Keith Warren had been only too pleased to help. He hadn't believed a word of Sunday's cover story, but found the bizarre truth instantly acceptable.

  Jenkins and Faith both regarded him with evident admiration. Like everyone else–everyone but Panin–they would always believe that he had stage-managed events perfectly. And as the Russians would never talk, no one need ever know just how imperfect the stage-management had been.

  'What happens now?' asked Faith.

  Audley smiled falsely. 'We divide up the loot, love. That's what happens.'

  He made his way past the new excavation to where Butler and Roskill were sitting.

  Butler got up stiffly.

  'Not much here, Dr Audley. Unmarked metal box–we forced the lock. Just two packets wrapped in oilskins, and the rest packing.'

  'And the packets?'

  'I've got what appears to be a blueprint for a military takeover of Moscow,' said Butler, 'planned to coincide with simultaneous moves in Leningrad, Minsk, Kiev and one or two other places. I've only skimmed it so far, though. There are some letters from military district commanders and a lot of coded material. It's dated 1937, so I can't place any of the names.'

  'I expect the names are all placed in my half,' said Roskill. 'Mine's a sort of who's who of the Soviet army in '37 –brigade commander and above. Six or seven hundred names, I'd say–and more than half have been joyfully stamped "deceased" in German. The mortality of the Russian peacetime establishment appears to have been remarkable.'

  Audley nodded.

  'Major Butler–I'd like you to take the Land-Rover and go and phone Stocker. Tell him what you've told me. Tell him that Panin's a hard-line KGB undercover man from way back. Back to NKVD days.'

  The KGB had sleepers in most countries, men who had nothing to do but to climb to positions of power and wait for their moment of usefulness. And naturally they had sleepers in the homeland too.

  'Now the cover's off because the KGB needs to put the Army in its place, and these files are the skeleton in the Army's closet. It's a straight blackmail job, tell him that.'

  He looked back at Panin. The cover was off, but there'd be no holding the man now. A success like this would put him into the Se
cretariat and eventually even into the Presidium, maybe. To have done a Presidium member a good turn would be something to tell Steerforth's grandchildren.

  'Tell Stocker that I'm fulfilling his orders to the letter. In exactly one hour I shall give Panin what he wants. If Stocker doesn't like it he can come down and explain to Panin himself– stay by the phone for his answer.'

  KGB, GRU–they were all bastards. And in the last analysis Nikolai Panin was probably the biggest bastard of them all. But at least he was an imaginative one, not a crude second-rater like so many at the top of the Soviet pyramid. And if there was any hope for Russia it would start at the top, not from the voiceless, unprotesting masses.

  Either way it was Stocker's headache now.

  And yet there was one more thing! A small thing to Panin, but no small thing all the same.

  'And tell Stocker that all Panin cares about are the two files.'

  He looked down at the other boxes peeping out of the loose earth in the bottom of the trench. Inevitably it would go back to the East Germans. Or maybe the West Germans would dispute its ownership. There was precedent enough, in all conscience: a citizen of the world had stolen it from the Turks, who never really owned it, long before the Russians, the Germans and an Englishman had got their thieving hands on it. It had been hidden and lost and stolen so many times that it belonged to everyone now, like the legend of Troy itself.

  'Tell him he's got the Schliemann Collection on his hands, poor devil.'

  Stocker could do what he liked with Steerforth's loot. Audley would settle for Steerforth's daughter.

  STEERFORTH. John Adair Steerforth, Flt Lieut, DFC, RAFVR, killed in a flying accident, September 1945. On this, his birthday–Mother.

  The End