Patriots

by Kevin Doherty

  On one of the side tables he kept a scrapbook. It was filled with snapshots, mostly of Galina and Katarina. The most recent shots were only of Galina. He started to slip some of the prints from their mounting sheets. But the selection was difficult and he found himself stopping often in indecision; in the end he replaced the prints and dropped the whole album into the briefcase.

  Then he was done. He lowered himself heavily into the armchair, as if what he’d completed was some onerous physical task, and took a final look around. His eye settled on the section of bookcase that concealed the safe. Automatically, he scanned the book titles on the shelf; there, where he had left it that night, was the Orwell. Nineteen Eighty-Four.

  But no, he wouldn’t be taking it. Or any of the books. Where he was going, he could replace them all. Ten times over if he wanted to.

  His last task before retiring for the night was to read through the English Sunday papers. Although he was coming to them a day late, there was one item that he had already noted that morning in the international news summaries that passed across his desk at Yasyenevo, about which he wanted to know more.

  It was the account of Home Secretary William Clarke’s death.

  ‘Car accident,’ he repeated thoughtfully as he moved from paper to paper and studied the accounts and photographs.

  Eventually an amused smile came to his lips. He knew all about the car crashes that could befall politicians and other leaders; also aircraft crashes, drug overdoses, dangerous swims, capsized yachts, insane gunmen working alone, and a legion of other bizarre ways of removing awkward individuals. Exactly what had Clarke done to merit his fate?

  He shrugged. He would find out in due course.

  Soon.

  *

  In his narrow bed at the Serbskiy Institute, a bed and in a room not much superior to those of his patients, Professor Ogarkin lay awake. He was pondering Galina’s progress.

  Maybe Serov was going to be proved right, he admitted to himself; maybe the paints would do the trick.

  He had watched from a window that day as Galina paced the courtyard below, looking up at the building from all angles. She was carrying the wooden case, a canvas board and the easel. One of the nurses was standing in a nearby doorway to keep an eye on her. The nurse was shivering because of the cold but Galina didn’t seem to mind it.

  At last she had put the easel down, right alongside one of the walls, and spread its feet. She mounted the canvas board on it and crouched down to open the paints case on a nearby step.

  Ogarkin had smiled and turned to Serov, who was watching with him.

  ‘Maybe we’ll have some developments now,’ he had said, relieved that even Serov looked pleased for once. ‘Call back next week and see.’

  ‘I can’t,’ Serov had said.

  Well, Ogarkin thought to himself as he looked back now on the incident, the comrade general was a busy man. He couldn’t keep chasing about forever just for the sake of one girl.

  The professor blew his nose one last time and tried to get some sleep.

  *

  Yegor Ligachev drew a hand down either side of his face, stretching the skin beneath his eyes until it stung, then combed his fingers through his pure white hair.

  The Party Congress was drawing near; too near. His office was awash in drafts of speeches, wordy resolutions from well-meaning party bureaucrats, and the endless proposed annexes that every new Five Year Plan generated like spring pollen.

  He sighed, a long, hollow sound that seemed to echo back at him from the high corners of the room. There were so many who came to scratch at the doors of power; so many arguments; so many factions to meld. It all pressed down on him.

  And Serov’s plan was the weightiest pressure of all.

  Once, when he was the secretary for Novosibirsk region, he’d made the long flight south to visit the cottonfields of Uzbekistan. There was a storm in the air, a great hot cawl of electrical tension that closed over the plains the day he arrived. It was like being caught inside a net of crackling energy. The tension made him want to scream, just to try and break the spell. Eventually, when he could stand it no longer, that was exactly what he did: he drove alone one afternoon to the heart of a limitless plantation where there was no other human being for many kilometres in any direction and screamed at the white sky until his voice broke and he was drenched in perspiration.

  These weeks of waiting were like being trapped in that net once more. Coaxing Mikhail Sergeyevich through every step. Fighting his own instinct to yield to the scream again and abandon the whole enterprise. Finally, and worst of all, realising that it was too late to scream. There was no way of going back: the enterprise had taken on a life of its own, as indifferent to those caught up in it as the Uzbek storm.

  Like Faustus, he had signed his compact; and like him, all he could do now was be patient.

  *

  Georgi Zavarov was being patient too. Olga was in bed, although it was doubtful whether she was asleep, and Ratushny had coughed and moaned for a while in the far reaches of the rambling apartment and run considerable amounts of cold water. But now the apartment was still. The litre bottle of brandy lay dead at Zavarov’s feet. A second one stood open on the mantelpiece by his folded arms. He never bothered with a glass these days.

  He lowered his head like a grizzly giving in to sleep and rested his forehead in the crook of his elbow. The heat of the log fire bathed his body and he spread his legs to absorb more of it.

  ‘Only heat you’ve had down there for a long time,’ he muttered. The slur in his voice pleased him. What else was there for him to do these days but drink? Whatever Serov had to say about it.

  He knew he couldn’t trust Serov. Working with him was like dancing with a cobra: sooner or later the bite would come, however sweet the rhythm.

  As ever, the man was up to something. Zavarov was certain of it: something beyond even the bounds of this fantastic scheme that he’d drawn them all into. For all the chance any of them had of fathoming it, they might as well try and count the stars.

  So he was being patient. Because Serov’s icy analysis had been right: he had no choice. It was that or watch Gorbachev turn his armies into toy soldiers and his missiles into washing machines.

  He was being patient and he drank. He humoured Olga. And he prayed to God for strength.

  *

  The money from Moscow, the passage of which through the Soviet Foreign Trade Bank had first pleased and then distressed Director Smolny, had since then passed half the banking day in the Banco Nacional de Panamá and half in the Bahamas.

  Now, as Tokyo awoke to tomorrow, the telexes in the Saitama Bank began singing like birds of the morning. They told of the yen’s overnight performance on Wall Street and Threadneedle Street; they enumerated batches of transactions from every corner of the globe; and they detailed a long list of transfers as the Soviet money now moved on from the Bahamanian corporation accounts that had sheltered it to certain others on Saitama’s books.

  The transfers were perfectly legitimate: payments by one trading partner to another for goods, commodities or services. All the corporations had histories behind them in the house of Saitama; their business dealings with one another always had proper documentation when it was needed. There was no apparent connection between them, other than a trading one.

  The financial cat’s cradle that Serov had constructed was under way. Zurich, Bonn, Amsterdam and London were yet to be added. By the time it was complete, its unravelling would be the kind of job that could make rich men of international lawyers and finance specialists, and fools of the clients who hired them to attempt it. The attempt was unlikely to be made.

  30

  Hampshire

  Stratfield Saye was asleep. It wasn’t a place for late hours.

  Only in the house where the man from the Home Office lived were lights still burning. One was in a small room at the front, where the security man leafed through a paperback and listened to the night-time creaks of the old tim
bers. The other was in the games room at the rear, where four men had gathered to listen to Viktor Kunaev.

  Viktor took in the scene as he entered. The room was becoming familiar territory to him now; as were its people.

  Light was provided by two green-shaded bulbs suspended from the ceiling on long flexes. They had once hung over the billiard table but now illuminated two high-backed chairs positioned to face each other in the centre of the floor. One chair was his, the other was for Matt Parrish.

  Viktor had never seen the room with the billiard table in its rightful position; since the start of the debriefs it had remained pushed against the wall, where it was tonight.

  Here Parrish stood, a forbearing and wise-looking man, leaning against the table. He was big and raw-boned with a farmer’s weatherbeaten face. It was an honest face and Viktor liked the uneven look of it. He was in the act of taking a cigarette from a white packet as Viktor came into the room; he looked up at him and nodded.

  The table also served Parrish as a resting place for his ashtray, the tape recorder and a clutter of coffee cups and mugs. Ring-shaped stains marched along the edge of the green baize, each session adding to their number. Two folders, which Viktor now recognised as transcripts of their sessions, lay open nearby.

  At the edge of the double pool of light sat the tireless stenographer, his muted typing machine on a folding card table. Viktor’s gaze finally came to rest on Dick Sumner, sitting opposite the stenographer, his fingers playing nervously with the flights of a metal dart.

  The scrape of a match being lit broke the silence; Parrish held it between his cupped hands for a moment and the flare cast a glow across his features.

  ‘Well, Viktor.’ He paused to put the flame to his cigarette and inhaled a mouthful of smoke. ‘Here we all are again – just as you asked.’ He shook out the flame and swept the match in a wide arc before dropping it into the ashtray. The gesture encompassed all of them.

  Parrish settled himself more comfortably on the edge of the table. Viktor went to his chair and sat for a moment in silence, thinking over what he planned to say. When he was ready and looked up again, he was aware that all eyes were on him; but none as sharp as Parrish’s.

  ‘I believe that when your organisation is training people for intelligence work, Mr Parrish, you describe the Soviet personality as secretive and distrustful.’

  Parrish smiled. ‘It’s a generalisation that some trainers use. Old hands, usually. I think it’s a dangerous simplification. Sorry if it offends you.’

  Viktor shook his head. ‘I have behaved according to type.’ Parrish drew deeply on his cigarette but showed no inclination to reply. Viktor continued. ‘I have good reasons. In the FCD – in fact, in all parts of the KGB – we work as if we are in a hall of mirrors. Take the Border Guards. They watch our frontiers to make sure no one escapes from Soviet territory. But there are other troops positioned behind them. Their task is to watch the guards. We have guards to guard the guards. That is how we are. We march in a circle – sometimes we get nowhere but we always know where everybody is.’

  Parrish shrugged. ‘So?’

  ‘Tonight I do not want us to march in circles but I have tried to arrange certain precautions. A hall of mirrors. You and Mr Sumner – you are here to watch one another.’ He paused to lend weight to his next words. ‘Mr Parrish, do you remember when I said I did not know whom I could trust?’

  Parrish nodded. The room had become very still.

  ‘That is because the man I have told you about – mole is not a good name for him: he is more important than that – I do not know his identity, you see.’ He looked from one to the other and added, ‘Life would be so much simpler if I did.’

  Parrish was puzzled. ‘You said you could prove conclusively who he is.’

  ‘Yes, and that is true. But the possession of proof does not always mean that you know something yourself. You will understand in a minute.’

  Parrish’s cigarette smoke drifted up through the light. His gaze followed it into the darkness as though he could trace in it the implications of Viktor’s circuitous logic. ‘Viktor, are you saying you’re worried that the person could be in this room right now?’

  Viktor shrugged. ‘It struck me as a possibility.’

  Sumner cleared his throat. ‘You said it was someone high up.’

  Viktor smiled. ‘Which is why I have decided to talk to you after all. This man was of university age when I was about twelve years old. He was at university here in England. You are roughly the same age as me, Mr Sumner, so it cannot be you.’

  Parrish did a quick mental calculation. ‘I would’ve been at university about then.’

  ‘And that is why I spent a long time wondering about you. But – with respect – on balance I do not think you occupy a high enough position. Mr Sumner is right, you see. This man was recruited because he was considered to be one of the brightest people of his generation. Whatever else the KGB may be, it is very efficient in its selection of agents – its long-term judgement is seldom wrong. If you had been its choice, I would expect you to be more senior by now. Sorry, Mr Parrish.’

  Parrish laughed softly. ‘I’m not sure if you’ve just paid me a compliment or the opposite. However, I take it your mind’s sufficiently at rest now to get on to the matter of the – what was it you called it? – the avoska?’

  Viktor signed. ‘At rest? As much as it can be. I can lead you to only one man.’

  Parrish frowned. ‘Are you suggesting there’s an entire network, a ring?’

  ‘Yes and no. There are other sleepers, yes. Whoever and wherever they are, however, they do not depend on one another as a conventional ring would. Each one does not even know who the others are.’

  ‘Then that’s conventional at least. You mean there’s a system of cut-outs between each of them.’

  Viktor shook his head. ‘A ring needs cut-outs only if the members are interdependent for the task they have been set. I said these sleepers are not. Every one of them works on his own. The programme was Khrushchev’s personal idea. It ended after he was ousted.’

  ‘One at a time then,’ Parrish said. His cigarette had burnt itself down to the filter and was giving off an acrid odour; he crushed it in the ashtray, ignoring the ash that spilt onto the green baize of the table. ‘Whoever and wherever the others are, let’s stick to the one we’re interested in at the moment.’

  Viktor nodded. ‘Tomorrow we go to London. All three of us.’

  ‘London?’

  ‘You will take me to a post office and I will collect a poste restante package in my name. It should be there by now – I posted it on Saturday as Anna and I left London. I will give the package to Mr Sumner. You will witness me doing this.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Mr Sumner will take the package directly to your forensic scientists.’

  ‘Forensic scientists? What is this package?’

  ‘A book. Merely a book. A book about Russian philosophy. In English. But I would not recommend you or Mr Sumner to read it.’

  ‘I see,’ said Parrish, though he didn’t.

  ‘You would leave fingerprints. Fingerprints will stay on paper for up to thirty years. Did you know that? Even longer on the dust cover if it has the right kind of finish. This book already has enough fingerprints. Some are my father’s, of course, because the book belonged to him.’

  Parrish believed he was beginning to understand. ‘And the other fingerprints?’

  ‘Are those of the man you seek. There are not even the fingerprints of a bookshop owner or a browsing customer. My father ordered the book direct from the lists of the English publisher. Perhaps a worker or two in the printing house handled it, but that need not worry us. Fingerprints, Mr Parrish. That is why Mr Sumner will need his forensic scientists.’

  There was silence. The stenographer stopped tapping. Viktor rose and stretched.

  ‘And now, if you will excuse me, I would like to go to bed. Anna has said she will stay awake for me. I do n
ot want to keep her waiting. This time is stressful for her and she needs much sleep.’

  Sumner watched Parrish. He nodded. Viktor smiled and waited for one of them to unlock the door.

  *

  At Mayfair’s Holiday Inn, the young Portuguese doorman called Jesus finally emerged from a door behind the porter’s counter and came over to where Eva was waiting for him in the lobby.

  ‘Good evening, miss.’ He knew her face from previous visits but not her name.

  ‘Sir Horace Gaunt is expecting me. He said you’d be able to find me a parking place.’

  ‘I see what I can do. Everybody want favour tonight.’ It was his way of ensuring that she made it worth his while.

  The spot that he found for her was smack in the centre of the small courtyard at the side of the hotel, beside the rows of ten or twelve other cars that were already there. She groaned when she saw how visible she’d be to anyone who chose to glance that way from the front door.

  Gaunt took a quarter of an hour to appear, by which time she had a crick in her neck from staring fixedly in her mirror. He folded his long body into the car’s front seat.

  ‘What’s all the panic about?’

  ‘There’s no panic, Sir Horace.’

  ‘That wasn’t my impression when you phoned me.’

  ‘Sorry. I’ve simply made my mind up about something.’

  ‘And it couldn’t wait until morning.’

  ‘I’m making sure I don’t change my mind.’ Even as she said the words, she knew they were wrong. Two errors in not many more sentences: apologising to him and admitting the possibility of doubt. She was handling this abysmally; not at all the way she’d planned it. Best to get it over with.

  ‘I want out. Now.’

  ‘Out of what?’

  ‘You know perfectly well.’

  Gaunt stared out of the side window at the comings and goings on Berkeley Street. She actually wondered if he was about to accede to her demand. But when he spoke his tone was icy.