Patriots

by Kevin Doherty

  ‘Who the hell are you?’ she demanded.

  ‘A friend told me about you. Said you’re the best.’ He seized her wrist and pulled her up against his groin. ‘Show me what you’ve got, my angel. I’ll show you what I’ve got.’ He began unbuttoning his flies, still clutching her arm with his other hand.

  The whore recovered her voice. ‘Clear off,’ she ordered. ‘I’m busy. I’ll be busy all night as far as you’re concerned.’

  She tried to free herself from his grasp but he hung on with drunken tenacity. Suddenly he tumbled towards the bedroom and burst through, pulling her after him.

  He stopped short to coo at the sight that met his eyes.

  ‘Oh, someone’s busy all right, sweetheart. But does he really need both of you?’

  The young man in the bed stared fiercely back at him but said nothing. The girl beside him dived under the covers and stayed there.

  The whore’s fist, landing on Gramin’s ear, recaptured his attention.

  ‘Out,’ she hissed. ‘Now. Right now.’

  The punch seemed to cool him off a bit. He rubbed at the glowing ear, pouting, but let her pull him towards the door.

  ‘Can I come around another time?’

  ‘No. I’m by special arrangement only. Whoever told you about me shouldn’t have.’

  ‘How do I make one of those arrangements?’

  ‘If you don’t know, then they’re not available to you.’

  She pushed him out of the door and slammed it quickly, slipping the security chain in place.

  He pleaded with her for a while from the other side, then he belched decisively, rebuttoned his flies and descended the stairs. He swayed in the doorway as if unsure what to do next or where to go, before wandering off towards the far corner of the street.

  *

  The voice on the radio was now talking about pig breeding, reeling off the kinds of statistics that bore no relation to the pathetic supplies of meat that reached the shops. Serov listened for fifteen minutes before he turned off and got out of the car, glancing up to check that everything was still and quiet on the sixth floor. He locked up carefully, walking around the car to check all the doors, and set off in the direction that Gramin had taken, keeping close in against the buildings.

  When he turned the corner he walked on until he came to a red-brick tenement with a fallen porch. In the doorway stood Gramin, now looking not at all drunk. Serov joined him.

  ‘Success?’ he asked.

  Gramin nodded. ‘The whore was the one you described. But she was taking her ease in the sitting room. The radio was on and there was a book and a glass of tea by the sofa. She was fully dressed. Wearing slippers, even. Not what you’d call ready for action. She hasn’t been near her bed tonight.’

  ‘Did you get into the bedroom?’

  ‘Certainly. There was a man and a girl in the bed. I only got a quick look in the light from the sitting room, which wasn’t much. He was skinny, dark haired.’

  ‘What about the girl?’

  ‘Young. Long blonde hair, very straight. Pretty face. No idea about build. She went under the sheets as soon as I arrived and stayed there.’

  ‘Did the man speak?’

  ‘Not a word. He didn’t look pleased, though.’

  Serov took out his wallet and handed over some cash. ‘You remember I said I might want you to do something else for me tonight?’

  ‘You’d like me to follow the blonde.’

  ‘The man will be out by midnight. I want to know who she is, where she lives – everything you can find out about her. Did you see enough to recognise her?’

  ‘I think so. What if she stays the night?’

  ‘Give it as long as you can. If you lose her we’ll try again next time.’

  ‘How do you know there’ll be a next time?’

  ‘There’ll be a next time.’

  Serov melted into the shadows and hurried back to the pork production figures.

  *

  Twenty years ago. There had been plenty of next times.

  He slipped the last property brochure into its relevant A–Z page and turned the Ferrari’s ignition key; five litres of power growled into life beneath him. He took the car slowly down the car-park ramps and into the street. As in Moscow, children and men stared as he passed.

  But this was better than Moscow.

  Much, much better.

  *

  Knight sat with his eyes closed and the yellow lunch box on his lap. Around him the hospital outpatients area was full and too busy for the staff to keep track of everyone. He would be safe for as long as it took one of the nurse-receptionists to realise that he had no right to be there, that he was not waiting for an appointment. Then he would have to move to another waiting area or another hospital. Or somewhere else entirely. He’d never realised before how hard it was to find a warm place to sit in a city without paying for it.

  He had gone through the contents of the yellow lunch box and studied the photographs in it. Most were night shots. The bald man and his companion. The house where they stayed, with an NW2 address printed neatly on the back of one of the shots. A white van. The young Libyan, the one whose photograph he had already seen in the newspapers. The van and a black Jaguar outside a small house that he knew would turn out to be Brook Cottage. Just as he knew whose car the Jaguar would turn out to be, its registration plate perfectly visible.

  And finally, the bald man leaving the Opera House.

  Such an unspeakable trail of death. Clarke, his driver, the Pangton girl and her minder. The Saudi prince and his entourage. The Special Branch men with them. The ordinary people who happened to be on the wrong stretch of a Surrey road at the wrong time. Ibraham Abukhder, no innocent himself. Joss Franklyn. Who should have been him, Knight.

  And the ones who were dead in spirit. The ones who had yet to pay. Was he one of them? Perhaps. Hadn’t part of him died twenty years ago, when he had chosen this path?

  A choice that dated back to Izmaylovo that summer. Major Genrikh Kunaev’s academy. Long days when the work seemed never-ending; humid evenings when the geese flew overhead and he went to lie in the arms of a forbidden girl.

  *

  ‘I’ve been told to stop seeing you.’

  She pouted at these words from him, then shifted in the bed to lie on top of him. Her hair fell over his face like a curtain. He was looking up at her inside a golden tent that filtered the lamplight and made a soft, dim world that felt safer than any he’d ever known. Her skin shone, her lips and teeth gleamed with moisture that he wanted to taste.

  ‘Who told you that?’ she said.

  ‘Just someone.’

  ‘Will you obey this someone?’

  He blew a gap in the curtain and watched it fill again.

  ‘You’ve left your home,’ he said. ‘Will you ever go back?’

  The curtain trembled as she shook her head. ‘Home is a father who lives for war and a woman who hates him because of it but won’t leave him. So what is there at home for me? No, I won’t go home.’

  ‘Then I won’t stop seeing you.’

  *

  Then afternoon in one of the high-ceilinged rooms in the academy. Bright sunshine out in the garden but so dark inside that he had the ceiling light on. Before him on the table a manual on subversion propaganda.

  Suddenly Major Kunaev was there, entering so quietly that he didn’t hear him until he spoke. In English for once.

  ‘You’re a member of the Church of Rome, Boyar. I find that intriguing.’

  Startled, Knight glanced up to see the major watching him with a bemused smile.

  ‘I don’t practise any more. Not since my father’s death. Why should it intrigue you?’

  Kunaev looked mischievous, a sign that he was in the mood for intellectual debate. Knight’s heart sank.

  ‘The two great opposites,’ Kunaev ruminated. ‘Rome and Moscow. The two greatest empires the world has ever seen. But diametrically opposed.’

  ‘They have a c
ertain amount in common. Both have been called totalitarian. Both honour the dignity of individual labour but more so when geared to a common goal – in the one societal, in the other spiritual. Both admit of free will but find a higher purpose in subjugating it to the will of the corporate body.’

  Kunaev smiled bleakly. ‘And both have had great wrongs committed in their name: your Torquemada, our Stalin. Don’t look so surprised at my plain speaking, Boyar – Stalin was a mass murderer and I thank comrade General Secretary Khrushchev for having the guts to say so.’

  Knight sat back and closed the manual. ‘Your country’s purges, Rome’s Inquisition. Yet to believers, neither negates the doctrines of their faith.’

  Kunaev’s eyes were gleaming behind the thick lenses. He was enjoying himself. ‘Perhaps you are a philosopher, Boyar. Perhaps we should seed you in a university, where you can tutor the young and bring them to Marxism through Romanism or Anglicanism or Buddhism or Judaism – any -ism, we won’t mind.’

  So saying, he returned Knight’s smile and moved away from the door, producing the book that he’d been holding out of sight behind his back while they talked.

  ‘I always enjoy our debates, Boyar. I think you do too – yes? That is why I thought you might like to borrow this. It’s in English, so don’t worry – you’ll be able to read it without difficulty.’

  He handed the blue-bound volume over. Knight took it and read the title and the name on the dust cover:

  History of Russian Philosophy

  The first comprehensive and complete survey in English

  By N. O. Lossky

  ‘Thank you,’ he said with as much enthusiasm as he could muster, wondering when on earth he’d find time to look at it.

  ‘No thanks are necessary for broadening the mind of a student of the Izmaylovo academy. I must have the book back, sadly – it is a rare copy. But you may keep it all summer if you like. We will discuss it as you read through it. You will find it fascinating. No one can truly understand Dostoevsky or Tolstoy unless he has met their mentor, Fedorov. And for an examination of so-called religious truths, you will enjoy Karsavin.’

  With that he hurried off, leaving Knight to leaf through the pages of the book and feel even more intimidated. Perhaps if he managed one chapter a week …

  *

  ‘And I did,’ Knight muttered. ‘And left my fingerprints all over the damned thing. Just as you wanted me to, Genrikh Kunaev.’

  He opened his eyes to see the hospital receptionist staring down at him. It was time to move on.

  43

  Moscow

  Viktor Chebrikov, chairman of the KGB, left his offices in Dzerzhinskiy Square at one fifty precisely, was driven through the gateway beneath the Kremlin’s Spasskiy Tower five minutes later, and entered the meeting room on the top floor of the Arsenal block at one minute to two.

  Marshal Georgi Zavarov left General Staff headquarters on Gogol Boulevard at exactly the same time, fortified himself with a quick swig of brandy in the back seat of his Zil limousine, and saw Chebrikov’s car U-turning and parking in the Arsenal courtyard just as his was pulling into it. The KGB man had already been dropped off; four minutes later Zavarov was with him in the meeting room.

  Yegor Ligachev only had to walk across the courtyard from the yellow Senate building to the Arsenal block, to join them.

  In the meeting room, at the head of the table, Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was already waiting as each of them arrived. His head was bent over a folder of correspondence that he was speed-reading. He didn’t look up or greet any of them; he just kept on reading.

  Valets were on hand to take their outer coats, scarves and gloves. The men handed them over in silence and the white-gloved servants padded softly away.

  There was no small talk as they seated themselves. Ligachev took the number two’s customary position on the General Secretary’s right, while Chebrikov and Zavarov sat opposite him. On the table between them were bottles of mineral water, drinking glasses and a centrepiece of flowers. Pencils and pads of paper completed the arrangement. But no alcohol, no boxes of Cuban cigars or English and American cigarettes as in the old days. Not even an ashtray, Zavarov noted dolefully.

  Eventually Gorbachev raised his head, leant back in his chair and gestured with an open hand to Viktor Chebrikov for him to begin. No preliminaries; there never were these days.

  The KGB chairman acknowledged the invitation with a crisp nod. ‘Each of us has seen and heard the Western news reports of the last few weeks. I passed recordings and extracts to you from the West European and American television and press.’

  Gorbachev didn’t stir but the others nodded. As well as the source material provided by Chebrikov, each of them had kept an attentive ear to the BBC’S World Service, Voice of America or Deutshe Welle, depending on their linguistic capabilities. Unlike the rest of the country, the areas of inner Moscow and the resort locations where Politburo members had their homes and dachas were kept clear of radio jammers.

  ‘These indicate that the operation is running exactly as planned. To be specific – first, the Anglo-American action has been a complete success.’

  ‘From whose point of view?’ Ligachev asked, for the sake of appearances. ‘Theirs or ours?’

  ‘Both, Yegor Kuzmich. The assassination went without a hitch. We couldn’t have done a better job ourselves. Next, Gadaffi of Libya reacted to it as our strategists said he would, trying to capitalise on it by laying the blame at the West’s feet. Naturally, and as we also projected, spokesmen for the British and American governments gave immediate and categorical off-the-record assurances to their press and broadcasting communities that there was no such involvement.’

  ‘Off the record?’ Ligachev queried. ‘Why off the record?’

  ‘There’s nothing sinister in that. Official statements might have lent some credibility to Gadaffi’s allegations or suggested that the British and Americans were worried by them. By handling them in a low-key way, they would have been hoping to reduce them to the level of Gadaffi’s usual pronouncements. In my opinion they succeeded. And that’s good. Remember – the more successful they’ve been in refuting Gadaffi’s allegations, the better it is for us in the end.’

  ‘And the British and American follow-up?’

  ‘They’ve laid a convincing false trail. Their strategy has been more or less what our scenarios had led us to expect. Their chosen stooge was a Libyan trainee airman. He was a good choice and has been accepted without question as the assassin. The world is now convinced – more importantly, so are the other Arab nations – that it was Gadaffi himself who ordered the Saudi prince’s liquidation. In parallel, word of the intended Saudi coup that Gadaffi was sponsoring was fed by British intelligence to their media mouthpieces. From the British press and television reports the story has spread to the rest of the world. Consequently the tide of Arab opinion is now running strongly in Britain and America’s favour. Their fall from grace will therefore be all the more dramatic, and the Arabs’ reaction against them all the more extreme, when we implement the final phase.’

  ‘The final phase,’ Ligachev repeated. He turned to Zavarov. ‘In connection with which, comrade Marshal, tell us about the Special Detachment unit, the Spetznaz team. Did it cover everything it was meant to?’

  Zavarov nodded confidently. He took particular pride in his Spetznaz brigades. Had he been a few years younger, he would have been tempted to dole out more than verbal encouragement to the two young women who had been detailed to the London assignment.

  ‘Set a pickpocket to catch a pickpocket,’ he said, turning to address his remarks to Gorbachev. ‘And set an assassin to cover an assassin. He – or she – knows better than anyone else how the other will think, how he’ll approach an operation. That was the principle behind our strategy, and – just like the stages of the operation that comrade Chairman Chebrikov has described – it has been brilliantly borne out. Our Spetznaz unit has done an outstanding job. Its reports indicate that it
was onto the killing unit that the CIA lent to the British from almost its first day of operation. Furthermore, the covers adopted by the Americans, the way in which they had obviously been briefed and prepared for the assignment, their acquisition of the Libyan stooge, their materials and ordnance supply – all these things point to full collusion by the British. So we have everything we need, and more, to prove conclusively that the Saudi was the target of an Anglo-American action.’ He paused, looking pleased, before adding, ‘And I understand that comrade Chairman Chebrikov’s agent has now been able to make contact in London with the Spetznaz unit.’

  Chebrikov sat forward again. ‘Correct. He waited until he’d established good cover in London and was confident that he wasn’t under surveillance. Now he’s not only made contact, he also reports that he’s taken delivery of the evidence – photographic and documentary – that the Spetznaz unit amassed.’

  At the end of the table Gorbachev still sat listening, though not looking at any of them. He sat sideways to the table, gazing instead at the bleak sky outside. One hand was laid flat on the papers that he’d been reading earlier; now his fingertips lifted and came gently down again. It was the smallest of gestures but every one of the other three saw it.

  ‘This agent of yours,’ he said, turning to Chebrikov. ‘Aren’t you being rather modest on his behalf? I believe he’s quite a senior man.’

  Chebrikov frowned, momentarily disconcerted. ‘That’s correct, comrade General Secretary.’

  ‘A top man. Director of the First Chief Directorate, in fact.’

  ‘Yes, comrade.’

  ‘General Nikolai Serov.’

  ‘Yes, comrade.’

  ‘Isn’t it unusual to risk a man like that in the field?’

  Chebrikov had regained his composure. ‘It is unusual. But so is this operation, comrade General Secretary. I specifically asked the director to handle it personally. In the service of the Soviet peoples, naturally he didn’t hesitate.’ He looked thoughtful for a moment, sucking in through pursed lips. ‘Even though great personal sacrifice will be involved.’