Patriots

by Kevin Doherty

  They stopped to watch a windsurfer. Sir Marcus had brought his binoculars. When the surfer finally fell over, they walked on.

  ‘Trouble is,’ Sir Marcus resumed, ‘we’ve lost you just when you were going to be some use to us. Activated, you might have stood a chance. Now I don’t know how we track down the others – whoever they are.’

  He stopped walking and had another squint through the binoculars. The surfer was upright again.

  ‘How is Gaunt anyway?’ Knight asked.

  ‘He doesn’t like me being his shadow. I’ll have to call a halt soon. The politicians won’t like it but that’s too bad.’

  ‘Keen to get back to your retirement?’

  Sir Marcus brought the binoculars down and shook his head. ‘With me around we’ll never get anywhere with him. He won’t make a move. They wouldn’t even activate him. If he really is theirs.’

  ‘I suppose so. What will happen to him in the end?’

  ‘He knows he’s got to go. They’ll let him claim personal grounds or something similar. Spend more time with his family – that sort of line. In a year or so. That’s why I’m concerned. It doesn’t give us long. He’ll have to do something soon or not at all. I suspect it’ll be not at all.’ Sir Marcus sighed and lifted the binoculars to his eyes again. ‘How’s the girl, by the way?’

  ‘She’ll be all right.’ Knight had said nothing about the baby and didn’t intend to.

  ‘You were silly, weren’t you? All those years ago.’

  Knight shrugged. ‘I was young.’

  ‘You were soft.’

  ‘Weren’t we all?’

  Sir Marcus brought the binoculars down; his grey eyes scanned Knight’s face.

  ‘Not as soft as that,’ he said.

  *

  The office was deserted, the minister who occupied it attending a Cabinet meeting.

  It was an office that offered few clues to the personality or private life of that minister. It was clearly meant to be a work station, nothing else. A stack of three red boxes occupied the top of the bureau by the desk. On the desk itself a full in-tray and even fuller out-tray took up one corner. A file of letters and memoranda for signature waited on the plain blotting pad in the middle. And in the other corner was an untidy pile of three or four of that day’s newspapers. It was untidy because each paper had been read or at least skimmed, in the process losing its morning crispness.

  The topmost paper was the Financial Times. Unlike the others, it hadn’t been closed before being consigned to the pile. It lay folded open at a page of classified business-to-business advertisements. Halfway down that page a faint pencil mark had been made along the side of one of the advertisements.

  FINANCE FOR EXPORT–IMPORT

  Substantial funds available for export–import UK trade.

  Also back-to-back letters of credit.

  Strong core of 18–20 blue-chip investors.

  Please call our UK offices:

  Terem Investments

  01-863-1261

  Apparently, here was a politician whose interest in commerce amounted to more than a cursory speech at Budget time and the occasional business lunch.

  *

  Serov had just stepped out of the shower when the phone rang. He left wet footprints across the luxurious pile of the bedroom carpet as he hurried to pick it up. Water dripped from his hair and body to form a damp circle around his feet.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘They’re still convinced it’s Gaunt,’ the voice at the other end said.

  Serov frowned. ‘This is an open line. Be careful. Where are you?’

  ‘Go to hell. The deal’s complete now. I said I was through.’

  The line went dead. Serov dried the handset with the towel and padded back to the bathroom.

  ‘Gaunt,’ he repeated, towelling his chest. He chuckled softly. ‘Thank you, Boyar.’

  He reviewed the situation as he dressed. The money was the key, of course, the money that had passed so fleetingly through Director Smolny’s hands in the Foreign Trade Bank in Moscow and had been all around the world since then. Zavarov had been the only one authorised to trigger the military procurement account, Chebrikov the KGB one, and Ligachev the Central Committee funds. Not even the General Secretary could override their personal authority over their own budgets. It was an operational safeguard that had been instituted after Stalin.

  Now that the accounts had been penetrated, however, and the laundering network established, it would be simple enough to step up the flow of funds. That could start just as soon as Gorbachev had spelt out his terms to Zavarov and the others. Which would be any day now; if it hadn’t happened already. Then they’d find that rather more cash would be siphoned off than any of them had planned. That was business. The high-technology companies that Serov would purchase would be an important factor in bringing the Soviet Union up to technological parity with the West; buying them was something that the West itself had made necessary by its restrictions against exporting high technology to the Eastern Bloc. If some of the companies thus acquired happened to be engaged, now or later, in defence contracts, well then, so much the better …

  There was a knock on the outer door of the hotel suite. Serov glanced at his watch.

  ‘Punctual,’ he remarked approvingly.

  Dressed now but for his tie and jacket, he strolled unhurriedly through to the hallway and had a look through the spyglass in the door. One man stood waiting outside. Serov unlocked the door and opened it wide.

  ‘Mr Stephens?’ he asked.

  ‘Correct.’ The man handed him a business card. It carried his own name and, above it, that of a leading international detective agency.

  ‘Come in, Mr Stephens.’

  He poured himself a glass of bourbon but Stephens took only a soft drink. They settled themselves in the armchairs in the suite’s sitting room.

  ‘Shall we get right down to business, Mr Stephens?’

  ‘That suits me.’

  ‘There are two parties I want you to find for me. One is a young family – a husband, a wife and a little boy.’ He took a draught of bourbon. ‘The other is a man about my own age and a younger woman. Much younger. She’s pregnant.’ He broke off, remembering his feelings that night in the payphone booth when Ogarkin had told him. Bad enough that he’d traded her; but the child as well? Would he have traded his child if he’d known? Could he have done that?

  Stephens was staring at him. He finished the bourbon and stood up to avoid the man’s perceptive look.

  ‘I will give you their names and last known locations, but all will have changed.’

  ‘Mind if I make a few notes as we talk?’

  Not in the slightest.’

  Serov poured himself another bourbon and they talked for an hour.

  When Stephens had gone, he finished dressing. He should choose somewhere special to dine tonight, he decided. The best that this city had to offer. But not one of those dull places that the British seemed to favour. Somewhere lively, with music and women. He needed cheering. Perhaps reception would advise him. Before leaving the room, he checked his appearance in the mirror. He was satisfied with what he saw.

  Grey suit, white shirt, dark tie. The very picture of a prosperous Western businessman.

  Apart from the heavy Makarov pistol in his hand.

  AFTERWORD

  In the small hours of Tuesday morning, 15 April, American bombers from USAF bases in Britain bombarded the Libyan capital, Tripoli. In the course of the attack, Gadaffi’s base, the Bab Al-Aziziya barracks, was hit.

  It appeared that the raid’s objective was to assassinate Gadaffi. This was what most commentators in the Western media decided. With some pride, many US citizens reached a similar conclusion.

  However, certain facts contradict their belief.

  To begin with, there was the formidable technological sophistication of the American assault aircraft. They had the ability to target with pinpoint accuracy, yet they failed to hit a single one of t
he places in the well-lit Aziziya compound where Gadaffi was known to work or sleep. One bomb did land close enough to his two-storey house to kill his fifteen-month-old adopted daughter and injure two of his other children; but nothing short of a direct nuclear hit could have harmed them if the family had been in the nearby bunker that had been built for them and where they should have been sleeping.

  As for Gadaffi, he wasn’t even in Aziziya that night. He was probably at his main command centre two hundred kilometres south, in the oasis town of Jufrah. If the US military planners didn’t know this for sure, logic would have suggested it to them. Jufrah was where he always went in times of emergency. That period was one of emergency and had been ever since the skirmishes three weeks earlier in the Gulf of Sirte between the US Sixth Fleet and Libyan forces. Finally, prior to the Tripoli raid the US president’s military and intelligence advisers had offered him several alternative methods of assassinating Gadaffi, any one of which would have been more certain to have achieved its aim and some of which could have been completely clandestine. The president rejected them all.

  Far from being eliminated by the raid, therefore, the Libyan leader became a virtual recluse because of it. In so doing, he placed himself beyond the reach of any assassin, Soviet or otherwise.

  In other words, the West had found a way to keep Gadaffi alive.

  As Gorbachev had told Aganbegyan it would.

  *

  In Saudi Arabia, King Fahd made a concession or two to his critics. Sheikh Yamani was the fall guy; Fahd sacked him from his position as oil minister. His passport was confiscated and he was forbidden to leave the country.

  Eventually, some measure of accord was achieved in OPEC over output and pricing. But although prices stabilised to an extent, they never returned to anything like their peak levels.

  Nor did the power of the OPEC cartel.

  *

  In Moscow, Gorbachev was saluted by four standing ovations at the close of the 27th Communist Party Congress. His final message to the five thousand delegates was typical of the new leadership style that he was setting. Rejecting the cheerleading approach of his predecessors, he simply wished the delegates good health and told them: ‘Now go back home and work hard.’

  Politically, he had good reason to feel that the Congress had been a personal success. Over half of the three hundred-plus Central Committee were new men of his caucus. For any leader to bring in so many new people so quickly without a bloody purge was unprecedented.

  Yegor Ligachev’s speech at Congress was strongly supportive of his leader. He commented favourably on the personnel changes, contrasting them with the Brezhnev-type policies of keeping people in jobs for years, which had produced only ‘self-isolation and stagnation’. It was a further warning shot across the bows of the remaining members of the audience whose appointments dated back to the Brezhnev years.

  The Congress pursued two broad strands of thought. There was the need for change at home: again and again Gorbachev hammered home the need to get the economy moving, reduce central control, offer more worker incentives, achieve cost effectiveness and high quality of production, and introduce flexible pricing of goods that would reflect basic laws of supply and demand.

  On foreign policy his prescription for change was no less startling. World communism, although still desirable, was relegated to a distant goal instead of an immediate priority that would be allowed to dominate everything. In other words, military adventurism abroad was to be scaled down. He told the amazed delegates that Western imperialism was no longer a mortal enemy to be quashed at all costs, but merely ‘the society with which we have to coexist and seek paths of accommodation.’

  But in the months that followed, despite Gorbachev’s political success, progress was slow on other fronts. A solution to Afghanistan remained out of reach for over two years. Success in arms control proved hard, despite some bright public-relations highspots. At home, the more that corruption was rooted out, the deeper it seemed to be ingrained. Economic growth continued to lag; workers and management were reluctant to give up the old, comfortable ways of working.

  As for the energy crisis, oil production stayed behind target and the foreign earnings shortfall continued.

  There was something worse.

  On Saturday 26 April, at one twenty-three in the morning, a fearsome explosion tore apart one of the RBMK nuclear reactors that had worried Aganbegyan and the Oligarchy Committee.

  The accident at Chernobyl crippled the Soviet nuclear energy programme and was the worst nuclear accident the world had ever known.

  *

  In Britain the government continued on a stable course with a strong majority in Parliament. After a general election the following year, it went on to a third term. There were no high-level sackings in the intelligence organisations.

  However, a series of deaths began to occur among workers at some of the companies involved in high-technology defence research. These took the form of bizarre and not entirely convincing suicides. The news media were interested for a time, but the stories grew stale.

  The deaths remain unexplained.

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