Hopscotch

by Brian Garfield

  Ross pulled his hands out of his pockets, empty. Cutter said, “We didn’t bring a camera. Or a microphone.”

  “Then none of us is wired for sound,” Yaskov said.

  Ross murmured, “Are we just going to take his word for that?”

  “Why not?” Cutter said offhandedly; then he went back to Yaskov: “You weren’t in earshot when I introduced Smith to Ivanovitch.”

  “It might have been Jones, mightn’t it.”

  Both of them laughed a little and then Cutter said, “There’s a little problem about all this.”

  “I wish you Americans didn’t always think of things in terms of problems and solutions.”

  “I’d call this a problem, quite specifically. It’s got more than one solution. That’s where you and I have trouble. You want him alive—you want to milk him. We don’t particularly want that to happen.”

  “As a matter of policy it is more important to my government that Kendig be neutralized than that he be brought home for questioning. I hope that clarifies my position?”

  “You’d rather have half a loaf than none?”

  “Precisely.”

  “My, you folks are getting flexible this year.”

  “I’m happy you appreciate that. Do we have a basis for cooperation, Mr. Cutter?”

  “I’ll put it to my superiors.”

  “And your own recommendation to them will be?”

  “It will be negative.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “I hope you are,” Cutter said.

  Yaskov inspected a fingernail. “I do hope nothing’s happened to him.”

  “Yes. You’d be embarrassed if some third-rate power reached him ahead of you.”

  “So would you, Mr. Cutter.”

  “I don’t think you need worry that anything’s happened to him. Things don’t happen to Miles Kendig. He happens to them.”

  Yaskov nodded as if on consideration he agreed. Then he said, “I fear your superiors will honor your negative recommendation.”

  “I imagine they will.”

  Yaskov’s sigh was gentle. “A word in private, then.” He took Cutter away a little distance. Ross saw him lean forward, intending Cutter to listen to him, staring straight into Cutter’s face. The icy ruthlessness of the eyes unnerved Ross; it was a point-blank stare that destroyed the barriers of ordinary defense and pretense. Yaskov spoke, Cutter nodded; then Yaskov crooked his finger and Ivanovitch stirred. Yaskov bobbed his cane toward Ross and went away, Ivanovitch hurrying after.

  Ross said, “What did he say?”

  “Kendig called him from Stockholm. Yaskov believes he went on to Helsinki from there.”

  “A lot of this is going by too fast for me,” Ross said as they turned off the Champs. “Why’d he give it to us for free?”

  “Because it’s true he’d prefer half a loaf to none. He’d rather we nail Kendig than not see him nailed at all. He tried to bargain, we called his bluff and he had no choice but to give in to us for nothing.”

  “You’ve got to be a Machiavelli in this business.”

  “You’ll pick it up as you go along, Ross.”

  “What was all that about Ivanovitch’s camera?”

  “They haven’t got you taped. They don’t know who you are. I didn’t see any point making it easy for them—we might want to use you in the field after this. Ivanovitch didn’t matter, he’s on tape everywhere west of Warsaw—his name’s Kirovoi, he’s an errand boy. One look at him and you know what he is and what he does.”

  “But you brought me along instead of somebody like him.”

  “I wanted you to meet Yaskov,” Cutter said.

  “I’m glad you did. It was an education.”

  “There aren’t many left like him,” Cutter told him. They turned in at the door and The Lemon Taster gave them an acidulous glance. Cutter said to her, “I’ll want six field men upstairs at half-past six. The best you’ve got. Clear it through Follett. And book us eight seats on the first flight to Helsinki after nine tonight.”

  “Yes sir. This came for you.”

  It was a postcard from Stockholm. Cutter let Ross read it over his shoulder.

  Having wonderful time. Wish you were here. M.K.

  Cutter’s bark of laughter startled The Lemon Taster.

  – 20 –

  FROM A KIOSK in Stockmann in Helsinki he made one call to London and then he rode a taxi to the airport and made it onto the British Airways Boeing with only a few minutes to spare. Snow-flakes drifted past in the night when they lifted off. He catnapped most of the way to Heathrow and walked through customs with only a routine glance at the Jules Parker passport. He rode the bus in from the airport to the terminal in Kensington and then did a little charade designed to disclose a tail, transferring from tube-train to red bus to taxi; he left the taxi in Regent Street and backtracked by bus into Kensington and walked down to the Kingston Close Hotel in its mewsish seclusion behind the boutique that used to be Derry & Toms.

  He told the hall porter he was in London on business from Bradford in the north; he put on a broad Yorkshire accent and therefore wasn’t asked for a passport. He signed in as Reginald Davies and let a porter carry his bag up to the room.

  The hotel was comfortable but neither grandiose nor luxurious; it attracted commercial travelers from New Zealand and Scotland, dowager aunts from South Africa. He’d met a contact here once but he’d never booked into the hotel; it wasn’t a place where they’d start looking for him.

  He sent down for a pint of Dewar’s. Afterward he had to think a moment why he’d done that—it wasn’t his usual Scotch but it would not have been prudent to order Haig. Then he remembered who it was that drank Dewar’s.

  He had a shower and found the bottle in the room; he poured two fingers into a tumbler and sat in the easy chair to think out the moves—his and theirs.

  Yaskov knew three things he hadn’t known before. One: he’d seen the manuscript so he realized Kendig knew far more than anyone had thought he knew. Two: Kendig had been in Stockholm fourteen hours ago. Three: Kendig was traveling as Jules Parker and had flown from Stockholm to Helsinki under that name.

  Cutter would have him out of Madrid by now; he’d have traced Kendig through Orly at least as far as Copenhagen by now and he too would know the Jules Parker ID. That was because Cutter and Yaskov had their stringers out—they’d have to have them out by now—and it would have been no great trick for them to canvass the airports in the guise of national or Interpol officers; they’d have sifted descriptions and names, eliminated the genuine travelers and narrowed the suspect list to not more than three or four, of whom the only repeat would be Jules Parker.

  The teaser phone call he’d made from Helsinki would bring the British into it as well. Yaskov might be a few hours ahead of the Americans, a few hours behind the British; but quite likely they’d all collide at Heathrow. The odds were that within twelve hours both Cutter and Yaskov would bring their physical presences into London.

  Anticipating the hunter’s moves was always dicey. You might be too slow, too stupid; there was also the chance of being too clever—expecting them to move faster than they actually moved. That could be equally dangerous.

  The British would put Chartermain on it. About a thousand RAF pilots—the few to whom so many owed so much—had won the Battle of Britain; half of them had been killed; among the surviving Spitfire pilots had been Chartermain but he’d lost his left leg to a Messerschmidt in September 1940 and they’d transferred him into Intelligence. He’d run some of the Double-Cross agents until the end of the war and then he’d moved over to MI6. Kendig was now in the jurisdiction of MI5 but that wouldn’t take it out of Chartermain’s control any more than the FBI business had taken it out of Cutter’s control in Georgia.

  So he was dealing with Cutter, Yaskov, Chartermain and indeterminate lesser fry from the French SDECE, the ex-Abwehr West Germans, the East German BND and whatever peanut agencies felt too vain to delegate the respon
sibility to the big boys. It made for an obvious question: to what extent would they reinforce one another and to what extent would they get in one another’s way?

  In keeping with that would be the internal abrasions in the American operation. Cutter would be using Follett’s personnel because there was no other source. Cutter had despised Glenn Follett for years. Myerson wisely had seen to it that the two men worked in separate districts but now that safety device had been neutralized. Follett spent his life playing the role of bumbleheaded loudmouth and Cutter never had been willing to see past that defensive screen; actually while Follett ran a loose ship he had a good talent and his achievements were commendable. But Cutter wasn’t comfortable with people who acted as if they didn’t know what they were doing; he had a few blind spots and one of them was a tendency to refuse to credit professionalism to those who lacked the appearance of professionalism.

  Yaskov was a different artifact; he had the difficulties of bureaucracy but no one in his organization disputed his leadership. There was a temptation in nearly every human being to imitate that which he hated: men often displayed the very characteristics they most loathed in their fathers. Philosophically Yaskov was a dedicated Marxist, according to his lights; he believed honestly in the sort of society that encouraged five-year plans for the proletariat; but he was the son of a czarist officer and preferred elegance to efficiency, noblesse oblige to democraticization. In the elitist hierarchy of the Soviet KGB he enjoyed the privileged position of a Richelieu. He was a romantic and vanity dominated him; he would run the hunt with all his brilliant skill and energy because Kendig’s freedom would be a personal challenge to his pride.

  Chartermain was yet another factor: Chartermain was an imperial colonialist. He surrounded himself with staff who possessed ultra-English names like Colin and Derek. Most of the world was inhabited by poor ruddy bastards or bloody wogs. Chartermain’s wife was “the memsahib.” His operations displayed a genteel and sophisticated casualness that took civil service bureaucracy into account and assumed that they should muddle through anyhow. In his chortling fashion Chartermain probably had found and blown the whistle on more Soviet plants than had any other counter-espionage chief in the West.

  Kendig had invited only the very best people to the ball.

  They would run the usual drill: question airline counter people at Heathrow, taxi drivers, rent-a-car girls. They’d put people on the taxi stand outside the West End terminal. They’d keep bumping into one another and the people interviewed would let their questioners know that they’d been interviewed more than once. Gradually each agency would accrete a picture of its opponents’ operations. Either they’d begin to confer or they’d proceed independently with the jealous pretense that the others didn’t exist.

  In any case they’d achieve facts which were mainly negative but no less important on that account. They’d find out he hadn’t flown on from Heathrow. Cutter, with the advantage of knowing through Saint-Breheret that Kendig had a blank French passport, might treat with Chartermain to have all ports of embarkation watched for both Jules Parker and a French emigrant who fitted Kendig’s description. The fact was that Kendig didn’t have the French passport—he’d left it in the safe in Paris.

  They’d find out he hadn’t taken a taxi from the airport or from the West End terminal. They might find out he’d taken the limo bus from Heathrow to the terminal but in any event they’d lose the trail there; he’d covered his tracks between terminal and hotel. They’d canvass hotels for Jules Parker, not for Reginald Davies.

  They’d know quite positively that he was in England. But that was like looking for a needle in Nebraska. Knowing he was on the island but not knowing where, they’d get snappish. Irritably they’d blame one another. They’d get into a hell of a flap. It was fun to contemplate.

  But it wasn’t enough. He couldn’t sit cooped up and satisfy himself with visualizations of their confusion. Passivity wasn’t the object of the game.

  He’d have to come out in the open. Sting them.

  Six years ago he’d spent months in the Middle East pulling the camouflage off the Soviet-sponsored arms traffic in heavy arms to Al Fatah. They were getting armored vehicles, field guns, long-range mortars, even ground-to-air missiles. These came from various sources—Arab governments, Czechs, arms merchants in the West—but the job was to determine how the stuff found its way to the secluded desert camps of the Palestinian liberation armies. It had become evident the smugglers’ route was as neatly laid out and maintained as the Ho Chi Minh Trail. It had befallen Kendig to find and close it.

  The job had required liaison with MI6 because Aden, which was British-occupied, was a key distribution point on the arms route. Local apparatchiks kept kicking the buck upstairs until Kendig had been obliged to fly out to London, meet with the top man and smooth out the arrangements.

  The top man had been Chartermain and the meeting had taken place on a Sunday—not in White-hall but in Chartermain’s home in Knightsbridge, a detached Victorian manse in a mews: too large for practical living but then Chartermain and his memsahib were given to lavish entertaining. Chartermain used his study there as a second office; it was a good deal more than the usual gentleman’s library.

  An excellent way to enrage a lion was to disturb its den.

  Luck could run bad; there was always the danger of the unhappy coincidence; there’d be scores or hundreds of them searching for him and if he spent a lot of time in public places there was the risk of someone’s fortuitously spotting him. Pure accident like that accounted for a large number of man-hunting coups; pure accident like that was not accident at all but a mere mathematical long shot—if they kept enough people searching long enough then the chances of their finding him increased geometrically with the passage of time and the accretion of clues.

  When he went out of the hotel he avoided using the lift which could be a trap; he used the stairs. When he set out for the first time he did it during the morning rush and melted into crowds. Impulse made him cache the manuscript: he removed the pages from the false-bottomed suitcase, crept to the basement with them and found the domestic supply cupboard, a fair-sized room filled with mops and dustcloths and bedding fresh from the laundry, hampers on wheels for the daily room changings, cartons of loo paper and hotel-size bars of soap, brooms, vacuum cleaners, spray polishes and the like. He opened a bar-soap carton and counted the contents and multiplied that figure by the three dozen cartons stacked against the wall and concluded it would be at least seven weeks before they got down to the last carton in the stack, if they didn’t cover it again with fresh supplies; he emptied the carton he’d opened, put the manuscript in it, filled the rest with soap bars and rearranged the stack with the manuscript carton at the back and bottom of everything. He marked it with a little pencil cross that nobody would notice unless he was looking for it and knew what it meant. He carried the excess bars of soap out of the hotel in an ordinary paper bag and disposed of them miles away in a sidewalk dustbin.

  When he made his first evening reconnaissance he went out at dusk when the light was poorest. He used the underground a bit but mostly buses; never taxis.

  Chartermain’s garden was a horseshoe around the house, well tended but drab this late in the year. On the fourth side—the left—a paved lane ran past the kitchen door, made a little dogleg at the rear corner of the house and ran on through the back garden to a coach house that had been converted into a garage with servants’ quarters upstairs—a remodeling job that had been done in the 1920s when occupants of such a house could afford a large staff. Goosenecked streetlamps bathed the front garden and the porte-cochere but the lane went back through a patch of shadow beyond the kitchen; the illumination at the rear was poor, thrown by a single lamp high on the side of the coach house at the head of an outside stair that clung to the ivied wall.

  Past the garage the lane continued in a gentle bend, going on between two five-story Georgian monoliths into a street beyond. But there was a gate across
the front of the lane and at its other end a chain hung across it to prevent traffic; it was no thoroughfare out of the mews.

  It took him several days to work out the population and routines of the household. There were two servants; they looked like husband and wife; they lived in the quarters above the coach house. Presumably the maids’ and butler’s quarters in the main house were unoccupied—perhaps closed off to conserve heat. The wife evidently performed as housekeeper and cook, the husband as butler, chauffeur, gardener and handyman. On the second night of his surveillance there was a gathering of eight couples among whom Kendig recognized a member of Parliament and a man who had been, and perhaps still was, the Deputy F. O. Secretary to whom Chartermain’s department reported through the Chief of MI6. On that occasion two additional servants worked in the house but they went home afterward and presumably had been supplied by some agency on a temporary basis.

  Each morning a Humber saloon piloted by a liveried driver—a government employee—collected Chartermain and drove him away to his duties. The garage housed two automobiles—an Austin Mini which the servant husband used for errands and the wife for shopping, and a Jaguar 3.8 saloon which the memsahib used twice in the four days, both times for afternoon excursions lasting several hours (shopping? hairdresser? liaison with lover?); she drove herself. When she returned she let herself into the house with a single key, indicating there was no burglar alarm system. That conformed with what he knew of Chartermain; the man was as old-fashioned as Yaskov, he probably had contempt for gadgets and gimmicks and the electronics of modern espionage.

  He performed his surveillance from stolen cars, He would boost a car, park it somewhere in the mews and watch the house; he would drive the car to another part of London and abandon it within a few hours before the description could have got onto the hot-sheets.

  His break came on the Thursday evening. The servant husband emerged from the kitchen door carrying two valises; the memsahib, who was quite trim and attractive in her lean fifties, came along a moment later tugging on her gloves with brisk little jerks. She wore a topcoat and a little pincushion hat—a traveling outfit. The servant fed the luggage into the boot of the Jaguar and the memsahib smiled and spoke, got into the car and backed it out into the mews and drove away. Chartermain had private means and a country estate; quite likely she was going down to Kent for the weekend.