We couldn’t enlighten them, but, apart from emphasizing they’d be reporting this development to their governments, there wasn’t much they could do without scuppering the outcome of the meeting, which they didn’t have the authority to do. X himself told us the less we knew the better.
There was a final wrap-up session during which Slavsky vented some of his contempt for Gorbachev and his outrage about what was happening to his country before we downed shots of vodka with varying degrees of enthusiasm and said our farewells.
Before leaving in the car Norrback had laid on, Slavsky enveloped X in a bear-hug. There was no doubt they understood one another perfectly. A deal had been done.
‘I’ll be keeping a close eye on the ticker tape when we get back to HQ,’ Hexter said to me in an undertone as the car headed away along the drive. ‘I reckon there could be some interesting developments in Moscow in the days ahead.’
I couldn’t summon a reply. I’d done what I’d been told to do. But I didn’t like it. I’d been in the Service sixteen years and I’d never had such a feeling of … moral contamination.
‘Don’t look so miserable,’ said Hexter. ‘Remember, this wasn’t our choice.’
‘You can say that again.’
‘I probably will. When we know what the consequences are.’
Ah, the consequences.
I didn’t want to think too much about what those were going to be as the party broke up. Curtis and Bourdil went their separate ways, then we left with X, heading for the Airport Hilton. We weren’t due to fly back to London until the following morning. Norrback shot me a glance as he saw us off that spoke volumes. He didn’t think we had anything to be proud of and he barely acknowledged X’s effusive thanks.
‘Bit of a cold fish, our host,’ X remarked as we drove away.
‘That’s the Finns for you,’ said Hexter. And X laughed.
But I didn’t.
And none of us was laughing an hour later, when the news reached us.
It came in a phone call from Norrback. Slavsky’s plane had blown up shortly after clearing the Finnish coast. Completely destroyed. No possibility of survivors. Wreckage scattered across the sea. ‘I am sorry,’ he said. And there really wasn’t anything else he could say.
Hexter was surprised, but not shocked. ‘The KGB hasn’t lost its teeth, then. What a waste of time and effort – and life, of course.’
The KGB’s responsibility seemed clear. We reckoned they must have sent agents into Finland to plant a bomb on the plane while Slavsky was busy conferring with us. Detonating it just after the plane had cleared the coast suggested they wanted to minimize the recovery of evidence. Slavsky had friends in high places. But he had enemies too. And now they had struck.
We notified HQ and watched the coverage on the TV news. The commentary was in Finnish, of course, but we got the gist. A private plane with four people on board had taken off from Torbacka airfield late that afternoon, booked destination the Åland Islands, and exploded over the sea south-west of Helsinki. But the plane’s route suggested they weren’t actually going to the Åland Islands at all. Staff at the airfield said the four had spoken to each other in Russian. It was all very mysterious.
Except to us. When we broke the news to X, he reacted as if this was a possibility he had foreseen all along. ‘Disappointing. Very disappointing.’ As to what would happen now Slavsky’s coup was stillborn, all he said was, ‘We shall just have to trust to luck, gentlemen. Maybe this was a falling-out amongst plotters. Maybe they’ll still go ahead.’
Hexter and I agreed that was whistling in the wind. The conspirators would go to ground now. Gorbachev was safe. For the time being, anyway.
I can’t pretend I was altogether sorry. I mean, I was sorry Slavsky and his companions had died, obviously, but I’d been unhappy about the whole project. Part of me was relieved the KGB had given us a way out of a deal that could have turned seriously sour.
We flew back to London the following morning, straight into a vigorous debriefing at Century House. C was livid about what had happened, though it seemed to me he was angrier with our political masters for putting us in such a position than with us for failing to anticipate how it might end. The conclusion was that officially we’d never met Slavsky. The Americans and the French signed up to that as well. No one had gone to Helsinki to meet anyone. There’d been no contact of any kind.
Fortunately, the fax X had handed to Slavsky had been destroyed in the explosion. X himself had no formal government standing. And I was able to confirm Norrback had never known the reason for the meeting – a meeting everyone who’d attended it now agreed had never actually taken place. A small piece of history had ceased to exist.
‘I spent last weekend quietly at home,’ Hexter said to me over coffee. ‘And I happen to know you did too.’
We moved on and were happy to do so. The world moved on too. Gorbachev was rapturously received by the crowds when he attended East Germany’s fortieth anniversary celebrations. ‘Gorby, Gorby, Gorby,’ they chanted. They couldn’t get enough of him. And while he was there he put a stop to Honecker’s plan to stage a Tiananmen Square of his own a few days later. The Stasi was forced to let protesters have their say. There was to be no bloodshed. And without bloodshed – or the threat of it – there was no control.
Honecker disappeared into retirement a week or so later. The ground was shifting beneath our feet. And on the ninth of November, the first cracks appeared in the Berlin Wall. Thousands of East Germans crossed into West Germany that night. The Iron Curtain had opened. And it could never be closed. What Slavsky and his co-conspirators had hoped to prevent had come to pass. Nothing would ever be the same again.
Politicians adapt more quickly than most. It goes with the job, I suppose. There were no votes to be won by mourning the loss of Cold War stability when our TV screens were filled every night with pictures of ecstatic young Germans tearing down the Berlin Wall. Whatever reservations our leaders had were stifled. They embraced the future. And no one – absolutely no one – wanted to hear anything that suggested they’d ever tried to stop that future in its tracks. Our abortive mission to Helsinki became an unmentioned, in fact unmentionable, subject.
I kept my head down and Hexter went back to Hong Kong to tie up the loose ends of Operation Yellowbird. ‘Out of harm’s way,’ as he put it. He didn’t take me with him, as I’d hoped. Instead, I was dispatched to Rome, to dig up whatever I could about the Andreotti government’s attitude to the changes sweeping eastern Europe.
It wasn’t much of a mission. Italy didn’t call the shots, in NATO or the EU – the European Community, as it was then. So nobody really cared what they thought. But it was categorized as useful background information and, as Hexter said to me, Rome was a congenial place to lie low while my involvement with Slavsky slipped further and further out of our masters’ minds. ‘Treat it as a holiday,’ he advised. ‘You deserve one.’
My cover was checking security at the British Visa Office, which involved my putting in a few token appearances there and not much else. Otherwise, I was left to my own devices. I didn’t get the feeling anyone was impatiently awaiting my report back in London. I was, for the time being, a forgotten man.
I had the use of an apartment near the Piazza Navona. It was tiny, with eccentric plumbing, and was wedged under the roof at the top of a crumbling old building in a winding little alley off Via dei Coronari.
I could have grouched around the city feeling sorry for myself, I suppose, but, actually, as the weeks passed and days of torrential rain alternated with days of diamond-sharp light, I slipped into one of the most contented passages of my life. Autumn in Rome, with little work to do and plenty of time to do it in. What wasn’t there to like?
My only contact on government policy was a boozy old senator and former minister who turned out to be good for nothing except drinking at my expense. Before I gave up on him, though, he mentioned his niece was employed as an English interpreter in the Prime Minist
er’s office in Palazzo Chigi and could arrange a guided tour of the building if I was interested. I think that was his way of telling me I wasn’t going to get anything useful out of him.
Never look a gift horse in the mouth. I didn’t need a guided tour of Palazzo Chigi, of course. But an interpreter in the Prime Minister’s office? You never know what might come of that. So I called her. And, after I’d had the tour, I called her again to thank her.
I think I was already in love with Cinzia Bianconi by the time we had our first actual date. She was beautiful and elegant, in the Italian way, and I could happily have listened to her speaking her softly accented brand of English all day, especially if I could gaze into her sloe-coloured eyes while I was about it. She was lovely. And my life had been short of loveliness for far too long.
We soon began an affair. Cinzia lived in Prati with her parents, who couldn’t be told anything about me because they were still hoping she’d be reconciled with her husband, whom she’d abandoned in Milan. Rinaldo was a dullard with a violent streak, according to Cinzia. There was no prospect of her going back to him and divorce was her intention, but it was going to take some time to accustom Mamma e Papà to the idea. And springing me on them wouldn’t help.
Where I figured in Cinzia’s future was hard to say and certainly we never looked much further ahead than the following week. Dinner. The cinema, with Cinzia whispering translations of the dialogue to me. Long afternoons in my apartment. Slow walks through Rome by night. They were the coordinates of our relationship. I was happy. She was happy. We were happy. And I just wanted it to go on for ever.
Soon, I was hardly bothering to keep up much of a pretence of doing what I’d been sent to Rome to do. But nobody back in London seemed to care. I was my own boss. And the only opinion I cared about was Cinzia’s.
The affairs of the outside world faded into relative insignificance. I followed them as far as I did on the World Service and in the pages of the Herald Tribune. Kohl was working for German reunification. The régime in Czechoslovakia was tottering. There were rumblings in Romania. Events were playing out very much as Slavsky – and others who’d never admit as much – had feared they would.
I remember reading one Herald Tribune article in particular sitting in the December sunshine outside a caffè in Piazza Farnese. Cinzia was going to cook supper at my apartment that evening and I’d just bought some vegetables at the market in Campo de’ Fiori. They were in a bag on the chair beside me. I remember all the particularities of the scene, even though there was no reason to at the time. The reason came later. The significance of what I read was another week away from dawning on me.
The article was about a surprise visit to Beijing by Bush’s senior representatives, Scowcroft and Eagleburger. The stated reason for the visit was to brief the Chinese on a recent NATO summit, but an end to China’s post-Tiananmen quarantine was also mooted. The two men met all the senior figures and had a cosy chat with Deng Xiaoping. It sounded to the Herald Tribune as if Bush was going soft on the Chinese. It sounded that way to me too.
I didn’t really care, though. They could all play their cards in the game of realpolitik and take their winnings or bear their losses as events dictated. I wanted no part of it.
But what I wanted or didn’t want was supremely irrelevant. I was part of it. I could never be otherwise. I was deluding myself in thinking my carefree existence in Rome could just drift pleasurably on. I wasn’t there because I’d been forgotten. I was there because that was where they wanted me to be. Because that was where they knew they could find me. When the time came.
And it wasn’t long in coming. The following Saturday, Cinzia and I saw a film and went for supper afterwards at a cosy little restaurant. She’d been distracted all afternoon and eventually told me why. She’d heard from a friend that Rinaldo had been sacked from his job and had left Milan, saying he was going back to Rome. That wasn’t good news, of course, but I tried to reassure her he probably wasn’t going to contact her. But she wasn’t reassured and, suddenly, late in the meal, she looked out of the window and thought she saw Rinaldo watching us from the other side of the street.
I didn’t see him myself. He dodged out of sight as soon as Cinzia spotted him. It occurred to me she was so worried she might actually have imagined he was there, though I didn’t suggest that to her. She called him uno mostro – a monster. I had him down as something less forbidding. I was confident I could handle him if I needed to.
Cinzia always went home on Saturday nights to spend Sunday with her parents. It was expected, as part of an unspoken bargain that meant they never asked where she was, or who with, during the week. Normally, she took the Metro, but she was so spooked by the Rinaldo business that I put her in a taxi.
I took a few precautions walking home that night: some double-backs and detours intended to flush out anyone who might be following me. No one was. I hadn’t expected there would be. I wasn’t worried. Yet.
I had an early Sunday morning routine of taking a run along the riverside. Down by the Tiber at dawn, away from the traffic – those runs are one of my happiest memories of Rome. I used to follow the east bank from Ponte Sant’Angelo round to Ponte Sisto, then the west bank back to Sant’Angelo.
By the time I crossed Ponte Sant’Angelo at the end of the run, the novelty-sellers and tourists were already out. I did my best to ignore them. In my mind, I was still down by the river.
Suddenly, a man was standing in front of me, shouting and jabbing his finger. He was thirtyish, dark-skinned, with a lot of greasy black hair and a few days’ growth of beard. He was wearing jeans and a leather jacket. He could have stepped straight out of any Roman crowd. As to what he was shouting, my Italian wasn’t good enough to keep pace with his words, but I caught enough of them – bastardo, intruso, adultero – to get the message. And he mentioned Cinzia by name several times, so there wasn’t any doubt who he was.
He shoved me violently enough at one point to upset a street trader’s display of Gucci handbags, which sparked a lot of shouting and gesticulating from the salesman as well. Several of the other traders seemed inclined to join in, at which point Rinaldo lost interest and hurried off, shouting a few parting threats and insults at me as he left.
I headed back to my apartment, worrying about what I’d tell Cinzia and how we were going to cope with what I’d now mentally categorized as the Rinaldo problem. Life clearly wasn’t quite as free and easy as I’d allowed myself to believe. There’s always a serpent in paradise.
The disturbing question was how Rinaldo had known where to find me. He hadn’t followed me the night before, I felt certain. Was it just a coincidence? I wasn’t buying that. What was the explanation, then?
I began to wonder if he could have spoken to some friend of Cinzia’s and learnt from her about our relationship. It was possible Cinzia had let slip that I worked, at least in theory, at the British Visa Office. Could someone there have given Rinaldo my address? They certainly shouldn’t have. But …
I gave the apartment building a thorough recce before going in. There was no sign of Rinaldo. But, strangely, someone was keeping a watch on the entrance, from a nearby doorway. He was nothing like as inconspicuous as he thought he was. But, then, he wasn’t trained for that kind of thing.
‘What the hell are you doing here, Tahvo?’ The question, posed when I was close enough to touch his shoulder and he still hadn’t noticed me, made him start violently.
I smiled. I was actually pleased to see him, however unexpected the visit. But Norrback didn’t smile back. He looked deadly serious. ‘I guess it’s good news you don’t know why I’m here. If you don’t know.’
I assured him I didn’t. Then I asked how he’d found out where I lived. He’d called in a favour with someone at the Finnish embassy, apparently, who’d spoken to someone at the British embassy on his behalf. He wouldn’t name names.
‘I’m supposed to be in Brussels for talks about Finland joining the European Community. I will need to
be back there tomorrow. None of this’ – by this he seemed to mean the effort of travelling to Rome to see me – ‘has been easy to arrange.’
‘So, why have you arranged it?’
‘Are you sure you don’t know?’
‘I’m sure.’
‘And I can trust you, can’t I?’
‘You know you can.’
‘Yes. I know.’ But he didn’t look as if he knew.
‘What’s the matter, Tahvo?’
‘I’m not sure. But if I’m right … for you, a lot.’
‘D’you want to come up to my flat for a chat?’
‘No. I’d rather talk … in the open.’ That sounded worrying. And the way he glanced past me and then over his shoulder wasn’t any less worrying.
‘I really need to take a shower. I’ve been running.’
‘OK. I’ll wait down here.’
‘You may as well wait in my flat.’
‘No.’ He licked his lips nervously. ‘I’d prefer … not.’
I looked at him long and hard then. There was clearly something wrong. Something very wrong. ‘Forget the shower, Tahvo. Just tell me what’s going on.’
‘You haven’t heard?’
‘Heard what?’
‘Curtis is dead. Hit by a car while jogging in Washington on Thursday. Bourdil is dead too. A heart attack, so they say. While swimming. In Paris. Yesterday morning.’
‘My God. Really? Both of them?’
Norrback nodded. ‘Both.’
‘That can’t—’
Norrback nodded again. ‘No. It can’t, can it?’
There was a lot to take in and none of it was good. It was asking a lot to believe Curtis and Bourdil’s deaths weren’t linked in some way. But, if they were, then I was linked to them too. ‘I haven’t heard anything about this,’ was all I could say for the moment.
‘Why are you in Rome, my friend?’
‘Oh, some two-bit assignment.’
‘Which someone else could easily have done?’
One False Move Page 15
