by John Gardner
As soon as they were parked with engines stopped in a far corner of the facility, away from executive buildings, two cars drove out accompanied by the maintenance van, halting near the steps which had been manhandled into place by a Russian ground crew. One of the cars was a long black Lincoln with tinted windows and big snow tyres.
Two plain-clothes men came on to the aircraft first, smiling and nodding, approaching Natkowitz and Bond with reassuring gestures.
In English they asked for passports in which they quickly stamped entry visas. ‘When you are ready, please come straight down to the Lincoln,’ one of the men nodded to Bond. ‘He’s waiting for you. Oh, and wear your gloves and parkas. Don’t leave skin uncovered. This is very much Russian winter.’ Another broad smile and a cheery nod.
They went down the steps and walked, bundled in heavy parkas, to the long, comfortable looking Lincoln, ice crystals crunching under their mukluks.
In the darkness, snow seemed to surround them, sparkling in the lights from the cars or humped in high dirty banks on either side of cuttings gouged out to make roads and runways accessible. A driver, padded and fur-hatted, descended from the front of the car as they approached, slung their two flight bags into the boot and made hurrying gestures towards the rear passenger door like a sheepdog rounding up and penning a pair of strays.
The heat in the back of the car hit them like a humid front coming in suddenly in the wake of some unusual winter weather pattern.
‘So, you have come. Good. Pleasure! Pleasure to meet you!’ His accent was almost Oxbridge, but came out in a great boom, the sound of a merrymaker, a man of constant good humour. Bond had a clear view of him for the best part of a minute while the interior lights stayed on.
His first impression was of a large, powerful man, the face long and broad with oddly clownish Slavic features, thin light-coloured hair, one wayward lock falling on to his forehead. The man was alive with goodwill, twinkling eyes and a mobile mouth. Instinctively Bond knew he would be a good mimic and an excellent teller of tales, the kind of person who would do all the accents.
‘Stepakov,’ he said, drawing out the second syllable Ste-paaaa-kov, and clutching Bond’s hand with a paw of very large dimensions. Then again, ‘Stepakov,’ to Natkowitz. ‘Friends call me Bory – Boris – but they call me Bory. Please you also call me this, yes?’
‘Delighted,’ Bond felt there was need to put on a kind of silly-ass accent, though it was uncharacteristic, and he could not have said why he did it. ‘James Betteridge. Friends call me James.’
‘Good, so, James. And you must be Pete. London said to call you Pete.’
Natkowitz nodded in the gloom. ‘Newman,’ he said aloud.
‘Da, very good. As in feeling like a new man, eh?’ A gust of laughter, and the car began to pull away from the aircraft around which the ground crew was swarming. The pilot had said they would be on their way back within half-an-hour.
‘New man, as in feeling like a, yes? You wish for something hot? Brandy? Stoly? Coffee?’ Stepakov’s face was occasionally lit as they drove past overhead lights.
They chose coffee, and the Russian proudly opened a built-in bar which contained, among a number of bottles, large flasks of coffee, black and scalding hot.
‘You have used the, how do you say it, the facilities on the aircraft, yes? You have had pee?’
They both nodded.
‘Good. If you want to pee again, let me know in good time and we will arrange something. It will have to be at some service stop. No way you can do it in the open unless you wish to have your genders decapitated, so to speak. Frostbite is no respecter of person or personal effects.’
His laughter was infectious and he moved around a lot in the seat, taking up a great deal of room. The Lincoln had obviously been customised. Bond sat next to the Russian, while Pete Natkowitz faced them on one of a pair of jump seats flanking the cocktail bar.
‘You see, we go quite a long way.’ They could feel the man’s smile.
‘Not just into Moscow?’ Bond asked.
‘Oh, no. Definitely not into Moscow. You think we’re going to give you guided tour of Centre?’
‘We had hoped . . .’ Bond began, and the Russian laughed again.
‘You wanted to see the famous Memory Room where we keep pictures of our most famous spies, yes?’
It was Bond’s turn to smile. ‘It might be useful.’
‘Sure,’ Stepakov rumbled. ‘When I come to London you take me to Special Forces Club, eh? Hans Crescent, Knightsbridge. I see some of the pictures there. Then VIP trip around your Century House. Good for a big laugh.’
‘Welcome you with open arms, Bory.’ Natkowitz nodded in the darkness. ‘Where we going, Bory? Just so that we know.’ His voice was even, but with an undertow of something that bordered on threat.
For a few seconds it was silent in the car. When Stepakov spoke again, all traces of the natural good humour had gone. ‘Okay, I put you straight. Is necessary. Tonight the Chushi Pravosudia did what they promised. The body of a senior First Chief Directorate officer was found, near Exit 95 on the ring road. They discovered his regular driver, drugged and unconscious, right inside the Yasenevo headquarters, and even the legendary Houdini couldn’t get in there. So,’ he seemed to take a long, sad, deep breath, ‘so, is very secret all of this. We don’t wish for it to be known, except for a very select number of trusted people, that you are in the country. These Chushi Pravosudia are serious. We’re certain they have a very sophisticated organisation with people inside KGB and maybe even the Central Committee. They are not just hooligan elements. This is very critical business. Maybe affect the entire leadership, actually. So we have to be circumspect. Secret. We must move like ghosts from the enchanter fleeing – this is your poet Shelley, yes?’
‘Possibly.’ Bond frowned in the dark.
‘Definitely. “Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead/ Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing.” This is definitely Shelley. I read many of your great poets when I first learned English. Wordsworth, Longfellow, Shelley and your last poet of the people, Betjeman. Now him I really enjoyed. Our poets are full of gloom.’
‘Not really up on Shelley, Bory.’ Bond had never been a great one for poetry, unless you counted Homer.
Pete asked again, ‘Where we going, Bory? Or is that too secret even to tell us?’
‘Where do you think? Safe house, of course. Or really a safe dacha.’
‘Ah, we would be talking about something around twenty-five miles west of Moscow then?’
‘About that, yes.’ They were on a main road now, passing through a built-up area and Stepakov’s face was lit up in a strobe effect from the overhead lights. He was smiling and nodding. ‘I think you know the place, James. More coffee?’
Bond was now certain they were heading for either Nikolina Gora, Zhukovka or one of the other communities near them. In the bad old days, these places, west-southwest of the Kremlin, had been the luxury communities, the dachas for favoured writers and artists and the special so-called villages where the Party leaders lived in style. These areas used to be referred to by those in the know as Sovmin or Academic Zhukovka. Sovmin was a well-guarded complex in which Cabinet ministers had their dachas hidden among beautiful woodland below the gentle hills outside Moscow. Bond had no reason to believe that anything had changed in that direction. Maybe the ideology had altered but the leadership would still have its privileges.
‘Just sit back, James, and enjoy the journey.’ Stepakov’s voice took on a soothing tone. ‘You will soon be asked to look at the harder side of life in this winter of discontent we appear to be suffering in Russia. Which means when we turn you loose, you will also suffer a little. Enjoy while you have the chance.’
Bond nodded, sipped his coffee and put his mind into idle. Pete Natkowitz appeared to have fallen asleep.
‘He’s called Boris Stepakov,’ M had said. ‘Boris Ivanovich Stepakov. Forty-five years of age. A career KGB officer with
a lot of experience of terrorist groups throughout the world and an expert on dissidents within the Soviet Union. He’s a product of the Andropov Institute also and he knows his stuff.’
Stepakov’s experience ranged from service with the twentieth department of the First Chief Directorate – dealing with emergent, developing countries – to the investigation department of the Second Chief Directorate, which, in the main, oversees internal security and counterintelligence.
Tanner had said Stepakov was ‘a man of awesome knowledge; in some ways, he wrote the book, literally. A KGB internal publication he called The Stray Dogs, an obvious reference to Qaddafi’s infamous 1985 speech when he ranted about “hunting down stray dogs”.’ ‘We have a right’, Qaddafi had said, ‘to take a legitimate and sacred action – an entire people liquidating its opponents at home and abroad in broad daylight.’
The book dealt in great detail with such incidents as the 1969 attempt on Brezhnev’s life, the many unreported hijackings of the seventies and the bombing of the Moscow subway in 1977. Tanner had claimed Stepakov to have been very honest throughout the book, advising his senior officers that KGB should take care when having dealings with terrorist organisations, particularly the PLO and others in the Middle East. He had even chided the KGB hierarchy and the Central Committee for having had dangerous affairs with Arafat and people like Ilich Ramîrez Sánchez, The Jackal.
‘You will find him exceptional,’ the Chief of Staff had said. ‘Personally, I believe he had a great deal to do with the Soviet change of policy towards international terrorism in the 1980s.’
Now, in the back of the Lincoln, rocking its way through the frozen dark towards God knew where, they had come face to face with Boris Stepakov who was to be their case officer, their control in whatever the Russians needed to do in flushing out the Scales of Justice, the Chushi Pravosudia.
‘You wrote a book, Bory. We’ve been told you wrote an excellent book,’ Bond said after they had covered another mile.
The Russian laughed as though this was a joke. ‘Sure, I wrote a book, but it didn’t get into the best-seller lists, except inside KGB. I was young and foolish – well, maybe not so young, and for “foolish” you should read “honest”. For a time, I thought I’d end up counting the trees.’ He repeated the phrase in Russian, ‘Schitayet derev’ya.’ It meant, in the old Russian argot, being sent to the Gulag.
‘Our people think most highly of it.’
‘They do? Well, it eventually had some success here. I would very much like to be able to write a great novel, but I have been confined to one unpleasant area of life. I am a specialist, so to speak. I was the one who asked for two people from your Service to help us out. There were some here who thought this a very daring move.’ The light caught his face again, for a moment, and Bond thought he saw concern dance across the big Russian’s eyes.
‘We also thought it daring.’ Bond tried to make light of the remark. ‘Some of us thought it insane.’
There was a rumbling chuckle which seemed to come from deep inside Stepakov’s stomach. ‘Perhaps it is insane. Who knows? Personally, I think it’s obvious. We have two English members of this Scales of Justice. Two men who are expected by these people. They are here to do a particular job and we have nobody who could pass themselves off as English. So we come to you.’
‘These two . . .’ Bond began, but Stepakov cut him off.
‘Wait, James. Wait until we can talk in complete security. No, that is not good English. You cannot talk in silence. I mean in absolute security.’ He seemed to glance up and Bond saw that he was looking towards the broad back of the driver who concentrated on the road ahead. ‘He’s silent as a tomb. Been my driver for years. But . . .’
They were in open country now. No lights, just the impression of snow in tall banks, blown from the road to allow free passage of vehicles. Beyond the snowbanks the countryside remained blotted out by darkness. No moon or stars, just a blanket of black like a solid wall. They passed no other vehicles, only the occasional sign of life – a lonely single outpost or a huddle of houses and wooden shacks which made up some village, a small desolate community.
Bond remembered the first time he had driven in the American Midwest. He pictured the vastness of great fields of grain in the Midwest, rippling to the far skyline, knowing that the corn or wheat went on for miles, further than the eye could see. As one who had been born into an island society, he had not been prepared then for the sense of space, and here it was again, even in the darkness – the realisation of being in a country so huge that it could even swallow the vastness of the United States and tuck it away into one corner.
At last they started to slow down and there were signs of life. Buildings and pavements at the sides of the road. Lights, then darkness again. More lights and a sudden turn to the right, taking them on to a broad unmade path where trees suddenly swallowed them up. A security post of some kind and a stunning blast of freezing air as the driver operated his window, threw out a hand and passed a document to a uniformed figure with a submachine gun slung over one shoulder and his face masked against the weather.
They were waved on, and a pair of great metal gates opened ahead of them, leading to a well-made road twisting between trees heavy with snow and ice. The roadway, Bond noticed, was clear and free of ice. Just inside the gates he saw a dark, thick horizontal line signifying the presence of a hidden barrier, probably a tall steel wall which would leap up from the road to stop any attempt at further progress by unauthorised persons.
They drove slowly, the tall firs thick on either side, and through them an occasional wink of light. About a mile further on, another turn to the right, then, suddenly, they burst from the trees, the house appearing as though by some illusion.
It was large – a two-storey structure mainly of wood with a low overhanging roof and windows set well back. Broad steps led up to what appeared to be the main door, though the entire structure was surrounded by a wooden platform, the roof supported by carved wooden pillars, a porch on which to laze during summer.
The thick dark circle of trees, the ice and the snow painted a raw picture. Whenever they tried to capture a scene like this in films, even on a real location, Bond considered, they failed utterly. The reality was always harsher, for in spite of the beauty of this house in the large clearing of firs, the impact upon the eyes, and then the mind, was bleak.
To the right of the house three cars were already parked – two saloons and one that looked like a Range Rover, all with broad, studded winter tyres. The place was bathed in light from the windows and from hidden exterior bulbs, and Bond had to admire the way in which the dacha had been shielded from view until almost the final moment.
Natkowitz stirred and Stepakov shifted his bulk with a sigh. ‘We’re here. Wake up, Mr Pete, Mr New Man,’ he split the name in two.
‘Ah!’ Pete gave an imitation of a hibernating animal making its first stir after the winter. ‘This is it? We came all this way just to visit a ski lodge?’
Two men came down the broad wooden steps, opening the doors, taking their luggage from the boot, assisting them out and motioning them towards the door.
They walked from the freezing air into warmth from hidden heating and a large wood-burning stove in the great hallway. There was a smell of polish, wood and strong cigarette smoke. Bond’s first thought was of descriptions he had read as a boy, descriptions of hunting lodges in The Prisoner of Zenda, or books of adventure by Dornford Yates. It was all there, from the polished floor, the rugs, the trophies on the walls, to the deep leather chairs and the feeling of height and space. A wide uncarpeted staircase curved down from a gallery which traversed the entire hallway and great carved beams angled up to the steep roof.
The door closed behind them and for the first time they saw Stepakov clearly – a tall, big man, smiling happily as he unzipped his long padded coat. He nodded to the pair of men who had come down to the car.
‘These are my assistants.’ His voice boomed like
a man with slight hearing loss who compensated by speaking too loudly. It was as though he were breaking some accepted behaviour, a boorish tourist talking stridently in a cathedral where people were worshipping. ‘Alex and Nicki.’ He introduced them, the two men coming forward and shaking hands without a hint of deference.
Alex was short and plump with a face straight from the Tenniel illustrations of Tweedledum and Tweedledee in Through the Looking Glass. Nicki was slim, dark, good-looking and muscular. He moved like a street fighter, and the same arrogance showed in his eyes. They were both dressed casually, and Bond instinctively tagged them as highly trained muscle, not knuckle-draggers but men with sharp IQs. They certainly worked as a pair, for their movements complemented one another and they seemed to hang on Stepakov’s words in unspoken loyalty.
‘Come, you’ll be hungry.’ Stepakov was now revealed to be dressed as casually as his assistants, in slacks, heavy sweater and a checkered shirt, unbuttoned at the neck. The slacks were baggy and crumpled as though he had slept in them – a man dressed for comfort, or action. The butt of an automatic pistol, tucked firmly into the small of his back, protruded from his waistband. He carried it as though the weapon was part of his body, a sign instantly recognisable to Bond. Now Stepakov led the way past the staircase to double doors which he flung open to reveal a long and wide room dominated by a table piled high with food.
Natkowitz’s eyes slewed towards Bond and he raised one eyebrow, for the spread laid out for them was enough to feed all five men for about a week – plates of pirogi, the glorious pies and pasties famous for their myriad fillings of egg, cabbage, sour cream, cucumber; large assorted plates of zakuski, salmon, herring, caviar, cold meats, salads, great loaves of black bread and salvers of blinis to eat with the smoked fish and caviar.
‘Come, eat and drink. This is the best way we can get to know one another.’ Stepakov strode to a separate table at the far end of the room, where serried ranks of bottles were ranged with military precision – wines from Moldavia to Armenia. ‘We prefer sweet wines, James and Pete. You, from my studies, seem to like a drier variety . . .’