by John Gardner
The package contained a thick wad of traveller’s cheques, some cash in English and Finnish notes, a valid American Express card, plus a Visa card issued by one of the major German banks, air tickets, travel documents and a passport which said Lyko was a German computer programmer. Other papers and pocket litter suggested he was en route to London for a course due to begin at the British offices of a multinational software firm, on January 2nd. Lyko’s new name was Dieter Frobe. As ever, the professor’s wife, an untidy, listless, heavy drinker, remained in the dark about her husband’s double life. She asked no questions as long as there was a good supply of Stoly in the apartment. The activator, Optimum, came, over the telephone, at 2 a.m. Friday, December 28th. The flight left at 8.40 a.m.
Herr Frobe came into Heathrow on time, passed through immigration and customs without setting off any bells or whistles, and took a taxi to one of those richly named, utilitarian hotels which litter the warren of streets around the junction of the Edgware Road and Oxford Street. This one, which he had never used before, lay behind the large department store, Selfridges. By midday, he had walked into Oxford Street itself and eaten a meal of shrimp cocktail, rump steak and trifle at an Angus Steak House near Marble Arch. At three in the afternoon he made his first telephone call, from a public box in Orchard Street.
A woman answered, her voice immediately recognisable. The moment he heard it, Lyko became obsessed with the idea that there might be a problem.
‘Can I speak to Guy?’
‘Sorry, Guy’s out. I’ll take a message . . . Hey, is that Brian?’
‘Yes, it’s Brian. Will he be long, Guy, I mean?’
‘No idea, Brian. Where’ve you been hiding yourself?’
‘Helen, I need to speak with him, it’s . . .’
‘He’s over at the Beeb. Something to do with a job. Seeing some producer who says he can use him. Is this urgent? Is it . . . ?’
‘Yes. Very urgent.’
The Beeb, Lyko knew, was the way people spoke of the British Broadcasting Corporation. He cursed, silently. If Guy was at the Beeb, heaven knew when he would be back. The Beeb often used freelance cameramen like Guy on overseas documentaries or with second units for drama series. They could call a freelance and within a couple of hours he would find himself at the other side of the country. Again Lyko told Helen that this was extremely urgent. ‘Tell him Lazarus.’ This was the activator agreed with all the British recruits. ‘We have to go tomorrow. Say I called. Just tell him, Helen.’
‘Lazarus? Really?’ Her voice had become breathy. Oh, God, he thought, Helen should have been kept out of it. He had told Stepakov that the woman was possibly a weak link. Mouthy, he had called her, meaning she was insecure. Stepakov said that was Chushi Pravosudia’s problem.
‘Can he phone you? I’ll get him to give you a bell the minute he gets in.’ She was obviously excited, knowing her lover was committed to the cause of a new Communist freedom. You could sense that she felt Lazarus also included her.
‘No. I have to be out,’ he said, very quickly. ‘Out now, in fact. But this is urgent. Ask him to stay by the dog, would you?’ Lyko was particularly proud of this last. As often as not, someone from South London would call the telephone the dog. Rhyming slang, dog and bone, phone.
‘I walked along Oxford Street, turned left, and made my way through to Marylebone High Street,’ he told the silent, slightly cynical audience in the sterile room below the Russian forest. ‘Give them the tradecraft,’ Stepakov had instructed him. ‘Don’t elaborate. They’ll want to hear you did the job well. These people believe in the rituals. They’re old Cold War veterans and won’t be impressed by your usual flamboyant lecture style. And no shoddiness, Vladi. Understand?’
So he said nothing of what was going on in his head. Nothing about the pain of coming to England and only spending time in London. Lyko had learned, studied and taught English for the best part of his life. He loved, lived, and breathed Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens, Scott, the poets Wordsworth and Shelley. He had even instilled a love for Shelley in the clown-faced Stepakov. In England he wanted to visit the libraries, the old sites. He wanted to take a train to Stratford-upon-Avon and see the views that Shakespeare had seen. His mind was always on the great writers and poets when he was in England, but he told them none of this.
Lyko walked on into Marylebone High Street where he used another public telephone to call George. George was in and said, ‘Yes, yes, of course. God, I thought this would never come. When do we leave?’
‘As soon as I can get hold of Guy.’
‘I’ll stay in. Let me know as soon as you’ve got it organised.’
‘I’ll call you sometime tonight.’
Lyko walked back into Oxford Street, hailed a cab and asked to be dropped at the Hilton. He had not spotted the surveillance, but knew it would be there. Stepakov’s people were good, and they were everywhere. He relied on them to pick up any watchers Chushi Pravosudia might have on his back. There had never been any sign of people following him, and Stepakov’s men and women had come almost to second guess the little professor. They certainly knew his haunts and his morals. He had given no signal of success, so they would probably be in the Curzon Street/Shepherd Market area before him. ‘All the time,’ he told them in the sterile room, ‘I doubled back. I lingered at shop windows. I detected no surveillance. I even spent half-an-hour in the Selfridges department store. People were returning gifts that were sub-standard, or broken. I saw a lot of women returning underwear.’ A schoolboy snigger. ‘Then I checked the street again.’
In telling the story, the professor was as honest as possible, though he clouded the next hour and a half by simply stating baldly, ‘I went with a whore to pass the time.’
There was a splutter from Stepakov who was well aware of the way in which Vladimir Lyko passed the time with whores. He did it regularly on Chushi Pravosudia money whenever he got out of the country. His favourite was a tall black girl with immense breasts who worked the Shepherd Market area blatantly, unconcerned by the laws that banned prostitutes from the streets. Stepakov knew all about her. How they called her Shiner, and how she specialised in helping men like Lyko live out their fantasies. Stepakov’s people had even bugged her little work apartment near Curzon Street and heard her tell of the client who liked to crawl around on all fours while she pelted him with oranges. He even brought the oranges with him while she provided the strange leather underwear on which he insisted. Stepakov considered this a great waste of oranges and was pleased that Lyko’s sexual fantasies were more comprehensible. Why, he could supply Vladi with lastochka who owned whips and chains, right there in Moscow.
By six on that bitter cold evening, the professor was back in Oxford Street and called Guy again, from another telephone kiosk. This time the cameraman was in, and elated by the news. They set up the meet for Gatwick airport the following afternoon.
‘Where’re we going?’ Guy asked.
‘You’ll see soon enough. Tomorrow. Three o’clock.’
The professor glossed over the following hours, leaping ahead to the next afternoon. ‘Here it began to get difficult. Helen turned up with the two men. They all insisted on her being with them. I had no papers for her. No visa. Nothing.’
This was real trouble. His instructions were clear. You will bring in the cameraman and sound assistant, they had told him. Now the two major players would not move without Helen who had often worked with them in the past. They argued that she was one of the team, so Lyko aborted that day’s departure, returned to London and made a crash call to Sweden.
At ten o’clock the following morning a special delivery reached him at the hotel, direct from Stockholm. These people were very efficient. He thought they must have prepared documents for all the recruits, for the package contained a visa stamp and extra papers for Helen.
‘You must understand that Chushi Pravosudia recruits from Britain, or anywhere else, were to use their own valid passports. They provided visas and other control
documents. I was very concerned about being watched, because they seemed to have everything so tightly sewn up. Knew everything. So I made the next move quickly.’
He telephoned Sweden again, saying he was heading into place. Helsinki. The group would follow as he instructed them. They met at Gatwick, and he gave them the tickets, all rescheduled by telephone, once more from a public kiosk.
He flew out to Helsinki that night, direct by Finnair from Heathrow. Stepakov’s people picked him up at Vantaa. ‘The most delicate part was about to begin. If we pulled it off, we would be very close to penetrating the Scales of Justice’s inner circle.’
The man who checked into the Hesperia Hotel under the name Dieter Frobe was not Lyko, but a trusted Stepakov agent, a former First Chief Directorate field agent who physically resembled the professor. They had briefed him thoroughly, and it was this man – in the sterile room they simply called him Dove – who had next made a crash call to the Swedish number, telling them there was a hold-up. The pigeons, he said, had been delayed. He would let them know as soon as they started to fly.
‘Sweden appeared to accept this calmly at first.’ Lyko was standing straighter, occasionally walking up and down as he went through the story of his little adventure. ‘By two days ago they had started to get frantic.’
‘We need the pigeons. We need them now.’ The voice from Sweden was sharp, commanding.
‘It’s no fault of mine,’ Dove told them, whining and laying it on with a trowel. ‘I’ve ordered them. It is a domestic matter. Be patient.’
‘The window is not large,’ by which they meant there was a serious time-scale problem, a window of opportunity.
The people whom Dove talked of as the pigeons were, in fact, long gone. All three, two men and a woman.
Lyko waited for them as they came off the Finnair flight from London. There was a car outside, he told them. He even helped them with the luggage. ‘We must make a short helicopter trip,’ he said.
‘Never been in a helicopter.’ Helen was more excited than the others, and was almost like a child once they were in the car which took them to the private flying area at the far corner of Vantaa airport.
The chopper was a big Mil Mi-26 with Aeroflot markings. The Finns were quite used to Aeroflot making unscheduled flights in and out. As always, they had co-operated with the request for his flight plan.
‘They suspected nothing.’ Lyko meant the ‘pigeons’ and gave a self-satisfied smirk. ‘Within three hours we were here, or within a few miles from here.’ He turned deferentially to Stepakov who motioned him to one side as though swatting an insect out of the way.
‘Captain Bond, Mr Newman, you will now become Guy and George. Nina would pass as an English girl anywhere, being half-Scottish. That is correct, yes?’ Bond nodded, and Stepakov laughed. ‘I read bad English sometimes. Some people say Scotch.’
‘Which is a drink,’ Bond supplied grittily. Concern, the possibility of duplicity and a regiment of problems had already marched through his mind.
‘Right, Scotch is a drink. You won’t see much Scotch where you’re going, I fear, Captain Bond. Chushi Pravosudia have instructed that you should be at the Dom Knigi bookshop on Kalinina Prospect at seven thirty tonight. All three of you will enter and purchase a copy of Crime and Punishment – apt, huh? You will linger for a short time, and then leave. If contact is not made, there is a fallback at Arbat restaurant, nine o’clock. We shall be following you all the way. I have enough forces at my disposal to make absolutely certain that you are tracked wherever they take you. Now,’ he put his head back and glanced from one to the other, ‘you must have many questions. You have also to spend time getting to know Nina, and we have to talk about signals, codewords and the usual trappings of an operation like this. There is much to do before seven thirty when you enter the most secret circle of the Scales of Justice. Questions?’
As James Bond opened his mouth to frame his initial concern, he knew they were in over their heads.
‘What if you lose us?’ He wanted to let Stepakov know he was not happy with the small amount of information. He wanted the Russian to feel he was anxious, if only to make the man more fearful, to pause and reflect. He repeated. ‘What if you lose us?’
‘Then you will be – what is the English slang? You will be in dead lumber? Is this correct?’
Bond nodded. ‘I’m not ecstatic about the dead part. And what of our two French friends?’
‘What indeed?’ Stepakov made his clownish features go blank.
Then Natkowitz spoke, leaning back, looking lazy and unperturbed. ‘Before we take this on, can you tell us your own assessment of the situation? The general objective of the Scales of Justice? What they expect to accomplish?’
There was a long pause during which Bond counted to ten.
‘Yes,’ Stepakov’s voice dropped almost to a whisper. ‘Operation Daniel might hold a clue. I think Chushi Pravosudia are planning what terrorists nowadays call a world-shattering spectacular, and I think you, and Captain Bond, and Nina here are going to be at the vortex of that spectacular. It might be that they know exactly what we’re doing. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if they’re pulling our strings. Does that help you, Mr Peter Natkowitz? Please let’s dispense with the Newman rubbish.’
10
DAUGHTER OF THE REGIMENT
It started to snow as they reached Kalinina Prospect, taking the slip road off Suvorovsky Boulevard. Flakes the size of silver dollars drifted sluggishly through the night air. Some hung motionless, for there was hardly any wind. Within a few minutes it began to thicken. The traffic moved slowly and bundled-up people trudged along the pavements, badly wrapped parcels silhouetted against the lighted shop windows. The scene had all the makings of a Christmas card.
Lyko drove. He said the snow would not last long. ‘The blizzards are over for now. This means it’s a little warmer, so it probably won’t freeze again until the early hours. The city soon gets back to normal once the blizzards are gone.’
Hard dirty snow packed the gutters and was piled against buildings, leaving only two-thirds of the pavements clear.
Sitting in the back of the old, souped-up Zil, James Bond tried to make sense of the day. Since they left the dacha, he had immersed himself in everything he had seen and heard, his mind circling, buzzard-like, trying to pounce on one fact that made sense. The windshield wipers lazily pushed away the buildup of snow while the inside of the windows started to steam. Lyko swept his open hand across the glass, clearing a view for a few seconds. The road ahead looked bleak, rather than romantic. To Bond, everything looked bleak. He could make no sense of any part of the operation in which he and Natkowitz were engulfed. There was no shape, no form, no logic whichever way he looked at it.
When Stepakov had revealed that Natkowitz was an Israeli and an officer of the Mossad, Pete simply sat back and laughed at him, his face looking even more like that of a gentleman farmer in an English pub. You could almost see the phoney horse-brasses hanging around imitation Tudor beams.
Nicki had moved, blocking the door, his dark face threatening. Alex pushed his Tweedledum figure from the wall against which he had been leaning. Henri Rampart looked at his shoes as if displeased with their shine. The lovely Stephanie Adoré seemed to be posed for a glamorous photograph, her head cocked and one jewelled hand poised under her chin, while Nina Bibikova sat very still, her dark eyes fixed on Boris Stepakov.
‘Look, Bory, I’ve always had great respect for KGB. What makes you think, because my true name is Natkowitz, I’m the Mossad?’
Stepakov guffawed. ‘Because, Pete Natkowitz, your handwriting has been on a hundred operations carried out by the Mossad, some of them against KGB. I know you. I have your dossier. In the Mossad you’re as famous as Bond in his Service. Come on now. We know who you are, and I’m not going to become difficult about it. If the Israelis want to be in bed with the Brits, that’s none of my business. My business is splitting open the Chushi Pravosudia, finding out what makes
it tick. I needed two agents from British SIS. I now find I really need three, two men and a woman, but we can provide the woman. I’m not concerned if SIS send us one officer and a member of the Mossad. It’ll be a neat trio – SIS, Mossad, KGB.’
‘If you could provide a woman officer, why not the two men, Bory?’ Bond asked, a whole chain of questions forming in his head.
Stepakov sighed, put one large hand on the chair against which he had earlier leaned, turned it around and sat down, straddling it, his thick arms resting along the back.
‘James,’ his face looked pained, ‘do I have to explain the concerns we have about Chushi Pravosudia? It should be obvious to you that they are very well-organised. It doesn’t take a huge intellect to see them for what they are – hardline, old-guard extremists with a lot of pull. We look over our shoulders all the time. These people have admission through doors we can barely open these days. Have you not yet worked out what Russia is really like now, poised over the abyss of ruin, economically scuppered and with the Neo-Stalinists fighting to regain control? A year ago they said the Revolution had failed, now they tell us perestroika has failed. It’s chaos. The hardliners have agents within KGB, within the Central Committee, they have friends at court. I truly believe they’re everywhere.’