She was going to answer him, but thought better of it. The little creep didn’t know, couldn’t know why it meant something to her, why she’d fly, at some appreciable risk, all the way to Moscow to visit a cemetery, when you couldn’t even be sure who was in it.
‘Wait in the car,’ she told him, when they arrived. ‘I won’t be long.’
Past the gates of the Donskoy Cemetery and they were huddling in small groups. Some, she felt sure, had been coming every weekend for most of their life, drawn by the separate and collective tragedies that had touched them all.
No lost or faded memories in this place. No sleeping, gentle souls at rest under the fir trees. Everything raw and bitter, just as it had been.
In its heyday, during Stalin’s purges of the 30s, the crematorium had despatched some 500 souls a night – a charnel house, way out beyond the reaches of the civilized world.
Margo could feel the anger that lay just below the surface. The same anger that had brought her from London.
Move to the left of the main door, they had said. A hundred metres down the main path between the endless gravestones. Left at the dark grey monument and then you will see it.
It’s probably the place where his remains have been left. Probably.
Only then did she let herself think of him.
She stood in front of the central plaque. Mass grave number three. Ahead of her the statue of a woman, half-kneeling, arms across her chest, head bowed forever, frozen in stone.
Close by, a single urn in memory of the lost, the unknown, perhaps even the unloved.
‘Nevostrebovanniye prakhi’. Unclaimed ashes.
They would have brought him here in darkness, she thought, when the cemetery was closed. Nameless, state functionaries, sweating and swearing. And in the long grass behind the gravestones, they would have dug a small hole, shoved the container with his ashes inside and covered it over. Amazing, that they had bothered at all.
And yet they would have seen it – and enjoyed it – as ritual humiliation. A shabby final act, without prayer or mention, as if Mikhail had never existed.
Two days after returning from Moscow she had gone to see Manson. Even on a bright day his presence had made the room seem dark and unhappy.
‘You shouldn’t have gone to Russia.’ He didn’t look up from his papers. ‘You disobeyed a direct order.’
‘I had my reasons.’
‘Which were …?’
‘What do you think? He was my agent.’ She sat down uninvited. ‘I want to re-open his file.’
Manson stopped writing and slowly lifted his head. ‘I’m happy to have a conversation with you, Lane – but not that conversation. OK?’
‘No it’s not. He was betrayed and you did nothing about it. The file was opened and closed on the same day. I know what a real investigation looks like – and this was a sham.’
Manson raised a single eyebrow. ‘There’s no point going down this road because there’s nothing at the end of it. No compensation. No revenge. No resurrection. Just a fucked-up relationship with an awkward, angry ally who we need, more than he needs us.’
‘Thank you for making the situation so clear.’
‘You can take that tone if you want to, but it doesn’t change anything. Leave the Americans alone. Understood? Move on, Lane. You lost a man who could have been saved. Should have been saved. But it’s over.’
She made for the door but Manson called out after her. ‘He didn’t belong to you. You know that, don’t you? Agents don’t belong to anyone. They drift in and out …’
‘That’s bullshit. Try some other cliches.’ She was angry, didn’t mind if he saw it. ‘They’re human beings. Mikhail was a human being. Remember what they look like?’
He got up and stood by the desk, suddenly tired, ill at ease. She could see his eyes fighting to stay open.
‘What happened to you?’ She shook her head. ‘All these years here. All those grand ideals? Or did you just decide it was easier to lie in your basket and piss where they told you to?’
He looked down at the floor. ‘Forget it, Lane. I wish there was another way, but there isn’t. For all our sakes, forget it.’
She had crossed Vauxhall Bridge, turned right along the Embankment and as the city left work and fumbled its way home, she found herself on a bench in St James’s Park.
It was autumn and a gale blew sudden gusts of leaves across the damp grass.
A few people glanced at her – caught the strong jaw, the short blonde hair, a little spiky on top where the wind had played with it.
Her coat hid a slim figure – one size too slim, according to the common view. Ever since she could remember, there had been someone in her life, wanting to feed her more.
Had the passers-by been closer, they might have seen the slow movement of her eyes, absorbing, recording, not rushing pointlessly from object to object, but calm and grounded, just as they had been on the day she was born.
Her parents remembered a birth without tears. In Margo’s first seconds on earth, her eyes had fixed on one face then another, but without surprise or distress. Born with questions, said the specialist. Who are you people and what are you doing here?
Default expression became a lukewarm smile, never far away – except today. A smile for all seasons and moods. The kind of smile you can hide behind because it tells nothing to the rest of the world.
No easy boxes to fit Margo Lane.
Day one at school, she’d been told to take off her coat – refused point blank – drew herself up to her twenty-five inches and invited the teacher to remove her own coat if she chose but she, Margo – child of irrepressible convictions – had no such intention.
She had sat there the whole day with the coat clasped around her, having proved a point for life. No one, but no one, could ever make her do anything she chose not to.
So place her in a group, and as the years passed she would emerge most often as the conductor in an orchestra of voices.
The one who can start them speaking and the one who stops them dead.
The one who led her schoolfriends through forests and over streams, always pushing on up the next hill to the next tree, to the next signpost, the next corner, the next brick wall – and then a bit further. Just to see what was there.
No wonder she had been unable to resist the collected curiosities at Vauxhall Cross – the men and women who clutched at secret straws, who went looking for threats and dangers and sometimes didn’t return.
Margo pulled her coat tightly around her. The cold wind had sucked tears from her eyes and she wiped them away with her glove.
She remembered what a colleague had told her soon after joining the Service. ‘There are no happy endings in this building. That’s not the business we’re in. But there can and there should be fitting tributes to those who sacrifice themselves for what we do.’
Fitting tributes?
More like pompous crap.
She thought of Manson telling her to forget it.
Mikhail deserved better.
MOSCOW
THREE YEARS LATER
There were four of them around the table, playing cards, with the beer and the vodka chasing each other and their voices rising in the clammy, overheated flat off Leninsky Prospekt.
Arkady Mazurin had been drunk half the day, long before the others arrived; a mangy, fat dog of questionable pedigree across his knees, the screams down the phone of his lunatic, long-divorced wife, still in his ears, and his luck draining away.
It had been all right until one of them had talked politics. Said how much better it had become under the new man. How the spies now controlled everything. Not like the old days when the Party hacks kept trying to interfere. Now Security was back on top where it belonged – ruling the roost.
He’d grown first bored, then angry and then he’d let them have it. All about how rotten the system was from top to bottom, how the best and brightest were leaving, how the vast state of Russia was like some broken-down tru
ck by the side of the global highway, going nowhere.
‘What’s the matter with you?’ one of them had asked.
He pulled himself up and stood over them. ‘We were brutal, and stupid and we ruined millions of lives – and the new crowd has learned nothing.’
It was Grishin, who had spoken up, like the little rat he’d always been, playing everyone off against each other. ‘My dear Arkady, none of us was perfect.’
‘You talk of perfection?’
‘I only meant that we served—’
‘We served ourselves … remember? We of the glorious Committee for State Security. He shook his head. ‘And you talk of perfection?’
Grishin produced an oversized handkerchief and blew his nose. ‘I was going to say that it’s no good drinking to forget the past. What we did was—’
Arkady crossed the room and stood right in front of him. ‘I don’t drink to forget the past. I made my peace many years ago with what I did. No, my friend’ – his nose was centimetres from Grishin’s – ‘I drink because the present is so fucking horrible.’
Nothing was said for at least a minute. Far below them they could hear the traffic, grinding slowly through the fresh snow.
And Arkady knew he’d said too much.
He remembered the surprise, registering on Grishin’s plump, greedy face. He also remembered that special Russian movement of the eyes. A tiny swivel. Barely visible. But you know so well what it means when you’re in Moscow. You know that the man has registered what you said. And before long, when it suits him, when he can use it for maximum personal benefit, when he can sell you for the right price, he will tell someone else. At which point – slowly, or even not so slowly – the incriminating tale will begin its climb through the State’s ineffably tedious catalogue of citizens’ misdeeds, until one day, in an office far, far away from anything resembling civilization, an alarm bell begins to ring.
Arkady knew how it would go. The bright new technocrats would open a big, fat file, probe his decades-old reports and messages, look at his absences, go after things that didn’t quite add up, weren’t quite true, couldn’t be backed up by facts. Contact reports, surveillance, bank accounts.
If they really went for it, it wouldn’t take them long. Not if they had him in the frame.
And then?
And then they would send the car to bring him in.
Used to be the grey Volga with the curtained rear windows – room for three in the back, so that the other two could beat him up if he became difficult.
He rubbed a hand across his face and pushed the dog onto the floor.
After that, it was all too clear. He had no friends left in high places. Hadn’t attended the stupid reunions, the retreats, the whisky parties where old spies lied about their failures and inflated their successes. Hated the self-righteousness and all the talk of serving ‘otechestvo’ the Fatherland.
So there would be no one to take his call.
Outside the window another winter had lain down across the city. As he peered through the grimy, frozen glass he could see the lights burning in a hundred buildings way out into the suburbs. Shapes moved, screens flickered. Everyone was out there. Just as they always were in Russia.
Everyone and no one.
Arkady shut his eyes. I’m fifty-nine, he told himself. I could still have a life somewhere.
LONDON
Margo wished she hadn’t told him about her job.
But they were getting married in six months, or a year, or sometime – so it seemed only fair. Let him take a quick look over the fence, a glimpse of the secret world. And then they could go back to their spaghetti and forget about it.
When she said it, Jimmy had given her one of his quizzical looks.
‘You serious?’
‘It’s not the kind of thing to joke about, is it?’
‘I wouldn’t know.’ He looked back at her over his shoulder. ‘We’ve been engaged half a year and you never thought to mention it.’
‘It just didn’t seem important …’
‘Christ, Margo. You didn’t think it important to tell me what you actually do? I thought you were a researcher at the Foreign Office, writing briefs for ministers on arms control, proliferation, up to your bloody eyes in target selection and throw weights.’
‘It doesn’t change anything …’
‘Of course it does. You lied to me, lied to my parents and friends …’
‘Just hang on a minute’ – she could hear her voice rising – ‘I’m not free to blurt this kind of thing out to anyone I feel like. Ever heard of rules? Procedures?’
They didn’t speak much after that. She cleared dinner with most of the pasta going into the bin. Jimmy turned on the television and sat resolutely in front of it.
Hours later when he climbed into bed she could feel the silence pushing its way between them.
‘Why did you tell me today?’
‘I thought you should know …’ She turned to face him in the darkness.
‘But why today?’
‘It seemed like it was time.’
‘Just a gut feeling? Thought I could finally be trusted?’
She reached for his hand but he pulled it away. ‘I always trusted you. I wouldn’t be with you if I didn’t.’
If the truth were known, she thought later, perhaps she hadn’t trusted him after all. The very things she loved about him – his openness and spontaneity – made him unsuited to keeping secrets. She couldn’t tell him that. But she thought that soon she would have to take a different tack with him, remind the middle-class public schoolboy with the badly-cut hair, that it was time he grew up, that some things were more important than being open. That she operated for the public good, in a pretty hostile world and that people like her had to make some sacrifices if that carefree, pub-centric, have-a-great-day crowd that he hung around with weren’t going to have their sleep disrupted by stray bullets or bombs.
And he wouldn’t take it well. Not a lesson like that. So the questions would keep on coming – buried one day, dug up again the next. But always dropped back in her lap. The way a dog delivers a bone.
He put out a hand and touched her hair. ‘What happens if I get a phone call one day from someone I’ve never met and never heard of, who says you’re not coming home, because something happened somewhere that he can’t tell me about? Is that how this ends, Margo?’
She hadn’t prepared for that one. Hadn’t put herself in his shoes.
‘Did you hear what I said?’
‘I don’t know what to tell you, Jimmy.’ She turned away in case, even in the darkness, he could see her expression. ‘I just don’t know.’
WASHINGTON DC
‘I need a favour, Vitaly.’
‘Delighted, Harry – Russia is full of favours. Which one would you like – a holiday by the Black Sea, a trip to a ball-bearing factory?’
Harry Jones smiled across the crowded Georgetown restaurant. Long before becoming national security adviser to the president, he had studied Russian, been attached to the US embassy in Moscow and eavesdropped on some of the Kremlin’s most secret radio transmissions. Russians – and especially their ambassador to Washington, Vitaly Yanayev – were never dull.
‘How are things at the embassy, Vitaly?’
The ambassador smiled. ‘You tell me – you listen to everything we say from morning till night. From the noises we make in the bathroom, you calculate what we ate for dinner the night before. You analyze the bedtime stories we read our children, in case they contain coded messages. And in return we keep hundreds of your people employed following us all over America in our mundane daily lives. How do you think we are?’
Jones grinned. ‘We only have your best interests at heart …’
‘You’re too kind.’ Vitaly pushed his plate away and poured himself another glass of wine. He was immaculate as ever – just a shade more immaculate than a diplomat on a state salary has a right to be. The tie, a little too expensive, the jacket, an inch
too sculpted. He liked his clothes, liked himself in the mirror, but he knew that his vanity was a weakness and that Harry didn’t share it. Two years ago he had written in a cable to Moscow that Harry Jones always dressed like a liberal arts professor from the Midwest. A bow tie, tweed suits, strong, practical shoes. ‘Harry Jones, doesn’t do Armani,’ he told them, ‘but he does do power. And he is comfortable using it. Do not underestimate him.’
That was language Moscow understood. Harry Jones had their respect.
Vitaly raised an eyebrow. ‘You mentioned a favour, Harry. What can I do for you?’
Jones shifted slightly in his chair. ‘We have a package we need to locate in Syria and bring home.’
‘Of course you do. We too have packages there from time to time. A human package?’
‘You could say that.’
‘And you want me to suggest an exit.’
Harry took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. ‘I’ll get the check. A little cold air might do us some good.’
They emerged onto M street and headed down the icy hill on Wisconsin Avenue towards the Potomac. A taxi was struggling to make it up to the traffic lights. Tiny snowflakes danced around them. Harry thought that in an hour or so the storm would hit the city and shut it down for the night.
‘Moscow weather,’ he told Vitaly. ‘Pretty much the same there today, I guess.’
The ambassador took his arm as they crossed the road gingerly towards the Watergate Hotel.
‘So will you help on this one?’ Harry stopped and stared straight into the Russian’s eyes. ‘You’ve access to the government there and assets on the ground that we haven’t.’
‘And the package is in government hands?’
‘It may be – certainly within their sphere of influence. We’re talking about the “Shabbiyah” – the paramilitaries. That’s why I came to you. You’re the only ones Damascus will talk to.’
‘Who is this package, if I may ask?’
‘One of our coordinators.’
‘I see. Coordination is such a risky business these days, because there is so little way of knowing who to trust. Someone you buy one day, may be bought the next by others for a bigger sum.’ He grimaced. ‘But you know that better than I do.’
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