The Man Who Was Saturday

by Derek Lambert

  ‘The leads,’ Duff said lighting a cigarette. ‘You were going to give us the leads.’ He coughed, confirming everyone else’s worst fears about smoking. He stubbed out the cigarette.

  ‘Nothing specific but we’re making progress,’ Thurston told him and Holden knew he was lying.

  Shoemaker said: ‘It’s my guess that the other six codenames operate in totally different areas from Marion Shannon. Each in a different section of the Western structure so that, co-ordinated, they could destroy us. One in NATO maybe, up there at the top.’

  ‘Maybe one in the European Economic Community,’ Fliegel said thoughtfully. ‘A government minister even.’

  ‘A Secretary of State?’ Duff suggested, smiling.

  Thurston said: ‘If Calder was – is,’ he corrected himself, ‘right then the traitors of the ’fifites and ‘sixties were minor league. Their job was to establish and maybe train the major league of the future. Get them primed for the final takeover. And if, in their own fields, they’re as influential as Marion Shannon was in disarmament then they could make it.’

  ‘Unless we find Calder,’ Holden said.

  ‘Yes, Mr President, unless we find Calder.’ Fat chance Thurston’s tone said.

  It was Duff, one crossed leg swinging, who put the words to the notion that had been crystallising in everyone’s minds. ‘I think we’ve got to accept,’ he said slowly, ‘that at least one of these influential sleepers operates in Washington. Maybe two or three. Who knows, maybe Saturday.’

  A breeze sprang up in the Rose Garden and blew away the inquisitive snowflakes.

  Thwack.

  The small rubber ball hit the white wall of the racquets squash court hard and low at an awkward angle. But not awkward for Shoemaker; he lobbed it softly into a corner and Holden didn’t even try to reach it; that was the difference between them – he played to try and keep fit, Shoemaker was fit and played because he enjoyed it.

  ‘Okay,’ Holden said, ‘you win. Let’s take a break.’

  ‘You played well,’ Shoemaker said.

  ‘For an old man.’

  ‘Come on,’ Shoemaker said. ‘You’re one of the youngest presidents in the history of the United States.’

  True. But at the moment he didn’t feel young. He was weighted with Calder’s wasted years.

  They adjourned to the soft-drinks bar adjoining the squash court in the grounds of the White House. Holden poured them orange juice.

  ‘So,’ he said, leaning on the bar, ‘as Assistant for Security what do you think?’

  ‘About Calder? I don’t know. He’s been gone a long time. The Soviets may have got him. Or he may have escaped.’

  ‘Everyone else figures he’s dead.’ As always Shoemaker’s optimism appealed to Holden. The optimism of youth? Not quite. Shoemaker was thirty-eight but young by Cabinet standards. And uncomplicated by Security Council standards.

  Shoemaker said: ‘You’ve got to admit it’s the most likely explanation.’

  ‘I don’t happen to think so.’

  ‘Oh?’ Shoemaker frowned.

  ‘But maybe it’s because I’m involved personally …. Did you know Calder and I were friends?’

  ‘A long time ago? Yes, I knew that.’

  ‘What you didn’t know, at least I hope you didn’t know ….’

  And Holden told Shoemaker about his betrayal.

  ‘It goes without saying,’ he finished, ‘that this is between the two of us.’

  ‘Of course. We’re both on the same side.’

  Holden sipped his juice; the ice tinkled like wind chimes. ‘I’ve got a job for you,’ he said at last.

  Shoemaker waited. The falling snow had melted and rain spattered the window.

  Holden said: ‘I want you to go to Russia,’ and when Shoemaker looked startled: ‘You see I’ve given this a lot of thought and you’re probably the only man who can find out if Calder is still alive.’

  ‘Why me?’

  ‘Because if the Soviets allow the American President’s Adviser on Security into Russia it means there’s still hope.’

  ‘They will assume I’ve come to get him?’

  Holden nodded. ‘Which in its turn means that he’s escaped, gone to ground.’

  ‘I still don’t understand. Why me?’

  ‘Who else? The Soviets have to be impressed by the importance we attach to finding Calder and there are only a handful of people in high places who know what’s going on. I could hardly send the director of the CIA or the NSA ….’

  ‘I’m to be used as bait?’

  ‘What I’m saying is that, one – we need confirmation that Calder is still alive. Two – we need someone in the area in case he makes contact with our embassy in Moscow. Three – there’s always a chance that, if the KGB get a lead, you’ll be able to beat them to it.’

  ‘Chance would be a fine thing,’ Shoemaker remarked.

  Holden poured himself more juice, thick with fresh pulp. ‘The first two points are the important ones. If Calder makes a break for it he can’t go it alone. Who knows, he may be injured.’

  ‘So I fly to Moscow observed by a brigade of KGB and then fly to Irkutsk. Isn’t that a little obvious, Mr President?’

  ‘I’m not suggesting that anyone is fooling anyone. We and the Russians will be using each other to get a lead on Calder’s whereabouts. But I agree, we have to make a pretence of deception. Which is why you’ll enter the Soviet Union through the back door. California, Japan, Nakhodka and then the Trans-Siberian Railway to Irkutsk in Siberia. Luckily Irkutsk is one of the stopovers allowed by Intourist.’

  ‘With respect, sir, you have a devious mind.’

  ‘Why is it,’ Holden asked, ‘that whenever anyone says with respect they mean the opposite? Devious? How about subtle? You see I’m a chess player and I have to consider every nuance of an opponent’s move.’

  ‘So I’m a move in a game of chess?’

  ‘You’re a gambit,’ Holden told him.

  ‘I don’t know a great deal about chess,’ Shoemaker said, ‘but isn’t there another ploy called a sacrifice?’

  END GAME

  CHAPTER 24

  By December the annual battle between General Winter and Old Man Baikal had reached a crucial stage.

  All over Siberia, from the Arctic to China, from the Urals to the Pacific, the lakes had surrendered to the cold and were manacled with ice. With the exception of Baikal. With its home-brewed hurricanes and earth tremors that shook its bed, a mile deep in places, it would resist until the middle of the month. It always did. And even then it would carry on guerrilla warfare: a thunderous clap and a crack wide enough to swallow a truck would fizz across the ice like black lightning. Respect winter by all means, but revere Baikal.

  But in September when Calder jumped onto the coal barge on its way to the lake, hostilities were only tentative. A few fogbanks rolling up the four-hundred-mile-long crescent moon of the lake, the occasional breeze testing its winter sinews on the glass-clear water.

  For a few moments Calder didn’t realise that he had been hurt. Then the pain knifed him.

  He sat up on the coal, powdered rain washing his face, and reached for his leg. He touched a sharp stick and when he realised that it was his shin-bone protruding from his flesh, passed out. When he regained consciousness the sky was glowing green, the rain had spent itself and a man was looking down at him.

  ‘And who might you be?’ He wore a spade beard and a leather hat with ear-flaps tied under his chin.

  Calder sat up again. He could see the shin bone sticking through his trouser leg like the prow of a model boat. He wanted to vomit. He said: ‘There was an escape …. I’m one of the brodyagi ….’

  ‘With a suitcase? Wearing a raincoat and a suit? If you’re a convict I’m Grandfather Frost.’

  ‘I had just arrived in the camp,’ Calder told him. ‘From Moscow.’

  ‘I thought you had a foreign accent.’

  ‘I was at reception when they broke out. I joined
them. What would you have done?’

  ‘What you did. What camp?’

  ‘Volokon.’

  ‘Political crimes, isn’t it? Dissidents? What did you do, comrade?’

  Remembering the legendary Siberian independence from Moscow, Calder told him that he had foolishly indulged in a vendetta with a highly placed bureaucrat – ‘A Muscovite, of course’ – and accused him of corruption.

  ‘Foolishly?’ The bargemaster tugged at his square beard. ‘I don’t think so, comrade. You showed spirit; you should have been a Siberian. Those pricks in Moscow … na levo is their password: they don’t know what it is to do an honest day’s work.’ He sat on a rock of coal shining in the dawn light and saw the shaft of bone. ‘Shit! What are we going to do with you, comrade?’

  ‘In the old days they used to put food out for the brodyagi so that they didn’t have to steal.’

  ‘You need more than food, my friend. If you don’t get treatment you’ll get gangrene. And you can’t run far on one leg.’

  ‘If you take me to a hospital I’ll lose more than a leg.’

  ‘Your life? Maybe. They’d certainly move you north to a camp where you piss ice-cubes.’

  The green light above the pencil-points of the pines on top of the looming river-banks was turning pale blue. It was going to be a beautiful autumn day.

  Pain ran up Calder’s leg in ripples.

  The bargemaster said: ‘You’ve got money?’

  ‘I’ve got something better than money: I’ve got dollars.’

  The bargemaster was impressed. ‘They didn’t take them away from you?’

  ‘They were about to. How much?’

  ‘Not for me, you understand. I’m a Siberian: Siberians don’t hustle for money. We have a saying: “In Siberia only the bears steal.” Have you heard that?’

  From every Siberian I’ve ever met, Calder thought, and reached for the suitcase lying in the coal.

  The bargemaster said: ‘I know what you’re thinking because you’ve been corrupted by Moscow, but I don’t want a kopek. Now my mate who I’ve left in charge of the old tub towing the barges, he’s different. He’s Siberian but he’s a Buryat and he’ll want money to keep his mouth shut. And the medic who fixes your leg, he’ll have to be paid off.’ He watched Calder release the catches on the suitcase. ‘Where do you want to get to?’

  Calder found the address Katerina had given him. ‘To a village at the north-east tip of Baikal.’

  ‘Your lucky day. We’re taking this coal to the top of the Old Man. But it’s going to be tricky. We pass through Irkutsk to get to the lake and if there’s been a break the militia will be checking anything that moves. But still, you have dollars ….’

  Calder handed him a wad. The bargemaster pulled a tarpaulin over his body, making a tent of it over the exposed bone, and made his way back along the rope gangways connecting the four barges to the steamboat, the Ulianov, Lenin’s real name, butting against the current.

  Five hours later the bargemaster anchored off Angarsk thirty miles from Irkutsk on the banks of the Angara, the only one of Baikal’s 336 waterways to drain rather than feed it. He rowed to one of the wharfs. He returned with a man with sagging cheeks and sad eyes who hissed his s’s when he spoke. The medic.

  When he saw Calder’s leg he hissed like a punctured football. ‘Bad, very bad. The bone is dirty. Where can I work?’

  ‘Here,’ the bargemaster told him. ‘We can’t get him onto the Ulianov. Even here’s dangerous.’

  A militia helicopter clattered over the docks and wheeled away to the north before reaching the Ulianov and its barges.

  The medic pointed at a plank. He told the bargemaster to insert it under the broken leg and fetch a pail of boiling water.

  The medic handed Calder a bottle of vodka. ‘Here, drink this.’ And bite on the bullet! He began to cut away the trouser leg with a pair of kitchen scissors. Calder put the neck of the bottle to his mouth; the vodka, oily moonshine, scalded his stomach. ‘This is some mess,’ the medic said. Calder looked away from the naked bone and drank more moonshine; this time it didn’t burn so sharply. From his black bag the medic took yellowing cotton wool and, with the water the bargemaster had brought steaming in a galvanised bucket, bathed the edges of the wound. ‘More vodka,’ he said. ‘Drink more, get good and drunk. Maybe I’ll have a shot.’ He took the bottle and swigged. ‘Good stuff, I know a chemist ….’ He handed the bottle back. Calder poured more moonshine down his throat; this time it was salve. The medic poured hydrogen peroxide on the bone and the wound. It frothed. He took a plaster bandage from his bag, dipped it in the boiling water and stood it upright on the plank. Then he washed his hands with carbolic soap. He nodded at the bargemaster and whispered. Calder picked up the whisper: ‘Hold him, this is going to hurt.’ The medic needn’t have worried: the pain was receding, flying away with the arrowhead of ducks passing overhead. The medic placed the heel of his hand on the bone and pressed down and Calder’s scream rose into the pale blue sky; his body bucked but the bargemaster held him. Holding the bone in place with one hand, the medic poured orange mercurichrome onto a piece of lint and placed it on the wound above his hand. ‘Now you hold it,’ he said to the bargemaster, pulling the lint over the bone. Deftly he wound the plaster bandage round Calder’s shin. When he had finished he said to the bargemaster: ‘That’s the best I can do.’ And: ‘Ten more dollars please – for the vodka.’ And only bears steal. Calder almost smiled, then the sky turned black.

  Militia boarded the Ulianov at Irkutsk, city of gold and furs from which Russians once journeyed to settle in California and Alaska, but the bargemaster persuaded them with vodka and dollars, manna from heaven, that there was no point in searching the barges. Look, he said, and they looked and all they could see was coal and a couple of tarpaulins.

  With high-rearing hydrofoils skimming past, they made their way down the last forty miles of the Angara to Baikal. Calder came to as the Ulianov pulled its barges into the low curve of the crescent. The evening sky was cooling but his body was hot with fever.

  He peered over the side of the barge. He had visited Baikal long ago with an Intourist guide and he remembered her claims. Seventeen hundred types of fauna and flora … freshwater seals – ‘Yes, seals,’ irritably – that had made their way down river from the Arctic aeons ago … and, triumphantly, containing more water than all the Great Lakes of North America put together.

  North America. Was Harry dead? He burned inside; outside his sweat was iced. His leg pulsed with pain.

  The Ulianov, churning water, turned in an arc and, like a duck with coal-black chicks, headed north-east.

  At 1 am they were stopped by a patrol boat. A searchlight swept the barges turning black carbon into silver; the beam lingered for a few moments on the two heaps of tarpaulin, then swept back to the Ulianov. The skipper and mate of the patrol boat boarded her in the blue-white glare but were also persuaded with vodka and dollars that there was no point in searching the barges. ‘A convict on a barge as slow as a porpoise heading back in the same direction as the break? Stupid,’ the bargemaster said.

  ‘Who said anything about a convict?’ the skipper of the patrol boat asked. ‘Who said anything about a break?’ He took a gulp of firewater but didn’t elaborate.

  The following morning, as they passed the island of Olkhon, the lake brewed a storm. Brimming waves punched the barges and rain sluiced from sagging clouds. The wallowing of the barge woke Calder from a feverish sleep. He peered inside the canvas. Blood was seeping from the bottom of the plaster-cast; the cast was streaked with coal-dust.

  On a storm-tossed lake with a broken leg and every KGB operative and militiaman in Siberia looking for him. Hopeless. The futility of his life since those bold years on the campus washed over him with the rain.

  The Ulianov pulled into the shelter of a grey cliff and anchored. Here the waves slouched. Shivering, Calder closed his eyes. So he would submerge from life – he heard the water lazily slapping the hu
ll of the barge and there was foam in his brain – and the Soviet sleepers would continue to undermine the West in their seats of power.

  Why hadn’t Western intelligence been more zealous in pursuing the proposition that agents such as Philby and Maclean had been instructed to recruit youth? That their brief had been to establish a hierarchy of awesome power in the eighties.

  Too late now: the illustrious sleepers were above suspicion. But Holden should have acted on the information I sent him about Marion Shannon. And yet she was in the clear. Why? Has everything I’ve done been a waste?

  The engine of the Ulianov thumped into life and the bursting foam bubbles in Calder’s skull became louder and more rhythmic.

  The village of Oskino, lazily wooden but gritted here and there with cement outhouses, lay the width of a grey beach from the water. Behind it green hills covered with brush climbed timidly to crests of pine and larch. On either side granite and basalt cliffs stood guard.

  A few years earlier Oskino, which depended for its survival on fishing, had nearly died. Chemical and cellulose plants had begun to poison the lake and its fish, but the protests had been so passionate that Moscow had thrown in its hand.

  The village’s main catch was omul, the salmon of Baikal, but today as the Ulianov hove to half a mile offshore, transparent fish sucked from Baikal’s depths by the storm and tossed onto the shore were being harvested. So fat were the ugly little fish that they provided fuel for lamps. The women also collected bright green sponges, fruit of the storm, with which they scoured their pots.

  The bargemaster waited until nightfall before rowing Calder, quiet now but breathing as rapidly as an exhausted dog, to the shore. He moored the row-boat to a wooden jetty on the opposite side to the fishing boats and went looking for the family Petrov. He found them in a wooden dacha on the edge of the village.

  Yury Petrov, prematurely grey hair a crown of fulfillment rather than age, read Katerina’s note, handed it to his wife, dark and feline-sleek with Mongol cheeks and eyes, struggled into a coat and followed the bargemaster to the jetty.

  Together they carried Calder through dark streets made from upturned logs to a wood-panelled room in the dacha where Petrov’s wife had already made up a bed. The bargemaster went back for Calder’s suitcase. ‘I don’t know whether you want money,’ he said. ‘Our friend has plenty of it. Dollars,’ watching for an animal-twitch of interest.