The Man Who Was Saturday

by Derek Lambert

‘In Bratsk. We have friends there.’

  ‘You have friends everywhere.’

  ‘And now one in the United States ….’ The train shuddered. Petrov held out his hand. ‘Goodbye. Maybe one day ….’

  ‘Maybe.’ Calder gripped Petrov’s hand very hard. Then he threw his crutches into the carriage and followed them. When he reached his compartment and looked out of the window all he could see was Petrov’s back at the end of the platform. Even at that distance he looked jaunty.

  At the Chinese border he showed his American passport to the Russian officials who boarded the train. Inside it were the most valuable travel documents he had ever possessed – a wad of dollar bills. When the passport was returned it was empty.

  Calder didn’t attempt to bribe the Chinese. He was taken off the train, held at the border until the evening, then taken on another slower train to Peking.

  After the President of the United States had been in touch with the Chairman and Prime Minister of the People’s Republic Calder was officially deported, placed, under guard, on a charter plane paid for by the Americans and flown to Tokyo. He was given to understand that the Chinese were not displeased by his anti-Soviet activities.

  In Tokyo he learned from the US Embassy that Harry was out of hospital. That he had made a fair recovery – not good, Calder noted – and that it was hoped that eventually the effects of the fractured skull would clear up and he would be as normal as any other child. A bullet-nose of fear had lodged and stayed with Calder for the rest of the journey.

  They were waiting for him in a small room at Logan Airport furnished with red plastic seats, a table heaped with magazines and a bar. Ruth looked as she had always looked in his thoughts, smart and soft at the same time, red-gold hair more businesslike than she was …. When she saw him her hand flew to her mouth.

  And Harry was as he had known he would be except his hair was a little shorter, cropped where the fracture had been, and he was wearing jeans instead of the short pants he had worn in Calder’s dreams, and his expression was searching, like a child assessing a new teacher.

  ‘Hallo Harry,’ Calder said. The moment he had unreeled so many times and he didn’t know what to say, what to do.

  He stretched out his hand. Harry looked past it.

  Ruth said: ‘We didn’t know what to expect ….’

  Then Harry spoke. ‘Hallo dad,’ he said. ‘What have you done with your leg?’

  ‘It’s a long story,’ Calder said. ‘Want to hear it?’

  And when Harry nodded he bent low on his crutches, his hand still outstretched and this time Harry took it.

  Calder, walking with his crutches in the Rose Garden, said: ‘They think Harry’s going to be okay. I was therapy apparently.’

  ‘And Ruth?’ Holden walked quickly to keep up with Calder who used his crutches flamboyantly.

  ‘We’ll try,’ Calder said. ‘For Harry’s sake.’ He reined in his crutches. ‘Maybe for our sakes.’ His hand looked for the beard he had shaved off.’ Anyway we’ll try ….’

  Hedges and pruned rose bushes still dripped with rain but winter sunshine was making a fragile place of the garden. A bird sang in the crab-apple trees.

  ‘She knows what you’ve done,’ Holden told Calder. ‘Not in detail, of course. But enough. You won’t be the first hero to remain undecorated. But you won’t want for anything.’

  ‘Except a leg,’ Calder said.

  ‘Of course we’ll have to give you a new identity. A new image. A little plastic surgery maybe …. How do you fancy the West Coast? San Diego maybe.’

  ‘It’s warmer than Siberia.’ Calder started to swing himself along again. ‘That cable to Jessel saying I was wrong about Marion Shannon … it was to convince him that he had to kill me?’

  ‘As we both know Jessel worked for the CIA. But he had another employer, NSA, the National Security Agency. People don’t realise they’re more powerful than the Company.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘I realise it now.’

  ‘What sort of an answer is that, for Christ’s sake?’

  ‘Evasive, I guess. Anyway the fact is that Jessel’s real masters were NSA not CIA.’

  ‘The CIA was a cover? I’ll be damned. CIA versus NSA … With a set-up like that the KGB doesn’t have too many problems in Washington. Or maybe they engineered it that way?’

  Holden nodded wearily. ‘That was part of Shoemaker’s brief, to spread dissension. He worked with Zec, director of the NSA; not that Zec was a traitor, he was just a dupe. Shoemaker even got to sign coded cables. As you know – Jessel got one.’

  ‘And Shoemaker never attracted a whiff of suspicion?’

  ‘Partly my fault.’ Holden turned away and stared at the colours trapped in the raindrops. ‘I trusted him too much, just as you once trusted me ….’

  ‘Just the same he must have been one hell of an actor.’

  ‘Actor?’ Holden frowned. ‘I don’t think so. They got to him so young that deception became part of his character. But he was brilliant, I’ll concede that – he even recommended the killing of Marion Shannon. But that, of course, was when she had been blown, when she no longer served any purpose.’

  ‘Was he suborned on the campus? Like the others? Like me?’

  ‘At UCLA. A certain professor of economics. I suppose that’s where we make our mistake: we assume that traitors are spawned in the ranks of the deprived rather than the privileged. Shoemaker looked around, didn’t like what he saw in his own circle and blamed the system rather than the individuals. As soon as he did that he was a soft touch for our comrades. I suppose the best we can say for him is that he had moral values.’

  Calder stopped, dug the rubber-blunted tip of one of the crutches into the rain-soft grass. ‘Moral values? Do you really believe that? Is that what you thought about me when I made a run for it?’

  Holden said carefully: ‘At first I had nothing but contempt for you. But,’ hurriedly, ‘then I realised that, to an extent, I was to blame.’

  ‘Damn right.’

  ‘So I guess I came to terms with fallibility. I was fallible, you were, Shoemaker … I suppose he believed what he was doing was justifiable.’

  ‘More than that. He believed it was right. Right, right, right. Just as I did. And who knows, maybe it was. Treachery, what a melodramatic word! Like patriotism. And that surely is merely a geographical accident. ‘

  ‘It’s something to believe in,’ Holden said.

  ‘The Russians believe in it.’

  ‘So why have you come back if the values there are the same as here?’

  ‘For that reason I suppose. In the final reckoning we’re individuals. They wanted to kill me, my son was hurt. What the hell is patriotism? It’s where you’re conceived, that’s all it is, goddammit.’ He skewered the crutch in the grass and faced the White House. ‘Shoemaker never got to realise that.’

  ‘Like you,’ Holden said, ‘he was side-tracked by ideals.’

  ‘Ah, ideals. Elusive, aren’t they? How can you say that the ideals preached in Washington are preferable to the ideals preached in Moscow?’

  ‘I can’t,’ said the President of the United States of America.

  As they walked towards the Oval Office Calder said: ‘So what we have established is this: the enemy isn’t in the Kremlin anymore: it’s here, established decades ago.’

  ‘Which is why, perhaps, the KGB has allowed the old men to linger in the Kremlin: they knew that in the world stakes the Politburo that matters is in the West. Here.’

  ‘Well, you’ve nailed seven of them. But their vacancies will be filled. Their successors are in their teens, twenties, thirties but they’ll get there. Who knows, maybe one is being recruited right now over a giant sandwich at Elsie’s.’ He paused. ‘Remember the naïve views we had about equality?’

  Holden glanced at him curiously. ‘I remember.’

  Calder took a sheet of typewritten paper from the pocket of his topcoat. ‘Read it. The names are the key Western a
gents inside the Soviet Union. I found them in Jessel’s briefcase among the names of other contacts.’

  Holden scanned the names. ‘My God, dynamite!’ He folded the sheet of paper. ‘Hell, supposing the KGB had found them before you.’

  Calder stopped, turned and faced Holden, saw him for a moment looking up triumphantly from the chess board as he called check. ‘Those dreams,’ he said, ‘they weren’t so naïve.’

  No muscle moved on Holden’s questing features but suddenly there was a filter there. Calder remembered the expression, too, across the black and white squares. ‘I don’t understand,’ Holden said.

  ‘In the cause of equality,’ Calder told him, ‘you’ve got two weeks in which to warn everyone on that list that they’re about to be blown. Two weeks in which to get them out. After that a good friend of mine named Yury Petrov is sending the list to KGB headquarters in Moscow. Stalemate, Mr President, a terrible trap to fall into.’

  Later when he was Christmas shopping in Washington, Calder remembered Holden’s last words in the Rose Garden. ‘I never did think we were naive. Maybe what we possessed was pure wisdom. Maybe sophistication is the only naïvety.’

  Fingering the pocket chess-set which Holden had returned to him he thought: ‘Katerina possessed that pure wisdom when we first met. No longer.’

  Older people had told him that as the years accelerated their youth returned in vivid detail. Perhaps we journey back to a time of sublime innocence, the only truth.

  Or am I merely trying to divert my own conscience? On the list he had given Petrov – but not on the one he had handed to Holden – he had included Dalby’s name. Even now he could save him; but he knew he wouldn’t.

  Holding his purchases with difficulty, he swung himself out of a store with GOODWILL TO ALL MANKIND frosted on its windows and told the driver of the waiting limousine to take him to the safe house in Georgetown where Ruth and his son were waiting for him.

  In the apartment on Leningradsky a rousing party was held to welcome the New Year. Sasha sang with unrestrained passion, a dog with a brown nose got under everyone’s feet, twenty-three bottles of vodka were killed, a young man with brilliant prospects in the Soviet Foreign Ministry fell instantly in love with Svetlana and Leonid Agursky proposed marriage to Katerina.

  ‘Give me a little time,’ she said holding his hand. ‘But if we do get married you know you will always be second?’ and when he asked to whom: ‘To the movement, of course – you’ll even have to wash the dishes,’ and when he asked: ‘But not second to anyone else?’ she turned away from him so that he couldn’t see how damp her eyes had become and said: ‘No, no one else,’ and gripped his hand.

  In the New Year a dozen Western diplomats, businessmen and advisers were recalled abruptly from the Soviet Union. Four others ignored the warnings they received and were summarily executed in white-tiled cells with bullets in the backs of their necks.

  Dalby died from a heart-attack although, as it was frequently pointed out in the Institute for World Economy and International Affairs, he hadn’t had a history of cardiac trouble.

  During the next six months five VIPs in the Western political and military structure also died. Also from natural causes. Or accidents.

  If you enjoyed The Man Who Was Saturday, check out these other great Derek Lambert titles.

  Each year a nucleus of the wealthiest and most influential members of the Western world meet to discuss the future of the world’s superpowers at a secret conference called Bilderberg.

  A glamorous millionaires just sighting loneliness from the foothills of middle age … a French industrialist whose wealth matches his masochism and meanness … a whizz-kid of the seventies conducting a life-long affair with diamonds, these are just three of the Bilderbergers who have grown to confuse position with invulnerability. A mistake which could prove lethal when a crazed assassin is on the loose…

  Buy the ebook here

  The Red House follows a year in the life of Russian diplomat Vladimir Zhukov, the new Second Secretary at the Soviet Embassy in Washington – a ‘good Communist’ in 1960s America.

  Seeing what life in the West is really like, he discovers there is more to American than what Soviet propaganda has taught him. Increasingly intrigued by the Washington circuit, from outspoken confrontation between diplomats to the uninhibited sexual alliances arrange by their wives with other diplomats, the capitalist ‘poison’ begins to work on him and his wife.

  As he struggles to remain loyal to his country and begins to question who is the real enemy, he has to decide to whom is first loyalty due: country or lover, party or conscience.

  Buy the ebook here

  The Trans-Siberian Express has left Moscow carrying the most powerful, closely guarded man in the Soviet Union - and also the man who plans to kidnap him.

  Tension aboard the train is at a maximum. The KGB has checked and double checked. But as Vasily Yermakov, the Soviet leader, tries to sleep on the first night in his cabin, he has an uneasy feeling that something is about to go wrong.

  Buy the ebook here

  As the Soviet space-shuttle Dove orbits 150 miles above the earth on its maiden flight, Warsaw Pact troops crash into Poland.

  The seventy-two-year-old President of America wants to be re-elected, and for that he needs to win the first stage of the war in space: he needs to capture the Soviet space shuttle. But as the President plans his coup a nuclear-armed shuttle speeds towards target America – and only defection in space can stop it.

  Buy the ebook here

  In neutral Lisbon, British Intelligence have concocted a ruthless doublecross to lure Russia and Germany into a hellish war of attrition on the Eastern Front and so buy Britain the most precious commodity of all: time.

  That plot now hinges on one man: Josef Hoffman, a humble Red cross worker. But who is Hoffman? And where do his loyalties really lie?

  Buy the ebook here

  Derek Lambert’s classic spy novel exposes the truth about the life of the Western community in post Stalin Moscow, and their existence in which tensions and hostility of the Soviet Union sometimes prove intolerable.

  An American working for the US embassy and the CIA, a young Englishman at the British Embassy gradually cracking under the strain of Moscow life, and a member of the Twilight Brigade. In an alien land their lives become inextricably joined in a vivid and tense story of diplomats, traitors, Soviet secret police and espionage.

  Buy the ebook here

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Derek Lambert was born in 1929, and served in the RAF for two and a half years, before becoming a foreign correspondent, travelling the world to exotic locations that later inspired his novels. His travels gave him first-hand knowledge of his material and it was his authentic tales of espionage made him a household name and bestselling author. He spent the later years of his life in Spain, where he died in 2001 at the age of 71.

  OTHER BOOKS BY

  FICTION

  Angels in the Snow

  The Kites of War

  For Infamous Conduct

  Grand Slam

  The Red House

  The Yermakov Transfer

  Touch the Lion's Paw

  The Great Land

  The Saint Peter's Plot

  The Memory Man

  I, Said the Spy

  Trance

  The Red Dove

  The Judas Code

  The Golden Express

  The Man Who Was Saturday

  Vendetta

  Chase

  Triad

  The Night and the City

  The Gate and the Sun

  The Banya

  Horrorscope

  Diamond Express

  The Killing House

  NON-FICTION

  The Sheltered Days

  Don't Quote Me But

  And I Quote

  Unquote

  Just Like the Blitz

  Spanish Lessons

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  Australi
a

  HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.

  Level 13, 201 Elizabeth Street

  Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia

  www.harpercollins.com.au

  Canada

  HarperCollins Canada

  2 Bloor Street East - 20th Floor

  Toronto, ON, M4W, 1A8, Canada

  www.harpercollins.ca

  New Zealand

  HarperCollins Publishers (New Zealand) Limited

  P.O. Box 1

  Auckland, New Zealand

  www.harpercollins.co.nz

  United Kingdom

  HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

  United States

  HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

  195 Broadway

  New York, NY 10007

  www.harpercollins.com