by Clark, Eric
The houseboats were moored at a point where the canal ran parallel to the railway track. As he neared, Kovalev saw their sameness; all were white, all with a small garden on the bank, and on the roof of each of them an identical TV aerial.
Kovalev did not know Van Louden’s real identity even now. He did know from his work for the Center that one of Van Louden’s major jobs in Holland was infiltrating the various Palestinian organizations. This had been a major Soviet preoccupation since 1968, one that intensified as the country’s standing in Egypt had declined.
Kovalev wanted one of Van Louden’s Palestinian sympathizers to carry a bomb on board Zorin’s flight. It would be written off as just another Palestinian attack. Zorin would die and Russia would be blameless.
But first Kovalev needed Van Louden’s co-operation. It was no good getting the Center to issue an order — Van Louden’s position was so strong that if he had any reservations about such an instruction he could, at the very least, cause delays. And time was something that Kovalev did not have. That was why he wanted to see Van Louden face to face.
He reached the first houseboat and began counting: he wanted the eleventh. He reached it, checked for a bowl of red tulips in the left corner of the window, then walked across the plank. The door was open. Inside, it was dark after the sunlight and he felt a brief wave of panic. He could hear nothing except the creak of wood as the boat shifted slightly in the water. He was getting old and it was too long since his operational days. Once he would never have stepped through a door like that.
A man stepped forward into his vision. They stared at each other. Even after all these years, and with all the changes, Kovalev recognized him instantly. The two men began to laugh.
‘Jan van Louden,’ said Kovalev as they embraced, ‘you are the finest Dutchman I have ever met.’
‘And you, my friend Petri, are the finest Fritz,’ said Van Louden. Kovalev, he knew from the message from Moscow, was travelling on a German passport.
Van Louden went through into the galley and returned with a bottle of Dutch gin. He poured two small glasses and they drank, emptying them at a swallow.
Kovalev was still staring in amazement.
‘You should see your face,’ said Van Louden.
Rarely in such an inhuman profession were there moments like this. Kovalev had not seen Van Louden — better to continue thinking of him by that name — for nearly ten years.
Van Louden was smiling at Kovalev’s amazement.
‘You like the look?’
Kovalev was not sure whether Van Louden meant the look of himself or of the boat. He restricted himself to an all-embracing ‘yes’ in reply.
The last time Kovalev had seen Van Louden they had both been wearing shapeless suits and Van Louden had been worrying about his hair thinning prematurely. Now he wore a red silk shirt, tight at the waist, open wide at the neck to display a silver medallion, and flared jeans. His head was completely shaved and, like his face, it was of the uniform brown that comes with the help of a sunlamp.
Van Louden spread his arms. ‘It’s the cool, hip, capitalist art dealer look!’ He laughed, but Kovalev got the feeling that he actually wanted to be admired. Kovalev knew that Van Louden had gone abroad with a false identity to set up an illegal network. Where, he had not known. ‘A successful capitalist art dealer by the look,’ he said, joining in the banter.
Van Louden snorted. ‘Ah, it’s easy to be a successful capitalist provided you’ve got money to start with,’ he said, ‘It’s almost embarrassing. I open a gallery as cover, and it keeps making more and more money.’ Kovalev used a tone of mock seriousness. ‘You must adopt Marxist principles in running your gallery. Then you can’t fail to lose money. Otherwise you’ll get corrupted — and what’s more we’ll stop sending your pay.’ The two men enjoyed the glow of friendship for a few more moments and then Kovalev forced himself to remember the urgency. ‘I take it this place is safe?’
‘As safe as I can make it. I search regularly.’ He shrugged. ‘If it’s not we’re being watched anyway.’
‘It’s a wet affair,’ said Kovalev.
Van Louden reacted without emotion.
‘Who and when?’
‘Just some fool. It needs to take place tomorrow.’ Although Van Louden said nothing, it was obvious what he was thinking: Kovalev had become too high-powered to be handling this kind of operation in person.
Kovalev sensed it but couldn’t bring himself to admit the truth. ‘I wasn’t far away,’ he said. ‘Time was a problem. There seemed no one here …’
‘And it is important? That’s why they risk you?’
‘Perhaps.’ With Van Louden, Kovalev thought he could relax. ‘Either that, or someone has decided I’m now expendable.’ He did not smile.
‘How can I help?’
‘What I want,’ said Kovalev, ‘what I need, is for one of your Palestinians to carry a case on an airplane for me. Can that be arranged?’
‘Tomorrow morning?’
‘Yes.’
Van Louden looked at his watch. ‘I think so.’ He stood. ‘I’ll drive you into town and make a phone call from a booth on the way.’
He paused before he reached the door.
‘I take it there’s a bomb in the parcel?’
‘Yes,’ replied Kovalev. ‘But we don’t have to tell him that, do we?’
*
At 10.35 p.m. Kovalev entered the hotel lobby. There was a message at the reception desk: ‘Please call Mr Rutten.’
A pre-arranged message from Salkulkin, only to be sent if there were problems.
Kovalev fought back his frustration. He had the number of a call booth he could call on the hour. There was nothing he could do for twenty-five minutes.
At eleven he telephoned from a booth in the lobby. Sakulkin answered immediately. ‘A message from home,’ he said.
‘Tell me,’ said Kovalev.
‘Now? Over the phone?’
‘We haven’t time to play it by the book. Tell me fast and get off the line.’
The message tore apart all his planning. The Irish Special Branch had chosen just this moment to clamp down on Soviet diplomats suspected of helping the Irish Republican Army. It was being done according to diplomatic rules, of course: little things like delaying clearance of diplomatic pouches, or holding diplomats trying to leave the country while their credentials were ‘checked’. Kovalev’s courier was one such man.
Kovalev walked back towards the elevator. Just over twelve hours. He would have to think again. Van Louden would be calling soon.
At the lobby shop he remembered he needed matches, and he bought a throw-away lighter. While he waited for change he looked over the magazines. He found it astonishing how many of them dealt with war. He took his change and began to walk away.
A thought struck him and he turned back to the magazines. The cover of one, A History of World War I in Forty Weekly Parts, showed a shell exploding in a trench.
Kovalev hurried for the elevator. It could still be done. Inside his room he grasped his overnight case, opened it and examined the spot where the handles joined the body of the case. Satisfied, he placed it on the bed. The telephone rang.
‘I need more help,’ he told Van Louden. ‘A laboratory …’
*
Van Louden picked him up an hour later. ‘It’s arranged,’ he said.
‘Good.’ Kovalev sank down in his seat.
‘The firm specializes in customs-syntheses — making up chemical formulas on order for universities and research institutes, so its lab has virtually everything.’
Kovalev nodded his appreciation.
The factory was in darkness and lay back from the road. The man waiting at the door was nervous. He was small, and his face had a hangdog look, the features of someone permanently struggling to stay out of debt or retain his job or keep his wife. As they walked through the building his stage whisper had the edginess of near-hysteria.
‘You will be out at six?’ he said.
‘You’ll see everything looks the way it does now?’
He switched on the neon lights, and they entered the laboratory.
The other two stood just inside the door while Kovalev looked round. A tap was dripping into a basin and from outside he could just hear the rumble of heavy lorries on the road. There was a strong smell of sulphur.
He returned to the door. ‘It will do very well,’ he said.
Van Louden was questioning the small man. ‘You’ve got everything I wanted?’
‘Yes.’ He gestured to a spot on one of the benches where chemicals and pieces of apparatus were already lined up.
‘The picric acid?’ asked Kovalev.
‘Yes — but there’s not much. The amount I was told you wanted. It’s not used widely now.’
Kovalev knew that. Some doctors still used it for burns, but not many.
‘Will it be missed?’ asked Kovalev.
‘No. There’s always a lot of wastage. I can handle it.’
Satisfied, Kovalev walked over to the bench and checked his watch. It was nearly one o’clock.
‘He’s nervous,’ Kovalev said when the little man had left.
‘He’ll be all right. It’s the first time he’s had to do anything like this. Normally we just want to know which universities and which research bodies are ordering what formulas …’
Kovalev had begun to check through the equipment. Satisfied, he reached for his overnight case. He took off his jacket and pulled his tie undone.
He realized Van Louden was asking whether he could stay. ‘Stay? Oh yes. We’ll keep each other awake.’
But it was obvious from Kovalev’s face and manner that he would have no problem staying awake. At last he knew what he needed to do and he was doing it.
First he studied the materials on the bench: the jar of yellow crystals, the larger jar of what looked like sugar, the bottle of what could have been olive oil. There was also a small selection of tools and two tubes of adhesive, brought by Van Louden.
With the door closed there was no sound from outside. The only noises were the dripping of the tap and soft, indecipherable mutterings from Kovalev as he began to work.
Van Louden watched as Kovalev poured some of the oily liquid into a narrow jar. He then plugged the jar with a rubber cork and turned it upside down. He wanted to know how long the concentrated sulphuric acid would take to eat through the rubber.
Then he began to examine the case. It had two compartments, one for clothes and one for papers. The handle was hollow plastic, the ends protruded into the case. It was crudely finished.
Kovalev peeled back the lining material exposing the base of the handles. Then, using a piece of tubing, he filled the handles with water to see how much they would hold.
Half an hour had passed. The acid began to trickle through the rubber stopper on to the dish below. Kovalev noted the exact time and re-set the experiment, this time doubling the thickness of rubber.
So far he had said nothing. Now he began to speak, explaining his actions to Van Louden.
The bomb was going to be the case itself. The explosive would be packed along the top side of the case and the lining replaced over it. It would reduce the inside width of the case by about an inch, too small an amount for anyone to notice.
He began to mix the ingredients. First, the yellow crystals. It was the magazine that had made him think of them.
‘This stuff has many names,’ he explained, measuring a quantity of crystals. ‘The British called it lyddite, the French melinite, the Italians pertite. Even the Japanese had their own name for it — shimosito.’
‘Picric acid?’
‘That’s it.’
Kovalev was enjoying his lecture. He weighed a pound of the material. It looked like coloured granulated sugar.
‘It was once very important,’ he said. ‘The great explosive — more powerful than TNT. There was just one trouble, though. They filled bombs and shells and grenades with it — but it corroded the metal. Useless!’
To the picric acid he added a half pound of slightly dampish granules — ‘sodium chlorate,’ he said. He then added an equal amount of ordinary sugar.
He made the mixture into a block, the length of the case and about an inch wide, and put it into a make-shift container of cardboard and brown sticky paper.
He tried it for size on the inside of the case. A good fit.
‘Now, we just stick it in there, re-seal the lining and …’
‘But how do you detonate it?’
‘Ahhh …’
The second lot of acid had burnt through its rubber cork.
‘Concentrated sulphuric acid,’ said Kovalev. ‘We fill the handles with it, seal it with rubber, and wait for it to burn its way through the rubber. It won’t burn through plastic.’
‘And then …’
‘And then,’ repeated Kovalev.
He checked his watch. The acid had taken 77 minutes to work its way through.
He went silent.
‘Problems?’ asked Van Louden.
‘I’d like thicker rubber,’ said Kovalev. ‘It burns through quicker than I’d like. But if I increase the amount of rubber there’s not enough room for acid.’
He considered the problem. Finally he nodded. ‘Yes, yes,’ he assured Van Louden. ‘There’s a way …’ It would have to be 77 minutes, but he would see the bomb was handed over at the last minute. The assassin would have to stay close to Zorin on the aircraft. Then if there were delays on the ground the blast itself would be enough to kill the man. He calculated that it would be fatal up to three rows of seats away.
Priming it immediately before the handover was no problem. He would put the bomb together now, the acid contained in a glass phial inside the handle. The ends of the handle would be plugged with rubber. To release the acid he would strike the handle hard enough to smash the glass. The only problem was the simple one of handing over the case to Van Louden’s Palestinian.
He inserted the block of explosive and re-stuck the lining. He moved the case under a light. It looked untouched.
Van Louden was looking at his watch.
‘You were quick,’ he said. ‘Our friend will be relieved.’
They began to walk towards the door. In anticipation of being outside and able to light a cigar, Kovalev took his new, throwaway lighter from his pocket.
He clicked it several times watching the flame flare and die. Each time there was the sound of a hiss of gas.
He stopped and stared at it, as though hypnotized. Van Louden watched amused. He tried to remember whether it was possible to buy such lighters in Russia, even in the special shops.
Kovalev turned back into the room and held the lighter underneath a lamp. After studying it for a few moments, he spoke. ‘No. He said we’d got until six. I’d like to use the time.’
And clutching the lighter he turned back to the bench.
Chapter Eighteen
THEY HAD DECIDED that any news of developments should go to Sunnenden. Scott wanted to know nothing — unless things started to go wrong — until it was all over.
Cory — both Scott and Sunnenden agreed — was too close to breaking down. Having set everything in motion he seemed to have gone into a state of deep shock.
The last time Sunnenden had seen him he had been slumped in his sitting room, his head leaning even further to one side than usual, eyes blank and unseeing. His hands were clasped tightly on his lap, and when he raised one to beckon Sunnenden to sit it shook more than ever.
The other reason Scott had suggested news should be relayed to Sunnenden, as the younger man well knew, was to ensure that it was his head that remained on the block. Scott would survive; there was always room for his special talents. As for Sunnenden, there was already the suggestion that a posting with one of the US agencies abroad might ‘broaden’ his experience.
Sunnenden reflected on this as he sat behind his desk, gazing around the room, wondering how much longer it would remain his.
&nb
sp; So far there had been only one message, a report of Zorin’s safe arrival in Holland from the CIA station there. Sunnenden debated driving out to tell Cory, but decided against it — seeing the man in his present state only added to his depression.
Now at 11.30 a.m. he had nothing to do but wait, shuffle files that had only been sent to him ‘for information’, and wonder what to tell Janet. Could he persuade her that an overseas posting was a promotion? He would have to tell her something — and soon. The previous evening they had fought right in front of the boys.
‘Just look at you,’ Janet screamed.
And he realized that his rumpled trousers — normally militarily creased — and unshone shoes were public announcements of his failure.
‘Why? Why?’ she had asked.
And Sunnenden had remained silent until she sent the boys away and then made up a bed for herself in the spare room.
He squared the files absentmindedly and straightened a pencil. He could not go out. He wanted to be at his desk when news arrived. He suddenly remembered there was one thing he could do.
The dissidents’ file was still in his right, bottom drawer. He unlocked it. And then, painstakingly slowly, he fed the contents sheet by sheet through the shredding machine until only the empty folder remained.
When another message finally came it made no sense to Sunnenden. He used a scrambled telephone to call the CIA man who had been delegated to pass material to him.
‘What’s it mean? Is it important?’
The voice at the other end was curt; the tone made it clear he was co-operating only as far as he had to, that he found even that distasteful.
‘Ask Cory,’ said the man. And he hung up.
*
Cory felt he was coming through it. The more powerful anti-depressants that had been prescribed helped, but he thought it was more than that …
At least he had done what he could. It wasn’t his fault that the scheme would not go ahead. Of course, people were going to suffer — Zorin would probably die, his wife would be widowed, the child fatherless. But in the long term would things have really been any different for them? Cory was sure that, without hope of escape, Zorin would have returned to dissidence with vigour and reckless regard for himself — and would certainly have ended dying in a labour camp or enduring a living death.