The Run Around cm-8

by Brian Freemantle

  Berenkov tried to cough, to disguise the gagging that rose in his throat and almost failed, so that he came near to choking, but fortunately the rotor engines of the helicopter had not completely quietened, so nobody noticed.

  ‘Comrade General!’ greeted the camp commandant. He was a colonel named Slepov: he held himself stiffly to attention and actually saluted. Behind the man Berenkov saw ranged other camp officers, two majors and three lieutenants.

  ‘Comrade colonel,’ responded Berenkov. He did not bother to reply to the salute, nor to address himself to the escorting officers. ‘Everything is ready?’

  ‘My own office has been made available,’ said Slepov. Tentatively he moved away from the landing area, inviting Berenkov to accompany him, which Berenkov did.

  ‘That’s considerate,’ said Berenkov.

  ‘You will require some refreshment?’ invited the commandant, frightened at the reason for Berenkov’s visit and wanting to extend all the protective hospitality possible.

  Berenkov still had a foul taste in his mouth from his reaction to the arrival smell and there was the need for preliminary discussion anyway. He said: ‘Perhaps something to drink. Flavoured vodka, preferably.’

  ‘We enjoy pepper vodka in this climate,’ said Slepov.

  ‘That will do excellently,’ said Berenkov.

  As they approached the officers’ quarters, Berenkov was aware of the attention from the outer ring of prisoner barracks, recognizing the professionalism of the institutionalized in which he had once been so expert himself, the ability to react to something as earth-shatteringly unusual as a helicopter arrival would be to them but at the same time showing nothing in that reaction to offend or infringe prison regulations to incur any sort of penalty.

  The officers’ quarters were raised on supports from the freezing ground and almost oppressively warm, in contrast to the outside temperature. There were a series of pot-bellied stoves running down the centre of the large, outside office block and additional central heating radiators beneath windows which Berenkov saw were double-glazed and additionally heavily curtained. Slepov’s office was carpeted and an attempt had been made at a conference area to one side, with easy chairs and a couch and a rectangular table. The bottles were already prepared on the table. Slepov poured and Berenkov sank the first drink in one gulp, needing it: it burned through him, warming as it was supposed to do and taking some of the earlier taste from his mouth. Berenkov accepted a second and as he handed it to him Slepov said, exploring: ‘It is not often that we have a visit from a KGB general?’

  ‘It is only the Englishman, Sampson,’ said Berenkov, getting the man’s fears out of the way at once.

  ‘I have him waiting,’ said the commandant.

  The man started towards the intercom device on his desk but Berenkov stopped him. ‘Wait!’ he ordered. ‘You have informers in his block?’

  ‘Three,’ confirmed Slepov.

  ‘Reliable?’

  ‘They know better than not to be.’

  ‘What do they report on him?’

  ‘Very little,’ said Slepov, uncomfortably. ‘He has not formed any particular friendships, certainly nothing homosexual. In the first month of his imprisonment he broke another prisoner’s nose, fighting off a rape attempt.’

  ‘No boasts?’ demanded Berenkov.

  ‘Boasts?’ queried Slepov, bewildered.

  ‘There have been no remarks about his succeeding, in whatever his mission was in coming to Moscow?’

  ‘Nothing,’ assured Slepov. ‘If there had been I would have reported it at once.’

  ‘Let me see him,’ ordered Berenkov.

  The man with whom Charlie Muffin supposedly fled to Russia, after their KGB-engineered escape from Wormwood Scrubs, was led into the commandant’s office within minutes and Berenkov guessed he had been held in one of the outside offices. Edwin Sampson was wearing a grey canvas prison suit stiff with age and use and work boots around which were wrapped strips of cloth, for additional warmth. Both ankles were manacled and linked by a short chain, so that he could only walk with short, scuffing steps, and from the centre of that chain extended a longer metal link to another short chain between a set of handcuffs that held his hands, horny with callouses, close together and tight to his waist. His head was shaved bald against lice infestation, and his skin was tight across his cheekbones and chin. The skin was yellowed by exposure, different only where his eyes sank deeply into his head, where it was oddly black. His stance, between the two escorting guards, was stiffly respectful but docile, the attitude of someone determined against any offence that might earn retribution.

  To the guards Berenkov said: ‘Leave him.’

  The men looked to Slepov, who nodded.

  ‘I want to conduct the interrogation alone,’ Berenkov said, to the commandant.

  ‘Regulations insist-’ began the man but Bereknov cut him off.

  ‘Alone,’ he said again.

  Sampson remained quite still in the middle of the room, as if he were unaware of the conversation around him.

  Berenkov settled behind the commandant’s desk, wanting the indication of its authority. He said: ‘You are serving a sentence of thirty years?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Do you expect the British to attempt an exchange?’

  ‘I do not know, sir.’

  ‘But you hope for one?’

  Sampson hesitated, unsure how to reply, worried about offence. Eventually he said: ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘After your arrest, in Moscow, you were taken to the Serbsky Psychiatric Hospital?’

  Sampson visibly shuddered. ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Where you were treated with drugs?’ Aminazin to induce shock, Berenkov remembered, from the man’s file. Sulfazin, too, which caused a feverish rise of temperature, further to disorientate.

  There was another shudder from the Englishman. ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Listen to me very carefully,’ said Berenkov. ‘I want you to comprehend completely what I say. I am going to ask you some questions and you must reply honestly to them. If you do not reply honestly, I shall ensure that any exchange approach by the British is permanently blocked: that you remain here for thirty years. I shall further have you taken to Moscow, to be treated again at Serbsky, until I believe the answers you are giving. Do you understand?’

  The yellowed face glistened with the perspiration of fear and the manacled hands began to tremble. Sampson said: ‘Yes, sir. I understand, sir.’

  ‘You supplied disinformation to Moscow from a position in British intelligence while you were stationed in Beirut and Washington and attached to European Planning in NATO?’ said Berenkov. This was all in the file too, evidence from the man’s Moscow trial, after his confession, but Berenkov wanted to confirm everything.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘To trick the KGB into believing you were a genuine and valuable spy?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Your supposed trial and imprisonment in Wormwood Scrubs was a trick, too, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘For what purpose?’

  Sampson moistened his lips, nervous at having to go beyond the brief, obedient replies. He said: ‘Further to make the KGB believe I was genuine.’

  ‘Did you expect them to rescue you from jail?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘I was to try to infiltrate the KGB.’ The man spoke prison-fashion, his wetted lips hardly moving.

  ‘To act as a spy for the British?’

  ‘Yes.’

  There had been no deviation from anything that had emerged at the trial but Berenkov had not expected it at this stage: the questioning so far had been to lull the other man as much as he could be lulled into the false security of safe answers. From now on the questions and those answers had to be different. ‘Tell me about Charlie Muffin,’ he demanded, curtly.

  Sampson swallowed, his throat visibly moving. ‘I was put in a cell with him, in
England. He was serving a sentence for deceiving the CIA, as well as the British. Both directors into KGB capture.’

  Still trial deposition, thought Berenkov. And supported by their own records. Which had to be wrong. Would both services have abandoned their directors for some infiltration scheme? He found it difficult — practically impossible — to conceive yet it had to be, if Charlie Muffin were back in British intelligence, which he provably was. It was the moment to remind the man of penalties. Bere-nkov said: ‘Remember what I said about an exchange? And Serbsky.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Charlie Muffin’s imprisonment was a trick, too, wasn’t it? Part of the same plot to infiltrate both of you into the KGB?’

  Sampson’s distress this time was greater than at any time before: the sweat leaked from him, staining through the canvas and shining his face and he clutched one metal-strapped hand over the other, in an effort to control the shaking. He said: ‘That was the prosecutor’s demand, at the trial.’

  ‘I know,’ said Berenkov, hard-voiced. ‘And then you denied it. But that denial was a lie, wasn’t it!’

  ‘No!’

  The prisoner had twice forgotten the respectful ‘sir’, which he well knew to be a punishable offence, recognized Berenkov. He said: ‘So tell me about Charlie Muffin.’

  ‘He wasn’t part of anything; couldn’t be. He had to believe I was a traitor, to build up my credibility when I got to Moscow. And he did believe it: I think he hated me.’

  ‘Why did he hate you?’

  ‘Because he did not regard himself as a traitor, although that was what he’d been sentenced for being; he always said he trapped the two directors for their trying to trap him. That it was personal.’

  The sweat was making black marks on the prison uniform and the respectful address seemed completely forgotten. Berenkov said: ‘Why did he come with you to Moscow, then?’

  The pause this time was different than any before. Throat pumping, Sampson said: ‘Because imprisonment was destroying him.’

  You poor bastard, thought Berenkov. It was an easy reflection, from his own experiences, despite everything the Englishman had done or tried to do. He said: ‘You remember being separated from him, soon after you got to Moscow?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sampson. Then, remembering, he added hurriedly: ‘Sir.’

  ‘Do you know what happened to him?’

  ‘From the questioning at my trial I assumed he had been arrested, too, sir.’

  ‘He wasn’t,’ disclosed Berenkov. ‘He escaped back to England with the help of the British embassy.’

  It was not a question and Sampson was too well indoctrinated to respond. Berenkov let the full awareness settle with the other man and then continued: ‘And he’s back in your intelligence service. Operating as an agent.’

  For several moments there was no response, because Sampson was fighting against any reaction that might get him into trouble, but in the end he failed. His head went back and the word came out in a wail: ‘No!’

  ‘Yes,’ insisted Berenkov.

  For the first time since the interrogation began Sampson directly fixed the Russian with those hollow eyes. ‘Why!’ he said, wailing still. ‘How!’

  Sampson genuinely knew nothing, Berenkov decided. No man who had undergone the psychiatric interrogation of Serbsky and endured imprisonment here at Potma — and been threatened with a continuation of both — would have risked lying. Who had lied then? There was only the woman, Natalia Nikandrova Fedova. Yet she had been the KGB debriefer who exposed Sampson as the spy he later admitted to being under that first interrogation. Nothing reconciled, to make any sense. Unless … No, that did not make any sense, either. He said: ‘So you were tricked, too?’

  ‘But why!’

  Something else that did not make sense, thought Berenkov. Honestly he said: ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Sir?’

  It was unthinkable for a prisoner to make any sort of demand unless he were on the point of complete breakdown. ‘What?’ said Berenkov.

  ‘I have told the truth.’

  ‘I believe you have.’

  ‘Please, sir, don’t submit me again to the Serbsky!’

  ‘I won’t,’ said Berenkov.

  ‘No punishment: please, sir, no more punishment!’

  ‘No,’ promised Berenkov. ‘No more punishment.’

  Later, during the final moments of Berenkov’s anxious departure from the camp, Slepov said: ‘About the prisoner? Is he to be subjected to any special sort of regime?’

  ‘Nothing,’ ordered Berenkov. ‘He is to be treated normally.’ What, he wondered, passed for normality in a place like this?

  Vasili Zenin had decided to sleep at the apartment to examine it fully in the light of the following morning. And he did so very fully indeed, studying the maps and diagrams of the conference buildings and gardens that the woman had provided and calculating from them the sightlines available from the corner window overlooking the entire area. Definitely the sloped lawn designated for the commemorative photograph, the Russian determined. The trees he’d feared from ground level might interfere would be no problem and if there were any winter sunlight it would be sufficiently to one side not to impair his vision. He needed the accuracy of the rifle sight to assess the precise distance but he did not think the range to be any greater than four hundred metres, from which he had never missed.

  Zenin turned away from the window and saw the disarranged bed through the open bedroom door. A very definite mistake to have brought her back here, he recognized again. But one that had been made and about which there was no benefit in continued recrimination: sexually she had been one of the most exciting women he’d known and supplied a need, like she would again.

  Sulafeh Nabulsi was less than a mile away in the main conference building, taking the care she had shown from the day of her arrival to be recognized by the security guards. She, too, was thinking of what had happened in the apartment. She knew he would get her away after the killing, because he had promised he would. They could live together, she decided. It would be wonderful to be his woman.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Permanent State Department officials had, of course, organized the President’s European trip, advance groups liaising with the host countries in each capital months before, but the planning had personally been that of James Bell himself. It was the Secretary of State who had either approved or vetoed every one of Anderson’s public appearances and selected the people whom the man would meet, both publicly and privately. In addition he had insisted upon seeing the drafts and then the finally prepared speeches that Anderson would make at each event and function, determined nothing would be out of place for what he recognized to be the triumphant swan-song of his friend’s presidency. Berlin was as successful as Bell intended the entire trip to be. It began with an impressive arrival ceremony, where Anderson was greeted at Tegel airport by the West German president. Together they inspected a guard of honour to the accompaniment of a full band before the President gave the podium speech at which the theme was struck for every address the man was to make: Clayton Anderson, the man dedicated to peace. In the evening the Chancellor gave a glittering banquet to which Martha Bell wore a shimmering silk gown and once more outshone Janet Anderson, whose husband gave his second speech in which he spelled out more directly that the thrust of his two terms of office had been to mediate and solve intractible international problems and remove forever the threat of war which had divided his host country. In the morning — for internal US consumption — there was the required visit to an American army base to see and talk with troops forming part of the NATO commitment, which once more provided a forum for another speech, Anderson looking forward to the time when tensions between East and West had been swept away to make such a commitment and such an Allied force unnecessary. And an even more required visit to the Berlin Wall. It was the best television and photographic opportunity during this stage of the European trip and Bell had devoted great care t
o it, even arranging for an elevated platform to be constructed for the cameramen and photographers alongside the observation tower which Anderson mounted to stare grave-faced across the wire and the mines and the automatically triggered machine-guns into a gaunt East Berlin. Here — brilliantly — there was no speech. Anderson was pictured slowly and sadly shaking his head and he shook his head again to shouted questions from journalists demanding his impression, only allowing himself to be pressured at the moment of entering his car to say that the Wall was a testimony that required no words. There were provisions, of course, for private talks between Anderson and the Chancellor and the preceding briefing session was the first opportunity since the conversation aboard Air Force One for the President and the Secretary of State to talk privately and alone.

  ‘You know what I regret, Jim?’ mused Anderson.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That Kennedy got in first with his I am a Berliner speech: that would have gone down well today.’

  ‘Circumstances have changed, Mr President.’

  ‘Still a hell of a speech,’ insisted Anderson. ‘Anything new out of Geneva?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘False alarm then?’

  ‘It’s looking more and more like it.’

  ‘You’ve got a lot of private reassuring to do in Geneva,’ reminded Anderson. ‘I had to lean on Jerusalem more than anyone else to get them to the same conference table as the Palestinians and I don’t want any backlash to pull the Jewish vote at home away from the party.’

  ‘I understand,’ said Bell.

  ‘I want you to fix up as many meetings as you can with the Israeli Foreign Minister and anyone else you consider necessary,’ said Anderson. ‘You tell Cohen and anyone else who needs to be told that however it might look publicly that privately we’re still in their corner: always have been and always will be.’

  ‘I’ll do that,’ promised Bell.

  ‘You think it would be risky to give an unattributable briefing about that to the important media people?’