by Craig Thomas
They had spoken no word of retirement to him as yet; for which he was grateful. If anything clouded his general self-possession, his satisfaction with his lot, it was the idea that one day the neat, uncluttered flat in Sussex Gardens would become a bare, unfurnished cupboard to be inhabited, with growing dissatisfaction, for the long hours of endless, successive days.
He wondered how cold it was in Finland, and whether to delegate the organisation to one of his senior assistants — perhaps even to Davenhill, whose standing with the Minister, though not immutable, was at that moment satisfactory. And it would do the young man good.
Then he saw Davenhill, still in his leather topcoat, looking around at the Gallery, and Aubrey sensed that he was looking for him. Snow had turned to gleaming wetness on his hair and shoulders in the lights of the Chamber. He did not feel irritation — perhaps something about the younger man's attitude, an eagerness of body and face, intrigued Aubrey. He felt a swift pluck like mild indigestion at his stomach, and smiled. Then Davenhill saw him, and waved the newspaper in his hand, stepping immediately down the aisle to him.
'… The facilities for mutual inspection, by satellite and by military delegations, written into the terms of the Treaty, are surely all the Honourable Member could require, even for his satisfaction…' — the junior minister droned, raising two languid supporting breaths, and a mutter of denigration. Davenhill, who was looking extremely serious as he sat down, could not forbear to smile.
'Dear, dear — standards down again, I see. I don't know why you come here, Kenneth.'
'And to what do I owe the pleasure of your company?' Aubrey asked drily. 'To answer your remarks — I come because I find it all so reassuring. Don't you?'
'No initiations of mortality, then?'
'None at all. An abiding somnolence — I'm sure the map is still mostly pink, you know.' He studied Davenhill carefully for a moment, then added: 'What is it?'
'Folley…'
'What about Folley?' Aubrey found it suddenly difficult to control his interest; perhaps even panic — and knew that he was getting old.
'No contact.'
'What?' Something had been disturbing his calm — now he knew what it was. There had been an edge of concern that Folley had not reported in by the time he left his office to come to the House. He should have done — should have been picked up. 'What does Waterford think?'
'I've got him waiting downstairs — will you speak to him?'
'Yes, I must. Come.'
Aubrey cast one swift glance down at the floor of the House, then turned and made his way out of the Public Gallery.
Waterford was waiting for them near the Members' Entrance. Again, Aubrey was struck by his bearing; despite the military officer's civilian overcoat and the trilby hat, he still appeared like a prizefighter masquerading as a retired soldier, so looming was his presence, so marked his features by extreme experiences. He was a rogue operator — which was why he and Davenhill had chosen him. Waterford merely nodded to Aubrey as the little man gestured them through the doors out into New Palace Yard. The commissionaire saluted Aubrey as they passed.
Aubrey put on his bowler hat, and turned up the collar of his dark overcoat. It was still snowing, and beginning to lie. Davenhill belted the leather topcoat. The lamps in the Yard were great, faded billows of light; their footsteps were muffled by the thin layer of settled snow.
They patrolled the Yard once. Aubrey became irritated with their silence, the sense of them as machines who would not speak with his command.
'Well? Waterford — what's happened to him?'
'He's dead — or caught.'
'How can you know that?' Aubrey felt himself protesting too strongly; but an obscure sense of danger, threat, which placed what might have happened against the polite remarks inside the Commons in a chilly perspective. 'Weather?'
'Nothing to kill him off.'
'Delay?'
'He was to report if he needed more time.'
'Unless it would endanger him to do so — the helicopter is going back again tonight, isn't it?'
'Yes, it is,' Davenhill said, speaking for the first time. 'But — shouldn't we have a contingency plan?'
Aubrey was suddenly reluctant. His mind kept placing what he was being told, and what was surmised, in the blackest contrasts with the report he had made to the Foreign Secretary that afternoon — even to his recent conversations with Buckholz, Deputy Director of the CIA, talks with the Finns — he realised he was shivering; not with cold, not for Folley, not for any specific thing. But at a vague, oppressive sense that he had, simply had, to consider the Helsinki Conference in direct relation to the possible disappearance of Folley, and the certain disappearance of Brunton, and one test roll of unproven infrared film.
'What's the matter, Kenneth? You look absolutely awful.'
Davenhill touched his elbow, and Aubrey straightened, and said:
'Contingency plan. Very well. There is only one — no time to brief anyone new, get them trained — you two will have to go.'
'What?' Davenhill was aghast; squinted nervously up at Waterford's bulk.
Waterford merely nodded, then said, 'With him? That's a risk.'
'Kenneth — I'm not a field-agent. How the devil can I go?'
'You can — and will. Don't you see — if Folley is lost to us, then we may be dealing with something very serious indeed — so serious that the protocol of sending a Foreign Office Special Adviser no longer applies! You will prepare yourselves to leave tonight — unless we receive a report from Folley after the helicopter's second trip across Finland.'
He stood looking at the two of them, then looked up at the facade of Westminster Hall. He could see only dimly through the slanting snow the statues of English kings ranged along the building. And the lights seemed distant, too. He shivered again. He looked at Waterford, and added:
'Very well. If Folley is missing, I will admit the feasibility of your hypothesis. The Russians are in Finland, and probably in force. It will be up to you to prove it!'
The car had left the road at the northern end of the Ustinsky Bridge, smashed through the thin layer of ice on the northern bank of the Moskva, and sunk beneath the dark water, early that morning. Only at noon was the lifting operation got under way, two bright red mobile cranes manoeuvred into position on the Kotelnicheskaia Quay, when Vorontsyev's office obtained a priority order signed by Deputy Chairman Kapustin. The frogmen could work only minimal shifts in the freezing dark below the surface, and the work proceeded with painful slowness under the titular direction of Police Inspector Tortyev, who was KGB, but who had been reluctantly forced to accept the authority of Alevtina, to the policeman a much too-young junior officer in the SID. But he was not prepared to argue with her signed authority; he satisfied his sense of inferiority and truculent envy of the girl's position with pleasure that she at least kept out of the way, mostly in her car, or near the tea-wagon that was also doling out generous measures of vodka to divers coming off shift.
The girl sensed Tortyev's sullen hostility, and the surprise of the other policemen, and enjoyed the reactions she created. She was aware of herself as a diminutive figure in fur coat and hat, and long boots, as if she were a fashion model posed against some unexpected industrial background. And, since she rarely doubted her abilities or her instincts, she knew that no mere drunk had crashed a black Zil saloon into the Moskva, despite the impressions of the only witness, a policeman on foot patrol along the quays, looking for dossers or black marketeers and the like. She knew that Vrubel was in that car, and that he had been put there dead. Even if the policeman who had seen it had seen only one man, being below the level of the bridge, on the Quay, he had heard the car start up, and accelerate. Alevtina knew they would find a jammed accelerator when they got the black saloon out of the river.
The late afternoon was bitterly cold. She wanted more strong tea, but sensed that Tortyev, briefing the crane operators near the tea-wagon, would misinterpret any movement on her part,
and instead lit another cigarette. The car's ashtray was almost full of stubs. Long English filter-tips; she never smoked Russian tobacco. Major Vorontsyev was recovering in hospital, they said: if they got the car up soon, then she would report to him personally later hi the evening. She did, she decided, believe the doctors, and her smirking colleagues who well knew her concern for their chief, when they said he was all right; but she would like to see for herself.
She was half-way through the cigarette when Tortyev came towards her car, opened the door, and slid into the passenger seat, rubbing his gloved hands together, and blowing ostentatiously with the cold.
'It's ready. The divers have rigged up the lifting gear, at last. They can't see a body inside…'
'What?' she said sharply. 'The doors are open?'
'No. Neither doors nor windows. He has to be in there — if there was anyone in there.'
Alevtina smiled in a superior way, exhaling smoke which rolled under the roof of the car. 'Just wait and see, Inspector. There's someone in there.'
'I hope you're fucking right — otherwise it'll have been a very expensive piece of salvage work, won't it?'
Alevtina continued to smile broadly, understanding the motive behind the obscenity. Doubtless Tortyev had already imagined what she would be like in bed, and come to the conclusion either that she was the same as any other tart with SID knickers off, or a cold fish who worshipped her work and was frightened of men. The conventional grooves in most of the male minds around her in the KGB amused her. Women were spy-bait, or secretaries; not much more to most of the officers she knew. She had been accepted by the rest of Vorontsyev's team, after an initial period of sexual innuendo and proposition, as a police officer. It was all she asked; she knew that Vorontsyev respected her abilities, and that was a bonus.
'Let's go and have a look, then, shall we?' she said, reclaiming the initiative and getting out of the car. Tortyev slammed his door when he, too, got out. Alevtina shivered, despite the coat and fur hat, and thrust her hands into her pockets. She walked down almost to the shelving stonework of the edge of the Quay, and looked up at the mobile crane, its head dipped out over the river like some African bird drinking. Tortyev, standing beside her but a few feet away, raised his hand, and shouted an order. The crane-driver raised his thumb, and then put the crane into gear. The second crane had withdrawn, as if ousted in some rivalry between the two machines.
The black saloon, roof first like the back of a whale, came up out of the water, swayed and hovered above the river, water streaming from panels and underbody, mud thick on the wheels and sills, then the crane traversed, and for a moment the dripping car hung over the girl, soaking her. Someone laughed — not Tortyev though it was doubtless his idea — as her coat was soaked. Then the car was lowered on to the Quay behind her. She stood furiously still, her back to the policemen and their sniggers and grins, not even taking her hands from her pockets. She dipped her head, and filthy river-water dripped from her hat into the pool around her feet.
'Get a torch, then!' she heard Tortyev snap at someone, and the sound satisfied her, she would wait — after all, she knew. She heard the blow-torch start up, sizzle for a little while, then a rending of metal as the door was heaved open. She listened to the sounds of men scrabbling with something in the interior of the car, waited still, then turned on her heel even as Tortyev was starting to come to her, strode up to the car, and looked once at the white dead face staring sightlessly through the windscreen of the car. The body had been reseated upright in the driver's seat. She recognised the face — it was still sufficiently similar to the one in the photographs in her car.
'It's him. Have him taken to the morgue, Inspector.' The doctors told him almost as soon as he came round that he would not have frozen to death, wrapped in his topcoat as he was; he was told in the same neutral tones that they used to inform him that there were no broken bones; only a badly-sprained left wrist and multiple bruising. The deafness had worn off slowly, although they diagnosed one perforated eardrum, and the buzzing in his head and the dizzy sickness both left him during the afternoon. By the evening, he could sit up in bed in the private room of the small hospital in a rural suburb of Moscow — an aristocratic house in the old days — and consider his good fortune.
The bomber had not wired for instantaneous explosion presumably for his own safety when arranging the body on the bed. It was a ridiculous way to have avoided death; he could still feel as a sensation in his fingertips, the delicate cold wire, the strand that had linked him for a moment with death.
As the hours passed, he found his attention returning to the minutes of his occupancy of that cold, small bedroom at the dacha, and the face of the Ossipov-substitute. He had been found, face-down in the slush, by a senior member of the Central Committee Secretariat, who was cohabiting in his dacha with a woman not his wife. Vorontsyev retained a dim impression of a man in pyjamas and Wellingtons and a silk dressing-gown round his shivering form — before he had passed out again from the pain of being turned over.
Why? Why such — extreme measures? What was he so close to that a bomb had to be used to stop him? Vrubel — they would not see him again, unless he re-emerged in the last condition of the Ossipov-substitute. According to his wife's statement, Vrubel had made two telephone calls before leaving her flat. She had overheard neither call. How many men would it have taken to organise the operation that quickly? A lot — trained, expert men. The ruined dacha belonged to an unimpeachable member of the Council of Ministers. It was impossible that he should be involved. He was not even in Moscow at the time, but at a trade conference in Leipzig.
Vorontsyev lit one of the cigarettes at his bedside, coughing on the raw smoke. Then he lay staring up at the ceiling for a long time. Thought became, gradually, suspended; he almost dozed. Cigarette after cigarette disappeared from the packet, and the most conscious thing he seemed to do was to stub each butt in the metal ashtray advertising some awful beer.
It was late in the evening when he received a visitor — Deputy Chairman Kapustin. The bulky man with the broad, expressionless face settled himself on a chair at the bedside without enquiring after Vorontsyev's health. Vorontsyev tried to sit more upright; Kapustin seemed not to notice his efforts.
'I want to discuss your — accident, Major,' he said. Vorontsyev sensed the pressures of other voices, issued orders. Perhaps even from Andropov? He felt a quickening of thought, almost in the blood. 'I have to be completely frank with you,' he added as if he disliked the idea, and wished to disown it.
'Yes, Deputy?'
'From the report you dictated this morning, it is clear that you have stirred up something rather nasty, and far-reaching. Though you can have no idea what it is.' The final phrase was heavy with seniority. Vorontsyev could not like Kapustin, but was too intrigued by what he might learn to resent the man's proximity. Yes, he decided, he was nattered by the promise of revelations, of being fully informed.
'Your investigations,' Kapustin continued, his homburg hat still balanced on his knee, but the fur-collared coat now unbuttoned, 'were intended to add to our knowledge of the movements and contacts of senior army officers. This surveillance was ordered by…' He paused, as if forcing himself to overcome the habits of years, ingrained, then he managed to say: 'By the First Secretary and the Chairman, in joint consultation. Similar surveillance has, as you are aware, been carried out during the past year on a number of generals and military district commanders. What you in your section of SID do not know is that similar surveillance has been applied to senior members of the Politburo, the Praesidium, the Supreme Soviet, and the Central Committee Secretariat..'
Vorontsyev was shaken. He said, 'All with the same — suspicion in mind, Deputy?'
Kapustin nodded. Vorontsyev lit another cigarette, and saw that his hand was trembling with excitement. Whatever was going on, it was huge, out of all proportion to the small sliver of the totality that he had glimpsed, that had embedded itself in his flesh as surely as if it had b
een a splinter of wood from the ruined dacha. The compartmentalisation of all the security organs of the state extended even to the SID. He had had no idea that perhaps half the force was working on the same operation as himself and his team.
Kapustin said, 'You talked with Vrubel — what impression did you get of him? Did he know who you were?'
Vorontsyev, because his mind raced to the possibilities., ignored his private humiliation, so much so that he said immediately, 'He found me comical as a cuckolded husband.. ' Kapustin remained silent. 'But he was cocky, and not just with sex…' Vorontsyev concentrated, seeing the man's face, hearing his voice. 'He knew who I was, and that if I wished, I could make trouble just because he was having my wife. But he didn't seem to care. It seemed to make him more confident.'
'What do you conclude from this, Major?'
'I don't know. At the time I suspected something — some secret knowledge or power that made him — immune?' Kapustin's eyes lit up. He said. 'Exactly! that is what I suspected from your report. A great pity that you did not take other men with you…' He waved aside protest, and went on: 'Whoever is behind this, they are suitably ruthless. One must admire them for it, if for nothing else.'
'What do we know, Deputy? So far?
'Mm. I am permitted to tell you — ordered, in fact. The earliest clue was a tapped telephone call from the Bureau of Political Administration of the Army; a senior member of that department of the Secretariat who was about to retire, due to inoperable cancer. Perhaps he made a slip just because he was old, or ill — or confident. He used a phone that he would not know was tapped, but he might well have suspected it. His name was Fedakhin. He talked in what was obviously code, and he mentioned two strange things. He referred to Group 1917, and later in the conversation — that was his call-sign, we think — he referred to Finland Station. He was responsible for that area of the border, and the north-western military district. Apparently, this Finland Station was proceeding well, and he could look forward to retiring a happy man — to await the great day, as he put it.'