by Craig Thomas
'So much stuff on them, sir, we got in touch with the Branch. They must have thought of you.'
'They did, indeed, Inspector. My thanks for your promptitude,' Aubrey had replied stiffly to the Inspector, who was bending to peer under the umbrella Aubrey carried. And such stuff- chauffeur's uniform, British passport for someone, with a face not identifiable among the dead here, another change of clothes, and one of the dead murdered with a rather out-of-date, though still effective, KGB tool, the watch-wire — Times Cravats, he understood were their popular name. It was KGB, that was evident — the one security machine above all others that enjoyed the gadgetry of violent death, the little toys that killed.
And towels from the airport — strange that they had not rid themselves of them, or the white coats. Aubrey thought he understood the lethargy of aftermath. But — who was dead, and who killed him? And — Aubrey could almost taste the feline pleasure of the mystery — who owns the face on the British passport?
'Inspector?' he called.
The policeman, disgruntled and wet, hurried up.
'Sir?1
CI have some instructions to give. Perhaps I might use your car radio?'
'Certainly, sir.'
'And I shall have need of photographs of these three — not here, but when they've been cleaned up. As quickly as possible — you can get them removed now. All papers, anything you remove, will be collected for our own investigation, early tomorrow.'
'Sir.'
As they walked bowing to the windy sleet, the Inspector grateful for Aubrey's offer of a crescent of the umbrella, Aubrey had a sudden image of the crash outside Kassel, months before. And he sensed an excitement he could not quite explain, certainly not define with any precision, that here was coincidence in a certain direction. He hurried his steps, unconsciously, to the police car.
'You'll want it rigged through to — London, sir?
'Yes, use the number you would normally use — I'll take it then.'
It took little more than two minutes for the police radio to be patched into the receiving station on one of the floors of the Euston Tower, and from here Aubrey was connected directly with INTELCORD, the SIS's co-ordination and evaluation section, housed in Queen Anne's Gate itself, unlike many of the service's units.
'There you are, sir.' The Inspector left without pause, handing the mike to Aubrey, shutting the car door on the sleet and the traffic. As the window misted almost immediately, Aubrey felt quiet, and calm, with a little tickle of excitement beginning somewhere in his stomach.
'Who's that?'
'Callender, sir.'
'Good. Callender — send someone out here to collect some pictures, some bodies, and some evidence, would you? One of your customers has some nasty marks on his neck, which one of our foreign counterparts is responsible for. I — shall want a lot of clearance time for this, Callender. I shall want to know who the men are, and whose picture I have in a fake passport.'
'Sir, we're right up to here with co-ord work — '
'No, Callender, you are not. Not as of early tomorrow morning. Hurry things up, would you? Out.'
He sat for a time in the fuggy car, warmth not apparent, but cold less so. A great nuisance that he was booked on a morning flight to Helsinki, to act as Waterford and Davenhill's control, and to oversee security, in conjunction with the CIA man, Buckholz, for the Treaty Conference's final sessions, when Khamovkhin and Wainwright would both be present.
A great pity. Here, on this Oxfordshire roadside, there was a real mystery — and, with an instinct he would never have trusted as a younger man, he knew it was important.
Galakhov knew that his picture had been taken at least twice during the time he spent passing through Passport Control and then Customs at Seutula Airport. It would have been done by the CIA, by Finnish Intelligence, even perhaps by the KGB. It did not matter. To any foreign intelligence service, he was simply a native Finn returning to Helsinki, then travelling north; and to the KGB, he was expected. And they would be expecting Ozeroff to look like him, not like the body in the Heathrow toilet. Records had been changed, the computer doctored, everything required already done. Thus, it was with confidence that he passed through the controls, out into the lounge, and waited to be contacted.
He could not restrain a small pulse of excitement beating in his chest, making his breath flutter. There had been little reaction on the plane to the killing of Ozeroff — he had had a couple of drinks, true, but only for the pleasure; no, but he could not help, as he stepped on to Finnish soil, realising how deep into the operation he already was, and how close to the real simplicity of the thing. Preliminaries were almost over — he and Khamovkhin, soon. All he had to do was to pass the interview with the Head of Security where Khamovkhin was being kept during his visit, then act his part until Khamovkhin was no longer required to be alive.
'Have you a light?' a voice asked him at his side. He turned slowly.
'What?' he asked in Finnish. 'What do you want?'
Nonplussed, the young man said, 'Have you a light?' He spoke in Finnish.
'I am a non-smoker — it is a filthy habit,' Galakhov replied, bored, even amused at the kind of rubbish the KGB still considered viable operational procedure.
'Where is the toilet, please?' the young man asked. Though he spoke in Finnish, this time, instead of the word toaletti, Galakhov heard the Russian pronunciation, twalyet. He almost burst out laughing.
'Wait till you get home,' Galakhov said; then, when the young man's face appeared suitably pained, said, 'I believe the toilet is on the next floor.'
The young man could not quite disguise his satisfaction before he made his face expressionless, and said, 'Follow me, please.' He took Galakhov's suitcase, and walked away towards the glass doors to the car park. Galakhov, seeing his neck still red above the coat collar, even though cautious by nature, and careful of indulging his abiding sense of superiority, could not help but consider how easy the whole thing was going to be.
Vorontsyev had rubbed a small round clearness in the mist of the window, and was staring down into Pyatnitskaya Street. People on their way to work, huddled in heavy clothes, shunted against each other on the pavement six floors below. It was a bitter day, frost bright on the road, the trails of tyres black on its silver.
He had got up at six, washed and shaved, and eaten a good breakfast. The work, and drink, of the previous night had left him and he felt refreshed.
The faces were still on the wall — the diagram of the state on a second, and a huge map of the entire Soviet Union on a third, lapping down over the bureau. He was waiting for the duty officers of his team to arrive. When he briefed them, they would be taken entirely into his confidence. Then he would talk to Kapustin, and seek permission to go to the Finnish border, to discover what Vrubel had been doing.
He posed himself before the faces, and stared up at them. Old men, most of them. Men of distinguished loyalty to the Party, men about whom no questions had been asked, not even during the Kruschev regime. And yet, if they were guilty, it was precisely during that period that they would have been forming this Group 1917, working out its strategy.
He looked at General Ossipov. It was an older photograph than the ones he had studied in his office, and the man was in a light suit, and it was summer in Odessa. He knew the place, had holidayed there with Gorochenko and his wife, just before he began his studies at the Lenin University.
He did not allow himself to idle over the memory, though it was pleasant. Marya Ilyevna Gorochenko retained a special, perhaps sacred, place in his memory.
Vorontsyev smiled at the simplicity of his attitude — like so many other simplifications, or unthinking responses he had made over a lot of years — conforming, accepting, belonging; and yet he could not despise such a sleep of reason. They were good people, both of them. He had wept at her funeral, and many times the prick of tears had come to him when he thought of her. It might have been a luxury, but she had been his mother, childless and grateful for
the opportunity; his own mother had died soon after the war, soon after the death of his real father. He remembered her as a faded, untidy, shabby woman. Something that hovered in corners, and did not go out — like a ghost, or something left over that no one wanted.
He skirted the procession of images, and focused again on Ossipov. Why the Far East? And the reference, he suddenly remembered, to Finland Station? Did that mean Finland itself, or Leningrad? Was it a reference to the return of Lenin to Russia, in the sealed train — a symbol of what the coup wished to do ideologically? Was Vrubel's attachment to the Finland border confusing him?
'You cunning old shit,' he said softly to the photograph, 'Where did you go, and who did you meet? And what for?'
He looked above the photograph, to another. Praporovich, commanding Group of Soviet Forces North, a strong man, old-style Communist; he had a blunt, violent language which expressed his hatred of the West, his commitment to the eventual, and military, spread of Communism. Who could be more loyal a servant of the State — on the surface?
Vorontsyev crossed to the chair at the bureau, and pulled out of the old briefcase the file on Praporovich. Then he moved a sheaf of papers from the armchair, and sat down, opening the buff folder on his knees. He had not been seized by a definite idea — merely by the logic of beginning at the top. The Marshal was the most senior man on the wall in front of him. He would require to be investigated first, as was his right, Vorontsyev thought with a smile.
Praporovich was a widower, with two sons, both of them in the army — Vorontsyev checked them immediately, shuffling through the loose papers until he found photostats of their army records. On was a Major in an Airborne Division, the other a Colonel in command of one small section of the northern missile chain — 'Firechain'. Little there. He went back to the old man, looking up once at the hard, square features appearing to regard him with contempt from the wall — a portrait of an old and terrible Tsar. He winked at the photograph, wondering why the Marshal could not smile even at a party following a large-scale military exercise in the DDR. Perhaps he was an habitual stoneface?
The Marshal rarely took holidays — he had a dacha outside Leningrad, and spent a great deal of his off-duty time there, or in his suite of rooms at the expensive Baltiskaya Hotel. He rarely entertained women at either residence, preferring his huge collection of gramophone records and his books — and his persistent hobby of wood-carving. Vorontsyev studied, briefly, pictures of two statuettes in polished wood, and seemed to touch the old man's private self. A boy and a girl — the girl on a small pony.
There were sheets of small prints supplementing the written records. They were less talismanic than the cartridges of slides he had watched of Ossipov, but he studied them carefully, noting the faces he did not know, the possible contacts — though he did not compare them with the supplementary sheets which explained their identities. Not at that moment. He was interested in the Marshal.
Praporovich's movements had been exhaustively documented. Military conferences at the highest level in Moscow, Leningrad and various Warsaw Pact capitals — Prague, Berlin, Budapest, Warsaw. Vorontsyev wondered for a moment whether there was sufficient freedom of movement…
But no. He could not be his own courier. He was present at the annual exercises of Group of Soviet Forces Germany — though not at the most recent winter exercises, which were the largest for five years — '1812'.
Vorontsyev felt chilled, as if a door had opened, but no light, only cold, flowed from it. He checked back, his fingers clumsy and gloved with haste. No — Praporovich had not attended every exercise over the past years — seven, eight, ten years; he checked off the references on the grubby photostat compiled by Leningrad SID. He usually attended the summer exercises had been on the 1968 exercise that had led to the intervention against the Dubcek regime — but he had attended. two, four of the last seven winter exercises in the DDR. As part of the necessity for all senior Group Commanders to be aware of overall strategy. In case of illness, resignation, death — transfer was easy.
Why not?
Was his staff there?
Vorontsyev scribbled the query on a fresh page of his notepad. He would have to check. He wondered why Praporovich had not been at '1812'. And did it mean…?
He refused to countenance the idea that acceleration was taking place, that there was any vital reason why the Marshal had stayed at his headquarters in the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, as if in answer to some subterranean explosion, his hands shivered with the groundshock. The solid structure of the investigation appeared on the point of subsidence, sliding into something horridly real.
He began to cross-check. How closely was Praporovich acquainted with the other faces on the wall?
It was a little after nine when the doorbell rang. He looked up from the papers now spread on the floor, stretched as he rose from his kneeling crouch over them, as if trying to spark them into reluctant flame, and his back and bruises protested. He stood up, stepping carefully over the arranged documents. He had taken the decisive step of cutting the original documents to pieces, arranging them anew, with the help of paste and a stapler, into sections which displayed more easily and meaningfully the relationships between the men on the wall.
And it was interesting — if one went back far enough. Almost, he thought, almost like discovering someone who has patiently covered his tracks, but who had been at the scene, or near it, at the time in question — whatever his alibi, however he had burned the bloodstained clothes, tidied the room, removed the fingerprints…
No. His men had arrived. He would let them see, and ask them to decide, before he would commit himself…
His smile of satisfaction died when he saw his wife on the doorstep, her face freezing into haughtiness and a sense of mistaken action as she saw his own face change.
'Well?' he said. He was holding the door foolishly ajar; it was like his stupid mouth, he thought, hanging open.
'I — want to talk,' she said, appearing to damp down her irritation, her embarrassment.
'What about — I'm busy,' he snapped.
'You — you've seen your father?'
'Yes. I said I'd telephone.'
'You might have said no. May I come in?'
He looked at his watch.
'I'm busy,' he said, then: 'Oh, come in!' It was graceless, and sulky. He despised himself for the immaturity of his reaction. He could sense the smile of satisfaction on her face as he led her into the lounge. He waved his hand towards the sofa. Natalia hesitated, then settled herself. She did not offer to remove her fur coat, nor the dark fur hat she wore.
Standing by the empty mantelpiece above the electric fire, he studied her. Her cheeks were touched with pink from the cold outside. Her fur-lined boots, to her knees, were new, and unmarked from the pavements. She had come by taxi.
She said, 'I had to talk to you.' It sounded remarkably artificial. As a singer, she was not renowned for her acting ability, only for the quality of the voice itself. He felt she was acting a part. He could not understand why she needed to.
'About what?'
'Us?'
'Us? There isn't any us, is there, Natalia?' Even the use of her name seemed a concession. He did want her there.
She opened her coat, as if on cue. It was ridiculous. She was too smartly dressed — dark-green wool, with a high collar and excellent fit. It would have cost money — would have been given by a lover, or bought on a Bolshoi tour. They had been in Paris in the autumn. It was as if she declared herself naked by the gesture. He hated her.
'Isn't there?' she said. 'About the other night — I'm sorry it had to happen. I — was ashamed…' She dropped her gaze.
He could not believe her. He wanted to re-establish some sense of superiority, and his voice was loud as he said, 'Sorry? Ashamed? Your bloody lover tried to kill me — or didn't Mihail Pyotravich tell you that?'
She looked at him, and there seemed to be something real happening in the theatrically wide eyes. She was speakin
g to him, as well as to some imagined audience of her performance.
'I — he didn't say that..'
'Didn't he? He left you before you could climb all over him, and led me right into a neat little trap. For some reason, Vrubel wanted me dead! You wouldn't know why, I suppose?'
'You don't think — ?' she began, and there was genuine fear in her voice. As if she sensed herself alone in the room with him for the first time.
'How the hell do I know! You're capable of it.' She shook her head. He admitted: 'I suppose not.'
There was a silence. He turned his back on her, and lit a cigarette from a fresh packet. He heard her say: 'What about us, Alexei?' It was the first time she had used his name. And the tone was old, magical. He knew it was calculated.
He turned round.
'You're here, aren't you?' He wanted to go on being bitter, recriminatory. But, though he despised his feeling, he could not ignore it. Too often he had imagined the scene, and he was now helpless before the reality. He had to concede; that had been decided when he opened the door to her. 'What the hell do you want with me, Natalie? You've buggered up my life once already! Do you want the satisfaction of doing it again? Is that it?'
She shook her head. He was glad she did not offer to move from the grubby sofa and its dun-coloured covering. He did not want to be any closer to her. Her body, even at that distance, was tangible against his frame. The sensation was dirty, like a wet dream. He hated that — she the cinema, he the audience; her body unreeled like the frames of some titillating film. He tried to dissolve the feeling in anger.
'The hell it is? Who sent you, eh? Mihail Pyotravich?
She looked startled, as if he had seen deep into her self, but she said, 'He only helped me to make up my mind.'
'Fuck you, you bitch! I don't want to be handed to you like some sticky sweet! Or a bandage because I'm coming to pieces!.If you don't want to come back, then get out — get out!'
He turned away from her again, willing her to move, wanting her not to come closer to him. He heard the sofa creak slightly as she stood up.