by Craig Thomas
'Chief?' Maxim said in a small voice. He tittered with em barrassment, then cleared his throat. 'We have to keep coming back to this bugger Vrubel, and who killed him. Do we know any more about him?'
Vorontsyev settled in the single easy chair — his team were stiff and upright on dining-chairs from the other room. He said, 'Alevtina, what's new?'
'Nothing, sir,' the girl said, correctly, almost primly.
'Sent the bill for your coat to Tortyev, have you?' Ilya asked.
'I have,' she snapped. Then, to Vorontsyev, who was smiling: 'We can't trace anything suspicious in his contacts — and no one saw him that night. This is a dead-end, sir.'
'Naturally. He wasn't mugged for his wallet. All right — his history. He's been on the Finland border for two, three years. In charge of a section of the wire. Overall security. You know how the Border Guard works — compartments, autonomously run, but with a central co-ord.'
'Then is he being used in his capacity as a Border Guard officer, or as something else?' Pyotr's mind seemed to unclog as he asked the question. There was just a dull patch of brain at the front of his head now, solid as an undigested dinner.
'As a Border Guard — what for?'
'Doesn't it depend what this Finland Station is supposed to mean?' Alevtina remarked. Vorontsyev looked at her carefully. The girl never started hares.
'Explain.'
'What I wondered, sir, was whether it was just his code, or the code for something bigger.'
'Bigger? In what way?'
'What are we dealing with, sir — revolution, or something else? We are dealing with the Army, aren't we?'
'We are. But it's the revolution aspect that we have to be concerned with here — so where does Vrubel fit into that setup? I can't believe that a Border Guard Captain is behind a revolution! Can you?' Ilya shook his head. 'Quite. However, we are going to divide our strength, as of now. What we have to know is what the set-up along his stretch of the wire is. Know everything. His men, their attitude, his movements, and the like.'
'You know what you're saying, sir?' Maxim said. 'You are suggesting that he's concerned in some kind of border crossing…'
'Don't talk rubbish!' Pyotr burst out, then saw Vorontsyev's unamused features. 'Sorry.'
'Sounds ridiculous, doesn't it?' he said. 'But — is it? I want to know. Which is why I'm going to Finland in the morning — at least, to the border. Deputy Kapustin has placed this team in charge of the Vrubel business — run everything down. You four will stay here, and branch out as much as necessary over the next couple of days — tracking down any lead suggested by his contacts, his background, his behaviour-pattern.'
Not one of them uttered an audible protest. Then Pyotr said, 'This is while we're checking on your Rogues' Gallery, sir?'
'Yes. I want you to concentrate on Vrubel, but on the others as well, taking two each for the moment. When I get back from Finland, I'll take on the other two myself — Ossipov and Praporovich.'
'We can presume that Vrubel knew a lot — otherwise why try to kill you when you tailed him?'
'That may have been already set up — witness the body of the old sod in the black coat. I wonder whether Vrubel wasn't laying for me all the time? However, I can't see it. We assume no one else knew of our suspicion that Ossipov had a double…'
'Hundreds of people did, by the time we started asking questions. Vrubel was in the KGB. So are a lot of others who must be helping!' Maxim said, his eyes staying fixed on the wall-chart that Vorontsyev had drawn.
'Agreed. It could be anyone. Which is why we have to turn up something, and soon. Some common factor.'
'How widespread is it, sir?' Ilya asked. 'I mean, you don't need much to knock over the Politburo, not if you're using tanks.'
'True. Moscow Military District could supply more than enough — even a nice airborne assault on the Kremlin!'
'What a bloody mess that would be!'
Vorontsyev smiled thinly, then went on: 'So, we have to gain some kind of inside knowledge of Moscow District without arousing suspicion. But, if it's Moscow, then why Ossipov — he's at the other end of the world? And why Vrubel — he was based a thousand miles away? And all the others. What of them?'
He napped his hands on his thighs, an audible disturbance in the sudden silence.
'We're going to make a lot of noise doing this, sir,' Ilya offered unhelpfully.
'I know. We can't afford low profile, but we have to look like a small and isolated group, just making enquiries. Remember that. We can't afford to trigger off the thing we're trying to prevent.'
'But, sir — ' Ilya again. 'Do you really think that a revolution is on the cards? It's impossible, surely?'
'Is it? Not if the Army does it, surely? Can you see the Air Force bombing their comrades in the tanks, or the fleets shelling Moscow from the Baltic? It only needs a little push — and what is there to tumble down? The Politburo, the Kremlin clique — and MS! Do you fancy taking on a T-72 with a 9 mm pistol, Ilya?'
'I see.'
'All of you — do you see? All they need to do is to take and hold the centre. If they're sure of enough Army support from the other Military Districts. Then no one could touch them. The KGB swept away, and replaced by some military police organisation, and the Kremlin in the hands of the Marshals. It's easy — as long as it's the Army doing it!'
His face had gone bright with perspiration and effort. He wanted the best out of them. They were young, and the system was their safe, warm womb. He had to show them how unsafe the whole thing was when threatened by an army. The Red Army.
'But why would they want to do it?'
Vorontsyev paused, then looked at each face — each clean, scrubbed, confident face. They seemed so young, and incapable of being hurt, or believing themselves mortal. And a mental consideration that might have been going on beneath the conscious surface seemed to clarify, achieve a peroration. Those faces in front of him in the untidy room dazzled him with insight.
'You four — not one of you believes in anything — right?' They appeared puzzled, grins starting and fading like little glimpses of sunlight. Alevtina looked quizzical, but as if she teetered on the edge of his own realisation. 'You don't read Lenin, you don't read Lenin, you don't remember Stalin, or the War against the Fascists — think about being in Berlin, in the grounds where they found the petrol-soaked corpses — ' He felt the rhetoric whirl up, speaking through Gorochenko's experiences, and what he knew of his own father's life. If he could suddenly understand, perhaps they could, too. 'Or rinding the thousands of lime-decayed bodies in the mass graves — Babi Yar and all the other places the SS had been. Go further back, remember the Civil War against the Whites, the hungers, the billions who've died since 1917. Think about these things when you buy your next bottle of malt whisky in the shop across from the Centre, or eat your subsidised breakfasts in the Centre canteen, or order a new suit from imported Italian cloth. Silk scarves, fur coats — ' he added suddenly for the girl's benefit. 'It's a cushy number, brothers and sister. Without history. But these old buggers remember — and perhaps they still believe!
'Or maybe they're just not ready for their pensions, or to throw away their 88–22 toys and new bombers and reactor-driven aircraft-carriers. In the end, does it matter a toss whether they have a motive or not? They may be doing it — and that's all that should worry us!'
Slowly, they looked at each other, then to him. Each one of them, as if present at some ritual, nodded to him. He sat back again, relieved. Then the telephone rang in the lounge. He had not switched the extension through. Ilya got up, and he waved him out.
The others got up, stretched, and began to study the faces on the wall. Vorontsyev tried to relax into the satisfaction of authority, to attend with a complacent half-ear to their comments, often ribald, frequently irreverent. Yet it was a hard quietude. What he had told them, the emphases he had placed, had frightened him, too. It was no longer easy to think in terms of wall-charts, pictures taken with the power o
f secret surveillance. If the Army was really engaged on a coup, then there was no stopping them — not if they had the agreement, even acquiescence, of the majority of senior commanders. Like those men on the wall.
Moscow would be no safer than Luanda, or Beirut. Except that the struggle would be short, and bloody — and the Army could not lose it.
'I'll take that hatchet-faced bastard, Timochenko!' Maxim said with delight, tugging the photograph from the wall. 'He once gave my cousin the shaft — I owe him!' It was said with amusement, and with an underlying enthusiasm.
'Don't frame him,' Pyotr laughed.
'I shan't need to!'
Ilya came back into the room at that moment. Vorontsyev turned to receive the message, still smiling at the enthusiasm of Maxim as he now hunted for the files on Timochenko, one of the two members of the Secretariat he had pinned to the wall. His smile vanished when he saw Ilya's white face — as if, he thought, only at that moment had the danger come home to him.
'What is it, Ilya?'
'Sir, that report on Ossipov and his staff from Khabarovsk KGB Office-'
'Well?'
'They're all dead — the office was blown to smithereens early in the morning — the off-duty team were murdered at home. Bombs…'
'What?'
The silence of the room was stifling. 'The work of the Khabarov Separatist Movement — they say. They're all dead. Every KGB officer in the town.' And Vorontsyev understood. He would have to go to Khabarovsk himself. Ossipov had had them killed.
Seven: Winter Journeys
None of the Oriental carpets or embroidered sofas, not even the tall windows overlooking Dzerzhinsky Square from the third floor, nor the high ceiling, could disguise in spacious elegance the functional nature of Andropov's office. The furnishings displayed him as a connoisseur, as someone immensely privileged in his society — and the battery of telephones on his immense desk betrayed his position as Chairman of the KGB. Mahogany wall-panelling, brocaded curtains — he sat looking round the room for a few moments after Kapustin had left, then turned his gaze on the telephones. He shook his head, as if admitting a reality.
The line to the Kremlin, the line to the Politburo and Central Committee members, the lines that connected him with any, or every, KGB office in the Soviet Union. He stared at the bakelite that, through high-frequency circuits, allowed him to control his security machine.
Dial Khabarovsk, and see who answers…
He did not wish the thought, but now it had presented itself, he felt an anger stirring in him, shaking a frame unprepared for high emotion. He despised emotion — feared it because it had the unfamiliarily and danger of an infection.
Of course he had approved sending Major Vorontsyev to Khabarovsk, with a forensic team. The Major's supposition was not unsound, that Ossipov had had his men killed. There, the centre of the little storm he felt. There. All right, in the Ukraine, before now, KGB men had been stabbed in alleys, even been blown up in their cars; but to take out the whole team?
Something else. It meant it was close. They had nothing to fear.
Khamovkhin had left him in charge. The apparatus of State had moved to Dzerzhinsky Street, to the Centre. Andropov perceived no possible irony in the thought. This was now the State, he thought. Here. Because nothing else mattered but that they find, isolate, and remove the enemy. And only he, and his service, could do that.
Could they?
He stirred in his desk, a sudden cramp in his legs. He looked down at them, as if they had turned against him. He did not blame Khamovkhin — only a stupid man would do that. Everything had to be as normal. Which was the trouble — no one could be told. They were sitting in a restaurant with the rest of the world, but only they knew about the bomb — and most of the staff were sick, or untrustworthy, and only one or two could be sent to search it out, disarm it He put aside the analogy. It was too real, too sensuous. Feodor had left him to mind the house.
The file on his desk was leather-bound. In it was material not dissimilar to that which had been scattered over Vorontsyev's floor, pinned to his walls. Material that tired, and infuriated Andropov. Ridiculous not to have a perfectly dear idea of who might be involved — who had to be involved — and maddening, to be able to do nothing. He could not admit to impotence, not after the years of power. But he was aware that the State had shrunk to the size of this room, and that his hold upon things was as fragile as the connections made when he dialled numbers on the telephones in front of him.
He stood up, walked swiftly, as if possessed with purpose, to the windows, and looked down. The square in front of his office, sparkled below him. The people of Moscow were out in great numbers, as they always were when the snow fell, or the frost glinted. Winter people, the Russians. He felt detached from them, as he always did. He felt no sense of mission, no obligation.
He went back to his desk, and opened the file, flicking through the polythene-covered pages, seeing the faces stare out at him. The prime suspects. Praporovich, Ossipov, the Defence Minister, Marshal Yaroslavich, members of the Politburo, the Central Committee.
Isolate, and destroy.
But, before he could do that, he had to discover the chain of command, the hierarchy of the coup. And twelve months had so far brought nothing. If, if, if — who is behind it, who is the leader, who, precisely, is involved, what are the commands, the plan — when? His head ached with the unanswered questions, his body ached with the sense of impotence. He was not afraid, but Did it all depend on one young Major in the SID, and his flight to Khabarovsk? How could it? And how could it not? Had the Khabarovsk Office discovered something, so that they had to be silenced?
The telephone rang, startling him.
'Yes?' The Kremlevka, the direct line to the Kremlin. Pushkin, the Prime Minister. The business of government. He listened, and stared at the room. It was there, the business of government, he thought. In that room.
Vorontsyev was waiting for the specialists with whom he was to fly to Khavarovsk. His plane left in another hour, and he had arrived in order to finalise the briefing of Ilya and Maxim, who were flying to Leningrad, on their way to Vrubel's section of the border wire.
The three of them sat together in the Diplomatic Lounge, in that glassed-off section of it reserved for the KGB. As they sipped at coffee and watched the commercial airliners stack, descend, and touch down outside the double-glazed windows, Vorontsyev warned them, repeatedly, of the parameters of their investigation.
He knew he was being cautious, but caution was required. It was of the essence. He felt old, much older than them, a crabbed and pinched soul in the face of their almost adolescent enthusiasm. The tension was high in each of them, and they were impatient with his sober mood. Yet they had to understand. He saw Maxim's eyes drift to the TWA Boeing as it slid past the windows, and snapped:
'It's not for my health's sake, you know!'
'Sorry, sir,' Maxim said, just able to resist glancing at his companion.
'You have to be undertaking an ordinary investigation — understand? You have to convince everyone that you're doing a police job because Captain Vrubel has been murdered. His mistress reported his disappearance…' He lowered his eyes for a moment. The name filed on the official notification to Missing Persons was that of his wife — her maiden and professional name. But it had to be good — because he did not know who might engage himself in checking the checkers.
His own excitement had long since drained away as he set up the two-pronged investigation — Maxim and Ilya to Finland, himself to the Far East. Kapustin had agreed that the action of the Separatist Movement in Khabarovsk was unexpected, even suspicious. And had consented to his personal investigation of the bombings, together with a team from the SID who would study the forensic realities. Vorontsyev's target was Ossipov, and military truth.
Because he had been able to convince Kapustin, and presumably Andropov himself, that Ossipov had to be perhaps the most important single link in a chain that they could not see. Not on
ly had he bobbed up, a cork of suspicion, but the death of the whole KGB team was too fortuitous to be accidental.
He had slept little, his mind turning like his stomach with rising nerves. He said, for perhaps the third time since they had arrived at Cheremetievo, 'We dare not trigger the thing we're trying to prevent.' He knew they regarded his sombre face as that of a rather boring uncle, intent on restraint, on dampening youthful spirits. He felt the necessity to communicate to them, and the difficulty of doing so. They were being entrusted with an investigation he would have handled himself; and they understood the gravity, the weight. But they did not feel it as he did.
'We'll be careful, Major,' Ilya said. 'We know what's at stake.'
'Good. Just Vrubel, then. Arouse as little suspicion as possible. But act normally, please! You are in SID, and that should frighten people. Don't be too low-key.'
'No, Major.'
He gave it up. It was like rehearsing children in a lesson. Parrot-fashion they repeated what he taught them, but they did not understand. He was filled with sudden foreboding.
They sat in silence for the few remaining minutes, then their Leningrad flight was called, and he stood up with them, and they shook hands. He was despondent as he watched them move away down the tunnel towards the plane. He was afraid that they would miss something, something important. He should have gone himself.
He got himself another coffee from the machine, winced at its acrid taste, and lit a cigarette. He picked Pravda from the plastic bench, and scanned the inside pages. The official story of the explosions in Khabarovsk was to lay the blame where it had been claimed by telephone — the Separatists.
He folded the paper, and tossed it aside.
Kapustin had not been willing to be rushed into a premature judgement. He had not shared Vorontsyev's moment of inspiration when Ilya had repeated the telephone message. Kapustin, and Andropov saw the wider picture — which was largely grey, unformed. Kapustin wanted to know why Ossipov was involved, and he could not tell him. He could not even imagine a plausible explanation. Instead he clung to the fact that Ossipov had needed a double, to avoid surveillance. To meet someone, receive orders.