Skydancer

by Geoffrey Archer

  Peter breathed in deeply and stood up, his chin thrust forward. The wind blew his hair into his eyes and he pushed it back with his hand. The man in the anorak noted the gesture. He had seen him do the same several times in the last ten minutes.

  Changing career at his age was risky, and surely even to think of it at that time was being defeatist, wasn’t it? Peter turned towards Waterloo Bridge and set off down the pavement. The man in the anorak stood up casually, stuffed the newspaper back in his pocket, and ambled after him.

  ‘Do sit down,’ Field-Marshal Buxton gestured to a chair.

  It was nearly four o’clock, and Peter had been waiting over an hour for the Chief of Defence Staff to return from Downing Street.

  ‘They’ve agreed,’ the old man declared conspiratorially. ‘They want you to draw up some dummy plans, good enough to fool the Russians, but which don’t reveal any sensitive information. Think you can do it?’

  ‘Hmmm. There’ll have to be some sensitive bits in it just to make it convincing. They must realise that, for heaven’s sake!’

  Buxton’s intense grey eyes peered over his gold-framed half-moon glasses. He was wondering how frank to be.

  ‘I’ve been discussing this business for the best part of an hour at Number 10. The Prime Minister called in the Defence Secretary and the heads of MI5 and MI6. Their initial reaction was far from favourable, I can tell you. Michael Hawke seemed to want you locked up in the Tower, along with Anderson and that East German fellow! He’s very bitter about your disregard for security procedures; says he’s going to ensure you are fully disciplined – thrown out of the Civil Service and all that!’

  Peter groaned.

  ‘Shouldn’t worry. I don’t suppose it will come to that,’ Buxton soothed. ‘Just trying to give you an idea of the atmosphere at this meeting! Well, I eventually managed to persuade them to give serious thought to your proposal, and interestingly enough it was the MI6 man who came to your aid. Liked the idea. Said it reminded him of the 1960s when they fed a doctored version of the plans for Concorde to the Russians – and you know what happened to Concordski!

  ‘I, er, told them about your suspicion of a spy inside MI5. Dick Sproat said it was rubbish, of course! Couldn’t really say anything else. He, er, he said that they knew about Anderson and Metzger. They’ve been keeping a watch on Anderson apparently. They suspected Metzger was an intelligence man, though they hadn’t been able to confirm it yet.’

  Peter’s eyebrows arched with interest. If Anderson had been under observation, then presumably he must have been too!

  ‘In the end they agreed, but they want strict safeguards. You’re to have the plans ready for Monday morning, and then there will be a vetting committee here to check it out. Just a small select group; we’ve got to keep this utterly secret.’

  ‘I hope Anderson will agree to all this,’ Peter cautioned.

  ‘He’ll bloody well have to! He’s got no alternative!’ Buxton snorted.

  ‘But what will happen to him when it’s over? Does he get immunity from prosecution?’

  Buxton’s eyes twinkled for a moment.

  ‘I’m sure the Ministry of Agriculture can be persuaded to find a job for him,’ he mused.

  It was six in the morning when Peter parked outside Anderson’s house. This time he had telephoned in advance.

  Alec opened the door within seconds of his ringing the bell – as if he had been waiting behind it. There was no sign of Janet or the children as Peter was ushered hurriedly into the library.

  ‘What’s happening? Who’ve you told?’ Anderson demanded nervously.

  He was dressed in bottle-green corduroy trousers and a navy-blue pullover. A small twist of cotton wool was stuck to the underside of his jaw where he had cut himself shaving. The corners of his mouth were tight with anxiety.

  ‘Look, Alec, people are sympathetic, really they are,’ Peter reassured him, hoping he sounded convincing. ‘They’ll do all they can to help you, and to ensure that Janet and the children are safe. But they want you to do something in return.’

  ‘What exactly?’ Alec asked tremulously. ‘And who are these people?’

  ‘People at the top. The very top. And they want you to help turn the tables on the Russians. To get our own back.’

  He paused, noting the look of apprehension on Alec’s face.

  ‘On Monday morning I shall meet you in the Defence Ministry and give you a set of plans for the Skydancer warheads. They’ll look convincing but they’ll be deliberately misleading. Now, you are to pass these to Karl Metzger, insisting of course that they’re the genuine ones. And in return you should demand from him the negatives of the photographs he’s been using to blackmail you. It’s that simple.’

  Alec shook his head.

  ‘Nothing is that simple, and you know it. Supposing he can tell they’re false?’

  ‘He won’t,’ Peter insisted. ‘You’ll have to trust me on that.’

  Anderson stared at him silently for a moment.

  ‘And if it all works like you say, what then? What happens to me – at the Ministry?’

  ‘They’ll find something suitable for you,’ Peter answered irritably. ‘For God’s sake, Alec! You’re on the floor! You’re being offered a hand up!’ He suppressed an urge to take the man by the throat and shake him.

  He glanced down at the desk, with its top rolled back. The photograph of Mary still lay there, half-wrapped in brown paper. He took it in his hand and held it under Anderson’s nose.

  ‘Yes. Yes, of course I’ll do what you say,’ Alec whispered. ‘What else can I do?’

  Peter stood up, the photo-frame still in his hand.

  ‘I’ll take this with me, if you don’t mind,’ he said.

  Alec looked up questioningly.

  ‘Sentimental reasons,’ Peter explained.

  On Sunday morning Oleg Kvitzinsky did not wake early. It had been a difficult night.

  Saturday had been a relaxing day for him, immersing himself in the inconsequential issues that preoccupied the lives of Katrina’s family.

  Katrina herself had passed most of the day hovering around her little nieces, remarking to anyone who would listen that they were the most perfectly delightful children she had ever known. Oleg had cast the occasional anxious glance in her direction, knowing what this was leading to. His wife always became obsessive about her childlessness when they came to the dacha. The fecundity of the countryside and the ease with which her brother’s wife produced babies made her reason inwardly that it must be possible for her to conceive here, at the dacha.

  At supper she had frowned at Oleg and scolded him as glass after glass of vodka had passed his lips. Then, when her brother-in-law produced two bottles of Georgian wine for them to taste, she could feel tears of despair welling up in her eyes. Her husband would be no use to her drunk.

  Before they finally fell into bed, Katrina had sprayed her body lightly with the Dior perfume carefully preserved from their last visit to the West. At first Oleg had shown all the signs of falling into instant slumber, but she had quickly unbuttoned his pyjamas and began to caress the soft, furry dome of his stomach. Slowly but surely she sensed his arousal.

  Oleg himself had been surprised at the liveliness of his feelings after so much alcohol, and he had begun to believe that a rare degree of mutual satisfaction might be achievable that night. But then the noise had started in the next room. Katrina’s brother and sister-in-law slept on the other side of the wall. The rhythmic creaking started softly and unevenly, but built up steadily to a persistent tempo.

  ‘Oh, this is a farmyard!’ Oleg groaned, feeling the vitality draining from him.

  They had both lain awake after their failure, back to back, their bodies not quite touching. Oleg told himself he should have had more to drink, so not even the mirage of sexual potency could have arisen. On the other side of the bed Katrina let her tears of frustration soak into the pillow.

  In the morning she had risen early to help her mother
and busy herself around the house, trying to project an image of contentment. She found it impossible to discuss her personal difficulties with her family.

  The intermittent sunshine of the previous day persisted, and Oleg took the children for a walk in the birch woods while the women prepared lunch. Katrina’s brother spent the morning asleep. The freshness of the air, away from the pollution of Moscow, had a sweet taste to it which he savoured.

  From a distant village the wind blew the sound of bells tolling the faithful to church. In this part of the atheist state the Orthodox Church was at its strongest. Congregations were growing as a result of the tentative liberalisation of the Gorbachev government.

  But for Oleg the value of priests did not lie in their performance of ceremony and ritual for the masses, but in the unfettered communication of ideas which a select few were prepared to encourage.

  It had been while walking in woods like these just outside Zagorsk that Oleg had first come across Father Yuri, one bitter winter about five years ago when twenty degrees of frost had given a crisp skin to the deep layer of snow. The priest’s dog had fallen into a drift and the cleric had been struggling to free it.

  Father Yuri had a small parish in Zagorsk, and led a necessarily simple life. The size of a parish was important to a priest, because his salary depended on donations made by his congregation. What Father Yuri lacked in funds, however, was compensated by gifts of food and drink from his parishioners. Whenever Oleg went to visit him, he would be pressed to help himself from the quantities of cakes and sweetmeats that seemed permanently to adorn the priest’s table.

  That Sunday, Oleg waited until four in the afternoon before making his visit. Lunch at the dacha was a necessarily lengthy affair, starting with borscht, and cucumbers in soured cream, followed by local wild duck and fried cheese cakes with plum jam. The side dishes alone had taken the women most of the morning to prepare.

  Zagorsk was dominated by the onion domes of the Cathedral of the Assumption and the Trinity-Saint Sergius monastery. Oleg parked his car just outside the fortress walls, and walked through the narrow streets with their doorways and pillars decorated in blue and gold until he came to the house which had almost become his confessional.

  The door was opened by Yuri’s wife, who beamed with pleasure to see Oleg again. It had been several months since his last visit.

  She led him through the hallway with its faded green and gold wallpaper. On the floor the bare boards were covered by a threadbare length of carpet whose oriental pattern was scarcely discernible now. A single light-bulb, under a shade of etched glass, hung from the ceiling to illuminate their way.

  She opened the door at the end of the passage.

  ‘Look who it is who has come to visit you, Yuri,’ she announced with delight.

  ‘Oleg Ivanovich!’ the priest bellowed, rising from a small wooden armchair in the corner of his study, and bustling towards the door with his arms outstretched. He was a large man, in his fifties, with a square face and widely-spaced eyes. The thick beard that completely concealed his chin had been jet-black in younger days, but was now flecked with grey. His strong, straight hair was brushed sharply backwards, revealing a baldness at the temples.

  The two men embraced each other fondly, as the woman left them on their own together.

  ‘Come, my friend! Sit down and be warm.’ The priest beckoned him towards the two chairs on each side of the tiled stove. He opened its door and pushed inside small pieces of wood he had collected while out walking. His dog lay curled up in front of the heat, observing the arrival of the visitor with one eye.

  ‘I expected to see you out walking this morning,’ Oleg exclaimed. ‘The weather was so fine. But then when I heard the bells I remembered you had more pressing duties!’

  The priest’s bellow of laughter seemed to shake the brass chandelier whose electric candles cast a soft light into the room. They continued in flippant, jocular terms for several minutes while Yuri prepared the samovar. The priest did not touch alcohol but made an elegant ritual out of serving tea.

  ‘And how are things at the centre?’ he asked over his shoulder. ‘It’s so long since you visited that I imagine life must be very busy for you.’

  The charcoal was well alight now and the water began to sing. Oleg stretched out his legs and hooked his hands behind his head.

  ‘Things move in their own way,’ he answered enigmatically, his eyebrows arched almost derisively. ‘If what passes for life in Moscow is reality, Yuri, then this life of yours is pure fantasy,’ he mocked. ‘But on the other hand, if this is real, then . . .’

  He didn’t complete his sentence but his meaning was clear.

  ‘Well, if you don’t know which is the real life, it is too long since you last came to Zagorsk!’ Yuri retorted, and bellowed with laughter again.

  The samovar boiled, and the priest turned his attention to it.

  ‘But, my friend,’ he continued with concern. ‘If you are serious, then you have a problem. For the truth is that it is all real. There – and here.’

  There was a knock at the door and the priest’s wife entered with two plates of cakes.

  ‘Oleg Ivanovich must be hungry after his journey,’ she fussed, placing the plates on the table by the window.

  ‘Ravenous!’ Kvitzinsky joked, reaching across to take a pastry.

  She beamed at him and bustled out of the room again.

  A silence fell between them for a moment.

  ‘But you are troubled, my friend,’ the priest prompted eventually. ‘Troubled by doubts about the purpose and reality of your life? It’s a common condition, you know.’

  ‘Perhaps it is more a question of rightness than of reality,’ Oleg explained. ‘Morality even . . .’ His voice tailed away.

  ‘That’s a subject I’m supposed to know something about,’ the priest said gently, knowing for sure that Oleg had an overwhelming need to unburden his soul.

  ‘You know I work for the military now?’ Oleg looked up at his friend uncertainly. He was strictly forbidden to talk to anyone about his job, but in this house it was customary for such rules to be ignored.

  Yuri handed Oleg an elegant porcelain cup and saucer. ‘Is it still about computers?’

  ‘Yes, it’s still computers,’ Oleg confirmed, sipping the pale green tea whose smoky perfume seemed to complement the scent of the charcoal in the samovar. ‘Computer technology can free man from industrial slavery, so that his talents for craftsmanship can be liberated and developed. I really believe that.

  ‘But it can do other things too, unfortunately. It can delude men into believing they can achieve almost anything . . . even total security against enemy attack. It’s what the Russian people have dreamed of for centuries! Now there are those who believe it is a dream that can come true!’

  ‘And that is why they moved you into military work, my friend?’

  ‘Exactly,’ Kvitzinsky whispered in reply. ‘They believe that I . . . and my computers can achieve the ultimate for them. To build a shield which will be directed electronically and automatically to fend off every type of attack. It was an honour to be given this duty. I was deeply flattered. And a challenge – there is none greater. But . . .’

  ‘But anything so perfect – it is of course impossible!’ The priest completed his sentence for him.

  ‘The funds are unlimited . . . everything can be sacrificed for this aim, it seems to me. The arthritis of Katrina’s mother can go untreated . . . Katrina herself can remain childless – but nothing must hinder my work, so they say.’

  The priest shivered. The window was not firmly latched, and he stood up to attend to it.

  ‘You talked of morality. You know, of course,’ he explained as he readjusted the curtains, ‘that when it comes to morality, your masters and mine are in conflict. In my house, right and wrong are decided by a higher order than the Party. And it is for each and every man to decide for himself in whose house he is going to live. There is no other way, my friend.’r />
  ‘Yes,’ Oleg answered unhappily. ‘I know. Sometimes, though, the circumstances make it too difficult to take a decision like that, don’t they?’

  For some time the priest let his hand rest on Oleg’s shoulder. Then slowly he moved away and lowered himself back into the chair by the stove.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he answered kindly. ‘That’s a question you will have to put to yourself.’

  John Black lived alone in a three-roomed South London flat, surrounded by the few possessions he had accrued during his life. He had been married once, a long time ago, but it had been an unsatisfactory experience and he never talked about it.

  He had felt certain that his Sunday at home would be disturbed before long. Indeed, he would have been worried if it had not. The plan to supply false versions of the Skydancer documents to the Russians was fraught with dangers, and he had ordered a tightening of the surveillance on all those involved.

  After lunching on a frozen chicken pie hurriedly cooked in his microwave oven, he had settled down to watch an old Bette Davis film on television.

  The interruption to his viewing came from a source he had not anticipated. Indeed he had not realised until then that the FBI worked on Sundays. The message from the signals analysis office in Miami had him kicking off his carpet-slippers and pulling on his thick-soled shoes within seconds.

  His own office had rapidly found an address for the telephone number the Americans had supplied. It was the Berkshire area again. With a quick phone-call to Reading police station, so that they could alert his friend in the Special Branch that he was on his way, he slipped behind the wheel of his car and headed for the motorway.