by Craig Thomas
The remainder of the KGB personnel, who had not dropped out of sight to the lower levels and platforms of the metro station, were engaged in searching all possible places of concealment in the station foyer. A small team was busy opening all the left-luggage boxes, set against the far wall. Others checked papers, questioned ascending passengers, bullied and threatened. Pavel watched, with a degree of fascination, a typical and very thorough KGB operation against the citizens of Moscow.
****
He tried to keep in his line of sight the entrance to the gents' where Gant had retreated. The man was having a bad time. He could not comprehend how Gant had ever been selected for this mission. Pavel himself was only a link in the chain, one of Edgecliffe's small Russian force in Moscow, but he knew more than perhaps he should have done, since Edgecliffe respected all those native Russians who worked for him, Jew or non-Jew, with a more than ordinary respect. He, unlike Aubrey, appreciated the risk they took — and, if he could avoid it, he wouldn't let them walk in the dark: in the case of Pavel, not even for the Firefox.
Pavel almost missed the KGB man heading down the steps to the gents', because he was watching the furore as someone was arrested at the entrance to the station. Some irregularity in the man's papers, in his travel visas or work permit, perhaps — it had been sufficient. As soon as he saw the KGB man, head bobbingly descending the steps, he moved away from his position near the restaurant, coming casually off the wall like a hoarding unstuck by the weather. It still wasn't sufficient to prevent another KGB man coming from the restaurant, wiping his lips with a dark blue handkerchief, from asking him for his papers. For a moment, but only for a moment, Pavel considered ignoring the order. Then, he turned his head and tried to smile nervously, reaching slowly, innocently, into his breast-pocket.
Gant was still in one of the closets, seated on the lavatory, his coat pulled around him, one hand gripping the lapels tightly across his throat, the other clenched in a pocket in an attempt to disguise its shaking. He knew he was close to the condition he had found himself in in Saigon. He was close to having the dream again.
He hadn't needed to make himself sick. He had only just made it to the sanctuary of the closet before he had heaved up his dinner. The bout of nausea, continuing until he was retching drily and gathering bile at the back of his throat to make the retching less painful, had left him weak and unable to move. He had settled wearily, agedly, onto the seat, trying to control his racing heartbeat, and the flickering, fearful images in his head. He listened to the footsteps, the muttered talk, the whistling, the splashing of water and the tugged clicks of roller-towels. A dozen times, the washroom had been empty, but he had not moved. He did not think he could.
He felt like a man beginning a ten thousand mile journey who breaks his leg, slipping on his own doorstep. The cold part of his mind which continued to function, though merely as an impotent observer, found his situation ridiculous, and shameful. He could not explain why he should feel so shot to hell, but he suspected that he simply had not prepared himself for what he had encountered. Gant had no resistance to fear. His brittle, overwhelming arrogance left him vulnerable to situations he could not control — and, however much he tried to persuade himself that his situation was controllable, the fiction would not take root in his imagination, calm him.
He heard footsteps on the tiled floor outside the cubicle. He promised himself he would leave as soon as the washroom was empty again. Then a fist banged on the door.
'In there,' he heard, in Russian. 'Your papers. Quickly.'
'I–I…' he forced the words out. 'I'm on the loo,' he said, recollecting the English vernacular that had been drummed into him.
'English?' the man called out, in a thick accent 'State Security,' he added. 'Your papers, please.'
'Can you — wait a minute?'
'Very well,' the man replied in irritation.
Gant tore paper from the roll, crushed it noisily, then flushed the lavatory. He undid and rattled the buckle on his belt, and the loose change in his pocket, and then slid back the bolt and stepped out of the cubicle.
The KGB man was thick-waisted but heavily-muscled, and displeased. He was, Gant guessed, low in status within the service, but did not intend to let an English tourist see that. He puffed his chest, and glared theatrically.
'Your papers — please.' He held out his hand, staring at Gant's face. 'You are ill — or, maybe, frightened?'
'No — stomach,' Gant said weakly, patting his overcoat.
The KGB man went through the papers carefully, without imagination or haste. Then he looked up. He offered them to Gant, and said: 'Your papers are not in order!'
Buckholz had told Gant repeatedly that such a trick was a stock tactic in preliminary investigation. The accusation, of something, anything — just to gauge the reaction. Yet he was unable to respond innocently. He panicked. Fear showed in his eyes, in the furtive darting of his gaze — the animal seeking a bolt-hole. The KGB man reached for his pocket, and Gant knew the man was about to draw a gun. Reacting instinctively, he bulled against the man, hand reaching for the hand in the Russian's pocket, driving him off balance, even as he sought the gun.
The KGB man was driven up against the roller-towel cabinet before he could regain his balance. He was still trying to reach the gun in his pocket, the one reassuring factor, as Gant tugged frantically at the towel. The hand that had closed upon the gun wriggled in his grasp — he found it difficult to hold the thick wrist. He brought his knee up into the Russian's groin, and the man's breath exploded and he groaned, sagging against the wall. Then Gant had a huge loop of towel free and he wound the loop around the man's head. Then he pulled. The Russian's free hand struggled with the tightening folds — his eyes seemed to enlarge, become totally bulbous. Gant's own vision clouded, and he continued twisting and tugging the towel. He seemed to hear a voice, distant and high, and feel a hand on his shoulder, pulling at him… he held on. Then, he was turned bodily, and something exploded across his face.
He was staring at Pavel, his hand raised to slap him a second time. His face expressed a cold, ruthless fury.
'You — stupid animal! He was KGB — don't you understand what that means? And — you've killed him!' Gant turned to stare dumbly at the pop-eyed, discoloured features of the Russian on the floor. The man's tongue was hanging out fatly. He turned back to Pavel.
'I–I thought he'd — guessed who I was…' he said in a feeble voice.
'You're a menace, Gant!' Pavel said. 'You could get us all killed, do you realise that?' He stared at the body for a moment, as if mesmerised, then he bent swiftly galvanised by a cold fear, and unwound the towel.
Taking the body under the armpits, he dragged it across the floor of the washroom and into an empty cubicle. He tucked the legs inside the door, rummaged in the pockets, and then locked himself in the cubicle.
'Is it clear?' Gant heard him ask.
'Yes,' Gant replied in the voice of a zombie.
He looked up, and watched as the big man climbed over the door of the cubicle and dropped beside him. He was wiping his hands which were dusty from the top of the door. He patted a pocket. 'I have tried to disguise your stupidity by making it appear that the man was robbed.' He sniffed at Gant. 'Now,' he added, 'quickly go up the stairs, and make your way slowly to the entrance. If anyone — anyone — calls on you to stop, obey them. Show your papers, and pretend you're ill, as before — understand?'
'Yes. He — he said my papers were not in order.'
'You damned fool — you killed him for that? They are in order. He was only trying to put you up.'
'I — didn't know where you were…'
'I was stopped, by the KGB. But my papers also were in order.' He pushed Gant ahead of him. 'Now — quickly, up to the entrance. This fat officer could become the object of a search at any moment, and then no one would be allowed to leave this station!'
Gant was stopped twice crossing the station concourse by minor KGB officers who glanced at his
papers, asked after his health and his movements, and then let him go by. Slowly he approached the temporary barrier thrown across the entrance of the station.
He had no idea how far behind him Pavel was. He would have to wait for him — if he got through the barrier.
The men at the barrier, at least a tall, grey-haired figure with the side of the face that had, at some time, received very poor plastic surgery — Gant assumed it to have been a war-wound — appeared to possess more authority than the big man he had strangled. Gant passed his papers across to a younger man standing in front of the grey-haired, expressionless senior officer, and waited. He tried not to look at the scarred, half-repaired face, but found his gaze drawn to it. The tall man smiled thinly, and rubbed his artificially smooth cheek with one long-fingered hand.
'English?' the younger man asked. 'Uh — oh, yes.'
'Mm. Mr. Grant — we must ask you to wait at one of the tables here for a moment, until we check with your hotel.'
'I have the papers…'
'Yes, and your passport and papers have received a security service stamp — nevertheless, we must ask you to wait.'
The young man lifted up the barrier, so that a hinged section stood on end, and Gant was ushered through. Other tables besides the one at which he was directed to sit, were occupied. About half-a-dozen people in all. Not all of them Russians. He heard an American voice, belonging to an elderly man, saying:
'There's no right on earth makes you question that passport and those papers, sonny!' A young KGB man, crop-haired, waved the remark aside, and continued with a telephone conversation.
Gant sat down, heavily, at the table. It was a rickety affair, erected for the express purpose of providing a semblance of the KGB's normal interrogation facilities. He swallowed hard. He turned his eyes to the barrier, and saw Pavel repossessing his papers and passing out of the entrance to the station, without a backward glance. Suddenly, he felt deserted, alone. He was once more no longer in control of the situation. He stared at the black telephone isolated on the table.
Then the young man slid into the chair opposite him, and smiled. 'This won't take very long, let us hope, Mr. Grant,' he said.
As he dialled the number of the Warsaw Hotel, Gant saw, clearly, and for the first time, the odds against him. He was taking on the largest, the most ruthless, the most thorough security service the world had ever seen. It was small comfort to recollect that Aubrey had described the KGB as notoriously inefficient because of its very size. To Gant, sitting at that table, in the cold foyer of the metro station, it was no comfort at all, the smooth platitudes of a man in an hotel room in the middle of London.
'Hotel Warsaw?' the young man asked in Russian. Gant kept his eyes on the table, so that he did not betray any sign that he followed the conversation. 'Ah — State Security here. Let me talk to Prodkov, please.' Prodkov would be the name of the KGB man who worked on the staff of the hotel — he might have been a waiter, desk-clerk, dishwasher, but he possessed far more power than the hotel manager.
There was a considerable wait, then: 'Prodkov — I have a tourist here, Michael Grant. He is registered in room 308… Yes, you know him. Tell me, what does he look like? Would you look at me for a moment, Mr. Grant, please? Thank you — go ahead, Prodkov… Mm. Yes… yes — I see. And he is not there now?' There was another, longer pause. Gant waited, in disbelief. Aubrey could never have anticipated what was happening to him now — now it would emerge that Grant looked different, or was already tucked up in his bed. 'Good. Thank you, Prodkov. Goodbye.'
The young man was smiling affably to deny what had just occurred. There had been no suspicion, no force — merely a very ordinary, routine check on a tourist's papers. He handed back the sheaf of papers, tucked neatly into the cover of the passport bearing the name of Michael Grant.
'Thank you, Mr. Grant — I apologise for any delay. We — are engaged in a search for — criminals, shall we say? Of course, we wished merely to eliminate you from our enquiries. You are now free to resume your nocturnal sightseeing tour of our city.' The young man was obviously proud of his English. He stood up, gravely shook hands with Gant, and then waved him through the barrier. The grey-haired man smiled crookedly as Gant passed him, only one side of his face wrinkling with the expression.
Gant nodded to him, and then he was outside the barrier and walking as steadily as he could towards the entrance. Outside the ornate entrance, beneath its elaborate, decorated portico, the wind was suddenly cold. Gant realised that his body was bathed in a sweat of relief. He looked around him and saw Pavel detach himself from the shadows.
'Good,' he said. 'Now, we have wasted far too much time already. Soon, it will be dangerous to be on the streets, impeccable papers or otherwise. Come — we have a short distance to walk. You go ahead of me, down the Kirov Street. When we are away from the station, I will catch you up, and show where we are heading. Good? Very well, begin walking.'
* * *
They picked up two of the known associates of Pavel Upenskoy and Vassily Levin just before six in the morning. Both were family men, living in the same tower block of Soviet Workers' flats on the wide Mira Prospekt, overlooking the vast permanent site of the Exhibition of Economic Achievements in the northern suburbs of Moscow. The black saloons of Kontarsky's team parked in fhe forecourt of the block, while it was hardly light, and the men moved in swiftly. The whole operation took hardly more than three minutes, including the ascent of the lift to the fourteenth and sixteenth floors. When the team returned, the two additional human beings appearing satisfactorily disturbed, barely awake, and deeply frightened, Priabin knew that his chief would be satisfied.
Priabin grinned into the frightened, wan faces of the two men taken from then beds as they passed him with nervous side-glances. They knew, he sensed, why he had come for them — and they knew what to expect when they were returned to the Centre, to Dzerzhinsky Street. He watched them being loaded into two of the black cars, and then glanced up at the block of flats. On the sixteenth floor, he could make out the smudge of a white face at a dark window — the wife, or perhaps a child. It did not matter.
His breath smoked round him in the cold dawn air as he returned to his car. Dipping his head at the passenger window, he said to the driver: 'Very well — give the order for the surveillance-team to move in on the warehouse. Let's get Upenskoy as well, while we're about it!'
* * *
Gant woke from a fitful, dream-filled sleep as the doors of the removal van were opened noisily by Pavel Upenskoy. Shaking his head, muttering, he pulled himself into a sitting position on the mattress which had been laid just behind the driver's cab. Gant had boarded it in the warehouse of the Sanitary Manufacturing Company of Moscow.
The light of cold, high bulbs filtered into the interior of the truck, but Upenskoy was hidden from Gant's view by the stacked lavatory bowls and cisterns that he was to drive that day to Kuybyshev, a town lying more than seven hundred road miles from Moscow. A new hotel being constructed in Kuybyshev awaited the toilet fittings.
'Gant — are you awake?'
'Yes,' Gant replied sullenly, trying to moisten his dry, stale mouth with saliva. 'What time is it?'
'Nearly five-thirty. We leave for Bilyarsk just before six. If you want, the old man has made some coffee — come and get it.'
Gant heard the heavy footsteps retreat across the concrete floor of the warehouse, and ascend some steps. A flimsy door banged shut. Then, the only sounds were those of his hands rubbing at the stubble on his chin, and the sucking of his lips as he tried to rid himself of the dry, evil taste in his mouth. He brushed a hand across his forehead and examined the thin film of sweat on his fingertips carefully, as if it were something alien, or something familiar the appearance and nature of which he had long forgotten. Then he wiped his hand on the trouser leg of his faded blue overalls into which he had changed when he arrived at the warehouse.
He had not slept well. He had not been allowed to sleep for more than two hours af
ter being brought by Pavel to the warehouse, in a narrow commercial street that ran off the Kirov Street. They were only a quarter of a mile from the Komsomolskaia Metro Station. Pavel had not allowed him to sleep as he had hammered home to him the facts and nuances of his new, and third, identity — that of Boris Glazunov, driver's mate, who lived in a block of flats on the Mira Prospekt, who was married with two children and who, in reality, Pavel had explained, would be staying home and out of sight, while Gant accompanied him in the delivery truck as far as Bilyarsk. The briefing had been conducted entirely in Russian — Gant had been forcibly reminded more than once of his language training with the defector, Lebedev, at Langley, Virginia.
At last, after a recital of his assumed life history, and a repeated account of what papers he carried, and what they represented, he had been allowed to sleep — to sleep as soundly as his own mind would allow him. He had relived the strangulation of the KGB man in the washroom, in a grotesque, balletic slow-motion in endless repetition — to relive the reaction that had caused him to sag against a shop window in the Kirov Street, so that Pavel had hurried to catch him up, and hold his shaking body until the epilepsy of reaction passed.
Gant climbed to his feet, and tried to put the vivid images from his mind. As he clambered and squeezed his way out of the back of the truck, he tried to consider the future, the hours ahead, to help drive away the past. He knew now that he could rely completely on Pavel Upenskoy.
In any and every word that the big man had spoken, Gant had sensed the contempt in which he was held by the Russian. It was as if, Gant admitted, he had been insulted with the company of a weekend flyer in the cockpit of the Firefox, Pavel having to tag him along until he could dump him outside Bilyarsk. Gant understood the ruthless professionalism of the big Russian. Where and how British Intelligence had recruited him, he did not know, but the old man, the nightwatchman at the warehouse, had muttered through his gums something about Pavel having had a Jewish wife, who was still in prison or labour camp for having demonstrated against the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, twelve years before. That had been when Pavel had left him briefly alone with the old man who had tried to soften Pavel's harsh treatment of the American. Apart from that fact, Gant knew nothing about Pavel Upenskoy. Yet, strangely, he accepted the big man's contempt, and brusque manner with equanimity. The man was good.