The Volga sped south-eastwards, back towards the city. The rain grew heavier. The man in the bronze raincoat said, ‘It is very important we find your friend, you know. In fact, we’re sorry we left it so late. We should have come round for you last night. But there were problems.’
‘I don’t understand any of this,’ Michael told him.
The man in the bronze raincoat squeezed his arm. ‘You will, my friend. Please have the patience of a half of an hour.’
‘Militsia,’ remarked the driver, glancing in his mirror. He slowed down four or five miles an hour as a yellow highway patrol car with a broad blue stripe on it overtook him and carried on towards Gorkogo Ulitsa.
‘We had hopes that your friend would be with you,’ said the man in the brown suit.
‘Well, so did I, but we had an argument. Listen – I’m not under arrest, am I?’
‘No, no, my friend. Nothing like that. But there is danger.’
‘What kind of danger?’
None of the three men would answer that question. In any case, they had now reached Gorkogo Ulitsa, Gorky Street, and were driving slowly along on the right-hand side, obviously looking for John.
‘Please, keep your eyes wide, too,’ asked the man in the bronze raincoat. ‘It is very crucial that we find your friend.’
The rain meandered down the Volga’s windows. Michael lowered his head so that he could see out of the opposite side of the car; but the pavements Seemed to be crowded only with hurrying Russians in plastic raincoats and fur-collared anoraks.
‘Any sign of him?’ asked the man in the brown suit. ‘What’s he wearing?’
‘A raincoat. Blue, with a belt. Nothing special.’
The man in the bronze raincoat took out a pack of Russian papirosi cigarettes, and offered one to Michael without looking around. Michael said, ‘Nyet, spasibo.’
The man stuck one of the cardboard-tube cigarettes in his mouth and looked at Michael with interest. ‘You have been remembering your phrase-book?’
Then he smiled, and said, ‘Ah, no. My apology. You have been making friends with Konstantinova.’
Michael said, ‘Listen. I demand to know what’s going on. And I certainly demand to talk to the British Embassy.’
‘My friend, for your own safety, the very worst thing that you could do is speak to the British Embassy. We are saving you from the British, not to mention everybody else.’
‘Who are you?’ Michael demanded.
The man lit his cigarette, and filled the car with pungent blue smoke. He wound down the window a little way, so that the smoke eddied out in fits and starts. ‘We are friends, Mr Townsend; that is all that we can inform you at present. Please, have patience. And do try to see if you can spot your friend.’
‘We’re not going to the Toy Exhibition?’
The man shook his head. ‘Where do you think they will look for you first?’
‘Where do I think who will look for me first?’
The man in the brown suit turned around and said, ‘The KGB, my dear fellow. You thought we were KGB? Well, if you knew the KGB, their typical people, you would know at once that we were not. You see now, Miss Konstantinova, there is your typical KGB officer. Good quality, too. We know her very well.’
‘Rufina Konstantinova is a KGB officer?’ asked Michael. ‘Listen, really, this sounds ridiculous—’
The man in the brown suit smiled. ‘Of course. You have never been to the Soviet Union before. Security matters of this kind are not within your usual experience. They seem like a play, from the theatre. Men in raincoats, rushing around in strange cars. Mysterious women. Secret rendezvous in the Moscow Metro. All this happens in New York and in London, of course, but somehow not with the same heavy-handedness.’
Michael sat back on the stretch-nylon seat-covers. ‘I think you’d better take me back to my hotel.’
The man in the brown suit covered his mouth with his hand. His eyes were thoughtful but amused. There was a wart on the side of his forehead, and another on his chin, diagonally balanced. He said, ‘You have failed to understand, Mr Townsend. You cannot go back to your hotel; and you cannot go to the Toy Exhibition. You have been rescued.’
‘Rescued? Rescued from what?’
The man in the bronze raincoat tapped his cigarette into the Volga’s cheap chrome ashtray. ‘We have a friend who called Rufina Konstantinova late last night in the guise of her Intourist director on Marksa Prospekt, and told her that she would have to go early to ВПНХ. In point of fact, that was a way of removing your chaperone without making too much of a fuss. Our plan was to go to your hotel and explain matters to you, so that you would have time to leave with us before Rufina Konstantinova returned. But, we had difficulty. Our movements are always observed by the KGB, and we were delayed. By the time we reached the Rossiya, you were just leaving; and, worse, you were being followed by a KGB agent.’
Michael said, ‘Tell me what he looked like, this agent.’ He was serious now.
‘Young, tall, a few spots on his face. He looks like a teenage hoodlum. He always approaches foreign tourists asking for shutz and rokmusik and Adidas sport bags.’
‘Shit,’ said Michael.
‘Problem?’ asked the man in the bronze raincoat. The Volga turned left across the rain-slicked intersection with the Moscow Ring Road, and drove eastwards past the Hotel Minsk, across the junction with Novoslobadskaya Ulitsa, and towards the Moscow Circus. The rain came in pattering waves now, like watery locusts against the windscreen. Because of the Volga’s inefficient ventilation system, the windows began to fog up, and Michael began to feel that he was in a world without sight or sense.
‘That boy,’ he said, ‘that teenage boy. Well, that KGB agent, if you say that’s what he was. He was following John out of the station.’
The man in the bronze raincoat squeezed Michael’s arm reassuringly. ‘I regret in that case that the KGB have probably taken him in. I am sorry. We should have been able to prevent that from happening. But at least we have managed to save you from such a future.’
‘But what have they taken him in for? What has he done? What do you mean “taken him in”?’
‘Please – Mr Townsend – please don’t panic. There is danger, but no necessity for panic. You will be safe, if you are careful, and stay with us. It is dangerous for us also, but we everywhere take the most of precautions.’
‘But why have they taken him in?’ Michael insisted.
‘They have taken him in because it has been pre-arranged with the British government that all scientists and lecturers and computer experts, all people like you, should be obliged to remain here in the Soviet Union once you have entered.’
‘What?’ Michael demanded. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’
The man in the bronze raincoat said calmly, ‘Where were you going today?’
‘Nowhere. Just for a ride on the Metro.’
‘To Aeroport? For a man who is staying in Moscow for twelve days, a Metro ride to Aeroport is not logic. Why should a busy man on his one free day take a Metro ride to Aeroport? When you have come to a new country, you want to explore new places. The Kremlin, Gorky Street, Arbat Square. But Aeroport?’
‘I wasn’t going to Sheremetyevo.’
‘Then where, my friend? To Kholinka field, perhaps, to look at the new guidance installations?’
‘How did you know that?’ Michael asked him, hotly.
The man in the bronze raincoat took out another cigarette. The Volga was turning north now, up Mira Prospekt. The man lit his cigarette, and blew twin funnels of smoke out of his nostrils. He seemed calm, but also alert, as if he were quite prepared to die at any moment. Perhaps life in Moscow made everybody a little like that. It wasn’t the fear of being caught by the sudden lunacies of New York or Los Angeles; it was the fear of being steadily crushed under the great and ever-present weight of the state.
The man said, ‘Three English businessmen have now passed through our hands; two out of the three s
aid that they had been asked to go to Kholinka airfield and look at the new guidance installations. There may have been more, who declined to come here, once they had been asked by your government to undertake this task; and there may be others, about whose future we have heard nothing.’
Michael said nothing. The man smoked, and brushed curls of ash from his raincoat. ‘This coat cost me 150 roubles.’
They drove past the Polish Roman Catholic Church. The rain began to clear, and the windscreen wipers started blurting in protest against the Volga’s glass.
The man in the bronze raincoat said, ‘In the past year, the KGB have taken in scores of businessmen from Great Britain, and from the United States, and they will remain here to contribute their expertise to Soviet science and Soviet economy until further notice; that is all we know. Somehow, and for some reason. Great Britain and the United States are renting or lending out the services of some of their most talented people; but, it is done very discreetly. There has been no information about it in the Western press, or television. If there have been any distracted relatives in the West, then certainly we have seen no news of them.’
Michael cleared his throat. The face of the man in the bronze raincoat was wreathed in smoke, so that he looked like one of the Gorgons. Michael said, ‘Who are you?’
The man said, ‘I don’t know what you would call us. Heroes, villains, cowboys? We have no name really. Many of us have worked for the KGB before, some of us work for Western intelligence services. We are mostly agents who have seen the cynical nature of the political structure on both sides of the world. Actually, for want of a better description we call ourselves Lamprey; that small parasitic marine creature which attaches itself to larger fish and gradually rasps off their flesh with its teeth. We are an association of professionals who are dedicated to undermining those intelligence structures for which we once worked, in the interest of international harmony, and of plain humanity. There are many hundreds of us, from lowly clerks to important colonels. We share one mission.’
‘Where are you taking me?’ asked Michael. ‘All my clothes are back at the hotel. My passport, too. I can’t just—’
‘Your clothes and your passport have already been taken care of. Your room at the Hotel Rossiya is empty. Your bed is made, your razor and your toothbrush all gone. When the KGB return to see where you are, it will look as if you have never existed.’
Michael felt a tightening of uncertainty. If these men really had removed all trace of him from the Rossiya, then they had cut off his last communication with the real world. As far as Intourist and the British Embassy and Margaret were concerned, he might just as well have stepped through to another dimension; vanished, without any way of being followed.
As if he could hear aloud what Michael was thinking, the man in the bronze raincoat said, ‘You mustn’t be concerned for your safety, Mr Townsend. You are safer now than you were in the arms of Miss Konstantinova. You must realize that she was specially assigned to make it emotionally easier for you to accept that you would not be returning to England; and that for a while, you would be working for the Soviet Union.’
‘What about John?’
‘Your friend Mr Bishop? Well, they would have provided him with a woman if they had considered it worthwhile. But they will already have been sent a dossier on him by MI5 in London; and judging by Mr Bishop’s behaviour and appearance, I would guess that his dossier has revealed that he is more “turned on” by computer hardware than by pretty women, and they will give him plenty of that to play with.’
‘You mean that MI5 is working in co-operation with the KGB?’
The man in the bronze raincoat nodded. ‘The international balance of power is changing, my friend, for an ultimate purpose which we have begun to guess at, but which may be far greater and far more devastating than we can yet discover. Certainly, there have been enormous increases lately in security communications between Moscow, London, and Washington; and much of this increased traffic has been in very highly coded form which makes it almost impossible for anyone without access to their defence department computers to understand.’
Michael said, ‘What are you going to do? Are you going to try to smuggle me out of Russia? Or what?’
‘We will keep you somewhere safe until you can be returned to England. Once you are back there, you should have no problems, as long as you make it your business to forget everything that has happened to you. Your government will be too embarrassed to take any action against you. At least, that is our belief.’
‘Can I call my wife?’ asked Michael. ‘She’s going to think that I’ve been killed or abducted or something.’
‘We will make sure that she knows that you are safe, and that you will be returning to her shortly.’
They reached a small dull street on the outskirts of Moscow, lined with weather-stained 1960s apartments. The driver pulled the Volga into the curb, and the man in the bronze raincoat climbed out, and said, ‘Bistra,’ which Michael knew to mean ‘quick’. They crossed the pavement in the slanting rain, and passed through the smeary glass doors of a concrete housing project. The hallway was lit by a single flickering neon tube, and smelled strongly of disinfectant. The man in the bronze raincoat pressed the button for the lift, and after a while it arrived, letting out a groan like a man suffering severe stomach-ache in an echoing public toilet.
As they ascended, the man in the bronze raincoat shook Michael’s hand, and said, ‘My name for anything you care to say to me is Lev Unishevsky. You can call me Lev if you like. Neither name is real.’
The lift groaned again, and stopped at the fifth floor. They walked in silence down a narrow corridor, until they reached the last apartment. Lev rapped quickly at the door, and said, ‘Lev.’ A few moments elapsed, and then the door was opened up by a young pale-faced woman in a blue headscarf.
Lev said: ‘We lost the other one. Vakhmistrov got him, I think.’
The girl closed the door behind them, and led them through to a cluttered living-room full of stale cigarette smoke, where two men and a girl were sitting on a sagging sofa discussing a large map of Leningrad. They looked up briefly as Lev brought Michael in with him, and one of them said, ‘Zdrastvuytye, Lev. You were a long time. Did your shopping, as well?’
Lev unbuttoned his raincoat, brushed it briskly with his hand, and folded it over the back of an armchair. ‘We had some difficulty. They were watching the Saratovskaya street garage. In the end, we had to call Gorovets.’
He took out a cigarette, and lit it. He was a short man, with a middle-aged spread that wasn’t flattered by his sleeveless Fair-Isle pullover. ‘We are going to have to run Mr Townsend back to England very quickly, I think. It seems that we are being watched more and more.’
‘What about his friend?’
‘I don’t think there is anything that we can do, not at this stage. If Vakhmistrov has got him, then they’ll probably have him out at Zagorsk by now.’
‘What happens at Zagorsk?’ asked Michael.
Lev called, ‘Nadia, make some coffee, would you?’ Then he looked at Michael through his clouds of cigarette-smoke, and said, ‘At Zagorsk is a KGB centre for preparing aliens like your friend Mr Bishop for work in the Soviet Union; making sure that they understand the simple principle that if they decline to co-operate, they will only be obliged to stay in the Soviet Union longer, until they do co-operate.’
Michael said, ‘Really, I think I ought to call the British Embassy about this.’
Lev shook his head. ‘If you do, you will be doing nothing less than signing your friend’s death-warrant. He will disappear and the KGB will deny that they have ever seen him. After all, what evidence do you have that Vakhmistrov actually abducted him? You see, you have none. You are not in England now, my friend, and even if you were, I doubt if you would be able to elicit much sympathy from your authorities.’
Michael said, ‘I’m very confused. Yes, I will have a cup of coffee.’
He sat down in one of th
e armchairs. The man on the end of the sofa nearest to him leaned forward confidentially, and tapped his knee with his finger, ‘Izvinite,’ he said, ‘excusing me.’
‘Yes?’ asked Michael.
The man smiled sheepishly, and gesticulated with one hand in the air. ‘Kenny Dalglish,’ he said. Then, explosively, ‘Futbol!’
‘Yes,’ said Michael. ‘Futbol.’
It was only then that he saw the AKM automatic rifle propped up against the bookcase, and the boxes and boxes of ammunition. He looked at the gun and then he looked at Lev. Lev smoked, with one hand in his pocket, and simply shrugged, as if to say, this is the real world, what do you expect?
Eleven
Golovanov said off-handedly, ‘I wish to take Inge with me when we go to inspect the 20th Guard Army. That could be arranged, I imagine, without too much fuss?’
Yeremenko was buttoning up his right-hand glove. He looked across at his senior officer through yellow-tinted sunglasses. They were standing on the airfield at Luckenwalder, on a grey but glaring afternoon, while only a hundred metres away a huge An-12 transport plane disgorged troops and trucks and clattering rocket-launchers. On the far side of the field, twenty-two silvery-white MiG-23 bombers were lined up, their canopies open like the transparent wing-cases of exotic beetles, while mechanics and armourers prepared them for the moment when Operation Byliny would be announced.
Yeremenko replied, ‘No serious difficulty, comrade marshal. Well, not in arranging it. She could travel with Major Grechko. I just wonder if her presence on this inspection would be – well, entirely discreet.’
Golovanov’s smile looked as if it had been cut into clay with a tight length of wire. ‘She works for the KGB, my dear Yeremenko. How could I possibly be more discreet than that?’
Yeremenko made a half-hearted attempt to register surprise, but Golovanov laughed harshly, and grasped his. arm. ‘Do you take me for a milk-fed fool? Inge has been passing back to Dzherzhinsky Square every grunt and every groan of every visit that I have paid her. You don’t seriously think that they would allow me a private sex life, do you? No, I take her for what she is; a beautiful woman who has been assigned to keep her eye on me, and to make sure that I behave myself, ideologically speaking. All this business of having poor Poplavskiy drive me out to her house, and collect me again in the morning, when the houses all around must be crammed to the chimneys with KGB. No, britchik. I am allowed this little pleasure because I have earned it, and because it is a way in which our political masters can keep a watch on me, day and night. So, Inge will come to Haldensleben with me. You can do that for me, can’t you?’
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