Golden Fox

by Wilbur Smith

  She locked the driver’s door, but left the side-window open an inch at the top as she had been instructed. She entered the back door of the bustling supermarket. It was the last Friday of the month, and pay-day for tens of thousands of office workers and civil servants. The queues at the checkout tills were scores long.

  Isabella passed quickly out through the front entrance into the main street of the suburb and turned left. She pushed her way along the crowded pavements until she reached the new post office building. There was a pair of teenage girls in the glass cubicle of the first public telephone booth from the left. They giggled into the receiver and jangled their fake gold ear-rings and rolled their eyes at each other as they listened to the boy on the other end of the line, sharing the earpiece of the telephone.

  Isabella checked her watch. It was five minutes short of the hour, and she felt a stab of anxiety. She tapped imperiously on the glass door, and one of the girls pushed out her tongue at her and went on speaking.

  A minute later Isabella tapped again. With ill grace the pair hung up the receiver and flounced away angrily. Isabella darted into the booth and closed the door. She did not lift the receiver, but made a show of searching for small change in her purse. She was watching the minute-hand of her wristwatch. As it touched the pip at the top of the dial the telephone rang and she snatched it up.

  ‘Red Rose,’ she whispered breathlessly, and a voice said: ‘Return immediately to your vehicle.’ The connection was broken and the burr of the dialling tone echoed in her ears. Even in her perplexity, Isabella thought she had recognized the heavy accent of the large powerful woman who had picked her up in the closed van on the Thames Embankment almost three years previously.

  Isabella dropped the receiver back on to its cradle and fled from the booth. It took her three minutes to reach the Mini in the Pick ’n’ Pay carpark. As she inserted the key in the door-lock she saw the envelope lying on the driver’s seat, and she understood. She had read the books of Le Carré and Len Deighton, and she realized that this was a dead-letter drop.

  She knew that she was almost certainly under observation at that moment. She glanced around the carpark furtively. It was almost two acres in extent, and there were several hundred other vehicles parked around her. Dozens of shoppers pushed their laden shopping-trolleys to the waiting motor cars, and beggars and off-duty schoolchildren loitered and idled about the carpark. Car pulled in and out of the gates in a steady two-way stream. It would be impossible to pick out the watcher from this crowd.

  She slipped behind the wheel and drove carefully back to Weltevreden. The letter was obviously too important to be entrusted to the postal service. This was an ingenious form of hand delivery. Locked in the safety of her own private bedroom suite she at last opened the envelope.

  First, there was a recent colour photograph of Nicky. He was dressed in bathing-trunks. He had developed into a sturdy and beautiful child of nearly three years of age. He stood on a beach of white coral sand with the blue ocean behind him.

  The letter that accompanied the photograph was terse and unequivocal:

  As soon as possible, you will acquire full technical specifications of the new Siemens computer-linked coastal radar network presently being installed by Armscor at Silver Mine naval headquarters on the Cape peninsula.

  Inform us in the usual way once these plans are in your possession. After you have delivered, arrangements will be made for your first meeting with your son.

  There was no signature.

  Standing over the toilet-bowl in her bathroom, Isabella burnt the letter and, as the flames scorched her fingertips, dropped it into the bowl and flushed the ashes away. She closed the toilet-cover and sat upon it, staring at the tiled wall opposite.

  So it had come at last – as she had known it must. For three years she had waited for the order to commit an act that would finally put her beyond the pale.

  Up until now she had been instructed merely to inveigle herself into her father’s complete confidence. She had been told to make herself indispensable to him, and she had done so. She had been ordered to join the National Party and seek election to parliamentary office. With Nana’s help and guidance, she had done so.

  However, this was different. She recognized that she had at last reached the point of no return. She could turn back from treason – and abandon her son; or she could go forward into the dangerous unknown.

  ‘Oh, God help me,’ she whispered aloud. ‘What can I do – what must I do?’

  She felt the great serpentine coils of dread and guilt tighten about her. She knew what the answer to her question must be.

  A copy of the Siemens radar installation report was in her father’s strongroom in Centaine House at this moment. On Monday the file would be returned by special courier to naval headquarters in the nuclear-proof bunker complex built into Silver Mine mountain.

  However, her father was flying up to the sheep ranch at Camdeboo over the weekend. She had already refused the invitation to accompany him on the excuse that she had so much work to catch up on. On Saturday and Sunday, Nana was judging the Cape gun-dog trials. Garry was in Europe with Holly and the children. Isabella would have the top floor of Centaine House to herself for the entire weekend. She had full security clearance, and the guards at the front door knew her well.

  The wind was out of the north. The first snowflakes eddied down, silver bright against the grey sow’s belly of the sky.

  There were a dozen men at the graveside, no women. There had been no women in Joe Cicero’s life, just as now there was none at his death. All the mourners were officers from the department. They had been delegated to this duty. They stood stolidly to attention in a single rank. All of them wore uniform greatcoats and scarlet-piped dress caps. All their noses were red, with cold rather than with grief. Joe Cicero had no friends. He had seldom evoked any emotion in his peers other than envious admiration or fear.

  The honour guard stepped smartly forward and, at the order, raised their rifles and pointed them to the sky. The volleys rang out, punctuated by the rattle of the bolts. At the next order they shouldered their weapons and marched away, boots slamming into the gravel path and clenched fists swinging high across the chest.

  The official mourners broke their ranks, shook hands briefly and expressionlessly then hurried to the waiting vehicles.

  Ramón Machado was the only one left at the graveside. He also wore the full-dress uniform of a KGB colonel, and beneath his greatcoat the gaudy lines of his decorations reached below his ribcage.

  ‘And so, you old bastard, for you the game is over at last – but it took you long enough to clear the stage.’ Although Ramón had been head of section for two years now, he had never truly felt that he had succeeded to the title while Joe Cicero was still alive.

  The old man had died grudgingly. He had held the cancer in remission for long agonizing months. He had even kept his office in the Lubyanka right up to the last day. His gaunt spectral presence had presided at every meeting of section heads, his will and his enmity had inhibited Ramón at every turn, right to the last.

  ‘Goodbye, Joe Cicero. The devil can have you now.’ Ramón smiled, and his lips felt as though they might tear in the cold.

  He turned away from the grave. His car was the last one remaining under the row of tall dark yews. With this rank, Ramón now rated a black Chaika and a corporal driver. The driver opened the door for him. As Ramón settled into the back seat he brushed the snowflakes from his shoulders with his gloves.

  ‘Back to the office,’ he said.

  The corporal drove fast but skilfully, and Ramón relaxed and watched the streets of Moscow unfold ahead of the departmental pennant on the shining black bonnet of the Chaika.

  Ramón loved Moscow. He loved the broad boulevards that Joseph Stalin had built after the Great Patriotic War. He loved the pure classical lines of some of the buildings and the brilliant contrast that they struck with those in the rococo style alongside the skyscrapers that Sta
lin had built and topped with their red stars. The concept of Soviet giantism excited him. They drove past the massive bronze statues of the heroes of the people, the monstrous figures of men and women marching forward together brandishing submachine-guns and sickles and hammers, raising high the socialist banner and the red star.

  There were no commercial advertisements, no exhortations to drink Coca-Cola or to smoke Marlboros or invest with Prudential Insurance and read the Sun. That was the most striking difference between the cities of Mother Russia and those of the crass and avaricious capitalistic West. It offended Ramón’s instinct that the appetites of the people should be stimulated for such shoddy and indulgent goods, that a nation’s productive capacity should be diverted from the essential to the trivial.

  From the back seat of the Chaika he looked upon the Russian people and he felt a glow of righteous approval. Here was a people organized and committed to the good of the State, to the betterment of the whole not the individual parts. He observed them, patient and obedient, standing at the bus-stops, standing in the food-queues, orderly and regimented.

  In his mind he compared them to the American people. America, that fractious childlike nation, where each man pulled against the other; where avarice was considered the greatest virtue; where patience and subtlety were considered the greatest vice. Was there any other nation in history which had perverted the ideal of democracy to the point where the freedom and the rights of the individual had become a tyranny on the rest of society? Was there any other nation which so glorified its criminals – Bonnie and Clyde, Al Capone, Billy the Kid, the Mafia, the black drug-lords? Would Russia or any other sensate government emasculate and shackle its armed forces with such rules of disclosure and publicly debated budget allocations?

  The Chaika stopped at a set of traffic-lights. It was the only vehicle on the broad thoroughfare apart from two public buses. Where every American had his own automobile, there was no such wasteful ownership in Russian society. Ramón watched the pedestrians cross the street in an orderly stream in front of his vehicle. The faces were handsome and intelligent, the expressions patient and reserved. Their dress had none of the wild eccentricity that would be evident in any American street. Apart from the predominance of military uniforms, the clothing of both men and women was sober and conservative.

  Compared to this educated and scholarly people, the Americans were illiterate oafs. Even the workers in the Russian fields could quote Pushkin. The classic books were amongst the most sought-after items on the black market. Any day that one visited the cemetery at the monastery of Alexander Nevsky in Leningrad you would find the graves of Dostoevsky and Tchaikovsky piled with fresh flowers, daily tributes from ordinary people. By contrast, half the American high-school graduates, especially the blacks, had reading skills barely adequate to follow the captions in a Batman comic-book.

  Here, then, was the reward for almost sixty years of the socialist revolution. A structured and delicately layered society, secretive and protected in depth. Ramón often compared it to the Matryoshka dolls in the Beriozka tourist stores, those cunningly carved nests of human figures which fitted one within the other, the outer layers protecting and hiding the precious centre.

  Even the Russian economy was deceptive to the Western eye. The Americans looked at the food-queues and the lack of consumer goods in the gigantic GUM departmental stores, and in their naïve and simple-minded way they saw this as the sign of a failed or at least an ailing system. Hidden from them was the internal economy of the military productive machine. A vast, highly efficient and powerful structure which not only matched but far outstripped its American capitalistic counterpart.

  Ramón smiled at the story of the American astronaut perched in the nose capsule of his rocket waiting for the blast-off who, when asked by ground control if he was nervous, answered: ‘How would you like to be sitting on top of the efforts of a thousand low-bidders?’ There were no low-bidders in the Russian armaments industry. There was only the best.

  In much the same way there were no siftings from the ‘equal opportunity’ school of employment, or rejects from IMB and GM, in the upper echelons of the Russian military. There were only the best. Ramón was aware that he was one of them, one of the very best.

  He straightened up in his seat as the Chaika entered Dzerzhinsky Square and passed the heroic statue of the founder of the organization of state security on its raised plinth, and moved up the hill towards the elegant but substantial edifice of the Lubyanka.

  The driver pulled into the narrower street which ran behind the headquarters and parked with the rows of other official KGB vehicles in the rank reserved for them. Ramón waited for him to open the door and then he crossed the road to the rear entrance and entered the building through the massive cast-iron grille doors.

  There were two other KGB officers ahead of him at the security-desk. He waited his turn for clearance. The captain of the security guard was thorough and painstaking. He compared Ramón’s features to those of the photograph on his identity document the regulation three times before allowing him to sign the register.

  Ramón mounted to the second floor in the antique lift of etched glass and polished bronze. The lift and the chandeliers were relics from pre-revolutionary times when the building had been a foreign embassy.

  His secretary stood to attention beside her desk when he entered his office and greeted him as he hung his greatcoat at the door.

  ‘Good morning, Comrade Colonel.’ He saw that overnight she had set her hair with hot curling-tongs into crisp tight curls. He preferred it loose and soft. Katrina’s eyes were almond-shaped and hooded, a legacy from some distant Tartar ancestor. She was twenty-four years old, the widow of an air force test pilot who had died flying a prototype of the new MiG-27 series.

  Katrina indicated the cardboard box on the corner of her desk. ‘What should I do with these, Comrade Colonel?’

  She opened the lid, and Ramón glanced at the contents. They were all that remained of General Cicero’s presence. She had cleared the drawers of the desk that now, at last, belonged to Ramón alone.

  Apart from a gold-plated Parker ballpoint pen and a leather wallet, there were no personal items in the box. Ramón picked out the wallet and opened it. There were half a dozen photographs in the compartments. In each of them Joe Cicero posed with a prominent African leader, Nyerere, Kaunda, Nkrumah.

  He dropped the wallet back into the box, and his hand brushed against Katrina’s soft pale fingers. She trembled slightly, and he heard her catch her breath.

  ‘Take it all down to Archives. Get a receipt from them,’ he ordered.

  ‘Immediately, Comrade Colonel.’

  She was an attractive placid woman, with a narrow waist and wide comfortable hips. Of course, she had the highest security clearance, and Ramón had meticulously recorded their relationship in his daybook. Their relationship had the tacit sanction of the head of department. Her flat was a convenient base for him while he was in Moscow, even though she shared the two rooms with her elderly parents and her three-year-old son.

  ‘There is a green-flash despatch on your desk, Comrade Colonel,’ Katrina said huskily as she picked up the cardboard box. Her cheeks were still lightly flushed from the brief physical contact. Ramón felt a shaded regret that he would be leaving Moscow at midnight. On the average he spent only a few days in the mother city in any one month. He saw so little of Katrina that her appeal was still fresh, even after two years.

  She must have read his mind, for she dropped her voice to a whisper. ‘Will you dine at the flat tonight, before you leave? Mamma has found an excellent sausage and a bottle of vodka.’

  ‘Very well, little one,’ he agreed, and then went through to his own office.

  The green-flash box was on his desk, and he unbuttoned his tunic and split the security seal that the cipher department had affixed.

  As he read the code Red Rose he felt a sharp elevation of his pulse rate. That annoyed him.

  Red Ro
se was merely an agent like a hundred others under his control. If he allowed personalities to intrude, his own efficiency was diminished. Even so, as he lifted the Red Rose folder from the box he was struck suddenly by a mental image of a naked girl perched on a black boulder in a Spanish mountain stream. The picture was extraordinarily vivid, even down to the deep indigo blue of her eyes.

  He opened the file and saw at a glance that it was the report on the South African naval radar chain that he had called for. It had come in via the London embassy bag. He nodded with satisfaction and then consulted his daybook. With the log open before him he lifted the handset of his departmental intercom and dialled Records.

  ‘A printout. Reference “Protea”, item number 1178. Urgent, please.’

  While he waited for the printout to be delivered, he rose from his desk and crossed to the windows. The view was novel enough to engage his interest. Over the statue of the founder he looked across the stately forest of buildings to the colourful onion-shaped domes of the Cathedral of St Basil the Blessed, and the walls of the Kremlin.

  He was still disturbed by the memories that the Red Rose despatch had evoked. On a logical train of thought his mind went on to the journey that would begin for him at midnight from Sheremetyevo Airport, and the child who would be waiting for him at the journey’s end.

  He had not seen Nicholas for over two months. He would have grown again and he would be speaking even more fluently. His vocabulary was quite unusual for his age. Paternal pride was a bourgeois emotion, and Ramón sought to suppress it. He should not be standing dreaming out of the window while there was so much work to be done. He checked his wristwatch. In forty-eight minutes there was a meeting scheduled, the result of which would vitally affect his career over the next decade.

  He returned to his desk and took his notes for the meeting from the top drawer. Katrina had typed them out in double spacing. He flipped through the pages, and found that he still knew every word by heart. His presentation was memorized word-perfect. Further study would only affect the spontaneity of his delivery. He set the report aside.