Document Z (11 page)

A few moments past the hour, Michael Howley appeared. He came from nowhere, from the darkness beyond the yard like some spirit of the moor, and he stood beside the car with his hat pulled tightly on his head. Bialoguski leaned across to unlock the door. The man got in, Bialoguski pointed the Holden onto the road, and they drove for ten or so minutes, the car breathing heat into the winter air, the men silent beyond Howley's occasional low instruction to turn.

The wind on the coast was biting. They pulled up on a gravel circle on a cliff. Bialoguski left the engine on to run the heater.

‘He's left you?' asked the ASIO man.

As Bialoguski went to reply, he was wondering how he could make some money from the things he was about to say. ‘That's right. He stayed at Cliveden. The extra room. He said he'd lost his hotel keys but I think that was a lie.'

Howley had a minifon. The doctor could see it strapped over his shirt. He thought: I'm important enough that they're recording my every word.

‘Yesterday he went to Redfern,' he said. ‘He told me where and I found the address for him on a map. He's recruiting me, I'm sure.'

‘You think he'll stay with you again?'

‘He finds Cliveden useful. He knows I'll be there to support him. I think he's decided to use it as a base.'

The ASIO man was watching him talk, sitting turned slightly towards him, spectating from close range.

‘It's a shame,' Bialoguski said.

‘Oh?'

‘Yes. I'm struggling to keep up with the Cliveden payments. The rent is very high. I may have to move and it will likely be somewhere less convenient.'

Howley didn't respond.

Bialoguski reached into the back for a satchel. He dragged it forward and tossed the flap open. ‘It would be better for everyone if I managed to keep my flat,' he said. ‘Here, for example, are the contents of Petrov's pockets.'

He revelled in his description of the previous evening's hunt. He narrated the position and precise content of the items copied and handed the copies over. He was the masterful secret agent, the Queen's trusted spy. Howley examined everything but showed him emotionally next to nothing. Bialo-guski knew that this was very much part of the game.

‘Did he spot you doing this?' Howley asked.

‘No. He was snoring like a pig.' The doctor pointed to the address list. ‘This is very good for you. Here. These names, they are Australian names.'

‘Yes, I see them.'

‘You know these men?'

‘Some.'

‘You can turn these men. Doublecross. You can feed them false information, false documents. You can control what the Soviets know. Petrov is MVD. Positive. He is recruiting me non-stop.'

The ASIO man had a small electric lamp, which he ran over Bialoguski's schematics.

Bialoguski said, ‘These are his agents. No doubt.'

‘No doubt?'

‘Positive. This is treasure for you. This is as good as it gets.'

Howley produced an envelope—cash for the doctor's retainer. Seeing this, Bialoguski reached into his satchel for an envelope of his own. Inside:

EXPENSES INCURRED IN THE FORTNIGHT
:
CRANE

‘All legitimate,' said Bialoguski.

Howley read the list by the lamplight. There was a noise outside in the wind, a sudden scrape. The lamp was turned off and both men looked. The wind whipped around the Holden. They peered. There was nothing but darkness and nothing, the cliff edge and the black, crashing sea.

Howley flicked the lamp back on. ‘You want us to fund Stalin?'

‘I am at the coalface. That is what sympathy costs.'

The man was quiet for a moment. Then he gave Bialoguski the list and put his hands to the heater. ‘You'd best add the date. I think you can't be too careful where money's concerned and it doesn't belong to you.'

Bialoguski got out a pencil. ‘Agreed,' he said. ‘And the rent on my flat? You will talk to someone? You will talk to Colonel Spry?'

Howley told him that they'd see. ‘Don't use your codename for the finances,' he said. ‘Use a natural-looking pseudonym. Jack Baker.'

Ocean spray was misting on the windshield. An extended silence meant the meeting was over. Bialoguski put the car into gear and returned them to the car park. Howley said goodnight and disappeared the way he'd come.

The doctor had a cigarette and felt ecstatic. He wondered whether Howley knew that he was sitting the flat for free. Even if he did, that might be better. They would understand each other that way. And he wouldn't call his bluff when Bialoguski was adding so much information to the pot.

He put the car on the road. He decided to go and find Lydia.

B2 looked again at the monochrome photographs, grainy samples shot at odd angles, only the moderate suggestion of depth. Petrov with briefcase and double-breasted suit. Petrov in crowd in grey-tone hat, shorter than those around, staring, waiting. There was a business card in elegant cursive:
Vladimir
Petrov, Third Secretary of the Embassy of the USSR, Canberra
. B2 looked at these things, searching for some form of meaning. All he could find was sadness.

He got up to make tea. What did Petrov think he was doing? B2 was almost certain now that they had enough material to burn him. A well-delivered threat about his drunkenness and weakness for prostitutes; spy for us, or go home in Russian handcuffs. Probably they'd never do it. They couldn't be too reckless while their organisation was still on trial. But the point was that Petrov was leaving himself open. He knew they were following him and still he visited houses of poor repute. This was the mystery that B2 couldn't reconcile. Was Petrov baiting them? Was the whole thing a Soviet dare? He thought hard. If it was possible, it was only possible because everything was possible.

Petrov bears a striking physical resemblance to Mr Harold
Holt, Minister for Immigration; could be described as slightly
shorter, thicker-set, slightly fatter edition of Holt. He has longish
hair, turning prematurely grey, like Holt's, brushed straight back,
also like Holt.

B2 shovelled the tea leaves quickly, digging deep into the box. He set the pot and waited, rereading the account of Crane's latest report. B2 never met personally with agents. His job was to provide the vision, to be the omniscient paragon who rearranged the puzzle pieces of counterespionage so that they joined and found coherence. He thought Crane was a compulsive liar and completely out of control. But concerning Petrov's strained relations with the other Russians, perhaps the doctor had a point.

He went to a filing cabinet and pulled on a drawer. There was a program in here somewhere: Operation Cabin 12, detailing the preparations to protect a hunted defector. B2 liked the name, one of his own concoctions, a certain ring to it, the suggestion of shelter and branding. He opened the file on his desk. It was a plan and nothing more. Wired safe houses in Sydney and Melbourne, body swaps and speedy rendezvous on the Wombeyan Caves Road. The Riley was to be used, its dashboard fitted with sound recorders. There were shopping lists for the safe houses, whisky at the top. Two officers were to be resident at all times, and then two men from Special Branch with guns. B2 saw that someone had selected opportune suburbs, even possible streets.

He wrote a memorandum headed ‘Possible Cabin Candidates'. Vladimir Mikhailovich Petrov topped the list. Almost everything that western intelligence knew about Soviet espionage had come from the mouth of a defector—Gouzenko, Kravchenko, Tokaev. The history wasn't so good. Gouzenko had spent days pressing his case to every agency in Canada before the mounted police caught on. Then there was Oksana Kasenkina. She'd leapt from the third-floor window of the Soviet consulate in New York, having been locked up by the Russians when the US State Department refused her initial attempt. Given the man's limitless travel and constant meetings with communists, B2 was certain now that if the embassy had an MVD resident it was Petrov. He wrote an opinion outlining the best possible circumstances for having him defect. The core need was documents, Cyrillic proof. The wisdom was trust the record. Defectors had strange ideas about loyalty and betrayal and you could never be sure of the truth.

Bialoguski was a problem. If it came down to him managing a potential defection then they might as well not bother. He wrote a heading, ‘Third Vector', and jotted some thoughts. Naturally, they couldn't induce a defection—External Affairs would have a fit. The offering would need to be modest, perhaps lifetime protection and cash for a house. The director of counterespionage drafted an induction sheet in triplicate and put Spry's name first. He sealed it and the memorandum in an outgoing envelope. The unstated message was that if the organisation could do this, any question marks about its existence would disappear. If elected, Labor wouldn't fold an apparatus that was turning Soviet spies. And if Petrov was MVD, then his public testimony might land the man's bastard agents in gaol.

B2 returned to his chair. The light in the room was dissipating. He picked a magazine from the shelf and turned to a poem by A.D. Hope. He'd shared an office with Alec over one desolate Melbourne winter, and had never known for a moment that he wrote.

The Kingston Mothercraft Centre stood in an eerie, sunset light. Evdokia walked that side of the street, going by the building, its stretches of lawn, the young elm trees pegged to the slope.

She went into the Kingston newsagency. There had been a letter that week from Tamara. Things weren't going well in Moscow. Their father was ill. It was difficult to decode the inferences in her sister's words—like those of any fifteen year old, a poor conduit for bad news—but it seemed to be cancer. In any case, the doctors were using radium.

At least it wasn't her mother. Was that an awful thought? She couldn't bear the idea of her mother falling ill. If it had been her mother, she would have requested the next plane home.

She scanned the shelves for something her father might like. They had a souvenir range here: Canberra mementos in Shelley china. She looked but couldn't choose. The news-agency closed.

Outside, the dusk had reddened. She walked south past the Kingston Oval and over the avenue as the street lamps came on. Coming to Lockyer Street, she could see something large protruding from their letterbox. It was a package of string and paper, a note taped to the outside:
Communism is a movement
of scientific intellects originating in Godlessness and materialism
and exploiting poverty and it must be met in the battlefield
. No signature. No stamps. Inside the package was a hard-cover book. The King James Bible.

Evdokia stood with it in her hand, hate rising at the back of her neck. She looked up and down the street but saw no one. She opened the book, grabbed a wad of pages and bent them in her hand. She held the front and back covers and applied a shearing force. The book didn't break. She threw it into the outside bin, wondering when whoever had delivered it had followed her, whether they had crept alongside or behind her, wondering on what expedition she had been marked out and tracked.

His eyes were getting worse. The specks were gone, but now a spasmodic grey smudge clouded his sight, dropping a muddy curtain between himself and the world. Reading the newspapers was becoming difficult. He knew his depth perception was shot. He was going blind. That was his conclusion, and when it happened it would probably spell the end of him.

Michael Bialoguski told him to stop worrying. They were sitting together in Bialoguski's waiting room, which was also Doctor Beckett's. When the ophthalmologist finally appeared, Petrov judged him to be about fifty. He wore a brown jacket with a red tie and over these a white coat. He said Petrov's name and they shook hands.