The Defector (15 page)

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“I’m disappointed we can’t stay the night. I won’t spoil our dinner.”

“Well, I was thinking,” she said.

“We are at a motel, after all. We could take a room and leave when we felt like it…” His eyes gleamed and he touched his glass against hers.

“We could,” he said.

“I’d like that.”

“So would I,” Davina said.

“I’ll go and fix it.” She booked a room, facing out the receptionist who smirked as she handed her the key, and as she walked back to join Sasanov, Davina thought suddenly that she had no qualm of embarrassment in paying for the use of a bed for a couple of hours. No embarrassment, no sense that she was in any way diminished by taking sex at such a basic level. They wanted each other and it was natural to make adjustments so they could be together.

“That’s all right,” she said.

“I paid for the night. I was just thinking that if anyone had told me I’d book a room to sleep with a man in a place like this, I’d have said they were raving mad. You’ve certainly changed me. “

“Are you sorry?” he asked her. She shook her head and laughed.

“No. Not in the least. I wouldn’t have missed you for anything.”

“Then why don’t we eat quickly?” he suggested.

“The food will be filthy, and I’m not hungry. Not for food.” The look he gave her was so frankly sensual that she felt tempted to suggest they forgot about dinner altogether. But she didn’t and they spent an hour eating steak and drinking wine, while he teased her by looking at his watch. In the motel room, she began to get undressed; it was a drab little place with hideous mock G-Plan furniture and a double bed of mean proportions. Sasanov stripped quicker than she did; he began to help her and then changed to making love to her before she was ready. She had no restraint with him, no pretensions to false modesty. He had never given her time. She twisted her arms tightly round his neck and lost herself in him. At one moment she thought how much this rough, masculine lovemaking aroused and satisfied her, and was overcome by tenderness for him, until the gentler emotion was swept away by mutual passion. He slept very briefly, and she lay awake, anchored to the bed by his weight, and felt again that blend of gratitude and joy which was perilously close to love. But she mustn’t love him. That would mean disaster for them both, when his wife and daughter were united with him, and there was no place for her in his life. He had liberated her, and she had no right to try and chain him in return. She switched on the ugly little overhead light and he woke.

“It’s time we started back,” she said.

“Let me get up.” She looked at herself in the little mirror on the wall, and began to put her clothes on.

“I must do something with my face,” she said.

“I look a terrible mess.”

“You look like a woman who’s been making love,” Sas anov corrected her.

“Will you do me a favour?”

“Another one?” she turned to him, fastening her dress. He was ready, sitting on the edge of the rumpled bed, smoking.

“A little one,” he said.

“Don’t brush your hair back like that. It looks better down.”

“It looks like a gipsy!” she retorted.

“Untidy hair doesn’t suit me.” They switched out the lights and left. She turned on the radio in the car; they were less than forty minutes away from Halldale Manor when the radio telephone buzzed. She picked it up, steering with her right hand. The codesign for her call was repeated. Sasanov heard her say, “What? Oh, my God! Yes, yes, all right. I’ve got that. Right away.” He saw her face in the semidarkness, and said quickly, “What’s happened what’s wrong?”

“There’s been a fire,” she said.

“The whole Annexe was burnt to the ground. Nobody got out. It’s still blazing and we can’t go near it. We’ve got to go back to London;

they’ve given me an address. “

“Fire?” Sasanov said slowly.

“How could it burn so quickly you say nobody was saved?”

“No,” she said.

“Think of Roberts and the others-how horrible!” She swung the car round and sped back towards London.

“There wasn’t time to raise an alarm. Apparently the place went up like a torch. Do you realize she glanced hurriedly at him ‘- if we hadn’t stopped at that motel we’d have been there too?”

“Yes,” he answered after a moment.

“That’s what they intended. Slow down or you’ll get us killed anyway! There’s only one thing that starts a fire like that. Not a fire, a firestorm. I’m afraid I’ve been discovered, Vina.”

“Oh God,” she muttered.

“Don’t say that. How could you be discovered, how could anyone know you were there?”

“I don’t know, but they did,” he said.

“Somehow they got a fire-bomb into the Annexe. It was meant for me. Where are we going? “

“To a flat in Shepherds Bush,” she said.

“A car’s picking us up at the intersection between Putney Bridge and King’s Road. They’ll escort us there. I’ll radio in just before we cross Putney Bridge. Don’t worry.” She laid her hand on his knee.

“Don’t worry, you’ll be safe. If this is an attack on you, then we’ll let them think they succeeded. Don’t you see, you’ll be really safe then?” He didn’t answer. He squeezed her hand and returned it to the wheel.

“You drive too fast,” he said.

“You need both hands.” They didn’t talk again; at the intersection beyond the bridge, a car in a side road dipped its lights as they approached and fell in behind them. Sasanov watched the lighted, empty London streets slip by. It was nearly two a. m. The bodies in the burnt-out Annexe would be identified;

there would be an inquest, managed by White’s department everything would be covered up and officially registered as a gas leak or a major electrical fault. The KGB might think they’d killed him. until whoever had betrayed him told them he’ was still alive. James White had the pathologist’s report on the charred corpses at Halldale in front of him; he also had the findings of the team of experts on arson and explosives who had rooted among the smouldering ruins of the Annexe. Prompt action by the local fire brigade and the nursing staff had saved the main buildings and contained the fire. The story had made all the national newspapers and both television channels carried stories and on-the-spot reports of what was described as “Fire Horror in Old People’s Home’. One of the best men in the Department had been put in charge of investigations. He was a thin bespectacled figure who looked more like a teacher than a specialist in the art of sabotage. His name was Fisher, and he sprawled awkwardly in the chair by the Brigadier’s desk, as if he couldn’t compose his long legs and arms in harmony with the rest of him. The Brigadier put the papers aside.

“Traces of high octane 15; that rules out any possibility of accident,” he said.

“Certainly does.” Fisher took an unlit pipe out of his mouth.

“That stuff is used in conjunction with Tyron multiple 2; the corrosive agent has a time-setter for eating through the separating compartments and allowing the two agents to mingle. The second they do Boom! You get a minor explosion that releases the activated agents, and on contact with ordinary oxygen you get a chain-reaction that literally sets on fire the air and everything in it.

“I reckoned that if the device was in the kitchen and it looks from what we found as if the fire started there it was timed to activate at just before midnight, when everybody would be upstairs asleep. They wouldn’t have had a chance of getting out, it spreads so quickly and the heat and smoke generated is so intense.”

“Hmm…” the Brigadier said.

“Nasty stuff.”

“Very nasty,” Fisher agreed.

“Makes the old American napalm look like a box of safety-matches. It’s been used before in cases where they wanted a blanket operation eliminate everybody at one crack. It’s highly sophisticated stuff, and only available to the Centre professionals.”

“From the police reports,” White said, ‘there might be a link-up with the van driver found in his van in the ditch. He’d apparently just made a delivery to the nursing-home, and to the Annexe. What doesn’t tie in is why he should have been going in the wrong direction when he went off the road. The other goods in the van were invoiced to a housing estate leading away from Haywards Heath, not towards it.

“He’s also suffered head injuries which don’t appear to be related to his injuries when the van crashed. I think we’ll find something there. If he recovers enough to tell us anything. The medical outlook isn’t too good. He’s been unconscious since they found him. ” Fisher suggested, “Surely a Centre man would have killed him.”

“You’d think so although they’re not infallible,” White remarked.

“I’m sure there’s a connection. Somebody got that bomb into the Annexe, and it must have been something the staff would have accepted without question. Like groceries. I’ll get some of our chaps to combine with the local police. They’ll probably come up with something. But it doesn’t answer the real question.” He lit a cigarette, and Fisher felt encouraged to light his pipe.

“How did they know Sasanov was there?” the Brigadier muttered.

“How the hell did anyone know exactly where he was-except for his minder, the staff at Halldale, and me.”

“One of the staff, maybe,” Fisher suggested.

“They got done for their pains at the same time. No chance to investigate the leak.”

“We’re looking into that,” White said.

“It seems the most likely. Serves whoever it was bloody well right. Anyway, thanks, Fisher. I’ll take the matter in hand myself. Thank your assistants, will you? They did a splendid job. ” When he was alone, the Brigadier flicked through the papers, glancing at items at random; he wasn’t really concentrating. Someone had found out where Sasanov was hiding. Someone had alerted the KGB. It would be easy to imagine that the traitor was on the security staff and had died for his pains. But the Brigadier didn’t believe it. They had a Mole, and the Mole had found Sasanov. If the Russians thought they had now silenced Sasanov, that was exactly what he wanted them to think. If they made no further inquiries about their missing delegate, it would connect their intelligence service with the Halldale fire. They wouldn’t do that; the Soviet Embassy would make representations to the Home Office and continue to cause as much trouble as they could over the vanished Russian. Therefore the charade would have to be played out. Sasanov must be produced; his body had, after all, been waiting in cold storage after the beauty treatments given to it. White buzzed his secretary and asked for his friend the Police Superintendent’s office number. They exchanged a few words about their health and their mutual interest in cricket, and then White said, “By the way, I think we could pop our frozen fish back into the sea. Can you arrange that? And find it in a day or two, will you? Oh, thanks, that’s fine. Yes, plenty of publicity-that’s what we want. How about lunch next week?” He made a note in his diary and rang off. The KGB were going to get themselves a body; if they chose to take it back to the Soviet Union to bury, or rather to play with to establish its identity, he had no objection. What he was really concerned about was keeping Sasanov in total isolation, while he began investigations into whether the Russians’ informer had indeed been burned at Halldale with the innocent, or was at liberty and watching.

“Irina, would you stay behind? I’d like to discuss this essay with you.” Irina Sasanova nodded. The rest of the class of students had put their books away; the lecture was over. Her teacher in sociology was a young man, less dictatorial than the senior lecturer in the subject; he enjoyed making his students laugh and encouraged a degree of open discussion which was rare in Moscow University. She came up to the rostrum; he had her latest essay on the table in front of him. Seeing her expression he said, “It’s good, don’t worry. I’m not going to give you a bad mark. It’s just that I see certain lines of thought in your work recently. I wondered if you were aware of them, that’s all.”

“I don’t know, Comrade Poliakov. I’m not conscious of anything. Please explain to me.”

“Sit down.” He offered her his chair and swung himself up on the edge of the table. She had turned rather pale and she looked anxious. She was pleasant-looking rather than pretty, but the fair hair and blue eyes were attractive. She very seldom smiled these days, and her contacts with her fellow students were perfunctory. For the past eight months she had been under an invisible cloud, as the daughter of a senior Soviet official who had gone to the West and disappeared.

“You have a definite trend towards individualism,” Poliakov said gently.

“Your work emphasizes more and more the role of the State in relation to the individual, instead of the other way round.” The colour rushed into her face;

the next moment he would tell her that she was showing signs of deviation in her political thinking. He saw the fear in her eyes.

“I’m not aware of it, Comrade; I promise you, if that’s what you see in my essays, it’s quite accidental. Just please point out to me where the errors are so I can put them right!”

“I don’t think they are errors,” he said.

“I much prefer the view of sociology that you’re expressing, however tentatively. I’m not criticizing you, I’m congratulating you. And I know how difficult things have been for you in the past months. Stop staring at me, Irina Ivanovna, as if I were trying to trap you and denounce you to the KGB. ” The girl’s eyes filled with tears.

“I don’t know what you mean,” she mumbled.

“I haven’t done anything wrong. I didn’t mean to write anything..” He shook his head.

“There’s no word of your father, is there?” She glanced up at him in panic.

“No. No, we don’t talk about him.”

“But losing him has affected you, hasn’t it?” he asked gently.

“Believe me, Irina, I’m taking as big a risk talking to you, as you are in answering. Will you trust me?” He didn’t know it, but she had been weaving romantic fantasies about him ever since he became her lecturer. Daydreaming about him had kept her mind occupied. This time she blushed for a different reason.

“Trust me,” he said again.

“Please.” She nodded, afraid of breaking into tears.