The Defector (40 page)

“Just nerves,” she said.

“I’ll be glad when we’re on our way.”

“We all will,” he said.

“Let’s go back to the hotel and eat there. No point in drifting around till five o’clock. You’ll feel better after lunch,” he said to Davina. They got the bus back to the hotel. In the foyer she excused herself.

“I couldn’t face food,” she said.

“I’ll go and lie down for a bit.

I’ll feel better if I sleep. ” She saw them move into the dining-room and took the lift up to the room on the second floor. She washed her face in ice-cold water, changed out of her clammy dress. She sat on the edge of the bed and lit a cigarette. Her hand was steadier. She had to think it out, carefully and coolly, marshalling every fact. This was the way she had been taught to think, to analyse. Her reactions outside had been hysterical because suspicions came at her like shrapnel, flying in at tangents, striking in different directions at once. If that slip of the tongue was right, Harrington was speaking from the other side when he said’they’. Accusing Spencer-Barr of treason while he suppressed the Russian’s warning about the real danger only confirmed her first view. She closed her eyes, concentrating. How circumstantial was their meeting, all those months ago in the office in London? How deliberate the playing upon her sympathy, the joking questions about Ivan Sasanov? How convenient had been his recall from New York, after a publicized lapse into drinking too much? There was a dreadful pattern emerging even as she remembered their meetings, some by chance, others arranged by him. He had become seedy, unreliable, after twenty years of active service and good reputation. He had got himself recalled after Sasanov’s defection. And he had latched on to her because he knew she was the Russian’s minder. Those were the facts and the circumstantial evidence;

they damned him even without the instinctive knowledge of his deception. That had come to her so strongly that morning that she had almost lost control of herself. She had seen him as a liar, as much as heard him. Seen him play-acting with the two young Russians, pretending to be sympathetic, hiding his hostility to Poliakov after his lapse when the young man took him by surprise. His solicitude for her was false too; he was poised like an animal, ready for anything to happen. The suspicion had become certainty; he was the enemy, had always been the enemy. He was the Mole who had sent the fire-bomb assassin to Halldale Manor. Sasanov had warned her that such a man existed. a traitor within the service. Worst of all, she had involved him in the escape plan, and, unsuspecting, the Brigadier had agreed that he should go. She put out the cigarette and began to search his clothes and belongings. Her crash course at the so-called language school had included where to look for bugs, microfilm and weapons masquerading as tubes of toothpaste, brushes, pens and pencils, suitcases, shoes with hollow heels. She worked very quickly and found nothing. She stood in the middle of the room and looked around her. He had no weapon of any kind; not even a tiny signal transmitter, such as could be fitted into a lighter and had a range of over a hundred miles. Was it possible she was mistaken that her suspicions were hysterical? And then, lying on the chest of drawers, she saw the expensive Hermes leather bag he had bought for her in West Berlin. Major Tatischev didn’t know what to do. General Volkov had not gone to his dacha, and there was no reply from his Moscow apartment. He had not notified his secretary or Tatischev of a change of plan. The top-priority message was locked away, unanswered. By noon, Tatischev decided to go round to the apartment himself. He took a man skilled in lock-picking with him. A few minutes inside the place assured him that his Chief had not spent the night there; more puzzling, his razor and toothbrush were still in the bathroom, and his dressing-gown hung behind the door. The valet Yun’s things were still in his room. He returned to his office feeling very uneasy. The General’s car was not in the garage; he had left his office early the previous afternoon and not phoned in since. Tatischev sent for his secretary and fortunately the young man was found at home spending a long day in bed with his girlfriend. He came to the office soon after one-thirty, looking very apprehensive. He’s afraid, Tatischev thought;

so am I. We all live in fear of making a mistake. He stared at the secretary, whose adam’s apple went up and down in his throat as he tried to swallow.

“You say the Comrade General left early in the afternoon?”

“Yes, Major. About three o’clock.”

“He didn’t say where he was going? No, I see… Did he indicate that he would come back or go to the country? You don’t think he said anything. Hmm. He had no appointment for that afternoon; he just left the office?” The secretary swallowed hard again. The nervous trick was beginning to madden Tatischev.

“I think he had a telephone call,” the young man said nervously. He never dared discuss his superior’s private life with anyone, not even the girl he lived with. He wouldn’t have said a word about the call except that the Major was becoming suspicious of his answers.

“What call?” Tatischev shouted at him.

“You idiot!

“Why didn’t you say so before? Who telephoned him?”

“I don’t like to say,” the secretary stammered.

“It was private. The General wouldn’t want me to discuss…”

“The General is missing!” Tatischev yelled at him.

“I’ll take the responsibility; who phoned him? “

“A girl,” the secretary said.

“He gave me a number to call if he was there and needed in an emergency. I never had to use it.” While Tatischev was ringing the number and the telephone shrilled unanswered in Irina’s flat, the address was traced. At about the same time the civil police had summoned up enough courage to take action about the car with its KGB number-plate which was blocking a side street near the Somoyonov airport. Their call through to the transport section in the Dzerzinsky Street complex did not get channelled through to Tatischev in time. He was standing outside the front door of Irina Sasanova’s apartment, bullying the old caretaker because she was fumbling with the master key. He knew as soon as he stepped inside that the place was not empty. There was a heavy silence that he recognized;

he had seen many men die and many dead men. He had brought two security guards with him. He heard one of them shout from the kitchen as he himself broke open the bedroom door and saw the outline of a body covered by a blood-soaked sheet. General Antonyii Volkov’s uniform was neatly folded on a chair, with his boots standing like sentries underneath it. An hour later, when the security guards had cordoned off the building and the street, and the two bodies were spirited away through the service entrance at the back, Tatischev went through the pockets of the General’s jacket and found the key that opened the special box to the decoder.

“You sit out in the gardens,” Harrington said to Irina.

“I’ll go up and see if she’s all right.”

“She did look very pale,” Poliakov remarked.

“I hope she’s not sick with anything.”

“Just travel sickness,” Harrington quipped automatically;

neither of them laughed. Dour buggers, he murmured to himself as he left them. Russians had no sense of the ridiculous. Not that he felt exactly humorous himself. Out of sight his expression became grim; he made his way to the reception desk and walked round it to the inside. He spoke quickly and very softly to the receptionist, who immediately showed him into the inner office where the private telephone was kept, and went out closing the door. Harrington sat down and picked up the receiver. There had been no message for him. It was nearly nine hours since he had sent his message to Volkov. He had not expected a reply direct to the hotel before late morning. He reminded himself that it was a weekend and Volkov would certainly be out of the city. It would take a little time to reach him. His intuition that early morning as he watched the cruise ship coming into harbour would have alerted his Moscow chief to the possibility of an escape by sea. Some precautions would have already been taken. But he should have been contacted, his message acknowledged. He was frowning and the frown became a scowl as he dialled the code number and delivered a second message. The diary he had used as a key for British Intelligence communication had a double function. The message he spoke into the Moscow recorder was given the double prefix of most urgent, top priority. Decoded it gave full details of the plan to get Irina and her companion out of Russia by means of slipping the cruise ship at Sebastopol and being taken off by a yacht flying Polish colours. Security services in Sebastopol were to be alerted, and the two women and the male Russian were to be arrested as they attempted to go ashore. He himself must be allowed to escape and keep the rendezvous. He requested urgent and immediate confirmation that the message had been received and the plan put into operation. He gave his code name and ended with the call-sign. He pushed open the door, nodded briefly to the scared woman behind the reception desk. He had no intention of going upstairs to Davina; he’d decided during lunch that his idea of taking Poliakov aside and handing him over to the local militia, or else killing him, was a solution born of panic. The unexpected had unnerved him; he had seen a Spencer-Barr agent in the young man, with his convenient cover story of being Irina Sasanova’s friend. His reaction had been bad; he admitted that. The nerves were ragged, unsettled by his resumption of alcohol, but only in the short term. He had been falling asleep drunk, and waking with the shakes, his heart thudding against his chest wall like a battering-ram. That was how he’d woken at dawn that morning, to find the bed empty and Davina standing out on the balcony in her nightdress, watching the cruise ship. And his pocket book lying on the table. He had been terrified and angry, still drunk as he joined her in the moonlight, and the finely tuned intelligence had acted independently of the vodka in his brain, and said “That’s how they’ll get her out. By sea, on a ship like that one. Probably on that ship. ” The same intelligence had made use of the Hermes bag. Thank God for his sharp instinct. If you could thank God for a thing like that. Thank God for the love-sickness afflicting the two young Russians; that couldn’t be manufactured or taught at Moscow Centre; not even where men learned the language of counterfeit emotions, just as they did at Langley in Washington and Langham Place in London. Alexei Poliakov was no British agent, sent by the loathed Spencer Barr He was exactly what he said he was; the girl’s lover, running away to the West with her. Harrington had only to see them together to know it was the truth. He didn’t have to worry about Poliakov. Volkov’s Crimean henchmen would deal with him. as he had promised to deal with the KGB informer, when the young man whispered Jeremy’s warning.

“Don’t worry,” he had said the tough professional straight out of a second-rate spy film- “I’ll know what to do about him.” And the poor fool had believed him and offered his idiotic help.

“Please, call on me I’m braver than I look I could kill a man…” And Harrington had pressed his thin shoulder and said, “Of course you could.” He paused in the foyer. Upstairs was Davina, his excuse for gaining time to make the call. Her nerves were giving out; no criticism of her, he said to himself. She was brave enough, and cool. Old, hardened pros like himself got sick when the eleventh hour approached. Love was her motive, too. Like the girl and the youth with his poet’s face. He didn’t want to think about Davina. He needed to be alone, to sit for a few stolen minutes in the golden Russian sunshine, surrounded by the beauty of the garden. Russians knew how to make houses and gardens beautiful; they knew how to take a pleasure resort like Yalta with its reputation for healing the sick rich of the old order, and turn it into a paradise for ordinary Russians. A place where the humble worker could afford the benefits of a health spa; where families could take their holidays and gape at the splendours of dead men’s palaces, now turned into museums or converted to sanatoria for their use. Provided they got the official passes entitling them to go there, and the permits to travel. No society was perfect, Harrington reminded himself. It didn’t matter, being cynical. He couldn’t help himself. He had to have a private joke at the expense of everything, sacred as well as profane. He found a garden chair under a tree and moved it into the sunshine. He sat with his eyes closed, face upturned to the sun. Fifteen years of work with James White’s service; five years of treason. It had happened so gradually, while he was stationed in West Germany. The contact was light as feather-down at first, a mere whisper from the enemy. His motives were honest to start with; he inclined his ear to the whisper intending to pass its message back to London. And then he had delayed. The contact was a West German, a journalist he had known and liked for many years. The theme was corruption; everyone had his hand out and was taking something for himself. The Cold War was over; but the Departments kept the Intelligence war going to keep themselves in jobs; the men at the top were setting themselves up for retirement with numbered accounts in Switzerland, while the field-workers plugged on and were pensioned off with sixpence at the end. Money was to be made. It was time Harrington thought about himself and his own future. He remembered it, sunning himself in the hotel garden. He very seldom examined his motives or allowed himself to think back to the days when he was straight. The suggestion had been cleverly timed. He had no prospect of real promotion; his work was stale and his bank account tended to show up in red. He was bored and afflicted with the restlessness of middle-age, when the hair starts coming away on the comb and sex is once a week. He dabbled, very carefully at first, allowing himself to be firmly propositioned. The money was disproportionate to the effort. He took it, and the slope to serious treachery was only a gentle incline. They didn’t need to blackmail him; Harrington was honest enough to dismiss that as an excuse. He had begun to enjoy being a double. His Swiss account grew and his skill was being really tested; feelings of inferiority and resentments buried over the years began to exact vengeance on his colleagues. He made crude jokes about Humphrey Grant in public, and presented himself as a buffoon, well past his best. He took the UN job and set up a front with the Rumanian and the East German, while he passed to the latter highly confidential information about Anglo-American Intelligence within the United Nations countries. He was told to get drunk and seem to slip, to get himself recalled to London. He had found drinking all too easy; the habit had taken a hold before he realized that it was an issue separate to following instructions. He had waited for weeks to bump into Davina Graham. And everything she did helped his pursuit of Ivan Sasanov for the KGB. Taking him with her was the final irony, the humeure mire that appealed to his sense of a malevolent Fate manipulating men. It was a shame it had to be Davina. He opened his eyes and rubbed them; for a moment his vision swam black and gold after the sunlight. He blinked at his watch; it was 3. 45. One hour and a quarter before the cruise ship sailed. No message had come from Moscow. No acknowledgement of his two messages. He shrugged off fear; if they made a balls-up from their end it wasn’t his fault. It wouldn’t be his fault if he had to go to the captain of the ship and show him his authority to stop Davina and the others going ashore. And he’d need that authority at sea. The captain wouldn’t unquestioningly accept his word as had the receptionist and her husband in the hotel. He got up and went inside;