The Defector (41 page)

he paused at the desk and looked inquiringly at the woman. She shook her head. Nothing. He called Antonyii Volkov a crude obscenity. And then he saw Davina coming in from the garden with Irina and Alexei Poliakov. Tatischev was in his office with the decoded first message on the desk when the second call from the Crimea was decoded and put in front of him. The first had alarmed him enough; the urgency and openness of the second, demanding the arrest of three people, all referred to by code names, was impossible to implement without breaking into Volkov’s safe and reading his files. He dared not take the responsibility. He put an urgent call through to Volkov’s superior, the Chairman of the Committee for State Security, in his magnificent dacha in the Usovo complex reserved for the members of the Politburo; General Igor Kaledin, who would not now appoint Antonyii Volkov as his successor as head of the KGB. It was some time before Kaledin returned the Moscow call. He had been taking his ease on the reserved beach, dozing like a tortoise in the sun, when he was told there was a very urgent call from Volkov’s assistant Major Tatischev. The Major chewed a cigarette until the tobacco stung his mouth and he spat the pieces into the ashtray. He was frantically watching the time as he waited. Kaledin was old; he couldn’t hurry back to the dacha. It was over half an hour before Tatischev was able to speak to him. He blurted out his account of the discovery of Volkov’s body in Irina Sasanova’s flat. Yes, yes, he stuttered, the security police were already searching for her.

A full report was being got ready and would be sent by despatch rider to him at Usovo. But the two messages from Livadia were marked top priority and already the time limit had elapsed; he didn’t know whether to carry out the orders requested, and he had no knowledge of the agent signing himself Danton. On his end of the line Igor Kaledin hesitated. He knew who Danton was;

the Mole working in SIS Personnel in London, the Mole activated to find and pinpoint Sasanov for assassination. According to Volkov he had succeeded and the traitor had died in the fire at Halldale Manor. Danton was on the cruise ship. And he would have the last resort weapon issued to all officers of the KGB. He hesitated, but only for a moment. Power shrouded him like an invisible mantle, a power so immense that only the occupant of Lenin’s chair in the Politburo could countermand his orders. The messages referred to the Daughter, a male companion and a British agent who would be on the cruise ship Alexander Nevsky, bound for an evening stop at Sebastopol. Without access to Volkov’s private records, there was no way of knowing who they were.

“You say the cruise ship has left Yalta? Yes; radio an order to the ship’s captain. Tell him to act immediately when requested by a member of the State Security Service who is a passenger on the ship. And no one is to be allowed to leave the ship at Sebastopol until the officer makes himself known. Open General Volkov’s private safe and have his files ready for inspection. I am coming back to deal with this myself. One more thing. ” He let a pause develop, whilst Tatischev sweated blood for fear he had done something wrong.

“One more thing, Major. Take all necessary action to maintain security over General Volkov’s murder. Remove all witnesses. There must be no scandal. When Irina Sasanova is found, have her brought to the office so that I can question her myself He hung up, and Tatischev slammed down the receiver. He grabbed the bunch of keys on their silver key-ring, the keys he had seen Volkov use and which never left his possession. Each was numbered. He rushed through to the General’s private offices where his safe was kept.

“What am I going to do?” Davina whispered the question to herself.

“How am I going to stop him?”

The bedroom was stiflingly hot, the afternoon temperature was climbing into the eighties, and she had been walking up and down as if she were in a cage. For a moment when she was in despair, she thought ofsasanov, waiting in England, trusting and hoping, and forced herself to be calm, to try and think ahead. There was no need to put the evidence together, to justify by careful reasoning, her suspicion that Peter Harrington was a traitor. The final proof was in her hand. She had been so angry that she shook as if she had a fever; she threw the thing she had discovered hidden in the lining of her bag onto the floor, where it glowed red in a patch of sunlight. Then she stopped and picked it up, and put it in the pocket other dress.

“A gun,” she said to herself.

“If only I had a gun…” But there was no gun, and she wouldn’t have known how to use it if there were. The sense of helplessness was so frustrating that her eyes filled with tears and she dashed them angrily away. She called herself a fool, a fool wasting time imagining how she could outface a man trained to kill or cripple with one blow. Cunning, not false heroics; that was the only way to get Irina Sasanova and the boy to safety. She recognized that, and accepted that it could only be done if she remained behind. She looked at herself in the mirror; the face seemed strange to her, hollow-cheeked, the tanned skin taut, great shadows round her eyes. She hadn’t prayed since her childhood, but she did so then, in a whisper.

“Dear God, give me the courage. Don’t let me think about it. Just make me brave.” Then she opened the door and went out and downstairs to look for the girl and the boy. They took a bus to the port; she sat with Irina, while Harrington and Poliakov found seats in front. Harrington was in a talkative mood; he kept up a flow of Russian to the young man. She hoped he didn’t notice how quiet and uneasy Poliakov seemed. Beside her, Irina stared out of the window;

her bright prettiness had gone since Davina had found her in the garden. She looked sallow and she bit her lower lip with nerves.

“God,” Davina pleaded, ‘don’t let him notice anything. don’t let him suspect. ” They got off at the port, and Peter Harrington took her arm.

“There’s the Alexander Nevsky,” he said.

“Nice ship, isn’t she? The two of them seem very glum-he hardly said a word.”

“Not surprising,” Davina said.

“You never drew breath. They’re just terribly nervous, that’s all. I nearly passed out myself at lunchtime.”

“I know,” he said.

“But you mustn’t worry. Everything’s going to go smoothly. I feel very confident.”

“You didn’t this morning,” she reminded him. Keep talking to him, act normally, whatever happens. ‘you were paranoid about the wretched young man,” she went on.

“You frightened the life out of me talking about Spencer-Barr working for the other side-no wonder I went at the knees! What’s made you so optimistic all of a sudden?”

“Don’t be cross,” he murmured, bending towards her. She caught a waft of alcohol on his breath people were wrong when they said vodka didn’t smell.

“I just got worried, that’s all. I’ve got nerves too, you know. He’s all right, I realized that after a bit. I just don’t like the unexpected in this business. And I’m sure that little creep isn’t what he’s supposed to be.

I’m going to have a good dig round when we get back.”

“Yes,” Davina said slowly, “I should do that.” Igor Kaledin sat leaning forward, his elbows on Volkov’s desk, bifocal glasses on the humpy bridge of his nose. He was a heavy pipe-smoker and there was a bank of blue smoke above his head. He had finished reading the file on Sasanov that Volkov had written up himself and kept locked away. It was open at the last page of entries. Antonyii Volkov was known to be secretive, greedy for exclusive credit, but not even Kaledin had appreciated how he operated until he read the papers. Everything had been run off the copier by Volkov himself; all tapes of calls, interviews and messages were kept in duplicate in his private safe and only placed on general file when the project was successful. And not all of them were, as Kaledin discovered, skimming through other files whose code-names he recognized. Any evidence damaging to Volkov had been destroyed. Only what damaged others was included in his official reports. He refilled his pipe and lit it, puffing the strong-smelling tobacco-smoke; the back of his leathery neck was a dull red, and the red of mounting anger glowed in his little eyes behind the glasses. The defection of Ivan Sasanov had been a major political disaster to the Politburo; its propaganda value to the West had not been fully exploited by British Intelligence, who had obliged the Russians with a faked-up corpse. And Kaledin knew that Sasanov would need a period of negotiating with his hosts before he decided to tell them what he knew. And what he knew was of such vital importance that the Mole, Danton, had been recalled from New York and set to work in the SIS headquarters to try and find him. The fire-bomb at Halldale Manor seemed to have succeeded; this was the point in the file where Kaledin’s blood-pressure started to rise in proportion to his anger. Volkov had not believed it, but he had kept this opinion to himself. And he had concealed Danton’s confirmation of that opinion. He had told no one that he knew Sasanov had survived. The enormity of what he had done and what he had risked showed the immensity of his ambition. And that ambition was stated in his own neat handwriting, in the notations which were a kind of personal journal, never intended for anyone to read and gloat over but Volkov himself. He was aiming for Kaledin’s crown. To bring the Soviet Union’s most damaging defector in twenty years back to Russia would prove his worth and Igor Kaledin’s incompetence. And for this he had arrested Fedya Sasanova. An act which had it come to light would have proved conclusively that her husband was alive and working with the West. But the arrest had been kept a secret, as secret as the detailed and repellent account of his seduction of the daughter. Kaledin had not the slightest objection to any form of pressure, mental or physical, being applied for a political end. The hideous cruelty practised on dissidents in the special psychiatric hospitals had his full approval, but he operated on two levels in respect of his officers’ conduct. Political expediency justified any aberration;

abuse of power to satisfy degrading personal tastes brought the whole organization into disrepute. It mocked the symbolism of the shield that was the badge of the KGB, the defender of the State against its enemies outside and within. The old man growled with rage at what he read. To frighten and blackmail the daughter, to hold the mother hostage-these were recognized gambits in the game Volkov was playing. But to pander to his base instincts, as part of that game, affronted Kaledin’s puritan instincts. He detested degeneracy; he persecuted homosexuals on principle; he favoured the death penalty for rape. And so the plan progressed, each phase developing as Kaledin read Danton’s reports and details of the denoument planned at Sebastopol. Irina Sasanova, and the university tutor Poliakov, and a British woman agent masquerading as an East German tourist, would be seized as they were about to embark on a yacht in the port, falsely carrying Polish colours. Danton was to be allowed to escape and reach the yacht, returning to England to continue his work. The next and final phase in Volkov’s plan was to negotiate with the SIS and the British government for the return of Sasanov in exchange for the freedom of his wife and daughter and the repatriation of the British woman agent. Danton had it on the best authority, that of the woman agent herself, that Sasanov was prepared to come back to Russia and submit to punishment to save his family. It was all as neat as a jigsaw-puzzle; all the complicated pieces fitted and merged to form the picture Antonyii Volkov wanted. An outstanding Soviet Intelligence coup, masterminded and executed by his subordinate without Kaledin’s knowledge. But the vital piece in his picture was being bundled into a grave within the confines of the KGB hospital at Kuntsevo. The head was missing from the hero-figure in the completed puzzle. Volkov had foreseen every eventuality except the one which had overtaken him in Irina Sasanova’s bed. Keremov shut the file. He looked at his watch and calculated. The cruise ship was on its way. The captain had received his radio message. Nothing could happen while he made up his mind what course to take. Sasanov noticed that the American observer did not appear again after the first day’s session. The courteous Southerner had been introduced to him briefly, and had sat down at the table between Kidson and the naval captain from the Ministry of Defence. He made notes; Sasanov knew the recordings of the sessions would be copied on tape and given to him for despatch to Washington. He didn’t ask questions; after only one morning and afternoon he was absent from the debriefing and didn’t appear in the dining-room. The next morning Sasanov asked Kidson where he was. Kidson looked very tired; he was his calm and pleasant self, but there were signs of strain.

“He was called back suddenly,” he told the Russian.

“Some internal crisis or other. We’re sending them the tapes and they’re happy with that for the moment.” Sasanov frowned.

“That is strange,” he said.

“They made so much of having their man here in person. Why didn’t someone come out to replace him?”

“No doubt someone will,” Kidson parried.

“It doesn’t worry me if they’re not here in the flesh. I find them a difficult mixture. That chap for instance. Old-world charm and Southern-gentleman approach to everything, and underneath it I’d say he was totally unscrupulous. I never liked their strong-arm tactics. “

“Maybe not,” Sasanov said.

“But we respected them. More than your service. You don’t like killing enemy agents and you’d rather let your own traitors escape to Russia than put them on trial. We have never understood you. I don’t understand you either.”

“You understand us better than you make out,” Kidson said.

“You’d give yourself up to save your family and Dav-ina Graham. You threw your life and your career away because of what was done to your friend. I can’t imagine our colleague from Langley doing either.” There was bitterness in his voice. He said to Sasanov, “We’re due to start in ten minutes. You go down to the conference room and I’ll join you.” When Sasanov had gone he went to the window and opened it. The warm summer air fanned his face; his head throbbed with the painful migraine that plagued him when he was under stress. He knew the CIA would not be sending another representative to Hampshire. They would get the tapes and that was all. The Brigadier’s disclosure that there was a leak to the KGB had prompted them to activate their agent Spencer Barr ahead of White’s revised plan. Their reaction had produced an over-kill response literally, because Spencer-Barr had arranged the murder of Volkov so that the escape from Sebastopol could take place. The instructions sent to him to change the escape route had cited Volkov’s lone-wolf method of operating. This had given the CIA man in Moscow the idea of stalling a KGB arrest by murdering the man who was to give the order. Spencer-Barr had ignored his instructions from London and obeyed Washington instead. Without knowing that the source of the leak and the real danger to Irina Sasanova was waiting for her in Livadia, he had transmitted the original British plan for the escape by sea, and delivered everything into the hands of Peter Harrington. And there was nothing London could do to stop it. Even Spencer-Barr’s confession that he had included a warning of KGB penetration would be passed to the Soviet agent in person. He and Grant had combined with the security chief in the Moscow Embassy;