The Relic (25 page)

She paused, masking the mouthpiece for a few seconds with her hand. Does he know? Is he pretending? Was he part of this surveillance without telling me? Her instinct urged her to attack, to tear down his defence.

‘Volkov's disappeared,' she said.

He'd been prepared since he got the apologetic call from his detectives saying they'd lost the trail. He'd sent the news posthaste to Moscow Centre. Just twenty-four hours after his dinner with Eloise Brückner.

‘My God,' he said.

‘He had a woman, Peter,' she cut in on him. ‘You knew about it, didn't you? Don't lie to me. You knew!'

He thought very quickly. Why should she guess? Viktor must have broken confidence and told her.

‘Yes, I did know. I saw them in the street together. Viktor didn't want you upset. He told me to say nothing. Find out about her. But keep it low key. I got a Swiss firm to keep a watch on them.'

She cleared her constricted throat. ‘Tell me about her.'

‘Listen Irina, I know you're blaming me. I'd have told you, but Viktor wouldn't allow it. He said you are too valuable to be upset. His own words.'

‘They were together for how long? Weeks, months? She's the one who broke in to my office and knocked me out. She stole Volkov's passport. It had just been renewed. We were summoned back to Moscow. I was to bring him with me. Like it or not, Peter. You understand?'

‘Christ, yes,' he said.

He'd dismissed the story as a cover to get her out of Geneva before Eloise could bring a legal action, but it was true. The woman called Lucy Warren had gone to Irina's office, bashed her over the head and made off with Volkov's passport. He'd been right to alert Moscow when he discovered she was the daughter of a Ukrainian
emigré
, founder of an anti-Soviet organization that had international affiliations. They'd set off by car the afternoon of the attack on Irina. And lost the experienced Swiss tail after a hair-raising drive in the rain and darkness. He couldn't believe it when he heard that it was Volkov at the wheel.

‘We'll find them, don't worry,' he said. ‘We have the number of the car. They'll be tracked down. He can't get far without a visa.'

‘No,' Irina said. ‘He can't. If you'd told me instead of going to Viktor behind my back, I could have stopped it. I'm going to point that out when I get home. They don't hold me responsible. They've been very helpful, very sympathetic. You let him cheat on me and kept it to yourself. You kept it as a titbit to feed Viktor, didn't you? Getting yourself well in. Just wait till I get home! My father has some extremely influential friends.'

Müller said what he'd been longing to say to her for years.

‘Why don't you go fuck yourself, Irina? No one else wants to.' He hung up on her.

She sat beside the telephone for some time. The headache was becoming less painful. She tried another cigarette; her hand trembled. The taste was still disgusting. No alcohol, she knew that. Stay quiet, rest. Apart from a mild concussion there's the element of shock. She went in to the kitchen and made herself a glass of tea. She concentrated upon being calm. She lay down on the bed and forced herself to breathe deeply, keep her eyes closed. She took her pulse at intervals. It steadied. At five o'clock the buzzer sounded from the street entrance.

A girl came up and said shyly that she'd been sent from the embassy to help her pack. She could, if the Comrade Doctor liked, make supper for her and stay the night. She was young and pleasant; she said she worked as a secretary. She wasn't KGB. Irina could scent them, however cleverly disguised.

Suddenly she was glad of the girl's company. She didn't want to be alone. Why not be looked after for a change? Have someone to talk to if she felt like it.

‘You can stay, if it's no trouble,' she said.

‘I'd be glad to. You must be feeling awful. What would you like me to do first?'

Her name was Elena and she said it was her first overseas posting. Irina tried to smile. No, not left alone in the flat on that last night. Someone to take care of her. To deal with the packing up of her life for the last five years.

‘You could make us both some tea,' she said.

As they sipped it together, the girl said, ‘You must be looking forward to going home. There's nowhere like it, is there?'

‘No, there isn't,' Irina agreed. ‘Russians aren't happy outside Russia.'

The girl looked away in embarrassment as the doctor's eyes filled with tears.

Colonel Leon Gusev was feeding the jig-saw pieces into his private computer. Names, dates, locations, questions, suppositions, possible answers and conclusions.

Yuri Warienski had been traced to the early records kept in the Ukraine, when all births and deaths were registered and lodged in a central filing system in Kiev, with duplicates for the state security in Moscow. Born in January 1930. Parents worked on a collective farm. The area was overrun by the German army in the attack on Smolensk. The civilians who had not escaped into the countryside were rounded up, the adults shot and the children sent back to Germany as slave labour. Warienski, Yuri, aged sixteen, was on the list of Ukrainian nationals rounded up at the camp at Spittal in 1945. No Ukrainians had been forcibly repatriated from that camp, except specific war criminals and members of the Ukrainian arm of the SS. A hundred and fifty out of ten thousand troops, and thousands of civilians. The Allies, with the Pope's connivance and the pleas of their Polish brothers, had snatched the rest from Soviet vengeance.

He ran through the notes on the criminals. A lot of information had been extracted from those who'd been returned. Their interrogations, the sentences; death by shooting on arrival, or deportation to the labour camps in the Arctic.

The name Yuri Warienski came up in the brief report on one man, Boris Malik, known to have served in the Einzatz commando, the SS death squads. One of his compatriots, hoping to save his own skin from the machine-gunners, accused him of being a homosexual, and cited his friendship with a young boy (Yuri) in the camp. Fifty years later the man's bellow of contempt rang in Gusev's ears. ‘I buggered women, not boys! He was just a hungry kid!'

He had been condemned to death, along with his accuser. The name Warienski appeared on the Red Cross list of displaced persons in a camp in Rimini. Two years later, it appeared he had been issued with a set of papers and was allowed to settle in England under the guarantee of a Major Richard Hope. The same name as the officer in charge of selecting the war criminals at Spittal. Gusev found the pieces fitting, only to leave tantalizing gaps in the electronic puzzle he was putting together.

The murderous Boris Malik had befriended the boy. So had the English army officer, who got him to England and gave him a job. An interesting youth, this Warienski, to have attracted such diverse patrons. Perhaps the turncoat's charge of homosexuality was true.

The computer rejected this. No record of misdemeanour either at Spittal, in the DP camp at Rimini, or thereafter in England. He had been thoroughly investigated as an active anti-Soviet in the hope of finding something that could be used to discredit him. There was nothing. He married, had a daughter, Lucy Eileen, and remained on such good terms with his benefactor that Richard Hope left him his manufacturing business when he died. The computer flooded him with pieces for his puzzle after that.

Warienski, naturalized and known as Warren, had sold the business after a heart attack and moved to the Channel Islands to avoid punitive taxation in Socialist Britain. He had devoted the rest of his life to making trouble for his native country.

A founder of the Free Ukrainian movement in the British Isles; in close communication with other anti-Soviet organizations throughout the world. A tireless worker in the exposure of the Yalta Agreement and the fate of the Cossacks. He had organized a worldwide protest at the arrest and imprisonment of the dissident Dimitri Volkov in 1983. A large piece of the picture slotted into place.

Within a few days of his death, his daughter had gone to Geneva and made contact with the exile. That contact had become a liaison. All his careful conclusions were being proved right. There was a political conspiracy, as he told Viktor Rakovsky. Times had made such a move possible. There was unrest, instability, opposing factions fighting a last battle for the way Holy Russia should proceed. It was permissable to call it that, even applauded.

He rested. The computer screen was blank. He'd proved all the connections necessary, but he hadn't justified the extra time it had taken. By now they had pinpointed the venue for the anti-Soviet activists' meeting. The Makoff Galleries were run by the grandson of a Tsarist
emigré
who specialized in pre-Revolutionary art. The coming exhibition had alerted the London Embassy, and a man well known to them, Mischa Czernov, had visited the Makoff and asked for the use of the proprietor's flat above, during the reception. A rival gallery, specializing in Soviet art and on good terms with the embassy had obtained a copy of the guest list for the Makoff private view. There were some very interesting names there …

But it wasn't enough. He hadn't answered his own niggling doubt. His conclusion lacked the strength and depth to have real political significance. Volkov was Ukrainian, a dissident who'd suffered for his views. But he'd spent five years in idleness in Switzerland. He'd dropped out of the protest movement as effectively as if he were in the Gulag. More so, since many of those imprisoned there had continued to smuggle out messages and make their commitment known to the outside world.

It fitted, but it didn't fit tightly enough to satisfy him. He sighed. He couldn't go further. He decided to compile the information in a concise report and put it in front of his chief. Omitting nothing. Not a name, a date or an observation. He knew Rakovsky liked to analyze in depth for himself. He didn't appreciate synopses. Gusev's report was on Viktor's desk by the next afternoon.

It was followed within the hour by Peter Müller's urgent message sent via the Russian Embassy in Berlin, that Dimitri Volkov had left Geneva and vanished. His wife, Irina, was on her way back to Moscow.

Leon Gusev was there to meet her when the Aeroflot jet landed at Sheremetov Airport.

Lucy saw the signpost
Auberge des Brumes
, and slowed down. She had taken over from Volkov despite his protests and he had slept for the last four hours of their journey. It was monotonous driving, endless miles of auto-route at a steady cruising speed. It was very hot and dusty. She looked at him asleep in the seat beside her. The dark hair fell over his forehead and he had slipped down to lean against her.

She would never forget that feat of driving. He hadn't been afraid; he'd been exhilarated, full of daring. They were going to spirit him back to Russia. Pumped full of drugs, suffering from some ‘illness' that his wife would certify, and flown home. Thinking of Irina Volkova made Lucy swallow, as if that steely grip was round her throat, the thumb seeking a pressure point while she choked for breath. If she'd faltered, not found the heavy box with her groping hand … she shivered.

A strait-jacket, Irina had threatened in Russian, not realizing she would be understood. Lucy would have been restrained, locked away as a violent patient who'd attacked the doctor. She would have been ignored when she protested. She would have been helpless, at the other woman's mercy.

And Volkov wouldn't have known what had happened. He'd thought she was going out to buy a new dress. He'd have waited, worrying, wondering and finally gone back to his apartment where his wife would have been ready for him. It was worse than the worst nightmare dredged up during the night. She felt cold with horror at what might have been.

It was almost six o'clock. She'd been at the wheel for so long she felt stiff. Auberge des Brumes. She slowed and followed the exit sign. It might be a motel. It might be shut, it might be anything, but she liked the name. The Inn of Mists. They were near the river.

They'd skirted Paris to the west and got on to the auto-route l'Oceane. They were aiming for the Normandy coast because they dared not risk trying to get through customs and immigration at Jersey airport. Their best hope was a sea crossing. It was vague enough and no details had been worked out. Fugitives don't plan, she realized. They run, as we are running, and trust their luck will hold.

Volkov stirred beside her, yawned and woke up.

‘Where are we? What time is it? I've been asleep for hours.'

‘You needed it,' she said. ‘I've turned off the main road. We're going to have a soft bed to sleep in and something to eat. And a bath. Darling, that's the first thing I want—a hot bath!'

The hotel was small and heavily beamed, with an overhanging medieval upper storey, and it sat in a garden full of flowers.

‘We can hide here for ever.' He kissed her cheek. ‘We're husband and wife?'

‘Mr and Mrs Warren,' she said. ‘I'll fill out the registration cards. That's if they have a room.'

They had two vacancies the
propriétaire
said. She was tall and thin, quite the wrong type to appear in the dark little hallway as they went in. But she smiled and said they were lucky, not the best rooms, but she had one with single beds and one with the
matrimoniale.…
Both on the upper floor, one with a river view, the other looking down on to the garden.

Volkov spoke first. ‘We will take the
matrimoniale
, Madame. The view is not important. And we'll have dinner later. Come on, darling. It's been a tiring day. We've driven all the way from Paris and it's so hot,' he explained.

The
propriétaire
smiled at him. She thought he looked a most interesting man, rather romantic. They got a lot of stodgy English and even stodgier Germans coming in off the auto-route.

‘If you'll fill out the registration cards,' she said.