The Tamarind Seed (29 page)

Even if he himself were not involved, Sverdlov's defection had to be stopped. The arrival of the ‘green' proved that it must be imminent. He couldn't delay, even though he incurred some personal risk. He had a telephone number which was to be used only in extreme emergency. The normal means of passing his information was by the dead letter method; he frequented a record shop in the city centre; his love of rare classical recordings was well known, and he had been a regular patron since he arrived from Washington. His method was simple. He went once a week as a matter of course, bought a record or a tape. When he had something to pass on, he went into the recording booth and stuck the tiny cylinder containing the film from his lighter camera into a certain hole in the soundproofed wall above the entrance. His visits were timed exactly, although they alternated each week; his contact, whom he didn't know, was sometimes in the shop at the same time. After Fergus left the booth, his contact went in and picked up the microfilm. The risk of anyone else seeing it among the multitude of perforations and at the agreed spot, well above eye level, were negligible. In the same way it was easy for Fergus to pass a message to his controller, whom he also didn't know except by a code name, Paul. But this was too slow a means of communicating his vital piece of information. He had the telephone number in reserve; he had always had one, wherever he was posted. He knew the figures off by heart.

He left the cloakroom; he was calmer now. He looked at his watch. He had two appointments that morning, one due in fifteen minutes. By all the rules of caution, he should make that call outside the Embassy, where there was no risk of its being overheard or traced. This meant delay. It was eleven o'clock in the morning; he would have to wait until midday, and leave the building. He could go to the record shop; there was a telephone kiosk there which he could use. It was a delay but not long enough to flout the careful rule he had observed throughout his double life. Never do anything within the confines of the Embassy which could be traced back. He walked back to his office. Midday; he could leave early and take the car uptown. There was no reason to panic. Friday. It would be easy for them to remove Sverdlov over the weekend; most people went out of Washington as it was beginning to get hot. He could be taken on board an Illyushin jet and flown back without anyone noticing. It had been done before. Fergus went into his office and settled down for his first appointment. He smoked a lot during the half an hour, and his fingers shook slightly. Otherwise he appeared his normal self.

Judith called Nielson at home that morning. She had decided what to say; Sam was becoming increasingly annoyed and impatient with her requests for time off or to leave early. He just wouldn't take another one. She tried to sound hoarse over the telephone, and told his wife a straight lie. She had an infected throat and a fever; she wouldn't be able to come in that day but she expected to be fit for work on Monday. She apologised for causing inconvenience and then rang off quickly before he could come to the phone. Nancy was away for the weekend, so there was no risk of her lie being discovered. She had spent a wretched night; she made her face up and decided that knowing Feodor Sverdlov had put ten years on her age. She packed a small bag, just enough for the one or possibly two nights she would be away. She hadn't decided how to get back after Sverdlov left for England, but there must be several flights to the States. She couldn't plan that far ahead; it didn't seem to matter by comparison. She didn't eat breakfast; coffee made her feel sour and slightly sick. She drank fruit juice and wondered whether the continuous feeling of dread was anything more than a manifestation of acute nerves. It was nothing she could define in terms of common sense. Everything was going well. Loder had the operation in his hands, and she trusted his efficiency. Sverdlov seemed confident; their first step was only a few hours away. Once they were on board the plane for Barbados she would certainly feel easier. Twice during that interminable morning she nearly telephoned Sverdlov at the Soviet New York office. Seeing him last night had given her courage; whether it was for herself or because she felt he needed her support. Judith didn't know. But by the morning the confidence had ebbed away, leaving the sick feeling of imminent disaster. She had tried to express it to him just before he kissed her good night, but there hadn't been time.

He had said he loved her. He had kissed as if he meant it. It had made her feel quite disorientated afterwards. There were two or three hours left in spite of her efforts to pass the time, by cleaning out the apartment, and even doing some of Nancy's ironing for her. But she was afraid to go out. Sverdlov might call; Loder might call; there could be a last-minute change. Even Sam might decide to check on how ill she really was. The apartment was like a prison; Judith made a sandwich which she forced herself to eat, and settled down to try to read. The telephone rang once and she sprang up, but the call was from a man, asking for Nancy. No others came through. At three o'clock she brought her bag into the front hall. Sverdlov was never late; he would be coming to collect her at any moment. They were supposed to be going away for a lovers' weekend; he had impressed on her several times that she must appear to be happy and relaxed. But he hadn't reminded her last night. His mood had been restrained, almost sad. She checked her watch again. It was ten minutes past. He had never been late before; never once …

A minute later the front door bell rang.

General Golitsyn was asleep in his chair; he had eaten a heavy lunch and by early afternoon he felt slack and weary. The atmosphere was humid and outside the windows a bright sunshine beat against the glass. He had the window shades lowered and the air conditioning turned up. Then his old body sank into the chair, the limbs relaxing, the head dropped on his chest, the eyes still open like a lizard lying apparently comatose on a rock. Then they shut, and he snored softly in the way of old men who have dozed off sitting up.

When the message came through from Fergus Stephenson, he had just woken and was drinking a glass of tea. He found it more difficult to shake off the lethargy following a short sleep; as a young man he had used the technique of cat napping very successfully. A half an hour taken in trains, cars, lorries jolting over primitive tracks, behind a desk where he had worked all night—in aeroplanes and even on horseback, in the early days of revolution—Golitsyn had been able to recharge his energy with the minimum rest. But now he dithered, he sucked his cheeks in and out, and blinked his reptilian eyes to focus. When he first got the message he didn't understand it properly. It demanded too much of him too quickly. He read it a second time, and then his assistant and his secretary heard a yell, followed by a shattering blasphemous obscenity. The assistant came in, the secretary did not dare.

He found the General standing with the message in his right hand, his face blood red, bellowing and swearing like a man twenty years younger.

Moments later Anna Skriabine, white and shaking, stood in front of him explaining every detail of the flight schedule Sverdlov had taken from Washington to New York and from New York to Barbados. He had been booked on a plane leaving at four-thirty. Golitsyn glared at his watch. It was already five-thirty. He was in the air and on his way. Quite suddenly he turned on the girl. He shouted at her. She had been told to watch, told to report every word and movement of Feodor Sverdlov. Only that morning she had come to his office and said that Sverdlov seemed attracted to her and was going to take her out. Golitsyn's hand came out and slapped her brutally across the face. She had not only failed, he roared at her, but she had been completely duped, and duped him, Golitsyn, in turn. She stood with both hands covering her face, and sobbed with fright. The old man gave her a look of dreadful menace. Then he told her to go back to the secretarial quarters and to stay there. Within the next half an hour there was frantic activity in the cable section. One of Stukalov's men would be on the way to Barbados to watch him; he had caught an earlier flight scheduled to arrive two hours before, catching a connection in Trinidad. But one man was not equipped to deal with this development. He had no orders to kill Sverdlov, only to shadow him and note his movements. He, like all the Embassy staff concerned, were completely off guard. Sverdlov's trip to Barbados was regarded as an Intelligence operation, carried out with the full knowledge of the General, openly planned and the details arranged through the Embassy. No one had imagined for a moment that it was a preliminary to Sverdlov's defection. And that it must have the organisation of the British S.I.S. behind it. The message received by Golitsyn said very clearly that he was dealing with the British Embassy, and preparations to receive him were in hand. The tone of the warning suggested urgency, but they were in ignorance of the fact that he had already managed to leave America for a former British colony. Golitsyn felt like a madman; Sverdlov had slipped away, following the boldest of all Intelligence maxims that if you want to elude a pursuer, do so in daylight with as many people round as possible. Sverdlov had got out of the States, where his seizure and disposal would have been easily arranged. He had got away to a West Indian island, where his abduction would be difficult, if not impossible, without an international scandal. And it was sufficiently remote, with an indifferent system of communication to make a top speed change of plan extremely difficult to organise. Golitsyn cabled Moscow first giving Panyushkin the details received in the warning message from ‘Blue's' controller, and asking for his instructions by immediate return cablegraph. Golitsyn's mind had seen two or three possible courses of action, but he dared not take any of them without the final approval of Sverdlov's superior. He had never even considered acting without authority. No blame could attach to him for waiting on his chief's directions.

A plane could be chartered which would fly a team out to Barbados. A single directive could be cabled to Stukalov's lone operative, ordering him to seek assistance from their meagre contacts on the island and try to seize Sverdlov, to hold him until the kidnap plane arrived. From there he could be conveyed in stages to Europe. Once in any of the East European countries, he was as good as in the Soviet Union. The old man's hands shook with rage and terror. He had initiated the arrest of Sverdlov; he had sent the secretary Kalinin back, dazed and doped by the Embassy doctor, to the experts in the Lubiyanka, who had got what they wanted.

He, Golitsyn, had begun the whole investigation into Sverdlov, worrying at his reputation like a fierce old hound digging for a buried bone. He had cast the doubts, and taken it upon himself to deliver the wrong-doer to justice. Instead, he had permitted Sverdlov to escape into the hands of Soviet Russia's Western enemies. He might punish the failure of Anna Skriabine, but the vengeance of Panyushkin was too dreadful to imagine.

He contacted Stukalov in New York, allotting a portion of the blame to him; he spoke to the Soviet Ambassador to UNO and then dragged himself to an interview with his own Ambassador to explain exactly the crisis which threatened them. It was the Ambassador who made the suggestion which the General should have thought of for himself. If Sverdlov were going to defect, he had probably taken his British hosts a present. Was anything missing from the confidential files … Even before the chief filing clerk appeared before them, stammering and dripping sweat, Golitsyn knew the answer. They went down to the filing section, and the Ambassador opened the safe with the General beside him. He handed him the file which the departmental chief said Sverdlov had inspected that morning. He found the sheaf of papers which had been substituted. A long memo from the personnel officer; a list of leave for the senior K.G.B. officers in Washington and New York.

The latest communication from ‘Blue' was missing. That meant the defection was going to take place in Barbados. As the Ambassador had said, Sverdlov had brought his hosts a present. And as a result the K.G.B. would inevitably lose their most important agent since Philby. Golitsyn could have given a cry of physical pain; instead the silence developed round the group in the filing section, until it was more expressive than the most explicit words. Then Golitsyn broke it.

Throughout his life he had made only two momentous decisions without reference to a higher authority. When he had hidden the school teacher's books, and when he raised the red flag from the ranks of his regiment and gave the call to march on Petersburg.

This was the third and probably the last.

‘I cannot wait for General Panyushkin's instructions,' he said. ‘Sverdlov has stolen the “Blue” file. He must be stopped.' Nobody answered him. The Ambassador stood back to let him pass, and Golitsyn went back to his own office.

Later that night a privately chartered jet flew from San Francisco with four passengers on board. It arrived at Seaways, Airport on the island of Barbados at 5 a.m. The four passengers, all men, were described on their passports as Canadian citizens. They informed the sleepy Customs official that they were making a tour of the islands. They showed the normal signs of being too rich for their own good; one of them appeared a little drunk. They drove off after a long wait, during which they complained and argued, in a hired car, giving the address of the smartest hotel on the Atlantic Coast, formerly the mansion built by Sam Lord, a slave owner and smuggler famous in Barbadian history. That was what the airport officials heard. It was only afterwards, when the investigations began, that nobody at Sam Lord's Castle had ever seen or heard of any of them.

It was dark when they landed at Seaways Airport. The night was very black without the lustrous moon Judith remembered, but stars glittered in profusion overhead. The gentle trade wind blew, cool and constant, moving the trees. As they crossed the tarmac there were pools of water on the ground. It was the rainy season; she had forgotten. Sverdlov was holding her arm, walking with long steps that forced her to hurry beside him. The journey by air had seemed long and a brief storm over the Caribbean had made their gradual descent uncomfortable, with a lot of bumping.