Romanov Succession (26 page)

“Oleg must have stayed up nights to dream this up. Nothing could be clumsier.”

“It's secure,” he said. “Unless they know what book to use there's no way on earth to break the code.”

He stepped behind her chair and kneaded the back of her neck. She tipped her face back and smiled, upside-down in his vision; he bent to kiss her.

Then he had another look at his wristwatch. Where the devil was Cosgrove's radio man? It was getting on for eleven o'clock; the first contact with Vlasov was scheduled in something less than three hours.

She misinterpreted his gesture. “I deplore your lack of confidence,” she said mischievously. “I'll finish it in time.”

“All right. But where's that damned radio?”

A chill highland mist hung about the bungalow; he extinguished the parlor lights before he stepped outside for a breath of air. The night was total; the base was blacked out. He heard the disembodied growl of a vehicle moving across the tarmac not too far away; in the mist he saw nothing. If there was a gunman out there good luck to him.

He turned his head to catch the moving vehicle's sound on the flats of his eardrums. It was on the runway itself and when it stopped it was by the main hangar. The engine idled for several minutes and then he heard it go into gear and start moving again. Back toward the main gate, changing through a couple of gears, never getting into high. It stopped briefly—getting clearance at the gate—and his ears followed it out to the high road. He heard it come forward in the night. The two slitted lights were ghostly emerging from the mist; he stepped back out of the drive.

The lights went out; the ignition switched off. He heard the door open and he spoke merely to identify his presence: “Hello?”

A brief but absolute stillness; then a heavy breath and a stranger's voice: “Who's that—who's that?”

“General Danilov. Are you looking for me?”

“Cor, you gimme such a fright, sir!” A vague shape swam forward in the fog.

“You'd be Cooper?”

“That's right, sir. Lance Corporal Arry Cooper. You want this rig inside the ouse?”

“I'll give you a hand.”

It turned out to be a small van. Lance-Corporal Cooper opened the back doors and they manhandled the shortwave transceiver across the lawn into the house.

“Just set it down on the floor and stand still until I shut the door and get some lights on.”

When he switched the lamp on he saw he'd been fooled completely by the voice. He'd expected a weasel-faced little Cockney. Cooper was as wide and muscular as a Percheron draft horse. He had a handsome square young face with a thatch of yellow hair combed neatly across his forehead.

Cooper stood at attention but his eyes roved about the homey little room. I'm sorry I'm so late, sir. It was the fog and all. I lost me way three times. I'm not a native here.”

“I gathered that much, Cooper. Let's set it up on this table, shall we?”

The wireless set was a bulky monster; it had to weigh a good hundred pounds. The case lifted off like that of a motion-picture projector. Cooper turned the empty case upside-down and it wasn't empty after all: a thin wire was coiled neatly against the lid, snapped down with leather straps.

“Ave you a ladder then, sir?”

“There's a stepladder in the pantry. Will it do?”

“Ave to, won't it.” Cooper was attaching one end of the coiled wire to the antenna lead at the back of the set. Then he carried it toward the front door, paying it out as he went. He waited by the door, not opening it, until Alex brought the stepladder and switched off the lights. Then they threaded the wire out through the window beside the front door and Alex went outside with him.

“D'you mind steadying the ladder for me, sir?”

Alex jammed its legs hard down into the earth and braced it with one hand while he hooked the other hand into Cooper's belt and boosted him up toward the low-sloping roof.

Cooper was gone a good five minutes; Alex heard the twanging rustle of the antenna wire as Cooper drew it along after him and pulled it taut before fixing it to the chimney.

They went inside. Irina had finished coding the message. Cooper pulled the telegrapher's key out of its slot and began twisting wires around knurled connectors. “The weight of it's in those dry cells, y'see, sir. We can't trust the electric up here so we carry our own.”

Alex had a look at Irina's pad: groups of numbers—each five digits separated from the next by an X. It would mean nothing to Cooper but that was how it had to be.

“Ave you got frequencies for me, sir?”

“Set to send and receive on five-point-six-two megacycles. Have you got a wristwatch?”

“No sir, sorry to say.”

“I'll warn you when it's time then. We've got about an hour.”

He took the pad and rolled the top sheets over until he came to a blank page; he glanced back at the list of notes Irina had made and then he jotted something on the clean page and tore it out and carried it to Cooper.

“This is the message you'll receive first.”

On the sheet of notepaper he'd written: XXX30X21901X 63302X19016X33021X90163X.

Cooper had neat small white teeth. “Same word three times, in't it, sir?”

It meant he knew his job and that was good. “It's a recognition signal. If you don't get that opening you don't respond to the message.”

“I understand, sir.”

“Now here's your reply to it.” He gave him the second sheet.

Cooper glanced at it and nodded. To him it didn't say
Condotierri
three times; it was merely a string of twenty-seven digits separated by Xs. But it was obvious he understood the procedure.

“When you've broadcast that recognition code you'll continue immediately without waiting for an answer. You'll broadcast the message on these sheets. At the end of that transmission you'll switch over to Receive and you should get an acknowledgment that looks like this one.”

KollinXCarnegie
.

“There won't be a message from your opposite number then, sir?”

“That'll be tomorrow night.”

Cooper nodded. “Right, sir. Got it.” He displayed his fine teeth again. “All quite mysterious-like, in't it.”

“When it's all over you'll find out what it was about, Corporal. You're part of something very important.”

“Yes sir. That's what Brigadier Cosgrove told me.”

Irina said, “Would you like coffee, Corporal?”

“I wouldn't mind a cuppa, madam. If you'd show me to the larder I'll brew it meself.”

“I'm sure Sergei will be glad to do it.” She left the room.

Cooper pushed his lips forward and lifted his eyebrows. He didn't say anything; he grinned at the doorway where Irina had disappeared, transferred the grin to Alex and then went back to his key to test the circuits. Tubes began to glow in the ungainly apparatus and Cooper twisted the tuning rheostat; the brass telegrapher's key began to tap out staccato rhythms, picking up incoming messages on the various bands. Satisfied it was working properly, Cooper shut it down and leaned back in the wooden chair. “Well then sir, I expect we're ready to go to war, ain't we.”

14.

Thursday morning he watched MacAndrews's drafted dockyard crew put the finishing touches on the spidery rapelling tower and then he spent nearly three hours with Irina interviewing Colonel Yevgeny Dieterichs, the Soviet defector. At half-past ten they took a break and he walked outside with Irina.

“He seems genuine enough,” she said.

“Keep putting him through his paces. Milk him—you know how important it is.”

“I wish I were going with you instead. Dinner at the Savoy—an evening at the Haymarket.… I could do with a bit of that. I feel as though I've been shipwrecked up here.”

“This was your own idea.”

“Darling, the whole blessed thing was my own idea and I confess I'm unforgivably proud of it.”

“You've a right to be.” The Austin was swinging up the verge of the runway toward him. “I hope the rest of us can live up to it.”

“You will,” she said, very soft. Sergei drew up and reached across the seat to push the passenger door open for him.

She stood watching while the Austin took him away toward the main gate.

They drove south and west along the chain of lochs through the dark green highlands. The sky was matted but they had no rain down the craggy length of Loch Ness. There was virtually no traffic. They ran on south at a steady forty and fifty miles per hour through the early hours of the afternoon. Maneuvering Scottish recruits were tenting on the banks of Loch Lomond and on a brighter day it would indeed have been bonnie—swards of rich grass dropping gently toward the cool deep water.

At four they picked up the smoke of Glasgow's furnaces above the hill summits. Alex navigated from the street map on his lap and Sergei did an expert job of threading the clotted traffic. The city was dreary, black with soot.

The approach to the railway station was jammed with traffic. Alex lifted his case over the back of the seat and pushed the door open. “You may as well drive straight back unless you want to stop for supper. Pick me up here on the Sunday evening express from London—you've got the timetable?”

“Yes sir. Godspeed then.”

“Take care driving, old friend.” He hopped out and carried his case inside the thronged station. The scabs twinged now and then but he no longer had to make a conscious effort not to limp.

His priority pass got him a seat in a leather-upholstered compartment and he rode south into grey rain flipping through a newspaper and two news magazines he'd bought to catch up on what had been happening in the world since he'd left Washington ten days ago. In France the Nazis were retaliating against acts of sabotage by executing innocent French hostages. In Tokyo there had been an assassination attempt against Baron Kiichiro Hiranuma, the Vice Premier of Japan.

In Russia the Wehrmacht had now occupied four hundred thousand square miles of Soviet territory and the advance continued. There had been a terrible pitched battle for Smolensk. The Russian remnants had been forced to evacuate the city. Yet correspondents' dispatches from Moscow indicated that life in the capital went on nearly as usual. Ration cards were now required but the stocks of food and necessities seemed quite sufficient. The German invasion had divided into three prongs aimed at Leningrad, Moscow and the rich industrial basins of the south. Scattered Russian resistance and the length of their own supply lines had slowed the Nazis' advance; but the
blitzkrieg
continued—apparently right on schedule. Hitler meant to make his Christmas speech from Moscow.

Well past midnight he left the train at Euston Station and was collected by a War Office lieutenant who had a Daimler staff car waiting. “It's a good thing you've got digs, sir. I didn't think there's a room to be had in all of London. I'm putting up in a bed-sitter in Paddington with an RN ensign and two Anzac lieutenants.”

They drove north and east. The blacked-out streets were virtually empty except for the occasional helmeted bobby and fire-watchman. Twice they had to dodge craters in the streets but most of the buildings were intact.

When they made the turn into the Archway Road the driver said conversationally, “There's still a car behind us, Lieutenant.”

They turned right into Shepherd's Hill with open ground falling away steeply to the left side of the road.

The Daimler slid to the curb and a car puttered past; Alex had a look at it but it told him nothing; there wasn't enough light to see the driver's face.

“Thanks for the lift.”

When the other car had disappeared over the hill he took his valise up the steps and rang. The Daimler stayed at the curb until the door opened and he stepped inside.

Baron Ivanov answered the door himself. “Were you followed?”

“Yes. I expected it.”

The tiny Baron wore an expensive smoking jacket; his bald head gleamed in the lamplight. Black velvet curtains hung heavily against all the windows; the house was rich and warm and elegant in the style of a century ago.

Ivanov showed him to a bedroom—upstairs in the rear. “I hope you will be comfortable.”

“It's quite luxurious.”

“Anatol has asked me to see to your needs.”

“A good night's sleep at the moment. Is there a rear way out?”

“It is a terribly steep embankment—it is almost a cliff. There is an old railway line beneath the rear garden.”

“Is there a tube station nearby?”

“At the intersection where you turned.”

“I don't suppose there are any taxis.”

“Not this far out, but you are welcome to the use of my Bentley at any time. My chauffeur lives on the premises.”

“That's very kind.”

“It is not kindness I assure you. According to Prince Leon you are our last hope.”

“I'm a soldier, Baron, not a Messiah.”

“Whatever I have is at your disposal. I suppose I should caution you that the last White Russian general who borrowed my Bentley was shot at for his pains. It took quite a bit of string-pulling to have the bulletproof glass replaced.”

It wouldn't have been politic to ask why the Bentley was armored in the first place; obviously the job had been done long before Vassily Devenko's ride in the car. The Baron had fingers in many schemes and—his enemies said—hands in many pockets; it was not unlikely his political and military alliances had impressed him with a need for prudence. The house itself was wired with a visible alarm system.

Alex expected the Baron to bid him good night and leave the room but the tiny aristocrat went to the dressing table and perched himself on the upholstered stool before it. “There is something you must do for us.”

Somewhere across London the air-raid sirens began to wail. The distant keening distracted the Baron; he said, “They rarely bomb this far north in London but if you hear the alarms you will find our shelter in the cellar. The ladder is directly under the staircase we just used.”