The Dark Chronicles (78 page)

But, I decided, that was rather unlikely. They would need a lot more than a phone call. During the Cuban crisis, when the Service had been running Penkovsky, Moscow Station had given him an emergency signal to use if the Soviets were about to launch a strike. He was to call a special number, breathe down the phone three times, hang up, and then do the same a minute later. The missile crisis passed, but a few weeks after it Cowell received just such a call. Protocol dictated he alert London at once, but he guessed that Penkovsky had been caught and had revealed the code under torture, so did not press the panic button.

This had comforted me in one way, but troubled me in another. The Service had done its best to avoid discussing Penkovsky’s motives ever since, preferring to focus on the fact that he had helped avoid the Cuban crisis escalating to war. The possibility that the Soviets had genuinely wanted to provoke an attack from the West had been quickly discounted – it was suicidal. It seemed to me that what had most likely happened was that Penkovsky had told his interrogators that the code meant something much less dangerous. But
he
had known full well what it meant. In which case, he had decided that
the world should end in nuclear war, and had tried to trigger it. If he had made the call a couple of weeks earlier, or made it to someone more jittery than Cowell, it might have happened.

I reached the Victory, but realized the moment I came through the door that something was wrong. The table where I’d left Sarah was vacant. She’d gone.

‘Over here, darling!’ said a lilting voice in Russian, and I turned towards it and saw her seated at a table on the other side of the room. I rushed over.

‘What the hell’s going on?’ I said.

‘Nothing. This table just came free and I realized it offered better protection from the windows.’ I looked across and saw that she was right: it still had a view of the door, but we couldn’t be seen from the street as easily. I slid into the seat next to her, my heart still thumping in my chest from the thought that she’d been captured.

I told her about the phone call, and asked her if anything had happened since I’d left. She gestured to a group of labourers who had come in and taken over a nearby table, and I looked them over. Their overalls were smeared with tar, their hands were deeply calloused and several had missing or rotten teeth. They were genuine. Apart from them, there were fifteen other people in the café: two were waitresses and the rest customers. There were probably a couple of people in the kitchen making the food, so that would make it seventeen. Of the remaining customers, five were grouped together and had the ragged jumpers, scarves and slightly febrile, furtive look of students. The remainder were either sitting alone or in pairs, including a couple of old men hunched over a chessboard. All had been here when I’d left, so were nothing to worry about. It was anyone new that we had to watch now: the Head of Station might think to send an advance party. They might want to try to use the occasion to kidnap us – especially me. The chance to capture a double didn’t come along too often.

I looked around, searching for an alternative exit. I couldn’t see
one: no staircase or back door, and the window in the lavatory had been glued shut. There would probably be a way out to the street through the kitchen, but finding that in an emergency might prove difficult. I took a sip of coffee, my hand shaking a little as I lifted the mug. Had I just made a dreadful miscalculation in telling the Service where to find us? I wasn’t sure if it would be much more preferable to being captured by Yuri’s men.

A sound came from somewhere to the right, and I jerked my head towards it. It was laughter: one of the students had told a joke and it had gone down especially well. Several of the young men were throwing their heads back in hysterics, but on the other side of the table sat a slender girl smoking a cigarette, with just the hint of a smile on her lips. She was pretty: a brunette in a dark sweater and pleated woollen skirt. The young man who had told the joke kept glancing in her direction, but I could have told him he was wasting his time, because she didn’t like him, she liked his friend with the beard. As if sensing my appraisal, the girl suddenly swept a coil of hair back with her fingers, turned her head and stared straight at me, exhaling smoke through her mouth. I turned away at once, and caught Sarah looking at me.

‘Having fun?’ she said, and I blushed.

The music that had been playing on the radio halted abruptly and a news bulletin began, discussing plans for the centenary of Lenin’s birth the following year. I’d seen posters for it plastered along the street, proclaiming ‘Lenin is more alive than the living’.

It was nine o’clock on the morning of Monday, 27 October, which made sense – my reckoning had been that it was the 25th, but I must have underestimated the time they’d held me under with drugs when I’d first arrived. It gave me a perverse pleasure that I’d been within two days of being right, despite them checking everything around me every evening to make sure I didn’t make notches in the wall with my fingernails or any such thing. I’d counted in my head, and I’d kept it intact enough to count nearly six months to within two days.

I listened to the bulletin as I continued to survey the room, waiting for any mention of fugitive prisoners wanted for murder. None came, but I didn’t think that would be the case with the next bulletin – if we were still alive by then. The programme wound up and another began, about a factory that was producing more than its quota purely because of its passionate devotion to Lenin.

‘They didn’t mention the attacks,’ Sarah said. ‘I suppose that’s to be expected?’

I nodded. ‘It’s not like Cuba, when it was the Americans who accused them of mischief. This time it’s they who have detected a threat, or think they have, and their reaction will be the utmost secrecy.’

‘Presumably that means there won’t be any warning, either. If they decide to strike, they’ll just do it.’

‘I’m afraid so. But let’s not get grim.’

‘What if he doesn’t come?’ she said. ‘The Head of Station, I mean. What’s our contingency, our “Plan B”?’

‘He’ll come,’ I said, with more conviction than I felt. What if he decided it was a trap? I ran my hands across the surface of the table. Resting on top of it were salt and pepper pots, a dirty glass that looked like it still had a couple of inches of vodka left in it, presumably missed while clearing up the previous night, and a chipped ceramic ashtray. I picked up the latter and placed it on a free table nearby, because I knew the KGB installed microphones in such things. It was unlikely they’d done it here, because they were usually interested in restaurants frequented by foreigners, but I wasn’t taking any chances. I tipped ash into my empty coffee cup instead.

‘The Americans are out,’ I said. ‘They’d simply call the Service and ask for their take on it. The same goes for all the other Western embassies.’

‘So it’s this or bust? What about one of the Eastern embassies – China, for instance?’

‘No, I think that’s more likely to exacerbate the situation, don’t you? The only thing I can think of is that we could try to get to
the U-boat ourselves. If we could prove that the injuries at these bases are the result of a leak rather than an attack, it might be enough for them to draw back. If we got hold of the leaking canisters, we could get the Soviet embassy on the islands to signal Moscow that the mustard gas in them is of the same type that was found in the “attacks” on their bases fifty miles away.’

She looked unconvinced, as well she might. It wasn’t just a matter of getting out of the country: we probably wouldn’t even be able to get out of the city. We were being hunted by an army of dedicated professionals: I knew from reviewing the Penkovsky operation that Moscow was home to around 20,000 KGB agents.

‘How would we reach the canisters? And what about the B-52s?’

‘Not sure. But I think if we can show that at least one part of this is an accident, it will make them reconsider. I think it’s the combination of the events in Estonia and the B-52 flights that has persuaded them they’re about to be attacked. Take away the attacks on the bases and the B-52s aren’t enough to wage a nuclear war over. The Americans may be playing silly buggers or trying to scare them, but by themselves the B-52s aren’t conclusive.’

‘That’s not a contingency plan,’ she said quietly. ‘That’s a prayer.’

I didn’t reply. Behind the counter, one of the waitresses swore at a battered coffee-maker. My eyes flicked back and forth between the occupants of the room and the door, a dilapidated affair with paint sticking to the frame and a small bell that tinkled whenever anyone passed through it. It rang again now, and a girl emerged through the smoke and the steam. She was young, pretty and very Russian-looking, but that didn’t mean much: you could find Russian-looking girls in England, and if you did you might decide to recruit one of them and post her here. But the girl immediately greeted the older woman behind the counter with a cheery wave and removed her quilted jacket, beneath which was a waitress’s uniform.

It must now be at least twenty minutes since I’d made the call to the embassy. Twenty minutes more of Brezhnev and the others discussing warhead positions…

‘Paul.’

I looked up at Sarah, and realized my knees were jerking under the table. I willed them to stop.

‘Sorry.’

One of the waitresses, an older woman in a stained red smock with a kerchief wrapped around her head, waddled out from the kitchen with a tray of pastries and placed it in front of the chess-players, who set aside their game to tuck in. After months of eating nothing but thin soup and seeing nobody but my guards, there was something so normal about the scene that I suddenly wondered if I hadn’t imagined the whole thing: the bunker, Brezhnev and all the rest. The normality was also depressing. This was daily life in Moscow, and it looked to be roughly akin to Britain during the Blitz. How could I have ever believed this was a society that could bring equality to all, to the extent that I’d chosen to betray my own country? Freedom, justice, peace for mankind… Why had I fallen for such a ludicrous fairy tale?

Anna, of course. She’d fed me with the romantic dash of Lermontov and Tolstoy and the rest of them – all perfect fodder for a twenty year old – before filling my head with Marx, presenting his nonsense in the same beguiling manner. I had a sudden memory of her leaning over my hospital bed, administering a poultice to the wound around my left kidney. I had winced as she’d pressed it, and she’d smiled down at me with those beautiful flashing eyes of hers.

‘My poor boy,’ she had said, her lips forming a pout of mocking, flirtatious concern.

I replayed the memory in my mind, as I had done many times before, narrowing it down to that one despicable gesture. Because my wound had been a real one, and it had been deliberately administered in order to have me hospitalized so that she could nurse me back to health and, while doing so, seduce me, after which she had been prepared to feign her own death – all of it part of Yuri’s elaborate honey-trap operation to recruit me. And that moment,
that gesture, showed a level of calculation and, I thought, pleasure in deceiving me that turned my insides out.

‘
My poor boy
.’ What a sick, twisted little bitch she had been. But what a sad, pathetic waste my life had been as a result of falling for her…

The bell above the door tinkled again, and I looked up to see a man in a long grey coat walk in, struggling with a large umbrella. I turned away, for one horrid moment thinking it might be Smale from London, but then my skin started prickling and I glanced back and the horror returned because, of course, it
was
him.

*

Christ, that was all we needed. I forced myself to keep my gaze on him. He’d managed to collapse the umbrella and was shaking excess rain from his coat as though trying to rid himself of fleas. He hadn’t changed an iota since I’d last seen him, filling in forms for me to travel to Rome in that cramped corner office of his on the third floor of Century House.

He began making his way past tables towards the counter, and I almost expected someone to stop him, he looked so out of place. It was around freezing outside, but I knew from the amount of times the milk had curdled in my cell that it had been an Indian summer and nobody else in here was really dressed for winter – a few wore coats, but most were in jumpers and jackets. Smale, on the other hand, was wearing a fur-collared overcoat, scarf, gloves and an astrakhan
ushanka
, looking like an extra from
Doctor Zhivago
. Except that everything else about him said England: the bony little nose, the fish eyes, the pursed lips – even the way he was walking, his back a little hunched. He belonged in that building in London and nowhere else, and I was having trouble absorbing the information.

They had made
Smale
Head of Moscow Station.

He was now hovering near the counter like a constipated pheasant – he had seen us but was pretending he hadn’t, and seemed
to be deciding what to do next. After a few moments, he joined the queue and I ground my teeth as I watched him progress with it, his podgy pink face almost painfully conspicuous among the sallow complexions of the other customers. He reached the front of the line and ordered, and I held my breath, watching for a flicker of suspicion on the face of the waitress, but she didn’t flinch, turning to the samovar without hesitating. She poured tea into a glass, and he took it, paid and then shuffled into the centre of the room with his tray, ostensibly looking for somewhere to sit. With studied carelessness, he stumbled into the back of the chair opposite mine, and asked loudly if it was free. His Russian was good: perhaps he’d gone for a top-up with Craddock.

I nodded. He thanked me and placed the tray on the table, then removed his coat and draped it over the back of the chair. I clenched my jaw at the sight of his beautifully starched white shirt, which looked like Jermyn Street, and which he had paired with a dark-green woollen tie. I suppose I should have been grateful it wasn’t an Old Harrovian one and that he hadn’t brought a bowler hat with him for good measure. He seated himself, crossing his legs. He had surprisingly small feet, which were squeezed into a pair of Lobb brogues. Most of the shoes worn by those around us didn’t even have complete soles. I resolved to ignore all this, and just hope to God that anyone whose eyes rested on him would presume he was a Party official or one of the
nachalstvo
slumming it for breakfast. He’d managed to get past the waitress, at least. Oblivious to my concerns, he lifted the glass of tea by one of its filigreed handles and took a dainty sip of the hot liquid, staring sightlessly ahead.