The Tamarind Seed (25 page)

‘I thought her bosoms were going to fall out,' his wife said.

‘It would have made the dinner party if they had.'

By ten o'clock the next morning, she was on her way to the Stephensons' house on Kalorama Road.

‘What the hell's up with you, Judy? I heard you go to the kitchen at four in the morning and you were up again at six. The way you're looking you could hire out to haunt a house!'

Nancy Nielson had chosen the breakfast both women ate together as the one time when Judith wouldn't be able to avoid her or make an excuse to rush out of the apartment. What she said was true; Judith looked drawn with lack of sleep. There was an expression of permanent anxiety on her face, and she moved through the day in a fog of cigarette smoke. Nancy, scrubbed and pink like a college girl model in a deodorant ad, watched her with hard eyes. She was an attractive girl, blonde and bouncy in manner, but the eyes were like flint.

‘I couldn't sleep,' Judith said. ‘Coffee please.'

‘You're in another mess, aren't you?' Nancy passed the pot and poured for her. ‘Who is it this time?'

‘Nobody you know,' Judith said. ‘And it's not the sort of mess I got into the last time. It's just worrying at the moment. It'll be all right.'

‘It might help if you told me,' Nancy suggested. ‘Apart from you losing your beauty sleep, honey, you're doing me out of mine. When you take to walking the damned floor all night you wake me!'

‘I'm sorry. It won't be long; it's just temporary.'

She lit a cigarette; the coffee tasted strong and bitter. Nancy was entitled to complain; she was also entitled to an explanation, since she had been such a loyal friend when Judith needed friendship and understanding most, when she broke with Richard Paterson. The temptation to tell her about Sverdlov was very strong. She was unbelievably tough, with a realistic attitude that often provided a straight, simple answer to something which Judith was inclined to see as a fearful complication. But this was more than a personal difficulty, involving a man. This meant Sverdlov's chance of escaping from his own people. He had treated some aspects as a joke, but she knew him well enough now to realise that this was part of his personality, as distinctive a characteristic as Richard's incapacity to see himself or anything connected with him as anything but deadly serious.

Sverdlov would die with a sly little jeer at the expense of Fate. But she knew that he had not exaggerated his own danger, or the lack of time in which he could manoeuvre. There was no real reason not to tell Nancy some of it, and relieve herself of the anxiety which was driving away sleep and trying Sam Nielson's patience to the limit. But if there was no logic, there was certainly instinct, and this counselled her to say nothing, nothing to anyone outside Loder.

‘If there's anything I could do to help,' Nancy prompted.

Judith shook her head. ‘Nothing, thanks. And don't take any notice of me, Nancy, I'll sort myself out soon. Perhaps one day I'll find someone who's just a nice straightforward man.'

‘Like hell you will,' the Canadian girl said. ‘You're a born victim, dear. You can't have it without
love,
can you?'

‘I'm not in love with him,' Judith said. ‘You're wrong about that.'

‘Oh for Christ's sake!' Nancy got up from the table. ‘Kid yourself, but don't try and kid me!' When she left the kitchen she banged the door.

Sverdlov flew back to Washington. He walked into his office and settled down to work; he called for Anna Skriabine who sat by his desk, discreetly showing a gap between her knees, taking dictation. She had been told to watch for the least sign of anything unusual; there was nothing she could detect except that he looked extremely tired. His face seemed thinner, the cheeks hollowed out, and ugly dark patches under the eyes.

‘Would you like your tea now, Comrade Sverdlov?' He looked up and smiled. He hated the soft, throaty voice, the sly sexy look that darted at him over the dictation pad. When he looked at the girl he kept thinking of Kalinin, the young man who had worked for him for three years and whom he had respected and liked for his integrity. A man of the new generation of Soviet Russians, with a mind reaching out for a little independent thought, rejecting the old tenets of blood and terror as a cleansing agent for humanity.

He thought of Kalinin as he was when he last saw him, when he was getting ready for his trip to Barbados, and as he must be now, a broken puppet in a cell in the Lubiyanka, only kept alive so that he could drag Sverdlov to the grave.

‘Yes, you can bring it now. I have a letter to write to my wife.'

‘You look tired,' the girl ventured. ‘I hope nothing is wrong at home.'

‘New York is a tiring place.' Sverdlov stretched a little and watched her with a look of approval. ‘Most tiring of all is making love to pretty ladies who can't make up their minds. Tell me, Anna—do you think women are easy to persuade?'

‘I don't know. It depends.'

‘Depends on what?' The eyes were travelling over her; she felt as if he were seeing her as a person for the first time. It made her feel odd, almost frightened. She had gone to bed with numerous men in the course of her training and her duties, but she felt panicked by the thought of Sverdlov.

‘It depends on the woman; and what you want her to believe,' she said. There was a colour in her face, and she looked extremely pretty. Kalinin wouldn't stand up well to a comparison. By this time he might weigh even less than she did.

‘That you love her,' Sverdlov said. ‘That's all. But when a woman believes that, she will do most things the man wants, wouldn't you say so?'

‘Yes. Yes, I think that's so, Comrade.'

‘Good,' Sverdlov smiled crookedly; the girl opened her lips, showing the teeth, and then for a second her pink tongue appeared.

‘Then my friend in New York will soon be convinced,' he said. ‘And I shall be able to get some sleep. I will also be able to go home.'

She brought the glass of tea, and turned to leave the room for the usual ten-minute interval until he called her back again. ‘Anna, I've changed my mind; I want to send a telegram to my wife. Take it down to the coding officer.'

He had decided on impulse not to write; it took too long to arrive even by plane, and it would be further delayed while Golitsyn had it opened before despatch. At all costs he had to lay the faintest suspicion that might stir in that old but cunning brain, that he was avoiding going back to Russia.

He gave it to Anna Skriabine, who wrote it down and then went out, no doubt to make a hurried copy, as he thought. What he had said was simple and he hoped convincing.

‘My duty delays me from returning for a few more days. Please suspend your petition until we can meet. My hope and desire is for reconciliation and I remain as always your loving husband.'

That should satisfy Golitsyn, and more important still, keep the long arm of Panyushkin from stretching out suddenly to pluck him back by force. Golitsyn's trip to New York had been reported to him as routine; it only emphasised how closely he was being watched; it also alerted him to the possibility that he might well be under real surveillance. So long as his contact was Mrs. Farrow, this provided him with an alibi; he intended to strengthen this by explaining a fictional plan to Golitsyn which would allow him the latitude he needed to make the final connection with Loder.

He thought suddenly that the mental strain he had been suffering for so long, the nervous tension, the frustrations and inward bursts of irritated cynicism, culminating in that decision to go away to the West Indies, had found a common channel. His mind was working at a speed and with a precision that had been lacking for many many months. The strain upon him was enormous, but the resources were meeting it and all the ingenuity, the brilliance which had brought him to the top level of his country's Military Intelligence, were now marshalled against his own organisation in the effort to save his life. He had called himself a survivor to Judith during that holiday on the island. Then it had been a cynical disclaimer of any true commitment. But now survival had a sharper significance. It was allied to an intense fury at the way events had turned against him, at the fate of Kalinin, at the direction in which his people were going and which must exact the lives and liberties of so many men of quality in the service of their country. On a lower level it was the simple hate he bore for Tomarov, who had protested friendship while he was trying to persuade him to return, for the bitter fanaticism of his wife, who loved a political ideal more than the man she married, for the dour enmity of Golitsyn, the sucrose deceit of Anna Skriabine. Justice for the weak did not exist; there was no guideline for humanity but the logic of expediency. He had said all that to Judith too, and meant it, in the way it is possible to mean an abstract. He knew it was true intellectually; now he felt the sting of it in actual situation. There would be no justice for him. He had been condemned by the mere fact of being suspected. Again as he said, the pendulum had swung, but like the nightmare instrument in the Poe horror story, it had a razor's edge. Expediency dictated that he dodge that murderous sweep at the expense of patriotism and at a price he had never imagined he could bring himself to pay. And there was the ultimate irony, which Judith would appreciate. It was the lack of justice, the rule of expedience which prompted so much human treachery, that gave him the right to betray them and take his chance with the enemy.

He had spent the last part of the week working out possible plans for taking refuge with Loder's organisation. The most obvious was to walk into the British Embassy and ask for asylum. With the bribe of the documents passed over by ‘Blue', the British might well have agreed to this, and faced the considerable diplomatic storm and Soviet protests which would have followed their refusal to return him. But on reflection, one possibility made the easiest solution the most dangerous for him to follow. If he were being watched he would never be allowed to reach a Western Embassy. And the more he considered it, the more convinced he became that Golitsyn had put men on to him after New York. He would have done so in similar circumstances. He would also have given orders to murder the suspect immediately, by any means available, if he showed any sign of running for diplomatic cover on the enemy side. Golitsyn would have done the same.

He could not hope to go to the British direct; if his own people had any immediate indication of where he had gone for protection, his chances of being tracked down and murdered ran that much higher. He needed a time lag to get out of the United States; a day or at best two days, long enough for Loder's people to move him somewhere the K.G.B. couldn't go to first. Knowing his own organisation's efficiency made it more imperative to guard against the least mistake, to minimise risk to the point of cowardice. He was literally thinking in two halves, running and pursuing himself at the same time. Only then could he avoid the action which he judged would be taken. And in the long hours of the previous night, he had found a solution which could buy him the time he needed.

He put an internal call through to Golitsyn's office and said he would be there within five minutes to see the General.

He thought that the old man looked even older; he seemed to have shrunk, even when he stood up and greeted Sverdlov as usual, offering him tea or the whisky which he was known to drink irrespective of the hour. Sverdlov chose the whisky; he had drunk very little since the crisis emerged. But he couldn't show any variation in his routine, any change of habit. He took the drink, and gave the General his twisted smile.

Golitsyn was very deferential; on that morning his hostility seemed veiled, as if he were making a special effort with his chief.

They talked of internal Embassy subjects for a few minutes, and then Sverdlov said coolly, ‘I have come to a crisis with Mrs. Farrow.'

‘Oh,' the old man said. ‘That is a pity. I thought she was committed.'

‘She'll be committed when she brings her first report,' Sverdlov said. ‘I said I thought I had got her, but there is still that little bridge to cross, the one from her side to ours. She is in a romantic mood at the moment. I shall have to take next weekend to help her cross that little bridge. Seduction is hard work, General.'

‘I am too old to remember much about it,' Golitsyn said. ‘Surely it has some compensations?'

‘At another time I might enjoy it, but I've had to cable my wife and ask her to wait again.'

‘I can understand,' the General said. ‘It is not easy to choose.'

‘I choose my duty.' Sverdlov spoke sharply. ‘There's no question of which has the first priority. This woman has access to the most confidential reports on everything Nielson does in UNO. He has no secrets from her; she told me. She even has a set of keys to his safe, that's how much he trusts her. She deals with his personal correspondence as well as everything official. He is on social terms with the President and half the Senate. Mrs. Farrow could be one of our most important agents over here. You know the old proverb—women and horses, ride them often and make them work. If I let this woman go now, and take time to attend to my personal business, we could lose her. One weekend to convince her she is doing it for love, and then a controller can look after her for a week or two. I should get a copy of Nielson's brief from the Brazilian Maritime development after the weekend. Then she can't turn back.'

‘Have you decided who is to take her over in your absence? It might be dangerous to leave her uncontacted even for a few days. Women aren't reliable in the same way as men, they have to be nursed, Comrade, carefully nursed until they've become used to what they're doing.'

‘Have you a man in mind for her, as a temporary link till I get back?' Sverdlov asked him.

Golitsyn hesitated. He had chosen Stukalov for another reason besides rewarding him for watching Sverdlov; he knew the importance of replacing Sverdlov with a personable man who could establish a similar hold over Judith Farrow. It wouldn't be easy to make the transition, but he relied upon Stukalov to substitute effectively. He had picked up a girl in The Hague two years earlier, begun a discreet liaison with her and ended by subjecting her to blackmail. She had worked for Soviet Intelligence for eighteen months until she became suspect by the Dutch and finally served a long prison sentence. Stukalov had been posted elsewhere long before and his connection with the case never came out, because the girl had known him under a different name.