XPD (50 page)

Shumuk put on his spectacles, got up and looked out of the window. Across the street the COMECON annex building was in the course of construction; work continued all round the clock – when darkness came, the construction workers toiled under floodlights. Many of the labourers were women. A line of people waiting for a bus were watching a brawny peasant woman mixing cement. There were long bus lines. A militiaman and some Young Pioneers in their green uniforms were waiting for the special bus that would take them down the Minsk Highway to the battlefield of Borodino. It was a necessary pilgrimage for all the party faithful. Here they would see the place where the might of Napoleon was broken, and where in a later war the Soviet Guards halted the Nazis and stood outnumbered for five long days and nights. Borodino never failed to inspire new faith in the onlookers. Perhaps Shumuk now needed such an infusion of fervour to help him endure the machinations of his colleagues in the Political Bureau. There was little doubt that they had prepared their enthusiastic report about the propaganda value of the Hitler Minutes as a way of putting Shumuk on the spot. Now there were memos, reports and inquiries coming every day, some of them from the Central Secretariat. All could be summarized as ‘How much longer?’ Shumuk sighed. It was time, he reluctantly decided, for drastic action.

Essentially, Parker must be brought out of danger – that was the code of Moscow Centre. None of its professional Russian-born agents were ever abandoned to their fate. It was imbecilic of Parker to involve himself with the man who had committed the murders in Los Angeles and London, but that did not change matters. On the contrary, it made it even more vital to get Parker home for, if he was taken into custody by the Americans, he would be facing charges of first-degree murder.

And yet to pull Parker out would mean that Grechko would come back to Moscow with his reputation unimpaired. Grechko would be able to blame the collapse of Task Pogoni on Moscow’s decision to move Parker. Knowing the way that Grechko could always muster support and sympathy from certain highly placed enemies of Shumuk’s, one could easily envisage Shumuk himself being blamed for the failure of Task Pogoni. That was something he was determined to avoid.

Shumuk always kept a pair of high-powered binoculars on his windowsill. He found it interesting and instructive to study the people in the streets below. The Red Square bus arrived, and the line of passengers began to board. There was not enough room for everyone. One woman stepped out to hail a passing taxi and a man in a bright blue woollen hat shouted angrily at the bus driver as the bus pulled away. It was unseemly and un-Russian, and the others, although equally angry, turned away to pretend it had not happened. But after the bus had gone the anger of those left behind abated. Shoulders hunched, they turned their backs against the wind and watched the big blonde girl mixing cement. Shumuk put his binoculars down. The bus for Borodino still had not arrived.

Shumuk touched the Washington telex decode with the tips of his bony fingers. He could almost feel it: a lifetime of intelligence work – devious tricks and complex lies, half-truths and betrayals – had given him an instinct that seldom faltered. The Kleiber business was all part of some CIA trick and he would have no part of it. He sat down at his desk and scribbled a message for his Washington KGB office on the special encoding pad, laboriously writing one block capital letter in each grey, printed square so that the cipher clerk could insert the coded message into the empty spaces below each line.

PARA ONE CONFIRMATION MOSCOW CENTRE PERMISSION GRANTED FOR 982 MEETING STOP LOCATION YOUR PARA EIGHT MESSAGE NUMBER 907372-KLT TIMING 22 00 HOURS TWENTY FIRST AUGUST STOP PROCEED CAUTIOUSLY STOP COMMUNICATE RESULT IMMEDIATE STOP CEASE ALL CONTACT WITH 907
[
Parker’s submission numeral
]
REPEAT CEASE ALL CONTACT 907 WITH EFFECT IMMEDIATE STOP END PARA END MESSAGE MOSCOW CENTRE

Shumuk finished pencilling the message and smoothed it on his desk to read it through again. Perhaps this development was a blessing in disguise. This go-ahead for Grechko might provide a chance to end Grechko’s blundering career. Shumuk read the message again. ‘Proceed cautiously’ – that got him off the hook but forced Grechko to attend the clandestine meeting. If that meeting was a CIA trap, then Grechko would be totally compromised by the western intelligence agencies. That would certainly mean the end of Grechko’s chances of a seat on any of the directorate committees.

There was another aspect of the present situation which gave Shumuk comfort. If the Kleiber-Grechko meeting on 21 August was a CIA trap, the Americans would be most careful not to alert the KGB to impending danger. They would certainly not move against Parker until their trap closed. That would provide Shumuk with time to get Parker home to Moscow. He pursed his lips and nodded to himself. Such a scenario would give him a triumph with Parker at the very moment when Grechko fell prey to the CIA. He smiled. After all, Parker was the most important factor; Grechko – whatever mess he made of things – could rely upon his diplomatic immunity. Shumuk imagined himself explaining this modestly to a committee of inquiry, shortly before they commended him for his brilliance.

As Shumuk pressed the button to call the cipher clerk, another thought came to him. Why not make certain that the Grechko meeting with Kleiber was a fiasco? It was no great secret that the British intelligence service were looking for Kleiber, so why not tell them where he was going to be on 21 August? He could give details of the meeting to London providing they would make Kleiber XPD. It was safer that way; Kleiber’s indiscretions would embarrass both London and Moscow.

At first the notion was no more than something to toy with; like a pain that can be activated by the careful movement of a loose tooth. But within half an hour Shumuk had learnt to live with such a notion. Rationalization being man’s only natural genius, it was not long before he was able to convince himself that revealing Kleiber’s expected whereabouts to the British was the method whereby he could embarrass the CIA.

He picked up his binoculars and nodded to himself. The bus for Borodino had arrived; it was mud-spattered and dented. As he watched, the doors hissed open and the uniformed young men filed into it. One boy used his hat to clean a patch of window.

Chapter 47

Jennifer Ryden’s priorities were hard to comprehend, thought Boyd Stuart. She had insisted that she must see him urgently but now, in a couturier’s in Sloane Street, she seemed to be little interested in anything but the dress she needed for a weekend party.

‘Thank God you weren’t in California.’ Her voice came through the red velvet curtain of the changing booth.

‘Why?’ said Boyd Stuart. He was sitting on a small gilded chair, watching himself reflected in the full-length mirrors.

‘Darling!’ said Jennifer Ryden, who was able to imbue this word with any one of a thousand meanings. ‘Darling!’ It was the mother speaking to the small child, or the film star assailed by fanclub secretaries. Her head came out of the curtains, while her hands grasped the cloth tight against her neck in decorous precision. ‘Because you finally found all my treasures.’

‘They were in the steamer trunk.’

‘Thank goodness.’ Her head went back inside the booth. ‘Let me have the pink dress again,’ she called to the salesgirl.

‘You put them there, Jennifer. You said leave it in the box room and don’t touch it,’ said Boyd Stuart to the curtain.

‘But you opened it.’ The salesgirl passed the long pink dress through the curtains.

‘And found all the things you’ve been asking for,’ said Stuart.

‘You might at least have let me open it myself. Did you force the lock?’

‘It was unlocked,’ said Stuart. ‘You complain about losing the things, and you complain about my finding them. What the hell does make you happy?’

She swept out of the changing booth and brushed past him, flaring her skirt with the side of her hand and striding up and down in front of the mirrors while turning her head as if to catch her reflection unawares.

‘Not you, my darling. You are far too clever for me.’ She looked to see if the salesgirl had heard her but she gave no sign of having done so. She was standing, arms folded, head tilted, eyes unseeing: the sort of pose that only women who work in dress shops adopt. Jennifer turned on her heel to swirl the thin silk of the dress, then she posed with arms akimbo. Her arms and legs were long and slim, her hands so elegant that she flaunted them, holding them against her cheek and splaying them on her hips.

‘I’ll try the green one again,’ she called loudly to the salesgirl, who gathered an armful of dresses from the chair and went downstairs.

Jennifer looked at herself carefully, smiling distantly as if at some joke she would never reveal. ‘Did you tell daddy?’ she asked quietly now that they were alone.

‘Tell him what?’ So that was it. She simply wanted to be sure that Boyd had not told her father of the night when he came home unexpectedly from Rostock in East Germany. He had found her in his bed with the husband of a girl she had been at school with. ‘Tell him what?’

‘That silly business with Johnny.’ She went back inside the booth, pulled the dress off and dropped it to the floor.

‘What silly business?’

‘Would madam like to try the striped one?’ The salesgirl had reappeared. She was still standing with folded arms, but now half a dozen long dresses were draped over them.

‘Just the green silk,’ said Jennifer. But the girl reached inside the booth and hung all the dresses on the hook and then went back to the storeroom.

‘Me and Johnny … that night,’ said Jennifer in a loud whisper. ‘Did you talk to daddy about that? He’s been in a filthy temper the last few days,’ she said, flicking at her hair with the ends of her fingers.

‘I didn’t tell your father that I returned unexpectedly early from a departmental fiasco in Germany and found you testing the mattress with our dear old friend Johnny,’ said Boyd Stuart. ‘I’m saving it up for the day I resign from the service.’

She smiled. It was the same mirthless smile that her father used to punctuate his dialogue. ‘That’s good,’ she said, looking at herself in the mirror, and holding the belt tight so that it emphasized her hips. ‘But daddy has been frightfully short-tempered lately. And it can’t be simply because I lost his beastly pocket-watch, can it?’ She looked at him in the mirror, caught his eye and smiled archly, moving her hips slightly, as if to remind him of what he had forsaken. Then she returned to the changing booth and put on her own woollen dress.

‘The watch inscribed to Elliot?’

‘I thought it
must
be something you’d said.’ To the girl somewhere in the storeroom she called, ‘I’ll have my hair done, and come back again. I simply can’t decide on a dress when I’m not looking my best.’

The salesgirl said, ‘Yes, madam,’ in a voice like an answering machine. She came upstairs and began picking up the dresses.

Jennifer Ryden came out of the booth with two Harrods carrier bags and some other packages wrapped in the coloured papers of Knightsbridge stores. She gave everything to Boyd Stuart, who could carry them only with some difficulty. Together they went out of the shop and stood for a moment on the pavement while Jennifer adjusted the Liberty silk scarf she wore on her head.

‘There was a message for you, Boyd,’ she said. She watched him dispassionately as he waved at passing taxi cabs.

Boyd Stuart said, ‘What sort of message? A bill, you mean?’ A cab passed them with its ‘For Hire’ sign lighted; the cabbie did not see them because he was busy shouting at the driver of a double-decker bus. ‘If those people at Barclaycard say the computer went wrong just one more time …’

‘It was a phone message about your work.’ She had grown up in a household where the comings and goings of shadowy visitors were commonplace. She was used to finding pistols in the wardrobe and bags of golden sovereigns on the mantelpiece, and hearing soft foreign voices and the slam of car doors in the middle of the night. This aspect of Boyd Stuart’s life she found easy to accept. ‘A man calling himself Shumuk wants to meet you at Widewater, Sollerod, near Copenhagen, on Sunday. I told daddy about it.’

‘And what did daddy say?’

She looked at him calmly and chose to ignore the sarcasm in his tone. ‘Daddy said pass the message on to you.’

Boyd Stuart nodded. The Shumuks and Rydens of this world were careful not to commit themselves to any action that might go wrong. Careful, too, not to have anything in writing.

‘Mr Shumuk seemed certain that daddy would want you to go. And Boyd! How the devil did this fellow guess that I would be seeing you today?’

‘Shumuk is a KGB general. I imagine he knows a great deal about all of us. His job in Moscow corresponds to your father’s position here.’

‘You sound as if you admire him.’

‘I hate the evil old bastard,’ said Boyd Stuart.

Jennifer shivered and moved away; she had forgotten such frightening glimpses of the cold violence within him.

‘You mustn’t go, Boyd. It sounds dangerous.’ She said it too quickly, too automatically for it to have been a measure of her love.

‘Daddy wants me to go, Jennifer. And what daddy wants, daddy gets.’

‘That’s loutish, Boyd.’ She waved her hand and a taxi, turning the corner at Pont Street, immediately flashed its headlights to acknowledge her summons.

Sollerod is a village on the Danish island of Sjaelland. The old coast road runs close to the large house that is called Widewater. Here the Baltic Sea narrows to the Kattegat and from the garden of the large house there is a view of the Swedish coastline.

General Shumuk’s attempt to appear inconspicuous had resulted in a slightly absurd mixture of western garments. A bright green shirt hung limply on his thin frame, and from its short sleeves his arms emerged like sticks. His trousers were of corduroy and his shoes had gilt buckles. The effect was of a man rescued from a disaster at sea and clothed by an over-worked charity.

The house was large and of modern design, with floor-to-ceiling glass and interior walls of white-painted rough brickwork. The furniture was light-coloured teak of that sort of uncomfortable Scandinavian design that aspires to being art. And the walls were hung with large abstract paintings in primary colours and spotlit by polished steel lamps. To alleviate the bleak interior, there were colourful oriental carpets strewn across the polished wood-block floors. From the windows there was a clear view of the water and of clouds combed thinly across the blue scalp of the sky.