Firefox (6 page)

But it did not seem to work, the sedative of familiarity.

Perhaps, in the huge. ornate foyer of the metro station, with its gigantic statuary, marbles and bronzes, and the mosaic floor and frescoed walls - perhaps he was unable to transpose himself to the cockpit, and calm his growing panic. All he knew that moment was that he was alone, stranded - they would have picked up Pavel, and the other man. What could he do?

A hand fell on his shoulder, and he jumped away as if stung by some electric charge within him. He turned round, and Pavel saw the damp, frightened face, and doubt nickered in his eyes.

‘Thank God,’ Gant breathed.

‘You look terrible,’ Pavel said, without humour. ‘Mr. Grant - I watched your performance … it was not very convincing.’

‘Jesus! I was shit-scared, man!’ Gant burst out.

Pavel looked at him, towering over him. Gant seemed smaller, slighter, less impressive than even his disguise would normally have made him. Pavel, remembering what Edgecliffe, the SIS Head of Station in Moscow, had said of the American, agreed. This man was a risk, Edgecliffe had said - if he causes serious trouble on the journey, get rid of him - don’t risk the whole network, just for him. And Gant looked as if he might be big trouble.

‘Go and make yourself sick,’ Pavel said, with distaste in his voice. ‘Go, and hide yourself in the toilets. There will be more KGB men on the way. We shall leave the station after they feel they are sufficiently reinforced when they are confident that, if we reach the main entrance, then we must have been searched at least three or four times. Go!’ He spat out the last word and Gant, after staring at him for a long moment, turned his back and walked away. Pavel watched him go, shook his head, and then set himself to watch, from the cover of his newspaper, the arrivals at the Komsomolskaia Metro Station.

David Edgecliffe, ostensibly Trade AttachŽ to the British Embassy, was in the bar of the Moskva Hotel.

From his position near the door, he could look out into the foyer of the hotel. He saw the KGB men arrive, together with at least two people from the Political Security Service. If his diagnosis was correct, then Fenton, poor lad, had not died in vain. He shook his head, sadly, over his Scotch, and swallowed the last of it. The appearance of those particular KGB officers would mean that the bluff of Orton’s murder at the hands of his supposed Moscow pushers because of the failure of supplies to reach them, would have been swallowed. Orton was dead - long live Gant.

He smiled sadly to himself and a waiter, at his signal, came over with another Scotch on a tray together with a small jug of water. He paid for his drink, and appeared to return to his book. Covertly, he watched the KGB men as they carried away Gant’s luggage.

They would have searched the room, he knew, and would have removed everything. Orton, the mysterious Englishman who looked so harmless, but who had infected the youth of Moscow with the terrible affliction of heroin, would be thoroughly investigated.

Edgecliffe was smiling. In his signal to Aubrey, that night at least, he could report a state of satisfactory progress.

Besides the false papers he had shown to the KGB searching the metro, to protect himself from identification as a suspected drug-trafficker, Pavel had in his pocket, among other things, something that would have caused Gant to become far more ill than he had thus far seemed to be: it was a red card, such as was only carried by members of the KGB. It was a card which he sincerely hoped not to have to use since it was a fake, but which he knew he might have to employ if there was no other way out of the station.

He had watched them arrive. As yet there were few, but they were thorough. He had already shifted his ground a dozen times in less than fifteen minutes, straining his nerve and patience to make his movements appear casual, unobtrusive. There were KGB men at the main entrance, where a hastily erected barrier had been thrown across the gap into the square and the night, and all departing and arriving passengers were having their papers inspected. They were a motley collection of duty and off-duty personnel from the various departments of the 2nd Chief Directorate, and some faces he knew from Edgecliffe’s files on the Political Security Service. They were looking for the murderers of Orton, the ‘economic criminals’ that formed one of their main interests in life.

He had seen Vassily, the third man on the embankment, only once, sitting in a station restaurant, eating a huge, doughy cake, and sipping coffee. The coffee was good, and the pastries and cakes cheap and filling for a man like Vassily, whose papers proclaimed him to be a night watchman. Vassily could stay in the restaurant for a couple of hours yet, and be searched and questioned, without arousing suspicion. So might he - but not Gant.

The remainder of the KGB personnel, who had not dropped out of sight to the lower levels and platforms of the metro station, were engaged in searching all possible places of concealment in the station foyer. A small team was busy opening all the left-luggage boxes set against the far wall. Others checked papers, questioned ascending passengers, bullied and threatened.

Pavel watched, with a degree of fascination, a typical and very thorough KGB operation against the citizens of Moscow.

He tried to keep in his line of sight the entrance to the gents’ where Gant had retreated. The man was having a bad time. He could not comprehend how Gant had ever been selected for this mission. Pavel himself was only a link in the chain, one of Edgecliffe’s small Russian force in Moscow, but he knew more than perhaps he should have done, since Edgecliffe respected all those native Russians who worked for him, Jew or non-Jew, with a more than ordinary respect. He, unlike Aubrey, appreciated the risk they took - and, if he could avoid it, he wouldn’t let them walk in the dark: in the case of Pavel, not even for the Firefox.

Pavel almost missed the KGB man heading down the steps to the gents’, because he was watching the furore as someone was arrested at the entrance to the station. Some irregularity in the man’s papers, in his travel visas or work permit, perhaps - it had been sufficient. As soon as he saw the KGB man, head bobbingly descending the steps, he moved away from his position near the restaurant, coming casually off the wall like a hoarding unstuck by the weather. It still wasn’t sufficient to prevent another KGB man coming from the restaurant, wiping his lips with a dark blue handkerchief, from asking him for his papers. For a moment, but only for a moment, Pavel considered ignoring the order. Then, he turned his head and tried to smile nervously, reaching slowly, innocently, into his breast-pocket.

Gant was still in one of the closets, seated on the lavatory, his coat pulled around him, one hand gripping the lapels tightly across his throat, the other clenched in a pocket in an attempt to disguise its shaking. He knew he was close to the condition he had found himself in, in Saigon. He was close to having the dream again.

He hadn’t needed to make himself sick. He had only just made it to the sanctuary of the closet before he had heaved up his dinner. The bout of nausea, continuing until he was retching drily and gathering bile at the back of his throat to make the retching less painful, had left him weak and unable to move. He had settled wearily, agedly, onto the seat, trying to control his racing heartbeat, and the flickering, fearful images in his head. He listened to the footsteps, the muttered talk, the whistling, the splashing of water and the tugged clicks of roller-towels. A dozen times, the washroom had been empty, but he had not moved. He did not think he could.

He felt like a man beginning a ten thousand mile journey who breaks his leg, slipping on his own doorstep. The cold part of his mind which continued to function, though merely as an impotent observer, found his situation ridiculous, and shameful. He could not explain why he should feel so shot to hell, but he suspected that he simply had not prepared himself for what he had encountered. Gant had no resistance to fear. His brittle, overwhelming arrogance left him vulnerable to situations he could not control - and, however much he tried to persuade himself that his situation was controllable, the fiction would not take root in his imagination, calm him.

He heard footsteps on the tiled floor outside the cubicle. He promised himself he would leave as soon as the washroom was empty again. Then a fist banged on the door.

‘In there.’ he heard, in Russian. ‘Your papers. Quickly.’

‘I - I…’ he forced the words out. ‘I’m on the loo,’ he said, recollecting the English vernacular that had been drummed into him.

‘English?’ the man called out, in a thick accent.

‘State Security,’ he added. ‘Your papers, please.’

‘Can you - wait a minute?’

‘Very well,’ the man replied in irritation.

Gant tore paper from the roll, crushed it noisily, then flushed the lavatory. He undid and rattled the buckle on his belt, and the loose change in his pocket, and then slid back the bolt and stepped out of the cubicle.

The KGB man was thick-waisted but heavily-muscled, and displeased. He was, Gant guessed, low in status within the service, but did not intend to let an English tourist see that. He puffed his chest, and glared theatrically.

‘Your papers - please.’ He held out his hand, staring at Gant’s face. ‘You are ill - or, maybe, frightened?’

‘No - stomach,’ Gant said weakly, patting his overcoat.

The KGB man went through the papers carefully, without imagination or haste. Then he looked up. He offered them to Gant and said: ‘Your papers are not in order!’

Buckholz had told Gant repeatedly that such a trick was a stock tactic in preliminary investigation. The accusation, of something, anything - just to gauge the reaction. Yet he was unable to respond innocently. He panicked. Fear showed in his eyes, in the furtive darting of his gaze - the animal seeking a bolt-hole.

The KGB man reached for his pocket, and Gant knew the man was about to draw a gun. Reacting instinctively, he bulled against the man, hand reaching for the hand in the Russian’s pocket, driving him off balance, even as he sought the gun.

The KGB man was driven up against the roller-towel cabinet before he could regain his balance. He was still trying to reach the gun in his pocket, the one reassuring factor, as Gant tugged frantically at the towel. The hand that had closed upon the gun wriggled in his grasp - he found it difficult to hold the thick wrist. He brought his knee up into the Russian’s groin, and the man’s breath exploded and he groaned, sagging against the wall. Then Gant had a huge loop of towel free and he wound the loop around the man’s head.

Then he pulled. The Russian’s free hand struggled with the tightening folds - his eyes seemed to enlarge, become totally bulbous. Gant’s own vision clouded, and he continued twisting and tugging the towel. He seemed to hear a voice, distant and high, and feel a hand on his shoulder, pulling at him … he held on.

Then, he was turned bodily, and something exploded across his face.

He was staring at Pavel, his hand raised to slap him a second time. His face expressed a cold, ruthless fury.

‘You - stupid animal! He was KGB - don’t you understand what that means? And - you’ve killed him!’ Gant turned to stare dumbly at the pop-eyed, discoloured features of the Russian on the floor. The man’s tongue was hanging out fatly. He turned back to Pavel.

‘I - I thought he’d - guessed who I was…’ he said in a feeble voice.

‘You’re a menace, Gant!’ Pavel said. ‘You could get us all killed, do you realise that?’ He stared at the body for a moment, as if mesmerised, then he bent swiftly galvanised by a cold fear. and unwound the towel.

Taking the body under the armpits, he dragged it across the floor of the washroom and into an empty cubicle. He tucked the legs inside the door, rummaged in the pockets, and then locked himself in the cubicle.

‘Is it clear?’ Gant heard him ask.

‘Yes,’ Gant replied in the voice of a zombie.

He looked up, and watched as the big man climbed over the door of the cubicle and dropped beside him.

He was wiping his hands, which were dusty from the top of the door. He patted a pocket. ‘I have tried to disguise your stupidity by making it appear that the man was robbed.’ He sniffed at Gant. ‘Now,’ he added, ‘quickly go up the stairs, and make your way slowly to the entrance. If anyone - anyone - calls on you to stop, obey them. Show your papers, and pretend you’re ill, as before-understand?’

‘Yes. He - he said my papers were not in order.’

‘You damned fool - you killed him for that? They are in order. He was only trying to put you up.’

‘I - didn’t know where you were…’

‘I was stopped, by the KGB. But my papers also were in order.’ He pushed Gant ahead of him. ‘Now - quickly, up to the entrance. This fat officer could become the object of a search at any moment, and then no one would be allowed to leave this station!’

Gant was stopped twice crossing the station concourse by minor KGB officers who glanced at his papers, asked after his health and his movements, and then let him go by. Slowly he approached the temporary barrier thrown across the entrance of the station.

He had no idea how far behind him Pavel was. He would have to wait for him - if he got through the barrier.

The men at the barrier, at least a tall, grey-haired figure with the side of the face that had, at some time received very poor plastic surgery - Gant assumed it to have been a war-wound - appeared to possess more authority than the big man he had strangled. Gant passed his papers across to a younger man standing in front of the grey-haired, expressionless senior officer and waited. He tried not to look at the scarred, half-repaired face, but found his gaze drawn to it. The tall man smiled thinly, and rubbed his artificially smooth cheek with one long-fingered hand.

‘English?’ the younger man asked.

‘Un - oh, yes.’

‘Mm. Mr. Grant - we must ask you to wait at one of the tables here for a moment, until we check with your hotel.’

‘I have the papers…’

‘Yes, and your passport and papers have received a security service stamp - nevertheless, we must ask you to wait.’