Firefox (7 page)

The young man -lifted up the barrier, so that a hinged section stood on end, and Gant was ushered through. Other tables besides the one at which he was directed to sit, were occupied. About half-a-dozen people in all. Not all of them Russians. He heard an American voice, belonging to an elderly man, saying: ‘There’s no right on earth makes you question that passport and those papers, sonny!’ A young KGB man, crop-haired, waved the remark aside, and continued with a telephone conversation.

Gant sat down, heavily, at the table. It was a rickety affair, erected for the express purpose of providing a semblance of the KGB’s normal interrogation facilities.

He swallowed hard. He turned his eyes to the barrier, and saw Pavel repossessing his papers and passing out of the entrance to the station, without a backward glance. Suddenly, he felt deserted, alone. He was once more no longer in control of the situation. He stared at the black telephone isolated on the table.

Then the young man slid into the chair opposite him, and smiled. ‘This won’t take very long, let us hope, Mr. Grant,’ he said.

As he dialled the number of the Warsaw Hotel, Gant saw, clearly, and for the first time, the odds against him. He was taking on the largest, the most ruthless, the most thorough security service the world had ever seen. It was small comfort to recollect that Aubrey had described the KGB as notoriously inefficient because of its very size. To Gant, sitting at that table, in the cold foyer of the metro station, it was no comfort at all, the smooth platitudes of a man in a hotel room in the middle of London.

‘Hotel Warsaw?’ the young man asked in Russian.

Gant kept his eyes on the table, so that he did not betray any sign that he followed the conversation. ‘Ah - State Security here. Let me talk to Prodkov, please.’

Prodkov would be the name of the KGB man who worked on the staff of the hotel - he might have been a waiter, desk-clerk, dishwasher, but he possessed far more power than the hotel manager.

There was a considerable wait, then: ‘Prodkov - I have a tourist here, Michael Grant. He is registered in room 308 … Yes, you know him. Tell me, what does he look like? Would you look at me for a moment, Mr. Grant, please? Thank you - go ahead, Prodkov Mm. Yes… yes - I see. And he is not there now?’

There was another, longer pause. Gant waited, in disbelief. Aubrey could never have anticipated what was happening to him now - now it would emerge that Grant looked different, or was already tucked up in his bed. ‘Good. Thank you, Prodkov. Goodbye.’

The young man was smiling affably to deny what had just occurred. There had been no suspicion, no force - merely a very ordinary, routine check on a tourist’s papers. He handed back the sheaf of papers, tucked neatly into the cover of the passport bearing the name of Michael Grant.

‘Thank you, Mr. Grant - I apologise for any delay. We - are engaged in a search for - criminals, shall we say? Of course, we wished merely to eliminate you from our enquiries. You are now free to resume your nocturnal sightseeing tour of our city.’ The young man was obviously proud of his English. He stood up, gravely shook hands with Gant, and then waved him through the barrier. The grey-haired man smiled crookedly as Gant passed him, only one side of his face wrinkling with the expression.

Gant nodded to him, and then he was outside the barrier and walking as steadily as he could towards the entrance. Outside the ornate entrance, beneath its elaborate, decorated portico, the wind was suddenly cold. Gant realised that his body was bathed in a sweat of relief. He looked around him and saw Pavel detach himself from the shadows.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘Now, we have wasted far too much time already. Soon, it will be dangerous to be on the streets, impeccable papers or otherwise. Come - we have a short distance to walk. You go ahead of me, down the Kirov Street. When we are away from the station, I will catch you up, and show where we are heading. Good? Very well, begin walking.’

They picked up two of the known associates of Pavel Upenskoy and Vassily Levin just before six in the morning. Both were family men, living in the same tower block of Soviet Workers’ flats on the wide Mira Prospekt, overlooking the vast permanent site of the Exhibition of Economic Achievements in the northern suburbs of Moscow. The black saloons of Kontarsky’s team parked in the forecourt of the block, while it was hardly light, and the men moved in swiftly. The whole operation took hardly more than three minutes, including the ascent of the lift to the fourteenth and sixteenth floors. When the team returned, the two additional human beings appearing satisfactorily disturbed, barely awake, and deeply frightened, Priabin knew that his chief would be satisfied.

Priabin grinned into the frightened, wan faces of the two men taken from their beds as they passed him with nervous side-glances. They knew, he sensed, why he had come for them - and they knew what to expect when they were returned to the Centre, to Dzerzhinsky Street. He watched them being loaded into two of the black cars, and then glanced up at the block of flats.

On the sixteenth floor, he could make out the smudge of a white face at a dark window - the wife, or perhaps a child. It did not matter.

His breath smoked round him in the cold dawn air as he returned to his car. Dipping his head at the passenger window, he said to the driver: ‘Very well - give the order for the surveillance-team to move in on the warehouse. Let’s get Upenskoy as well, while we’re about it!’

Gant woke from a fitful, dream-filled sleep as the doors of the removal van were opened noisily by Pavel Upenskoy. Shaking his head, muttering, he pulled himself into a sitting position on the mattress which had been laid just behind the driver’s cab. Gant had boarded it in the warehouse of the Sanitary Manufacturing Company of Moscow.

The light of cold, high bulbs filtered into the interior of the truck, but Upenskoy was hidden from Gant’s view by the stacked lavatory bowls and cisterns that he was to drive that day to Kuybyshev, a town lying more than seven hundred road miles from Moscow. A new hotel being constructed in Kuybyshev awaited the toilet fittings.

‘Gant - are you awake?’

‘Yes,’ Gant replied sullenly, trying to moisten his dry, stale mouth with saliva. ‘What time is it?’

‘Nearly five-thirty. We leave for Bilyarsk just before six. If you want, the old man has made some coffee come and get it.’

Gant heard the heavy footsteps retreat across the concrete floor of the warehouse, and ascend some steps. A flimsy door banged shut. Then, the only sounds were those of his hands rubbing at the stubble on his chin, and the sucking of his lips as he tried to rid himself of the dry, evil taste in his mouth. He brushed a hand across his forehead and examined the thin film of sweat on his fingertips carefully, as if it were something alien, or something familiar the appearance and nature of which he had long forgotten.

Then he wiped his hand on the trouser leg of his faded blue overalls into which he had changed when he arrived at the warehouse.

He had not slept well. He had not been allowed to sleep for more than two hours after being brought by Pavel to the warehouse, in a narrow commercial street that ran off the Kirov Street. They were only a quarter of a mile from the Komsomolskaia Metro Station.

Pavel had not allowed him to sleep as he had hammered home to him the facts and nuances of his new, and third, identity - that of Boris Glazunov, driver’s mate, who lived in a block of flats on the Mira Prospekt. who was married with two children and who, in reality, Pavel had explained, would be staying home and out of sight, while Gant accompanied him in the delivery truck as far as Bilyarsk. The briefing had been conducted entirely in Russian - Gant had been forcibly reminded more than once of his language training with the defector, Lebedev, at Langley, Virginia.

At last, after a recital of his assumed life history, and a repeated account of what papers he carried, and what they represented, he had been allowed to sleep - to sleep as soundly as his own mind would allow him. He had relived the strangulation of the KGB man in the washroom, in a grotesque, balletic slow-motion in endless repetition - to relive the reaction that had caused him to sag against a shop window in the Kirov Street, so that Pavel had hurried to catch him up, and hold his shaking body until the epilepsy of reaction passed.

Gant climbed to his feet, and tried to put the vivid images from his mind. As he clambered and squeezed his way out of the back of the truck, he tried to consider the future, the hours ahead, to help drive away the past. He knew now that he could rely completely on Pavel Upenskoy.

In any and every word that the big man had spoken, Gant had sensed the contempt in which he was held by the Russian. It was as if, Gant admitted, he had been insulted with the company of a weekend flyer in the cockpit of the Firefox, Pavel having to tag him along until he could dump him outside Bilyarsk. Gant understood the ruthless professionalism of the big Russian. Where and how British Intelligence had recruited him, he did not know, but the old man, the night watchman at the warehouse, had muttered through his gums something about Pavel having had a Jewish wife, who was still in prison or labour camp tor having demonstrated against the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, twelve years before. That had been when Pavel had left him briefly alone with the old man who had tried to soften Pavel’s harsh treatment of the American. Apart from that fact, Gant knew nothing about Pavel Upenskoy. Yet, strangely, he accepted the big man’s contempt, and brusque manner with equanimity. The man was good.

Pavel and the old man were sitting at a small, bare table in the despatch-office of the warehouse. As yet, none of the day-staff had reported for work. Pavel intended to be long gone before they arrived. He looked up as Gant shut the flimsy door behind him, as if inspecting the American critically in the light of the naked bulb suspended from the ceiling. The room, like the warehouse, was cold and Gant rubbed his hands together for warmth. Pavel indicated the coffee pot on the ancient electric ring plugged into the wall, and Gant collected a chipped mug from the table and poured himself some black coffee. Without sugar, the drink was bitter, but it was hot. Uneasily, as if uninvited, he settled himself at the table. The old man, as if at a signal, finished his coffee, and left the room.

‘He goes to see if we are under surveillance here,’ Pavel explained without looking at Gant.

‘You mean they…?’ Gant began quickly.

‘No - I do not mean they know where you are,’ the Russian replied. ‘These will not be the men who followed you last night, or that gang at the station - but the department of the KGB that is concerned with the security of the airplane knows who I am, and who the others are - they will be watching, no doubt, since the weapons-trials are in,” he looked at his watch, ‘less than thirty hours’ time!’

‘Then - they’ll know I’m on my way?’

‘Not necessarily. They will merely be watching us.’

‘If they stop us?’ Gant persisted. ‘It’ll all be blown to hell, before I can leave Moscow!’

‘No! If we are stopped, there are other arrangements.’ Pavel seemed to be battling with some doubt in himself.

‘What other arrangements?’ Gant said scornfully.

‘I’ve got to get six hundred miles today, man! How do I do it?’ - Gant laughed, a highpitched sound.

Pavel looked at him in contempt.

‘I am ordered to - die, if necessary, to ensure that you get away free,’ Pavel said softly. ‘It is not what I would consider a willing or worthwhile sacrifice … However, if we get out of here safely, then we shall not be stopped again until we reach the circular motorway where another vehicle will be waiting, in the event of trouble, to collect you. If there is no trouble, then you continue with me. Understood?’

Gant was silent for a time, then said: ‘Yes.’

‘Good. Now, go and shave, in the next room - clean yourself up, a little, yes?’ Gant nodded, and crossed the room. Just as he was about to close the door behind him, he heard Pavel say: ‘Gant - can you fly that plane - really fly it?’

Gant poked his head back round the door. Pavel was staring into the bottom of his mug, hands clasped round it, elbows on the bare wooden table. His big frame seemed somehow shrunken in the blue overalls.

‘Yes,’ Gant said. ‘I can fly it. I’m the best there is.’

Pavel looked up into Gant’s eyes, stared at him for a long moment in silence, then nodded, and said: ‘Good. I would not want to die to deliver faulty goods to Bilyarsk.’

He returned his gaze to the coffee mug, and Gant closed the door behind him. He switched on the weak, naked bulb, ran the water until it was lukewarm, and inspected himself in the speckled mirror. Pavel had cut his hair the previous night, and then he had washed it.

It was short now, flat on his head, without hair oil. He looked younger, perhaps a little like he had done as a teenager in Clarkville - except for the ridiculous moustache that survived from his personae as Orton and then as Grant. He soaped his face with a stubby brush and tugged at the bristles of the moustache until it had become hairs floating in the grey shaving water. Then he began, methodically, to shave the rest of his face.

When he returned to the office, Pavel was obviously ready to leave. The old man had returned, and vanished again, presumably to keep watch.

‘They are here,’ Pavel said softly. Gant sensed a new tension about the man, his ordinariness showing through.

‘How many?’ Gant asked, keeping his voice steady with an effort.

‘Three - in one car. The old man has seen them before. They are part of the team appointed to the security of the Bilyarsk project. They follow Mr. Lansing about Moscow, and Dherkov, the courier who comes from Bilyarsk. The old man thinks they are only watching - if they had come to make arrests, there would be more of them.’

Gant nodded when the Russian had finished. Then, his expression turned to one of surprise when Pavel drew an automatic from his overall pocket.

‘What-?’

‘You can use this?’ Gant took the gun, and turned it over in his hand. It was a type he had not met before, a Makarov, but it seemed close enough to the Walther P-38 that he had used more than once, if only on the range. He nodded.