Mazurka (33 page)

“Did you probe young Andres?” Galbraith asked.

Iverson nodded. “I did.”

“And?”

“He quotes Mikhail. Mikhail trusts Sundbach to behave himself.”

“And Andres goes along with that?”

“To some extent,” Iverson said.

“But not all the way?”

Iverson shrugged. “It's hard to say. He defers to Mikhail, at least on the surface, but I get the feeling he might do something different if Mikhail wasn't around.”

“How different? Would he do violence to Carl Sundbach?”

“Maybe. It's hard to tell with Andres. He's like a man completely covered in very tight Saranwrap. You look at his face and you think Prince Charming, and then a kind of glaze goes across his eyes and you know you've lost him. And you don't know where he's gone.”

“I want him to stay out of mischief, Gary. That's the only thing that matters. He's got to be on board that plane to Norway at ten o'clock tomorrow night, and it's too close to the end to have a royal fuck-up now.” Galbraith rubbed his acupuncture stud. It was said to relieve stress, which so far it hadn't done. “I move now to another matter, perhaps even a little more disconcerting. And that is dear old London, Gary. It appears that Colonel Viktor Epishev of the KGB is running around causing havoc over there, having shot two young policemen on duty. His real target is none other than Frank Pagan, who arrived in New York this very day. (I am having Pagan watched, of course. Let us pray for competence in this instance.) I want to keep Pagan busy diddling round with Kiviranna and out of harm's way, but I really can't have Epishev causing all this grief over in London.”

Galbraith paused. He was suddenly conscious of the delicate balance of things, the wheels spinning within wheels, the equilibrium so finely calibrated that even the light touch of a spring breeze might blow it all to kingdom come. He had been given a heavy responsibility, and he was determined to carry it out. The future of mankind, even if mankind were a class among which he found a thousand things despicable, a thousand things grubby, was no small affair. He cleared his throat and surveyed the consoles a moment.

“I really don't know what Vladimir Greshko thinks he's up to by sending his man to London,” Galbraith said. “But I believe it's time we found out. Agree?”

“Yes,” Iverson said.

Galbraith made a steeple of his fingertips and held it under his lower lip in a contemplative gesture. “I love smooth surfaces, Gary. Porcelains. Silks. Certain kinds of stones. Glass. Mirrors. I like surfaces so smooth you can't feel any kind of seam. What I hate is sandpaper. And what I'm beginning to feel right now is a certain amount of grit forming beneath my fingernails. I don't like the sensation, Gary.”

Galbraith dropped his hands to his side. “It's time to make Ted Gunther earn his salary, don't you think?”

13

Zavidovo, the Soviet Union

Because it was a beautiful dawn the Yakut nurse – a firm believer in the benefits of early rising and crisp air, even if the patient was terminal – had helped Vladimir Greshko into a wheelchair and pushed him out into the garden, where he sat in the shade of a very old oak, surrounded by pines and wildflowers and all the rest of what he considered nature's repetitive graffiti. It was, for him, a bucolic nightmare. Despite his rustic origins and the sentimentality he often felt for the land, he had become a city person, somebody made nervous by the racket of birds.

He watched the nurse go back inside the cottage and he glowered at her. To have been detached from his tube, disgusting as the thing was, was like being yanked from an umbilical cord. Twenty minutes, the Yakut bitch had said. Twenty minutes, no more, as if she were bestowing a precious gift on him.

The trouble with nature, Greshko reflected, was its unsanitary condition. Little things chewed on even smaller things. Ants scurried off with disgusting larvae in their jaws. Wild animals and birds crapped where they felt like it. He loved the tundra, those great prairies with their romantic isolation and impenetrable mystery, but when it came to thick trees and the awful green density of this place, he experienced a suffocating claustrophobia.

He closed his eyes, opening them only when he heard the sound of an automobile approaching from the distance. He turned his face to the pathway that led to the cottage, peering through the twisted posts of the old wooden fence. His first thought was that Volovich was coming to say he'd received news from Viktor, but when he made out the shape of the Zil – unmistakable! – he knew his visitor was General Olsky.

He saw Olsky get out of the long black car and come through a space in the fence, where a bramble bush snagged the sleeve of his well-tailored suit. Greshko stared at the bald head as it ducked under the thorns. And then Olsky was crossing the thick grass to the wheelchair in short springing steps. He wore this morning amber-tinted sunglasses, a horrible Western affectation as far as Greshko was concerned. They caught the dawn sunlight and glinted as if two copper coins had been pressed into his eye sockets.

Olsky asked, “How are you today, Vladimir?”

“Unchanged, Stefan. You find me as you found me when you were last here. Two visits in as many days! I feel very honoured.”

Olsky circled the wheelchair, pausing immediately behind Greshko. As a technique, Greshko thought it ludicrous. Was he supposed to twist his head round in order to see the little shit? Was this meant to place him at a disadvantage? Greshko wanted to laugh. When it came to technique, when it came to the body language of interviews, he'd written the book.

“Let's walk, Vladimir,” Olsky said. “I'll push you.”

“As you wish.”

Olsky shoved the chair over the thick grass, a shade too quickly perhaps, as if he meant to unnerve Greshko. Olsky wheeled him towards the pines, where the ground was rougher and the chair shook. Then Olsky stopped, catching his breath and sitting down with his back to the trunk of a pine. He snapped a stalk of long grass and placed it against his teeth.

“Do you like it here?” Olsky asked.

“This green prison? What do you think?”

“I can imagine worse places, Vladimir.”

“I suppose you can.”

Olsky stared in the direction of the small house. “You've got a decent place to live. Your own medical attendant. It could be a whole lot worse. At least the sun is shining and the weather's warm.”

Greshko smiled. Just under the surface of Olsky's words, he could hear it – a quietly implied threat, a hint of how the last days of the old man's life could be made utterly dreadful by removing him from this place and sending him in some cramped railroad carriage to the distant north.
Am I supposed to be scared shitless? Am I meant to nod my head and drool with gratitude?
“Why don't you come to the point, Stefan? Dying men don't have time for circumspection.”

Olsky was quiet a moment. “Where is Colonel Epishev?”

Epishev, of course
. Greshko said, “I assume he's at his desk. Unless you've misplaced him, of course. Which would be damnably careless of you.”

Olsky took off his glasses. “Where have you sent him?”

“Sent him? You forget, General, I have absolutely no power in the organs these days.”

“He came here. I have that on good authority. He came here with Lieutenant Volovich. I can only assume you issued instructions to him.”

Olsky watched a woodpecker as it fastened itself on to a pine trunk and rapped its beak with sublime ferocity of purpose.
Rap rap rap
. Epishev and Volovich had been spotted coming here. Ah, the risks one ran! The trees had ears and eyes and every goddam blade of grass was a potential microphone.

“I receive so many drugs, Stefan. I sleep a lot. Sometimes I have no idea of time. Sometimes people come to see me and I don't remember them ever having visited. And so many people come, I have more friends than I can count.”

“I want an answer, Vladimir. Why did Epishev and Volovich come here? And where have you sent Viktor?”

Greshko wondered if somehow. Volovich had been made to talk. But if Dimitri had confessed, then Olsky wouldn't be here asking these questions. Things would be different if Olsky
really
knew anything. Things would be rather more straightforward, perhaps even a little brutal. Greshko would have been removed from this place without ceremony. Besides, why should Volovich admit anything that might incriminate himself? The man might be nothing more than Epishev's toady, but he was surely no fool when it came to survival.

Olsky replaced his glasses. “Are you denying you were visited by Epishev and Volovich?”

Greshko smiled in spite of the sudden pain that knifed through his abdomen. Pain like this, you were never prepared for it, it went through your nerve-endings like a dagger through old papers. “How can I deny something I can't remember?”

Olsky felt oddly tense in the old man's presence, even though he knew he had no need to. Sabina was forever reminding him of his own new authority –
Sweet Jesus, you are the Chairman of the KGB, you don't need to be in awe of anyone, my love
. And of course she was right. But there was something in Greshko's demeanour, a quality connected to Greshko's history, the sense of the man's legend that now and then unnerved Olsky. Greshko had walked the same stages, stood on the same platforms as Stalin and Khrushchev and Bulganin and Malenkov, the luminaries of modern Soviet history. Greshko had been at the centre of things for so many years that his absence created a vacuum which, for most Soviet citizens accustomed to seeing his face on state occasions, was almost unnatural – as if the moon had failed to wax.

“First you lose some computer data,” Greshko said. “Then you lose one of your Colonels. If I was running the organs –”

“But you're not, General –”

“When I did,
General
, I controlled everything, the tasks of my key personnel, the access codes to the computers, nothing ever slipped away from
me
.” With some effort, Greshko raised his voice. “I knew where everything and everybody was, day and goddam night, I lived the organs,
General
, twenty-five hours a day, eight days a goddam week. Don't come here and make accusations that I gave an order to Epishev! You know I don't have
that much
power these days,” and here the old man snapped his fingers. “If I did, by God you'd see some iron in the backbone of this country!”

Olsky stood in silence for a time. He had cards to play, but he wanted his timing to be correct. He was prepared to let Greshko rant for a while. He watched globules of white saliva appear on the old man's lips. Then Greshko yielded to a prolonged fit of coughing, doubling over in his wheelchair, wiping his sleeve across his lips. His skeleton seemed to rattle. Olsky, noticing how crystalline mucus clung to the material of the old man's sweater, turned his face away for a moment. The paroxysm passed and Greshko, white-faced, was silent.

Olsky wandered some feet from the wheelchair. With his back to Greshko, he said, “A man called Yevenko was arrested yesterday, General.”

Greshko, whose chest felt raw, his lungs on fire, closed his eyes. He had the impression of a thousand wasps buzzing through his brain.
Yevenko
, he thought.

“More commonly known as the Printer,” Olsky said. “A criminal type whose speciality is forged papers, passports, and even the occasional rouble. He was arrested on suspicion of currency irregularities. It was a routine kind of arrest, but it had an interesting aspect to it. The Printer, it seems, had a story to tell about recently being called upon to make a West German passport for a man known as Grunwald.”

Greshko was sarcastic. “Fascinating. Tell me more.”

“Grunwald, according to the Printer, is in reality our comrade Epishev.”

“Really,” Greshko remarked. He showed absolutely no emotion on his face. “And you take the word of this criminal?”

“He was in a tight spot. He was ready to barter. People like him usually tell the truth when they face the prospect of lengthy incarceration.”

Greshko wheeled his chair a couple of feet. “Let's suppose for just a moment this criminal is telling the truth – although, as you may be aware, General, criminals rarely do. Viktor might have needed a forged passport in the normal line of duty. He works in some very grey areas, after all. He infiltrates underground groups, he may need false ID, a cover of some kind.”

“It's possible.” Olsky paused. “I'm reliably informed that the man using this passport left the Soviet Union on an Aeroflot flight to East Berlin. He then caught a connecting flight to London.”

“London? Why would Viktor travel to London?” Greshko asked. “This is all very thin, General. What evidence do you have that the man called Grunwald is Epishev in any case?”

Olsky said, “The photograph in the forged passport was Epishev's. The Printer assured us of that.”

“And you believed him?” Greshko infused scepticism into his voice, the tone of the experienced old master contemptuous of the apprentice's naivety.

Olsky didn't reply to this question. “Did you send Viktor to London, Vladimir?”

“Why would I send him there? Why would I send him anywhere, for God's sake? Besides, I couldn't send him abroad, he'd need clearance from a superior officer.”

Olsky, who knew Epishev had the authority to go in and out of the Soviet Union at will, a clearance given him by Greshko years ago, glanced through the trees for a time. There was something just a little pathetic in backing Greshko into a corner. Something almost sad, although that was an emotion Olsky couldn't afford to feel. He wondered why he wasn't savouring this moment. “Comrade General, when I visited you before I mentioned missing computer data relating to a man called Aleksis Romanenko.”

Greshko, like some old parrot, cocked his head and listened. What now? What links was this upstart Olsky trying to make?