Mazurka (56 page)

“Life would be easier if you told me,” Pagan said.

Kiss was quiet a moment. “I put it all together from nothing. It would only be fair to see you reconstruct it from nothing.”

Pagan shut his eyes, rubbed the lids. “Andres is going to fly a plane from Mossheim. He's going to enter Soviet airspace somehow. Then, presumably, he'll deliver some kind of bomb or rocket. Is that close enough?”

Kiss smiled. “You expect an answer to that?”

Pagan went on, “My guess is that he's going to strike a symbolic target, something that's going to displease the Soviets no end. I think he's more interested in damaging Soviet prestige than anything else.”

Soviet prestige, Kiss thought. He was thinking now of the fighters waiting in the Baltic cities, the men and women ready to rise up and do battle. He smiled. “You're still cold, Pagan.” And he remembered Pagan's story about how Romanenko had been used by the KGB, which now struck him as a preposterous bluff on the Englishman's part, a ploy to lure Kiss's secrets out of him. Well, if Pagan could play games, then so could he!

“You wouldn't tell me if I was warm anyway,” Pagan said. He gazed across the room at Kristina Vaska, who sat huddled and shivering, because there was a chill in the air at this time of day. She was pale and tired, as if all her energy had evaporated during that one moment of fury against Kiss. But it was more than a moment, Pagan thought. She'd carried it with her for years.

“How does he get an aeroplane? How does he manage to do that? Does he steal one?” Pagan asked these questions in the manner of a man thinking aloud. “How does he get inside a NATO base and steal a bloody plane, for Christ's sake?”

Mikhail Kiss shook his head. “You work it out, Pagan.”

“Inside help is the only way.”

“You're sure of that?”

“I'm not sure of anything. Especially the target.”

“Maybe there's no target,” Kiss said.

Pagan sat behind the desk, shut his eyes. He'd forgotten the last time he'd slept, the last time he'd lain down – and then it came back to him. It must have been the hours spent with Kristina.

He said, “No more games, Kiss. No more guessing games.”

“You're out of stamina, Pagan?”

“I've got stamina,” Pagan said. “At least enough to make another phonecall.”

“You've already called half the civilised world,” Kiss said. “Where this time? What's left?”

Frank Pagan reached for the receiver and called Directory Assistance. Without taking his eyes from Mikhail Kiss's face, he asked for the number of the Pentagon.

The Baltic

Andres Kiss, who had refuelled in the air over Gotland Island, a tricky manoeuvre he handled deftly, looked down on the grey-green waters of the Baltic. The F-16 carried 13,500 pounds of fuel, and he'd need every last pound of it if he was to get in and out again according to plan. As soon as he'd disengaged the F-16 from the airborne tanker, and seen the amber disconnect light on his panel, he suddenly pulled the nose of his aircraft up, simulating an out-of-control situation.

The plan called for him to broadcast an emergency message, which he now did. “Mayday, Mayday, LA Alpha 07, I've got a fire light.” And he continued his rapid rate of descent, plummeting to 10,000 feet, then 5,000, then 2,000. Down and down, rolling, swooping through cloud banks and seeing vapours disperse as he plunged.

“LA Alpha 07, state your position.”

Andres Kiss didn't reply to the voice in his headphones.

The request came again, and Andres ignored it a second time. He turned off the IFF switch, which would indicate to any radar probe that he'd hit the water below and was beyond any possibility of communication. Radar operators would assume that the emergency bleeper hadn't gone off because he hadn't ejected before the craft struck water.

So far, Andres thought, so good.

The plane was now about a hundred and twenty miles from the city of Riga in Latvia and travelling at six miles a minute. He kept descending, stabilising the craft when he was a mere hundred feet above the surface of the Baltic in Russian territorial waters. He could feel the effect of the water, a series of vibrations that disturbed the flight path of the craft. Using the Inertial Navigation Set, he flew east. As a back-up he had charts which would allow him to make visual verification of the information provided by the INS.

The island of Saaremaa, which the Soviets had seized from Estonia, loomed up to his left. A faint early morning haze hung around it. Andres Kiss thought of Mikhail now, and wondered what he was doing at this precise moment. He might be sitting in his sun-room, looking out into the garden. Or he might be pacing nervously, counting down the minutes.

Andres smiled, glanced down at the water, watched spray churn up from the surface. At this height he was flying below the point at which he might be picked up by the Soviet radar – provided the radar systems were operating. If the plan was running smoothly, they would not be. By flying this low, Andres wasn't taking any chances. If something had gone wrong inside the Soviet Union and the air defence systems
were
functioning normally, he'd still evade detection by radar.

Sun burned on the water, broken by the disturbed surface into millions of little sparkling lights. Andres checked the instrument panels again. He was travelling at three hundred and sixty knots per hour, a speed that conserved fuel. He was already far beyond the reach of any NATO aircraft that might have picked up his mayday signal. It was about ten minutes now to the Soviet mainland. Ten minutes through the Gulf of Riga – and then on, inevitably, towards Moscow.

Fredericksburg, Virginia

Galbraith had one of those numb moments of bewilderment, a time in which all brain activity seems suspended. What he was hearing made no immediate sense to him and might have been uttered in a foreign tongue. He opened his eyes – he'd been snoozing, dreaming of tropical places, sand dunes and palms and free-flying parrots and great date clusters – and heard the sound of Gary Iverson's voice coming through the telephone speaker on the bedside table.

“Name of God,” Galbraith muttered sleepily. “Tell me again.”

Iverson repeated what he'd said a moment ago, when Galbraith had first been stirred from his all-consuming slumber by the buzzing telephone.

“Fucking Epishev,” Galbraith said, tossing back the bed covers. “God damn his soul.”

“He erred, sir,” Iverson said, his voice made hollow by the echo in the speaker. “He must have assumed there were two men in the car. But the man who used Mikhail Kiss's telephone to reach the Pentagon was Frank Pagan –”

“Assume! We assume nothing in this business, Gary,” and Galbraith, stark naked, stepped out of bed. “We never assume. Assume is not in our vocabulary. Assume is a word for goddam politicians and priests. Assume is a word for people who have faith in things that cannot be seen, Gary. For example, you assumed Andres Kiss would obey Mikhail and leave Carl Sundbach untouched, did you not?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You see my point.” Galbraith, breathing hard and vowing anew to diet, climbed into a vast pair of pants with a waist wide enough to encompass two, perhaps three, slender adults. “What will we do now, Gary? What will we do?”

“A dark deed,” Iverson suggested quietly.

“It's a frightful thought,” Galbraith replied, though without much conviction. “There has been a traditional alliance, Gary, which I don't have to point out to you, between our two nations and their law-enforcement agencies. There has been shared information, even if in recent years there has been a falling-out between clandestine services in the two countries. Nobody trusts the Brits, do they? Well-intentioned men whose security has had the integrity of a colander. Nevertheless, Gary, the idea of
my
agency doing a dark deed on Frank Pagan …” Here Galbraith pulled on a tent-like white shirt. “I think I'll speak with this tenacious fellow and see if I can make him see sense, and if I can't do that, then perhaps – Well, I daresay the Clowns can have him, but only if they dine with discretion. We can't leave the man free to walk about, can we?”

“No,” Iverson said. “We can't do that.”

Galbraith, looking sorrowful, forced his feet into a pair of black leather pumps. He was hugely unhappy that Epishev had failed, because the onus was squarely back on him, and he didn't like that at all. He stood up, stamped his feet inside his shoes, and suddenly remembered the mention of something in the dossier he had on Colonel Epishev. Of course, the silly bastard was far-sighted and had to wear glasses, which he was seemingly too vain to do! Idiot vanity! Galbraith thought. If Epishev had worn his glasses as he was supposed to, then perhaps Frank Pagan wouldn't be around right now, doing damage, threatening the outcome of White Light.

Iverson said, “I took the liberty of arranging to meet Pagan at Grand Central Station, sir, an hour from now.”

Galbraith thought of the fast chopper that would hurl him through space at a speed of some two hundred miles an hour. He hated the deafening roar of the blades and the headache that always gripped him and the miserable sense of being tossed around in midair. But he knew of no faster way to Manhattan from Fredericksburg. His flying time would be approximately one hour and twenty minutes.

“I'll be there as quickly as I can,” he said.

Moscow

General Olsky handled the contents of the envelope as if they were fish that might or might not be dead. What he had in his hand were three American passports and fifty thousand American dollars. He flicked one of the passports open, stared inside it, then set it down. He tossed the bundle of money on to his desk in a dismissive fashion. He looked at Colonel Chebrikov.

“The woman actually
denies
knowing how the passports and the money came to be hidden under her floorboards?” Olsky asked.

“Yes,” said the Colonel.

“Even after it was pointed out to her that the passports bear photographs of herself and her two children?”

“She claims it's a malicious practical joke, General.”

“I don't see the joke at all,” Olsky remarked. “Perhaps Mrs Uvarova has a strange sense of humour. What about her husband, Colonel?”

“He's going to be brought in for questioning, General.”

“Has Deputy Minister Tikunov been informed that the family of one of his ‘trusted' officers has foreign money and foreign passports in its possession?”

Chebrikov said, “I imagined you'd prefer to make that call yourself, General.”

Olsky smiled. “How right you are,” he said.

New York City

It was five-thirty a.m. when Frank Pagan entered Grand Central Station. When he'd finally reached the Pentagon by telephone and had been put through to a duty officer there, he'd been told to hang up and wait. Somebody would call him back. What Pagan detected in this procedure was the kind of paranoia patented by the military mind. Ten minutes later, the telephone had rung in the kitchen of Mikhail Kiss's house and a voice that did not belong to the first duty officer asked Pagan for details.

It wasn't a situation in which details were exactly plentiful and Pagan's narrative, he realised, had about it a demented tone. Was he being relegated to that category of nuts who call the Pentagon or the CIA in Langley with schizoid tales to tell of dark plots? Was he just another lonely loony calling to hear himself speak?

Apparently he was taken with some seriousness, enough at least for the listener to suggest a rendezvous in a mutually suitable place, which turned out to be, at the suggestion of the listener, Grand Central Station. It wasn't altogether convenient to drive from Glen Cove back to Manhattan, but Pagan – forced by old habits – broke the speed limit all the way, using Kiss's large Mercedes instead of Kristina Vaska's Pacer, which reminded him of a fishbowl equipped with wheels. Whether Kristina was still in Glen Cove, or whether she'd gone by now, Pagan had no way of knowing. She'd wanted to come with him to Grand Central, an offer he flatly refused. He kept insisting, for his own benefit, that he didn't give a damn anyhow. Seal it and bury it, he told himself. Inter the whole bastard thing.
Put it in a coffin and deep-six it
.

He moved across the concourse, seeing a sparse gathering of early morning travellers, a couple of derelicts, a few drunks wondering what fibs to tell their wives who'd been waiting up all night in the suburbs. He'd been told to look for a man carrying a copy of
The Cleveland Plain Dealer
, a clandestine touch he found amusing. He stood outside a shuttered news-stand, which was the appointed place, and there he waited.

He gazed across the station, impatiently tapping a foot on the ground. He thought,
It began in a railway station and it may end in one, among the litter and the discarded tickets and muffled voices out of loudspeakers and the air that's dry and hard to breathe
. And then he was thinking of Edinburgh and a trail that had begun with the assassination of Romanenko. But it had begun long before that in a forgotten guerilla war in countries which, to all intents and purposes, had been erased forever from the minds of mapmakers.

He moved along the front of the news-stand, hearing the shunting of a locomotive nearby. Then he saw his contact, a tall stiff-backed man with a copy of
The Plain Dealer
held against his side. Pagan stepped forward to greet him. The man looked at Pagan, smiled. He had a pleasantly bland face and fair hair that was cut very short across his skull.

“Frank Pagan?”

Pagan nodded. The man, who had very pale blue eyes, studied Pagan's face a moment, as if he were searching for visible signs of lunacy. The man started to walk, and Pagan followed, thinking it apt that no name had been given, no handshake, no rank, no affiliation. Secrecy was a way of life in military circles. And when it was impossible to keep something secret, you did the next best thing, you stifled it in incomprehensible jargon.