‘This was a double event, as they say. One of the foreign policy advisers. They garotted him and his wife right in their dacha. It was his day off.’
‘What a way to spend a vacation.’ Meadows had always been prone to making sick remarks which slipped out before he could stop them.
M scowled at him, his faced twisted like a man who has tasted spoiled fish. ‘They scrawled Chushi Pravosudia over the mirror with the woman’s lipstick. I blame these serial-killer films for all the sensationalism.’ Then he turned to Bill Tanner. ‘I think we should ask Bory to come up. Make sure he knows we had no ulterior motive in keeping him waiting. I’d hate him to think we were pulling a psyop on him.’ By psyop, M meant psychological operation.
While Tanner was away, M told Meadows whom they were about to meet. ‘Boris Ivanovich Stepakov,’ he filled in the details, ‘head of their counterterrorist department. Lives outside the law, as it were. Reports only to the top. Has no dealings with the rest of the KGB. None of his files are on Centre’s mainframe computers. This is the man who asked for our help, and I trust him eighty per cent of the way.’
‘What about the other twenty per cent?’ Meadows asked.
‘We must always leave room for doubts. If there were no X factors, we would be obsolete. Accountants could do our work.’
‘I sometimes think accountants are taking over the world.’
‘Perhaps they are,’ M replied, and at that moment Bill Tanner returned, bringing with him the tall man with the long clownish face and a lick of blond hair which he constantly kept brushing back from his forehead.
‘You mind if I smoke?’ Boris Stepakov pulled a packet of Marlboro from the pocket of his shabby crumpled suit and lit a cigarette with a Zippo lighter. The lighter had the sword and shield KGB crest affixed to one side in gold and red. Stepakov threw it in the air and caught it. ‘A friend brought it in from LA,’ he laughed. ‘We couldn’t get such a thing, not even in the new Russia. Anyway, the crest is incorrect. We’ve removed the sword.’
‘Yes, but for how long?’ M asked.
Stepakov shrugged. ‘Who knows? History teaches us that man is basically a psychopath. He never learns. This is why history is circular. One day the sword will return.’
He did not want to talk in the hotel suite, and they understood that, for it was against all his training, so they went outside and walked along the quay in front of the hotel. M’s people surrounded them at a distance and Stepakov’s two men – the street fighter and the one who looked like Tweedledum – stayed very close, though just out of earshot.
‘We also tried to follow them,’ Stepakov said. ‘We had vans and two surveillance teams followed you,’ he nodded towards Nigsy Meadows. ‘The helicopter was large and powerful, a new version of the Mil Mi-12. What NATO calls a Homer. Its range is nearly seven hundred kilometres. They were very efficient. They even took out the man who drove your agents into Moscow.’
‘Mine, and yours, Bory.’ M had his head down as a chill wind blew along the quay. ‘You also infiltrated the operation.’
Stepakov nodded, then continued. ‘Lyko was murdered within half-an-hour of the drop, which means Chushi Pravosudia have close inside knowledge. It is also clear their links go right into the military and, almost certainly, as I have feared, KGB itself. Probably the Politburo and Central Committee also. But I still hold strong cards. There is a man, one of my men, who works deep within the military air traffic control. I think we have the flight plan of the Homer. Therefore, I think I know where they are.’
‘Out of Russia? Somewhere not far from here? One of the Scandinavian countries?’
Stepakov shook his head. ‘No, they are in Russia. But only just. In the forests close to the Finnish frontier. In the Arctic Circle.’
He told them the exact location. Two years ago, he continued, the Red Army had started to build a luxury hotel protected by forest high in the Arctic Circle. It was to have been used for officers of the special forces who do much training there under harsh winter conditions. ‘It was never completed – one of those things phased out even though a fortune had been spent, and many people had been relocated to work in the place. The army calls it the “Lost Horizon”. Intourist didn’t really want it, but it was passed to them. They did nothing. The staff lived there, but it was not a functional, going concern. Then Mosfilm asked to use it for a movie. They had many technicians flown up. A few stayed. I suspect these people are still there. Some, I believe, are controlled by Chushi Pravosudia. It makes a wonderful safe house. I should imagine they’re holding the poor Mr Penderek up there.’
‘Can we mount any kind of rescue from here?’ M asked, as though he already knew the answer.
‘I doubt if we can mount a rescue from anywhere. The only way in is by helicopter until the spring. The place is isolated. It looks like a monastery from the Middle Ages, but built of wood, not stone.’
‘Have you no way?’
Stepakov shrugged, tossing his head, holding it against the breeze as though to let the wind run through it to tame the unruly lock which fell across his forehead. ‘Only if I can convince some Spetsnaz senior officer to go – how do you say it? Out on a limb?’ The Spetsnaz are the Soviet Troops of Special Designation. The real élite, equal to SAS or Delta. Once more, Stepakov tossed his head in the wind. ‘But they are controlled by GRU, Military Intelligence.’
‘You have no levers?’ M’s voice was suddenly urgent. Stepakov shook his head.
‘I might be able to help you there.’ This time M sounded almost self-satisfied.
Several years before, James Bond had travelled to Los Angeles with orders to kill a man. This was both unusual and highly illegal in the great game played by superpowers. Contrary to popular belief, intelligence services are not in the assassination business, for it is counter-productive. If you know about an agent, or the leader of some network, there are more sophisticated things you can do to neutralise the threat. The first rule, however, is, better to live with the enemy you know than remove him with violence and risk a more cunning, undiscovered person succeeding him.
Certainly there have been revenge killings, but they are squalid affairs. Yes, there was foolish talk by officers of the CIA, putting up many ridiculous ways in which Fidel Castro could have been assassinated. But, in the main, killing is not an option.
The man Bond was sent to kill had been run as a double in London for nearly ten years. His demands had become more grandiose as each year went by. He gave less and wanted more. He had started to display all the symptoms of folie de grandeur.
When, at last, the storm was about to break and threaten him, he had been pushed over the edge by a woman. The beautiful girl with whom he had been living in London left him and ran to America, to LA. The man followed her and was doing foolish things, like creeping up to the house in which she sheltered, leaving flowers in the dark on the doorstep, telephoning her in the middle of the night. He was also telephoning the British Embassy in Washington, demanding to talk with the chief spook, making threats which would have caused much embarrassment to the British intelligence community. So Bond was dispatched to operate, without American sanction, in the United States.
He tracked the man down and killed him by running his car off the road in the Hollywood hills. He could still recall that night – the car turning over and over, its headlights strobing the darkness before it landed against rocks and blew up in a fireball.
On the following evening he engineered a casual meeting with the man this spy’s girl had run to. His name was Tony Adamus and he was a professional TV News cameraman. They dined together, and Bond made certain that neither he nor the girl suspected foul play in the spy’s death. He already knew the LAPD regarded it as an accident. They talked for a long time about Adamus’s work.
During the conversation, Adamus told him, ‘There’s nothing difficult about a studio cameraman’s job. He has to have a good memory and excellent reflexes, he must have a good eye so that he can focus the camera quickly and
correctly, good hearing to obey the orders that come from the director and he must be strong enough to move the ped or pedestal on which the camera is mounted.
‘The real skill in being a news cameraman is when you work in the field,’ Adamus had said. He was, naturally, a field man.
Bond was obsessed with the detail of other professional people’s lives. He also knew that it was best to know everything about journalism, for journalistic cover is often the most secure. On returning to the UK, he had gone out of his way to learn more about TV crews, cameramen and those who worked alongside them.
Now, on the large sound stage, the knowledge bore fruit. On the first day, Clive instructed them that they would be taping many people giving evidence, though the accused would not be present. The court was soon revealed to be a kind of military tribunal. Three senior officers sat in judgement while a prosecuting officer took turns with a defending officer in questioning clouds of witnesses.
Bond was amazed to see that Pete Natkowitz appeared at home with the sound equipment, swinging the big overhead sound boom on its silent mechanism and fine-tuning the words which came from the witnesses. Most of these were Russian, though there were some who were questioned and cross-questioned through interpreters. Clive said the final cut would be in Russian, though subtitles would be added so that the non-Russian people’s replies would be clear to an audience.
The first half-dozen witnesses were German. Each identified the absent accused as Josif Vorontsov. They all said that, in 1941, he was an SS-Unterscharführer in the Waffen-SS Special Duties Brigade, just as they evidenced the fact that on September 29th, 1941, he had been at the Babi Yar massacre. They had been there also, as soldiers. The prosecuting officer told the court these men had all been purged of their sins. No action would be taken against them. They had been given immunity.
These old soldiers of the Third Reich gave ghastly details of the massacre. Two of them wept as they told the story and one fainted and had to be revived by medical orderlies. They were shooting the video in black and white. Clive said it would give more credence to the final result. People remembered the Nuremberg trials when the Nazi leaders were accused, filmed in grainy black and white. Also the Israeli trial of Adolf Eichmann had been relayed to the world mainly in black and white. It was fitting. Psychologically the impact would be strong.
It was also horrific. Bond watched Natkowitz and Nina Bibikova and saw that, in spite of the fact they realised this was all a performance, they were deeply moved and disgusted by what they saw and heard. It was all convincing. You could hear the screams, the pleading and the bullets.
They completed the ‘testimony’ of the Germans by late afternoon. Then came the other witnesses – Jewish people, either very old or middle-aged, who had, supposedly, come up against Vorontsov in the death camp at Sobibór. If the Germans’ evidence had been harrowing on a scale of one to ten, the new evidence rated sixty.
By nine o’clock that night they had heard memories which could strip sanity to the bone. These old people described, in excruciating detail, the beatings, clubbings, stranglings – the casual violence meted out as daily normality in the death camp. After the first three witnesses, the mind became numb with revulsion. This was certainly death with everything as the director had warned.
Clive decreed they had time for one more. An old woman, supported by her equally aged husband, took the stand. They looked drained, haunted, as though living lives which had been taken away from them long ago. They gave their evidence in Russian, answering questions slowly. They had met in Sobibór and married later.
‘We did not expect to survive,’ the old woman said. ‘Even though we were still strong enough to be made into trusted prisoners, we did not dare hope for a life after the camp. Nobody remained trusted for long. Vorontsov, that man over there,’ she pointed with a trembling, aged finger, in the direction of the empty box, out of shot. By this time, as they all agreed, it was as though the shade of Josif Vorontsov stood there in reality.
‘That man. Vorontsov,’ the old woman stumbled over the words, ‘he made certain you did not remain trusted. One morning, we had two young girls assigned to our group. Our job was loathsome, for we had to help pick over the corpses for any jewellery or personal items that could be salvaged. These two girls were strong. In their twenties. They had worked on a farm, but they could not stand this. One of them began to retch, and this set off the other. Vorontsov was standing near the pile of bodies that morning. It was a gloomy day – every day was grim but today it was drizzling and worse. He . . . he gave an order to one of the guards.
‘The girls were dragged away. He considered them unfit for the job, so they were put in a special hut and used continuously for two days by the soldiers. On the third day they were dragged out. He had dressed them in some kind of finery, clothes taken from the dead, but considered sexually arousing. He paraded them in front of the whole camp. Then . . .’ she paused, unable to continue with the revolting way they had died. When she did manage to get the words out, everyone was shocked and stunned. It was one of the most horrific stories of atrocity Bond had ever heard. He could not even bear to picture it in his head and he blotted out the words, concentrating through the view-finder of the camera, obeying Clive’s trembling voice which came in through the headphones clamped over his ears. Clive told him to move in very close. ‘Get her head. That’s it. Right in. Now close on the lips. Just the eyes, nose and lips.’
Bond watched, seeing the lips moving but blocking out the words of her terrible description. And as he looked at this face, close in, he realised that, under the make-up, he saw something else which suddenly tangled his mind. His brow furrowed, his back straightened in involuntary reflex. His chest felt tight. He glanced towards Nina and saw that she was weeping, but her eyes were fixed on the old woman.
Behind the mask of this aged, haunted person, Bond saw laughing eyes and a young mouth, perfect lipstick and arched eyebrows. He knew who this broken old woman really was. Beyond the work of clever make-up artists with their latex, putty and paint, he could see the face of Emerald Lacy in the photograph that hung in the headquarters building in London – Emerald Lacy back in the sixties, telling some secret tale, leaning over the Xerox machine. Only then did he dimly recall that she was supposed to have been a wonderful amateur actress, and that theatre was a passion she had shared with Michael Brooks. His eyes shifted to the old Jew, the woman’s husband.
13
THE MAN FROM BARBAROSSA
‘The problems are incredibly complex. Byzantine really.’ Stepakov appeared hardly to have heard M’s offer of assistance. He spoke the word ‘Byzantine’ as though proud of his choice of English. They still walked along the quay near the Grand Hotel. The canal was a black sheet of glass, and what light there was made the buildings across the water look like grey cardboard cutouts. ‘The military are split. After all, the President promised a new country, and it seems to have slipped into chaos. He has promised a way forward through the Communist Party – so much for the Western belief that Communism has failed – but the disorganisation and hardship are worse than before. The army is unhappy. Some returned from Afghanistan to receive nothing, not even homes in which to live. The Americans have collective guilt over their returning troops from Vietnam. There is no collective guilt in Russia.’
‘But Misha will give you authority,’ M spoke soothingly, as though to give the KGB man confidence.
Stepakov flapped his arms. ‘Of course. Yes, the comrade President would give the order through me, but I have no idea whether the military would take any notice. Local commanders seem to be making their own rules.’
‘As I said,’ M put his face close to Stepakov’s ear, ‘I can help you. This would have to be done by Spetsnaz, wouldn’t it?’
‘They’re the only troops who could ensure a containment at the Lost Horizon, yes.’
‘Colonel Berzin,’ M screwed his eyes against the breeze. ‘Gleb Yakovlevich Berzin.’ Even his tone was cryptic. ‘Y
ou know him, Bory?’
‘Spetsnaz Training School commandant at Kirovograd? That son-of-a-bitch?’
‘Personally I know nothing of his ancestry.’ For a second M held the Russian with eyes bleak as an ice floe. ‘I do know that Colonel Berzin owes me a favour.’
‘He’s a general now. What the Americans would call hard-nosed. The course at Kirovograd has been made even more difficult since he’s been in charge. It was hell before him, now it is purgatory, hell, and a nightmare all at the same time.’
‘A general, eh? Come up in the world.’
‘Owes you a favour.’ Stepakov sounded as though he found that hard to believe, but he was not questioning.
‘I do assure you, Bory, that whatever his allegiances are now, there’s more than a ninety per cent chance that he’ll obey the President’s orders if you give him a message from me.’
‘You mean it? You’re not just hoping . . . ?’
‘Oh, I mean it. Whoever’s in control, Berzin will want to keep his job.’
‘You’re not telling me he’s an asset of your people?’
‘Hardly. Someone like Berzin would’ve been very difficult to control. No, he’s not an asset. But, as I say, give him a message, together with the President’s orders, and you should have no problem.’
‘And the message?’
‘Just tell him, “All I ask is a tall ship.” He should reply, “And a star to steer her by.”’
‘This is your poet, Masefield. I prefer Wordsworth.’ Stepakov’s mouth was fixed in the permanent clownlike smile that was also a look of despair.
If there had been light enough, the Russian might have detected a flush on M’s face. ‘Don’t know much about poetry,’ he growled. ‘Know what I like. Songs of the sea, that sort of thing. Just give Berzin the orders, then tell him what I said. Don’t even mention I said it.’
‘And he will obey the comrade President’s orders, no matter how he feels? Even if he’s allied to a possible military revolt?’