See Charlie Run

Chapter Twenty-Two

To inculcate a mentality which enables a sane person to kill, in dispassionate cold blood, requires a prolonged period of specialized psychological indoctrination: indeed the KGB relegate the practical instruction, the unarmed combat and weapon handling expertise and knowledge of debilitating drugs and poisons, to the very end of any training course. And without it being considered in any way an absurd contradiction, that indoctrination makes a case for the moral acceptability of the act in dictated circumstances while supporting the forbidden criminality of wanton, needless murder.

The Russian instruction – refined and perfected since the maniacal, mass slaughter days of Stalin and of people like Genrikh Yagoda, a trained pharmacist who once ran the forerunner to the KGB and enjoyed experimenting upon prisoners in Lubyanka – is regarded as the best by other intelligence agencies, all of which employ assassins.

A predominant reason making it superior to others is that Soviet psychologists are able fully to capitalize upon an attitude inherent and peculiar to Russians: a practically mystical love of country. The persistent theme throughout the lectures and debates, therefore, is that there is a positive duty to eliminate enemies of the state: to kill, for one’s country, is justified. It makes murder logical. Usually.

Olga Balan was a dedicated party member, an absolutely committed and loyal officer of the KGB but someone unable, no matter how hard she tried – and she tried very hard, spurred by that dedication and commitment – to forget her parents’ adherence to the Russian Orthodox faith and its inherited affect upon her. When she entered the service, she worried the stigma of their belief would militate against her: maybe even prevent her being accepted in the first place. That it didn’t only indicated an oversight in the background checks Olga knew were always carried out, and for a long time after her enlistment she lived in constant apprehension of the damaging fact emerging, to destroy her. Over the years that fear diminished, but the memories of the childhood church visits and the before-meal prayers and the learned-by-rote scriptures would not go away. Now those recollections stayed as an irritation, a dull but nevertheless nagging problem, like an aching tooth no dentistry could relieve. As someone who embraced communism completely she had no religion, of course. And had succeeded, as her KGB career progressed, in subjugating the dichotomy in almost everything. The exception was to kill.

Olga underwent her psychological indoctrination at a complex known as Balashikha, east of the Moscow ring road, just off Gofkosvkoye Schosse. At first there was positive revulsion – an absolute rejection of the justification thesis – so much so she expected her dismissal from the course, which would have meant her automatic ejection from the service. But then the escape occurred to her. Olga realized she was being trained in theory, not actual practice, for entry into the ultimately secret Department 8 of Directorate S of the First Chief Directorate: she could pretend.

She easily and unworriedly passed the assessments and the later, practical training with commendations, and upon her reference file in Dzerzhinsky Square she was listed as someone able – and capable – of killing. But only in theory. Until now: now it was no longer pretence. Now it was real: frighteningly real.

That very psychological indoctrination compounded her difficulty beyond any childhood religious prohibitions. Enemy of the State was always the requirement for the necessary justification. Was Irena Kozlov that? By defecting, she was, according to strict definition, but Olga could not accept the easy way out. Irena Kozlov had been tricked into crossing: so the formula didn’t fit.

Olga sat hunched at an outside table of the hotel at the beginning of the bridge, on the Macao side, the long-forgotten coffee cold in front of her, her mind suddenly blocked by the reflection, confronting at last something that she had been avoiding for too long.

Why didn’t Yuri suffer any agonized guilt?

Olga supposed that for his specialized department Yuri’s indoctrination had been much more exhaustive than hers but she knew one thing – the basic justification – remained the same. Which meant Yuri was calculatingly – dear God, how calculating! – prepared to murder, without any excuse. Her reasoning became jumbled, trying to hold different thoughts at the same time, irritated at mentally invoking a god in whom she didn’t believe and at the uncertainty she suddenly felt, facing up at last to the numbing callousness in someone she loved so much. Did she have the right, to think like this? Hadn’t she known – but refused to recognize – all along that Irena Kozlov was being manipulated towards her own murder? Of course she had. ‘You know I’ll do anything you want.’ Her own words – the long-ago undertaking after a night of lovemaking when he’d first proposed the idea – echoed in her mind, as if she could actually hear herself saying them. She’d known then what it meant and she’d conducted the entrapment interviews knowing what it meant. The only change to all the unobjected planning was that until twenty-four hours earlier it was going to be Yuri and not herself who carried out the act. So she was as culpable and as callous as he was: worse than him, even, someone prepared to be involved in murder providing it wasn’t her who had to pull the trigger or detonate the bomb.

Olga squeezed her eyes tightly against the tears of complete honesty, worried at attracting attention from the few people about her. She had to do it! She had to stop hiding behind mixed-up thoughts about a half-forgotten religion she didn’t profess and mixed-up thoughts about a morality she didn’t have: to seek out Irena Kozlov in the hotel she could clearly see across the other side of the river and pull the trigger of the special plastic assassin weapon that did not show up on airport security monitors, the Technical Division’s invention that employed compressed air to fire the killing, poison impregnated plastic bullets. Dear God – damn the readiness of the plea! – how much she hoped she could do it!

Calling upon the theory so well taught at Balashikha, Olga decided it wasn’t going to be easy, irrespective of her personal anxieties. From where she sat, the hotel appeared to dominate the far side of the bridge: anything or anyone crossing it would be fully visible all the time, like someone going over a drawbridge to a medieval castle. And Olga reckoned from the antipathy existing between them in Tokyo that Irena Kozlov was probably more likely to identify her than any other member of the Soviet embassy.

Which was only one of the difficulties. The Englishman, Charlie Muffin, had already proved his cleverness in getting Irena safely away from Japan. Professional, Yuri called the man, in reluctant admiration. Definitely someone who couldn’t be underestimated. And what back-up did the man have?

Olga sighed, thinking back to the training and its most basic precept: never move before a complete and thorough reconnaissance to learn everything possible about the target’s surroundings, and only move when you were sure of avoiding arrest or detection, after the act. She would not be able to do any of that, Olga accepted: the possibility of Irena spotting her was too great, and without reconnaissance she couldn’t properly plan the killing, and without a proper plan she couldn’t devise a guaranteed escape.

Oh dear God! she thought, too consumed by apprehension to care any longer about invoking the deity. She was numbed with fear, a physical sensation like the tingling which happened on bumping the sensitive part in the elbow, and there was another feeling, a welling sickness deep in her stomach, so real that she began to perspire, frightened she was going to vomit.

Olga stood, hurriedly spilling coins on to the table to pay for the coffee and starting off away from the bridge into the township. As she walked she told herself she was utilizing her tradecraft, losing herself in the jumble of streets instead of crossing directly to pursue Irena Kozlov from the hotel where a waiter or another guest might have remembered her later during any police enquiry, but she forced herself to admit the other, more important reason. She was delaying what she had to do, by any means she could find.

She crossed the colonial square beneath the unfocussed statues of Portuguese founders and plunged into the winding, haphazard alleyways beyond. Like Hong Kong, that other nearby relic of colonialism, Macao was being returned to Beijing and everywhere had the atmosphere of soon-to-leave neglect, like a house allowed to run into disrepair because its owners were about to move somewhere better. The warrens were crowded with stalls and people and noise and smells and bustle, and she let herself be jostled along by the tide, a piece of willing flotsam. Still going in the wrong direction.

There were cabs on the wider cross streets. She let two, empty, pass her and only tentatively hailed the next, but the driver was alert, jerking into the pavement, careless of upsetting both the pedallo driver and the tourists in his rickshaw, which shuddered to a halt against the pavement with obscenity screaming louder than the brakes.

Olga closed her eyes once more, against the scene this time, as if she did not want to see herself set off. Everything was an effort and she forcibly made it to look again. The car was just crossing the statued square: through a gap between the squared buildings Olga could see the yellow-stained river but not the bridge or the hotel beyond. No reconnaissance, no plan, no reconnaissance, no plan: the flaws repeated themselves in her mind and she frowned, trying to recall a familiar imagery and realized it was like the litanies she’d learned as a child in incense-filled churches with head-bowed parents, bribed with sweetmeats into obedience. The taxi went around the centrepiece directly in front of the bridge and then began its climb towards the far side and she saw, with the benefit of some elevation, that there were buildings beyond the hotel. She leaned forward, changing the address, gesturing to go by the Hyatt to the further cluster, the relief popping inside her. She would be far less conspicuous to anyone in the foyer arriving on foot than she would be by car.

The additional buildings appeared to be some sort of apartment complex. Olga paid the taxi off and for the benefit of the driver, making his turn to go back to the town, covered herself by appearing to enter the middle block. She waited until the car was actually on the bridge before emerging, going with reluctant slowness towards the hotel. She remained in the shadows of the last group of buildings, further protection to make her entry safely. Almost at once she was aware of the tourist coach crossing the bridge over which she had just come and smiled, at her good fortune. Olga didn’t supposedly believe in superstition any more than in religion, but she crossed her fingers and pressed them tight together, hoping the luck would last. She was aware for the first time how much her hands were sweating and instinctively pushed them down the sides of her skirt, to dry them. The wetness came back, immediately.

She timed her move with the confused disembarkation of a group she decided was German, letting herself be carried into the hotel as she had allowed herself earlier to be jostled through the alleys of Macao. Directly inside, she eased away, anxious not to be challenged by any tour leader. The reception area faced her, the elevators to her right. The ground area stretched away even further to the right, and Olga saw a magazine kiosk and moved towards it, eager for any excuse to orientate herself further. The move put her in the corner of the building, from which she could see the foyer completely to her left now, with the lounge and bar directly in front. There appeared to be a coffee shop alongside the lounge and another larger dining area to the far side of the main bar. She bought two English-language magazines – Newsweek and Cosmopolitan – for their protection and went cautiously into the lounge, intent on everyone around her, looking for the face of Irena Kozlov, briefly relieved at not locating the woman but not relaxing for a moment. There were no hide-away nooks or banquettes: the best was a table beside which some long-fingered plant emerged limp-wristed from an ornate tub, and Olga moved as quickly as she safely could towards it.

She did not know what she wanted when the waiter approached, just subduing the spurt of panic because to panic over something so inconsequential would have been ridiculous. She chose vodka, adding tonic as an afterthought, realizing she still hadn’t decided how to go about what she had to do and that she might need the excuse to remain there for a long time.

Olga moved the chair back slightly, better to gain the concealment of the plant, and held the Cosmopolitan in readiness for further concealment, if Irena suddenly appeared. She was appallingly exposed, Olga recognized, professionally: transgressing just about every instruction and lesson she’d ever learned. And badly placed, in addition. The lounge in which she sat was in an awkward part of the L-shaped floor design. At least half the immediate foyer area and the elevators from which Irena might emerge were virtually hidden from her view. And sitting where she was – minimally concealed – it was impossible to see beyond the bar, into the formal dining room. From either direction, Irena Kozlov could be upon her in seconds. The awareness brought a fresh burst of nerves, and Olga had to grip one hand over the other to quieten the shaking.

She sipped her drink, hoping it would help, striving to bring some rationale into her thinking. So she was here, in the hotel where Yuri three hours before had assured her Irena was hiding. Now what? She had to carry out some sort of survey – one more detailed than she had so far – but sitting for hours in a bar lounge wasn’t going to get done what she had to do: another way of hiding, in fact, like walking further than any precaution required into Macao. Room 525, Yuri said. Was that the way: stop hiding behind sagging pot-plants, go to the room with the special gun prepared for the moment Irena answered the door and fire, just once? All that was necessary, with the ricin capsule in the bullet tip, according to Yuri. One wound, anywhere, and the poison would kill her. What if it wasn’t Irena who came to the door? Panicked stupidity to expect her to be the one. There could be other people, an enclosing guard: so she could shoot her way in with the advantage of surprise, maybe take out one or two others but that was the maximum because the air pressure quickly dissipated from the gun, which was designed for the assassination of unsuspecting, unguarded victims. Which left her empty-handed, facing the rest of the protectors, and possibly with Irena safely bundled into another, unreachable room. Stupidity, she thought once more. The inner chant came again: no reconnaissance, no plan, no reconnaissance, no plan … What then? She didn’t know, Olga acknowledged, in a further sink of despair. She was sitting there with an assassin’s gun in the bag tightly held in front of her, intent to murder, but without the slightest idea how to go about it. Not wanting to go about it … Olga stifled the mental drift, bringing herself rigidly upright, as if a proper physical attitude would strengthen her weakening, inner resolve. She had to find a way: find a way to kill Irena and get back to Tokyo and Yuri and the life she knew they were going to have together.

In her room above, Irena Kozlov frowned at Charlie Muffin and said, in a now familiar demand: ‘When?’

‘Not today,’ said Charlie. ‘I thought you wanted to rest.’

‘Tomorrow?’ she said, ignoring the reminder.

‘Tomorrow,’ promised Charlie. With luck and a following wind, he thought: awkward bitch.

Relax, you’re safe: Yuri’s assurance. Irena said: ‘I don’t want to stay cooped up here that long. Can’t we go out?’

The summons from Boris Filiatov was waiting when Kozlov arrived at the embassy and Kozlov felt a flicker of unease: he’d forgotten momentarily how Olga had involved the Rezident and wished he’d had time to prepare. He actually considered delaying, to prepare a story, but he was already late and decided against it, not wanting to exacerbate any problem.

‘I have had difficulty locating you: and your wife.’ The challenge came without any preliminaries, as soon as Kozlov entered the office.

‘The surveillance upon the Americans. And the British,’ said Kozlov, cautiously. ‘It’s recorded in the log.’

‘I know what’s recorded in the log,’ said the Rezident. ‘It appears to have become a lengthy operation.’

‘Moscow considers it important,’ said Kozlov, falling back on the rehearsed defence. Filiatov didn’t appear to be impressed.

‘Where is your wife?’ asked the Rezident.

‘She made her own log entry,’ said Kozlov, uncomfortably.

‘Where do you believe her to be?’

‘Conducting surveillance upon the British.’

‘Where?’

Kozlov shrugged, needing time. Seeking safety, Kozlov said: ‘My wife and I are working separately … like the log says. I have remained with the American surveillance … my wife has transferred to the British observation. I do not know her specific whereabouts in the city.’ He would have liked it to have sounded better but maybe the vague uncertainty was more convincing.

‘You’ve not discussed the British operation in detail, then?’

‘No,’ said Kozlov, restricting his answer. He would have to be very careful: the doubts of the stupid, fat slob were obvious.

Throwing out a lure, in the hope of discovering what she might have already transmitted to Moscow, Filiatov said: ‘Have you discussed these operations with Comrade Balan?’

‘Orders do not allow me to discuss elsewhere any conversation I might have had with Comrade Balan,’ said Kozlov, formally.

Filiatov’s face went taut. He said: ‘Comrade Balan also appears absent from the embassy.’

‘I am unaware of anything involving Comrade Balan’s movements,’ said Kozlov, still formal. That might be difficult to explain later, but it was safer than trying to improvise.

‘From today surveillance will be suspended, upon both the Americans and the British,’ said Filiatov. It was a positive decision he could make, without committing himself too far if Olga Balan’s doubts proved unfounded.

Kozlov was about to acquiese, because it didn’t matter any longer, but then realized it would be a mistake. ‘It had the direct approval of Moscow,’ he said, the other familiar defence.

‘I have the power, as Rezident,’ announced Filiatov.

Pompous fool, thought Kozlov: the fact that Filiatov was prepared to invoke the authority showed how well Olga had sowed the seeds. He said: ‘As you wish.’

‘And I would like the fullest report on what’s been achieved,’ insisted Filiatov.

Which meant that so far the man hadn’t communicated with Moscow, gauged Kozlov: nor would he, until he had the file, because Filiatov was a man who used bureaucracy like protective armour. ‘It will take me some time,’ said Kozlov, seeing a way of holding the other man off from becoming an additional difficulty.

‘As soon as possible,’ insisted Filiatov.

Hurry, Olga, hurry, thought Kozlov.

‘It’s only circumstantial,’ insisted Harkness.

‘Dovetails with everything Charlie said,’ argued the Director, reading from the account that had arrived from Germany. ‘Messy … in Bonn … and the date’s right …’ He looked up. ‘Harry Bales, one of the toughest hawks in the American Senate, touring NATO installations and making a lot of waves about increasing troop strength to confront the Warsaw Pact. That dovetails, too.’

‘I think it’s circumstantial,’ repeated the deputy.

‘I think Charlie’s working well,’ said Wilson.