The Run Around

Chapter Six

Vasili Zenin realized there was a risk in leaving the bicycle he had rented from the Camden hirers without enclosing the wheels in the anti-thief chain they had demonstrated but decided it was necessary because he couldn’t waste time later unlocking it. He hoped it was the biggest risk he was going to have to take that day.

He parked it at the junction of Elsworthy Road with Primrose Hill Road, preparing himself carefully. He positioned the earphones of the Walkman precisely in place, switching on the Tchaikovsky tape, and then fixed the sweatband with even more precision, wishing he had a mirror to ensure both were as he wanted. He had been very particular over the fit of the running shoes, pleased at how comfortable they felt as he started jogging towards the park, breathing easily, arms pumping steadily as he moved: personal fitness is naturally a priority for Balashikha graduates and Zenin had always enjoyed running. It was the exercise sessions there and the lectured awareness of the popularity of jogging in the West that had given him the idea in the first place.

Zenin paced into the park near the top of the hill from which it gets its name, picking up the perimeter path furthest away from where the drop should have been made, wanting before he ventured anywhere near the marked place to make a far more thorough reconnaissance than he had on the previous occasion. There were actually three other joggers plodding around the lanes like he was, in shorts and singlet, and one was even wearing a Walkman. Zenin smiled, humming in time to the concerto, concentrating beyond them. It was emptier than he had expected from his earlier visit: a few people exercising their dogs, one or two sitting on benches and a couple lying prostrate upon the grass practically having sexual intercourse. Maybe, he thought, it heightened the pleasure to fuck in public. He turned left where the path veered to go parallel with Albert Terrace and past the sign from which he had learned bicycling was forbidden, finally with a frontal view, although slightly to his left, of the post and the bin. There was a man sitting on a bench about twenty feet away from the drop and a woman with a labrador actually at the spot: as he looked the animal cocked its leg against the lamp and Zenin’s face twisted in disgust at the thought that it might be fouling what he had to collect.

Johnson’s concentration was entirely upon the dead-letter box and it was Zenin’s snatching down immediately after the dog had urinated there – an unthinkable action because the man would have seen the animal do it – that alerted the Watcher. He hadn’t thought the pick-up would be made by a jogger and had let Zenin merge into the background of his consciousness as the Russian went by. Johnson grabbed the camera from its concealment beneath his jacket and managed three panicked exposures and then a more sharply focused shot of Zenin spurting away before getting up himself, stumbling in pursuit. Zenin left the park through the same exit Koretsky had used, running hard now up Primrose Hill Road.

Johnson hurried as fast as he considered he was safely able, slowing twice at Zenin’s obvious backward checks, gasping because of his weak chest by the time he got to the top of the hill. He did so just in time to see Zenin mount the bicycle in Elsworthy Road, jerking the camera up for one last attempt.

‘Fuck it!’ said Johnson. He’d known it was going to go badly like this: just known it! ‘Oh fuck it!’ he said again.

Elsworthy Road is a twisting, winding thoroughfare, so by the time Johnson reached it his quarry was completely out of sight. Expert that he was, the Watcher walked its entire length, wet with the perspiration of effort and annoyance by the time he reached the junction with Avenue Road. He saw the traffic jam backed up for several hundred yards and shook his head, in bitter awareness: the fact that he had been out-professionalized by a professional did bugger all to help.

A combination of normal bureaucratic delay and top level irritation – and therefore face-satisfying obstructiveness – at what MI5 considered arrogant and high-handed surveillance demands meant it was the following day before Charlie Muffin received Johnson’s report and the developed photographs. It took him only an hour to arrange the meeting with the about-to-retire Watcher.

‘I made a balls of it, Charlie. You don’t know how sorry I am,’ said Johnson, after they’d talked through in every way possible what had happened. They’d worked together before, always well. Knowing it was Charlie’s operation – which he had not until now – worsened Johnson’s remorse.

‘These things happen, mate,’ said Charlie, sympathetically.

‘I wanted to go out covered in glory and instead I leave covered in shit.’

‘What you did get confirms a lot: I’m grateful,’ said Charlie, sincerely. ‘It could have happened to anyone.’

‘It happened to me,’ said Johnson.

‘There have been worse cock-ups already, believe me,’ said Charlie. He wondered how many more holes-in-one Witherspoon had managed.

‘Any idea who he is?’

‘Not a clue.’

‘Or what the job is?’

‘Nope.’ There’d been eight responses to his embassy requests and none of them had meant a thing. Gale had replied from Moscow, too.

‘Be careful, Charlie. He’s good, bloody good.’

‘That’s what frightens me,’ admitted Charlie.

‘I’m giving the retirement party at the Brace of Pheasants,’ said the Watcher. ‘Any chance of your getting along?’

‘Ever known me miss a piss-up?’ said Charlie.

‘I am sorry,’ said Johnson, again.

‘A pint of beer and we’re even,’ assured Charlie.

‘I’d like to think it was as easy as that,’ said Johnson.

As he spoke Vasili Zenin was entering Terminal Two at London airport with the driving licence and passport which identified him as Henry Smale – and which fortunately the dog had missed peeing over – snug in his inside pocket. His ticket, however, was in the name of Peter Smith: he’d been lucky with the Swissair reservation and had decided it was an omen. He saw the pregnant woman ahead stumble, just before she fainted, and managed easily to switch to another passport line, to avoid becoming involved. Lucky again, he thought.

Because she was a member of the secretariat and therefore part of the official delegation, Sulafeh Nabulsi had a place on the platform but at the rear. The backs of those who were going to Geneva for the conference were against her but beyond she could see the faces of the hundreds of Palestinians gathered to hear what the current speaker was describing as an historic breakthrough in their demands for an independent homeland. Fools, she sneered, mentally. Worse than fools. Cowards. There was no struggle any more; no fight. Just a lot of ageing men posturing in camouflage fatigues, playing at being freedom fighters and using words like the actors they were. Most of the council at whose backs she was staring in well-concealed loathing each had a million dollars discreetly hidden in numbered Swiss bank accounts and would find it difficult to identify the muzzle of a Kalashnikov from its butt. And most definitely didn’t give a damn about the trusting idiots here whom they were deceiving at the final Tripoli assembly of the PLO with talk of a conference and a political settlement. Any more than they gave a damn about the Palestinians forgotten and rotting in the refugee camps of the Lebanon, target practice for any Shi’ite or Jew who felt like expending a bullet. None of them had even lived in a refugee camp, not like she had. At the age of nine, in the last hours of the 1973 Six Day War, Sulafeh had seen her grandfather shot in one by the Israelis, as a spy for Syria, which he had been. Four years later her mother and older brother had been blown up – accidentally said the later contemptuous report – when the Jews destroyed their house in retribution for a grenade attack upon a passing Israeli patrol. And she’d been raped in one. It had happened when she was fifteen and still a virgin. Her attacker had been one of the smirking clowns in a tiger uniform, like those smirking clowns in the audience in front of her, applauding and cheering every lie being told them. She’d fought as hard as she could, gouging at his face with her nails, and he’d punched her almost senseless and so finally she pretended to be unconscious when he tore at her pants and then drove himself into her, splitting her. And while he grunted and pumped above her she’d taken his own knife from his belt, halfway down his thighs, and put her arms around him in what he’d thought to be belated passion to be better able to stab him to death, plunging the knife into his back again and again like he’d plunged into her.

Sulafeh had an orgasm, doing it. She’d never had one since: certainly never during the countless couplings that had been necessary for her to insinuate and manoeuvre herself into the favour of the senior hierarchy to achieve the role she now occupied. She wondered if she might know the sensation again, at the moment of what was going to happen in Geneva. It was an often longed-for feeling.