The Russia House

CHAPTER 9

'Who on earth are Clive's new Americans?' I murmured to Ned as we assembled like early worshippers round Brock's tape recorder in the situation room.

The London clock said six. Victoria Street had not yet begun its morning growl. The squeaking of the spool sounded like a chorus of starlings as Brock wound the tape in place. It had arrived by courier half an hour ago, having travelled overland by bag to Helsinki, then by special plane to Northolt. If Ned had been willing to listen to the technological tempters, we could have avoided the whole costly process, for the Langley wizards were swearing by a new device that transmitted spoken word securely. But Ned was Ned and he preferred his own tried methods.

He sat at his desk and was putting his signature to a document which he was shielding with his hand. He folded the paper, put it in its envelope and scaled the flap before handing it to tall Emma, one of his assistants. By then I had given up expecting a reply, so that his vehemence startled me.

'They're bloody carpetbaggers,' he snapped.

'From Langley?'

'God knows. Security.'

'Whose?' I insisted.

He shook his head, too furious to answer. Was it the document he had just signed that was annoying him, or the presence of the American interlopers? There were two of them. Johnny from their London station was escorting them. They wore navy blazers and short hair, and they had a Mormon cleanliness that I found slightly revolting. Clive stood between them, but Bob had sat himself demonstratively at the far end of the room with Walter, who looked wretched – I supposed at first because of the hour. Even Johnny seemed discomfited by their presence, and so immediately was I. These dull, unfamiliar faces had no place at the heart of our operation, and at such a crucial moment. They were like a gathering of mourners in advance of an anticipated death. But whose? I looked again at Walter and my anxieties were compounded.

I looked again at the new Americans, so slight, so trim, so characterless. Security, Ned had said. Yet why? And why now? Why did they look at everyone except Walter? Why did Walter look at everyone except them? And why did Bob sit apart from them, and Johnny go on staring at his hands? I was grateful to have my thoughts interrupted.

We heard the boom of footsteps on wood stairs. Brock had started the recorder. We heard clunks and Barley's oath as he barked his back on the window frame. Then the shuffling of feet again as they clambered on to the rooftop.

It's a séance, I thought, as their first words reached us. Barley and Katya are addressing us from the great beyond. The immobile strangers with their executioners' faces were forgotten.

Ned was the only one of us with earphones. They made a difference, I later discovered when I tried them. You hear the Moscow doves shuffling on the gable and the rapid breathing inside Katya's voice. You hear the beating of your own joe's heart through the body mikes.

Brock played the whole rooftop scene before Ned ordered a break. Only our new Americans seemed unaffected. Their brown glances brushed each one of us but settled nowhere. Walter was blushing.

Brock played the dinner scene and still no one stirred: not a sigh or a creak or a hand clap, not even when he stopped the spool and wound it back.

Ned pulled off his earphones.

'Yakov Yefremovich, last name unknown, physicist, aged thirty in 1968, ergo born 1938,' he announced as he grabbed a pink trace request from the pile before him and scribbled on it. 'Walter, offers?'

Walter had to gather himself. He seemed distraught, and his voice had none of its usual flightiness. 'Yefrem, Soviet scientist, other names unknown, father of Yakov Yefremovich q.v., shot in Vorkuta after an uprising in the spring of '52,' he declared without looking at his pad. 'There can't be that many scientific Yefrems who were executed for an overdose of intelligence, even in dear Stalin's day,' he added rather pathetically.

It was absurd, but I fancied I saw tears in his eyes. Perhaps someone really has died, I thought, glancing once more at our two Mormons.

'Johnny?' said Ned, writing.

'Ned, we think we'll take Boris, other names unknown, widower, Professor of Humanities, Leningrad University, late 'sixties, one daughter Yekaterina,' said Johnny, still to his hands.

Ned seized another trace form, filled it in and tossed it into his out-tray like money he was pleased to throw away.

'Palfrey. Want to play?'

'Put me down for the Leningrad newspapers, will you please, Ned?' I said as airily as I could, given that Clive's Americans had turned their brown gaze full upon me. 'I'd like runners, starters and winners of the Mathematics Olympiad of 1952,' 1 said amid laughter. 'And for safety's sake perhaps you'd throw in '51 and '53 as well. And shall we add his academic medals, please, somewhere along the line? "He made candidate of sciences, he made doctor of sciences. He made everything, " she said. Can we have that, please? Thank you.'

When all the bids were in, Ned glared around for Emma to take the trace forms down to Registry. But that wasn't good enough for Walter who was suddenly determined to be counted - for, leaping to his feet, he marched fussily to Ned's desk, all five foot nothing of him, his little wrists flying out in front of him.

'I shall do all the ferreting myself,' he announced, in far too grand a tone, as he grabbed the pink bundle to his breast. 'This war is far too important to be left to our blue-rinse generals of Registry, irresistible though they may be.'

And I remember noticing how our Mormons watched him all the way to the door, then watched each other as we listened to his merry little heels prinking down the corridor. And I do not think I am speaking with hindsight when I tell you that my blood ran chill for Walter, without my having the smallest idea why.

'A breath of country air,' Ned told me onthe internal telephone an hour later when I was barely back at my desk at Head Office. 'Tell Clive I need you.'

'Then you'd better go, hadn't you?' said Clive, still closeted with his Mormons.

We had borrowed a fist Ford from the car pool. As Ned drove, he brushed aside my few attempts at conversation and handed me the file to read instead. We entered the Berkshire countryside but he still didn't talk. And when Brock rang on the car phone to give him some elliptical confirmation he required, he merely glunted, 'Then tell him,' and returned to his brooding.

We were forty miles from London, on the foulest planet of man's discovery. We were in the slums of modern science, where the grass is always nicely cut. The ancient gateposts were mastered by eroded sandstone lions. A polite in an in a brown sports jacket opened Ned's door. His colleague poked a detector underneath the chassis. Politely, they patted us both down.

'Taking the briefcase, are we, gentlemen?'

'Yes,' said Ned.

'Care to open it, sir?'

'No.'

'Dip it in the box, can we, gentlemen? We're not talking unexposed film, I presume, sir?'

'Please,' I said. 'Dip it in the box.'

We watched while they lowered the briefcase into what looked like a green coal bin, and took it out again.

'Thank you,' I said, taking it back.

'It's my pleasure, sir. Not at all, I'm sure.'

The blue van said FOLLOW ME. An Alsatian dog frowned at us from its barred rear window. The gates opened electronically and beyond them lay mounds of clipped grass like mass graves grown over. Olive downs stretched towards the sunset. A mushroom-shaped cloud would have looked entirely natural. We entered parkland. A pair of buzzards wheeled in the cloudless sky. High wire fenced off the hay fields. Smokeless brick buildings nestled in artful hollows. A noticeboard urged protective clothing in Zones D to K. A skull and crossbones said 'You Have Been Warned.' The van ahead of us was moving at a funeral's pace. We lumbered round a bend and saw empty tennis courts and aluminium towers. Lanes of coloured pipe jogged beside us, guiding us to a cluster of green sheds. At their centre, on a hilltop, stood the last vestige of the pre-nuclear age, a Berkshire cottage of brick and flint with 'Administrator' stencilled on the gate. A burly man came tripping down the crazy-paving path to greet us. He wore a blazer of British racing green and a tic with gold squash rackets on it, and a handkerchief shoved into his cuff

'You're from the Firm. Well done. I'm O'Mara. Which of you is who? I've told him to kick his heels in the lab till we whistle for him.'

'Good,' said Ned. O'Mara had grey-blond hair and an offhand regimental voice cracked by alcohol. His neck was puffy and his athlete's fingers were stained mahogany with nicotine. 'O'Mara keeps the long-haired scientists inline,' Ned had told me in one of our rare exchanges during the drive. 'He's half personnel, half security, all shit.'

The drawing-room had the air of being tended by Napoleonic prisoners of war. Even the bricks of the fireplace had been polished and the plaster lines between them picked out in loving white. We sat in rose-patterned armchairs drinking gin and tonic, lots of ice. Horse-brasses twinkled from the glistening black beams.

'Just come back from the States,' O'Mara recalled, as if accounting for our recent separation. He raised his glass and ducked his mouth to it, meeting it halfvay. 'You fellows go there a lot?'

'Occasionally,' said Ned.

'Now and then,' I said. 'When duty calls.'

'We send quite a few of our chaps out there on loan, actually. Oklahoma. Nevada. Utah. Most of them like it pretty well. A few get the heebie-jeebies, run for home.' He drank and took a moment to swallow. 'Visited their weapons laboratory at Livermore, out in California. Nice enough place. Decent guest house. Money galore. Asked us to attend a seminar on death. Bloody macabre if you think about it, but the shrinks seemed to believe it would do everybody good and the wines were extraordinary. I suppose if you're planning to consign large chunks of humanity to the flames you might as well know how it works.' He drank again, all the time in the world. The hilltop at that hour was a very quiet place. 'Surprising how many people hadn't given the subject much thought. Specially the young. The older ones were a bit more squeamish. They could remember the age of innocence, if it ever existed. You're aprompt fatality if you die straight off, and a soft one if you do it the slow way. I never realised. Gives a new meaning to the value of being at the centre of things, I suppose. Still, we're into the fourth generation now. Dulls the pangs. You chaps golfers?'

'No,' said Ned.

'I'm afraid not,' I said. 'I used to take lessons but they somehow never made much difference.'

'Marvellous courses but they made us hire bloody Noddy carts. Wouldn't be seen dead in the things over here.' He drank again, the same slow ritual. 'Wintle's an oddball,' he explained when he had swallowed. 'They're all oddballs but Wintle's got odder balls than most. He's done Socialism, he's done Jesus. Now he's into contemplation and Tai Chi. Married, thank God. Grammar school but talks proper. Three years to go.'

'How much have you told him?' Ned asked.

'They always think they're under suspicion. I've told him he isn't, and I've told him to keep his stupid mouth shut when it's over.'

'And do you think he will?' I asked.

O'Mara shook his head. 'Don't know how to, most of 'em, however hard we boot 'em.'

There was a knock at the door and Wintle came in, an eternal student of fifty-seven. He was tall but crooked, with a curly grey head that shot off at an angle, and an air of brilliance almost extinguished. He wore a sleeveless Fair Isle pullover, Oxford bags and moccasins. He sat with his knees together and held his sherry glass away from him like a chemical retort he wasn't sure of.

Ned had turned professional. His tantrums were set aside. 'We're in the business of tracking Soviet scientists,' he said, managing to make himself sound dull. 'Watching the snakes and ladders of their defence establishment. Nothing very sexy, I'm afraid.'

'So you're Intelligence,' said Wintle. 'I thought as much, though I didn't say anything.'

It occurred to me that he was a very lonely man.

'Mind your own fucking business what they are,' O'Mara advised him perfectly pleasantly. 'They're English and they've got a job to do, same as you.'

Ned fished a couple of typed sheets from a folder and handed them to Wintle, who put down his glass to take them. His hands had a way of finishing knuckles down and fingers curled, like a man begging to be freed.

'We're trying to maximalise some of our neglected old material,' Ned said, falling into a jargon he would otherwise have eschewed. 'This is an account of your debriefing when you returned from a visit to Akademgorodok in August, 1963. Do you remember a Major Vauxhall? It's not exactly a literary masterpiece but you mention the names of two or three Soviet scientists we'd be grateful to catch up with, if they're still around and you remember them.'

As if to protect himself from a gas attack, Wintle pulled on a pair of extraordinarily ugly steel-framed spectacles.

'As I recall that debriefing, Major Vauxhall gave me his word of honour that everything I said was entirely voluntary and confidential,' he declared with a didactic jerkiness. 'I am therefore very surprised to see my name and my words lying about in open Ministerial archives a full twenty-five years after the event.'

'Well it's the nearest you'll ever get to immortality, sport, so I should shut up and enjoy it,' O'Mara advised.

I interposed myself like somebody separating belligerents in a family row. If Wintle could just expand a little on the interviewer's rather bald account, I suggested. Maybe flesh out one or two of the Soviet scientists whose names are listed on the final page, and perhaps throw in some account of the Cambridge team while he was about it? If he wouldn't mind answering just one or two questions which might tilt the scales?

'"Team" is not a word I would use in this context, thank you,' Wintle retorted, pouncing on the word like some bony predator. 'Not on the British side anyway. Team suggests common purpose. We were a Cambridge group, yes. A team, no. Some went for the ride, some went for the self-aggrandisement. I refer particularly to Professor Callow who had a highly exaggerated opinion of his work on accelerators, since refuted.' His Birmingham accent had escaped from its confinement. 'A very small minority indeed had ideological motives. They happened to believe in science without borders. A free exchange of knowledge for the common benefit of mankind.'

'Wankers,' O'Mara explained to us helpfully.

'We'd the French there, Americans galore, the Swedes, Dutch, even one or two Germans,' Wintle continued, oblivious to O'Mara's jibe. 'All of them had hope, in my opinion, and the Russians had it in bucketfuls. It was us British who were dragging our feet. We still are.'

O'Mara groaned and took a restorative pull of gin. But Ned's good smile, even if a little battered, encouraged Wintle to run on.

'It was the height of the Khrushchev era, as you will doubtless recall. Kennedy this side', Khrushchev that side. A golden age was beckoning, said some. People in those days talked about Khrushchev very much as they talk of Gorbachev now, I'm sure. Though I do have to say that, in my opinion, our enthusiasm then was more genuine and spontaneous than the so-called enthusiasm now.'

O'Mara yawned and fixed his pouchy gaze disconcertingly upon myself.

'We told them whatever we knew. They did the same.' Wintle was saying as his voice gathered assurance. 'We read our papers. They read theirs. Callow didn't cut any ice, I'm bound to say. They rumbled him in no time. But we'd Panson on cybernetics and he flew the flag all right, and we had me. My modest lecture was quite a success, though I do say it myself. I haven't heard applause like it since, to be frank. I wouldn't be surprised if they still talk about it over there. The barricades came down so fast you could literally hear them crashing in the lecture hall. "Flow, not demarcation." That was our slogan. "Flow" wasn't the word for it either, not if you saw the vodka that was drunk at the late-night parties. Or the girls there. Or heard the chat. The KGB was listening, of course. We knew all about that. We'd had the pep talk before we left, though several objected to it. Not me, I'm a patriot. But there wasn't a blind thing that any of them could do, not their KGB and not ours.' He had evidently hit a favourite theme for he straightened himself to deliver a prepared speech. 'I'd like to add here that their KGB is greatly misjudged, in my opinion. I have it on good authority that the Soviet KGB has very frequently sheltered some of the most tolerant elements of the Soviet intelligentsia.'

'Jesus – well don't tell me ours hasn't,' O'Mara said.

'Furthermore I've no doubt whatever that the Soviet authorities very rightly argued that in any trade-off of scientific knowledge with the West, the Soviet Union had more to gain than lose.' Wintle's slanted head was switching from one to another of us like a railway signal, and his upturned hand was resting on his thigh in anguish. 'They had the culture too. None of your Arts-Sciences divide for them, thank you. They had the Renaissance dream of rounded man, still do have. I'm not much of a one for culture myself. I don't have the time. But it was all there for those who had the interest. And reasonably charged too, I understand. Some of the events were complimentary.'

Wintle needed to blow his nose. And to blow his nose Wintle needed first to spread his handkerchief on his knee, then poke it into operational mode with his fingertips. Ned seized upon the natural break.

'Well now, I wonder whether we could take a look at one or two of those Soviet scientists whose names you kindly gave to Major Vauxhall,' he suggested, taking the sheaf of papers I was holding out to him.

We had arrived at the moment we had come for. Of the four of us in the room, I suspected only Wintle was unaware of this, for O'Mara's yellowed eyes had lifted to Ned's face and he was studying him with a dyspeptic shrewdness.

Ned led with his discards, as I would have done. He had marked them for himself in green. Two were known to be dead, a third was in disgrace. He was testing Wintle's memory, rehearsing him for the real thing when it came. Sergey? said Wintle. My goodnessyes, Sergey! But what was his other name then? Popov? Popovich? That's right, Protopopov! Sergey Protopopov, engineer specialising in fuels!

Ned coaxed him patiently along, three names, a fourth, guiding his memory, exercising it: 'Well now, just think about him a second before you say no again. Really no? Okay. Let's try Savelyev.'

'Come again?'

Wintle's memory, I noticed, had the Englishman's embarrassment with Russian surnames. It preferred first names that it could anglicise.

'Savelyev,' Ned repeated. Again I caught O'Mara's eye upon him. Ned peered at the report in his hand, perhaps a mite too carelessly. 'That's it. Savelyev.' He spelt it. "'Young, idealistic, talkative, called himself a humanitarian. Working on particles, brought up in Leningrad." Those were your words, according to Major Vauxhall all those lifetimes ago. Anything more I might add? You didn't keep up with him, for instance? Savelyev?'

Wintle was smiling in marvel. 'Was that his name, then? Savelyev? Well I'm blowed. There you are. I'd forgotten. To me he's still Yakov, you see.'

'Fine. Yakov Savelyev. Remember his patronymic?'

Wintle shook his head, still smiling.

'Anything to add to your original description?'

We had to wait. Wintle had a different sense of time from ours. And to judge by his smirk, a different sense of humour.

'Very sensitive fellow, Yakov was. Wouldn't dare ask his questions in the plenum. Had to hang back and pluck your sleeve when it was over. "Excuse me, sir, but what do you think of so-and so?" Good questions, mind. A very cultural man, too, they say, in his way. I'm told he cut quite a dash at some of the poetry readings. And the art shows.'

Wintle's voice trailed off and I feared he was about to fabricate, Which is a thing people do often when they have run out of information but want to keep their ascendancy. But to my relief he was merely retrieving memories from his store - or rather milking them out of the ether with his upright fingers.

'Always going from one group to another, Yakov was,' he said, with the same irritating smile of superiority. 'Standing himself at the edge of a discussion, very earnest. Perching on the edge of a chair. There was some mystery about his father, I never knew what. They say he was a scientist too, but executed. Well a lot were, weren't they, scientists. They killed them off like fruit flies, I've read about it. If they didn't kill them, they kept them in prison. Tupolev, Petliakov, Korolev - some of their greatest stars of aircraft technology designed their best stuff in prison. Ramzin invented a new boiler for heat engines in prison. Their first rocketry research unit was set up in prison. Korolev ran it.'

'Bloody well done, old boy,' said O'Mara, bored again.

'Gave me this piece of rock,' Wintle continued.

And I saw his hand, upward on his knee again, opening and closing round the imaginary gift.

'Rock?' said Ned. 'Yakov gave it to you? Do you mean music? No, you mean a geological sample of some kind.'

'When we Westerners left Akadem,' Wintle resumed, as if launching himself and us upon an entirely new story, 'we stripped ourselves of our posessions. Literally. If you'd seen our group on that last day, you would not have believed it. We'd our Russian hosts crying their eyes out, hugging and embracing, flowers on the buses, even Callow was having a weep if you can believe it. And us Westerners unloading everything we had: books, papers, pens, watches, razors, toothpaste, even our toothbrushes. Gramophone records if we'd brought them. Spare underclothes, ties, shoes, shirts, socks, everything except the minimum we needed for our decency to fly home in. We didn't agree to do it. We hadn't even discussed it. It happened spontaneously. There was some did more, of course. Particularly the Americans, being impulsive. I heard of one fellow offering a marriage of convenience to a girl who was desperate to get out. I didn't do that. I wouldn't. I'm a patriot.'

'But you gave some of your goodies to Yakov,' Ned suggested, while he affected to write painstakingly in a diary.

'I started to, yes. It's a bit like feeding the birds in the park, handing out your treasures is. You pick the one who's not getting his share and you try to fatten him up. Besides, I'd taken to young Yakov, you couldn't help it, him being so soulful.'

The hand had frozen round the empty shape, the fingertips striving to unite. The other hand had risen to his brow and taken hold of a sizable pinch of flesh.

'"Here you are, Yakov," I said. "Don't be slow in coming forward. You're too shy for your own health, you are." I'd an electric shaver in those days. Plus batteries, transformer, all in a nice carrying case. But he didn't seem to be that comfortable with them. He put them aside, sort of thing, and kept shuffling about. Then I realised he was trying to give something to me. It was this rock, wrapped in newspaper. They'd no fancy wrapping, naturally. "It's a piece of my country," he says. "To thank you for your lecture," he says. He wanted me to love the good in it always, however bad it might sometimes seem from out side. Spoke a beautiful English, mind, better than half of us. I was a bit embarrassed, frankly, if you want to know. I kept that piece of old rock for very many years. Then my wife threw it out during one of her spring-cleans. I thought of writing to him sometimes, I never did. He was arrogant, mind, in his way. Well a lot of them were. I dare say we were in our way, too. We all thought science could rule the world. Well I suppose it does now, though not in the way it was meant to, I'm sure.'

'Did he write to you?' said Ned.

Wintle wondered about this for a long time. 'You can never tell, can you? You never know what's been stopped in the post. Or who by.'

From the briefcase I passed Ned the bunch of photographs. Ned passed them to Wintle while O'Mara watched. Wintle leafed through them and suddenly let out a cry.

'That's him! Yakov! The man who gave me the rock.' He thrust the picture back at Ned. 'Look for yourself! Look at those eyes! Then tell me he's not a dreamer!'

Extracted from the Leningrad evening paper dated 5th January 1954 and reconstituted by Photographic Section, Yakov Yefremovich Savelyev as a teenaged genius.

There were other names, and Ned took Wintle laboriously through each one of them, laying false trails, brushing over his tracks until he was satisfied that in Wintle's mind at least Savelyev meant no more than the rest.

'Clever of you to hide your trump in the middle of your hand,' O'Mara remarked as, glass in hand, he walked us down the drive to the car. 'Last time I heard of Savelyev he was running their testing range in darkest Kazakhstan, dreaming up ways to read their own telemetry without everyone reading it over their shoulder. What's he up to now? Selling the shop?'

It is not often I take pleasure in my work but our meeting and the place had sickened me, and O'Mara had sickened me more than both. It is not often that I seize someone by the arm either, and have to recoil, and loosen my grip.

'I take it you have signed the Official Secrets Act?' I asked him quietly enough.

'Practically wrote the bloody thing,' O'Mara retorted, very surprised.

'Then you will know that all knowledge that comes to you officially and all speculation based upon that knowledge are in the perpetual property of the Crown.' Another legal distortion, but never mind. I released him. 'So if you like your job here, and you are hoping for promotion, and if you are looking forward to your pension, I suggest you never think of this meeting again or of any name associated with it. Thank you so much for the gin. Goodbye.'

On the journey back, with the identification of Bluebird confirmed and phoned ahead of us in word code to the Russia House, Ned remained withdrawn. Yet when we reached Victoria Street he was suddenly determined not to let me go. 'You stick around,' he ordered me, and guided me ahead of him down the basement steps.

At first glance the scene in the situation room was one of purest joy. The centrepiece was Walter, poised like an artist before a whiteboard as big as he was, drawing up the details of Savelyev's life in coloured crayons. If he had been wearing a broad-brimmed hat and smock, he could not have looked more rakish. Only at second glance did I recall my eerie apprehensions of that morning.

Around him – which meant behind him, for the whiteboard was propped against the wall beneath the clocks – stood Brock and Bob, and Jack our cypher clerk, and Ned's girl Emma, and a senior girl called Pat who was one of the mainstays of Soviet Registry. They held glasses of champagne and each of them in his different way was smiling, though Bob's smile was more like a grimace of pain suppressed.

'A lonely decider,' Walter declaimed rhapsodically. He froze a moment as he heard us, but did not turn his head. 'A fifty-year-old achiever shaking his mid-life bars, looking at mortality and a wasted life. Well, aren't we all?'

He stood back. Then skipped forward again and chalked in a date. Then took a swig of champagne. And I sensed something ghoulish and scaring about him, like make-up on the dying.

'Living at their secret centre all his adult life,' he continued gaily. 'But keeping his mouth shut. Taking his own decisions, all by himself in the dark, bless him. Getting his own back on history if it kills him, which it probably will.' Another date, and the word OLYMPIAD. 'He's the vintage year. Any younger, he'd be brainwashed. Any older, he'd be looking for an old fart's sinecure.'

He drank, his back still turned to us. I glanced at Bob for enlightenment but he was looking studiously at the floor. I glanced at Ned. His eyes were on Walter but his face was expressionless. I glanced at Walter again and saw that his breath was coming to him in defiant gasps.

'I invented him, I'm sure I did,' Walter declared, seemingly oblivious to the dismay around him. 'I've been predicting him for years.' He wrote the words FATHER EXECUTED. 'Even after they'd drafted him, the poor lamb tried so hard to be good. He wasn't sneaky. He wasn't resentful. He had his doubts but, as scientists go, he was a good soldier. Until one day – bingo! He wakes up and discovers it's all a load of junk and he's wasted his genius on a bunch of incompetent gangsters and brought the world to the edge of ruin into the bargain.' He was writing in fierce strokes while the sweat ran down his temples: WORKING UNDER ROGOV AT 109 TESTING SITE KAZAKHSTAN. 'He doesn't know it but he's joined the great Russian male menopausal revolution of the 'eighties. He's had all the lies, he's had Stalin, the Khrushchev chink of light and the long dark of Brezhnev. But he's still got one last shot in him, one last menopausal chance to print himself on the world. And the new buzz-words are ringing in his ears: revolution from above, openness, peace,- change, courage, reconstruction. He's even being encouraged to revolt.'

He was writing faster than ever, shortwinded or not: TELEMETRY, ACCURACY. 'Where will they land?' he was asking rhetorically between gasps. 'How close will how many get to how many targets when? What's the expansion and temperature of the skin? What's gravity up to? Crucial questions and the Bluebird knows the answers. He knows because he's in charge of making the missiles talk while they go along – without the Americans hearing, which is his skill. Because he's contrived the encryption systems that dodge the American super-listeners in Turkey and mainland China. He sees all the answers in clear, before Brother Rogov fudges them for his lords and masters in Moscow. Which according to the Bluebird is Rogov's speciality. "Professor Vitaly Rogov is an arse-licking toady," he tells us in notebook two. A fair judgment. That's what Vitaly Rogov is. A verifiable, fully-paid-up, spineless, arse-licking toady, meeting his norms and earning his medals and his privileges. Who does that remind us of? No one. Certainly not our own dear Clive. So Bluebird blows his lid. He confesses his agony to Katya and Katya says, "Don't just whimper, do something." And by golly, he does it. He gives us every bloody thing he can lay his hands on. The Crown jewels doubled and re-doubled. Encryptions decrypted. Telemetry en clair. Retrospective code-breaks to help us check it out. The unbuggered head on truth, before it gets repainted for Moscow consumption. All right, he's potty. Who isn't, who's any good?' He took a last swig from his glass and I saw that the centre of his face was a crimson mass of pain and embarrassment and indignation. 'Life's a botch,' he explained, as he shoved the glass into my hand.

The next I knew, he had slipped past us up the stairs and we heard the steel doors successively open and slam shut behind him till he had reached the street.

'Walter was a liability,' Clive explained to me tersely next morning, when I bearded him. 'To us he was merely eccentric perhaps. But to others' – it was the nearest I had ever known him come to acknowledging the existence of sex. He quickly censored himself. 'I've given him to Training Section,' he continued with a return to his most frigid manner. 'He raised too many eyebrows on the other side.' He meant, on the other side of the Atlantic.

So Walter, wonderful Walter, disappeared and I was right, we never saw the Mormons again and Clive never once referred to them. Were they mere messengers from Langley, or had they formed their verdict and exacted their punishment? Were they from Langley at all, or from one of the mushrooming groups of initials that Ned had so objected to when he complained to Clive about the Bluebird distribution list? Or were they Ned's greatest of all pet hates - tame psychiatrists?

Whatever they were, the effect of them was felt all through the Russia House, and Walter's absence yawned at us like a shell-hole made by our best ally's guns. Bob felt it and was ashamed. Even hard-faced Johnny remained ill at ease.

'I'll want you nearer to the operation,' Ned told me.

It seemed a wretched consolation for Walter's disappearance.

'You're on edge again,' said Hannah as we walked.

It was lunchtime. Her office was close to Regent's Park. Sometimes on warm days we would share a sandwich together. Sometimes we even did a bit of zoo. Sometimes she gave the Cancer Institute a rest and we ended up in bed.

I asked after her husband, Derek. He was one ot the few subjects we had in common. Had Derek lost his temper again? Had he beaten her up? Sometimes, in the days when we had been full-time lovers, I used to think it was Derek who held us together. But today she didn't want to talk about Derek. She wanted to know why I was on edge.

'They sacked a man I rather liked,' I said. 'Well, not sacked, but threw him on the rubbish heap.'

'What did he do wrong?'

'Nothing at all. They just decided to see him in a different fight.'

'Why?'

'Because it suited them. They withdrew their tolerance of him in order to satisfy certain requirements.'

She thought about this. 'You mean that convention got the better of them,' she suggested. Like you, she was saying. Like us.

Why do I keep coming back to her, I wondered. To visit the scene of the crime? To seek, for the thousandth time, her absolution? Or do I visit her as we visit our old schools, trying to understand what happened to our youth?

Hannah is still a beautiful woman, which is a consolation. The greying and the broadening have yet to come. When I catch her face backlit, and glimpse her valiant, vulnerable smile, I see her as I saw her twenty years ago, and tell myself I have not ruined her after all. 'She's all right. Look at her. She's smiling and undamaged. It's Derek, not you, who kicks her around.'

But I am never sure. Never sure at all.

The Union Jack that had so enraged the dictator Stalin when he observed it from the battlements of the Kremlin dangled dispiritedly from its mast in the British Embassy forecourt. The cream-coloured palace behind it resembled an old wedding cake waiting to be cut, the river lay docile as the morning downpour flailed its oily back. At the iron gates two Russian policemen studied Barley's passport while the rain smeared the ink. The younger copied out his name. The elder dubiously compared his harrowed features with his photograph. Barley was wearing a drenched brown mackintosh. His hair was plastered to his scalp. He looked a little shorter than his usual height.

'Well – honestly, what a day!' cried the well-bred girl in a pleated tartan skirt, waiting in the lobby. 'Hullo, I'm Felicity. You are who I think you are, aren't you? A jolly wet Scott Blair? The Economic Counsellor is expecting you.'

'I thought the Economic people were in the other building.'

'Oh, that's Commercial. They're quite different.'

Barley followed her swinging tail up the ancestral staircase. As always when he entered a British mission, a sense of dislocation overtook him, but this morning it was absolute. The tuneless whistling came from his local paper boy in Hampstead. The huffing and bumping of the floor polisher was the Co-op milk van. It was eight in the morning, and official Britain was not yet officially awake. The Economic Counsellor was a stubby Scotsman with silver hair. His name was Craig.

'Mr. Blair, sir! How do you do? Sit you down! Do you take the tea or the coffee? They both taste the same, I'm afraid, but we're working on it. Gradually, but we'll get there.'

Seizing Barley's mackintosh, he impaled it on a Ministry of Works coat-tree. Above the desk a framed photograph showed the Queen in riding habit. A notice beside her warned that speech in this room was not secure. Felicity brought tea and Garibaldi biscuits. Craig talked vigorously, as if he couldn't wait to get rid of his news. His red face was shiny from shaving.

'Oh and I hear you've been having the most fantastic run around from those brigands in VAAP! Have they been making any sense at all? Are you getting anywhere, or are they just giving you the usual Moscow flannel? It's all makework here, you see. Seldom but seldom is anything actually transacted. The profit motive, somewhat like diligence, is unknown to them. It's all Brownie points and scratching one another's you-know-whats. The impossible combination, I always say, of incurable idleness harnessed to unattainable visions. The Ambassador used my very phrase in a despatch recently. No credit given, none asked. How do they ever come to grips, I ask you, with an economy built upon sloth, tribalism and hidden unemployment? Answer, they don't! When will they ever break free? What will happen if they do? Answer, God alone knows. I'm seeing the book-world here as a microcosm for their entire dilemma, follow me?'

He roared on until he seemed to decide that Barley and the microphones had had their fill. 'Well, I've surely relished our little conversation here this morning. You've given me much food for thought, I don't mind telling you. There's a great danger in our business of getting cut off from the source here. Will you allow me to pass you around a little now? Our Chancery people will never forgive me if I don't.'

With a nod of command, he led the way along a passage to a metal door with an evil eyehole in it. The door opened as they reached it and closed as Barley stepped inside.

Craig is your link, Ned had said. He's hell on earth but he'll take you to your leader.

Barley's first impression was that he was in a darkened ward, his next that the ward was a sauna, for the only light came from a comer of the floor and there was a smell of resin. Then he decided that the sauna was suspended for he detected a rocking underfoot.

Seating himself gingerly on a bridgechair, he discerned two figures behind a table. Above the first hung a curling poster of a Beefeater defending London Bridge. Above the second, Lake Windermere languished under a British Rail sunset.

'Bravo, Barley,' exclaimed a sturdy English voice, not unlike Ned's, from below the Beefeater. 'My name's Paddy, short for Patrick, and this gent is Cy. He's American.'

'Hi, Barley,' said Cy.

'We're just the local messenger boys here,' Paddy explained. 'We're rather limited in what we can do, naturally. Our main job is to supply the camels and hot meals. Ned sends his very special greetings. So does Clive. If they weren't so sullied they'd have come over and done their nail-biting with us. Hazard of the profession. Comes to us all, I'm afraid.'

As he spoke, the poor light released him. He was shaggy but lithe, with the craggy brows and faraway eyes of an explorer. Cy was sleek and urban and younger by a dozen years. Their four hands lay on a street map of Leningrad. Paddy's shirtcuffs were frayed. Cy's were drip dry.

'I'm to ask you whether you want to goon, by the by,' Paddy said, as if that were a rather good joke. 'If you want to bail out that's your good right and no hard feelings. Want to bail out? What do you say?'

'Zapadny will kill me,' Barley muttered.

'Why's that?'

'I'm his guest. He's footing my bill, fixing my programme.' Lifting his hand to his forehead, he scrubbed at it as a way of reviving communication with his brain. 'What do I tell him? I can't just up-sticks, bye-bye, I'm off to Leningrad. He'd think I was loony.'

'But you are saying Leningrad, not London?' Paddy persisted kindly enough.

'I haven't got a visa. I've got Moscow. I haven't got Leningrad.'

'But assuming.'

Another lengthy delay.

'I need to talk to him,' Barley said, as if that were an explanation.

'To Zapadny?'

'Goethe. Got to talk to him.'

Dragging the back of his right wrist across his mouth in one of his habitual gestures, Barley looked at it as if expecting blood. 'I won't lie to him,' he muttered.

'There's no question of your lying to him. Ned wants a partnership, not a deception.'

'That goes for us too,' said Cy.

'I won't be sly with him. I'll talk to him straight or not at all.'

'Ned wouldn't wish it any other way,' said Paddy. 'We want to give him everything he needs.'

'Us too,' said Cy.

'Potomac Boston, Incorporated, Barley, your new American trading partner,' Paddy proposed in a fresh voice, glancing at a paper before him. 'The head of their publishing operation is a Mr. Henziger, is that right?'

'J. P.,' Barley said.

'Ever met him?'

Barley shook his head and winced. 'Name on the contract,' he said.

'That the nearest you've got to him?'

'We've spoken on the phone a couple of times. Ned thought we ought to be heard on the transatlantic line. Cover.'

'But you've no mental portrait of him otherwise?' Paddy persisted, in the way he had of forcing clear replies even if it made a pedant of him. 'He's not a drawn character for you in some way?'

'He's a name with money and offices in Boston and he's a voice on the phone. That's all he's ever been.'

'And in your conversations with local third parties – with Zapadny, say – J. P. Henziger has not featured as some kind of horror figure? You haven't given him a false beard or a wooden leg or a lurid sex life? Nothing one might have to take into account if one were making him flesh, as it were?'

Barley considered the question but seemed to lose hold of it.

'No?' asked Paddy.

'No,' Barley said, and again unwisely shook his head.

'So a situation that might have arisen is this,' said Paddy. 'Mr. J. P. Henziger of Potomac Boston, young, dynamic, pushy, is presently to be found on holiday in Europe with his wife. It's the season. They are at this moment, let us say, at the Marski Hotel in Helsinki. Know the Marski?'

'I've had a drink there,' Barley said, as if he were ashamed of it.

'And in this impulsive American way they have, the Henzigers have taken it into their heads to make a lightning trip to Leningrad. Over to you, I think, Cy.'

Cy unlocked his smile and obliged. He had a sharp face when it came alive and an intelligent if snappish way of talking.

'The Henzigers take a three-day guided tour, Barley. Visas at the Finnish border, the guide, the bus, the whole nine yards. They're straightforward people, decent. This is Russia and it's their first time. Glasnost is news back home in Boston. He has money invested in you. Knowing you are in Moscow spending it, he requires you to drop everything, hurry to Leningrad, carry his bags for him and report progress. That's normal practice, typical of a young tycoon. You see a problem? Some way it doesn't play for you?'

Barley's head was clearing and his vision with it.

'No. It plays. I can make it work if you can.'

'First thing this morning UK time, J. P. calls your London office from the Marski, gets your machine,' Cy continued. 'J. P. does not talk to machines. An hour from now he telexes you care of Zapadny at VAAP, copy to Craig here at the British Embassy, Moscow, requesting you to meet with him this Friday at the Hotel Evropeiskaya, alias the Europe, Leningrad, which is where his tour-group is staying. Zapadny will wriggle, maybe raise a cry of pain. But since you are spending J. P.'s cash, it's our prediction Zapadny will have no choice but to bow to market forces. Figure?'

'Yes,' said Barley.

Paddy took back the story. 'If he's got any sense he'll help you get your visas changed. If he sulks, Wicklow can whisk them across to OVIR and they'll change them while he waits. You wouldn't make too much of it to Zapadny, in our view. You wouldn't grovel or apologise, not to Zapadny. You'd make a virtue of it. Tell him that's how life is lived these days in the fast lane.'

'J. P. Henziger is farnily,' Cy said. 'He's a fine officer. So's his,wife.' He stopped abruptly.

Like an umpire who has spotted a foul, Barley had flung out an arm and was pointing it at Paddy's chest.

'Hang on, you two! Hold your water. Half a mo! What use will either of them be, however fine they are, if they're riding round Leningrad locked in a bloody tour-bus all day?'

Paddy took only a moment to recover from this unexpccted onslaught. 'You tell him, Cy,' he said.

'Barley, on their arrival at the Hotel Europe Thursday evening Mrs. Henziger will contract a severe dose of Leningrad tummy. J.P. will have no taste for sightseeing while his lovely lady is laid low with the runs. He'll dig in with her at the hotel. No problem.'

Paddy set the lamp and power pack next to the map of Leningrad. Katya's three addresses were ringed in red.

It was late afternoon before Barley telephoned her, about the time when he reckoned she would be locking away her paperclips. He had taken a nap and followed it with a couple of Scotches to bring himself up to par. But when he started talking he discovered that his voice was too high, and he had to bring it down.

'Ah. Hullo! You got home all right,' he said, sounding like someone he'd never met. 'Train didn't turn into a pumpkin or anything?'

'Thank you, it was not a problem.'

'Great. Well, I just rang to find out, really. Yes. Say thank you for a marvellous evening. Mmhmh. And goodbye for the time being.'

'Thank you also. It was productive.'

'Hoped we might have had another chance to meet, you see. Trouble is, I've got to go to Leningrad. Some stupid bit of business has cropped up and made me change my plans.'

A prolonged silence. 'Then you must sit down,' she said.

Barley wondered which of them had gone mad. 'Why?'

'It is our custom, when we are preparing for a long journey, first to sit down. You are sitting now?'

He could hear the happiness in her voice and it made him happy too.

'I'm lying down, actually. Will that do?'

'I have not heard of it. You are supposed to sit on your luggage or a bench, sigh a little and then cross yourself. But I expect that lying down will have the same effect.'

'It does.'

'Will you come back to Moscow from Leningrad?'

'Well not on this trip. I think we'll fly straight back to school.'

'School?'

'England. Stupid expression of mine.'

'What does it denote?'

'Obligations. Immaturity. Ignorance. The usual English vices.'

'You have many obligations?'

'Suitcases of 'em. But I'm learning to sort them out. I actually said no yesterday and astonished everybody.'

'Why do you have to say no? Why not say yes? Perhaps they would be even more astonished.'

'Yes, well that was the trouble with last night, wasn't it? I never got round to talking about myself. We talked about you, the great poets down the ages, Mr. Gorbachev, publishing. But we left out the main topic. Me. I'll have to make a special trip just to come and bore you.'

'I am sure you will not bore me.'

'Is there anything I can bring you?'

'Please?'

'Next time I come. Any special wishes? An electric toothbrush? Paper curlers? More Jane Austen?'

A long delicious pause.

'I wish you a good journey, Barley,' she said.

The last lunch with Zapadny was a wake without a corpse. They sat fourteen, all men, the only guests in the enormous upstairs restaurant of an unfinished new hotel. Waiters brought food and vanished to the distant outskirts. Zapadny had to send scouts to find them. There was no drink and precious little conversation unless Barley and Zapadny contrived it between them. There was canned music of the 'fifties. There was a lot of hammering.

'But we have arranged a great party for you, Barley,' Zapadny protested. 'Vassily is bringing his drums, Victor will lend you his saxophone, a friend of mine who makes his own moonshine has promised us six bottles, there will be some mad painters and writers. It has all the makings of a most disreputable evening and you have the weekend to recover. Tell your American Potomac bastard to go to hell. We do not like you so serious.'

'Our tycoons are your bureaucrats, Alik. We ignore them at our peril. So do you.

'Zapadny's smile was neither warm nor forgiving. 'We even thought you might have lost your heart a little to one of our celebrated Moscow beauties. Can't the delicious Katya persuade you to stay?'

'Who's Katya?' Barley heard himself reply while he was still wondering why the ceiling hadn't fallen in.

A buzz of eager amusement rose from around the table.

'This is Moscow, Barley,' Zapadny reminded him, very pleased with himself. 'Nothing happens without something happening. The intelligentsia is small, we are all broke and local telephone calls are free. You cannot dine with Katya Orlova in an intimate and rather crazy restaurant without at least fifteen of us being advised of it next morning.'

'It was strictly business,' Barley said.

'Then why didn't you take Mr. Wicklow along with you?'

'He's much too young,' said Barley, and scored another peal of Russian merriment.

The night sleeper to Leningrad leaves Moscow at a few minutes before midnight, traditionally so that Russia's numberless bureaucrats may claim a second day's subsistence for the journey. The compartment had four berths, and Wicklow and Barley had the lower pair until a heavyweight blond lady insisted Barley exchange places with her. The fourth berth was occupied by a quiet man of apparent means who spoke elegant English and carried an air of private grief about him. First he wore a lawyer's dark suit, then he wore wildly striped pyjamas that would have graced a clown, but his mood did not brighten with his costume. There was more business when the blond lady refused to take off even her hat until the three men had removed themselves to the corridor. Harmony was restored when she called them back and, clad in a pink tracksuit with pompoms on the shoulders, fed them homemade pastries in gratitude for their gallantry. And when Barley produced whisky she was so impressed she made them eat her sausage too, insisting they drink the health of Mrs. Thatcher more than once.

'Where do you come from?' the sad man asked Barley across the divide as they settled for the night.

'London,' said Barley.

'London in England. Not from the moon, not from the stars, but London in England,' the sad man confirmed and, unlike Barley, soon appeared to fall asleep. But a couple of hours later as they pulled into a station, he resumed their conversation. 'Do you know where we are now?' he asked without bothering to establish whether Barley was awake.

'I don't think I do.'

'If Anna Karenina were travelling with us tonight and had her wits about her, this would be the place where she would abandon the unsatisfactory Vronsky.'

'Marvellous,' said Barley quite mystified. His whisky was gone but the sad man had Georgian brandy.

'It was a swamp before, it is a swamp today,' the sad man said. 'if you are studying the Russian disease, you must live in the Russian swamp.

'He was talking about Leningrad.