The Sinkiang Executive

Chapter Fifteen: KIRINSKI

The little man stood at the top of the monument with snow on his head and his mouth in a shout and his fist raised, for a moment bearing aloft the great red disc of the sun as it travelled through the noon, low in the south. The early fog still lay across the city, half covering the nearer buildings and making them look insubstantial, as if the little man were shouting that the show was over and the scenery must go.

There was nobody else in the park.

Ten minutes ago a dog had come racing through the lean dark trunks of the trees, following some scent and then losing it and looking around in frustration before it pissed against a tree and trotted along the soot-black railings and disappeared, a clown too late for an audience. A clock chimed, then another, their notes muffled in the chill. The scene was a steel engraving, snow-white and frost-grey and silvered by the light in the sky, with only the deep red sun for colour. Everything was frozen: the trees were made of ice and looked as if they’d snap off if you shook them.

He came punctually and I moved my head to watch the three entrances to the park where the open gates made gaps I in the railings and the hedge. The streets were hidden except in these three places; I couldn’t see any vehicles out there, or anyone walking. Twice in the last half hour I’d heard a bus go past on the other side of the long north fence, the second one stopping not far from where I was standing now. This was a few minutes before he’d come into the park, his black fur hat set straight on his head and his hands dug into the pockets of his short paramilitary jacket. He walked fast, leaning backwards slightly with his black knee-boots kicking up the snow, his thin pointed face turning to left and right as if, like the dog, he’d lost his way.

Nearing the monument he stopped to look up at Lenin for a moment and then marched on again, taking a paper bag from his pocket and tossing crumbs around him, stopping again to watch the birds as they came down, dipping and wheeling from the stark black boughs. I’d seen quite a few dead sparrows on the snow when I’d come here; it was below freezing again today and there was no food for them.

I was standing between the hedge and the dark green hut where the gardeners kept their tools, and I’d come here from cover to cover and with great care, because there were windows overlooking the place. It had taken me nearly an hour and I was satisfied, having covered the last fifty yards through a tunnel formed between the hedge and the north fence. For the man to see me he must come quite close; for me to see him I only had to look through the leaves. He might not, of course, be Kirinski.

Just before midnight I had telephoned Chechevitsin, telling him that the inspector of mines had met with a fatal accident on his way to the engineers’ symposium, and unfortunately had not been able to study the material. This morning I had gone to the library to photocopy the Kirinski material and then to the consignee at Central Station and left the films there, taking thirty minutes to survey and effect security. The whole place had become a red alert area and I could not live peaceably among the good citizens of Yelingrad for weeks or longer if I had to: the opposition had been on to Gorodok and I’d come close to walking straight into a trap at the station and I could walk into one now when I left cover unless I was very careful The only bit of luck we’d had was last night out there in the snow: the KGB people would have brought that courier in alive for interrogation if it hadn’t been for those young clods in the army; it was typical soldier mentality — they’d pop one off at a bloody mouse if they saw one, just to feel that sexy hairspring flexing under the trigger, bang and you’re dead. But they’d stopped the rot because no one would get a word out of Gorodok now.

Two girls came into the park from the opposite end and walked arm in arm along the curving path with their heads down and their hands tucked into their sleeves. As they came along the railings I could hear their voices in the still winter air: one of them had been reprimanded by the factory manager for not reporting a jammed lathe a week ago … the same as Misha when she… but a serious matter if… her father to intercede… managers take them… fading away and I checked the man feeding the birds and then went a short distance along the fence and used a crack in the boards and saw them crossing the street and going into a cafe just past the first corner, fair enough, the park was a short cut for them.

When I came back I saw that he’d crumpled the paper bag into a ball and dropped it into the wire basket that sagged from its rusted support near the monument. Some of the birds flew up as he passed close to them, then settled again to squabble murderously over the crumbs. He was walking quickly round the frozen surface of the pond with that odd backward-leaning gait of his, and soon he passed the monument again and came towards the hut, keeping to the path between the wire hoops and for the first time looking at his watch. His face was raw with the cold and his eyes were watering as they glanced restlessly across the hedgerow and the open gates. His thin jutting nose moved like a pointer, and several times he seemed about to leave the park, but each time decided to stay.

Even his smallest movements had an intensity that gave them a false significance: when he pulled his raw red hand from its pocket to blow his nose I could have believed he was bringing out a gun instead of a handkerchief. He was so close now that I went into deeper cover, losing sight of him; but I could hear him moving, his boots kicking at the snow and his breath coming sharply as if the cold air was painful to inhale. He had stopped now, and there was a short silence until he began stamping his feet and letting out his breath in brief little puffs, until I had the feeling I was listening to an animal in the wilds of the countryside. I thought I heard a sound coming from his throat, a kind of low tuneless humming, but wasn’t sure; it could have been just that he found breathing painful at this temperature. The first clock chimed the quarter and he moved off again at once, his boots thudding along the path; and I went back to the gap in the hedge to watch him. He was impatient now, but stayed close to the monument, standing for a time underneath it and moving away to a distant point and looking back at it. It was nearly an hour before he gave up and left the park.

By this time my feet were numb and I slipped twice on the snow as I left cover and took up the tag at long distance. He walked quickly, passing two bars where he could have used a phone. Five people passed him and he spoke to none of them. Soon after leaving the park he crossed the street and made north for one block, walking past the Trabant that I’d left parked between an army staff car and a van with plain sides. A minute later he turned suddenly and went into a small restaurant with steamy windows and a chipped sign picturing a pig hanging above the doorway.

The heat hit me as I followed him in and took the stool next to him at the counter.

“A bowl of solyanka,” he told the woman.

“The same for me,” I said, and waited until she’d gone to the hatchway before I spoke again. “I suppose you thought I wasn’t coming.”

His whole body jerked as he swung his head to look at me.

“She told you I’d be alone,” he said softly and fiercely, his boot scraping on the rung of the stool as he twisted farther round to study me. His teeth were chattering as he blew into his hands but his eyes locked their gaze on me, angry and apprehensive.

“No,” I said, “she didn’t. And if she had, d’you think I’d believe her?”

He took a long breath and sagged suddenly, as if the anxiety of the past hour had been too much. But even now the tension in him remained, an inner shaking of nerves that he couldn’t stop.

Tell me your name,” he said suddenly, looking down. God knows why he asked me that; perhaps it occurred to him that this was just a crazy coincidence and I wasn’t the man he was meant to meet.

“Rashidov,” I told him.

Another breath went out of him. “Kirinski.”

“Turned out rather cold today,” I said because the fat woman was back with our bowls of soup, putting them down and brushing her wispy hair away from her face where it was sticking to the sweat: this place was more like a sauna bath than an eating-house.

We spooned our soup without talking. There was a phone at the end of the counter and I pushed my bowl away before he did and excused myself and went through the curtains at the rear and into the first cubicle, standing on the seat and finding a gap between the curtain rail and the bedraggled Christmas decorations that gave me a narrow field of vision that took in the top of his head. I let him have three minutes but he didn’t leave the stool so I went back and got some money out and put it on to the counter and said we were going.

After the heat of the restaurant the air was like cold water thrown in our faces and his teeth began chattering again as I took him half-way down the block and opened up the Trabant and got started, driving north and parallel with the Gromyko Prospekt for half a mile and turning across the waste ground alongside the railway lines with the mirror perfectly clear the whole way. There was a rubbish dump in the far corner and I turned the car and backed up and stopped with the rear against the fence and a good view through the windscreen.

“This stuff,” I said and reached under the seat, ‘ought to be kept somewhere safe. Where the hell did they train you?”

He swung his sharp head at me. “Who do you work for?”

“That’s none of your bloody business.” I was sorting it out, putting some of it back into the envelope: I was going to hang on to the gammas and the Monome-Dinome tables because I might conceivably pick up some kind of signal in somebody else’s hands before he could warn his base. The cypher drafts were no use but everything else looked interesting, even some of the airfield dispositions with the Chinese hieroglyphs because those bastards in London weren’t going to spring me and I’d have to try anything that came along.

“Have you got a pencil?” I asked him and he felt for one in his jacket and I hit the end of the barrel so fast that it almost broke his wrist because he cried out and went dead white and had to double up so as not to be sick while I opened the Walther and dropped the magazine out and threw it under the seat and lobbed the gun into the back of the car and spread out the top map in the Russian material and got out my felt pen.

“These airfields,” I said. “What’s their strength?”

He was trying to sit up straight but his wrist was still painful and all he wanted to do was nurse it and I got fed up because he was wasting time.

“It’s your own fault,” I said, “you shouldn’t be so bloody uncivilized. These are the only three airfields in the whole of this area without squadron designation and combat strength and I want to know about them, come on.”

His face was still white but he was making an effort now and looking down at the map. I think it was more shock than anything: they’re the cock o’ the north all the time they’ve got those piddling little toys in their pockets but as soon as you take them away they go to pieces, it’s always the same.

“Come on Kirinski for Christ’s sake I’m waiting.”

“Decoy airfields,” he said on a breath, “they’re decoys.”

“What the hell for, if they — ” then I got it: the whole of the Sino-Soviet border was an armed camp and they were keeping a hot war on ice and that meant a permanent state of military intelligence preparedness and that was why Kirinski was so busy working for both sides like this.

“What are these planes,” I asked him, “dummies?” It was one of the aerial photographs presumably taken by covert reconnaissance from the Chinese side and the two aircraft were standing in dispersal bays some distance from the hangars.

“We fly two planes from each field,” he said and got out his handkerchief while I watched him carefully. “Can you read Chinese?”

I didn’t answer. You never admit to knowledge of a foreign language and he ought to know that. Most of the sheets detailing Soviet installations and military strengths carried Mandarin hieroglyphs, and the Sinkiang-Mongolian-Chinese defences were annotated in Russian.

“Where do you cross the border, Kirinski?”

“At Zaysan.”

“What’s your cover?”

“You know what my — ”

“Answer my question.”

He hissed somerning through his teeth and took a breath and said:

“Geological engineer.”

He didn’t like this a bit: he was doubling for two camps across the border and had a nice comfortable apartment with a girl-friend installed and a protection agreement with the KGB and this bastard Rashidov had come along and rifled his safe and threatened to blow him if he didn’t behave. I could see his point but I wasn’t going to let him waste my time because as soon as London heard the courier was dead they’d belt out another signal through Chechevitsin and throw me into a new phase and it might not give me any leeway.

“How difficult is it for people to cross the border from dm side?”

“It’s impossible,” he said.

“Why?”

“The situation is sensitive.”

“Listen, Kirinski, when I ask you a question I want you to go on talking till you’ve told me all you know, you understand? I don’t want any more of your bloody monosyllables. What situation is sensitive and what does sensitive mean?”

He made that hissing noise again: I think he was still frozen stiff and of course his nerves were hitting an all-time high and there was something else: he was a proud man and he didn’t like people treading on him.

The total strength of the Red Army,” he said with careful articulation, “is one hundred and fifty divisions. Forty of those are deployed along the Chinese frontier. That is the situation and it is sensitive in terms of unpredictable flare-ups. Six months ago there was a battle on the Sinkiang border involving fifteen thousand troops who were carrying out field exercises. Two thousand were killed. Since that time the frontier crossings have come under very strict control, especially at Zaysan. I trust I have answered your question.”

“You’re getting the idea.” I checked through the rest of the Soviet stuff and slid it into the envelope because there wasn’t time now to ask him for translation from the Mandarin: I was going to freeze everything until I got a signal from Chechevitsin. “What was Opal Light?”

He looked down at the batch of sheets stapled together top and bottom, and I thought he wasn’t going to answer; then he looked away and said:

“It was a Chinese operation.”

“What sort? Come on, Kirinski.”

“It was directed at the Lop Nor missile installations security services, last November. Intelligence was obtained.”

I let it go at that because it looked like a closed file and London wouldn’t be interested in a Sino-Soviet mission: most of this stuff would probably go to the CIA and I didn’t expect them to find anything new because the Americans were far more concerned than the British with the Sino-Soviet confrontation and its potential for world war, and they had the field well covered.

I put the batch away and looked at the photographs again and put those away too and asked him; “Did you start working for the KGB first?”

Another fractional pause: this was an assault on his innermost privacy and he was feeling the exposure.

“Yes.”

“How long had you worked for them before you started working for Peking as well?”

Pause.

“Two years.”

“Is it the money?”

I didn’t think it could be anything else: there was no kind of motherland ideology involved because this man wasn’t a double agent for one organization he was doubling for two. The amount of material I’d found in his apartment was equally secret and equally substantial for each side, and if either side found out what he was doing he’d go sky-high and that was why I could control him like this, as long as I had the material.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes it was the money.”

I didn’t believe him but I didn’t think he was lying to deceive. He wasn’t the type to go for the money: there was too much tension, too much pride, and too much resistance to my attempts at dominance. The reasons why we go into this trade are varied and we never talk about it because it’s always personal — we do it for money or out of some buried loyalty to a flag or to express an ingrained sense of duplicity or simply because of the razor’s edge syndrome: the inability to live too far from the brink without getting bored or drunk or going round the bend for the want of a starting-point to distant horizons we hope never to reach. It’s convolute and involute and we don’t question even ourselves, especially ourselves, because we don’t want to come up with an answer we can’t live with.

I’d put Kirinski down as a psychopath. That is the type I know best, and for good reason.

“Does Liova work with you?”

He jerked his narrow head to look at me. “No.”

“Does she work for the KGB?”

“No. She is my wife, and that is all.”

“Your legal wife?”

A slight hesitation. “Yes.”

I didn’t go into it. The art of interrogation is a paradox: you learn more from the questions than the answers, if you know how to bring out those questions by your silences; you also learn more from the way the answers come than from what they purport to tell you. Most of them are deliberate lies and this is accepted by both parties, but lies will protect you only up to a point: the point where you produce so many of them that you get lost in the confusion of your own making; the truth is easily remembered because it exists, but lies demand a trained memory and the stress can become overwhelming. This again is paradoxical: the more you lie, the more you reveal the truth.

She wasn’t, for instance, his legal wife. Because of the hesitation.

“Does she have any connection with the KGB?”

“No. I’ve told you, she — ”

“Or any other police or intelligence or security organization?”

“No. None.”

“Is she afraid of anyone?”

“Of course not!”

“So she doesn’t need protection.”

“No.”

“Even the protection of a gun?”

His hesitations lasted only a fraction of a second but they were beautifully consistent.

“No.”

“All right. Now I want a general preliminary picture: your contacts with the KGB, your contacts with Peking, then liaison, couriers, communications and security background. Take your time.”

He hissed in his breath again and began pointing with that long nose of his like a parrot trapped in a cage and I watched his hands because they’d be the first sign of movement and at some stage in the interrogation he was going to try making a break for it.

I could feel the tension in him and it was communicable: I was getting on edge. There was something about this man that I couldn’t place, some extra dimension that explained the inner shaking of his nerves. All right, he knew I could blow him and he knew what they’d do to him as a result; but I’ve been in the company of men in the final stages of stress and I’ve been there myself and all I knew as I sat in the cramped confines of the Trabant with Alexei Kirinski beside me was that his tension was a part of him and not wholly induced.

“I have no regular contacts,” he said, shivering.

“Names,” I said, “come on.”

“But I tell you I — ”

“I want their names.”

He began making them up and I let him because their names wouldn’t mean a thing to me and he didn’t seem to know that: he wasn’t KGB himself because even those people are put through a modicum of training and he wasn’t even a beginner — you don’t just walk away from a missed rendezvous and settle for a bowl of soup without even looking behind you.

We worked at it for fifteen minutes and I didn’t interrupt except to goad him on, and after a time he picked up the tricks and started hesitating deliberately to make me believe I’d asked a sensitive question.

“There is no direct contact with Peking. I use couriers for material, through Yumen.”

“What about signals?”

He hesitated and for no reason: there was no equipment in his apartment and he could throw me another bunch of phony names and get away with it.

“I signal through a frontier post.”

“Both ways?”

“No.”

“Come on then — which way?”

“From here to Sinkiang.”

“What about the other way — look, I want you to go on talking.”

“The other way I use a contact in Yelingrad.”

With a transmitter and cyphers and onward transmission to his contacts in the KGB, so forth. I let him go on talking while I listened for the right lie in the wrong place and watched the scene through the windscreen. Only a dozen people had crossed the waste ground since we’d got here and only a few vehicles had come past the corner, all of them with chains on. The cold was coming into the car and slowly cancelling out the heat of our bodies and Kirinski began rubbing his hands together but his teeth went on chattering as he talked.

“How much money do they pay you?”

“Not very much.”

“How much?”

“Five hundred rubles a month.”

“This bonuses?”

“Bonuses? What kind?”

“For a special assignment, or special information. There must be bonuses.” It’s a major part of Russian economic thinking.

“I received an extra hundred rubles for the decoy airfield photographs on the Chinese side of the frontier.”

“What about Peking? How much do they pay?”

He was tremendously fast and caught my throat with a curving ridge-hand before I could block it and followed this with his elbow rising as my head came forward on the reflex but I avoided it and formed a four-finger eye shot with my left hand but it wasn’t any good because all that tension was coming out of him and he was like a wildcat and I stopped trying to do anything formal because any kind of reaction would have to be instinctive if I were going to get out of this alive.

The first thing he’d go for was the gun but the magazine was under the seat and he knew that. The second thing he’d go for was the envelope because without that stuff I couldn’t blow him and he knew mat too. At present there wasn’t time for him to go for either the gun or the envelope because I was catching up on the initiative and had his left arm in a clamp while I went for his face again. He was trying to get leverage against the dashboard with his foot and I saw the heel of his black leather boot gouge into the speedometer as he straightened his leg and got the pressure he needed and started to use it, his shoulder braced against my throat and his right hand darting for the eyes and missing and darting free again as I blocked him every time until he used a wedge-hand against the throat and half-succeeded: I began choking and brought my knee up and smashed it into his ribs and forced some of the pressure off.

The horn had sounded three or four times because we were milling inside the confines of the car and whatever we hit we smashed: the windscreen went and I saw his boot rip from the heel to the top because this stuff wasn’t safety glass. The envelope had slipped down between the driving-seat and the door and I freed my left hand and tried to push it under the seat but he saw what I was doing because if he couldn’t get the gun he’d settle for the envelope: it was all he really needed. The horn was sounding again and I realized I had my knee against it as he wrenched his arm free and drove a palm-hand downwards and connected with a shoulder-blade.

I tried three consecutive eye-darts and they fell short because my arm was half locked but they worried him and he spun sideways and got purchase again on the dashboard and kicked away from it and broke the seat frame and sent me on my back with the effect of a rabbit chop as my neck hit the edge of the rear seat: bright flashing lights and momentary paralysis, dangerous and I rolled over to miss his boot as it crashed down and ripped some of the seat fabric away, sensation of losing touch, sounds muted, felt him lurch across to the driver’s side as someone began shouting, which I didn’t understand unless it was the noise the horn had been making, face at the window and a gloved hand shooting out and trying to stop Kirinski as he hit the door open and pitched through and began running, knocking one of them down there were more people here and I got up and heard someone asking what had happened, was it a thief, so forth, down on my knees so I made a lot of effort and got up again, still choking because of the wedge-hand strike, still seeing flashes.

Men running and calling out stop thief stop thief and I told them no, it was just a quarrel that was all and someone said hospital and I made another effort and said no, I didn’t want a hospital. That would mean the police and statements and what I had to do was get away from here as soon as I could because he’d taken the envelope and that was going to change the whole situation: he’d let the KGB loose on me now because there was nothing to stop him.