Kruchkov froze in the act of offering a cigarette. ‘Where did you get that one from?’ he asked.
‘I heard it was you or GRU.’
‘It was GRU.’ Kruchkov paused and his face cracked with a grin. ‘Fuck your mother! Good try, but not good enough! How the hell did you hear about that business?’
‘Just a rumour.’
‘Well, leave it at a rumour. And finish the cigarette downstairs. I can’t let you in any farther.’
‘You haven’t told me what you’re doing.’
‘Haven’t I? Well, don’t worry about it. It’s just a routine security audit. In and out overnight so that we don’t interrupt the flow of work.’
‘I don’t remember it happening before.’
‘No? Well, we don’t advertise. But believe me, it’s just routine. Would I be talking to you like this if it weren’t? Look, I’ve got to go. Apologies again for screwing up whatever you wanted to do. If it can wait until morning you’ll never know we’ve been. Give my love to Lara — ah, I’m forgetting, Lara isn’t living with you any more, is she?’
‘How did you know?’
Kruchkov looked at Kirov with a sympathy that didn’t hide a sense of superiority. I know something that you don’t know, it said, and Kirov had encountered it often enough to recognise that it usually masked cheap secrets that weren’t worth the having. But you could always be wrong. ‘Someone must have told me,’ Kruchkov was saying when Kirov interrupted him.
‘What is Ferenc Heltai like?’ he asked.
‘Heltai?’ Kruchkov answered in a long lingering way that had a dozen question marks from beginning to end. ‘Never heard of him.’
Bogdanov moaned that the Fire Brigade must have been in during the night. Someone had messed up the papers he kept strewn on his desk. ‘And not for the first time. Grishin has complained. Every night lately it’s the same. Have they been through your stuff?’
‘My papers are filed.’
Bogdanov picked up a bunch of telexes and leafed through them. ‘They’ve tried to put them back in order but it isn’t the way I left them.’
‘It wasn’t the Fire Brigade. At least, not last night. Special Investigations were in here.’
Bogdanov froze barely perceptibly, then casually put the papers back and asked, ‘I wonder what those spying bastards wanted?’ He turned to the subject of Kirov’s Bulgarian trip. ‘So tell me what happened. What did GRU turn up during their investigation?’ The questions flicked off his tongue like dandruff off the shoulders of his shiny suit, so easily that you wouldn’t know the answers were important. He wants to know and doesn’t want to know. He can’t handle the truth. Kirov felt a surge of annoyance and put it down to tiredness.
‘GRU gave the plant a clean bill of health. If there was any contamination of products from the Bulpharma plant, it didn’t arise at the production end. And I don’t believe that the plant is directly involved in the black market trade. GRU scared them and they’re still scared. They wouldn’t dare to divert production illegally.’
‘So the Bulgarian lead is a dead end?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Why not?’
Because the Bulgarians hunted him down? That wasn’t an explanation, it was an inevitability from the moment he had visited the plant. Perhaps the opposite. They had taken their time before picking him up. Except that it was standard procedure when handling an unknown quantity and, if they had identified him as a Soviet citizen, the Bulgarians weren’t going to wade in without checking first with the local referentura.
‘The Resident sits with the GRU station head.’
‘So?’
‘They take decisions together.’
‘Is that a serious comment? Are you telling me that GRU are running the referentura?’
‘It would explain why the Resident failed to report that a GRU team was investigating the plant.’
‘But why? Why would the Resident side with GRU? We’ve been kicking their arses for so many years it’s become a habit. You know how it works, you were in Washington.’
Kirov was in Washington where the GRU team were as clean and wholesome as poor relatives and the station head didn’t say boo without the approval of the KGB Resident. All in pursuance of the unwritten rule that said that the military was subordinate to the political even if the Americans didn’t have any political secrets you couldn’t read about in the newspapers. Remizov, who had been Resident at that time, wouldn’t even allow his army opposite number into his office.
But now things had changed, and in a changing world anything was possible.
He returned to his office and called registry to tap the computer for any record kept by 8th Department relating to the American, Craig. He also called the MVD Central Files Section in Ogaryov Street and put through the same request. Then he turned to his mail.
To: Colonel P. A. Kirov
12th Department
Second Chief Directorate
Committee of State Security
REFERENCE: STAFF MOVEMENTS — SPECIAL HOSPITAL KUNTSEVO
With regard to your enquiry concerning staff movements at the above institution for the period 9 February 1984 to 9 August 1984 covering personnel above the grade of Assistant Pharmacist, our records indicate the following:
Academician I.A. Yakovlevitch suspended from duty 13 February 1984
dismissed 27 April 1984 with loss of benefits emigrated from USSR 2 May 1984
deprived of citizenship 2 May 1984 present whereabouts not known.
Chief Pharmacist G.D. Orlov
resigned 5 May 1984 with preservation of benefit
reposted 7 May 1984 to No. 2 Pharmacy, Tula
present whereabouts No. 1Pharmacy, Cherepovets
(Signed) YU. A. BELINKOV
Directorate of Personnel (Special Section)
Main Hospital Administration
Moscow Region, RSFSR
‘Did you know that Yakovlevitch had been on the team at the Kremlin clinic?’ Bogdanov asked.
‘No.’
‘Was he treating Andropov?’
‘Work it out — he was suspended after Andropov’s death.’ Kirov put the paper down. The words continued to jump out of the page. Code — everything in code. There to be understood if only he possessed the key. He didn’t want to contemplate the alternative — that the Great Jewish Antibiotics Ring was without shape or form, a conspiracy looking for conspirators.
Bogdanov asked what ‘whereabouts unknown’ meant.
‘Yakovlevitch is in America.’
‘Then why “whereabouts unknown”?’
‘The hospital administration lost interest in him when he lost his pension rights. They don’t care where he is. Send a cable to the Washington Residency — for Yatsin’s eyes only — ask him for Yakovlevitch’s address.’
‘Isn’t that going to stir the shit?’ Bogdanov said flintily. ‘And what for? Where’s the connection with our business? Boss, this investigation is going all over the place.’
‘Send the cable.’
In the quiet of lunch-hour Kirov wrote down the possible theories.
First Theory:
The Great Jewish Antibiotics Ring is a simple black-market operation. Viktor Gusev was a Moscow racketeer with access to drugs from Bulgaria. He died from an accidental dose of contaminated antibiotics.
Evidence: Gusev’s flat and dacha show that he was living beyond his official income. Wholesale quantities of antibiotics where found at his apartment. The labels indicate that they came from Bulgaria. MVD had a tip-off that Gusev was the head of the racket.
Problems: Why was Gusev buying diamonds from the jeweller Ostrowsky? Why did Gusev and Ostrowsky’s daughter both die of contaminated antibiotics when a check at the plant indicates no production problems? Who broke into Gusev’s dacha and what were they looking for?