Somewhere he lost track of time and consciousness. He was in a room, the wooden interior of an izba, with a stove burning and the air warm and still; lying in a bed, buried under bedclothes. People came and went: a man and a woman; the woman bringing him bowls of soup and holding him gently upright to feed him; the man standing framed by the door, a watching presence like the eye of God. They didn’t speak to him.
Then Uncle Bog turned up.
‘I thought you were dead for sure,’ he said in a jolly manner. ‘You didn’t come back and I thought, that’s the end! But I said to myself: why should Radek have it all his own way? Why should he be king of the castle? So I came looking for you, and here I am!’
‘It wasn’t Radek,’ Kirov answered, and fell asleep.
When he woke up Bogdanov was still there, talking to the man and woman. He noticed the movement and came over to perch on the end of Kirov’s bed.
‘Concussion, shock and exposure damned near killed you,’ he explained cheerfully. ‘Fortunately no damage done. Cuts and grazes and your arm is bruised and may hurt for a while.’ He had no idea how Kirov had been injured. There was no bullet wound. Perhaps a branch had hit him, or he had fallen in dodging the shots. Bogdanov was unconcerned as long as the outcome was OK. But Kirov had seen his own death — or an incomplete version of it, like the bodies sometimes fished out of the Moskva with the evidence rotted from them. Murder, suicide, accident? Bogdanov was still speaking and Kirov gathered that the occupants of the izba had found him when they went to remove the fallen tree from the road. ‘Friends of Orlov. It gave them a shock. Bodies all over the place and you freezing to death and unconscious. They figured you for another friend of Orlov — don’t ask me why — and took you in. I think they’re cut up about Orlov being dead, he was a nice fellow by all accounts. Still that’s probably what saved you from Radek. If they hadn’t showed he might have finished you off.’
‘It wasn’t Radek.’
‘No? Whatever you say. Don’t you have enough enemies? Tell me about it another time.’ Bogdanov patted his arm and told him to take it easy. ‘Oh, and here’s some reading matter, selections from the American desk’s dossier on the Lee Foundation as requested from Tomsky. I’ve read it. They make pharmaceuticals. It’s no big deal.’
Night came and went in restlessness. The wooden house creaked. The wind rattled the shutters and a fall of snow, driven by a gale, crackled across the roof. An oil lamp burned smokily in one corner of the bedroom and threw shadows across the wall.
Kirov was feeling better the following morning. He woke early and his eyes fell upon the papers that Uncle Bog had left by the bedside, the file on the American company. He picked them up and perused them. They were much as Bogdanov had described. The file was thin because the KGB had a minimal involvement in the secrets of foreign pharmaceutical production: drugs were not strategic, and technically they were often harder to copy than electronics. Someone had once explained this difficulty to him. It wasn’t enough to have the recipe, you also had to know how to cook. That was why William Craig had been of interest: he knew how to cook. Most of the file consisted of financial data and market rumours that could have been gleaned from the press. None of it was secret. Some of it was even funny. The Lee Foundation was heavily enmeshed in lawsuits against distributors of bootleg versions of its products. They had their origin in Taiwan. Like Scherbatsky’s Chinese watch.
Bogdanov appeared at breakfast.
‘How goes it this morning, boss?’
‘OK.’
‘Fit to talk? I don’t want to rush you, but there are a lot of bad men after your blood and it doesn’t do to stay anywhere too long.’
‘I’m OK.’ Kirov struggled to a sitting position. His injured arm was still weak and throbbed when he used it. Bogdanov took a seat and waited patiently.
‘Why did you think Radek tried to kill me?’ Kirov asked at last. He heard the tremor in his voice. He told himself it would soon be all right.
‘I’ve got bad news for you.’
‘What?’
‘Scherbatsky is dead. They found his body out on the trail at Serebryanny Bor the day that you went skiing with Radek. Bullet in the back of the neck, straight out of the department textbooks. He was wearing his watch — you know the watch. There are no prizes for guessing whose prints are on it. How did they fix that?’
‘Scherbatsky offered it me as a gift. I must have touched it.’ Kirov thought back to the occasion he had visited Scherbatsky. The pleading and the nervousness. Radek must have promised a deal to tie Kirov to the housing fraud.
Bogdanov sighed and asked to sit down. ‘However he did it, Radek has you tied to Scherbatsky on the housing fraud, and now he has a case for murder. It’s a neat frame — who would have believed he could pull it off? And he wouldn’t have if you hadn’t got your eyes fixed on this Jewish thing instead of watching your back.’
‘Forget Radek.’
‘Radek wants you dead!’
Kirov shook his head. ‘He just wants my loyalty while he takes over from Grishin. He wouldn’t go through all the complications of his scheme if he intended to have me killed.’
‘Uh huh — then who was it?’
‘Heltai.’
‘Heltai?’ Bogdanov hesitated short of surprise. ‘I told you he was a Naughty Boy. But it makes some sort of sense.’
‘You’ve discovered something?’
‘Something — but God knows what it means. I did what you suggested, checked the manifest of the flight that took Yakovlevitch to America. There was an extra crew member on board, a flight attendant. The name is bogus but the description fits Heltai. I say he was on the plane and that he made sure our friend the Academician wasn’t going to survive the journey. Poisoned him, I guess: something to simulate a heart attack. First Yakovlevitch, then Orlov and an attempt to kill you. GRU are taking care of anyone who could throw light on what happened when Andropov died. What are they hiding? Murder?’
‘No — or at least not Andropov’s murder.’
‘Orlov told you that?’
‘Orlov didn’t know.’
‘Then what was so special about him?’
‘He was too curious,’ Kirov answered. Like me, he thought. Orlov was innocent enough to want to know the truth. He looked at Bogdanov who didn’t give a damn about the truth and who was hanging on to this business only because they were in so far that the safest course might be to see it through. That and maybe loyalty. Uncle Bog should throw in his lot with Radek, or make an arrangement with Heltai.
‘What was he curious about?’
‘Medical poisonings. He made some enquiries and found another half-dozen cases where patients had died of contaminated antibiotics or something similar. The victims were all Andropov supporters.’
‘Terrific,’ Bogdanov murmured. ‘I love it. But doesn’t that mean that someone was trying to kill Andropov?’
‘It was meant to.’
‘Then who was responsible if it wasn’t Chernenko and the rest of the old Brezhnev crowd?’
‘Andropov himself.’
He was tired. His head was spinning with images, speculations, possibilities, his sense of time adrift; the present like flotsam washed up by the tide of the past onto an empty beach. If only things would stay still!
Bogdanov could be heard in the next room; now a low murmur, now a burst of laughter as he entertained the man of the house with a dirty story. Between times he patrolled the outside of the izba and scanned the expanse of snow with binoculars or sat in a corner of the room fretting over a pack of cigarettes.