That thought brought home once again the enormity of what it was Cumming expected of him.
Paul’s only experience of Intelligence work had, till then, been the odd occasion at the front when some staff officer or other would arrive to throw his braided weight around. But that had always been the colonel’s business. By the time information had trickled down to his level, anything that remotely related to intelligence had been stripped out. All that ever reached him was couched in the sort of plain language even a junior officer could understand: in the morning you’ll be doing this or they need you to do that. And he’d do as he was told, not worrying about where the information had come from.
But he suspected that hadn’t been the sort intelligence with which Cumming dealt. Back at the front, it was more likely to be the result of simple observation or, as Paul often supposed, wishful thinking. No doubt they had other, more nefarious means of procuring information although he had never bothered himself over that. Not the kind that Cumming and Browning dealt in. A gentleman on a walking holiday might keep his eyes open for useful tid-bits; and it was one thing for Baden-Powell to draw butterflies out of Boer defences, or for Winston Churchill to pick up this or that piece of information while employed as a journalist. But the other kind of spying had always seemed to Paul to be somehow underhand. At least, not the sort of thing in which a gentleman would engage.
Such people existed, of course. Everyone had heard of Mata Hari, and poor Nurse Cavell, who probably hadn’t done anything at all but had still been shot for her pains. Yet even then he found it difficult to equate people like that — noble or ignoble — with someone like the man he had left in the alley. He could hardly be called a ‘spy’. To Paul’s way of thinking he was more akin to the kind of anarchists and socialists who had plagued Europe before the war, tossing their bombs at innocent passers-by in pursuit some unattainable pie-in-the-sky. But hadn’t it been exactly this sort of person who had turned the Russian order on its head? Perhaps the pie wasn’t as unattainable as he had thought.
The two bowler-hatted men disappeared below and the crew were readying to cast off. There was still no sign of the mysterious Hart and it dawned upon Paul that he was on his own. There was still time to bolt for the quay, but how would he explain that away? The ship’s officer had taken Paul’s ticket so Cumming would know he hadn’t missed the boat — and, more pertinently, taken Cumming’s money and not missed the boat.
The steamer’s engines began to turn and after a moment she slid away from the quay. Yarmouth receded and within a few minutes had sunk, like his stomach, into the water behind them. There were no lights to watch fade. Yarmouth had been blacked out. There might not have been any recent Zepplin raids but Yarmouth, he remembered, had suffered under the first attack back in 1915. People had been killed and they weren’t tempting providence by lighting an airship’s way for a second pass.
He turned away from the rail. It was always possible Hart had boarded the steamer before Paul had arrived or, failing that, planned to catch up with it in Hull. But if not — always assuming they didn’t get sunk by a German U-boat (for all he knew drowning through enemy action might be a hereditary trait) — Paul was going to have to make his own way from Helsingfors to the Russian border. And then to Petersburg. Or Petrograd, as he better get used to calling it. If he ever managed that, he would somehow have to find his cousin, Mikhail, a man he hadn’t seen for thirteen years and hadn’t cared much for when last he had.
Assuming Mikhail was still in Petrograd.
That his cousin had been paddling in political waters came as no surprise to Paul. It took no stretch of the imagination to superimpose the bigoted opinions of the boy Paul remembered onto a grown man, although he did wonder if Mikhail’s sister, Sofya, shared her brother’s views. It wasn’t quite as easy for Paul to picture Sofya as being anyhow different from the golden haired child of his memory. Paul’s uncle, Ivan Nikolayevich, would have been as reactionary as ever and just the sort of man Cumming could have used. But he was dead, so it had to be Mikhail or nothing. If Paul couldn’t find him, he supposed he would have to make for the nearest unit of the Czech Legion he could find.
He was aware that none of this left much room for manoeuvre. Cumming had seemed to think there was always the chance, given the fluid nature of the situation, that the Bolshevik regime might fall before Paul even got there. That would make things easier, of course, but then present him with a new set of circumstances. It had been made plain that he was expected to think on his feet, an idea he hadn’t much cared for. He had never possessed any great capacity for initiative. It hadn’t been required at school, and certainly not in the army. In the military one was told what to do and one had better do it, and sharpish. It didn’t do to stand around asking why, or suggesting that there might be a better way of doing it. He had got into the army’s way of doing things, and quite easily, and had assumed that was they way it always was. Now, after talking to Cumming and Browning, despite both men holding military rank, he wasn’t so sure. Their approach seemed to Paul barely coherent. He didn’t so much mind their attitude — exemplified by the sort of expressions they tossed across the desk like, that’s actually confidential and you must take this on trust, as he was quite willing to accept that one had to expect that sort of thing; they were brass, after all, and could be expected to guard jealously whatever secrets had been vouchsafed them. Some things weren’t for him to know. That was a prerogative of rank. What he did mind was his suspicion that the whole thing hadn’t been properly thought through. It all had the air of having been worked out on the back of an envelope. To begin with, having made the elementary mistake of confusing him with the other Paul Ross, one had to wonder what else they had got wrong. After all, he was carrying a sealed order requesting the Legion to act against the Bolsheviks. Bad enough to be caught with that at any time, he would have thought. But the country hadn’t been at war with the Bolsheviks when the plan had been devised; Intervention in Murmansk and the proposed landing at Archangel had changed that. Now they were at war and if he was caught he supposed he would be shot. That alone seemed to epitomise the back-of-an-envelope air of the whole scheme. No allowance made for a changed circumstance (why weren’t they thinking on their feet?) and too many suppositions made. If Paul’s time in the army had taught him anything, it was how the vague suppositions of military men, repeated often enough, had the capacity of firming up into what were seen as hardened facts. Given what he’d witnessed, he saw no reason to suspect that the same didn’t hold true for spymasters.
Wrapped in his greatcoat he moved to the bow once the dark outline of Yarmouth had disappeared. The coast, somewhere to port as they steamed north, was lost in the twilight. Now and then he saw a light, a farmhouse or some other building he supposed. Despite there not being much of a sea running, judging by the speed at which these lights passed, the steamer didn’t seem to be making much headway.