Gant's eyes widened again. He was thoughtful for a moment, and then he said: 'What happens to you guys, after I lift out of there?' His voice was quiet, breathy, as if he already knew the answer.
'It does not matter,' Baranovich said softly. His expression betrayed a sympathy for his visitor that the American could not comprehend.
'The hell it doesn't!' Gant said, stepping back, his arms raised at his sides. 'Hell!' He turned away from the Russian, his shoulders hunched, then turned back and said, waving his arm before him: 'You guys, all of you — you're so damn willing to die, I don't understand! Don't you resent those guys in London, ordering your deaths?'
Baranovich was silent for a long time, then he said: 'It is easy for you to feel indignant, Mr. Gant. You are an American. Any order that you are given is a source of resentment, is that not so? You are a free man…' Gant smiled cynically, and Baranovich seemed angered by his expression. 'You are free! I am not. There is a difference. If I resent the men in London who are ordering me to die, then it is a small thing when compared with my — resentment of the KGB!' Baranovich was staring down at the map with unseeing eyes, his features strained, his hands knuckled on the table, so that the heavy blue veins stood out like ropes. It was a long time before he straightened, and was able to smile at Gant.
'I'm sorry…' Gant began.
'Nonsense. Why should you be aware of — our little problems? Now, shall we go over the armament of the plane again. Luckily, for your purposes at least, they will be concerned to use air-to-air missiles in the first trial, not ground-attack weapons.'
He waved Gant back to his chair. 'Please smoke,' he said. 'We don't want you coughing amateurishly at the gate, do we?' His eyes had recovered their smile.
The beat of the rotors over his head had become almost inaudible to Kontarsky during the flight time from Moscow. Now, at ten o'clock, they were more than half way to Bilyarsk, flowing over the moonlit, silvered country below, marked by the lights of the scattered villages and collective farms, sliced by the beams of the occasional truck or car on the road between Gorky and Kazan, which they were, at that point, paralleling. The helicopter seat was comfortable in the interior of the MIL MI-8. Behind Kontarsky as he sat behind the pilot and co-pilot, were seats for twenty-eight more passengers. Only four of the seats were occupied, by Kontarsky's personal guard, a male secretary and a classified radio operator — all of them were KGB staff.
Kontarsky was sleepy, despite the tension within him. He had delayed leaving for as long as possible, in order that he could arrive in Bilyarsk with at least some information concerning the identity, and therefore the mission, of the man who had passed through traffic controls at Moscow, Gorky, and Kazan as Glazunov. The result of Priabin's investigations was — nothing. True, they had found the tail-car, a few miles beyond the turn-off to Bilyarsk; true, also, that they had found the overturned truck and the crushed body of Pavel Upenskoy ten miles further down the road to Kuybyshev. There was no sign of the second man. Therefore, with a nauseous, logical certainty, Kontarsky and Priabin had been faced with the knowledge that the second man was on his way, on foot, or by some alternative transport, to Bilyarsk. The old man at the warehouse had died almost as soon as they began to beat his knowledge out of him. Frail, weak heart. Kontarsky was still angry at such unfastidious waste.
The man's photograph had been transmitted to Bilyarsk, and the security guard alerted. Kontarsky had panicked himself into flying at once to Bilyarsk, to take personal charge of the counter-measures.
He lit yet another cigarette, having glanced over his shoulder, at the radio operator sitting before his console. The man, as if telepathically aware that his chief's eyes were on him, shook his head mournfully. Kontarsky turned back, facing forward in the helicopter again, staring at the helmeted heads in front of him, as if they might provide some inspiration. There was the taste of fear in the back of his throat. He brushed a hand across his eyebrows nervously. He knew there would be no sleep for him until the trials were successfully completed. He felt the common KGB impotence of having to rely upon computers, upon the whole huge unwieldy apparatus of the security service for results.
At that moment, Priabin was gaining access to the central records computer in Dzerzhinsky Street, a priority request for computer time. He was searching for a man, British or American without doubt, who had entered the Soviet Union recently, under a false name and passport, who could be identified as an intelligence agent. He was using the electronic mind of a huge machine to run to earth the second man in the truck. An electronic hunt, he summarised bitterly. Like Priabin, Kontarsky's faith lay in what people could tell him, what they could extract from individual minds and tongues. Yet the two they had picked up knew nothing, that much was obvious, except their own speculations that the man was an intelligence agent whose destination was Bilyarsk and the Mikoyan project; and Upenskoy, who would have known for certain, was dead, crushed to pulp beneath the weight of the truck.
Kontarsky's thought processes were defensive, even at the moment when he most needed daring, and imagination. Mentally, he was already preparing a defence for the officers of the Special Investigations Department who would be calling on him in the event of his failure. He writhed at the thought of having to depend upon a computer's master index of files in the Registry and Archives Department of the KGB. Yet, rely upon that machine he had to. There was no other alternative now. There was no one living to ask.
There was a further problem, of course. Unless he allowed the three dissident agents of the CIA and the British SIS to complete their vital work on the aircraft, there would be no trial the following day.
He cleared his throat, cleared his mind. He was terrified of espionage, of an attempt to sabotage the trial in front of Andropov and the First Secretary…
He would, he decided, allow himself at least two hours before the arrival of the official aircraft, to question the dissidents. He looked at his watch. Ten-fifteen. He was anxious now, to arrive, to be on the spot, to become active.
Police Inspector Tortyev was scrutinising a dossier of photographs of Alexander Thomas Orton. He had spread the snapshots across his desk regardless of date or place, and picked up samples at random. For half an hour, he had been picking up and discarding, and comparing samples from the heap. It had taken his small team three hours to collect the full dossier, from various sources within the KGB 2nd Chief Directorate. He had been denied computer time, which would have immensely simplified and speeded-up his enquiries. He gathered there was some kind of priority-search being mounted, and his team had been lucky to obtain the number of photographs they had done by manual extraction from the files, to supplement his own dossier on Orton.
Again, as with the man's shoes, Tortyev recognised the significance of the photographs. Almost casually, he selected two, one of Orton taken at Cheremetievo two days ago, and one of the man taken eighteen months before, in a Moscow street, just leaving a tourist's shop. It had been taken as part of a routine surveillance, before Tortyev had become interested in the activities of the businessman from England. Holding them together between thumb and forefinger, he passed them across his desk to Holokov and Filipov, who had sat silently awaiting the outcome of his deliberations.
'What do you think?' he said, offering the two pictures to Holokov. Filipov leaned across, almost touching Holokov's shoulder.