Alex and Nicki did not laugh as hard as their boss. They had undoubtedly heard the joke many times before.
As they ate and chatted, Alex and Nicki stood apart, one at each end of the room, like bodyguards. Finally Bond asked, ‘Shouldn’t we start work, Bory? We’re here to do a job after all. I’d like to get at it.’
Stepakov turned his clownish face towards him with a look of sadness. ‘All too soon you will have work to do, my friend. I promise you that. But here we are in four walls. You know what this means. In Russian it is like your saying, walls have ears. To be frank with you, actually, we don’t like this. KGB operational training and all our instincts are against the use of safe houses. Briefings between four walls. But we have made a room here that is as safe as it can be. Tomorrow. First thing tomorrow morning, we shall start. I too need to hurry this along or things won’t work out as we wish. By tomorrow night you’ll both be out there in the cold of a Moscow winter. I promise you.’
Most large cities of the world have a particular smell or sound. With New York it is sound – that series of man-made caverns which distort traffic noises, and the wail of police or ambulance sirens echo as though they are in low, narrow rocky valleys. In Paris it is smell – a mixture of coffee and strong Gauloise cigarettes. The Irish city of Cork is identifiable by the aroma of fish which grows stronger the nearer you get to the docks. London, in the old days, before the Clean Air Act, had a special scent, sooty and distinctive. Berlin still has the tang of burning wood when it rains, a reminder of the terrible destruction at the end of World War II. Moscow, even in the freezing cold, smells slightly sour. This gets worse in summer and jokers have been known to say that Lenin’s body, lying in state in the Red Square mausoleum, is responsible.
Nigsy Meadows caught the scent as soon as he stepped off the plane from Berlin. He knew that within a day he would have got used to it. It had all been very fast. Fanny Farmer, his replacement, had come in within three hours of receipt of M’s signal. There had been quick exchanges of information, mainly of an operational nature, and an hour later, Nigsy was on a Lufthansa to Berlin, Tegel, and from there direct to Moscow, Sheremetievo.
The Russian passport control officer flicked through his large black book, then raised his head and smiled. ‘Nice to see you back, Mr Meadows,’ was all he said in Russian, but to Meadows the unspoken words were there. ‘Ah, Mr Meadows, British Embassy spook, what’re you doing back in Moscow?’
There was an embassy car waiting, and Owen Gladwyn, the number two to the SIS resident, sat in the back seat. He thrust out a large pugilist’s hand to greet him. ‘Bloody cold weather you’ve brought with you, Nigs. How’s tricks?’
‘Much the same. I hope there’s some spare winter clothing knocking around in the shop.’
‘Doubt it.’ Gladwyn had a battered face, the inheritance from rugby football. It made him look like a first-rate hoodlum, though in fact he was a quiet, unassuming man who always got on with the job and never complained. ‘Give the Centre a bell, they usually have plenty of hard-weather gear to spare. Number’s 91, though nowadays you might even get a Porsche dealer.’
‘Very amusing.’ Nigsy was really unhappy. ‘Is Jupiter at home?’ Jupiter was this month’s crypto for head of Moscow Station.
‘Never goes out. Got a light in the window for you, old boy. Can’t wait.’
An hour later, Meadows was seated across from Jupiter, a rather smooth young man who had come up in the world like a rocket and was known back in the UK as the whizz-kid, for he was certainly uncannily talented. His true name was Gregory Findlay.
They faced each other in one of the two bubbles, as the hygienic rooms were called, deep within the embassy, safe from electronic or any other surveillance.
‘So, I have an operation running on my turf with a big notice stuck to it telling me to keep out.’ Findlay did not sound as peeved as his words indicated.
‘Come on, you don’t have to keep out, Greg. You’ll know everything. I’ll go through you all the way. Fact is . . .’
‘Fact is, old darling, you can override me at any time. That’s what M says, and I presume he has a reason for it.’
‘Fact is,’ Meadows continued, speaking over him, ‘I’m bloody tired, not to mention bereft of any proper clothes for this climate. Also, you have to brief me. Fanny only brought in the rudiments.’
‘Don’t really know what it’s all about.’ Findlay now did sound riled. ‘I have a pile of “eyes only” signals for you and a long one for me which I have to pass on to you immediately on arrival, which is now.’
Meadows nodded.
‘Right. Operation Fallen Timbers. We have two men in the field. Cryptos Block and Tackle, which sounds a bit muddied. I gather, however, that Block is of great operational importance, and word has it that he’s a former 00 Section man. Could even be Bond, for all I know. They are working in close harmony with Centre, which sounds far-fetched but appears to be part of bloody glasnost which is emptying our ricebowls faster than a plague of locusts . . .’
‘It won’t last for ever, Greg. We both know it, so don’t carp. Just give me all the contacts, map refs, signals, words, the usual.’
It took over an hour for head of Moscow Station to hand over the long and involved list, then another hour for Meadows to unzip the ‘eyes only’ signals. None of it made much sense, except the part about Chushi Pravosudia, the Scales of Justice. Findlay told him they had picked up two signals on the previous evening leading them to believe a terrorist act had been threatened and then carried out. They even had the name of the victim, Colonel General Viktor Gregor’evitch Mechaev, ‘And it couldn’t happen to a more deserving guy,’ Findlay had said as though he had ice in his veins.
So that was that. Meadows was aware. Meadows simply had to wait. Twenty-four hours a day until they either told him he could go home or there was a sudden panic alert from the ludicrously cryptoed Block or Tackle. Nigsy Meadows, a man of great intuition, just did not like the smell of it. But, then, Nigsy’s nose had always been sensitive in Moscow.
James Bond dreamed he was reading a great encyclopaedia and had come across some odd reference to an ivory plaque which was handed from the monarch to a new head of the Secret Intelligence Service as a badge of office. When he woke, the dream was so vivid that he could see the entries above and below the ivory plaque paragraph. They were ‘Ivy League’ and ‘IZL’, and he knew what the latter meant. Irgun Zevai Leumi; the Irgun, the Jewish right-wing terrorist group active in Palestine in the late 1940s. The whole thing was so real that he wondered if he were reliving an actual experience.
Alex, Tweedledum, had shaken him gently awake and told him there would be breakfast in half-an-hour. The room was light and airy, and he recalled standing in the dark by the window on the previous evening, noting the tiny wire mesh and the telltale plastic nipples of sensors on the glass. There had been enough light from outside where the area around the dacha had remained like day. Just beyond the edge of the light he had seen shadows moving regularly as though guards were walking the perimeter at timed intervals.
There was a bathroom off the bedroom, and he showered, shaved, and dressed in record time. Twenty minutes later, wearing slacks, a rollneck and soft leather moccasins, he went down the stairs and into the dining room where they had eaten so well the night before.