By six on that bitter cold evening, the professor was back in Oxford Street and called Guy again, from another telephone kiosk. This time the cameraman was in, and elated by the news. They set up the meet for Gatwick airport the following afternoon.
‘Where’re we going?’ Guy asked.
‘You’ll see soon enough. Tomorrow. Three o’clock.’
The professor glossed over the following hours, leaping ahead to the next afternoon. ‘Here it began to get difficult. Helen turned up with the two men. They all insisted on her being with them. I had no papers for her. No visa. Nothing.’
This was real trouble. His instructions were clear. You will bring in the cameraman and sound assistant, they had told him. Now the two major players would not move without Helen who had often worked with them in the past. They argued that she was one of the team, so Lyko aborted that day’s departure, returned to London and made a crash call to Sweden.
At ten o’clock the following morning a special delivery reached him at the hotel, direct from Stockholm. These people were very efficient. He thought they must have prepared documents for all the recruits, for the package contained a visa stamp and extra papers for Helen.
‘You must understand that Chushi Pravosudia recruits from Britain, or anywhere else, were to use their own valid passports. They provided visas and other control documents. I was very concerned about being watched, because they seemed to have everything so tightly sewn up. Knew everything. So I made the next move quickly.’
He telephoned Sweden again, saying he was heading into place. Helsinki. The group would follow as he instructed them. They met at Gatwick, and he gave them the tickets, all rescheduled by telephone, once more from a public kiosk.
He flew out to Helsinki that night, direct by Finnair from Heathrow. Stepakov’s people picked him up at Vantaa. ‘The most delicate part was about to begin. If we pulled it off, we would be very close to penetrating the Scales of Justice’s inner circle.’
The man who checked into the Hesperia Hotel under the name Dieter Frobe was not Lyko, but a trusted Stepakov agent, a former First Chief Directorate field agent who physically resembled the professor. They had briefed him thoroughly, and it was this man – in the sterile room they simply called him Dove – who had next made a crash call to the Swedish number, telling them there was a hold-up. The pigeons, he said, had been delayed. He would let them know as soon as they started to fly.
‘Sweden appeared to accept this calmly at first.’ Lyko was standing straighter, occasionally walking up and down as he went through the story of his little adventure. ‘By two days ago they had started to get frantic.’
‘We need the pigeons. We need them now.’ The voice from Sweden was sharp, commanding.
‘It’s no fault of mine,’ Dove told them, whining and laying it on with a trowel. ‘I’ve ordered them. It is a domestic matter. Be patient.’
‘The window is not large,’ by which they meant there was a serious time-scale problem, a window of opportunity.
The people whom Dove talked of as the pigeons were, in fact, long gone. All three, two men and a woman.
Lyko waited for them as they came off the Finnair flight from London. There was a car outside, he told them. He even helped them with the luggage. ‘We must make a short helicopter trip,’ he said.
‘Never been in a helicopter.’ Helen was more excited than the others, and was almost like a child once they were in the car which took them to the private flying area at the far corner of Vantaa airport.
The chopper was a big Mil Mi-26 with Aeroflot markings. The Finns were quite used to Aeroflot making unscheduled flights in and out. As always, they had co-operated with the request for his flight plan.
‘They suspected nothing.’ Lyko meant the ‘pigeons’ and gave a self-satisfied smirk. ‘Within three hours we were here, or within a few miles from here.’ He turned deferentially to Stepakov who motioned him to one side as though swatting an insect out of the way.
‘Captain Bond, Mr Newman, you will now become Guy and George. Nina would pass as an English girl anywhere, being half-Scottish. That is correct, yes?’ Bond nodded, and Stepakov laughed. ‘I read bad English sometimes. Some people say Scotch.’
‘Which is a drink,’ Bond supplied grittily. Concern, the possibility of duplicity and a regiment of problems had already marched through his mind.
‘Right, Scotch is a drink. You won’t see much Scotch where you’re going, I fear, Captain Bond. Chushi Pravosudia have instructed that you should be at the Dom Knigi bookshop on Kalinina Prospect at seven thirty tonight. All three of you will enter and purchase a copy of Crime and Punishment – apt, huh? You will linger for a short time, and then leave. If contact is not made, there is a fallback at Arbat restaurant, nine o’clock. We shall be following you all the way. I have enough forces at my disposal to make absolutely certain that you are tracked wherever they take you. Now,’ he put his head back and glanced from one to the other, ‘you must have many questions. You have also to spend time getting to know Nina, and we have to talk about signals, codewords and the usual trappings of an operation like this. There is much to do before seven thirty when you enter the most secret circle of the Scales of Justice. Questions?’
As James Bond opened his mouth to frame his initial concern, he knew they were in over their heads.
‘What if you lose us?’ He wanted to let Stepakov know he was not happy with the small amount of information. He wanted the Russian to feel he was anxious, if only to make the man more fearful, to pause and reflect. He repeated. ‘What if you lose us?’
‘Then you will be – what is the English slang? You will be in dead lumber? Is this correct?’
Bond nodded. ‘I’m not ecstatic about the dead part. And what of our two French friends?’
‘What indeed?’ Stepakov made his clownish features go blank.
Then Natkowitz spoke, leaning back, looking lazy and unperturbed. ‘Before we take this on, can you tell us your own assessment of the situation? The general objective of the Scales of Justice? What they expect to accomplish?’
There was a long pause during which Bond counted to ten.
‘Yes,’ Stepakov’s voice dropped almost to a whisper. ‘Operation Daniel might hold a clue. I think Chushi Pravosudia are planning what terrorists nowadays call a world-shattering spectacular, and I think you, and Captain Bond, and Nina here are going to be at the vortex of that spectacular. It might be that they know exactly what we’re doing. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if they’re pulling our strings. Does that help you, Mr Peter Natkowitz? Please let’s dispense with the Newman rubbish.’
10
DAUGHTER OF THE REGIMENT
It started to snow as they reached Kalinina Prospect, taking the slip road off Suvorovsky Boulevard. Flakes the size of silver dollars drifted sluggishly through the night air. Some hung motionless, for there was hardly any wind. Within a few minutes it began to thicken. The traffic moved slowly and bundled-up people trudged along the pavements, badly wrapped parcels silhouetted against the lighted shop windows. The scene had all the makings of a Christmas card.
Lyko drove. He said the snow would not last long. ‘The blizzards are over for now. This means it’s a little warmer, so it probably won’t freeze again until the early hours. The city soon gets back to normal once the blizzards are gone.’