There he was. Lyko would have recognised the walk anywhere. He pulled the car over towards the pavement, leaned across and opened the door for him to get in.
‘There,’ his passenger said brightly. ‘There was no need to worry. Like clockwork, Vladi. I’m like clockwork.’
‘Where do I go?’
‘Keep driving. I’ll show you. I’m your guardian angel, Vladi. You know that, don’t you?’
The little professor nodded energetically as he concentrated on driving, following his friend’s directions. As they neared the Moscow State University buildings, the streets became deserted.
‘Pull over here,’ the guardian angel told him, and Lyko had scarcely put on the handbrake when the bullet took off his face. The car filled with the smell from the pistol and from Lyko’s bodily reaction. There had been no sound, only the light plop from the noise-reduction device on the gun.
Lyko’s guardian angel had performed his last service. He stepped from the car and vanished quickly into the snowy Moscow night.
11
HÔTEL DE LA JUSTICE
Greg Findlay, the SIS resident head of Moscow Station had limited resources at his disposal. While there was a natural tincture of resentment over a former resident, Nigsy Meadows, being attached to the embassy to run Fallen Timbers at his own discretion, Greg was duty bound to give Meadows all possible ‘assistance, succour and help’, as they described it in the textbook jargon. His two juniors, with second secretary cover, did not have need-to-know, so could not be used. Nigsy, however, had pleaded for two of the resident’s four minders. The minders did any dirty work, from the occasional pick-up, to emptying dead-drops, to babysitting, guarding, or even flushing out the competition. Certainly the Cold War was officially over, but you did not abandon regular operations overnight.
Findlay wondered what the Americans were about when he heard reports that certain senators and congressmen actually wanted to disband the CIA. That lunatic measure, he confided in anyone who would listen, was like removing a burglar alarm from your house in Mayfair because the police had caught one thief in Kensington. There were also strange claims being made in much-praised novels about a close co-operation between SIS and KGB. He prayed it was not so. By the shades of Richard Hannay and Bulldog Drummond, this would have been catastrophic folly on a grand scale.
Findlay also had at his disposal four cipher clerks who dealt with routine embassy work as well as performing extramural activities for the SIS resident. This quartet had to be closely involved with Fallen Timbers, and one of them, Wilson Sharp, was there to field the first catch.
Sharp had the swing shift – four to midnight – so had been on duty for less than three hours when the squirt-transmission came in, a few seconds after six thirty-five. There was no surprise when the needles flicked and the warning went off in his headset. He punched the rewind button, started a new tape on the secondary channel on the main receiver and picked up the telephone, all in three fast moves. Nigsy Meadows was in the communications room within seconds, snatching the tape from Sharp’s hand and going down to the electronics bubble to work the decrypt machines. Ten minutes later he had Bond’s signal en clair:
SoJ to lift self, Tackle plus Brutus’s daughter from Dom Knigi, Kalinina Prospect, seven thirty this night. Fallback nine pip emma Arbat restaurant. Switched on. Please track. Block.
Nigsy was shouting for the car and one of the minders for protection should he need it before the decrypt had finished shredding into the burn bag.
Nigsy’s own car was an old Volga he had bought on the black market during his last stint at the Moscow Embassy. He could have used one of the many British cars in the pool – in fact as SIS resident he was allotted a splendid Rover – but Nigsy felt less visible in the Volga. He had spent much of his spare time working on the vehicle, replacing engine parts and making it generally more roadworthy. When they had moved him on to Tel Aviv, Nigsy had put the Volga in mothballs as he knew some day soon he would return.
His priority, after arriving in Moscow, had been to check out the Volga, draw the dodgy equipment that had been shipped in under diplomatic seal, and install it in the vehicle. The Volga came out of the embassy gates just after seven. It was logged by the KGB surveillance team, who still carried out the routine, in spite of the official cancellation of Cold War activities. They immediately fingered the driver as Bolkonsky Two, their identifier for the former resident, together with a member of the British boyevaya gruppa – their own outdated jargon for a combat team used as a hit squad – riding shotgun.
Even in the snow, which came and went like a tide, Nigsy drove just within the speed limit, turning left, then right, doubling back to get on to the Kamenny Bridge. He could see the floodlit gold onion domes of the Kremlin rising up to his right, for the Kamenny Bridge provides one of the best views of the Kremlin. In the far corner of his mind, Meadows thought that this had once been an ancient stone bridge, the very one Dostoyevsky’s character, Raskolnikov, crossed on that sultry July afternoon in the opening chapter of Crime and Punishment. Everyone did a course of Russian literature, among other things, before being posted to the USSR, but Nigsy’s thought could have been put down to some kind of ESP, for he knew nothing of Bond’s task that night, to buy Crime and Punishment at Dom Knigi.
Years previously he had worked with Bond in Switzerland. Together they had set up a snare for a Soviet agent engaged in laundering money for pay-offs to support networks being organised in the United Kingdom. They had become close, and Meadows often thought he had learned more about fieldwork from the six months in Berne than from any other experience. He had an affinity for Bond which had lasted through the years and prided himself that he could read 007 like an ophthalmologist’s chart at two paces.
They reached Kalinina Prospect via Marksa Prospect, skirting the hill topped by the old Pashkov Palace, now the Lenin Library, its circular belvedere just visible through the snow. As they made the first sweep, Meadows saw a grey MVD security van parking about a hundred metres from the bookshop and another one further down the street. They had all the telltale signs of watchers’ vans – the tall, thick aerials and mirror windows at the rear.
He spoke rapidly to the minder, Dave Fletcher, as they drove, telling him what to look for, describing Bond, giving him the possible location in which the agent might be spotted. He circled the area in imprecise patterns, first left, then right, then doubling back and making an approach from a different direction, knowing he could not keep this up for long, as the MVD vans almost certainly had the licence number of the Volga from the embassy watchers. He did not want the vehicle stopped and scrutinised. It bore no CD plates, in direct contravention of standing orders, and he was also carrying highly illegal electronics – a modified Model 300 receiver, originally made by Winkelmann Security Systems of Surrey – adapted for field use by Service electronics wizards in London.
One of the buttons on Bond’s parka contained a micro-transmitter, a strong homing device designed to talk only with this particular receiver, or one of its clones. The bleep came up just as Meadows thought it was time for them to be safe rather than sure. It showed that Bond was somewhere off to the right of them, behind Kalinina Prospect, moving at around thirty kilometres an hour.
‘You read it,’ he told Fletcher. ‘Just tell me which way to go.’
They lost the signal five times over the next half-hour, but on each occasion it came up again, moving faster now and heading out of the city, going east. By nine o’clock they were out in the countryside, Meadows worrying that they might have problems getting back to the embassy. The snow was thickening, though the signal remained strong. Then, unexpectedly, the track changed, moving very fast indeed, coming towards them as though on a collision course.