Trembling, so that the box rattled as if containing dice, she handed it over.
‘I understand.’
Cold loathing, so very adult, coated her voice. She was mature enough to understand what happened to anyone who crossed a KGB colonel; and a colonel with his proven homicidal background was even more dangerous than the rest. He felt a hint of paternal pride in her ability to assess risk during fraught times.
Alone now in his bare study, he opened another box on his desktop. Ursula had seen inside this one also, but had failed to sense anything special about the metal shard. As for Dmitri, he felt the stuff was strange, but possessed no means to analyse it further.
There had been other remnants for the research team to keep, and make sense of if they could. Somehow he thought they would fail.
For Dmitri, it was victory enough that he had brought it back from Siberia without his superiors’ knowledge. Metallurgical analysis did not excite him. The only person he had showed it to was young Daniela at work: she was twenty-one years old, lean and angular with a cruel face that excited him to look at. He had not yet taken her as a lover, Lieutenant Daniela Weissmann, but he thought it would happen soon.
But his third and real treasure . . . That was in the loft, and he was never sure what had called him to it, two years ago. People had been excited about the archaeological find in London, yet no else had sensed the presence of the buried crystal inside damp clay. Call it a gift of the darkness – except that no stirrings in his head accompanied his digging the thing out.
No commands from the darkness at all.
Perhaps his sensitivity to the crystal had simply been a side effect, nothing intentional or useful, of the dark power that corrupted him.
He remembered the thrill of sneaking past the guards, going down into the dig beneath the City, wondering what he was doing there. With his shielded torch, he had his own private viewing of a stone mask dating back to Londinium; but it was a blank wall of wet clay, the edge of one of the excavation pits, that had drawn him. Then the digging with fingers by torchlight, the slick-yet-sticky feel of the stuff, and the glint of crystal when he found it.
Crystal, shaped like a spearhead, and buried for centuries in London mud.
So precious, and yet he would never sell it.
Nor tell his KGB masters what he had found.
Of course, he had been in London for operational reasons. Going across to the West had kept him on edge; perhaps stealing an unsuspected archaeological find had been less dangerous than giving in to his other desires. A police manhunt might have made things awkward.
And what about Ursula?
He really did not want to think of her as a woman.
She is a problem, though, is she not?
Not as another potential victim.
Or would her screams be all the sweeter for their overtones of innocence betrayed?
Berlin, at least the Allied sectors, formed an island of western freedom in a Communist sea. But once there, for all the dangers if discovered and the recent tightening of access controls, it was relatively easy for Gavriela, with all the assets available to SIS, to slip into the Russian Sector.
Living in London, so different from the rest of Britain, made it natural to adopt the tough-humoured Berlinerisch attitude, and lose the hard g in words like Inge. Coats were even drabber than in England (Paris, on her holiday, had been a revelation), so she had dressed for the part, as had the two men forming her protective escort.
It was the 23rd of November, and freezing fog was everywhere.
The contact who met them at the safe house in Treptow, inside the Russian Sector and close to the black-looking waters of the Spree, was a grey-haired dour man who said: ‘She’s a schoolgirl, didn’t you know? Not exactly prime defector material.’
‘So what?’ said Gavriela, a hard-edged Ja, und? ‘It’s not her we’re interested in.’
‘Got it.’ His expression was one of grim camaraderie. ‘She does a good job of hiding how scared she is.’
‘Good.’ Meaning both things: the fear and not showing it.
Likewise Gavriela’s own fear, that things would go to hell and Carl would end up living with Rosie and Jack in Abing-don. But she pushed those thoughts aside as she climbed the bare wooden stairs, and entered a room whose floor was covered in cracked green lino, older but not so different from her kitchen back home.
Ursula was sitting on a plain wooden chair at a card table, wearing a grey cardigan and skirt, looking pale. The resem-blance to Erik at that age sent a dagger into Gavriela.
‘Who are you, please?’ asked Ursula formally: Wer sind Sie, bitte?
Gavriela was not a field agent. If she had been, her answer would have been a conscious choice. ‘I’m your aunt,’ she said in German. ‘Gavriela Wolf. I loved your mother Ilse like a sister.’
‘You died—’ Ursula stopped.
‘So you do know that Erik was your father,’ said Gavriela. ‘Your real father.’
‘Mother told me’ – with a dry eyed blink – ‘to stop me cutting myself. Knowing I’m not doomed to inherit his . . . obsessions. There’s a reason I wear long sleeves.’
Gavriela wanted to reach out and hug her, but it was too soon, far too soon.
‘It must have been hard, given your stepfather’s profession.’
Caution now, sounding out the girl’s political worldview.
My niece!
‘It’s not his job that’s the problem,’ said Ursula. ‘The things he’s— Never mind.’
Gavriela swallowed. ‘He . . . hurt you?’
‘Oh, no! Not the way you . . . No.’
So Dmitri’s victims remained outside the family at least. Plus, Ursula separated her stepfather’s actions from his job, implying violence that even the KGB would not sanction. But this would be guesswork on the girl’s part, nothing more.
Still, it was dangerous ground to cover so soon, so Gavriela broke the conversation, taking a chair and placing it opposite Ursula. She sat down, neither too far back – which might convey coldness – nor close enough to intimidate.
Being careful.
‘The war ruined everything,’ said Gavriela. ‘I believe Erik died, but I lost all traces of Ilse. And you . . . I didn’t know you existed.’
‘I contacted the British. I don’t understand why you are here.’
The thing was not to think of this as conducting an interrogation, although there were dangers in two-way information exchange – Gavriela felt exposed enough just being on the wrong side of the Curtain. The intent was for Ursula to help them willingly.
‘In 1940 I reached England,’ said Gavriela. ‘I’ve lived there ever since. Because of my war work, the Secret Intelligence Service knew how to contact me.’ She switched to English: ‘I’m really British these days. And I use a different name, but let’s stick to Gavriela for now.’
That was a little colloquial, but Ursula seemed to understand.
‘Do you know how many people died in Hungary?’ she asked, also in English. ‘Forty thousand.’
‘I know,’ said Gavriela.
‘But my stepfather says’ – in German once more – ‘that if it weren’t for Britain throwing its weight around over Suez, the Kremlin would not have had to react so hard. They have to show strength, he says.’
All Gavriela knew was that the PM was in Jamaica to ‘rest’, his health shattered by the crisis, having backed down following explicit threats from Washington and Moscow, including a Soviet promise of nuclear missiles destroying London if the British army, currently twenty-three miles from Suez, did not depart. Meanwhile, in the Commons, Macmillan had told backbenchers of Britain’s new place in the world: Greece to the United States’ Rome.
‘And what do you think, Ursula?’
The girl – my niece – clasped her hands over her belly.
‘I don’t know any more.’ She sounded old. ‘But I can’t help you kill him’
So she understood that she was of interest to British intelligence only as a way of getting to Colonel Dmitri Shtemenko