He waited on the edge of the precipitous moment. The guard took his papers, read them carefully, compared face with picture with face with picture clipped on his pocket…
And nodded. Hyde's hand — fingers, at least — had touched the small of his back where the pistol was now concealed in his waistband. The guard looked down, incongruously, at the faded denims and the three-striped training shoes he was wearing. And seemed more than ever convinced. Hyde's right hand regained his side, then touched the square briefcase, flicking the catch. The guard peered. His ear was close to Hyde's face, as if expecting a whispered confession. His fingers — bitten nails, but clean — riffled the folded sheets of continuous paper, the pamphlets and reference books, the ring-bound notebooks, the manuals.
"Thank you, Comrade," the guard announced at last with a slight, familiar deference. Members of the same side, the same club. Russians in Czechoslovakia — KGB Russians. Godwin had said the papers would stand up to inspection. They had.
Hyde said, "I hope this doesn't take all night."
"I'm off at twelve," the guard replied with complacency and a grin.
"Lucky sod. I won't be out before then—" He almost wanted to cross his fingers as he said that.
He ambled with studied indifference down the red-striped corridor towards the guard at the end of it, a man relaxed by his observation of the first guard's inspection of his papers. Already, there was the smell of ozone and air-conditioning. There were staircases running down further into the cellar complex. The corridor ended, opening out into a glass-panelled area with chairs and a vending machine. An incongruous rubber plant and magazines on a glass-topped table. The reception area of a new company out to impress visitors. Beyond more glass panelling, which reached to the high ceiling, lay the computer rooms. Men in white coats and foot-coverings, No Smoking signs, security warnings — the guard.
A flick of the papers, a glance at the breast-pocket ID, and the guard stood aside from the door. Hyde felt breath and heartbeat hesitate, even though he hardly paused in his stride as he pushed the first door open and passed through. Ten fifty-three, he saw, glancing at his watch as he pushed open the second door then let it close behind him. Constant temperature, high level of noise — chatter rather than hum of the machinery. Perhaps three people mincing and sliding between the metal cabinets — one carrying a clear plastic disc pack, loading it onto one of the computers. The shift manager and an operator were watching the job stream unfold on a console. The night shift.
High ceiling, a long room retreating beneath bright white lighting. Rows of VDUs and terminals. Controlled air came up near his legs through one of the hundred grilles set in the suspended floor. Thick bouquets of cable and wiring emerged from the floor directly into the boxes which stood like ranks of filing cabinets, most of them orange and bearing the legend ICL. Just as Godwin had said. British computers.
"Where's the post office engineer, Comrade?" he called out. A bearded young man looked up from a sheaf of print-outs, pencil held daggerlike in his teeth. He merely nodded in acknowledgement of what he guessed to be Hyde's role and business and waved an arm vaguely. Hyde followed the direction, moving more quickly now. If the fault had disappeared because the short-life battery had run down, if the engineer had called the Soviet embassy and requested a system test and the genuine tester was on his way, if, if, if—
Someone glanced at him without interest, assuming his business there. The noise of the room was almost unnerving. The temperature was dry, dead like the air. Carpet, wiring, air-ducts and grilles, glass walls, racks of tapes and discs, printers, VDUs. Hyde moved through an alien, mechanical landscape towards the highest security area. He saw guards, relaxed though in uniform, armed only with holstered pistols, an officer, and one man in overalls, incongruous as a plumber might have been in those aseptic surroundings.
A guard moved, glanced at his ID, and nodded. "Still giving trouble?" Hyde asked the post office engineer's back as he bent over an oscilloscope-like sophometric measuring set, toolbox open beside his swivel-chair. The man waved him to silence. Hyde shrugged, someone grinned and indicated the importance of the telephone call in which the engineer was engaged.
The highest security areas was glassed off from the rest of the computer room. Unnecessarily, but with habitual, obsessive KGB thoroughness. Status, too, played its part. KGB officers who could operate a remote terminal but who did not understand, and therefore despised, computers and their programmers and operators, would enjoy this sense of separation, of distance from the people in white coats. Civilians.
The engineer was talking over the telephone landline to Moscow Centre's Records Directorate. In his hand, flapping like a fan, was a transistor-board he must have just changed. In a similar room another trusted, security-cleared engineer would be checking the line at his end. From terminal to scrambler to modem to telephone line — the two men hurrying the miles towards each other. Feeding signals of known frequency down the line and through the system and checking the read-out at each end.
The fault was less than a mile of telephone line from the Hradcany, Hyde thought. He should have found it… Intermittent — calm down, it's not staying around to be found. Should already have disappeared, he reminded himself. Ten fifty-six.
The engineer put down the telephone and turned to Hyde. His round face was red and he was perspiring. His lips formed an obscenity in silence before he realised that he, rather than Hyde, remained the outsider of the group around the remote terminal.
Yet he persisted in his anger, saying, "Not as much fucking trouble as that lot!" He pointed to the telephone. On the screen, green symbols — a simple piece of information, perhaps—? Yes, football scores from Moscow. Hopelessly scrambled. A jumble of Cyrillic letters, gaps, half-lines.
Then, as if by magic, resolved. At the engineer's nod, the KGB Officer cancelled then re-summoned the scores, and they unrolled obediently. Dynamo Tblisi 2, Dynamo Kiev 1.
"See?" the engineer said demandingly. "See? What a bloody cock-up, Comrade system tester! It's too intermittent to trace. They keep telling me the fault's here, not in Moscow — not even in the Russian section of the line — but here in Prague! I ask you, how can they know that? Just bullshit!"
"Calm down, Jan," one of the guards told him. "Want another coffee?"
It was obvious they knew the man well. His freedom of expression and abuse appeared to be tolerated; even amusing to the KGB personnel. The officer appeared a little disapproving, but wished not to appear prudish or petty.
"My insides are silting up with that muck out of the machine!" the engineer grumbled.
"I'm making some real stuff now — won't be long," the guard bribed.
"Bless you, Georgi!"
Hyde saw a Moulinex coffee-maker on a desk-top in a glass cubicle. "For you, too, Comrade?" Georgi asked Hyde, startling him. His expression melted into a grin.
"Thanks." Hyde yawned theatrically. "How long, mate?"
"I've been here an hour — dragged off a military job for this, and even then the buggers wouldn't let me leave until I'd spun them ten miles of bullshit… nothing so far. Comes and goes."
"What's it doing?"
"You saw — can't reproduce anything properly one minute — then the next, perfect."
"I came over," Hyde began, tasting his cover-story like the bitter stickiness of envelope gum on his tongue, "because we got your report…?" He looked at the officer, who nodded. "About eight, was it?"