“Bruno, daaaaarling ...”
* * *
Two days later Timothy Edwards took Sam McCready out to lunch at Brooks’s Club in St. James, London. Of the several gentlemen’s clubs of which Edwards was a member, Brooks’s was his favorite for lunch. There was always a good chance one could bump into and have a few courteous words with Robert Armstrong, the Cabinet Secretary, deemed to be possibly the most influential man in England and certainly the chairman of the Five Wise Men who would one day select the new Chief of the SIS for the Prime Minister’s approval.
It was over coffee in the library, beneath the portraits of that group of Regency bucks, the Dilettantes, that Edwards broached specifics.
“As I said downstairs, Sam, everyone’s very pleased, very pleased indeed. But there is a new era coming, Sam. An era whose leitmotif may well have to be the phrase ‘by the book.’ A question of some of the old ways, the rule-bending, having to become, how shall I put it ... restrained?”
“Restrained is a very good word,” agreed Sam.
“Excellent. Now, a riffle through the records shows that you still retain, admittedly on an ad hoc basis, certain assets who really have passed their usefulness. Old friends, perhaps. No problem, unless they are in delicate positions ... unless their discovery by their own employers might cause the Firm real problems.”
“Such as?” asked McCready. That was the trouble with records—they were always there, on file. As soon as you paid someone to run an errand, a record of payment was created. Edwards dropped his vague manner.
“Poltergeist. Sam, I don’t know how it was overlooked so long. Poltergeist is a full-time staffer of the BND. There’d be all hell let loose if Pullach ever discovered he moonlighted for you. It’s absolutely against all the rules. We do not, repeat do not, ‘run’ employees of friendly agencies. It’s way out of court. Get rid of him, Sam. Stop the retainer. Forthwith.”
“He’s a mate,” said McCready. “We go back a long way. To the Berlin Wall going up. He did well then, ran dangerous jobs for us when we needed people like that. We were caught by surprise. We hadn’t got anyone, or not enough, who would and could go across like that.”
“It’s not negotiable, Sam.”
“I trust him. He trusts me. He wouldn’t let me down. You can’t buy that sort of thing. It takes years. A small retainer is a tiny price.”
Edwards rose, took his handkerchief from his sleeve and dabbed the port from his lips.
“Get rid of him, Sam. I’m afraid I have to make that an order. Poltergeist goes.”
At the end of that week, Major Ludmilla Vanavskaya sighed, stretched and leaned back in her chair. She was tired. It had been a long haul. She reached for her packet of Soviet-made Marlboros, noticed the full ashtray, and pressed a bell on her desk.
A young corporal entered from the outer office. She did not address him, just pointed to the ashtray with her fingertip. He quickly removed it, left the office, and returned it cleaned a few seconds later. She nodded. He left again and closed the door.
There had been no talk, no banter. Major Vanavskaya had that effect on people. In earlier years some of the young bucks had noticed the shining short-cropped blond hair above the crisp service shirt and slim green skirt and had tried their luck. No dice. At twenty-five she had married a colonel—a career move—and divorced him three years later. His career had stalled, hers taken off. At thirty-five she wore no more uniforms, just the severe tailored charcoal-gray suit over the white blouse with the floppy bow at the neck.
Some still thought she was beddable, until they caught a salvo from those freezing blue eyes. In the KGB, not an organization of liberals, Major Vanavskaya had a reputation as a fanatic. Fanatics intimidate.
The Major’s fanaticism was her work—and traitors. An utterly dedicated Communist, ideologically pure of any doubts, she had devoted herself to her self-arrogated pursuit of traitors. She hated them with a cold passion. She had wangled a transfer from the Second Chief Directorate, where the targets were the occasional seditious poet or complaining worker, to the independent Third Directorate, also called the Armed Forces Directorate. Here the traitors, if traitors there were, would be higher-ranking, more dangerous.
The move to the Third Directorate—arranged by her colonel-husband in the last days of their marriage, when he was still desperately trying to please her—had brought her to this anonymous office block just off the Sadovaya Spasskaya, Moscow’s ring road, and to this desk, and to the file that now lay open in front of her.
Two years of work had gone into that file, although she had had to squeeze that work in between other duties until people higher up began to believe her. Two years of checking and cross-checking, begging for cooperation from other departments, always fighting the obfuscation of those bastards in the army who always sided with one another; two years of correlating tiny fragments of information until a picture began to emerge.
Major Ludmilla Vanavskaya’s job and vocation was tracking down backsliders, subversives, or, occasionally, full-blown traitors inside the army, navy, or air force. Loss of valuable state equipment through gross negligence was bad enough; lack of vigor in the pursuit of the Afghan war was worse; but the file on her desk told her a different story. She was convinced that somewhere in the army there was a deliberate leak. And he was high, damned high.
There was a list of eight names on the top sheet of the file before her. Five were crossed out. Two had question marks. But her eye always came back to the eighth. She lifted a phone and was put through to the male secretary of General Shaliapin, head of the Third Directorate.
“Yes, Major. A personal interview? No one else? I see. ... The problem is, the Comrade General is in the Far East. ... Not until next Tuesday. Very well then, next Tuesday.”
Major Vanavskaya put down the phone and scowled. Four days. Well, she had already waited two years—she could wait four more days.
“I think I’ve clinched it,” Bruno told Renate with childlike delight the following Sunday morning. “I’ve just got enough for the freehold purchase and some more left over for decorating and equipping it. It’s a wonderful little bar.”
They were in bed in her own bedroom—it was a favor she sometimes allowed him because he hated the “working” bedroom as much as he hated her job.
“Tell me again,” she cooed. “I love to hear about it.”
He grinned. He had seen it just once but fallen for it completely. It was what he had always wanted and right where he wanted it—by the open sea, where the brisk winds from the north would keep the air crisp and fresh. Cold in winter, of course, but there was central heating, which would need fixing.
“Okay. It’s called the Lantern Bar, and the sign is an old ship’s lantern. It stands on the open quay right on the Bremerhaven dock front. From the upper windows you can see as far as Mellum Island—we could get a sailboat if things go well and sail there in summer.
“There’s an old-fashioned brass-topped bar—we’ll be behind that serving the drinks—and a nice snug apartment upstairs. Not as large as this, but comfy once we’ve fixed it up. I’ve agreed on the price and paid the deposit. Completion is at the end of September. Then I can take you away from all this.”
She could hardly keep herself from laughing out loud. “I can’t wait, my darling. It will be a wonderful life. ... Do you want to try again? Perhaps it will work this time.”