“Oh, Adam, you’re not going back already? There’s ages of daylight left,” one of the secretaries called to him.
He forced a rueful grin.
“Duty calls, or rather the plans for the Manchester Chamber of Commerce visit call,” he shouted back to her.
He walked through the woods to his car, dropped his bathing things, had a covert look to see if anyone was interested, and locked the car. There were too many men in sandals, slacks, and open shirts for one extra to be of notice, and he thanked his stars the KGB never seemed to take their jackets off. There was no one looking remotely like the Opposition within sight of him. He set off through the trees to the north.
Valentina was waiting for him, standing back in the shade of the trees. His stomach was tight, knotted, for all that he was pleased to see her. She was no expert at spotting a tail and might have been followed. If she had, his diplomatic cover would save him from worse than expulsion, but the repercussions would be enormous. Even that was not his worry; it was what they would do to her if she were ever caught. Whatever the motives, the term for what she was doing was high treason.
He took her in his arms and kissed her. She kissed him back and trembled in his arms.
“Are you frightened?” he asked her.
“A bit.” She nodded. “You listened to the tape recording?”
“Yes, I did. Before I handed it over. I suppose I should not have done, but I did.”
“Then you know about the famine that faces us. Adam, when I was a girl I saw the famine in this country just after the war. It was bad, but it was caused by the war, by Germans. We could take it. Our leaders were on our side, they would make things get better.”
“Perhaps they can sort things out this time,” said Munro lamely.
Valentina shook her head angrily.
“They’re not even trying,” she burst out. “I sit there listening to their voices, typing the transcripts. They are just bickering, trying to save their own skins.”
“And your uncle, Marshal Kerensky?” he asked gently.
“He’s as bad as the rest. When I married my husband, Uncle Nikolai was at the wedding. I thought he was so jolly, so kindly. Of course, that was his private life. Now I listen to him in his public life; he’s like all of them, ruthless and cynical. They just jockey for advantage over each other, for power, and to hell with the people. I suppose I should be one of them, but I can’t be. Not now, not anymore.”
Munro looked across the clearing at the pines but saw olive trees and heard a boy in uniform shouting. “You don’t own me!” Strange, he mused, how establishments with all their power sometimes went too far and lost control of their own servants through sheer excess. Not always, not often, but sometimes.
“I could get you out of here, Valentina,” he said. “It would mean my leaving the diplomatic corps, but it’s been done before. Sasha is young enough to grow up somewhere else.”
“No, Adam, no, it’s tempting but I can’t. Whatever the outcome, I am part of Russia, I have to stay. Perhaps, one day ... I don’t know.”
They sat in silence for a while, holding hands. She broke the quiet at last.
“Did your ... intelligence people pass the tape recording on to London?”
“I think so. I handed it to the man I believe represents the Secret Service in the embassy. He asked me if there would be another one.”
She nodded at her shoulder bag.
“It’s just the transcript. I can’t get the tape recordings anymore. They’re kept in a safe after the transcriptions, and I don’t have the key. The papers in there are of the following Politburo meeting.”
“How do you get them out, Valentina?” he asked.
“After the meetings,” she told him, “the tapes and the stenographic notes are brought under guard to the Central Committee building. There is a locked department there where we work, five other women and I. With one man in charge. When the transcripts are finished, the tapes are locked away.”
“Then how did you get the first one?”
She shrugged.
“The man in charge is new, since last month. The other one, before him, was more lax. There is a tape studio next door where the tapes are copied once before being locked in the safe. I was alone in there last month, long enough to steal the second tape and substitute a dummy.”
“A dummy?” exclaimed Munro. “They’ll spot the substitution if ever they play them back.”
“It’s unlikely,” she said. “The transcripts form the archives once they have been checked against the tapes for accuracy. I was lucky with that tape; I brought it out in a shopping bag under the groceries I had bought in the Central Committee commissary.”
“Aren’t you searched?”
“Hardly ever. We are trusted, Adam, the elite of the New Russia. The papers are easier. At work I wear an old-fashioned girdle. I copied the last meeting of June on the machine, but ran off one extra copy, then switched the number control back by one figure. The extra copy I stuck inside my girdle. It made no noticeable bulge.” Munro’s stomach turned at the risk she was taking. “What do they talk about in this meeting?” he asked, gesturing toward the shoulder bag.
“The consequences,” she said. “What will happen when the famine breaks. What the people of Russia will do to them. But Adam ... there’s been one since. Early in July. I couldn’t copy it; I was on leave. I couldn’t refuse my leave; it would have been too obvious. But when I got back, I met one of the girls who had transcribed it. She was white-faced and wouldn’t describe it.”
“Can you get it?” asked Munro.
“I can try. I’ll have to wait until the office is empty and use the copying machine. I can reset it afterward so it will not show it has been used. But not until early next month; I shall not be on the late shift when I can work alone until then.”
“We shouldn’t meet here again,” Munro told her. “Patterns are dangerous.”
He spent another hour describing the sort of tradecraft she would need to know if they were to go on meeting. Finally he gave her a pad of closely typed sheets he had tucked in his waistband under his loose shirt.
“It’s all in there, my darling. Memorize it and burn it. Flush the ashes down the can.”
Five minutes later she gave him a wad of flimsy paper sheets covered with neat, typed Cyrillic script from her bag and slipped away through the forest to her car on a sandy track half a mile away.
Munro retreated into the darkness of the main arch above the church’s recessed side door. He produced a roll of tape from his pocket, slipped his pants to his knees, and taped the batch of sheets to his thigh. With the trousers back up again and belted, he could feel the paper snug against his thigh as he walked, but under the baggy, Russian-made trousers, they did not show.
By midnight, in the silence of his flat, he had read them all a dozen times. The next Wednesday, they went in the Messenger’s wrist-chained briefcase to London, wax-sealed in a stout envelope and coded for the SIS liaison man at the Foreign Office only.
The glass doors leading to the Rose Garden were tightly shut, and only the whir of the air conditioner broke the silence in the Oval Office of the White House. The balmy days of June were long gone, and the steamy heat of a Washington August forbade open doors and windows.
Around the building on the Pennsylvania Avenue side, the tourists, damp and hot, admired the familiar aspect of the White House front entrance, with its pillars, flag, and curved driveway, or queued for the guided tour of this most holy of American holies. None of them would penetrate to the tiny West Wing building where President Matthews sat in conclave with his advisers.
In front of his desk were Stanislaw Poklewski and Robert Benson. They had been joined by the Secretary of State, David Lawrence, a Boston lawyer and pillar of the East Coast establishment.
President Matthews flicked the file in front of him closed. He had long since devoured the first Politburo transcript, translated into English; what he had just finished reading was his experts’ evaluation of it.