Philip McCutchan
The Man From Moscow
One
For some days past all the military traffic had been going the one way — north, up the Kola Peninsula. Troops and military stores on the move were, however, nothing very new and no one thought much about it. On the whole the civilian population was, as ever, too preoccupied with its terrible climate to think much about anything else; this state of mind was almost endemic to the inhabitants of the grim, bleak towns and ports of the Peninsula. Certainly they connected the military movements, in a vague sort of way, with what had been going on in and around the Barents Sea and in particular on the islands of Novaya Zemlya; and to that extent they were interested, even excited, and they felt inside themselves that the Soviets were after the big prizes again. But there was nothing whatever to indicate that the wind of change, deserting Africa for the moment, was about to blow pretty strongly behind the scenes in Moscow.
At the moment it was scarcely a wind, of course. It was a mere breeze, a very gentle zephyr, light airs wafting phantom-like along the remote corridors of the Kremlin… but it was going to become a gale, and when it did, it would blow out of the Kremlin and into the streets of Moscow and beyond, far beyond the borders of the Soviet Union.
Shaw’s tall figure, the starched shirt-front and white waistcoat a patch of gleaming lightness in the early autumn dusk, strode out from Kensington Palace Gardens past the top-hatted custodian at the gates and into the High Street. He crossed over the road by Barkers, behind a number 9 bus. When the bus had gone on he saw the gunman crossing a little farther up in the Knightsbridge direction and when Shaw turned into Palace Gate the man was not far behind him, presumably sticking tight until he was in the Daimler.
The Daimler was parked a couple of hundred yards up the road on the left and it was facing south. There were few people about, although it was not late. A young man and a girl in evening-dress came towards him, seemingly on the look-out for a taxi, and a group of teds, coats well below their rumps, drifted along past the car, assing about and talking in high voices. On the other side of the road an old man, unkempt and tramp-like, made his way along, stopping now and then to pick up a dog-end from the gutter. Some way ahead a policeman crossed stolidly over from Queen’s Gate, glanced without interest towards the vehicle and moved away along Gloucester Road, bored as hell.
The scene couldn’t have been more ordinary.
Shaw approached the Daimler and put his head in at the front nearside window. He said, “Excuse me… can you tell me the way to Chelsea Square, please?”
The driver, a fat man in chauffeur’s livery, looked at Shaw closely and then glanced over his shoulder at the two men sitting in the back. He said something in a language Shaw didn’t recognize, but he had the feeling that he’d been identified quite apart from the password nonsense and that his identity was being confirmed to the Daimler’s passengers; and he wondered coldly how many other people around London knew him on sight like this man did.
Just then one of the passengers, a pleasant-looking man in his middle forties with a soldierly touch about him, leaned forward and said in a heavily accented voice:
“That, my dear sir, is the way we shall go ourselves as it happens. If you care to accept, we shall be pleased to take you near there. So?”
Shaw’s rangy shoulders moved slightly and he said, “Well — thanks. That’s very good of you.” The lower-deck lights of a passing bus flickered down into the car, glinted for a moment on metal, and Shaw noted whitened knuckles gripping a gun-butt. “I’d be delighted.”
“I am so glad to be of help.”
The man’s companion pushed the door open and got out onto the pavement. Shaw could not have guessed at his nationality but he, too, had a military air. He also had a frank, open face — and he looked genuine. Shaw bent and got in and the man climbed back beside him. The first man gave a brief order and the chauffeur started up, heading along Palace Gate into Gloucester Road. Shaw, glancing sideways, said, “Well — here I am. And now can I know where I’m going?”
“It is wiser not. Please, no questions.” The man’s voice was polite and, like his appearance, pleasant enough. Leaning across Shaw he said quietly, “Now, Carl.”
Carl grunted and fumbled in his pocket. He said, “I am sorry, but this is necessary. Please do not make it difficult for us, Commander Shaw. You must not know, afterwards, where you have been.” He produced a length of some thick black material and slipped a broad swathe of it over Shaw’s eyes. As it was pulled taut into a knot behind his head, Shaw felt the pressure of an automatic in his side.
The man on his right said, “Down on the floor, please. There is plenty of room… you will be uncomfortable, however, and I am sorry, but we must not risk a blindfolded man being seen. You will understand.”
Shaw breathed hard, angrily, through his nose. He said, “I’ve only myself to blame for coming along at all, I know that — but aren’t you rather overdoing the play-acting, chum?”
“We think not. You will see. Please do as I ask.”
“Very well.” Shaw slid down onto the carpet. “But it’s got to be worth it. And if there’s any funny business…”
“There will not be.” The man spoke with quiet assurance and sincerity. “You can trust us absolutely, and soon you will thank us, Commander Shaw. If you think that we are not trusting you in return, a little reflection will tell you that if we did not we would scarcely be doing — what we are doing. You will understand very soon.”
Very soon, indeed!
It was high time somebody came clean, in Shaw’s opinion. So far, the whole evening had been decidedly unusual, and it had started even before he’d arrived at the Embassy back in Kensington Palace Gardens — during the afternoon in fact, when an anonymous caller had come on the outside line to his flat and jammed the receiver down as soon as he had passed his message and without giving Shaw time to say a word of acceptance or rejection. However, Shaw’s curiosity had been aroused, to say the least of it, and he had got Latymer to wangle him one of the Admiralty’s quota of invitations to the Embassy function that his caller had suggested he attend; and then that evening he’d dressed in full tails and gone along.
It had been ordinary enough at the start.
A mid-European orchestra, its members wearing national costume, had been playing away on a dais at the far end of a long room; heavy chandeliers, the crystal glittering in a kaleidoscope of reflected colour, hung from the ornate moulded ceiling, their lights touching the diamonds of the women and the jewelled orders of the diplomats and the decorations of the high-ranking Service officers. Indeed the whole atmosphere had been one of sweetness and light — which was welcome enough, but also strange enough, in the London Embassy of an Iron Curtain country in the nine-teen-sixties.
And Shaw had felt instinctively that it was phoney.
This wasn’t just because of that mysterious caller — the phoniness was absolutely basic and the sweetness was a mere oasis — or more accurately, in his view, the bitter-sweetness of a mirage — in the desert of suspicion and open hostility
that characterized the cold war. It just didn’t add up; all these gay fraternizers, peculiar enough bedfellows at any time, would be at one another’s throats again the moment the Five Powers’ Conference was over.
Shaw reached out a long arm, stretching round the back of a bulky Ambassador who was chatting to an Under-Secretary from the Commonwealth Relations Office. His fingers contacted a heavy silver box of cigarettes — black ones, with gold tips. Russian, and very expensive. Balancing his glass precariously in one hand, he revved his lighter and blew a long trail of smoke ceilingwards over the Ambassadorial head. Shaw’s eyes were watchful — and hard. He was keyed-up and alert, yet a detached part of his mind was bored to death. He’d never been much of a man for parties or receptions, diplomatic or otherwise; in fact he loathed formal entertaining, it didn’t mean a damn thing to him.