He’d succeeded by improvising upon the instructor training, recognizing that what he had to carry marked him more obviously than anyone else going in or out. So he prepared himself to merge with it as naturally as possible into the background, like he had earlier done by becoming a jogger at Primrose Hill. He hoped they’d remembered to pack more than just the M21 and the Browning and their ammunition.
Having had a week to study workmen on the streets of Bern and Geneva, Zenin easily found the day before the planned pick-up a shop in the Speichergasse selling the most commonly worn type of dungarees, blue, with bib and braces. He bought a matching cap as well, a pair of heavy boots and a set of rubber wedges. A comparable bag was the most difficult to locate and it was late afternoon before he discovered a store off the Munstergasse. Everything, of course, had to be kept separate from the hotel in which he was staying, as a supposed tourist, so he took all the packages back to the lock-up garage in which he had parked the hired Peugeot. Unselfconsciously Zenin stripped naked, putting on only the overalls and for an hour vigorously exercised, bending and twisting to crease the newness from them and to get them as sweat-stained as possible. He dried his face with the cap, to mark that as much as he could and scuffed the boots along the floor and against the concrete sides of the garage. The bag was canvas, like that he had to collect, and he dirtied that with dust from the floor. The dungarees were damp with his perspiration when he took them off and Zenin screwed them tightly into a ball, so that they would dry further crumpled.
He approached the garage cautiously the following day, not wanting to be seen entering in a suit and emerging a workman, having to wait fifteen minutes before he was satisfied the road was clear. It was more difficult to leave, because his vision was restricted by the narrowly opened door but again he did so sure that he was unobserved. Zenin travelled back into the centre of town on a tram, confident he’d done a good job on the overalls when a woman already on the seat on which he lowered himself perceptibly moved away.
A hesitant man attracts more attention than a confident one and Zenin went assuredly along the most direct linking street into Brunnadernain, which, somewhat to his surprise, had been dismissed by the professional Watchers at Kuchino as being the unlikeliest to house surveillance spots. He hoped they were right. Protectively, Zenin wore the cap pulled low over his forehead and walked looking slightly down: if there were observation it would be from some elevation, to avoid street level obstruction, so his face was as hidden as it could be.
He made no pause going through the embassy gates, someone with a right to enter, and neither did he approach the main entrance. Instead he went to a smaller side door not obviously marked for tradesmen deliveries, but which was its proper purpose. And which he would have known if he were familiar with the building. To the guard he said: ‘Run Around,’ and was admitted immediately.
The KGB rezidentura was at the rear of the embassy, as distanced as it could be from any overlooking buildings from which directional listening devices could be aimed, an interlocking series of rooms absolutely divided from the rest of the legation by a barred and locked gate behind which sat a uniformed KGB guard. Zenin gave him the same operational identification but before he was admitted the man verified the code with the rezident-in-charge, Yuri Ivanovich Lyudin.
The locally based KGB officer was striding down the corridor, beaming, by the time the security gates thudded closed behind Zenin.
‘Vasili Nikolaevich!’ greeted the rezident.
‘Yuri Ivanovich,’ responded Zenin, more restrained.
Lyudin stopped some way away, still smiling, looking at the workman’s outfit. ‘There were many photographs from which to recognize you today. But we weren’t warned how to expect you!’
‘Of course you weren’t,’ said Zenin, more than restrained. He’d memorized Lyudin’s face from photographs as well but none had shown the man as fat or as flush-faced as he was.
‘It’s very good concealment,’ praised Lyudin.
‘I hope you’re right,’ said Zenin. ‘Have things arrived for me?’
‘A sealed container,’ confirmed Lyudin.
‘Which has remained sealed?’
‘Of course,’ said Lyudin. Why had Dzerzhinsky Square been so insistent that no indication be given to this man about the additional surveillance teams that had been drafted from Moscow?
‘I need an equally sealed room,’ demanded Zenin.
‘One is set aside,’ said Lyudin. ‘But perhaps a little refreshment first? I have some excellent Polish vodka.’
‘It’s ten-thirty in the morning,’ reminded Zenin.
‘I waited for you before I began,’ sniggered Lyudin, wanting the other Russian to accept it as the joke it was intended to be.
Zenin didn’t, nor did he smile. He said: ‘There were some requests from Moscow: detailed information about Geneva?’
Lyudin’s smile became hopefully broader at the awareness of Zenin’s involvement. ‘Which I personally responded to. Myself.’
‘And personally made the surveys?’
‘Yes,’ confirmed Lyudin. ‘I trust it was satisfactory.’
From a series of bars, guessed Zenin. It was easy to guess how Lyudin had gained the patriotic complexion. And why so much of the Geneva information had been inaccurate. The need for protest to Moscow was far more than personal now: such a man, particularly a man in a position of command like Lyudin, represented a positive danger to the entire rezidentura. But more importantly to the KGB itself. Zenin said: ‘I’ve decided upon my report to Moscow.’
‘I am grateful, Comrade Zenin,’ said the other Russian, misunderstanding.
‘The sealed room and the container?’ reminded Zenin.
Lyudin led the way further back into the rezidentura, to a chamber actually within the building, with no connection to any outside surface. It was so small Zenin was practically able to reach out sideways and touch either wall. There was harsh strip lighting around the four sides of the squared ceiling and it illuminated the entire area in a glare so fierce that Zenin had to squint against it.
‘This is the examination room: we were advised you would need to conduct an examination,’ said Lyudin.
Zenin was curious at what other things at what other times might have been examined here: despite his profession he’d never been into a mortuary but imagined this must be very like such a place. There was just a metalled table, a single chair, metal again, and a wall-mounted telephone: there was even a smell of antiseptic cleanliness. He said: ‘This will do adequately.’
‘The container is in my personal security vault.’
‘I would like it now.’
For a moment Zenin imagined the man was going to suggest an alternative but instead Lyudin nodded acceptance and hurried from the room. Zenin found it oppressively hot – he supposed from the intense lighting – and claustrophobic, too. Zenin decided that such surroundings would quickly disorientate a person, particularly if that person were frightened: perhaps it was fortunate he was anything but frightened. Lyudin returned almost at once. The container appeared to be of some hardened plasticized material but Zenin knew it to be stronger than that, a specialized light-weight alloy at least capable of withstanding an aircraft crash and any engulfing fire that might have followed. On the outside was a large combination lock activated only by a first-time operation of the correct selection of numerals, which only he possessed, memorized. Any wrongly probed sequence, in an effort by an expert locksmith to discover the combination, would have automatically set off the phosphorus and then acid incineration of the contents; the container was hermetically sealed so the chemical reaction of phosphorus and acid would have made a gas sufficient to create a bomb capable of destroying everybody and everything within its fifty-metre radius. In addition to the explosion, the alloy under such pressure disintegrated into thousands of razor-edged shards: its destructive capability had been tested over an additional fifty metres against gulag detainees like Barabanov, against whom Zenin had been pitted at Balashikha. There had, of course, been some survivors: twenty, each so badly maimed they were shot on the spot because they could never medically have recovered to perform any further useful function. One hundred and fifty died outright, burst apart.