Shumuk touched the Washington telex decode with the tips of his bony fingers. He could almost feel it: a lifetime of intelligence work-devious tricks and complex lies, half-truths and betrayals-had given him an instinct that seldom faltered. The Kleiber business was all part of some CIA trick and he would have no part of it. He sat down at his desk and scribbled a message for his Washington KGB office on the special encoding pad, laboriously writing one block capital letter in each grey, printed square so that the cipher clerk could insert the coded message into the empty spaces below each line.
PARA ONE CONFIRMATION MOSCOW CENTRE PERMISSION GRANTED
FOR 982 MEETING STOP LOCATION YOUR PARA EIGHT
MESSAGE NUMBER 907372-KLT TIMING 22 00 HOURS TWENTY
FIRST AUGUST STOP PROCEED CAUTIOUSLY STOP
COMMUNICATE RESULT IMMEDIATE STOP CEASE ALL CONTACT
WITH 907 [Parker’s submission numeral] REPEAT CEASE ALL CONTACT
907 WITH EFFECT IMMEDIATE STOP END PARA END
MESSAGE MOSCOW CENTRE
Shumuk finished pencilling the message and smoothed it on his desk to read it through again. Perhaps this development was a blessing in disguise. This go-ahead for Grechko might provide a chance to end Grechko’s blundering career. Shumuk read the message again. ‘Proceed cautiously’-that got him off the hook but forced Grechko to attend the clandestine meeting. If that meeting was a CIA trap, then Grechko would be totally compromised by the western intelligence agencies. That would certainly mean the end of Grechko’s chances of a seat on any of the directorate committees.
There was another aspect of the present situation which gave Shumuk comfort. If the Kleiber-Grechko meeting on August 21 was a CIA trap, the Americans would be most careful not to alert the KGB to impending danger. They would certainly not move against Parker until their trap closed. That would provide Shumuk with time to get Parker home to Moscow. He pursed his lips and nodded to himself. Such a scenario would give him a triumph with Parker at the very moment when Grechko fell prey to the CIA. He smiled. After all, Parker was the most important factor; Grechko-whatever mess he made of things-could rely upon his diplomatic immunity. Shumuk imagined himself explaining this modestly to a committee of inquiry, shortly before they commended him for his brilliance.
As Shumuk pressed the button to call the cipher clerk, another thought came to him. Why not make certain that the Grechko meeting with Kleiber was a fiasco? It was no great secret that the British intelligence service were looking for Kleiber, so why not tell them where he was going to be on August 21? He could give details of the meeting to London providing they would make Kleiber XPD. It was safer that way; Kleiber’s indiscretions would embarrass both London and Moscow.
At first the notion was no more than something to toy with; like a pain that can be activated by the careful movement of a loose tooth. But within half an hour Shumuk had learnt to live with such a notion. Rationalization being man’s only natural genius, it was not long before he was able to convince himself that revealing Kleiber’s expected whereabouts to the British was the method whereby he could embarrass the CIA.
He picked up his binoculars and nodded to himself. The bus for Borodino had arrived; it was mud spattered and dented. As he watched, the doors hissed open and the uniformed young men filed into it. One boy used his hat to clean a patch of window.
47
Jennifer Ryden’s priorities were hard to comprehend, thought Boyd Stuart. She had insisted that she must see him urgently but now, in a couturier’s in Sloane Street, she seemed to be little interested in anything but the dress she needed for a weekend party.
‘Thank God you weren’t in California.’ Her voice came through the red velvet curtain of the changing booth
‘Why?’ said Boyd Stuart. He was sitting on a small gilded chair, watching himself reflected in the full-length mirrors.
‘Darling!’ said Jennifer Ryden, who was able to imbue this word with any one of a thousand meanings. ‘Dar-Ling!’ It was the mother speaking to the small child, or the film star assailed by fanclub secretaries. Her head came out of the curtains, while her hands grasped the cloth tight against her neck in decorous precision. ‘Because you finally found all my treasures.’
‘They were in the steamer trunk.’
‘Thank goodness.’ Her head went back inside the booth. ‘Let me have the pink dress again,’ she called to the salesgirl.
‘You put them there, Jennifer. You said leave it in the box room and don’t touch it,’ said Boyd Stuart to the curtain.
‘But you opened it.’ The salesgirl passed the long pink dress through the curtains.
‘And found all the things you’ve been asking for,’ said Stuart.
‘You might at least have let me open it myself. Did you force the lock?’
‘It was unlocked,’ said Stuart. ‘You complain about losing the things, and you complain about my finding them. What the hell does make you happy?’
She swept out of the changing booth and brushed past him, flaring her skirt with the side of her hand and striding up and down in front of the mirrors while turning her head as if to catch her reflection unawares.
‘Not you, my darling. You are far too clever for me.’ She looked to see if the salesgirl had heard her but she gave no sign of having done so. She was standing, arms folded, head tilted, eyes unseeing: the sort of pose that only women who work in dress shops adopt. Jennifer turned on her heel to swirl the thin silk of the dress, then she posed with arms akimbo. Her arms and legs were long and slim, her hands so elegant that she flaunted them, holding them against her cheek and splaying them on her hips.
‘I’ll try the green one again,’ she called loudly to the salesgirl, who gathered an armful of dresses from the chair and went downstairs.
Jennifer looked at herself carefully, smiling distantly as if at some joke she would never reveal. ‘Did you tell daddy?’ she asked quietly now that they were alone.
‘Tell him what?’ So that was it. She simply wanted to be sure that Boyd had not told her father of the night when he came home unexpectedly from Rostock in East Germany. He had found her in his bed with the husband of a girl she had been at school with. ‘Tell him what?’
‘That silly business with Johnny.’ She went back inside the booth, pulled the dress off and dropped it to the floor.
‘What silly business?’
‘Would madam like to try the striped one?’ The salesgirl had reappeared. She was still standing with folded arms, but now half a dozen long dresses were draped over them.
‘Just the green silk,’ said Jennifer. But the girl reached inside the booth and hung all the dresses on the hook and then went back to the storeroom.
‘Me and Johnny… that night,’ said Jennifer in a loud whisper. ‘Did you talk to daddy about that? He’s been in a filthy temper the last few days,’ she said, flicking at her hair with the ends of her fingers.
‘I didn’t tell your father that I returned unexpectedly early from a departmental fiasco in Germany and found you testing the mattress with our dear old friend Johnny,’ said Boyd Stuart. ‘I’m saving it up for the day I resign from the service.’
She smiled. It was the same mirthless smile that her father used to punctuate his dialogue. ‘That’s good,’ she said, looking at herself in the mirror, and holding the belt tight so that it emphasized her hips. ‘But daddy has been frightfully short-tempered lately. And it can’t be simply because I lost his beastly pocket-watch, can it?’ She looked at him in the mirror, caught his eye and smiled archly, moving her hips slightly, as if to remind him of what he had forsaken. Then she returned to the changing booth and put on her own woollen dress.
‘The watch inscribed to Elliot?’
‘I thought it must be something you’d said.’ To the girl somewhere in the storeroom she called. ‘I’ll have my hair done, and come back again. I simply can’t decide on a dress when I’m not looking my best.’