“Maisky and Skrypnik. Maisky was a Jew, the son of a watchmaker from the stetl. I met him once in Petersburg. A small man with bad teeth.
“There was a third man with them, a Mongol guide. He made his way back to Russia after they died and managed to make a report. Badmayeffwas their expert on Tibet then. He interviewed the man and wrote the report himself.
“Now, Maisky and Skrypnik had gone to Tibet officially as explorers, so heavily edited versions of the report were deposited in all the proper places the Institute of Oriental Languages at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Oriental Section of the Imperial Archaeological Society, and the Imperial Academy of Sciences.
One or two articles were even published in journals. I read some of them myself.”
He paused and fingered the steering-wheel again. No-one passed in the street. It was Tuesday night, and it was cold, and children were in bed at home, dreaming of fat Father Christmases and dining off brandied pudding in their sleep.
“The real report, the unedited version, was locked away in a file in the Secret Service archives and promptly forgotten. The Mongol disappeared almost certainly killed because of what he knew.”
“What did he know?”
“Be patient, Christopher. I’ll come to that. I think Badmayeff planned to act on the report, but first of all he needed funds and the backing of the right people. However, it was already 1913 and circumstances were far from propitious for an undertaking in Tibet. The file stayed where it was, gathering dust. I had no idea of its existence, of course. No-one had any idea.
“I only discovered what I have just told you this year, after I received the report about Zamyatin being sighted near Mount Kailas. My information was reliable. There were photographs, as I said. So I believed Zamyatin had really been there. And I asked myself what could possibly bring a man like Nikolai Zamyatin to such a God-forsaken place. A man on his way up. A man with access to the corridors of power.
“It was then I remembered that you had been there in 1912.
Looking for Russian agents. Perhaps, I reasoned to myself, you had been mistaken. Perhaps there had indeed been agents, or at least one agent. If so, I argued to myself, there must have been a report, there must still be a report somewhere .. . and Nikolai Zamyatin must have found it and read it.”
Abruptly, Winterpole reached out a hand and cleared a space where fresh condensation had fogged the windscreen. Outside, the snow still fell, its faint flakes drifting down past the street-lamp, remote and colourless, like shadows falling from another planet.
“I instructed my best agent in Moscow to look for the report. It took him a week to find it. Or, to be precise, to find the file it had been in. The report itself was missing Zamyatin had either kept it or destroyed it, there was no way of knowing which. There was, however, a second file in Badmayeff’s hand. It contained a synopsis.
of the full report, intended for the eyes of the Tsar himself. The synopsis is less than a foolscap page in length and it tells us very little. But it does make one thing clear: Maisky and Skrypnik were sent to Tibet expressly to search for something. And whatever it was, they found it.
“What is also clear is that their discovery did not go back to Russia with their Mongol guide. It was left in Tibet. Badmayeff’s synopsis ends with a request for further finance in order to kit out an expedition to bring it back. But war broke out in Europe and everybody started waving flags, so no expedition was ever sent.
Until this year. Until Nikolai Zamyatin appointed himself to the task.”
Somewhere, footsteps sounded on hard ground and faded again.
Someone was reclaiming the streets from Sunday’s violence. A light went on in a room opposite and was extinguished a few seconds later. A dog barked once and was silent. The night continued.
“What has any of this to do with me or my son?” Christopher asked again.
Winterpole leaned his forehead against the cold rim of the
steering-wheel and breathed out slowly.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“I wish to God I knew, but I don’t. I swear that’s the truth.”
“Then why .. .”
“Go through all this? Because, Christopher, although I cannot begin to explain it to you, I know that there is a connection. So far, all I know is that you were in the Kailas region eight years ago. And Nikolai Zamyatin was there four months ago.”
“You mean that’s what brought you all the way up here? My son is kidnapped and you come here talking about coincidences. You tell me stories about a man I’ve never seen or heard of.”
Winterpole did not answer at once. Outside, the snowflakes danced as he came closer to the heart of the thing. They were all dancing: himself and Christopher Wylam, and somewhere far away, Christopher’s son and a man called Zamyatin, all caught in a Dance of Death, turning round and round in the still darkness like figures on an old clock.
“There’s something else,” he said at last, his voice flat and
emotionless.
“Go on.”
“Last month,” he said, ‘a Tibetan monk arrived in Kalimpong in northern India. He was dying: he’d come over the high passes during some very bad weather. Somehow we’re not sure exactly how he managed to get a message to a man called Mishig.
Mishig is a Mongol trader with his base in Kalimpong. He’s also an agent for the Russians. Until the Revolution, he worked quite happily for the Tsarist regime. Now he’s a messenger-boy for the Bolsheviks .. . and just as happy. He keeps them informed about traffic to and from Tibet. Low-grade information mostly, but from time to time it throws up pearls. So they’ve given him a small radio transmitter that he uses to communicate with a controller in Calcutta, whose identity is still unknown to us.
“We know that Mishig’s control is able to get messages through to Moscow and Europe, but we haven’t yet worked out his system.
In the meantime, we go on monitoring all the signals that pass between Mishig and Calcutta.”
There was a pause. Winterpole took a deep breath.
“On the tenth of November, we intercepted a message to Calcutta from Mishig. It was marked “urgent” and had been encoded quite differently to any of his previous signals. And it was signed with the code-name “Zima”. That’s Russian for “Winter”.
It’s the official code-name for Nikolai Zamyatin.”
Winterpole paused again. Christopher sensed that he was reluctant to get to the point.
“Exactly what did this message say?” he asked.
“You understand, Christopher,” Winterpole said in a quiet voice, ‘that there can be no going back. Once I have told you, you won’t be able to leave it alone. I can still spare you, I can still keep silent.
It’s your decision.”
“Tell me. I have to know.” He felt the tension in his stomach tighten into a knotted cord. Outside, the snowflakes danced and fell.
“He asked for information,” Winterpole said.
“Information about an Englishman called Christopher John Wylam, who had worked for British intelligence in India. And about his son. A boy called William.”
The undertow had him firmly in its grip at last, and he could feel himself going under. Thin hands flailing, tearing the sunlight out of the sky. He said nothing.
“Three weeks after that,” the other man went on, inexorable now he had begun, ‘we got hold of a signal from Calcutta to Mishig. It said they had tracked you down in a place called Hexham in England. There was a request for further instructions.”
He paused.
“I’m afraid that’s where things went a bit wrong,” he said.
“We thought Mishig would send another message to Calcutta later the same day. He was due to despatch one of his routine signals. But he never made the broadcast. He took the next train from Siliguri to Calcutta. We’re certain he carried the instructions to his control in person either orally or in writing, it doesn’t matter. That was six days ago.”
Christopher looked at Winterpole.
