receiving the Red Rose letter, Isabella left the Mini in the car park of the new Pick 'n' Pay supermarket in the suburb of Claremont.
She locked the driver's door, but left the side-window open an inch at the top as she had been instructed. She entered the back door of the bustling supermarket. It was the last Friday of the month, and pay-day for tens of thousands of office workers and civil servants. The queues at the checkout tills were scores long.
Isabella passed quickly out through the front entrance into the main street of the suburb and turned left. She pushed her way along the crowded pavements until she reached the new post office building. There was a pair of teenage girls in the glass cubicle of the first public telephone booth from the left. They giggled into the receiver and 228 jangled their fake gold ear-rings and rolled their eyes at each other as they listened to the boy on the other end of the line, sharing the earpiece of the telephone.
Isabella checked her watch. It was five minutes short of the hour, and she felt a stab of anxiety. She tapped imperiously on the glass door, and one of the girls pushed out her tongue at her and went on speaking.
A minute later Isabella tapped again. With ill grace the pair hung. up the receiver and flounced away angrily. Isabella darted into the booth and closed the door. She did not lift the receiver, but made a show of searching for small change in her purse. She was watching the minute-hand of her wristwatch. As it touched the pip at the top of the dial the telephone rang and she snatched it up.
'Red Rose,' she whispered breathlessly, and a voice said: 'Return immediately to your vehicle.' The connection was broken and the burr of the dialling tone echoed in her ears. Even in her perplexity, Isabella thought she had recognized the heavy accent of the large powerful woman who had picked her up in the closed van on the Thames Embankment almost three years previously.
Isabella dropped the receiver back on to its cradle and fled from the booth. It took her three minutes to reach the Mini in the Pick 'n' Pay car park. As she inserted the key in the door-lock she saw the envelope lying on the driver's seat, and she understood. She had read the books of Le Carrd and Len Deighton, and she realized that this was a dead-letter drop.
She knew that she was almost certainly under observation at that moment.
She glanced around the car park furtively. It was almost two acres in extent, and there were several hundred other vehicles parked around her.
Dozens of shoppers pushed their laden shopping-trolleys to the waiting motor-cars, and beggars and off-duty schoolchildren loitered and idled about the car park. Cars pulled in and out of the gates in a steady two-way stream. It would be impossible to pick out the watcher from this crowd.
She slipped behind the wheel and drove carefully back to Weltevreden. The letter was obviously too important to be entrusted to the postal service. This was an ingenious form of hand delivery. Locked in the safety of her own private bedroom suite she at last opened the envelope.
First, there was a recent colour photograph of Nicky. He was dressed in bathing-trunks.- He had developed into a sturdy and beautiful child of nearly three years of age. He stood on a beach of white coral sand with the blue ocean behind him.
The letter that accompanied the photograph was terse and unequivocal: As soon as possible, you will acquire full technical specifications of the new Siemens computer-linked coastal radar network presently being installed by Armscor at Silver Mine naval headquarters on the Cape peninsula.
Inform us in the usual way once these plans are in your possession. After you have delivered, arrangements will be made for your first meeting with your son.
There was no signature.
Standing over the toilet-bowl in her bathroom, Isabella burnt the letter and, as the flames scorched her fingertips, dropped it into the bowl and flushed the ashes away. She closed the toilet-cover and sat upon it, staring at the tiled wall opposite.
So it had come at last - as she had known it must. For three years she had waited for the order to commit an act that would finally put her beyond the pale.
Up until now she had been instructed merely to inveigle herself into her father's complete confidence. She had been told to make herself indispensable to him, and she had done so. She had been ordered to join the National Party and seek election to parliamentary office. With Nana's help and guidance, she had done so.
However, this was different. She recognized that she had at last reached the point of no return. She could turn back from treason - and abandon her son; or she could go forward into the dangerous unknown.
'Oh, God help me,' she whispered aloud. 'What can I do - what must I do?' She felt the great serpentine coils of dread and guilt tighten about her.
She knew what the answer to her question must be.
A copy of the Siemens radar installation report was in her father's strongroom in Centaine House at this moment. On Monday the file would be returned by special courier to naval headquarters in the nuclear-proof bunker complex built into Silver Mine mountain.
However, her father was flying up to the sheep ranch at Camdeboo over the weekend. She had already refused the invitation to accompany him on the excuse that she had so much work to catch up on. On Saturday and Sunday, Nana was judging the Cape gun-dog trials. Garry was in Europe with Holly and the children. Isabella would have the top floor of Centaine House to herself for the entire weekend. She had full security clearance, and the guards at the front door knew her well.
The wind was out of the north. The first snowflakes eddied down, silver bright against the grey sow's belly of the sky.
There were a dozen men at the graveside, no women. There had been no women in Joe Cicero's life, just as now there was none at his death. All the mourners were officers from the department. They had been delegated to this duty. They stood stolidly to attention in a single rank. All of them wore uniform greatcoats and scarlet-piped dress caps. All their noses were red, with cold rather than with grief. Joe Cicero had no friends. He had seldom evoked any emotion in his peers other than envious admiration or fear.
The honour guard stepped smartly forward and, at the order, raised their rifles and pointed them to the sky. The volleys rang out, punctuated by the rattle of the bolts. At the next order they shouldered their weapons and marched away, boots slamming into the gravel path and clenched fists swinging high across the chest.
The official mourners broke their ranks, shook hands briefly and expressionlessly then hurried to the waiting vehicles.
Ramsey Machado was the only one left at the graveside. He also wore the full-dress uniform of a KGB colonel, and beneath his greatcoat the gaudy lines of his decorations reached below his ribcage.
'And so, you old bastard, for you the game is over at last - but it took you long enough to clear the stage.' Although Ramsey had been head of section for two years now, he had never truly felt that he had succeeded to the title while Joe Cicero was still alive.
The old man had died grudgingly. He had held the cancer in remission for long agonizing months. He had even kept his office in the Lubyanka right up to the last day. His gaunt spectral presence had presided at every meeting of section heads, his will and his enmity had inhibited Ramsey at every turn, right to the last.
'Goodbye, Joe Cicero. The devil can have you now.' Ramsey smiled, and his lips felt as though they might tear in the cold.
He turned away from the grave. His car was the last one remaining under the row of tall dark yews. With his rank, Ramsey now rated a black Chaika and a corporal driver. The driver opened the door for him. As Ramsey settled into the back seat he brushed the snowflakes from his shoulders with his gloves.
'Back to the office,' he said.
The corporal drove fast but skilfully, and Ramsey relaxed and watched the streets of Moscow unfold ahead of the departmental pennant on the shining black bonnet of the Chaika.
Ramsey loved Moscow. He loved the broad boulevards that Joseph Stalin had built after the Great Patriotic War. He loved the pure classical lines of some of the buildings and the brilliant contrast that they struck with those in the rococo style alongside the skyscrapers that Stalin had built and topped with their red stars. The concept of Soviet giantism excited him. They drove past the massive bronze statues of the heroes of the people, the monstrous figures of men and women marching forward together brandishing submachine-guns and sickles and hammers, raising high the socialist banner and the red star.
There were no commercial advertisements, no exhortations to drink Coca-Cola or to smoke Marlboros or invest with Prudential Insurance and read the Sun.
That was the most striking difference between the cities of Mother Russia and those of the crass and avaricious capitalistic West. It offended Ramsey's instinct that the appetites of the people should be stimulated for such shoddy and indulgent goods, that a nation's productive capacity should be diverted from the essential to the trivial.
From the back seat of the Chaika he looked upon the Russian people and he felt a glow of righteous approval. Here was a people organized and committed to the good of the State, to the betterment of the whole not the individual parts. He observed them, patient and obedient, standing at the bus-stops, standing in the food-queues, orderly and regimented.
