Twenty minutes later he was in the attic, calling South Africa via the advanced radio transmitter. It took a few minutes before Jan Kleyn answered. They used no names when they talked to each other.
Konovalenko reported what had happened. The cage was open and the bird has disappeared. It hasn’t managed to learn how to sing.
It was a while before Jan Kleyn realized what had happened. But once he had a clear picture of the situation, his response was unequivocal. The bird must be caught. Another bird will be sent as a substitute. More information about this later. For the time being, everything goes back to square one.
When the conversation was over, Konovalenko felt deeply satisfied. Jan Kleyn understood that Konovalenko had done what was expected of him.
“Try him out,” Jan Kleyn had said when they met in Nairobi to plan Victor Mabasha’s future. “Test his staying power, look for his weaknesses. We have to know if he really can hold out. There’s too much at stake for anything to be left to chance. If he’s not up to it, he’ll have to be replaced.”
Victor Mabasha was not up to it, thought Konovalenko. When the chips were down, behind that tough facade was no more than a confused, sentimental African.
Now it was Konovalenko’s job to find and kill him. Then he would train Jan Kleyn’s new candidate.
He realized that what he had to do next would not be all that easy. Victor Mabasha was wounded, and he would be acting irrationally. But Konovalenko had no doubt he would succeed. His staying power was legendary during his KGB days. He was a man who never gave up.
Konovalenko lay on the bed and slept for a few hours.
As dawn broke he packed his bag and carried it out to the BMW.
Before he locked the front door he primed the detonator to blow up the whole house. He set it for three hours. When the explosion came, he would be a long way away.
He drove off shortly after six. He would be in Stockholm by late afternoon.
There were two police cars by the junction of the E 14. For a brief moment he was afraid Victor Mabasha had revealed both his own and Konovalenko’s existence. But nobody in the cars reacted as he drove past.
Jan Kleyn called Franz Malan at home shortly before seven o’clock on Tuesday morning.
“We have to meet,” he said curtly. “The Committee will have to meet as soon as possible.”
“Has something happened?” asked Franz Malan.
“Yes,” replied Jan Kleyn. “The first bird wasn’t up to the job. We’ll have to find another.”
Chapter Eleven
The apartment was in a high-rise complex in Hallunda.
Konovalenko parked outside late in the evening of Tuesday, April 28. He took his time on the journey up from Skane. Even though he liked driving fast and the powerful BMW invited high speeds, he was careful to stay within the speed limits. Just outside Jonkoping he observed grimly how a number of motorists had been waved down at the side of the road by the cops. As several of them had overtaken him, he assumed they had been caught in a radar speed trap.
Konovalenko had no confidence at all in the Swedish police. He assumed the basic reason for this was his contempt for the open, democratic Swedish society. Konovalenko not only mistrusted democracy, he hated it. It had robbed him of a large part of his life. Even if it would take a very long time to introduce it-perhaps it would never be a reality-he left Leningrad the moment he realized the old, closed Soviet society was past saving. The final straw was the failed coup in the fall of 1991, when a number of leading military officers and Politburo members of the old school tried to restore the former hierarchical system. But when the failure was plain for all to see, Konovalenko immediately started planning his escape. He would never be able to live in a democracy, no matter what form it took. The uniform he had worn ever since he joined the KGB as a recruit in his twenties had become an outer skin as far as he was concerned. And he just could not shed his skin. What would be left if he did?
He was not the only one to think like that. In those last years, when the KGB was subjected to severe reforms and the Berlin wall collapsed, he and his colleagues were always discussing what the future would look like. It was one of the unwritten rules of the intelligence service that somebody would have to be held responsible when a totalitarian society started to crumble. Far too many citizens had been subjected to treatment by the KGB, far too many relatives were eager to extract vengeance for their missing or dead kin. Konovalenko had no desire to be hauled before the courts and treated like his former Stasi colleagues in the new Germany. He hung a map of the world on his office wall and studied it for hours. He was forced to grit his teeth and accept that he was not cut out for life in the late twentieth century. He found it hard to imagine himself living in one of the brutal but highly unstable dictatorships in South America. Nor did he have any confidence in the home-rule leaders who were still in power in some African states. On the other hand, he thought seriously about building a future in some fundamentalist Arab country. In some ways he was indifferent to the Islamic religion, and in other ways he hated it. But he knew the governments ran both open and secret police forces with farreaching powers. In the end, though, he rejected this alternative as well. He thought he would never be able to handle the transformation to such a foreign culture, no matter which Islamic state he selected. Besides, he did not want to give up drinking vodka.
He had also considered offering his services to an international security company. But he lacked the necessary confidence; it was a world with which he was unfamiliar.
In the end, there was only one country he could contemplate. South Africa. He read whatever literature he could lay his hands on, but it was not easy to find much. Thanks to the authority still attached to KGB officers, he managed to track down and unlock a few literary and political poison cabinets. What he read confirmed his impression that South Africa would be a suitable place to build a future for himself. He was attracted by the racial discrimination, and could see how both the regular and secret police forces were well organized and wielded considerable influence.
He disliked people of color, especially blacks. As far as he was concerned, they were inferior beings, unpredictable, usually criminal. Whether such views constituted prejudice, he had no idea. He just decided that was the way things were. But he liked the thought of having domestics, servants, and gardeners.
Anatoli Konovalenko was married, but he was planning a new life without Mira. He had grown tired of her years ago. She was probably just as tired of him. He never bothered to ask her. All they had left was a routine, lacking in substance, lacking in emotions. He compensated by indulging in regular affairs with women he met through his work.
Their two daughters were already living their own independent lives. No need to worry about them.
As the empire collapsed all around him, he thought he would be able to melt into oblivion. Anatoli Konovalenko would cease to exist. He would change his identity, and perhaps also his appearance. His wife would have to exist as best she could on the pension she would receive once he was declared dead.
Like most of his colleagues, Konovalenko had organized a series of emergency exits over the years through which he could escape if necessary from a crisis situation. He had built up a reserve of foreign currency, and had a variety of identities at his disposal in the form of passports and other documents. He also had a strong network of contacts in strategically important positions in Aeroflot, the customs authorities, and the foreign service. Anybody belonging to the nomenklatura was like a member of a secret society. They were there to help each other, and as a group could guarantee that their way of life would not give way beneath them. Or so they thought, until the unthinkable collapse actually happened.
Toward the end, just before he fled, everything happened very quickly. He contacted Jan Kleyn, who was a liaison officer for the KGB and the South African intelligence service. They had met when Konovalenko was visiting the Moscow station in Nairobi-his first trip to the African continent, in fact. Jan Kleyn made it very clear that Konovalenko’s services could be useful to him and his country. He filled Konovalenko’s head with visions of immigration and a comfortable future.
But that would take time. Konovalenko needed an intermediate port of call after leaving the Soviet Union. He decided on Sweden. Several colleagues had recommended it. Apart from the high standard of living, it was easy to cross the borders, and at least as easy to keep out of the public eye; to be completely anonymous, if that was what you wanted. There was also a growing colony of Russians, many of them criminals, organized into gangs, that had started to operate in Sweden. They were often the first of the rats to leave the sinking ship, rather than the last.
