'There will be a telephone, Mr Holt. But my first priority is to apprehend the despicable culprits responsible for this crime.'
'Just a telephone – the street was packed solid. You don't need me to tell you.'
'Mr Holt, we need to have a description from you.'
He was in a police state, a state controlled by the leviathan apparatus of the Organ of State Security. A state where the KGB crushed all dissent, kept the gulags filled. He was in a country that boasted no terrorism, no law and order problem, no incidence of armed crime. He believed, as never before, that in this country nothing moved, nothing happened, without KGB authority. Now a charade about the need for a description.
'Ask someone else what the bastard looked like,'
Holt yelled at him.
The militiaman close to him had clenched his fist, ready to intervene, and the militiaman beside the rubber doors had his hand wavering close to the wood trun-cheon fastened to his belt.
The KGB officer strode away.
All so clear now to Holt. The State had butchered them. The authorities had killed them… He went off down the corridor, he shrugged away a feeble attempt by his militiaman minder to stop him. He went into an office that was empty because of the weekend. He picked up the telephone, he dialled a zero and then seven for long distance, he waited for the clicks, he dialled the Moscow code and the embassy number. The 'unob-tainable' whine sang back at him. He tried twice more.
Twice more the same blank whine.
Out of the clinic. The short walk along the sea front, the two militiamen trailing him, a distance away as if he might turn on them, savage them.
He reached the Oreanda Hotel. The street and the half steps picketed off, brown paper stuck where the glass panels had been, the glisten of soap and water on the steps. In past the militia and more KGB, up to the reception desk. He wanted a telephone call to Moscow.
It was regretted there was no telephonic communication with Moscow. Then he wanted a telex connection with Moscow and he wanted it now, right now. It was regretted that there was also no telex communication with Moscow. By whose authority? By the authority of State Security.
So tired, so bloody exhausted. Slowly, deliberately,
'I have to speak to Moscow.'
'I am so sorry, Mr Holt, but it is not possible for anyone to speak to Moscow. All the lines are closed.'
'Is there a post office?'
'It is Saturday afternoon, the post office is closed, Mr Holt.'
› 'I'have to speak to my embassy.'
'I am sure that later, Mr Holt, the lines will be restored.'
The reception manager gave him his room key and then reached below the counter and shuffled to him Jane's handbag. Dropped it when she was hit. It was a small, kind gesture by the reception staff, to have retrieved the handbag, kept it for him. He offered his thanks. He went slowly up the flights of stairs to his room. He locked the door behind him. He tipped her bag out onto the coverlet of his bed. Her purse, her passport, her notepad, her pen, her embassy I/D, her lipstick, her mirror, her hairbrush, her letter from home, her photograph of Holt in Whitehall held in a small silver frame, her camera…
He was shipwrecked. His landfall was a room on the second floor of the Oreanda Hotel in Yalta. His sea was a closed down telephone and telex system to Moscow and a wall of silence. He had gone through shock and misery and fury, now his reserve failed. Alone, where no-one saw him, Holt knelt beside his bed and wept, and his face covered her possessions, and he said over and over again the words she had spoken to him.
'Don't be childish, Holt.'
The ciphered message whispered onto a teleprinter at main headquarters in Dzerzhinsky Square. A report from KGB Yalta to KGB Moscow, giving information, requiring guidance. Saturday afternoon in the capital city. The message, still in cipher, passed to Second Directorate, domestic counter-subversion, and to Fifth Chief Directorate, suppression of dissent. Rows of weekend empty desks in Second and Fifth Chief, dust covers over the computer consoles, skeleton staffing.
The minutes sliding away. Second Directorate duty officer going in search of his senior, his senior telephoning home to the man commanding the Second Department of the Directorate, the man commanding Second Department waiting for a call back from the Directorate chief out walking his dog. Fifth Chief Directorate on hold and looking for a lead from Second Directorate. Foreign Ministry Embassy Liaison stating they would take no action until briefed by Second Directorate, and until consultation with Fifth Chief Directorate. The dog was a young German Shepherd and needed a good long walk on a Saturday afternoon.
The duty officer at the British embassy whiled away his afternoon in the near deserted building, and watched the ripple of the Moskva River from his upper room.
He had run down Lenin Street. He had turned away from the shore front into a small alleyway. No more running then. He had walked as he had shrugged into his windcheater. One bad moment, when the windcheater had been on the ground and he had had to scoop it up. The gun under the shoulder of the windcheater. Another right turn, and another left turn, and the Volga car in front of him, and the man starting the engine.
The rifle – magazine detached and metal stock folded down – wrapped in sacking on the floor of the car. Going fast out of the city and towards the Alushta road.
'Did you succeed?'
He punched the air in front of his face, and turned to the wide billowing smile of his commander.› There was no obstacle to their flight. They had beaten the road blocks.
He was Abu Hamid. Abu Hamid was the name he had taken when he had joined the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. He was 28 years old. His body was bone thin, spare, as if he ate little, as if he enjoyed no luxuries. The complexion on his face was smooth with the exception of the scar under his left eye. He wore no moustache and his matted dark hair was cut close to his scalp. Beyond the scar he was unrec-ognisable, unremarkable.
He was a chosen man.
He sucked hard, like he was panting, on his cigarette.
He exploded the smoke from his mouth. He had stripped off the civilian clothes in which he had appeared on the front pavement of the Oreanda Hotel.
He was now in military fatigues. They had stopped by the roadside at the city's limits and behind the cover of flourishing saplings Abu Hamid had swiftly dug a deep hole in the ditch and crammed in it the windcheater, the trousers, the shirt, the moustache, and the wig.
The city of Yalta was behind them. The high slopes of oak and beech forest that dominated the city were lost to them. In a comer of the car park of the Sechonov Climatic and Physiotherapeutic Institute, shielded by small recently planted acacia and laurel and magnolia trees, they had transferred from the Volga car to a military jeep. The car could not be linked to them. The car had been hired from Intourist. The car had been fitted with false plates. Later, the plates exchanged, the car would be returned, the bill paid. None of that was the business of Abu Hamid.
The commander knew that the journey from Yalta to Simferopol would take, given a few minutes either way, one hour and three quarters. They hammered through Gurzuf, past the signed turnings to the Defence Ministry sanatorium and the 'Sputnik' Youth Camp.
The commander's eyes flickered to the side mirrors of the jeep. They had no tail. Through Alushta, as if it did not exist, as if the narrowing streets in the town were merely an inconvenience on their journey. The commander pricked his ears to listen for a trailing siren. He heard nothing. The jeep straining when they climbed towards the lower reaches of the Chatir Dag that rose higher than any mountain in Lebanon, higher than the mystic Hermon of Syria, higher than any mountain of Palestine that was the homeland of Abu Hamid.
The aircraft should now be leaving Moscow. There was a schedule to be met. At the road's summit, under Chatir Dag, they did not pause to look back and down towards Yalta and the hazed seascape.
Abu Hamid leaned forward. He unwrapped the AK-47 assault rifle from the sacking on the floor space between his feet. He emptied the magazine. On semi-automatic, at a range of five or six paces, he had fired eleven bullets. He knew the weapon as he knew himself.
Now he put the remaining rounds with the magazine and the rifle carefully into the mouth of the sack,
