The navigator laughed cheerfully, all the more for the sneer of distaste on the co-pilot's small mouth as if the retreating, jogging boy had left an odour behind which would contaminate all of them.
'We'll be off on time today, sir.'
'Well, don't blame me for it. Accidents happen even to the best of us.'
More smiles, and a moment of gallantry from the men – stepping aside that Anna Tashova and the stewardesses should be first on the steps.
The major of the Committee of State Security – KGB- worked from a smaller and less imposing building than his colleague in the militia security police. The address was not listed in the telephone directory, and was known only to those civilians who had a need for the knowledge.
The major was a frugal man who seldom took more than thirty minutes for his lunch, but since the arrest of Moses Albyov and his subsequent suicide he had not left his office, sleeping the previous two nights on an army bed that graced one corner of the room.
At half-past three the grey telephone on his desk, the direct line that by-passed the switchboard, rang out. A short message and from militia headquarters.
The Jew had been identified.
Quite clever really. The photograph they had taken of him showed indents at the sides of his face from the arms of spectacles, recent enough, but not worn when he had been brought in. One of the patrolmen from the car had said he might have been wearing them when he was taken; and the wounded policeman's description on which the arrest had been made, that had included spectacles. They had found them in the gutter where the street sweeper had pushed them, and the luck was that the lenses were still intact. The major had been kind enough to say that it would be police work that would identify the boy, and that was what it had been. A photograph of the glasses, an analysis of the lenses, a photograph of the boy, and twenty-five detectives touring the city's eye clinics. It was faster than doing it with the boy's teeth: fewer spectacle wearers than those requiring extractions and fillings.
And now they had a name, and were cross-checking with the statutory civil authority dossier.
Moses Albyov, residing at 428B Avenue of the First of May; a workers' quarter in the northern suburbs, he was informed, and also that there was no previous record of violence, and that two cars had left for the address and would be there within a quarter of an hour. Smash the little bastards, he thought, smash them till they screamed like the rats they were. Not long till they'd have their hands on them; the Albyov parents would tell of the associates, would have them all in the cells by dawn.
No delays on the departure of Aeroflot flight 927 to Tashkent. On time, on schedule. The passengers walked the hundred yards to the plane, in untidy caterpillar file out across the tarmac, heat streaming back at them from the great, open surface, burning through the soles of their footwear, driving their eyes together with everything beyond the middle distance dissolving into a haze.
'The seats run A-B-C down one side of the aisle, and D-E-F on the other,' David said to Isaac.
They were near the plane now and walking to the rear exit where the steps had been wheeled up, and there was an angle of shade thrown by the single high-tail structure. 'Yevsei told Rebecca the package would be on the right-hand side, level with the nineteenth row, and would be under the blankets, the blankets that they store in the luggage shelf at the top. We must get on the plane quickly, before the herd, so that one of us can sit in that row and the rest close by. I Will try and see that it is me. When I take the package I will go to the toilet at the back to get the guns assembled. Give me two minutes, then come and knock at the door. Quite soon we will go, after ten minutes, when the seat belt sign is off.'
David was the first of the three on to the steps, Isaac close behind, Rebecca separated by a dozen passengers. David climbed steadily, his speed dictated by the pace of those in front. To any passenger who glanced casually among his fellow travellers David would have aroused no particular interest, his inner tensions successfully masked. He seemed confident and relaxed as he ducked his head through the low doorway. He hesitated for a moment, sizing up the long cigarlike interior of the plane, with the duck-egg decor and green-backed seats stretching away from him to the distant cream-painted door that was half-open, so that he could see the silhouettes of the shoulders of pilot and co-pilot. Isaac nudged him, and he walked down the aisle, noting the row numbers. Row 19, aisle seat C. Isaac opposite him, Row 19, aisle seat D. The package would be above Isaac, and the boy hadn't look for it, was settling in his seat, fastening his safety belt.
Rebecca stooped into her place, four rows in front, but not turning to see them, and then David lost sight of her as other passengers surged the length of the cabin in a steady clamour. It was what he had heard, that people always suffer stress before take-off and before landing; makes them raise their voices, and push aggressively in a way they would not contemplate if their feet were grounded. David fastened his seat belt and looked across at Isaac.
'Courage, my friend,' he said.
'Not courage. It is the time for luck now.' Isaac closed his eyes, waiting for the motion of the plane to tell him they were taxi-ing.
Five minutes they'd been in the house, time enough for them to recognize the stark terror on the faces of the father and mother of Moses Albyov before the truncheon in her lower abdomen and the pistol whipping across his face had delivered up the names of David and Isaac and Rebecca.
One policeman stayed in the living-room, covering with his drawn pistol the woman who cowered in the chair, clutching herself and moaning, and the man lying still on the floor with the blood running from the head wound on to the lino surface. Another had gone to his car to radio to headquarters the fruits of the visit Six more, packed close together, were speeding towards the home of the one called David, the one the woman had said she had gone to visit the morning before to ask the whereabouts of her son.
Some hundreds of yards short of David's address the driver of the police car silenced the siren he had used to clear a path through the traffic, and when they staggered to a halt, his foot hard on the brake pedal, there was a swift and often rehearsed routine for them to follow. Two running for the back, jumping the wire fence, then crouching low, their guns aimed at the rear door. Two more at the front, and behind the car, to give themselves cover. The remaining two, an officer and one who was brave, chancing their luck at the door. 'Shoot him if he has a gun. Without hesitation. Remember what Albyov did, and remember this is one of them.'
David's mother, alone in the house, answered the hammering at the door. Her younger children were still at school, her husband at work, so she was without protection as the officer forced her against the old wooden sideboard, his knee hard against her thigh so that the carved angle bit into her skin. There was no reason to hit: she talked without resort to violence. Too much for her, after a year in Treblinka and never called for the showers, no resistance left, not to a man in uniform who carried a gun, and who shouted and who wore boots that reached to his knee. She had submitted before and would do so again. She told them of her son's friends, pointed him out in the family photograph, said he hadn't been home the previous night.
At militia headquarters they believed in the power of routine. Three names, photographs that would illustrate them when the cars came in from the homes, and when Central Records turned up the files. All standard and routine. Just as it was routine to call the airport with the names, and the principal Aeroflot ticket offices, and to send descriptions to the railway station and the bus terminus by the square of the granite war memorial. All routes of exit from the city were notified with 'priority' messages. And because the computer of the central Aeroflot offices was repaired and functioning, that was the source of the first hard information. The message rattled back over the teleprinter – three names, three tickets, flight number, take-off time, destination. All this was controlled from the second floor operations centre of the militia headquarters – fast, quiet, efficient, a trained team that was good at its work, and which had discovered a scent, and believed that the kill was close.
A call to the airport, routed through the offices of the Frontier Guard control point, to the commander of the unit who had responsibility for all matters affecting security. A second call to the Control Tower.
'Aeroflot flight 927 to Tashkent has been airborne nine minutes, close to ten,' the Frontier Guard commander reported back to the Control Room. Verified by the tower.
'Then tell the control tower to radio the pilot, order him to return. Tell him the passengers should be informed there is a technical fault. When the plane lands I want every man you have around it. Nobody gets off, not till we arrive.'
'Do you want the pilot to be told that this is a security matter?'
'Why not?'
Down in the yard the black Moskva car had been alerted; it waited with its engine idling for the sprinting
