Christina was lying on the bed in her tennis costume. She had the phones of her stereo in her ears.
‘You’re resting..
‘Trying to.’
‘What sort of day did you have?’
‘Boring.’
‘What was boring?’
‘It was compulsory, because of the new teacher. We had to go to Dummerstorf-Waldeck, to a boring museum.’
‘What museum?’
‘The Stasi museum. The new teacher is from Hamburg. She says we have to know about the past. The past is boring. I missed tennis practice. The past is gone, why do we have to know the past?’
‘What were you told about the Stasi?’
‘We were told what they’d done. It was boring, it has no relevance to today. I’m not to blame for what happened before. It has nothing to do with me. I don’t have any guilt. The new teacher asked us whether any of our parents had been victims of the Stasi.’
‘What did you tell her, Christina?’
‘That I didn’t know. That I’d never heard you or Poppa talk of the Stasi. The man who took us round the museum, he said the Stasi suffocated under the paper they made. They spent all their time writing reports, so they had no time to read their reports, all they did was write them. That was why they did not know the revolution was coming until it was too late. They sounded to me to be stupid and boring. Momma… I need to rest.’
His car took him from the Kremlin gate.
The minister had told the cabinet meeting that the armed forces were short of funds to the extent of one hundred trillion roubles – Pyotr Rykov had given him the figure, and made the exchange calculation for his minister – twenty billion American dollars. The minister had told the politicians that a minimum of 100,000 troops lived in sub-human conditions of poverty – Pyotr Rykov had provided him with the statistic and the fact that soldiers sold their equipment into the black market so that they should not starve.
He always sat in the front passenger seat, beside the driver.
He would trust his driver with his life, with his secrets, with his future. He had clung to his driver because the grizzled elder man, long past the date of retirement, had been a true friend from the second tour in Afghanistan and through the German posting, and during the years at Siberia Military District. He had brought him to Moscow. Pyotr Rykov had always shared his inner thoughts, confidences, with his stoic quiet driver. ‘It’s the funding, or it is mutinies..
A frown slowly gouged at the forehead of his driver.
‘Either the funds are provided or the Army disintegrates..
The driver squinted from the wet, icy road ahead up to his mirror.
‘We cannot, will not, tolerate the destruction of the Army.’
It was the fourth time the driver had checked the mirror, and in response he had slowed for a kilometre, then speeded for a kilometre, and repeated the process.
‘Without the strength of the Army, if the Army is neutered, then the Motherland collapses.’
The driver gave no warning but swung the wheel from the main highway and cut into a side street that was half filled with the stalls of a vegetable market, scattering men and women.
‘Either they make the funding available or the Army, to save itself, must take decisive action..
The driver pulled out of the side street and accelerated into a two-lane road. His eyes flickered again towards his mirror and his frown deepened.
‘There is money for the politicians and for their elections, there is money for bribery and corruption, there is money for schemes to win votes to keep the pigs at the trough…’
The car crawled. Pyotr Rykov glanced at his driver, and finally noticed the anxiety. He swung round in his seat, stretching the belt taut, and saw the car that followed them. Two men in the front of the car, a man in the back.
‘How long?’
The driver said, grimly, ‘The whole of the journey.’
‘All of the way?’
‘Fast when we go fast, slow when we are slow.’
‘Not before today?’
‘I would have told you, Colonel.’
‘Who are they, the shit fuckers?’
He regarded his driver as a mine of information. His driver sat each day at a centre of learning, as he many times had joked, in the car parks of the ministry or the Kremlin, the foreign embassies or the city’s major military barracks, talking with the other drivers. They were the men who knew the pulse and movement of Moscow. They were the men who recognized first the shifting motions of power.
‘They change nothing but the name. It is a new name but the old way. When the KGB wishes to intimidate then it drives close. It lets you see them, lets the anxiety build, lets you know they are close and merely await the final order.’
‘You have no doubt?’
‘They want to be seen.’
He reached between his legs and pressed the combination numbers of his briefcase lock. He took his service pistol from the briefcase and checked the magazine and the safety. He slid it into his waist, cold metal against his skin.
‘Stop.’
His driver braked. The black car with the three men inside stopped a dozen paces behind them.
‘Pull away.’
They eased away from the curb. The black car with the three men inside followed behind them.
‘What do I do, friend?’
‘It is what you have already done. You have bred enemies.’
The fear winnowed in Pyotr Rykov’s mind. It was the fear he had known when he had walked in the villages of Afghanistan, when he had been in the street markets and bazaars of Jalalabad and Herat, when the threat was always behind him.
‘I am protected.’
The driver smiled mirthlessly. ‘In Russia, through this century, Colonel, men have believed they were protected.’
‘I am protected by the minister.’
‘The minister is not in the Kremlin, Colonel. They are in the Kremlin.’
‘They can flick themselves.’
‘It is a warning. They will watch to see how you respond to the warning.’
They reached the apartment. The apartment was in an old building in a wide street. He stood for a moment on the pavement and the black car accelerated away. None of the three men looked as they passed. He told his driver at what time he should be collected after lunch. He was alone, and exposed.
‘I wouldn’t have believed it of you, Phlegm – diffidence sits uneasily with you.’
They lunched in the judge’s chambers. A manservant waited at the table. No guests, only the judge and Fleming of German Desk.
‘It’s not a state of affairs I enjoy, Beakie.’
‘Do I have to spread the towel on my shoulder again, or is it time for confidences? Is it about that business, the young woman and the Stasi thug?’
In the good old days, the lamented old days that were gone, there would have been brandy with the coffee. Not any more. Fleming refilled his glass of gassed water.
‘How long have you got?’
‘Not more than ten minutes. Bounce it at me.’
Fleming said, ‘It is extraordinary, certainly beyond my experience. We are not in control, but we have what we regard as important policy riding on it – yet, we are reduced to watching. Our allies, the Germans, equally have
