Charlie.
‘What indicator?’
‘There was just one mistake he made. And that hardly a mistake. When he got on to the bicycle he appeared to Johnson instinctively to ride on the right-hand side of the road, not the left. It was a good hundred yards before he adjusted. He’s not accustomed to travelling on our roads.’
‘Tenuous,’ insisted Harkness.
‘I don’t think so,’ said Charlie, with matching insistence.
‘What’s your thought about the package itself?’
‘“You will despatch the catalogue,”’ said Charlie, quoting the second message Novikov had encoded. ‘And then: “You will wrap the November catalogue.” Johnson guessed it at five inches by eight inches and that’s confirmed by the photo-analysis because it’s visible in his hand, at the moment of his coming up by the marker post. Too large for any written letter then. Put together with the two messages, I’d guess a passport or a plane ticket or possibly both.’
‘Airports and ports?’ said the Director.
‘I’ve covered as many as I think reasonable, the full description as well as the half-face photograph,’ assured Charlie.
‘What about major political events?’ asked Wilson. ‘I’ve had the Foreign Office bitching about the time they’re having to spend on that.’
‘Eight possibles, all in November,’ said Charlie. ‘There’s a meeting of OPEC in Vienna, an IMF conference in Paris, which is also hosting the bi-annual gathering of African non-aligned nations. In Geneva there is the continuing arms limitation talks and again in Geneva there is the American-initiated conference for which they’ve finally persuaded Israel to sit at the same table as a delegation from the PLO. Jordan and Syria are also involved. In Brussels there’s a Council of Ministers meeting. The United Nations is sponsoring a Foreign Ministers’ assembly in Madrid, to put pressure on the drug smuggling countries in Latin America: the majority of Colombian and Bolivian cocaine comes into Europe through Madrid. The American President is visiting Berlin, on the 28th. The Secretary of State will be with him and then go on to the Middle East conference in Geneva. From Berlin the President is going to Venice, for a NATO summit.’
‘Bloody hell!’ said Wilson, despairingly. ‘With how many is Britain involved?’
‘The Chancellor of the Exchequer is attending the IMF meeting in Paris, obviously,’ set out Charlie. ‘The Foreign Secretary is going to Brussels and to Madrid. And the Prime Minister is scheduled for Venice.’
‘What’s the first meeting?’ asked Harkness.
‘The drug meeting in Madrid, 2 November.’
‘That means we’ve got exactly three weeks,’ said Harkness. ‘That’s not enough …’ He looked at the Director and said: ‘I propose that we immediately issue warnings to the counter-intelligence services of every country involved, with what we’ve got.’
‘That would come to thirty-two,’ said Charlie. ‘I counted.’
‘Then it’s impractical. It would cause chaos,’ said the Director.
‘Let’s assume for a moment that the pick-up was a passport,’ said Harkness. ‘What about the chaos if there is an assassination and the man is caught with a British passport in his possession …?’ He hesitated, as the idea came to expand the argument. ‘That could even be part of whatever is going to happen: somehow, some way, to embarrass us with some false involvement.’
‘I acknowledge the risk but I don’t think there is sufficient to sound alarm bells yet,’ refused the Director. ‘How would we look if nothing does happen and we’ve got the counter-intelligence services of thirty-two countries – and possibly their external agencies as well – looking under every bed they can find? We’d make ourselves the laughing stock of the century.’
‘I’m sure there is going to be an assassination,’ said Charlie. ‘Gale, in Moscow, responded positively to every query I sent about Novikov. If Novikov is OK then so’s the information.’
‘Then we’ve got to be the people to stop it,’ declared Wilson. To Charlie he said: ‘Are you sure enough about Primrose Hill to call off the intense surveillance of everything Russian?’
‘God no!’ said Charlie. ‘I think Primrose Hill looks right and I think we should pull out all the stops to find whoever he is but I’m not at the moment putting it any higher than fifty per cent.’
‘Which is a further reason for not yet involving anyone else prematurely,’ said the Director. Still addressing Charlie, he said: ‘What now?’
‘I wish to Christ I knew,’ said Charlie, regretting the carelessness of the remark as soon as he’d made it, conscious of Harkness’s face tightening in disgust at the blasphemy. The man was an avid churchgoer, usually three times every Sunday: it was common knowledge he’d spent his last holiday in a retreat.
They left the Director’s office together and in the anteroom outside Harkness said: ‘Make an appointment to see me alone tomorrow: we have to talk about administration matters.’
Over the man’s shoulder, Charlie saw the Director’s secretary make a grimace of sympathy. Was Alison Bing looking for a bit of rough? wondered Charlie. As the deputy turned away, Charlie grinned and winked at the girl. She winked back. Forget it, love, thought Charlie: I’m old enough to be your father. Pity, though. It could have been fun.
By six o’clock in the evening Koretsky had five confirmed and independent reports of the continuingly tightened observation and hoped he had not been too quick with his assurance to Berenkov. And then he relaxed, realizing how he could comply with the instruction and satisfy Dzerzhinsky Square at the same time. He set out in close detail how the cordons were being detected, around every Soviet installation in London. But then pointed out that it proved the hand-over had gone as well as he’d already reported: if it had been detected, the British would not still be bothering, would they?
By the time he sent the cable, Vasili Zenin had been in Switzerland for two days.
Chapter Eight
The Geneva mock-up, like all the rest at the KGB’s artificial cities installation at Kuchino, was supposedly in specific and street-named detail; like at the instruction centre at Balashikha, it was isolated behind high concrete walls to separate it from all those other less specifically detailed training re-creations of Western towns. Geneva after all had Politburo priority, which supposedly again permitted no element of error. But Vasili Zenin discovered there were errors. Stupid, dangerous mistakes, like there having been no warning of bicycling being forbidden by law in Primrose Hill Park, something which could have ended the entire mission before it even began.
Zenin was determined against anything endangering his first assignment, because of another, paramount determination. He had enjoyed, come to need, the best-every-time accolades of Balashikha and wanted them to continue. He needed, quite simply, to be acknowledged the foremost agent operating from Department 8 of Directorate S – to be the most successful assassin they’d ever known.
Which was why the smallest of oversights had to be guarded against. And which was why, after that late evening arrival in Geneva, he had disobeyed the final Moscow briefing instructions and not hired a car to go at once to Bern. Instead he had taken the anonymous airport bus into the city terminal and ignored taxi drivers and their possibly long memories to walk through the avenues and streets until he’d found the small auberge in the side road off the Boulevard de la Tour, safely away from either of the areas of the city in which he was later to operate. He booked in as Klaus Schmidt.
It was a breakfast-only auberge and he took the meal, although he did not want to, because not to have done so might have attracted attention. It was the type of place in which everyone was existing on the sort of budget where every meal counted. Travelling on an English passport meant he chose the
Zenin disdained any transport, public or otherwise. He got at once on to the Boulevard des Tranchees and stayed on the main and busy highways as he strode towards the lake. He crossed the Rhone feeding from it over
