‘What do I have to do now?’ asked Krogh, showing his increasing reliance.
‘Do you want to eat?’
The belated hunger he’d felt at the hotel had gone now and Krogh said: ‘Not really.’
‘Then just rest. You’ve got a lot to accomplish in the coming days.’
‘I will,’ undertook Krogh. He wouldn’t sleep, he knew: it would be impossible.
‘And I’ll take you back,’ said Petrin.
Petrin accompanied him to his suite. Inside Krogh looked curiously at the other man and said: ‘What’s happening now?’
‘Now you take the sleeping pills I gave you,’ said Petrin. ‘Which you weren’t going to do, were you?’
‘No,’ miserably admitted Krogh at once.
It was Petrin who got water from the bathroom and stood in front of the American while he took the dosage, an adult guaranteeing a child swallowed its medication.
‘I know practically everything you’ll do or try not to do,’ said Petrin. Mould the clay into any shape, he thought.
‘Yes,’ said Krogh in further dull acceptance.
‘Remember, Emil. I’m here with you in the same hotel. Looking after you. You’re safe.’
‘Yes,’ said Krogh again. He wished he didn’t need the comfort of that assurance.
The person who was going to be around the American most of all when he worked in Rutland Gardens was Yuri Guzins, and the man was terrified. The suggestion that a scientist go from Baikonur to London to oversee the drawing was met with the sort of frenzied protest that Berenkov and Kalenin had expected. And as they further expected the project chief, Nikolai Noskov, succeeded in arguing himself out of the responsibility, so anxious to avoid it that it was actually he and not Kalenin who put forward Guzins’ name as an alternative candidate.
Guzins tried to protest just as forcibly but he lacked Noskov’s seniority. More importantly he lacked Kalenin’s seniority
One of the man’s final, weak protests had been that he spoke no language but Russian, so Vitali Losev was sent from London to chaperon the man from the first moment of his arrival into Europe, at Amsterdam’s Schipol airport.
Losev went with deepening bitterness, viewing it as another secondary role and deciding that it was dangerous, too, when he saw the obvious, attentionattracting apprehension with which Guzins emerged from the arrival hall on to the main concourse. Losev moved at once to minimize it, directly approaching the heavily moustached scientist with the immediate assurance that he was going to be escorted and that there was no need for concern.
They entered Britain by a roundabout route, driving all the way from Amsterdam to Calais by car and crossing to Dover by sea ferry. Guzins travelled on a Greek passport that had been freighted in the diplomatic bag from Moscow to London and which Losev had carried with him to Holland, for their meeting. It was a completely uneventful trip and they arrived at Rutland Gardens late on a Thursday night.
‘What is this place?’ demanded Guzins at once, nervously.
‘Your home,’ said Losev. ‘Welcome to England.’
28
With his customary objectivity – which in matters of personal safety could be brutal – Charlie Muffin admitted to himself that he was taking the biggest risk of a risk-burdened life. Additionally, he accepted that what he was doing was reprehensibly unprofessional. That any unbiased observer would judge it to be bloody daft. And that he thought so too: worse than bloody daft, in fact. Insane was a far better word. He tried to balance the assessment by telling himself he was irrevocably committed, but refused that excuse at once, knowing it not to be the case: that he could still change his mind. And then, in complete honesty, confronted the fact that he didn’t want to operate any differently from the way he was doing right now, so he wouldn’t. Besides, to change his mind at this point would be to admit a mistake and Charlie had an inherent dislike of admitting mistakes and most certainly wouldn’t contemplate such an admission to Harkness. Which, he conceded, made him not just bloody daft but bloody minded, as well. And still left him facing the biggest risk he’d ever knowingly taken. Because if this went wrong by one tiny iota those who ruled his existence – not shithead Harkness but Intelligence Committees and permanent civil servants – might be sufficiently pissed off with him to think a hundred years in a ratinfested jail cell was too good and remove Charles Edward Muffin from circulation altogether. Charlie was convinced such an embarrassment-avoiding course had been taken before, with other insubordinate troublemakers: far less trouble, far less difficulty, all so much neater.
The problem, which always seemed to be the same problem, was watching his ass at the same time as looking straight in front to see all the approaching dangers. He’d taken all the precautions he could think of taking, which hardly rated as precautions at all, and he couldn’t think of anything else he could do. Which was unsettling because Charlie never liked to be absolutely devoid of ideas like he was this time.
He completely tidied his apartment and conceived fresh snares, and before he officially took his leave he treated William French to a pub lunch (pie, pickles and beer perfectly kept in wood barrels) to thank the man for what he had already done and to ask if he could keep in touch while he was away from the office.
‘I’m not going to regret this, am I, Charlie?’ probed the Technical Division scientist cautiously. ‘A favour’s a favour but this is coming close to needing some proper authority.’
‘It’ll be all right,’ assured Charlie. I hope, he thought: he was never comfortable endangering mates, no matter how justified the necessity might be.
‘I’ve kept my name off everything,’ warned French. ‘If there
‘That’s precisely what I’d expect you to do,’ said Charlie honestly. ‘You don’t think I’d point the finger, do you!’
‘No,’ agreed the man at once. ‘I don’t think you’d do that under any circumstances.’
Charlie didn’t imagine he would either: he just wasn’t sure. He said: ‘So I’ll keep in touch, OK?’
‘You know how I feel about open telephone lines,’ said the man whose expertise
‘I’ll be circumspect.’
‘That’s not much of a safeguard.’
‘It is when we both know what we’re talking about.’
It was, of course, necessary for Charlie fully to reconnoitre the Soviet delegation hotel and he sketched the surveillance over two days. He explored all the roads immediately adjacent to the Blair hotel, like Gloucester Terrace and Bathrust Street and Westbourne Crescent, giving particular attention to any that had one-way traffic restrictions, and then spread the check as far north as the Paddington Basin and as far south as Hyde Park, although he did not go down as far as the restaurant in which Vitali Losev had made his first hostile meeting with Alexandr Petrin.
With just days to go before Natalia’s arrival, Charlie had his hair cut and bought two new shirts and a new tie and briefly considered – and rejected – new shoes, and alternated his two suits so that he could have both cleaned and pressed.
And then, finally, Charlie decided he was ready: there was nothing left to be done that he hadn’t already done. All he could do now was wait. He admitted to himself that he was nervous: more nervous than he could remember being on a lot of past assignments, which was virtually how he was regarding this, an assignment. He had some idea, from the photographs, but he still wondered if Natalia would be the same when he saw her again for the first time.
Throughout all the preparations, the Soviet observers maintained their twenty-four-hour watch.
At its most basic a number-for-letter code transliterates directly the letter of an alphabet for its
