the time he’d finished Richter could open his left eye again. The glass of water helped, but only a little. Richter knew that what he had to do was to take as long as he could to tell the tale. That way he could recover some of his strength before Yuri took him away to play.
Orlov spoke. ‘Well, Richter? We’re waiting.’
Richter coughed and shook his head. ‘Where – where do you want me to start?’
‘At the beginning, Richter, at the beginning. Where else?’
As soon as Walter Hicks left the Oval Office, the President moved over to the desk and depressed a key on the intercom. ‘I’m on the way down,’ he said, and walked out of the office. Two minutes later he entered the Situation Room, a small, wood-lined underground chamber, some twenty-five feet long by twenty feet wide, located in the basement of the West Wing of the White House, directly under the Oval Office. It is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a hardened or bombproof facility, and is only designed to be used in the early stages of a crisis.
‘How’s it going, John?’ the President asked, walking across the room.
John Mitchell, the tall grey-haired Vice-President, looked up from his copy of the
‘I’ve just seen Karasin,’ the President said.
‘And?’ Mitchell looked interested.
The President shrugged. ‘And nothing. He asked to see me because Russian satellites had detected our escalation to DEFCON FOUR and wanted to know what it was all about. He claims to know nothing about any threat to the US, and I think he’s probably telling the truth.’
Mitchell grunted. ‘I’ve said it before, Mr President, and I’ll say it again. I think the CIA is paranoid about this so-called covert assault. I don’t believe there is a threat to America, and I think we’re just wasting our time. More importantly, we’ve now alarmed the Kremlin for no good reason, which will do nothing for our international relations. My recommendation, Mr President, is that we stop this nonsense, stand down to normal readiness, and tell the Russians it was all just a false alarm.’
The President nodded. His Vice-President was no fan of the CIA, or any of the other intelligence organizations. ‘I hear what you say, John, but I disagree. As long as there is even the slightest possibility of any threat to the security of the United States, I’m going to take whatever steps I think are justified. Right now, that’s DEFCON FOUR, and a meeting of the National Security Council here at the White House in thirty minutes.’
Richter told Orlov about Newman, and the suspicions SIS had entertained about his death. He went slowly through his time in Moscow, telling him about the few inconsistencies he had found on the body – the injuries that weren’t there but should have been.
Orlov interrupted. ‘That’s not enough, Richter. I grant you that one of his legs would have been likely to break, but there is no certainty in the matter.’
‘Quite right, Vladimir,’ Richter said. ‘Perhaps I should have pointed out that by then I was just looking for indications as to how the man had been killed. I knew as soon as I looked at the corpse that it wasn’t Newman.’
‘How?’ Orlov’s voice was a soft, silky purr.
‘Attention to detail, Vladimir. That’s where a lot of high-powered schemes fall down; attention to detail. Your SVR colleagues picked some poor sucker who was unfortunate enough to be about Newman’s height, weight and colouring, and I’ve no doubt they checked to see if Newman had any distinguishing marks. Because none were obvious – no scars, tattoos and so on – they assumed that he hadn’t got any. If they had bothered to look, they would have found that he had had an ingrowing toenail removed years ago. The corpse your people thoughtfully provided for the Embassy had all ten toenails.’
‘I see,’ Orlov said. ‘I take your point. The whole scheme, of course, was not of my doing but I was kept informed of the operation. I will see to it that the appropriate steps are taken in Moscow to reprimand the operatives responsible for this.’
Richter nodded. ‘I’m sure you’ll enjoy that, Vladimir.’ The Russian made an impatient gesture. ‘Continue.’ Richter asked for more water, more as a delaying tactic than because he actually wanted any, then finished off Moscow and told him what SIS knew about the overflight of north-west Russia by the Blackbird. Richter sang the praises of the SR–71A fairly loudly, partly because he wanted to annoy Orlov just a little, to try to make him slightly less critical of the lies he was soon going to start telling, and partly because dragging the story out bought him just a little more time, and time was something he needed a lot of.
‘Yes, yes,’ said Orlov, impatiently. ‘The American spy-plane can fly high and fast, we know that. It was fortunate for the Americans that we were not prepared for such an intrusion. It would have been a different matter if they had met any of our MiG–31 interceptors.’
‘No doubt, Vladimir, no doubt,’ Richter said. Orlov looked at him sharply, but Richter wasn’t smiling. He couldn’t smile. He didn’t think, the way his face felt, that he would ever smile again.
He covered the diversion of the Blackbird to Lossiemouth, and dealt with the insistence of the Ministry of Defence on seeing the films shot by the aircraft cameras. Up to that point, he hadn’t really told Orlov anything of importance, or anything he hadn’t already known or hadn’t guessed. The difficult bit was just about to start.
‘So,’ Orlov said, ‘what did your so-called experts think of the films?’
‘They were puzzled,’ Richter replied, which was true. ‘And they still are.’ Which wasn’t quite true. ‘The only significant feature on the films shot by the Blackbird was the removal of a small hill which had been on previous satellite films of the area.’
Richter saw Orlov stiffen almost imperceptibly. ‘So?’
Richter tried to inject a little puzzlement into his voice. ‘The Americans believe the hill was the test site for a new type of nuclear weapon, but that’s not our take. Our experts’ reading of the seismograph records suggests that the weapon test was just a blind, using a conventional medium-yield weapon to conceal what you’ve really been up to.’
‘Which is what?’
‘We still aren’t sure, but we believe that the hill wasn’t a hill at all. We think that it was a camouflaged site, covering some sort of covert installation, which you have since decided to remove. Then you detonated a surplus nuclear device to cover up the fact that the hill – or rather the installation – had vanished.’
Richter could see Orlov start to relax, so he spun him the rest of the yarn that he had been working on ever since the lights had come on in the bedroom. He told him that SIS suspected that the installation had been a test site for a portable phased array radar unit, designed for early warning of either orbital or sub-orbital missiles or intruders. He expounded on the potential of such a device to avoid detection by reconnaissance vehicles, its value to Russia and the possible illegality of such a radar under the terms of the SALT agreements.
Orlov started nodding before he got halfway through the tale, and Richter hoped it was to convince him that he was right rather than an expression of his appreciation for Richter’s ingenuity.
‘We obviously don’t know any more than that at the moment, but we’ll find out, I promise you,’ Richter concluded.
‘I don’t think you will, Richter,’ said Orlov, speaking the absolute truth. ‘You, personally, certainly won’t.’ He paused for a moment. ‘Why are you so certain that the hill was a camouflaged site?’
‘We aren’t, but we applied simple logic,’ Richter said. ‘You’ve very rarely carried out above-ground nuclear weapon tests, and only then after a lot of preparation and work. We saw no signs of such preparations near the site. No, what happened in the tundra had all the hallmarks of a hasty cover-up, using a bomb blast to remove the evidence of what you were doing up there previously. It’s the only scenario that makes sense.’
Orlov nodded slowly. ‘Very good, Richter, very good. Your logic is impeccable, but the premises upon which
