Man From Barbarossa

Stepakov sighed. ‘Captain Bond, all in good time. You will be told everything at our special briefing. Enough.’

End of story for now. Bond realised that, while his first view of the Russian in the semi-darkness of the car at the military airport had been of a powerful man, his guard had dropped during the journey to the dacha. Now he saw clearly that Stepakov was indeed a very tough, uncompromising man, his physical attributes complementing a very high IQ – a person used to giving orders and one who was normally obeyed.

‘A man of awesome knowledge,’ Bill Tanner had said. Bond believed it as the Russian gave him a wide smile as though embracing him.

He went back to his eggs which were all but spoiled, and the look on his face must have betrayed him, for the dark girl Stepakov had called Nina came over and asked if she could do him two more. ‘You are fussy about the way your eggs are cooked, I think.’ She smiled at him, looking him in the eyes as though testing him.

He nodded and thanked her. She gave him another hard look, as though trying to see which one of them would blink first, then turned away. She wore a crisp blue dress not unlike a nurse’s uniform and he realised that his eyes hardly left her as she walked back to the big table. He could sense the way in which her body moved inside the material which crackled as she walked, and his mind filled with that tiny glimpse of the long, stockinged leg and the hint of lace as she had drawn her pistol.

He picked up his coffee cup and saw Stepakov’s eyes on him, smiling as though they shared a secret.

‘Nina Bibikova,’ he said, low and almost confidentially. ‘A handful, I tell you, but one of my best. She worked in the Washington Embassy for two years and the Americans never made her. Secretarial cover, and I know for certain they didn’t even keep a dossier on her. Both your Service and the Americans have the idea that our only employment for a woman is as lastochka, for honey traps.’ He used the Russian word for ‘swallow’, KGB slang for the prostitutes or skilled seductresses they used for entrapment, an old speciality of their service.

‘But, you see, they’re wrong. Nina is very special.’

‘Yes.’ In the back of his head Bond saw the girl’s large black eyes, the small crescent scar to the left of her mouth, the high cheekbones and now, her long slim fingers as she placed a plate with two freshly boiled eggs in front of him.

Again their eyes met, and he felt a distinct frisson of challenge. Unsummoned, his mind screened a clear picture of Nina’s face above his, her lips descending on to his mouth. For a moment, he was filled with an almost tangible sense of yielding flesh.

‘Thank you, Nina.’ He wondered if his look betrayed the lust that had stirred at the winking centre of his manhood.

Her lips parted in an expression of acknowledgement and, though she did not speak, the quick sliding of her tongue over her lips and the signal in her eye came directly from that all too human lexicon Bond already knew by heart.

There was very little conversation over the rest of breakfast. Stephanie Adore tried to make it clear to everyone that she had enjoyed an evening at the Cafe Royal with Bond, hinting that this had been more than just a simple meal. Natkowitz made two remarks about the Scales of Justice, framing them as questions directed towards Stepakov who simply parried them and again made it clear that he would not be drawn. Henri Rampart ate three rolls, dry, with not even butter or a film of jam. When the Russian expressed surprise, he simply said that the doctor at his unit outside Paris maintained people should eat more dry bread. ‘It is better for you than all the high-fibre diets the Americans hurl at you.’ He lit a Gauloise, drawing hard on it, and continued to talk. ‘The Americans are obsessed with diets, health, cholesterol and smoking. This is so crazy. At one time you had the simple choice, you smoked or you did not smoke. Now you cannot smoke for fear of people getting secondary inhalation. If this were so serious they should look to newsprint and books. Printers’ ink is dangerously full of the same carbons they fear from cigarettes. So what do you do? Burn the books? Ban newspapers? Wear respirators in the streets to ward off all those fumes from the internal combustion engine? I guarantee that two hours reading a book will do as much harm as walking through a cloud of secondary smoke.’ He spoke like a fanatic, and with some anger. Nobody commented. This was a well-worn monologue, the diatribe of one who wanted to defend the indefensible.

Alex and Nicki stood by the door and the lovely Nina walked between the round table and the coffee, filling cups and bringing extra toast. She did all this with dignity and no sense of servility. The fact that she was obviously on the team did not make her role as table-server demeaning.

The sterile room was in a basement carved out and cemented like a bombproof shelter. The walls, Bond noted, were lined with the thick anti-electronic material they used in embassy bubbles, the bubble that had been more or less stolen from the American practice, as it took up little space, and was one hundred per cent secure, though it caused much discomfort to those who had to use the igloo-like facilities in embassy bowels. Here, at the dacha, there was a whole large room and it was clear that no expense had been spared. Though the walls and ceiling were well-lined, there were also small electronic bafflers, grey boxes with winking red lights, fitted into the roof and at each corner of the room. The door had an extra sliding section which sealed it off from the crude wooden stairs and there was no telephone – an extra precaution lest security was somehow breached and the instrument made live.

They sat in comfortable leather chairs, arranged in a half-circle, and nobody was given a chance to take notes. No pens, pencils or paper were allowed in the room.

‘This must be absolutely secure,’ Stepakov began. ‘We have taken great pains to make it so, for I suspect we know far more about Chushi Pravosudia – what you call the Scales of Justice – than any of our visitors from France and the United Kingdom. Let me first explain my position in all this. My name, as you know, is Boris Ivanovich Stepakov and I hold the rank of General, KGB. More than that, because of our fears of internal terrorism, I do not report through normal channels. I don’t present myself to the Central Committee or the Praesidium. I don’t have to make a physical report to dva 2 Ploshchad’ Dzerzhinskogo, the postal address of KGB Moscow headquarters as I’m sure you know. I answer directly only to the Chairman, KGB, and the General Secretary, who is now also our President. You will realise why in a moment.

‘You have met my immediate staff – Alex, Nicki and Nina. They are my most trusted people, and we have others, both here and at another dacha a couple of miles away in the forest. They act in a number of ways – they are bodyguards, go-betweens, analysts and keepers of my closest data bases. We are a kind of task force, and apart from these, others work unseen – in the Kremlin itself and secretly both in and outside our borders. We make up what is commonly known over here as Stepakov’s Banda. In English, I suppose it might be translated as Stepakov’s Mafia. Many within KGB and the army do not like us at all, and I have to be exceptionally careful both with information and my personal movements, particularly in Moscow.

‘You must understand that we in the Soviet Union have not been in this business of international counterterrorism for very long. We have not yet started to share completely as you in the West share. This is, I suppose, the reason we have not altogether been forthcoming about the organisation you call the Scales of Justice.’

He coughed, clearing his throat before continuing. ‘The Scales of Justice, or Chushi Pravosudia as we call them, first came to your attention in the October of last year. I fear we have had knowledge of them for much longer than that, and our knowledge will undoubtedly alarm you.’

It was as though he had begun to soften them up for something sinister – facts which possibly had escaped the West entirely. Whatever it was, James Bond felt an old familiar stirring – the desperate need to know everything about his enemy. He also sensed something else. It was as though all his experience had brought him to this one point. He had squared off against evil many times in his long career. Larger-than-life evil. Criminal, political and military wickedness. At the time, much of it had seemed unreal. Now it felt as if he were about to come up against a kind of reality he had never faced in the past.

The Scales of Justice, Stepakov told them, had come into being within the Soviet Union and her satellites of the old Eastern Bloc as early as 1987. Primarily, they had been Russian in concept, and at first KGB had believed they were another manifestation of unrest. Early on there had been informers. They knew, by the autumn of 1987, that Chushi Pravosudia was organised much as a network of agents was organised. ‘Initially there were three rings, or cells, here within the Soviet Union. They have now amalgamated these into one.’ Stepakov’s manner was grave. His natural happy and boisterous personality seemed