Man From Barbarossa

‘No, dear. No script. We have to make it up as we go along. As for the title, weeeellll, I suppose we could call it Death of a Salesman but I suppose Arthur Miller’d be a bit miffed. Let’s make up a name – after all we are making up a movie. Let’s call it Death With Everything, because that just about sums up the plot. Grisly, dears, just too grisly.’ He gave an almost sly pout in Nina’s direction. ‘Hope you’ve got a strong tummy, dear. The people in this epic aren’t exactly your normal cosy down-memory-lane folks.’ He paused, sadly only for a quick breath. ‘These good people do go down memory lane, only all the mementos are mori, as it were. It’s as amusing as an evening with grim-visaged death, as the Bard would have said.’ He sighed, raising his eyes to heaven. ‘Lord how I miss Stratford,’ then in an aside to Bond, ‘I was there with Peter, you know. And how that boy’s got on, bless him. Get him now? Oh, well, we can’t all be visited by a good fairy in our cradles, can we? I think they let Karabos into my nursery.’

At the far end of the sound stage, people had begun to drift in, and even at a distance, a cold chill descended blotting out the heat from the lights.

12

DEATH WITH EVERYTHING

Nigsy Meadows was right – and wrong. As he had expected, M sent him a flash which came in at three in the morning. They woke him and he tottered down to the bubble to deal with it. After that, he found it difficult to sleep. The signal did not contain the instructions he had expected, ordering him back to London. Instead, he was told to meet M personally at the Grand Hotel, Stockholm. The wording indicated that the Old Man wanted Nigsy there yesterday. For breakfast and, preferably, on toast.

He arrived in the middle of the afternoon. The people at Aeroflot were their usual uncommunicative selves. Even under the twin turbos of glasnost and perestroika, very little has changed in the manner in which the Russians run their hotels, restaurants or state airline. In his short time back at the embassy, Nigsy heard stories of couples trying to get meals in Moscow hotels. They were usually turned away from half-empty restaurants because they were not ‘a party’. When it came to booking a flight on Aeroflot, they wanted to know, as Nigsy’s old father would have crudely put it, ‘the far end of a fart’.

Finally he had got out with the help of the third secretary (Trade) who was the embassy’s travel agent. He was left with the distinct impression that Aeroflot would have been happier if he had travelled British Airways, even though BA did not run flights direct from Moscow to Stockholm.

The Grand Hotel, Stockholm, is more large than grand, though none can deny that the views from the rooms at the front, looking across the canal towards the royal palace, are spectacular. People were known not to book wake-up calls, relying on the military band playing during the Changing of the Guard. The music floated loudly across the short spit of water and on a good day you had to raise your voice to be heard above the military marches.

Meadows thought he spotted the first signs of M’s presence at the hotel some two hundred metres from the elaborate entrance. One of the British Embassy’s pool cars, aptly a Saab 9000 CD, was tucked into a parking slot with its nose protruding so that the driver and observer had good sightlines along the approach. In Stockholm, the SIS preferred to be in plain sight unless a particular situation demanded otherwise. Hence the CD plates and British registration, shouting that the embassy had interests nearby.

In the foyer, replete with high-priced glass-cased baubles and a grand curving staircase, two Special Branch men tried to look like tourists, an exercise which made them only appear more like policemen. Nigsy even knew one of them by name, but they all behaved with perfect decorum. Nobody nodded, smiled, or even passed a raised eyebrow. He wondered what these kind of people did when they went off to the Canaries or Madeira, or wherever policemen went on vacation nowadays.

As a pillbox-hatted pageboy led him to the elevators, Nigsy saw someone slightly more perturbing who also hid in plain sight – a short, muscular young man, dark and self-confident with the restless eyes and air of a street fighter. He stood close to the elevator doors, scrutinising anyone who approached. This man was definitely neither Branch, SIS nor the local Swedish versions. He had KGB written right through him, like the wording inlaid in a stick of English seaside rock. No psychiatrist wheeled on by the Service could have told how Meadows knew, but he did. Part intuition, part long-term Moscow experience. His nostrils twitched, the mental antennae beeped, and the answer came up, KGB thug. To Nigsy it was unnerving because he knew that, had Bond been there, his answer would have been the same. On the flight he had started to realise he was feeling guilty about 007’s disappearance.

The message light was winking on the telephone when they got to his room, but the pageboy insisted on showing him the luxurious amenities of the accommodation, even though the word luxury is practically an insult in the Swedish lifestyle.

Nigsy tried to intimidate the lad by advancing on him, edging him from the room, thrusting money into his hand, tipping to excess multiplied by three. The pageboy would have none of it. He went through the long spiel, praising room service, the minibar and the wonders of the television system, which, besides the usual programmes, would give him excellent adult films as well as three normal choices plus Sky and CNN. All for a fair price.

He was still talking, showing off his English and obeying hotel policy as Meadows closed the door on him, turned, threw himself across the bed and grabbed the phone to ask for the message.

Would he please call the Bernadotte suite? Should they put him through? Please.

‘Franklin Mint’s suite.’ Bill Tanner’s voice was balm to his ears.

‘It’s Bert. Home is the hunter.’ There was none of the ‘grey goose is flying tonight’ rubbish. Just plain Bert would do it, followed, of course, by the key phrase.

‘Come on up. Quick as you can, old boy.’ Some three-decimal-nine minutes later, Nigsy Meadows stood in the famous rooms which had been home to people like Gigli, Henry Ford II, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.

M sat in a comfortable chair nursing a cup of tea. ‘Have some, Nigs?’ His smile was that of a wily old alligator. Meadows declined, asking if the place was secure.

‘Safe as a tomb,’ Bill Tanner supplied. So Nigsy told them they had KGB in the lobby.

‘Yes,’ M looked unruffled, ‘we’re hosting a small, and very private, meeting.’

‘Ah,’ Meadows said. Then, ‘They all laughed when I sat down to play.’

‘Always the wag, Meadows,’ M gave a tired sigh. ‘You lost one of our favourite sons, I gather.’

He nodded, inwardly furious. ‘Snow. Ice. Moscow nights. The whole show. Thought we were right on top of him. Then they flew him out, straight over my head in a damned great chopper.’

‘Yes.’ M took another sip of his tea. ‘This is really rather good. Sure you won’t have any?’

‘No, sir.’ Meadows spent a lot of his life telling his wife, Sybil, that when he refused food or a cup of tea, he meant it. She always pressed him when he said no.

‘We’ve put people straight into the field.’ M seemed to be talking at the teapot. ‘You did get a good signal from him?’

‘You could hear it chime from ten miles, sir. Then there was only the usual intermittent loss. It wasn’t the equipment.’

‘So, you came a pearler, Meadows.’

That triggered another memory. His father laughing over a line in one of Graham Greene’s books – he could not remember which – where the head of a private detective agency greeted one of his errant sleuths with almost the same words. ‘Another of your pearlers . . .’

‘If you mean they got away so fast that I couldn’t follow, yes, sir. You can’t very well take to the skies in a Volga, especially when it’s snowing and you’ve only got limited liability.’

‘They did.’ M smiled to show he was playing with his agent. ‘Not your fault, Nigs.’

‘No, not my fault, sir. But that doesn’t make it any easier.’