Man From Barbarossa

be leaving for a week or so. In that time we shall put you under drugs and question you.’

‘I know nothing that would interest you. I am a soldier with no access to the greater secrets of the Organs.’

M nodded. ‘Probably, but we’ll have your voice on tape, and from it my technicians can produce amazing confessions. By the time we send the transcript and tape to GRU and KGB, you’ll have told us things you did not even suspect you knew.’

‘I am a soldier,’ Berzin protested again.

‘Then that will be the end of it. You will probably die like a soldier, while your wife and children will be packed off to the Gulag. Good riddance.’

Berzin broke about an hour later. He claimed that he was merely on a training exercise. He had no orders to kill Savall. Then he spilled all he knew about the training and use of Spetsnaz forces – how they would be used in any war and how they were used now as an elite force undertaking difficult military espionage and clandestine operations in the NATO countries.

‘He talked himself dry,’ M told them in the Bernadotte suite. ‘Gave me everything, then said he needed asylum for himself and facilities to get his wife and children out of Russia. We refused.’

M had asked him if he enjoyed his life as a soldier. It was all Berzin had ever wanted. He was also a high achiever who knew, as high achievers always know, that he had a marshal’s baton in his knapsack.

‘We simply told him that we wanted his happiness. He could return to Russia. We would even provide him with photographs showing that he had eliminated Savall. Already we had done a deal with him.’ Savall was to be given a new identity and shipped off to Australia once he answered all the questions. ‘He was pretty spineless,’ M said with disgust.

Before they allowed Berzin to leave, M had spent an evening with him. ‘We will never ask you to spy for us,’ he told the Spetsnaz officer. ‘But there may come a time in the future when you can be of some small service to us. I swear to you that it will never be in time of war, nor will it be against your country’s interests. If that moment ever comes, someone will be in touch with you.’ He then gave Berzin the code phrases, together with a lurid description of how he, personally, would see that a tape of all their conversations went to the right hands in Moscow if the officer did not do the favour asked.

‘There is a lesson in this,’ the wily old spy said. ‘Keep everything. Never throw anything away. Use every scrap that’s given to you. I imagine the general will come up trumps.’ He smiled gleefully now, and turned immediately to the orders he had for Meadows, letting Bill Tanner do the detailed briefing.

That night James Bond and Nina Bibikova showered together once more, to escape the fibre optic lenses and the invisible ears. ‘I know,’ Bond said, close to her ear. ‘I saw both of them. You knew they’d be here, I presume?’

She nodded fiercely.

‘It’s okay. I am one of the few people who has the whole story. This is why you wanted to be with us? Because they were here?’

‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘But something truly terrible will happen. We must try to find a way to get out. All of us. Pete and my parents as well. Look for any way of escape, James. Please look hard. The Chushi Pravosudia are obviously using actors from various companies throughout the Soviet Union for this charade. My parents were in a theatre company based in Leningrad. That’s where they went after they staged the accident.’

They went on washing each other, going through the ballet they were quickly perfecting. Bond asked if she knew why it had been necessary to use two technicians from England to do the camera work when any Russian team would have done it just as well. She had no idea. ‘I think, however, that we shall all be disposed of as soon as the video is completed. Nobody will be left, but there is more to it than this.’

They slept in each other’s arms that night, rising at dawn, when summoned, to begin another day with the horrors of the past.

More and more witnesses were taped, each with his or her terrible description of life at Sobibor which was run like a sickening mass production factory, the final product being dead Jewish people.

They described how the Germans and their Ukrainian turncoat assistants had meticulously organised the place. It was similar to all the nauseating stories anyone had heard of the Nazi death camps. It was the efficiency that was as distressing as the amoral mass executions. All those who gave evidence were people who had been saved from the gas chambers either by their skills or strength. Some had been tailors or cobblers, working in special areas for the camp staff. Others had escaped by doing the revolting work – the picking over of possessions left by an intake of prisoners, the ‘dentists’ whose job it was to remove gold teeth from the victims and the sanitation squads who cleaned out the cattle trucks in which the doomed were transported to the camp. One old woman told how her entire time at Sobibor had been spent in a shop which specialised in picking the yellow Star of David patches from the discarded clothing of victims.

The witnesses had been trained by experts, so when he was behind the camera, Bond knew, with part of his mind, that they were actors performing as former victims. Yet the achievement of these men and women was so real, so brilliantly good, that as the day wore on, he became deeply depressed and mentally torn by the endless abominable repetitions.

It was late on the second afternoon that he realised some of the actors were appearing more than once – giving evidence, then being freshly made-up to return and perform as a new character with a slightly different story.

Michael Brooks himself came on to the witness stand for a second time towards the end of the day. Ordinarily, Bond would never have recognised him, now an old, bent and quavering man. It was the face behind the mask that Bond saw clearly and this performance was bravura. The old man told of one day at the camp, a day when the camp was visited by the architect of the so-called ‘Final Solution’, the Holocaust – Heinrich Himmler himself. On that day a special train arrived with several hundred Jewish girls from a labour camp in the Lublin district. Himmler watched the whole extermination process from arrival to the end.

‘He gave no sign of remorse,’ the aged Jew, who was Michael Brooks, told the ‘court’. ‘He simply watched each phase with a growing interest. The victims might have been cattle for all the humanity Himmler showed. I was near the party when they left. I spoke some German in those days. Before he got into his car, Himmler said to the commandant, “You’re doing well, but if things go as they should, you’ll get some bottlenecks. That could prove difficult. I will order more chambers to be built. You need to be able to process more. I’ll see to it.” Those were the words he used, “to process more”.’

They wrapped up for the day and Clive came down on to the sound stage floor. ‘They’re expecting some big cheese from Moscow tonight.’ He looked tired, as though he also felt the strain. ‘I’ll be up late in the editing suite. I’ve got permission for you to take a walk outside so that you can get fresh air.’ The effect of the day seemed to have removed his cheery, camp manner. ‘It’s quite cold, and you can’t go far, but I think it might do you good.’

Bond, Nina, Pete Natkowitz and three of the wardrobe people went outside through a door which led directly from the sound stage. They could not speak freely because of the wardrobe trio, and the darkness hit them like a wall, so that it took several minutes for their eyes to adjust. Then the lights around the Hotel de la Justice came on and Bond realised why he had thought it familiar. From the outside it looked like some large medieval monastery fashioned in wood. He had once seen a drawing of a building just like this one. There was even a hexagonal gate tower, projecting from one side of the building, while the arched windows in perfect rows along the exterior could easily have been the windows to monastic cells.

The place had been built in a great circular clearing cut out of the forest. It must have measured a good half-mile across, and the perimeter where the clearing turned into thick woodland was lined with a high fence of barbed wire. It was lit at intervals by small floodlights, giving all of them the impression that they were at this moment in the awful camp of which they had heard so much during the day.

In the trees behind the perimeter, Bond thought he could sense movement. He saw nothing but experience told him there were armed men hidden in the forest. Nina was probably right. Nobody who worked on this video would be allowed to leave. The Hotel de la Justice would become their own personal death camp.

As they returned to the door, through which they had been allowed to leave, floodlights came to life on the far side of the building, revealing a circular hard standing marked with a white H. As the dazzling illuminations cleaned the darkness around this area the sound of helicopter engines roared in from above, getting louder until one