Man From Barbarossa

16

THE BLUES IN THE NIGHT

When Bond got back to their room, he found Nina in her towelling robe, still sound asleep on the bed where he had left her. She looked peaceful, lovely and detached. The robe had fallen open to reveal part of her left thigh and Bond automatically covered it. He had known since yesterday that this casual operational necessity which had thrown them together, had, for him, gone over the borderline, making them what the Americans might, in understatement, call kissing cousins.

Quietly he stretched out next to her, staring into the darkness, his mind a cauldron of confusion. Once every couple of years the Service invited him to speak to the new entrants at the kindergarten, as they called the training establishment some ten miles east of Watford. He always began with the old saw. ‘Field agents and airline pilots suffer from the same occupational hazard – nine-tenths boredom followed by one-tenth sheer terror.’

So far, this job had certainly fallen into the larger portion of that hazard, but he had followed every rule, obeyed the command given to him by M, namely, done nothing but keep his eyes and ears open. ‘If the worst comes to the worst, just wait,’ the old spy had told him. ‘Wait for the catalyst.’

He had allowed himself to be inserted with Pete Natkowitz into what Stepakov insisted was the heart of Chushi Pravosudia. He had played at being Guy, the recruited cameraman, and accepted Nina from Stepakov at face value. But he was no nearer to the absolute truth regarding the Scales of Justice. Had he been magically spirited this moment into his Chief’s presence, all he could have said was that the terrorist organisation appeared to be run by General Yevgeny Yuskovich, Commander-in-Chief Red Army Rocket Forces, and that Yuskovich was passing himself off for the sake of this charade of a trial as the army’s Judge Advocate General.

He supposed he could add that the innocent Joel Penderek had behaved like a docile, guilty man, but after that he was left with nothing, only the sound and fury of paradox and conflicting absurdity. Now Bond tried to put his feelings for Nina to one side, letting his mind zero in on logic and facts.

The facts were that a phoney trial was being acted for cameras in some godforsaken edifice, ten miles or so from the Finnish border, if Emerald Lacy was to be believed. Nina had been foisted on them and he had formed a sexual relationship with her. At the same time, Pete Natkowitz had fallen into similar intimacy with the girl Natasha, whom he said was a member of his own Service.

During the discussions – the ring of conspiracy – which had taken place that night, he had been struck by two things. First, Natasha had taken no part in the conversation and second, Michael and Emerald Brooks’ contribution had been worthless. Indeed, the pair of them had become dubious assets in Bond’s suspicious mind.

The kernel of information offered by Brooks could be summed up in the man’s own words – ‘. . . The whole thing about this war criminal Vorontsov is a blind, a sleight, a way to throw the Kremlin and the President off- balance. It’s only part of something greater, an evil which will have appalling consequences. We know some of it but not all. The gist is that hardline military people are about to launch a plot which will destroy America and probably Britain also. And I mean destroy.’ That was what he had said, and the pivot of the information was contained in eight words – ‘We know some of it but not all.’

Neither Brooks nor his wife had offered to share what little knowledge they were supposed to have. Instead, Bond and Natkowitz had been shown the inside of a box of mirrors, a story about the hotel having been built on the site of a monastery, a smoothly conducted tour around a secret hiding place. He had not really bought their tale of night-stalking through the building, of ‘finding’ the Boys’ Own hidden tunnel, a tale of luring three soldiers to their deaths in order to provide them with three P6 automatics. He had not even seen the bodies of these dead soldiers.

A thought snapped into his head. It was almost audible, like the tumblers on a security lock dropping into place. Silently, Bond slid from the bed. He had put his pistol, together with the spare magazines, on the floor wrapped in a towel and had advised Nina to do the same on her side of the bed. Quietly he picked up the bundle and crept into the bathroom.

First he examined the ammunition. The weight and feel were right. The magazines slid neatly into the pistol’s butt, so if anything was wrong it had to be in the gun itself. Quickly he disassembled the weapon and his fear was confirmed in a matter of seconds. The firing pin had been carefully filed away, so this particular P6 was of no value unless you wanted to use it as a bludgeon.

He reassembled the automatic, wrapped it in the towel and returned to the bedroom, crossed the floor silently and exchanged his little towelled bundle for the one on Nina’s side of the bed.

In the bathroom once more, he checked the ammunition, then began to strip down the pistol. Nina’s weapon was lethal, the firing pin in place and the mechanism lightly oiled. So there you have it, he thought. Nina was armed, he was not, and he could but presume Natkowitz had been left in the same position. He went back to stretch out beside Nina, knowing, as he had discerned during the night, that all was far from well with Michael and Emerald.

How in heaven’s name could that be? he questioned. He had seen the files; he was one of the chosen few who were, as they said, ‘Sensation Cleared’. These two were legends in the secret community – the Huscarl, the Service’s two-handed axe sent to avenge those famous KGB penetration agents the Press called moles.

He frowned in the darkness, searching for any hint from the files he had examined, which might explain that the Huscarl had been tainted – tripled – because that was where logic took him. Once more, the picture of the elderly spies skulking round the building, operating like a pair of agents in some comic book, filled his mind. It was foolish, not just unlikely but damned near impossible to believe.

Never discount the impossible. He heard M’s chilly voice in his ear. Dry old spies, he thought. Dry, slack with their years. Obsessed by methods now obsolete. Could they possibly have been taken in? Could they themselves have become unwitting agents? Even that was not likely, for the proof lay beside Nina on the floor. One weapon spiked, ready for Bond’s own use or misuse. He realised that his thoughts spun in circles, and that he really did not want to accept Michael Brooks’ and Emerald Lacy’s guilt, for their condemnation would be Nina’s also, and his heart wanted Nina to be on the side of the angels. But she was not, and he had to accept that, unpalatable as it might be.

Then what of the silent Natasha? She was, she said, a member of Chushi Pravosudia, yet she gave them no answers and Pete had vouched for her. ‘She’s with me, if you understand,’ he had said, or something of that nature. Had she also been doubled? If so, nobody was safe. He recalled someone else saying the only true way to freedom is through paranoia. Was he now drowning in his own doubts and uncertainties?

An old song came into his head. ‘Blues in the Night’. He recalled some of the lyrics. ‘A worrisome thing that leads you to sing the blues in the night.’ Then another voice crept into his ear, Nina’s. Nina murmuring to him, ‘Trust nobody. Please trust none of them, not even Bory . . .’ she had whispered as they came out of Dom Knigi after buying Crime and Punishment. Bluff? Double-bluff? Truth? He fell into a shallow doze, wakening as Nina stirred. The darkness outside never altered, but their watches said it was time to start a new day.

In London, M was closeted with Bill Tanner, examining the transcripts. They had Bond’s map reference and had pinpointed the place. ‘The Red Army Senior Officers’ Centre,’ Tanner mused. ‘The place they built on the site of the old Orthodox monastery, St Kyril of Antioch, or some such.’

M nodded, grabbing at the other flimsies, the radio traffic of the Red Army, monitored from a hundred outposts. Certain types of transmission had increased, notably signals between the place where Bond was located and October Battalion, Spetsnaz, the equivalent of one of 22nd SAS squadrons, always held in readiness in Hereford. The October Battalion consisted of some forty-five men. They were at constant alert, separated from other troops on a base near Leningrad.

M read the translated and decrypted signals carefully. ‘Only a spit and a stride from Blessed St Kyril’s,’ he