completed his role. In a moment, he would be able to retreat from this location, this tension. Count the money—
'Then the fault on the computer should have disappeared by now,' Hyde said. He remembered turning the hands and setting the clock in the darkness of the metro tunnel.
He saw the shoulder of the guard, the first obstacle of his course. Even if he passed him, there would be others; beyond them, he might only find that the engineer had already left, the fault had vanished, his presence unnecessary and immediately suspicious. The guard's shoulder twitched like an organ of sense detecting something amiss. Hyde gripped the material of Suk's suit above the breastbone.
'I'm walking into a trap because you couldn't do your fucking job properly!' he hissed, leaning his lips to the man's ear. He heard Suk's ragged breathing, loud as an alarm signal, and immediately released the thin, coarse material of the jacket. Suk was vigorously shaking his head, and sweating once more.
'No…'he protested.
'Get lost.'
He shrugged Suk aside. The man backed away like some cowed, theatrical servant, then muttered in a whisper: 'I — will wait…'
Way out, exit, his mind warned, and he placated Suk with a nod. Then dismissed him from his thoughts. He heard the hesitant footsteps vaguely; something that did not concern him.
Down the green wall to the next basement level, parallel with the handrail of the stairs, was painted a red stripe. It signified an area of maximum security. They had passed stripes along every wall, down every set of steps. They had gone from green to yellow to blue and now to red. Indications of growing security, of greater and greater restrictions to access. Increased warnings to Hyde of his danger, of the distance back from the computer room to the castle above.
Red stripe. Absolutely no unauthorised personnel. Strictly no admittance without the correct papers and identification. He looked again at the guard's shoulder. The red stripe down the wall was at the level of the marksman's badge on his upper sleeve. The tip of his rifle barrel jutted beyond his shoulder, as if searching for him; waiting.
Twelve steps — then he had only the ID clipped to his breast pocket and the other papers with which to confront this first guard. And, if he passed him, he would be between the rifle-tip he could see and the Kalashnikov of the next guard further along the corridor. In a crossfire if they so much as suspected…
Twelve steps.
He took the first step, body steady, temperature endurable, legs OK, breathing controlled.
His left foot fumbled at the third step. Already, the guard's shoulder-flashes and arm-badges were more significant, larger in his vision. It was as if he were on the point of tripping, of stumbling the short distance to a collision with the uniform. He hesitated, felt the perspiration beneath his shirt, then almost at once he was two- thirds of the way down the striped wall towards the guard's shoulder. He felt light-headed, as if with fresh, chill air. Better. Under control. Better.
His foot touched the bottom step and the guard, startled, turned to him. Hyde stared into the young, freckled, open features, knowing that if anything went wrong, if he were suspected or even exposed, he would have to kill this guard in order to get out. The narrow corridor and the flight of stairs were the only exit he knew from the cellars of the Chancellery.
Marksman's flashes, KGB stripe. 'Good evening, Comrade,' Hyde said casually, presenting his breast-pocket ID for inspection, airily waving his other documents in his right hand, as if beginning the theatrical hypnosis of the young guard.
He waited on the edge of the precipitous moment. The guard took his papers, read them carefully, compared face with picture with face with picture clipped on his pocket…
And nodded. Hyde's hand — fingers, at least — had touched the small of his back where the pistol was now concealed in his waistband. The guard looked down, incongruously, at the faded denims and the three-striped training shoes he was wearing. And seemed more than ever convinced. Hyde's right hand regained his side, then touched the square briefcase, flicking the catch. The guard peered. His ear was close to Hyde's face, as if expecting a whispered confession. His fingers — bitten nails, but clean — riffled the folded sheets of continuous paper, the pamphlets and reference books, the ring-bound notebooks, the manuals.
'Thank you, Comrade,' the guard announced at last with a slight, familiar deference. Members of the same side, the same club. Russians in Czechoslovakia — KGB Russians. Godwin had said the papers would stand up to inspection. They had.
Hyde said, 'I hope this doesn't take all night.'
'I'm off at twelve,' the guard replied with complacency and a grin.
'Lucky sod. I won't be out before then—' He almost wanted to cross his fingers as he said that.
He ambled with studied indifference down the red-striped corridor towards the guard at the end of it, a man relaxed by his observation of the first guard's inspection of his papers. Already, there was the smell of ozone and air-conditioning. There were staircases running down further into the cellar complex. The corridor ended, opening out into a glass-panelled area with chairs and a vending machine. An incongruous rubber plant and magazines on a glass-topped table. The reception area of a new company out to impress visitors. Beyond more glass panelling, which reached to the high ceiling, lay the computer rooms. Men in white coats and foot-coverings, No Smoking signs, security warnings — the guard.
A flick of the papers, a glance at the breast-pocket ID, and the guard stood aside from the door. Hyde felt breath and heartbeat hesitate, even though he hardly paused in his stride as he pushed the first door open and passed through. Ten fifty-three, he saw, glancing at his watch as he pushed open the second door then let it close behind him. Constant temperature, high level of noise — chatter rather than hum of the machinery. Perhaps three people mincing and sliding between the metal cabinets — one carrying a clear plastic disc pack, loading it onto one of the computers. The shift manager and an operator were watching the job stream unfold on a console. The night shift.
High ceiling, a long room retreating beneath bright white lighting. Rows of VDUs and terminals. Controlled air came up near his legs through one of the hundred grilles set in the suspended floor. Thick bouquets of cable and wiring emerged from the floor directly into the boxes which stood like ranks of filing cabinets, most of them orange and bearing the legend ICL. Just as Godwin had said. British computers.
'Where's the post office engineer, Comrade?' he called out. A bearded young man looked up from a sheaf of print-outs, pencil held daggerlike in his teeth. He merely nodded in acknowledgement of what he guessed to be Hyde's role and business and waved an arm vaguely. Hyde followed the direction, moving more quickly now. If the fault had disappeared because the short-life battery had run down, if the engineer had called the Soviet embassy and requested a system test and the genuine tester was on his way, if, if, if—
Someone glanced at him without interest, assuming his business there. The noise of the room was almost unnerving. The temperature was dry, dead like the air. Carpet, wiring, air-ducts and grilles, glass walls, racks of tapes and discs, printers, VDUs. Hyde moved through an alien, mechanical landscape towards the highest security area. He saw guards, relaxed though in uniform, armed only with holstered pistols, an officer, and one man in overalls, incongruous as a plumber might have been in those aseptic surroundings.
A guard moved, glanced at his ID, and nodded. 'Still giving trouble?' Hyde asked the post office engineer's back as he bent over an oscilloscope-like sophometric measuring set, toolbox open beside his swivel-chair. The man waved him to silence. Hyde shrugged, someone grinned and indicated the importance of the telephone call in which the engineer was engaged.
The highest security areas was glassed off from the rest of the computer room. Unnecessarily, but with habitual, obsessive KGB thoroughness. Status, too, played its part. KGB officers who could operate a remote terminal but who did not understand, and therefore despised, computers and their programmers and operators, would enjoy this sense of separation, of distance from the people in white coats. Civilians.
The engineer was talking over the telephone landline to Moscow Centre's Records Directorate. In his hand, flapping like a fan, was a transistor-board he must have just changed. In a similar room another trusted, security- cleared engineer would be checking the line at his end. From terminal to scrambler to modem to telephone line — the two men hurrying the miles towards each other. Feeding signals of known frequency down the line and through the system and checking the read-out at each end.
The fault was less than a mile of telephone line from the Hradcany, Hyde thought. He should have found it…
