Moment of reorientation, a turn, short run, then turn right, then more stairs, up, up…
Suk's hand grabbed him and regretted the act as Hyde turned on him, fist raised. They were in a wide corridor, just as the memorised diagram that Suk had supplied had shown. Hyde knew where he was and how far from the clean air in the Third Courtyard—
'You're in the wrong damn place!' he snarled in a whisper. People hurried past them. Now, he could hear the noise of fire-appliances moving into the courtyard. Through a window, their headlights bounced and glared. Like hunting searchlights.
'I came — I was worried when the alarms—'
'Where now?'
'Come — this way.'
They were on the ground floor of the Chancellery. Already, people were being moved out of the building — cleaners, clerks, security guards, KGB and STB officers. Men in white lab coats similar to the one he wore. Suk guided him towards a tall narrow door. A guard perfunctorily inspected their breast-pocket ID cards, and they were out into a windy night which snatched at Hyde's breath and lowered his temperature immediately so that his teeth began to chatter and his body shivered uncontrollably; fevered.
'Are you—?'
'Just bloody cold!' he snapped.
Firemen in yellow waterproof leggings and dark uniform coats hurried across the scene in front of them. Men with guns ran, directed by other men in uniform greatcoats or leather topcoats. Panic. The organism had been wounded in some vital part. The antibodies were in flight, hurrying to the scene. Rather, he thought, the wasps' nest, stirred with a stick. Someone had damaged the secret stuff, the valuable stuff—
He patted his pocket.
'Here,' Suk offered, and handed him his short, dark coat. 'Give me the white one.'
Hyde removed the dustproofing coat and donned his own overcoat, placing the cassette in his pocket. The gun still nestled in the small of his back.
'Across this courtyard,' Suk began, whispering close to Hyde's ear, pausing until the man nodded, 'around the east end of the cathedral, into Vikarska — yes? I showed you on the map.'—
'I remember,' Hyde snapped impatiently.
'Good,' Suk replied, his face pinched by cold and offence. 'You will find the workmen's ladders where I showed you. With them you can climb the main wall into the garden there — and the other wall…'
'I know. I can climb that with my hands and feet. I only hope you're right, mate.'
Hyde looked at the man, looked through the open door into a scene which had suddenly become more ordered, drilled, slower moving. More brown uniforms, many leather and mohair topcoats. A man with black smears on his face, as if he had been close to a fire…
They were searching now. They knew he had got out of the cellars. Time was diminishing, being coiled in by the pursuit. He glanced into Suk's face.
'Thanks,' he murmured, and then turned his back. Suk watched him until he disappeared into the shadows near the statue of St George, making for the cathedral. He simply disappeared into the deeper shadow behind a spilling pool of blue, revolving light from a fire-appliance. By that time, he was already running.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN:
A Consignment for Moscow
Voronin watched each of them, arranged like exhibits on the three upright chairs on the other side of the Rezident's desk. He had requisitioned Bayev's office at the Soviet embassy with a casual authority, confident of his own role at the hub of the drama. He was alone with his three prisoners; alone, except for the frowning Party portraits that stared down from the walls, unchanging, rather forbidding. He noticed them, perhaps for the first time in a number of years — since they were no more than the normal furniture of a KGB Rezident's office — with the eye of the three foreigners in the room. Lenin, Brezhnev, Nikitin and the others — a small number for the years since 1917, he observed to himself — sternly indicated to Aubrey and the Massingers that they were already seated in the ante-room of an alien way of life. Voronin watched them, eager for signs of stress, of defeat, and confident that they would appear as tangibly as the spots associated with chicken-pox or measles.
Aubrey had tidied his remaining hair and buttoned his shirt. He had tightened his narrow, striped tie. His jacket had been flung at him by one of Voronin's men as he was forced into the limousine outside the safe house. Voronin remembered it with satisfaction as a dismissive, final gesture. Aubrey wasn't wearing it now.
Massinger sat stiffly upright, his injured leg thrust out in front of him — the too-small trousers they had supplied at the lodge before he was transferred were strained over the bandage; stained on the thigh with drying blood. His wife looked dowdy and middle-aged with her hair dishevelled and make-up smudged. Defeated by her bruises and swollen, split lips. She seemed little more than a mirror of her husband's dejected and weakened condition, and it was difficult for Voronin to reconcile the woman he saw with the well-connected, troublesome image that Babbington and Kapustin had feared.
Voronin was satisfied that the Massingers were disorientated, frightened, clearly aware of the brevity of the future. They knew they would die quite soon. Aubrey; however, the third member of the consignment for Moscow, disappointed him.
He was tired, unshaven, old. But he had the appearance of a pensioner suddenly roused from sleep rather than that of a captured intelligence officer. Voronin felt cheated. Aubrey's appearance should have mirrored that captivity. On the contrary, it belied what he must surely be feeling. It was an unreasonably lame conclusion to the days, weeks, months, years of effort of which Voronin had been an important part. Hidden cameras, microphones, doctored film and tape, lighting, scripts, actors. A complete, elaborate, marvellous forgery, all to entrap Aubrey. Entrap this one old man who seemed incapable of understanding what was happening to him. Voronin remembered the smoky rooms, the endless whirring tapes, the hiss of film sliding through projectors. He remembered Aubrey in front —
That day, perhaps of all days, they knew — the whole team had sensed it — they had Aubrey. That was the film they'd released to the French, that had been shown all over the world. They'd all known they had him then, that he couldn't escape them…
And yet now he seemed to have done so. He looked drugged, weary, indifferent.
Voronin dismissed his disappointment and picked up the telephone. It was the reason he had had them brought to this room, rather than spend the intervening hours before their transfer to Schwechat airport in tiny, separate cells below ground. As he waited after dialling Kapustin's number at Moscow Centre, he checked the dials and lights on the encryption unit's face. Was Aubrey glancing slyly at him? Perhaps not. It was a superfluous call, merely confirming their success. But, he wanted these people to hear it. It was a call for the benefit of his prisoners.
He glanced at his watch. Twelve-five. They'd be transferred at four to the airport. Aubrey with false diplomatic papers — he must be seen by witnesses who would later recall that he went willingly, not under arrest — and the other two as diplomatic passengers. Their departure would remain secret— forever. Like their later executions in Moscow.
He heard the connection being made and leaned forward to switch on the desk speaker, clamping the receiver to it. Aubrey's eyes wandered vaguely, hardly aware. The Massingers were distracted by his movements from their intent perusal of the monochrome faces looking down at them from the white office walls.
Aubrey and his companions would disappear. SIS in Vienna was in total disarray, and controlled by Babbington. There would be no effective search, no possibility of counter-measures. The Austrians would want nothing to do with it except, at a safe distance in time, to make the appropriate empty diplomatic noises. There was this room, then a limousine to Schwechat, then the cabin of the Tupolev, then another car, then another room. That was all that lay in front of the Massingers: Aubrey had little more to look forward to.
'Comrade Deputy Chairman—!' Voronin announced, to attract Aubrey's attention. Their eyes seemed to focus. The Massingers appeared unmoved, their attention having wandered as easily as that of children. Aubrey twitched once like a small animal receiving a shock from a buried electrode. Then his attention, too, seemed to
