the grey-haired, expressionless senior officer, and waited. He tried not to look at the scarred, half-repaired face, but found his gaze drawn to it. The tall man smiled thinly, and rubbed his artificially smooth cheek with one long- fingered hand.
'English?' the younger man asked. 'Uh — oh, yes.'
'Mm. Mr. Grant — we must ask you to wait at one of the tables here for a moment, until we check with your hotel.'
'I have the papers…'
'Yes, and your passport and papers have received a security service stamp — nevertheless, we must ask you to wait.'
The young man lifted up the barrier, so that a hinged section stood on end, and Gant was ushered through. Other tables besides the one at which he was directed to sit, were occupied. About half-a-dozen people in all. Not all of them Russians. He heard an American voice, belonging to an elderly man, saying:
'There's no right on earth makes you question that passport and those papers, sonny!' A young KGB man, crop-haired, waved the remark aside, and continued with a telephone conversation.
Gant sat down, heavily, at the table. It was a rickety affair, erected for the express purpose of providing a semblance of the KGB's normal interrogation facilities. He swallowed hard. He turned his eyes to the barrier, and saw Pavel repossessing his papers and passing out of the entrance to the station, without a backward glance. Suddenly, he felt deserted, alone. He was once more no longer in control of the situation. He stared at the black telephone isolated on the table.
Then the young man slid into the chair opposite him, and smiled. 'This won't take very long, let us hope, Mr. Grant,' he said.
As he dialled the number of the Warsaw Hotel, Gant saw, clearly, and for the first time, the odds against him. He was taking on the largest, the most ruthless, the most thorough security service the world had ever seen. It was small comfort to recollect that Aubrey had described the KGB as notoriously inefficient because of its very size. To Gant, sitting at that table, in the cold foyer of the metro station, it was no comfort at all, the smooth platitudes of a man in an hotel room in the middle of London.
'Hotel Warsaw?' the young man asked in Russian. Gant kept his eyes on the table, so that he did not betray any sign that he followed the conversation. 'Ah — State Security here. Let me talk to Prodkov, please.' Prodkov would be the name of the KGB man who worked on the staff of the hotel — he might have been a waiter, desk- clerk, dishwasher, but he possessed far more power than the hotel manager.
There was a considerable wait, then: 'Prodkov — I have a tourist here, Michael Grant. He is registered in room 308… Yes, you know him. Tell me, what does he look like? Would you look at me for a moment, Mr. Grant, please? Thank you — go ahead, Prodkov… Mm. Yes… yes — I see. And he is not there now?' There was another, longer pause. Gant waited, in disbelief. Aubrey could never have anticipated what was happening to him now — now it would emerge that Grant looked different, or was already tucked up in his bed. 'Good. Thank you, Prodkov. Goodbye.'
The young man was smiling affably to deny what had just occurred. There had been no suspicion, no force — merely a very ordinary, routine check on a tourist's papers. He handed back the sheaf of papers, tucked neatly into the cover of the passport bearing the name of Michael Grant.
'Thank you, Mr. Grant — I apologise for any delay. We — are engaged in a search for — criminals, shall we say? Of course, we wished merely to eliminate you from our enquiries. You are now free to resume your nocturnal sightseeing tour of our city.' The young man was obviously proud of his English. He stood up, gravely shook hands with Gant, and then waved him through the barrier. The grey-haired man smiled crookedly as Gant passed him, only one side of his face wrinkling with the expression.
Gant nodded to him, and then he was outside the barrier and walking as steadily as he could towards the entrance. Outside the ornate entrance, beneath its elaborate, decorated portico, the wind was suddenly cold. Gant realised that his body was bathed in a sweat of relief. He looked around him and saw Pavel detach himself from the shadows.
'Good,' he said. 'Now, we have wasted far too much time already. Soon, it will be dangerous to be on the streets, impeccable papers or otherwise. Come — we have a short distance to walk. You go ahead of me, down the Kirov Street. When we are away from the station, I will catch you up, and show where we are heading. Good? Very well, begin walking.'
They picked up two of the known associates of Pavel Upenskoy and Vassily Levin just before six in the morning. Both were family men, living in the same tower block of Soviet Workers' flats on the wide Mira Prospekt, overlooking the vast permanent site of the Exhibition of Economic Achievements in the northern suburbs of Moscow. The black saloons of Kontarsky's team parked in fhe forecourt of the block, while it was hardly light, and the men moved in swiftly. The whole operation took hardly more than three minutes, including the ascent of the lift to the fourteenth and sixteenth floors. When the team returned, the two additional human beings appearing satisfactorily disturbed, barely awake, and deeply frightened, Priabin knew that his chief would be satisfied.
Priabin grinned into the frightened, wan faces of the two men taken from then beds as they passed him with nervous side-glances. They knew, he sensed, why he had come for them — and they knew what to expect when they were returned to the Centre, to Dzerzhinsky Street. He watched them being loaded into two of the black cars, and then glanced up at the block of flats. On the sixteenth floor, he could make out the smudge of a white face at a dark window — the wife, or perhaps a child. It did not matter.
His breath smoked round him in the cold dawn air as he returned to his car. Dipping his head at the passenger window, he said to the driver: 'Very well — give the order for the surveillance-team to move in on the warehouse. Let's get Upenskoy as well, while we're about it!'
Gant woke from a fitful, dream-filled sleep as the doors of the removal van were opened noisily by Pavel Upenskoy. Shaking his head, muttering, he pulled himself into a sitting position on the mattress which had been laid just behind the driver's cab. Gant had boarded it in the warehouse of the Sanitary Manufacturing Company of Moscow.
The light of cold, high bulbs filtered into the interior of the truck, but Upenskoy was hidden from Gant's view by the stacked lavatory bowls and cisterns that he was to drive that day to Kuybyshev, a town lying more than seven hundred road miles from Moscow. A new hotel being constructed in Kuybyshev awaited the toilet fittings.
'Gant — are you awake?'
'Yes,' Gant replied sullenly, trying to moisten his dry, stale mouth with saliva. 'What time is it?'
'Nearly five-thirty. We leave for Bilyarsk just before six. If you want, the old man has made some coffee — come and get it.'
Gant heard the heavy footsteps retreat across the concrete floor of the warehouse, and ascend some steps. A flimsy door banged shut. Then, the only sounds were those of his hands rubbing at the stubble on his chin, and the sucking of his lips as he tried to rid himself of the dry, evil taste in his mouth. He brushed a hand across his forehead and examined the thin film of sweat on his fingertips carefully, as if it were something alien, or something familiar the appearance and nature of which he had long forgotten. Then he wiped his hand on the trouser leg of his faded blue overalls into which he had changed when he arrived at the warehouse.
He had not slept well. He had not been allowed to sleep for more than two hours after being brought by Pavel to the warehouse, in a narrow commercial street that ran off the Kirov Street. They were only a quarter of a mile from the Komsomolskaia Metro Station. Pavel had not allowed him to sleep as he had hammered home to him the facts and nuances of his new, and third, identity — that of Boris Glazunov, driver's mate, who lived in a block of flats on the Mira Prospekt, who was married with two children and who, in reality, Pavel had explained, would be staying home and out of sight, while Gant accompanied him in the delivery truck as far as Bilyarsk. The briefing had been conducted entirely in Russian — Gant had been forcibly reminded more than once of his language training with the defector, Lebedev, at Langley, Virginia.
At last, after a recital of his assumed life history, and a repeated account of what papers he carried, and what they represented, he had been allowed to sleep — to sleep as soundly as his own mind would allow him. He had relived the strangulation of the KGB man in the washroom, in a grotesque, balletic slow-motion in endless repetition — to relive the reaction that had caused him to sag against a shop window in the Kirov Street, so that
