Foster attempted to back off immediately. ‘We could use a normal drop.’
‘I want a personal meeting.’
‘The same as today,’ insisted Foster. ‘If I am not happy, I won’t make the contact.’
Something had to be done! ‘Don’t run out on me.’
‘What are you accusing me of?’
‘I know how sensitive everything is here,’ avoided Snow. ‘Nothing has been endangered. Nor will it be. There’s no reason for anyone to lose their heads.’
‘London’s got to decide about all this,’ said Foster. ‘There has been a lot of government-inspired comment in the People’s Daily about foreign intervention and counter-revolution. Something is building up.’
Snow decided that instead of being his link with London this man was a positive barrier. ‘But not connected with me. So there’s nothing for London to decide: they just have to be told about what happened.’
‘You’ve got to take care!’ said the embassy man.
‘I always take care,’ sighed Snow, bored with the need for repetition. He’d have to complain, irrespective of any effect it had upon Foster’s career.
‘Extra care.’
Snow felt his chest begin to tighten. He always carried a relieving inhaler, but he was strangely reluctant to ease the asthma by using it in front of the other man. Foster might construe it as being brought on by matching nervousness when in fact it was caused by his angry impotence, at this fool and this meeting.
‘You leave first,’ ordered Foster. ‘I’ll watch you out: make sure you’re clear.’
‘A week from now. Here,’ repeated Snow. ‘No flower signal nonsense.’
‘All right,’ said Foster, uncertainly.
Snow did feel some apprehension, walking from the park, and his anger at the other man increased for creating the totally unnecessary tension. His discomfort grew, banding tighter, and he began to strain for breath. But still he denied himself the relief until he knew he was well beyond Foster’s view. By which time he had left it too late. The seat was actually filming before his eyes when he reached it, slumping down to fumble the inhaler finally to his mouth. It took a long time for the muscles to relax: even then there was a rasping wheeze which Snow knew would take maybe an hour completely to leave him.
It was the worst attack he could remember for months and it disturbed him. Foster was a fool, to have caused it: a frightened, stupid fool who was making life intolerable, physically now as in every other way. Snow didn’t see any reason to worry about the man’s career: clearly Foster loathed it and would positively welcome a chance of escape.
‘He really is unusual,’ admitted Gower. ‘Not at all what you’d imagine anyone attached to the Foreign Office to be like.’ Very nominally attached, Gower qualified, to himself.
‘So what is he like?’ demanded Marcia, sharing the dinner wine evenly between them.
‘He complains all the time about bad feet: wears things that look more like snowshoes than proper footwear. I suppose the first impression is that he’s scruffy but he’s really not: that’s the trick. It’s difficult to get a proper picture of him at all, even when you’ve been with him as constantly as I have.’
‘I want to meet him!’ declared the girl, at once. ‘Invite him for dinner. That would be all right, wouldn’t it? My meeting your instructor, I mean.’
‘I’m not sure,’ said Gower, doubtfully. He’d been reluctant to engage in the conversation with Marcia in the first place: now he regretted it even more.
‘Invite him!’ she insisted. ‘I must meet this mystery man!’
He was a mystery man, accepted Gower. There wasn’t even a name to introduce to Marcia, if the invitation were accepted.
Fyodor Tudin was a dedicated career officer, an asexual bachelor whose only indulgence was sometimes to drink himself into a stupor in the secure solitude of his Sytinskij Prospekt apartment. The drinking had become more frequent since the changes, which still frustrated and angered him. It was not enough to have survived the KGB restructuring. He should have got the chairmanship of the Directorate, not that icy bitch of a robot Natalia Nikandrova. He’d earned it, for all he’d done in the past: would get it, despite her trying to bury him under the organization of the republic networks.
He just had to find a way.
Discovering personal failings – or best of all, personal, discrediting secrets – was the way. Which was why, within a week of his humiliating appointment as her deputy, he had searched her personal file in the archives. He’d been disappointed by the sparseness of what was there, hinting at an existence here in Moscow as empty as his own. A baby had been an intriguing hope, but the record of a woman who lived alone showed the death of a naval officer husband eighteen months earlier, so there had been nothing useful there. He had been equally hopeful of an odd involvement with an Englishman, until he saw it had been considered an operational success, contributing to her promotion.
Determined to find something, Tudin had initiated a discreet monitor on everything Natalia did, and was therefore curious when he discovered her necessarily recorded official enquiry about the son, Eduard, linked to an apartment at Mytninskaya.
So curious, in fact, that he extended it with additional enquiries of his own. And kept hoping.
Thirteen
Having taught Gower as well as he believed he was able, Charlie set the graduation tests, never once giving the man the slightest warning, even ordering some checks when he was not personally present, the obvious times for Gower to expect something. Others he staged when Gower would have considered himself to be off duty.
Gower only failed to locate one displaced object in a room-entry check. He picked out every shadowing car, on motorways and minor roads. Without being told, he took to hiring cars on credit cards and driving licences held under false, department-supplied legend names, and by so doing destroyed any paper trail from which it would have been possible to discover his true identity. He extended the hire-car precaution, detecting surveillance during one of the planned observations and lulling the professional department Watchers by constantly using the vehicle to embed his connection with it in their minds before evading them completely by abandoning the car in the most prominent place for them to continue watching while he disappeared. His basic tradecraft proved to be impeccable. Three times he beat professional observers on a ground pursuit by dodging in and out of department stores with front, side and back entrances. On two subsequent occasions, he defeated the same increasingly angry department observers passing in a brush contact an unseen package to another person – a woman – going in the opposite direction on a crowded street. He emptied and filled dead-letter drops faultlessly. He carried out his own surveillance on trained men instructed to lose him, which they did only twice in six different situations, never once establishing identifying eye-contact which would in turn have marked him out to an intelligence professional. There were three separate efforts to photograph him, using a team to appear as holidaymakers posing for a vacation souvenir in such a way as to have put him in the background. These he avoided every time. Under simulated interrogation by department specialists, he obeyed Charlie’s constantly repeated instruction by lying as little as possible – and by always being able to remember the lies he’d told – and withstood four hours of questioning before being caught out, and then in such a minor mistake that he was able to recover in what Charlie considered a sufficiently convincing way.