'Your papers — please.' He held out his hand, staring at Gant's face. 'You are ill — or, maybe, frightened?'
'No — stomach,' Gant said weakly, patting his overcoat.
The KGB man went through the papers carefully, without imagination or haste. Then he looked up. He offered them to Gant, and said: 'Your papers are not in order!'
Buckholz had told Gant repeatedly that such a trick was a stock tactic in preliminary investigation. The accusation, of something, anything — just to gauge the reaction. Yet he was unable to respond innocently. He panicked. Fear showed in his eyes, in the furtive darting of his gaze — the animal seeking a bolt-hole. The KGB man reached for his pocket, and Gant knew the man was about to draw a gun. Reacting instinctively, he bulled against the man, hand reaching for the hand in the Russian's pocket, driving him off balance, even as he sought the gun.
The KGB man was driven up against the roller-towel cabinet before he could regain his balance. He was still trying to reach the gun in his pocket, the one reassuring factor, as Gant tugged frantically at the towel. The hand that had closed upon the gun wriggled in his grasp — he found it difficult to hold the thick wrist. He brought his knee up into the Russian's groin, and the man's breath exploded and he groaned, sagging against the wall. Then Gant had a huge loop of towel free and he wound the loop around the man's head. Then he pulled. The Russian's free hand struggled with the tightening folds — his eyes seemed to enlarge, become totally bulbous. Gant's own vision clouded, and he continued twisting and tugging the towel. He seemed to hear a voice, distant and high, and feel a hand on his shoulder, pulling at him… he held on. Then, he was turned bodily, and something exploded across his face.
He was staring at Pavel, his hand raised to slap him a second time. His face expressed a cold, ruthless fury.
'You — stupid animal! He was KGB — don't you understand what that means? And — you've killed him!' Gant turned to stare dumbly at the pop-eyed, discoloured features of the Russian on the floor. The man's tongue was hanging out fatly. He turned back to Pavel.
'I–I thought he'd — guessed who I was…' he said in a feeble voice.
'You're a menace, Gant!' Pavel said. 'You could get us all killed, do you realise that?' He stared at the body for a moment, as if mesmerised, then he bent swiftly galvanised by a cold fear, and unwound the towel.
Taking the body under the armpits, he dragged it across the floor of the washroom and into an empty cubicle. He tucked the legs inside the door, rummaged in the pockets, and then locked himself in the cubicle.
'Is it clear?' Gant heard him ask.
'Yes,' Gant replied in the voice of a zombie.
He looked up, and watched as the big man climbed over the door of the cubicle and dropped beside him. He was wiping his hands which were dusty from the top of the door. He patted a pocket. 'I have tried to disguise your stupidity by making it appear that the man was robbed.' He sniffed at Gant. 'Now,' he added, 'quickly go up the stairs, and make your way slowly to the entrance. If anyone — anyone — calls on you to stop, obey them. Show your papers, and pretend you're ill, as before — understand?'
'Yes. He — he said my papers were not in order.'
'You damned fool — you killed him for that? They are in order. He was only trying to put you up.'
'I — didn't know where you were…'
'I was stopped, by the KGB. But my papers also were in order.' He pushed Gant ahead of him. 'Now — quickly, up to the entrance. This fat officer could become the object of a search at any moment, and then no one would be allowed to leave this station!'
Gant was stopped twice crossing the station concourse by minor KGB officers who glanced at his papers, asked after his health and his movements, and then let him go by. Slowly he approached the temporary barrier thrown across the entrance of the station.
He had no idea how far behind him Pavel was. He would have to wait for him — if he got through the barrier.
The men at the barrier, at least a tall, grey-haired figure with the side of the face that had, at some time, received very poor plastic surgery — Gant assumed it to have been a war-wound — appeared to possess more authority than the big man he had strangled. Gant passed his papers across to a younger man standing in front of 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.