Why was it not the same man? The question was more important than the discovery, the solution to the problem of the shoes. One of the three men who had met Mr. Orton had — taken his place in the river? Why?
The question might not have interested an ordinary policeman, not as directly, or as insistantly as it interested Tortyev. But then, Tortyev was not an ordinary member of the Moscow police. He held a police rank, and his offices were situated in the Police Headquarters but, like many of his colleagues, he was a member of the KGB 2nd Chief Directorate. His only superiors, the only people to whom he was answerable, were KGB officers in the Political Security Service.
Tortyev had been in charge of the Orton case since the first addiction cases had come to the attention of the Moscow police and, naturally and inevitably, to the attention of his section of the KGB. His rank in the police had been made up to Inspector, at thirty-three, and he was given authority to co-opt suitable resources in order to unearth, and smash, the ring creating the addiction.
Tortyev had a hatred of drugs, and of pushers. It was as burning a hatred as belonged to any member of any drugs squad anywhere in the world. Tortyev would have done equally valuable work in New York, or London, or Amsterdam. He hated Orton. When Holokov, fat, efficient Holokov, had informed him of the Englishman's death, he had been pleased, though, in another way, frustrated. He had wanted to confront Orton, see him sentenced. Yet his death had not mattered — they knew the others, the ones Orton had supplied.
Yet now, Orton was not dead at all, he admitted. His teeth ground together audibly in the silence of the room. He picked up the telephone. An operator at a special switchboard divorced from the switchboard that served the rest of the police building, answered.
'Get me the Seventh Directorate — the office of Colonel Ossipov,' he said, and waited for his call to be answered. When it was, he swiftly requested assistance, in the form of men and time, from the KGB Colonel responsible for the surveillance of English tourists. The call took less than a minute. Tortyev had priority with the Seventh Directorate.
When he had put the telephone down again, he went back to studying the shoes, pushing them together, pulling them apart, as if making them perform some simple dance. Now that he had requested more men, to begin checking on Orton's movements, he would need Stechko, Holokov, and possibly the sergeant, Filipov, even if the man was a Jew, to begin checking through their records of the previous visits of Orton to Moscow, their records of his contacts, behaviour-pattern, habits…
As he pressed the intercom switch to summon his subordinates, he was still staring at the odd shoes. He was smiling, as if they represented a challenge to him.
At the moment he was about to speak, he suddenly wondered what had become of the transistor-radio that had been itemised at the airport — and had been inspected for drugs. It had not been in his hotel room, nor on the body. Of course, it might be at the bottom of the river.
'Stechko — get Holokov and Filipov right away — I've got some important paperwork for you,' he said, his smile becoming puzzlement once more. Where was that radio?
Semelovsky was waiting for him, the small Moskvitch saloon pulled into the side of the narrow road leading to Bilyarsk, the bonnet open. Gant could see the faint outline of Semelovsky hunched into the open jaws of the car, as if in the process of being swallowed. He settled down at the peak of the bank which bordered the road, and waited. The man went on working, or appearing to work, on the engine of the small car. Gant spent ten minutes checking that the figure was alone, and that the road was empty. When the man stood up, stretched his back, and cursed in Russian, Gant ducked back out of sight. Semelovsky was small — Gant saw light glint from the two moons of his spectacles. The man looked around him, and up and down the road, then returned his head beneath the bonnet. Gant heard muffled tinkering, and a tuneless whistle, then slowly got to his feet, and eased himself down the slope of the bank. The man's back was to him, and if he were not Semelovsky, then…
'How long have you been watching me-' the little man asked in Russian, in an irritated voice, without lifting his head from beneath the bonnet. Gant stopped in his tracks, one foot raised from the ground in a half-made step.
'Semelovsky?' he asked as the shock dissipated in his system.
The man emerged from beneath the bonnet, wiping his hands on an oily rag. He studied Gant by the light of the moon, low on the horizon still, nodded to himself as if in satisfaction, and closed the bonnet loudly. Gant moved closer to him. The man was in his late forties, possibly fifties. The remainder of his frizzy grey hair clung to his ears, but the top of his head was bald. He was dressed in a drab suit, and wore a raincoat. He was barely more than five feet in height. He looked up at Gant, the light glinting from his spectacles as he studied the American.
'You're late,' he said at last.
'I'm sorry,' Gant snapped back, irritated by the man.
'It's a question of the guards,' Semelovsky explained, as if to a child. 'A little longer, and one of the guard-posts, either at the junction or the other end of the-road, would have sent someone to discover where I was. It is almost an hour since I checked through the first guard-post — which is why my car has, to all intents and purposes, broken down.'
Gant nodded, and then said: 'How do I get into Bilyarsk?'
'A good question. In the boot of the car, of course.'
'Won't they search it?'
'Probably not. It was searched at the other end. Thoroughly. The KGB work very mindlessly, most of the time,' he added, as if lecturing on the subject of an inefficient mechanism. 'If the one guard-post is detailed to search all incoming vehicles, and the other all outgoing traffic, then they do not, as a rule, change functions — despite the recent draft of extra guards into the town. Do you know, there were more than a dozen jammed into the guard-post at the highway junction.' Semelovsky smiled suddenly, brilliantly. They must be expecting trouble, of one kind or another!'
He walked round Gant to the rear of the car, and opened the boot. He gestured to the American, sharply, as if accusing himself of having wasted valuable time, and Gant joined him. The boot was empty, and small. Pocketing the gun he had held all the time in his right hand, Gant climbed into the small space, hunched himself into a foetal position, and nodded. The Russian stood watching him for a moment, and then nodded back. The light disappeared, and Gant was in a confined, cramped darkness. He accepted that Semelovsky would have prepared the boot so that he would not asphyxiate. The darkness held no terrors for him. The boot was not as cramped as his own thoughts had proved, those months in the hospital. He heard the tinny roar of the engine, realised that Semelovsky, with careful attention to detail, was firing on only three cylinders, and then was heaved against the cold metal of the boot-door as the Russian pulled onto the road.
Semelovsky gave little thought to his passenger as he negotiated the remaining miles to the outskirts of Bilyarsk, where the quarters for the technical and scientific staff had been constructed. The road was narrow and deeply rutted by the passage of numerous heavy Vehicles, bringing equipment to the project site. Semelovsky thought only of his function within the total operation that was intended to bring Gant and the Mig-31 into successful proximity. He had been recruited into the underground cell by Baranovich, for whom, and for whose sufferings at the hands of the NKVD and later the KGB, he had an almost religious respect. Semelovsky was himself a Jew, but had spent most of his adult life working successfully on various technical and military projects for the regime that despised and harried in large numbers, the people of his race. But, Baranovich was sufficiently his hero to shake him out of the political cowardice of years; like all converts, he was zealous to an extreme.