He stopped at the corner and went into a leather and luggage shop; bought a cheap wallet and a large cheap briefcase of the sort college students sometimes used to carry school books. It was a small valise, really; the manuscript would fit easily.
He carried the empty case up to Drury Lane and went down as far as the passage; he hadn’t known the philatelist’s exact address but the passage was only a hundred feet long and he saw the place as soon as he’d turned the corner. He stopped there to survey it.
The cardboard sign in the door said CLOSED. A few pedestrians moved through the passage but none of them was a stakeout; there was nobody sitting in a parked car, nobody holding up a lamppost. A uniformed traffic warden walked across the far end of the passage but didn’t even glance down its length. Kendig crossed to the opposite curb and made another search from that angle but nothing showed up.
Then the philatelist’s door opened and a squat man emerged, reaching behind him to flip the sign over. Now it read OPEN. The squat man went down the passage away from Kendig and turned the far corner.
Kendig put his back to the place and walked away. His steps were leisurely but his pulse raced.
It had taken only a glance to know what the squat man was. Kendig hadn’t seen him before but the serge, the Slavic scowl and the clumsy shoes had been dead giveaways.
They’d set something up for him there; it was in readiness now and the shop had reopened. Ten minutes later and he’d have walked right into it.
It meant Yaskov had his people out in force. There were at least three other passport dealers in London but if Yaskov had set a trap in this one it meant he’d set traps in all four. It meant, further, that Yaskov had been briefed by the British or had found out on his own hook through some English contact that they’d flushed Kendig and had him on the run without papers.
Coolly and relentlessly they were inscribing the pattern of his annihilation.
It began to rain again in the early afternoon. Discreetly he checked out an Avis car-hire office; there was a man in a doorway opposite it trying not to look like a policeman. He didn’t need to know any more than that. He went into an oak-dark restaurant and sat at a small table over a mixed grill watching through the window beside him while cars moved by, their tires hissing on the wet paving.
Jaws and mind ruminated. They were handling it properly—the way it had to be done. Once they’d taken the decision to treat him as a security crisis they’d had no alternative. He’d given them an advantage by issuing the big challenge here in London: he was isolating himself on an island. It was a big island with an enormous population but it was finite and had a limited number of routes of escape; knowing that fact made it possible for them to commit great forces to the job. He’d chosen England for that reason—he wanted to make it as costly as he could, that was part of the game, and by giving them the opportunity here he’d made it possible for them to concentrate far more effort and manpower than they’d have been willing to spare on him if he’d picked a porous playing field like the Continent or South America.
The Soviets were in it in strength as he’d hoped they’d be. That fellow watching the Avis office had all the earmarks of copper; so Chartermain had brought the Yard into it and Kendig’s likeness would be folded into every bobby’s pocket south of Inverness. Cutter and Follett would be spreading the word about Kendig’s supposed French passport and they’d be covering the intervals between Chartermain’s suave troops and the Yard’s stubborn flat-feet. No doubt the delegations of half a dozen smaller powers in London had got the word through one source or another and had alerted their personnel.
The longer he kept them at bay the more desperate they’d become. It wouldn’t be long—if it hadn’t happened already—before the orders would come down to take off the last of the kid gloves; probably the orders would be to make it look like an accident. They wouldn’t shoot him in a public place.
They were governed by no code except expedience. There were no Commandments except Thou Shalt Succeed. Some of them had consciences of one kind or another but they all were caught in the gears of their great machinery. They believed in using any necessary means to preserve what they thought of as the greater good. It was a curious sinister idealism that motivated the best of them; the rest didn’t count, they were merely Good Germans, they’d do as they were told—lost souls who’d settled years ago for the usual hypocrisies and specious rationalizations.
He’d always recognized the weakness in himself and that was why he saw it in the rest of them. In his own case it had never been put to the test. He had never been ordered to kill anyone. Lurid fictions to the contrary it was not part of the usual plays of espionage to commit murder; there had been assassinations, politically motivated, of which he had knowledge afterward and of which he had written with feelings of genuine outrage in his book. But he had never participated in any effort to take out a person, whether an ally or an enemy agent. It simply wasn’t done. The objective nearly always was to obtain information or to plant false information. In either case it had to be done without the other side’s realizing it had been done. Ideally the operative worked in such a way that nobody found out he’d been there at all. That sort of ideal couldn’t be achieved if he left the landscape littered behind him with dead bodies.
Kendig was not certain what he might have done if Myerson had given him a kill order. He’d had training in the use of weapons and the tactics of unarmed combat but he’d never had to use them; last night’s football yardage in the police station had been the most violent escape of his life except for the night he’d taken a bullet in the head on the Czech border wire; and he’d done no one any real injury. The game was one of wits, not of brute strength or ruthlessness.
But now they meant to kill him. This was something he’d known all along but the full realization had been creeping up on him for a while that there was a point at which they were bound to succeed if he kept playing the game with them: time, numbers and all the probabilities were in their favor. A matter of ten minutes one way or the other this morning might have delivered him onto Mikhail Yaskov’s chopping block.
He visualized himself walking through a door and into the guns. It would happen sooner or later. And what then?
It distressed him in an almost comical way to realize how ordinary he was after all. Neither a pacifist nor a first-strike Neanderthal; merely a man who believed in self-defense. He knew, studying it as honestly as he was able, that if they tried to kill him he would try to kill them first.
A squall rattled the windows; it had become a cloudburst, the rain oiled across the panes and shattered in a haze on the surface of the street, cars spraying high turbulent wakes from the spitting puddles. A man sprinted out holding a tent of newspaper over his head; dodged a car and dashed across the street to catch the tall red double-decker that swayed around the corner.
He saw no point going out into that. He had no dry clothes to change into.
The place had a saloon bar and he was able to get a drink at his table; he ordered Dewar’s straight up. He finished the meal, enjoying it, and when the whiskey came he sipped it and took pleasure in the flavor. His appetite had been ravenous for weeks—the voracity of a condemned man eating his last meal—but now he was luxuriating in the subtler tastes and textures of things.
The Dewar’s was Carla Fleming’s brand. He’d been flashing images of her. He’d no passion to rejoin her; she hadn’t been or done anything extraordinary; it wasn’t infatuation. But she was a vivid bookmark, marking the place where he’d turned a page. That night in Birmingham he’d begun to look at things beyond self-pity and the escape from boredom. That was when he’d discovered the moral outcry of the book he was writing.