There had been great security at the airport, all the passengers were thoroughly searched, and yet they had their guns when it came to the moment of taking the plane. The way they did it was simple. They had a friend, a friend who worked at the airport, and was therefore outside suspicion. It was he who placed the guns on board and hid them, all long before the passengers boarded. What had the Arabs to do? Only to go to a prearranged seat and find the bags. It was all on the BBC. And there is a man who is known to us, isn't there? Yevsei Allon, isn't that the name of the boy, Rebecca? In your class in ninth and tenth year. He is at the airport at Kiev…'
'But he is in the freight and the cargo. He would not have access to the cabins of planes.' An interruption, as if she were willing the project not to work. For it was out of the fantasy stage now and becoming something sharper, keener, more dangerous.
'He will have to find a way, Rebecca, and it is you that must persuade him. You are the one that knew him best. You are the one that he will listen to.'
'We rely on you.' Isaac was close beside her, hand on her shoulder where it had not rested before. 'And we must rely on your friend. Otherwise we will not board the plane, and if we do not then we shall be taken. That is certain.'
David rose from the floor, dusting the dirt from the seat of his trousers, pushing away the coil of hair that had slipped on his forehead. 'Rebecca, you will see Yevsei. Do not hurry yourself, or rush him, but put him in debt to you. Make him a favour that he must repay, and then arrange a rendezvous again tomorrow morning. By then I will have the guns. Isaac, you must go to the Aeroflot booking centre, the big one on Kreshchatik where they will be busiest. A flight tomorrow afternoon that goes far into the interior. A four-hour flight we will want, not less, so we have sufficient fuel. It is for you to decide where we go, and the way you will purchase the tickets. But it must be in the afternoon – if that is not too late.'
'Where do we sleep tonight?' Rebecca asked.
'You, I don't know,' and David laughed, a twist in his lips. 'Isaac and I, we sleep here, and this is where you should come when you have finished with Yevsei. If they have broken Moses then they will come in the morning for us… to our homes. Rebecca, you understand what confronts us? You know what is the future if they take us? Basement cells and interrogations, and then they will shoot us or hang us, as the will takes them. There is no mercy, no clemency to those who seek to kill the pigs, not if one is on his back in the hospital and perhaps about to die. Yevsei is important to us, do not forget that. If you want to grow old, to bear children, if you want to know the breadth of Israel – then Yevsei must help you.'
They were all on their feet and moving towards the door. He put out his arms and took her, lightly holding her shoulders and urged her towards him, so that her forehead was against his mouth, and he kissed her gently, just below the hairline and for the first time. 'Tomorrow night we will sleep in the West. Do not forget that. Tomorrow we go.'
The two men watched her as she broke away and went down the path towards the track that would take her to the main road. She did not look back, and her shoulders were hunched except when they straightened and rose in small convulsions, the action of one who is crying. Then she was gone, lost in the trees. Neither boy looked at the other, avoiding a meeting of their eyes and feelings. Had chosen the easier road, both of them. Had given themselves tasks that were not comparable to hers, and felt a clutch of guilt, shared and unspoken. The clinging silence of the forest spread across them when her footsteps had died and faded. Brave little girl, Isaac thought, if she will do this for us, brave little girl, not that he'll have an easy time of it, old Yevsei, not that the winning and wooing would be simple, or painless.
'Will it work, Isaac?' asked David, staring beyond him into the undergrowth.
'There is no alternative. This way offers us a chance. Not a good chance, but something.
Without it we are condemned.'
CHAPTER THREE
It was two years since they had given Charlie Webster a room of his own.
He hadn't really known whether to be flattered or grateful or what. It gave him a certain importance to be able to turn a key in the door when he went off for lunch, leaving an empty desk behind him as he headed for the lift and the fifteen-floor descent in the tower block that overlooked the Thames. Not that many of the deskmen for the 'Firm' enjoyed the privilege of only themselves for company. Trouble was that he could never quite satisfy himself as to whether the room was in recognition of the work he now did or simply a reward for services rendered.
'Foreign Office', Charlie called himself to those who asked but who did not know him. 'Well, not exactly Foreign Office,' his wife would say, 'but something like it, to do with Foreign Affairs anyway.' Fact was he never went near Whitehall. Too public. You couldn't be certain there wouldn't be some of those bloody agency photographers hanging about waiting for an ambassador or something, and he didn't want his photograph plastered all over the front pages just because he happened to be following a Venezuelan or a Zambian diplomat into the place. But since they came under the Foreign Office wing, and that was where the Under Secretary who now headed the Department had worked before his transfer, it was most convenient for members of the Secret Intelligence Service to bracket themselves with the herd of diplomats and civil servants who ran the public side of Britain's dealings with overseas governments.
Charlie worked to the Soviet Desk. Nine of them in all, answerable to Cecil Parker Smith, obe, mc, and most of them concerned with things military. That put four in the same room where they fiddled in each other's hair and didn't get much done, and thought they were the cream for the cat.
Two more on politics, the heavy fellows who spent their time reading the speeches of the Kremlin men, poor buggers. One for economics: he had a room to himself, and needed it, kept him going flat out, flogging his way through text books and brochures and progress reports. Then there was the one they called the Real Estate Man; he was the speculator, and his job was to predict long-range changes in Soviet attitudes and postures; worked to the letter of his brief and kept his thinking right in the far term, to the extent of sitting most of the day with his pipe in his mouth watching the pleasure boats negotiating Lambeth Bridge.
And there was Charlie, the ninth.
Last Christmas party, all a bit drunk, they'd christened him 'Double Diamond'- seen it as a hell of a laugh – and he'd looked blank, and they'd explained. 'DD'- those were the initials for his work. He'd still looked vacant and wondered why grown men always spent the last two days before the holidays dropping everything to gum paper streamers together to drape across the ceiling, and they'd shouted, 'sub-Desk Dissidents'. They'd all thought it hilarious, falling about over themselves. But that was his charge – sub-Desk Dissidents.
There was something to find out: couldn't doubt that. There were groups, cells, sections – call them what you want-that were alive and well and kicking faintly" inside the womb of the big red monolith. Not as many as there had been a decade before, but certainly some still there. Problem was that Charlie's job was to put them in perspective, extract any relevance from them. Much of his material came from emigre groups either in London or scattered across the cities of Western Europe, hopelessly unreliable people who would have you believe the whole bloody place was on the point of mass insurrection if you could only drop a Hercules load of Stirlings and FNs and grenades into People's Square, Novosibirsk. You had to weed and prune. Use the cosmetics to brighten the facade, and then search the cross-references and the files. Slowly, patiently – that's the way you touched on the subtle signs that pointed the way to the trends so beloved by his masters. Ukraine was usually fertile. There were bits and pieces from the Baltic; quite a little set-to they'd had in the Department over the Russian war ship that tried a flit to Sweden and that took a hammering from its own air force and turned back shot up; sub-Desk Military said it was theirs, Charlie claimed it too. Parker Smith sat for half a day on it while nobody spoke in the outer offices, then did his Solomon and gave it to sub-Desk Military. Followed by appeasing Charlie, told him he was doing too much valuable work for him to mess about working on something that was common knowledge to every European NATO set-up. Quite a ripple they'd had over that one. Bit of activity last year down in Georgia; Charlie had liked that because it came right out of the blue. Hadn't expected anything on that sort of scale, not a dozen bombs, quite excited him. He'd wondered what sort of devices they used, where they'd learned the trade.