At the count of seven, Fantani began gently easing the lid: it lifted at nine. He stopped abruptly, taking the thin tip of the glass-cutter and running it gently beneath the rim, feeling for any alarm trigger. Satisfied there was none, Fantani lifted the top off completely, staring down inside the safe, feeling the sharp burst of sensual pleasure more intense than he ever felt gazing at the naked body of a waiting woman. Beneath the circular opening the safe opened into a square retaining area and in it jewel boxes and containers were stacked like bricks in a child’s construction game.
Fantani took the cases individually from the safe, emptying their contents into the silk bag. Every colour in the spectrum dazzled up at him, reds and greens and blues and iced white, and he felt the excitement block in his throat. His hand was shaking when he replaced the safe top and twirled the dial to lock it. He re-positioned the covering pedestal and swept his hand across the carpet to erase any signs of disturbance. He decided to leave as he had entered, through the male bedroom. He turned off the dressing-room lights, crossed the darkened room and eased open the door to the landing and the widely sweeping staircase. He was halfway out when he heard the woman’s voice, talking animatedly, before he snatched back into the bedroom.
He was trapped.
The interrogation rooms were subterranean, far below ground level, but there was no dungeon impression. They were reached by a smooth operating lift and the corridors were rubber-tiled and well lighted by concealed strips behind unbreakable overhead glass, so that it appeared more like a hospital.
Hotovy was in one of the central rooms. Kalenin stopped just inside the door. The man was in a sitting position but not really in a chair. It was a metal frame, moulded to support a human shape. Hotovy was clamped into it, completely naked, with metal bands around his wrists, arms, waist, ankles and thighs, making him utterly immobile. There was also a band around his neck to keep him upright. The finger ends were pulped and crushed and electrodes were pasted to his genitals and nipples. Where he had been forced up against the tethering, in the agony of the current being applied, his body was purpled and bloodied. There were some haphazard whip marks across his chest and thighs, and his face was swollen and bruised. The eyes moved, although dully, at Kalenin’s entry. There was a telephone just inside the door and Kalenin used it to summon the waiting doctors. There were three of them.
‘What exactly do you want?’ asked the physician in charge.
‘Complete awareness,’ said Kalenin. ‘He’s got to recognize others can suffer as he has.’
‘For how long?’
Kalenin shrugged. ‘A brief confession. There’s only one thing I really want to know.’
‘Any concern about lasting effects?’
‘None.’
They set up an intravenous drip and then examined Hotovy for internal injuries. There was some spleen and liver enlargement, which they diagnosed as bruising, but an encephalogram disclosed no brain damage. Hotovy was already stirring when they prepared the other injections. The first stimulant they put into his arm, but the second, larger, dose they pumped directly into the aorta, an insertion only normally used for resuscitation after a heart collapse. Hotovy’s recovery was dramatic and complete, to full consciousness. Kalenin had expected the man to show fear: certainly there was apprehension but there was still a sullen resistance.
‘Thirty minutes,’ estimated the chief surgeon.
‘Bring him,’ ordered Kalenin, striding from the room.
Supported by guards on either side Hotovy was hauled, feet dragging, behind the KGB chief. It was only a few yards to the other side of the interrogation area. Here the chambers were larger and partitioned, so that observers could watch questioning unseen from a soundproofed box. Behind the glass, Hotovy’s wife and two sons sat cowed on a central bench. The woman wore a shapeless prison dress and the boys were clinging to her, terrified. As they watched, one gave way and began to cry and the woman pulled him into her shoulder to comfort him.
Hotovy gave a cut-off, strangled moan and pushed forward against the glass. The guards were ready and held him back. The Czech’s head moved, like a boxer who has taken too much punishment. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Please no.’
‘Rome,’ demanded Kalenin. ‘What did you tell the British about Rome?’
Hotovy looked round bewildered. ‘Rome?’ he said. ‘I told them nothing about Rome.’
It was a genuine confession, thought Kalenin. ‘You made a query to your ministry in Prague. About British concern at our expansion in Africa. There’s a file record.’
‘Only for the designation of source,’ whimpered Hotovy. ‘And that was Cape Town: Rome was never mentioned.’
Kalenin went to the microphone linking him to the men standing over the woman and boys, on the other side of the screen. Hotovy moaned again when he saw the Russian reach out for the control switch.
‘What about Rome?’ persisted Kalenin.
‘I don’t know anything about Rome!’ wailed Hotovy. ‘On my life!’
‘It’s not your life,’ said Kalenin, ‘it’s theirs.’
‘I don’t know anything about Rome. For God’s sake, believe me!’
Kalenin did. Which meant the damage was no more extensive than he already knew it to be. Abruptly he turned on his heel and left the room.
The chief doctor caught up with him at the lift entrance. ‘That was a massive stimulant,’ said the man. ‘I’d guess a collapse, almost at once. It’ll be severe.’
Kalenin turned, as the doors opened. ‘He’s not important any more,’ he said.
Richard Semingford was a precise, neat man, given to blazers with club buttons and ties, club-striped too. He had a close-clipped beard, and on the first night they had slept together in her apartment Jane Williams had produced a picture of her bearded father in naval uniform, and they’d tried to remember the opposite of an Oedipus complex and failed. They had made love there again tonight but not well and now they lay in the darkness, side by side but untouching.
‘You didn’t have to buy the meal,’ he said.
‘I know things aren’t easy,’ she said.
‘It costs a lot, maintaining Ann’s mother in that damned old people’s home. And there are a lot of things the Foreign Office doesn’t pay for, with the kids’ schooling.’
‘I said I don’t mind,’ she reminded him.
‘I do.’
She felt out for his hand. ‘You shouldn’t. I love you and I understand.’
‘I want to ask Ann for a divorce.’
‘Is that sensible?’
‘No.’ He kissed her on the cheek. ‘She might have relaxed her Catholic principles to marry a Protestant but I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t about divorce.’
‘So what’s the point?’
‘Permission isn’t necessary any more.’
‘She could still make it unpleasant: the Foreign Office doesn’t like personal unpleasantness, you know.’
‘She might not, if she thought she was being properly provided for.’
She squeezed his hand. ‘And how could you do that, darling? You can’t manage as it is.’
His hand tightened upon hers. ‘That’s the bloody problem,’ he said. ‘It’s always money.’
She tried to think of something to break his mood and said, ‘We had an awful man out at the villa.’
‘Who?’
‘Some insurance assessor, checking Lady Billington’s jewellery. Frightful person.’
‘What was wrong with him?’
‘Cocksure, for a start. Literally. I could practically feel his hand up my skirt.’
‘What’s his name?’
‘I never bothered to find out. I used to see men like him wandering the streets of Portsmouth and Chatham when daddy was on base, stumbling from pub to pub and leering at any girl they saw.’ Once more, the morning’s indignation was building up within her. ‘Bloody cats made him sneeze and I had to look after the damned things.’
‘What did Lady Billington think?’
‘You know her. The social conscience of the world! She thinks everyone’s wonderful.’