Each night, Nina and Bond had returned to their room, showered and secretly discussed observations made during the day. On this, the third night, they collapsed into bed around nine o’clock and went straight to sleep, though Nina woke Bond later and proceeded to do things at which many wives would draw the line. They drifted off again, happy and sated, into a sleep not peopled by the ghosts of Sobibór.
Bond woke with a start, his hand snaking out to grip the wrist of whoever had their palm firmly over his mouth. He did not struggle, but twisted the wrist, and would have applied more fast and crippling pain had he not realised it was Natasha trying to rouse him noiselessly.
Still holding the girl’s wrist, he propped himself on to one elbow and peered through the gloom, trying to make sense of her signals. She was nimble and expert, her free hand moving in silent and precise gestures, as though making contact with some alien being.
Wake Nina, then follow me, she was signalling. It is safe, but please hurry.
Nina came out of sleep effortlessly and with that enviable immediate alertness achieved only by doctors, nurses, soldiers, and disciplined field officers of exceptional intelligence services. Bond’s feet had hardly touched the floor when she was already moving silently, fastening the tie around her towelling robe.
Natasha beckoned them, still using sign language, warning that it was important for them to make no noise. The corridor was empty and there was an atmosphere of almost holy silence as though the wooden building had been muffled by some vast blanket. The sensation was so acute that for a second Bond thought they must have been victims of an avalanche. In his mind, he saw the building shrouded in snow, then realised that this was impossible. The strange sensation remained, reminding him of being in some ancient sacred place where prayers and beliefs have seeped into the ground, trees, stones or structure, captured and locked for eternity.
Natasha motioned them to stay close to the wall, and she paused for a moment by each door they passed, checking to make sure nothing could be heard from inside the rooms. They knew these rooms were occupied by ‘witnesses’, though, apart from the three people who had stood near the elevators on the first morning, they had not set eyes on any of the other guests except on the sound stage and in the canteen.
Before they reached the elevators, the guide pushed open a door with an international emergency exit sign, a little stick man running down a staircase. Bond always thought it looked as though the primitive character was attempting to dash down an ‘up’ escalator.
On the other side of the door, a staircase led up and down, fashioned as ever in wood. He imagined it would burn quite well. For the first time, it struck him that the entire building would be a deathtrap in the summer when the wood became baked by the sun into dry tinder.
They climbed up one flight, went through the door at the top into a corridor identical to the one they had traversed from their room. Now Natasha signalled for them to move faster. She crossed the space by the elevator bank and softly opened another door which had ‘Private. No Entry’ stencilled on it in Russian, English, French, German and Arabic.
They were in a small bare office. The blinds were drawn and the only furniture consisted of crates and packing cases strewn haphazardly over the soft pile carpet. A single brass student lamp with a green glass shade stood lit on a packing case in one corner, and Pete Natkowitz sat on a nearby crate, his legs swinging and his face flushed. Once the door was closed, he let out a long sigh and grinned at Bond.
‘They haven’t come yet?’ Natasha asked.
‘Well, my dear, if they have, you’ll find them hiding in one of these boxes. No, Tashinka, they have yet to arrive.’ He turned his attention back to Nina and Bond. ‘Sorry to get you up in the middle of the night, James. Natasha’s been trying to find a safe haven ever since we arrived.’ He told them the bedrooms were wired for sound, but the people who built the place had not got around to putting in video. ‘It appears we have to be heard but not seen, which I suppose means we’ve become adults of some kind.’ He slapped his right thigh in a gesture meant to convey amusement. ‘We’re not really certain if they have enough staff here to monitor the sound-stealing equipment, but the golden rule is . . .’
‘Assume they’re lifting the words out of your mouth,’ Bond supplied.
‘Naturally,’ Natkowitz nodded. ‘This room is free of any bugs. For the first time since we arrived we can talk freely.’
‘You’re absolutely sure about this?’ Bond eyed the room with deep suspicion. He was leery of talking in a place which, to his knowledge, had not been examined and swept. As he often told other people in the business, he preferred the Russian tradecraft of talking only in the open, and where they could not bring directional microphones to bear.
‘I’m certain. Three hundred per cent certain. But for you one-fifty.’ Natkowitz’s eyes danced with pleasure.
‘And Natasha?’ Bond was asking about her security clearance.
Natkowitz’s face went dead, the eyes suddenly becoming hard. ‘If I tell you she’s okay, you should believe me, James. To be honest with you, when she turned up in Moscow the other night – before they put us to sleep for a hundred years – I couldn’t believe my eyes. She’s with me, if you see what I mean.’
‘The Mossad has penetrations in Russia?’ Bond looked surprised, even a little awed.
‘You betcha.’ Natkowitz cocked his head to the left, as though to underline the statement. ‘The media in the West says the intelligence agencies of Britain and America are dinosaurs now that the Cold War’s over, that their minds are for ever frozen into the NATO-Soviet locking of horns in Europe. But they’re wrong, as we both know, James. Even the Mossad have kept a watch on the Volga, as it were. Too dangerous not to do so. Natasha and a couple of others have been here for some years. We implanted them in the early seventies when they were children. Them and their parents; and look where it’s got us. Really I . . .’ He stopped short at the noise which came from the far side of the door.
Bond moved like a cat, springing silently against the wall on the hinge side of the door, his right hand closed into a fist, thumb tucked into the palm and the knuckles of his first and little fingers protruding slightly, his arm bent at a right angle, making an L-shape, square with his body.
Natasha was flattened against the wall on the other side, ready, tense. Natkowitz and Nina did not move as the door handle slowly turned and a voice from outside whispered, ‘All families resemble one another.’
Nina drew in her breath, and the sound seemed to fill the whole room as the door closed behind the pair of tall figures who entered.
‘But each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ Nina’s voice broke as she completed the quotation from the opening words of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Then she flung herself forward into the arms of the elderly man and woman who stood silent and erect three paces inside the room.
The three of them embraced. Together. Their arms wrapped around one another so that they became a small tight circle of loving human beings – a little knot of love and comfort.
Bond took a pace forward, but Natkowitz slipped from the crate and restrained him. The trio remained, clinging to one another for several minutes. When they separated, each of them had cheeks damp with tears.
The man still had about him the stance of an old military officer, his back straight as a plank, the hair neat but iron grey. The moustache had gone, and his skin was like old, uncared-for leather, but the eyes still carried the missionary zeal he had practised all that time ago in the service of his country.