The train journey home was better than Richter had expected, mainly because he had managed to fight his way to a seat immediately. Having picked up a paperback at the station bookstall, he tried to read it as the train headed west, but his mind kept wandering away from the printed word.
Three things bothered him. First, at no time during his career in the service had Richter ever been aware of any requirement for a dedicated courier of the type proposed by Colonel Baldwin. Second, although the salary starting point was about what you might expect for courier duties, the annual increments were far too large. Third, coincidence apart, it seemed more than just providential that this job should have been created at exactly the time when Richter most needed to find employment. It was almost as if this job had been picked for him, rather than the other way around.
The next morning, Richter rang Baldwin and told him he’d take it.
Chapter Two
There were only seventeen passengers in the pale-yellow chartered coach which turned off the Moscow peripheral highway near the village of Tëplyystan, at just after eight-forty in the morning. Raya Kosov stretched herself comfortably across the two seats she had secured when she had boarded the vehicle, thirty minutes earlier, outside the Davydkovo station to the south-west of central Moscow, and she gazed incuriously out of the window.
The coach bounced and rattled on the uneven road surface as it made its way past the large sign warning ‘Halt! No Trespassing! Water Conservation District’, and continued slowly down the narrow road leading into the dense forest. About two hundred metres further on, the coach stopped at what looked like a militia post, but was actually a checkpoint manned continuously by armed SVR — Sluzhba Vneshney Razvyedki Rossi, or Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, personnel.
Two of the SVR troopers, wearing the uniforms of militiamen, boarded the coach as soon as it drew to a halt, and proceeded slowly and deliberately down the central aisle, as they carefully checked the identification of each occupant in turn.
Raya was sitting near the back, on the right-hand side of the coach, and she smiled at the young trooper as he reached out his hand for her pass. The trooper smiled back, as he did every time he saw her when he was on duty. Raya wondered how long it would be before he asked her out — or at least said something to her other than, ‘Thank you, Captain Kosov.’
‘Thank you, Captain Kosov,’ the trooper said predictably, and Raya suppressed a chuckle as she replaced her pass in her handbag. The pass was a buff-coloured plastic card bearing her photograph and a series of perforations which formed a code specifying the areas within headquarters that she was authorized to enter.
Once the guards had left the coach, it continued for just over half a kilometre further into the forest, and then skirted a large roundabout bordered by the various car parks used by senior SVR officers. It came to a halt beside the guardroom, which bore an entirely misleading bronze plaque that announced in golden letters, to anyone who penetrated that far, that this building was a designated ‘Scientific Research Centre’. The guardroom was the only point of access through a high chain-link fence topped by razor-wire, and it was occupied by armed troops from the SVR Guards Division, who again checked the passes of all the coach passengers as they filed through the turnstiles.
Once she had made it through the guardroom, Raya stepped out briskly along a driveway flanked by lawns and flowerbeds, covering the four hundred yards to SVR Headquarters in just a few minutes. The building was the former headquarters of the First Chief Directorate of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, better known as the KGB.
As the Soviet Union’s all-pervasive Committee for State Security, this organization was the direct linear descendant of the Cheka, the terror organization created in 1917 by Feliks Dzerzhinsky to liquidate any opponents of communism. Over time, it had become one of the three principal forces within the USSR. The other two were the GRU — Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravleniye, or Chief Intelligence Directorate of the Soviet General Staff — effectively Russian military intelligence; and, of course, the Communist Party itself. Of the three, the KGB was the largest and arguably the most powerful, but certainly the most feared organization.
The reason for this was simple. Although the KGB had a prime responsibility for any intelligence operations conducted against foreign powers, it was also required to ensure that the various peoples comprising the Soviet Union remained obedient to the directives and instructions of the ruling Communist Party. With such a vast population, the only effective method of achieving this was to enlist the regular assistance of unofficial informers, which the KGB recruited in huge numbers.
The recruitment method employed was as simple and effective as it was ruthless. A Soviet citizen would be told to report to the local KGB headquarters — an invitation that was impossible to ignore. Once there, he would be asked if he wished to assist the Communist Party by acting as an unofficial and unpaid agent of the KGB. To this question, the unfortunate citizen could only answer in the affirmative, because to refuse to act for the Communist Party could be legally defined as treason, and that was an offence punishable by death.
But, even by agreeing to become an informer, that citizen was not yet out of the wood. If the reports he or she supplied to the KGB officers, about immediate family, friends and acquaintances, did not contain a sufficient amount of compromising material, the informer would be summoned back by the KGB. Its officers would then point out how other informers operating in the same district were producing evidence of the type needed, so the new informer must either be deliberately suppressing information, or not seeking it with sufficient assiduity. Both failings in responsibility were by any definition both anti-Soviet and anti-Communist, and would therefore amount to treason.
In desperation, many informers resorted to inventing stories about mysterious strangers, or reporting snatches of conversation supposedly overheard between unidentified citizens, or else settling grudges by implicating people who had merely annoyed or cheated them.
It was conservatively estimated that, during the KGB’s heyday, two out of every five Soviet citizens were operating as full- or part-time informers for the organization. A saying popular in Russia at the time suggested that every time a Soviet citizen farted, the KGB could smell it, and this was not considered to be much of an exaggeration.
When Mikhail Gorbachev, and later Boris Yeltsin, came to power in Russia, the winds of change were already blowing, and the KGB was officially disbanded in 1991. In fact, of course, no such thing happened.
The KGB had always acted as the ‘sword and shield’ of the Communist Party, and there was no way that the Party — not to mention the Russian government — would voluntarily disarm itself by destroying its main intelligence service and principal means of support. Besides, it needed the KGB to keep the peoples of the Confederation of Independent States in check, just as the KGB had controlled the actions of the citizens of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics for over half a century.
What actually took place was little more than a departmental reorganization.
The Border Guards’ Chief Directorate, which was charged with maintaining the physical security of all Soviet borders, was transferred to the Russian Army, which should probably have been responsible for that from the start. The Second Chief Directorate, effectively the domestic security service, and the Fifth Chief Directorate, responsible for the control of dissident groups within the Soviet Union, were similiarly reformed and renamed.