Shaw said, “I suggest we wait until the food shops are open and then buy some sandwiches, or some bread and cheese — that sort of thing.”
“Cheese for breakfast?” Henderson looked quite sick, and his shaggy brows went up in pained surprise. “Come, come—”
“There’s lunch and supper as well,” Shaw pointed out. “You may find something else for breakfast. By the way… I’ll take over the driving for a spell if you’re getting tired, Henderson.”
Henderson shook his head. “I’d better remain in command, as it were, just in case of these confounded spot checks. Passports apart, I can always baffle the police with Worth-Butters.”
As Henderson closed the glass panel behind him and turned his back, Shaw caught a stifled giggle from Virginia. He gave her a broad wink. “Obliging man…” he murmured.
Virginia grimaced. “Too smooth by half, and the way he keeps quoting this Worth-Butters is almost indecent.”
The car started up again; Shaw sat silent and thoughtful in his corner. He didn’t exactly mistrust Hartley Henderson; diplomats like Worth-Butters didn’t, on the whole, make old pals of men likely to become security risks; they had at their disposal too many avenues of screening to slip up often, and this car alone seemed proof enough of Henderson’s excellent connections — he would scarcely have been foolhardy enough to knock off an Embassy limousine if he’d been an under-cover-man. Yet the very advent of this fast, luxurious car was just a trifle on the neat side, perhaps, for the entire peace of mind of an agent operating behind the Iron Curtain…
In Smolensk fifteen minutes later, Henderson and Shaw, leaving the girl in the car, got out and went into a small shop. They bought freshly baked but rather gray-looking bread, some butter, and cold black sausage — and had a vacuum flask filled with hot, strong coffee. That and a nip of the absent diplomat’s excellent Scotch set them all up and completed the cure. Shaw and Virginia were fine now, forgetting the horror of the Pripet as they found their way through Smolensk and out again along the Moscow highway on the last long stage of their journey to the capital. There were, as Henderson had promised, no road checks for them, though once they were waved down at the tail of a line of cars awaiting such a check. Henderson, after warning Shaw and Virginia on the intercom, merely stayed on the crown of the road and blew his horn continuously and an MVD trooper raced down the line, saw the CD plates, swept an eye over the car, seeming to recognize the registration, and waved them on. In the enclosed space at the back, Shaw and Virginia had been sweating drops of blood until Henderson drove triumphantly ahead amid hostile glares from the occupants of the waiting cars.
A little after that Henderson, overcome at last with the need to sleep, pulled off the road into a lay-by and cat-napped for a couple of hours. Traffic swept past them unheedingly, and no one bothered them, and when Henderson woke, he seemed as fresh as a daisy again.
They reached the outskirts of Moscow in the early evening as the sun went down the sky, sending great shafts of crimson and green streaking high above the cupolas and domes and tall concrete blocks of the city… the city that stood out black and grim and monolithic and curiously threatening against that red sunset. As they came into streets crowded with pedestrians, Henderson pressed the switch of the intercom.
“Where to?” he asked. “I don’t know if you have any particular hotel in mind… frankly Worth-Butters was disparaging about the one booked by Superluxury. He recommends the Moskva — by far the best, he said.”
“And by far the most expensive, I dare say. We’ll find something cheaper after seeing our Embassies.”
That was when the girl surprised him. She said, “Well, you know, this may sound wildly extravagant, but I’m on the holiday of a lifetime and I just am not going to count the cents. I’ll try the Moskva, Mr Henderson — that’s if the Embassy can fix me up passportwise, of course.”
Henderson nodded. “If I can find the way I’ll take you to the US Embassy,” he offered. “You’re likely to be there a while, so I won’t wait. I’ll hope to see you later at the Moskva… It’s in Marx Prospekt, by the way, wherever that is.”
“I’ll find it,” she said, “and thanks.”
“Not a bit. And you, Cane?”
Shaw said, “Drop me anywhere. I’m going to telephone the Embassy and see what they advise, rather than hang about for hours in a waiting-room.” He looked out at the street. “There’s a subway across the road, I think… that’ll do fine, thanks.”
Henderson slowed and stopped by the curb. As Shaw got out on to the pavement he looked quickly at Virginia. Her face was blank and expressionless. Shaw felt oddly disturbed. He didn’t know what her motives might be in joining Henderson at the Moskva Hotel. Maybe she simply wanted to keep an eye on the man… and it could be that she’d be able to do that more efficiently from even closer quarters than just another room in the same hotel. Henderson, by the look of him, could be extremely gallant with the ladies, and there was no better way of finding out all a man’s secrets. If he had any, that was.
Shaw felt a curious pang of jealousy.
He watched the car pull away into the traffic. Soon, it had disappeared. He was aware of a possible risk in letting the girl out of his sight, but in any case he couldn’t take her to the rend-evous in the Sokolniki Park. He shrugged and walked on for the subway, feeling a wateriness in his guts. Once again he was back in Moscow — and soon things would start humming. He wouldn’t care to be around this grim, alien city if and when a fellow Briton put a bullet in Comrade General Kosyenko… if bullets were Conroy’s way.
Meanwhile he had to follow Treece’s orders and establish contact with P.P.L Jones. He rummaged in his pocket and found a 15-kopeck coin and then he made for a public telephone.
Fourteen
The Embassy reacted fast; Jones, cool and noncommittal, was quickly put on the wire. Shaw’s orders had said he was to be an ordinary tourist who’d lost all his cash; since receipt of those orders matters had changed a good deal, but he stuck to instructions nevertheless, adding that he had also lost his passport in circumstances which he would prefer to discuss inside the Embassy.
Jones said smoothly, “Yes, you’d better do just that. We’ve already heard about you from the authorities.” Breath hissed through his teeth into the phone. “It’s a confounded nuisance, I don’t mind telling you, Mr Cane, but we’ll obviously have to do something for you.”
“I’d be very grateful.”
“I’ll see you in my office in… let’s see, an hour’s time. The Embassy’s at Sofiyskaya Embankment 14. Where are you now?”
“Kutuzovsky Avenue. Near a big railway-station.”
“Ah, yes — that’ll be the Kyevsky station. If I were you I’d get on the metro at Kievskaya.” Jones was into his phoney spiel now. “The nearest station for the Embassy is Kropotinskaya, and it’s a bit of a walk from there.” He gave directions and added, “You can’t miss it, it’s almost opposite the Tainitskaya Tower, the point where the building of the Kremlin was begun.”
Shaw said, “Many thanks, I’ll find you all right…” The line clicked rudely in his ear; he replaced the receiver and went out into the street, mingling with the Muscovites and becoming as unobtrusive as possible.
He walked along to the floodlit Kievskaya metro station and took a train for the agreed rendezvous in the Sokolniki Park. Walking into the spacious, air-conditioned station and paying his standard 50-kopeck fare, he was impressed with the work of the engineers who had built Kievskaya, of the architects from Kiev who had designed it; here was none of the oppressive subway atmosphere of London nor the squalor of New York. The place was really beautiful, with a vivid and colorful southern appearance… two rows of stately marble-faced columns, mosaic flooring, and walls finished in marble of varying colors… all this was a far cry from Camden Town and Dollis Hill. More mosaics looked down at him from the ceilings, eighteen of them in all, mosaics composed of rare stone and small fragments, framed in intricate ornamental stucco designs and depicting memorable events in the history of the Ukrainian and Russian peoples from the Pereyaslavskaya Rada of 1654 down to the present day. The station was a superb amalgam of light-gray Ufalei and white-pink koelga marble from the Urals, Georgian shrosha marble, dark red with white veins, the yellow-pink Crimean Biyuk-Yankoi marble, Ukrainian labradorite and red porphyry from Lake Onega…