‘Eh?' Krakovitch had turned sour again. ‘We are followed, spied upon, overheard, bugged, and you say is favourable?'
‘I meant you and Kyle both having shadows,' Quint explained. ‘It evens things up. And maybe we can cancel out one with the other.'
Krakovitch was alarmed. ‘I not being party to violence! Anything happen to that KGB dog, is possible I get the troubles.'
‘But if we could arrange for him to be, er, detained for a day or two? I mean, unharmed, you understand — completely unharmed — just detained.
‘I not know.
‘To give you time to clear our route into Romania. You know, visas, etcetera? With a bit of luck we'll be finished there in just a day or two.'
Krakovitch slowly nodded. ‘Maybe — but positive guarantee, no dirty work. He is KGB — you say — but if true, then he's Russian too. And I am Russian. If he vanish.
Quint shook his head, grasped the other's thin elbow. ‘They both vanish!' he said. ‘But only for a few days. Then we'll be out of here and getting on with the job.'
Again Krakovitch gave his slow nod. ‘Maybe — if it can be arranged safely.'
Kyle and Gulharov returned. Kyle was careful. ‘That was somebody called Brown,' he said. ‘He's been watching us, apparently.' He looked at Krakovitch. ‘He says your KGB tail has traced us and is on his way here. By the way, this KGB fellow is well known — his name is Theo Dolgikh.'
Krakovitch shook his head, shrugged, looked mystified. 'I never heard of him.'
‘Did you get Brown's number?' Quint was eager. ‘I mean can we contact him again?'
Kyle raised his eyebrows. ‘Actually, yes,' he nodded. He said that if things were getting sticky, he might be able to help. Why do you ask?'
Quint grinned tightly, said to Krakovitch, ‘Comrade, it might be a good idea if you were to listen carefully. Since you're a little concerned about this, you can start working on an alibi. For from this point forward you're hand in hand with the enemy. Your only consolation is that you'll be working against a greater enemy.' The grin left his face, and deadly serious he said, ‘OK, here's what I suggest.
On Saturday morning at 8.30 Kyle phoned Krakovitch at his and Gulharov's hotel. The latter answered the call, grunted, fetched Krakovitch who came grumbling to the phone. He was just out of bed, could Kyle call later? While this brief show was going on, downstairs in the Genovese's lobby, Quint was talking to Brown. At 9.15 Kyle phoned Krakovitch again and arranged a second meeting: they would meet outside Frankie's Franchise in an hour's time and go on from there.
There was nothing new in this arrangement; it was part of the plan worked out the night before: Kyle suspected that the phone in his room was now bugged and he simply wanted to give Theo Dolgikh plenty of advance notice. If Kyle's phone wasn't bugged, then Krakovitch's surely was, which could only work out the same. Anyway, the psychic sixth senses of both Kyle and Quint were playing up a little, which told them that something was brewing.
Sure enough, when they left the Geriovese just before 10.00 A.M. and headed for the docks, they had a tail.
Dolgikh was keeping well back, but it could only be him. Kyle and Quint had to admire his tenacity, for despite his rough night he was still very much the master-spy; now his attire was that of the shipyard worker, dark-blue coveralls and a heavy bag of tools, and the blue-black stubble of twenty-four hours' growth on his round, intense face.
‘He must have a hell of a wardrobe, this lad,' said Kyle as he and Quint approached the narrow, still slumbering streets of Genoa's dockland. ‘I'd hate to have to carry his luggage!'
Quint shook his head. ‘No,' he answered, ‘I shouldn't think so. They'll probably have a safe house here and there's bound to be one of their ships in the harbour. Whichever, when he requires a change of clothing, they'll be the ones who'll fix it for him.'
Kyle squinted at him out of the corner of his eye. ‘You know,' he said. ‘I'm sure you'd have been better off in M15. You have a bent for it.'
‘It might make an interesting hobby.' Quint grinned. ‘Mundane spying, that is — but I'm happy where I am. The real talent's with INTESP. Now if our man Dolgikh were an esper, then we could be in real trouble.'
Kyle gave his companion a sharp glance, then relaxed. ‘But he isn't or we'd have spotted him without Brown's assistance. No, he's simply one of their surveillance types, and pretty good at his job. I've been thinking of him as something big, but this is probably the biggest assignment he's ever had.'
‘Which,' Quint grimly added, ‘with any luck, is just about to terminate a mite ingloriously. But I wouldn't be too sure he's small fry, if I were you. After all, he was big enough to show up on Brown's firm's computer.'
Carl Quint was right: Theo Dolgikh was not small fry, not in any sense of the word. Indeed, it was a measure of Yuri Andropov's ‘respect' for the Soviet E-Branch that he'd put Dolgikh on the job. For Leonid Brezhnev would likely give Andropov a hard time if Krakovitch were to report to him that the KGB were interfering again.
Dolgikh was in his early thirties, a native Siberian bred of a long line of Komsomol lumberjacks. He was the complete communist for whom little else existed but Party and State. He had trained, and later done some teaching, in Berlin, Bulgaria, Palestine and Libya. He was an expert in weapons (especially Western Bloc weapons), also in terrorism, sabotage, interrogation and surveillance; as well as Russian, he could speak a broken Italian, decent German and English. But his real forte — indeed his penchant — lay in the field of murder. For Theo Dolgikh was a cold-blooded killer.
Because of his compressed build, Dolgikh might seem at a distance short and stubby. In fact he was five-ten and weighed in at almost sixteen stone. Heavy-boned, heavjowled under a moon face that supported a mop of uneven jet-black hair, Dolgikh was ‘heavy' in all departments. His Japanese instructor at the KGB School of Martial Arts in Moscow used to say:
‘Comrade, you are too heavy for this game. Because of your bulk, you lack speed and agility. Sumo wrestling would be more your style. On the other hand, very little of your weight is fat, and muscle is most useful. Since teaching you the disciplines of self-defence is probably a great waste of time, I shall therefore concentrate my instruction on ways of killing, for which I am assured you are not only physically but mentally best suited.'
Now, closing in on his quarry as they entered the winding, labyrinthine streets and alleys close to the docks, Dolgikh felt his blood rising and wished this were that sort of job. After last night's run-around he could happily murder this pair! And it would be so easy. They seemed utterly obsessed with this most seamy side of the city.
Thirty yards ahead of him, Kyle and Quint made a sudden sharp turn into a cobbled alley where the buildings loomed high, shutting out the light. Dolgikh put on a little speed, arrived at the alley's entrance, passed from grey drizzle into a steamy gloom where the refuse of four or five days stood uncollected. In many places overhead the opposing buildings were arched over. Following a frantic Friday night, this district wasn't even awake yet. If Dolgikh had been after the lives of these two, this would have been the place to do it.
Footsteps echoed back to him. The Russian agent narrowed small round eyes to gaze through the gloom of the alley at a pair of shadowy figures as they rounded a bend. He paused for a second, then started after them. But, sensing movement close by, a silent presence, he at once skidded to a halt.
From the shadows of a recessed doorway a gravelly voice said, ‘Hello, Theo. You don't know me, but I know you!'
Dolgikh's Japanese instructor had been right: he wasn't fast enough. At times like this his bulk got in the way. Gritting his teeth in anticipation of the dull smack of the suspected cosh and its pain, or maybe the blue glint of a silencer on the end of a gun barrel, he whirled towards the voice in the darkness, hurled his heavy bag of tools. A tall, shadowy figure caught the bag full in the chest, grunted, and lobbed it aside to clatter on the cobbles. Dolgikh's eyes were getting used to the gloom. It was still dark, but he'd seen no sign of a weapon. This was just the way he liked it.