and that his documents are not in order! If I were to let you through without the proper authorisation, next week I could well be a lumberjack in Omsk! I don't have the build for it, Comrade.'
‘What sort of a bloody control point is this, anyway?' Krakovitch was in full flood. ‘No telephone, no electric light? I suppose we must thank God you have toilets! Now listen to me —‘
‘— I have listened, Comrade,' at least the officer's guts weren't all sagging inside his belly, ‘to threats and vitriolic raving, for at least three-and-a-half hours, but —‘
‘BUT?' Krakovitch couldn't believe it; this couldn't be happening to him. He shook his fist at the other. ‘Idiot! I've counted eleven cars and twenty-seven lorries through here towards Kolomyya since our arrival. Your man out there didn't even check the papers of half of them!'
‘Because we know them. They travel through here regularly. Many of them live in or close to Kolomyya. I have explained this a hundred times.
‘Think on this!' Krakovitch snapped. ‘Tomorrow you could be explaining it to the KGB!'
‘More threats.' The other gave another shrug. ‘One stops worrying.'
‘Total inefficiency!' Krakovitch snarled. ‘Three hours ago you said that the telephones would be working in a few minutes. Likewise two hours ago, and one hour ago — and the time now is fast approaching one in the morning!'
‘I know the time, Comrade. There is a fault in the electricity supply. It is being dealt with. What more can I say?' He sat down on a padded chair behind the counter.
Krakovitch almost leaped over the counter to get at him. ‘Don't you dare sit down! Not while I am on my feet!'
The other wiped his forehead, stood up again, prepared himself for another tirade.
Outside in the car, Sergei Gulharov had restlessly turned this way and that, peering first out of one window, then another. Carl Quint sensed problems, trouble, danger ahead. In fact he'd been on edge since seeing Kyle off at the airport in Bucharest. But worrying about it would get him nowhere, and anyway he felt too banged-about to pursue it. If anything, not being allowed to drive being obliged to simply sit there, with the drab countryside slipping endlessly by outside — had made him more weary yet. Now he felt that he could sleep for a week, and it might as well be here as anywhere.
Gulharov's attention had now fastened on something outside the car. He grew still, thoughtful. Quint looked at him: "silent Sergei', as he and Kyle had privately named him. It wasn't his fault he spoke no English; in fact he did speak it, but very little, and with many errors. Now he answered Quint's glance, nodded his short-cropped head, and pointed through the open window of the car at something. ‘Look,' he softly said. Quint looked.
Silhouetted against a low, distant haze of blue light — the lights of Kolomyya, Quint supposed — black cables snaked between poles over the border check point, with one section of cable descending into the building itself. The power supply. Now Gulharov turned and pointed off to the west, where the cable ran back in the direction of Suet. A hundred yards away, the loop of cable between two of the poles dipped right down under the night horizon. It had been grounded.
‘Excusing,' said Gulharov. He eased himself out of the car, walked back along the central reservation, and disappeared into darkness. Quint considered going after him, but decided against it. He felt very vulnerable, and outside the car would feel even more so. At least the car's interior was familiar to him. He tuned himself again to Krakovitch's raving, coming loud and clear through the night from the border post. Quint couldn't understand what was being said, but someone was getting a hard time.
‘An end to all foolishness!' Krakovitch shouted. ‘Now I will tell you what I am going to do. I shall drive back into Siret to the police station and phone Moscow from there.'
‘Good,' said the fat official. ‘And providing that Moscow can send the correct documentation for the Englishman, down the telephone wire, then I shall let you through!'
‘Dolt!' Krakovitch sneered. ‘You, of course, shall come with me to Siret, where you'll receive your instructions direct from the Kremlin!'
How dearly the other would have loved to tell him that he had already received his instructions from Moscow, but… he'd been warned against that. Instead he slowly shook his head. ‘Unfortunately, Comrade, I cannot leave my post. Dereliction of duty is a very serious matter. Nothing you or anyone else could say could force me from my place of duty.'
Krakovitch saw from the official's red face that he'd pushed him too far. Now he would probably be more stubborn than ever, even to the point of deliberate obstruction.
That was a thought which made Krakovitch frown. For what if all of this trouble had been ‘deliberate obstruction' right from the start? Was that possible? ‘Then the solution is simple,' he said. ‘I assume that Siret does have a twenty-four hour police station — with telephones that work?'
His opponent chewed his lip. ‘Of course,' he finally answered.
‘Then I shall simply telephone ahead to Kolomyya and have a unit of the nearest military force here within the hour. How will it feel, Comrade, to be a Russian, commanded by some Russian army officer to stand aside, while I and my friends are escorted through your stupid little checkpoint? And to know that tomorrow all hell is
going to descend on you, because you will have been the focus of what could well be a serious international incident?'
At which precise moment, out in the field to the west of the road and back a little way towards Siret, Sergei Gulharov stooped and picked up the two uncoupled halves, male and female, of a heavy electrical connection. Taped to the main supply cable was a much thinner telephone wire. Its connection, also broken, was a simple, slender plug-and-socket affair. He connected the telephone cable first, then without pause screwed the heavier couplings together. There came a sputter and crackle of current, a flash of blue sparks, and — The lights came on in the border post. Krakovitch, on the point of leaving to carry out his threat, stopped at the door, turned back and saw the look of confusion on the official's face. ‘I suppose,' Krakovitch said, ‘this means your telephone is also working again?'
‘I… I suppose so,' said the other.
Krakovitch came back to the counter. ‘Which means,' his tone was icy, ‘that from now on we might just start to get somewhere.
1.00A.M. in Moscow.
At the Château Bronnitsy, some miles out of the city along the Serpukhov Road, Ivan Gerenko and Theo Dolgikh stood at an oval observation port of one-way glass and stared into the room beyond at a scene like something out of a science fiction nightmare.
Inside the ‘operating theatre', Alec Kyle lay unconscious on his back, strapped to a padded table. His head was slightly elevated by means of a rubber cushion, and a bulky stainless-steel helmet covered his head and eyes in a half dome, leaving his nose and mouth free for breathing. Hundreds of hair-fine wires cased in coloured plastic sleeves shimmered like a rainbow from the helmet to a computer where three operators worked frantically, following thought sequences from beginning to end and erasing them at the point of resolution. Inside the helmet, many tiny sensor electrodes had been clamped to Kyle's skull; others, along with batteries of micro-monitors, were secured by tape to his chest, wrists, stomach and throat. Four more men, telepaths, sat paired on each side of Kyle on stainless-steel chairs, scribbling in notebooks in their laps, each with one hand resting lightly on Kyle's naked body. A master telepathist — Zek Foener, E-Branch's best
— sat alone in one corner of the room. Foener was a beautiful young woman in her mid-twenties, an East German recruited by Gregor Borowitz during his last days as head of the branch. She sat with her elbows on her knees, one hand to her brow, utterly motionless, totally intent upon absorbing Kyle's thoughts as quickly as they were stimulated and generated.