'And tell Accounts we owe the Romanian Ministry of Agriculture for a sack of Grade A rye grain, 150 lbs.'
There'd be a squeal from that acidic old bitch in the counting house because she's always touchy about passing anonymous funds into Moscow without any explanation, but the rule is that if we damage any property we've got to report it and it's got to be paid for, and in any case this was nothing, the last thing I'd stuck Accounts for was a smashed Mercedes.
'Anything else?' Carey asked me. I said no and we shut down.
This was at 8:44.
It was mid-afternoon when London came through with instructions.
Medlock was back at the board.
'Zymyanin has booked out on the Rossiya to Vladivostok. Please stand by for Chief of Signals.'
Jane had been typing a report for the embassy, and stopped, leaving the room quiet. The sky in the high narrow window was already darkening toward nightfall even at this hour. The snow had eased off soon after we'd got back from the clothing shop.
I heard Croder's voice on the line.
'Your instructions are to board the train and try to make contact with him.'
With Zymyanin. I asked Croder: 'He signalled you?'
'No. We had his movements monitored. We think he finally decided against making a second rendezvous. Zymyanin is not normally a nervous man, but it seems he was frightened off by the Bucharest debacle.'
It didn't surprise me. You don't need to be nervous to get clear from a blown rendezvous with no intention of trying your luck again: it's simply a logical precaution. This trade's chancy enough without begging for an early grave. But what I didn't like was the idea of forcing Zymyanin into a rendezvous he hadn't asked for, because there were a lot of risks and some of them could be lethal, and if it had been anyone but Croder giving me these instructions I would have turned them down. I've taken lethal risks all my life with the Bureau — it's built into the business — but I always need to know in each particular case whether it's worth it.
'What's the situation?' I asked him.
'The situation is that we still think Zymyanin has something of major importance to give us, if we can persuade him. I don't need to tell you, of course, that he may be very difficult to handle by now.'
Yes indeed. It looked as if the Soviet had got clear of the Bucharest thing and was simply unwilling to take any more risks, but that was an assumption, and assumptions are always dangerous.
'You mean," I said, 'he might not have got away clean.'
'Quite so. He may have been tracked from Bucharest to Moscow.'
Tracked by the people who'd killed Hornby.
'He could in effect be still on the run.'
'That is possible.'
I watched the sky darkening in the window.' He could have been caught,' I said, 'caught and turned and given new instructions. Is that what you mean by "difficult to handle"?'
'Something along those lines.'
He's got a dry, thin voice, Croder. It's more like the sound of a paper shredder, and if you listen very carefully — as you should, if you are talking to the Chief of Signals — you can almost hear those little bright blades in there cutting the words out for you, the sibilants sharp and clear.
Something along those lines. I wasn't going to let him get away with that. I wanted him to know I was quite aware of what he was asking me to do. 'He could,' I said — Zymyanin — 'have been told to stay out of contact with London and try and draw me into a trap.'
In a moment,' that is also possible.'
There was a sharp ringing sound in the room; I think Jane had gone into the little kitchenette and had dropped a spoon or something. I didn't like the way it touched my nerves. Vladivostok was nine or ten thousand kilometres from Moscow on the Sea of Japan, and it would take seven or eight days to get there, straight through the heart of Siberia. In terms of security a moving train comes right at the bottom of the scale: call it a super-trap.
Croder was waiting. 'The thing is,' I asked him, 'is it worth the risk?'
Zymyanin was said to be Bureau, but at most he was an agent-in-place or a roving watchdog; he wouldn't know much about London and if the opposition had in fact caught him and put him under the light and burned everything out of him they wouldn't have finished up with anything major. If they did the same thing with a senior shadow executive he'd blow Big Ben into the Thames if he couldn't get to the capsule fast enough.
It's a built-in risk factor and well-recognized at the Bureau: the longer an executive runs and the more he knows, the more valuable he is to the opposition. Nobody likes this but there's nothing we can do about it except take out insurance, and the only insurance you can take out is not to send him into the field again.
Croder's voice came. 'I was expecting your question.' Whether it was worth the risk, this time around. 'Yes, we believe it's worth it'
I didn't ask why. Croder gives no easy answers: he thinks them out, and he must have been thinking this one out ever since Longs hot had crashed all over the signals board in London and sent people running for cover. He had also been getting input from Bureau agents-in-place in Moscow on the general intelligence background there, and he had finally put Zymyanin into the overall picture and come up with his findings: that it was worth risking the life of a senior shadow and worth risking that shadow's getting seized and interrogated and thrown onto the trash heap with nothing left in his skull but the burned-out circuits of his brain.
So it was a risk, but a calculated risk, and those I will accept. Without them, no executive can function.
'All right,' I told Croder, and he asked me to stay on the line for briefing.
I looked round for Jane. 'I'm taking the Rossiya to Vladivostok.'
She came back into the room. 'What time?'
'I don't know.'
A voice on the line said, 'Are you there?'
'Yes.' It wasn't Holmes this time.
'Have you been on that train before?'
I said I hadn't.
'All right, the one the subject is on will be leaving Yaroslavl station in Moscow at about 18:00 hours, local time.' the effect of the long distance plus the scrambler units made him sound like a robot. 'I can't be more accurate than that, because those trains are usually late and this one ran into a snowstorm soon after it left St Petersburg. If it in fact leaves at 18:00 hours we'll be running things rather tight, so we're calling on the embassy for help.'
We don't normally do that. Any of our overseas missions can end up messy in the extreme, with bodies lying around and the host-country police and secret services asking a lot of questions, and the embassy regards the Bureau understandably as a stinking fish. But they've got to give us assistance if we ask for it, because we answer directly to the prime minister.
I blocked the mouthpiece and told Jane, '18:00 hours.'
She nodded and got her notepad and sat on the floor cross-legged by the long carved stool.
'We're going to fax you,' the man in Briefing said,' three mug shots of Vladimir Zymyanin to the embassy right away. We're going to ask them to send a courier to Yaroslavl station and get you a ticket for Vladivostok, hopefully soft class if there's one available. That's a two-berther. If we — '
'I want you to make certain,' I told him,' that I go soft class. Understood?'
'We'll do our very best'
'No,' I said, 'I want you to make certain, for security reasons.'
'Very well.'
They could do it if they tried. If the train was full and there wasn't a berth available they'd have to buy someone off and a soft class passenger would ask for more cash, but they'd have to pay it. It wasn't a question of comfort — although eight days on a train would be a sight more bearable with only one companion — it was a question of routine mission security: I'd be operating under light cover and three passengers would be less easy to convince than one.