The man at his feet was groaning.
He’d been afraid he’d killed him for a moment; killing was much easier than hurting a man.
Arkady Rykov seemed to realise he was gripping something heavy in his right hand. He was gripping it so hard the muscles in his forearm were starting to twist with cramp. He opened his hand and the rounded stone, a paperweight of some kind that he’d snatched up from the desk, dropped leadenly onto the wooden boards an inch from the man on the floor’s bloodied head.
That, he thought, was careless.
If he killed the man at his feet there would be inquests, and many questions he did not want to answer.
“What’s going on in here?” Demanded a calm, boyish voice with an authority far beyond the years of its owner.
Lieutenant Alan Hannay stepped cautiously over the detritus-strewn floor. Behind him two big men wearing the Red felt trimmed caps of the Royal Military Police stepped into the room.
Vice-Admiral Sir Julian Christopher’s flag lieutenant looked around, and down at the man with the smashed face moaning softly at his feet. Finally, he studied Arkady Pavlovich Rykov and his badly shaken blond female companion. He frowned at the former KGB-man, and smiled a tight-lipped smile at Clara Pullman.
The young man removed his cap, scratched his cropped skull while he contemplated his next decision.
“Ah,” he sniffed, his youthful features a picture of bafflement. “Well, I think I can safely report to the C-in-C that you’ve introduced yourself to Major Williams.” He looked again at Arkady Rykov, this time a hard, quizzical look that lingered on the man’s scarred head and rage-filled eyes. “We were warned that you two had previous history. Have we finished settling old scores for the moment, Colonel?”
Clara Pullman took hold of her lover’s elbow.
“Yes,” she hissed.
Alan Hannay was waiting to hear it from the lips of the professional killer standing in front of him.
“Yes,” the Russian grunted. He spat on the man on the floor; Major Denzil Williams, the man he had come to Malta to replace as MI6 Head of Station on the archipelago.
Alan Hannay frowned; spitting on a man when he was down was just as bad as kicking him in his book. Still, if we’d understood the Russian character a little better it would probably have saved an awful lot of unpleasantness fourteen months ago. He glanced over his shoulder at the two Redcaps.
“One of you fellows cut along and find a doctor! Sharply now!”
Admiral Christopher’s flag lieutenant would have had a great deal more sympathy for Major Denzil Williams, the acting head of Station of the Secret Intelligence Service on the Maltese Archipelago if the man’s pig-headed complacency and incompetence hadn’t recently got one of his friends blown to pieces; and if he hadn’t had to be the one to break the news to Marija Calleja. The Admiral would have done that, but he was on a tour of inspection on Gozo and he hadn’t wanted the poor woman to hear the news from a stranger or by accident. Marija had sobbed uncontrollably for several minutes before Doctor Margo Seiffert had arrived and enveloped her in her arms.
“I’m Alan Hannay, by the way,” he grinned sheepishly, extending his hand to the pretty blond woman he knew had to be Clara Pullman, the defector’s secretary.
Arkady Rykov turned to shake his hand also, kicking the prostrate man’s left arm out of the way as he leaned towards the younger man.
“I didn’t know Lieutenant Siddall very well,” the C-in-C’s flag lieutenant said, not really very interested in whether the man on the ground between the two men was alive or dead, “but he was a decent sort and he will be sadly missed. Unlike some people I could think of.”
“I lost my temper,” the Russian apologised. “I haven’t lost my temper for many years. Not since my old friend Nikita Sergeyevich put down the rising in Hungary, in fact.” He sighed. “After that I learned that losing one’s temper was not enough.”
“Quite,” agreed the younger man.
“What has been done about the other names on the list?” Arkady Rykov asked brusquely.
“Two of the names were killed when HMS Torquay was bombed the first time. Two of the others are in custody. We’re still looking for other three.”
“Arkady!” Clara pleaded.
She and Alan Hannay both thought the Russian was going to start kicking the unconscious SIS man again. Although neither of them felt overly inclined to stop him if he did, they were both mightily relieved when he refrained.
“The World is full of fucking idiots!” Arkady Rykov growled. “I need a cigarette.”
The only man who had cigarettes was the second Redcap.
“Since when did you smoke?” Clara asked her lover.
“I always smoked. When we met I was busted up in hospital. They wouldn’t let me smoke. Then you said you hated men blowing smoke in your face so,” the man shrugged in an uncharacteristically Gallic way, “so I stopped smoking.”
Alan Hannay felt a little left out as the man and the woman gave each other long, searching looks.
“You gave up smoking for me?”
“It is no big deal,” the ex-KGB-man scoffed.
“Every time I think I know you I…”
Again, the Russian responded with a Gallic shrug.
“I was Iosif Vissarionovich’s translator, remember? After Yalta that slime ball Beria tried to have me sent to the Gulag for collaborating with the Yankees even though I was obeying Iosif Vissarionovich’s orders. I served Nikita Sergeyevich loyally for many years and then the old fart paid me back by making me break bread with Red Dawn. Giving up smoking is nothing, my love.”
Alan Hannay’s eyes kept opening wider and wider.
Clara saw this.
“Arkady was Joseph Stalin’s translator at the Yalta Conference in 1945,” she explained, wondering how she could sound so vexed. “The Man of Steel — that’s what the Russians called the old monster — had him mix with the American interpreters and that was how his spying career got started. Arkady was Nikita Sergeyevich’s, I mean Khrushchev’s inside man in the NKVD and later in the KGB. He fell out of love with Khrushchev when he was ordered to infiltrate the leadership of Red Dawn in 1959. When I met him he’d just escaped from…”
“Clara, I love you dearly but if you say another word I will have to break your beautiful neck,” the Russian said glumly, in between taking long, lung-filling drags on his cigarette. He gave Alan Hannay a bleak stare. “I must talk to Rosa Calleja.”
“The poor woman is practically catatonic, Colonel.”
Arkady Rykov’s expression indicated that he didn’t understand why this needed to be an insurmountable problem.
The trio were standing in the narrow cobbled street behind the Cathedral and had to stand to one side to allow a harassed-looking civilian and the new Redcaps into the wrecked office. The civilian was one of Denzil William’s men who’d run to fetch, presumably the two Redcaps he had in tow, when Rykov had turned up.
The Russian finished his cigarette and crushed out the glowing stub beneath his heel. He flexed his right hand, suddenly aware of the stinging ache across his knuckles.
“I think I’ve broken something,” he remarked.
“Somebody is hurt, they say?” A peeved, American accented woman’s voice demanded from the darkness behind the three people standing in the street. Margo Seiffert squinted irritably at the man testing his damaged right fist.
“Yes,” Alan Hannay called, stepping forward. “He’s inside that door,” he pointed. “Major Williams. He had a very nasty fall, I’m afraid.”
“A fall,” the former United States Navy Surgeon Commander asked, eyeing Arkady Rykov. “Um,” she breathed, “and would this fall have anything to do with what happened to that poor man yesterday in Kalkara?”