‘So you never saw her again?’
‘No,’ said Kozlov.
‘And don’t know what happened to her?’
‘No,’ said the man, once more.
There was a long hesitation and then Olga said: ‘Do you still love her?’
Kozlov shook his head. ‘I feel responsible.’
‘Would it be as easy, to get over me?’
‘I didn’t say it was easy.’
‘It sounds that way.’
‘Darling!’ Kozlov stood, holding out his arms. She refused to come to him and he dropped them, feeling foolish. Instead he went to her, reached out a second time and took her shoulders, bringing her face close to his. ‘I love you,’ he said. ‘No one else. That’s all I can say … no better way — other way — to make you believe me.’
It was several moments before she replied, and when she said ‘I believe you’, there was doubt.
‘Will you do it?’
Another long pause. Then she said: ‘There’s no other resolve, is there?’
‘No,’ he said, positively.
‘I’m not sure I can.’
‘Trapped,’ he said, coaxing some more. ‘Your words.’
Olga started crying, making no sound but with tears moving across her face. ‘I’m so scared,’ she said, broken-voiced. ‘So very scared.’
‘You can do it!’ he encouraged again.
‘I have to, don’t I?’
Kozlov didn’t reply, knowing it would be wrong at that second in time to say anything.
‘Just Irena,’ insisted Olga. ‘Not him.’
‘Just Irena,’ agreed Kozlov.
‘Over by this time tomorrow?’
‘Everything,’ he assured her.
‘You do love me, don’t you?’
‘Don’t doubt me. Ever.’
There was another period when her eyes searched his face and she said: ‘I won’t’, and this time there wasn’t any doubt.
They left Levine at the airport, with two of the crew of the C-130 controlling the surveillance of the military section, and Elliott accompanied the rest of the arriving CIA group to the Peninsula Hotel on the mainland Kowloon side.
Elliott was already established as the contact point for the colony’s CIA informants, and at Fredericks’ urging he went individually through everything that had been assembled.
‘Definite airport arrival?’ pressed the CIA supervisor.
‘Three separate confirmations, from Langley’s stock photographs,’ confirmed the man.
‘Cars?’ seized Fredericks, picking the most important point.
Elliott shook his head, the reluctance obvious. ‘Ground staff and immigration. Nothing outside.’
‘Son of a bitch!’ said Fredericks, vehemently.
‘Just a matter of time,’ said Elliott. ‘We’re running checks on all the taxis and courtesy buses and hire cars.’
‘We haven’t got time!’ said Fredericks, exasperated. ‘This thing is on a very short fuse.’
Elliott looked around the assembled group. ‘Now we’re all here,’ he said, ‘we can start spreading out. There are a lot of hotels, but we’ve got informants in most of them so it isn’t really such a difficult task.’
‘I’d like to believe that!’ said Dale, entering into the conversation to ease the pressure on a colleague.
‘I don’t care how difficult it is!’ reminded Fredericks. ‘I want it done and I want it done completely, and I want it done now!’
Elliott and Dale actually exchanged looks, their faces open but with no need of expression to convey their feeling at the burr-under-the-saddle attitude that was so obvious from the supervisor.
Elliott said: ‘It really is just a matter of time. An itty bitty matter of time.’
Fredericks’ face suddenly opened, more a grimace than a smile. ‘Right!’ he said. ‘The cork’s in the bottle.’
Chapter Nineteen
Irena Kozlov stood in the middle of the room, legs slightly parted, hands on her hips, in a physically intimidating attitude, questions bursting from her in a machine-gun staccato. ‘Why blow up the plane?’ was the most repeated demand, along with others. Like who-and-how caused the explosion, and had they been caught, and what he was going to do now, to get her out? And how?
Charlie Muffin confronted her feeling like a one-armed juggler trying to keep twenty coloured balls in the air at the same time, with his good arm strapped behind his back. And blindfolded as well, just to make it difficult. He attempted to concentrate absolutely upon the strident woman and to relegate the distraction of Harry Lu to the shut-off, solve-it-later part of his mind, but it wasn’t easy because what Harry Lu wanted was so inextricably linked with Irena anyway. As everything was. Charlie lied, repeatedly, insisting that the delay was only temporary and that soon — within hours, which was a further conscious lie — there would be another plane to take her safely to England.
‘How can you say that, after what happened in Tokyo!’ The challenge was immediate, puncturing the attempted assurance.
‘Because this time we’ll be more careful,’ said Charlie.
‘So you were careless!’
Charlie sighed: she was sandpaper abrasive. He said: ‘It was something we didn’t foresee.’ He was determinedly as forceful as she, refusing to be brow-beaten by her hands-on-hips attitude.
‘Yuri expected some trickery, but not this,’ admitted Irena. She hesitated, hands dropping to her sides, lowering herself into a chair. She hesitated and said with sudden and unusual quietness, as if realizing it for the first time: ‘I could have been killed.’
‘They wouldn’t have sabotaged the plane, if you’d been aboard,’ said Charlie. ‘They’d have snatched you.’
‘The man who met me at the airport!’ said the woman, the sudden alarm obvious. ‘He’s safe?’
I wish I knew any more, thought Charlie. He said: ‘Quite safe. A friend.’
‘He said we have to keep moving.’
‘The Americans are chasing,’ announced Charlie. It was a harbour-view room, the black stretch of the waterway lay between them and Kowloon and the New Territories beyond. Charlie looked briefly across at the mainland, wondering how long it would take Fredericks and the other CIA agents to arrive. From the chair upon which she was sitting, Charlie was conscious of Irena moving as if she were going to make a response at once, but abruptly she shook her head. Instead she said: ‘So you don’t know what’s happened to Yuri?’
Charlie hesitated, unsure of the best reply, and decided that there was only one. ‘No,’ he said. ‘There’s no contact between myself and the Americans, not any more.’
‘How are the meetings between Yuri and I going to be arranged!’
‘Through London and Washington,’ avoided Charlie, easily. Wilson was probably already mobilizing the squad to grab Kozlov on that first occasion. It was an operation in which he would like to be involved.
‘You said hours, before we can leave?’ queried Irena.
‘I hope so,’ said Charlie.
She appeared not to notice the qualification. Unexpectedly, she said: ‘I do not feel welclass="underline" I don’t think I can travel immediately.’
‘What!’ Charlie was off-balanced by the announcement: more coloured balls had been thrown into the juggling act and he had enough already. He looked intently at the woman. Pale, maybe, but that was all. Certainly her attitude since he’d entered the room gave no indication of her being unwell. The opposite, in fact.
‘I need to rest, before moving on,’ Irena said.
She was going to get the opportunity whether she wanted it or not, but the insistence unsettled Charlie. Minutes earlier she’d appeared anxious to get out as soon as possible, which was why he had lied. The strain had to be enormous; maybe she wasn’t as strong as she appeared. He said: ‘There’ll be time enough to rest.’
‘A day at least: I need a day.’
‘A day,’ agreed Charlie, because it suited him.
‘Are you confident we can evade the Americans?’
‘Yes,’ said Charlie, who wasn’t. There was a desperate need to reach Wilson, in London; a desperate need to do so much. Up and down went the coloured balls, a blur of impressions, nothing focussing.