Ross looked at her watch and then levered herself off the bench, stretching out the kinks in her back. “I’m going to freshen up,” she said, pointing to the sign for the showers.
“I’ll be here,” Smith said.
Ross made her way to the cabanas.
Ross paid for a cabana and went inside. She turned on the shower so that it would be audible from outside and waited. Two minutes passed and then she heard a light tap at the door. She slid the bolt and opened the door; a man was standing there. He was nondescript, wearing jeans, a t-shirt and a light olive jacket. He stepped inside, closed the door behind him and then slid the bolt through the lock.
“My name is Stepanov,” he said. “I work for the deputy director.”
“We need to be quick,” Ross said. “The man I’m with is sharp. He’ll be suspicious if I’m away for too long.”
“It won’t take long. Just a few questions.” He spoke quickly and quietly, the sound of his voice muffled by the hissing of the shower.
“Go on.”
“The rendezvous with Romanova. Are the details still the same?”
“As far as I know. Tomorrow at midday at the railway station. What’s going to happen?”
“I will be there,” he said.
“Not on your own?”
“There will be two of us.”
“And then? What will happen?”
“We will wait for Romanova to show herself, and then we will arrest her and the British agent.” He paused. “But you must get away. As soon as you see us, start to run.”
“Primakov explained. I get it.”
“There is a river terminal in Komsomolsk, at the end of Oktyabrskiy Prospekt, right by the beach. You can take a hydrofoil to Nikolaevsk. It will take twelve hours. There is a small airport there. Get a flight to Sakhalin, then south to Japan.”
She committed the route to memory. “Is there anything else?”
“The agent must not suspect anything. You must—”
“I’ve been fooling men like him for years,” she said, cutting across him. “It’s not going to be a problem.”
“Of course,” he said.
He was carrying a small bag. He unzipped it and took out a lipstick.
“What is this?” she asked.
“This is an elektricheskiy pistolet,” he said. “A lipstick pistol. It has been in use for many years, but Line T have improved the design. It is a single shot pistol, with one 4.5mm Makarov round. You twist the base, here, and it will fire. It is accurate to two metres. We think you should carry it. You will need to defend yourself if something goes wrong.”
“Nothing is going to go wrong,” she said. “And if he goes through my purse and sees this—”
“He will see a lipstick,” Stepanov interrupted. “Please. You are a valuable asset. We do not want you to be undefended.”
“Fine,” she said, dropping the lipstick into her bag. “Anything else?”
“No,” Stepanov said.
She looked at her watch. “I need to shower. He’s sharp, like I said. If my hair doesn’t look wet he’s going to be suspicious.”
Stepanov went to the door, slid the bolt, opened the door a crack and looked out.
“Good luck,” he said, turning back. “I will see you tomorrow.”
He opened the door all the way and disappeared into the corridor. Ross closed the door behind him, locked it again, and undressed. She stepped under the tepid water and scrubbed it over her skin, tipping her head back so that it could run through her hair. She took a moment to assess how she felt and found—still—that she wasn’t nervous. It was true what she had said: she had been doing this, working under the noses of Raj Shah and everyone else at the River House, for years. None of them suspected her. They underestimated her; they always had. They had no idea.
She twisted the tap to turn off the water, stepped out of the cubicle and towelled herself down. No, she thought. No idea at all. Smith might have been sharp, but she knew that she was more than his match.
PART V
Komsomolsk-on-Amur
65
Komsomolsk had two airports due to the presence of the Sukhoi factory. Milton looked out of the window and saw the city laid out like patchwork below him. The city and its suburbs stretched out for over twenty miles along the left bank of the Amur, a large watercourse that looked particularly wide as they circled above it at five thousand feet. Milton had read the Wikipedia entry for the city during their layover; the city was spread out in two distinct sections: the central area, which housed the shipyard and the Dzemgi, an area that had coalesced around the Sukhoi factory. The central, older area featured the Stalinist architecture that they had nominally come to photograph, while the area around the factory was composed of modern, bland apartment blocks.
Their flight was scheduled to land at Khurba airbase, the second of the two airports. The pilot came over the intercom and delivered an update in Russian that Milton did not understand.
“We’ll be on the ground in ten minutes,” Ross translated for him.
The flight attendants started to pass along the aisle to prepare the cabin for landing.
“Any other ideas how we’re going to play this?” Ross asked him.
Milton had been thinking about that. He knew that tomorrow was going to be difficult and dangerous. They would be operating in a city where they would have no consular assistance, and they were not travelling under a diplomatic passport. There would be no immunity if they were arrested. They would be alone and vulnerable.
“She wants to meet at midday,” he said. “We’ll scout the area in the morning and, if it looks safe, we’ll wait for her like she asked.”
“And then?”
“We get her out,” he said.
Milton thought that she was going to ask him how they were going to do that, but, instead, she checked her seatbelt and looked out of the porthole window as the ground rushed up to meet them.
She turned back again. “But that’s tomorrow,” she said. “How about today? What are we going to do?”
“We look around the city and take pictures,” Milton said, “just like we’re here to do.”
66
The embassy had booked them a room at the Hotel Voskhod, on Prospekt Pervostroiteleya. It was a new building, seven storeys tall and soulless. It had not been chosen for its amenities, but rather for its location: it was within walking distance of the railway station, and well placed as a hub from which to explore the rest of the town. There was a supermarket on one side of the building and a nightclub on the other.
They went into the reception area and Ross went up to the desk. A clerk was fiddling with a computer and looked up disdainfully when Ross cleared her throat. The conversation proceeded in Russian and Milton understood none of it; he heard the surname of their legends—Burns—and waited as the clerk took Ross’s credit card for incidentals and then printed off two keycards for them.
“Fourth floor,” Ross said once the process was complete.
She led the way to the elevators, summoned a car and stepped inside. Milton followed.
“Everything all right?” he asked.
“Fine,” Ross said. “It all checked out.”