'Tell me again, damn you.' He went and studied the painting of the discus thrower with unseeing eyes.
Miranda spoke to his back. 'Frau Samson is an inch or so taller than I am. She has longer legs.'
Without turning round he said, That doesn't matter.'
'You know nothing,' said Miranda, contemptuous now that she was on the firm ground of her own expertise. 'If I am to imitate her walk, it will make a difference.'
The black girl took a noisy bite out of the apple. Moskvin glared at her: she smiled. They all disliked him, Moskvin knew that. He'd grown up amongst such hostility; it was not something that had ever troubled him.
'We'll arrange it so that you won't have to imitate the walk,' said Moskvin, still looking at the black girl. Then he turned and fixed those eyes on Miranda. 'Can you do her voice?'
'Her voice is easy,' said Miranda.
The black girl took another bite of the apple. 'Keep quiet,' said Moskvin.
'I gotta eat, buddy,' said the black girl.
Moskvin went to the table and switched on the tape recorder. Fiona's voice came from it, saying, 'It's a lovely name.' (pause) 'Were you an actress in England?' (pause) 'And he brought you to Berlin?' (pause) 'Oh, I'm sorry.' (pause) 'What did your husband do?'
Moskvin switched off the machine. 'Now you,' he said.
Miranda hesitated only a moment, and then stiff and formal, and holding her hands together as if about to sing Lieder, she recited the same words: 'It's a lovely name.' She took a breath. 'Were you an actress in England?' She wet her lips and, completely relaxed now, she delivered the last three without pausing. 'And he brought you to Berlin? Oh, I'm sorry. What did your husband do?' Then she smiled. It was an impressive performance and she knew it. She'd always had this ability to mimic voices. Sometimes she found herself copying the voices of people she was speaking with, and it could cause annoyance.
'Good,' said Moskvin.
'Remarkable,' said Stinnes. The black girl clapped her hands very softly. Miranda still couldn't decide whether the girl was hostile to all of them or only to Moskvin.
'But will you be able to do it without the recording to prompt you?' said Moskvin.
'I'd need to see her again.'
'That will be arranged, and we'll have lots and lots of recordings for you.'
'The recordings are a help but I must see her speak too. I have to watch her mouth. So much depends upon the tongue if I am to make conversation. And I need to hear more of her vocabulary.'
'You will be told exactly what to say. There is no need for you to be sidetracked into any conversation other than the words we want spoken. It's simply a matter of making the voice sound natural, and imitating it accurately.'
'Good,' said Miranda.
'The element of surprise will be on your side,' said Moskvin. 'You will have spoken to the husband and to the sister before they recover from their amazement.'
'The phone is easy but… '
'I have solved the other problem,' said Moskvin. 'Her husband will be in a car, the driver's seat, and he'll be prevented from turning around. That will be Harmony's job and she's an expert, aren't you, Harmony?'
'You bet your ass I am, boss,' said Harmony, in a tone of self-mockery that Moskvin seemed not to register.
Still looking at Miranda, Moskvin said, 'You'll get into the back seat. You'll be close but he won't see you.'
'Good. I'll use the Arpège perfume she likes. He'll recognize the scent of it.'
'He'll smell you but he won't see you,' said Moskvin.
'I could never make myself look like her,' said Miranda. 'Just one glimpse of me and he'd…'
'I have thought of that too,' said Moskvin. 'No need to make you look anything like her. On the contrary we'll give you a black wig, dark glasses and heavy make-up. They will not be surprised that she would disguise herself to visit England. For them it will make better sense that way.'
'That's a load off my mind. I could never pass myself off as her. She's very beautiful.' She looked at the two Russians. 'In fact I like her.'
'We all do,' said Stinnes. 'We are doing this to help her.'
'I didn't know that,' said Miranda doubtfully.
'But she mustn't know,' added Stinnes.
'Under no circumstance must she guess,' said Moskvin, and he slammed his hand down on the table. 'Or you'll wish you'd never been born.'
'Okay,' said Miranda more calmly than she felt. She hated to admit it but Moskvin did frighten her, and she was not a person easy to frighten.
'She gets the message,' said Harmony. 'Can I eat my apple now, boss man?'
15
Bosham, Sussex, England. October 1983.
Few actions within the law can provide more joy than the dispassionate evaluation of a colleague's failure. And so it happened that the field operation that Pavel Moskvin planned against London Central became celebrated in speech and writing, and perhaps in song too, for long after Moskvin was dead and buried.
Some blamed the failure entirely upon Moskvin. He was a desk man, without the practical experience that service in the field provides (it was field agents in particular who inclined to this view). Moskvin was, undeniably, a bully; he was always in a hurry and he failed to understand the English. But then, many of his peers were bullies, very few of them were not in a hurry and even in England it was difficult to find anyone who claimed to understand the English.
A more convincing explanation of the fiasco came from less passionate observers, who located the flaw in the duality of the leadership: Pavel Moskvin, a career KGB officer too dependent upon his influence in Moscow, in partnership with Erich Stinnes, experienced field agent who, although senior to Moskvin, had no reason to expect benefit from the operation's success.
Others looked at the two women in the team: the black Jamaican woman who had never responded to KGB discipline in all the years of her service, and the Englishwoman who had been bullied into a vital part in the operation simply because she could imitate voices. Some said the women were truculent, others that their English mother-tongue bonded the two of them and created a potential rebellion. Others, all of them men, believed that no women were suited to such jobs.
'First prize for booboos, shit-face,' said Harmony Jones to Moskvin. They were in a small cottage in Bosham, near the south coast of England, where Moskvin was laying his trap for Bernard Samson. 'London to Berlin, then back to London again. This is the dumbest operation I was ever on, honey.'
Moskvin was not used to such defiance. He controlled his terrible anger and said, 'It is all part of the plan.'
Erich Stinnes looked up from his guidebook: Chichester and the South Downs. He watched them dispassionately. It was not his operation, and even if the British caught him he'd already put out feelers to them about defection. He'd told Moscow that the first approaches came from the other side and got permission to continue his contacts, so he would survive come what may.
Pavel Moskvin had reasoned along lines of equal infallibility. This operation was going to make his name, so it had to be dramatic. He was going to entice Bernard Samson into a trap, interrogate him to the point of death and then leave his mutilated body in an SIS safe house in England! If Samson's interrogation revealed something to question or destroy the reputation of his new superior, Fiona Samson, so much the better. Even the safe house had been chosen because Fiona Samson had revealed its existence during one of her initial debriefing sessions. Should the location prove compromised it would be Fiona Samson's treachery, not his failure.
Miranda looked at her three colleagues and shivered. She had never expected it to be like this. Miranda had played her part exactly as briefed.
Miranda had been standing on a grass verge, on a section of road near Terminal 3 at London Airport, when she saw Bernard Samson driving a car with Harmony sitting in the seat next to him. The car stopped very near her and then she had climbed into the back seat and mimicked the voice of Fiona Samson.