“Sign please,” Carstairs said in conclusion. He passed Harry a fountain pen and indicated where he needed to add his signature to the short list of people who had been given access to the file.
Harry scrawled out his name, adding an HRH for good measure and stabbing the pen into the paper to emphasize his disgruntlement. He couldn’t believe he was stuck in this small, airless room in the basement of the embassy. Not when he could be finishing his dinner date and making plans for a couple of days of wanton carousing on the Amalfi coast.
“Sure you wouldn’t like that in triplicate, old boy?”
Carstairs appeared to consider the offer seriously, while flipping open the file and leaning forward to spread its contents out across the table. He had a small splotch of pasta sauce on his collar. “Signing once is more than enough to get you in trouble,” he replied. It was the only time that Harry had ever heard him attempt a joke. Or what Harry assumed was a joke.
“Now, Valentin Sobeskaia,” the spy chief began, in the practiced cadence of a man repeating a briefing he had given many times before, “one of Stalin’s pet commercial boyars …” He looked up at Harry to make sure he understood the meaning of the term. Harry waved him on.
There was nothing particularly exciting or even classified about the information. For all that the Soviets had unleashed an army of theoreticians to explain the failure of their revolution in Harry’s time, and for all that the resulting explanation was utter bullshit, the Kremlin had paid at least some heed to future history. They would never admit it, of course, but they’d attempted to learn from the success of their Chinese comrades in freeing up some market controls while maintaining an iron grip in the political realm. Sobeskaia was a beneficiary of that complicated two-step. A Party boss who had been authorized to run a state enterprise along commercial lines. He was one of millions of Soviet citizens who had profited directly from Stalin’s own, very particular version of perestroika.
“Sobeskaia acquitted himself well, first as the senior foreman, then as director of a tractor factory given over to tank production in the early days of the war,” explained Carstairs. “He then disappeared from view for at least eight years but reappeared in good health as one of the first authorized managers of a corporatized State Business Enterprise.”
“A toaster factory, if you can believe it,” said Walker, with a short, barking laugh. “Automatic toasters. And they worked too, the son of a bitch! He was building them before we were. Exporting the suckers all over the damn world.”
Harry was beginning to get a feel for where this might be going. He stretched his back, which was feeling cramped. Closing his eyes against the glare of the overhead fluorescents, he decided to hazard a guess.
“We’re assuming, I suppose, that Comrade Sobeskaia spent those eight years covering himself in glory with the NKVD’s Functional Projects Bureau.”
“Ha!” Walker chimed in. “As the philosophers say, if a bear shits in the woods but nobody smells it, it was probably working for Lavrenty Beria.”
“Philosophers say that?”
“The ones from the faculty of mixed fucking metaphors do, yeah.”
Carstairs handed over a couple of photographs of the state-approved businessman. They were good quality, which didn’t surprise Harry at all. Although the Iron Curtain had trapped hundreds of millions of people inside Stalin’s gargantuan prison camp, for those with the trust of the state, travel was much easier than it had been in the original timeline. Over a thousand “enterprise boyars”-businessmen and — women who, like Valentin Sobeskaia, ran corporatized operations for Mother Russia-were now in Rome for the GATT conference. Many of them were even staying on this side of the Wall, doing business, signing contracts, making money with their ideological nemeses in the free world. Just as the once-and-future Chinese Communists would have done.
The photographs Harry flipped through all looked as though they’d been shot while Sobeskaia was visiting the West. Taken from a variety of angles and distances, they mostly featured backdrops of expensive restaurants and hotel lobbies.
“So why the flap over a toaster salesman?” he asked.
“Well, his fucking toasters are kicking the ass out of GE,” said Walker, not altogether facetiously. “It’s not like he has to pay top dollar for his slave labor, you know. Asshole’s moving into electronics next, transistors and maybe even silicon, according to the word here in Rome.”
“But that’s not why you want him, is it?” Harry asked, perusing the rest of the documents laid out before him, which amounted to a particularly meager report, he noted. Mostly just baselevel commercial intelligence about the operations of Prozpekt Elektric, the state corporation run by Sobeskaia. Harry shook his head. Carstairs had made him sign the Official Secrets form to read a bunch of newspaper ads for some of Prozpekt’s cheap consumer wares. A couple of washing machines, a microwave oven, and a steam iron. All of them looking as though their designs had been stolen from sources uptime-which, of course, they had. The Sovs hadn’t just gained access to 21C military technology after the Emergence. They’d also grabbed up a treasure trove of data on eight decades’ worth of development in consumer goods, and, Harry thought wryly, a history lesson from Deng Xiaoping in how to get the West to pay you to bury them.
“No, we have little interest in Comrade Sobeskaia’s cheap microwave ovens and toasters,” Carstairs replied. “I don’t care for these so-called microwaves personally. Unlike Mr. Walker. I find they either burn one’s food or leave it frozen in the middle, or both.”
An exchange, unspoken but unmistakable, passed between the station chiefs. An in-joke or an old disagreement, perhaps. Carstairs moved on, retrieving a small, plain envelope from the back of the file, which he opened before tipping the contents out onto the table.
“Sobeskaia smuggled these to us via an intermediary.”
“His dame,” added Walker.
Harry frowned at the metal shavings, scattered over an advert for a Nijinsky coffee machine clipped from The Telegraph. The tightly curled metallic tendrils were a dirty silver color and quite lustrous under the harsh, white, fluorescent light.
“Well, I’m guessing it’s not radioactive,” Harry said, only half joking. “You do know not to play with plutonium, don’t you, Mr. Carstairs?”
“It’s tungsten,” replied the British spymaster. “Chinese tungsten, mined in the mainland Communist territories, of course.”
“Of course. I don’t suppose Prozpekt is branching out into jewelry or exotic yacht keels, then?”
“What?” That threw Carstairs, if only momentarily.
“Niche uses,” the prince explained. “Not nearly as popular as using it for armaments.”
The other men nodded. Walker spoke then. “You got it. Penetrator rounds, supersonic shrapnel-all the good stuff. You don’t need tungsten for it, but unless you have a whole heap of depleted uranium lying around, it’s not a bad option.”
Harry picked up one of the small metal shavings. It felt dense and hard, and he was careful not to pinch it too firmly in case he cut himself.
“So, what’s the story? You’re sure Sobeskaia isn’t launching a weaponized toaster onto the market?”
“Could be,” Walker conceded, to Carstairs’s obvious chagrin. “Well, we don’t know, do we?” the American added in reply to a glare from his SIS counterpart.
“No, we do not,” said Carstairs. “We don’t know much about Mr. Sobeskaia at all. Other than that he chose to reach out and make contact with us via an informal channel, requesting a meeting while he was here in Rome for the GATT conference. He sent us these shavings as a teaser.”
“Spiffing. So I suppose your people talked to his people?”
“Tried to,” said Walker.
“And at this point Mr. Cockup joined the party, right?”