"You know where it came from. We got more than we need. We want you to have a share. And change it quickly, before somebody decides it's fake."
For a second or two I thought the silly bugger was going to cry, as he blinked and looked down at the notes. But he soon got hold of himself and said, "Too much. Too much."
"Put it in your pocket and shut up!" I grinned and gave him a clip on the shoulder.
"It's time we got the lads down to the range.
The students were in fine form, and gave an ironic cheer when we appeared. Apparently there'd been a clip about the raid on the morning's TV news, and bush telegraph had whizzed a full account of it round more efficiently than the Internet. Nobody seemed in the least put out by the loss of Misha, least of all his former colleague in SOBR, who appeared to regard him as entirely dispensable.
I'd been intending to play the whole thing down, and I asked Anna to explain that, for political reasons, it was essential that Brit involvement in the bust remained under wraps. But the Russians were so enthusiastic about the hit that I decided to make a virtue of it and called a special seminar at which we took everyone the students who hadn't been there, and our own guys through all the stages of the raid: planning, equipment, preparations, execution.
It proved an inspired idea: everybody was gripped by the analysis and discussion, and learned useful lessons. Of course I said nothing about the handout of dollars, but I did deplore the lack of a formal debriefing session.
"I'm not criticising anyone, I said.
"That isn't my business. But at home we'd have done it a different way and in fact it's what we're doing now. It's always important to talk through what's happened. That's the way you avoid mistakes in future."
"Misha," somebody started.
"Why did he fall? Why no safety rope?"
"He was supposed to have one. I told everyone to rope up, but it seems he hadn't bothered. Your special forces people are like us: you don't take kindly to orders."
I saw two of the Russians exchange glances, and added, "That's not criticism. It's a statement of fact." Finally I said, "I must emphasise that our participation in the raid was completely unofficial, so we can't have any mention of it leaking to the media. Otherwise we'll be in the shit with our own people.
Understood?"
All through that day I felt I was blundering deeper and deeper into a moral maze.
Almost making matters worse was the fact that the course was going really well. Our relationship with the students had never been better. Maybe it was the success of the hit that fired them up; whatever, a lot of jokes were flying about and morale was great. Sasha was all over the place in his desire to be helpful.
At lunchtime Anna and I went for a walk. I'd already had some food when she appeared at the back of the building, yet I offered her lunch God knows what we would have given her if she'd accepted. But she said she'd had an apple, and otherwise didn't intend to eat until the evening.
So it was that we strolled off down one of the tracks into the training area.
I think her intention was just to be friendly, and to thank us again for leading the raid; but gradually her talk turned to the present good relations between East and West, and the contrast with the bad old days of the Cold War, when the KGB was crazily suspicious and went to fantastic lengths to penetrate foreign embassies in Moscow.
"You know what happened in the Japanese Embassy?" she asked.
I shook my head.
"It was an old merchant's house, like your British Embassy. It still had fireplaces and chimneys. So the KGB decided that the way to penetrate it was by sending a man down a chimney to plant microphones. They found a very thin man, trained him to climb, and sent him off' She stopped, looking at me.
"And what happened?"
"Nothing! The man was never seen again. That was the end of him. Did he get stuck? Is he still there, perhaps? Did the Japanese catch him and feed him to their tame fish? Nobody knows. Of course the KGB couldn't ask, so they never found out.
I laughed and said, "When you worked in London, I suppose you were spying too?"
"Naturally! All Russians abroad were spies then. We were running the Intourist office, of course, but every day we were sending in reports to the KGB."
"What about?"
"Oh, prominent people who booked air tickets or tours, foreign visitors to London, economic activity in general… I'm sure most of the information was useless, but we thought we were tremendously important."
"But how did you get into spying in the first place?"
"To see the world. Isn't that what you say about your navy?
"Join the navy and see the world"? That was it with the KGB, exactly. In those days, the only chance you had of getting out of the Soviet Union was by joining the Ministry of Foreign Affairs or the KGB. Those were the two best careers on offer."
Several times during our chat I almost challenged her about the business of our lap-top. But I decided on balance that it was better not to stir things up.
So, on the surface, everything was brilliant; and yet, undermining the cheerful atmosphere, was the presence of Apple and Orange, sitting there in the Embassy lock-up.
The CNDs were a lead weight on my mind, and Sasha's invitation to supper made everything worse. How could I chat up his old mother with this in the back of my brain?
All afternoon my mind kept wandering as I tried to think up ways of wriggling out of our commitment. What if we dropped both devices, un primed off one of the bridges into the Moscow River, and told Hereford there'd been an unfortunate accident — a crash which had flung the cases out of the back of the van an dover the parapet? Even if they believed it they'd probably react by simply getting two more CNDs sent post-haste from America, and we'd be back in the shit, neck deep, with even less time to extricate ourselves.
What if we dumped the cases in the river but reported that we'd installed them correctly at the two sites? Obviously the satellite wouldn't pick up the right signals but maybe we could attribute this to faults in the systems. I needed to consult Toad on that one.
What if I posted Anna an anonymous typewritten note about the contents of the Embassy lock-up? A quick raid by Omon, an almighty diplomatic row, Embassy staff expelled, SAS sent packing, international stand-off, countdown to World War Three..
When I confided my anxiety to Whinger that evening, his reaction was typical.
"For fuck's sake, Geordie," he went.
"You're getting old. The only thing to do's to get the bastards in place and forget about them. It's a thousand to one they'll never get used. So let's bury them, have done with it and don't get caught, 'cause life's too short."
I stared at the deep lines in his face and the curls of grey in the light-brown fuzz of his hair.
"You always were a mean bastard," I told him, 'but I reckon you're right. We'll go for it."
Our next decision was to shift our early-morning run in the direction of the potential Orange site, to clear that one down.
During the past few days we'd made a couple more passes along the track that went by the old air-raid shelter, but we'd still not looked inside, and now we needed to suss it out properly.
The nights were growing steadily longer, so the next morning we set off in the dark, and we'd covered the three kilometres to the site before the light was at all strong. This meant we had to hang around a while before we could see, but at least we felt confident that no one else was about.
The shelter proved to be not much more than a tunnel driven horizontally into a piece of sloping ground a primitive structure with an arched roof of corrugated iron which was about ten feet high in the middle and dropped down to ground level on either side. From the front we could see that the tin was only the inner lining: on top of it was a layer of concrete maybe a foot thick, and then earth. In the front wall, made of concrete blocks, was a small opening at shoulder height, designed to let in light and air, and the entrance was to one side. Since the only illumination came through those two apertures, the inside was dark as a cave and we had to feel our way past the edge of the heap of old planks dumped in there.