Brinkman felt the burn of embarrassment at the public examination. He wished he could think of some proper response. Knowing it was insufficient, he said, ‘I’ll try.’
Maxwell shook his head. ‘You’ve got to do better than that. I don’t want you making any mistakes, not even once. Classrooms and mock-these and mock-thats can never properly equip you for the real thing. You’re going to a sensitive place: the most sensitive place. I know you’re ambitious – that’s another finding of the aptitude tests and psychiatrists’ reports. I’m glad. Someone without ambition isn’t any good to me. But use it properly. I’m not expecting – no-one’s expecting – sensations: no Krushchev-like denunciations of Brezhnev or Andropov at secret Politburo sessions. I want steady, practical work. I want the analysis to be correct and I want the assessments to accord with the facts, as best you can obtain them. Don’t ever take a chance, to impress me or anybody else. You got that?’
‘Yes sir, I’ve got that,’ said Brinkman, knowing he had to. He didn’t intend taking any chances: not stupid ones, anyway. But if one came that wasn’t stupid he was going to grab it like a drowning man snatching at passing driftwood and show everyone – Maxwell and his father and everyone – just how good he was.
‘Ingram’s staying over, to ease you in.’
‘That’s kind,’ said Brinkman. He didn’t want to be eased in by anyone, picking up cast-off contacts like second-hand clothes but it wouldn’t have been politic to say so.
‘He’s done a good job there,’ said Maxwell. ‘He won’t be an easy act to follow.’
‘I’ll do my best,’ said Brinkman. Modesty, like apparent honesty, was another thing he practised.
‘Do more than that,’ said Maxwell, in his hearty voice. Brinkman wondered if he took the part of Santa Claus at the department Christmas party. ‘This could make or break a career, you know.’
‘I know,’ said Brinkman. Just as he knew it was going to be the former, not the latter.
Maxwell stood, ending the meeting. The man offered his hand and said, ‘Good luck.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ said Brinkman, modest still. Luck wasn’t going to have anything to do with it.
The love-making was good, like it always was, because he was more experienced and unselfish, knowing how to bring her up and then keep her there, so that she had orgasm after orgasm and even then didn’t want to stop but kept pulling at him, urgently demanding. When they finished Ann still clung to him, wanting his nakedness next to hers. After a long time she said, ‘Eddie?’
‘What?’
‘Why not?’
‘You know why not,’ he sighed, confronting the familiar demand.
‘I don’t think it’s a reason.’
‘I do.’
‘Dozens of men your age have kids. You’re only forty-five, for Christ’s sake!’
‘And you’re only twenty-six. And when I’m sixty – if I get to be sixty – you’ll only be forty-one.’
‘So what!’ she demanded, exasperated. ‘If we had a baby now he or she would be eighteen or nineteen when you’re sixty. And of course you’re going to live beyond that.’ Ann wanted a baby, for all the natural, proper reasons but there was another one as well. A child would occupy her, completely; take away the aimlessness of her life in Moscow.
‘We’ll see,’ he said.
‘You’re avoiding it.’
‘I said we’ll see.’
Ann detected the note in his voice and accepted it was time to retreat. ‘I want a baby, Eddie,’ she said, firing the final salvo. ‘I want a baby very much.’
The headquarters of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti is largely a pre-revolutionary building, an ochre-coloured, rococo place dominating the square named after Feliks Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the organisation: in 1961, Nikita Krushchev unveiled a statue to commemorate the man whose groundwork makes it possible for the Soviet Politburo to rule the country. Before 1917 the seven-storey building within the long shadows of the Kremlin housed the All Russian Insurance Company. During World War II political and captured German prisoners were conscripted to build a nine-storey extension for the already greatly expanded intelligence service. There was an attempt to maintain the architectural style but it failed and the two buildings look as if they have been stuck together by children given different sets of building bricks for Christmas. Behind the haphazard, uneven facade is Lubyanka, the prison which gained terrifying notoriety under the purges of Stalin and the murderous zeal of intelligence chiefs like Yagoda and Beria. Lubyanka is no longer a prison. The unremitting expansion made it necessary for once bloodstained cells to be refurbished into offices and part of that expansion is occupied by the Second Chief Directorate of the KGB.
There are other directorates and divisions entrusted with the internal control of the Soviet Union but the Second Chief Directorate has the primary responsibility. That responsibility extends to the surveillance of all Western embassies and the identification and monitoring of the intelligence activities within those embassies.
Vasili Sokol was the director, officially designated deputy to the chairman himself, Aleksai Panov. Sokol was a heavily moustached, thick-bodied man of great determination and the focus of that determination was to rise one floor to the chairman’s pine-panelled office. It couldn’t be long, now. Despite the doctors’ warnings about the effect upon his emphysema Panov still chain-smoked those stinking tube-filtered cigarettes and the absences when he couldn’t even leave his bed were increasing to the point of his replacement becoming an open speculation. Sokol knew that all he needed was a coup, to single him out to the Politburo. The difficulty was in finding one.
Sokol was a methodical man, always early in the office to assimilate the overnight reports segregated in a series of In-trays hedged the entire length of his desk, one for each province, with a separate division for Moscow. He devoted particular attention to the reports of the grain shortages. Sokol had succeeded to the position he now occupied because his predecessor failed to anticipate and then quell unrest through food riots and Sokol didn’t intend suffering the same fate. He put the file to one side, for more detailed attention later and went to the reports from the capital.
The Foreign Ministry internal memorandum was on top of the pile, recording the British application for a diplomatic visa in the name of Jeremy Brinkman. Sokol noted that it had been granted and that the designation was cultural attache.
Sokol smiled down, wearily shaking his head. Sometimes he wondered why any of them – Russia included – bothered with the ridiculous pretence. Each side – the professionals at least – invariably knew what the other was doing, who was doing it and what the covers were. Cultural attache was the favourite. So the intelligence replacement for the British was someone named Jeremy Brinkman. Sokol routinely marked it for a file to be opened and went back to the grain reports. They were the important consideration, at the moment: a new intelligence Resident could wait.
Chapter Three
Farewell parties were usually the best. There was a purpose to them, a positive reason for going beyond the customary excuse of escaping from one set of four walls to another set of four walls. There was the official ceremony for Ingram, at the embassy on Morisa Toreza, but the bigger gathering was at the man’s own apartment, in the official diplomatic compound off Kutuzovsky Prospekt. It wasn’t limited to the British but included all Ingram’s friends from the other embassies as well, and this was the one Ingram assured Brinkman he would find the most useful. Ingram was a small, rotund man given to quick, fussy movements; he wore spectacles which Brinkman considered wrongly designed, with large round frames which made the man look like an owl, an owl in an unfamiliar hurry. Towards Brinkman the attitude was clearly that of mentor to pupil; Brinkman resented the patronising attitude but gave no indication of doing so.