King laughed dismissively, further embarrassment. ‘Square, somehow,’ he said. ‘Physically square.’
‘There’s a revolving restaurant on the top of the Ostankino TV tower,’ said Blair. ‘You can see something of Moscow.’
They were beyond the range of the directional eavesdroppers now, so the remark was missed by the listening Russians.
‘Sounds like a good idea,’ said Blakey. ‘We’ve been going round and round for quite a while anyway.’
On the Ulitza Akademika Korolyova, Blair led the way into the Sed’moye Nebo restaurant and in his fluent Russian engaged in the ritual of negotiating a favoured table with the head waiter and because those on either side of the window location were already occupied it meant that the pursuing KGB men were unable to get near enough to hear any conversation and long boomed microphones were impossible in such public surroundings.
As they sat Blair warned, ‘I hope you’re not in a hurry. Or hungry. These things take quite a long time. It’s something you have to get accustomed to, in Moscow.’
‘You know what I’d like?’ demanded Blakey. ‘I’d like Orlov to turn up this week with a perfectly sensibly explanation of why he hasn’t been able to make the contacts. So that all those pricks at headquarters can realise they’d been just that. Pricks.’
‘It would be good,’ agreed Blair. He added, ‘Somehow I can’t see it happening. I’ve got a gut feeling that it’s gone cold.’
‘You think it was the watch upon the woman in New York?’ asked the other supervisor.
‘I don’t know,’ said Blair. ‘I warned them as strongly as I could. I would have expected our people to have recognised any Soviet surveillance, if there’d been any.’
‘Wouldn’t there have been some sort of announcement, naming Orlov, if they’d moved against him because of what we were doing in New York?’ asked King, acknowledging Blair’s experience.
‘Not yet,’ said Blair. ‘Maybe not at all. Just something in a few months’ time saying that he’d been voted off a committee and then later dismissed from the Central Committee itself. He’ll be in jail by then, of course.’
‘Creepy country,’ said the inexperienced King. He stared out over the slowly revolving panorama of the Soviet capital and said, ‘That’s something else that occurred to me this morning. Everything’s grey: actually coloured grey, I mean.’
‘It’s not, really,’ said Blair. ‘But it’s a pretty common first impression.’
‘You know how it happened, don’t you?’ said Blakey to the CIA Resident. ‘How your balls got caught in the vice?’
‘How?’ said Blair.
‘Perelmen,’ disclosed Blakey. ‘George Bush was a CIA Director and made vice President. Perelmen thought the pathway looked pretty attractive. Set out to portray himself as the indispensible foreign affairs expert, better than State and better than anyone.’
‘Sorry I let him down,’ said Blair bitterly.
‘You didn’t,’ said Blatkey. ‘He let himself down announcing coups before they happened. This thing should have been kept under wraps so tight an Egyptian mummy would have looked naked.’
‘Pity it wasn’t,’ said Blair. He pulled back for the arrival of the tardy waiter, giving their order for bortsch in Russian.
‘Sure it’s a pity,’ agreed Blakey. ‘Now it’s blame time and you’re right at the end of the line. I’ve been at Langley for the last three years; know how the system works. You’re the one who fouled up, according to the book. All the panic and all the bullshit will be justified, the proper reaction to what seemed to be happening. You’re the one left carrying the can.’
‘Seems pretty shitty,’ said King, coming back from his examination of the Russian capital.
‘Believe me,’ said Blakey. ‘I’m right.’
Just how right was proven by the message awaiting Blair when they got back to the embassy that afternoon. After further consideration, cabled Hubble, it had been decided there would be no purpose in Blair’s tour being extended longer than originally scheduled. Blakey was to remain, as acting intelligence Resident.
Blair smiled wanly down at the decision, remembering it was what he’d told Ann to fob her off after his most recent return from Washington. She should be pleased: everything was turning out as she wanted it to.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Blakey, when Blair showed him the recall cable. ‘I didn’t try for this, you know?’
‘I know you didn’t,’ assured Blair. ‘Things could still turn out for the good.’
‘Reconnaissance?’ said Panov.
‘Unquestionably,’ said Sokol, recognising that Panov was speaking for the benefit of the record, to show his awareness. The KGB chairman’s attitude was remarkably changed. He’d stood smiling to greet him when he entered, directly from the control room, and within minutes of their conference beginning the vodka had been served. He went on, ‘From what we heard we know positively that there’s a meeting and we know it’s to be Friday.’
‘Congratulations,’ allowed Panov. ‘You’ve been proven right…’
‘Thank you,’ said Sokol, knowing the required modesty.
‘… About one man,’ balanced the chairman. ‘Nothing’s been resolved about the Englishman.’
‘It will be,’ undertook Sokol.
It was not until he returned to his own department that Sokol reflected on the extent of the exaggeration. At the moment he only had half a success; and that was still positively to materialise.
He cleared his desk of everything except the files on Jeremy Brinkman, right back to the first entry of the man’s arrival, looking for anything he might have missed. He stopped, curiously, going to Blair’s file for comparison and then calculating from the guard reports that the Englishman appeared to have visited the Blair apartment on more than one – several, in fact – occasions when the American was back in Washington. He made a note and put a genuine question mark after it, unsure if there was any significance. It was a pity that Blair was so good at cleansing his apartment of the listening devices so regularly planted and equally regularly found and jammed by the man.
It took Sokol two hours to exhaust the written dossiers and then – exhausted himself – he lowered the lights and started on the videos and the attempted eavesdropping with the pistol microphones that had already proved so effective that day upon Blair as he moved about the city. He saw it, on the last film. At first he wasn’t sure, stopping and rewinding the film and then stopping it again on a freeze frame, at the actual moment of Brinkman putting the transistor on the kiosk edge. With the frame held, Sokol found the independent sound tape, coordinating it by date and time to the attempt to overhear the Tuesday conversation when Brinkman and Orlov had arranged the Russian’s escape. There was just the meaningless snarl of interfering static that Brinkman intended.
Sokol picked out all the Tuesday films, looking for the kiosks now – all so brief they had been missed, until the latest, longer conversation – isolating the contact every time. He watched the most recent tape through again and then put the lights up, confident he’d found the method and the dating of liaison. And depressed by it. From the reports it was always a different kiosk. And so because they could never know in advance what the next box was going to be, they couldn’t put a tape on it, for next Tuesday. There was never any evidence of his dialling out. So it was always an incoming call, from another untraceable telephone. The Englishman had been clever; cleverer, in fact, than Blair. Next Tuesday the watch upon the Englishman would be very different and very concentrated and before it happened Sokol knew he needed an intensive session with the electronic experts. He had to have a listening van capable of connecting at once -within seconds – to the call if he were to be as successful here as he had been in Krasnaya Park. Sokol decided – until he talked to the experts – to keep this from Panov. The man had had sufficient with which to be impressed in one day.
‘He promised!’ protested Paul. ‘He promised he’d write and fix the trip.’