The best vehicle they had was a six-year-old Mercedes 220, which I suppose had filtered down from one of the East German consulates. It had an automatic shift, which the man demonstrated at some length, pointing out its advantages: you could lean one arm out of the window, light a cigarette in safety, or put your arm round your girl-friend while you were driving along.
“That’s fantastic,” I said. “Where are the wiper blades?”
“In the glove compartment.” He showed me. “You want them fitted?”
“I’ll put them on when it starts snowing again.” The spare-parts situation was obviously no better than the last time I’d been in Russia: you’d still lose your wipers if you didn’t watch out.
I paid the deposit and took the car three times round the block to make sure it wasn’t going to break down right away, then checked the map again and drove to Gromyko Prospekt. They’d put some sand down along the main streets but the ice had begun to pack and quite a few Wolgas and Zhigulis were cocked against the kerb with their body work bent in various places. A black Moskwicz came into the mirror three blocks after I’d started out and stayed there for another mile before it turned off at an intersection. Soon afterwards a Chaika limousine came hounding along in the centre lane, slewing from side to side and pulling up outside a red brick building near the main square. There was no indication of what went on inside, which was typical, and I put it down as the Communist Party Headquarters or the local KGB, because of the guards.
By the time I reached the Union Building it had started to snow again, and I drove past the block and made two left turns and got out to fit the wiper blades. I then drove off and made an expanding box search of the streets in the vicinity until I found a hotel. It was a tall narrow building wedged between a market-produce exchange and an employment bureau, and I left the Mercedes and walked round to the rear of the place and checked it out for access, exposure and geometry: single iron fire-escape from the fifth floor to the ground, high double gates to the yard with their hinges rusty and one of them broken away, a parked van with two of the tyres flat and the spare wheel missing, and a row of dustbins below the three barred windows on the left side looking out from the building. The exposure looked all right except for the place on the far side of the street at an angle of thirty degrees and I went across at the first intersection and walked back on the other side and read the official-looking board over the main doors: it was a home for unmarried mothers. I walked back round the block and went up the steps and into the hotel.
Papers, papers.
For two nights. Perhaps for three, but that would depend on the snow.
Andreyev Rashidov, an ex-captain of the Red Army, now journalist. Yelingrad is a fine town, and its people are welcoming. I am sure I shall be very comfortable here.
One narrow staircase. No lift. Two doors to the rear, three to the side of the entrance hall, the front door being fitted with dead bolts top and bottom, the panels being glass but too narrow to let an average human body through in an emergency. My baggage is in the car. I will bring it in myself. It was a room on the fifth floor, which I had asked for. I like a good view and it isn’t necessary to go down the steps of a fire-escape if you’re in a hurry: using the series of swings they’ve worked out at Norfolk you can reach the ground within three seconds per floor of any given building with ceilings eight feet high.
Roman-style central hearing with grilled vents in the floor, two narrow windows overlooking the rear, a drainpipe running down past the left-hand window but with one of the U-clamps broken away from the brickwork, discount. No telephone.
There is a bell to summon you to the hall, should you receive a caller or a message. You may order simple meals from the State Restaurant across the street and eat them in the parlour on the ground floor, with vodka if you wish. To close the heating you merely slide this shutter, so. The bed is comfortable, as you can observe.
He was a tired stooping man with a habit of holding his head on one side as if he were listening to you with one ear and to something else with the other. The badge in his lapel showed him to be a Party member of the Yelingrad district headquarters, as he explained with an air of faded fervour. I was permitted male guests in my room.
When he had gone I checked for bugs and of course found nothing: this wasn’t Moscow, but a small agricultural-industrial city with a garrison of the military installed on its outskirts at the end of the road that ran seventy miles to the frontier of Sinkiang. Beets, zinc and soldiery: and somewhere not far away a helicopter base I would have to locate — they had been short-range WSK Swidniks and I wanted to know more about them; it was conceivable that London would finally insist on that third photograph.
A little before ten o’clock I left the hotel and drove to the post office near the huge Museum of Folklore and Minerals and telephoned Chechevitsin. The number was reported as being out of order but in Russia this normally means the operator is in the middle of a conversation or didn’t hear the number correctly, and I insisted and finally got a connection.
There was nothing I could tell from Chechevitsin’s voice, which reassured me. He repeated after me that the twelve tungsten drilling-bits had arrived at the freight station and were in order. The consignment number was 3079.I thanked him and hung up. On a scale of one to twelve I was in good physical condition; tungsten indicated that I had read, understood and was following sealed orders; drilling-bits meant that I now had a car and was therefore fully mobile; freight indicated that I was at present totally clear of surveillance and station referred to the films. The consignment number was of course that of the telephone at my hotel. There’s a diminutive ginger-haired clerk in London Cyphers who sits on her thin little bottom all day working out one-time speech codes for specific operations, and although we twig her a lot she does a good enough job and searches out the local scene very thoroughly: as I’d noted this morning at the railway station.
When we twig her too much she says she’s going to give us a birds-egg collection in the code, which would of course mean we’d been blown.
Ten minutes later I left the post office and took the Mercedes to the junction of Gromyko Prospekt and Union Square and parked it under the bare winter trees. There was no kind of surveillance on the Union Building from the front, unless use was being made of a window somewhere within sight of the main entrance; I had no way of finding out. When I drove through the square and round to the rear of the building I again saw no evidence of a watcher. It took me forty minutes to satisfy myself about this because the man on the corner had been walking up and down and blowing into his bare hands until a taxi picked him up. The other man, in charge of the hot-chestnut stand on the south side of the square, had also interested me until I noted that he had been standing with his back to the main entrance while seven people had left the building and three had gone in.