This area was clean, at this moment. I’d checked it thoroughly and dangled my image three times round the square and twice past the Union Building in case any one of the hundred or so windows had an observer posted. There wasn’t one. They’d picked up the Mercedes in this immediate area and I’d pulled a phase three on them and if they were going to set traps anywhere it would be here.
At 05:12 the first street lamps came on and I started up and took the Trabant closer, parking it in fair cover between a military jeep and a small black Syrena at the corner of the square. It had meant taking my eyes off the field for a few seconds at a time and I nearly missed her as she came down the steps and started walking towards the corner. The engine was still running and I switched off and got out and waited two minutes and took up the tag.
She was crossing the intersection at Prospekt and Station Street when she saw the queue of people. I think she was on her way to a different place because there was a kind of double take in her attitude and she stopped to talk to a woman outside the store. She then joined the queue herself and I made a close detour and saw that a consignment of kitchenware had just come in: a truck with a Tashkent number plate was still unloading. There were approximately forty people already in the queue but that wasn’t too long for a Russian provincial city store in the middle of winter when transport problems were added to the general lack of supply. If Liova Kirinski stayed the course she’d be here for more than an hour because she’d have to reach the head of this queue, choose the merchandise, join the next queue with her order form for payment at the cashier’s booth and then join this one again to collect her purchases.
I gave it ten minutes. She was then off the street and inside the store, with exactly thirty-two people still in front of her. Assuming she’d been on her way somewhere else and might still go there when she left this store I assessed the risk as low and calculated and walked back to the Union Building and made one circuit on foot to check for ticks and then went round to the rear. The last of the daylight had gone but there was a three-quarter moon hanging across the eastern skyline and the street lamps were throwing down an ash-grey diffusion of light that picked up the iron fire-escape. On my first visit here I’d noted that the traditional custom was in force: on a lot of apartment buildings they remove the lowest section of the fire-escape so that it’s still easy for people to come down and drop to the ground if the place is on fire but difficult for them to climb it. The official reason is to discourage burglars but everyone knows that it’s to oblige people to go past the dezhurnaya every time they leave and return home: the Party, police and military factions are particularly interested in strangers visiting any given residential area and in Yelingrad this interest is increased by the city’s proximity to the Chinese frontier.
There was snow on the windowsill below the first platform and I threw dirt on it and got the necessary purchase without making any noise. The rest of the climb was slippery but I was in shadow the whole way up and the back door of the Kirinski apartment was in good visual cover because the three buildings standing nearby were blank-walled on this side and five storeys higher. The door had a glazed panel but I didn’t want to break it unless I had to. The lock was a standard tumbler bit and I started work on it.
At intervals I listened to the sound background: a line of trucks crossing the bridge over the canal half a mile away, presumably a military convoy; men’s voices on the far side of the nearest building, and the scrape of snow shovels; a radio programme, much closer, coming from the apartment below and on the left side.
The tension bar went into the keyway and I felt for the notch on the underside of the bolt, then gave it enough pressure to push the racking stump against the tumblers; I didn’t know how many there were but the standard number was three. My hands were freezing and I was clumsy, getting the pick into the keyway but having a lot of trouble finding the tumbler and raising it. I had to try three times before I could feel the gate lining up with the stump, and I made a time check at 05:43 to establish temporal orientation because you can fiddle with a lock for half an hour and think you’ve only been at it ten minutes: it’s concentrated work and you tend to forget the environment and that can be dangerous. Even with these small tools I was making a degree of noise and Liova could have left someone in the apartment: sister, neighbour, so forth.
I had two of the tumblers raised and felt the third one lining up with the racking stump. My fingers were now partially numbed and I wasn’t sure whether it was the gate coming into alignment or the other tumblers moving laterally because of wear. Below the fire-escape a car had begun moving, accelerating into second gear and going slowly past the corner and into the square. I’d allowed for various contingencies as a matter of routine: the merchandise running out before Liova was at the head of the queue, her original errand becoming abortive, a neighbour giving her a lift back in his car and shortening the time element. As this stage I’d hear her coming in through the front door and the risk was minimal.
I eased the pick away and increased the force of the tension tool and felt for movement and got it and steadied my right hand as the racking stump went through the gates of all three tumblers and the bolt slid back.
05:47.
Once I was inside I put the lights on because I could work faster and that was essential because the risk of being disturbed was greater than the risk of the light’s being noticed and bringing some kind of enquiry.
Living-room, one bedroom, kitchen, small dining-room, bathroom, large closet, skylight, fanlight, four minutes to make certain there was no radio transmitter and no short-wave receiver, then steady work, every cupboard, every drawer, every contained space and every visual cover material — rugs, curtains, pictures — and every disguise feature — radio, lamp-bases, bookshelves, the big leaved table. Forty-five minutes and no go, a blank, try again. The deadline I’d estimated was one hour from the unlocking of the door but that was arbitrary and she could be back here at any next minute and I hadn’t worked out a cover story because I didn’t yet know her personal relationship with Kirinski and that was the key to what I could do here.
Box mattress, clock-case, Chinese vase, sink-cupboard, cistern, gas geyser — the telephone rang and persisted and I waited and the room was quiet again and I went on working — pelmets toolbox, sideboard base, cutlery cabinet, blank every time a blank and the deadline one minute away and I began sweating.
Something had changed in the background sound and I went into the kitchen again and cracked the door open and listened and tried to fit this aural pattern against the one I’d heard before and finally got it: the radio was still going but I couldn’t hear it in the living-room because the walls were thick. Shut the door and went back and began working on surfaces: walls, wainscoting, panels, doors, cupboards, tapping and listening for hardness, softness, diaphragm tones, reverberation, echo effect, dissimilarities in texture sounds, inconsistencies in surface structures, drawing blank, drawing blank wherever I went.
07:29 and an overrun on the deadline of forty-two minutes, it was no bloody go but this was the target centre and London had worked for three months on just getting me here and if Alexei Kirinski was clandestine in any way he’d have to conceal material where he lived.
Sounds: clock, creak of the wood stove, a door shutting a long way off, she didn’t have to come through a door, otherwise total silence. I would hear her footsteps, first. Listen for those.
Air vents, ledges, the skylight, the plumbing access panel at the end of the bath, blank, all of them blank. I began measuring, using the wooden spoon from the tray in the kitchen, comparing widths and thicknesses: the wall over the kitchen doorway, the side of the big closet, the depth of the sink recess, the base of the sideboard, the rear wall of the closet again where I’d tapped before, with nearly four inches unaccounted for, warmer, measure again, four inches, represented by seven spoon’s-lengths from the master wall outside the closet and six and a half lengths inside, try tapping again, higher this time, all the way up to the ceiling, a slight echo effect in this section two feet between the beams and the beams don’t go all the way down so it must be a frame of some kind and this knot-hole is in a separate panel and it -