“This stuff,” I said and reached under the seat, ‘ought to be kept somewhere safe. Where the hell did they train you?”
He swung his sharp head at me. “Who do you work for?”
“That’s none of your bloody business.” I was sorting it out, putting some of it back into the envelope: I was going to hang on to the gammas and the Monome-Dinome tables because I might conceivably pick up some kind of signal in somebody else’s hands before he could warn his base. The cypher drafts were no use but everything else looked interesting, even some of the airfield dispositions with the Chinese hieroglyphs because those bastards in London weren’t going to spring me and I’d have to try anything that came along.
“Have you got a pencil?” I asked him and he felt for one in his jacket and I hit the end of the barrel so fast that it almost broke his wrist because he cried out and went dead white and had to double up so as not to be sick while I opened the Walther and dropped the magazine out and threw it under the seat and lobbed the gun into the back of the car and spread out the top map in the Russian material and got out my felt pen.
“These airfields,” I said. “What’s their strength?”
He was trying to sit up straight but his wrist was still painful and all he wanted to do was nurse it and I got fed up because he was wasting time.
“It’s your own fault,” I said, “you shouldn’t be so bloody uncivilized. These are the only three airfields in the whole of this area without squadron designation and combat strength and I want to know about them, come on.”
His face was still white but he was making an effort now and looking down at the map. I think it was more shock than anything: they’re the cock o’ the north all the time they’ve got those piddling little toys in their pockets but as soon as you take them away they go to pieces, it’s always the same.
“Come on Kirinski for Christ’s sake I’m waiting.”
“Decoy airfields,” he said on a breath, “they’re decoys.”
“What the hell for, if they — ” then I got it: the whole of the Sino-Soviet border was an armed camp and they were keeping a hot war on ice and that meant a permanent state of military intelligence preparedness and that was why Kirinski was so busy working for both sides like this.
“What are these planes,” I asked him, “dummies?” It was one of the aerial photographs presumably taken by covert reconnaissance from the Chinese side and the two aircraft were standing in dispersal bays some distance from the hangars.
“We fly two planes from each field,” he said and got out his handkerchief while I watched him carefully. “Can you read Chinese?”
I didn’t answer. You never admit to knowledge of a foreign language and he ought to know that. Most of the sheets detailing Soviet installations and military strengths carried Mandarin hieroglyphs, and the Sinkiang-Mongolian-Chinese defences were annotated in Russian.
“Where do you cross the border, Kirinski?”
“At Zaysan.”
“What’s your cover?”
“You know what my — ”
“Answer my question.”
He hissed somerning through his teeth and took a breath and said:
“Geological engineer.”
He didn’t like this a bit: he was doubling for two camps across the border and had a nice comfortable apartment with a girl-friend installed and a protection agreement with the KGB and this bastard Rashidov had come along and rifled his safe and threatened to blow him if he didn’t behave. I could see his point but I wasn’t going to let him waste my time because as soon as London heard the courier was dead they’d belt out another signal through Chechevitsin and throw me into a new phase and it might not give me any leeway.
“How difficult is it for people to cross the border from dm side?”
“It’s impossible,” he said.
“Why?”
“The situation is sensitive.”
“Listen, Kirinski, when I ask you a question I want you to go on talking till you’ve told me all you know, you understand? I don’t want any more of your bloody monosyllables. What situation is sensitive and what does sensitive mean?”
He made that hissing noise again: I think he was still frozen stiff and of course his nerves were hitting an all-time high and there was something else: he was a proud man and he didn’t like people treading on him.
The total strength of the Red Army,” he said with careful articulation, “is one hundred and fifty divisions. Forty of those are deployed along the Chinese frontier. That is the situation and it is sensitive in terms of unpredictable flare-ups. Six months ago there was a battle on the Sinkiang border involving fifteen thousand troops who were carrying out field exercises. Two thousand were killed. Since that time the frontier crossings have come under very strict control, especially at Zaysan. I trust I have answered your question.”
“You’re getting the idea.” I checked through the rest of the Soviet stuff and slid it into the envelope because there wasn’t time now to ask him for translation from the Mandarin: I was going to freeze everything until I got a signal from Chechevitsin. “What was Opal Light?”
He looked down at the batch of sheets stapled together top and bottom, and I thought he wasn’t going to answer; then he looked away and said:
“It was a Chinese operation.”
“What sort? Come on, Kirinski.”
“It was directed at the Lop Nor missile installations security services, last November. Intelligence was obtained.”
I let it go at that because it looked like a closed file and London wouldn’t be interested in a Sino-Soviet mission: most of this stuff would probably go to the CIA and I didn’t expect them to find anything new because the Americans were far more concerned than the British with the Sino-Soviet confrontation and its potential for world war, and they had the field well covered.
I put the batch away and looked at the photographs again and put those away too and asked him; “Did you start working for the KGB first?”
Another fractional pause: this was an assault on his innermost privacy and he was feeling the exposure.
“Yes.”
“How long had you worked for them before you started working for Peking as well?”
Pause.
“Two years.”
“Is it the money?”
I didn’t think it could be anything else: there was no kind of motherland ideology involved because this man wasn’t a double agent for one organization he was doubling for two. The amount of material I’d found in his apartment was equally secret and equally substantial for each side, and if either side found out what he was doing he’d go sky-high and that was why I could control him like this, as long as I had the material.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes it was the money.”
I didn’t believe him but I didn’t think he was lying to deceive. He wasn’t the type to go for the money: there was too much tension, too much pride, and too much resistance to my attempts at dominance. The reasons why we go into this trade are varied and we never talk about it because it’s always personal — we do it for money or out of some buried loyalty to a flag or to express an ingrained sense of duplicity or simply because of the razor’s edge syndrome: the inability to live too far from the brink without getting bored or drunk or going round the bend for the want of a starting-point to distant horizons we hope never to reach. It’s convolute and involute and we don’t question even ourselves, especially ourselves, because we don’t want to come up with an answer we can’t live with.
I’d put Kirinski down as a psychopath. That is the type I know best, and for good reason.
“Does Liova work with you?”