Chapter Sixteen: COURIER
The TU-154 came out of the haze like an image taking shape on a negative, breaking through the low ceiling a mile from the end of the runway and flopping down only ten minutes late despite the weather: they said there was more snow coming in from the south-west.
People began leaving the observation deck, their faces pinched with the cold. I waited until the plane had turned at the end of its run and started rolling in this direction; I was frozen from the drive in the Trabant but there were other things to consider. I was getting to know Chechevitsin: his signals were brief and security-conscious to the point of being uninformative. This wasn’t typically Russian and I suppose he was probably someone out from London and worried about making mistakes. This time the rdv was for 3.05 at the airport, courier arriving Flight 96 from Moscow, recognizable on sight. No precise point of rendezvous. I was expected to pick him out of a hundred and fifty passengers. No specific instructions: I was to assume that he was to receive the films.
I’d say the problem had been the Trabant. It was the driving-seat that had broken away and I’d had to take the other one off its runners and use it as a prop, wedging it between the rear seat and the driver’s squab. But there’d been nothing I could do about the smashed windscreen except clear the rest of the glass away and drive with my eyes half-shut against the freezing blast of air. I’d told the man at the hotel there’d been an accident on the snow and he’d let me put the car into the yard at the rear and I’d left it there, walking around to the household store to call Kirinski and then Chechevitsin: I wanted it out of sight as much as possible because there couldn’t be too many dark blue Trabants driving around the city without a windscreen and I might just as well put my name on the bloody thing. I’d asked Chechevitsin to get me another one but he’d said it would take time and I couldn’t put any pressure on him because even a used car would cost the earth and he’d be lucky to find one.
Only a few of the people were left on the observation deck now: the 154 was swinging into the reception bay and the service vehicles were going out to it. I waited another two minutes and went through the swing-door and down the steps, moving a little faster than normal but not running. He was still behind me at the end of the passage and I turned sharply, using cover and going into the open again to watch him react when he saw me. He’d lost me for only a few seconds but it had worried him and he shrugged himself deeper into his coat as he walked on past the information desk.
There’d been nothing in the mirror when I’d driven here but the Trabant had a unique image because of the windscreen and I’d left it parked between a big Chaika and a wall and I’d walked into the main hall through the freight entrance and taken a lot of trouble with mirrors and mirror substitutes and drawn blank everywhere. That had been at 2.40 and I’d come up to the observation deck through a clean field but at 2.53 the man with the sloping shoulder had come through the swing-door and stood there for a couple of minutes making a lot of fuss about the cold, stamping his feet and blowing into his bare hands and going out again. A lot of people were doing that: it was the first big freeze of the winter and they were feeling it; but this man had kept his back to me and faced the line of windows at the right angle and I’d noted it but hadn’t been sure until I’d checked on him. So it had been the Trabant and he’d picked me up at some time after I’d turned into the car park and kept station on me and held back too long and lost me and looked for me and found me on the observation deck, going out again and waiting for me at one end of the passage, not a first-class tag but he wasn’t running any risk because the other one had closed in and was watching me now from light cover near the main entrance.
“Excuse me, comrade.”
A man with a bunch of faded carnations, God knew what they’d cost him but he had the eyes of a romantic and he was past the age when he could afford to lose a good woman even if he couldn’t afford the flowers either.
“Yes?” I answered.
“Is that the Moscow plane, just in?”
“That’s right, comrade. Flight 96. She’s a lucky girl.”
“They were all they had left.” He shrugged wistfully and walked off across the hall with both tags watching him and a man coming away from the newspaper stall on the far side, a third man, waiting to question him when the time was right.
Three.
It didn’t look good. There were things I wanted to know and there wasn’t time to think about it because the courier would now be coming through Gate 1 and I’d have to make a decision within the next minute and then act on it. But the same pattern was here: the second courier was moving straight into a trap and this time London hadn’t been on to it. Either that or Kirinski had thrown the whole thing at the fan: I’d called his apartment as soon as I’d got the Trabant stowed away in the hotel yard, but Liova had answered the phone and said he wasn’t there so I gave her the message: I’d taken copies of the material so if he thought he could blow me now he’d better think twice. But he must have triggered the KGB on his way home and when he’d got there it had been too late to do anything about it, and the Trabant must have become red hot within half an hour of my driving away from the waste ground he thought he’d got nothing to lose if the KGB put me through interrogation because I had no evidence and they wouldn’t take any notice of what I said: a man under interrogation will say whatever might save him.
The first of the passengers were coming through, all of them muffled against the cold and hurrying from habit, many of them with the slightly Mongol faces of the region, a group of children in red jackets, three youths with long hair and jeans getting attention from the provincials here, a man waddling alone with a ‘cello case, no one, recognizable on sight.
Alternatives: keep back and let the courier go by without seeing me and put it down as a missed rendezvous; let them trap him if that was what they’d come here to do. Or let him see me and let him go by and try to make a rendezvous later; this would depend on his degree of training and if he wasn’t any better than Gorodok he’d foul it up and blow both of us and therefore Slingshot. Or tag him and get him alone in a clear field and made the rendezvous then; this would call for miracles and I hadn’t got any because Kirinski had been very strong and my right bicep was still numb from one of his strikes and the neck-blow from the edge of the back seat had left me with nerve shock and I’d never had to tag a contact and throw my own tags, three of them, except in training at Norfolk — and a lot of the stuff they give us at Norfolk is too sophisticated to work in practice: it’s on the curriculum as a mental exercise.
Five Red Army officers in shiny boots and enormous greatcoats, one of them a general with his jowls overflowing his collar; three Tadzhik women in traditional costume; another man with a musical instrument and now a plump woman smiling over her bouquet of faded carnations while the man explained to her that they were all he could find.
Decision: I wouldn’t let the courier go by without seeing me. I would make eye contact and take it from there.
A group of men came past in black coats and Homburgs, most of them with beards and gold-rimmed spectacles, their Muscovite accents chipping at the air as they herded together towards the main doors. I glanced at their faces: I glanced at every face and looked away to the next, forming the habit. At this moment I was under close scrutiny and had to take the utmost care, because my eyes, staying too long on one face among all the others, could condemn a man to death.