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?”
He jerked his narrow head to look at me. “No.”
“Does she work for the KGB?”
“No. She is my wife, and that is all.”
“Your legal wife?”
A slight hesitation. “Yes.”
I didn’t go into it. The art of interrogation is a paradox: you learn more from the questions than the answers, if you know how to bring out those questions by your silences; you also learn more from the way the answers come than from what they purport to tell you. Most of them are deliberate lies and this is accepted by both parties, but lies will protect you only up to a point: the point where you produce so many of them that you get lost in the confusion of your own making; the truth is easily remembered because it exists, but lies demand a trained memory and the stress can become overwhelming. This again is paradoxicaclass="underline" the more you lie, the more you reveal the truth.
She wasn’t, for instance, his legal wife. Because of the hesitation.
“Does she have any connection with the KGB?”
“No. I’ve told you, she — ”
“Or any other police or intelligence or security organization?”
“No. None.”
“Is she afraid of anyone?”
“Of course not!”
“So she doesn’t need protection.”
“No.”
“Even the protection of a gun?”
His hesitations lasted only a fraction of a second but they were beautifully consistent.
“No.”
“All right. Now I want a general preliminary picture: your contacts with the KGB, your contacts with Peking, then liaison, couriers, communications and security background. Take your time.”
He hissed in his breath again and began pointing with that long nose of his like a parrot trapped in a cage and I watched his hands because they’d be the first sign of movement and at some stage in the interrogation he was going to try making a break for it.